Wanting to become a coach, or even having the skills and experience to become a coach is not enough. To really become a successful coach, you need to adopt the mindset of a successful coach.
Whether you are a business coach, leadership coach or life coach — the end result you want to achieve with your clients is profound personal growth. Even business coaches help businesses grow through its people, usually the owner or boss.
So with the understanding if you are a coach you are in the personal growth business — it stands to reason that if you want to be successful at coaching, you need to be congruent and practice what you preach. Which means investing in yourself and in your own personal growth.
Depending on your discipline and how you like to learn, you should be reading and attending workshops on a regular basis. Your mindset starts with what you feed your brain, so in order to continuously learn and grow you need to be consistently feeding it new, relevant information.
If I was a potential client and asked you “what books are you currently reading?”, I would hope you could rattle off a handful. Successful coaches are passionate about what they do, and are hungry to learn about a myriad of subjects.
On the subject of brain food, the next area you need to work on is frequency you are tuned into. Like a radio, you can listen to a lot of different channels out there. There’s the “blame channel” where the constant topic up for discussion is blaming third parties for what is happening in your life or the world. You hear (and participate in) discussions on how the current government is to blame for everything bad in the world.
Successful coaches immerse themselves in positive thinking. They tune out negativity and look for potential versus blame. If they hear or see something negative, they look at the role they can play to help fix it — or they move on and use their energy on more positive pursuits where they have a role they can play in the outcome.
Almost all the coaches I know who have what I would call a “coach mindset” use affirmations. For some people, and certainly when I was first introduced to it, affirmations feel silly and a bunch of hogwash. However, using positive daily affirmations is just another way to tune into a positive and growth-minded frequency.
It is said that it is what you say to yourself, about yourself when you are by yourself that truly matters. If you are a human being, you have work to do with your internal dialogue. So daily positive affirmations are an important tool to set the tone and focus of every day.
If you really want to be a successful coach, you need to start with you. If you do not have the right results with your clients, or you are not attracting the right types of clients, start with your mindset and you will be amazed with the results that follow.
Originally published at medium.com