How to Know If You're Coachable

One, if you wanna kick off this year, and kick your business into high gear by hiring a coach, you absolutely need to know before you do that if you are coachable. Second, if you have worked with coaches in the past and had less than stellar results and don't really know why, this is also for you. Because it's possible that your coach just wasn't the right person for you, it wasn't the right time, the goals weren't clear. It's also possible that your outcome was related to the fact that maybe you were not really coachable at that time. And the third group of people it's for are for coaches because we need to be coachable too. And we need to have really good guidelines for ourselves, for who we choose to work with based on their readiness to work with us? Make sense? Okay so we're gonna get right into it. Just wanna give you a little bit of intro music, cuz I don't know, I still like that kind of thing, be right back.

So maybe you're one of the people that I mentioned who's thinking about hiring a coach, cool. Perhaps you're working with a coach now, maybe you've worked with one in the past, and it's tempting to think that a really good coach can literally pull success out of you simply because you hired them. This slight of hand, which I consider to be a form of outsourcing ownership of your business doesn't actually work because you are the one who's responsible for your success or failure. And if you don't believe me, try reading the small print of your client agreement, at least the client agreement of any coach who has integrity. And please don't fall for the magical thinking that you're gonna get great results simply because you hired a coach with a hefty price tag.

Don't laugh, I know of quite a few air quote, high ticket coaches who encourage potential clients to liquidate their 401k, max out their credit cards, cash in their inheritance, sell their eggs, or take out a second mortgage to afford their coaching fees. In my not so humble opinion, that is ridiculous. The most important thing to consider is whether you're even coachable, there I said it. Now, if you have a chance after you listen to this, go back and listen to episode 135 where I talk about the differences between a business coach, a consultant, and a strategist, and how to know which one you need in your business at different points in time. I went into a lot of detail about the differences between them and why I personally use an application in my business. I also talk about this extensively in episode 113. Now I am gonna link to both of these in the show notes, so please don't pull over to the side of the road if you're driving and scribble them down not necessary, I got you.

But here's what I wanna say before I say anything else. It is not your coach's responsibility to ensure that you get your desired outcome. It is your coach's responsibility to ensure they're working with someone who's coachable enough to get that desired outcome. Applied to me, I think it's my responsibility to act with integrity to continuously expand and improve my knowledge and skills and to invest in my own professional development so that I can be the mentor and leader that my clients need. However, I screen them for coachability because I don't wanna take anybody's money or time when they don't have a shot at that amazing outcome that they want and I think deserve. So there, okay, listen, for this episode, we are gonna turn the camera around and focus on you, not your coach, because you need to pay attention to yourself. You need to have some level of self-awareness, and if you are the impatient type, here's your spoiler alert.

Being coachable is not something that you like reach a certain level or certain plateau, and now you're good, you will slide in and out of coachability at different points in time. Some of us are highly coachable on certain topics or aspects of our business, but a whole lot less so on others. I have personally ranged from highly coachable to utterly uncoachable, and this spectrum of coachability occurred while I was in an active coaching engagement. Hell, it even occurred during a particularly memorable occasion in my master coach training so, if you find as I go further with this episode that, oh wow, shoot, oh shoot, oh no, that sounds like me, take heart, anyone can become more coachable, but it really helps to understand where you currently fall on the coachability Index so that you don't waste your money or time, because there are many coaches who will take your money even if you're not coachachable. And that would be a shame because you might think coaching is bullshit based on that experience, when it can be a totally transformational experience for your business and your life. So to break this down and make it as relatable, helpful, actionable as possible, I am going to share three different categories.

Red light, yellow light, green light. Now, there are the speeders and the stoppers out there when it comes to the yellow light, but basically the way I think about it is a red light means this person is not coachable on this issue at this time so it's a hard no for me. I will not invite them to be a client. Yellow light when it comes to coachability basically means slow down and get more inform. I mean, think about it, if you are in a traffic situation, you see the light ahead of you turn yellow, you're gonna look at your odometer or speedometer rather, and you're going to figure out, do I have time to stop safely without the guy behind me running into me? Or should I step on the gas pedal and zip through before the light turns red? Basically it's a request for more information and you make that request of yourself in a driving situation really, really quickly and pretty intuitively, unless you just learned how to drive. Green light situations are, I am a hundred percent confident that this person is coachable, and if I'm the person they wanna hire, we go ahead and proceed.

So if you're a coach and you wanna grab this framework, be my guest and if you're wondering if it's the right time to hire a coach, especially if you wanna work with me, you can give yourself a self-assessment. Okay shall we start? Okay, so let's go first to the red light situations, because I don't know, that's sort of juicier, I think. Okay are you ready for the list? Number one, and this is really a hard pass, someone who can't make decisions or makes decisions impulsively or second guesses all of their decisions endlessly. If you are an entrepreneur, you gotta make decisions, you gotta make a lot of decisions, and many of the decisions you make have to be made in the moment on the fly. So when someone has extreme difficulty making decisions, making good decisions, because they are either impulsive or indecisive, they're not coachable, at least not by someone like me.

Next up, a deficiency in critical thinking and strategic thinking when it comes to business. A lot of people don't really realize when they start their own business, just how complicated it is and just how many things they need to think about. There's a lot of intersections. There's a lot of unexpected events, and you need to think both critically and strategically. You simply cannot outsource all of those key decisions no matter how good the coach you're working with is. Next on the list, significant trust and control issues. Now, if somebody shows up for a consultation with me talking about how their previous coach did them dirty, that is as much a red light situation as it would be if we were on a first date because people who have a lot of trouble trusting others and have trouble giving up control are gonna have a hard time working with a coach. They're gonna have a hard time hiring help. They're gonna have a hard time doing anything that they can't do all by themselves. And working with a coach, a consultant, a strategist, any kind of helper in your business require some faith in the process and willingness to be vulnerable.

So folks with heavy duty trust or control issues, that's a red light for me. Next one, very passive, very dependent people. Now, those who show up to a consultation call and say, just tell me what to do and I'll do it now if they mean I've been struggling with content creation for two years, and I just need someone to teach me their system so I can just do it, that's different. You probably wanna hire a consultant for that, right? A content creation consultant, but someone who basically does not wanna do the emotional labor of deciding key things about their business. Like, who do they serve? How do they serve? What are their prices? They don't wanna make any of that decisions, they wanna outsource all of that and say, just tell me what to do and I'll do that. That's a hard no for me because sooner or later we're gonna part ways and then what are you gonna do? It's kind of like never being able to launch your adult kids, ew.

Okay, next up significant dysfunction when it comes to communication. People that are constantly blowing up your Voxer or emailing you, or people that ghost. Maybe because you had some agreement or accountability about doing something and they don't do it, and now they're ashamed or embarrassed or they just don't wanna have any questions, so they don't respond or they don't show to up to calls in that moment, you're not coachable. Now listen, for the record, and in full transparency, we've all been this person. We've been this person in our romantic relationships. We've been this person with our family members, we've been this person at on the job, and we've been this person in our business, so have I. But a coaching relationship is a focused relationship for a period of time with specific rules, roles and responsibilities. If you can't communicate with the person you've hired to help you during that engagement, you're wasting your money and time cuz you're not coachable.

Okay, you wanna hear my favorite, the help rejecting complainer. Now, this is a category I made up years and years ago because I mean, I call people by this category when I was a therapist because I could not understand why someone would hire someone to help them make the pilgrimage to their office week after week. Back when we were working face-to-face, before we had all these groovy tools to work virtually and remotely, but every single thing I gave them in an attempt to help, they shut down. So it's like, wait a second, you want help, but you're not willing to try any of the things that I as an expert in helping have to offer you? Hmm, that just goes well beyond the scope and the amount of emotional labor that any coach should be expected to do. So if you know better, you've tried everything, you know ahead of time what will work and what won't, and you're not willing to experiment, don't hire a coach for sure.

Here's another one, people whose answer to every question is, I don't know. Now I how often people use this expression when I was going through coach training, because the trainer would not allow any of us to say, I don't know, to anything. We had to say something else, and you kind of really realize what a crutch it is to say, I don't know. It usually means I don't wanna make a mistake or I don't wanna be held accountable, or I don't want the responsibility for whatever it is you're asking me about. None of those makes a good coaching client, so that's a red light situation for me. Couple more, somebody who whenever you're asking them a question and you're trying to help them make changes in their business that they allegedly want to make, they say It depends.

Now, I've used this expression before on this podcast, because I learned it in grad school from my favorite professor who was trying to get people out of the idea that there are cookie cutter solutions for everything. People are so much more complex than that, people's businesses are so much more complex than that. So it depends can mean I need to take different things into consideration and I can't create a system when there's a lot of individuality, that's one thing. But someone who overly relies on it depends, is probably over complicating things because it's hard for them to make decisions and commit to those decisions. Now these are somewhat broad generalizations, but I think you know what I'm talking about when I say, it depends person, everything depends right with that type of person.

Last one, under the red light category, the person who wants a guarantee. Now I have even seen this recommended in different coaching programs where the coach who's running the program tells their trainees to offer a guarantee. I don't know how anyone can actually do that and be in integrity. I don't know how a client can expect a guarantee, and I don't know how a coach can ethically and in integrity offer one, because there's no way that, you know, that the person's gonna do the work. And I've seen these so-called money back guarantees, tThey are so detailed, the conditions are so tight that basically nobody would actually qualify. Because if you do the things you'd need to do to get the guarantee, you're going to get the results and I'm sure that's by design. So if somebody says, do you guarantee results, that has to be a red light for me because that tells me this is a person who's looking to outsource responsibility when they don't do the work, and that that has to be a no for me.

Okay, so we've covered you know you’re not coachable if and when, and again, I need to reiterate this. If you identified with any of these scenarios, you're not a bad person and you are not hopelessly beyond coaching. It simply means that in whatever scenario you identified with, you identified with my description in that area, at this time, you're not coachable. And if you're thinking about something that happened in the past, very likely you are at a different of coachability right now. Remember, this is not a one and done set and forget, we all slip and slide all the time when it comes to coachability. Now, let's talk about yellow light scenarios and remember, this means I need more information because this person might be coachable. They might not be coachable. I'm not getting a really red light or green light scenario, and so I need more information. What do those scenarios look like and how do you know if you are maybe coachable, maybe not.

A person who needs a lot of reassurance about change. A person who needs a lot of permission seeking to communicate information to them. A person who questions the coach, their training, their background, their certification. A person who hates, hates, hates paying for any kind of help and the reason they are contemplating working with a coach is because they've allowed things to get so bad they are truly desperate. A person has a real hard time developing rapport with the coach, even though they sought them out and most coaches these days do a discovery call, a strategy, call, a free consultation. These are yellow light scenarios because news alert folks, even though there are now like a fuck ton of coaches out there who are marketing themselves as trauma aware, trauma informed, trauma trained. I've talked about this on previous podcasts, not gonna go into a lot of it now.

But as a former licensed psychotherapist of 20 years, a lot of these things resistance to change, difficulty trusting a person or their training difficulty asking for help, allowing themselves to get a point of desperation. These are all potential trauma responses so is that an automatic no, for me, no, no, it's not. I have to assess, it's a yellow light, I need more information so if you are a person who's contemplating hiring a coach, or you are a person who has worked with coaches and they told you are resistant, or you seem to have trouble trusting that I know what I'm doing or I'm concerned why you let things get so desperate before you reached out for help, or we seem to be having trouble kind of warming up to each other, I'm concerned about this. It's possible that this is part of your trauma response, how I address it, I ask is it working through past trauma one of the things you're dealing with, and are you aware of how it's showing up in your business? Are you aware of how it's showing up in your ability to identify when you need help, your willingness to ask for help and your ability to receive help?

See, to me it comes down to permission and consent, now I am a very direct person. I have a personality that some people really like and others find confrontational. What seems to be guarded, withholding, secretive to me might be a personality trait or it might be part of someone's trauma response, but if I'm scratching my head about whether you're coachable or not, it's probably gonna end up being a red light because let's face it, if someone is really skeptical or flat out disbelieving that coaching is a real thing and that it has anything to offer them, I'm really gonna wonder why they're there. You know, sadly, a lot of people just follow the herd, they don't even know why they started a business. They don't know why they have the kind of business that they have, other than the fact that it seemed to work for someone else. So they just followed in their footsteps, and a lot of people, sadly, I think they need to hire a coach because everybody else seems to be doing it, that's a terrible reason.

That's a terrible reason to hire a coach. If you don't know why you're there, I don't know how you could possibly get tangible, meaningful benefit from it. Now, does that mean that if you have these trauma related traits or behaviors or challenges that you're not coachable? No, it doesn't mean that, but if you're talking about me working with me, I'm gonna need to know a little bit more about how you are dealing with that trauma and whether or not you are getting that need met in another way. Just because I've been a psychotherapist doesn't mean I'm one now, and as a business coach and strategist, I cannot also be doing therapy with you. A lot of people don't really understand that, they think, wow, cool. I can hire a coach who's also a therapist, that's like a twofer. No, no, it's not. It means you are hiring a psychologically sophisticated coach who's very well educated, very well trained, acts with integrity, that's what it means.

I can't be your therapist, you might be in therapy and working with a coach. That happens all the time, and that can be terrific provided everybody kind of stays in their lane. But if it's really painful for you to recognize when you need help to give yourself permission to get help, and then allow yourself to receive it coaching may not be the right approach for you because in my opinion, under those conditions, you're not very coachable. Okay now, I'm sure you are dying to hear my green light list, so I wanna take a hot minute to share this first, and then I'll be right back with the traits, behaviors, and attitudes that make someone coachable. Be right back.

Okay, you ready for the green light list? Let me just say, you don't have to be a meditator. You do not have to be someone who practices mindfulness. However, I think it's a really, really good sign if a person who's considering working with me practices meditation or mindfulness, or is at least familiar with mindfulness and let me tell you why. Even if you don't know anything about mindfulness, what I'm about to tell you will be like, oh, is that what it is? And it's most basic form living in a mindful way comes down to three things. Being open, being curious, and being non-judgmental, how would that look and why does that have anything to do with coachability? Well, let me tell you being open includes being open to examining what's working and what isn't working in your business. It means being open to trying new things. It means being open to getting feedback. It means being open to having someone point out your blind spots, your biases and where you are holding yourself back.

You have to be open for that kind of business, so to speak, to really be coachable. When it comes to curiosity, like call me a weirdo, but I'm really curious about why I do what I do. I'm very self-reflective and introspective. And I love working with people that are too, because when we're curious about ourselves, we tend to be curious about other people and about the way things work. And what I love about people who are curious is this, they're willing to try things, even if they don't know for sure how they're gonna turn out. This is the fundamental risk taking nature that all people who are self-employed, whether they call themselves an entrepreneur, a freelancer, a coach, a consultant, an agency owner, an independent professional, you kind of have to have some level of curiosity because there is no roadmap, no step by step guidance that is gonna get you the exact business that's right for you.

I know there's a lot of cookie cutter programs out there, but people are not cookies, in my opinion. And sooner or later, if you follow those step by step approach programs, it's gonna crumble because it's not gonna reflect you and your individual personality traits, your individual preferences, the way you like to go about things, how you solve problems, how you make decisions. There is no perfect fit situation so curiosity makes you coachable because it means you're willing to try things. Non-judgmental that's the last piece of mindfulness that I think makes someone super coachable, non-judgmental, towards themself, towards others, and towards their own experiences. If there's one thing I wish I had learned so much sooner in business and in life, it's this, how to dance with failure, how to try new things without worrying so much about how they're gonna turn make mistakes, learn from them, fall on my face and fail, and get up and fail, and get up and fail because every successful person I've talked to on this podcast and met in my life failed their way to success without exception.

It's gonna be really hard to do that if you're judgemental because judgementalism is not something you just do cuz you like to make fun of other people and how they look and how they dress and what kind of house they live in. If you're judgemental towards others, I promise you're judgmental towards yourself. That shit is habit for me and when you're judgemental you will automatically stick to what you know, your comfort zone, you're gonna do the things that you already know you're good at. Now, someone else might try to tell you, yeah, but I just wanna play to my strengths, I got that. I do my best to play to my strengths, but it wasn't until I really started working on not being so fucking judgmental of my myself that I could actually grow, take some chances, do something different and learn. So those traits make someone very, very coachable.

To recap, open, curious, non-judgmental there's a few more, you wanna hear 'em? Okay, self-aware and committed to personal growth. It maybe goes without saying if you're hiring a coach that you are committed to personal growth. But I've certainly met people who really don't want to hire anyone. They really don't want to need anyone. They consider it evidence of, you know, a weakness or a flaw that they are even thinking about hiring someone. That person is not self-aware and they're not committed to personal growth because personal growth requires that you look at where you are, not just where you wanna be. Next up, somebody who wants to be intentional in their business and life. Something I did a lot of and talked a lot about in previous episodes of this podcast over November and December of last year, I got pretty ruthless about creating space in my business. And eliminating everything that was taking my time, my money, my energy, my focus, my effort, and was not bringing about the desired result.

Now, I'm not super impulsive, got a long history of that happy to say I'm not as impulsive anymore. So most of these things I had been doing for one or even two years, so I am talking about intentionality. Now, I wanna be super, super, super intentional about what I do and how I do it, where I spend my energy, my focus, my time, my money, and I really love working with people who are the same, because people who are intentional are always focused return on investment. They're always looking to move the needle. They don't wanna just feel better. They want things to actually be better, and that makes them very, very coachable. Few more, I used to have this thing where I would refer to people who just really wanted to learn from me, but then they didn't do anything with it as kind of lurkers or learners when I'm not being so snarky but what I realize now is they need to be action takers.

I had two categories for my action takers, action figures and action heroes because, okay, I admit it, I am very direct and I use a lot of humor to soften the directness, but an action figure is someone who doesn't just learn from you and benefit from what they've learned. They take action so that it becomes a part of their framework, it becomes a part of their decision making, and it benefits their business and their action heroes are ones who 10x, that the people that literally from one coaching call to the next have done so much. You can't believe they found the time and energy to do it but you don't have to be an action hero to be coachable. You do have to be an action figure, okay? You have to be willing to take action otherwise, neither you nor the coach is going to know that you're actually benefiting from the coaching engage. A willingness to see what is and isn't working. I kind of covered that earlier when I was talking about red flags, red lights.

People need to be curious and need to be willing, you cannot be in denial about what is and isn't working in your business because what we resist tends to persist and the things that we're in denial about are automatically going to persist in our business, able to form a healthy relationship with trial and error, experimentation and willingness to dance with failure makes someone very coachable and I would say someone who enjoys the process as well as the goals. And what I mean by that is they're willing to pat themselves on the back when they accomplish something, and they're also willing to take it in stride when they F up, that makes someone highly coachable. In a nutshell, what Carol Dweck would call a growth mindset and if you're not familiar with the work of Carol, I will link to her book in the show notes. It is on the very top of my must-read list for anyone who owns a business.

So before we go, you do know that just listening to this podcast or, or any podcast, no matter how mind blowing, the information is only gonna take you so far, right? I mean, it's basically passive so I want you to take some action, even though you're not my client and move the needle from passive content consumption to action figure. Okay, here's what I want you to do, write down two lists, or you can also record two voice notes or schedule an accountability session with a biz bestie. But this is what I want you to capture whether you're doing this on your own or working with an accountability partner. Two lists one, the why, the when, and under what conditions am I coachable. The other list, the why, the when, and under what circumstances am I not coachable. Because what I believe you're gonna discover is, well, first of all, these are not trick questions, and this exercise is definitely not busy work.

You will begin to see where you actually need to work on your coachability, you will be able to assess for yourself if you're actually ready to look for or hire a coach, and you may even be able to put in perspective why you didn't get the outcome you wanted when working with a coach in the past. Okay, I want you to increase your self-awareness about coachability so if and when you do hire your next coach, you both have a clean shot at a fantastic outcome. And if that coach just so happens to be me, I want you to be ready to make the most of what I have to offer, I think we both deserve that. Okay driven woman, that's a wrap. I'm gonna be back next week with an amazing guest interview, but I really do want you to make these lists for yourself. I have seen far too many people waste far too much money and time hiring help they're not ready to receive. It gives the whole coaching industry a bad name, and there are fabulous coaches out there just waiting to serve you when you're coachable. Okay, I'll see you next week.