Want To Get Great At Something? Get A Coach!
We all need an excellent coach. I have had many amazing coaching and mentoring experiences in my life. When I was younger, the coaches were primarily with my involvement with sports. Some of my sports coaches were great at bringing out the best in me and others. Other coaches did not have the right acumen for this role and impeded the growth and development of players, including myself. Being good at something does not make you an excellent coach. And, as Atul Gawande explains in detail, excelling at something does not mean you have reached your potential. Why not be the best you can be?
When I began my journey as a social worker and counselor, my supervisors became interested in me and improved my skill set. They simultaneously pushed me beyond my perceived limitations while supporting my work. Many coaches ASSUME that you either have to push somebody hard or take their hand and gently guide them. A good coach seamlessly and instinctively knows when and how to apply each strategy. A good coach knows your strengths and obstacles to success and is willing to manage the resistance that the ego will place in the way as a hindrance. Generally speaking, the ego is the greatest obstacle to sustained growth and development. The ego may express itself as overconfidence or lack of confidence. They both are an imbalance of humility.
Want To Get Great At Something? Get A Coach!
“How do we improve in the face of complexity? Atul Gawande has studied this question with a surgeon’s precision. He shares what he’s found to be the key: having a good coach to provide a more accurate picture of our reality, to instill positive habits of thinking, and to break our actions down and then help us build them back up again. “It’s not how good you are now; it’s how good you’re going to be that really matters,” Gawande says.This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.”
Get A Coach – Why you should listen
Atul Gawande is author of several best-selling books, including Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End and The Checklist Manifesto.
He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship and two National Magazine Awards. In his work in public health, he is Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation and chair of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally.
In June 2018, Gawande was chosen to lead the new healthcare company set up by Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway.
Get A Coach – What others say
“Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.” — Atul Gawande
“The concept of a coach is slippery. Coaches are not teachers, but they teach. They’re not your boss—in professional tennis, golf, and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach—but they can be bossy. They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.
Coaches are like editors, another slippery invention. Consider Maxwell Perkins, the great Scribner’s editor, who found, nurtured, and published such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. “Perkins has the intangible faculty of giving you confidence in yourself and the book you are writing,” one of his writers said in a New Yorker Profile from 1944. “He never tells you what to do,” another writer said. “Instead, he suggests to you, in an extraordinarily inarticulate fashion, what you want to do yourself.”…
The coaching model is different from the traditional conception of pedagogy, where there’s a presumption that, after a certain point, the student no longer needs instruction. You graduate. You’re done. You can go the rest of the way yourself.
Since I have taken on a coach, my complication rate has gone down. It’s too soon to know for sure whether that’s not random, but it seems real. I know that I’m learning again. I can’t say that every surgeon needs a coach to do his or her best work, but I’ve discovered that I do.
Coaching has become a fad in recent years. There are leadership coaches, executive coaches, life coaches, and college-application coaches. Search the Internet, and you’ll find that there’s even Twitter coaching. (“Would you like to learn how to get new customers/clients, make valuable business contacts, and increase your revenue using Twitter? Then this Twitter coaching package is perfect for you”—at about eight hundred dollars for a few hour-long Skype sessions and some e-mail consultation.) Self-improvement has always found a ready market, and most of what’s on offer is simply one-on-one instruction to get amateurs through the essentials. It’s teaching with a trendier name. Coaching aimed at improving the performance of people who are already professionals is less usual. It’s also riskier: bad coaching can make people worse.”
Excerpt from Personal Best-Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?
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I felt like she shared an endless flow of wisdom with me, most of it through her personal experiences. She also owned that she did not have all the answers and stated this regularly. Not knowing was her default setting unless she had a current source of inspiration and/or wisdom. This was a humbling experience for me. I was raised to act like you know something is important even if you don’t. The concept of “not knowing” was new and confusing at first. Today, I am most grateful when I know that I do not know something and that it is OK and important to accept “not knowing” without ego and attachment. I sense this is critical in being an effective coach. Knowing what you know and accepting “not knowing ” when you don’t.
I had a class in Racial and Cultural Groups many years ago. The Professor often commented after a student replied how embarrassed they were that they didn’t know something with the exact phrase every time, “You don’t know what you don’t know. And how can you?” The coach or mentor and student humility are essential to success. What qualities have you experienced in coaches or mentors that have left a lasting impression on you? What is a great coach to you?
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