Success Stories from Coach Training and Coaching

How have you benefited from coach training or coaching?

To help you see the benefits of coach training, we asked CEOs and business leaders this question for their first-hand experiences. From learning to wait for the best answer to becoming a better leader overall, there are several benefits gained from coach training and leadership coaching that may help you improve your personal and professional life.

Here are 10 success stories from coach training and coaching:

• Learned To Wait for The Best Answer
• Gained More Confidence and Better Decision-making Ability
• Guided and Empowered To Make Career Change
• Helped Improve Work and Life Satisfaction
• Learned To Plan and Prioritize
• Made Me Engage Better With Others
• Able To Communicate Better
• Learned To Exercise Patience
• Became a Better Listener
• Became a Better Leader Overall

Learned To Wait for The Best Answer

I learned a very powerful lesson – the best answer is often not your first answer. When I was taking a coaching mastery class, our instructor had us do a coaching session with another student. We were to be the coach and the person being coached and in between each question asked and answered we waited 30 seconds. I was the one being coached and it was amazing to me that with each question I asked, if we had not been waiting for 30 seconds, my first answer was very flippant. Usually funny and meant to entertain but somewhere around the 20 second mark, the defenses would drop and another answer emerged. I learned a lot about my own ability to trust the process, trusting the coach and trusting myself with creating the best answer for myself. Sometimes we are rushed to be the experts or look like we always have the perfect answer – RIGHT NOW. But when we give ourselves the space and trust we need, we can create the best answer for ourselves.

• Marissa Loewen, Create the Rules

Gained More Confidence and Better Decision-making Ability

Coaching has helped me become more confident in my decision-making ability and has given me the tools to handle difficult situations with grace and composure. I have become more aware of my own personal strengths and weaknesses, and how to use these to my advantage in order to achieve greater success in business and my personal life.

• Amira Irfan, A Self Guru

Guided and Empowered to Make Career Change

In my late 30’s, I hired a life coach to help me with my personal relationships. While she helped me with my relationships with my wife, daughter, and friends, her biggest impact was in my business.

Working with that coach helped me admit that I didn’t like practicing law. But more importantly, she helped me see that it wasn’t too late to make a change (even after 15 years of practice). She challenged me to imagine a business I actually liked running, and that set me down the path of forming my own online business selling legal templates. I now have a life and business I truly love. All thanks to working with a life coach.

• Bobby Klinck, com

Helped Improve Work and Life Satisfaction

Leadership coaching helped me to step back and re-assess my work/life approach to improve my overall work and life satisfaction. Finding ways to improve my work/life balance and focus on my own satisfaction helped me to become a better leader and grow my business as well. These are the kind of areas that coaches can tap in to see the potential and push you towards it. I’m thrilled about the progress I made so far, and it made me much more satisfied with my work and life.

• Harry Campbell, The Rideshare Guy

Learned To Plan and Prioritize

Better time management. With today’s plethora of distractions, wasting time on the wrong things is almost inevitable without a plan or a coach to help navigate our to-do list mind fields. The notion that each day’s three most important tasks must be completed before tackling any other work has been a game changer for us. Knowing a coach is there to keep us accountable for completing the important tasks is a massive benefit as well and helps propel us further than we could go on our own.

• Michael Van, Furnishr

Made Me Engage Better with Others

I once had a colleague who was interviewing for a promotion. Management asked him how he would rate his performance in his current role. He rated himself a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. Not surprisingly, he was not selected for the role. His high rating of himself signaled to the interviewers that he may not be receptive to coaching and feedback.

I’ve found that my openness to coaching has served me well in two ways. I generally assume my coach is bringing valuable insights, so I take the feedback to heart. My client interactions have become more productive and in turn, my clients are more engaged. Even when I find my supervisor’s feedback to contrast with my own style or technique, I’m receptive without challenging him or her. I not only make sure I’m receptive to my supervisor’s coaching, but I actively seek out coaching from successful colleagues. It takes a degree of humility to recognize that there is always room for improvement. If growth means success, then coaching brings success.

• Jonathan Vander Werff, CFP®, My Financial Coach

Able To Communicate Better

Effective communication can make a team and a loyal customer base. Coaching led me to have better communication skills with my team and the clients. I learned to listen better to my team and use appropriate body language. Even my skills in responding to emails and talking to clients have improved. Through coach training, I learned how to keep a positive attitude toward people which led to getting positive responses from them. My verbal and written communication skills have improved considerably due to coaching. I have learned how to prioritize communication and constantly work on communicating with the people around me.

• Samantha Odo, Precondo

Learned To Exercise Patience

Patience is something I learned from visiting with a career coach. When I was younger, I was so anxious to get out and achieve, that I would rush through my work and inevitably make mistakes. Today, I know to give myself a break and not push myself too hard to the point where I will begin to burn out.

• Gerald Lombardo

Became a Better Listener

I learned how to listen to my team. I didn’t know how to actually listen to my team effectively. Before coach training, I thought I knew how to handle a team, hear employee feedback and make changes where necessary, but I didn’t realize I wasn’t actively listening to what my team had to say. Through coaching, I learned how to really pay attention to what my team was telling me, ask the right follow-up questions and take immediate action to make those changes. I think we all take listening for granted, but active listening is an entirely new skill I learned through coach training and has made all the difference in how I work with my team or how our company operates.

• Karim Hachem, Sunshine79

Became a Better Leader Overall

I have learned how to be a more effective leader, how to better motivate and inspire my team, and how to create a more positive and productive work environment. The thing about leadership coaching is that not only do you receive actionable feedback on your own approach, but you also get to see in real-time what kind of approach inspires others to improve. Leadership coaches aren’t just mentors, they’re role models, allowing you to experience good leadership techniques from a new, refreshing viewpoint: as a follower. This is why I feel like coaching is a good idea even for established leaders and managers because, after years, it’s easy to fall out of touch when you only ever see leadership from one perspective.

• Soumya Mohan, Poised

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