Video Transcription

We’re going to do a little introductory video, talking about the value of coaching in the relevance of coaching today. Some people have asked me why is coaching on the rise. Why is it been, become so pervasive? And why are there so many questions as to what it is and what it isn’t. So, why coaching? Why now? Why is it exploited? So, I want to talk about that. Before, getting into the 5 bullets, I’m going to give you 5 bullets on why I believe coaching is on the rise right now, and why I believe it’ll continue to be. But before I do that, I just want to clarify again what I believe coaching is.

Coaching is a mutually collaborative dialogue, focused on continued performance, development in the direction of meaningful objectives.

So, it’s helping another person draw the genius out of that person, to help them align their current behaviors to achieve future objectives. And so, hopefully we can clarify what coaching is and with that in mind, we’ll be able to talk further on why it is on the rise now. The other thing I just wanted to say is I do believe coaching is the fastest path to sustainable growth. I don’t believe anything can move an individual farther and faster than an excellent coaching relationship. I really truly profoundly believe that. That’s why I want to help you as a coach and have those who need coaching.

Here we go…

Five basic points as to why coaching is on the rise right now

So, why coaching? Why now? I would summarize all five of them within the title of culture shift. I believe that culture is shifted times they aren’t changing. And because of that coaching has filled the void that has been created.

1. IndependenceWe’ve been moving steadily towards more and more of an independent society rather than a community society. There was a time that people were plugged in with their families. Dinners were held together. People had more time or talk more time. No one ever had more time than we have now. They talk more time to invest in relationship. We sit around the table and talk about all of the dealings of life, what’s working, what’s not working.People were engaged in faith groups. There are churches, mosques, synagogues. They were more connected there.People were bowling in leagues where as people bowl alone. Now, there’s a great book called bowling alone. It talks about this move from community to independence. Now, that’s partially, because of the, I think it was the ’20s when the U.S. government decided we needed something to boost the financial well-being of society or to help the economy and they created what’s called consumer capitalism. And to create consumer capitalism, they had to convince us that we need what we don’t need and we want what we don’t want. And part of that was to create an independent soul, to focus on the ego to help and individual or to bring an individual to see himself as unique and alone and separate and the strength of that individual is a very ego centric development.I don’t need to get farther and farther into that. But we have moved away from community towards more of independent. Everyone’s alone.Sadly, I meet people in marriages, who live very independently. They don’t seem to have any need for that relationship. They are purely independent people under a contract and under the same roof. But, they are not a couple. They are not one. They’re two very distinct, very independent. That seems to be the movement of society. As a result, as you can imagine, we don’t have the kind of bouncing-off-of-each-other within a safe, trusted relationship that would have been there in the past within family and community, and leagues, and groups, and societies, and associations. Because we’re all alone now, we just don’t have that kind of feedback that can feedback loop, that kind of open, honest dialogue that would give us the way to live life. We would learn from those conversations. So, the independence, the breakdown of community into more of an independent society has really affected.
2. The discomfort with assertivenessThis is one of my primary focuses within my training, corporate training, I’m a communications coach consultant and trainer, and I can say for sure we have been moving away from comfort with assertiveness. There was a time when people were comfortable. In robust dialogue, they would raise their voices and pound tables and they would really lose on each other.The whole time they didn’t hate each other, they weren’t trying to dominate the other person. They were communicating openly and authentically with what they believe was appropriate enthusiasm on the given subject. They didn’t take it personally. I’m not saying never, but it was a society more comfortable with raised voices and stern, direct dialogue. We, today, have lost our comfort with assertiveness and people are uncomfortable even saying NO to a telemarketer. So, they play games and hang up. They do all these things rather than saying, “Thank you for the call. I’m not interested”. And so just to be able to communicate straight, direct with appropriate respect and intensity, it’s something that we’ve lost as a community.Part of coaching, is to be able to have that direct, straight, difficult dialogue at times to help a person see what they might not want to see. So, the discomfort with difficult conversations, the discomfort with assertiveness is part of the rise for the need for coaching; some safe person, some safe place where we can actually hear something that otherwise no one’s going to tell us or otherwise we’re not willing to hear. So, that was #2.
3. I would call OVERLOAD and there are 2 bullets of overload. One is stimulation overload. The other one is information overload.I’ll probably do whole talk on this. So, I’m not going to go too far on it now. But in our society today, we have been overwhelmed with stimuli, too many sights, sounds, smells; too many people on our lives, too many things. And information overload is just outrageous; I’ve already did some research on this. They found one additional, the New York Times contains, one day, one daily edition, one daily newspaper contains more information than the average person living just 300 years ago, would have been exposed to the course of their entire lives.So, in the 1700s, a person in their entire lives would have been exposed to the same amount of information in one daily newspaper. And how many emails do you get a day? How many commercials do you see a day? How much information is trying to break through to get your attention? So, be mindful of that, that stimulation overload, too much on the senses; information overload, too much information coming in.   Means people blocking out everything and part of what they’re blocking out is helpful information, helpful questions, helpful things to consider that would actually enable them to have better lives. So, I believe that’s part of it, stimulation overload, information overload, or summarized just overload. I think that’s one of the causes for people needing coaching today.
4. A culture of distrust, we’ve created an  adversarial economy.It’s assumed, I’m over-generalizing so hopefully you can bear with me, but I think it’s assumed that every business is trying to take as much money from the customers as possibly can and give them as little value as possibly can in products and services. And the consumer, the customer, their job is to pay as little as possible and take as much as they can. And so, it’s adversarial. It’s “Aha! They tried to fool me with this, but I got them and I got this scoop on, plus I got the discount and I returned it and I lied about where I got it and I got…Haha! I got them.” It seems to me, just assumed, that’s adversarial. We’re trying to get them, they’re trying to get us. When someone says, “Here’s a free…All I have to do is say, “Would you like a free…? And people would go, “No, no, no.” And they ran away. There was a day that something free was a good thing. Now, we assumed they’re off to something. And if we even look at them, they’ll catch us and somehow brainwash us and take our money.There’s so much fear created by this cultural distrust and adversarial business culture that it’s difficult to actually trust someone when they’re asking us a tough question or working through something. So, this culture of distrust, as again, created walls around us.
5. Compounding complexity.Truth is, life is too confusing. People are overwhelmed. They’re overloaded. They feel they’re living in an adversarial environment. Without the social network they’re accustomed to, without the comfort of difficult conversations, they can’t understand.I tell you what, I buy a new device, and if you’re anything like me, I buy a new Blackberry. I’m all excited to know how to use it. You know? But, I probably use one-tenth of what you can do. But immediately someone says, “There’s a newer one.” What are you talking about? You know? Just this morning, my son was telling me, “Now, we got to move to another phone device and it does more cool things and…” It’s just too confusing for me. I don’t know about you, but it’s hard to keep up with technology, to keep up with all the things that are changing in our world.

All of this, together, keeps us from being able to be centered and focused on where are we now in relation to our goals, dreams, and objectives. Are we behaving in a way that the odds are good we’re going to hit our target? And there’s too much noise and we feel alone, we lied to ourselves, by the way, let’s not cheat ourselves, and without the help of a trusted soul that can coach me, that can help me find the genius, find the truth within me that will help me find my path and stay on it, it’s just tough without having that great coaching relationship.

So, I believe these are some of the things that have caused coaching to be on the rise. I think it’s a great thing if we do a great job as coaching. I believe we can have positive effective effects, not only with that client but on that client’s universe, if you know what I mean. And through this, I think you can be very positive deeper and wider than just the coach and the client. So, I think coaching is on the rise and will continue to be until we have a great and positive effect. Hopefully, this will help you to understand why it’s on the rise.

So, be mindful, there are some challenges out there and people definitely need the value of coaching. That’s why I want to encourage you to be the very, very, very best coach you possibly can be, whether you do it professionally or otherwise to develop the skills, capacity, understand the tools, the e-thoughts of it, the character of it, and to coach effectively. There are a lot of people who are looking for help. So, hopefully that helps. Why coaching, why now, why it is on the rise? And we want to be good at this. This is James McNeil here at coachingasyournextcareer.com. Hope this has been helpful and I certainly hope we will talk soon.

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