Can You Be Coached?

Can you be coached for your professional life? Do you honestly believe you know everything there is to know about managing your work, your team, your company, or your personal life? Virtually every top executive and producer who works with us start the work by announcing:

1. “I’m uncoachable” 
2. “This will never work.” 

We assure them that’s okay with us, and then we get down to the business of professional coaching…

Toughest Case 

One of our toughest cases was a writer who’d won every award in two industries – Emmys and Effies (in the television industry), One Show, Clio, and Aurora Awards in advertising (she has given us permission to tell this story). But along the way she’d left a trail of bad feelings, lost business, and a lengthening resume. She told us once about a conversation she’d had with a former boss. 

“No one wants to work with me,” she told him.

“Everyone wants to work with you,” her ex-boss said. “No one can figure out how.”

By the time she started working with us, she had 18 jobs on her resume and each stint was getting shorter and shorter. She was, as she now admits, the very definition of a diva (i.e. ‘Pain in the Butt’). 

Being Coached

When we first started working with her, she was resistant to the slightest suggestion. She was terrified (although she didn’t admit it at the time) of the slightest tinkering with her self-image. Finally, we broke it down to the smallest possible baby steps: “Do you think you could meditate for three minutes today?”

We suggested that for nearly a month before she said, “Oh, okay, sure”, with zero degrees of certainty. When she reported she’d done it, we asked her if she felt any less creative. She reluctantly admitted, “No.” It took us nearly a year to increase “3 minutes today” to what is now her regular 30-minute routine. 

Along the way, she discovered that her creative skills haven’t diminished and her people and team skills have increased exponentially. When her former husband gave her an unsolicited compliment that she seemed calmer and more self-assured than he’d ever seen her before, she went from being our toughest critic to one of our biggest fans. 

But our biggest fan of all is her current employer. The CEO and her colleagues no longer have to hold their breath when she goes into meetings or on calls with clients. Now they have the rewards of all her talent as well as her talents as a new-found people person.

So much for not being able to be coached…

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