Business coaching definitely facilitates progress in your career. Individuals who have business coaching typically comment that they wish they had considered it earlier in their career. With business coaching you can talk about yourself with an objective person and within a safe space. It further enables you to identify and address aspects that may hamper your advancement.
Let us be more specific about how business coaching can benefit your career:
Clarify your true passion
Even though we may chose a certain career there may be various areas of specialisation. E.g. if you are a lawyer you could consider conveyancing, litigation, commercial law, maritime law, etc. Business coaching helps you work through your true passion, talents and interests. This enables you to be more focussed with the kind of career exposure you want.
Identify how to advance
Every company and leader has different requirements when it comes to promoting employees. So business coaching will help you be more business-like in how you approach your career. You will hardly progress if you only focus on what you think is important. It is important to be aware of what the company looks for in advancing high flyers.
Building relationships
Our relationship with seniors and clients often determines our rate of progress. We are too close to ourselves to see how others perceive and experience us. A good business coach will give you feedback on how you come across. They will then equip you to strengthen your working relationships.
Factors affecting your effectiveness and productivity
Business coaching helps you identify and address factors negatively influencing your progress. Your planning and organising skills may prevent you from reaching deadlines timeously. Perhaps your interaction with some key role players highlights less helpful aspects of your behaviour.
Obviously you need job knowledge and skills to be effective at work. However, there are many softer aspects that require attention too. How good are you at relating to others? Are you able to influence people? Do you have certain traits that hamper your effectiveness?
Through coaching you will explore aspects of yourself. You will revisit how you function and see what may require some tweaking. In a safe space you can talk about real issues affecting you, something we can seldom do at work.
Business coaching enables you to explore different approaches to your work and career.
Coping styles
It is easy to cope and be at our best behaviour when everything is working well. Inevitably there are times when we work toward a tight deadline or on a high profile project. Or it could be that we are dependent on others, who fail to deliver what we require.
When under pressure we may react in an instinctive, more emotional way. This could have a detrimental impact on our progress over time. Our coping styles under stress also highlight certain developmental areas. E.g. Individuals who are already quite driven by nature may become even more task orientated. They become abrupt and focus purely on achieving results. This means that relationships may suffer.
You may be quite a reflective, analytical kind of person. So under stress you may become even more analytical, to the extent that you suffer from analysis paralysis. Perhaps you become more indecisive and unable to make up your mind.
Therefore business coaching will help you explore how your behaviour changes when you are under pressure.
Stress management
Stress is an inherent part of our lives these days. At work the expectation is often that you need to cope no matter what. Lawyers are measured on the number of cases they bring in a month. Whereas youngsters working for a start-up put in long hours, often with little reward while the business grows.
With business coaching you will identify the core stress factors in your life. You will also determine strategies for reducing stress and how to manage it better.
You can definitely explore career coaching as a vehicle to fast track your progress.
Business coaching is a partnership between you and someone who equips you to become the successful person you want to be. Meet with various coaches and find one with whom you feel a good connection.