Find Your Perfect Coach
How to Choose and Hire a Coach that Fits Your Goals
If you are considering to hire a coach for yourself, maybe you have recently learned about coaching or maybe heard about the benefits of coaching from someone who went through a program.
For people who have experienced gone coaching the explanation of why you need a coach is unnecessary. They have already experienced the power of transformational coaching. However, if you are a beginner looking for the best guidance to navigate the coaching world, read on. I will try to answer the FAQ:
- Why do I need a coach?
- What is coaching?
- What is Career Coaching?
- What should I expect from a Discovery call?
- How would I know if the coach is right for me?
❓Why do I need a coach?
What do elite athletes and C-suite executives have in common? The people in both categories have coaches.
That’s not a coincidence. Business executives understand that in order to achieve and operate at the level of peak performance they have to adopt the “elite athlete mindset”. This mindset starts with building the right support systems for yourself i.e. hiring the right coach.
Notice, both elite athletes and C-suite are not some “people with problems” or “people who can’t motivate themselves”.
I can tell you from my coaching experience that 90% of my clients are extremely high-functioning, intelligent, self-directed individuals. The reason why they have chosen to hire a coach is that they all have all come to the realization that coaching is not only for someone who needs to “get their shit together.” It is for someone who knows that they have some shit to work through in order to get to the next level.
You hire coaches for getting in shape, for getting your driver’s license, or even for that cooking class you have decided to take. Why not hire a coach for the things that truly matter? For become a next-level thinker. For achieving your personal and professional goals. For unlocking your true potential as a human being. For becoming the happiest person you know.
❓ What is coaching?
To understand what is coaching let’s first understand what coaching is not.
❌ Coaching is not Therapy.
Therapy is focusing a lot on the past (like childhood traumas) to unblock the present. As a coach I am not interested in the past. In our sessions we will be focusing on three things:
- What is the current state?
- What is the desired state?
- Building a system to close the gap between the two.
Coaching is not a therapy, however, coaching sessions can have therapeutic effect. Many clients experience a cathartic release during the coaching sessions. And it makes sense.
Have you seen the joy of a blind person who’s gone through an eye surgery and can now see clearly for the first time in their life? This is the joy that people experience in coaching — the joy of clarity. The peace that comes from being deeply grounded in the knowledge of what you are, and what you are not.
❌ Coaching is not Consulting.
A Consultant is a Subject Matter Expert in a certain domain. You hire consultants to solve a particular problem for you. You pay them high-ticket prices because they were training 10 years to get the job done in 10 min.
For example, if you hire me as a Talent Acquisition Consultant, I would be able to come help you hire people. As a Consultant, I will be leveraging my expertise in the recruitment industry.
As a Coach, I am a Subject Matter Expert in Coaching, however, I am not a Subject Matter Expert in YOU. You are. You know everything there is to know about yourself and all the answers are hidden within. The challenge is to unlock those answers and this is where the coaching shines.
Your mind is the door 🚪 to the source of higher intelligence. The coach is the Keymaker 🗝️ (yup, another Matrix reference for you). We guide you to the awareness of your ability to unlock that intelligence within you.
Being always inside your mind limits your ability to gain perspective.
You can’t get out of your head if you are always in it.
The coach is the perspective.
As a Coach, I am here not to solve your problems FOR you. I am here to solve your problems WITH you. My expertise lies in the techniques, tools, methodologies, frameworks, strategies to get you to your desired state. My job is to show you that you always have options, and get you to execute on those options you might not have considered.
❌ Coaching is not Teaching.
The objective of a coaching session is not to load you with tons of information. It’s not a lecture, where you are sitting quietly for an hour taking notes from a wise guru. No. That’s not what we as coaches do.
By all means, our coaching sessions will have some teaching elements. There are some puzzle pieces 🧩 that are just easier to share through teaching so that you could integrate them into your map of reality, however, teaching is not the primary purpose of the coaching conversation.
My job is not to impose my opinions on you. My job is to guide you so that you could find answers on your own.
❌ Coaching is not Mentoring.
A Mentor is someone who is further along your career path — they guide you from the level of their own experience being 3–5–10 years ahead of you in this journey.
They know what it feels like to be in your shoes, and they are guiding you from the place of their seniority, specific knowledge and accumulated career experience.
Mentors who are not good coaches often impose their opinions. They give advice based on what is good for them, not necessarily what is good for you.
A Coach would rarely have shared your career path. If they do, this definitely helps them as they can play a role of both a mentor and a coach, but ultimately, that is not what Coaches do.
We do not need to have any technical knowledge or industry expertise to have transformational coaching conversations. We guide from the depth of our own life experience, and this is why we value personal development so much.
❓ Ok, so if Coaching is not Therapy/Consulting/Teaching/Mentoring, what exactly is coaching?
- Coaching is a workout for the mind. You go to the gym to strengthen your body, you come to a coach to strengthen your mind. A competent coach will be able you to detect and point to the hidden inefficiencies in thinking which consequently result in inefficient action. You calibrate thinking, you execute on your new map of reality, you get new results.
- Coaching is a transformational conversation. Throughout the coaching conversations you uninstall unproductive mindsets, and install new beliefs that result in new behaviours, systems, outcomes.
- Coaching is always a short-term engagement which can last from 3–6 months. Our job is not create codependency. Our job is to create independence. However, we often have returning clients as they come back to work on other things once they have successfully overcome the first challenge.
- Coaching is always outcome-focused. The objective is to set a big goal and close it or at least to create momentum and build robust systems that will eventually get the goal closed. It is always helpful if you have at least some understanding of what you want to achieve before you book your Discovery call.
❓What is Career Coaching?
This is what most people think career coaches do:
✔ Resumes
✔ LinkedIn profiles
✔ Sending you to apply for jobs
What we actually do:
✅ Helping you to gain Absolute Clarity in your Life Purpose and Mission
✅ Crystallizing your Values and helping you to build systems to live your Values and manifest them in your Career
✅ Connecting you with our network
✅ Connecting you with the networks of our network
✅ Helping you to develop mentors in your professional domain
✅ Building up you confidence that bleeds into every other area of your life (family, friendships, personal relationships, etc.)
✅ Work with you on your communication skills
✅ Uninstalling harmful or unproductive mindsets that block you from exercising the right behaviour that would manifest your career vision
✅ Helping you to develop your personal brand through thought leadership and content creation
✅ Showing you the job hunting strategies that actually work
✔ Resumes & ✔ LinkedIn profiles are easy-peasy tactical stuff that even a student can do for you with a couple of hours of training (especially with ChatGPT now).
Transformational work with the mind that shifts your identity and flips your map of reality upside down — this is what is hidden behind the high-ticket pricing.
As coaches we often hear that coaching is expensive.
I always ask my clients:
What is the price tag you would put on transformation?
If coaching gets you a 10–20k+ on your next offer, work-life balance you are not currently experiencing, a team of people who appreciate you and make you feel that you belong, and a manager who is invested in your growth at work or beyond it, is it an EXPENSE 📉 or is it an INVESTMENT 📈?
You spend 1/3 of your life working (probably more if you are serious about your dreams). So if you are anything like me then you would agree:
Life is too short for mediocre career experiences.
I know people have a lot of questions around Career Coaching. But behind the scenes, we never really think of ourselves as Career Coaches.
Our profession is Holistic Human Development. We just happen to be in Career Coaching.
This is why our work never ends.
After securing the job our clients come back to us to work on other things — career progression, building up reputation and personal brand, starting side-hustles, and then eventually becoming 1-person businesses, satrtup foundersm, and thought leaders who serve the world and elevate others.
Getting a job is only the first step in this journey.
❓ What should I expect from a Discovery call?
First. If you have built the resolve to hire a coach, congratulations! 🥳
You are probably in 0.001% of population who have decided to invest in their growth. Just a decision to work with a coach puts you ahead of the crowd.
Second. Come prepared. The time that you are getting with a coach is valuable. Even if it is a free first session, you want to maximize the value from the call.
Do your research, write a list of questions you have, write down your thoughts about your vision and the goals you intend to accomplish.
Third. I’ve seen different approaches out there but I can tell you how I do my first Discovery call.
I don’t do Discovery calls.
I just coach.
It doesn’t matter for me if it is a first time I am meeting you or the last — you are getting a focused session as if you were already my client. My job is to provide maximum value in the short time we have together.
If your mind is exploded 🤯 by the end of the call, I consider it a job well done. If we are a mutual fit — great 👍. If not — great too 👍. Even if we don’t work together, I have a list of coaches I admire and respect who I happily make referrals to all the time. Ask me, and I will make an intro.
❓ How would I know if the coach is right for me?
This is the right question to ask yourself. Coaching is a serious investment and should not be taken lightly. There are a lot of coaches out there who even have shiny credentials. But are they competent? Not always.
Since one of many things that I do is Talent Acquisition, here is a puzzle piece 🧩 from recruitment I want to share with you.
Hire a Coach as if you would be hiring someone to work for you.
Because we coaches are truly working for you.
Here some tips for hiring (applicable both to workers and coaches):
- Hire a Coach who is Hungry, Humble, Smart. In other words: high energy, high intelligence, high integrity. This is how in recruitment we hire Ideal Team Players. Why these 3 are important? A high-energy coach will hustle for you and will inspire you. A high-intelligence coach will have an ability to decode and reprogram the functioning of your mind. A high-integrity coach will never do anything that would compromise his reputation (he worked too hard to build it). Mix all 3 in one Coach, and you will have an unstoppable force — a force you can have on your side.
- Hire for competence. For example, there are a lot of self-proclaimed Career Coaches who have never hired anyone or never touched recruitment or Talent Acquisition. You wouldn’t hire an obese personal trainer for yourself, would you? (Unless you are training for a sumo competition of course :))
- Hire for confidence. Confidence is a function of competence. It is very hard to fake confidence if there is no experience and specific knowledge to back it up.
- Hire for results. Look for social proof. Read testimonials. Get recommendations. When people achieve real results they want to tell everyone about their “secret weapon”. Look for that.
- Hire for deep work. A lot of coaches are too obsessed with marketing. They would constantly spam TikToks, duckface selfies, and cheap-dopamine lead gen content. (We all do what we can to get clients, who am I to judge?) But I have heard this from my executive clients and I share their sentiment. They say they are concerned when they see a coach who creates an impression of a person who cares about marketing above everything else.
- Hire for love. Uff….that came out too cheesy, right? 🧀 But here is the truth. People get into coaching because they want to help other people. People who stay in the game, are those who can’t imagine their life without coaching. They found their life purpose. True love for something inspires the discipline to study the craft. A disciplined mind will stop at nothing on the path of Mastery. And in Coaching, there is no end to mastery, because there are no two people alike. Every mind is unique. Every puzzle is interesting.
OK, let’s wrap up.
We talked about what coaching is not, and what coaching is. We talked about what to expect on your first call and how to prepare for it. Hopefully, you have a better idea around what you should be looking for when you are hiring a coach.
Shop around.
In dating, in hiring, in business — you do not start a relationship having one single data point. Get more data points. Talk to more people who have gone through coaching. Meet more coaches. Truly understand what coaching is before you engage. Make a list of the things you are looking for in a coach. Truly, approach hiring a coach like hiring talent for your business.
Get the preparation phase right, and you just might open the door that will change your life forever.
See you on the other side.
🚪
