“…And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance! I Hope You Dance.”
—Lee Ann Womack
I’m going to admit something to you now that not every coach will admit: Sometimes, coaching doesn’t work.
The professionals I work with usually seek me out to deal with one of two major roadblocks:
- They don’t know what to do to get beyond the success they’ve already had, or
- They do know what to do, but they’re *afraid* to do it.
The first of these hurdles requires special training. The second is clearly a coachable issue. But both can be resolved much more simply than a lack of commitment. If there is no true commitment, coaching won’t help, no matter how excellent a given coach may be.
Commitment stumbling blocks tend to arise under the following three conditions:
1. Not wanting it badly enough. To achieve anything of great significance, you need to possess a burning desire to make it happen.
Now and then, a client will consult me to help him grow his business or practice, only to quit after a month or two, just as we are beginning to make real progress. In a case like this, the client tends to agree that coaching has been helping, but then openly confesses his/her lack of drive, saying, “Perhaps I just didn’t want it badly enough”. Simply wanting something to happen isn’t enough. Wanting it intensely—having a “burning desire” for it—is a prerequisite for success.
2. Not believing it is possible for you to have it. You can want something intensely, but if you don’t truly believe it is possible to have, you won’t get it. Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics, explained it succinctly:
“If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can’t—you’re right.”
3. Not being willing to persist. If what you wanted out of your life or career was the prize at the end of a dance marathon, would you be the last one dancing? Or would you be exhausted by the seemingly-endless music, and choose to “sit it out”?
“I’ve tried doing seminars,” blurted Larry during one of my workshops, while we were on the topic of useful marketing tools, “but they just don’t work for my kind of business.”
“How many seminars have you done?” I asked him.
“Three,” he replied.
I got Larry to tell me that he hadn’t spent a lot of money on any of them—not even on advertising beforehand—and that, nonetheless, a few people had showed up to each one and at least one person had asked him for a quote afterwards. So, I persisted:
“What if you believed that seminars did work and you did twenty of them to get your business going?”
“It wouldn’t do any good,” he responded definitively.
“Well, how can you know that from the brief experience you’ve had with them?” I pressed.
Larry started to say that he ‘just knew’, but then, he caught himself.
“I guess I just didn’t believe they would work, so I stopped doing them,” he admitted.
“There’s more to it than just ‘not believing’,” I coached. “You had only just gotten started, and you stopped dancing.”
Often, what you want is harder for you to achieve than you want it to be. In my chapter of Success and Happiness, I explain how if you want to be a “rainmaker”, you must continue to “rain dance”…until it rains.
For some sound advice on having the *persistence* to overcome your roadblocks and get what you want—some great choreography—contact me. Choose to dance, and then keep REACHING…
