The Most Important Thing You Need as a Young Leader
In a previous blog post, I talked about why personal coaching is the key to clarifying your purpose as a young leader so you can breathe again. I also talked about what personal coaching is and what it is not and how personal coaching differs from mentoring, therapy, or teaching. In today’s post, I want to share with you the most important thing you need as a young leader and how personal coaching helped me get this thing and why you need that thing too.
I believe if you really want to accomplish your dreams and become who you want to be in your career and life, personal coaching is what ultimately matters. Not the "technical rigor" of your skills. Not your credentials. Not your educational qualifications. Not your professional experience. Not your ideas.
You need something else, something that only a personal coach can give. You need hope. You need to lead you. You need to take care of you. Anthony M. Grant, author of a 2003 study titled The Impact of Life Coaching on Goal Attainment, Metacognition and Mental Health, discovered that life coaching enhanced mental health and satisfaction with life in individuals. Anthony Grant notes in his study that even though life coaching is not specifically focused on mental health, it improves mental health functioning. In a study with 20 post-graduate students, Grant found that not only did goal attainment increase after coaching, but depression, anxiety, and stress were notably reduced after the coaching.
Growing your career and becoming who you want to be in your life is about feeling good about you first before you can make anyone else feel good. And to feel good about you, you need hope. In his paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Nir Halevy discovered that lacking hope may cost you and others around you. You need hope to succeed at work and win in life.
You probably are not feeling that good about yourself right now. You don’t need me to share another study with you to remind you that most young leaders are not feeling hopeful about their future. I am not saying you are not taking care of yourself. I am saying you know you deserve better and you are capable of more.
And if you are hopeless, I know how it feels to be hopeless. I have been there. When I started working with my first personal coach, it helped me feel good about me and my future. I started believing in myself again. I started surrounding myself with people that believed in me. I finally had a team.
Personal coaching is how you take care of you before you take care of others. It’s how you build the best team around you. It’s how you grow as a young leader. It’s how you make the most impact by impacting you first.
Why is that important?
What a personal coach gave me was something I couldn’t give to myself at the time I was struggling to become who I wanted to be and take control of my life. But when I started coaching, I finally had someone who understood my problems. I had someone in my corner that believed in me and understood my desires. Not just what I was interested in doing with my life or what I wanted. But someone who understood my deep emotional needs.
The problem is I didn’t know who I was and I was busy trying to hold on to things that I thought could sustain me, but when I discovered who I really was, I was able to let those things go. There is a quote in Timothy Gallwey’s book The Inner Game of Work: Focus, Learning, Pleasure, and Mobility in the Workplace that describes what happens when you don’t know who you are or when your team doesn’t know who they are.
“The problem is your people don’t know who they are,” … “Thus, they tend to identify themselves with their roles, their reputations, the company itself, and the current way of doing things. When the stability of any of these factors is threatened, their automatic response is to resist, and to resist as if they were protecting their own selves. Because they are protecting who they think they are, they do so with considerable force.”
While I was busy trying to hold on to these things that I thought were who I was, deep inside me was a deeply wounded little boy who needed someone to give him hope. I couldn’t find this hope in my profession, job, business or with friends. It came from a personal coach.
My coach became part of my team. Personal coaching gave me a team that believed I was the best person around to do what I needed to do with my life and to solve the problems I needed to solve with my goals and fulfill my own needs. Personal coaching taught me how to lick my own wounds. I want to help you lick your own wounds. That’s what great leaders do. They have an amazing ability to lick their own wounds and bounce back from failure and setbacks much quicker than most people. Anyone can learn this skill.