I first got involved with life and business coaching in 1999, and I have been amazed at how frequently people, and even coaches, misuse the life coaching process.  People hire someone to coach them for a whole range of reasons.  Unfortunately, many of these reasons have little to do with life coaching.  Sad to say, far too many people will sell their coaching services to anyone who will pay them for almost any reason.  Or worse, many others use a coach with no real purpose in mind.

The only reason you will want to engage a life or business or executive coach is to accomplish your Coachable Goals.  The real reason coaches go through all of their training and practice is to be able to coach you to make sure you DO accomplish your Coachable Goals.  Yet, too many coaching prospective clients and people purporting to be life coaches do not understand the importance of having Coachable Goals or what they really are.  Consequently, coaching commences without any real purpose.  This is not good for the client, the coach, or coaching in general.  To put this in perspective, this is like paying an attorney for no reason, or at least for something that has nothing to do with the law.  The reason you would even consider talking to an attorney, let alone pay an attorney money is to solve a legal matter.  But, if you did pay an attorney without a legal goal, you would be paying the attorney to do something he or she was not trained to do and the outcome would be very questionable.  You would probably seriously question the performance of the attorney, and would be concerned about receiving so little, if any, value for your payments.

What is a Coachable Goal?  A Coachable Goal is a future place you want to be that requires you to grow and improve as a person to achieve it.  In essence, your Coachable Goals represent the new life you want to lead for yourself and others.  It may involve improving your work life to suit all of your personal desires, priorities and passions.  Or it might involve improving your personal life to include your health, your peace of mind and your connection with your beliefs and values.  Or it might involve improving the relationships you have with your family and chosen others.  Or it might involve some combination of all three.  No matter what, your Coachable Goals will be yours only, and will be improvements you and only you want.  They must come only from within you.  Goals imposed on you by others do not fall into YOUR Coachable Goals.

Your Coachable goal encompasses you creating the personal or work or family life that you really want.  Your Coachable Goals will become life-altering goals for you.  Choose wisely.

The hot link on this page to Coachable Goals will connect you to in depth explanations of what we at the Coach Connection have found to be the 15 most popular Coachable Goals in the past four years, and how your coach will probably assist you to achieve them.  All of these Coachable Goals have been accomplished by former TCC clients.  We have learned that once you read several of these Coachable Goals, you will get an idea of what you can expect to accomplish yourself.  We strongly recommend that you have at least a general understanding of what your Coachable Goal is before you engage a life coach.

I experienced first hand the confusion surrounding the true purposes of using a life coach.  I wanted to hire a life coach in 2000 to help me find out how I could fully enjoy my business coaching, even though my practice was growing rapidly and my clients were achieving great successes.  I could not put my finger on why tension filled knots appeared in my stomach as I continued to coach business owners to increase their profits and have more time for themselves at the same time.  I was very happy for them, but felt something was missing, and I could not figure out what it was.  I became a business coach after having attempted many other jobs and work positions.  I had previously run a number of businesses and had sold my last one at 1:14 PM EST on May 17, 1995.  Since then, I had been trying to find the right work position for me.  I had even spent a week taking the self analysis test in the Book entitled "What Color is Your Parachute" to discover what was the right job for me.  I then followed the conclusions from this assessment.  I became involved in training a consultant sales force with a large international consulting group for over two years; I became a business broker, a business consultant, a real estate investor, and a business coach.  Needless to say, I was still searching 5 years after taking the test.  (I keep my copy of "What Color is My Parachute" as a reminder of how I wasted five years using their self-analysis method)

I was the Membership Chairman of the International Coach Federation (ICF) and I had personal access to all of the approximately 2,000 to 3,500 ICF members.  In addition, my team of 42 coaches and I tried to personally call and talk to each member at least once a year to thank each one for being a member of ICF.  In the process, I became acquainted with scores of coaches.  So, I thought finding the right coach for me would be fairly easy.  I started by contacting the coaches I knew and liked the best and went from there.  Boy was I wrong

I interviewed 27 coaches over a 6-month period, before I finally found the right coach for me.  I jumped at the chance of having Thom Politico coach me.  But why was I so excited about coaching with Thom after so many rejections?  Thom was the first coach to ask me "Bill, before we do anything, what do you want to accomplish through our coaching?”  I explained my situation and what I wanted to accomplish.  Thom then repeated my goals in an even clearer manner that resonated with me.  He explained that my goal was to figure out what I really loved to do so much that I would be excited to go to work every day for the sheer joy of it.  I quickly agreed and was thrilled to now have a clear purpose for my coaching.

What Thom did that the other coaches had failed to do was to discover if I had a Coachable Goal and to have us both agree on what it was, before coaching started.  Thom and I coached towards achieving my Coachable Goal.  I was so anxious to accomplish my goal that I asked to start immediately.  After only a few initial discovery sessions with Thom, it became very clear to me (and Thom) that my real passion was to be a business owner, much more than coaching other owners.  We laughed when Thom and I discovered than the knots in my stomach were not caused by hearing the successes of my business owner clients, but were caused by hearing the problems they complained about.  We realized together, that I wanted to HAVE these problems, so I could solve them myself.  From there, we continued the discovery process into all aspects of my life, so we could design and build a business around ME.  It was a hoot.  The result of our coaching towards my goal of discovering and actually getting my ideal income position, where I went to play every day, and was so good at it that I contributed considerable value and high quality results, was to form The Coach Connection.

I had written an article about how to succeed at starting a business that said success to starting a business was highly dependent on finding a need and filling it better than anyone else.  I had found two different needs.  One was the need for a person to be able to determine if coaching was right for them and then find the very best coach for them.  This need I discovered during my own journey to find a coach.  The other was the need for coaches to discover, find, and connect with the clients who provided the very best fit, so they could coach their ideal clients.  This need I discovered in my interviews with hundreds of ICF member coaches over a two-year period, when they expressed their frustrations in finding the right clients for them.

Thom Politico coached me to design The Coach Connection around fulfilling these two needs and do so in a way that allowed me to fulfill my personal passions and priorities, follow my integrity, maximize my talents and avoid my self-imposed obstacles.  Later I recruited Thom and Jim Cahill as partners to actually build my business.  We spent eleven months dissecting and reconstructing this company to accomplish both needs better than anyone else in the world.  We launched The Coach Connection on May 31, 2001, as a direct result of Thom Politico coaching me to my Coachable Goal.  I have not regretted a moment since.  I have had more fun, accomplished more, grown more as a person, met more terrific people, and improved my health, my tennis game, my financial situation and my family relationships since I embarked on my journey to achieve my Coachable Goal with Thom.  And I started all of this at the young age of 55.  I feel that I am living proof that this life-coaching thing works, and actually works better than most people realize.