disclaimer: I’ve read in full only “Takes for Self-improvers, clients, people ‘bought into’ self-development” which I’m mostly interested in, skimmed the rest
Thanks for the writeup! I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on how I should figure out the value of getting coaching.
My current approach is to do a lot of self-coaching myself and only when I feel like I’m stuck for a longer period or feel overwhelmed I reach out to a coach/therapist. Then, I use the sessions not only to figure out the object-level problem, but also I try to learn how to become a better self-coach by reflecting on the sessions on a meta-level (so that I don’t need them anymore).
There is of course an opportunity cost—I could just get coaching sessions regularly, regardless of whether I’m stuck, or not, and focus on my thing—engineering/parenting/founding/… But if I’m gonna save the time/effort by not learning to coach myself and instead outsource the coaching skills to others, am I not gonna need them in the future?
There is of course always the benefit of having another person check on my thinking and hear their perspective, but that doesn’t need to be a coach, it can be a domain expert, if my self-coaching skills are good enough.
To sum this up, what am I likely missing with this approach?
Glad it was helpful! Happy to see that you utilized the ‘playlist’-type function of this to kick off these thoughts
This sounds like a nice process you’ve carved out for yourself. Always pleased to see when people are at such an advanced position in being conscientious about their growth.
Similar to what it sounds like your process is, my sense is that the best frequency for working with most coaches/therapists follows an ‘organic cadence’ that’s tied to particular phases and occasions. It seems like, in most cases, consistent indefinite sessions are more likely to stray from addressing things that are (a)live
Things I’d suggest that could be helpful to think about:
– There’s a meta-skill to knowing when to bring in certain people to lean on / get inspired by in different situations. Viewing that as an ongoing learning project to reflect on could be good. (It could imply that you want to strengthen aspects of your network in case you want to call upon them, for example) – This project of knowing when to bring certain people in can be enhanced by more information about use cases associated with different people and frequencies. Maybe self-coaching is great for certain territories of your experience, but consistent founder-coaching while you’re in phases of creation, scaling up, management, etc. are almost always useful. A lot of this is tied to seasonality and phases in my mind. Bringing in a coach ‘to thrive’ in winter, when you’re likely to be more introspective, etc., could be better than doing so in the summer, when you might want to be having experiences in the outside world to bring back for yourself later. – I don’t want to assume things about your process, but self-coaching/-therapy is tricky even for coaches and therapists. If you want to get really good at this, it’s likely some time refining that toolkit (*focusing explicitly on getting better at self-coaching*) would be a good investment of time and resources – Getting coaching/therapy when you feel stuck is a reliable signal of need and/or comes with a higher likelihood of getting value from individual (sets of) sessions. The downsides are that you can lose momentum getting stuck, you could get stuck for longer than it needed to be, some people struggle to ask for help in low-powered states. Consistent coaching aimed at the medium- to long-term can ‘head off’ certain tangles/hangups. More on this here
Hope that was helpful! Curious how what I mentioned landed for you
disclaimer: I’ve read in full only “Takes for Self-improvers, clients, people ‘bought into’ self-development” which I’m mostly interested in, skimmed the rest
Thanks for the writeup! I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on how I should figure out the value of getting coaching.
My current approach is to do a lot of self-coaching myself and only when I feel like I’m stuck for a longer period or feel overwhelmed I reach out to a coach/therapist. Then, I use the sessions not only to figure out the object-level problem, but also I try to learn how to become a better self-coach by reflecting on the sessions on a meta-level (so that I don’t need them anymore).
There is of course an opportunity cost—I could just get coaching sessions regularly, regardless of whether I’m stuck, or not, and focus on my thing—engineering/parenting/founding/… But if I’m gonna save the time/effort by not learning to coach myself and instead outsource the coaching skills to others, am I not gonna need them in the future?
There is of course always the benefit of having another person check on my thinking and hear their perspective, but that doesn’t need to be a coach, it can be a domain expert, if my self-coaching skills are good enough.
To sum this up, what am I likely missing with this approach?
Glad it was helpful! Happy to see that you utilized the ‘playlist’-type function of this to kick off these thoughts
This sounds like a nice process you’ve carved out for yourself. Always pleased to see when people are at such an advanced position in being conscientious about their growth.
Similar to what it sounds like your process is, my sense is that the best frequency for working with most coaches/therapists follows an ‘organic cadence’ that’s tied to particular phases and occasions. It seems like, in most cases, consistent indefinite sessions are more likely to stray from addressing things that are (a)live
Things I’d suggest that could be helpful to think about:
– There’s a meta-skill to knowing when to bring in certain people to lean on / get inspired by in different situations. Viewing that as an ongoing learning project to reflect on could be good. (It could imply that you want to strengthen aspects of your network in case you want to call upon them, for example)
– This project of knowing when to bring certain people in can be enhanced by more information about use cases associated with different people and frequencies. Maybe self-coaching is great for certain territories of your experience, but consistent founder-coaching while you’re in phases of creation, scaling up, management, etc. are almost always useful. A lot of this is tied to seasonality and phases in my mind. Bringing in a coach ‘to thrive’ in winter, when you’re likely to be more introspective, etc., could be better than doing so in the summer, when you might want to be having experiences in the outside world to bring back for yourself later.
– I don’t want to assume things about your process, but self-coaching/-therapy is tricky even for coaches and therapists. If you want to get really good at this, it’s likely some time refining that toolkit (*focusing explicitly on getting better at self-coaching*) would be a good investment of time and resources
– Getting coaching/therapy when you feel stuck is a reliable signal of need and/or comes with a higher likelihood of getting value from individual (sets of) sessions. The downsides are that you can lose momentum getting stuck, you could get stuck for longer than it needed to be, some people struggle to ask for help in low-powered states. Consistent coaching aimed at the medium- to long-term can ‘head off’ certain tangles/hangups. More on this here
Hope that was helpful! Curious how what I mentioned landed for you