I know superpowers are just fantasy for many folks, and you might even be a bit dubious yourself, but I’m serious!
What if your clients felt like you:
- were a mindreader (always just delivering what THEY didn’t even know they needed)
- had body-scanning capabilities (instinctively knowing exactly what was troubling them)
- had a laser-focus (you focus every single second of your time on they want)
- had a protective shield (everything you do shields them from harm)
Wouldn’t that be cool?
Superheroes are thought of as superheroes because they make the incredibly complex seem ridiculously easy, they make people feel safe & protected, and they move heaven and earth to help (which makes people feel special).
And it’s for these reasons that EVERYBODY loves superheroes.
Now let’s look at the standard approach to coaching…
Do we have a mind-reading capability? No. We wait for our clients to tell us about their problems – which means they actually have to aware of them and by then, the problem is already bigger than it needed to be.
Do we have a body-scanning capability? No. We just try to fit our clients to somebody else’s idea of “correct” – which means we miss the signs of trouble brewing
Are we laser-focused on what they want? No. We spend our time dealing with their supposed “problems” based on somebody else’s idea of “correct” – which means we’re focusing on what they need, not what they want (and nobody likes focusing on their problems)
Do we have a protective shield? No. Because we wait for our clients to tell us about their problems, we try to fit our clients to some kind of “ideal” and we spend our time focusing on their problems, we completely miss all the signs that would have shown us that injury was likely and BOOM! All of a sudden they pick up a strain or worse, that appeared to come out of nowhere.
So, comparing the standard approach to coaching to the superhero approach…
Do we make the incredibly complex sound ridiculously easy? No. We try to teach our clients what we know about a subject, which usually means using technical jargon that they only half understand (until we’ve spent much longer teaching them about it)
Do we make them feel safe and protected? Probably not. After all, when problems do happen, we just farm them out to someone else to deal with it!
Do we make them feel like we’ll move heaven and earth to help them? No. We make them do all the things they don’t like doing because we know that it’s good for them.
Hmm…who would YOU rather be coached by? A standard coach or a superhero coach?
Oh, and I’ll let you into a little secret…superhero coaches DO exist!