Can we coach ourselves? The future of self-improvement

A familiar scene for most of us will be that of an athlete being trained by an experienced coach with a view to accelerating his or her performance. In business therefore, the coach metaphor signifies having somebody teach us and drive us towards our goals.
However, can we coach ourselves? Can we accelerate our own performance without having someone else there spurring us on?
The answer is yes.
Several of my business clients perceive having a coach as getting somebody to teach us and impart knowledge to us, then oversee us practising those newly acquired skills with a view to mastering them. Nowadays, we can easily access an abundance of online content at no cost, so the critical point of being coached is to appreciate and navigate how we currently perform, and this will be a major aspect of what I am going to discuss.
The stepping stone with which a coach can greatly contribute to a student or person being coached is to identify the strengths of that person and areas that need improvement.
Some top executives I have interviewed asserted that the cause of their transformation was candid feedback they received from their CEOs and colleagues, which, after having been with the company for many years, shifted their perspective and behaviour. But executives at the highest lev?els rarely receive honest feedback, especially in the areas where there is room for improvement. These can eventually become that person’s blind spot.
Why is this important? One senior coach shared with me the analogy of a coach being much like a mirror. An executive or manager can perform self-reflection regarding what they have done; however, there are certain blind spots that can only be seen from the perspective of others.
There is the story of the former chief executive of Duke Energy, America’s largest electric company, James Rogers, requesting that his team members provide him with feedback by grading him on a scale of A to F. The result was shown in real time on a screen everyone could see. Although the grade was generally good, he noticed that fewer than half of them hesitated to give him an A.
He took the feedback seriously and explored further through interviewing his staff and found that his internal communication was the No 1 improve?ment area. Thus by being open to feed?back and listening to it with no excuses, we will discover where we can begin the process of coaching ourselves.
Howard Guttman, an American management consultant, also suggests creating a “circle of support” by inviting people we trust to be our mirrors along the self-coaching process. These people could provide the candid feedback on the areas in which we aim to excel. I have seen that a pitfall occurs for clients pursuing this step when they invite colleagues who don’t talk straight or are not available to witness their performance substantially at various stages of the process.
So, the initial stage of coaching ourselves is to discover who we really are. This is the first, simplest, and yet biggest step for the groundwork of the self-coaching journey.

Dr Siraya Kongsompong is the senior solutions practitioner at APMGroup and a professional certified coach of Erickson International. Write to her at [email protected].