Questions To Ask Yourself When Hiring a Coach

• Are you looking for guarantees or promises from a coach that you would never, in good conscience, give your patients or customers?

• Are you really in the market for a therapist rather than a life coach — someone to address mental health issues, like depression or anxiety from a clinical perspective?

• Are you in the market for a consultant — someone to give you advice or tell you what to do?

• Are you looking for an accountability buddy? Someone to only hold you to your word?

Guarantees: Coaching cannot promise outcomes any more than physicians can ethically promise patients a full recovery. Like the best physicians, coaches know that the success of coaching relies at least 50 percent on the commitment and openness of the client to change and grow.

Therapist, Consultant or Life Coach? While coaches are not therapists, what transpires in the coaching space can be every bit therapeutic. The best coaches coach the whole person. We are not “business coaches” or “relationship coaches “ or “ADHD coaches”, “burnout coaches” or even “coaches for physicians” — despite our chosen marketing focus.

I coach physicians, because I have a special knack for knowing the characteristics that make so many doctors attracted to medicine at a young age, often good at what they do, and also suffer uniquely.

At the end of the day, however, physicians are human. Nothing more. Nothing less. I coach humans, who happen to be physicians — or cyber security CEOs, or investment bankers or PE teachers.

Or another human who happens to do a certain kind of work.

Just like other humans, doctors want love. Doctors want to come home to a partner with whom they feel seen and heard. Just like other humans, physicians can have mental health struggles with depression, addiction and OCD. I coach doctors who may be burned out.

I coach human beings who struggle with these and many other challenges — some created by their work as physicians in a toxic system and some that have little to do with their chosen profession. I coach human beings.

Accountability: As for holding clients accountable to their goals. This is certainly an aspect of coaching. But that is just one of the structures coaching can offer — and only if it’s applicable to what’s going on. Coaching is not consulting, but there may be times we put on our consulting hat. But this is rarely as life changing as helping you claim your own solutions.

Coaching is individualized, non-formulaic, sometimes messy, sometimes slow, often beautiful, always surprising to both coach and client. Coaching takes great skill that includes deep listening, knowing when to intrude in service of the client, wisdom, practice and the ability to forge special connections with clients. Without connection, skills mean nothing. There are some things that cannot be taught. Physicians know this as well as anyone.

If you’re looking for a path you’ve never taken before, one that together we map as we go, then coaching is for you. If you’re ready to go right, even though you were absolutely sure you needed to go left, then coaching is for you.

“When I started coaching with you, I thought you were going to tell me three things that were wrong with me and how to fix them,” one client recently told me. “Instead I found myself. Someone just fine exactly as I am. There is nothing to fix”

This client came to coaching for one thing and is staying for entirely other reasons. It is no longer about fixing himself. It is about loving himself. It is about choosing what he wants to do, whom he wants to work with. His life is now about freedom. This is what coaching is about.