Do you hire a mechanic to service your car?

Do you have a personal trainer or go to a gym to workout?

Do you call a plumber if your tap is leaking?

Or are you like thousands of other small business owners who decide to Do It Yourself with these tasks. After all how hard is it to change the engine oil, get a little exercise or change a tap washer?

Just how much can you do yourself?

The value of having a business coach in order to plan, review and implement major projects within your business is no longer a luxury but in some cases a necessity. This is a function you can Do Yourself, but sometimes it is far more effective to hire an outside perspective, to assist with developing and implementing new initiatives in your business.

Business owners like simple, easy to understand yet powerful tools to use in their business. The 3 Step Coaching Model is one of those tools. The model incorporates 3 simple steps, examining the WHO, the WHAT and the HOW. If you are a Do It Yourself kind of business owner you too can follow these 3 simple steps.

Often a business coach will discover who the client is (and helps them to do the same), by talking about, learning about and strengthening WHO the client is. They work with the client to identify their values, needs, qualities, talents, character, integrity and spirit.

This is really important to do for several reasons:

1. The better the coach understands the client, the better they can coach them.
2. The better the client understands themselves, the more they grow and learn about their strengths and abilities.

Most business owners don't focus enough on Step1. They are mostly wanting goal setting (Step 2) and goal achievement (Step 3). So, the coach has to introduce this step to the client and see if they want to work on the WHO stuff. It's the WHO stuff that provides the leverage in coaching - and what really makes coaching.

For the Do It Yourself business owner it is very important to identify your personal and business values and align these with your goals. Values define what is important to us. They are always positive and motivate all behaviour. The quality of our life experience is determined by our values. We compare things in the outer world against the values that we hold.

We often use values to measure the relative worth of something and deem it to be a positive or negative experience as a result of that measure. Following on from this, we use values to set priorities or rank things ahead of others. What this means is that we have a hierarchy of values. This hierarchy is linked to the direction and purpose of our life and our experience of it.

People though are often unaware of their values and precisely what they are. This can lead to feelings of dissatisfaction because they aren't aware of the distinctions that would allow a more fulfilling life experience. Values could be things like beauty, creativity, family, honest, friendships or anything else of worth.

In many cases, most clients don't really know what they most want. They have some ideas, but rarely are they clear, and rarely are the goals an expression of the client's values. So, the coach helps the client to clarify their goals, make them specific and personal, and finds a way to link the goal to the client, meaning linking the "WHAT" to the "WHO." Or to put it another way, when the "WHO" (the client) is clear, the "WHAT" (goals) naturally flows and becomes clear. This makes coaching much easier for the client and coach.

For the Do It Yourself business owner this is your chance to list your goals, write them down as quickly as possible, reserve judgment for later. Once you have a comprehensive list, spend time prioritizing the list, ranking the goals from the most to the least important. Make sure the number one goal is clearly aligned with your personal values. For example your goal may be to work only fifty hours a week. This would be clearly aligned with your value, the family.

The role of the coach is to support the client to select, then implement the best strategy or focus, that will help the client get what they want faster. By selecting the right "HOW," the client ends up strengthening their "WHO." In other words, the 3-step process displayed is a circular one.

For the Do It Yourself business owner, this is the time for action. Take dramatic steps to implement your action plan and make the plan come alive. Remember that if you have taken the first two steps carefully this final step will result in effortless achievement.

All business owners can take advantage of the 3 Step Model and make the leap toward success.

diagrag 7 text box