The Campbell Academy Blog (71)

Each end of coaching

My friend recently asked me if I would help him by giving him some coaching for his fledgling business.

I haven't known him that long, but I've known him long enough, and I see him quite regularly, in fact, for one reason or another more regularly, and I see many people.

He has a freelancer business.

He sells his time for money and does really well, but now he has no time and enough money, but he's out of time and nowhere to build the business.

We chat about these things when we see each other, and what comes next seems quite apparent to me.

And so, we've been chatting in various ways, and then he asked if I would coach him.

I was flattered.

I've never really coached anyone like that for business, so I said I would happily help.

It will just involve cups of coffee in different places to chat about where you are now really based around the structure of our business course to say, "Have you thought about this and have you thought about that" but then I guess that that is coaching.

Another friend of mine runs an extraordinarily big business.

It's not so dissimilar to our business but not quite the same.

In a conversation a while ago, I asked them the same thing my friend asked me.

Would they be prepared to coach me in business because we're moving to a different place, a different level, and he's already been there (for many years) and already gets all the highs, lows, stresses, and strains?

And so, for the first time last week, he came over to the practice to help out a little bit and to chat with our senior leadership team and to see if you could give some advice related to what was going on.

It was super simple and seemingly obvious (but not so obvious that we had already seen it), and I guess that's how coaching goes.

Brilliant people have the ability to make complicated things simple.

So, the friend who's helping me to try and simplify the complexity of my business finds that really easy, but I see them as brilliant.
What I have to do for my other friend who wants help from me is try to be as close to the brilliant guy as I can.

We're all coaching someone somewhere, friends, family, children, colleagues; it happens all the time.

Just because you find it easy doesn't mean that they do.

"It's only easy if you know the answer".