Why do I need a life coach? Accountability
Many of us keep a “to-do” list of things we need to accomplish with due dates. In the work environment, you are accountable to your boss and through periodic update meetings, report on your progress. This reporting relationship drives accountability. In our personal lives, we are accountable to ourselves, and we aren’t always the taskmaster that our boss is. How often have you blown by the due date without completing the task? It is easy to justify your lack of progress. Oftentimes you have been very busy doing other things but not working on your goal activities. So, you feel busy, but you weren’t productive. When this happens, the client gets behind in achieving her goals. The client/coaching relationship drives accountability for the client.
In past growth stories, I wrote about validation, insight, and action planning. Specifically in action planning, the coach works with the client to establish reasonable timelines for action items. The client then works on those activities before the next coaching session, getting closer to achieving the goal. This is the first step in accountability.
In the coaching environment, accountability comes about in two ways. First, similar to meeting with their boss, clients will want to be prepared when meeting with their coach. Generally, clients want to report progress and will prioritize goal activities in order to do so. Second, if the activity is not completed, the coaching process re-establishes a due date for the activity. Let me explain further.
In a coaching session, the coach and client start out with some small talk before getting into the core part of the session. The second part of a coaching session is ownership. In this step, the coach and client discuss what activities the client agreed to complete in the last session and the client reports on progress. Remembering that the coach is the client’s ally, she will ensure the client takes time to acknowledge what has been completed in order to feel satisfaction with her progress. When the client reports that an activity was not completed as agreed to, the coach will ask probing questions to understand why. Sometimes there is a valid reason that the client did not work to the plan such as an unexpected illness but sometimes the client just did not get it done. The coach and client will strategize ways to get back on track.
There are very few of us that can stay on track 100% of the time and this is especially true if what we are trying to achieve is hard and demanding. The coaching relationship adds an additional layer of accountability that keeps us on track.