Do You Rock, or Do You Wait to be Rocked?
or “Coaching and your ambition number…”
There are two main widely diverging schools of coaching that I can see.
- One is like a cheerleader or motivator… the coach is trying to get water from a rock…
- The other, the coaching I practice, is very different.
The principle of the second type of coaching: you can only coach someone who is in action. You can redirect them… but they have to be in movement. It is not my job or responsibility to get you into movement.
So this is what the “do you rock or do you wait to be rocked” question is trying to find out.
I have found that I want clients who are a match to what I do and how I do it.
And if they are waiting for me to tell them what to do, overall… I am useless.
This is why I changed my whole coaching structure from talking-coaching to 67 step coaching: if you don’t have a direction already, a project, a life’s purpose, then at least work on the 67 steps’ principles… until you have something that you can see that you are up to and willing to work on.
A few months ago one of my 67 steps coaching students asked me to coach him in business.
Creating a business requires a lot of skills. But in essence, once you have created one business, and learned the moves of business, any business, you can start looking what kind of business you’d like to create. You learn a lot about yourself, about business principles, you learn skills while you build that one business… 1
How did other people learn business?
The reason so many highly successful people have had several bankruptcies is because learning a business through doing a business is like learning to cook while you are a cook in a restaurant: you don’t have a lot of room to make mistakes… and mistakes are fatal.
But such is business…
There are no schools really for learning business… the way there are schools for surgery so people don’t have to practice on live people and maim them… lol.
The personality that likes being told what to do, the personality that likes to go to school, is different from the personality who takes risks and takes things in stride… risking everything every day.
I don’t mean taking stupid risks… but taking risks is part of doing business.
In the beginning my student was learning and experimenting… but then something went south… and for a long time, I noticed, that we were talking, but there was no coaching: there was nothing to coach about because there was no action.
So yesterday this was put on the table…
I’ve made it his responsibility to have something to be coached in…
Why wouldn’t I want to tell him what to do? Because this is not school. And I am not a motivational coach either.
And I hate that kind of coaching… And remember, I never do anything for money that I wouldn’t do for free.
PS: the question could have been asked like this: Are you a self-starter?
A self starter is a person who begins work or undertakes a project on his or her own initiative, without needing to be told or encouraged to do so.
When I look at someone’s Starting Point Measurements, the numbers that indicate Self Starter are the ambition number and the TLB number, on the positive side, and the desire number and your level of delusion on the negative side.
- This should make sense. Ambition is the size of the vision you are willing to invest energy into…
- TLB number is what shows if you are willing to invest any energy into something that is not immediately gratifying
- The desire number is the stuff you want but not willing to put any energy into… but will spend most of your time fantasizing about
- The level of delusion is hand in glove with the desire number: you would have to become the kind of person who can have what you desire… and you fancy yourself already that. The delusion number indicates the size of your missing capacities…
You can get your own Starting Point Measurements. Knowledge is power… once you know, you won’t expect yourself to do things you are not suited for.
PPS: Self starter is not the same as someone who starts but doesn’t finish
PPPS: My brother is not a self-starter. But his wife is.
You can be a good person, and even successful even if you are not a self-starter… You could be working on something that someone else (not me) nudges you to do (a job? a partner? partners?) and you need me to manage you and direct you and guide you on this journey… I am OK with that.
- There is a difference between a business and a project. Or creating a website and building a business. I won’t go into it, but the difference is vast. A lot of people have projects, maybe even make money, but don’t have a business… They are freelancers, or service providers, or something like that. This, in a way, includes me… I don’t really have a business. I have had businesses, but this one isn’t a business. It needs me to work every day, and if I die it dies.
