Why All Medallists Have Coaches

Like competing at sport, setting up and running your own business can be a great, but rewarding challenge.  But, when it comes to your business results, will you be glad just to have been selected to represent your country, or glad to have made it to the Olympic final, or is a medal the least you will be satisfied with?

If you were an athlete and not a business owner, how would you try to ensure that you at least won a medal?

It doesn't take much research to discover that all the great athletes were helped to achieve what they did by their coaches.  In fact Sir Steve, Sir Matthew, Dame Kelly, Dame Tanni, Sir Chris and the others simply couldn't have done it without their coaches.

Could the same be possible in business?  You bet it could!

Even the non-athletes among us know, I am sure, that sportsmen and women need to train for their event.  They need to incorporate a mixture of strength, fitness and stamina work, as well as skill, into their training regime.  How would they get on if they did this all themselves; unaided, unobserved and with no feedback?

I suspect that actually, at the highest level, they would make a pretty good fist of it for a few days, even weeks.  I am certain that self-motivation is no problem whatsoever for these elite stars.  Along the way they will have learned what mixture of exercises make up a top-class training programme, so they can plan their forthcoming schedule without assistance.  They will know what 'doing it right' feels like and be able to sense when they are starting to fall short of their best.  They will undoubtedly have the ability to 'shout at themselves' and not need the coach's voice in their ears.  But would they ever dream of dispensing with all coaching?  Would they ever!

Is the same true in business?  Do the Bannatynes, the Bransons, the Roddicks and the Sugars know how to plan and run a business, and make it hugely successful, without any outside help.  Of course they do, or did in the case of the late Dame Anita.  Does this mean business and sport are different?

In spite of this evidence, I actually believe they aren't that different.  I have talked about top class athletes and top flight entrepreneurs, but how did they get to the top in the first place?

If your school days were anything like mine, whatever your sporting achievements, until you were maybe ten years old you were unlikely to have had much input from a teacher, except to explain the rules of the game.  You probably didn't train either; you just 'played'.

But from then on, it is highly likely that someone was advising you on how you might do better.  And maybe around this time your world polarised into those who enjoyed and were good at sport, and those who'd rather do any anything else but games and PE.  The good got better and progressed through club and county level to become the international representatives we discussed earlier.

I think this model is exactly duplicated in business, in the early stages of this part of a business owner's career.  To start with some people just play at it, copying what the others do and discovering whether it really is as enjoyable as they thought it might be.  But then what?

Can the ones who find excitement and enjoyment in running their own business get better and bigger on their own?  My own research amongst Business Advisers is that the ones who make the biggest strides forward are the ones who have taken the decision to employ the services of a professional business coach.

Returning finally to the elite sporting personalities we looked at earlier, I said they could not have achieved what they did without the help of their coaches.  What I am equally sure is that the coaches could not have gone out there and won Olympic medals themselves, at least not at the time they were coaching their protégés to do so, even if they had been top performers themselves in the past.

So don't necessarily expect your business coach to be a better entrepreneur than you are trying to be.  It may just be that their skill is in helping others to succeed.  This skill might just be knowing all of the questions, and not necessarily knowing all of the answers.  Just like the sports coach, all they can really do is help their clients help themselves, and at this they are supremely skilful.

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