Choosing a Resilience Coach

Choosing a Resilience Coach

In today’s environment of high-speed change and unpredictable challenges, resilience coaching can be a firm foundation for executive success and growth through adversity and transition. I believe resilience is leaders’ greatest strategic opportunity (if ethics-based), but left unheeded it will become the leaders’ greatest risk.

Here are guidelines for choosing the best executive resilience coach for you and your organization.

Consider your priority goals…with an open mind. A high-level coach should be able to tailor the coaching to your very specific goals, business and personal circumstances, challenges. In addition, a great coach will help you lift your gaze and see perspective and potential where it might have been missed.

Credentials. Coaches should have first in class credentials in degrees and certifications, as well as experience in working with world-class leaders and the most complex problems. Coaches should stick to their areas of expertise. For example, I never wade into psychology/psychiatry or offer financial or investment advice.

Deliverables. Understand whether the commitment you would have to make to benefit from the coaching is one you are prepared to make—sufficiently efficient, practical, and tailorable to your needs and lifestyle. A great coach will help you find literally one-minute changes and what someone once referred to as the “door hinge” changes—those single decisions and actions that can swing the door (the situation) wide open.

Compatible. Explore in an introductory session whether you feel confident in the coach’s abilities, you trust their commitment to confidentiality, and you feel stylistically and approach to coaching is a good fit for working together.

Practical considerations. Consider whether the Zoom/in-person options are compatible and whether the fee structure works for you.

A great coach is well worth the investment and should be able to work with you over time in different ways, perhaps more intensively at the outset and check-ins to update or address new challenges thereafter.