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.