"Just as elite athletes have coaches who help ensure their best performances, a coach will be a true partner who holds you accountable to living up to your potential."

A Coach on Your Side

By John Bowen

Each of us needs all the help we can get building our businesses these days. Keeping up with ever-increasing competition, new investment products, and diverse strategies-amid a constantly evolving regulatory environment-requires considerable time and energy. Add the current volatility of the market, and many advisors find themselves scrambling as fast as they can just to stay in place.

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Elite advisors understand that staying on top of industry changes and moving forward in their practices requires a commitment to ongoing education and development. And they understand that to get the most from lifelong learning, they must take an active approach, tapping a range of resources that include seminars, conferences, peer groups, and publications.

Another excellent way is to enlist the assistance of a coach who will help you create a vision of what you want your life to be and then help you achieve it. A coach will enable you to start thinking of your time horizon as 20 years out, not just how to manage through the few months ahead. Just as elite athletes have coaches who help ensure their best performances, a coach will be a true partner who holds you accountable to living up to your potential.

Our research shows, however, that most advisors (83 percent) struggle to find people with a proven track record who will help them reach their next level of success. I'll address that challenge in this article by looking at the steps you can take to find a coach who is right for you and to get the most out of the coaching process.

1. Perform a self-assessment. Before anything else, sit down and have a serious conversation with yourself. Ask yourself: What is it that I really want? Imagine yourself in the future: What do you want your life to look like in one year? Five years? Twenty years? Don't limit yourself to just what you want to achieve in your business, but take a look at your entire picture, including your family life, your leisure time, and your health. Compare where you are now with where you want to go. What are you going to need to get there? What are your major concerns? This is a serious self-assessment, so be as objective as you possibly can. It will help to look at yourself as your spouse or a close friend might see you. If you're willing to do this kind of frank, in-depth self-assessment, it's a clear indication that you have the commitment that a coaching program will require.

2. Define the specific areas where you want to focus. Using your self-assessment, you should next define the specific areas where you want to change or improve over the next 12 months. It might be that you want to work with more affluent clients, for example, or that you want to become an acknowledged expert in a particular market. Perhaps you want to implement systems that will elevate the level of service your clients receive in order to increase your assets under management. You might also include areas from your personal life that you identified in your self-assessment.

3. Locate the right coach or mentor. Once you have a clear idea of what you'd like to achieve, you'll be in a position to ask: Who might help me with these particular issues?

First, look around in the area where you want to excel. Whom do you most admire in that field? Who is having the most success? Identify those people and get in touch with them. Ask them how they were able to achieve what they have. You want to find out not just what they know, but also if they are someone that you could learn from. They should be able to engage you in a way that connects with you and touches on your ambitions. Someone may be an expert, but if you don't feel a personal connection, that person is not right for you.

If you feel that this person might be a good coach, ask if he or she would be willing to coach you in your area. If not, ask for a referral to a coach (perhaps to their own).OWEN JR. Many successful advisors have coaches who can offer you referrals.

Alternately, you could work with a professional coach. An excellent resource is the International Coach Federation, a professional organization of more than 5,000 personal and business coaches around the world. It offers a free referral service and lists many coaches, including those who specialize in financial services and business development, on its Web site at www.coachfederation.org.

You'll want to interview potential coaches to find out if they have the skills that you need and whether your personalities mesh. Ask about their background, specifically whether they have ever worked with someone in your situation with goals similar to your own. Because it's easier to understand their approach by actually experiencing it, many coaches will offer to do a practice coaching session with you.

4. Make an agreement with your coach. Coaching is all about the gap between what you have and what you want. Most coaches will want to work within the framework of a clear agreement about the results you want to achieve within a specified time period. This agreement will precisely define your ambitions-what you are truly passionate about and are willing (and eager) to work hard to achieve.

Too often we're caught up in things that we think we ought to be doing, as defined by someone else. Simply wanting something because it sounds like what we should want is not enough. A skilled coach will help you get in touch with your real ambitions and do so in a non-judgmental way.

You'll also create a fairly detailed action plan that will identify steps to take and barriers that might be encountered within the time frame. Your coach will gauge how much confidence you have in actually accomplishing each step and will help you construct a realistic plan.

As for costs, a friend who acts as a mentor may simply want a good bottle of wine in return. More typically, individual coaches who work on an engagement basis can charge from $100 to $300 per hour. Corporate coaching programs offered to the financial services industry can run $4,000 and up per year.

5. Work the process. Many coaches will want you to make a minimum commitment, typically three months. As this assessment period progresses, take a look at your progress. Are you making the progress you want? Do you have the ambition to move forward, or are you feeling pushed along? Are you eager to continue the process, or do you feel resistance? Assuming that the process is working for you, you'll move ahead.

As you work your plan, your coach will stand side by side with you, encouraging you along the way. When barriers occur, a coach will help you see the difference between the actual obstacles outside of yourself and those inside you. By doing so, a coach will help you get around barriers that otherwise could have stopped your progress. If goals are not met, your coach will help you learn from that and discover what can be done differently.

A good coach will also help reveal things to you about yourself that you may never have noticed. By uncovering these blind spots, you'll be able to make choices and see opportunities that you would have missed before. Perhaps most valuable of all, a coach can help you start to understand that you can do much more than you set out to do, that your ambitions are larger—and more attainable—than you ever thought.