Why Great Coaching Starts With Better Diagnosis, Not Faster Answers

I’ve been coaching for more than 28 years.

I’ve worked with thousands of people.

Taught coaches, personal trainers, therapists and healthcare professionals.

Written books.

Spoken on stages all around the world.

And spent more hours than I could possibly count listening to people explain the problems they want help solving.

You might think that all of that experience would make me quicker to give people an answer.

In reality, it’s made me slower.

Not because I don’t have ideas.

I’ve got TONS of them.

But experience teaches you how expensive the wrong answer can become when it’s applied to the wrong PERSON, in the wrong POSITION, at the wrong time.

A strategy might be intelligent.

The advice might be perfectly reasonable.

And the process might have worked BRILLIANTLY for hundreds of other people.

That’s why my approach is diagnostic.

Before I tell you what I think you should do, I want to understand what’s ACTUALLY happening.

What result are you getting?

What’s creating it?

What have you already tried?

What limits, obstacles or challenges are present NOW?

And what kind of business and life are you really trying to create?

The thing is, expertise isn’t simply having more answers than everybody else.

It’s knowing that an answer only becomes valuable when it belongs to the problem and the person standing in front of you.

So yeah, after 28 years I probably CAN give you an answer quickly.

But I’d rather take the time required to make sure we’re answering the right question.