Being a success coach is all about success – your client’s success. Only when your client has succeeded, can you succeed. In this blog, we will map out just what goes into achieving success, consider why true success, like true happiness, can be so elusive, and finally offer some suggestions that will help insure success for both your client and you.

What Makes Success?

One definition of success is “the progressive realization of worthwhile goals.” Whether explicit or implicit, we must have goals to be able to achieve success. By this definition, they must also be worthwhile, which means that they must be in alignment with the values that we hold as individuals, as well as in alignment with the values held by our social group. Finally, those goals must cover the various aspects of our lives – personal, social and vocational.

The Task of the Success Coach

The success coach’s task is to guide their client through the process of crystallizing their goals across a range of areas from personal goals, to family and social goals, and vocational goals. As indicated above these goals reflect the values of the individual and their social unit. The goals need to be reviewed for consistency and realism. Then the success coach should work with the client to develop plans for the achievement of the goals including strategic insights. Finally, the coach must transition from planning to implementing, setting a schedule and using accountability coaching to help the client turn these plans into reality.

Why Is Achieving Success so Difficult?

Beyond the fundamental complexity of the goal setting, planning and implementing processes, there are three particular challenges facing the success coach and their client. They are what I will call the challenges of honesty, realism, and balance.

By honesty I am referring to the need to determine the true behavioral style, values and skills of the client. Not only is there a good chance that the client has not accurately determined these elements of their personality, but there is also a very good chance that the client has been indoctrinated into false beliefs by their parents, teachers, friends and society. For example, the world is full of doctors’ children who have been convinced that their true calling is medicine, when in fact it is not. Another influence is economic and political reality, as the client may have adopted vocational and social goals early on to deal with these factors, and then never readjusted their goals when these factors changed.

By realism, I am referring to the job of the success coach to objectively review goals and advise their client on the consistency and reasonableness of their client’s constellation of goals, as a whole. I am not arguing against ambitious goals, but there are combinations of goals that can stack the deck against the overall success of the client.

This brings us to the issue of balance. Balance is critical, particularly in today’s western world, since vocational demands often compromise the achievement of family and social goals. The success coach’s greatest contribution may come at this point in the process by supporting their client striking a good balance here, and therefore achieving success for their client and themselves.

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Dave Iuppa
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach