Navigating the Coaching Maze Unveiling Your Learning Style and Finding the Right Mentor – The Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast Season 3 Finale!

The theme of this season of the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast has been to equip allied health professionals to make more informed decisions about what support they need in their practice so they can thrive, rather than just survive. 

So in the final episode of Season 3, Jo reflects on one of the most common questions asked by allied health professionals; how do I find a coach? 

But before you think about looking for a coach, Jo has a question for you. A question you should consider and know the answer to before you seek out a coach. 

Plus she explores a question you should be considering if you are running a course or workshop. 

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• • Activating Resilience via Purple Co
  • Future Proofing Health Professional Facebook group 

 If you know you need more support, please visit my website at https://jomuirhead.com

Finally, if you loved this episode, please make sure you subscribe and leave us a review.

Transcript

Welcome to this, the final episode of season three of the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast. Hi, I’m Jo, your host, and today I’m going to be speaking about how do I find a coach? You may have noticed that season three has had a bit of a theme running through it, which is all about equipping health professionals in private practice of all disciplines, to make more informed decisions about the types of services people need in their business to help them thrive, not just survive. I spend a lot of time talking about us, the humanness in us and what we know to be true is that we can’t do this work alone.

We cannot do it in isolation. And I get that we are all worried about the future. We get concerned about finance, we get concerned about energy, we get concerned about time. We get concerned about the role of a AI. It would be very, very easy for us to go into a place of scarcity. But I invite you today to put that aside and go maybe in this episode today, I will find a way of thinking, one thing that Jo presents to me that will help me navigate my fears, my concerns, and help me move from a place of somewhat surviving into a place of thriving. So hands up. If you have ever seen a question in a community forum that says, how do I find a coach? I’m expecting hands going up in offices in the car, put your hand back on the steering wheel, people.  Walking with the dog. Maybe you’re out just enjoying some sunshine wherever you listen to your podcast. You see that question asked a lot. And invariably it is met with <laugh> Many, many, many, many, many, many comments with people who wanna help you. The comment section of that question is filled with people who wanna help you. And it’s usually somebody writing something like, Hey, I can help. Here’s the link to book in a discovery call with me. Or that’s exactly the kind of thing I help people with. This is how you get in touch with me. And I have looked through all of those comments. And then you get others who are tagging their favourite coach or the people that they have an affiliate relationship with in the thread going, I can’t recommend this person enough. I can’t recommend this person enough. I can’t recommend this person enough.

So the person who originally asked the question is left with so many options and choices. And to be frank, I get overwhelmed reading all the comments. So then I start to get very concerned about the person who originally wrote the post thinking, how does this poor person make a decision when they’ve got 200 people offering them services? So before you ask your community or your tribe or your people, how do you find a coach? Can I suggest you first answer this question? How do you like to learn? Because a lot of coaches give you information but they don’t execute with you. And this leaves a lot of people feeling betrayed or worse like they have failed. Now standard industry practice is to give you the information and then leave you alone to go and execute. And then you’re left confused and uncertain, paralyzed. You don’t do anything.

So when you’re just given a piece of information and say, go do this. How many of you go do that? Not many or someone will give you access to a huge online community where apparently you can ask for support from others, but you’re too scared to ask because you’re confused and uncertain. And the community is often so noisy that your question gets lost in that sea of noise. Now I know that there are communities around who don’t do either of those things, and that’s awesome and that’s great. So I’m not here to call anybody out, but this is what I’m observing. This is what I’m seeing and this is what I wanna call out in our coaching industry. So before you invest in a coach or some other type of learning and development, let’s get clear about how you like to learn so that you can find someone who is going to number one, get you and then help you achieve the results you want to achieve ’cause there’s a lot of coaches around helping you to achieve the results they want you to achieve because that’s all they know how to teach and coach in. They may not necessarily be the results you want to achieve. So how do you like to learn? Well, we’ve all been through training. We’ve all been through training where we’ve got skills and knowledge acquisition. If you’re anything like me, you’ve purchased training and it is still sitting in the inbox of your emails or it’s in its special folder of training to be done now. Or if you’re like my good friend Kylie Warry, you have an excel spreadsheet of all the training that you have purchased that you haven’t done yet. Training is about skills and knowledge acquisition, right? That’s kind of what we did when we were at college or university. We got a book or we read an article, we wrote an essay on it and we learned. 

So there’s training, then there’s consulting. Now consulting is about very specific advice for a very, very specific problem. Consulting is what a lot of people want from a coach, and I share that with you. They want you to consult. What is the best way for me to do this? Get me to start. Tell me what to do. I just want you to tell me what to do. Consulting is very specific advice to help solve a problem or to help you get to somewhere that you wanna go. And then we’ve got mentoring, which is learning from someone who has done something you wanna do or is someone you would like to become more like. Mentoring is a very different relationship to coaching, even though a mentor might use coaching skills and techniques as a part of that mentoring relationship. And coaching is a very specific modality, just like EFT or CBT or DBT. Oh my God, look at all the T’s. Coaching is a modality and it’s a way of helping people reach a goal, helping you address your mindset, helping you be very solution focused.

Then we have clinical supervision and consultation. We learn through clinical supervision or clinical consultation. And then we have continuing professional development, which might be attending a course or a conference or a program. So we all have very different ways that we like to learn. And the great news is we’ve got different ways of being taught. So I’m curious now, how do you like to learn? So I’ve known for a really long time that I am a kinesthetic learner. I like to learn while I’m doing it. If I am just left to read a book or listen to anything and then consider it learned, it’ll not be learned. I will forget it. I don’t do it. I’m that person where the, the rule applies: if you tell me how to do something, I will retain 10% of the knowledge. If you show me how to do it, I’ll retain maybe some more of the knowledge. If you do it with me, chances are I’m likely to learn how to do it, but not everybody’s like me. There are some people who are awesome auditory learners. They consume books and implement information that they learn very, very quickly. As soon as they start learning about a new piece of knowledge or a new skill, they’re implementing it and they’re reinforcing their learning. Some people are very good at watching as visual learners. They go to a course or a conference, they get a book, they get slides and they can learn and they can implement that information quickly. I’m not like that, but you might be. Chances are we need all of those parts of learning engaged to help us actually learn. I personally know when I’ve learned something, I can teach it to another person. That is how I know I’ve learned something, that I’m not just regurgitating head knowledge or book knowledge or article knowledge or Instagram knowledge. I can actually pull it apart, put it back together in a way that helps you learn. So I’m curious, what’s coming up for you? How do you like to learn?

So what I’ve learned in 2022, 2023 is that most people are asking for a learning environment that includes do it with me, show me how, do it with with me, build my confidence. Help me to feel safe. And people do not want a course or a workbook unless they’ve got some of you in it. So if you are a coach or a therapist or a health professional and you wanna go and create a course, please, please, please listen to this. So before you create your next course that you are thinking, I don’t have to show up for this, I can just record it once and people are gonna buy it because it’s the information they need. Please know this. People are not going to buy your course unless you help them to feel safe in the execution. Let me say that again ’cause I tripped over my tongue. People are not going to buy your course unless you help them feel safe in the execution.

So think about how you like to learn. What is some of the best development, some of the best learning that you’ve done, and how is that executed with you? So I’ll use the You, The Entrepreneurial Clinician community, which is now finished. You can buy the training for the community that I delivered in that community. So much training. So much training I thought people would come to that would be flocking to that community because of all the training. There is training about mindset, there’s visibility in marketing, there’s burnout, there’s multiple streams of income. The training is exceptional in that community. But what people came for was the community a place to be vulnerable, to try new things and to be supported while doing so, so that that learning platform or that the way that community worked was that every month I would turn up and I would deliver a training in the first week of the month.

And then the second week of the month, we would have a Q&A about the training. And then in the fourth week of the month, I would have a hot seat coaching session by far the most attended sessions with a hot seat coaching sessions. And people would watch the learning and they would ask questions in the community. But by far, the analysis that I have done is that people wanted the community do it with me. Help me solve this problem now. I want your attention, I want you to help me feel safe. Now, that wasn’t true for everyone because there was this gentleman named Adam who was on the other side of the world, and he knew that he couldn’t turn up to the live session. So we talked about that and I gave him a challenge ’cause he had previously tried to move out of agency into private practice. And he came to me feeling like a complete failure ’cause he couldn’t make it work. He’d followed all the guides, he’d followed all the setups, but there was just something going on for him that he couldn’t make it work. So he went back and got a job in another agency. Well, in six months of just immersing himself in all the learnings and the trainings and being encouraged to implement, because every training was a snapshot training that you could go and implement. Immediately. He went from full-time agency employee to full-time, private practice, and then he relocated to a completely different state, was full-time, private practice, upped his session fee, paid for his insurance, and then had a baby. And that was somebody who didn’t need the sense of community, somebody who didn’t want his fears and mindset issues addressed in the moment. He was able to glean from all the other sessions and recordings.

And you know what, within six months, that’s a pretty huge achievement. So not everybody learns the same, but it’s up to us as individuals, as professionals, to work out how we consume learning. I hadn’t realised how powerful community is for learning. I had developed a mindset that was, I didn’t like community. Community wasn’t for me. And that was because I’d never really found a community where I felt safe, where I felt encouraged, where I felt like it was okay for me to be vulnerable. I hadn’t found that place. And it wasn’t until 2022, 2023 that I found it. And then I learned how to create it. And then I learned that exponential learning can happen in community because my questions can get asked, my accountability can be challenged, but then I also get to observe and learn and participate and help the others in the community.

I get to see the questions that are being asked, which I might be reminded of, or they might be asking about a problem I haven’t reached yet. So I’ve totally changed my concept of community for learning. And I think one of the things that the pandemic showed us is how much we as health professionals miss learning environments that are about community. So my son, who isn’t a health professional, he finished his university education here in Australia during the pandemic. He couldn’t attend classes and he didn’t have a graduation. And even though he’s a smart young man and he took his learning seriously and he did what he needed to do, I kind of feel like he got shafted a bit because he didn’t have the opportunity to learn with others and experience others learning alongside him. And I’m wondering if there are graduates here who are listening to this podcast who may have missed out because they didn’t have those opportunities during the pandemic either. So I also know that I like to have someone help me implement. I like having a community or people around who can give me an immediate answer to my immediate problem so that I can get unstuck quickly, but I also really enjoy learning from others.

So if you are trying to work out who you need to help you achieve your goals, you need to answer the question, how do you like to learn? And then you go and find the person who can help you learn. I think too many of us are driven by personality based marketing tactics. We like a person and then we trust the person and then we end up being disappointed if they can’t deliver. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you can’t like them ’cause marketing as I’ve been teaching forever and today is all about know you, like you, trust you. But when we have been through a situation where trust is hard, where it’s scary, where it’s like, I don’t wanna give this person my money, I don’t wanna give them my trust, I don’t wanna give them a piece of me. I don’t wanna be vulnerable. Well, how do you take responsibility for your own learning and development? Because the answer isn’t for health professionals to close up shop and go, that’s it. I’m just gonna do what I do, know what I know. Go on my merry way. That doesn’t serve you and it certainly will not be serving your clients. So as this series, as this season of The Entrepreneurial Clinician comes to a close with this episode today, I ask you, how do you like to learn?

I really look forward to coming back with a renewed sense of vigour and vision and energy and helping you possibly answer that question. How do you like to learn? So if this has stimulated something in you today, please go to the Future Proofing Health Professionals Facebook group and ask the question in that group. Get the conversation started. Learn from each other. There’s over 300 people in that group. Go learn from each other. If you are in a room with 300 people, wouldn’t you like to know how each other learns and then be able to use that environment as a learning environment? That is my invitation for you today. So until season four or whatever is next for Jo, go be your awesome self.