Great coaches aren't just found on the sidelines in sports. In today's episode, John dives into the benefits of finding the right coach to fit your career, business, and life goals.

John McConnell has combined corporate athleticism, outdoor education and embodied leadership into a truly comprehensive mind/body practice for building better executives.  His approach integrates: corporate psychology, team-building, systems thinking, Emotional Intelligence, sports training, experiential learning and neuroscience principles. As a senior faculty member at National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) for a decade, John trained instructors to run high stakes, real world professional training expeditions and his work helped take the NOLS curriculum to a new level, designing programs which led to NOLS signing NASA as a corporate client.  John is a Master Somatic Coach through Strozzi Institute and has a Masters in Applied Behavioral Science from the Leadership Institute of Seattle.  John was based within Microsoft for his thesis work, examining teamwork and leadership in rapidly changing high tech and entrepreneurial settings.  He started his own personal and professional coaching company in 1997 (the Ascent Institute) and now is in partnership with his wife and fellow leadership coach Virginia Rhoads at Jempe Center.  Through his practice he has created a truly unique approach to leadership training, a meld of physical, mental and emotional to achieve elite performance in executives who then thrive in today’s challenges.

Show Notes

• A coach brings subject matter expertise
• Standing on the sidelines and observe/outside perspective
• Honesty and accountability
• Helps you solve your own problems
• Good listener and partner to ask the important questions
• Three scenarios of when you should engage with a coach:
  •  Do you feel stuck?
  •  Are you limited by something or someone?
  •  Do you need to channel your ideas and find inspiration?
• Coaching types
  •  Educational (skill building, knowledge building)
  •  Transactional (how can I …; behaviors and actions; goals focused)
  •  Transformational (emotional, mental, physical)
• Coaching environments
  •  Intellectual: thoughts, ideas, inspiration, changing mental models
  •  Interactional: group coaching, interacting and motivating others
• Find out the difference between coaching and counseling
• Take the responsibility for the value of a coaching session
• Coaching is what happens in the session and everything in-between
• Ask what the cadence and structure looks like to determine if it’s something you can work with
• How to find a coach
  •  Evaluate
    •   What is your learning style and goals
    •   Coaches promises and results (testimonials, ask for client samples)
    •   ○Have a conversation with the coach you’re considering
• Find out why John was called the Samurai Bean Walker back in his youth