WHY YOU NEED COACHING

Our organization is known as Two-ship solutions. We came up with that name because we felt our mission was to offer solutions to leadership and relationship issues.

Now by offering solutions, it doesn’t mean that we have the answers to all your questions or solutions to all your problems. What we have is a solution, a formula, to help you come up with a solution to your own problems and situations as far as leadership and relationships are concerned. This is what coaching is all about.

 I have been helping my boys with their school work lately. What I have observed in them is that they always want me to give them the answer to the problems instead of helping them work out the problems and come up with the answers themselves.

Apparently we are all like my kids. We want someone to give us solutions to our problems and that’s why we ran from this person to that person and from this place to that place in search of answers. As leaders and Pastors we have also not helped a lot because we have made people dependent on us by always giving them advice and solutions to their problems. We feel good when people give us credit for the input we have had in their lives. Nothing wrong with this but let it be that you have come alongside them and helped them find their own solution to their problems.

Why is this important? It is important for this reason. Within each of us is a God given ability or rather capacity to solve our own problems.  One of the values of coaching is believing in people. Now it is easy to say “I believe in you” but from my experience, I learnt that what I told people (“I believe in you”) and how I handled them was very different. In dealing with them, I dealt with them in such a manner that showed I didn’t believe in them at all. That’s why I wanted to be the one to tell them what to do, give them answers to their problems, not realizing that what I was doing was making them dependent on me.

What people simply need is to be coached into how they can solve their own problems.  If you give people answers, what happens the next time they have a problem? They aren’t anymore equipped to solve it on their own than they were the last time, so they come back to you again… and again and again. This is what I have seen in counseling married couples. Like they say, “don’t just give people the fish to eat, teach them how to fish so that next time they will get for themselves the fish to eat.”

"Coaching is practicing the disciplines of believing in people in order to empower them to change."

                                                                               - Tony Stoltzfus