Why Did I Choose Coaching?

I started being coached in the latter part of 2015. At that time, I had been working for the University of Missouri for twenty-three years, first as a programmer, and more recently as a team lead and scrum master.

I did not enjoy my job. In spite of working with great people to solve problems and help our appreciative customers, there was something missing. I could not explain why I showed up to work every day, except that I needed to pay my mortgage and I showed up the day before.

The assignments came to me in unpredictable waves. We had just switched from a formal yet unsuccessful waterfall model of project management to the more modern Scrum methodology. We managed to do that with three projects in flight, which produced no end of headaches for everyone involved. All of our processes were changing. Success was hard to define and seemed even harder to achieve.

My relationship with my boss was strained. He was the first person who seemed to truly believe I had some leadership potential. He invested time in me and provided opportunities I never had before. At the same time, he was more intense than any boss I had dealt with. He was prone to outbursts, both in terms of productivity and emotion expressed at high volume. Where I tended to be in things for the long term with a consistent pace, he tended to make bold progress and then withdraw for a time. We seemed to have nothing in common beyond wanting progress and wanting to take care of the team.

In spite of these challenges, coaching was about the most distant thing from my mind. I had tried working with a coach unsuccessfully in the mid 90s. I also had a vast library of books about self help, management, goal setting, and time management. I had read most of them and tried to implement some of the processes. Often I was met with bursts of success in the short term, followed by a challenge that would result in me falling back on old habits, the new system all but forgotten. Then it was time to try the next process.

More recently, I had picked up some premium tools in the form of audio seminars from Tony Robbins, the Sedona Method, and paraliminals from Learning Strategies. All of these seemed to help for a time, but none of them seemed to take me to the level I wanted to be at.

So what finally made me choose coaching when all evidence pointed to the fact that I probably could not be fixed? Ultimately it was my work situation. It felt hopeless. I was unhappy. I didn’t think there was much I could control. I had tried so many things. If I could get some help developing a financial plan so I never had to show up on someone else’s schedule, that would deliver a level of relief that justified the expense.

Beyond that, I knew I needed some accountability. I needed to make commitments to someone else so I could not make excuses about being too busy to make progress. Also, coaching was not cheap. I was going to be accountable to myself, because I like saving money far more than I like wasting it.

Once I identified my key pain point, my primary outcome, and how I could try something different in order to achieve a different result, making the decision to commit to coaching seemed like a good choice for me.