Get A Coach Be A Coach The New Coaching Approach to Accelerate Individual Success and Organizational Results

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GET A COACH BE A COACH
THE NEW COACHING APPROACH TO ACCELERATE
INDIVIDUAL SUCCESS AND ORGANIZATIONAL
RESULTS

ROGER CONNORS JEFF ADCOCK KELLY ANDREWS SETH CONNORS

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. Get a Coach
1. So, Why Don’t You Have a Coach?
2. Flipping the Model
3. Coaching Triggers
4. MITs and ABCs
5. Coachability
6. Find a Coach
7. The Ask
8. The Three Types of Coaching Engagements
9. The 1-2-3’s of Self-Directed Coaching
10. Coach Your Coach
II. Be a Coach
11. Why Be a Coach?
12. Everyone Is a Coach
13. Just Reach Out
14. The Connector Manager/Leader
15. Role 1: Ignite
16. Role 2: Coach
17. Role 3: Connect
18. Role 4: Lead
19. The Case for Self-Directed Coaching
20. The Coaching Community
Advance Praise for Get a Coach | Be a Coach
About Zero to Ten
About the Authors

Copyright © 2020 by Roger Connors, Jeff Adcock, Kelly Andrews, and Seth Connors.
Get a Coach | Be a Coach®; Self-Directed Performance Coaching®; Coaching Community™;
Connector Manager/Leader®, Anytime. Anywhere.
Anything.®, Coaching Triggers™; and Everyone Gets a Coach When Everyone is a Coach® are
trademarks of Zero to Ten, LLC, used with permission. The assessments, models, charts, and lists
referenced herein are owned by Zero to Ten, LLC, used with permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 9780593188699 (hardcover)
ISBN 9780593188705 (ebook)
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved. (v4)

To all those who have ever offered each of us advice, counsel, instruction,
and guidance, thanks for the coaching! We are better because of you!
For additional resources:
www.book.zerototen.com
inquiry@zerototen.com

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to acknowledge the fantastic coaching we have received from
multiple teams and individuals on this project. There’s nothing like a good
coach to help you get it right, and we have experienced that in writing this
book.
First, thanks to Adrian Zackheim and the Penguin Random House team,
whose belief in the Self-Directed Coaching concept and assistance on this
book have been pivotal to making it happen. To Nina Rodríguez-Marty, our
editor, we thank you for your insights, contribution, and attention to detail.
To Dave Pliler, we give our thanks and appreciation for your talent and
assistance in helping us put this book together. You are a great friend and
coach.
To the Zero to Ten team and Think Tank, we express our appreciation for all
your help. Colleen, Allen, and Zach have been fabulous partners. It takes a
community to accomplish anything extraordinary, and we are grateful to be
working together.
To the hundreds of individuals who participated in our research, focus
groups, and beta projects, we thank you for your feedback and coaching. We
are better because of you.
We are thankful for the influence and support of great friends like Justin Hale
and MG Kristian, Jim Seaberg, Jerry Henley, Phil Menzel, and many others.

Ultimately, we express gratitude for the support and encouragement of our
spouses, Gwen, Erin, and Leslie.
We have received great coaching from all of you.
Thank you.

INTRODUCTION
If you could find a better way to get results in your job, would you be
interested? How about in your personal life? If this better way could help you
get real traction and produce visible progress, would that be compelling? As a
leader, if you could help the teams you depend on to meaningfully improve
their performance, would you want that?
It’s not often that something new comes along that can make a meaningful
difference in getting things done at the personal, team, and organizational
levels. There’s no shortage of claims . . . everyone makes the promise of
improvement and progress, even when they know that it might not happen.
This is different. What we are going to show you in this book really works.
It’s based on current research, meets the “common sense” rule, is field-tested,
and is probably something you have actually done before.
It’s getting coaching—advice, help, know-how, expertise, and support—
when you need it, for anything you might be doing. Imagine having the
ability to reach out to an expert when you are stuck trying to solve a problem
in your job. How about doing something for the first time? We are going to
show you how to get the coaching you need anytime you need it, anywhere
you are, and for anything you are doing. Now, duplicate that ability across
the teams in your organization. What impact would that have on
performance?
In Get a Coach | Be a Coach, we introduce you to a new approach to
coaching that successful people use all the time. For those like Tom Brady,

Oprah Winfrey, and Mark Zuckerberg, it just seems to be a natural part of
who they are. In fact, they surround themselves with coaches. We are sure
that you’ve done it too—looked to others for coaching. We call this new
approach to coaching Self-Directed Performance Coaching, and it’s a
powerful process for helping you become even more successful at anything
you do.
Consider how coaching is being done today. According to the International
Coach Federation in partnership with Price Waterhouse Cooper (PwC), it is
estimated that there are around 47,500 professional coaches in the world. Do
the math, and that means there’s approximately 1 coach for every 143,000
people. Take a number. Get in line.
If the current model only supports 1 coach for every 143,000 Learners, there
is little hope in getting coaching where, when, and how you need it.
Outdated, old-school, one-on-one professional coaching models make
effective coaching scarce, expensive, and hard to justify for the masses. It
works for a few, but not for the many.
To make coaching available to everyone, we have found a better way. We
want you to learn what’s possible out there today, how to access coaching
more intentionally, and then help you bend the odds substantially in your
favor as you learn how to flip old-school thinking on coaching and get the
expertise and advice at the moment you need it.
You ever been in school? Taken music lessons? Played a sport?
Tutored or been tutored? The fact is, at some point in your life you’ve had a
coach. You’ve also very likely been one. So has everyone else out there, and
there’s a good reason for it; research shows2 that those who learn how and
when to leverage coaching will see on average 88 percent better results—a
near doubling of performance. Huge!
What if we could show you how to create better than a one-to-one coaching
ratio? Much better—because everyone can be a coach. Fact is, there are more
like ten coaches lurking inside each person out there because we all have at
least ten skills we can coach on. That’s a little better than 143,000 to 1, yes?
Our clients pay us to think more deeply on coaching than anyone else in the
world. We eat, drink, and sleep coaching, and have done the research around

what makes coaching work for successful individuals, teams, and
organizations. We will build your confidence in that statement through
research, studies, new models, and new ways of thinking. You will meet real-
life people who have applied the SelfDirected Performance Coaching process
and had great success, like career advancements, performance awards, and
setting company records.
We will show leaders and managers how to build coaching and scale it across
their organization by understanding and promoting Coaching Triggers, Most
Important Things, Coaching ABCs, the Three Types of Engagement, Skill
Index, the High Five Coaching Strategies to Coach Your Coach, and how to
Get a Coach and Be a Coach. We will show employees and team members
how to work together and facilitate critical knowledge transfer that will
improve engagement and performance in their workplace. All the research
and our own experience shows that vibrant coaching communities and
cultures produce better employee performance and retention.
You will be introduced to success stories ranging from Steve Jobs and Dr.
Astrid S. Tuminez, to our own clients, like Lindsey and Daniel. By the end of
this book, you will clearly understand how to accelerate individual, team, and
organizational performance through coaching. And you will want to. You
will know how and when to get coaching, and how to leverage the skills and
experience of others to more quickly bring about your own success and the
success of those around you.
The coaching wave isn’t coming—it’s here. Eighty-three percent of HR
professionals now plan to expand their organization’s use of coaching skills
for their managers, and 44 percent of high-performing organizations have
decided to dedicate a line item in their budgets specifically for coaching. To
go along with this, Josh Bersin of Bersin for Deloitte, shared research that
revealed “the highest performing organizations are doing something different:
they’re taking a ‘build vs. buy’ approach to critical talent. And finding that
‘build’ often outperforms ‘buy.’” Coaching, at its core, is an essential
building block to developing people and accelerating learning. Understanding
this truth and learning to tap into the coaching opportunities all around you is
the game changer. We predict that “coaching for the masses” will become a
core competency for every organization and every person focused on results.
This book will show you how to Get a Coach and Be a Coach, step by step,

describing how to use Self-Directed Performance Coaching to drive the
coaching you need in your work and life.
The questions remain: What are you doing for the first time? Where are you
stuck? What do you need to get better at fast? Most importantly, what are you
waiting for? Let us show you how to Get a Coach anytime, anywhere, for
anything—and accelerate your performance to maximize potential and attain
historic results.

GET A COACH
As you read this book, you will discover that there are two tracks in the
Self-Directed Performance Coaching model: “Get a Coach” and “Be a
Coach.” Part 1 of this book introduces you to the Get a Coach track. By
following the steps outlined in the next ten chapters, you will learn the art of
getting a Coach anytime, anywhere, for anything. You will find fresh, new
tools for accelerating performance for yourself, your team, or your entire
organization.
As you reach out to Get a Coach, you will experience some amazing payoffs:
increasing your skills and abilities in ways that will help you nail the results
you need—both professionally and personally. You will make stronger
connections with others that will serve you for years to come. You will be
recognized as someone who can take on new things and get the job done,
partly because you will have developed the ability to reach out to get the
expertise you need, when you need it.
This journey is for everyone and for anything you might be doing. There is so
much to gain. Let’s get started.

S
SO, WHY DON’T YOU HAVE A COACH?
o, why don’t you have a coach? That’s a question we ask time and
again as we work with executives, managers, frontline team members,
schoolteachers, construction workers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, sales
associates . . . even personal friends.
It doesn’t matter what your job or hobby may be, everyone ought to have a
coach around some of the important things they are trying to get done in their
jobs, career, or personal life. While it’s not the first instinct people generally
have, we think it should be.
Take Lindsey, for example, a smart, dedicated, and attentive student
balancing a demanding full-time job and all the stresses of pursuing an MBA.
Lindsey was hoping for a promotion at work, but the Series 65 exam for
financial professionals was standing in her way. She took the test multiple
times but unexpectedly failed each time— not like her. She had always been
a good test taker and a great student. She felt devastated, frustrated, and stuck
in her ability to move beyond what had become a barrier to the progress she
wanted to make in her life.
One day, she approached us and explained her dilemma. Our response: “So,
Lindsey, why don’t you have a coach?” Lindsey was surprised—she’d never
thought about it before. “Why don’t I have a coach?” We suggested she find
a coach where she worked, someone who had just recently passed the exam.
It didn’t take long in the conversation before she cut us off—“I got it! This is
great. I know exactly what to do!”

Lindsey soon found her coach and proudly reported back that she retook the
test and passed! She was thrilled! After having experienced the power of
coaching firsthand, Lindsey then decided to get another coach to help her
prepare for the Certified Financial Planner exam, which she also passed.
Soon, Lindsey began seeing salary increases, promotions, and career
successes that in the past she had only dreamed about.
Not long ago, we received another update from her. She started a new
position with one of the world’s largest investment companies and needed to
get three more serious certifications in just five weeks. She said, “I found a
great coach and was able to pass the tests. I earned a sign-on bonus because
of it and now for the new hires, I have been coaching them through their
licensing journey!” Lindsey added, “The whole idea of coaching has forever
changed my life.”
It all started with a coach.
We’re guessing you can relate to Lindsey on some level. You too have
important things that you need and want done, projects that may seem a little
out of reach or even impossible to achieve. Maybe you’ve even failed
miserably, feel you’ve used up all your resources, and are ready to settle for
something less. If so, it is time for a coach.
Coaching Done the Right Way Works
At some point in our lives, most of us have worked with some type of coach
or mentor. It might have been a coach for athletics, debate, music, or dance—
we’ve almost all seen a coach in action.
The journal Public Personnel Management conducted a study showing that
those who get coaching increase their productivity by 88 percent. That’s
nearly doubling your performance with the help of a coach!1

Coaching increases productivity by 88%. Journal of Personnel
Management
A pro in almost any “performance occupation,” from sports to theater to
music, would never dream of not using a coach. Still, the response we usually
get on the “coaching is good” pitch is, “Yeah, we already know that!” So, if
you know it and we know it, let’s agree . . . coaching, effectively done,
increases performance—even for the best of the best.
Case in point: Atul Gawande, professor
of surgery at Harvard Medical School and
a top surgeon in his field, turned to a
coach. According to Atul, in both his own
New Yorker article2 and his TED Talk,3
after eight years of practicing medicine,
and seeing his past post-surgical
complications drop, his performance
eventually went flat, seeing little if any
personal improvement. “Maybe this is
what happens when you turn forty-five,”
he said. Atul thought perhaps he had hit
his pinnacle. Then he watched Rafael

Nadal play in a tennis tournament and noticed something: at one point the
camera showed Rafael interacting with his coach, then the obvious hit him . .
. “even Rafael Nadal has a coach!”
But Atul had never seen coaching used in medicine. “I’m ostensibly an
expert,” Atul says. “I’d finished long ago with the days of being tested and
observed. I am supposed to be past needing such things. Why should I expose
myself to scrutiny and fault-finding?”
Still, Atul was determined to promote his own improvement and decided to
give coaching a try. He asked a retired surgeon he trained under during his
residency to observe him doing a thyroidectomy— an operation Atul said he
had done “a thousand times.” During the procedure, his coach stood silently
by, scribbling in a notepad, occasionally moving to change points of view. “I
was initially self-conscious about being observed,” Atul said, but eventually
got into his groove and operated as normal.
After everything was finished, Atul thought, “The case went beautifully. The
cancer had not spread beyond the thyroid, and in eighty-six minutes, we
removed the fleshy, butterfly-shaped organ.” If anything, he was expecting
praise from his coach. But that wasn’t what he got. With a pad full of notes in
tiny handwriting, his coach started down the list of constructive criticism.
“You cannot achieve precision with your elbow in the air,” his coach began.
“When you are tempted to raise your elbow, that means you need to either
move your feet or choose a different instrument.” The feedback continued.
“Did you notice that the light had swung out of the wound during the case?
You spent about half an hour just operating off the light from reflected
surfaces.”
“That one, twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on
than I’d had in the past five years,” Atul later remarked. After two months of
coaching, Atul noticed himself getting better again. And after a year, he saw
his post-op complications begin to drop. This led Atul to continue his
research on coaching and eventually proclaim, “Coaching done well may be
the most effective intervention designed for human performance.”
Atul isn’t the only expert who feels this way. Take Eric Schmidt, former
CEO of Google. Back in 2002, one of the board members of Google, John
Doerr, told Eric, “You need a coach.” Confused

and a bit defensive, Eric responded, “I don’t need
a coach. I’m an established CEO. Why would I
need a coach? Is something wrong?” John replied,
“No-no-no . . . everyone needs a coach.” Despite
initial pushback, Eric soon began meeting with
legendary CEO coach Bill Campbell, who helped
him dramatically transform Google at a pivotal
moment in its history. Eric later wrote a book
about his experience called Trillion Dollar Coach.
Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook, also received some
coaching from Bill Campbell during her time at Google. She related that
during her first week on the job, Bill stopped her and asked, “What do you do
here?” She had been hired as a “business unit general manager,” a position
that did not previously exist and a role—by her own admission—she didn’t
even completely understand. Sheryl responded by saying that she used to
work at the Treasury Department. But Bill wasn’t satisfied. “Okay, but what
do you do here?” She then replied with some ideas of what she thought her
role entailed. Again, Bill responded, “But what do you do here?” Finally,
Sheryl honestly admitted that, so far, she wasn’t sure she did anything. “I
learned an incredibly important lesson,” Sheryl later said. “It’s not what you
used to do, it’s not what you think, it’s what you do every day.”
The coaching Bill Campbell offered Sheryl Sandberg and countless other
tech giants was such a sought-after competitive advantage that it earned him
the nickname “the Coach of Silicon Valley.”4
Atul Gawande, Eric Schmidt, and Sheryl Sandberg are the best in their field .
. . and use a coach. So should we, and so should you! As said previously, we
believe that coaching is the most effective mechanism for accelerating human
performance. It is the secret to getting ahead in life. If paired with the right
coach, you can get just about anything done.
Coaching Encodes the Brain
Now, we understand that not everyone will see the benefits of coaching as
clearly as we do. In fact, another friend asked for advice regarding an OKR
(objectives and key results) he was trying to hit. He was stumped by the

concept of coaching and asked for advice on how to move forward. You can
probably guess by now what we asked him, “Who’s your coach?” He
responded, “Google is my coach.” We had to smile: “Google isn’t your
coach. Google is a search engine.” He laughed and we went on to say, “As
amazing as that technology is, search engines don’t have the ability to watch
you, give customized feedback— positive or negative—or relate with you on
a personal level and in an engaging way.”
Instead of looking for simple hows, we’d encourage you to look for whos.
According to Benjamin P. Hardy on Inc.com,5 we need to be asking, “Who
can help me accomplish this?” Inc.com goes on to suggest that “the better
you can get at asking, ‘Who?’ . . . then getting smart and intelligent people to
help execute your goals, the more successful you can become . . . millionaires
ask ‘how?’ while billionaires ask ‘who?’”6
In fact, we would make the point that the act of coaching itself— interacting
with another person—literally encodes the brain differently. Neuroscientists
teach that there are neural pathways in our brain coated with myelin sheets
that form something like superhighways for connection between different
regions of our brain.

As we form habits, these highways become thicker and more effective at
transmitting information. Encode it wrong the first time, and you have the
tough job of breaking those bad mental habits. But when you encode it at the
outset with effective coaching, the end result is productive, successful
behaviors, scientifically accelerated performance, and a vibrant mental
superhighway.
The kind of coaching we are talking about in this book is not mentoring, and
it’s not peer coaching, executive coaching, or life coaching. It’s coaching
around specific skills, coaching that is meant to get you from Point A to Point
B as quickly as possible. All of these other forms of counseling and support
have a purpose and role to play, but the coaching we are talking about is
“performance coaching”— coaching that is targeted at gaining specific skills
that will help you succeed and achieve specific tasks that turn into real
results.
This performance-driven coaching is a
groundbreaking new coaching approach that
centers itself on the knowledge transfer of
expertise and the skill development needed to
execute on that. These competencies are essential
in light of projections by the United States
Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics
that Baby
Boomers will be out of the workforce in the next
ten years7—taking with them a significant knowledge base and experience
set that could prove difficult to replace.
Bottom line: Is there something you want to get done? Done well? Done
quickly? If so . . . get a coach!
The chapters that follow will guide you through a process that will allow you
to Get a Coach anytime, anywhere, for anything. It’s called Self-Directed
Performance Coaching. The promise we can make is twofold:
1. Learning this process will transform the way you go about getting
things done—that is, the way you get everything done. It applies on
the job, in your career, at home, and in your personal life.

Everywhere.
2. This book will change the way you think about how people should
work together to make things happen.
We raise only one caution: once you read this material and “hear” it in your
mind, you can’t “unhear” it. It’s sticky and will cause you to see everything
differently.
Our next step is to flip the model on coaching.
1 Olivero et al., “Executive Coaching.”
2 Atul Gawande, “Personal Best,” The New Yorker (October 3, 2011), newyo
rker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/personal-best.”
3 1. Atul Gawande. “Want to Get Great at Something? Get a Coach.” TED video, 16:38. April 2017.
www.ted.com/talks/atul_gawande_want_to_get_great_at_something_get_a_coach/transcript.
4 Marty Cagan, “The Greatest Coach,” Silicon Valley Product Group (April 24, 2019), svpg.com/the-
greatest-coach.
5 1. Benjamin Hardy, “The Single Most Important Principle for Any Entrepreneur to Understand,” Inc.
This Morning (June 2019), inc.com/benjamin-p-hardy/the-single-most-important-principle-for-any-
entrepreneur-to-understand.html.
6 Hardy, “Single Most Important.”
7 1. Nanette Miner, “As Baby Boomers Near Retirement, Companies Risk A Leadership Shortage,”
Forbes (October 15, 2019), forbes.com/sites/forbes coachescouncil/2019/10/15/as-baby-boomers-near-
retirement-companies-risk-a-leadershipshortage/? fbclid= IwAR0JGTnPxZ3JKh_ ZEh-
BETIfDHzrWaFSlN358F9CbMVMK1ID9ucqI0dG9u0#74c3b41051f9.

M
FLIPPING THE MODEL
oving people from Point A to Point B in big cities has been an
opportunity waiting to happen for centuries. In the modern era,
demand for this transportation has been primarily handled by two
industries: rental cars and taxis. As recent as 2014, rental cars held 55 percent
and taxis 37 percent of this personal transportation market.1
Cue disruption.
An innovative new approach entered the space in recent years and flipped the
model by putting the passenger in control. No long car rental counter lines.
No frustrating, time-consuming cab hailing. Uber and Lyft made it possible
for a rider to get from any Point A to any Point B anytime they wanted.
On the surface one could argue that there are strong reasons why these new
services wouldn’t necessarily make sweeping changes to the current model.
Why take the risk to disrupt? After all, is it really that big of a deal to wait a
few minutes at the airport for a cab or car rental? Apparently it is. According
to Certify, a company that tracks expense reports, in the past four years rental
car usage has fallen from 55 percent to 23.5 percent, and taxi usage from 37
percent to 6 percent.2

What makes this Uber/Lyft story even more compelling is that originally
there had been another player in the space, one that Uber was keenly focused
on—the black car service. Black car service was a private, personalized
transportation option that knew a customer’s Point A and B so they were
ready the minute the passenger needed to go. The headline for Uber’s website
in 2011 was “Everyone’s Private Driver.”
Uber recognized the unfilled need for an even better way, so they flipped the
model.
What does this have to do with coaching? Today, the coaching, learning, and
development industry is in a similar situation. Like the traveler of a few years
ago, the “Learner” today needs to get from Point A to Point B in knowledge,
skill, and ability more quickly in order to get their job done more effectively.

The old, centrally controlled, top-down approach to coaching, learning, and
development faces even more challenges than the transportation industry did
when Uber started to disrupt things back in 2010.
The change: flip the coaching model to self-directed.
By flipping the model, coaching in the
organizational setting is no longer a top-down,
leader-directed process. Rather, it is an integrated,
bottom-up model that empowers you to take
charge of your own learning experience in a way
that has a direct impact on your performance.
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
The Learner Wears the Whistle
Flipping the model means the coach is no longer in charge of the coaching
experience—it’s the coachee, or what we call the Learner.
Let’s imagine you want coaching on how to tie rock-climbing knots,
specifically the well named “Bowline on a Bight.” In the old model, the
coach drives the conversation, sets the agenda, gives the homework by telling
you what knot you need to learn, and drives the next conversation. In Self-
Directed Coaching, all that changes.
Throughout this book, we will show you how the Learner takes ownership to
find a Coach, set the agenda, run the coaching session, and follow up to get
the skills they need.
This bottom-up approach puts ownership for acquiring skills on the Learner,
so they customize the coaching they need for the specific skills and results
they want.

Research today shows a significant shift in learning preferences by the
generations now filling the ranks of every kind of career—from teaching
elementary school, to biopharmaceutical engineering, to running teams and
organizations. One of those compelling shifts is to self-directed learning. In
fact, three fourths of individuals now cite self-directed learning as their
choice for acquiring knowledge.3 Another study showed that “55% of Gen
Zers [those born between 1995 and 2010] seek out new job skills on their
own, without expecting help or guidance from their company or boss.”4 Self-
directed is here to stay.
It’s just more effective. Take, for example, research from Case Western
University on coaching behaviors. Researchers discovered that in our efforts
to help someone else, “we often jump to telling them what to do to fix the
problem or improve their performance . . . That activates a psycho-
physiological state known as the Negative Emotional Attractor (NEA), what
we call coaching for compliance.” How do people react to that? They actually
become defensive and less open to the coaching we are offering.
Their conclusion from the study: “Our primary role as a coach is to help
someone else with their self-directed learning and change with the key being
on ‘self-directed’ . . . In essence, the associate drives the agenda.”5
What’s the good news for you and me about Self-Directed Performance
Coaching? This approach enables everyone in the organization to engage

with a Coach, regardless of where they sit. No longer is coaching reserved for
just executive-level leaders; coaching can be made available to anyone,
anywhere, at any time. Better yet, the coaching process you are reading about
here makes it even more possible to deliver coaching in bite-size, real-time,
on-demand pieces that are more easily consumable and more transferable to
results.
Reading Get a Coach | Be a Coach will help explain the Self-Directed
Performance Coaching process and show how it can be used at every level of
the organization, from frontline to the C-suite. This process will also show
how every organization can afford coaching, even when the average cost of a
typical executive coach out there is $500-plus an hour.
Let’s talk more about flipping the coaching model. The benefits and impact
are clear. Take a look at how this works:

At this point, it should be obvious: Self-Directed Coaching offers
significant advantages over the old coaching
model. Again, there is a place for other kinds of
mentoring and coaching, but the benefits of
coaching can be expanded to everyone when an
organization uses the self-directed approach.
Self-Directed Performance Coaching Model
Our Self-Directed Coaching model is built on three core principles.
1. Every team member has a list of the Most Important Things (MITs)
they need coaching on in order to succeed in their jobs.
2. Everyone should Get a Coach to improve and accelerate
performance on these Most Important Things.
3. Everyone can Be a Coach to help others gain the skills needed to
accomplish their MITs.
Again, this model connects self-directed learning with coaching: two
powerful frameworks that fit today’s generation. One hundred percent
accountability is given to the Learner to get the coaching they need while
leveraging the expertise around them in their networks. While the model is
new, you have probably done this before—reached out to someone to get
some help or advice that will allow you to break through and get something
important done. That’s not new, but the model is, capturing an innovative
process that makes this more deliberate, more repeatable, and more efficient.
And, the process we will show you makes that reach-out even more effective.
Nothing to lose here, only gains.

Now, for the remainder of this chapter, we are going to outline the model for
you, and then in subsequent chapters, dive into the details.
Get a Coach
In the Get a Coach track, there are a few key steps:
1. Identify your MITs, the Most Important Things you need coaching
on, as prompted by the Coaching Triggers.
2. Identify one or more coaches who can help you accomplish your
MITs.
3. Coach Your Coach to make sure you are focusing on the skills you
need to develop.
At the end of the day, it’s all about increasing your ability to get real results
in your job and life. The empowering process of Self-Directed Coaching
enables you to get the skills you need to get that done.

Get a Coach in Action
After being promoted to director of sales at his company, Philip decided to
use our Self-Directed Coaching methodology to help him achieve his MIT—
he wanted to “crush it” in his new job. He identified his first coach, the
former director of sales. She recommended he get to know the sales and
marketing departments better than anyone else. She told him he would know
he’d done it right when the executives started flocking to him for
information, updates, or insights on sales. That turned out to be a great piece
of coaching!
To act on that input, Philip found other coaches who were executives and
other cross-functional department heads—those who touched marketing and
sales in any way. He took all their coaching and built the sales reports they
recommended. This helped Philip become an expert in every relevant key
sales performance indicator.
Within two months, the executive team invited Philip to key decision-making
meetings and soon after started coming to him when they needed other
important sales data. Philip had achieved his Most Important Thing and also
formed strategic connections with executive team members that started to
catapult his career.
Not long after that, and in a real show of
confidence, Philip was asked to audit each

department within the organization and identify
where the company could tighten their costs, with
the purpose of obtaining Series B funding—an
envied role in the organization. It all began with a
coach.
Be a Coach
The Be a Coach track begins by:
1. Identifying your expertise: What can you do well and believe you
can coach on?
2. Reaching out to your team, coworkers, and network, and offer to
coach and connect others on their MITs.
3. Coaching Learners on the skills you have picked up yourself along
the way.
Be a Coach in Action
Parker had just finished his first year of college and was eager to get an
internship to start his professional work experience. Like many times before,
he reached out to his dad, one of our authors, and asked for coaching. What is

the process to finding a good internship? Where do you find openings? How
should I build my résumé? What questions are common in the interview
process? There was a lot he wanted to know.
As Parker asked his dad these questions, Jeff quickly realized that his own
knowledge on the topic was a little dated. He realized a much better coach
would be someone who had recently landed an internship, not a father who
entered the workforce thirty years ago.
Parker had a brother just two years older than him who had recently landed a
prized internship with Amazon. So Parker engaged his brother Zack to be his
Coach and over several sessions learned where the best internship
opportunities were posted on their university campus, what business clubs he
should join, and how to build his résumé in a format that companies preferred
for business students still in school. He then set up coaching sessions where
Zack role-played with Parker as the interviewer, asking many of the same
questions he had just been asked in his own interviews.
“Coach” Zack is still a full-time student, and yet because of his recent
experience and success, “Learner” Parker found the perfect Coach. The
double bonus of this Get a Coach | Be a Coach relationship is that Zack
actually benefited as much as Parker, as the coaching mentally cemented his
own recent learning. Coaching helped Parker organize what he had learned
over the past year in a way that made the knowledge and experience he
gained even more rewarding.
Get a Coach | Be a Coach. Super simple, but extremely powerful. We
continue to witness amazing results as people apply this model, get coaching,
and offer coaching to others—a new tool that will allow you to supercharge
your own learning and development around virtually any topic.
In the next chapter, we show you when you should reach out to a Coach. You
may be surprised at the coaching opportunities you currently have that may
not be so obvious.
1 1. Certify, “Infographic—Certify SpendSmartTM Report,” Certify, Inc. (2018),
www.certify.com/Certify-SpendSmart-Report-Infographic-Q2-2018.aspx.
2 Certify, “Infographic—Certify SpendSmartTM.”
3 1. Henna Inam, “Three Coaching Mistakes That Prevent Change in Others,” Forbes Career

Newsletters (July 24, 2019), forbes.com/sites/hennainam/2019/07/24/three-coaching-mistakes-that-
prevent-change-in-others/#3e2d7e87670f.
4 Robin Reshwan, “Generation Z Characteristics in the Workplace,” U.S. News & World Report
(November 5, 2019), money.usnews.com/money/blogs/out side-voices-careers/articles/generation-z-
characteristics-in-the-workplace.
5 Inam, “Three Coaching Mistakes.”

A
COACHING TRIGGERS
xl Rose took a bus to Hollywood in the early 1980s to join the
heavy metal music scene—a music genre famous for gritty guitars
and screaming vocals. By 1985, Axl had formed Guns N’ Roses,
one of the most successful heavy metal bands to date. In the middle of
dominating the scene with chart-topping number one platinum records, Axl
began to lose his voice. Try singing along with “Welcome to the Jungle” or
“Paradise City” and you’ll see why. What did Axl do? What would you do?
You could change your style to Shawn Mendes, but that would be difficult
for a heavy metal act.
A very unlikely coach emerged for the screaming metal superstar, Elizabeth
Sabine, an opera singer and voice coach in her mid-sixties. Elizabeth knew
firsthand the vocal cord struggles opera singers have in hitting high notes.
Over the years, she had mastered the ability to change her breathing and use
her diaphragm to hit and hold notes that would strain and damage the
untrained. Sabine became such a good coach that the heavy metal community
lined up for coaching lessons from someone they began to call “the Heavy
Metal Grandma.”1
What would have happened to Axl if he didn’t get a coach? No voice means
no career. He reached out when he really needed help, and he found a coach
who worked for him, albeit in one of the most unlikely places.
There are certain things that trigger when you should get a coach. In Axl’s
case, he was staring at the end of his career—but it’s better not to wait this

long before you decide to get some coaching. In fact, our view is that you
should always “Think Coach First.” When you do, you will shortcut solutions
through the experience of others—saving months, even years of failed
attempts or stalled pursuits.
The Five Coaching Triggers
There are five coaching conditions, or “triggers,” that, if they exist, should
cause you to “Think Coach First”:
1. You’re doing something for the first time.
2. You’re stuck and not making progress.
3. You’re looking to accelerate progress or speed things up.
4. You want to crush it with a “hit the ball out of the park” kind of
performance.
5. You need to do something that has highly strategic consequences.
In any or all of these situations, every time, we recommend you “Think
Coach First” and Get a Coach. Doing so will save you time and provide a
mechanism for tapping into their knowledge, moving you up the learning
curve.
Imagine you are the CEO of an organization, large or small. What would you
think and feel if you heard that people who are stuck or doing something for
the first time, maybe working on really strategic projects or looking to speed
things up, even those wanting to crush it, weren’t reaching out for coaching?

None are asking for help to make progress or capture learning that others
have already gained. Would you think there was something wrong in your
culture? The answer . . . yes. Every CEO we’ve talked to feels that way.
The team and organization pays a big price when
people don’t “Think Coach First”! Let’s take a
look now at each of the five Coaching Triggers.
FIRST TIME
If you are doing something for the very first time, you likely need help. The
right coach can help you get an early pass from the school of hard knocks. In
fact, they may reduce many days of “learning the hard way” with just fifteen
minutes of coaching.
One commercial property company CEO, a former McKinsey consultant,
shared with us what he told his team: “You get ten points for copying, and
only one point for originality.” In other words, why reinvent the wheel if you
don’t have to? Think back to your youth, when you did something for the
first time, like skiing, playing an instrument, or learning a language. From

that experience you will readily recognize that getting a coach before you
jump in and make rookie mistakes or develop bad habits is important for
getting the job done right.
Consider Nate. He was excited for a chance to help train an underperforming
European sales team. Just after accepting, however, reality hit—he was in
way over his head! He’d never even trained somebody in the United States,
let alone in a different country. He recognized this was the perfect time to Get
a Coach and help cure his “first time” jitters. Nate quickly asked his former
boss to be his coach—as he’d done similar sales trainings before. After doing
his homework, Nate traveled to Germany and in his initial training with the
European team was asked how to do something pretty tricky. Nate recalled
that his coach had covered a near-identical task with him during his coaching.
He nailed it with the European team, and his managers were thrilled with the
results. A short three weeks later, Nate was given a promotion to lead the
European team. Needless to say, Nate became a Self-Directed Coaching
convert!
STUCK
We are all stuck somehow, someway, on something. Maybe you’re at a place
where you aren’t quite sure how to move forward, or you charged into a
project and what you expected didn’t happen. There are many versions of
stuck, from a short-term need to figure out a new approach, to “I’ve tried
fifteen different ways to tackle this over the past month and nothing works.”
The benefit to knowing this Coaching Trigger is that you will recognize that
some coaching, early on in the process, could save you hours and even days
of wasted effort and frustration.
Take, for example, an economics consulting firm we know of whose leaders
tell all new hires that if they work on a problem for more than twenty minutes
and can’t solve it, they should stop and bring together a group of people to
consult with and ask for their advice.2
Or consider Cole, a correctional officer we know who wanted a promotion to
the rank of sergeant. After going through the rigorous promotion process the
first time, he missed the cut by one place. No promotion. He was hugely
disappointed. After all, he had given it everything he had. He felt stuck and

unsure of what to do next. As he went through our training, he recognized
that he needed to get a coach. He soon found several coaches who helped him
prep for the interviews. Each became key in helping him understand the
promotion process. One coach was really good at feedback. Another offered
spot-on guidance to improving his presentation skills, which led to a major
shift in how he approached the task. Cole went on to nail his promotion
interviews and scored 100 percent on his presentation. He finally made
sergeant. He found coaching to be a mission-critical tool for getting
“unstuck” and finding new solutions.
ACCELERATE
We all need to accelerate our own growth, our own ability to get bigger and
better results. After all, you can’t make any real progress by just standing
still. We live in an accelerated world. More progress. Bigger results.
Speeding things up to beat the competition is at the heart of it all. It seems
every quarter of every year employees are asked to do more, achieve more,
and discover ever more magic to accelerating growth. When you feel the heat
demanding greater acceleration— recognize this Coaching Trigger and turn
to a coach.
Let’s look at Wendi, a data manager at Utah Valley University, who needed
to accelerate her analytical skills to keep up with growing demands of
concurrent enrollment at the university. Wendi knew she needed coaching, so
reached out to two coaches—after all, she was looking to accelerate her
knowledge, so getting two perspectives would help. Both coaches helped
with her immediate questions, then one recommended an upcoming data
academy course at the university for employees. Wendi was able to get
approval from her boss to attend. In fact, her boss was so excited to learn of
the academy that she signed up the whole team to Level Up and accelerate
everyone’s knowledge.
CRUSH IT
If there is a must-have result that you’re reaching for that is outside your
comfort zone or wheelhouse, get a coach. The path to crushing it has
traditionally been about raw force, sheer grit, and more effort and hours. The

Crush It Coaching Trigger can evoke the kind of coaching that removes a lot
of the risk and fear from stretching yourself. Crushing it with a coach’s help
gives you someone to lean on, helping you chart a course that’s perhaps even
more informed. In our knowledge-based economy of today, crushing it is all
about finding the right know-how. In fact, you are probably not going to
really crush it without a coach.
Jessica was competing in her first local scholarship pageant and needed to
win to fund her higher education. She didn’t feel ready for the interview or
onstage walk and was concerned it would cost her the competition. Driven to
perform at her best, Jessica reached out to several women, including the
pageant director, other competitors, and even other competitor’s mothers. She
was surprised by how many women were willing to help and soon received
coaching by those who knew how to nail pageant interviews.
For her onstage walk, she found a previous model and other pageant
contestants who helped her with minor changes. The biggest surprise came
when one of the women suggested she simply switch out her shoes. That
minor change led to a major win. On the night of the competition, Jessica not
only won the highest scores in Interview, Talent, and Evening Gown but
became the first African American woman crowned in her city.
STRATEGIC
This last Coaching Trigger is about finding coaches to help when you are
working on something that is strategic to the success of the people, team, or
organization that are depending on you. If your success is their success, it’s
strategic. And that means you can’t afford not to deliver.
A few decades ago, a professional fighter named Dean Lister visited a New
York Jiu Jitsu gym to help another fighter prepare for an upcoming grappling
tournament. Dean was known for employing an unusual submission called
“the Achilles leg lock.” At the time, the vast majority of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
attacks were targeted at the neck and arms, not the legs, which made Dean
both unorthodox and incredibly successful.
One gym student named John Danaher recognized the strategic opportunity
he had to pick the brain of Dean Lister. He briefly approached Dean and said,

“That’s interesting what you’re doing with these Achilles locks, because I
don’t really do that at all.”
Dean replied with the question, “Why would you ignore fifty percent of the
human body?”
John paused as a light bulb went off and said, “I don’t know.” Dean’s short
sentence unexpectedly went on to change the landscape of submission
grappling as John Danaher then dedicated over a decade to developing a
complex leg lock system. John trained a group of up-and-coming students in
his new system who went on to dominate all the major No-Gi Jiu-Jitsu
tournaments. Within Jiu Jitsu, learning how to attack and defend leg locks
has become essential for any serious grappler.
John’s short conversation proved to be very strategic to him fostering a
championship gym and an ironclad brand as an inventor in his craft.3
Coaching Triggers jumpstart your brain to help
you discover all the areas in your work and life
where you should use coaching. We’d like to
encourage you to go through the Coaching
Triggers model again and apply it to yourself.
Write down your thoughts. Remember, this is just
brainstorming, so don’t over think it. Simply
capture the first thoughts that come to you, then
evaluate it later.
Ask yourself:
Is there something I am doing for the first time? What is it?
Am I stuck? If so, on what?
Am I looking to accelerate growth in an area or task? Name it.
Is there a project where I need to crush it? What is it?
What am I doing that is strategic? Where are people counting on
me?
Coaching Blockers

As we said before, everyone experiences some form of coaching early in life.
Most of us, however, stop experiencing the benefits of coaching as we move
out of those developing ages. Why is that, especially at a time when getting
coaching may be most useful? Is it a lack of understanding on how to reach
out? Is it using avoidance tactics to not involve someone else when learning?
Avoidance comes from one or more factors we call Coaching Blockers.
These are those beliefs we have adopted that convince us we don’t need help,
based on our experiences.
Let’s explore five of the most common blockers:
Coaching in your youth was forced on you. Did you really ask for that
ancient piano teacher or nerd PE coach in tight shorts? You may not want to
relive those memories! Once becoming an adult, it’s easy to see why many of
us choose to move as far from those awkward, and even sometimes painful
experiences, as possible. We may have formed the early belief that coaches
are not all they are cracked up to be.
Don’t share the victory. After high school and into college, most people
leave parents and the built-in coaches of school classrooms and team sports,
and transition into the world of relative self-sufficiency.
For many, learning to do things on their own is a sign of becoming an adult.
A badge of honor. This belief continues upon entering the work-force, when
so many are competing for jobs, salaries, and recognition— instilling the
mistaken idea that getting help means sharing the victory. Why would you
want someone to parachute in, contribute a small percentage of help, then
claim a majority of the win? It goes against our natural survival instincts, so
we struggle through things longer than we should in order to preserve the sole
victory for ourselves.
You can figure it out yourself. Do It Yourself is a thriving industry.
YouTube videos, blogs, big-box home warehouse store clinics and classes.
DIY is great for those who have time to burn on a project, preferring to save
some money over hiring a professional to repair that old toilet or install that
new door. This often translates to our professional lives, with the
encouragement to be a self-starter. In your parent’s generation, it was called
the “John Wayne syndrome”: solve your own problems; don’t ask for help.

Coaching is a waste of time. This Coaching Blocker belief comes in many
forms, but at its core lies the notion that coaching is a waste of time. Maybe
you’ve tried coaching and it didn’t work. Or, more commonly, you’ve seen it
fail for others. Perhaps you imagine no one can coach you on a skill or job
you’re already so good at. Or, for the time invested, getting a coach up the
learning curve just isn’t worth it—you can get it done faster on your own.
You don’t want to lose control. A recent study by OnePoll (on behalf of
Ford Motor Company) suggests that 73 percent of Americans would rather
drive than fly, even if it means adding six and a half hours to their travel
time.4 In other words, people like to be in control. Many feel that involving a
coach means surrendering your calendar, giving up the steering wheel,
handing over the whistle to a (nerd) coach who will only want to do things
their way—leaving you in the back seat of your own life.
These blockers we’ve identified, along with all others that have come to your
mind, prevent us from getting a coach when it would be most beneficial. In
these situations, we should ask: “Why don’t I have a coach?”
With a well-developed routine of “Think Coach
First” and using Coaching Triggers to beat the
blockers, you will find yourself reaching greater
goals and getting better results in your work and
life. “Think Coach First” exposes you to new
ways of thinking, enabling you to lean on others.
Their experiences will set your own career on course while reducing the fear
of failing that holds so many people back.
“Think Coach First” and you will literally expand your capacity to achieve
more and perform better by getting the coaching you most need, when you
most need it.
In the next chapter, we cover the basics of what you need to know to start the
coaching conversation.
1 “Elizabeth Sabine,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia (August 2019),
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Sabine.
2 1. Alison Beard, “The Art of Asking for (and Getting) Help,” Harvard Busi- ness Review (December
17, 2019), hbr.org/ideacast/2019/12/the-art-ofasking-for-and-getting-help.

3 Jon Tucker. “John Danaher Dean Lister.” YouTube video, 2:12. January 17, 2018.
youtube.com/watch?v=BYNJ_YApDsk.
4 1. Tyler Schmall, “Why Three in Four People Prefer Driving Over Flying,” New York Post (May 17,
2019), nypost.com/2019/05/17/why-three-in-four-people-prefer-driving-over-flying/.

O
MITS AND ABCS
n January 1993, Leon Lett found himself playing defensive tackle
for the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys—his first Super Bowl. His team was
dominating the game and was on pace to score the highest number
of points of any Super Bowl in history. Late in the fourth quarter, Leon
snatched up a fumble and ran the ball sixty-plus yards. As he approached the
end zone he lifted the ball in front of him in celebration, only to have it
stripped out of his hands by an opposing player just inches from a
touchdown. He had become distracted from getting the ball across the line,
his Most Important Thing, and cost the Cowboys the record for most points
ever scored in a Super Bowl game.1
Each of us has hundreds, if not thousands, of things we’d like to accomplish.
Ultimately, we need to figure out what’s most important— which balls to
move across the goal line. The Quotient Study surveyed over five hundred
thousand global leaders and teams, finding that 85 percent of employees
don’t know their organization’s most important goals.2 Hard to believe, but
our own experience over the past thirty-five years working with executives,
CEOs, middle managers, and frontline workers confirms this to be true:
people find identifying their Most Important Thing difficult to do.
When it comes to coaching, we have devised a reliable process to help you
identify the Most Important Thing—“MIT” for short. It’s a simple process
that quickly helps anybody identify what they should get coaching on first.

Simply consider all the important things you are doing, either in your job or
personally. We will focus on job-related MITs here. These can be either
longor short-term efforts, big or little in scope. The key is that they are
important for you to achieve them. Now use the Coaching Triggers you
learned about in chapter 3 and write down the associated triggers as they
apply to the things you are working on (see the diagram below).
As introduced in chapter 3, use these Coaching Trigger questions to help you
identify the sought-after skills where coaching can help:
Of the important things you are doing . . .
1. What are you doing for the first time?
2. Where are you stuck?

3. What are you doing that is intended to accelerate or speed up results
you need to get?
4. Where are you trying to crush it?
5. What are you doing that you would consider strategic, or where the
results are really important to others?
For example, you may be a data analyst who is running a report for senior
management for the first time and could be trying to accelerate by learning
macros that build in some automation to speed things up. Or, you might be a
high school principal trying to crush it with test scores in the school, but are
stuck solving a new teacher turnover problem. Whatever your situation, our
research shows that the average person has six to seven items they can list as
Coaching Triggers.
Since you can’t work on everything at once, run the items from your list of
five above through your urgency filter. What’s right in front of your
windshield? Most urgent? What will run you off the road if not handled as
soon as possible? Consider items on your list that are highly visible, those
with coming deadlines. It may be something you know is very important to
your boss or other people relying on you. You will probably have more than
one rise to the top, so let’s keep it to no more than three right now.
These three things are your Most Important
Things that you need coaching on: your MITs.
Your coaching efforts will be focused around your
MITs. Experience has shown us that it’s the right
place to begin.
Know Your ABCs
When enrolling someone to be your coach, we think it’s wise to start with
what we call the ABCs of Coaching. Since you, the Learner, are driving the
coaching process, it’s important to start off any coaching session as strongly

as possible.
We learned the importance of this in one of our early focus group sessions.
We asked the participants to go around the room and share their MIT as
though they were having their first discussion with their coach. As each
person described their MIT, we watched how difficult it was for them to
explain what they were wanting. They were, on the whole, too vague and
fairly confusing. On top of that, the average time to share their MIT was
roughly six minutes! Way too long.
We realize it can be difficult to know where to start when first meeting with a
coach, but first impressions are important, so being clear and concise is
critical.
Just how do you start a productive conversation with your coach without
stumbling around trying to explain what you need? The answer again—the
ABCs of Coaching. The ABCs provide a framework you can use to
succinctly and clearly communicate your MITs and relevant information to
create a positive first impression for your coach.
Simply stated, the ABCs address where you are and where you want to go—
from Point A to Point B—then what you’ve done so far to get there:
Point A: Where you are now.
Point B: Where you want to be and by when.
Context: What you’ve done so far around your MIT.
POINT A
Start with where you are now so your coach is clear with where you are in the
process of achieving your Most Important Thing. For example, if your MIT is
hitting your sales quota for the year and you’ve sold $100,000 so far with
$600,000 in the pipeline, Point A would be your sales to date and current
pipeline, or where you are now. For MITs that are more qualitative, use a
scale from 0 to 10 to assess where you currently are (we will talk more about
this later in the chapter).
POINT B

Then, share where you want to be and by when; this is your ultimate
destination and why you want coaching in the first place. Point B must be
measurable so you know if it has or hasn’t been achieved. It’s also crucial to
establish a “by when” or due date, as Point B should be a tangible point in
time. Again, staying with our sales example, if your sales quota is $1 million,
you would say, “My Point B is to hit
$1 million in sales by December 31.” When you make your Point B
measurable and time bound, it becomes a beacon that helps you know where
you need to go, which then helps your coach recommend the right path.
CONTEXT
Context is all about what you’ve done that’s brought you to Point A and the
plans you currently have to reach Point B. By concisely sharing this
information with your coach up front, you help them understand what you’ve
already done so they don’t recommend you do the same old things and can
quickly make recommendations that make sense. How many times have you
asked somebody for advice only to be bombarded by what you’ve already
been told or tried?
In this example, the context would be, “I’ve
spoken to my manager about how to hit $1 million
and read five of the current top sales books. I’ve
also tried cold-calling decision makers who could
lead to large corporate accounts.”
Sharing context also lets your coach know up
front that you’ve put in the sweat equity needed to
earn some of their time. It demonstrates you value
their time and didn’t just run to them as soon as you hit a wall or had a
question. Before you ask someone for coaching, you should go through a
mental checklist to ensure you did your homework. Have you Googled or
YouTubed the topic or skill? Have you really spent time pondering? If the
answers to these questions are no, go back and prepare before you ask for a
coach.

Sharing your ABCs with your coach should take less than sixty seconds (not
six minutes!) and looks something like this:
My MIT is to hit my sales quota for the year.
My Point A is that I’ve sold $100,000 and have $600,000 in the
pipeline.
My Point B is that I need to sell $1 million by December 31.
Context: So far, I’ve spoken to my manager about how to hit $1
million and read five of the top sales books. I’ve also cold-called
decision makers who could lead to large corporate accounts.
In that brief introduction, not only did you cover where you are and where
you need to be, but you disclosed what your gap is. Your coach didn’t simply
hear what you’ve done; they also heard what you haven’t done. That’s part of
the beauty of the ABCs: you communicate more than what you say. You’ve
quickly provided them with a needed road map to effectively coach you.
Being concise sets up the coaching experience to be self-directed, getting
their wheels instantly turning as they focus on the information you need.
Think about the coaching requests that you have had. How positive would the
experience have been if they had quickly provided you their ABCs? That
type of preparation demonstrates they truly value your time and are on the
ball. You’ll want to coach them again if they need it.

The Skill Index
Self-Directed Coaching is all about getting the skills you need to successfully
achieve whatever you are working to accomplish. The Skill Index we created
and refer to below provides a common scale to understand where you are and
where you want to be as you share your ABCs. The index is a set of numbers
ranging from zero to ten, representing different skill levels. You should
recognize this familiar ranking scale—it’s used for characterizing language
levels, computer skills, skiing routes. The higher the number, the higher the
skill. Recall that the word skill is defined as “the ability to do something
well.” This index will help you understand how well you do at that particular
skill. This is not a learning stages model but is meant to help you capture
your actual skill at something, at a point in time. (Note the graphic of riding a
bike, a skill most of us can relate to, which is intended to help illustrate the
skill level.
This “0-10” scale is meant to help you answer the question “How well can
you do it?” We probably don’t need to explain zero—it means you can’t do it
at all.
Zero understanding or experience. A ten means you’re a master. It’s defined
as being at the top of the game in this area. You’re a recognized expert. At
this level, you’ve most likely hit the ten-thousand-hour rule first introduced
by K. Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State University,
and then popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. The idea is

that real masters have spent at least ten thousand hours becoming that good at
what they do.3 As a master, you may not know everything, but you know
enough to be considered a true pro. You probably don’t need to master most
of the things you are doing. Some level of capability less than 10 may be
good enough to do what you need to do.
We save ten-plus for those few who have continued their quest and are the
best in the world. For our purposes, they aren’t even on the scale. By the way,
one sign of a true “master” is that they have an irresistible urge to teach
others.
They just can’t help it.
The numbers between zero and ten show some
degree of increased capability on your way to
mastery.
Let’s run through the scale:
Here’s what it might look like with your ABCs
around an MIT that is more qualitative in nature:
My MIT is to get better at SQL skills (structured query language:
coding language used to communicate with databases).
My Point A: I’m a 5 in my SQL skills and can do some of it.
My Point B is to be an 8 in my SQL skills and do most of it in one
year.
Context: So far, I’ve watched a few YouTube videos, took an online
SQL course, and dabbled in our database trying a few things. I can
do elementary database updates, but that’s about it.
As you can see in the example, it’s important to call out not just the numbers
on the index, but also what they mean so there is both clarity and alignment
for you and your coach. The Skill Index is useful for communicating skill-
based ABCs and can provide a lot of insight when you use it to figure out
where your coach thinks you are in your skill.
One of our authors, Kelly, was surprised when realizing he and his Latin
dancing coach were not aligned.

He asked his coach where he felt he was on the Skill Index with bachata (a
style of Latin dancing). Thinking he’d hear “five or six,” our soon-to-be-
deflated coauthor was shocked when his coach told him he considered him a
“three,” mostly because he wasn’t correctly completing a critical technique
called “the pretzel.” Hard to hear but good to know. The information gave
Kelly the direction he needed, and after a bit of work he soon advanced to a
higher-level class.
Using the Skill Index to see if you’re on the same page with your coach can
lead to very productive conversations.
Write Your ABCs
Now that we’ve covered what the ABCs of Coaching and the Skill Index are
all about, it’s time for you to write your MIT. As you go through the rest of
the chapters in this book, it will be helpful to reflect back on. So, take a
minute and write down your MIT and ABCs by answering these questions:
With your MIT and ABCs in mind, you might practice saying them out loud
with a timer to see if you can deliver them within sixty seconds. If it’s too
long or too short, adjust your details up or down so your coach will have
enough to chew on but not so much that they choke.

It’s important to note that your ABCs are fluid and will change each time you
get some coaching or make some progress—meaning your Point A will be
ever changing as you make your way up the Skill Index. For that reason, we
recommend you start each coaching session with your ABCs, even if it’s the
same coach. This process resets the playing field and helps you direct the
coaching session to get what you need, when you need it.
In the next chapter, we reveal the key to getting the most out of what any
coach might offer.
1 Staff, “Remembering the Day of Leon Lett’s Super Bowl Blunder in Dallas’ Win over Buffalo,” The
Post Game (January 2015), thepostgame.com/blog/throwback/201501/leon-lett-dallas-cowboys-super-
bowl-fumble.
2 FranklinCovey, ed., “The Execution QuotientTM: The Measure of What Matters,” FranklinCovey
White Paper (2001), 1–19,
www.academia.edu/24435804/The_Execution_Quotient_The_Measure_Of_What_Matters.
3 Malcom Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008).

S
COACHABILITY
ome time ago, Roger Connors met with Dr. Astrid S. Tuminez,
president of Utah Valley University—a large public institution of over
forty thousand students—to explain the concept of Self-Directed
Coaching. After hearing it, she paused for a moment, then said, “It reminds
me of ‘the beginner’s mind.’” “What’s ‘the beginner’s mind?’” Roger asked.
“It’s a Zen Buddhism principle that suggests having an attitude of openness
to learning new information.” She went on to say that in order for someone to
be willing to get a coach, they would need to be open to learn from those
around them.
Originally pronounced “Sho-shin,” from the Japanese language, a
“beginner’s mind” is a way of life in Zen Buddhism philosophy. When
studying something new, even at advanced levels, one learns best when
approaching a subject with the eagerness that a beginner would. This
university president is a wonderful example of the concept.
Astrid was born in a farming village in the Philippine province of Iloilo and
moved with her parents and six siblings to the slums of Iloilo City when she
was two years old, because her parents were seeking better educational
opportunities for their children. Her pursuit of education eventually took her
to the United States, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1986 with a
bachelor’s degree in international relations and Russian literature. She then
earned a master’s degree from Harvard and a PhD from MIT.

We found it relevant that a person so accomplished (we have not shared the
half of it) would have the “beginner’s mind” concept be top of her mind in
the conversation.
As Roger got to know her staff and colleagues, everyone commented that Dr.
Tuminez has an insatiable appetite for learning. Could this mind-set and
attitude have led to her success?
A Change in Belief
There are a few important variables that will determine how impactful the
coaching you get will be: finding the right coach, defining your MIT, using
the ABCs, guiding the coaching experience effectively, and so forth. Based
on our experience, however, the most important variable will actually be you.
That is, your ability to be coachable. Coaching will not have a big impact on
your performance, regardless of how expert the coach is, unless you approach
the discussion with a beginner’s mind.

This type of mindset is not natural for most, especially for seasoned leaders
who have a great deal of experience in their domain. Professor Wayne Baker,
professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, calls
this phenomenon the “sage syndrome.” He describes how “leaders feel that
they have to be the font of all wisdom, to know everything, and never have
any needs or never ask for help.” He goes on to share that over time “that’s
really self-limiting; leaders need to ask as well In fact, if a leader is not
willing to ask, it’s hard to get anyone else to do it.”1
To benefit fully from coaching requires a wholesale change in belief about
learning from others. It requires that you be coachable. Always.
Consider the world of sports. When it comes to
selecting players for a team, the number one thing
professional scouts look for in a potential player is
their ability to be coached.2 Andy Drake, a senior
recruiting coach for NCSA (Next College Student
Athlete, a recruiting organization) and former
head college baseball coach, describes what he
looked for when recruiting. “When I went to a
game to watch athletes as a college coach, I was
looking to see how coachable does this kid look? If your body language is
terrible, if your coach is talking to you and you’re not paying attention, if
your teammates are not doing well and you’re throwing your hands up, if
you’re sitting on the bench when everyone else is up and listening to the
coach, that’s what I was looking for.”3
Those who have the ability to be coached excel. Those who don’t don’t.
Michael Jordan, arguably the best basketball player of all time, has said, “My
best skill was that I was coachable. I was a sponge and aggressive to learn.”4
MATT
Our coachability model includes four key characteristics: mindfulness,
authenticity, transparency, and teachability, or MATT for short (see the
diagram below).

Let’s take a look at how you see yourself relative to each of these. On a scale
of 0 to 10, use the Skill Index we presented in the last chapter—it’s included
here again for quick reference. Where would you rate yourself on each of
these four qualities—how well do you do it? Don’t overthink this one, just
respond with first impressions:
1. Mindfulness is the quality or state of being aware of one’s
emotions, thoughts, behavior, and experiences.
Your rating: (0 to 10)
2. Authenticity is the quality of being who we really are, not playing a
role but having our words and actions be consistent with our beliefs
and values. It’s being authentically you.

3. Transparency is the quality of being open and free in sharing your
thoughts and feelings.
4. Teachability is the quality of valuing the opinions and experiences
of others, and being humble enough to accept them.
Your total score: : _______ (add up the four numbers)
Here’s how we would view your total score:
You might feel your score would vary depending on your circumstances.
This is probably true. We are all more or less coachable in different settings
with different groups of people. Hopefully, this little self-assessment sets the
stage for identifying what else you might do to become even more coachable
in settings where that would make a difference in
your performance and results.

Learning how to coach is important, but learning
how to best receive coaching can make all the
difference. The benefits are huge when you can
get input from others to help you succeed!
Getting to Know MATT
Let’s go a little deeper into each of these coachability building blocks. We
invite you to be especially aware of how you might improve your score and
your ability to receive coaching in a way that allows you to put it into
practice and achieve your MITs.
Mindfulness is a difficult one for many of us. Being self-aware can be hard,
and self-deception is common. It’s often much easier to evaluate someone
else, rather than ourselves. In fact, behavioral and social science has long
known that it is a natural human tendency to overestimate our own qualities
and abilities in a positive way. There are many names for this: illusory
superiority, above-average effect, superiority bias, leniency error, sense of
relative superiority . . . you get the point. We tend to think we are better than
we are.
When approaching a coaching session, a high degree of mindfulness will help
you: you will pick real numbers on the Skills Index that reflect where you
really are and avoid inflating your abilities (remember, we all do it), and you
will be prepared to share your own performance gaps and professionally
accept feedback the coach will provide. Coaches with a high degree of
mindfulness will be more aware of their own limitations in their expertise and
guard against giving bad coaching, as well as be more receptive to the
Learner leading the coaching session. All good outcomes when we are more
mindful of ourselves.
Authenticity, the second building block of coachability, causes people to
represent their honest and genuine thoughts, character, and beliefs. They are
true to themselves. Author and thought leader Brené Brown suggests that

“authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re
supposed to be and embracing who we are.”5
Similar to mindful people, authentic people are aware of their true strengths,
weaknesses, and character flaws, but they are unique in the sense that they
honestly reveal them to the world. When approaching a coaching
conversation, authentic Learners are candid with their thoughts and readily
share with the Coach what excites or frustrates them. Likewise, authentic
Coaches are not afraid to speak up when they notice mediocre performance
and do not beat around the bush when providing advice or feedback. Most
people can read when we are not authentic, which causes them to be on alert
and put up their guard. Authenticity leads to genuine coaching discussions.
Transparency, the third building block, is critical to effective coaching.
Transparent people don’t need to be asked what they think or why they made
a decision; rather, they actively share their thoughts willingly and frequently.
Being transparent elicits trust in the eyes of the hearer and spawns
psychological safety during a conversation, opening up others.6 During a
coaching session, a Learner will be transparent with setbacks and proactively
disclose potential concerns, while a Coach will transparently counsel the
Learner about their progress and openly share the limitations of their own
advice. There are no hidden agendas when transparency is present, a key to
making coaching work.
The fourth building block of coachability is teachability. Simply put, this is
all about valuing the opinions and experiences of others. It entails being
capable, eager, and humble enough to accept and learn new information. This
is harder for people who read, research, and experiment a lot on their own,
because they already feel they have studied up and are probably well ahead of
the pack when it comes to subject matter knowledge. A teachable Learner
realizes that there is tremendous value to be gained from possible coaches
around them, and every morsel of advice can potentially lead to a
breakthrough. Similarly, a teachable Coach undoubtedly recognizes that they
can always improve and will adapt their coaching style to that of the Learner.
The four elements of coachability— mindfulness, authenticity, transparency,
and teachability—form a powerful belief system for accelerating
performance. When both the Learner and Coach

are coachable, they benefit together from the
interaction and enable an incredibly productive
knowledge transfer.
Putting It into Practice
So, what does this look like on a team? Take, for example, our friend Josh,
product manager for a large tech company with seven developers under his
oversight. His role basically entails managing the flow of product, making
sure processes, projects, and the development team functions effectively.
What’s unique about Josh’s role is that he doesn’t have actual authority over
the developers—they have other managers they report to. He instead acts as a
coach and supportive figure.
When we asked Josh about his experiences coaching, he went off—
immediately sharing a time he worked with two developers who were both
delayed in getting features out for a product. After approaching who we’ll
call Dev-1 and going over the timeline and needed updates, the guy had a
meltdown. “Who are you to tell me what do to? You’re not my manager!”
Dev-1 barked. Josh knew he didn’t have any real authority over him (and was
grateful), so he took a breath and described the project again, this time in
more detail, all while assuring Mr. Uncoachable that he was being honest and
fair. “Eventually the guy came around,” Josh offered through gritted teeth,
“but it took quite a bit of my time.”
Josh then described working with Dev-2 . . . an entirely different experience.
“After explaining the situation to her, she graciously took the coaching [and]
was happy and excited. Soon, I saw her productivity double and we really got
the ball rolling,” Josh said with a smile.

Two developers. Same situation. Complete opposite response. What was it
that caused Dev-1 to react so negatively to coaching while Dev-2 was happy
about it? Coachability. “The second developer was much more coachable,”
Josh said. “She was humble enough to recognize where she could improve.”
As we think about this story and relate it to the elements of MATT, we can
see that Coach Josh did a good job being authentic and transparent as he
described the situation to the two developers. He didn’t beat around the bush
and he didn’t hesitate to be open about the consequences of missing the
deadline.
As for the developers, the first was not very teachable and immediately
resorted to questioning Josh’s authority. The second had a high degree of
teachability and was willing to hear Josh out and change course. Dev-2 was
also mindful, in recognizing where she could improve, which resulted in a
significant bump in performance.
As you think about being coachable, the most important takeaway is that you
accurately view yourself and others. This comes when you recognize that in
order to be an effective Learner or Coach, you must seek to be coachable—
having a beginner’s mind—and honestly assess your degree of mindfulness,
authenticity, transparency, and teachability that you bring to each coaching
interaction.
Okay, now it’s time to find a coach. In the next chapter, we show you how to
do that.
1 Beard, “The Art of Asking.”
2 Bruce Eckfeldt, “Why Great CEOs Like Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, and Bill Gates All Used Coaches,”
Inc Today’s Must Reads (January 2017), inc.com/bruce-eckfeldt/how-great-ceos-like-steve-jobs-eric-
schmidt-and-bill-gates-got-even-better.html.
3 Jason Smith, “How to Tell if Your Athlete is Coachable,” USA Today (June 12, 2018),
usatodayhss.com/2018/how-to-tell-if-your-athlete-is-coachable.
4 Jim Afremow, The Champion’s Comeback: How Great Athletes Recover, Reflect, and Reignite (New
York: Rodale Inc., 2016).
5 Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection (Center City: Hazelden Publishing, 2010).
6 Han Yi, Po Hao, Baiyin Yang, and Wenxing Liu, “How Leaders’ Transparent Behavior Influences
Employee Creativity: The Mediating Roles of Psychological Safety and Ability to Focus Attention,”
Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies 24, 3 (September 21, 2016): 335–344,
doi:10.1177/1548051816670306.

W
FIND A COACH
hile working a stressful job with two young and active children,
Seth, one of the authors, realized he didn’t handle his kids very
well after getting home from work. He set an MIT to improve
his ability to stay calm in high-pressure situations—like landing a jet on an
aircraft carrier, or, worse, dealing with hungry and tired toddlers! On a walk
with his wife, Seth asked her who she thought he could go to for coaching to
help him be a more patient dad. They thought through what professions
required staying calm under high stress and made a list ranging from nurses
to police to firefighters—even military Special Forces.
He then began reaching out to different people in each of those fields. Some
were old classmates and others were friends or family who could connect
him. He had conversations with a number of these high-stress rock stars, but
ultimately it was the last one he talked to who gave him the transformational
advice he was after.
It was an officer who trained highway patrol professionals in a myriad of
skills, including staying calm. His recommendation was to employ combat
breathing whenever you begin to feel duress. This is where you simply
breathe in deeply for four seconds, hold for four seconds, and breathe out for
four seconds. That process floods the brain with oxygen, which activates the
frontal lobe, where our higher mental processes occur. This exercise redirects
the body from an amygdala response of flight, fight, or freeze and brings the
brain back to better thinking. If only more parents knew that combat training
was a helpful parenting tip!

After practicing and using this technique over a period of time, Seth
improved his ability to the point he felt he’d achieved his MIT.
Seth had multiple coaches helping him. One coach
is good, but more can be better. Having more than
one coach gives you more than one perspective. If
you’re talking to a number of different coaches,
you will glean unique nuggets from each. Multiple
coaches also allows you to create diversity in your
coaches, enabling you to see a bigger picture than
you possibly could with only one. They can also
bring attention to common themes, which will
provide greater confidence around what you can
do to be successful and help you triangulate on what’s working.
It’s About Expertise
Finding a coach with the needed expertise in your MIT is critical to ensuring
you get the advice and input that will lead to success. Within the Self-
Directed Coaching framework, expertise is what qualifies someone to be a
coach. You might wonder why a solid ability to explain isn’t also included as
a key qualifier. After all, everyone’s met that brilliant professor or engineer
who can near instantly solve a problem but struggles to explain how they did
it. Wouldn’t you want a coach who can effectively walk you through what
they know step-by-step?
The beauty of Self-Directed Coaching is you don’t need to find someone who
also has the ability to explain their expertise, because it’s on you to learn how
to effectively get what you need from your coach. Your ability to direct and
guide the coaching conversation broadens the pool of potential coaches from
the rare few who may possess the ability to explain, to anyone who has
already figured out what you’re hoping to do.
How do you identify just who has the appropriate know-how? What level is
good enough in a coach to help you achieve your Most Important Thing?
They don’t need to be as high up the food chain as you might think. After all,
does everyone really need that perfect 10 coach in order to show them what’s
next?

Level Up
Let’s look again at our coauthor Seth. When he was pursuing his
undergraduate degree, he decided he wanted to learn Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He
did a little research and found it takes an average of ten years to get a black
belt—there are a total of five belts (white, blue, purple, brown, and black)
that require two to three years on each.
Seth went to a free club at the college he was attending and was shocked
when he met the instructor—a mere blue belt who was only one level up
from where he would be as a newbie white belt just starting. Seth questioned
whether this guy could give him the best level of instruction, but decided to
give it a try. After training for a few months, he went to his first tournament,
where his college team would be competing against other Jiu Jitsu gyms—
mostly all coached by black belts. The results? His college team cleaned up,
taking first or second place in all of the weight categories in the white belt
division. Why did they dominate the competition that had been taught by
black belt masters, when they were taught by a “lowly” blue belt? On the
surface, it doesn’t make sense.
The answer came when Seth moved to California and joined a gym with a
world champion black belt instructor. One day, when he asked the black belt
how to get out of a choke hold, the black belt showed him five different ways
that varied in complexity—far too much information for Seth’s brain to
absorb. By contrast, when Seth had asked the blue belt the same question, he
got one simple solution that he could instantly grasp and put into practice.
When looking for a coach, too often people look for the figurative “black
belt.” It seems logical to want “the best,” thinking they will yield the best
results. But shooting for the best—the 10—is often the hardest approach, as
there are fewer of them out there.
More importantly, it’s good to remember that a “black belt” hasn’t been
where you are for a very long time, while a blue belt has. This “recency
effect” allows the figurative “blue belt” to remember what it was like to be a
“white belt” and recall what you can and can’t retain. What would and would
not be helpful.

Finding a coach just one level up is often the most effective. That means if
you’re a 3 on the Skills Index, you should probably be hunting for just a 4 or
5 to coach you. The next Level Up Coach can often provide the very best
coaching to help you take the next step.
Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook, echoed this sentiment
when she said, “Friends at the same stage of their careers may actually
provide more current and useful counsel. Several of my older mentors
advised me against taking a job at Google in 2001. Yet almost all my peers
understood the potential of Silicon Valley. Peers are also in the trenches and
may understand problems that superiors do not, especially when those
problems are generated by superiors in the first place.”1
We’ve also found it makes it easier for people to
commit to finding a coach when realizing they
only need to go a level up. In general, a level up is
less intimidating, more accessible, and it’s easier
to get them to spend time with you. Finding a
coach or coaches is not as hard as you may think.
Coaching Pools
On one occasion, a training participant we’ll call Cindy approached us after a
session and said that she was not getting any coaching from her manager. In
fact, she was frustrated and ready to leave the organization, then added, “if
my manager doesn’t fire me first.” She had often asked for him to sit in on a

call and coach her, but he refused to do it. He just kept saying, “You need to
up your game” and “get results.” Finally, Cindy said her manager happened
into her cubical one day while she was on a call. He sat down and listened,
and after the call was over gave her feedback. He told her that her technical
knowledge was off-the-charts good, but her relationship building on the
phone needed to improve. “Finally,” she thought. “Now I know what I need
to work on!”
We then described for Cindy the concept of Coaching Pools, which we use in
our training, and gave her three questions she should ask herself:
1. Who do you know who has expertise in your MIT?
2. Who do you know who may have expertise in your MIT?
3. Who do you know who can connect you to someone with expertise
in your MIT?
Almost immediately, she said, “Okay, I got this. I can already think of a few
people I could go to who could help.” She went on to say that “there’s one
person I know in my neighborhood. That’s where I’ll start.” We encouraged
her to keep thinking and to reach out to a number of people.
Now let’s go through the three Coaching Pools questions.
COACHING POOL QUESTION NO. 1
Question number one is all about the low-hanging fruit, where you list those
you know who without question have experience in what you’re after.
Consider everyone here, not just a level up.

Question number two is where you think through those who may have the
knowledge you’re after, but you’re just not sure. Consider people you may
know only by acquaintance—perhaps you associate with them in a club,
volunteer organization, or go to church with them. They may even be in your
organization in a different department or on a different team.
Not too long ago at a training we were conducting for a group of thirty
people, we did our usual “experiment.” We asked someone to call out an MIT
they needed coaching on. A hand shot up from the back of the room, and the
person said, “I need help with Amazon AWS.” We asked the group (people
from the same company, but from a mix of different departments and teams)
who could help. From the front of the room, we heard a low mumbling and
realized that most in the room were pointing to someone and saying,
“Susan!” We looked at her, and she said, “Yes, I can do that.”
We then pushed the test further and asked for another coaching MIT. The
next one was organizing management levels for a new sales team. A hand
shot up in the front row. We could tell the group was skeptical that the person
responding could really help, so we asked this potential coach why he
thought he could be helpful. His reply, “I’ve done it three times before in
former organizations.”
Fantastic! Two for two on connecting coaches. Right in front of us, we were
watching people’s beliefs change about how hard it is to find a coach. Why
not try three for three? We asked, “Who else has an MIT they need help with,
but make it a personal one this time?” The response from someone on the

other side of the room was “dancing.” After the nervous laughs died down,
we asked, “What kind of dancing?” “Country dancing” was the reply. To
everyone’s amazement, a woman raised her hand and said, “I just took a
country western dancing class last Wednesday. I can help!”
Three for three! That’s not unusual in the groups we work with— there is
always a match or connection. It never fails.
It’s important to understand that these coaching matches, especially the first
two, were within the same organization . . . actually, they were in the same
room but were not connected. What price is being paid individually, in the
team and the entire organization, when these connections aren’t being made
and coaching is not being exchanged? Finding the right coach speeds up
results. Always.
The final Coaching Pool question, number three, gets you thinking about who
can connect you to someone with the expertise you need. These may be all
the same people from numbers 1 and 2 above, but the focus is on knowing
who they know, on connecting to their network. Connectivity greatly expands
the number of people you have access to.
You may have heard of the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” party game. Kevin
Bacon is a notable actor (Footloose, Apollo 13, X-Men: First Class), and the
way the game goes is to find the shortest number

of links between any actor and Kevin Bacon. The idea is that any Hollywood
actor can be linked through their movie roles to Kevin Bacon within no more
than six links. Of course, this plays off the six degrees of separation idea that
any two people on the planet are six or fewer acquaintances from each other.
Facebook wanted to put the six degrees of separation rule to the test and
determine what the actual average number of degrees of separation are
between two people. They used their enormous 1.74 billion–name database
and a sophisticated algorithm, and discovered that the average of six degrees
of separation was incorrect. It’s actually 3.74!2 In other words, if you don’t
know somebody directly who has the expertise you need, odds are you are
just a few connections away from somebody who does.
We recommend that as you search and identify potential coaches, you reach
out to three to five of them. If your MIT is highly unique and specialized,
then identifying and connecting with five coaches might be difficult, but
we’ve found that in most cases it’s doable, as well as rewarding.
With Self-Directed Coaching, anybody can find a coach for anything,
anytime, anywhere—improving your skill(s) much faster than you ever
thought possible.
Next chapter up—“The Ask.” Here, we show you how to get your potential
coaches to say yes to your coaching request.

1 Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New York: Random House, 2013).
2 Smriti Bhagat, Moira Burke, Carlos Diuk, and Ismail Onur Filiz, and Sergey Edunov, “Three and a
Half Degrees of Separation,” Facebook Research (February4,2016),research.fb.com/three-and-a-half-
degrees-of-separation.

T
THE ASK
here is an important promise we can make to you as you take the
Self-Directed Coaching journey: You will be shocked, in a good
way, at the number of people willing to be your coach. Case in point
. . .
Cristina Pianezzola, a gift-planning professional at a large public university,
decided to reach out to get some coaching. She admitted it was hard for
someone in her specialty to get input at a university, as she’s more of a one-
person band. She thought of several people on the other side of the nation in
her line of work, but didn’t know them personally, but decided to reach out
and give it a try anyway—maybe they would respond. Cristina was amazed
to find that everyone she reached out to agreed to speak with her, resulting in
some great conversations. She felt it was one of the most productive activities
she had done to break through on a particular problem she was trying to
solve.
For many, the most challenging part of the process is the “Ask.” We
understand that it can be intimidating—soliciting help from people you may
not know, asking for guidance or time. Some might even be nervous to ask
those they actually know well.
While studies show that the fear of reaching out and asking for help is real,
those same studies show that the fear is largely unfounded. A Cornell
University study1 found that people underestimated others’ willingness to
help by as much as 50 percent, while a Workforce Purpose Index revealed

Get A Coach Be A Coach The New Coaching Approach to Accelerate Individual Success and Organizational Results

Get A Coach Be A Coach The New Coaching Approach to Accelerate Individual Success and Organizational Results

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