When someone decides to become a business coach, they are not just responsible for their own success or failure anymore since it is the job of a coach to guide entrepreneurs and small business owners to success. How successful someone is as a business coach will, therefore, be directly reflected by the people who placed their trust in him/her to see them through to a better future.
It is for this reason that most successful business coaches from all over the world believe that people should only try coaching they are qualified enough to do a good job. The thing is though, business coaching qualifications don’t simply designate one’s history of successfully completing business coaching courses alone, although it’s certainly a big part of it.
Whether you are planning to take on business coaching courses to improve your own business and help your executives fair better, or you want to establish a career in the field of business coaching, it would be wise to first consider the following checklist to see if you have what it takes.
General Tendency to Teach and Guide
A lot of people know a lot of things, but very few of them are willing to share their knowledge and discuss different points of view with an open mind. If you are known in your social and business circle for being that kind of a person, it’s both a sign that you can be a good teacher/professor and a business coach. A coach is, after all, a teacher and an innate natural willingness to share knowledge and guide pupils will make the job feel easier.
The Advisor
There is a significant difference between an advisor and a know-it-all. A know-it-all is someone who feels a sense of superiority and enjoys the feeling of being always right, whether they actually are or not! This person feels a burning desire to be always right and win in debates that they had no reason to start in the first place. They may still possess knowledge and experience, but they are limited in their ability to make it useful for others.
The advisor, on the other hand, is the person who has knowledge and experience but will not feel the need to be proven right or wrong, unless there is a point to it. The advisor advises people when they seek it or need it but doesn’t get into ego-induced arguments; neither do they force their advice onto anyone. People who can relate to the advisor are already on their way to becoming business or life coaches, they just need the right business coaching qualifications to get started formally.
Natural Ability to Connect and Communicate
If there was to be one singular soft skill on the basis of which people had to be successful in their business ventures, it would have to be communication. We connect and communicate with human beings in business, and although it may seem from the outset as if trade is mostly conducted on the basis of numbers, in practical life, that isn’t always true.
One of the main duties of a business coach is to help their clients or students connect and communicate with various people across various industries and different levels of work. Therefore, if you are a good communicator who connects with people from all levels with relative ease, you are going to become a natural business coach, but only after you have completed relevant business coaching courses to organise your innate skills and give them a proper direction.
Business Coaching Qualifications
Remember how we mentioned that completing a few business coaching courses is a part of the necessary qualifications? Well, it’s a big part nonetheless, and one without which you cannot hone your natural and acquired skills in a way that will benefit your clients or even your own business. The BCF Group provides potential candidates with those necessary business coaching qualifications, through both accredited and unaccredited business coaching courses. They even have one-on-one coaching options for those that need it, look through all the options before deciding which one would be the best fit for you.
High Intelligence
There is no denying the fact that successful business leaders are intelligent, and more so than the average Joe. If you are going to teach intelligent people, you need a high enough IQ to do that for sure!
Logical reasoning, problem-solving skills, pattern recognition, out of the box thinking, improvisation, quick thinking, etc. are all tools of the trade for business coaching professionals, and if you are good at those already, you have the potential to be a successful mentor, post-training.
Jealousy Doesn’t Come Easy to You
An attribute that is often forgotten about the business mentor is that they must really care in order to help others reach success, sometimes at a much greater level than their own. Being a kingmaker, one cannot be jealous of the king who succeeds to the throne, which is not an easy job. People who get jealous when seeing others succeed will find the job of business coaching to be the wrong field for them.
On the other hand, if you are the kind of person who enjoys seeing others succeed, you will thrive in this profession. Also, do keep in mind that it’s not exactly a completely selfless act, as agile business coaching does pay quite well, and it helps you build the connections that you may later need to launch your own start-up.
You are Not Egoistic but Confident
To be proud of one’s own self and achievements is not the same as being egoistical because the former gives you confidence while the latter will likely make you overconfident. Be it in business or in life, learning is a continuous process. In order to be a good business coach, you must have an open mind that can take in, assimilate, and improve on ideas from anyone, without letting your ego act as a barrier.
It takes a confident person to be able to go down and up across various levels of the business and learn from the resulting experiences. Someone with a huge ego will not be able to go too far along this line of real-life education and acquire the experience necessary to help themselves and their clients effectively.
You Own a Successful Business
Although it’s not necessary for someone to be a successful business owner in order to become a business mentor, it can initially prove to be quite difficult to sell people on the idea that you can help them, if you have not built a business for yourself first!
Therefore, although this one is not a necessity exactly, business coaches with at least some entrepreneurial experience behind them will enjoy more credibility with their clients for sure. It doesn’t have to be a big business, as long as it is successful and has a viable plan for future growth as well. This is also one of the reasons why business leaders of all stature are also encouraged to take up business coaching courses, as it allows them to better manage their own businesses as a natural result.
