Perhaps the best lesson I’ve had to learn over and over again as a coach is that there are no shortcuts to greatness. There is no secret to being a better coach, no secret to learning to master enrollment. These things require knowledge and understanding, yes, but more importantly, they require experience.
The reason we’ve created the Samurai Coaching Dojo the way we did was that watching coaching and studying coaching as a way to learn how to do it, makes about as much sense as trying to get a child to walk, by having them study walking.
The only way a child can learn to walk is by doing it. Not just because this type of learning can’t be explained to such a young mind, but because no two bodies walk the same. And the same is true of coaches. No two people coach the same. Our pasts are vastly different, our experiences varied, our relationship to ourselves and our intuitions are as unique as our relationship to each and every person we will ever coach.
And so the only way to learn how to coach masterfully is to coach, watch what you have done, feel the feedback of the falling or of the supportive ground of a question well placed. The only way to enroll with honor is to invite and feel the response, the hard arrival of retreat or rejection, or the first wobbly acceptance or interest of the person in front of us.
So often we wait until we fully understand before we try to coach in a certain way. We wait until we fully understand what to say in an enrollment conversation, how to deal with a certain objection, or how to say the right numbers. But you can never learn this way.
If you take nothing else from the Samurai Coaching Dojo take this: the only version of you who knows how to become a brilliant coach and who knows how to enroll with nuance and skill, is a future you that has already done it. No one not even Christina and myself can tell you exactly how to do it. You must step and fall and earn your power and understanding.
We can help you make better choices, help you see the strategy of how to grow, even point out the places where your walking needs some work, but only you can walk. Only you can practice. Only you can learn to embody the most powerful version of the coach you long to be and the success you long to have.
This is why practice is at the center of it all. Because practice is the only way to truly learn the secrets of your own individual path.
