Coaching is largely successful because business owners are talented and driven, and coaches are experienced and bring outside perspective to problems and solutions. A coach guides you with support and accountability to take advantage of your capabilities to get past roadblocks and reach new levels.

It’s a great partnership – as long as you are willing to embrace failure as part of the road to improvement.

Why?

In order to bring about change in your situation, you will necessarily need to do some things differently, otherwise things are unlikely to change. To make progress, you need to develop new skills, habits, approaches and knowledge about your business and yourself.

And when we try something new, there’s a very high chance that we will fail as part of our attempts to succeed. We have to accept this – even though we are older, successful in many ways, and people in our companies can see us. We may hesitate to be that vulnerable.

But there is no learning without experiencing failure.

Science proves that failure is necessary for us to learn new skills and habits. (If you want to dive into more of how this works, this podcast by Andrew Huberman is an excellent place to gain more knowledge.)

Risking failure may be one of the most challenging things for you to face while being coached. Even though learning new things requires us to risk failure, we usually resist intentionally risk risking failure, and we’re quite good at rationalizing that resistance.

I encourage anyone who is being coached to develop a mindset that not only accepts failure but embraces failure as a necessary part of learning and succeeding. Once you take that chance, that’s where real change and progress happens.