If you’re tired of making things harder than they need to be, then hiring a coach to help you is the best thing you can do. Yes, even with gardening. You may not think hiring a gardening coach is “worth it” when there is so much free information online, but I’m going to give you three benefits of hiring a gardening coach that the free stuff online just can’t give you.
As a personal trainer, I help my clients to make the path to fitness and health easier and more successful. I see the value in coaching everyday, and I often hire a coach myself to help me with my goals.
As for my vegetable garden, I’d already spent two years toiling away with frustrating yields. I was ready to work with a professional.
Rick Stone, of The Online Gardening School, is the gardening expert whose content I got the most value from. After taking his Seed Starting Challenge I joined his course, The Gardening Academy, where he provides video classes to watch on your own time, a forum for asking questions, and an interactive monthly group call.
It’s been nearly a year being in his course, and I wanted to round up the three biggest benefits I’ve experienced from hiring a gardening coach.
The market for gardening products is massive. Some of them are fantastic, others are a complete waste of money.
Unless you have a lot of experience – or a guide to help you – you’re going to end up buying things that really don’t give you the value of what you spent on them.
For example, in my first year in our new home (before joining Rick’s course) I purchased grow lights I found on amazon that had lots of good ratings. Despite using them correctly, none of my indoor seedlings never got taller than a few inches.
A year later, there was a discussion on grow lights in the Gardening Academy monthly call and it became clear – these lights were not even close to bright enough to grow seedlings into any sort of usable size for an outdoor garden. I had spent over $90 on lights that were totally useless for me now.
Here’s another example. A student in our group was wondering if a fairly pricey landscaping project was a good way to go. From her perspective, it seemed like it would be.
Rick has had experience with what this student was thinking of doing, and shared that it may not be the best choice to do and explained a different perspective that the student hadn’t considered. He then told her about another option she could consider which would be cheaper and lower maintenance.
Hiring a good coach saves you money (and frustration) by giving you access to years of experience accumulated by the coach to learn which products, items, or services are absolutely worth it for you to invest in for achieving your goals, and which are not.
Self-learning and being a self-starter are important qualities to possess. And going on the journey to learn what you need to know is a worthy experience. However, a great coach can can act as a multiplier on your actions and assist you in reaching greater success sooner.
The first year I started seeds indoors, it was nice to see them come up, but frustrating to see they never got big enough to go outside. (And the grow lights weren’t the only problem I had.)
I took Rick’s Seed Starting Challenge, which was a 7 day online series he led where he took us step by step through starting out seeds.
My success in this series was so much greater than when I’d tried on my own and I was learning far more than I’d ever learned before. I still had to do all the hard work, but having guidance from an expert helped me work hard on the right things.
Too often, people hire a coach hoping they’ll help them achieve meteoric success without all of the hard work that it takes to get there. They just think “this person knows the secret, if I work with them, they’ll tell me the secret, then I’ll have unbelievable success, too.”
Unbelievable, indeed.
Hiring a good coach significantly shortens your learning curve, not by helping you to “skip to the front of the line” but rather by allowing you to tap into their wisdom to help you put your efforts into the right places and ensure that more of your hard work yields a result.
When you are excited about something new, you’re often full of questions about that one thing you’re excited about. I get this all the time with new clients…
My new client wants to get better running endurance and they have a gazillion questions about running, thinking that everything they need to know to get better at running has to do, specifically, with running.
What I’m thinking about (and going to teach them about) is all of the things they need to become a better runner, most of which are outside the narrow lane of just focusing on actual running. From their respiratory mechanics, to their mitochondrial health, and of course, ensuring all of their joints and tissues function how we need them to – these are the things I’m going to be helping them with to help them be a better runner.
A good coach has a curriculum they’ve developed of things they think are important for a student to learn. That curriculum ensures you learn things you may not have thought to look into but which make you a more well-rounded person in whatever subject matter you’re working with the coach on.
So no matter what you want to learn more about, or become more proficient in, I hope this blog helps you see that it’s absolutely worth it to hire a coach. With a good coach, you build a foundation of knowledge and success that will surpass anything you thought possible.
Not sure how to pick the right coach for you? Read this blog where I give you my easy 3-question framework for choosing the right coach for you.
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