Hiring A Coach: How To Pick The Right One

Hiring a coach can be an excellent decision whether you are just starting out, want to accelerate your progress, or want to get to the next level. But how do you decide who to hire when there are nearly infinite choices out there?

I’ve been a strength and fitness coach for over 20 years, coaching people to achieve their health and fitness goals. I’ve also hired my fair share of coaches for my own goals. I’m going to share with you the three simple questions that you should ask yourself when considering who you’ll hire as your coach.

These questions work for any industry, so whether you are hiring a fitness coach, a financial coach, a personal growth coach, or something altogether different, use these questions to help you make your decision.

1. Does the coach have an abundance of experience?

A person can have passion and knowledge to share when they are young in age or young in their career, but it will never beat the wisdom of many years and decades of life experience doing the thing they have become an expert in.

Imagine looking through a telescope. This is what the knowledge of a young coach is like. They can see a lot in the small visual field which is available to their eye. But they don’t yet know how that small scope of knowledge interacts with the rest of the ecosystem in which it lives, or that there are multiple layers above and below that small view they have.

If the person you are considering hiring does not have an abundance of experience, you’ll want something else that makes it ‘worth it’ to hire them. The next two questions might help you decide if it’s ‘worth it’ (or not worth it).

2. Does the free content the coach puts out actually spur you to take action?

I want to preface this question by stating that YOU are the one who needs to decide to take action. No one can “make” you take action (or do anything, for that matter.)

Now, any coach can make a video or write a post that sparks your interest, and perhaps you even inspires you to put it in your “Saved” tab. But, our drive to take action can be spurred by various things in our environment, including things another person does.

But a coach who encourages in just the right way, or who teaches in just such a way, that you take action from it, that’s a coach that could be an excellent fit.

3. If you hired a coach and it just went “OK” in terms of results, would it still be worth it?

Everyone dreams of getting the very best results, but simple probability tells you that not everyone is going to get the best results.

This can happen for a variety of reasons. You might not have as much energy to give to your coaching program that you would have wished to have. Your coach might excel more in helping you with some things than with others. There can be any number of reasons why you end up with “OK” results instead of “amazing” results.

Would you still think it was worth it if you got “OK” results instead of amazing results? This is a value assessment you have to make, and you need to be honest with yourself as you do it.

Look at the cost of their offering, look at what they give you, imagine the best results you could get from working with them, then imagine the least results you could get. If your results land somewhere between those two endpoints, would you still say it was worth it?