Have you ever been on an incredible course, getting all revved up and leaving feeling inspired and motivated? And then done nothing?
That’s the risk with a course, is that a lot of information is delivered in a short amount of time, with no follow up. Think about when you studied… you’d attend class, then go and do some homework to embed the knowledge, then write a test. With a course, you listen (maybe) and then go back to your old routine.
I first thought about this when someone was telling me about all these amazing sales courses she'd attended but how her sales had not improved. The courses are great, but what are you going to do with what you’ve learnt? If a course could be followed up with a series of coaching sessions, that would serve to embed the learnings and link them to performance prerequisites, and that would be a productive combination, but budgets are tight and one-day courses are easier to sell to the financial manager over individual coaching contracts.
Whether you want to sell something or act in some way, what you require is change, and change comes with practice over time. As with any path you might take, it is easy to veer in another direction, or hang around at the start. What you need is help to link your learnings to your own goals so that you have the motivation to act on them, and then you need someone to help you along the way and make you accountable.
A course will provide you with knowledge but coaching helps you to build the capacity required to act on that knowledge so that you can use it to achieve your objectives.