Coaching is simplicity,” the Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry said. “It’s getting players to play better than they think that they can.” Without Coach Landry’s skilled hands and heart guiding them, the Cowboys might never have become “America’s Team.”
In the same way, for Fort Worth to reach its full potential and be recognized as the “Entrepreneurial Capital of Texas,” the city’s professional business and life coaches will have to help take our leaders and service providers to a much higher level of performance.
Coach Landry’s quote reveals the essence of the coaching profession: taking people to a place that’s better than they believe they can get to on their own. But this will require serious organization and focus on the part of the professional coaching community.
There’s a Coach for That It is hard to imagine a life pursuit that can’t be enhanced with the right professional business or life coach. This can include:
Becoming a more effective private business owner or corporate executive;
Learning to lead teams and enhance individual performance;
Developing skills that can accelerate your personal growth;
Finding balance and purpose;
Perfecting your “nonmedical” skills as a physician or dentist;
Becoming a more confident and effective pastor or teacher;
Overcoming physical or emotional handicaps;
Recovering from loss or traumatic life circumstances;
Learning to “reinvent” yourself from success to significance;
Transforming your lifelong hobby into a new profession; and
Learning to be a more effective team player or board member.
The “Wormhole Effect” If you are a fan of “Star Trek,” “Star Wars” or the Science Channel, you already know what a “wormhole” is.
For the rest of us, allow me to refer to a quote from Space.com: In 1935, physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen used the theory of general relativity to propose the existence of “bridges” through space-time. These paths, called Einstein-Rosen bridges or wormholes, connect two different points in space-time, theoretically creating a shortcut that could reduce travel time and distance.
If Einstein and Rosen are right, space travelers could choose to move from one universe to another by rocketing millions of light-years (and hundreds of generations) or by simply moving instantaneously from one to the other via a wormhole.
In the same way, individuals and teams of all kinds can invest (or waste) tremendous amounts of time, energy and money trying to improve performance on their own. Or they can hire an experienced, professional coach (wormhole) to get there faster, cheaper and with greater success. While both approaches may ultimately work, “going it alone” often results in a series of frustrating dead ends and unmet expectations because we simply “don’t know what we don’t know.”
Calling All Coaches From 1993 to 1995, Fort Worth lost more than 50,000 jobs due to the closing of Carswell Air Force Base and downsizing of General Dynamics (now Lockheed). To help our city recover from that devastating economic setback, I said “yes” when Mayor Kay Granger asked me for help creating and leading the Fort Worth Business Assistance Center. Ever since I served as the co-creator and first executive director of that effort, I have been on a mission to rally the business support resources of our city to help grow our base of successful entrepreneurs and executive leaders.
Today, there is a reawakening to the fact that Fort Worth has the opportunity to establish itself as an entrepreneurial powerhouse, given its educational, technological, logistical, governmental, health-science and geographical resources. That said, I believe that reaching our city’s full potential will require that all experienced, professional coaches come together in ways that will make accessing their talents easy for our community.
But I need your help.
If you are a professional life or business coach, or know one, please contact me at [email protected] or 817.832.5696 so I can add you to our growing list of coaching resources. My goal is to help organize these resources in a way that will encourage more and more people to accelerate their growth through professional coaching.
By working together, Fort Worth’s leaders and their coaches will continue the legacy of strong relationships and world-class business practices that our children and grandchildren deserve.