You need a coach, not a teacher

If the coaching doesn’t yield your desired results, there’s always Photoshop. (Image by Sasin Tipchai)

If you want to learn something — anything — the content is out there.

There are books, videos, and courses galore to show you how to do whatever it is you want to do, from flower arranging to sailing to investing. Whether in person or online, there is no shortage of information and eager teachers out there.

Despite this, we don’t reach our goals. We don’t all learn how to do the things we want to. Although online course completion rates are not the best measure of whether someone is learning, most sources suggest that they hover between 5 and 15 percent. Presumably, some of these people got as much as they wanted to from the course or learned what the wanted to learn elsewhere, but for many of them, life happened. They wanted to follow through, but they didn’t.

This isn’t necessarily a problem. There are plenty of things I had thought it would be a good idea to invest time and money into and now find myself grateful that I did not. I’m sure I’m not alone. But what about the people who genuinely want to learn something new and fail?

The fact is, the abundance of information in the world is difficult to make sense of without a guide to help you parse it, organize it, and figure out how to approach it — not only on a practical and logistical level, but on an emotional one, too. You don’t need a teacher, you need a coach.

Some teachers happen to be coaches, but they are not necessarily the same thing. To teach is to organize and share the information, but guiding the student through that information is where the coaching begins. A teacher tests you on what was covered, and that’s that; a coach will help you figure out how to practice or study so that your success on such a test is inevitable. Your coach is your partner in learning, holding you accountable and nudging you to follow through on a plan that’s based on your own goals.

If you decide to hire a personal trainer, you’ll easily find a person who will put you through the paces of a workout. After an hour, you’ve worked your muscles and burned some calories. But if that personal trainer is a good coach, you’ll get so much more. The exercises will be targeted to your specific needs; you’ll be pushed to the edge of your capability and learn techniques for dealing with the fear and fatigue you’ll experience; and you’ll receive recommendations for an ongoing program that will help you to achieve specific outcomes within your desired time frame.

A math tutor can help you complete your homework and pass the test; a math coach will help you identify the underlying gaps in your knowledge and give you a plan to resolve them. A guitar teacher says, “Cool, what do you want to learn?” when you show up each week. A guitar coach will make recommendations for what you should learn next, based on your tastes and interests, and help you break down the obstacles that prevent you from following through on your daily practice and find ways around them. A guidance counselor makes recommendations for your next steps after high school based on your grades and scores; a college coach will help you actually improve your grades and test scores if that’s necessary; she may also have offbeat ideas for how to reach your goals in less conventional ways that you never would have thought of on your own.

A coach isn’t a miracle worker — she can’t help you unless you’re willing to follow through and do the work she’s asking for. But unlike a teacher, she will be there to help you uncover the blocks that are preventing you from doing your best work. She isn’t more committed than you are, but she sees more than you see, and can help you to understand that the challenges you’re going through are a normal part of the process, point out how far you’ve come, and encourage you to stay the course when the going gets rough.

As accomplished as good coaches may be in their respective fields of expertise, coaching can be subject agnostic. Your coach doesn’t even have to be an expert in your field to help you succeed in it. The principles of learning can be applied to any subject or skill. This is good news for you, too: Once you understand how to learn effectively, you can be your own coach.

If you or your child find yourselves struggling with any aspect of learning, whether it’s the content, the work habits, the emotional blocks, or the mechanics of how to study or practice, a teacher may not be what you need. You don’t need someone to offer the content — that’s already out there (probably free on YouTube). You need a coach.