Do you need an executive coach, or a Vision coach?

First of all, what’s the difference?

Executive coaches provide guidance and support on a range of topics, including leadership, communication, time management, and decision making. The gist of executive coaching is to help clients become more effective in their roles and achieve their professional and personal objectives.

A Vision coach, on the other hand, is more like a sherpa. They will work with you to determine what successful leadership, communication, time management, and decision making looks like. What are the objectives you actually want to accomplish that would make you feel successful? A Vision coach helps you use this definition of success to make daily decisions. It becomes an internal compass that you are empowered to use, with or without external advice.

What do executives coaches do?

An executive coach helps business leaders develop new skills, often “soft skills”, and improve their performance. Executive coaching typically involves one-on-one sessions between the coach and the client, where the coach uses a variety of techniques and strategies to help the client set and achieve goals, work out challenges, and improve their overall performance.

What does a Vision coach do?

A Vision coach can build your internal confidence and trust by helping you define what makes you successful. The coach will take you on an introspective deep dive first, to understand where you’re at and what has you feeling satisfied and dissatisfied, whether at work or in your personal life. Where do you want to go from here? Finding that out, then charting the Roadmap to get there, is the key benefit of a Vision coach. They’ll work with you to imagine an amazing future, then the practicality of the steps you need to take to make it happen.

Potato, potato

Do they sound like two different ways to get the same result? To many, yes. But the short-term satisfaction of winning at work is nothing like the contentment of knowing that you are proactively defining the terms that you want to live your entire life on. When it comes to goal setting and personal growth, I’ll take the latter every time.

Which one you need depends on where you are

If you’re under a high-stakes environment and need to hit immediate, big, short-term goals, you may need an executive coach, Especially if you need advice that comes with specific industry experience, or when figuring out strategy for 1:1 conversations and relational dynamics within the higher levels of a company. Corporate politics is real, y’all. If you’re gunning for a very specific promotion or outcome, get a very specific coach. As they say in tech, “if you want to build a self-driving car, hire someone who has built a self-driving car before.”

If you are confident in your inherent strengths but unsure how to best wield them, a Vision coach may be a better option for you. It leaves the future open for definition – either you are on the same path and want to know how to grease the wheels, get more satisfaction and achieve more, faster; or, you want to reimagine a new future where success may come in different forms, outcomes aren’t tied to inputs and exploring is a viable life activity. If you want to think farther in the future and more holistically about your life, Visioning is for you.