Being A Lighthouse For Clients
As a consultant or a coach, it’s your job to help your clients achieve their goals and grow their business (and grow themselves). You help them see the light in doing things differently than they have before and you warn them away from things that could endanger their business (or themselves).
Basically, you’re a lighthouse.
Lighthouses — those seaside towers with the bright beacon shining out over the water have two essential jobs:
- Act as a navigational aid to ships at sea. Lighthouses served as landmarks so ship captains would know where they were in regard to cities and ports. You might think all lighthouses look alike, but they’ve purposefully been designed to be different structurally or painted in different designs and colors so they can act sort of like a road sign to the ships at sea. At night their lights shine over the water and flash or rotate in different combinations of lights or sequences so the ships can tell them apart.
- Lighthouses also serve as warning beacons, shining bright through dark nights and the strongest storms to let ships know when they are getting too close to the rocky shores.
The lighthouse doesn’t plot the course for the captain, it doesn’t take over the controls and pilot the ship for the captain, and it doesn’t tell the captain what to do. A lighthouse provides information and awareness — the rest is up to the captain of the ship.
The role of a coach and consultant is the same as a lighthouse
The coach provides information and insight.
They shine a light on possible threats.
And then they let the client make their own decisions on how to steer their ship.
