A Good Coach Should Want to Get Fired

My wife and I hired a sales coach. We kept him for three years. Then I fired him.

He wasn’t a bad coach. He had good ideas. Most of them were familiar — scripts, cadence, accountability — but familiar isn’t the same as useless. A lot of that stuff works.

Three years was still too long.

I didn’t see it then. I see it now. I wasn’t paying for strategy. I was paying for energy. His presence on a call got me hyped. I left ready to move. When the call ended, a lot of that motion ended with it.

He didn’t really get the ADHD brain. I don’t blame him. I wasn’t diagnosed until later, and I couldn’t have explained it well myself. Some people don’t need more ideas. They need ignition. A voice on the other end of the phone can supply that.

That isn’t nothing. It also isn’t the same thing as getting better.

A coach can stay in your life if the work changes. What shouldn’t stay the same is needing the same call to do the same job. The longer that version lasts, the easier help turns into dependence.

The role of a sales coach is to want to be fired. Not ungratefully. Fired because you no longer need them for the reason you hired them.

Founder, Motion Wins