When I started reading Becoming Coachable by Scott Osman, Jacqueline Lane, and Marshall Goldsmith, I didn’t expect it to hold up a mirror to my own coaching journey.
Yes, I’ve trained as a coach—and even earned one of my certifications through Marshall Goldsmith’s Stakeholder Centered Coaching program—but I’m still learning every day. This book reminded me that coaching isn’t just about helping others grow; it’s also about keeping myself coachable.
The authors define being coachable as being open to four things: change, feedback, action, and accountability. Here are 6 lessons that struck me:
1. As Dean Newman puts it: “Change is not always a good thing. It may force us out of tired habits and impose better ones upon us, but it can also be stressful, costly, and even destructive. What’s important about change is how we anticipate and react to it. Change can teach us to adapt and help us develop resilience, but only if we understand our own capacity for growth and learning. When change makes us better, it’s because we learned how to turn a challenging situation to our own advantage, not merely because change happens.”
2. I also realized that when I assess a client’s readiness to be coached, I’m really looking for something deeper: not just willingness, but hunger—a hunger for self-awareness, for growth, for the discomfort that leads to transformation. Oftentimes, the client is attracted by the expected reward from coaching but may not realize the work needed to get there.
3. Adam Grant reframed something I’ve experienced myself and also heard from some of clients, Impostor Syndrome. “Impostor syndrome isn’t a disease… it usually means you’re facing a new challenge and you’re going to learn. Feeling uncertainty is a precursor to growth.”
4. The book also emphasized intellectual humility—being willing to admit you might be wrong. “The intellectually humble are willing to question their own beliefs, the evidence on which those beliefs are based, and the blind spots that may distort them.” That’s not always easy, but it’s necessary.
5. Marshall Goldsmith reminds us: “You can correctly diagnose a problem… and know the actions that will fix it. But that knowledge is useless if you don’t do the work.” Insights from coaching are helpful only when these are translated into action and accountability.
6. One of the most honest reminder about sustaining the behavior change after the coaching program ends came from Caroline Webb: “So, it is very likely that when you stop working with your coach, there will be backsliding. You would not be human if you did not see your behavior revert a little bit.” Setting up ways to maintain accountability is critical.
Being coachable is a lifelong skill. As I coach others, I must keep learning to be coachable myself. Maybe the real measure of a coach isn’t just how well we help others grow, but how open we are to being shaped—and reshaped—along the way.
