• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, December 1, 2010

Unbeknownst to you, many of the executives you know engage with a business and/or life coach. These coaches are there to help make sense of the chaos that is everyday life, and can help execs learn the best way to address career issues, maintain work/life balance, and even mentor the employees who work for or with them. Coaches are valuable and effective -- and if you ever get the opportunity to work with one, I certainly recommend you do it.

I was fortunate enough to have my company pay for coaching earlier in my career, and in addition I've had my own coach for many, many years now. I've learned a lot; among my most important lessons is s one thing I learned a while back that has helped me through many difficult times: "No matter what decision you make when faced with a difficult situation, the decision you made was the right decision for that moment in time."

It may sound a bit existential, or even a bit new-agey, but that one statement has helped me many times to get out of the downward spiral that can occur when you start second-guessing yourself and rethinking your past decisions. Being human means you're empowered with cognitive thought, but that can also be a debilitating thing. Human beings, and especially executives in mid- to large-sized companies, are constantly forced to make hard decisions. When you find yourself spending time and energy rehashing old situations, you have to catch yourself and realize that if you hadn't made the decision you made, then you wouldn't necessarily have the information you have now!

What that means is, every decision, whether in retrospect was "right" or "wrong," leads you to an outcome -- and that outcome is a learning experience. When you make the "right" decision, you see the benefits. When you make the "wrong" decision, you learn from it - and hopefully that makes you smarter for the next similar situation that may arise. If you had made the opposing decision, you never would have had the benefit of the outcome that taught you what you needed to know.

Sometimes coaches are the most useful when they help you identify the learning experiences that come from making the "wrong" decision, which you may not have noticed yourself. Life is a series of experiences that help shape you into becoming the person you want to be. If those experiences are in a professional environment, then they shape the kind of professional you're going to be. If they are on a personal level, they have the same effect. What's most difficult is not keeping these two worlds separate, but rather identifying where learning from one world can and should be applied to the other.

The decisions that executives make, like hiring, firing, changing direction or going all in on a product idea; these are very heavy decisions. In almost all of these situations a human being is affected, and the executives are human beings so rarely do they take these decisions lightly. Inevitably the person making the decision will have to choose, and someone wins and someone loses. That's business, and that's life, but no one does it alone -- and a coach of some form can certainly help you to work with all the right information.

Have you ever used a coach? What did you learn that helped you the most? The folks reading this column would likely benefit, so please go to the Spin Board and share something you learned with the rest of us!