How many times have you promised yourself that tomorrow youll upgrade the computer system, hire some help, or formalize your marketing plan only to find that tomorrow was six weeks ago? Maybe you get all fired up about a new business idea, only to be frustrated by a thousand interruptions that prevent you from doing anything about it. Or, perhaps you berate yourself for being disorganized, lazy, or unfocused, when really youre not taking action because youre afraid of where the next account will come from, or to commit the dollars to hire the help you desperately need.

If you can identify with any of these scenarios, chances are youd benefit from working with a business coach. Essentially, a coach is strategist, confidant, devils advocate, and mentor rolled into one. Although it sounds counter-intuitive, coaches don't give advice, because advice typically reflects the givers ideal solution. Instead,coaches help people access their own solutions. In fact, new research into brain functioning provides scientific validation for a number of coaching principles. Among them: focusing on solutions (instead of problems) and on-going reinforcement enables the brain to produce new insights and solve problems more efficiently.

You may be telling yourself that you cant start the business, grow the business, handle the business, or remember why you even got into business. Your coach knows that you can make the cold call, write the marketing plan, understand a balance sheet, fire the bookkeeper, and do whatever else you need to in order to be successful.

Coaching works by helping you to:

1. Focus on your agenda. Coaches dont tell you what you should do (thats your mothers job) or how to solve your problems (thats consulting). A coach helps you get clear on specific goals, create an effective action plan, and keep taking steps to get the results you want.

2. Become more resourceful. Procrastination, indecisiveness, over-busyness, and lack of motivation are usually symptoms of fear, negative assumptions (that have no basis in fact), and lack of resources. Coaching reveals your strengths, and provides tools for working around obstacles, so they wont keep you stuck.

3. Take action. Every week, you decide on the action steps youll commit to before your next coaching session. This built-in accountability factor is a powerful motivator for making the follow-up calls, writing the brochure, and finishing the presentation.

4. Focus on results. Rather than analyzing mistakes from the past, coaching focuses on what you want to achieve in the future, and on practical, step-by-step ways to get there.

5. Think bigger. A coach helps you develop the ideal vision of your business one that makes you so excited, you become willing to do what it takes to make the vision a reality.

6. Get objective feedback. A good coach mirrors your world view, so that you can see the limiting beliefs and unproductive behaviors that are hindering your business growth. Once youre aware of your self-defeating patterns, you can change them for good.

7. Become more confident. Once you start taking action, you get results and your confidence grows. Almost magically, the bar for what you want and are able to achieve moves higher.

8. Stop wasting time. A coach helps you identify and eliminate unproductive time drains, like burying yourself in administrative tasks, chasing dead leads, or fretting over unimportant details so that you can focus on activities that bring revenue in the door.

9. Get a huge return on your investment. Lets face it, if making change was easy, youd have done it on your own by now. In many companies, coaching is de rigueur for helping executives develop their leadership skills as well as manage their time, people, and resources more effectively.

10. Get a life. Coaching is about the whole person. Often, the issues in your business life show up in your personal life as well. Once your business starts working better, your relationships, health, and emotional life work better, too.