287: The Difference Between Coaching, Consulting, Mentoring & Teaching - #GrowYourLife

Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening to the Grow youw Life podcast. My name is Jeremiah Gracowski. On this podcast, I talk about ways for you to grow in your life, your business, to be able to reach your goals, make more money. If you're a coach or mentor, and you've been listening to this for a while with me, I help you know how to get more clients and actually monetize that as fast as possible. Today I want to talk about a little bit of a different topic, a little bit more relaxed on this one. It's the holiday. I like to go into something a little bit more relaxed. And I want to talk about something that I studied for a while that I think helped me a lot. What's the difference between teaching and coaching? And that's what we're really going to dive into. And even what's the difference between teaching, coaching versus consulting? And I think we're going to bring together all three of those. So again, maybe you have a background in teaching. I know a lot of people who become coaches. They make courses, they have a background in teaching, and they want to bring that to the table. They want to take that experience of teaching others to the table with a coaching business. Maybe, you know, you're listening to this right now because you love the teaching that I share. The difference is, is that a coach is able to pull out of people what the action is that somebody needs to do. Whereas a teacher is, is walking people step by step through something and it's transferring information. Now, a great online coaching business that is a group coaching program program, something that people can buy in a membership format might combine teaching and coaching. And I think that by combining those two, it provides a lot of great resources to people. You can resource them with information as well as provide them with the support and the accountability that they need to reach their goals. But I'll tell you this, is that we live in a day and age with artificial intelligence and YouTube. If you're watching this on YouTube and podcasting, teaching is, you know, teachers don't get paid enough. And the reason why is because teaching is just not something that, like, is necessarily sustainable to be able to just build a business by just teaching people stuff. And to my chagrin, I. I wish that that was the case. I find myself a pretty good teacher when it comes to teaching different concepts and stuff to people. But it's not enough to build a business. And so you have to learn how to actually get people results and transformation and move them just not just from transferring information, but actually moving people into action. And this is one of the toughest things that I've had to learn is that a coach moves somebody to action. They take. What does the person want to do? What is that desire that that person has? What is that thing that they're struggling with to accomplish on their own? And, and then they don't just transfer information to people, but they actually activate that thing inside of the person in their nervous system to actually move and take action. This is again, something that you either have it or you don't. And it's a skill that you have to learn over time. So the difference between a teacher and a coach, a teacher is imparting or passing on information. Now, great teachers are actually coaches that teach and coach at the same time. And they're not just passing on information, but they're actually also sharing from experience. They're giving practical ways to make sure that they're doing it. They know how to motivate people. They know how to move people into action overall in their lives. And so great teachers actually are a coach, but they call themselves a teacher. Again, if you're just somebody who's just, I have this information and I want to pass it on to people, that's just not enough. And that's something that you want to grow in that skill. You want to learn. What is it that motivates people? What is it that drives people? What is it that keeps people engaged? What is it that that takes people from where they are stagnant to. Because most people are stagnant. They have a goal of what they want and they're not going to learn something because they don't want to not do anything with it. We're not in school anymore. People aren't in school. They're not just required to listen to you. And so you have to actually really learn how to be that coach, that person that knows how to pass on the information and then get people to take action. Okay, now the other thing is, what's the difference between a teacher, a coach, and a consultant? And this is another thing that I, that I learned because in our business, we have consulting, we have a consulting aspect, we have a teaching aspect, and we have a coaching aspect to it. And you know, for years I battled with like, what's the difference between all these? A consultant is actually taking exact, step by step processes inside of an organization or a business. They're working with somebody specifically to help them reach a goal. And they know how to move people not just into taking action, but, but they know exactly what action that person needs to take. Now, a great coach doesn't even need to know what the exact action is that people need to take. They can go on the journey of discovery with the person and discover it on their own and then learn how to motivate that person to take action. So a great coach, again, can pull out of somebody inside of themselves what they need to do to take action. Whereas a consultant does need to have that team teaching, kind of that understanding beneath the surface. But they also know exactly what people need to do. They know exactly what steps people need to take. So again, in my business, I have a piece of it that is consulting. I have a. I have a very large piece of it that is a hybrid coaching consulting. But I don't necessarily call myself a teacher with just, you know, students in what I'm doing, because I'm not just passing on information. I'm not just telling people what to do, but I'm actually walking them through a process that they can apply in their life and they can take action with. And so maybe you're struggling with identifying what the. What the differences are with this. You know, another term that people use is mentorship mentoring. Somebody goes even kind of above and beyond teaching, coach and coaching. Again, we're not dictating to people, but it's a lot of people that are. Might be great consultants when they learn how to not just tell people what to do, not just dictate, but they learn how to listen, active listening, and they know how to really come alongside somebody and raise them up to a higher level. That's what a mentor is more like a fathering or mothering type of a role with people, where it's like you're. You're really providing that, like, okay, I'm going to actually elevate you and help you grow in this area because I've been there and I've done it, and I've walked that road myself. And so again, a coach can go based on some source material. They can go based on pulling it out of people. A consultant can go based on even stuff that maybe they don't necessarily know themselves, but they learned. They know how to tell people what to do. A teacher can teach curriculum, but a mentor really needs to come from experience. Experience. And oftentimes in my business, I find that I love mentoring people because I have experience, over 21, almost 22 years now, experience in the online marketing and sales space of taking people from where they are to where they want to be to get the kind of results that they want in their lives and in their businesses. And I've been doing this for. For that long. I say once January rolls around here, it'll be 22 years in 20, 24 that I've been doing this with people. And so I started off as a consultant and as a service provider that actually did work with people and consulted them. And that's where I got my start in business. And then I started teaching people, and then I've started coaching people back in. It was about eight years ago. No, it was about 10 years ago I started coaching people. And now I really feel like I truly am mentoring people in their business. But I do wear the different hats. I kind of go in between all those. Like on this podcast, Again, there's a very. A lot of teaching aspects to it, but I also bring a lot of that experience. So it's a passive versus active form of mentorship. And so again, just kind of knowing what these terms are can help you identify in your business what's the differences that they make and how. And how a lot of people might perceive it as well, and how you might perceive your own identity in your own business. I'll tell you that we want to move past just being a teacher, just giving people information, and go into where we're really, truly raising people up like a father or a mother would, or an aunt or an uncle. And again, there's a lot of teachers that are actually great mentors, but they call themselves. Okay, there's a lot of consultants and coaches that call themselves teachers. They call themselves any number of these different things, but they're really doing one of the other ones. But by technical term terminology, those are the differences that I've found is that teaching alone is just that, passing on that information, coaching, you don't even need to necessarily have the source material of what people need to do. You can pull it out of other people because your job really is motivating that action in somebody's life. And then the consultant knows exactly what people need to do. They're more dictating what needs to be done. People are hiring them for that. A mentor is definitely not dictating, but they know exactly what needs to be done because of their own experience. And they're not just teaching, but they are imparting to raise up others. Okay, so those are those, the differences really between all four of those. And I think that this is helpful for some of you, maybe you're a little bit more analytical, more of a fact finder, to be able to use this in your life, in your business. To be able to kind of know and identify what that role is that you take. All right, listen, if you're a coach, mentor, trainer, somebody that wants to do that in your own life and in your own business, and you want to get more results, you want to get more clients, I'd love to work with you. I'd love to help you. I'd love to lead you from where you are to where you want to be. In my client growth accelerator program, I work with people every single week to get more leads, to get more clients in their business, and to make the kind of money that they want to make. And so I'd love to see you as a part of that. Click on one of the links below in the description, and then we can start that journey together. We'll talk soon. Have a good one.