Can You Be Coached? Roadmap for New Pharmacy Professionals

You’re a relatively new pharmacist or pharmacy tech with a year or so of real-world experience under your belt.

So, you know that while your pharmacy education was great, you really don’t know what actually working in your chosen profession is like until you work within it.

That’s why it’s wise to find yourself a mentor or a coach now who can help you through the challenges and shorten your learning curve once on the job.

Noted speaker and consultant, August Turak, in a September 30, 2011 post at Forbes.com, writes that a “proverb says that only stupid men learn from experience. Wise men learn from other people’s experience. “

But, he adds, in order for your mentor/coaching relationship to truly be of benefit to you, you must be “coachable.”

What does that mean? Turak offers five characteristics of individuals who will benefit the most from a coaching relationship:

1. Humility. “Only humility can teach us that the most important things we need to learn require fundamental changes in our behavior and outlook,” Turak writes.
2. You need to have an “action bias.” You need to not only step out of your (clichéd, but true) comfort zone to find a good mentor/coach, you also need to act on the recommendations your coach offers.
3. Turak says you must have a “purity of purpose…. At the time I had no interest in business per se. I was hungry for Mobley’s [his mentor] wisdom for wisdom’s sake, and I am quite certain that if my motivations had been selfish he never would have made the offer he did.”
4. You must be willing to “surrender control,” Turak writes. “Even when we do find a mentor we often put him in an impossible situation. We implicitly insist that we will only give up control once we have seen results.” Turak adds that “ironically,” most people who need coaching the most tend to have the hardest time giving up the need to see results before they’re willing to give up the sense that they control the outcome. Or, as Turak writes, a “journey into the unknown is by definition a journey into uncertainty. Insisting on certainty is just another bogus constraint we impose to stay off the hook.”
5. Finally, a coachable individual has “faith,” Turak writes. You must believe that going into coaching will benefit you. It may not benefit you much, but it could be life changing. Or, as Turak adds, the “benefits of change are often only obvious after the change has occurred.”

Are you looking for a new pharmacy position?
The recruiters at Rx relief® can help you find a great new opportunity at hospitals, clinics and pharmacies across the country. We’ll even “coach” you in the fine art of the pharmacy interview! Contact us today!