We know what we are, but not what we may be – William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Until recently I used to walk my son to and from school once a week. We used to play word games during the walk and one of our favourites was the ‘I Don’t Know’ game. You take it in turns to try and ask each other an unanswerable question. If the other had to answer ‘I Don’t Know’, the questioner gets a point.

Annoyingly, my son was better than me at this game. He would ask ‘How many stripes does a zebra have?’ I didn’t know. A point to him. I’d ask ‘How many stars in the sky?’ He’d answer ‘More than twelve.’

I was reminded of my weekly walks to school recently when I was listening to a brilliant expert in financial services talking about best business practice for IFAs. In case you don’t know, I run an IFA business when I’m not working with Quiver Management.

I’ve listened to this expert talk several times, and I always learn something new. But there was one concept that troubled me. At the start she talked about helping us achieve our ‘true potential’.

So what’s the problem with defining one’s potential?

It’s a nebulous concept, potential. Try asking yourself what your potential is and you’ll have to admit that you don’t know the answer. That’s the point of potential; it’s what we don’t yet know we are able to achieve.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t have goals and motivations for your business. It’s important to have criteria and targets to work towards, so that you know what success looks like.

But how do you know when you’ve achieved your potential? What if you actually have a bit more potential and you just haven’t realised it yet? And if it’s hard to predict that potential as an individual, it’s even trickier for a business. There’s always more that can be done, bigger and better. And how many business owners would expect to reach a certain point, then stop wanting to grow? It’s in our nature to look for the next challenge once we’ve risen to the previous one.

How can coaching help?

So understanding yourself is a key element of running a business. It’s also fundamental to what a good business coach can do for their clients – to help understand the motivations and to ensure they are embedded into the business.

Without this understanding of what your business is aiming to achieve, it’s impossible to devise a coherent plan for growth. So good coaches ask the right questions to give business owners clarity over where they want to go, or better still encourage them to ask those questions of themselves, so they can be empowered to find their own direction.

There are many words one could use to provide such clarity. Goal, vision, motivation, desired outcome. But I’m not sure ‘How good can I be?’ is the most important question. It is certainly an unanswerable one.