What Does it Mean to Be Coachable?

What does it mean to be "coachable" in MLM, and why is it important?One of the many disagreements I had with my sponsor in a former MLM business involved duplication and being coachable. He was telling me about the approach of a very successful person in our company, and one of the things she would do is call her new distributors daily to check in with them. I told him I could never call people that often unless they asked me to, because I consider that to be harassment!I have always been a self-starter and a hard worker, and in my former career I was both a team leader and a supervisor. I was accustomed to being left alone to do my job, and in truth most of my supervisors could not have told me how to do my job even if they wanted to! When I wanted to learn how to do something new, I would enroll in a seminar or read a book or manual. If something did not work as I understood it to, or if I needed help, I would ask. It never occurred to me until recently that some people don't operate the same way!My sponsor said that since he wanted to be just as successful as this other person, he thought he needed to do exactly what she was doing (and suggested I follow suit!) But that didn't sit well with me so I continued doing things my own way. Then my sponsor won a contest and went on a cruise with many leaders in the company (that lady included) and there were several educational presentations given. To his amazement, he heard several different approaches. This confused him! He truly thought all of the leaders must be doing the same things.What I now know, is that I could not duplicate what this woman was doing because of my personality type. As I observe more and more people with this understanding, I see that most people tend to assume that in order to duplicate their success anyone they coach must exactly mirror their actions. Yet each of the four personality types has definite strengths and weaknesses. While it is good to try to improve upon your weaknesses when possible, it is really much easier to figure out how to achieve the same result using your strengths!What I now think being coachable means is:
Learn about the personality types and identify yours
Find several people who have achieved what you want
Learn their strategies and understand why it works for their personality type
Pick the strategies that will work for YOU!
Everyone is actually a blend of all four personality types. Just because you are a "green" that doesn't mean you can't use some of the strategies a "blue" would use. If a particular strategy doesn't feel "wrong" to you, try it. Constant personal growth is something we should all strive for. But do not think for one minute that you must do everything exactly the same way as your sponsor or mentor in order to succeed! Do NOT believe them if they tell you that!There are certain traits that anyone who wants to be really successful should develop and certain weaknesses they should overcome. Napoleon Hill does a great job of discussing this in chapter 7 of "Think And Grow Rich." And there are certain things everyone who desires success in MLM should do, such as:
Find a mastermind group of mentors
Attend company events
Dial in to conference calls and participate (speak up!)
Work on your business consistently
Work on self development consistently
Use third-party validation
Point people to resources, don't be the expert all of the time
Some of these will be outside the comfort zone of some people, so they need to work up to doing it! If you do it, guess what, your team members will too! But in some cases they will need a different approach and it may take them longer to grow into certain behaviours.Whenever you want to accomplish something new, it is advisable to coached and mentored. Just recognize that not everyone gets to the top by the same road!Wouldn't the world be boring if we were all the same?