Would You Try Dating Coaching?

Your girlfriends are the best.

They encourage you, loan you great clothes, and tweak your online profile for you. Without them, you wouldn’t have the confidence to show up at karaoke night in a miniskirt and belt out Shania Twain. (You’d have a lot fewer embarrassing pics on social media, too!)

But as great as girlfriends are—and they’re awesome—sometimes you can’t help but think you could use a second opinion on what you should be doing to get a guy.

From someone who isn’t biased in your favor.

That’s where dating coaches come in.

Although we’re comfortable with the idea of business coaching or life coaching, relationship coaching is a fairly new beast. Why would anyone hire a coach to help them with their love life?

I’ll let a real-life dating coach explain the answer in just a bit, but first I want to dispel some of the myths about coaching.

It’s not true that you’d have to be desperate to enlist the services of a dating coach.

Dating coaches are for high-performance individuals who want to excel at the one thing that matters most to their life-long happiness: love.

You get a dating coach not because you’re hopeless, but because you want to figure it all out.

You don’t want to know what your mother’s friend’s daughter did to get her husband. You want to know what an expert would recommend in your situation based on their research.

You want to know what an expert would think of your online profile and the kind of first impression you make. You want to know what an expert would say about what you’re wearing and how well you hide how nervous you are.

You just want someone who knows what they’re doing to tell YOU what to do, rather than having to fumble around without a clue.

But there’s one big barrier to enlisting the help of a coach:

Courage.

For some, it takes a great leap of courage just to go into a bookstore and purchase a book on dating. What might the checkout person think?

For others, contemplating hiring a dating coach brings up images of how friends and family might react. They’ll never live it down.

That’s why online dating coaching can be so effective.

It’s private, confidential, and takes place, as the cliché goes, in the comfort of your own home. More and more dating coaches are offering consultations by phone or via Skype.

One of those coaches is Emily McKay, who along with her husband Scot runs X & Y Communications. I first met Emily over a decade ago, through their fabulous dating podcast “X & Y On the Fly.” What makes she and her husband unique is their tag-team style, with the male perspective and female perspective perfectly integrated.

I asked Emily if she could share some of her experiences as a coach. Here’s our conversation.

AW: One of the best things about the internet is that anyone can get advice on dating and relationships without broadcasting the fact they’re looking for it. Personal coaching crosses that barrier. It puts you face to face with someone else who’s going to give you personal feedback. That can seem quite scary. What does it take to get a woman to come to you for coaching, and how do you see your role?

Emily: The most important thing is that both Scot and I have both faced our own fair share of dating disasters and relationship quandaries before finding each other in our thirties.  That means we’re not only passionate about empowering others to find love like we have, but we also hold a deep respect for anyone who steps up to get the relationship success they want and deserve.

AW: What are the most common struggles you see your clients having?

Emily: For women, it’s often about the frustration of not being able to meet a truly great man.  Either the men they encounter come on too strong sexually too soon, or they seem to lack social skills.  Other times, women report that they’ve met a man they like, but he seems to be pulling away.  Another recurring theme is a disconnect in communication between women and the man they’re seeing. What’s truly heartbreaking to see is how many women are losing faith in men altogether because of bad experiences with a particular individual.  There are still plenty of great men out there!

AW: Do you find yourself giving the same messages over and over again? If so, what are they?

Emily: Well, Scot and I always say, “Deserve what you want.”  That means you have to be the kind of woman that the man of your dreams is going to want in his life.  That mindset is so basic to success, yet it’s so unheard of in today’s “me first” culture.

AW: When someone reads dating advice on a book or website, it’s up to them to decide how much of it applies to them personally. But when they’re actually talking with a dating coach, they’re faced with hearing things they may not really want to hear. Do you ever find that your clients are resistant to what you have to say?

Emily: We’ve always made it a point to be honest–we’ll tell you what your best friends might not–but you’ll always know we have your best interest at heart.  We’re also willing to be vulnerable first, sharing our own mistakes and heartbreaks.  It’s always important to know you’re not alone.

AW: What kind of changes have you seen in the clients you’ve worked with?

Emily: Wonderful ones!  Plenty of women we get to know find the man of their dreams, get engaged and have happy marriages.  Others find the solutions to making the relationship they’re in happier.  And yes…we’ve also empowered plenty of women to move away from patterns of attracting the wrong man and start attracting the right ones.