I've seen many guys get a ton out of coaching. I have also seen guys get very little out of it. The two parts of it are the coach and the student.
On the coach's side, it's as
@Glow notes:
- Is he good at the skill itself?
- Is he good at teaching the skill?
A guy who gets laid twice a month but is good at teaching it will tend to make for a better coach for most (non-advanced) students than a guy who gets laid double that but doesn't know how to teach. By the same coin, a guy who's a terrific teacher but terrible with girls is obviously going to be a non-starter, at least for seduction.
Once you get pretty good with girls, the calculus shifts on that former example though, as you are able to learn just by watching a guy in action or picking his brain with pointed questions and don't necessarily need him to be a good coach... so if you're already an expert, that 4+ lays-a-month guy who's bad at teaching it is typically going to be a better guy to observe, study, and model yourself after than the good-teacher-2-lays-a-month guy, whose level you've perhaps already surpassed.
On the student's side, you need a couple of things:
- The student must be sold on whatever method the teacher is teaching, or at least open to being sold on it
- The student must want to succeed enough that he will continue to implement the teachings post-lesson
- The student must come in with a reasonably open mind and be willing to set aside preconceptions and do as instructed
I've done a lot of coaching and had a bunch of mentors in whatever fields I've studied. I always see lots of gains from it, and it's easy for me to compare fields I've totally self-taught vs. fields I've had coaches, teachers, and mentors, and point to far more rapid progression in the latter fields. e.g., I totally self-taught myself music in college, and it took me 4 years to get reasonably good (and actually I can't even say that... I had piano lessons for five years in primary school, so actually I already had a base of coaching informing my music later on). On the other hand, with good teachers and mentors in seduction and sales, I had results I was pretty satisfied with within a year or so, and progress after that came fairly fast. In both those fields I have long felt like coaching and mentors shaved a decade off my learning curve.
If there's a field I want to learn and I don't have a mentor in it or can't find a good coach in it, I always feel like I'm stuck doing things the really hard, long, slow way until I can fix that situation. And generally once you have a good coach or mentor things pick up a lot... or at least do for me.
The flip side of that is coaching is not for everyone. I have watched students leave pickup bootcamps over the years (several of them) after deciding that flirting with girls in bars or on the street was simply not for them. I don't know how they intended to meet women otherwise, because they didn't say (I guess online or through friends), but there was clearly a wall of mental resistance they had there that they could not break through, nor could the coach. They came out to training, maybe seeing if they might be able to get through it, then decided that, nope, this is not for me.
I have also seen students who have taken multiple trainings with different teachers and companies but who did little practice in between and hadn't really made any progress. They seemed to be relying on the coaching to somehow gift them totally formed skills or mindsets... whereas what coaching is about is more opening you up to possibilities, correcting mistakes you are making in practice, and pointing you in the proper direction, to speed your progress -- but you still need to walk down that direction and make attempts and experience mistakes to make that progress.
If you have the right mindset and motivation for it, good coaches and/or mentors are the greatest boon you will experience in any field of study.
If you lack that mindset or motivation, coaches/mentors may just end up being another waste of time and possibly waste of money (if you're paying for it). I have even seen students who paid for coaching, did what the coach asked, then went out after and reverted to their old ways, while still saying they thought the coach's stuff was better, they just couldn't get themselves to do it.
There's a certain kind of open-mindedness I think you need to have to get the most out of coaching.
You also really need to be able to set your own resistances and preconceptions aside... if that's too hard, it's probably not going to go well, because all coaching really is is taking the mentalities and experiences of someone else into yourself and making the effort to adopt/absorb them.
Chase