Life coaching: goals, impact
Business life coaching Yorkshire clients: goals and personal impact
Back to the future for goals
Sending an email to our future self might seem just an amusing diversion but it could be a useful life coaching tool to achieve our goals.
If we received a message from our past self, would we measure up to the self to which we'd aspired?
There are email services providing this facility. At the time of publishing this article, one site reported 727,802 messages and rising.
Sending such an email chimes with Steven Covey's "start with the end in mind" - one of his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and is a great start to the personal development coaching process.
So our personal development coaching lesson is about beginning with how we want our life to be, then work backwards, identifying goals and the plans to make them a reality
Personal development coaching and purpose of goals
As any life coach or personal development coach will testify, goals give us something to aim for and propel us. Research shows that goal setting has a profound effect on personal performance and identifies a gulf between those who set goals and those who don't.
Popular within personal development coaching circles is the 1951 Yale University study which found that only three per cent of students graduating that year had life goals. Twenty years later, the members of this small group had vastly outperformed their peers. Financially, their collective wealth was greater than the sum of the remaining 97 per cent.This was attributed to goal setting.
If you want to be listened to, start listening
When it comes to personal development coaching, only effective listening will do. The coach should achieve a ratio of 75 per cent listening and 25 per cent speaking. Only by listening, can we understand the needs of our client. Effective listening in coaching makes us truly client centred.
I've facilitated focus groups exploring good and poor customer service where communication has been at the core. If communication determines the customer experience, it can determine the effectiveness of all other exchanges.
Most experts within life coaching circles will tell you that listening is a skill to be developed and maintained. Hearing is one thing; listening is another.
If you fall off your bike, get back on it
It doesn't take long after new year before people lament the fact their resolutions are in tatters or abandoned.
However, as most figures in the life coaching fraternity tell you, there's no such thing as failure - just feedback; a lesson for the future.
It's up to us to use our experience positively. If we learn to ride a bicycle and fall off, we get back on. No one said we would free wheel from the word "go."
Take Thomas Edison and his quest to invent the electric light bulb. At each unsuccessful attempt -there were thousands - he said he'd simply found another way that didn't work."
We learn, we refine our processes and start again striving to reach our goals.
And why wait until 1 January to set resolutions? While it provides an apt calendar watershed, we can make a new start any day.
Choose what we listen to carefully
On average, we receive twice as much negative as positive feedback. Negative conditioning begins in our early years and is usually reinforced throughout life. However, we can reduce its impact.
Filtering what we pick up from the media is a good start and we can boost our self esteem with positive affirmations, hang around only with friends and colleagues who support us and we can commit to a lifetime of personal growth to reach our potential.
The life coach in our language
A key aspect of life coaching is understanding the constant dialogue in our minds. Pioneers like Henry Ford, the father of modern assembly minds, and electric light bulb inventor Thomas Edison knew how to write the script. Their internal conversation - their "self talk" - was programmed to help not hinder. Ford is credited with saying: "If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can't, you're right", a quote popular among life coaches because a positive attitude is the basis for success in any endeavour.
Our self talk is influenced by our attitude, how we view a situation or an object. To change our attitude, we need to understand how thoughts, feelings and behaviours are linked. The life coach philosophy is that if we change how we think, our feelings and behaviour will follow.
Personal development coaching
For further information about our personal development coaching services, please use the contact details in the sidebar. We look forward to meeting your personal development coaching needs.