passion


Awaking the Sleeping Giant Within

In today’s guest post Coach Diane Dutchin shares her expertise and knowledge to benefit both you and your clients.

Awaking the Sleeping Giant Within

by Diane Dutchin

"Awaking the sleeping Giant within" by Diane Dutchin

“Sleeping never moves you forward, it’s the awakening process that stirs you to action”

(DianeD)

I know, the title to this topic is not the usual you come across in your mail box like “how to uncover and tap into your niche”, or “how to attract more clients”. However, stay with me, this is an appropriate fit because it’s about you the coach and your client.

My intent is to deliver a one two punch of relevant information to empower you to reflect, to reapply methods of being and doing in your journey as a coach, and hopefully lead to a revival, renewal/refreshing to both you and your clients.

Let’s start with you the coach:

Reflect: when you first started your practice what was your attitude like? Aside from the excitement of finally doing what I felt I was created to do, I was focused on uncovering what areas of life I was deeply passionate about and connected to.

Forget about what the experts are saying you should or shouldn’t do, and what the latest niche is. What fired you up and awakened your spirit? Is that fire still there or is it a dying ember? Or, are you more motivated by external realities than your internal convictions? Stay consistent to your internal convictions. Here are some steps I follow to help me awaken sleeping giants in my journey

Revisit/Reapply: your core values and your personal beliefs. Revisiting my values gives me the opportunity to assess my present state, and how much of my values/beliefs are still in line with my living, and make adjustments where needed. By doing that you sharpen:

  • Your talents – what you know you’re really good at
  • Your passions – what you deeply care about
  • Your purpose – what is it you want your life to count for
  • Your impact – what is the outcome you’re looking to achieve

By incorporating your basic style of coaching with fresh ideas, tips and tools you can strengthen your practice, and find yourself at the advantage of serving with excellence.

Revive: your truth, your internal realities, and your purpose – not someone else! It’s easy to place too much emphasis on what others are doing, and dismiss what convicts and motivates your particular style. Yes, it takes someone with courage to stay consistent, recognize opportunities, and accept the calling to be a coach of positive change. I am not saying to ignore growth, but don’t throw out the baby with the bath water by neglecting the fundamentals you established your practice on.

Renew/Refresh: your life, your vision, your focus, your practice and your delivery. By taking the time to reflect, revisit/reapply and revive areas, thoughts, actions or saying about your life and practice, you could experience a welcomed renewal that can improve your delivery add deep refreshing to you and your practice.

All about the client:

Seeing that you’re in the coaching profession, I am going to automatically assume part of your focus when working with your client, is to:

  • Guide them towards the door of awareness
  • Empower them to open the door,
  • Challenge them to step into the journey
  • Motivate them to discover their answers, solutions, etc. in specific areas.

So, why is it some coaches overcomplicate this process? As a coach you want to remain mindful of lining up your words with your actions. I would rather have someone under promise with their words and over deliver with their actions, instead of over promising and under delivering.

Clients come to you because they have a need, and are drawn to you based on a number of factors:

  • What they’ve read on your site
  • What they heard through a referral
  • What your past clients said/testimonials
  • What was felt through the initial connection

In my experience I’ve found my most effective encounters and results came when I avoided the flashy and fancy approach. People aren’t looking necessarily for how much credentials are behind your name, or how many hundreds of clients you’ve served – all they care about is “can you help me with______?”

The basic foundational questions still works and can be extremely effective to get the journey of awareness, and empowerment to change started:

  • Why, when, where, what and how? (in whatever order)

You still have opportunity to ask other questions like:

  • What are your internal/external realities?
  • How important are values and beliefs to you?
  • On a scale ____? How do you feel about____?

My experience is that this way such questions will automatically fall into place!

There should be a natural flow when serving your clients. Be cautious of “trying” a new thing you read about, or what happens to be the “new style of coaching”. If not, it could show up during the session and mat be the last one with the client.

As a coach you can awaken and elevate areas of your personal and professional life to higher levels of fulfillment, and stir your clients forward to have a more impactful, and life transforming experience.

How do you know when an area in your life needs to be awaken, and what action do you take to revive it?

You are your Greatest Investment!

About Diane Dutchin

“Diane – life coach with a passion for living her best life and motivating others to do the same. I provide quality coaching and facilitating services to clients and coaches on a personal and professional level. I work with people to improve the quality of their lives on a personal and professional level.

Check out my site at www.makethemovecoaching.com and connect for a free 1 hour strategy session.”


Aligning Values & Vision in Your Business

Robert Boyd draws upon over 25 years worth of business experience to share his experlise and knowledge in today’s guest post.

Atrocity Stock Free Image Dreamstime Stock Photos resized

Aligning Values & Vision in Your Business

by Robert Boyd

What was I thinking?

This thought surely crosses every entrepreneur’s mind in the business start-up frenzy, and intensifies and reverberates after the shingle’s been hung and the last business card’s been carefully arranged in its holder.

Many business owners don’t have a business degree, and some don’t have much experience. Tired of 60-hour work weeks for mediocre pay, many employees swap an ID badge for a DBA. But as time ensues, few escape the letdown of seemingly side-stepped dreams. Even fewer escape the knock back to reality. In fact, most new businesses fail. According to the Small Business Administration, only five percent survive beyond the five-year mark. Business experts tout practical reasons for failure, such as poor planning, wrong location, insufficient capital, overexpansion and the inability to stay current with technology. Some even say starting a business for the wrong reason breeds failure. Whatever the cause, fantasies of hundred dollar bills and weekday afternoons in the movie theater dim as exhaustion and reality take root.

Let’s use an example: A transition from a solo psychology practice into a wellness center that offers varied services like nutrition, massage and counseling. Visions of dollar signs and one free Saturday a month jump in the owner’s head. She hires. She gets checks. She fires. She writes checks. She’s tired. She begins thinking that maybe life wasn’t as bad as it was. She wonders what she was thinking.

What were you thinking? What were you thinking? What were you thinking? Why did you shift?

Money and freedom are fine values, and while we may indeed value them for material gain, money often symbolizes deeper values. The truth is, we can make money doing absolutely anything: Selling hot dogs at the beach. Working at the home store. Building skyscrapers. Walking labradoodles. So why this?

A closer look reveals that in the example, under our business endeavor lays the business owner’s personal values. Self-reliance, freedom of choice and equality are fully expressed in the expanded center through the nature of the service (self reliance), the varied services (freedom of choice) and by combining stigmatized counseling services with mainstream, well-accepted services (equality), while only one was expressed in the solo practice (self-reliance). And in this example, the value of money actually came to mean security and freedom, not just money for the sake of having it.

Exercise: Google “values list”. Print it out. Scan it visually and narrow it to fifteen concepts that you value and that guide your actions. Then trim it to five, then three. Entrepreneur or not, determine how your business endeavor expresses each of these values. This may require some reflection, but is an exercise well worth doing.

Our values guide us in both daily decisions and in life-changing choices, including professional success. Reminding ourselves of our ‘why’ pulls us forward when a venture starts to sour or stall. It’s easy to lose sight of your vision with those debt and stress-induced blind spots.

Values infuse passion when little else sustains us. Doing business without them generates the ordinary. Values birth vision. Be extraordinary—in business and in life.

About the Author/Further Resources

Robert Boyd, Managing Director of SportsEquip and an expert in the equipment & surfaces used by elite sportsmen & athletes. Robert has been in the industry for over 25 years providing football goals, tennis nets & cricket equipment to schools, clubs & the general public.

 

Image above title © Atrocity | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos


How passionate are you about your coaching?

A common theme that I see in those wanting to become coaches is a passion for coaching. It may be that it’s a particular niche or process that has ignited that enthusiasm or it may be for the entire field.

Yet from time to time I come across coaches and those wanting to be coaches who have lost touch with that passion and are frustrated – maybe by their perceived lack of progress in their studies or growth of their practice.

There are lots of practical actions that you may be able to take in such a situation. Often in such a situation an individual may feel that they have done everything they can think of to do and yet nothing has worked.

The actual situation that is the source of the frustration can be very varied. With such a broad spectrum of potential “causes” this would be a very long post if I even attempted to cover a proportion of the scenarios.

Instead I am focusing a few minutes about your passion for your coaching and why you love(d) the idea of becoming a coach.

I invite you today to remind yourself of that and to (re)-connect with your passion for coaching and all that means for you. That may mean that you take a moment or two to really imagine, using all your senses, what you want to be doing as a coach.

Perhaps it’s about taking the time to actually go and physically do a coaching session with your own personal goal of being of service to that person.

Maybe it’s about reviewing testimonials and feedback that you have been given by past clients – or even writing a testimonial that you’d love to receive from your dream client.

Having (re)connected with your passion notice what occurs to you in this state about what you can do next with your coaching.

One thing I know as a coach is that when someone is feeling frustrated that the solutions that they are aware of for a given ”problem” can be very different to the ones that they can see in the same situation when they are feeling passionate. If nothing else it can be a great boost to your motivation and energy 😉


Get it Done

By Stever Robbins

This week’s guest post takes the form of a Question and Answer session all about 9 steps to work less and do more.

Why do we procrastinate? What are some simple tips for beating procrastination?

Thinking causes procrastination. No, really. We build up tasks in our mind, thinking they’ll be huge, unachievable,or unpleasant. The remedy is to stop thinking and just start acting. Your brain will still get in your way, however. While you’re filling out your procrastinated expense reports, your brain will distract you with worries that you’re making no progress on the novel you’ve been procrastinating.

As I mention in my book, you can make your brain happy by speed-dating your tasks. List what you’re procrastinating. Start at the top and work on each task for exactly five minutes, then move to the next task. Use a timer to be precise. When you’re done, take a 5-10 minute break and do it again. Five minutes is short; your brain will let you do it. Since you’re hitting several of your procrastinated tasks, your brain knows you’ll get to your other tasks just five minutes from now. It frees you to focus completely on the task in front of you, yet guarantees you’ll go on to make progress on everything that’s important.

Your career background includes a lot of technology companies, but Step 3 of your 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More is called “Conquer Technology”. Why doesn’t technology automatically make us more productive? How can we use it to become more productive?

Don’t get me wrong; some technology really delivers on its promise. But often, technology saves effort in one place while adding effort in others. For example, each new gadget packs more capability into each device. What makes it attractive and fun also makes it distracting and kills our productivity.

Technology is a tool, nothing more, and nothing less. When a carpenter uses a screwdriver, she picks it up, uses it, and puts it down again. That’s how you use tools. Treat your technology the same way. Instead of being married to it everywhere you go, divorce your technology. Have it around, just not in front of you. Do your thinking on paper. Decide what you need to do. Then get out the tools to do it. If you need to do something on computer—like send email—get up, walk over to your computer, open the email program, send the email, close the program, and walk back to your main work area. By keeping each task distinct, you’ll learn to use your computer as a tool. Instead of being a distraction, it becomes a superb way of amplifying your focus. In that Step 3 of the book, I explained how I evaluate all of my gadgets to make sure they are delivering on their work-less-do-more promise; I suggest everyone do the as me.

Does being organized automatically mean you’re getting more done?

Being organized means you have a place for everything and everything goes in its place. When you’re disorganized, everything you do has the added burden of your having to search for the tools need to do it. For example, when you’re disorganized, writing a Thank You card is an adventure. You have to brave your Supply Pile. You hunt for 5 minutes to find the crumpled paper bag where you stuffed those Thank You cards. You start writing … only to find you’re out of stamps. A 10-minute trip to the Post Office, later your cards are ready to go. If you’re organized, you get out your Thank You cards and stamps. You write the Thank You card, stamp the envelope, and toss it in mailbox. Elapsed time: 30 seconds, instead of 15 minutes and 30 seconds.

If you use the 15 minutes you saved to get more done, then being organized helps you get more done in the same amount of time. Otherwise, you’re getting the same done in less time, freeing up the extra time to do something awesome. Like eat Oreo Ice Cream Cake. That’s one way being physically organized can help you be more productive. I also offer advice on how to organize your days and brain better in the book too.

In your book, you recommend people not consider all their options. How can this help someone get more done?

We love choice! We believe more choice means more happiness and more movement towards our goals! The research on choice refutes this, however. Give us more than two or three choices and we become less likely to act and more likely to regret any choice we take.

In daily life, this means too many options stalls us, and we end up less happy with our choices. We make and re-make our decisions until we’ve spent more time and money making the decision than the decision is actually worth.

By limiting our options, we limit the research needed for the choice, and we’re more likely to keep moving forward. My example is buying a digital camera. I’ve needed one for three years now, but there are too many to choose from. If I simply limit my options to the first ten cameras that appear on the Consumer Reports web site, the decision becomes much easier. Will I get the best camera possible? Probably not. But I will get a camera and start doing the photography I need to get done. Without limiting my choices, I stay paralyzed and stressed.

Leverage is usually a term applied to finance? The final step of your 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More is called “Leverage”. What do you mean when you use the term?

Leverage is a physics term. A lever is a simple machine. You put in a small force on the long end of a lever and get a strong force out. In finance, leverage means using a small amount of your own money to borrow a much greater amount, so you get huge financial effects using only a small amount of money.

In Get-it-Done Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More, I use leverage to mean doing a small amount of work and getting a huge result. Choose ways of working where you work less and get outsized results. For example, most of us scribble down a to-do list as a way of keeping track of what we have to do today. You can get leverage by jotting down that list in a format that someone else can understand. Then you can hire an assistant, give them your old to-do lists, and they can hit the ground running. You are doing a little more work by writing neater and maybe elaborating each item a bit. Your return is immense, though, because your to-do list enables you to free up time by delegating.

What is an action day? Shouldn’t every day be an action day?

An action day is one of my favorite tips in the book and a great way to get things done while bonding with a friend. Call a friend who wants to have a super-productive day. Get together in person or by phone, each bringing a list of things you want to get done. Commit to making progress and start working. Check in at the top of each hour, report your last hour’s progress, and declare your next hour’s plan. Your promise to each other gets you started, and the hourly check-ins keep you on track. I find in-person or phone works best for action days.

Every day can be an action day if you have people willing to play. I wrote the final draft of my book by holding five action days a week. The action days kept me going through the rough patches, and a couple of the regular attendees became friends! An action day is pretty intense, though, and I found that two each week was a good number.

What is the biggest hindrance to your personal productivity? How do you deal with it?

The internet. The web and email are a large part of my job, and they’re both distraction machines. The moment I open an email or visit a web site to do research, I risk hours of distraction. Its siren song is extremely seductive and hard to resist…

My solution is to divorce my technology as I described earlier. Rather than thinking of my computer as “my computer,” I think of it as a different tools, depending on my task. Sometimes it’s my typewriter, sometimes it’s my reference book, and sometimes it’s my newspaper. When I think of it in terms of the tool I need at the moment, it helps me stay focused on the current task.

… and when that fails, I use a freeware program called Freedom on my Mac to shut down my internet connection for a couple of hours.

If a person can make just one change to make themselves more productive, what would you recommend they change?

Definitely Step 1, which is Live on Purpose. Regularly stop and ask yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing. Then make sure what you’re doing is really the best way to reach that goal. I do this a dozen times a day. “Why am I surfing Facebook?” “I dunno. Habit.” “Ok, self, get back to work!”

Living on Purpose goes far beyond your moment-to-moment tasks, however. I used to go to four or five business conferences each year. Why? “I’m doing important business development,” was my answer. Year, right. When reviewing my client list, I realized not a single client had come from attending a conference. My clients had only come from speaking at conferences. Now, I only attend conferences where I’m speaking, or if there’s some other compelling reason to be there.

You recommend that people schedule interruptions. How is this possible?

You schedule interruptions by setting aside a time block each day for dealing with interruptions. If you’re interrupted, quickly decide if it’s a show-stopping emergency. If not, jot it down on your “Interruptions” list. Wait until your scheduled interruption time and work on it then. If Bernice drops by, asking you to review a memo she’s written, just say, “I would be happy to. I’m busy right now. How about if I get back to you a little after 4 p.m.?” When your interruption time arrives, her memo will be on your list and you can handle it then. Often if the interruption is someone with a problem, they’ll solve it themselves when you make yourself their convenient rescue service.

Interruptions will take your time one way or another. If you schedule them, at least you can get work done in the meantime.

About the Author/ Further Resources

Stever Robbins is a serial entrepreneur, the author of Get-it-Done Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More, host of the #1 iTunes business podcast  The Get-it-Done Guy, and an adjunct lecturer at Babson College. He is currently working on his 10th startup.

Stever holds regular action days. If you’d like to be on the announcement list, visit http://www.SteverRobbins.com/actiondays. Announcements of new action days are sent out once or twice a month.