Category: Coaching Tools

The Art of Effective Listening

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What does it feel like to be truly listened to? When someone is really interested in what you want to say? We like it when people listen to us, but how often do we expect people to do this for us without us taking the time to listen to them?

Listening is an essential communication skill. Improving our listening skills can have a valuable impact on all areas of our lives. It can improve the relationship with our loved ones, lead to improved connections with friends, help us to understand better what’s needed from us at work, help us to understand what a customer really wants.

I like to think of a conversation like the creation of a piece of art. The speaker is the artist (and in collaborative work, there might be multiple artists). At the core of their artwork is a message or emotion that they want to convey. As they speak they might paint a picture in your head, or a film of video, a story or a composition, or completely immerse you in an event. You will get their message most clearly if you can start with the blank canvas of a clear mind, and are able to resist adding your own thoughts, judgements and assumptions into the creative mix.

Some parts of the message will be clearer than others. By asking questions you can make sure that the understanding you are getting is what they want to communicate. Immersing yourself mentally and physically into their world will lead to a much deeper understanding, increase your connection with them, and lead to new learning and insight for you.

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How to Create Your Ideal Day

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How is your typical day? Do you find yourself annoyed, stressed, feeling frustrated, or just bored of what you do? Would you like to feel energised, passionate, embracing every moment? Have you ever really thought about your ideal day and what it would look like, feel like, sound like?

Why know your ideal?

I’m willing to bet you can describe a tough or difficult day much more easily than your ideal one? Our brains are predisposed to look for problems, challenges, threats. It’s an important part of our safety – to identify things which could threaten our life so that we can protect ourselves. The parts of our brains which do this date back to the hunter-gatherer days, a time when those approaching a bush to gather berries without anticipating that there might be a tiger hiding behind and waiting to the eat them were much less likely to survive than those who were prepared. However in today’s world the threats are a little different – and yet we still seem to anticipate, prepare for and respond to them as if they are life and death. This continual focus on threats and problems has two major impacts: Continue reading →

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How to Easily Achieve Your Big Goals

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I ran my 99th Parkrun on Saturday! For those that haven’t come across this phenomenon, Parkrun is a free, timed 5km running event which takes place across 540+ locations across the UK (and more across the world) at 9 am every Saturday morning.  My next Parkrun will mean that I join the “100 club” and I’ll be rewarded with a lovely t-shirt! The organisers will also mention my achievement before the run, along with others who are reaching 50, 100 or even 250 runs.

Emma and Peter in front of the Golden Gate Bridge with Parkrun signAs I ran around on Saturday I considered my journey to get to number 99. My first parkrun was in November 2013, nearly 5 years ago. I went along to find out what all the fuss was about and have been going along steadily ever since. It’s a way to keep fit and to push my running fitness in a different way to going for a jog on my own. I’ve been a tourist (visiting different sites around the UK, and even managing to find one in San Francisco), but usually run around the route at York racecourse. When I first started, 100 runs seemed a long way away. But by going back week by week, the numbers stacked up – and 5 years later I’m running round in a pretty decent time, and enjoying it immensely.

Chunking down

That reflection led me to consider how this is reflected in other goals in life and I realised there was an immediate running link at a lower level. Quite often I get to the start line on a Saturday and I’m tired, I’ve been out the night before, had a hard week plus all number of other excuses and the only goal I have is to get around the 5k. I know that all I have to do is keep on putting one foot after the other, one step at a time, one breath at a time and I will get there. Once again the big goal is broken down into small, manageable steps and before I know it I’ve done it.

So how can we use this to achieve big things?

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5 WAYS TO RECLAIM YOUR WORK-LIFE BALANCE

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How much does your work interfere with your life? How often do you work late or through your lunch hour because there’s just too much to do? How long does it take you to switch off from work? An evening? Or a weekend? Or do you need a week’s holiday?

When I first started work I think I had a pretty good balance – I was a junior member of staff, so had few responsibilities and the company flexi-time policy meant if I’d done my hours I could go to the pub on a Friday lunchtime and then take the afternoon off – heaven! My weekends were full of friends and living life to the full – and I came back to work on a Monday needing the week to recover! Skip forward 10 years and I found myself as a manager, working long hours, needing the weekend to relax and recover from the efforts of the working week. By the end of a weeks holiday, I could just about let go of the stresses and forget about work. My “life” – and here I mean my personal life – all the out of work stuff that I really wanted to do – had been sacrificed for the needs of the company. Continue reading →

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How to overcome procrastination?

 

Do you find yourself putting off or never quite getting round to some tasks for ages? These things weigh on your mind as something you need to get to, but there’s always something more urgent to sort, or you’re not quite in the right frame of mind to tackle it? Then, when you finally get to the task, and complete it, you feel this beautiful sense of relief and lightness – and wonder what all the fuss was about!

This blog is a great example of that for me. As I mentioned in my last post I set my website up and created all the infrastructure so I could get going 4 years ago, published a couple of posts…. and then nothing!  The longer I left it the harder it was to go back to it – the bigger the blocker. In fact I earlier this year I refused to look at my website because I felt so guilty about not keeping it updated or adding anything to it. So what’s changed? What got me moving?

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30 Day Blog Challenge

It’s over 4 years since I posted anything here. I got my website all set up, my blog ready to go, loads of great ideas and so what happened?

I could give loads of reasons – the biggest being the day job getting busy (more about that later I’m sure), but the real reason was that I got scared and didn’t make the time to overcome that fear. Scared of what? Well ultimately I think boils down to fear of failure – people not liking what I write and what I do, looking for the perfect thing to blog about and putting too much pressure on in the meantime. There’s also a fear of success in there too – it may sound silly to some – but there’s that question of what happens if too many people like what I do and I get too much interest than I can deal with and I can’t deliver on my promises.

As with any fears – it’s really interesting seeing them written down on a page. Despite the fact that I journal, I don’t think I’ve written these down for myself – and just doing it now has made these fears much smaller, with the realisation that I have the ability to overcome all of these things.

About a month ago I decided that I really did need to take these fears in hand and take some action. Just get blogging… and still nothing! I just couldn’t quite get motivated to make that first post – couldn’t figure out what to write.

I realised I need some help, some structure and guidance on how to get my message out there (so that people read this thing and it’s not just a journal alternative that people find if they are lucky). So after a bit of digging around on courses, I’ve signed up to the 30-day blog challenge.

I’m really hoping for motivation and inspiration – and that it creates a some interesting content for readers follow over the next month, hopefully creating a habit for the years to come!

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Does Your Inbox Rule Your Life?

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How many emails do you have in your inbox? Do you open it up knowing that somewhere in there there are actions you need to take, but you just don’t quite know where to start? So you start at the top and never quite further than the top few – and the emails just keep on growing…

3 months ago I had 2 inboxes with over 2000 emails sitting in them in a bit of a jumble. I did do fairly regular clear outs, but I (like many people I know) also used my inbox as an action list – so emails remained in there until the action was complete. This meant that in busy times I reverted to tackling the urgent tasks over the important tasks – as they were the ones topping the list.

Now I have 25 emails in the inboxes across both accounts and I’m using my email for what it’s intended – as a communication tool. My actions are nicely organised in another tool – which is (almost) as easy and simple to manage as flagging an email in my inbox!

So how did I get here over the last few months? What did I discover which I’ve been looking for for years in my time exploring time management that I haven’t seen before?

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The suns rays coming through the clouds onto a lake

What is Coaching?

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Have you tried to describe a problem to someone and before you finish they tell you emphatically exactly what you should do to solve it? However in doing so they haven’t taken into account all the other constraints which you’re facing which are likely to make their solution irrelevant. So you try to explain, but they insist that this solution will work… so you walk away frustrated and no further forwards in solving your problem?

Although the problems of each person may sound similar on the surface, a solution that works for one person often isn’t relevant for the other, and the only way to know what is the best course of action is to delve deeper into the exact nature of the problem. Given that the individual with the problem is the one who knows it best, the most useful course of action is to help them to find the solution themselves.

Coaching works on this principle – a coach acts as a sounding board to really listen and help you to find a solution to the problems and challenges you are facing, introducing different perspectives and tools to facilitate them in the process.

A coach will help you to move through the problem solving process by:

  • setting clear, realistic, achievable goals
  • fully explore where you are, what you have already done, what solutions you have tried and what you have learnt as a result.
  • generate ideas of what you could possibly do – and push you hard to think of new approaches you haven’t tried already
  • identify clear actions that you will take and when you will take them.

This sounds like a very simple process and something you can do yourself, so what value does a coach bring? A coach will:

  • make sure that you work through this process properly, drawing out those things which you wouldn’t always recognise yourself and helping you to face the challenges that you don’t realise you are avoiding.
  • ensure you  celebrate your successes, keeping you motivated and moving forwards.
  • hold you accountable, helping you recognise those actions which you set which are repeatedly not done and explore what the resistance is to this task, understand the reasons for avoidance and find an alternative solution that works for you.
  • introduce you to a wide range of tools and techniques to help you to work through a challenge. A coach will select these tools to fit your needs and help you to open up to a new perspective.

Most simply though, by working with a coach you achieve your goals faster because you make a commitment to someone other than yourself to take action and you have a time and a date when you will report back on progress. Furthermore the action has been well thought through is something you believe in.

Coaching can be applied to a wide range of areas for improving business performance as well as personal and individual development. For some examples please see my offerings page.

If you’re interested in finding out more then give me a call or send me an email to set up a chat.