HOW I Coach: Part 2

Even though I’m a coach who is a cheerleader for positivity and possibility, I know that LIFE IS HARD — it isn’t always sunshine and butterflies and unicorns and rainbows. The old saying April showers bring May flowers is an apt analogy for life and coaching. We all have gray, rainy days and thunderstorms that pop up. Sometimes even seasons filled with them.

My job as a coach is to help you learn how to navigate those uncertain, challenging, rainy days so you can learn and grow from them. Coaching through those grey seasons can evoke transformational change and here’s HOW…

AWARENESS

The starting place in every coaching engagement is self-awareness. Life throws us curve balls that we often exacerbate without even knowing it. Through exploration, self-reflection and some data collection, coaching helps clients discern what are the real challenges and what are the manufactured obstacles; what is it I can control and what can’t I control; what is most important, what is urgent and what can wait.

One of the biggest obstacles for anyone amid any transition is a personal pattern of mental gymnastics that creates stress and negativity making it almost impossible to respond to the challenges of life with strength, resilience and confidence.

Thank goodness for my friend and mentor Rick Carson who pioneered Taming Your Gremlin® over 30 years ago to help us FREE ourselves from the monsters of the mind! His simple, not to be confused with easy, three step process begins with SIMPLY NOTICING how I’m adding to the misery of a current situation. Once I get good at noticing, step two — I can fool around, play with different options to reduce the misery. Step 3 – repeat as needed!

Twenty years later, another friend and mentor, Shirzad Chamine integrated the research findings from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, performance science and positive psychology to create Positive Intelligence (aka PQ) – a simple operating system to help build the mental fitness to respond to challenges with a positive mindset instead of a negative mindset. Guess what – there are three muscles that strengthen our PQ: The Saboteur Interceptor (catching the monsters); Self Command (directing the focus of your mind) and The Sage Perspective (looking without judgment for the opportunity in the challenge.)

ACTION

Once a client gains clarity and awareness, that’s when your coach asks – what are you going to do with that?! Transforming learning into meaningful action is the purpose of every single coaching conversation. And both of the above-mentioned tools are critical in coaching because they integrate AWARENESS with ACTION!

ACCOUNTABILITY

Did you just cringe? Accountability gets overused and abused but in coaching it’s your friend – helping you to stay true to what you want to do. Transformational change only happens when you have some way of calibrating your success.  Accountability is so misunderstood and so critical to lasting change that I wrote a whole other blog post about it!

AWARENESS + ACTION + ACCOUNTABILITY = SUCCESS

That’s my secret formula for HOW I COACH!