I have noticed how great Deb networks with crowds that she surrounds herself with. She has a way of connecting business clients together. I would recommend her highly as a professional business and personal life coach. News @ Lighthouse Coaching
The following articles were published in TK Magazine - reprinted with permission.
Your most important asset is YOU.
Isn’t it interesting that we seek the best trainers and coaches for our athletes and yet never consider that we may need a trainer or coach for ourselves professionally? The differences between athletics and your profession are small; both require you to be at a top level of performance, utilizing all of your resources, clarifying your goals and directing your efforts and energy toward success. And yet, when was the last time you looked for a coach for your business?
Are you on top of your game? Are you mobilizing all of your resources? Do you have a clear vision of where you are going and how to get there? Are you organized, energetic, and motivated? If so, the cards are stacked in your favor, if not, you need a coach.
No matter what product or service your company represents, YOU are your company’s most valuable asset and resource. Consider for a moment one aspect of your business, the costs of an employee; the investment in a new employee includes soft-costs related to indoctrination to the company and training. This cost can be $10,000-30,000 or more --- these costs do not include the education and training that are on going. This is an investment that must be cultivated and motivated to bring the greatest benefit to the entire organization. You may be the expert in your field, but do you know how to train others to do your business? A professional coach can help you generate the results you need.
Professional growth and success do not depend on a robust economy, timing and education. Donald Trump and Martha Stewart can attest to that. Where does great success come from? Biographers describe successful people through their personal characteristics: vision, persistence, flexibility, creativity – the list is long and varied. They describe their ability to move quickly and decisively in difficult situations. They talk about their persistence without stubbornness; their breathtaking risks with solid rationale for taking them.
It comes from the personalities of the people within an organization who are the life blood that carries success from every level within a company. A professional coach educates employers and employees about their specific strengths and short comings, developing goals and a plan to make all members of the team succeed.
It’s tough. You feel like you are being pulled in all kinds of directions. It is your personal qualities that ultimately will shape your business. So the most leverage we have in creating a business is the work we do on ourselves. That is why we hire a coach. The term comes from the sporting world, where excellence, or the lack of it, is on immediate public display. Athletes, who are good, excellent, in fact, listen to a coach to assist them to reach beyond their limitations.
Topeka may think of itself as a small town, but the complexity and pressure of modern living reaches us in the same way as it does on the crowded coasts. Shooting from the hip is not a business strategy. Hoping things will “turn around” is a passive, reactive response to an urgent need for direction, goal setting, prioritizing and organizing your structure and culture. Sincerity is wonderful and a tremendous asset for us in the Midwest, but we need plans, strategies, systems (a game plan) to give us direction. Would you go into a race without the skills needed for success?
The job of a coach is to help you develop your vision, reach your goals and dreams and push you beyond your limitations. We help your ship to come in! But that is another story.
I Resolve
I Resolve to make one symbolic change.
Every year on January 1st, following what seems to be a genetic instinct, each disc jockey or talk show host informs us that this year they are making a resolution not to make any New Year’s Resolutions.
After this pale humor they explain, with thick humility, that they don’t make resolutions because they don’t keep them.
Apparently, “We try harder” doesn’t work. But then, when you’re doing something wrong, effort is not the problem. “Drive faster, we’re lost,” usually results in getting lost faster.
Bad resolutions usually go like this: We detect some general problem (I should be more patient, for example), so we make a general resolution. A general resolution is guaranteed to fail because we can’t maintain any focused energy on such a wide area. No sooner have I been patient with a clerk than I can’t find my keys and my irritation gives me away.
So what would work? I know one thing that will work. It won’t transform you overnight but it will erode your favorite vice. A small symbolic change works.
Every husband instinctively knows that if his wife redecorates one room—just painting it a different color, that he is in grave danger of a wholesale renovation. She starts with the kitchen. All right, that was good. Then, unrelentingly, she notices that this makes the living room next to it look really drab. So she paints that and adds a new chair. After that, it’s off to the races. Halls, stairways, ceilings, drapes – nothing is safe!
But the entire extreme makeover started with painting the kitchen off-white. One small change. Can we learn from that? Here’s how it happened to me last year. I had a teensy problem with clutter. Not terrible, but annoying. I asked my coach (everyone needs one of those!) how I could deal with this clutter. He is not subtle at times. He remarked, “Can you tell how long you have been in the room by the number of drawers that are open?” I thought this was cruel and unusual coaching, but I did acknowledge that I could see five open drawers from where I was sitting.
So my resolution was to close drawers. Not to clean up my office, not to be organized, not to be as neat as my mother suggested in my teenage years. Just close the drawers.
I could do that. I was focused. It is so simple, clear and vivid that open drawers became a direct challenge. I did it. I now close drawers. Did you know that to close drawers you have to put things back in them? The drawer, excuse the pun, serves as closure to the task. Well, I closed drawers. Then I put things IN drawers. Things didn’t all fit in drawers unless I organized them. To organize was to prioritize what could go in and what couldn’t. I was on a mission. I kept my resolution and it changed my office and my feeling about my office.
It didn’t stop there. I didn’t want to become an extremist, so I started tentatively eyeing my bookshelves. I like my shelves to reflect my reading habits. Some books are half-read, others are reference and some embody hopes for a winter afternoon. I don’t want to disturb that, do I? But maybe if I put all my coaching books on one shelf…
To discover a small change in your business or personal life that will make a BIG difference in how you operate, contact me and receive a free coaching session.
Your impossible task
If you would like to know why you don’t get more done, it’s probably because you have assigned yourself an impossible task. It is impossible because it is infinite.
Here’s how it works. You listen to the pep talks, you read the inspiring anecdotes and graduation speeches and they all tell you the same thing: the sky is the limit; you can have/do/be it all.
But let’s say you’re an honest hard-working Kansas girl. Somewhere inside you there is a toxic equation: if the sky is the limit, then there is no limit to how much I have to work. After all, I’m not going to cheat, steal or win the lottery, so unlimited potential is unlimited work. Both sides of the equation have to balance. The result is what management books call paralysis of immensity.
Do you have this paralysis? Here’s an easy way to find out. Let’s make it personal so it fits practically everyone. Close your eyes (after reading this first, of course). Think of exercise. How many people do you hear say, “I get tired just thinking about exercise.” This tell-tale phrase is important. When they think of exercise, they really think of muscle, sweat, hours and pain. They have unconsciously assigned themselves a huge impossible task. Otherwise they wouldn’t be tired. If you think of a 10 minute walk, you will most likely not feel tired. If you do, Starbucks or prescribed medication might be in order.
When people say things like “I don’t know where to start,” “I feel overwhelmed,” and “I’ll never get/learn” this, they have most likely assigned themselves an impossible task. These phrases will show up in cluttered garages, right before exams, upon the purchase of new computer software and on occasion talking to a co-worker when the relationship is prickly.
I was coaching a salesperson who just couldn’t bring herself to make the phone calls she had to make to earn the money she needed. After a few discreet questions, I was sure she had turned phone calls into an impossible task. So I uncharacteristically became strict. (I’m a marshmallow inside). But I faked a stern tone and told her she had to make her phone calls only between 9 and 10AM and she had to make three calls, then she had to stop. Under no circumstances was she to make more than three or go past 10AM.
You see, an impossible task is a kind of inner trance, like watching TV only she was watching herself phone all day long, hour after hour – after all the sky was the limit! So when I made the task finite, it broke her trance. She couldn’t look at her infinite task; she had to do the one I assigned.
Of course it worked or I wouldn’t write about it. She was so excited that at the next sales meeting, I was invited to talk and she gave a testimonial. She made the calls! She made some money! She stopped worrying – after all she was following orders! She had the rest of the day to herself unburdened by her impossible task.
So when you find yourself thinking all the time about what you don’t want to think about and have scars on your soul for scolding yourself for not doing what you know you should, you just might take a look at how you look at your task. And if you need help, I know a good coach.