In my last blog post I said I was going to start a new coaching series to share with you how to use the tools of success. I am not talking about skills such as finance or management, though these are important too. No, I am talking about the tools that give you persistence and faith because without persistence and faith you can have all the skills in the world but they wont get you very far.
Think about what I just said for a minute. All of us enter our careers with a certain set of skills. We either enter a graduate career or we forge our entrepreneurial skills early in life. Lets focus on the corporate world as this is where most of you are. So you have climbed the greasy pole fairly swiftly and you are now in your early 30’s. You are what they call a high flyer, a fast track employee, a high potential. You left University with good grades and the graduate programme taught you enough skills to move forward. Over the next few years you took every stretch opportunity you could find and maybe you even re-located to show flexibility. Now comes the hard bit…..you got to a fairly senior level with your intelligence and your skills but guess what …to go further you need to re-learn your swing!
Tiger Woods: after winning numerous championships, broke down everything he was doing and totally reinvented and re-learned his golf swing. Why? He thought it could be improved….AFTER he was already arguably the greatest golfer in the world!
And this is the first Mindest and Manifesting tool ….a commitment to CANI or constant and never ending improvement. All successful people that I have ever known are voracious readers of books, they spend thousands on their own personal development and find coaches and mentors that can consistently take them to higher levels of achievement. Why? Because learning and growing is exciting and, more importantly, because the skills that got you to where you are today wont take you any further. It is who you are that matters not what you know.
Continuing to grow after you have become successful requires humility. It requires that you stay open to learning and that you can ask for help from people who know more than you.
Tiger Woods understands, like all top tier athletes, that coaching not only accelerates his successful performance but also helps him meet and exceed his professional targets. His coaches include one for his swing, another one for fitness, and he says that he relies on his caddy’s coaching for guidance on the course. More and more business and organizational leaders are beginning to follow his lead.
Tiger Woods now probably also understands that what we do in our private lives will impact our success too. More about that next week!
When was the last time that you asked for a mentor or a coach? When was the last time you sought out the advice of somebody who has already done the thing you want to do next in your career or personal life?
Remember this …who you are speaks so loudly I cant hear what you’re saying.
Until the next time …live with passion!
Tracey
Oh so very true ! Coaching is not about giving recipies or tools like the ones you learn in school. It is about changing the coachee, changing his or her way of thinking, so that he or she is able to look at new situations, and cope with them, in order to win. It is about (re-)opening his or her mind to be agile in front of those situations, and to (re-)gain confidence in his or her ability to master these situations.
But of course, if nothing can be done without persistence and faith, you will not achieve anything without DARING, which implies some courage and the liberty to let people think what they want, but DO it anyway.
As I like to tell my coachees, "if you don't dare, you will go nowhere". A great illustration of that can be found in the following short but very powerful video : = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb2YOg_dkQM