Habit of Thought

10 Reasons Why You Don't Need a Coach

I'm often asked what coaching does for people. The coach's favorite answer is, it depends. It entirely depends on what the person being coached (PBC) wants or needs. The outcomes vary tremendously from PBC to PBC. (I will address what coaching does for companies in a separate post.)

I find a good way to answer the question of what coaching does for people is to describe situations I've encountered where the person didn't need a coach. The list below, in no particular order, contains a sampling of reasons why they didn't.

Time Management

1. You manage how you spend your time by managing your goals and priorities, not by how much you can cram into a given day. You have a system of some kind in place to handle all the incoming stuff yet retain peace of mind.

Physical Health

2. You are physically healthy. You have daily routines for exercise, sleep, and diet that increase your capacity and restore it.

Social Life

3. Your social life is in good order. You connect with people in a meaningful way regularly. You have a good support system of people you love spending time with, who have your back, who push you when you need it, who leave you feeling happier and more alive after spending time with them.

Family Life

4. Your family life works for you. Baggage from the past rarely influences your outlook, relationships or responses today. Family needs are one of the big rocks that go on your calendar and spending list first.

Personal and Professional Development

5. You believe in and routinely engage in some sort of personal and professional development through regular reading, additional education, hobbies, conferences, seminars, or a mentor. If your employer doesn't pay for these things, you invest in them yourself at an affordable level.

Productivity

6. Your home, your office, your workspace, your car, your garage: anywhere you spend a lot of time is organized to meet your needs. You can lay your hands on important paperwork in a matter of minutes. Clutter is managed and purged regularly.

Career

7. You have a handle on your career. You stay up with trends in your field, your industry, your customer base. You watch for the effects of technology in your work and take every opportunity for training that comes your way. You take full responsibility for improving your current skills and learning new ones. You also routinely work to improve your people skills--listening, communication, managing, delegating--as well as any technical skills involved.

Finances

8. Your finances are solid. Will, health proxy, living will are in place. Short- and long-term savings and investments are in progress. You have a good credit rating. Your life, health and belongings are protected at the right level by insurance. How you manage your money works for you.

Leadership

9. You regularly apply your leadership skills in your life and work, regardless of your level or title in a company or your role in your family. You understand leadership is a life skill, not something you only do at your job. You think strategically, respond with emotional intelligence, understand your role, and fulfill your responsibilities.

Values

10. You know what your values, ethics and beliefs are. You make virtually all of your daily choices and decisions in accordance with what's important to you and what brings meaning to your life. You know how to quickly assess requests for your time, money, or energy before saying "yes." You know how to say "no" gracefully.

Perfection Is Not the Goal, Progress Is

This list doesn't mean a meaningful life is possible only if all 10 things (or others you can think of) are in place. For many people, getting one or two of those things in order is enough.

How about you? Are the blessings you already have in your life enough to keep body, soul, and mind together and functioning?

Balance Part 2: Managing Your Energy

Time isn't the only limitation on your personal capacity and sense of balance. Our lives are powered by energy, both external and internal. We push through our day as if both were unlimited.

In their book, The Power of Full Engagement (link goes to my review of it), authors Loehr and Schwartz make a convincing case for understanding we are personally powered through four levels of energy.

Physical energy runs our bodies, emotional energy comes from positive emotions, mental energy gives us the ability to concentrate, and spiritual energy provides the motivation and direction for how we spend what we have.

At face value, this sounds like everything we've heard before. The difference is in what Loehr and Schwartz observed about how professional athletes improve their performance. The point of the whole book is

"To build capacity, we must systematically expose ourselves
to more stress--followed by adequate recovery." (Emphasis is the authors'.)

I don't know about you, but I don't lack for sources of stress. There is so much to do and so many people depending on us, it seems self-indulgent to rest and recharge before your body demands it. I think of interviews I've read about successful people who claim to get by on 4 hours sleep at night and the occasional power nap. (How much sleep we need is a controversial topic with conflicting advice.)

But do we build in time to recover from periods of stress? Rarely if at all.

The book offers a systematic yet flexible approach to building your energy capacity in all four dimensions. There are no quick fixes, but there are simple things you can do, and you must start with managing your physical energy. Without that, there isn't any other kind.

One of their clients, William, made one relatively simple change in the way he worked. He began taking a break every 90 to 120 minutes, during which he ate something, drank some water, and took at least a brief walk. Based on this strategy alone, within 2 weeks William estimated a 30 percent increase in his energy in the afternoons.

I could use a 30 percent increase my energy--how about you?

What would it take for you to factor in a break of some kind every 90-120 minutes during your day?

 

Work-Life Balance: It's All About the Container

Work-life balance is lot like fashion. Its definition changes with seasons, trends, the economy, gender roles, and cultures.

The problem is, our life's container is time, which we perceive through the concept of a 24-hour day. All of those other influences come and go, but no one, not even Einstein and his theory of relativity, has found a way to increase the hours in a day.

Balance as a Life Stabilizer

The definition of success I work with includes goals that are stabilized by balance. Creating a dream inventory where you wish and brainstorm to your heart's content is one thing. Flooding your to-do list with tasks is another. Your sense of balance in your life is your thermostat telling you when to adjust how many goals and tasks you have in play at one time. Too many goals overwhelm you; too few goals give you little sense of fulfillment.

What Balance Is Not

All areas of your life, e.g., work, children, aging parents, home repair, finances, social life, hobbies, professional development, do not have to get equal time in order to have balance. Trying to do so will guarantee you won't have any sense of balance at all.

What makes you feel a sense of balance will change with time, life circumstances, your health, your finances, and other aspects.

There is no one perfect balance to strive for. This is where the "if onlies" can really derail you: if only I had more time, made more money, exercised more; if only the kids would clean up around the house; if only I had a more understanding boss; and so on.

The Big Rocks Story

Steven Covey in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, tells a story learned from an associate who attended a seminar. The seminar presenter used a glass jar, rocks, sand, and water. The jar represents your life. If you fill the jar with sand and water to fill every conceivable space (the tons of little stuff that lands on your desk), then you have no room to put in your big rocks (the people and activities that mean something to you).

Building a sense of balance in your life requires recognizing that you are dealing with an inflexible, limited boundary we call time. Just as jamming too many rocks into a glass jar will shatter it, putting too much in your life can cause painful breaks in your health and relationships.

A Practical View of the Time Container

I will go into more detail on this in a later post, but through another book I discovered that using Microsoft Outlook 2007's weekly calendar view as my "jar" works wonders in my ability to manage my time, and therefore, my sense of balance. Dealing with my life in weekly chunks with occasional forays into months and the whole year has made a world of difference in managing what I need to do and what I need to let go of.

I cannot locate the originator of my favorite definition of balance, but here it is anyway:

Balance is time for your passions.

How much time are you spending on your passions?

The Magic of "Next Action" Steps

I'm in love with David Allen. (Yes, my husband knows.) Or rather, I'm in love with his work. His book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity is now a classic in the productivity and time management fields.

I would take this book with me even if I were marooned on a desert island with no one else but a volley ball to talk to like Tom Hanks in "Cast Away."

Next Action

One notion alone makes the book worth buying and reading: Allen's definition of next action, which is the next physical, visible activity required to move a situation forward. A next action stands alone; it has no dependencies.

Project

Allen defines a project as any task that requires 2 or more next actions to complete. The book tells you how to use a Weekly Review process to clear your head. A big piece of that is to think through each project to determine the next action and a pretty good idea of when you will do it (if you're the one who's going to do it).

Pure genius.

The Typical To-Do List

Let's say you are a typical business owner, and this is your current to-do list:

1. Prep for meeting on <date> with Prospect A.
 
2. Call Client X about overdue invoice.

Of these 2 items, only #2 looks like it could be a next action. It is if you have Client X's phone number and invoice at hand for reference during the call.

In item 1, "prep" is too generic a term. That could mean anything from simply making sure you have a pad of paper and a pen to take with you to the meeting to performing hours of research on the prospect's company and industry. The former is a next action; the latter is a project.

When I understood "next action" versus a "project," it revolutionized my whole life, not just my work. Next actions and projects are two separate things entirely, yet we usually treat them the same way, that is, we put them both on our to-do list as if they require little time and effort. Then we are frustrated when we can never seem to complete the list when we set aside time to get things done.

Physical AND Visible

The crucial aspects of a next action are that it is "physical" AND "visible." As Merlin Mann points out in his blog 43 Folders, understanding this distinction wakes you up to the landmines waiting for you in your to-do list.

Don't take my word for this. You don't even need to read Allen's book to put this concept immediately to work. Take this concept for a spin. What have you got to lose besides a little time? Here are your next actions:

1. Find your to-do list. (Or write one if you don't have a list.)
2. Find / open your calendar.
3. Circle everything on the list that meets the definition of next action. (Everything else is a project.)
4. Decide how long each next action will take.
5. Assign a time and date on your calendar to each next action.

For the advanced practitioner, combine the next action concept with the 7 steps of writing a goal, and watch your productivity soar.

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What's your to-do list like? Could it use a tune-up?

Here's WHY to Have SMART Goals

SMART goals were first introduced about 30 years ago. Much more recently, Evan Carmichael suggests DUMB goals might inject more inspiration and passion into the mundane stuff that can come out of SMART goal thinking. 

Evan has a point. Thinking in specific and measurable terms can keep you in the mode of incremental change when what is really needed is a bigger leap. Or something else entirely.

Still, thinking through a goal is a good habit to get into. And if you really want to achieve it, putting some energy into predicting and preventing obstacles will significantly increase the chances of success.

In my work with clients, I add three more letters to the SMART acronym: WHY.

W stands for written. This may seem obvious, but people do much better with goals when they write them down. Keep a list of 3-5 goals on an index card with you and read it several times a day. This helps focus your energy and attention on the goals, which increases the probablility of success.

H stands for harmonious. As much as we sometimes think of our lives in compartments, work and home, for example, daily living is much more integrated than that. For any one goal to be achievable, you need to make sure you don't have other competing goals taking you in the opposite direction. Also, goals should be not only harmonious within your own life but also with the goals of significant others.

Y stands for yours. Take a minute to write down a few goals you already have in mind. Then think about where they came from. Did all of them originate within you, or did someone else hand you one or more of them? For example, work objectives are usually laid down by your boss. Did you have a chance to discuss their impact on your current workload before agreeing to take them? If not, and if you truly haven't accepted them, that will have an impact on your ability to achieve them.

If you'd care to do any research yourself on whether setting goals is worth the time and effort, here are a few things to consider:

• To find research about goals via Google or other search engines, you need to search on terms like "proximal goal" (near-term goal) or "distal goal" (long-term goal). Those are the terms researchers use.


• If you search on the phrase "written goals," you are likely to come across a description of a 1953 study made by an ivy-league university such as Harvard or Yale. It's a story repeated across the Internet on many a consultant's web site. And it's not true. Fast Company magazine debunked that goal study back in 1996.

Further reading I've enjoyed:

• "Setting Goals When Performance Doesn't Matter" by Gerald H. Seijts. This article published in 2001 is one of the best research reports I've found on the effect of goals on performance.


• "Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey" by Edwin P. Locke and Gary P. Latham. While written in a bit more scholarly voice, this article published in the September 2002 issue of American Psychologist provides a fascinating (and brief) overview the last 35 years of research into the relationship between setting goals and performance.


• Education.com has an excellent summary about goals in which they include some of the key points from Locke and Latham.

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So, have I convinced you to give goals a try? Why or why not?