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?

Delete Prior

I had my first BlackBerry cell phone for a year before I found the "Delete Prior" function that allowed me to delete a range of the emails on it.

Before that, I had to delete all the emails individually. It was tedious and painful.

(If you don't know how to find this function on your BB, see instructions at the bottom of this post.)

Click a Button and Get a Clean Slate

Sometimes when I press that BlackBerry button, I wish I could just as easily wipe out all the mistakes and mis-steps and poor decisions of my life and start over. Other times I'd like to do major housekeeping on my to-do list in the same way. Or I might just wish I could start that day over.

Anne Shirley, the feisty heroine of Anne of Green Gables, has an interesting approach. She sees each new day as a fresh start, with no mistakes in it. (She constantly gets into trouble, though her escapades pale in comparison to what kids today get themselves into.)

A Symptom, Not a Treatment

In working through a recent book I read, I've come to understand that impulse as a symptom of a lack of balance, a lack of energy, or both. When I feel that way, I set aside time as soon as I can to assess my commitments and goals at a higher level than managing them day-to-day. That "reset" function clears out the underbrush and helps me remember how much I love my work.

My Actual Reset Button

The real cleanout happens before we go on our two-week vacation. My favorite day of the whole year is the night before we leave on our trip. By that point, everything that's going to get done is finished. Anything that couldn't get done has been scheduled for the days and weeks after our return. Expectations and commitments have either been met or reset or renegotiated.

Something To Think About

How often do you feel overwhelmed?

What do you do to reset commitments and expectations when that happens?

What kind of positive ritual could you create for that reset?

How often do you think you'd need to do it?

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How to Mass Delete Emails on Your BlackBerry

1. Open your mail function on your BlackBerry.

2. Scroll to and highlight (with the rolling ball) the date header for the day where you want to delete all emails before AND INCLUDING that day. For example, let's say you want to keep only those emails that came in today, Oct 17, 2010. Then you would scroll to and highlight the date header for Oct 16, 2010.

3. Press the BlackBerry menu button to the left of the rolling ball. Scroll to the "Delete Prior" menu item. Click on that item.

4. A confirming screen asking "Delete all prior items?" is displayed with the options to Delete or Cancel.

5. Click Delete. All emails prior to that date will be deleted. If you select today's date, all emails that came in today plus all previous emails will be deleted.

National Punctuation Day

Where would we be without punctuation Nowhere thats where So celebrate National Punctuation Day today

(Thanks to colleague Ruth Thaler-Carter for pointing out this auspicious occasion.)

Punctuation is one those things you don't notice until it's not there, like electricity or water.

I still remember the day in my junior year high school English class when one of Miss McGrath's grammar lessons lit up my head like the proverbial light bulb. I loved diagramming sentences (no, I wasn't a suck-up, just a geek). From that day on I knew when to use : or ; or . I knew the difference between an adverb and adjective. Gerunds became my personal favorite.

It wasn't until the late 90s when I taught myself HTML that I learned there were two types of dashes, en and em, which are different from the hyphen and the minus sign. All four have distinct meanings. 

Punctuation is the jewelry of writing. The exclamation point is the flashy diamond. The period is the clasp closing the necklace of words.

What would we do without it I hope I never have to find out

 

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?

Tracking Great Ideas

Is there anyone out there who truly lacks for great ideas, whether you need one for business, professional, or personal challenges?

My problem is definitely not lack of ideas. It's that there are too many of them and more coming every day from blogs, Twitter, e-newsletters, conferences I've attended, meetings, books I've read, and even some I've dreamed up myself.

This morning, while looking for something else, I stumbled across the idea journals I started when I began my business ten years ago this month. The journals worked well to collect the ideas. As I skimmed through them, though, it was clear I hadn't done much with them.

When I Google "tracking great ideas," it offers over 8 million links. The first two are go to the same article about the US Department of Defense "Great Ideas" competition. A scan through the next couple of search results pages provided no sites devoted to the idea of how to track great ideas.

After a bit of experimentation with search terms, "capturing ideas" finally brought up what I was looking for. LifeDev gives 25 Tools for Capturing Ideas Anywhere. Now, if I only had a place to download all those ideas...

As an aficionado and disciple of Getting Things Done (Amazon) by David Allen, I know the book would suggest setting up one or more file folders, one idea per 8 1/2 x 11 page. But that feels too cumbersome and requires use of paper, not very green. And I still need something to collect the idea when it hits, which more often than not is not when I'm in my office.

My main idea collector today is my Outlook Task List, which conveniently synchs with my Blackberry Tour. The Task List has become a bit of a dumping ground, though. Sorting through it for ideas means I have to ignore all those tasks with past-due dates.

So, I declare my first 2010 resolution to be:

1. Establish a system to (a) capture ideas as they come along.
2. Establish a place to store ideas I want to keep for consideration.
3. Review the list monthly to select ones to implement, archiving or discarding the rest.

How do you capture great ideas? How often do you review them and select one to do? Any suggestions?