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Big Questions

I speak frequently about awareness of knowing where you are right now. As a coach I am frequently asked to help people get where they want to go. I often say coaching is a lot like a good map or a GPS. It can show the route, but you must do the work to get there.

If you have ever used google maps for directions you know it asks 2 questions, start address and ending destination. If you called me on the phone for directions, the first thing I would ask you is where are you at now? So I ask you "Where are you now?"

Take an inventory of where you are at now? What resources are at your disposal? Are you aimed in the right direction at your goals? Do you know the direction of your goals? What are your beliefs? What are you telling yourself? WHERE ARE YOU RIGHT NOW?

Last week there seemed to be a theme in much of my interactions with people about another big question. This came up in a leads group I attend and it is a big coaching question, "What do you want?" Now this question must be put into situational perspective and it must be applied with, intensity and sincerity. We often think we know what we want, like money, but the truth is we want the money to buy the thing we really want--a new car, a bigger house, a maid, a boat. So I ask you what do you want? Stop and think for a minute. What lies in your deepest desires? What do you seek? Wisdom? Freedom? Clarity? A worry free life? A vacation? WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT?

The answer to the previous question will help establish the ending destination I spoke of earlier. That question will define the goals you are chasing, the port that your ship is aimed at. “It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage.” ~Henry Ward Beecher.

The final big question is an internal measurement, an internal compass that will let you know as you get closer to your port. How will you know when you've got it? Often people reach a goal they put down on the paper, but they feel no satisfaction from achieving it. Usually these individuals did not put down what they really wanted and they didn't take an accurate measurement of how they will know when they got it. Sometimes it is easy, we want a car. Say you want an Escalade. You want it because of how it makes you feel, the way it drives, and it's safety record. How will you know when you've got it? You will be driving the Escalade, feeling safe and confident. Other times you will need to define the measurement a little better, because the payoff isn't quite as cut and dry. For example, I want organization in my life and in my home. How will I know when I have it? This gets a little tougher.

This question is designed to help create SMART goals and to help us associate the emotions related to our desires and goals. When we use emotion on our side it is a powerful ally. Emotion creates inspiration, drive and purpose to our actions. HOW WILL YOU KNOW WHEN YOU HAVE GOT IT?

• Where are you at right now?
• What do you want?
• How will you know when you have got it?

WARNING: Use these question with caution, they may cause uncontrolled goal setting and lead to success in you life. If used on a daily basis, these questions can lead to positive habit development and positive lifestyle choices. If you become addicted to these questions please consult a professional immediately. Not intended for children under 3 years of age, let them enjoy their innocence.

The Great Wall and how to Overcome It!

It was widely believed that no human being could run the mile in less than four minutes. The best time was 4 minutes, 1.4 seconds, set in 1945. The record stood strong for several years, and both medical exerts and athletes were unanimous in the view that the four minute barrier could not be broken. “Not possible”, they said. In fact, it was believed that the 4 minute mile was physically impossible, that it could not be beaten without causing significant physical damage to the athlete’s body. And this was commonly accepted as fact.

Then, on 6th May 1954, Roger Bannister did the impossible. At a windy athletic meet in London, England, Roger ran the mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds, shattering the four minute barrier. John Landy - Roger's rival and an accomplished runner - had until then a personal best time of 4 minutes 1.5 seconds. In fact, after running a mile in under 4 minutes and 2 seconds three times, John said that the four minute barrier was "like a wall". Amazingly 56 days after Bannister conquered the four-minute-mile barrier, John Landy, broke Bannister’s record and ran the mile in 3 minutes 57.9 seconds.

So what happened? Did the human body suddenly get stronger? Was it new technology improving running shoes? Did Bannister have a special training method? None of these really. The reality was... The four minute mile was a psychological barrier more than anything else!

To further prove the point, by the end of 1957, sixteen other runners had run the mile in less than four minutes. What Roger did was prove that the barrier or “wall” was not a physiological one, It was just a mental one. What Roger Bannister did on that windy day was not merely set a new world record; oh no, it was much more historically important than that. He demonstrated that overcoming mental barriers is the key to delivering breakthrough and historical personal performances--performances that affect more than just ourselves. Through overcoming our own limitations we empower others toward success.

The power of your mind is incredible. Your “limiting beliefs” or “mental barriers” are profoundly more powerful than physical or accepted facts. You see the mind cannot distinguish between imagined and real. We all have our beliefs about what we can achieve - and what we can't. And our success is limited by those barriers. Even our effort is often restricted by those barriers. We don't try - because we see those barriers. To our mind it is like driving towards a road closed sign. It already is making other plans, devising another route.

What are you thinking about? What is holding you back? Change your thinking to change your results. What mindsets do you have that are getting in your way? What self limiting beliefs have you accepted as fact, physically impossible?

What is your “Four Minute Mile Barrier”?

Opportunity! Probe the limiting beliefs, mental barriers (like the 4 minute mile), or negative attitudes that you are keeping in your mind. Awareness is the first step to shattering that barrier.

· Write them down.

· Change the “I can’t” to “I will”.

· Stop thinking impossibilities and Start believing in possibilities

· Decide to break through your mental barriers.

The choice is yours. Make the decision and take the action!

A while back I got this sent to me as an email. It is worthwhile to share.
The original email gave Charles Schultz of "Peanuts" fame credit for this. Upon further investigation, I found that only the ending quote is from Schultz.

You don’t have to actually answer the questions. Just read it straight through, and
you’ll get the point.

1. Name the five wealthiest people in the world.
2. Name the last five Heisman trophy winners.
3. Name the last five winners of the Miss America pageant.
4. Name ten people who have won the Nobel or Pulitzer Prize.
5. Name the last half dozen Academy Award winners for best actor and actress.
6. Name the last decade’s worth of World Series winners.

How did you do?

The point is, none of us remember yesterday's headliners.

These are no second-rate achievers. They are the best in their fields, but the applause dies…Awards tarnish…Achievements are forgotten. Accolades and certificates are buried with their owners.

Here’s another quiz.

See how you do on this one:

1. List three teachers who aided your journey through school.
2. Name three friends who have helped you through a difficult times.
3. Name five people who have taught you something worthwhile.
4. Think of a five people who have made you feel appreciated and special!
5. Think of five people you enjoy spending time with.
6. List 3 books that have had an impact on you.

Easier?

The lesson:

The people who make a difference in your life are not the ones with the most credentials, the most money, or the most awards. They simply are the ones who care the most.

"Don't worry about the world coming to an end today.
It's already tomorrow in Australia."
(Charles Schultz)

Now take a moment to consider the reverse of this. The impact you leave on this world, on your community, in your heart, is not about how much money you make, the fame you found, nor the accolades to received. It is about the relationships and people.

You are not an island.

My coaching is all about creating action in your lives. Go get connected. Go connect. Decide now to take action to connect with another person. Write a letter, call someone to meet for lunch, attend a community meeting. Do this with the intention of the other person. Love is a powerful emotion.

Are you ready to invest in yourself for 2009?

2 Day Coach Training on January 24th and 25th.

I will be conducting the first 2 Day Intensive Coach Certification Class for Northern Colorado this month. I still have spots available.

Are you interested in becoming a Life Coach or an Executive Coach? If so, the Certified Coaches Federation offers a two-day certification course which will give you the title of Certified Coach Practitioner™. Included in the course tuition, is a full twelve-months of support via our Continuing Education program. Our program gives you the tools, methods and business techniques to immediately apply what you easily learn in this experiencial training.

Our students tend to be experts and professionals in another field. We have trained as coaches: doctors, lawyers, psychotherapists, hypnotherapists, corporate managers, corporate facilitators, corporate trainers, business owners, yoga instructors, massage therapists, nurse practitioners, real estate agents, holistic practitioners, travel agents, astrologers, sports coaches, authors, certified financial planners, science of mind practitioners, salespeople, organizational consultants, venture capitalists, teachers, nutritionists, project managers, professors and active coaches who wanted certification.

So if you are ready to help others make 2009 their best year and you are ready to invest in yourself, contact me today.

I'll be speaking to World Financial Group associates in Fort Collins on January 8th. I will be putting to life the last post I had on here. I will report back how it goes.

Also I am new to twitter and will be posting my own ramblings on there also and I welcome followers. Here are a few of what I have going on in 2009, share with me what you have going on. In most of the presentations I do I point out that the presentations are interactive. That means it requires audience participation to get the full experience. This is true with this blog also, it is interactive. It only is successful when you participate.

Got Skills?

Successful goal setters are a lot like professional athletes. Professional athletes are not paid big dollars for their skills before they have developed and proven their worth. You are born with exceptional skills, but have you developed and proven them? You see many of us have never really learned proper goal setting techniques, nor developed the skills to become professional goal setters. And if you have, I am guessing that you do not practice these skills enough and analyze them enough to maintain the professional expectations. Now if I am wrong, I am honored to have you reading my blog!

For the rest of you, let us look at a few of these skills.

Road Trip!

If you have ever used google maps or mapquest you are aware of the two key questions they ask if you want directions: starting location and destination. These are the same questions I ask my clients in helping them calculate the directions for their end destinations: their goals. In successful goal setting, you must answer where are you now and where do you want to go.


Now the next step in our road trip is checking our vehicle and planning for any road hazards that we may encounter. This involves maintaining our vehicle before the trip and considering possible problems we may encounter. Before family vacations my father would always get the oil changed, the tires inspected, check the spare, and have the fluids topped off. He was much better at this than I, so I belong to AAA and know that help is only a phone call away. My dad would have made a great pilot. He went through a similar pre-flight checklist that any pilot goes through before taking flight. OK, so how do we do this in our road trip of life? Well it involves considering any obstacles or self limiting beliefs we may have. It means assessing the final destination and considering things that may prevent us from reaching that destination. Now what can you do to check the spare and get the oil changed? Assess the skills you currently have that may need to be used to achieve this goal. Figure out what new skills or resources you may need to acquire to reach this destination, and take steps to get them. Who can you call if you run into trouble? Who can act as your triple A?


On family road trips my mother acted as the Julie, the activities director. She packed things for us kids to do along the way. She was quick to suggest a game for us all to play, like the alphabet road sign game, to keep us quiet. She was the voice of reason on when we NEEDED to stop for food and bathroom breaks. The point is, consider who are your travel companions on this road trip. Who will be impacted by this decision? Which travel companions will help you and which ones are along for the ride regardless?

Finally, figure out where you need to stop for gas and where you are sleeping each night. Break your trip down to smaller, easily achieved legs. You do not want to drive straight through on long trips, especially if you are traveling with others. Shorter legs are safer. Shorter legs help ensure you will survive the trip and enjoy the destination once you arrive. Once you have broken the trip down into smaller legs it is important to realize that all of the previous steps need to be taken for each leg of the trip.

Do you know the way to Carnegie Hall?

Any professional athlete will tell you, practice makes all the difference. As I wrote in a previous entry (How to Get Started) practice involves more than just going through the actions. Practice involves attitude, visualizations, going through the motions, failure, and adaptation. A lot like riding a bike, trial and error can be effective, but more than likely destructive without support and encouragement. So it goes with goal setting, you will need lots of support, encouragement and skinned knees (trial and error). But remember, you must get back on and keep practicing.


Get Drafted


Ever notice how much more exciting it is to drive on long trips when there are other cars on the road? When there is nothing but open road, it appears nice, but quickly your mind loses focus. And after we have been driving a while we get drowsy and the car begins to weave. We will often turn the radio up, unroll the windows or call friends. Life has a way of doing that when we begin to go through challenges alone. We are excited at first and we speed on our way, but we quickly lose focus. Then we spend a bunch a bunch of time and effort just trying to get back focused. Well I suggest find some cars to put on the road with you. Preferably ones that are heading toward the same destination as you.


Professional athletes compete. They participate as members of teams. Even solo athletes, professional golfers, tennis players, cyclists and Nascar drivers have teams. They surround themselves with people that share their goals and people that demand their best. Cyclists and race car drivers practice a technique call drafting. In drafting, two or more vehicles can race faster when lined up front-to-rear than a single vehicle can race alone. Even the lead car benefits from reduced energy expenditure from less drag. Professional goal setters do the same thing. They meet regularly with their teams, they meet with mastermind groups, and report to their coaches. They align themselves to draft the leaders in their organizations or better yet, allow others to draft off of them. They know that by practicing and supporting each other, they all have a better chance at finishing on top. It is easier to maintain focus when the other cars are going similar speeds and heading in the same direction.



Correcting an Eye Problem

I am sure that successful goal setters visit their opthamologist regularly, but that is not what I am talking about here. My neighbor and I were talking one afternoon about fishing the next day. I asked him if he had the following day off from work and he told me he was going to call in because of his eye problem. Concerned I asked him about it. He said, "Yeah I just can't see myself going in."

Often our biggest obstacle is ourselves. Not consciously, but frequently that little voice in our head or our subconscious sabotages much of our success because it can't see us making more than $50,000 a year or it can see us as 30 pounds lighter. Prescott Lecky talks about this as our own self-definition or self-conception. If you limit how you see yourself, all the other preparations and exercises will not work.


The next eye problem we need to be concerned about is losing our objective view. When you look into a scope at a target you are focusing your attention only on the target. You lose your peripheral vision, like a horse running with blinders on. The danger of this is we often miss the roadsigns of life. We miss the opportunities around us and neglect many of the "other" aspects of our life. Imagine yourself sitting at a stop sign, in the pitch black of night, waiting to turn onto the highway of life, but you can only see the 10 feet of light directly in front of you that your headlights cast on the road. What if another car is coming? This limited scope can paralyze us into inaction.


The treatment is pretty much the same for both of these diseases, regular check ups and full doses of an outsiders perspective. Find a coach or mentor. Meet with them regularly. Get involved with professional organizations and mastermind groups. Professional goal setters attend seminars and read books to help them grow and stretch.

Finally, perform self examinations. First close your right eye. Now your left eye. You see we often we see clearer with our eyes shut. Can you see the big picture? Can you clearly see yourself accomplishing this goal? Can you see the details? What do you hear?

It has been proven that your mind cannot distinguish between reality and a vivid image created in your mind. Visualization is an important technique and helpful in keeping an accurate perspective. Visualize the end in sight. Visualize the next step. Listen for the sounds you hear. Become aware of situations where you are telling yourself that you just don't see it happening. Then stop that talk in your head. But closing your eyes to assess where you are mentally and to visualize where you are going is one of the most essential habits of professional goal setters. This review of your situation can allow you to correct course and the more often you do it, the less likely you are to get too far off course.

A quick review:


Know where you are starting from and know your destination

• Plan for Obstacles and know your resources
• Break it down
• Practice
• Ally yourself with others with similar Goals and Find a Coach or Mentor
• Review and Re-assess frequently
  

Write it down and be SMART

Last post discussed writing your goal down. This is a key step. Where do you write it? Excellent question. As your coach through this journey I suggest you get a Success Journal. A journal where you can write your goals and your progress of these goals on a daily basis. I know sounds hokey. But often drills are a bit hokey. I remember doing this tennis drill where we placed tennis balls on five spots on the court. We would run and bring the balls back to the starting point and then we would put the balls back, making sure they would not roll away. It was gruelling and looked silly. In the beginning I often wondered how this was going to make me a better tennis player. Well now as a raquetball player, I can say that I get to most balls. I don't have the stamina I developed back then, but back then I got to most balls. I got there in a controlled way that allowed me to still return the ball.

Drills are merely conditioning for the real thing. They help you develop the necessary skills to be good or even great at whatever task you are taking on. So get yourself a journal. Next is how to write the goal. An undisciplined goal is a lot like a child created dessert, it often looks good, but you just can't stomach it.

OK Smarty-pants, How do I write a Goal?

Follow a simple recipe for sure-fire hit, a SMART goal will lead you to success.
A SMART Goal is an acronym for the necessary ingredients that a goal MUST have in order for it to be achieved. In any recipe there are essential ingredients and then there are personal preference ingredients. These are ESSENTIAL ingredients:

• A goal must be Specific: You must be very clear about what exactly you want to accomplish. Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?
  
• A goal must be Measurable: You must have a quantifiable way of tracking your progress. How will you knowthat you attained this goal?
  
• A goal must be Achievable: . Your goals must be things that are within your power to control.Your goals must be challenging, but realistic for yourself
  
• A goal must be Relevant: Your goals need to be in-line with your personal mission statement or your purpose in life. Goals that are incongruent with your personal values will not lead to happiness, but rather disconnect.
  
• A goal must be Time Specific: Your goal must have realistic deadlines.

"Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you'll start having positive results.” ~ Willie Nelson

One final tip for constructing your goals, write your goals as positive statements, rather than negative ones: Example of positive statements: “I will be smoke free”, or "I will make healthy eating decisions and be 195 pounds." Negative examples might be: “I will stop smoking” or “I will lose 25 pounds”. Your subconscoius doesn't register the negative. Program your mind to think in the positive. To allow yourself, rather than limit yourself.

Now write your goal down in 2 places: 1. in your success journal and 2. on a 3 X 5 card and place it somewhere that you will see it often. Maybe on your computer at work. Possibly the mirror in the bathroom. Put it somewhere that you will see it often and you can check -in with yourself to see how you are doing.