Big Change is never achieved alone
Coaching often gets a bad rap.
The plethora of life coaches hitting the online world with few qualifications and 'just' personal lived in experience has not helped the cause of coaching in recent years. The term life coaching is enough to send shivers down even the most spiritual of spines.
And yet in the world of sport, coaching is how you get to number one, coaching is how you understand the game, the play, and crucially how to put yourself in the mindset to be a winner. My daughter has just completed a three year degree in sports coaching, my own path to business, mindset and performance coaching and gaining my advanced coaching qualifications has tested my brain. It's not an easy win, and it's a skill. It takes some learning and practice. And it's something I see as ongoing learning and development - constantly finding new ways to coach, guide and flex my approach to help people in my care.
Working with Jamil Qureshi this week on Raise The Bar's Change Catalyst programme (yes I am now his biggest fan - the restraining order has been sent) had me high-fiving the zoom screen (obviously it didn't because anyone that high fives or fist bumps in business or, in fact, ever should have a word with themsevles). What Jamil did was put into words how I feel about proper business, performance and mindset coaching.
Jamil was talking about success, about what success looks like, how you bring it to life what you know, what you think you know. He talked about attitude being way more important than intelligence with a line I have already stolen: "I will wins every day over IQ." Which is all about how you think, how you feel, how you act.
He talked about passion being the biggest multiplier of human performance. He drew many an analogy between sport and business and the parallels of finding the passion in business, in your business, in the business you work with to amplify your performance, your personal success.
And then he pointed out that you will only ever be as successful as your network, as your community because not one person knows the answer. Because through the lens of another we can see a different way of thinking, of behaving, of acting.
Because the world you are experiencing right now is the reflection of what you believe. Because we live in a world of our own making. Often we get stuck like a scratched 12 inch (you'll have to be a certain age to get that one) because we often can't see past our own way of thinking, our own learned behaviours; and the record is well and truly stuck on rewind and playing the same song on repeat. How often do you think you want to do something different but then just fall into the same patterns of behaviour and nothing ever changes.
Success comes from the connections we create, the ones we foster, the people we mix with, who get to know, the champion cheerleaders, the challenging cheerleaders.
If you're lucky you'll have people around you who support you, challenge you, cheerlead for you, kick you up the arse when you just need to crack on. But sometimes when your mum or your best mate isn't available, coaching is gold.
Coaching is product development where you are the product. Coaching provides individuals with the best investment they will ever make because it focuses focusses on the systems and processes that allows the existing product to move seamlessly through quality control and onto the best buy lists. Coaching provides new thinking which allows opportunities; new product development, product innovation, it allows the product to try new paths, to add widgets (new behaviours, new ways of seeing things). Coaching stimulates growth, developing the processing and thinking computers fine tuning the human system.
Big change is never achieved alone. Get in touch if you'd like to debate, discuss and book your own product development.
P.S. I provide a soundbite, on-the-go coaching programme for midlife women in leadership called Coach in your Pocket; have a look and see what you think. Who's in your pocket? https://sarahknightconsultancy.co.uk/coach-in-your-pocket
