As a very successful CEO, why would someone like Eric Schmidt suggest that he needs a coach and so do you?  I see executives every day who make incredible strides forward toward their goals with the help of an executive coach.  Their work is inspiring, and I am honored to be part of it.  But some of you may still wonder what a coach could do for you and why you should invest in an external coach for yourself.

Thinking about the key reasons that have power for supporting your success and growth, the Top 10 reasons for hiring an external executive coach are:

1. Your coach is there for you, your agenda, your goals.  Your coach cares about your success, as you define it.
2. Your coach helps you get clarity around your goals, get inspired by them and what they mean for you, and maintain focus in your busy world.
3. Your coach looks for your blind spots and helps you see the impact you have from a new perspective and see new alternatives to move you forward.
4. Your coach is a source of ideas, knowledge, tools, cutting-edge thought, and a broad body of experience and perspective that helps you recognize challenges early, and discover new and creative solutions.
5. Your coach helps you grow as a leader by developing your awareness, your thinking, your knowledge base and your vision for what is possible.
6. Your coach will not judge you for what you say or do.  You can be perfectly honest about your fears, doubts and concerns and your weak moments without repercussion.  You can truly get out your feelings, worries and challenges and address them with your coach in a confidential manner.  Your conversations are private so that you can tackle any situation – even those you don’t feel you can share with anyone else.
7. Your coach supports you in being accountable for taking action on your biggest priorities.  When you take on a new habit, behavior, style of communicating or other change to your ingrained habits, your coach is your partner for making new habits stick and addressing obstacles as they arise.
8. Your coach provides disciplined self-reflection on what you are doing and where you are going.  You have structured time to take the larger view on your career, your business, your progress toward your big picture goals – and that is what will truly allow you to grow as a leader.
9. Your coach is your objective external sounding board to help you try out new thoughts, behaviors and ideas in a safe environment and giving you feedback on what is moving you forward and what appears to be holding you back.
10. Your coach is a witness to your success and encourages the discipline of measuring your progress and celebrating your achievements, and building confidence and accountability for your actions and decsions that move you forward in achieving your goals.

What could you achieve this year with a coach?

What would it mean for you to rediscover your passion and live each day fulfilling your dream, without the overwhelm?

For most business owners, rediscovering your passion means taking a hard look at what is causing you to feel stress and overwhelm, and tackling that at the source.  This process is simple, but not easy to undertake on your own.  We create our own stress by how we think about our circumstances and how we choose to react to them.  So, the root cause of your stress is you, and there are particular circumstances or interactions that trigger you to feel stress – and these will be unique to you.  The great news is that you can change the stress you create for yourself in any circumstance just by shifting how you think about it.  The first step is to raise your awareness of the kinds of thoughts that are triggering your stress, and take them out into the light of day and decide if they are thoughts that are helping you along your path, or getting in your way.

One of the best ways to raise your awareness in this way is to work with a coach, or a group of business owners who have been through similar things and share some of your frustrations, fears and stress to uncover the hidden thoughts that are raising your stress.  With a professional coach and other business owners, you can ideas on what thoughts are holding you back and how you might change them to gain productivity, confidence and courage.  Even on your own, you can work on this by journaling your stress: try writing down the moments where you feel irritated, worried, guilty, fearful, or angry.  Notice what thoughts are racing through your mind as you experience that feeling and write them down.  Decide which thoughts are serving you well and represent the truth, and which thoughts are creating stress in you.  As you start to identify thought patterns that cause you stress and situations that trigger them, you will gain control over the level of stress you feel, and allow  yourself to refocus on the things you love about being in business.

Stay tuned for another post on Rediscovering Your Passion for Business soon, and join our preview call for upcoming Business Growth Mastermind Coaching in January!

Join us for a Preview Call on January 25th at 12:00 pm CST.

Click this link to register for the Preview Call!

So what remains to define your journey to a more fulfilling life?  Simply making the changes needed to integrate this process into your life on an ongoing basis.  As your life changes and you achieve key elements of your vision, you may find that your vision begins to expand or change in ways that cause you to incorporate new goals.  As you gain skills and overcome obstacles to your success, you may find entirely new skills suddenly become relevant and perhaps even critical to achieving your goals.

How can you incorporate this change without losing your momentum?  Just as good manufacturing processes include an element of continuous improvement, or Kaizen, you can apply this same concept to your vision and your process of achieving it.  And just like running a business or organization of any kind, you want to plan on some regular reviews and opportunities to review what is going well, and what you might want to change.

What personal practices do you currently have in place?  How could you integrate some review of your personal goals and progress into those practices?  If you journal daily, how would you include some review of your plans into that?  If you review your finances quarterly, what would adding a review of other aspects of your business or life at that time add to your ability to plan for the future?  Are there other mindfulness or planning or visioning practices that would lend themselves well to reviewing your vision, goals and recommitting to them, or making appropriate changes to keep the inspiring and motivating to you?

With a vision, goals, strategies and plans that originate in your personal skills, talents, preferences and values, you will find yourself living a life of greater satisfaction, purpose and energy. This higher level of energy will allow you to achieve so much more than you thought possible in your chosen field, while leaving you abundant energy to share with others and inspire them to find their own source of energy, inspiration and fulfillment.

Want to learn more and get help becoming your truest self?  Learn more about my Mastermind Coaching Groups starting this month and come to the preview call:  http://transcendllc.biz/blog/business-growth-mastermind-group

Partners can be colleagues, family members, friends, or anyone who has an interest in helping you meet your goals and achieve your vision.  When considering who you might enroll as your partner, think about who might share your vision, benefit from you achieving it, or be pursuing a similar vision themselves.

The purpose of partnering is to find continuing support from someone who truly wants you to achieve your goals and is able to provide help to you when you need it.  In a coaching relationship, you can count on your coach to be supportive of whatever vision you are creating, and unbiased about what goals you choose, or how you choose to get there.  A professional certified coach is one of the best ways to achieve this level of partnership, but if coaching is not for you, you can find other types of partnership that help you grow and learn on your journey to your vision.

Some things a partner can bring to you include resources, ideas, a brainstorming partner, encouragement, accountability and feedback.  If you are both working toward similar goals, you can trade success stories, celebrate together as you reach milestones, and pull each other up when you get discouraged in any particular area.

If you can’t find an obvious partner in your immediate circle, you may want to focus on a specific goal and look for others who are acquiring a similar skill or habit.  For example, if you have an important goal that includes developing stronger public speaking skills, your local Toastmasters may be a resource both in developing that skill, but also in finding partners in your journey to reach that goal.

Depending upon your goal, you may find local networking groups, existing support groups, and alumni or educational groups where others share your goal and are actively sharing their successes, strategies and struggles, and these groups can be the source of great power in keeping you on course

Who will you choose to partner with in your journey?  Which partners might be right for each of your goals?

Of course tangible goals like losing weight, or eating better can be measured on a scale, or by tracking your meals and looking back to see how you did.  But what about other goals you might have like losing your temper less often, or listening better?  Because these goals are measured by how others perceive you and your behavior, you may need to develop a system for getting regular feedback and understanding how much progress you are making, and what else you might need to consider.

In the work environment, you may already be getting feedback from peers, a boss, investors, and at home you may have a partner, children or other family members who observe you first hand.  Instead of relying on existing feedback mechanism, it can be very helpful to ask these observers about what they see you doing and how that has changed.  What appears to be working, and what remains to be improved?  If your goal is a great working relationship with your team, ask them how they would characterize your working relationship with them now and how that has changed since you began implementing your strategies.

Let others know what you are working on, and ask them to help you by letting you know how you are doing on that.  By being vulnerable and human, and letting others know you are aware of areas you could do better, you are likely to be seen in a more sympathetic light even when you do not make progress, or when you backslide.

Feedback is critical when you are seeking a result that involves other people and their perception of your behavior and how it impacts your relationship with them.  You may think you have dramatically improved your listening skills, but if no one else can see a difference, you may still have a long way to go, and detailed feedback from a trusted source can be the difference between making a quantum leap toward your goals and meandering along and perhaps missing the mark and ultimately slowing your progress toward your vision.

Perhaps the most familiar advisor for many executives is the mentor.  A mentor is an invaluable resource at any stage of your career and provides advice, counsel and resources to show an executive how to achieve success in the way that the mentor did it.  The mentor shares the strategies that worked for them at a similar stage in their career to help the executive achieve similar results.  The mentor is usually 2-3 levels further on in their career than the executive and has a “been there done that” approach to helping the executive think through the options in front of them.  They can provide a model for how progress can be made – and the executive gets a roadmap for following in the mentor’s footsteps.

A coach, on the other hand, is not necessarily someone who has taken the exact career path the coaching client is pursuing, but helps the executive develop their own path to whatever destination they are seeking.  While a coach may provide resources, models and ways of reframing a situation, the coach does not provide “the solution” for how to handle a situation, but helps the executive consider many alternatives for moving forward.  The coach is not there to tell the executive how to do their job better, but rather to provide an outside perspective to help the executive consider more broadly the impact of their actions and a wide range of possible alternatives to arrive at more powerful solutions that fit the executive and the situation.

Think about great athletes and their coaches.  The coach is often a fan of the game, a student of the game, but usually not a superstar player themselves.  Like a great sports coach, an executive coach is not necessarily a better player than you at your game, but the coach can provide feedback and insight to help you fulfill your potential and reveal your inner greatness.

When you are navigating the waters of a culture, club or structure where there is a more senior person whose footsteps you want to to travel, a mentor can be a great fit and a huge help in making the right connections, playing the politics and getting seen in the right places.  However, for the executive who is creating a new game or forging a new path due to changing markets, customers, organization or technologies, a coach can guide the executive to get very clear on the goal, develop strategies that leverage their unique strengths and talents, plan and implement every day, and clear away barriers as they arise.

The coaching relationship is a unique one that can open the eyes of an executive to new possibilities and catapult them to greatness of their own making.

Even outside of coaching relationships, you can build an accountability partnership with people who share your goal.  If your team at work decided that you will all eliminate complaining, you can hold one another accountable and help each other notice when you spiral into a negative cycle.  Just knowing that one other person is going to be asking you about your progress can help you stay on track with your intended actions.

In an organization, there is no skill more important than “walking the talk”, or living by the principles that you publicly espouse.  If you have ever seen a management team say they “value diversity” and never change the gender/race/nationality of their own team, you know what I’m talking about.  Another great example in corporate America is companies who say “people are our greatest asset” and then allow poor people management skills to persist and even promote the individuals with the poorest people skills – because they bring in revenue results.  At what cost?

The cost for a management team not “walking the talk” is in losing credibility and trust.  This is often when the corporate mission begins to be seen as a “slogan of the week” to be hung on the wall and ignored, just like the last one was.

The cost to you as an individual in not “walking the talk” and honoring your commitments to yourself is that you begin to lose trust and faith in your own ability to follow through.  The impact of this is greatest on your confidence, your self-image and your faith that you can overcome obstacles.  An accountability relationship of some kind can help you stay on track, and also help you catch yourself quickly when you begin to fall short of your action plan, and make adjustments to the plan, or to your habits and thoughts to ultimately bring you success.

There are always multiple strategies for achieving any goal, and these can be as personal as the goals themselves.  If you want to reduce the amount of soda you drink, you might think about when you drink it now, what triggers you to drink it, and what alternatives you might create for yourself.  Not having it at home could help someone who primarily drink soda at home, but if you drink it mostly at work from the vending machine while on a break with colleagues, your strategy would probably be very different.

If you are trying to replace an old habit, whether it be interrupting others in conversation or asking multiple questions at once before you get answers, you will want to find new behaviors to replace them with.  You might work on shutting off the internal dialogue that has you preparing what you want to say by listening to the other person and building a mental image of what they are saying and taking a breath in the silence before you say anything.  You might have a mantra before you speak of “one question”… and practice not speaking until you had the question you really wanted to ask.

A strategy is simply a decision about how to use resources to solve a problem.  It is a choice about what you will do and what you will not do in order to achieve a goal.  When you have given a strategy a good chance to succeed and find it ineffective, it’s time to come up with a new strategy.  Remember, experimenting is how we learn.  Failures are opportunities to examine what happened with a critical eye and design a new solution that may work better.

What strategies will you come up with to reach your goals?  How can you learn about strategies that have worked for others and might be useful to you?  How will you leverage your innate strengths and values to make your strategies right for you?

If your goal is to have a healthy body, for example, you might set a goal of losing 20 pounds by October 31st, 2010, or you might set a goal of reducing your soda consumption to no more than 8 oz per day by September 1st, or any other goal that helps you reach your definition of “a healthy body”. The exact goals you set will be very specific to you, and there is no “right” or “wrong” goal, just like there isn’t a “right” vision.

In a business context, your goal might be to improve effectiveness of your meetings, and the SMART goal could be something like: Have a clear agenda for each meeting 24 hours ahead of time and end each meeting on time and with a clear set of action items assigned to specific individuals with deadlines. Or: Have only one key issue per meeting, and keep meetings to under 1 hour. Or: Have meetings only when there is a need for discussion and decision-making or quick touch-base meetings, not just to “share” information better presented in writing. All of these are possible goals. The point is to make it specific to your image of what the goal looks like.

To start with, you need to get specific about what things would have to be present for you to feel you have attained your vision. If your vision is to have a healthy body, what does that mean to you? Is it about weight, body fat percentage, how fast you walk a mile, ability to touch your toes, how much you can bench press, how often you exercise, the kinds of foods you nourish yourself with, the measure of cholesterol or other blood chemicals? If your vision is to have effective meetings, what does that mean? Is it about wasting less time, enjoying meetings more, having fewer meetings, building accountability, increasing focus, or just about making clearer decisions in meetings? All of these are possible, and many many more. Sometimes it helps to close your eyes and place yourself in your vision and imagine how you will feel there, and what will have changed for you to feel this way.

Now that you have visualized it, what specific goals did you attain to feel that way? And how can you begin moving in that direction? If you have a specific business-related goal, what are some first steps you could take to work toward your vision?

While setting goals, it is important to remember to set Realistic goals (remember the “R” in SMART?). Too often, we set goals that are very ambitious, but perhaps too ambitious and when we are unable to achieve them as quickly as we planned, we feel that we have failed.

In order to avoid this feeling of failure, but still stretch yourself to push a little further than is “easy”, it is best to set yourself a series of smaller goals for the coming week or month. To stick with our health example, a set of first steps might be to have a physical, stop drinking sugary drinks, and start walking 30 minutes every day. While this might be possible, it might be challenging, so you might set a “minimum acceptable” goal of getting the physical, and walking at least twice a week for 30 minutes, and eliminating sugary drinks during the week. Finally, you might set a target somewhere between this minimum and your ideal, and aim for that. At least if you achieve the minimum, you will feel that you have made meaningful progress, and you may be able to do even more than that in the process.

For our business meeting example, you might start with small steps such as making a list of all the types of meetings you currently have, and identifying the purpose each is serving, and outlining which ones could be eliminated, which ones need to be improved, and what might need to be added. Your “minimum acceptable” goal might be to just have the list of current meetings and their purpose. And the target could be somewhere in between where you have the list of meetings and their purpose, and you identify which ones most need improvement. Again, you will at least be able to make the list, and feel you are “on the path” to making improvements, but also feel like there is some challenge in reaching for the middle and ideal targets.

If your goals are long-term, such a 1-2 year or more away, be sure to set up some interim goals. In most cases, it is hard to set a goal of getting a big promotion, getting married, changing your corporate culture or other multi-step challenges and achieve it in a couple of months, so break your goal up into shorter-term milestones that you can aim for and feel the satisfaction of making progress before you achieve ultimate success.

Now that you have established your goals, write them down. Track them. Review them at least weekly and see how you are progressing. If you find that you are slipping, think about what specifically happens in the moment you slip up, and how you might change your thoughts and emotions to break through the next potential slip and move forward.

More next time on developing strategies around each goal.

How can you discover your values?  One way is to look at  list of values and try to select those that speak to you, and then keep shortening the list until you are down to the most important 5 and prioritizing those.  You can also look at moments in your life when you felt most fulfilled, satisfied and full of purpose and ask yourself which values were being honored.  Conversely, when you think of times you were angry, you can ask yourself which values were being violated.

I noticed this myself when I found myself getting angry over trying to change an airline ticket to go home about 12 hours earlier than planned, and being asked to pay more than 3x what the original ticket had cost for the pleasure of doing so.  When I looked closely at my reaction I realized that I have a strong value around fairness, and this situation just felt inherently unfair, and that was the basis for my anger.

Keep a list of your values and once you have the top five, try sorting them in order of importance.  Which one must you honor above all others?  Which one would keep you from being happy were it violated?  Once you have a top value, which one would come next?  And so forth.

These Values help you quickly assess opportunities, people, projects and environments which will serve you and those which will conflict with your core values.  Here’s one list of possible values, but you may find others fit more closely for you – feel free to add your own words and explore what feels right for you.