I was recently at an event where David Hyner, a well known and respected coach, was explaining his model for self coaching for which he defined the Massive Goal Principle. David has interviewed in his life a number of top achievers from all walks of life and he derived from them this methodology.
Within an hour of intense and interesting explanation he highlighted a well organized technique that involved a pyramidal structure of concepts and metrics about planning and execution for the achievement of your own big goal.
While I was fascinated by the good structure and the level of charisma that David managed to establish in a venue filled with nearly 50 business people I started thinking about a few simple concepts, mostly biased by my experience and training:
- Given a large number of people, for each great achiever in that group there are hundreds or thousand that in spite of motivation, inspiration, luck and a number of other factors did not achieve what they planned. Dan Brown had one of the characters of his novel “The Da Vinci Code” stating that: “history is written by winners”: by the same metric I would say that great achievers are well known or become famous but who tried equally hard with poorer results won’t be mentioned too much.
- If we look around we’ll notice that many people are not trying to achieve anything great and they are happy to “survive”: having a relatively easy life, a job to pay bills, never challenging themselves and drift along.
- Most people fail at achieving something because of a number of factors and accountability to themselves and motivation tend to be low or inexistent, even when the initial purpose was good.
In business as well as in life people tend to think in terms of goals: what to do (I want to run a marathon), learn (I want a degree or a new qualification), achieve (I want to raise my turnover by 30% or having a £100K job) and so on. In reality how many times did you hear somebody saying that she will start dieting, exercising or wasting less time on meaning less tasks at work and so on and so on?
I have even encountered last year an online product that offers, for a fee, a structured coaching program that supposedly helps a pair of friend to set up a mutual coaching programme, establishing goals for each other and coaching each other toward their achievement. The only experience I have is of two friends of mine who decided to try this and within a few weeks their goals, although if reasonably well defined collapsed for lack of consistency from both parts: committing to a close friend was not felt strong enough and the so-called coaching sections were merely friendly chats without a structure and a time frame.
Self coaching, following a personal commitment or written instructions from a book or online, fails because of the lack of two main factors:
- accountability: we tend to promise to ourselves, often in good faith, that we’ll do this and the other. Many people tend to over commit themselves about their “to do” list: frequently this can cause stress, anxiety or apathy toward the particular task. Ultimately these are just promises we do to ourselves. Let’s see 2 examples:
- I tell to myself that I will get up at 7AM and go for a run. I can be the kind of person who does it or, as it can happen, when the alarm clock goes off I might simply ignore it.
- I agree with my friend Mark to meet at 7 and go for a run: it becomes an appointment with somebody else and makes me accountable toward him; as I do not want to let Mark down and I will be there at 7.
- clarity of distance: when I am involved in a decision about myself it is usually difficult to be objective about the direction to take: think at examples like changing job, deciding upon an important purchase or committing on a business strategy. An external, detached, person can often see very objectively your situation and come out with a decision that, perhaps, you would not like and take that easily. The clarity of distance is natural if you are completely extraneous to a person rather than a friend or a relative. In fact who knows you very well and has exposure to a historical knowledge of what brought you to the decision, might be as biased as you are about it.
The above reasons are offering the perfect case for using a professional coach to help one’s decision process: the coach has (really, should have) qualification and experience to help your decision process and help you to:
- commit yourself to challenging, realistic and measurable goals
- ensure that you are accountable toward yourself and the coach
- when you stuck in an important decision the coach will have the clarity of distance to facilitate your decision by helping your thinking process
Professional Coaching offers structured and time framed sessions that, like short business meetings, are designed to take decision and plan actions. Coaching is based on questions, powerful questions that help you deciding and committing on what to do: whether you are ponderating the options about the next acquisition for your company, how to plan for a new start-up or what to do next in your career a coach can ensure your thinking process is always at its best.