On most occasions, individuals that seek out coaching possess a demeanour that is conducive to a successful coaching relationship. However, every now and again coaches are presented with some challenging situations. It may be that a client has no idea of what they want or that they find it difficult to follow a plan or that they are simply unwilling to change.

The top five challenges that we believe coaches are likely to face are:

1: Lack of Commitment

Some people find it extremely difficult to commit to a cause, whether it has to do with work or life in general. One of the most effective strategies to encourage commitment is to build an individual’s drive and motivation. If a client finds meaning and purpose in what they’re doing, they’ll be motivated and willing to put in the hard yards to achieve their goal. A coach could assist a client achieve that drive and motivation by having the client draw a self-image that reflects the positive outcome of their coaching relationship.

2: Procrastination

Procrastination is a common problem that can be a major stumbling block for many people. One of the best ways individuals can work around this stumbling block is to break their goal down into manageable sizes - mini goals. They should then create a timeline that clearly states when their mini goals should be achieved. This is a great strategy for coaching clients to see the rewards that can be gained from disciplined actions and self control. After all, discipline is always required to achieve goals of substance.

3: Poor Communication Skills

Poor communication skills can put both the client and coach in strife. How is a coach supposed to assist someone if they don’t understand what they want? It’s extremely important that a coach knows what their client wants, and therefore vital that they’re well equipped with communications skills that can counteract whatever skills a client may be lacking.

A coach can improve communication with clients by rephrasing what has been said and having them confirm that it was in fact what they meant. A coach could also improve client communication by encouraging feedback in every step of the way and by stimulating insights, opinions and ideas.

A coach with good communication skills will also be able to recognise what communication styles work best with their client and deliver their messages in a clear, concise manner that resonates with their client.

4: Lack of Direction

When a client has little idea of what they want to achieve it can be quite challenging for a coach to assist a client discover what they want out of their coaching relationship. In these circumstances helping a client to identify their personal values, preferences, needs and vocational skills is particularly important, as it will assist them to form a Purpose Statement which will give them a heightened perspective of where they are now and a direction to work towards with their coach.

5: Lack of Proaction

On occasion clients perceive a coach will be able to assist them without having to do anything themselves. They expect to get to their desired destination with very little effort on their part. This mentality can be extremely challenging for a coach so it’s very important that the coach stresses what their role is at the start of all coaching relationships. It’s also important to clarify your expectations of the client as well as what assistance can be given.

The history of Life Coaching is quite diverse, however a lot of the concepts and principles used in Life Coaching can be correlated back to humanistic psychology that has its foundations from Carl Rogers’ and Abraham Maslow’s theories on higher human values, self-development and self-understanding.

It is important for coaches to have a comprehensive understanding of the theories, strategies and techniques that can be drawn from to assist clients achieve their personal best. Some of the theories that provide the backbone for many coaching approaches are: the GROW Model, Reality Therapy, Solution Focused Therapy and Neuro Linguistic Programming. Following is an overview of each of these theories and techniques:

GROW Model - An effective technique which can be used by coaches to structure their coaching conversations. The GROW model provides focus and direction to coaching sessions and is useful in increasing client awareness and accountability. The letters GROW form the acronym for: Goal, Reality, Options and Way forward.

Reality Therapy - Based on choice theory, this therapy holds that the underlying problem of all clients is the same: they are either involved in a present unsatisfying situation or simply not where they want to be. If this therapy is to be successful, the coach must guide the client to a satisfying situation and literally teach the client to behave in more effective ways than he/she is presently behaving.

Solution-Focused Therapy (SFT) - SFT focuses on the unsatisfactory situation, rephrases it, presents alternative possibilities, develops goals and then develops an action plan to meet these goals. This type of therapy is based on the belief that answers reside in the individual’s own repertoire of skills and is always framed within a context of human competency and our ability to change and adapt.

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) - A technique rather than a therapy, NLP is the study of what works in thinking, language and behaviour. It is used as a coaching intervention to enhance learning abilities, set goals, improve relationships and manage thoughts and emotions more effectively.

There are three basic fears that all of us experience from time to time: Fear of Failure, Fear of Rejection and Fear of the Unknown.

Yes, there are other fears we encounter, but these three are the ones that have the greatest tendency to affect our day to day decisions, and our ability and desire to achieve our goals.

Here are some very simple approaches to consider in addressing these fears.

Fear of Failure

Adopt the attitude that there is no such thing as failure. There is only learning.

Maybe the goal is too big and unrealistic as it is now. Is there something smaller you could work on first that is “less risky?”

In many cases, the “failure” comes from a skills shortage. So, what can you learn how to do, or to better, that reduces the risk? Sometimes we feel we’ll “fail” if we have to do the task on our own. Who could you ask to get involved with to accomplish the task with a greater result and less fear?

If something doesn’t work, try something else. You always have this choice, so “failure” doesn’t have to be permanent.

Has there ever been a time when you were successful? What made you successful then and can you apply it now?

If you haven’t succeeded at something before, what have you learnt from it that you can apply to now?

Fear of Rejection

We often focus on the thing the other person is saying “no” to. What are they saying “yes” to?

What would be different if you were focused on both what you want and what the other person wants versus just being focused on what you want?

Just because someone said “no” to you doesn’t mean you don’t have value. It’s not necessarily about you.

There is something to learn from every situation. What could you learn from a “no” answer? Are you really ready for a “yes” response? If you’re not ready for it, you might actually attract the “no” response.

You always have a choice of attitude. If you choose the negative outcome attitude, you’ll attract exactly that.

Remember the strengths and value of you, or of the proposition, and focus on that positive. That will attract a far more positive response.

Fear of the Unknown

There are some things you’re never going to be able to know about (like the future) in advance, so stop trying. If there’s information you need, what can (and will) you do about getting it?

Are you trying to make a decision based on an assumption? Remember that assumptions are not facts. Do you trust your intuition? Our intuition is typically right on the mark.

Even if the outcome isn’t what you want, there’s always something to learn from it. Learn the unknown, even if after the fact. Sometimes it takes a leap of faith. Are you willing to simply believe?

If you don’t try anything, you won’t move at all. Taking even little steps helps you learn the unknown, so you can take a bigger step next time. What little step can you take now?

Author: Noel Posus

Why don’t we achieve what we want?

Simple question isn’t it? If only the answer was as simple. If we knew the answer we’d all be achieving amazing things. Maybe then, if everyone was achieving great things, the great things we achieved wouldn’t seem so great anymore!

Maybe even in knowing the answer, you still wouldn’t achieve what you want? Let’s find out shall we?

The Dualism of Pleasure and Pain

There are many reasons postulated as to why we don’t achieve what we want. Most likely all of them are somewhat credible explanations. One theory seems particularly valid. It’s a principal that was initially postulated by the creators of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).

The theory essentially states that there are two groups of people, differentiated by the distinctly different ways they’re motivated. One group is motivated by moving away from what they don’t want. Their tendency is to minimise what they perceive painful or unpleasant; things they’re afraid of, or want to avoid. This group moves away from pain.

The other group is motivated by moving toward what they want. They give very little cognition to things that are unpleasant, and instead focus almost exclusively, consciously and subconsciously, on what they want, or what they perceive pleasurable and desirable. This group moves toward pleasure.

The thing is, by far the vast majority of people are motivated by the ‘moving away from’ paradigm. And that explains why the percentage of super achievers is the significant minority.

Think about your own circumstances for a moment. If I asked you what you want regarding the big three - wealth, health and relationships - you would most likely state that: you want to very wealthy; you want to be fit and healthy; and you want to be extremely happy and fulfilled in your relationships. On a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the most preferred state, you would probably want 4’s or 5’s in each facet.

A Comfortable Rate

Yet how do you actually rate? Most people rate 1.5 to 2.5. So, if you want a 4, and you only rate 2.5, why don’t you do something about it?

The reason for most people is that 2.5 is much better than 1. 2.5 is reasonably comfortable. 1 is where the pain is. 1 is where you have to battle each week to pay your bills. 1 is where you can’t afford a holiday. 1 is where you are overweight and at risk of serious health problems. 1 is where you are constantly fighting with your partner and no longer share intimacy.

But at 2.5 you’ve moved away from that. You’ve moved away from pain to a compromised level of wellbeing. Your basic needs are fulfilled. You can afford a reasonable house in a respectable suburb. You have some problems in your relationship, “but that’s normal.” You’re not obese, but you are moderately happy with your appearance and health.

The ‘moving away from’ mentality is one of compromise. You cognitively want more from your life, but you compromise on your desires because you attain a level of wellbeing that is not uncomfortable.

Life in Scales

Think of the 1 to 5 scale of achievement we used above as stops along a marathon. Picture in your mind thousands of people standing at the starting line waiting for the starter’s gun. The gun goes off and everyone starts progressing forward. The effort to get from 1 to 1.5 can be represented in distance by a kilometre. It’s not too much effort and the effort feels well spent. After all, point 1 is a very painful and unpleasant place. Almost everyone in the group makes it to stop 1.5.

The distance from stop 1.5 to 2 is 2 kilometres. It’s double the distance of stop 1 to 1.5. Whilst 1.5 feels ok, it’s still a little uncomfortable - you’d like to earn more to get a better house, lose some weight and stop smoking, and have fewer disagreements with your family and friends. The effort of another 2 kilometres seems worthwhile so you keep progressing. Although you notice that quite a few others have remained at the 1.5 kilometre mark.

You reach stop 2. You’ve now progressed 3 kilometres. It’s certainly more comfortable than stop 1.5. It’s not as good as you’d like, but you know stop 2.5 is 4 kilometres away, double the last effort. After deliberating for quite some time you decide to give it a go.

The 4 kilometres from stop 2 to stop 2.5 was more difficult than you anticipated. There were lots of steep hills, you got a stitch and blisters on your feet. But whilst it was a lot of effort, stop 2.5 is quite comfortable. You’re living in a nice house in a nice suburb. You have good friends and a good family life.

You often visualise what it’d be like at stop 3. In fact, when asked, you say you’d like the benefits of stop 3. But you also know how much effort it took to travel the 4 kilometres from stop 2 to 2.5. And you know that stop 3 is 8 kilometres away. Your conflicting thoughts (cognitive dissonance) - wanting the benefits of stop 3; yet knowing the significant effort required to get there - result in internal turmoil. You often have thoughts of stop 3 benefits, but the effort required to bridge the gap is just too much considering that you are not uncomfortable where you are.

But your mind has a tricky way of trying to cure your internal conflicts. It creates belief systems that endorse one aspect of your cognitive dissonance - usually the one that represents the path of least resistance and effort.

Belief Systems

Your subconscious thinking (or not thinking as the case may be!) is doing you a favour, validating your non-willingness to pursue your greater objective (in this case stop 3), by creating belief systems about your self-concept, abilities, environment, opportunities, as to why you couldn’t and/or shouldn’t achieve your objective. So rather than thinking, “Ok, I know I’d like the benefits of stop 3, but I’m comfortable enough where I am and am simply too lazy to expend the extra effort.” You think “Those people at stop 3 have got it lucky. They had all the opportunities whilst I had none. If only I had some luck come my way, I could also be at stop 3.”

You validate to yourself how far you’ve progressed (moved away from pain), rather than focussing on your initial, and ideal, objective (moving toward pleasure).

What’s important to remember is that most people start from the same place. The vast majority of wealthy people do not have university degrees. The vast majority of healthy and fit people work at it every day through proper eating and exercise. And fulfilling relationships with family and friends are not factors of fortune, they are worked on daily.

We rarely, if ever, give thought to how we formulated our beliefs. They just ‘are.’ Yet they are extremely powerful predicators to what we achieve in life.

Your belief systems are strong neurological triggers that create resistance to you being able to attain your cognitively desired objectives. These ‘perceived’ limitations become very real limitations.

For instance, if you have the belief that the world colludes against you, and that you are unlucky, you will have a neurological trigger that actually forces you at a deep subconscious level to look for negatives and bad luck. You will perceive external occurrences as ‘bad luck’. The same external occurrence, viewed by someone with a ‘good fortune’ belief system, would be perceived entirely differently. As a result, each person would act very differently to exactly the same event - one in a negative sense, and one in a constructive, positive sense.

There’s an old Zen fable that goes something like this:

There was an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbours came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbours exclaimed. “Maybe,” replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbours again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “Maybe,” answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbours congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “Maybe,” said the farmer.

This story demonstrates the importance of how you frame your beliefs.

If you want to change something in your life, including achieving your goals, you must first and foremost work on changing your belief systems that frame your ability and worthiness of having or attaining your desired change. Only by changing your belief system will you be able to bring about effective and enduring change.

Have you been moving from pain, or toward pleasure?

Over the centuries we’ve developed many templates to assist us optimise our functionality and perpetuate the cycle of (social) evolution. We’ve developed models of behaviour that are taught by one generation to the next to maintain a continuum of progress.

These templates form a benchmark of human performance and come in many forms of faith systems, belief systems, social paradigms, personal development edicts and psychologically-founded theories. They provide a framework of reasonableness for our behaviours; a set of rules for how we relate with each other.

These systems are generally quite complex. They’re not as portable and adaptable as our present lives, driven by societal pressures and immediacy, require. They’re the national library when all we really want is a synopsis.

There’s one extraordinary common element that traverses all these systems, beliefs, theories and paradigms. It’s a thread that is so fundamental and intrinsically linked that if it was removed, the whole quilt of progress would fall into useless pieces of yarn. It’s YOU.

Understanding Yourself

If you wish to improve yourself, you must first and foremostly recognise that all change stems from within. You have the ability to modify your thoughts and behaviours. You and only you can determine your personal rate of evolution.

Think for a moment of the people you hold in high regard. They may have certain enviable behaviours, or have attained admirable end states. The vast majority of those people have developed their behaviours through awareness and cognitive determination. They recognised who they wanted to be or what they wanted to achieve and willingly aligned their thoughts with their objectives. High level performance in individuals rarely transpires as an occurrence of chance.

You cannot keep doing the same things and expect a different result.

You have the power and the ability to change in order to produce a more positive result. You have the power to choose your attitude. The consequence of this simple and under-utilised reality is mind boggling.

Each and every day people go about their duties as servants to themselves. They are subservient to subconscious attitudes that are most often not acting in accord with their best interests. When most people are forced to bring their negative and destructive actions into consciousness, and asked why they acted as they did, they most often cannot provide an explanation.

They honestly do not know why they acted in the manner they did. This is because their untrained and unemotional subconscious invoked their actions without cognitive intervention. In the absence of cognitive intervention the subconscious directs our actions. What’s the problem with this? Nothing, if your subconscious has been trained to know how to appropriately act. But in most situations it hasn’t, and hence it turns to old patterns that have been learned subliminally. These actions are invariably not constructive, and are very rarely aligned with your conscious desires.

You are not a servant to your emotions. With cognitive intervention you can establish your attitude at any point in time. By establishing your attitude, you determine how you feel and how effectively you are able to operate. Imagine how empowering and life changing this simple possibility can be to you.

We often use communication as though people or circumstances “make” us feel or behave a certain way. This is not the case at all. It’s actually your absence of action that leaves you feeling frustrated and submissive to your feelings.

You only need to recognise that different people react dramatically differently to the same stimulus to know this is true.

Attitudes and Actions

As you go through each day you experience a plethora of attitudes. And your attitudes largely determine your level of effectiveness and emotional comfort. If you can manage your attitudes, you can dramatically influence how you feel, behave and perform.

For instance, you may regularly wake up and think to yourself: “I feel really tired today. I wish I didn’t have to go to work.” As you’re driving to work someone cuts in front of you and you think “How dare that person cut in front of me.” When you get to work there’s no milk for your coffee and you think “There’s no milk AGAIN! I’m not going to be able to work effectively unless I get my morning coffee.”

These simple scenarios are a representative start to the day for many people. And let’s face it, they’re negative, low performance attitudes. They are not conducive to high personal performance or a state of personal wellness.

Progressing through life allowing yourself to acquiesce to less than optimum attitudes invariably creates an enormous amount of unnecessary stress. That stress compounds over time and is a catalyst to substantially more complex issues.

In the absence of cognitive attitude management, your mind literally does not have a framework by which to assess environmental influences and relies on instinctual emotional responses. By aligning your attitudes with your desired performance, you are able to assist your mind to cope with external influences and frame your responses accordingly. In effect, you tell your mind how to respond in accordance with your consciously established value-based framework.

Making a Positive Choice

Most people believe their attitudes are a result of external pressures such as people or negative experiences. But whilst external pressures often trigger your attitudes, you are the one that ultimately decides your resultant attitude (or allows yourself to have an inappropriate attitude in the absence of a decision). You can either acquiesce to external pressures, which you have little or no control over, or you can control your response by choosing what attitude you’ll take. From the moment you wake to the moment you sleep, you have the power to choose your attitude.

Choosing your attitude starts with a mental intervention. Initially you’ll need to think about your attitude and choose appropriate attitudes throughout the day. As your mind becomes more aware of the attitudes you deem congruent, attitude selection will become second nature.

Greater efficacy in attitude selection starts by becoming more aware of your attitudes and the affect they have on your effectiveness and wellbeing. This is usually most apparent in stressful situations. When you’re feeling ‘negative,’ frustrated or anxious, make the cognitive decision to vary your attitude.

NEXT time you are in a stressful situation and you FEEL yourself becoming more anxious, take a brief moment, and a deep breath or two, then make the conscious decision to select a more appropriate attitude. One that will place you in a positive state of mind and assist you better deal with the situation and environment.

You can start with a few small things that may usually annoy you such as a car cutting you off; or someone saying something to you. Instead of regressing into your long term learned response, allow yourself a cognitive intervention. Say to yourself “Usually my natural reaction would be too… but I know I don’t have to react that way. I have the power to determine my attitude. I decide to be in control of the situation and to react in a positive manner, by…”

You’ll be amazed at how this simple principal can change your perception of events, and ultimately your view of, and efficacy in life. You’ll slowly but surely start feeling empowered by how much control you actually have over yourself and your environment (and others). AND you’ll immediately start seeing more positive results in your life. You’ll stop feeling those sensations that the world is working against you and recognise that ALL change stems from within. Your emotional comfort is a result of internal processes, not external stimuli.