However much a coach tries to coach you, if you don’t wish to be coached, the effort will go to waste. A coach can only show you the way but real coaching comes from within.
Yes, professional coaches are one useful resource and they may be experts in the area of the goal we’re pursuing, like a running coach or an executive coach, or they may just be an experienced sounding board to give a different lens on our problem. But to establish patterns of success and consistently achieve our goals, it’s helpful and more practical, convenient, and cheaper - to adopt some self-coaching behaviour.
Developing oneself is a process of transformation in which you ask yourself questions, you listen, think, decide, and act - and then you do it all over again - as a never ending activity. Always thinking about the content of your mind, listen to my body, and learn from the environment around you – and your reaction, or response, to it.
We often speak of self-made people with hardly any formal education or training. They are the best example for the success one can strike with self-coaching. Set yourself with a goal of achieving something, assess and see what areas you need to improve on, chase new knowledge in that direction, develop skills you need to acquire, motivate yourself living with the feeling success can bring you.
Ideas of your own
As you assess yourself, you may well come up with other ideas of your own. If so, write them down and make sure you use them. There is strong empirical evidence to suggest that goals and actions that are written down are more likely to be reached. In fact, the more you write about your goals, the greater your chances of success.
The more closely you can visualise exactly what you want, the more likely you are to make it happen. This means not just daydreaming but visualising, imagining yourself really in the situation you want to make happen. There is no point in setting yourself a lot of goals that you think you ought to achieve, if deep inside you actually don’t want to achieve them. If you feel yourself resisting working towards a particular goal, don’t beat yourself up about it but take some time and space to look carefully at what is happening.
Why are you resisting? Is that goal what you truly want? Or what your parents or friends think you would want? It’s a cliché to say follow your heart but, in the end, this is the only way to be happy.
No matter how you coach yourself, keep in mind that the better you get in coaching yourself, the better you will be able to coach the people around you. If you know yourself, if you can support and challenge yourself and ask yourself those important and sometimes difficult questions, then you can support and challenge other people and ask them those questions, too. In other words, your ability to coach others deeply and powerfully starts with you.
When you’ve decided what you really want, focus on it. This focus, which is sharpened by writing down your goals, is what will carry you through to success - provided, of course, you remember you are focusing on a future reality that you are in the process of bringing about, rather than on some impossible dream.
The importance and value of positive self-talk cannot be overestimated. If you’re constantly telling yourself you can’t do it, it will be exceedingly difficult for you to overcome this. If you believe you can do it, you can. Again, something of a cliché but it’s absolutely true.
Sponge
Coaching yourself is really about learning and expanding. Think of yourself as a sponge: How much can you soak up? Don’t simply settle for reading and listening. Be creative and look for something that doesn’t exist. Ask for help from those who can help you? Your success depends on your willingness to put yourself out there.
Congratulations. You are ready to coach yourself towards success.
Go ahead and schedule a standing meeting with yourself. Put it in your calendar and commit. This is a must for accountability and structure. Open a notebook to keep track of your progress and to complete the exercises. And lastly, go do something to move your life forward right now. Yes, right this moment.