Why do Great Coaches Matter →

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Great Coaches are not just your external eyes and ears but also facilitators of growth. They provide a more accurate picture of your reality. They recognize the fundamentals and are adept at breaking down your actions and helping you build them back up again.

Leadership with a coaching mindset is about more than just creating an environment that fosters growth and development for both the team and the individual. As a leader with a coaching mindset, you are the catalyst, focusing on helping your team members reach their personal goals while developing their skills.

A large part of coaching is helping someone make sustainable changes by understanding what's holding them back – both culturally and internally. This understanding is the key to helping them deliberately shift toward new beneficial behaviors.

Coaches can help with ”Goals”

How to tell whether a coach or a mentor is needed, and what is the difference? →

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Mentoring is a long-term process based on mutual trust and respect. On the other hand, coaching is for a short period and is more specific in focus. Mentoring creates an informal association between the mentor and mentee, whereas coaching follows a more structured and formal approach.

If you're looking for guidance, support, and insights from someone who's been there, there's no substitute for a mentor.

A professional coach is ideal if you need a trained practitioner to provide accountability. Coaches often come with a proven track record in dealing with specific issues. Even with this distinction, you will get some coaching from a mentor and mentoring from a coach

If you aren’t yet sure of a particular need and want general advice and experience, a mentor may do the best job of seeing where the specific problems are.

Sometimes, a mentor builds so much trust and respect that the mentee might even adopt the mentor’s mannerisms. It isn’t uncommon to find that you synchronize your reactions with the person you are talking to or being influenced by. It is just normal human behavior, also known as “mirroring.”

We all tend to mimic the gestures of people we like and do it subconsciously. So, the good news is that if you build a good relationship with a mentor and mirror their good traits, that is just fine.

Mimic or Mirror the Mnnerisms of Our Mentors Shows That We Have Connected

Coaching, Mentoring, and Leadership have a lot in common. →

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Professional coaches assist individuals in discovering solutions by using active listening skills, powerful questioning, expanding thought processes, identifying limiting beliefs, designing action steps, and providing follow-up support. Coaching skills can be applied to various areas of improvement.

Mentors, on the other hand, share their knowledge and expertise with mentees within their profession. They offer advice, guidance, correction, and encouragement to help individuals grow and succeed in their field. In some cases, mentors may also provide general life advice based on their relationship with the mentee.

Both coaching and mentoring can facilitate positive and long-lasting changes in individuals by transferring knowledge and skills from the mentor or coach to the individual.

Leadership involves the ability of an individual or group to influence and guide followers or other members of an organization.

Teaching is different than Coaching

Coaching is about being Positive Thinking →

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Mentoring and Coaching help build positive and lasting changes in individuals by transferring knowledge from the coach and mentor to the individual, and in the case of organizations and companies, coaching and mentoring become profoundly beneficial for the career growth of their employees.

Coaching is a form of development in which an experienced person, called a coach, supports a learner in achieving a specific goal. The question that may follow this is whether goals are better achieved by positive or negative influence?

A positivity coach is a professional who helps people overcome negativity and infuse more positivity into their lives. In this case, the negativity was present before the coach got involved, but that isn’t always the case.

In coaching and training, maintaining a positive attitude can lead to good performances and success. Improving your overall mood can help improve your performance by reducing negative thoughts and emotions, thus improving your proficiency. The most effective coaching helps others find the good in themselves and the world around them.

Be the best that you can be, but be smart enough to know when you need help. →

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Being the best that you can be, is good advice. In “An Essay on Man,” Alexander Pope said, “Act well your part; there all the honor lies. What happens if your position requires you to be more than you are?

An example of that might be if you are the lead in a project or a company and do not know the basics required to be in that position. In that situation, you should either move to a role you’re qualified for or immediately focus on what you need to learn.

Finding the right help can be a challenge. A coach can be a solution if you can identify the areas you need coaching. The right coach may require a complete and accurate needs assessment to determine if you need coaching and what your specific needs are.

Self-help books offer step-by-step coaching in the areas you have determined you are weak in, but you may need specific feedback regularly.

Be the best that you can be!

― Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

#careercoaching #careerdevelopment #careercoach

Be better than you were yesterday →

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Personal development involves our self-awareness, identity, talents, potential, and capacity to change. It also affects our ability to work well with others and on teams when needed. These things work together to create employability and enhance our quality of life. 

Personal development takes place throughout a person's entire life and happens in small steps. It is not limited to self-help but involves formal and informal development activities.

When personal development uses the workplace context, it refers to the methods, programs, tools, techniques, and assessment systems that support human development at the individual level.

Our life is made up of several lives which together make up our humanness →

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Our life story creates our identity, but that story must include all the lives we have experienced that make up our lives. One example is this quote: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” ― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons.

We can expand our own experience by learning more about others' human experiences. To do so, we need to know about the characteristics, key events, and situations that comprise the essentials of their lives: their struggles, conclusions, emotional responses, aspirations, and even their deaths.

Another well-known author, Tony Hillerman, writing about the Navajo people and their traditions, said: “Everything is connected. The corn beetle's wing affects the wind's direction, the way the sand drifts, and the way the light reflects into the eye of a man beholding his reality. All are part of totality; in this totality, man finds his hero, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.”

Authors are the gatekeepers to the lives they write about and provide us with the pathway to their knowledge and experiences. Harold Bloom, a well-known literature professor at Yale, has written many books about exciting authors. His book, Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human, claims that the playwright’s vocabulary of 22,000 words was so extensive that it proves he knew pretty much everything there was to tell about humankind. According to Bloom, Shakespeare “invented the human,” or at least a more complete definition of humanness.

In an interview published in 1995, Bloom reflected on the great authors of the Western world, stating the importance of reading and studying Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, and Cervantes. He said of these authors:

“They provide an intellectual and a spiritual value which has nothing to do with organized religion or the history of institutional belief………They tell us things we couldn’t possibly know without them, and they reform our minds. They make us more vital.”

Indeed, Bloom defines humanness using the stories and writings of authors rather than his own life story, but then, for Bloom, the authors he studied are a part of him.

Shakespeare’s quotes reflect a deep understanding of humanness that resonates with our lives today. I like these quotes, among so many others:

•          There is nothing good or bad; only thinking makes it so—Hamlet

•          Hell is empty, and the devils are here—The Tempest

•          Though this be madness, there is a method in it—Hamlet

•          All that glitters is not gold—The Merchant of Venice

•          To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man—Hamlet

The meaning of life is much more than our daily experiences and can include much from those other lives we read about. For example, I learned from Hyeonseo Lee’s “The Girl with Seven Names: Escape from North Korea” that I am glad I can be aware of the world without suffering from personal experience. Much can be witnessed in the nonfiction accounts of other people.

Even fiction gives us insight into our humanness. The suspense and twisting plots of Lee Child's Jack Reacher series take us to places we would never go and into situations we would never find ourselves in. We find excitement, empathy, and emotional experience in fiction. Literary critics often label a piece of writing as literature rather than fiction if it tries to describe the “human condition.”

Poetry can also challenge the status quo in our lives and, by doing so, improve the human condition of all people. An example is Maya Angelou’s work, which fought for equality and humanity, writing about the plights and triumphs of marginalized people.

What we learn about others by reading becomes part of the real meaning of our own lives.

If you focus on personal development does that mean you think you are broken? →

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Seeking ways to improve by building on who you are does not mean you are broken; it just means that part of you wants to improve and to be better. That desire is part of who you are.

The desire to improve and grow sometimes leads us to seek out self-help books, which is good. However, self-help books are often looked down on or resisted as offering real solutions. Probably the main reason is the mistaken conclusion that reading these books suggests that the reader is broken and needs fixing.

Just the opposite is true. Broken people focus on their negative traits rather than on how their good qualities can lift them up and help them improve. These insecurities stop them from going out into the world and discovering new things because they're too afraid of what people might think of them. Another more realistic way of improving is acknowledging that everyone begins from their place and that there is no real place where improvement and further personal development can not occur. We haven’t broken any more than that. We are complete. We are what we are, and we can try to be better.  

Reading more makes us feel accomplished and increases our knowledge, which makes us more empathic and humble.

Personal development is significant in that it helps you grow. You learn about the hardships in life from the experiences of others. You will learn to understand people and be kind and gentle. You turn into a more open-minded human, always eager to know and share more, and this shows up in your evolving character.

 

Dr. Seuss taught us that better things were coming and life is good

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It seems clear that Dr. Seuss was a Career Coach. The wisdom of Dr. Seuss is evident in the sayings he is known for, and they would all be effective for a Career Coach to use with the candidates that looked to the coach for guidance.

“Don't cry because it's over; smile because it happened.”

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”

“I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.”

"Life's too short to wake up with regrets. So love the people who treat you right, forgive the ones who don't, and believe that everything happens for a reason.”

“If you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it.”

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.”

“You will miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.”