Coach yourself to achieve your goals

Guest blog from Andrew Coates, Director, AMC Coaching.

Self-coaching can be very powerful.

It is all about helping yourself to grow and develop to achieve both your professional and personal goals.

Whilst having your own coach and self-coaching are very different, we can all benefit from thinking about and working on our own goals.

It can also be fun and a great way to get to know yourself more with increased self-awareness and self-reflection. Helping to get yourself unstuck and in control.

It is using coaching skills on yourself – open-ended questions and listening to your heart and your head.

Working on your self-awareness can be very beneficial.

Looking at your own values, thoughts and beliefs, strengths and skills. Reviewing what drives you and what holds you back. What is reality - or what your mind tells you is reality.

One person I have worked with uses this approach in developing herself as a more confident and effective leader.

She sets both personal and professional goals for herself and works through them on a regular basis. She says that it helps her not just to become more self-aware and to understand how she thinks and behaves, but also it is valuable time to take a step back and work through not just her goals that she wants to achieve but how to best handle issues as they arise.

To start; look at yourself and all the areas in which you might want to work on both personally and professionally.

  1. Goals - Decide on what is important to you right now in both your professional and personal life.

    Set a goal and write it down.

    Add a time frame as to when you want to achieve the goal by and ask yourself - What is most important about this? What does success look like for that goal? Why is the goal important? What does it mean to you?

    Schedule coaching sessions with yourself – book them in and then work on the goal in that session.

  2. Where you are now – With each goal that you work on, look at the reality of where you are now.

    Ask yourself what the current situation is? What perhaps might be holding you back? Where are you getting stuck? What have you tried so far? Again, writing this down is very powerful.

  3. Look at your options – What can you do to achieve your goal?

    Think creatively. You can always share with others and see what they think as well.

    Which option do you think will then work best that you can take forward?

  4. Make a plan and set yourself some realistic actions - How are you going to take the option you have decided forward? What are you going to do first etc?

  5. Ask yourself how committed you are to doing this and achieving your goal on a 1-10 basis

  6. Finally hold yourself accountable and review where you are going and where you have got to.

Another person I know has used this technique to think about his own future career planning.

There is a lot involved in career transition and starting with a goal in mind and working through this process has been very powerful for him.

It was the actual writing down of the goal, the plan with a set of actions, and holding himself accountable for those actions, which he said worked well.

Have a go at trying some self-coaching and see if it works for you.

www.amccoaching.co.uk