Business Coaching In Houston

Today there are a multitude of options when it comes to business coaching in Houston.  And, at the very least, that can bring confusion for those who are seeking out business coaching in Houston. The real problem, if you are looking for business coaching in Houston is:  Who do I hire and partner with?

To find the best business coach ask yourself one question:

  1. What is the real problem that I have?
  2. What are the consequences of not solving the problem?
  3. And, if I am presented with a solution, will I be open to utilizing it?

Mentally and emotionally you must be in the right mindset for coaching to work.  Depending on who you hire and what you wish to accomplish plan to carve out anywhere from 2 to 8 hours a month.  You will have to be committed to fitting coaching into your schedule.  Also, you are very likely going to have assignments for which you will be held accountable.

So, once you are clear on the above you are ready to pursue finding a business coach.  Fortunately, in Houston there are many options.  How well you interview your prospects for a business coach and how well they interview you will determine whether or not you decide to collaborate together.

When it comes to business coaching in Houston you have two broad areas to choose from.  You have the “program” business coaches who espouse and support programs with which they are affiliated.  Some examples are the John Maxwell coaches, Action Coach, Growth Coach and Focal Point Coaching.  They offer great value for those where it is the right fit.

The second area of business coaching in Houston are the independent business coaches.  They may be able to more specifically cater to a particular area of need.  For example, you may have an independent business coach that specializes in start-ups.  Or another may have great marketing expertise.  Once again, they offer great value if they are the right fit.

In my practice, as an independent business coach, I end up collaborating with 2 of every 10 people I interview.  Everyone I interview is fascinating in their own way.  Yet, even if there is an immediate connection, I am always looking strategically to see if there is a long-term fit.  Why?  I have discovered over the last 14 years that the best results for the client come over a period of time and not in one or two meetings.

I am not the business coach for everyone.  As you interview business coaches and you get the feeling that they see themselves as the business coach for everyone I would definitely hit the pause button and ask more questions.  Connection is important.  Yet the ability to collaborate over a period of time will increase the odds of success.

As you look at business coaching in Houston, know that the right coach for you is out there.  Interview your business coaching candidates. Reflect on what you hear, what you see and what you feel.  When you do, you will more than likely make the right decision in hiring a business coach.

Personal Development and Growth

You will become what you think about most.  This is a powerful statement when it comes to your personal development and growth.  What you think about most becomes the foundation for building your confidence and self-esteem.  And, what you think about most can help to improve your self-confidence or it can diminish it.  So, what are you thinking about most?

As a business coach, who also plays the role of a personal development coach, it is not necessarily easy to answer the question, “What do you think about most?”

I find a way to get something complex and deep started is to simplify it.  It is important to break it down into manageable pieces.  Let’s take a look at what I like to call the 5 Areas of Life.

  1. Spiritual-The spiritual is about how much you are conducting your life in alignment with your gifts and talents, who you are. If you are not, don’t panic or beat up on yourself.  This doesn’t mean that you don’t have a good life.  You probably do.  What it means is, that when you are living your life using your gifts and talents that you and your life will be happier and more fulfilling.  That definitely builds your confidence and self-esteem.
  2. Family-How is your relationship with your family? This is critical. Poor relationships will drain you of energy, focus and the desire to expand yourself and your world.  It is important to get this as right as possible.  It is hard to have build confidence and self-esteem in a constant cauldron of negative relationships.
  3. Business-This is what you do to earn a living. Or, what you do to exist.  The goal here is to be doing things that not only let you survive, but thrive.  An environment where you thrive will accelerate your personal development and growth.
  4. Financial-This is pretty straight forward. Have your income exceed your expenses.  Be a good steward of your money.  And, if you aren’t earning enough money, even if you have good financial habits, you can embark on personal development and growth, which will increase your value and put the odds in your favor of finding something where you will be paid more.  Actually, in the United States, this is the easiest area to change.
  5. Personal-This has three sub areas: The Mental.  The Emotional.  The Physical.  This is the area where you recharge yourself.  When you recharge yourself by focusing your mind on good things and progress, by feeling good about yourself and what you are doing then you are much more likely to create new pathways for your successful personal development and growth and ultimately your successful performance.  The last area, the Physical, is very important to supporting the mental and emotional.  When you feel good about yourself physically it is because you are doing good things for yourself.  The physical serves as an impetus to build your confidence and self-esteem in your thoughts and emotions.  The physical acts as a reservoir that the mental and emotional can draw on.  Take care of the reservoir of the physical and you will have the energy to become all that you can be.

These are five areas that you can focus on to take your personal development and growth to the next level.  Let them guide you to what you think about most.  After all, you do become what you think about most.

Definitions: Part 6-What a Personal Business Coach May Look at for Your Self-Improvement

In the last post we looked at the terms symptoms, motivation and vision. When understood all three can provide the fuel for the engine of your self-improvement. In this post, we will look at tolerations, tolerations, strategy, strategize and attraction.These four terms will conclude our discussion on definitions that are central to the success of a personal business coach or a personal development coach and his or her client.

Tolerations:This, in my opinion, is a big one. All of us have things we tolerate. Over the years, in my life and the lives of others I have worked with I have seen the negative effect of tolerations.

To tolerate means to allow the existence of something, to permit or endure something, to put up with something. This implies that the something (or someone) is less than desirable, less than the ideal, and tends to drain a person’s energy. Let me add, that tolerations will also take you off course and can cause you to lose your focus.

A toleration is a situation, a condition, an influence of any kind that is allowed to exist, is put up with, that is less than ideal. A toleration is often a hindering influence.

Tolerations must be vigilantly managed. In fact, tolerations are like weeds. They must be yanked out at the roots. If you have a client with some serious tolerations it is going to be extremely challenging to find a good path to self-improvement.

Tolerations can sabotage the best of self-improvement business coaching. Wherever possible, get rid of your tolerations.
Strategy: A strategy is simply a plan or a method for achieving a specific goal. Referring back to the definition of vision which is about your goals for the future, a strategy creates a road to accomplish your goals.

A strategy can be anything from a way to accomplish a simple task to a way to live life more fully. Strategies generally have several ways they identify and track the goal-seeking process. A good strategy is one that makes use of all available resources.

As a personal business coach finding or discovering a workable strategy for your client is essential for his or her success. This leads us to the next term that I will define.

Strategizing: To develop a strategy, plan, or method for achieving goals. To be of value to your clients as a personal development business coach you must be strategizing with them. And once you have a strategy, continuously review it and alter it as progress is made and circumstances change.

Attraction: The last term we will define is attraction. Attraction is to be drawn to something. Or, I might add, to have something drawn to you. In coaching, attraction is the power and ability to draw people or circumstances to oneself. Being open to acting on one’s intuition allows a person to attract the right clients for the right fit. Likewise, if you are looking for a coach attraction, acting on your intuition will guide you to selecting a coach who is more in alignment with who you are and what you wish to accomplish.

Definitions: Part 4-What a Personal Business Coach May Look at for Your Self-Improvement

In the last post we looked at the terms intuition, discern, solutions and environment and their definitions. In this post, we will look at shifts, leaps and strengths.All the terms we have addressed and defined so far are important. As a personal business coach or a personal development business coach I enjoy seeing shifts and leaps in my clients’ businesses and lives. And, for these shifts and leaps to occur, you must have strengths. So, let’s get started with the first term, shifts.

Shifts:Literally, a shift is a transfer from one place or position to another and includes a change, exchange, or substitution of something. It means to put something aside, such as a concept or understanding, and replace it with another. A shift can be systematic, following an established path of growth, or it can happen suddenly. Shifts are observable in resulting behaviors.

For example, in my personal business coach practice I had a client who was very talented, very bright and extremely impatient. You probably have already guessed that his impatience would end up sabotaging his talent and intellect. You are right. This was exactly what would happen. He would be overlooked for promotions because he was seen as reactionary with some mild displays of temper.

In his youth, he was a boxer. I asked him how he liked to box. He said he always liked to see what the other person was doing and react to it. He liked to be a counter puncher. He was very quick with great reflexes. I asked him if that was successful.

He said that in the beginning it was. Yet, as the competition improved he would lose because he would instinctively react, and everyone knew what his pattern was, so they were ready for him. Interestingly, everyone at work knew what his patterns as a manager were. They knew how he would react.

And very often, after he reacted, he would regret his behavior. We came up with a shift in thinking. Instead of reacting the next time someone says or does something, relax for a moment or a few minutes and then choose your response. Over time he changed from a react and respond leader to a relax and respond leader. This was huge shift. The benefit was that over time he became better liked and more trusted. Ultimately, he became the senior vice president of operations for the international company he was working for. To this day he is grateful for his shift from react and respond to relax and respond. Shifts will absolutely necessary to continuing self-improvement.

Leaps: To leap is to literally “spring” from one point or position to another. It involves jumping or springing over something to get to another place. In personal development business coaching, a leap is sudden and quick, not following a prescribed pattern of growth, and is usually accompanies with dramatic evidence of the leap. Leaps can be made over short or extensive distances. Leaping is the most obvious of all forms of client development that I have observed as a personal business coach. I have seen this in clients in many areas. It is a great reward as a coach to see clients make leaps in self-improvement that take their businesses and lives to a higher level.

Strengths: Literally, strength is the quality or state of being strong, an intellectual or moral force, a source of power, an attribute, or something with great value. Strengths are a collection of attributes, those things that a person excels at doing or has natural ability for. Strengths can be physical, emotional, or spiritual; they are values, skills, talents, attitudes, relationships, resources, and other sources of power, sustenance, encouragement, and satisfaction.

In self-improvement business coaching, identifying a client’s strengths is critical. Ultimately, for the client to be at his best and to give the most of himself he must be spending a large part of his time in his areas of strength.

When clients do not spend time in the areas of their strengths they will feel stuck, overwhelmed and are unlikely to improve. As a personal development business coach, I must identify a client’s strengths and guide them to developing a business and life around them. Yes, it is important to be aware of our weaknesses and to have a way to address them.

Yet, the greatest advances in self-improvement take place when we identify our strengths and design our businesses and lives to allow us to focus on them. When we do, this is a shift in and of itself. And when this shift is made, it leads to more shifts and ultimately leaps for the client to clear the way to greater self-improvement and creating the business and life he or she desires.

What Is Failure?

Failure is nothing more than a few errors in judgment repeated ever day over a period of time.

How often have you or someone you know seen something that is not working in a business and take the attitude that it just doesn’t matter enough to do something correct it, eliminate it or even improve it? Most of us have been guilty of falling into this philosophical trap of “it just doesn’t matter.”

These errors in judgment get repeated because people don’t think they matter. Over time, accumulation of poor thinking leads to poor choices. Read more

The Stages of Team Building

The Tuckman-Jensen analysis of the stages of team building has become a foundational piece in understanding how teams come together or pull apart, how they perform well or fail to meet desired results.

Tuckman and Jensen state that teams go through five stages of team development:

1. Forming—the search for commonalities

2. Storming-breaking away from false harmony into individual power displays, leading to rifts between team members. There is a tension in this stage between unity and individualism.

3. Norming-behavior in this stage is more about consensus between team members and more of a shift from “I” to “We.” Read more

The Formula For Success

One of the questions we must answer to have greater success in business and life is this:

How can we change the errors in the formula for failure into the disciplines required in the formula for success? The answer is by making the future part of our current philosophy.

Both success and failure involve future consequences, namely inevitable rewards or unavoidable regrets resulting from past activities.

So what do we need to do daily to be on the path to success? We must develop the discipline to look down the road every day. Read more

Attitude

Attitudes are affected by what we know since what we know determines he decisions we will make. Where our philosophy deals with the logical side, our attitude focuses primarily on emotional issues.

What we know determines our philosophy. What we feel determines our attitude. Here is the key point to remember. In business and life it is our emotional nature that governs most of our daily conduct in our personal and business worlds.

I have heard many well intentioned people say to others: “Be more logical. Don’t be so emotional.” That’s an interesting statement. Interesting because there is a strong emotion attached to it. Be more logical. Read more

Culture and Change

When culture and change meet, culture always wins.

Lasting success lies in changing individuals first; then the organization follow. And organization changes only as far or as fast as its collective individual change.

To strategically change your organization, you must first change the individuals. Too often, change fails because we don’t start with the individuals.

To change, individuals within an organization have to redraw their mental maps. If people are not remapped then they cannot break through the brain barrier of exchanging the old, familiar way of doing things and embrace the new, change. Read more

What Never Goes Out Of Style?

What Never Goes Out Of Style“During my 87 years I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.”-Bernard Baruch. It is your choice to build your character and your ability to think. They are critical to your success and happiness. Character and the ability to think are always in style.

In today’s world automation and artificial intelligence are allowing machines to do tasks once performed by human beings. Will the need for human beings to have good character and to think go away?

No. Human beings will have to have both of these to have good relationships. Without relationships there would be no need for personal development and growth in the areas of character and thinking. Without relationships, there would be no need to add value to yourself. Read more