Things Are Different

Things are different than they were a year ago.  This is a huge understatement!  The arrival of COVID 19 and the effect on our lives worldwide has been immense.  My business coaching practice in the Woodlands and in Houston has given me an observation point to see many businesses and how they have responded to the new world that COVID 19 has wrought.

The great news is that creativity, when it comes to survival is alive and well.  The bad news is that in many instances it is not enough to survive.  Each business, so to speak, is its own individual boat.  When COVID 19 first arrived, some boats were already in a safe harbor.  A safe harbor is a place where their business is not going to be severely affected.  They are going to be profitable and survive.  They will change because of safety concerns as to how they do business but overall, they are in good shape.

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How to Build Confidence and Self Esteem

“Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand brake on.” — Maxwell Malt

Do people possessing high self-esteem achieve greater success in life?

You may have heard from many people that they want to increase their self esteem. They believe that once their confidence and self esteem is high, they’ll be able to achieve more and greater successes.

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Networking Is One Letter Away From Not Working Part 2 What Is Your Goal in “Networking”

As we saw in the previous post, the word “network” was first used in England in the 1550’s to describe a finished product, a fish net.  A fish net was a piece of network.

When you think about it, a nice piece of network is about catching more fish, and as time went on, bigger fish.  In personal business coaching in The Woodlands and in personal business coaching in Houston, I collaborate with many different business owners and types of businesses.  They are all casting their nets to market their business, and in many cases, to expand it. Read more

Definitions: Part 3-What a Personal Business Coach May Look at for Your Self-Improvement

Previously, we looked at needs, wants goals and priorities.  A personal business coach or a personal development business coach also has to bring an aptitude to help the person being coached to better understand themselves internally.  As a business coach in Houston, I believe the following are areas that most coaches, regardless of the category, life coach, self-improvement coach, business coach or some other coaching discipline, use to benefit their clients.  Interestingly, regardless of the type of coach, they are all focused in some shape or form on self-improvement tips that can accelerate the process of your successful performance. This is critical because in the self-improvement business coaching model, all progress starts from within.  The first place to better understand yourself is with intuition.

Intuition:  This is the perception of truth, facts, information, or other input not based on any reasoning process.  It is the ability to have insight into something based on our own inner knowledge and truth, and not on external stimulus.  Intuition is that “little voice from within.”  Here’s what’s interesting.  The “little voice from within” very often counsels and supports our fears.  When our fears are affirmed, rightly or wrongly, they will keep us from taking a path to self-improvement.

The key to intuition and the “little voice from within” is to understand what we are truly saying when we talk to ourselves.  With self-improvement our intuition and what “the little voice from within” is saying to us will change over time as we gain in self-confidence and are on a more certain path.

Discern:  This means to be able to perceive and distinguish between things, usually through intuition or other internal knowledge. It means to recognize contrasts such as good and bad, right and wrong, timely and untimely, truth and untruth, real and false. Discernment is your natural ability to see at times what can’t be seen as well as what you can see and to take a course of action.

To move your self-improvement to the next level be aware of your level of discernment. For example, if you feel that very often you don’t see things coming or are often surprised in ways that are not pleasant, this is a call to up your level of discernment.  After all, only you can protect yourself from you.

Solutions:  The answers and/or solutions to a particular problem, situation, challenge, or dilemma.  For example, a common solution to miscommunication is to clarify what you hear the other person saying.  “Just to make sure I understand.  You said that we are going to meet next Wednesday, not next Tuesday?”

Solutions bring clarity.  Here’s a point that as a personal business coach, personal development business coach, or as a self-improvement business coach that I must always keep in mind for myself and my clients.  An answer is not necessarily a solution.  It is just an answer.  If the answer is something that can be reasonably implemented, then it can become a solution.  Very often an answer is the premise for a solution.

For example, a company wants to reach the next level.  The answer is to increase sales.  The solution is how to go about increasing sales.  In this situation we have an answer, to increase sales.  But, until how to increase sales is defined, we do not have a solution.

Environment:  The environment we are in is critical to our well being and our ability to embrace self-improvement.  In fact, one of the great challenges of personal business coaching is to support the client in creating the environment necessary for his or her personal development and improvement.

Environment can be defined as the aggregate or combination of surrounding things, conditions, and influences, including social, cultural, relational, personal, and professional forces, that shape the life of a person.

In conclusion, when you develop your intuition, you will discern better.  When you do these two things you will come up with solutions more quickly and as you do, you will create an environment that will support your continued self-improvement.  There are many self-improvement tips and ideas and my hope is that the above gives you some insights into how a self-improvement coach in Houston or anywhere in the world can support you in creating the business and life you desire.

In the next post, we will look at shifts, leaps and strengths.  All of which are key markers on the road to your successful performance.

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

Integrity and Leadership

According to Dr.Henry Cloud in his book, Integrity, integrity is “courage to meet the demands of reality.” Yes, integrity includes other aspects including but not limited to habitual honesty through and through and having strong moral principles.

Integrity is the quality you find in a good leader. A good leader will meet the demands of reality. Reality may be stormy seas. The leader will see how to navigate the ship to a safe harbor.

Reality may be rapid growth. The good leader sees the danger of overextending the company financially and has plans and options to make sure the financial integrity of the company and the well being of its employees is not compromised.

Leading by meeting the demands of reality allows us to lead from a position of strength, from integrity. How we lead, as Dr. Cloud points out, leaves a wake. Your wake determines three things. 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