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Tips for setting stretch goals:

• Make sure the goal is compelling
• What makes this goal important to you ?
• Search for the growing edge
• What would you do if you knew you wouldn’t fail? How can you play a bigger game?
• Balance the outrageous, ambitious and practical
• What’s one ambitious element you could add to your goal and still achieve it?
• How could you make that goal 10 times bigger and still achieve it?
• What would make your heart sing?

Expanding Your Comfort Zone

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. — Anaïs Nin

Our comfort zone has the familiarity of an old couch.… Read more

A vision without a plan is just a dream. A plan without a vision is just drudgery. But a vision with a plan can change the world. —Old Proverb

A strategic plan helps individuals and organizations determine where they stand, where they wish to go and how they plan to get there. By focusing on the big picture, long-term planning creates an opportunity for people to design their lives.

As coaches, we help people become the authors of their lives and create their ideal future. How do we support them to choose actions that are aligned with their values, vision and purpose?… Read more

Employment assessments are becoming more widely used by employers of all sizes as a means of assessing skills, behaviors and knowledge. Employers are seeing the value of having objective information about a candidate rather than relying solely upon subjective interviews where the majority of the information is provided by the candidate. As the use of the internet has grown so has the ability for employers to objectively assess candidates to determine if they have the right skills, attitudes and abilities for the position. Although behavioral interviewing has been a useful tool, it still relies upon the candidate’s skill in interviewing.

Assessment Use is on the Rise

Increased use of employment assessments isn’t necessarily bad news because if you are not a good fit for a position then it’s not likely that you will be successful or that you will stay with the company anyway.… Read more

This article illustrates how Balanced Scorecard techniques are being used in small businesses. It is particularly relevant to students who are based in small practices or even small businesses where exposure to business techniques, frequently presented against a framework of large corporations, may be limited. After reading this article, students will be better able to relate what they have learned to their everyday business environment and thus understand the techniques and produce better answers in their examinations.

Debate behind the balanced scorecard

The student should remember that the primary criticism that has motivated the Balanced Scorecard is that traditional techniques over-emphasise financial performance often to the possible exclusion of other measures.… Read more

A while back I was agonizing over how to fund a new venture. Do I raise money, and spend the added time to form a board and do books for a non-profit? Do I enlist investors and give up ownership in the organization? Or do I take out a personal loan (which I find distasteful) and run it as a business? Several self-imposed deadlines had come and gone, and I still couldn’t decide.

Finally I sat down with my friend Tim, a successful businessman who’s also a coach, and asked for help. I laid out my conundrum in detail, going through the pluses and minuses of each option, and then inquired: “What do you think I should do?”… Read more

The concepts of coaching and mentoring are often overlapping and there are many disagreements about what constitutes coaching and mentoring—especially when coaching and mentoring are delivered in an organizational setting. Considerable time can be taken (and perhaps wasted) debating over definitions of coaching and mentoring. I propose that another approach might be taken—that of determining which of seven distinction roles are served by coaching and mentoring in a specific organization.

I offer the following exercise as a catalyst for personal reflection as a mentor or coach or as someone leading a coaching or mentoring program inside an organization. This exercise can also serve as a catalyst for group discussion among members of an organizational planning team for mentoring and/or coaching.… Read more

I associate acknowledgement with acceptance. And acceptance can be from any body and in any form. Every heartfelt “AHAA”, “HMMM”, “WOW”, “That’s Great”, “Good Work”, “Well Done”, “I Like It”, happy eye raising expression, silence, a warm smile, or a hug brings acceptance and connection with client or anybody that you are dealing with, in fact this works in personal lives as well and when acceptance takes place the acknowledgement is somewhere evolving in the other person’s heart. Let’s do little bit of reflection to explore this more.

• Which is one acknowledgement that you still remember?

• What kind of feelings does it generate within you?… Read more

In this essay I explore the potential healing power of mythology and its use as a professional coaching tool. The twelve stages of the “Hero’s Journey”, as set forth by Joseph Campbell, will provide the paradigm in which to view a contemporary case study. Joseph Campbell believed that mythology had the power to heal. Campbell was a follower of Carl G. Jung. Followers of Campbell and Jung have captured essential ideologies from both men and termed it, Depth Psychology. For the purpose of this paper, these essential ideologies include the beliefs that the unconscious mind contains an historical record of all human experiences and that the language of the unconscious is rooted in symbols.… Read more

Most people hate fundraising. Even if we have a great cause that we love, asking for money can be distressing. Some fundraisers follow rules, offer gimmicks, or invoke guilt to get people to give, but fortunately, there is another way.

How do we make fundraising fun? By doing our inner personal work, we can ask from our core, from the place within that longs for full engagement and the possibility of co-creating a better world. Unscripted. Real. Authentic. Heart connecting.

When we come from a place of knowing why we’re moved to ask, the energy moves. From this place, we can gift them the opportunity to give.… Read more

How to Know if You are Connected to Your Client

Ask yourself:

• How many times have your clients connected back voluntarily?

• How many times did somebody tell you that “I want these sessions to never end because I feel good in these sessions”?

• How many times have your client called you just like that to share or take suggestions?

• Apart from the coaching sessions, how many times have your client made a phone call to you when they faced a downturn?

• How many times have you guided your client over the phone without charging them for that conversation just because that conversation was crucial for him and money is not everything for you?… Read more