The time spent with a coach is pivotal in the personal development of anyone. The coach helps you to restructure your habits and to align them with the relationship or career goals you have. However, these sessions don't last forever. How do you ensure that the lesson you learned and the habits you picked up will stick? You appreciate that the coaching sessions you had may have significantly improved your performance in every aspect of your life. Now that the sessions are over, it is up to you to make sure you fuel and maintain the motivation received from the coach's leadership.
Your coach was a partner that took on specific roles within your coaching journey:
He/She acted for you as a accountability partner
He/She was a person that helped you to reflect
He/She helped you to set your goals properly and to track them
People often find it challenging to stay motivated towards the promises they made to themselves while under the wing of a mindful leadership coach once their sessions are over. Some people relapse and return to how they were before getting professional counseling. You need to develop definitive methods to ensure that you benefit from what you learned.
The following are four tips to help you make the lessons you received last a lifetime.
1. Find Someone to Hold You Accountable
Finding the right accountability partner to keep you in line with your goals and commitments is very critical. Not everyone can make a good accountability partner for you. The person should be willing to call you out when you derail from your goals and commitments. Therefore, picking a close friend or a relative as an accountability partner may lead to awkward situations soon. Follow the following tips when choosing an accountability partner.
Define Your Goals and Strategies to Help You Achieve Them
Explain in detail what you want to achieve and what the partner should do to help you achieve it. Your accountability partner should know everything that you expect to gain from them. They should know your weaknesses and everything that has been holding you back from achieving that goal. By knowing your weaknesses, your accountability partner will be able to keep you from triggers that may get you to derail from your goals.
It also helps if your accountability partner is actively pursuing their own goals. In this way you inspire each other and it makes you feel like you are on the same mission.
Avoid People Close to Your Life
To effectively stick to your commitments, you want an accountability partner who can be objective without worrying about hurting your feelings. You want someone who is not afraid to give you some "tough love" when it is needed. Look for someone you have a lot of respect for. If your goals are career-oriented, get someone in the same profession. The partner will understand the industry and hold you accountable according to professional sensibility. A professional peer is ideal because both of your strategies may align toward the same achievement. Having a partner in the same profession is also advantageous because of the likelihood that you will be attending more events together. Spending more time with your partner makes it easier for both of you to keep an eye on each other.
Have a Grace Period
Include a grace period to learn your accountability partner before you commit to them. Talk frequently, meet for coffee, and discuss openly on your ambitions and strategies. Regardless of if you are in the same career, what you want to achieve is always unique to the next person. Therefore, talking frequently and openly with your potential accountability partner clears the differences in your ambitions and aligns both of you to commitments you can stick to.
2. Create Routines for Reflection
To ensure you are keeping track, you must continually see three things clearly; where you are, where you want to go, and what you can do to bridge the gap. The only person who can give you clear answers to these three questions is yourself. Constant self-reflection will show you if the strategies you put in place are working or if you need to re-evaluate them to get to where you want to go.
Dedicate a few minutes of your day for self-reflection. Preferably, use the first few minutes after you wake up to review the events of the previous day and to meditate on the itinerary for the day before you. Make decisions on how to handle situations in your work and home based on what you are currently going through. Most people use affirmations in the morning to assert and boost their confidence before they start the day. Try doing the same things a few minutes before you sleep. Reflect on the things you did right and the ones that you could have done differently.
Keep Track of Your Progress
Sometimes we get frustrated and feel like the ambitious goals we set wont come to fruition. You should learn to appreciate the small steps that you make every day towards achieving your goals and keep track of them. Because only difference between attaining your goals and not achieving them is consistency and persistence in following your strategy. Here are simple ways you can use to track your progress towards reaching your targets.
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
For you to monitor your progress efficiently, you need to look at your journey from the spectator-spot position. The little things you do every day may seem irrelevant if you are not able to see where you came from and how far along you have come. Not appreciating the small steps leads to demoralization and loss of focus. As you reflect on your commitments, always set aside a few minutes to remember the benefits of achieving your goal. Look at your day to day activities as the small steps you take while going up the stairs. When you are on the fifth step and start feeling exhausted, going back down means that the energy put into climbing the first five steps will go to waste. Look up and keep moving up the steps. Writing a journal helps you to keep track of those steps. And the next time you feel like you haven't accomplished anything you can go back a few pages and get a perspective on how far you came. It also has multiple other benefits that can help you with your self reflection, keeping track of your progress or time management.
3. Effective Time Management and Organization of Goals
With the big picture in mind, planning and organizing the necessary activities you should do to achieve your goals is the next important thing. For a goal to be feasible, it needs to be SMART - Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely. That way, you can split the goal into adequate action steps that help you to get to your ultimate results. Studies show that SMART goals are more likely to be approached and dealt with.
A good organization strategy without discipline will make it difficult for you to achieve your goal. Keep up with the deadlines you set for yourself and use your accountability partner to keep you in check with the small steps towards achieving your goal.
Celebrate Small Milestones
Celebrating every milestone and accomplishment regardless of how small it may seem is the best way to avoid stress and burn out in the journey to achieving your goals.
4. Join People Who Are Also Going Through a Personal Growth Phase
Surround yourself with people who are also in a process of personal growth. You can do that by joining groups or attending seminars. Be proactive and share your experiences that you made during your Coaching and certain ideas and processes. Start reading about personal growth and development and look for new ideas that might help you on your journey.
Also Studies show that we are the sum of our environment. Your character eventually becomes a product of the characters of the people you spend most of your time with. If your goal is to develop or grow your own company, attending business forums and networking with fellow entrepreneurs will give you innovative ways to impact your business for example. Therefore, when you have resolutions, goals, or targets you set to accomplish, your best bet is to hang with people who share similar goals. That way, your activities and interactions will be inclined toward the same direction. This will keep you focused on the commitments you made with yourself from the coaching sessions with your coach.
Conclusion
The coaching sessions you had may have ended, but you are supposed to carry the powerful lessons learned under your coach’s leadership throughout your lifetime. If you look back you might realize that your coach impersonated a lot of the points mentioned in this article. In addition to that you might have felt an extra level of commitment to your personal growth journey due to the time and money you have actively invested in your Coaching. Your goal now should be to stay dedicated to this journey and learn to hold yourself accountable. The points in this article can help you with that, but also your Coach can give you valuable advice on how to make your Coaching last forever. Do not hesitate to ask him or her. In case you feel deflated, you can book more sessions to rejuvenate the spirit of self-development.
At Empowerment Holdings we like to stay in contact with our clients and their journey. Therefore we invite you to follow us on LinkedIn or sign up to our newsletter to get the newest articles on subjects like mindful leadership and personal growth.
