Coaching yourself? What, When, How…?

Thinking of coaching yourself but don’t know where to start? It’s so much easier than you think. One of the simplest methods that I use in coaching is to ‘chunk down’. We’re so focused on the end result that we tend to load everything up into one big pile and then boom, we’re overwhelmed or place it in the too-hard basket.

By chunking down or making it into smaller sections, we’re able to work out a systematic process that gives us our step one, step two and so on. Let’s look at it this way, if you’re going to create a meal that you’ve never cooked before, here’s what you may do:

1. Look at recipes
2. Decide what you like to cook
3. See what the recipe entails
4. Make a shopping list
5. Buy the groceries
6. Set up the kitchen for cooking
7. Cook away

And hopefully, the results label you a ‘master chef’ in the making.

This is what coaching is all about. Having a strategy and system to guide you in the direction you want to move towards. We want to create goals (basically what we want more of out of life), then create mini goals out of that goal. If you’re able to do this, then you’re building your ‘how to’. By the way, most of us get stuck on the ‘how to’ way before it’s needed.

We know when we’re good at doing a particular thing and it’s easy for us to do. All you do is break down that process, that strategy of how you do that thing so well and transfer that process to a different aspect of your life. So, where you feel confident in one area of your life, share it with another part of your life.

Coaching Exercise

Let’s bring our attention on where to start.

1. Let’s break down different aspects of our life, for example:
   1. Relationships & Family
   2. Career
   3. Finance
   4. Well Being
   5. Physical Environment
   6. Personal Development
2. Choose 1-2 aspects that you’d like to work on and let’s choose Personal Development for now – ‘goal’
3. Do a bit of mind mapping to see what sparks your interest
   1. Meditation
   2. Focus
   3. Brain Plasticity
   4. Creating space – Me Time
4. Once you’ve decided what you’re after, a bit of research helps to expand your options – ‘mini goals’
5. Then you begin – ‘how to’
   1. Join a class/seminar/online course
   2. Get some books
   3. Practise techniques till you find one that works for you
6. Keep practising and start applying what you’ve been learning into your daily routines

Each time we create a goal and then mini goals for that one goal, we build our confidence in this process and gain momentum. Now we have some inspiration and motivation to get us into the ‘how to’.

By feeling confident about a goal sets in motion a positive emotional attachment, plus a sense of succeeding. Now, this is the right mindset to send you on your way.