Stay Positive and Achieve Your Goals
Three members who are qualified executive coaches (Joanna Bown, Beverly Landais and Geraldine Gallacher) kindly put together their top tips to help us plan and achieve our goals over the next 12 months and how to stick to them whilst keeping a positive outlook.
Reflecting to change your behaviours
Joanna Bown of Distinctions Executive Coaching, suggests imagining where you want to be before looking back to deciding which behaviours to focus on.
What are your priorities for 2020 and how to set them?
If you were already in December of 2020 and had achieved all you wanted for yourself both professionally and personally this year, what would you practically see, feel and notice that you aren’t seeing today? Then work backwards, break that down into visual goals, and set timelines against them – Where do you want to start? What’s missing? What support might you need to ask for? And from whom?
What new behaviours would I like to start building habits of this year?
Separate your skills from your behaviours – what specific new behaviours would you like to be experiencing, both personally and professionally, in 2020? How would you, and those around you, know that you were showing those new behaviours? What would you experience? How would you know? What outcome are you looking for?
What should you keep or leave behind?
What does a good year in 2020 look and feel like for you? What might you need to let go of, or surrender from, and also into, your life this year, to live with more courage of your convictions, to lean into the chaos and discomfort of change, to flex and relax your safety structures, and to lean into the discomfort with flexibility? This is how we grow…..
Planning to stay on track
Beverly from Beverly Landais Executive Coaching outlines some questions to help map out putting our goals into action.
Gaining perspective and making decisions
Find some quiet time and space so that you can answer three questions for yourself:
- What went well last year?
- What didn’t go so well last year?
- What did I learn?
Write up your thoughts and observations. What themes or patterns do you see?
Thinking about the future
Having captured your insights from the previous exercise, answer these questions for yourself:
- How might I apply this insight and learning to my thinking and behaviour in 2020?
- What kind of support and resources will help me achieve beneficial change in my life?
- How might I get more useful resources and helpful assistance in my life?
- What might be the first step in this process?
Write up your answers. Now set your intention. This is vitally important as intention guides action. What will you act upon today that moves you towards that beneficial change? Taking just one small step towards your goal will motivate and energise you to keep going. Remember "It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan." Eleanor Roosevelt.
Keeping positive in 2020
Geraldine Gallacher, MD at the Executive Coaching Consultancy, shares a few simple ways of improving your mental wellbeing even if you are extremely time-poor.
- get into the habit, every night of remembering three things that happened today that you are grateful for. This really helps to combat busy brain and also has been shown to reduce anxiety.
- try positive journaling. Restrict yourself to a paragraph and just write down the good things that happened.
- a really easy tip for making the endorphins run around is to be kind to a stranger. Believe it or not this has been proven to dramatically improve mental health. You benefit and so does the stranger!
Thanks so much for sharing your expertise and advice – it’s certainly given the editorial team at CWN food for thought.