COACHING: INVEST IN YOURSELF
Assuming we have a permanent World Cup going on around us, it’s interesting to see that athletes and other sports players have coaches — but usually we don’t.
For an athlete a coach is someone who asks the right questions, gives feedback, helps to define strategy, focuses on the athlete’s strength, improves preparation and defines the right time to recover after peak performances. We lack such inspirational coaches and experienced mentors to give us the feedback that will help us to make choices in the rest of our lives.
I believe coaching can and should start at universities. I had a coach on my MBA course. The coaching offer was actually decisive in me taking the Master’s degree at that college, but in my case the coach was not fully prepared and lacked experience or interest. It was very demotivating and I was on the verge of abandoning the MBA course because of it. A year later, when I decided to live and work in Barcelona, I tried another coach to help me work on this transition, and ever since I have been convinced of the power of coaching. It takes years of experience and many different tools to accompany other people successfully on their way. Now, years later, as I coach my own students, individuals and teams, I understand the complexity of the task. This is made greater by the fact that most prospective students do not really know what to expect first time around.
My own coaching philosophy is that of the Creative Personal Branding programme (CPB). The method is based on the idea that the individual, who was never completely free, is imprisoned in our limitless world in search of excellence.
As individuals, we are always observing and evaluating, and are always on our own when it comes to taking decisions. The risk of failure is enormous and therefore inhibits playful exploration. To master these challenges we need new skills.
The creative personal branding programme is designed to offer individuals an exciting way to understand challenges today, and to develop opportunities based on personal growth through self-insights. The programme may therefore help individuals of all walks of life move on to create vision for their work and life.
At the core of the programme lies each individual’s personality. In sessions, working as diverse intercultural teams or on a one-to-one basis, we reflect, interact and react to new challenges. Radical changes are not desired or desirable. The system, and we ourselves, are too fragile. Instead we look for ways of finding balance and wellbeing within ourselves and between teams, and of reaching objectives and responsibilities. We have to play with the contradictions of modern work and life. CPB means transition. CPB means reinvention. In such an atmosphere solutions to the challenges will arise surprisingly, but meaningfully, in the right atmosphere.
Now that I have been working with this method for years and seeing its results, I am more than ever convinced that coaching is one of the best investments you can make in yourself.
Coaching is a great tool for institutions, companies and the individual as a way of differentiating themselves and improving the efficiency of their performance.
Everyone who has finished a marathon knows the experience. For the average person there is no chance to succeed unless you are well prepared. Even that is no guarantee of success. Everything is much easier if you have the right people supporting you, however, working on your aptitude, and helping you to keep up your attitude. Your working life is like a marathon morphing into a decathlon. It is therefore not a question of being fast at the beginning. It is a question of reaching the finishing line, even though exhausted, and still having a smile on your face.
A coach can help you to achieve this.
