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Are you fulfilled?

The defnition of fulfilment is ‘the completion or achievement of a desire’. Fulfilment is also defined as ‘a feeling of happiness and satisfaction’.

What is fulfilment to you? Take some time to think about this.

Both of the definitions above could easily be seen as destinations to be reached or goals to be achieved as opposed to a journey to enjoy and savour each day.

As a coach, I’m encouraging you to set goals, to create a vision of the future you want, to define fulfilment and work towards it. I’m also encouraging you to enjoy the journey because this is your opportunity to be fulfilled each day.

It is important to enjoy the journey not just the destination. In this world, we will never arrive at a place where everything is perfect and we have no more challenges. As admirable as setting goals and reaching them maybe, you can’t get so focused on accomplishing your goals that you make the mistake of not enjoying where you are right now.

Joel Osteen

How fulfilled are you today in life? Take some time to consider this.

A useful and valuable tool to aid reflection is The Wheel of Life. You can access this tool here if you want to consider this now. The Wheel of Life helps us see where we are satisfied and happy with your life and also, where were are lacking fulfilment. Noticing where the gaps are and asking yourself ‘what’s missing’ can be powerful and revealing.

What is truly important to you? What will really fulfill you?

Notice whether your ‘wheel’ is balanced or not. A balanced wheel is a more balanced life. Achieving balance emotionally, spiritually, physically, mentally and financially too provides a strong foundation from which to work towards fulfilment, along with what you want to do, be and have in life.

The journey of course is not always smooth. Life, as Joel rightly points out above, is full of challenges but it’s how we react to the challenges that life puts in front of us that determines how we experience them and how resourcefully we navitage them.

How well do you approach challenging situations?

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.

How we react is our choice. It is within our control. It is also within our control to choose a fulfilled life and to be proactive in working towards this.

Being proactive is more than taking initiative. It is recognising that we are responsible for our own choices and have the freedom to choose based on principles and values rather than mood and condition. Proactive people are agents of change and choose not to be victims, to be reactive, or to blame others.

Stephen Covey

At 4PositiveGrowth we work with you to help you manage challenge and change. We provide you with the tools to help you react resourcefully and positively to the challenges that life puts in your path, to see these as opportunities for growth and learning, as opposed to barriers to achieving fulfilment.

If you think we can help and you’d like to talk with us, we’d love to hear from you, so please do get in touch!

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How important is commitment?

Staying committed is one of the most fundamental principles of success.

When setting goals for example, which can vary from leading a healthier life, having better relationships or achieving results at work, commitment remains an essential.

The reality is that it’s not always easy to maintain commitment. When you start on something new, motivation is often at a high, but that can wane and it’s commitment that will keep you going!

For some people, it’s not just maintaining commitment that’s a challenge, it’s actually wanting to commit in the first place. This can be for many different reasons, but all too often it’s our own negative self-talk that stops us going all-in and committing to something – fear, doubt, lack of confidence. Equally, commitment to a goal or task may be lacking as it’s simply not in line with your values or what’s really important to us.

A quick and useful exercise to better understand your motivation and commitment is to use the ‘5 WHY’S’ principle. I mentioned this in my post The Power of Goals. You simply repeat the question ‘Why’ to yourself 5 times. For example,

Why am I committed? – to this goal / task

Why is it important to me?

Why is that? And why is that? …. Why?

This is an opportunity to reflect and raise self-awareness. The answers you reveal will give you a deeper understanding of your motivation (or lack of). If you’ve uncovered your true motivation that’s great; you can harness this to your advantage, using it as fuel to maintain your commitment.

If you are still lacking in commitment it’s useful to check in and ask yourself if this is something you’re just interested in, rather than committed to;

“When you are interested in doing something, you do it only when it’s convenient.

When you are committed to something, you accept no excuses; only results”

Kenneth Blanchard

There are situations and roles where commitment is an imperative, such as when this would have an impact on life or death. In this case, there is no option but to be committed. The resources exist within all of us to be committed.

If you need help tapping into those resources, one option is to use an ‘anchor’. In Neuro Linguistic Programming we use ‘anchors’ to harness powerful positive states that we want to use as a resource. A good example would be if you were going to make a presentation in front of an audience and you were worried or anxious about this, we could anchor positive resources to support you. You might choose to anchor the positive sensations and feelings of being ‘confident’, ‘calm’ and ‘focused’ for example to help you be at your best during your presentation.

In the case of commitment, we can also take this approach and anchor the sensations and feelings you you associate with being truly ‘committed’. We can find a time when you experienced these sensations and anchor them as a resource that you can call on when you feel your commitment wane – essentially giving yourself a ‘commitment boost’!

Similarly, we can use visualisation to boost commitment. For example, if you are working towards a goal, take yourself forward to the moment in time when you have achieved that goal. Close your eyes and imagine what is feels like to have achieved the goal. Imagine you are there right now, experiencing the positive sensations, hearing, seeing and feeling all those great feelings of having been truly committed and having achieved your goal.

Creating a positive and resourceful ‘mini-movie’ and running this in your mind can be extremely powerful. It can reduce those feelings of fear, self-doubt, or lack of confidence for example, as your mind believes what it sees and begins to work positively for you, towards your desired outcome or goal.

These are some insights into tools to help you better understand and boost commitment where needed. NLP and visualisation techniques are very powerful and can have a significant and lasting impact. As a qualified NLP practitioner, I can help you access the resources within you to help you be at your best, whether that’s achieving your goals, boosting your commitment or simply improving your mindset and resilience. If you’d like to learn more, please do contact us at 4PositiveGrowth!

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The Power of Goals

Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?

Did you know that only around 3% of us actually have our goals written down.

Goals improve your chances of success

Research suggests that the 3% who have written down goals are on average 30 times more successful than those who have no written goals. A separate study by Harvard University also found that the 3% who had written down goals were earning 10 times as much as the rest of the group within 10 years.

Goals focus effort in a consistent direction

Success means very different things to all of us and goals are not only hugely valuable in helping us achieve the outcome we want, with lazer focus, they are also incredibly valuable in helping us navigate the journey there too.

Goals improve motivation and satisfaction

Well defined goals that are holistic and that are linked to our highest values, help us naviagte the ups and downs of life, with clarity and resilience. Goals hold incredible pulling power that can help us through and out the other side of the greatest challenges, failures and defeats that life throws at us. Taking time to understand why a goal is important to you, to understand the motivation behind to goal, unlocks the real pulling power of a goal.

In Westernised cultures, we often split goals into ‘career’ and ‘retirement’ or ‘working life’ and ‘home life’. By taking a more holistic approach to goal setting, such as the Japanese ‘Ikigai’ approach, we focus more on our purpose in life and how all other aspects of life link to this purpose.

Looking back on my own journey, I now see that I would set very clear goals for my career but I hadn’t linked these to my life goals or life purpose. Once I’d taken the time to see ‘the bigger picture’, a more holistic approach, I could better understand why I was making great progress against certain goals and less so against others. Some were in conflict with my true values and my purpose in life and so, the pulling power, commitment and motivation to take action towards these goals just wasn’t as strong.

If you’d like to increase the pulling power of your goals, I’m currently delivering the MENS SANA coaching programme online. MENS SANA is Latin for ‘Healthy Mind’ and the first session in the programme is a powerful goal setting session where I coach you through the value of goal setting, to creating powerful, effective, holistic goals and help you take action on these.

Learn more about MENS SANA and enjoy a complimentary introduction to the programme by joining me for ‘HOW TO BEAT PROCRASTINATION TO IMPROVE PRODUCTIVITY’. Email me today for your invitation to the next available session.

The goal setting session was great, especially the part called the 5 Why’s. It really made me think about my goals and why they were important to me. This process gave me a light-bulb moment when I discovered the real motivation for my goals which now feel easier to achieve, because I’ve got real clarity about why I want to achieve them. Real eye-opener for me!

Jude Liddle, Marketing Manager

Learn more about how we can help you unlock and maximise your potential for positive growth at 4PositiveGrowth

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Coaching – Just a few of the benefits!

Coaching has positively impacted my life and I am 100% confident it can do the same for you.

Working for a multinational company, receiving the best training available, I was wondering why I wasn’t making the progress I wanted to, towards my career and life goals. Equally, as a mum, I was struggling to find the balance I wanted for my family. 

Then I found coaching. I started being coached and this transformed my life. It helped me uncover my limiting beliefs, helped me find the balance I was trying to achieve and, helped me achieve goals and ambitions I wouldn’t have dreamed of, including running my own business as a Professional Personal Life Coach and Corporate & Executive Coach.

Coaching is all about YOU. No goal, journey or outcome is the same. How it helps you will be up to you. You might want to work on improving your physical or mental health, your career, relationships or improve your life balance.

Whatever you want to work on, some of the universal benefits of coaching are:

Having A Life Coach Makes You More Accountable. You become more accountable to follow through on whatever you’re procrastinating on or stopping yourself from doing. 

Having A Life Coach Saves You Time And Gets You Faster Results.  With just 24 hours in a day, how we use them can make a dramatic difference to how we feel that the end of the day. Instead of using old maps to help you navigate and plan your day, a coach can help you create your very own super-efficient GPS system! Reach your goals and life ambitions faster.

Having A Life Coach Gives You A Stronger Sense Of Belief And Self-Confidence. There are so many ways that we limit and hold ourselves back.  There are things that we want to do, but often aren’t doing simply because we don’t have the belief or confidence in ourselves.  A coach helps you work with those beliefs, helps you realize what you are truly capable of; building a stronger, more confident, positive and resilient you.

Did you know?   A ‘belief’ is just a thought you think over and over again, so why not start thinking positive thoughts over and over again. It takes the same effort!   If we tell ourselves we can do something, we believe it. If we tell ourselves we can’t do something, we believe that, too. So if we want better results in life, we first need to change our thoughts and our beliefs.

Did you know?   The brain will look to find the answer to the question you ask it.    So, instead of asking ‘Why can’t I make this work?’ (which asks your brain to look for the reasons you can’t do it) ask yourself; ‘How can I make this work?’ or ‘How many ways of solving this problem can I think of?’. Now you are looking for positive solutions!

“I was initially quite apprehensive about undertaking coaching after a bad experience of coaching in a former workplace.  However, Caroline’s approach was totally different and was very holistic and totally non-judgmental.  She used a range of really helpful tools to draw out the importance of many different elements in my life which then provided much greater clarity on where to focus my energies to improve things at work and at home and how those things were inter-dependent.  The emphasis was “what is right for me and how can I achieve that” rather than “where/what do I think I should be and how do I get there”.   The approach was very empowering and left me with a new way of thinking about things that I can use every day to be the best version of me!  I can’t recommend this highly enough.” Mrs U Callaghan, University of Liverpool

Get in touch with me, Caroline at 4PositiveGrowth to talk about you and how coaching can help you get to where you want to be.

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Coaching – Adding Invaluable Value

Coaching has never been more necessary than now and into the future.

Moving forwards change will be the norm and individual resilience and performance will be crucial to team and organizational success. Coaching leverages individual strengths and abilities for maximum performance.

Coaching also provides for direct on-the-job learning as well as just-in-time learning tailored to the particular situation. By enabling behavioral shifts, coaching allows projects and people to move forward immediately and with less effort.

Change in business today is often not linear, and requires quick shifts into entirely new models. True coaching supports people in quick shifts needed to meet changing business demands.

In today’s marketplace, adding value is key to business success.

Successful coaching adds value to employees, who then add value to their organizations by giving their best. Employees want to be happy, productive and innovative, and coaching creates the environment where this can happen. Coaching also supports diversity by recognizing every employee’s uniqueness.

Research and experience shows that employees perform better when positively coached, rather than being constantly evaluated. Researchers have also seen that people with more positive attitudes are more likely to succeed in their jobs and careers. Coaching fosters more positive employee attitude as a key component of development, and enhances positive attitude through positive support.

In a recent report from the Institute of Leadership and Management, research showed that slightly fewer than one quarter of respondents (24%) are not satisfied in their current role. One of the main reasons for this, according to the respondents, is a lack of growth and development opportunities (45%).

There is a wide recognition of the importance of development. Opportunities for growth and development contribute to a sense of satisfaction whereas their absence, was identified as a key factor in job dissatisfaction.

New Decade, New Direction (ILM) January 2020

Finally, coaching skills build and enhance team and work group performance, motivates sales production, improve management and leadership, and promote diversity awareness and leveraging. Human resource professionals have identified that in order to work well in the future, companies will need to hire employees for their fit with the organization, rather than to fill job descriptions. Employee fit is assessed and developed through coaching.

The future growth and success of your organisation is intricately linked with the development of your management. As such, a highly productive individual contributes greatly to the success of your team and your organisation’s performance.

Coaching will enable your organisation to:

  • Grow and expand by developing its leaders
  • Identify skill gaps to increase performance
  • Enhance retention of talent through tailored development planning
  • Increase accountability and commitment to specific actions
  • Create an effective channel for communication
  • Increase motivation, engagement and wellbeing of employees.

To talk about how we can help support growth, engagement, performance and wellbeing in your organisation, please get do get in touch with us @4PositiveGrowth

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Let’s explore how we can help you –

Choose what works for you – schedule a FREE DISCOVERY CALL using our Calendly link, OR contact us on the details below, OR send us your details – it would be our pleasure to give you a call.

  • Email

    caroline@4positivegrowth.co.uk

  • Phone

    07710 631181

  • Address

    Heswall, Wirral, CH60 6SS