Coach Andrea

Coach Andrea’s Intro

Michael Neill’s articles always provide a new tool that’s easy to use.  This week’s Tip has you turn around the word “but” to help you increase your success.

Quote of the Week

“Dwelling on the negative simply contributes to its power.”

~ Shirley MacLaine

Reversing “Buts”

By Michael Neill

I believe the credit for this one goes to John McWhirter, a UK-based NLP trainer. I originally came across it as a sales technique for handling objections, but I’ve used it a lot in my own personal development work….

How many times have you heard sentences like this?

“I’d like to hear more about your idea, but I haven’t got time right now.”
“I think you’re a really great person, but I’m not ready for a relationship.”
“It sounds great, but I can’t afford it.”

Most of us have learned to disregard whatever comes before the “but” and take the second half of the sentence as the speakers “actual” message. But what happens if you reverse the sentence, using the “but” as the pivot point, and then take things a step further in the direction we want them to go?

Try reading the following examples out loud, emphasizing the underlined phrase!:

“So you haven’t got time right now, but you’d love to hear more about this? When would be a better time to set up a meeting?”

“Let me see… you’re not ready for a relationship, but you think I’m a really great person? How about if we just hang out together for a while?”

“If I’m understanding you, you can’t afford it, but it sounds great? Well if it sounds great, let’s see if we can’t sort out a way for you to afford it!”

Today’s Experiment:

1. Complete the following sentence stems. You may complete each one as many different ways as you would like.

a. I want to be successful, but…
b. I want to be healthy, but…
c. I want to exercise, but…
d. I want to have more money, but…
e. I want a great relationship, but…
f.  I want to be true to myself, but…

2. Choose your favorite completions from part one. Reverse the “but”, and sell yourself on a new belief!

Example:

1. I want to have more money, but I don’t want to do more work.
2. I don’t want to do more work, but I do want to have more money. What are twenty things I could do to make more money with less work?

Have fun and learn heaps!

Copyright 2011 Michael Neill, author of Supercoach: 10 Secrets to Transform Anyone’s Life.  All rights reserved – Read more tips at www.Supercoach.com.

Coaching Call To Action

This week do what Michael suggests.  I bet you will have some ah-ha’s (and perhaps some ha-ha’s)!

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Coach Andrea’s Intro

Jared Brox identifies four leadership traits that can keep your employees from performing at their optimum level. At times in my coaching, I work with individuals who are receiving directives from above and I can assure you that Jared Brox has hit on key points that leave people shaking their heads, burning themselves out, becoming less engaged and eventually leaving the company. If you want to support your people to continue to be enthusiastic, high performing assets to your company, make sure you’re not exhibiting the following behaviors.

Quote of the Week

“Leadership should be born out of the understanding of the needs of those who would be affected by it.”
~Marian Anderson

Leadership Traits That Stress Your Employees

by Jared Brox

There is no such thing as a perfect leader. No matter how experienced you are, there is always something you can learn about your leadership style that will help strengthen the working relationship between you and your employees. So, even if you have a healthy rapport with your team, don’t forget to step back from time-to-time to ensure you haven’t unknowingly developed any of the following bad habits.

Big ideas, little follow-through
As a leader, you’re not only responsible for coming up with your company’s next big idea; you also have to build excitement for it among your employees. And, if you have a strong, motivated team, that shouldn’t be difficult. However, once you’ve built a consensus and everyone starts working toward making your ideas a reality, you have to be prepared to follow through to completion. It can be frustrating for employees to put in some serious elbow grease only to see a project fizzle out or never get implemented. Your team deserves to see the fruits of their labor and to have the opportunity to bask in the glory of a job well done.

Down-to-the-wire decision making
In contrast to the old saying, “deadlines are made to be broken,” highly motivated employees go to great lengths to ensure their work is delivered on time, every time. That’s why last minute decisions and changes in direction can really cause them a great deal of stress. Of course it happens from time-to-time, but as a leader it’s important to strive to iron out all the details and button up the loose ends as soon as possible on the projects your team is working on. Even if you know they can handle it, down-to-the-wire decision making often makes hard work that much more difficult.

Just along for the ride
Leaders should be ready to roll up their sleeves and dig in. Sure, on many projects you’re just there to provide your employees with some general guidance, but don’t underestimate the value of jumping in the trenches to show your team that you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty. It not only builds a stronger relationship with your employees, it will also affirm their confidence that you fully understand the scope of the project.

Communication lost
Not everything goes without saying, so it’s always a good idea to double check for understanding. If you’ve taken the time to build a strong, competent team, nine times out of ten, it won’t be necessary. But remember, it’s easy to get too comfortable with a high-performing team that needs little supervision, so don’t forget to maintain consistent communication. Nothing is more frustrating than having to start a project over from scratch because of mistakes that could have easily been avoided had you taken the time to be certain everyone is on the same page.

Most great leaders will tell you they are only as good as the people they lead. And, while that’s probably an accurate statement, it’s important to be sure you are doing all you can to create a working relationship that allows your employees to be their best.

This article, written by Jared Brox, is published courtesy of Express Employment Professionals. For more information on other leadership and employment-related topics, check out refreshleadership.com.

What’s New

March 23, 2011 – 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Keefe Continuing Education

Empowering Yourself!

Do you feel like you need to make a significant change in your business or personal life and would like some support to address these issues? I will provide my 5-step program for gaining control of your life.

This seminar is scheduled for Wednesday, March 23, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Keefe Tech, Framingham, MA. To reserve your place, please call 508-935-0202 or go to www.ktconed.org/health_and_lifestyle.htm.

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Coach Andrea’s Intro

While celebrating my birthday on Sunday, I had a surprise visit from my son, James. He and I were on the phone catching up and sharing our plans for the day. When I asked him where he was, he turned the corner into my bedroom with a big grin on his face and said, “right here, Mom!” You have to love these kids! As I was thinking about my message to begin this week’s Tip, I looked out the window to see, once again, the snow falling. Taking Loren Ekroth’s words to heart to start with “News and Goods”, I chose to share my birthday surprise rather than lament about the weather. And to remind all of us here in the Northern Hemisphere that there are only six weeks until Spring!

Quote of the Week

“Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.”
~William Makepeace Thackery

Two Simple Steps To Increase Meeting Productivity

Coaching Call To Action

Assess your meetings. Could they benefit from “News and Good” and/or humor?

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Coach Andrea’s Intro

How’s your attitude these days? This question is a great reminder for me and I’m thinking you, too. As we get closer to year end and the pressure is on, are you forcing compliance as a leader in your organization or are you leading with optimism, hope, and enthusiasm? This week’s Tip by Kevin Eikenberry reminds us of the power of sharing enthusiasm and positive messages.

Quote of the Week

“Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.”
~ Harold Geenen

The Importance of Your Attitude

by Kevin Eikenberry

Before any big game, coaches typically give their team a pep talk.

Coaches know from experience that sharing enthusiasm and delivering positive messages prior to the start of a game will help the team perform better. Maybe the other team is bigger, stronger, and faster. The coach may share those facts during practice but would never include them as the focus of the final words to a team. Will a pep talk alone create a win? Probably not, but everything else being equal, it will help.

Think about it this way. The more the expected pep talk provides hope – an opportunity to look at the world from the perspective of success and achievement – the better. Some call this optimism or enthusiasm or a positive mental attitude. Whatever you call it, science increasingly shows it to be a powerful force. Science or not, our experience tells us this attitude is contagious (Eikenberry, 2007, p. 151).

Eikenberry, K. (2007). Remarkable Leadership: Unleashing Your Leadership Potential One Skill at a Time. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Reprinted with permission from the OSU Leadership Center, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, (614) 292-3114, http://leadershipcenter.osu.edu.

Coaching Call To Action

Are you aware of the attitude you bring to encounters with others? Before you enter a room, start a meeting or pick up the phone, ask yourself, what is my attitude right now? Am I providing the space for growth, creative ideas and success or am I constricting, forcing, and deflating those around me? You get to choose which attitude you bring to the table.

Gift Certificates Available

Looking for a unique gift for a friend, colleague or family member? Giving the gift of coaching partners the recipient with a professional coach with real world experience.  Your gift provides one-on-one coaching to help them sift through their conflicting priorities and demands, determine what’s most important and take action.  The coaching will help them focus, gain clarity, problem solve, and get results.  What better gift is there to give someone you care about!

Customized coaching packages available. Please email Andrea@CoachAndrea.com for additional information.

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Coach Andrea’s Intro

Ah, December! The time of holiday cheer and forecasting, budgeting, assessing, and completing your year end goals. The pressure is on. This week’s Tip by Simon Tyler reminds us of the benefit of taking time for a simple meditation and the steps to do it. Deep breath in and out and count 1…

Quote of the Week

“If you neglect to recharge a battery, it dies. And if you run full speed ahead without stopping for water, you lose momentum to finish the race.”
~ Oprah Winfrey

Simple Meditation for the Busy Leader

by Simon Tyler

Living in Coachland, as I do, meditation is a much talked about technique for relaxing the mind and accessing more of one’s hidden potential. For years, I resisted the concept of meditation as requiring incense, a cross legged posture and Tibetan bowls, to which I was skeptical and under-resourced.

What I have learnt though is the power of simply STOPPING for even the shortest period of time. Brain research suggests body time to be 1/16th the speed of mind time, so it is absolutely not surprising that we can get utterly entangled in multiple thinking, loosing focus and, often serious fatigue.

Simple meditation is just that. It doesn’t have to have all the associated articles, although they will of course enhance the experience. It is about stopping the conscious activity for as little as 2 minutes.

Here’s a way to introduce simple meditation into your schedule this week:

• Breathe in and out naturally but slowly. Count up to 10 (sets of an inhale and an exhale), then count back down to 1.

• Just concentrate on your breathing, nothing else, let the thoughts come and go (go back to counting the breathing).

That’s it!

The busier you are the more difficult this challenge will be, but the greater the impact you will experience.

To astound yourself with what this stopping process can cause, repeat at the same time each day for a week (get your mind and body used to the time and place).

Keep it simple,
Simon

PS – I now love incense, still can’t sit cross legged and haven’t bought Tibetan bowls yet.

Simon Tyler is one of the world’s leading business coaches. His work simplifies the lives of business leaders and owners. He is an incisive consultant, inspirational writer, provocative public speaker and master facilitator. To learn more about Simon, visit http://simontyler.com.

Coaching Call To Action

Today, my morning pace was starting to get frenetic. So, I thought, what the heck, I’ll try Simon’s suggestion for two minutes. I caught myself before I set my timer and just closed my eyes and started breathing. It was a lovely gift to myself. Calming. I easily was able to pick up where I left off and with more energy. Will you try taking breathing breaks (simple meditation) this week? What difference does it make for you?

Gift Certificates Available

Looking for a unique gift for a friend, colleague or family member? Giving the gift of coaching partners the recipient with a professional coach with real world experience.  Your gift provides one-on-one coaching to help them sift through their conflicting priorities and demands, determine what’s most important and take action.  The coaching will help them focus, gain clarity, problem solve, and get results.  What better gift is there to give someone you care about!

Customized coaching packages available. Please email Andrea@CoachAndrea.com for additional information.

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Coach Andrea’s Intro

Now that this week’s elections are over here in Massachusetts, it’s interesting to think about what candidates did during their campaign to garner attention and votes. It was clear that they changed the voice inside their head from saying “no” to “what the heck”. In some cases this worked and in some cases it backfired. But, we all know that unless you try, (make the sales call, make the request, push yourself) you’ll never know if you could have succeeded. This week Michael Neill elaborates on this point using the Clinton campaign as an example. See the power of moving past your inner gatekeeper.

Quote of the Week

“To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.”
~ Elbert Hubbard

A Simple Shift To Create Possibility

by Michael Neill

I was once speaking with the personal assistant of one of my most influential clients. A large part of her job is to be the “gatekeeper” – the ultimate guardian of her boss’ time and schedule.

But when I asked her how often she actually had to “keep the gate”, she said that it was surprising to her how seldom people really tried to get past her and speak directly with her boss. At first, I thought that was odd, because I know a lot of people want things from this client.

And then I realized that wasn’t so odd at all. Because normally the gatekeeper inside us stops us way before we get to the gatekeeper outside us.

How many times do you stop yourself from asking?

How often do you talk yourself out of even looking into something or checking out a possibility because of that voice inside your head saying things like “Gee, they must get bombarded with things like this all the time”, or “that’s never going to work” or “there’s no point in even trying – they’re just going to say no”? We all have that voice – and yet some people aren’t stopped by it. What is it that allows them to move forward while the rest of us hold back?

Years ago, James Carville and Paul Begala were managing the presidential campaign of a then relatively unknown Governor from Arkansas named William Jefferson Clinton. They recognized that the only chance they had to make headway coming from the back of a very competitive field was if they changed the normal way of doing things.

In traditional political campaigns, the default response to any newly proposed initiative is “no”.

In a bizarre twist on “first, do no harm”, the only ideas that get through the screening process are the very small percentage that are either completely generic or on rare occasions, undeniably brilliant. While this does indeed result in a kind of damage limitation, it also results in ideas that don’t make that much difference to a campaign or in the world.

Since Clinton was never going to win with a traditional campaign, his team decided to do something kind of unique up until that point in politics. They decided to change the default response to “yes”. Instead of new ideas having to make it through layers of hierarchical bureaucracy before being approved, the new policy was essentially that any idea that had not been completely shot down by 9am was OK to run with.

This wasn’t an “anything goes” policy, and a number of eccentric, dodgy, and downright idiotic ideas didn’t make it through. But whereas most campaigns might try 2 or 3 different things in a month, the Clinton campaign was trying that many new things each day. And in the space of less than a year, he went from being a complete outsider that nobody believed had a chance to becoming the President of the United States of America.

While you may not want to become the next President, you can still benefit from making this simple shift in your own life. So as an experiment this week, flip your inner default switch from “no” to “yes” – from “what’s the point?” to “what the heck?”

Even if that voice inside your head turns out to be mostly right and things don’t work out and people do say “no” to your requests, you only have to be wrong two or three times to make tremendous progress on your seemingly impossible dreams. And if you don’t start moving past your inner gatekeeper, you’re probably not going to get very far in the outside world.

Have fun, learn heaps, and “just say ‘yes’!”

Copyright 2010 Michael Neill, bestselling author of You Can Have What You Want, and Supercoach: 10 Secrets to Transform Anyone’s Life. All rights reserved – Read more tips at http://www.geniuscatalyst.com

Coaching Call To Action

For the first half of the week notice: How many times do you stop yourself from asking?

For the second half of the week: Make the requests.

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Coach Andrea’s Intro

Today’s Coaching Tip is applicable to business owners and the people they manage. If you want a stronger organization, have your managers fight for their ideas. It makes them stronger, more thoughtful and more valuable. If you are a manager pitching your boss, know that “no” is part of your test for growth. Sheds a whole new light on the situation.

Quote of the Week

“Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.“
~ Author Samuel Johnson

Go Along With The No

by John Baldoni

Organizations are made stronger by people lobbying for what they believe in. We need managers with backbone to stand up for what they believe, otherwise they are simply ticket punchers, or yes people who prefer to roll with the tide. Some managers simply say no the first time to every proposal that comes their way, not because they are negative or contrary, but because they want to test the mettle of the person proposing the idea. They, like General Eisenhower, understand that “it’s not the size of the dog that matters, but rather the size of the dog in the fight.” If you want it, fight for it, and in the process show us what you and your idea or project can do for the organization.

Few of us will get many points for giving up. “Defeating those negative instincts that are out to defeat us is the difference between winning and losing,” said Olympic athlete and civil rights pioneer, Jesse Owens. “And we face that battle every day of our lives.” Perseverance and persistence for the right issue and the right cause is a matter of leadership (Baldoni, p. 165).

Baldoni, J. (2010). Lead Your Boss: The Subtle Art of Managing Up. New York: AMACOM

Reprinted with permission from the OSU Leadership Center, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, (614) 292-3114, http://leadershipcenter.osu.edu.

Coaching Call To Action

Where are you giving in too easily? What would happen if you were more persistent? This week choose an issue of importance to you and stick to your guns more than your norm. What happens?

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Quote of the Week

“You have to expect things of yourself before you do them.”
Michael Jordan

Expect to Win

by Stephen R. Covey and Rebecca R. Merrill

According to Greek mythology, Pygmalion, the king of Cyprus, carved an ivory statue of the ideal woman. He named her Galatea. She was so beautiful that Pygmalion fell in love with her, and because of his deep desire and will for her to be real, with the help of the goddess Venus, he was actually able to bring her to life, and they lived happily ever after.

This ancient myth has come to serve as a metaphor that illustrates the power of expectation. While this phenomenon is commonly referred to as the ‘Pygmalion effect,’ it’s also been called the Galatea effect, the Rosenthal effect, self-fulfilling prophecy, positive self-expectancy, confidence, optimism, or just plan faith. In modern times, it’s been made popular through the musical My Fair Lady, a modern Pygmalion story in which a professor’s expectations become the catalyst that inspires the transformation of a Cockney flower girl into a lady.

The principle is simply this: We tend to get what we expect – both from ourselves and others. When we expect more, we tend to get more, when we expect to get less, we tend to get less (Covey, 2008, p. 121-122).

From: Covey, Stephen R. and Merrill, Rebecca (2007). The speed of trust: the one thing that changes everything. New York: Free Press.

Reprinted with permission from the OSU Leadership Center, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, (614) 292-3114, http://leadershipcenter.osu.edu.

Coaching Call to Action

This reminds me of something I heard this week, “what you appreciate, appreciates.” When you acknowledge who is around you, shifts occur. This week set your expectations and intentions on what you want from work, from a relationship, from a peer, from yourself. Set the bar wherever you want it and expect it can be. Then push it a little higher. Let me know what happens.

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