Given my occupation as a coach to leaders in organisations, it will come as no surprise for me to say that coaching is a valuable part of developing your career mastery.
Sometimes we all need an external ear or voice to hear what’s going on in our world and share some strategic questions to help us see the way forward.
However, this may surprise you… I’m also a big advocate for self-coaching. Often we don’t need an external coach, we just need to sit, reflect and ask ourselves some good questions.
In particular, here are my top two reasons you should be coaching yourself:
- You know yourself better than anyone; and
- You most likely know what you need to do to achieve your outcome.
And if you need a third reason – you’re already doing it and have been your whole life.
Lately, I’ve been sharing about our upcoming Influential Presenting program.
I’m really looking forward to this because it’s been designed around two things that I value highly.
The first is practice. In my view, too much of organisational training is theory based and not enough is practicing real skills in real situations with real people.
In the same way that you can’t really learn how to ride a bike by reading about, the chances of you being a better presenter from learning presentation theory are also limited.
The second aspect of the program that I like is the use of self-coaching - Rather than everyone in the program being told to work on the same things by the facilitator, you will map your own personal journey and choose your own specific areas to focus on.
To give you an example of how this can be used, to improve your ‘Influential Presenting’ this week do a little self-coaching and reflect on the following:
- Notice how many ‘little presentations’ you give this week. Count them.
- Notice how many times you aim to influence someone this week. Count them.
- Notice how you show up or present yourself to people during the day.
- Notice how effective you are at pitching ideas to others.
- Notice how effective you are at making change happen. (Simply reflecting on these questions will be one change you can claim.)
- At the end of each day rate yourself from zero to five on how effective you were at presenting and influencing.
- Then, from your review, look at what you could do to improve.
- Next, pick one action to take (one only) to improve your performance. Do this for the next 24 hours and notice what impact this has.
I’d love to hear how your self-coaching works this week – hit reply and let me know.
And if you want to be a more influential leader in your presentations and want some support and practice consider our two-day Influential Presenting program in January.
Mike
PS: Joining us tomorrow for lunch, books and perhaps a glass of wine? Our special event is a double book launch with prizes, people to meet and lots of fun.