On January 14, we launched our fourth cohort of Transformative Coaching Essentials! (www.mclarencoaching.com/coach-training) We spent all of 2022 finding the people who would become tomorrow’s coaches. Change agents. Champions. Leaders. Facilitators. We said we would have a full training. It was a big project. It was a scary project. We have a full training!! Here is what I learned:
- It takes a team. For the life of me I try and try to do things on my own. I have this belief that it all falls to me. “It’s my program and I have to do all the work.” Even though I have so many coaches around me who want to help. Even though I say “yes” to their help, I notice I often do not ask for what I most need from them. There were times this last year that I didn’t think we would make it, that I doubted myself, and in those times I sometimes reached out to others. Those times I reached out, though, were the times I felt SO much better, being a part of a team. Allowing others to support me.
Not only did the people on my team support me emotionally, many of the people in our current program were brought in by someone on the team!
Asking for help; for support; for what you need. Do you struggle with this?
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Belief doesn’t matter. Okay, this might seem controversial, but I find it is true. Yes I subscribe to Napoleon Hill’s (paraphrased) edict that, “what the mind can believe and conceive, one can achieve,” but that is not the only way. There were many times that I did not “believe” we could fill up this training. It was outside my comfort zone, more than I had done in the past. There were times I had a lot of self-doubt. But we did it! So NOW I believe it! But I surprised myself. And this is because down deep some part of me wondered if we really could pull it off. I think more than my belief that we could do this, what kept me going was actually my commitment (see #3).
Of course the opposite is true as well – if I thoroughly believed we could not do it, I would not have tried. So I guess what I learned is to have some curiosity about it. And to jump in not knowing. Staying true to my commitment.
Where did you do something that you did not totally believe you could!? This is how we change our beliefs.
- Because I said so. This is one of the bigger learnings for me. One of the staff coaches this year asked me as we were working on filling up our training, “Why are you so committed to having the training be full?” My first answer is that I believe in coaching and I want to offer the program to as many people as possible so they become the people they want to be and in turn go out in the world and support others in their growth and transformation.
And yet, we would have been fine and happy if our training had been ½ full. In the end, we will work with as many people as show up!
But also I stayed true to it, “because I said so.” Because I said I would. I call this commitment. It works for me to declare a scary goal. And to stick with it no matter what, even when I am discouraged, even when it seems like it is not working. I get the most learning from this way of relating to my big and frightening declared outcomes – I said I would and I will.
I wanted to share. And to ask what you learned from your last big scary thing?
