The Career You'll Love

As you might know, I was in London this week attending the followup class to the Coaching Fundamentals class I took back in September.  That class was, in essence, the high level overview of the process, so the last few days were much more deep study and practice around some key areas:

• Core principles: Trust the client, partnership, possibility, accept/blend/create, and presence
• Emotional intelligence
• Articulating core values
• Core skills: listening, questioning, reflecting, and supporting

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How many times do you know what the right thing is to do, but lack the courage to act upon it?  Humans are wonderful at rationalizing, at finding creative excuses to avoid doing what’s hard.  Myself included, of course.

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I had a chance to attend a fantastic workshop this morning, led by the incomparable Gus Lee.  Never heard of him?  He’s a leader in challenging people to find and develop a core of character in their lives.

Read more on my Partnering in Possibilities blog »

There’s more than a little fuzziness around the concept of “soft skills.”  “Hard skills” are thought of as those technical abilities which often lend their name to an entire profession:  designing, architecture, repairing, nursing, and so on.  These are easy to identify because there’s a specific body of knowledge around each, and they’re the kind of things that our schools teach.

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In setting up my new business, one of the toughest challenges so far is picking a company name.  I’ve been (kind of) working on that for a month now, but have really been putting concerted effort behind it for the last week.

Why is it so difficult?

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I’ve noticed that a lot of people tend to shy away from being held accountable.  They seem to worry about the penalties which might be imposed if something goes wrong.  But that’s the wrong thing to focus on.

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As a manager, if you focus on the employee’s agenda when you’re coaching him or her, how do you ensure that the company’s agenda is being addressed?  Let’s focus on this balancing act for a minute.

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Here’s an article I know you’ll enjoy, written by Steve Pavlina:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2009/10/you-vs-the-cubicle/

Given that we can have so much of our work life sucked away by the power of those cubicle walls, why do we give it so much power over us?

Some really thoughtful questions there.

I hinted that a big decision was in the works for me, which is this:  I’m no longer hunting for a job.  Instead, I’m now building my coaching business.  What surprises me is how much of a difference this makes in my life.

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I just got done giving a presentation to a large number of project managers in HP, titled “Coaching Employees on Tough Issues.” How incredibly cool!

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