What in the World is Life Coaching, Will it Make Me Feel Better?

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What is life Coaching?

Well, Coaching has been around for a long time. It has been the way athletic success comes to the players. I coach business, life, career, students, and ADHD. The basic information (process) is exactly the same thing. Sounds ridiculous, but it is strategy, tactics, practice and play. So first we have to get to know you, you are the most important person in this process. Then we roll into what do we have to do to accomplish the goal that you gave me when we talked.

I have had 4 coaches in my life and for me the structure of it gave me an opportunity to circle back around and check to see if I was headed in the right direction. See if the goals I had set in front of myself going to be achievable or did they need to be broken down in a different format. When you work with a coach it is structure, accountability, strategy, and then you go out and test your theory to see if in the real world it works.

What is your approach to Coaching like?

Thank you for asking, I am a person that looks at from you first and what you are trying to accomplish second. Meaning we look at three profiles to figure out your abilities, your interests, and how you work. Whether a person is looking for a career or trying to figure out how to manage their company if we go out and try to use someone else’s personality, someone else’s strength it is a real reach for people. So it is much easier to figure out who you are and get you in a “Lane” for your future. A perfect example is: If you are head of operations and you need an assistant you might want to consider your personality first. If you are strict, you might want to choose someone that is more negotiable and if you are more charismatic and flexible you might want to choose someone that is stricter to hold the group more accountable.

Any one whether they are running a company or they are in the right job can figure out what their personality is so they can surround themselves with the right people to augment what they want to accomplish and that is in all worlds. That is home, that is volunteer work, or jobs whether you are an individual contributor or whether you are a manager.

Thank you for joining us, we will be doing more videos and I look forward to having you.

What Exactly is Career Coaching, Will it Help Me Professionally?

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What exactly does Career Coaching look like?

We are made up of ourselves (talents, interests and Skills) and Career Coaching looks like figuring out those things out first and then figuring out how to move into a job that is basically those things. Most people feel like it is impossible; neither thing is impossible, often when you make a career move you would move closer to the things you want.

I will give you a personal example. I left management and took a contract and contracted 4.5 years as a recruiter. Then opened this business. That happens to people all the time. Career pathing is not a short-term process. It is finding the direction, broadening how you think about it and then moving toward it. Part of how we look at it is “What % of your job do you dislike?” So if you dislike 70% of your job you may be very uncomfortable in the situation. If you can make the next move and reduce the activities that you don’t like to 50% of the job and then the ultimate goal is to continue to reduce the % of your job that you dislike. The goal is to have a job that only includes dislikes to 20% to 30% of the job.

It sounds like a dream but people do it all the time. You have to know where you are going. Your next job might be 30% better and at the same time career coaching includes improving in your current job. Many people make poor decisions when they have disengaged from their current job because they feel guilty for not producing their best work.

So the first thing I ask people to do is to recommit to the job that they are in so we can look at that job to see the next move. It proves that you really don’t like the job or when you reorganize your job and manage your career in the situation you are already in lots of people stay or push out their move to accomplish 3 or 4 more goals in their current job. My coach actually did that once when I said that I was going to make a move. She felt that I needed to train at another national conference before I moved to another job. You need to stay another year. Lot’s of times that happens to people: sometimes it is time to go, sometimes it is staying another year and at times it is waiting 5 years.

Thank you for joining us, we will be doing more videos and I look forward to having you.

Recruitment Coaching Richmond VA

A Guide to Creating Internal Structure Without an Office Environment

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In a situation like this where you are stuck at home without office structure to guide you. What are tips for creating an internal structure that you can live your life around?

The reality is the most successful structure that I see is external structure meaning can we put in place some more deadlines. If we were living a more normal life we would invite someone over for dinner and we would know we would clean our house before they came. Or we would plan a trip and all of our paper work would be done before we walk out the door. All of those things are gone now, I still think some of the keys to structure are body doubling and either blocking time or rotating thru projects.


I will explain. In the situation we are in today we could actually body double and block 4 hours to get something done and just be there to get things done. I hire body doubles sometimes and they might actually be studying the other room but someone is in the house and that makes me settle down and get the work done. So one option is to make an agreement with friends and they are like a body double. The Second one is to have a group of friends that you need to report back to regarding what you are trying to accomplish. The Third one is to have a plan for some kind of meet up for getting some exercise so the work needs to be done before you meet. (Another option with boring things is to shift between exercise and the activities that are not interesting.


About getting things done, I have two ways I encourage people to accomplish the activity at hand. I have to block big blocks of time. If you ask me to do something that is 40 minutes every day I really cannot do it that way. I can block a half of a day on one day and get it all done. Even when people what to study something or learn something that they have not been exposed to before I tell them to block the time once a week and then they will at least get started on the project.

Years ago I would do the boring things, 4 different things at a time. That was housework, expense reports, cooking and something that had to be turned in but was not creative. And what I would do is flip from one thing to another every 15 minutes. So today we would have multiple monitors and the reason for flipping was so my brain could think about boring task I had to do next and I could get it done much more quickly with the variety. That is another option, I also set a deadline for getting 4 or 5 of those things done in 2.5 hours. I could meet the deadline because there was a little bit of competitiveness in it.

Hope this helps, we will be doing other subjects as we move along on a regular basis. Hope you will join us again.

A Couple of Key Tips on the Interview Prep.

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This is what I like to do for people preparing for an interview.  

Prepare 16 hours:  First they are shocked when I ask them to prepare for 16 hours for an interview.  I want them to know the people that they are going to be with, I want them to know their skills and their experience cold and I want them to know the company and the industry.  If you have all the information then you will be very calm.  

Research and practice:  Reviewing and answering behavioral questions, looking at the personalities of those who will be in the interview with you.  Even if you have to join linked In so you can see all of their profiles and review all the PR and documentation about the company and the industry.  Check out Glassdoor, Linkedin, Press, etc.  

What makes you uncomfortable in an interview:  Being clear about the things you are not comfortable with, that is one of the key subjects.  So people have things happen to them along the way in their career, maybe they were unemployed for 4 months and they think that it is a huge gap.  If you can talk about it and feel comfortable with what you are telling so it becomes about you and your presentation.  If something has happened you are going to go straight out with some information but not a lot unless it is asked for by the interviewer because you don’t want that experience to be the focus of the interview.  

Thank you for joining us, we will be doing more videos and I look forward to having you.

Anxiety Stops Me From Achieving My Goals

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I struggle with starting projects because the I am afraid that I am not doing it right or it is not going to work out.

Lots of people feel that way. American Management Association recently released an article that talked about entrepreneurs. 35 % of the entrepreneurs are dyslexic in the US and about 20% of the entrepreneurs in the UK. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/business/worldbusiness/05iht-dyslexia.4.8602036.html

Maybe the UK does not tell you how to do things; in our corporate structure policies and procedures are so tightly laid out that if you can accomplish the task a different way and you have found another way to do it, you may not be allowed to. That means the person that has dyslexia is going to leave the company and start their own business and do it their way.

Now you are working remotely, you might actually be able to try some ways of doing things differently than you have done before. It would be a chance to see what it is like if you are not in a system where people are managing you so tightly.

For ADHD people with distractibility. Distractibility in the DSM description was argued about in the original name for ADHD. Some of the Doctors wanted to call it Attention Inconsistency. I actually think it should have been Inconsistency because of ADHD people like me; one day I can write the book and the next day I can barely find the page or one day I can run the company and the next day I don’t seem to be able to find my way to the bathroom. The Neuro-Psychologist that tested me said “ No one can figure out whether you are lucky or smart because the inconsistency is so obvious.”

Another thing I encourage people to do is to do it wrong the first time and count on starting it over. Get an hour into a project and see if it is working. If it is working, that’s great. If it is not working throw it away and start again. Go ahead and start then you can see whether you are accomplishing the goal. I always count on the first 1.5 hours being a throw away for me. I don’t have as difficult a time as some people do getting started. If I get started and it is a throw away then I am on to the right answer. Sometimes that is an easier way to accomplish thing; being perfect is not in the game for most humans so I would encourage you to stop thinking that you can actually be perfect. I want you to be able to accomplish the goal. I encourage you to try different ways of doing things and not to feel like you have to do it the perfect way when you get started. I would like to see everyone find their own way of accomplishing things, it is a lot easier.

I hope this helped, we will be doing other subjects as we move along on a regular basis. I look forward to seeing you again.