coaching

Specific
Actually, it’s important to set your goals with your “senses.” Another leg of the “Well-Formed Outcome” model is the use of specific language when defining your goals. During the recent training that I conducted at the Leadership School for sergeants in the Baltimore Police Department, having the participants get specific with their goals was one of my biggest challenges. I got responses on short and long term goals like: “I want to get a government job.” “I want to retire and get a different career.” “I want to have the best squad in the city.”

Vague?
There are several problems with being this vague. One is that you have no guideposts or markers to let you know if you are moving closer to or further away from your goal. It’s important to aim for the bullseye and not just in the general direction of the target. Without enough specificity, there is also the danger that you will end up getting things that you don’t want.

Senses
This is the time to bring in good questions and our senses. We experience the world through our five senses. To create strong internal experiences, we also bring our senses into play. We remember things that have a strong emotional impact. Our “servo-mechanism” (as Maxwell Maltz called it) is strengthened by sensory information. So, when setting a goal, ask yourself what it will look like, feel like, and sound like when you have achieved it. Use these same sensory markers to determine if you are moving closer to your goal.

Your Story
The best writers use sensory language to make their stories or information come alive. When you are writing the story of your life, make sure that you use all of your senses so that you can hit your mark. The more you live in the world of your senses, the more the world will come to life for you.

Write to me with any questions. Please retweet this post if you found it interesting/helpful.

Tomorrow, I’ll pick up the thread of “Well-Formed Outcomes.” Notre Dame is playing, so I thought I’d just put up a short post about something that’s been bugging me.

Post Length
Before I talk about the lie of personal development, I just want to note something. I’m a big fan of Seth Godin’s blog and the 300 Words A Day Blog. My intention is to blog more frequently with shorter, more cogent, and pithier posts. Let’s see how it goes!

Personal Development
The concept of personal development presumably carries with it the burden of improving who you are. You need to add things to the existing model of you. Rather than adding things, how about striping things away? How about limiting your media-created desires? How about getting rid of the clothes and “toys” that other people convinced you that you needed? How about getting rid of the “friends” who do nothing but vampirically suck out your energy?

Trust
maybe if we trusted our bodies, our intuition, and our experience, we might find that we have everything that we needed. It’s less about what we should be doing and more about fully focusing on our current experience. As Timothy Gallwey talked about, we need to find a game worth playing and surround ourselves with people who will challenge us to bring out our God-given gifts. Anything else is someone else’s trance.

Are you engaged in personal development right now? What are the emotional and material things that you could give up that might show a better Return On Investment?

Oh, and BTW, I’d love it if you subscribed. Just fill in your name and email in the form. You will hear my dulcet tones on a relaxation audio and receive the personal development classic, (ironic, I know) “An Iron Will” as a an ebook.

GOALS
Many of us have been instructed on the importance of setting goals. Written goals are a powerful way to give our dreams a deadline. The business world often uses what are called “S.M.A.R.T.” goals. This stands for: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timed.

WELL-FORMED OUTCOMES
This is a good start for personal or professional goals. As an NLP practitioner, I prefer the use of “Well-Formed Outcomes.” Well-formed outcomes (WFO’s) include the use of sensory feedback to make sure you’re staying on track. WFO’s are stated in the positive, are in your control, are specific, define the context, examine the resources you have and those that you need, and makes sure it is “ecological” by examining the impact on other people and things once you achieve the goal.

STATED IN THE POSITIVE
Most of us are clear about what we don’t want. We’re more concerned about moving away from pain than we are about moving toward pleasure. It has also been my experience that we usually get what we focus on. It’s not helpful to have an outcome that states: “I want to leave this horrible job.” Focusing on the negative doesn’t move us closer to our goal and there is evidence that this negative thinking can harm our health. This is another reason why getting rid of a bad habit is so difficult. “The more we resist, the more it persists.” It is much more effective to create a positive new habit and it is more effective to state a positive intention for your goals.

When you come up with a negative, ask yourself, “What do I want instead?” When you come up with this answer, make sure you don’t “should” all over yourself. The “Neuro” part of NLP means that whether you use “should, can, need to, will, or want,” each will have a different effect on your thoughts, emotions, and physiology.

Give this part of the WFO a try. Come up with a positive outcome for your job or personal life and we’ll look at the other parts of the Well-Formed Outcome later this week.

I’ve been gone and I apologize! I have a good reason. I’ve spent two weeks with JFK High School at their football camp. I’ve previously mentioned that I am the volunteer strength/conditioning coach as well as the running backs coach. It’s been quite an education. My high school football experience at Collegiate (about 35 years ago) was not adequate preparation for this experience.

The first week was 10 hour days in the rain with young men who are coming back from a 1 and 8 season record. There is a completely new new coaching staff. The second week consisted of 14 hour days in the heat at Monticello, New York. I was reminded why I was there when one of the boys told me he didn’t know Monticello was part of New York since New York consisted of “the three boroughs.”

We’ve got players who dream of stardom in the NFL and players like MK who joined the team in this, his senior year, because he wanted “to do something fun, stay out of trouble, and not be like my gangster brothers.” They don’t have a list of colleges they want to attend, they haven’t taken the SAT, most of them would be the first in their families to attend college, and they don’t have a lot of role models for success – inside or or out of school.

The nights for the coaches consisted of film study, chewing tobacco, a LOT of profanity and sausage sandwiches at 2am. I did the film study and sausage sandwiches ( and I still lost two pounds! – perhaps I can write “The Football Coaches Diet?”). My 9 year-old son was a trooper and witness to this “man thing.”  Times like this make me even more happy that I left the professional lie that I was living.  During the day, I got to practice what I had learned from books, DVD’s, “Remember the Titans,” “Friday Night Lights” and YouTube about what it means to be a football coach. My preparation didn’t prepare me to talk the boys through their tears of pain and frustration, the need for my Reiki skills, the need for mediation and bouncer skills, and the fact that the Emotional Freedom Technique would be accepted and welcomed by tough teens from the Bronx.

I have a new respect for the game and its potential to develop and reveal character.
To play at a high level requires incredible amounts of self-discipline and focus. There is a need to surrender your ego to accomplish a greater good. If you want to succeed, you must be persistent and learn to deal with adversity. At its best (and please don’t tell my fellow coaches that I said this) it’s learning how to trust and to love.

The boys at Kennedy work so hard to improve at the game. Their cynicism would melt from their game faces and an audience would gather when I or any of the other coaches talked about our lives and our journey to manhood. They were so kind to my son – teaching him the “proper” way to do a “soul handshake;” correcting his form when he threw the football; listening to his plans to breed mice; thanking him for his help with drills and providing water; and in one case, a player sharing that, like my son, he was also named for a character from Norse mythology. In his case, his mother expecting a girl, named him after Thor’s daughter! This revelation was overheard and he was the source of teasing but he felt the cost of the disclosure was worth the benefit of gaining common ground. So many of these young men are incredible and deserve much more than life has planned for them. I hope I’m able to tilt at this windmill for at least this season.

I should be doing more of the work on my bill-paying coaching business but right now, this volunteer coach thing is working for me. So on my way to being a rich and famous leadership and life coach, I’ve found something else to keep me in the ranks of the army that continues to fight “The Long Defeat.”

This is point #3 in Nonprofit Leadership.

I am a member of the Founders Club.  I’ve started three schools and I’m proud of the changes I was able to make in people’s lives.  In two instances I made the decision to leave rather than gain Pyrrhic victories in a battle of egos.  I’m not sure I would have wanted to work for me.  I was so mission-focused that the touchy-feely stuff  some adults seemed to need from me just wasn’t there.  That was me.  There are a host of reasons you should run screaming from a job offer to replace any founder who intends to remain active in the organization they started.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Every institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.”  That can become a good thing or a bad thing.  I have experienced both with founders I have encountered.  One thing I do know is that I will never work for/with another founder and I would not recommend it for anyone who is looking to make a difference in their nonprofit work.  If you are bold enough to venture forth anyway, get a contract and factor in some sort of additional compensation into your contract for the pain you will inevitably experience.

The qualities that were responsible for launching the founder’s vision can often end up being the same qualities for which the founder eventually becomes despised.  A pioneering spirit turns into ego-centrism and dictatorial decision-making.  The board of directors is often ineffective in this kind of a setting.  When new board members, not under the thrall of the founder, try to make changes, the scene is set for a terminal battle.  The only hope at this point is probably an organizational coach with the skills of King Solomon.

If you end up working for one of these people, know that a lot of your time will involve as much ego-stroking as client work.