Here’s how to improve your ability to coach yourself and others!
Step 1: Start with ambition and commitment to self-development.
Taking responsibility for your own professional development is both sensible and prudent. Acting this way demonstrates healthy self-regard.
Today everyone must understand the importance of continuous self development and make a commitment to actively do it.
In today’s workplace having access to a great coach is a must. But having a coach is not, by itself, sufficient to insure ongoing success and progress. Taking charge of your own self-development makes the difference. Taking charge is critical to staying relevant.
Remember: Coaches become great when they work with people who are open to change and want to be successful, evolve, and grow.
Learn more from Marshall Goldsmith
If you want to protect yourself and others from the “cruel winds” of the marketplace, you must do two things:
For Yourself:
- Make a commitment to improve your professional and interpersonal skills.
- Schedule time every week specifically for this purpose.
For others:
- Make self-development and self-coaching resources easily accessible.
- Share websites, articles, podcasts and other information you have found helpful with colleagues to help them grow and develop.
Step 2: Focus on the skills needed for success in today’s marketplace
QwikCoach offers two free eBooks to understand what it takes to succeed in the workplace — Prepare and Thrive and Win at Work. Together they outline what’s needed to perform well in today’s always challenging workplace.
To learn more about QwikCoach, download our free eBooks with additional insights.
Here’s how: Complete the short sign-up form in the middle of our Home Page. (If you’re already a part of our email list you’ve already received our eBooks.)
Mastering key skills and using them every day is vital, but not enough. Remaining relevant professionally is also important. Organizations and individuals play significant roles in supporting all of these activities. Both must work to identify and share great sources to help people stay current, informed, and productive.
Simply providing a set of helpful links in an easily accessible site is a great start. Providing this type of support is important because even if you assume that some people are able and willing to stay current, many are not. Most need help cutting through the clutter of the internet and getting to what will really help them.
Bottom line . . .
Always assume people are on overload and need support. Let people know it’s their responsibility to self-coach. Provide them with helpful resources to ensure their success and increase engagement.
If you are an individual looking for the right professional development opportunities, seek advice from those you know are keeping up and also growing professionally. Easy to find, they are the winners who always find time to grow, learn, and perform at the highest levels. While everyone at work is overwhelmed — or thinks they are — a brief request for help will be accepted even by the busiest colleagues. Reaching out to others will also help you to expand your internal network and strengthen ties among colleagues.
Step 3: Use an effective coaching model.
There are many effective coaching models in use today. Each allows anyone who wants to coach them self (or others) to stay focused on what they need to develop, change, learn about, or practice more aggressively. We at QwikCoach recommend our proprietary model — the DARETM to Succeed coaching model.
Step 4: Use available tools like QwikCoach to jumpstart your self-coaching experience.
The gold standard for coaching is still one-to-one live coaching. However, with insufficient numbers of coaches to go around more and more self-coaching will be needed. But how?
Image having a coach you could access on any device. Today you can. An online coach such as QwikCoach provides an extensive set of practical coaching resources filled with ideas and starting points for growth, development, and discovery.
QwikCoach allows anyone to successfully engage in self-coaching. It does this by providing well researched coaching content focused on needed workplace competencies. Content includes proprietary tips, techniques, practice ideas, and much more. With QwikCoach you also get a vast array of curated resources from a wide range of external thought leaders and other credible sources.
And, as managers or other professional coaches appear in your everyday work life you’ll be better prepared to benefit from their support too because you’ve already experienced the benefits that come with coaching.
And finally — appreciate this:
Widespread self-coaching isn’t going to happen without personal commitment and organizational effort, energy, and focused support. Creating an environment where people are encouraged to grow and develop through self-discovery will take real initiative by forward-thinking organizations and leaders.
But it will happen!
Too much is at stake and too much can be achieved when self-coaching AND coaching others becomes the norm.