Coaching Supports Your Goal Achievement
An old wise man once said that many people may really want to learn new things, but have the problem of not wanting to be taught what they need to learn. The truth of the matter is that every one of us must keep learning. That is the way that we will keep growing, developing and improving in one specific area, or in different areas of life.
No matter your current state or your personal status, there lies ahead of you bigger dreams to live out, and greater heights to scale. And, most importantly, inside of you resides the most incredible potential to attain those heights. But, you must be willing to learn more. Getting a coach or getting involved in a coaching engagement is a hugely valuable investment in this regard.
So, how does coaching specifically help you? Coaching helps you by enabling and increasing your power of self awareness. This is particularly by making you more aware of your unique abilities and potentials to grow, as well as the possibilities and opportunities that are there for you to utilise in reaching your goals.
Furthermore, coaching helps you to build the required capacity to set, achieve and fast-track your goals. This is while also ensuring that you have by your side the experienced, loyal, committed and professional coach working alongside you as a supportive partner, urging, challenging and encouraging you along the journey.
The greatest benefit of having a coach in this regard is that, beyond holding you accountable for goal achievement, your coach never lets you suffer the pain and despair of getting stuck or giving up when you encounter ‘roadblocks’. This is usually the problem that many people have along their journey of life, which makes them unable to achieve life, career, business, financial goals and others.
They often don’t have a person like the coach that can be trusted to go along the journey with them, helping to keep them focused, passionate, consistent and accountable. Having a coach by your side in this regard particularly increases your personal awareness and enhances your value-creation capabilities.
The Power of Personal Awareness for Impact Leaders
Personal awareness relates to your level and application of self-knowledge in relation to your purpose, plan and programme, as well as in relation to other people in achieving that purpose. Awareness also relates to your interaction with a specific, spatial and global environment, as you adapt to where you are, and adjust to what can or cannot be controlled or changed.
Personal awareness thus inspires and compels you to ask yourself the critical 
questions about your personal purpose, motives, motivations, goals, expectations and strategies for achieving your goals. The relevant questions are: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going from here? How do I get there? What do I really want here, now and/or the future? A lot of people never stop sometimes or at a critical stage in their life to ask themselves these questions, which will assist in increasing personal awareness and intentionality in life.
The lack of self-awareness denies a person the benefit of proper self-evaluation; self-definition and self-confidence. You should not allow many more days to pass after now before you begin to seriously seek realistic answers to these questions from within you. As a leader and resource manager, you owe it to yourself and others to get to know yourself better. You therefore need to perform a personal “SWOT” analysis on yourself.
For avoidance of doubt, “SWOT” means: Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats. You definitely have some strong points as a person, which need to be developed to the point of excellence. As a human being, you also have certain personal weaknesses that need to be mitigated against. There are of course opportunities in your operating environment to leverage, and certain threats or challenges as well that you must be ready to overcome. What is important is that you must be honest about your true strengths, weaknesses, potentials and fears.
Coaching in this regard becomes almost indispensable in the sense that a good and experienced coach helps and guides you in the course of your coaching engagements to do a few things with your personal SWOT analysis. These include skillfully highlighting and amplifying your unique skills and talents, in further boosting your confidence regarding what you do extremely well, what do you really enjoy doing and areas where you can be most proud of yourself. The 
goal in this regard is to provide you with the excellent basis to build on your strength, turning your strength to excellence.
Conversely, because you are not perfect (no one is perfect), your coach is eager to also help you to appreciate areas of your weaknesses, without playing them up to the point of defeatism and discouragement. It is about understanding for instance where you have clear skills deficits, or certain personal limitations and inhibitions, as well as even what some people may see in you as a weakness. With the support of the coach, you are challenged to face up to these issues and weaknesses, as you are guided to explore and implement mitigation possibilities and be accountable regarding your committed actions in this regard.
The power and benefit of increased personal awareness for you as a leader is that it provides you with a growth mindset, and puts you in a much better frame of mind to continuously seek realistic opportunities to display your special skills, abilities, knowledge, experience and creativity. Obviously, the more opportunities that you have to practice what you learn and know, the better you will become at what you do.
And, with regard to an understating of your weaknesses, you are able to identify the obstacles that either currently stand in your way or could sabotage you in the future. Coaching in this instance empowers you to develop realistic action plans to overcome the possible present and future challenges or obstacles. The key issue is to be honest with yourself and people, as you confidently lead others by vision and inspiration.
Your personal awareness is evidenced by your being convinced that you are in the right place, with the right people, doing the right thing because you have the right goals. It is also being convinced that you have an alternative plan of action if you are not in the right place and with the right people. The keys to true awareness are: The 3C’s. These are your personal Conviction; Commitment; Consistency.
Enhancing Your Leadership Value through Strong Personal Values
Values are sets of personal attributes and/or motivations that are so important to you that you will consistently choose to prioritise in virtually every area of your life. Your personal values reflect how you show up in your life and your specific needs. These values thus relate to the principles that you live by and what you consider important for your self-interest. Some examples of strong personal values for leaders in particular are courage, optimism, credibility, loyalty, commitment, compassion, trust, respect, etc.
Personal values are important driving forces in any individual’s life. They shape the thinking patterns, beliefs, behaviour and actions of people, so that they are self accounting or held accountable by others. Therefore, for a leader, it is very important that people are very clear about your core personal values.
Your personal values in this regard would always enable and direct people to determine, define and promote your values as impactful leader. It is not just because these personal values are important to you, but also because they reveal the key principles and/or standards of behaviour by which you live and 
lead as an exemplary leader. As a result, your personal values will easily a mirror of your leadership value.
Most of what is done and achieved in the course of a coaching engagement is centred around your personal values, which in turn reveals your belief systems. And, coaching is really all about dealing with personal beliefs. The task of coaching is almost always to develop, alter, challenge, reinforce or eliminate beliefs, depending on the situation and the goal of the client.
Coaching in this regard interrogates, and deals with the deeply held personal views and connection of the client with what is believed to be worthy, useful, desirable, intolerable, worthless etc. All of these are based on the beliefs of the client, which are ingrained in his or her personal values.
The relevance of values in leadership coaching is that values provide direction because personal values act like a compass, helping to navigate forward, even when the situation gets rather ‘foggy’. As coaches, being clear on personal and leadership values is the first step to helping leaders to get unstuck and move forward with purpose. There must in this regard be congruency between personal values and actions.
As a leader, you need to evaluate what your values and priorities are. This will depend on what you are ready to spend your time, money, knowledge, energy and talents on. My encouragement to you is that you should seek to create value in, and for people by appreciating the power, potentials and possibilities in people. When you do this truthfully and with the right motive, your own intrinsic value will surely appreciate in their hearts and minds, instead of just in their heads. That is what creates mutual trust and love, both of which are very essential for the sustainability of great relationships.
Ultimately, value appreciates through people, to create increased corporate value and benefits. It thus makes more sense to invest more in people-assets than in physical-assets, because what people see, people do. And what people get, people give. That is why love for people is one of the greatest and most valuable offerings that you can give.
In summary, as a leader, you need to build more value in, and through your people. You must listen to their hearts. True leadership is in this regard building rapport and having the right connection with people. This starts with letting them know that you value them and that you value what they speak from their hearts more than from their heads. Remember that leaders that genuinely love people are usually loved several times over by their people. It all boils down to having and maintaining strong personal values.
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Dr Emmanuel Imevbore is an executive coach, management consultant and business strategist. He is the CEO of International Coaching and Mentoring Institute, a specialist coaching and coach-training organisation. He can be reached by email: emmanuel@ic-mi.com; and WhatsApp: +27 79 259 1768.
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