Life coaches have helped change the lives of thousands of people—stirring them from an incorrect, unfulfilled, and sometimes even destructive life and into a healthier path that aligns with their real interests and goals.
As a business owner, you can learn a lot from the lessons imparted by life coaches and apply them to your management techniques to drive results, and ultimately, bring your business to the next level. Here are eight tips on how to be your own life coach:
Keep a Journal
With all the information that business owners receive every day, it becomes mentally exhausting to keep track of what’s important and what’s not. Observation and recording are two fundamental scientific concepts that not only work wonders in the scientific world, but can also be applied in the business arena.
Keep a journal and write down thoughts you had for the day, such as what went wrong and what could use improving. Take note of ideas that pop into your mind throughout the day and then expand on them later on, after hours. Be as detailed as possible when writing in your journal, and include your emotions. Over the weekend review your notes to determine which ideas are worth carrying over until next week, and which ones should be addressed immediately.
Watch Your Emotions
Life coaches deal with people who are going through a lot of different emotions, from grief and guilt to anxiety and addiction. If you can’t avoid being affected by such negative emotions, you might subconsciously pick them up and have it alter your reasoning and judgment while running your business.
As your own life coach, establish a clear distinction between business matters and personal affairs to isolate the emotions that are needed to do each one competently. Granted, most human emotions are essential to a healthy life, but not all of them have a place in business.
Learn How to Listen
Listening is perhaps the most undervalued skill in the workplace. Entrepreneurs pride themselves on working 60 to 80 hour work weeks or developing highly sophisticated algorithms, but when it comes to listening to even the most straightforward instructions or feedback being relayed by employees, they fail to give a hundred percent.
Keep Moving
Life coaches advocate continuous growth; they know that learning doesn’t stop when you graduate high school or college, but instead, it is a lifelong process that dramatically impacts the personal and professional growth of people. As your own life coach and the CEO of your company, make it a point to learn something new every day.
Use the web and its vast and free resources, such as NLP online learning guides, to educate yourself in your free time without having to attend more demanding coursework from traditional campuses. Read self-help books, as most of them fall under the category of life coaching and lend themselves as an invaluable resource for setting the right objectives and planning.
As a business owner, you may not be actively looking to learn more once you’ve got a firm grip of the day-to-day operations. But by continuing to educate yourself with new knowledge, you are better equipped to manage business hurdles and approach problems from different angles.
Cultivate Strong New Relationships
Similar to how any business retains its customer base, life coaches establish their personal brand by cultivating strong relationships with their mentees. As a business owner, don’t treat your customers as mere numbers in your quarterly earnings reports.
Form a deeper bond with your audience, making follow-up calls with potential leads and existing clients, conducting Q&As online, and doing casual in-person meetups. Notwithstanding the fact that you’ll be spending more time and energy to get to know them better, good life coaches know that fostering long-term relationships with people will only bolster stronger business performance over time.
Find Inspiration
Finding the inspiration to bring your business to new heights often comes naturally in the form of art, quotes, stories, etc.
As your own life coach, you are in charge of inspiring yourself every day on how to better your business. It doesn’t matter if it’s a new product or service feature, new office layout, and design, or even just a different snack at the vending machine. Fortunately, inspiration is ubiquitous. Visit art galleries and museums, read through autobiographies of people who inspire you, or brainstorm with people.
Learn How to Deal With Negativity
Life coaches can turn people’s lives around. Not by showing them a “Holy Grail” system that improves their luck, but by teaching people how to deal with the negative energies in their life in order to bring the positive energy out.
A common technique that life coaches use to counter negativity is to visualize the worst case scenario. As a business owner, ask yourself – how would this decision affect me for the worst? After you realize how petty your worries are, you’ll be more confident in your decision-making.
Be Consistent
Once you finish all the aforementioned steps, you should start again from the top. Treat it as a checklist that you do every day, rather than a one time thing. Life coaches are all about consistency. They know that it’s about developing the right set of habits until it becomes second nature.
Avoid having the mindset that there is a peak or ceiling that you should eventually hit. Instead, think of it as an endless upward spiral that, if followed continuously, will improve your quality of life or, in this case, your business’ performance and growth.
Final Thoughts
Filling two prominent roles of your own personal life coach and business owner can be a daunting commitment. Fortunately, you don’t have to go from zero to sixty when trying to be your own life coach and drive your business to the next level. Start with one or two of the steps above and then add more as you become more comfortable with this new role.
As you take steps to get your business to the next level, it’s ok to ask for help! Let us work with you to grow your business! Get started today!
References: https://richtopia.com/effective-leadership/negativity-workplace https://inlpcenter.org/available-nlp-programs/nlp-practitioner-certification-online/ https://tribune.com.pk/story/996873/7-ways-to-keep-emotions-in-check-at-work/ https://magazine.vunela.com/7-reasons-how-your-business-can-benefit-from-journal-writing-233e3934d15b
