A-Head for Success

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5 Dimensions for Success with Less Stress

5-Dimensions-for-Success-with-Less-Stress

5 Dimensional Coaching

As we enter a new year, most of us will have thoughts about what it will take to make it a success.  We will doubtless make huge commitments to ourselves and our businesses to make it a good year.  But it’s stressful being successful.  My A-HEAD for Success 5 Dimensional Coaching ® program is designed to make it less so.  In this article I wanted to share with you the 5 Dimensions and then in future articles I will go into them in more detail.

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What is Integrative Coaching?

Integrative CoachingCoaching is a wonderful tool for those who care about getting results with more ease:  it helps you achieve your goals by creating practical action plans, using tools and techniques to help achieve them and helping you to build skills to facilitate the change you seek.

Integrative Coaching does the same but it goes deeper, if required.  Because sometimes there is a reason that goal achievement is elusive, or perhaps challenging.  Integrative Coaching looks at what is blocking you.  Unless the blocks are removed, problems will recur, especially in times of challenge.  Integrative Coaching, a more sustainable approach, will look at the psychological blocks, the biological ones (tired all the time is a common factor), the emotional ones (stress and anxiety for example) plus more.

Author Philippe Rosinski says it is “… a holistic approach that calls upon multiple interconnected perspectives to facilitate the unleashing of human potential towards meaningful pursuits … from the physical to the spiritual.”  In the A-HEAD for Success terms, spiritual is all about purpose and meaning.  When you are aware of and completely aligned to that, everything else becomes easier and clearer.

Three Levels of Integrative Coaching

Integrative Coaching is at the forefront of The A-HEAD for Success 5D Coaching Model ™ which helps provide three levels of integrative coaching through the 5 Dimensions (Clarity, Skillset, Mindset, Stress-Resilience, Health and Energy).  Of course we only work at the level of need but the process helps identify the need which is different for everyone.

  1. Integrating a variety of approaches tailored to suit your specific needs
  2. Integrating mind and body. A good example is that a client may present with any number of physical symptoms.  For example: exhaustion  (my latest book explains how complicated this condition is and why the integrative approach is so important), insomnia, headaches or Irritable Bowel Syndrome to name a few.  Though there may be physical causes to these, there may also be emotional and lifestyle factors involved.  Stress is very often a factor in IBS so we deal with it from a multifaceted perspective.
  3. Integrating parts of the self. This deals with self-sabotage which may be impacting performance, health, relationships and more.  So we address this internal conflict:  if you feel that you have your foot on the breaks and the accelerator at the same time, self-sabotage may very well be at play, but it is often subconscious so you need to work with an expert to deal with it.

Conventional coaching tends to be somewhat formulaic and will not always address the finer details which can so impact on us.  Integrative Coaching helps address the complexity of what it means to be a functioning person in a dynamic world.

Want to know how it might help you?  Call me, Tricia Woolfrey, on 0345 130 0854 to find out more.  Calls are no-obligation and completely confidential.

© Tricia Woolfrey

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Source of Negative Stress: Deadlines

Stress and deadlines
Deadlines:  as we near the end of my series of articles on sources of negative stress, we will explore this most common of stressors.  Deadlines can certainly add to your sense of stress, especially if there is a lot at stake:  perhaps your reputation, or a valued customer, or an important sale which is the difference between making target or not.

Yet, without deadlines, tasks can stretch to fill the time available.  And, of course, if there is no deadline, the time available is all the time in the world.  That is until the consequences are felt too strongly and too late to do anything about it.

There are five main questions to consider about deadlines:

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Sources of Negative Stress: Regrets

Stress, regrets and hindsightIf you are living with regrets, it can feel as though the past is ever-present, tarnishing what is good and holding you back.   Yes, regrets can be stressful.  They can certainly keep you awake at night.  They can also affect how you manage, and engage in, your daily life.

Regrets can be for something you did which you shouldn’t have or something you should have done which you didn’t.

In the moment that you do something (or decide not to), you do so with our best thinking at the time.   As someone

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5 Keys to 2017 Being Your Best Year EVER (2.5 mins to read)

2017 Best year yetMost people want each new year to be their best.  But with much less stress.   And more fun.  And bigger results.  If possible.  So, is it really possible?  If we accept that we can only control the controllable and take response-ability for our results in a focussed way, I would say a resounding ‘yes’.  But too often we give our power away to outside forces.  So, the following keys will help you take charge and make it happen:

  1. Get clarity

Become clear on what you want to achieve (your vision and goals) and why.  The why is your motivation which carries you through the tough times so it needs to be big enough to do that.  It makes all the difference between achievement and enrichment – two concepts which are not mutually exclusive unless you make them so.  Clarity enables you to say ‘no’ to those things which are not ‘on-purpose’ so it frees up more time for you to do what’s needed to fulfil your goals.

Clarity around how you are going to achieve it is next.  When you break things down into your priorities, the next step is easier to take.  And the one after that.  And the one after that.

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10 Traits of Successful People

10 Traits of Successful People10 Traits of Successful People

You could argue that most people want to achieve more success with less stress.  Whether you feel your efforts are yet to be rewarded with results or your success has come at too high a price, there are factors which characterise those who have a positive success formula.  Though of course it will vary from person to person, there are common themes:

  1. Clarity

The very first component for success is to have clarity of purpose, mission and goals and to keep these in sight.  When you have this kind of clarity, all your efforts are focused in the right direction – so you spend much less time readjusting, backtracking and regretting.

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What’s the Difference Between a Coach, a Mentor and a Consultant?

Denial or TruthThey say that all the best people get support to get them to the top and to keep them there.  It is a sign of vision, strength, and drive to want to take your performance and productivity seriously enough to invest in yourself and your business in this way.  But how do you know what kind of support you need? 

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Customer Retention is Boring

customer retentionI recently signed up for a very expensive service from someone who positions himself as an expert, no, THE expert in his field.  I was given a lot of promises which made the large investment a no-brainer.

I have pretty high standards and, over the years, I have learned to lower them.  And lower them some more.  So, even with the hype, I wasn’t expecting everything which was offered to the degree it was positioned.

However, after a possible 20% delivery and 80% disappointment, and having given said-company ample time to catch up with themselves, I was told they were too busy to deal with it.  They had new customers to deal with.  New customers are EXCITING.  Problems are boring – or so they believe.  He is operating the customer churn and burn strategy.

This individual is pretty charismatic.  He is good at winning new business.  However, his reputation is being tarnished because he is good at customer attraction and very poor at customer retention.  Given that keeping a customer is less expensive than attracting a new customer.  And that there are only so many customers in the world, no matter how charismatic you are, looking at how to keep the ones you have is an important part of your business strategy.

Brand management and reputation management are key to this.  So, a couple of questions for you:

  1. Do you have a customer retention strategy?
  2. How effective is your customer retention?
  3. What would your customers say about you if you weren’t in the room?
  4. What would your customers say are your most redeeming qualities?
  5. What would your customers say is most frustrating in dealing with your company?

Here are some of the customer retention strategies I teach my clients:

  • Make sure your systems make it easy for them to do business with you
  • Offer only quality service and quality products
  • Have a quick turnaround on queries
  • Be easy to get hold of
  • Acknowledge every communication
  • Treat existing customers with as much care as you do prospects, if not more so
  • Under-promise and over-deliver – this on its own will set you apart from the competition
  • Stay in touch

Your customers will forgive you a lot of you care about them.

Tricia Woolfrey is an integrative business coach helping people like you and companies like yours perform at their best, so that you can be more profitable, with less stress and with your integrity intact.  Call 0845 130 0854 for a free telephone consultation.

© Tricia Woolfrey 2014

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A-Z of Business: Z- ZEN – Can Mindfulness be Profitable?

Mindfulness in BusinessWhen I started out in business in 1998, success to me was the achievement of a particular goal, be it profit-related, the completion of a project or the acceptance of an idea.  And while these are true, they are concerned with the what of success, not the how.

Over the years, I have studied many psychological and business-school concepts.  And what is missing for most people is the application of zen principles to business.

For the purpose of this article, the term zen can be considered as the mindful engagement with your work and operation of your business (or your job if you work for someone else).  This means being purpose-ful about what you are doing and why, from a macro perspective and a micro perspective.

So, to begin with, why do you do what you do?  What purpose does your business (or job) fulfil?  I am reminded of an old parable about a man who visited a city many hundreds of years ago.  He came across two men labouring under the noonday sun.  He asked the first what he is doing “Oh, I am just doing some labouring.  It is hard work and I will not be finished for hours.”  He asked the same question to the second man who responded “I am helping to build a cathedral”.  This story beautifully describes the purpose of their work.   One saw it is a job, a means to an end, something he had to endure each day.  The second man saw it as a vocation and put his heart and soul into each stone he laid.  Which man was likely to have been more productive?  Which man happier?  Which would have inspired others?  And which went home with a sense of achievement?

Are you clear about what your business is there to achieve in terms of a higher purpose?  If you are in business purely for money, as a lot of people are, what is the higher purpose that money is there to achieve?  For example, let’s take a cleaning company.  Not the most glamorous of businesses and fraught with day to day problems.  It would be easy to get bogged down in the nitty gritty of the issues around difficult customers and unreliable staff.  So, what is the higher purpose?  This would be personal to everybody but it may be to provide a beautiful environment for your clients to live or work.  Or it may be to provide work and career opportunities for employees who have had difficulty holding down a job in the past.  Or, if you really have no passion for the work at all, it may be to provide a good education for your children so that they can be free to make more fulfilling career and life choices for themselves.

When you have an over-riding purpose, it can carry you through the most challenging of times.  It can pull you out of the mire of the day to day and into a higher, more creative, more empowered mindset.  Which is likely to create more profit for you?

At a micro level, it is about being purpose-ful in the moment.  This means applying yourself 100% to whatever it is you are doing, fully absorbed.  The ability to multi-task is seen as a skill and even a virtue.  It is something I have been proud to call a skill.  And it is.  But it is also a weakness.  I noticed myself yesterday doing something and then stopping it to start something else and then interrupting myself doing that to do yet something else.  I realised that I have become so “skilled” at multi-tasking and responding to requests and interruptions that I now interrupt myself!  So I have to remind myself and, when I do, there is a flow to my work.  A peacefulness, a quiet productivity which is enriching and rewarding.  Of course there are times when I have to multi-task and over the years of my career I have had to do this thousands of times, shifting gear at a moment’s notice, which is why it is a difficult habit to break.  However, the effort of stopping and starting and stopping and starting again reduces productivity and increases stress.  It is important to be able to do it but not to make it a way of life.

True multi-tasking is a myth as usually you are simply stopping and starting, picking up and putting down.  I recently saw a cartoon about women being great multi-taskers.  It showed a woman flying through the air with a duster in one hand to clean the ceilings and pushing a vacuum with the other to clean the floors.  But in reality it is really very difficult to apply yourself fully to more than one task at once.  Sure you can wait on the phone for someone to pick up while you file something away but in reality, you are almost always only doing one thing at once.  Doing that one thing with a sense of purpose can bring a richness to the most mundane of tasks.  Most people hate filing but if you do your filing with an intention to create order in your environment this can transform the experience and it can even feel meditative.  In addition, thinking about the piece of work that paper represents with an attitude of gratitude and appreciation can be equally rewarding.  Certainly better than attacking the filing with a feeling of resentment and obligation.

So, the concept of applying yourself 100% to whatever you are doing in the moment, thinking about the purpose of that task, brings with it a higher level of clarity and productivity, a calmer demeanour and a much nicer person to take home to the family!  This brings with it greater financial profit but also an intrinsic profit which is priceless.

And last, but by no means least remember the principles of karma – that you reap what you sow.  So, be kind in your interactions and you will be richly rewarded with deeper and more trusting relationships as well as greater loyalty with your associates, your employees and your clients.

If you would like to learn more about how mindfulness can enhance your productivity and your profits, call me on 0845 130 0854.

On this note we end my A-Z of Business blogs, which I hope have been productive for you. As we enter the new year, I hope that your 2014 business plans are clear – your company goals, business values, products and USP…and that you feel personally prepared to take on the year ahead, manage your time effectively, serve your customers and motivate your staff. For any additional support, do contact me at tricia@pw-consulting.co.uk. I wish you a very happy new year and a successful 2014!
 

© Tricia Woolfrey 2014

About Tricia Woolfrey – click HERE to find out about the author.

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A-Z of Business: Y – YOU – Are you the Problem or the Solution?

You and your businessWhether you are in business for yourself or working for others, it is natural in times of success to take credit for it.  But it’s tempting to blame external factors (other people, customers, the economy, market forces, etc) when things go wrong.

However, to do so is no help at all except that it massages a fragile ego.  You are still stuck.  The mark of a successful business-person is one who looks to themselves in times of challenge.  In this way, they retain control rather give away their power to outside forces.  To avoid looking to what you could do differently is to be a victim, powerless to make changes.  In this competitive world, it is unsustainable.  The power is in the ability to evolve.

 

All it takes is a different perspective.  Look to yourself for the solution and ask yourself the right questions:

  1. What factors have contributed to this problem?
  2. In what way(s) have I contributed to this problem?
  3. Where did I take my eye off the ball?
  4. What didn’t I do which I should have done?
  5. What did I do which I shouldn’t have done?
  6. What didn’t I do which I could have done?
  7. What steps can I take now which can remedy the situation?
  8. What steps can I take to avoid this happening in the future?
  9. Is this part of a bigger pattern?
  10. What else can I learn from this?

By putting yourself “at cause”, you take control, you evolve and you build a more robust business.  It takes courage, insight and humility.  Do you have what it takes?

It can be difficult doing this for yourself and this is where a good coach/mentor can really help.  Why not book a session now?  Call me on 0845 130 0854 to find out more.  You’ll be glad you did!

© Tricia Woolfrey 2013

About Tricia Woolfrey – click HERE to find out about the author.

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