Arrêtez-vous pendant quelques minutes pour écouter les sons autour de vous. Fermez les yeux si vous voulez et écoutez. N’essayez pas d’interpréter les sons. Ceci doit être une expérience agréable alors choisissez un endroit où votre audition ne sera pas saturée par des sons désagréables. On parle de sons ici, pas de voix. Evitez les endroits où il y a des conversations.
Last time, we looked at how important it was to be ready to change. You will not change if you are not ready. In this post, I want to show you some aspects that will influence the likelihood of the success of your change programme. There are external and internal aspects. You may not need to consider all of them but during your coaching journey, your coach should help you identify which of these aspects may be at play when you seem stuck and not able to implement the changes required to achieve your goals. There are no right or wrong on any side of these aspects but it will be helpful to know how they influence your ability to be successful at changing and evaluate if you need to change some unhelpful influences to increase your likelihood of reaching your objectives.
This is a purely external factor. During coaching, you will define actions to carry out between sessions. Each of these actions should bring you closer to your goal. These actions must be as much as possible in your control to complete. Ideally you want to be able to carry out these actions fully on your own. This way you can plan exactly how and when to do them. The more heavily actions depend on other people, the less control you have and the less likely it will be that they are carried out and that you will achieve your goal. Design your action plan so that it relies mostly on you.
Now we are going to look at internal factors, how you see yourself succeeding and being in control. There are three main factors I want to discuss: self-efficacy, locus of control and self-esteem.
Your self-efficacy is your own belief in your ability to carry out a task and be successful at it. It is a completely personal judgement. It is related to self-confidence. If you are a person who relies on others’ appreciation of you, your level of self-efficacy may be influenced by the level of feedback you receive. However, how you decide to react to this feedback is still yours, which is why self-efficacy is fundamentally an internal trait. It has been shown that a high level of self-efficacy leads to be able to sustaining more effort that when well-oriented, will lead to more successful outcomes.
Feeling that we are in control of a situation increases the likelihood of success. The locus of control describes how much we feel we are in control. Some people tend to think that what happens in their lives is dictated by external events (external locus of control) and others tend to think that internal forces control what happens to them (internal locus of control). We are all somewhere on a continuum between the two extremes. Your locus of control is related to your self-efficacy: a more internal locus of control is usually correlated with higher levels of self-efficacy. There is no right or wrong side to it. However, studies have shown that having a more internal locus of control leads to higher success and less anxiety.
Your self-esteem is your personal subjective evaluation of your own worth. Everybody has an idea of their self and self-esteem is your rating (positive or negative) of this self. This rating is a combination of the beliefs you hold about yourself and your emotional states. It will be important to identify early in the coaching journey if your self-esteem may be an issue as then the coaching approach should vary according to your level of self-esteem. It may well be that in cases of extremely low self-esteem, coaching may not be the answer and a coach may well decide to refer a client for counselling or psychotherapy instead for instance.
Are you in a process of changing something in your life? Where are you on the four aspects discussed here? Do you see how they influence how you fare in this change?
Maintenant, vous avez décidé de vous lancer dans un parcours de coaching. Vous avez peut-être même pris contact avec un coach potentiel en suivant les directives et conseils que j’ai énumérés dans mon article précédent dans cette série. Si vous êtes à ce stade, c’est que vous souhaitez changer quelque chose. C’est un très bon début. S’il s’avère que l’on vous a demandé (obligé ?) de suivre des séances de coaching, vous serez peut-être moins prêt à changer.
Cependant, la volonté, le désir de changer est un aspect très important du succès du coaching. Pour parler franchement, si vous n’êtes pas prêt à changer, vous ne changerez pas et même si vous avez le coach le plus talentueux et le plus performant au monde, cette personne ne vous fera pas changer. Le changement est une action, une décision personnelle et vous êtes le seul à pouvoir le faire. Cela signifie que pour réussir, vous devez assumer la responsabilité des résultats du coaching.
Vouloir ou ne pas vouloir changer n’est pas mauvais ni bon en soi. Vous avez juste besoin de comprendre où vous vous situez sur ce continuum. Si vous ne le faites pas, vous risquez de perdre beaucoup de temps et d’argent en coaching sans atteindre les résultats escomptés au départ.
Regardons les choses en face, le changement peut être difficile et il est normal de ressentir parfois une certaine réticence à changer. Le changement signifie que vous gagnerez des choses bénéfiques mais que vous perdrez certains aspects de la situation actuelle. Très tôt dans le parcours de coaching, vous devez évaluer ce que vous obtiendrez avec vos objectifs, à la fois positifs et négatifs. Vous devez évaluer s’il existe des éléments de la situation actuelle que vous pourriez perdre mais que vous souhaitez conserver. Moins vous voulez garder de choses et plus vous obtiendrez de résultats positifs, plus votre motivation pour le changement sera grande.
Vous devez comprendre pour qui vous voulez changer. Si c’est pour vous-même, encore une fois, votre motivation et vos chances de succès seront plus grandes que si vous cherchez à changer parce que quelqu’un d’autre veut que vous changiez.
Enfin, vous devez évaluer les avantages de votre situation actuelle. Il y a des avantages dans tout. En changeant, vous en perdrez probablement quelques-uns. Comment ces avantages sont-ils compensés, atteints dans votre objectif souhaité ? Les avantages apportés par le changement doivent être au moins égaux aux avantages acquis par votre situation actuelle.
Si vous changez, que gagnerez-vous? Qu’allez-vous perdre ?
Voulez-vous changer pour vous-même ou parce que quelqu’un d’autre vous l’a demandé ?
Quels sont les avantages du changement et de la situation actuelle ? Un autre élément important pour pouvoir changer est le contrôle de ce changement. J’aborderai cet aspect de votre parcours de coaching dans mon prochain article de la série.
Just stop for a few minutes and listen to all the sounds around you. Close your eyes if you wish and listen. Do not interpret the sounds. Just listen. This is to be a pleasant experience so choose the place where you stop not to be overloaded by sounds you do not want to hear. I am talking about sounds and not about voices, so avoid places where there will be conversations going on.
Cela semble facile mais combien de fois choisissons-nous de prendre l’ascenseur ? Alors dans cet article pour augmenter votre bien-être, je vous demande de prendre les escaliers autant que possible. Pas besoin de courir, allez à votre rythme.
Now, you have decided to embark on a coaching journey. You may even have made contact with potential coaches using the guidelines and advice I listed in my previous post in this series. If you are at this stage, it is that you wish to change something. It is a very good start. If it happens that you have been asked (requested?) to go through some coaching sessions, you may be less inclined to wish to change.
However, readiness to change is a very important aspect of the success of coaching. To put it bluntly, if you are not ready to change, you will not change and even if you have the most talented and successful coach in the world, this person will not make you change. Change is a personal action and you are the only one to make it happen. It means that to be successful, you need to take the responsibility for the outcome of the coaching.
Wanting or not wanting to change is not bad or good in itself. You just need to understand where you are on this continuum. If you don’t, you may end up spending a lot of time and money on coaching without reaching the results you wished to reach at the start.
Let’s face it, change can be difficult and it is normal to feel some reluctance and be daunted sometimes. Change means you will gain beneficial things but also that you will lose things from the current situation. Very early in the coaching journey, you need to assess what achieving your goal would bring you, both positive and negative things. You need to assess if there is anything in the current situation that you may lose but that you want to keep. The fewer things you want to keep and the more positive outcomes you will gain, the higher your motivation for change will be.
You need to understand for whom you want to change. If it is for yourself, again your motivation and chance of success will be higher than if you are looking to change because somebody else wants you to change.
Finally, you need to assess the benefits of your current situation. There are some benefits in everything. When changing you will probably lose some of them. How are these benefits compensated, achieved in your desired outcome, goal? The benefits brought by the change have to be at least equal to the benefits gained your current situation.
If you change, what will you win? What will you lose?
Do you want to change for yourself or because somebody else asked you?
What are the benefits of the change and of the current situation? Another important part of being able to change is being in control of the change. I will discuss this aspect of your coaching journey in my next post in the series.
Un coach sérieux doit:
Si vous sentez, à tous les niveaux, rationnels, sentimentaux et intuitifs que c’est la bonne personne, alors allez-y.
De Haan, E. (2008) Relational coaching. Journeys towards mastering one-to-one learning. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
It sounds easy but how many times are we choosing the lift instead of walking up or down the stairs? So in this feel-good post for this week, I am asking you to take the stairs (up and down) as much as you can. No need to run up and down, just go at the right speed for you.
Il a été montré que prendre note des choses pour lesquelles nous sommes reconnaissants augmente notre bien-être. Cela nous force à penser de manière positive. Alors cette semaine, je vous demande de noter chaque jour aux moins trois choses pour lesquelles vous êtes reconnaissant, des choses qui vous ont fait sourire, rire, aimer.
A serious coach will:
If when while and after talking with a potential coach, it feels right in your head, your heart and your guts, it probably is.
De Haan, E. (2008) Relational coaching. Journeys towards mastering one-to-one learning. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
coaching-vision.com 