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While some individuals procrastinate to a lesser extent and manage to complete tasks reasonably promptly, others unfortunately struggle to accomplish much of anything.
A lot of people seem to have a singular idea of what procrastination is, but that idea never really seems to match up with reality. When we think of procrastination, we imagine someone simply sitting around and doing nothing when they really should be doing something specific. While this is sometimes the case, there are many other ways to procrastinate.
When we think of personal development, we usually think of taking a course or developing a specific skill, and while these do develop us as people, they don’t develop who we are as people.
When we talk resolutions and goals, planning is the single greatest roadblock on anyone's journey. We have great intent to 'do the thing' and we may even get started on it, but somewhere along the line, it quietly fizzles out.
I started the year by focusing on personal development, though I have been focusing on it more intensely these last few weeks because I know that, as the year wears on into February and March, life has gotten fully back into gear, with the rhythms of our schedules taking over, and our resolutions soon forgotten or pushed to the wayside.
I recently used the metaphor of a stagnant pond to discuss what it is to halt your personal development – equating a stagnant pond to a person who isn’t growing. Normally, when people discuss personal development, they assume we are talking about skills training for work. This is the easiest way to grow, but there is a difference between skills development and personal development.
One of the most important goals people give up on, is that of personal development. From a business perspective, companies tend to focus more on training technical skills than personal development, focusing on courses that will directly benefit the business.
With the festive season now a distant memory, the year has gotten into its groove. This leads to many setting their New Year’s Resolutions aside or giving up on them entirely. Over time the idea of a New Year’s Resolution has become something of a ‘wash, rinse, repeat’ cycle - something we attempt year after year, often without real progress.
At the beginning of the year, the one thing on everyone’s mind is the topic of New Year’s Resolutions. We talk about getting fitter, improving our work/life balance, learning a new skill, etc. Almost serving as a metaphor for what happens to most of our resolutions, gyms are full at the start of the year, but they are quieter by March. Somewhere along the line, something isn’t working. Could it be ‘reality setting in’, or is there something we are missing?
Coming back from the festive season, one of the more common New Year’s Resolutions for working professionals is that of attaining work/life balance. The concept of work/life balance comes from the perspective that work is ‘there for money’, while life is ‘what you love doing’. This puts many in a position where they feel like their work is ‘stealing time’ from their life.
Have you ever wondered whether coaches judge their clients? After all, doesn’t the coach hold all the power in the relationship, while the client is vulnerable due to their need for help? In order for one person to judge another, they need to have power over the other, however small that power differential may be. It may seem similar to therapy; but it isn’t really the case. A therapist sitting at the far corner of the room, jotting down notes you cannot see; this seems like a situation predisposed towards judgement, but it is instead designed to create clinical separation. This separation does not really exist in coaching, because while coaching is still professional, it is far less clinical in approach. In both cases, though, judgement is unhelpful and harmful to both the client and the professional. No coach wants judgement to be part of their brand.
Feedback is incredibly important as it is the only way we learn and grow. In a recent post I discussed receiving feedback, how you can learn from it and what you can do with it – but feedback is a loop, and now that we have discussed receiving it, we need to discuss giving it. Returning to the case study from the previous article; Tom, Jean’s manager, had identified that Jean was repeatedly making the same mistake in her interactions with her team and had chosen to give her that feedback.
2023 has been a busy year, November and December are the busiest months for many sectors in South Africa, and many are feeling overwhelmed. To be overwhelmed is ‘to feel buried/drowning/suffocating’. When you are suffocated by work, you aren’t just busy, you are also not breathing – which means you aren’t getting what you need.
As a coach, one of my bugbears is the statement “I would have spoken to you sooner, but I was feeling terrible.” No matter how extroverted a person is, when we feel bad, we withdraw into ourselves and push others away. This behaviour has its roots in our evolution as a society, we don’t want others to see when we aren’t doing well. A person’s time of need is exactly when they should see a coach.
While many people might enjoy the concept of receiving feedback, this is usually on the proviso that the feedback is given in a way the receiver is comfortable with – the form, formatting, and context of the feedback itself are just as important as the receiver’s relationship to the person giving them the feedback.
Conflict seems easy enough to define and understand, but it is a deeper and more complicated topic than most give it credit for. In the work environment, conflict usually takes a protracted form, most often as a series of arguments or disagreements. Where many things in life are one way or the other, conflict takes place in stages, small problems which grow and accumulate, eventually becoming what we recognise as conflict.
The theory of transactional analysis states that when two people speak to one another, there are actually six people involved in the conversation because each of us has three modes through which we converse, the Parent, the Child, and the Adult. The Parent judges, nurtures, and tells others what to do; the Child either plays to the needs of others or is rebellious; the Adult comes through when we speak to one another as equals.
Something I started discussing recently was how peoples’ personalities play into how they experience and take accountability. Demonstrating how accountability takes different forms for different people is one thing, coming up with solutions and adaptations for this is another thing entirely. Where the Enneagram groups people into 9 types, CliftonStrengths is far more dynamic; a list of thirty-four strengths, reported on a personal preference basis, meaning the ranking changes depending on who is taking the test.
