Life and Executive Coaching
The Journey Begins
The Best Getting Better
Life Coaching Tips and Techniques No. 133
A change for the better?
When there has been a major change in your life say changing jobs or leaving a partner for another or quitting something suddenly unexpectedly you expect whatever you're going to is better than what you left behind. Otherwise why make the change? That is the main rationale of major change. But when something goes wrong (as they inevitably will) with any aspect of that change or choice (or non choice) as the case may be, things can get worse than they were before the unforced/forced changed. When that happens it is very hard not to panic and fall into despair. You're essentially caught in a no man's land of leaving a former destination but not yet arrived at the new destination. If you're the kind of person who has a very active regret engine, this kind of thing can drive you insane.
Life is full of changes, every day is (or should be) a transition to something better. Think of each day as an opportunity to change your life for the better. Not just surviving each day (which is an achievement in itself) but using that day to transform yourself, your business, your job, improve our skills, to develop your hobby into a business.
The normal planning function that should be a part of your life if you are a high performance person would normally fall away if you are under great stress or duress. Planning is not suitable for this time. Panic rules. It is normally a time of quick deliverables and execution (if that happens sometimes paralysis sets in). But it is precisely why you need to deliver on your high level plans before the stressful times. It takes the pressure off you if you have used this time fruitfully to open up a second income stream for example.
Plan and execute before the need arises for that deliverable. In other words for example develop your personal business whilst you're still in your job so that any necessary transition is all that is needed in the case of losing your job (or being made redundant) or merely perhaps even a lifestyle choice (a sea change).
A friend of mine is in the waiting room/departure lounge (a place from which you are either made redundant or redeployed) after 27 years service with a company. He is terrified, petrified of the outside world. He should be he has never set foot anywhere else. My recommendation: take and money and run (to the nearest retraining centre). Get yourself some in demand skills as quickly as you can. After 27 years he has reached a ceiling and is no longer growing. I also advise him that after he leaves he will feel sad, depressed, uncertain, anxious as regular work provides a much needed structure for men the lack of which leads to mental health issues, obesity, relationship problems and general dissatisfaction with life. It is all related to having to start from scratch somewhere else after having paid your dues for 27 years.
Why are Project Managers (PMs) paid so much? Because there is a large element of uncertainty in determining the path to deliver a project or program? In others words generally a project (by definition) is something that hasn't been done before therefore is new to the organisation and there is great uncertainty of the duration and major milestones and achievements of the journey.
Projects and PM's lurching from crisis to crisis. Why? First question where in the project is this occurring? In pre-planning, planning or implementation or business transition? If in pre-planning you could say the idea is not robust enough or the organisational's appetite for this kind of project is not keen enough. If in planning you could say that the idea is simply no good or too hard to implement for whatever reason. If in implementation you could say not enough planning (and of the right type and quality especially a rigorous proof of concept) was done. If in business transition you could say that the business were not consulted or consulted enough or consulted by the right kind of people to explain the changes to them. What is the root cause of these problems? Simply that the transformation of information from one phase to another was not controlled enough, disseminated enough, understood enough to allow all interested parties access to information as it changed from one state to another.
When something goes catastrophically wrong why do people turn off their mobiles, don't answer their land line (if they have one) and don't reply to emails. They stay indoors they don't interact they just exist for a while. In essence why are they running to ground? Self preservation they think. Self protection. To get away from the masses persecuting them. In my view running to ground in essence gives your punishing superego the time and space to discipline you to death. It is the last thing you should do but really the first thing you do anyway. This period being in the eye of the storm lasts for a several weeks then begins to resolve itself. Of course seeking help during this time will be helpful for your long term rehabilitation.
Music is great therapy. I play percussion in a salsa band and find a practice session or performance very relaxing in a spiritual sense. I think the reason is because it has to do with timing or rather time and rhythm. When everyday life is discordant and has lost its rhythm and chaos reigns music provides both a physical and spiritual framework which is universal, mathematical and provides a secure refuge for whatever is going in your life. It is very difficult to express in words the role of music in combating stress, anxiety and depression but it does have a role to play. When all around you is chaos, playing a nice rhythm in 2/4 or 4/4 time on the congas or timbales is soothing, healing and completes you. Of course if you've never played instruments before getting to this point requires a massive amount of work and effort and endless practice but I think the payback rewards the expenditure of the effort.
About Gilbert Labour
Mr Labour is a strategist, consultant, adviser, speaker and presenter on corporate restructuring, psychopathy in the workplace, life and executive coaching, project and program management, Six Sigma and Lean process improvement.
He combines all these skills in a unique combination, utilising Six Sigma and project management, to provide modern enlightened companies with truly innovative advice that will create a sustainable competitive advantage. Mr Labour exercises his skills and influence with compassion and deep understanding of the human condition especially where restructures result in overwhelming change and job loss.
He specialises in the following industries: legal and accountancy, telecommunications, transportation and aviation, banking and finance, insurance, government, IT and outsourcing and believes that his experience in these verticals is applicable across all industries, countries, languages, cultures and businesses generally. He has 30 years corporate experience in these industries.
Every single industry he specialises in (telcos, aviation, retail banking, insurance, outsourcing) faces fundamental challenges to continued survival and prosperity in the 21st Century and Mr Labour is well placed to provide a multi-disciplinary approach to uncovering insights for competitive advantage.
He sees the management of strategic, compliance and operational risk as one of the key issues facing executive managers on a daily basis. But not all companies can take advantage of formal Basel II and Sarbannes-Oxley (SOX) governance models.
For those companies that are not in the financial industry but still require strong governance around the management of operational risk, Mr Labour is an expert on creating strategies for managing operational risk supported by strong programme management structures to ensure compliance.
He has been extensively involved in process improvement initiatives within project and production environments. He has delivered Six Sigma Green and Black Belt process improvement programs that provide bottom line improvement whilst maintaining and enhancing employee morale.
He also owns and runs one of the world's most comprehensive web resources on the topic of life and executive coaching containing over 1500 pages of advice and more than 250 articles on life and executive coaching. He has also been quoted in learned papers, newspaper and magazine articles.
He has written a book on life coaching which provides an introduction to life coaching for the general public. He has also written a book on executive coaching, Executive Coaching for Process Improvement Excellence, that provides daily insights for top managers looking to succeed in today's fast paced environment.
He is also a pioneer in the field of coaching and project management having presented a landmark paper on this topic at PMISA 2004 (World Conference on Project Management) in South Africa in May, 04. His paper entitled Sane Project Management, a Life and Executive Coaching Approach has created both a new field in project management and a new area of interest and research for coaching and coaches around the world.
For PMISA 2006 (World Conference on Project Management) he has written a paper entitled Project Management and Six Sigma - a convergent and divergent model for solving business problems. He seeks to develop a theoretical and practical model to extract readily applicable business approaches from both divergence and convergence of these two disciplines.
He will explore whether coaching can facilitate the extraction of some of the benefits of this convergence? This will be continuing an exploration of the connection between coaching and project management that he first developed and presented at PMISA 2004.
Mr Labour acknowledges that in today's highly competitive and rapidly changing business environment, a busy consultant, life coach or executive coach must evince a compelling value proposition, as much for himself as for his product and service.
His unique value proposition is bringing to bear, on difficult even intractable business problems, a brilliant mix of both quantitative and qualitative approaches, embracing Six Sigma, Lean, project management, executive coaching, operational and line management.
He has a refreshing engaging and vibrant perspective on life and business in the corporate world. He is able to engage with any company in the world, within his industry expertise and beyond, and provide an assessment of the issues and problems that management suspects exists. He does this on a pro-active basis and confidentially.
He is also able to execute or be involved in the execution of any recommendations resulting from these engagements. He has previously managed large programs of work involving major restructuring, outsourcing and downsizing.
He forecasts a greater demand for people with his unique blend of skills in the future especially where established, staid inefficient companies in otherwise dynamic industries face head-on competition from more efficient home grown companies and those companies thriving in the tiger economies of China and India with their vast pool of cheap, educated and trained local talent.
Life Coaching Tips and Techniques No. 132
How do I decide what to write on my web site?
I exercise every morning for about an hour and a half, sometimes this gives me an idea. It may even move beyond a skeleton during the session. Otherwise the idea will need real work and graft to come to an article that is decent enough to be put on the web site. Anything that is too personal and that cannot be abstracted is discarded. It must sound intense, moving, real but rather than personal universal.
I read the news sometimes this gives me an idea. I read very widely and I do it at least for one hour each day. This sometimes inspires me. Wide reading of especially gifted writers helps the phrasing, the approach, the attack, the hook just like budding musicians learn grooves from master musicians. I know what I'm talking about in this analogy as I'm currently learning to be a latin percussionist.
I might watch people around me that also is a rich source of material. Today's topic is grief. There is a lot of suffering about and loss. My father died in 1992 and it took me 10 years of soul searching, analysis, mistakes, regret and agonising pain before I saw my way clear. This is some highlights of that journey. Will it help someone do their sentence in less than 10 years? Perhaps. This is the type of grief where you can't even exercise or even move more than absolutely necessary to maintain life, in essence you're paralysed.
Grief
To live is to grieve
I have written lots on grief on this web site. Also I devote one track on my life coaching CD to grief. This is not just losing a loved one to death but losing your partner for any other reason (they leave you for example) is also devastating and leads to the start of the grieving process.
The pure agony of the loss tempered somewhat by the shock is a sledgehammer combining destructive force of unlimited power and seemingly duration. This is the blow to the stomach, the next blow is when the shock wears off and comes with the realisation of the loss this is the uppercut the knockout blow. This is beyond mere sadness, this is the destruction of your emotional well being for some time to come. The realisation that you'll never see that person come into a room, talk to you, touch them, feel them close to you cannot be borne.
In the early stages of grief nothing can help. This is a period you must go through without pills, illicit drugs, alcohol or tobacco. You will dream a lot of the departed one. You will suffer the lows and lows of regret in all its forms. There is no light at the end of this tunnel (yet). The problem with taking drugs is that it only delays the inevitable reckoning with yourself. This is the most difficult period to survive. What can help is seeking support from someone who specialises in grief counselling or someone who has gone through it and survived (not everybody does).
The idea, belief, suggestion that you need to be strong during this period, to stay strong for those left behind is poor advice and useless when you're in the hurricane of grief the lunacy of grief. The face of someone in grief is enough to tell you that gratuitous advice about standing firm is at the very least unhelpful. There is no need to be strong. If all you can do is be weak, crying all time, sobbing, tearing yourself inside out then so be it. Watch your nutrition during this period as people tend to stop eating.
The point you want to get to is where you celebrating and remembering the good things and forgetting the bad things but that serenity is a long way off. Your anger with them dying is the overriding emotion initially. Why did they have to die? Then guilt why did I let them die? Why didn't I do more? Why wasn't I there when it happened? If there was some argument or dispute in the air when the loved one died then that makes your salvation so much more difficult and protracted.
Grief and recovery is a cyclical process. You can't stop exposure to loss, you never stop grieving, you never stop loving the one you're with or subsequently lose. To live is to experience loss and grief. Grief is the other side of the coin of love. Grief is evidence that you have loved deeply and to love is an indication that you are mentally prepared for grief at anytime. It can't be otherwise as life is ephemeral and full of risks.
There is no point to living without love so you won't experience grief. Love/grief are fundamental human emotions and the process of grief may be a survival instinct. When your partner dies, perhaps in the caveman times that meant there was no longer any food to share around. The grief felt by the partner and the subsequent loss of appetite was perhaps to ensure that the surviving partner could go on without food for a week or two until she found a new partner or perished but evolution would not let that latter circumstance to happen.
About Gilbert Labour
Mr Labour is a strategist, consultant, adviser, speaker and presenter on corporate restructuring, psychopathy in the workplace, life and executive coaching, project and program management, Six Sigma and Lean process improvement.
He combines all these skills in a unique combination, utilising Six Sigma and project management, to provide modern enlightened companies with truly innovative advice that will create a sustainable competitive advantage. Mr Labour exercises his skills and influence with compassion and deep understanding of the human condition especially where restructures result in overwhelming change and job loss.
He specialises in the following industries: legal and accountancy, telecommunications, transportation and aviation, banking and finance, insurance, government, IT and outsourcing and believes that his experience in these verticals is applicable across all industries, countries, languages, cultures and businesses generally. He has 30 years corporate experience in these industries.
Every single industry he specialises in (telcos, aviation, retail banking, insurance, outsourcing) faces fundamental challenges to continued survival and prosperity in the 21st Century and Mr Labour is well placed to provide a multi-disciplinary approach to uncovering insights for competitive advantage.
He sees the management of strategic, compliance and operational risk as one of the key issues facing executive managers on a daily basis. But not all companies can take advantage of formal Basel II and Sarbannes-Oxley (SOX) governance models.
For those companies that are not in the financial industry but still require strong governance around the management of operational risk, Mr Labour is an expert on creating strategies for managing operational risk supported by strong programme management structures to ensure compliance.
He has been extensively involved in process improvement initiatives within project and production environments. He has delivered Six Sigma Green and Black Belt process improvement programs that provide bottom line improvement whilst maintaining and enhancing employee morale.
He also owns and runs one of the world's most comprehensive web resources on the topic of life and executive coaching containing over 1500 pages of advice and more than 250 articles on life and executive coaching. He has also been quoted in learned papers, newspaper and magazine articles.
He has written a book on life coaching which provides an introduction to life coaching for the general public. He has also written a book on executive coaching, Executive Coaching for Process Improvement Excellence, that provides daily insights for top managers looking to succeed in today's fast paced environment.
He is also a pioneer in the field of coaching and project management having presented a landmark paper on this topic at PMISA 2004 (World Conference on Project Management) in South Africa in May, 04. His paper entitled Sane Project Management, a Life and Executive Coaching Approach has created both a new field in project management and a new area of interest and research for coaching and coaches around the world.
For PMISA 2006 (World Conference on Project Management) he has written a paper entitled Project Management and Six Sigma - a convergent and divergent model for solving business problems. He seeks to develop a theoretical and practical model to extract readily applicable business approaches from both divergence and convergence of these two disciplines.
He will explore whether coaching can facilitate the extraction of some of the benefits of this convergence? This will be continuing an exploration of the connection between coaching and project management that he first developed and presented at PMISA 2004.
Mr Labour acknowledges that in today's highly competitive and rapidly changing business environment, a busy consultant, life coach or executive coach must evince a compelling value proposition, as much for himself as for his product and service.
His unique value proposition is bringing to bear, on difficult even intractable business problems, a brilliant mix of both quantitative and qualitative approaches, embracing Six Sigma, Lean, project management, executive coaching, operational and line management.
He has a refreshing engaging and vibrant perspective on life and business in the corporate world. He is able to engage with any company in the world, within his industry expertise and beyond, and provide an assessment of the issues and problems that management suspects exists. He does this on a pro-active basis and confidentially.
He is also able to execute or be involved in the execution of any recommendations resulting from these engagements. He has previously managed large programs of work involving major restructuring, outsourcing and downsizing.
He forecasts a greater demand for people with his unique blend of skills in the future especially where established, staid inefficient companies in otherwise dynamic industries face head-on competition from more efficient home grown companies and those companies thriving in the tiger economies of China and India with their vast pool of cheap, educated and trained local talent.
Life Coaching Tips and Techniques No. 131
More Life Coaching Thoughts and Ideas
Life Coach Position Statement: Hands-on Management of introduced and self generated chaos in self and others.
The number one guiding principle for developing highly effective teams is to have your best people work with the best. Whether it is other internal people or external resources. This is easier said than done. Firstly you have to identify who your 'best' people are. What will be the objective and subjective criteria for selection? Having overcome that hurdle the next hurdle is how find and couple that high achiever with the right person/partner who will out the very best in each of them. On the other hand, great people who work with poor performers become demoralised and demotivated.
In praise of praise. Praise is most treasured when it comes from someone who you trust and who you know from experience is extremely good in your own particular field or specialisation. Praise is a reward for effort and achievement. Praise works best if it is withheld until the correct standard of performance is reached but it can be used judiciously to encourage incremental improvements in performance just short of the required standard. Praise should be something that is used where one has been involved in the progress of the person right from the beginning. Praise invigorates the source of the improvement and becomes almost an eternal flame for self improvement.
The best people are measured by how well they do under pressure. Some thrive some wither. The best thrive but it was probably not always so. What are the secrets to not merely surviving but thriving in a boiling cauldron? The secret is not adaptation which is a Darwinian thing but experience and failure. Lots of both and the attitude that you will learn from each and every mistake no matter how embarrassing or silly.
The winner of a recent stage in the Tour de France said he won it because in June (a month before the race) he did the same stage and knew it to the meter so he knew what he was facing. Another secret to success is repetition, rehearsal and lots of attempts and failures esp. failures.
When you're in the zone, it feels like everything takes off and lands on a solid rock runaway of unlimited length. If feels like you will never run out of runway either taking off or landing. What happens when you run out of runway? Build more runway.
In life you need to maximise every advantage. If you're pretty or handsome then it's a priority to get in shape and stay in shape to better portray a winning image. But the advantage is more than just skin deep. Working out will improve your confidence and will project a certain glow a warmth that people are attracted to.
Life Coach Position Statement: Hands-on Management of introduced and self generated chaos in self and others. A life coach cannot dare to assist others unless he also assists himself at the same time. An obese life coach is not a credible role model for helping a client lose weight and get into shape.
Life coaching recognises that life is an exercise in chaos management/containment. The purpose of life coaching is to introduce some principles and techniques to better manage the chaos. But it is not about management per se because there are more elements involved than can be addressed by management techniques alone.
Management is useless when the person has deep personal or psychological problems to begin with or is addicted to alcohol, gambling or illicit drugs. It is that 'personal' element that takes life coaching out of the realm of the consultants and practitioners who specialise in management and into the sphere of life coaches.
If that were not the case then life coaches would be merely about preparing and executing to do lists. But it is more than that. How much more depends on the style and approach of the particular life coach. In my practice I manage forward but I sometimes need to go back to pick up the thread of someone's life. I can forge into the unknown but preferably from the known.
Obesity. How can working with a life coach help? A life coach can provide a structure for understanding the root causes of obesity in a particular subject. The structure is only the rails, it is not the train. It is for the client to create the train having been given the guidance about the gauge of the track and other characteristics of the environment that the train will run on.
Don't waste time memorising end results and the myriad of different ways to get there. As long as you know the formula you can work towards the end result by reverse engineering the product to derive the process at any time. There is no need to always stick to a rigid inflexible approach for the sake of safety, it's ok to wing it sometimes when one is in command of the methodology to derive the process, any process.
Success both in a corporate environment and in your personal life is sometimes a matter of longevity. Of hanging around long enough to be the last person standing and still interested in the role/position. But this should not be your modus operandi nor should rushing ahead trying to shake up the natural pace of the market. You must conserve your energy and expend it cleverly as there is only so much to go around.
How do you get people to trust your judgement? It starts with you trusting your own judgement and making decisions on that basis and letting people see you doing it. There is no other way to gain their trust.
In corporate environments people send too many emails. By that I mean ineffective people send too many emails. Those that know how to get things done use other strategies and tactics, email not being one of them. It also doesn't mean you then have endless meetings. What it boils down to is great operators know just the right mix between the impersonal (email) and the personal (one on ones) and the group (meetings). They also know how to take time out for reflection knowing that great decisions take time to percolate.
Qualities of good operators. Good operators in a corporate environment are few and far between. People who operate at a consistently high level and can do so on a sustained basis. What are some of the things they are and do that sets them apart? Performance is a race not a sprint but a marathon. Good performers are in it for the long term. They start slow and keep the same pace all the way in. Where they need to accelerate, it is measured and planned. When they decelerate it is done graciously not sliding and skidding all over the road. Good operators strike people from the first as being someone unusual but they don't know the reason. They are attracted to them but they don't know exactly why.
Don't take too much on even if you're capable of doing them concurrently. The surest way to degrade your capability is to give it too much work. The idea is to give the right work and the right amount of that work. It is a matter of experience and judgement to get the best out of you.
About Gilbert Labour
Mr Labour is a strategist, consultant, adviser, speaker and presenter on corporate restructuring, psychopathy in the workplace, life and executive coaching, project and program management, Six Sigma and Lean process improvement.
He combines all these skills in a unique combination, utilising Six Sigma and project management, to provide modern enlightened companies with truly innovative advice that will create a sustainable competitive advantage. Mr Labour exercises his skills and influence with compassion and deep understanding of the human condition especially where restructures result in overwhelming change and job loss.
He specialises in the following industries: legal and accountancy, telecommunications, transportation and aviation, banking and finance, insurance, government, IT and outsourcing and believes that his experience in these verticals is applicable across all industries, countries, languages, cultures and businesses generally. He has 30 years corporate experience in these industries.
Every single industry he specialises in (telcos, aviation, retail banking, insurance, outsourcing) faces fundamental challenges to continued survival and prosperity in the 21st Century and Mr Labour is well placed to provide a multi-disciplinary approach to uncovering insights for competitive advantage.
He sees the management of strategic, compliance and operational risk as one of the key issues facing executive managers on a daily basis. But not all companies can take advantage of formal Basel II and Sarbannes-Oxley (SOX) governance models.
For those companies that are not in the financial industry but still require strong governance around the management of operational risk, Mr Labour is an expert on creating strategies for managing operational risk supported by strong programme management structures to ensure compliance.
He has been extensively involved in process improvement initiatives within project and production environments. He has delivered Six Sigma Green and Black Belt process improvement programs that provide bottom line improvement whilst maintaining and enhancing employee morale.
He also owns and runs one of the world's most comprehensive web resources on the topic of life and executive coaching containing over 1500 pages of advice and more than 250 articles on life and executive coaching. He has also been quoted in learned papers, newspaper and magazine articles.
He has written a book on life coaching which provides an introduction to life coaching for the general public. He has also written a book on executive coaching, Executive Coaching for Process Improvement Excellence, that provides daily insights for top managers looking to succeed in today's fast paced environment.
He is also a pioneer in the field of coaching and project management having presented a landmark paper on this topic at PMISA 2004 (World Conference on Project Management) in South Africa in May, 04. His paper entitled Sane Project Management, a Life and Executive Coaching Approach has created both a new field in project management and a new area of interest and research for coaching and coaches around the world.
For PMISA 2006 (World Conference on Project Management) he has written a paper entitled Project Management and Six Sigma - a convergent and divergent model for solving business problems. He seeks to develop a theoretical and practical model to extract readily applicable business approaches from both divergence and convergence of these two disciplines.
He will explore whether coaching can facilitate the extraction of some of the benefits of this convergence? This will be continuing an exploration of the connection between coaching and project management that he first developed and presented at PMISA 2004.
Mr Labour acknowledges that in today's highly competitive and rapidly changing business environment, a busy consultant, life coach or executive coach must evince a compelling value proposition, as much for himself as for his product and service.
His unique value proposition is bringing to bear, on difficult even intractable business problems, a brilliant mix of both quantitative and qualitative approaches, embracing Six Sigma, Lean, project management, executive coaching, operational and line management.
He has a refreshing engaging and vibrant perspective on life and business in the corporate world. He is able to engage with any company in the world, within his industry expertise and beyond, and provide an assessment of the issues and problems that management suspects exists. He does this on a pro-active basis and confidentially.
He is also able to execute or be involved in the execution of any recommendations resulting from these engagements. He has previously managed large programs of work involving major restructuring, outsourcing and downsizing.
He forecasts a greater demand for people with his unique blend of skills in the future especially where established, staid inefficient companies in otherwise dynamic industries face head-on competition from more efficient home grown companies and those companies thriving in the tiger economies of China and India with their vast pool of cheap, educated and trained local talent.
Mr Labour will be holding an Executive Coaching Retreat in Mauritius between 26 September 2006 and 15 October 2006. Please contact Mr Labour for further details of the retreat. There are places for only 5 executives at this retreat which will focus on the growing opportunities in China and India.
Life Coaching Tips and Techniques No. 129
Life Coaching Thoughts and Ideas
Psychopathy is mind architecture by a Hitler
Every now and then, life for me becomes very busy and I don't have time to properly develop the ideas that come to me when I'm running and doing other things. The ideas don't stop but the time to develop them is not available. These are a collection of raw ideas. If time permitted these would be developed further and may even have turned out in the final shape to be something totally different from what was envisaged originally.
Everything you do at work, every thought you have you can bet someone knows about. Corporates are full of people trying to second guess you. Sometimes they succeed. This is not a bad thing. It simply means that you are behaving predictably some of the time. It's what you do the rest of the time that is the key to high performance, to standing out as someone very special but not weird or a fruit loop. There is a very thin line, a thin membrane between success and madness.
Dysfunctional performance. There are people you encounter every day in corporate environments who are dysfunctional. As a people manager and program manager in charge of project managers I am especially exposed to project managers who have partially lost the plot. I am not talking about people who have spectacularly lost the plot but those who have a low grade infection if you will, who keep under the radar very effectively hidden from those who may pry too much. In actual fact, any manager worth their salt knows these people are afflicted.
Because the problem is not so in your face it is very difficult to establish if someone is failing because of it. I say failing because I know there are people in corporate environments who are dysfunctional but successful these are the psychopaths of this world. So here I am discussing the 'normal' personality type who is failing. The behavior of normal personality types who fail is also known as incompetence. But these performers can improve even given their limited intellectual and emotional horsepower.
My father Raymond. How special was this person? It was like talking to someone who had infinite knowledge. It was as if the conversation could stretch on forever without ever being disordered or boring. It was unfathomable structure with a very light touch. The top was soufflé underneath iron intellectual infrastructure. An unbelievable combination of charisma, knowledge, experience, madness and insights.
I have written elsewhere that he was phenomenally intelligent but it was more than that. In his childhood he suffered from a very undisciplined upbringing saved only by his intellect and wide reading. I use the word saved guardedly because he wasn't really saved at all as he suffered all his life from these bleak episodes. But having gone through his Calvary gave him a very sure touch when analysing and working with people.
Poor performance. Another reason why people aren't performing is that they're not physically fit. By that I don't mean they don't have a physical platform as much as they are not even on an average level of fitness. That is they smoke, they drink to excess, they form very poor quality relationships that only fuel their dependencies, they're over caffeinated, they take recreational drugs, they don't get enough sleep or exercise, they're probably under stress (which they would be if the proceeding was all true) and most telling of all they're overweight. When you add that combination it is a wonder that they can perform at all even poorly. They probably push themselves but there is only so much flogging you can do. The key thing is they don't shine, they cannot.
There is this guy at a workplace I know who is constantly yakking away. Talking non stop. The problem is not that he is talking but that he is verbalising thoughts and ideas what should by rights be kept inside head. No one needs to hear this verbal diarrhoea. It is pre-work and needs to be done in private.
What is the right level of enthusiasm in a corporate setting? Difficult to say. If you're not excited enough you make mistakes and if you're too excited you make mistakes. The environment is conducive to making mistakes what with unrealistic deadlines mixed with high quality expectations. A high level of enthusiasm enables a person to keep a high energy level for multiple short periods of time.
There is an interesting case going on in the US of a soldier who ha been accused or rape and murder in Iraq. The interesting this is this soldier was discharged from the army on the grounds of a 'personality disorder'. Now my guess is that this guy is psychopathic meaning he is an automaton without a conscience. A perfect killing machine. The only surprise for me is why he was discharged from the army. I would have thought he had the perfect mind architecture for a brutal war being fought without rules or quarter.
A lot of middle age guys have completely lose the plot. How can you tell? They are cranky, mean, selfish, whinging and short sighted. They pine to have sex with 20 year old girls. They have problems with internal discipline. They are erratic and these are the sane ones. The insane ones (the psychopaths) are impossible.
You notice, even amidst the endless violence in the Middle East that ordinary people are still helping their fellow man, taking them to hospital, carrying them on stretchers, holding their hand. The forbearance of these people is amazing. These people don't have to do it but they do. They do it because it could have been them, it could be them tomorrow. All this in 49C heat in the middle of summer in Baghdad. It is inhuman that people are suffering this violence in such devastating heat. If a place on earth it is this place. You notice how civil wars take place in some of the most inhospitable places on earth like Somalia and Afghanistan. Why fight over what is mostly barren earth.
There is a no way the federal opposition in Australia can afford a top flight executive coach (@ say $25000 per month retainer but an as executive coach I can give them some free advice (gratuitous maybe). IR will be a huge issue at the next election but it will have a tendency to get away from them especially when it gets down and dirty into the detail. My suggestion: hire an IR genius who knows every detail of the legislation. Someone who is both tactical and strategic. Someone who understands politics intimately. Someone who can drive the opposition agenda. This person already exists but they are employed by the major consulting firms and hired out as $400 per hour. The lesson is that the opposition has to treat the election and all the period before it as a corporate would for say a key product launch, a life and death product launch. You have to employ and engage the best of the best in all fields. If you don't there will be another 4 wilderness years.
Executive Coaching and Stress. The purpose of executive coaching is not to alleviate or eliminate stress per se. The purpose of Executive Coaching is to provide a structure, a paradigm by which the Exec may make sense of his surroundings and his performance in these surroundings. Once he has developed an internal model, a simulator of existing performance, he can then use that engine (without involving or jeopardising his current job) to run test cases, That is, play with different performance parameters so as to come up with a number of likely candidates for excellence. Ironically it is former executives and senior managers that fill the ranks of executive coaches as no one without that background can be a credible, reliable and effective executive coach. So stress is well known to executive coaches, that is probably why they are coaches escaping from the fire.
The purpose of life coaching is not to make your life perfect in every aspect nor is it even to strive for perfection however noble that might be. Life coaching is the art of the possible within existing constrains and resources. Life coaching is evolution rather than revolution. Don't focus on the tiny aspects of your life and try and get those all right. Don't expect or try for perfection in everything. Don't be distracted from your main mission by the little mistakes along the way. Sure they're frustrating and perhaps show a lack of discipline and application occasionally. To be really good requires the ability to create and evaluate multiple hypothetical situations and determine their usefulness in your master plan moving forward. For a successful business person, life is a massive juggling act balancing work, life, family, own personal business and everything else going on. Life coaching answers the question "How can they do it better?".
When you're really busy is the best time to get going with the things you really want to do in life. Write your book, article, develop your business or web site, start a great relationship/end a non functioning relationship. The busier you are the more focused, directed will be your effort and the more weight your work will have. Because the time you spent doing it is time you could hardly spare but you did therefore the value in time translates hopefully into work that is spare, strong, dedicated and useful for yourself and others. As a corollary when you're not busy is not the time to start something fresh, new and innovative. When you're not busy you're soft, flabby, sloppy wasteful of your time and unable to distill your resources to be more effective.
Continuity. When people get sick, demotivated, lackluster or simply have given up you break continuity and without continuity you can't have performance.
A very public breakdown. Most Executives break down in private (of course everyone knows about it but that is a different matter) but occasionally a breakdown is very public. A referee affords a unique opportunity to watch decisions being made, mistakes being made and the forces at work to redeem these mistakes. That redemption is within the context of the game and the referee compensates for the mistake, sometimes overcompensates and then both sides are angry with him.
A top class sporting match (refereed by a top ref) provides an Executive Coach with a great opportunity to watch an executive at work. In a recent match, a referee had a spectacular breakdown issuing 16 admonitions. A referee is an Executive, the work place is the soccer pitch. The referee is at work. Each day Executives make decisions but the ramifications of these decisions is sometimes not known for 3 months or 6 months or more but in a soccer game each decision is made in a split second and the results of these decisions is plain for all to see instantaneously. Watch when the ref makes a mistake, you will see him compensating the other side, given them the benefit of the doubt in every 50/50 decision that has to be made.
About Gilbert Labour
Mr Labour is a strategist, consultant, adviser, speaker and presenter on corporate restructuring, psychopathy in the workplace, life and executive coaching, project and program management, Six Sigma and Lean process improvement.
He combines all these skills in a unique combination, utilising Six Sigma and project management, to provide modern enlightened companies with truly innovative advice that will create a sustainable competitive advantage. Mr Labour exercises his skills and influence with compassion and deep understanding of the human condition especially where restructures result in overwhelming change and job loss.
He specialises in the following industries: legal and accountancy, telecommunications, transportation and aviation, banking and finance, insurance, government, IT and outsourcing and believes that his experience in these verticals is applicable across all industries, countries, languages, cultures and businesses generally. He has 30 years corporate experience in these industries.
Every single industry he specialises in (telcos, aviation, retail banking, insurance, outsourcing) faces fundamental challenges to continued survival and prosperity in the 21st Century and Mr Labour is well placed to provide a multi-disciplinary approach to uncovering insights for competitive advantage.
He sees the management of strategic, compliance and operational risk as one of the key issues facing executive managers on a daily basis. But not all companies can take advantage of formal Basel II and Sarbannes-Oxley (SOX) governance models.
For those companies that are not in the financial industry but still require strong governance around the management of operational risk, Mr Labour is an expert on creating strategies for managing operational risk supported by strong programme management structures to ensure compliance.
He has been extensively involved in process improvement initiatives within project and production environments. He has delivered Six Sigma Green and Black Belt process improvement programs that provide bottom line improvement whilst maintaining and enhancing employee morale.
He also owns and runs one of the world's most comprehensive web resources on the topic of life and executive coaching containing over 1500 pages of advice and more than 250 articles on life and executive coaching. He has also been quoted in learned papers, newspaper and magazine articles.
He has written a book on life coaching which provides an introduction to life coaching for the general public. He has also written a book on executive coaching, Executive Coaching for Process Improvement Excellence, that provides daily insights for top managers looking to succeed in today's fast paced environment.
He is also a pioneer in the field of coaching and project management having presented a landmark paper on this topic at PMISA 2004 (World Conference on Project Management) in South Africa in May, 04. His paper entitled Sane Project Management, a Life and Executive Coaching Approach has created both a new field in project management and a new area of interest and research for coaching and coaches around the world.
For PMISA 2006 (World Conference on Project Management) he has written a paper entitled Project Management and Six Sigma - a convergent and divergent model for solving business problems. He seeks to develop a theoretical and practical model to extract readily applicable business approaches from both divergence and convergence of these two disciplines.
He will explore whether coaching can facilitate the extraction of some of the benefits of this convergence? This will be continuing an exploration of the connection between coaching and project management that he first developed and presented at PMISA 2004.
Mr Labour acknowledges that in today's highly competitive and rapidly changing business environment, a busy consultant, life coach or executive coach must evince a compelling value proposition, as much for himself as for his product and service.
His unique value proposition is bringing to bear, on difficult even intractable business problems, a brilliant mix of both quantitative and qualitative approaches, embracing Six Sigma, Lean, project management, executive coaching, operational and line management.
He has a refreshing engaging and vibrant perspective on life and business in the corporate world. He is able to engage with any company in the world, within his industry expertise and beyond, and provide an assessment of the issues and problems that management suspects exists. He does this on a pro-active basis and confidentially.
He is also able to execute or be involved in the execution of any recommendations resulting from these engagements. He has previously managed large programs of work involving major restructuring, outsourcing and downsizing.
He forecasts a greater demand for people with his unique blend of skills in the future especially where established, staid inefficient companies in otherwise dynamic industries face head-on competition from more efficient home grown companies and those companies thriving in the tiger economies of China and India with their vast pool of cheap, educated and trained local talent.
Mr Labour will be holding an Executive Coaching Retreat in Mauritius between 26 September 2006 and 15 October 2006. Please contact Mr Labour for further details of the retreat. There are places for only 5 executives at this retreat which will focus on the growing opportunities in China and India.
Life Coaching Tips and Techniques No. 128
Life Coaching Thoughts and Ideas
In whatever walk of life or profession you might be in, no matter how busy you are, how demanding you are of other people (especially if you are), always but always give praise and thanks for a job well done. Nothing will buy you more loyalty and even greater efforts from your people than praise. One of the truest markers of psychopaths is that they never give praise (and probably have never received it).
There are the great players who you couldn't have a conversation with about the game they are so gifted at. These people are purely instinctive sportsman. Whilst there are others who besides being great players are also great people, great intellects who know the game from a human dimension and understand greatness. You may be great but it does not necessarily follow you understand what it is to be great, what it takes to be great. These latter also make the best teachers.
Sports people who lose the plot are the same as executives having a breakdown. There is a cause of the breakdown, there is a recovery period both mental and physical and there is a return to the game/office. If only it were as simple as that. The breakdown is such a calamity such a journey into the abyss the void that the comeback is a journey of another dimension. Think of running a mile with a 40 kilos pack on your back and your energy level half of what it used to be.
If you are better, much better than anyone around you it is not really a cause for your personal rejoicing. One of the reasons for your excellence is that your current capability is so much more than whatever the current situation will ever demand of you. The question to ask is: why are you wasting your talents on a position or situation that is evidently far less demanding of your talents than you would wish it to be (in ideal circumstances).
One of the reasons for this is discrimination whether age, race or otherwise. Another reason could be that you have voluntarily downsized and you have taken a role that is less demanding on yourself because your personal circumstances have changed, your energy levels lower and your focus less sharp.
There should always be a layer between what you write and you. Sometimes this layer is raw, bleeding, on edge but it should always be there. When it is not there hell ensures for the artist but undoubtedly great art can ensue but it is not sustainable for the artist. The other extreme is art or writing which is barren, devoid of emotional risk. An artist that is still emotionally engaged but healthily so (especially with all addictions under tight control) is the ideal. The work is edgy but it is sustainable and will improve over time. The time of the incandescent artist is probably past. Does that mean the time of great art is passed?
Corporate psychopathy - what can the knowledge we have about this subject do for us? Is there a program, tool, something to identify and remove psychopaths from the organisation, from our lives? Unfortunately there is no such thing because the disease is not recognised as such and hence has no reliable and agreed diagnosis and treatment. There are no doctors specialising in treating psychopathy, it is not a
condition per se but a description of a personality trait that is socially undesirable but not thought of as an illness. As a result of this there are people out there causing havoc in our personal and work lives that are literally getting away with murder.
How do you recognise someone who's lost the plot? How do you help someone who's lost the plot? You will only help someone you care about. You only want to help someone who you already think highly enough about to take the time to understand their situation. The number one symptom of this problem is asking an area or person to do work for you that is out of their scope. The correct response is for them not to do it. If they do it, then you have two people who've lost the plot. People who have lost the plot are an embarrassment but keep the workplace interesting and vibrant.
What is better? Working within yourself but doing so superlatively and getting compliments and satisfaction form your clients? Or working on something new, at the edge and beyond your performance envelope and confused each day with your clients bemused, unhappy, impatient and frustrated? Pushing the envelopes working in the area of invention, innovation and creativity. Probably the natural answer is working within yourself but that would be wrong. The right answer is both together are better than either one on their own. One is past the other is the future. The future builds on the past but the past also builds on the future. For an explanation see other articles on this web site regarding how to improve your past. You have to look back if you are going forward (using your in built rear view mirror).
How to make the best use of your corporate time? Have a goal separate from the organisation goals that you are working towards. Ideally make everything you do for a corporate goal also work simultaneously toward your personal goal. Merge the two seamlessly so that one becomes the other. There is no two lives here. It is one and only and they are the same.. There is no separation between work and play, life and work.. At work there is life, at home there is work.
How to make the best use of your corporate time? Have a goal separate from the organisation goals that you are working towards. Ideally make everything you do for a corporate goal also work simultaneously toward your personal goal. Merge the two seamlessly so that one becomes the other. There is no two lives here. It is one and only and they are the same.. There is no separation between work and play, life and work.. At work there is life, at home there is work.
All personal success requires a personal charisma the 'why should I care about you factor'. This cannot be manufactured but it can be nurtured if there is a spark of it there. There are books written about how to be likeable but they are useless. Being likeable is a gift. The very best managers, when they walk back into a room where people are working, cough or speak aloud just before they get there (to give them a chance to get on with whatever it is they do and not embarrass them). It is a courtesy by the manager but speaks volumes for their people skills and sensitivity. It displays an innate sense of management.
Realise that you're not in a corporate environment forever so make the most of your time there. Enjoy it. You can only enjoy it if you are triumphant. The secret is to be at the top of your mental and physical game whilst you're there and leave when you go off your game. There is no point being there if you're a lame duck.
About Gilbert Labour
Mr Labour is a strategist, consultant, adviser, speaker and presenter on corporate restructuring, psychopathy in the workplace, life and executive coaching, project and program management, Six Sigma and Lean process improvement.
He combines all these skills in a unique combination, utilising Six Sigma and project management, to provide modern enlightened companies with truly innovative advice that will create a sustainable competitive advantage. Mr Labour exercises his skills and influence with compassion and deep understanding of the human condition especially where restructures result in overwhelming change and job loss.
He specialises in the following industries: legal and accountancy, telecommunications, transportation and aviation, banking and finance, insurance, government, IT and outsourcing and believes that his experience in these verticals is applicable across all industries, countries, languages, cultures and businesses generally. He has 30 years corporate experience in these industries.
Every single industry he specialises in (telcos, aviation, retail banking, insurance, outsourcing) faces fundamental challenges to continued survival and prosperity in the 21st Century and Mr Labour is well placed to provide a multi-disciplinary approach to uncovering insights for competitive advantage.
He sees the management of strategic, compliance and operational risk as one of the key issues facing executive managers on a daily basis. But not all companies can take advantage of formal Basel II and Sarbannes-Oxley (SOX) governance models.
For those companies that are not in the financial industry but still require strong governance around the management of operational risk, Mr Labour is an expert on creating strategies for managing operational risk supported by strong programme management structures to ensure compliance.
He has been extensively involved in process improvement initiatives within project and production environments. He has delivered Six Sigma Green and Black Belt process improvement programs that provide bottom line improvement whilst maintaining and enhancing employee morale.
He also owns and runs one of the world's most comprehensive web resources on the topic of life and executive coaching containing over 1500 pages of advice and more than 250 articles on life and executive coaching. He has also been quoted in learned papers, newspaper and magazine articles.
He has written a book on life coaching which provides an introduction to life coaching for the general public. He has also written a book on executive coaching, Executive Coaching for Process Improvement Excellence, that provides daily insights for top managers looking to succeed in today's fast paced environment.
He is also a pioneer in the field of coaching and project management having presented a landmark paper on this topic at PMISA 2004 (World Conference on Project Management) in South Africa in May, 04. His paper entitled Sane Project Management, a Life and Executive Coaching Approach has created both a new field in project management and a new area of interest and research for coaching and coaches around the world.
For PMISA 2006 (World Conference on Project Management) he has written a paper entitled Project Management and Six Sigma - a convergent and divergent model for solving business problems. He seeks to develop a theoretical and practical model to extract readily applicable business approaches from both divergence and convergence of these two disciplines.
He will explore whether coaching can facilitate the extraction of some of the benefits of this convergence? This will be continuing an exploration of the connection between coaching and project management that he first developed and presented at PMISA 2004.
Mr Labour acknowledges that in today's highly competitive and rapidly changing business environment, a busy consultant, life coach or executive coach must evince a compelling value proposition, as much for himself as for his product and service.
His unique value proposition is bringing to bear, on difficult even intractable business problems, a brilliant mix of both quantitative and qualitative approaches, embracing Six Sigma, Lean, project management, executive coaching, operational and line management.
He has a refreshing engaging and vibrant perspective on life and business in the corporate world. He is able to engage with any company in the world, within his industry expertise and beyond, and provide an assessment of the issues and problems that management suspects exists. He does this on a pro-active basis and confidentially.
He is also able to execute or be involved in the execution of any recommendations resulting from these engagements. He has previously managed large programs of work involving major restructuring, outsourcing and downsizing.
He forecasts a greater demand for people with his unique blend of skills in the future especially where established, staid inefficient companies in otherwise dynamic industries face head-on competition from more efficient home grown companies and those companies thriving in the tiger economies of China and India with their vast pool of cheap, educated and trained local talent.
Mr Labour will be holding an Executive Coaching Retreat in Mauritius between 26 September 2006 and 15 October 2006. Please contact Mr Labour for further details of the retreat. There are places for only 5 executives at this retreat which will focus on the growing opportunities in China and India.
Life Coaching Tips and Techniques No. 127
Life coaching is not about making people feel good about themselves. In some cases, it makes people feel bad about themselves
Influential enough to be credible and credible enough to be influential
The best life coaches learn from their clients as much as if not more than their clients learn from them
A life coach has to be creative because he is in a way reshaping someone else's life and even beliefs. That provides the life coach with a lot of power and influence. How does a life coach reshape someone's life? Or more to the point how does he get himself into a position where he is influential enough to be credible in reshaping someone's life? The latter is the job specification of a life coach.
It is what all your experience and sessions with your client should lead you to. If it doesn't you're not a life coach and your client is wasting his time and money. The former is aspirational, that is, the best life coaches should aim to reshape people's lives. After all, why would they come to you? They come to you because they need a structure to conduct their daily lives. Perhaps even a direction to aim their daily life efforts at. But as life coaching is collaborational, by direction I mean self-direction. But a guided self-direction, at least at first.
The world has endless variety and provides the observant life coach with many opportunities to observe and learn from people (not clients). A great life coach looks for these opportunities, especially if it involves himself, and exploits them to the max. Squeezing all the life learning out of them. At times this may cause pain but that is a small price to pay for this priceless learning. It is what your clients pay you for. That perceptive insight into their own condition.
But that is not to say that life coaching is a purely intellectual pursuit and the resulting relationship one that is antiseptic. It is far from that but it is always absolutely professional and ethical. Great life coaches perform a very difficult balancing act.
They have intellectual horse power of the highest calibre, you need it to be a credible life coach, but that is allied with an emotional awareness of yourself and the client that transcends the intellect and operates in a magical sphere.
All great relationships possess something unfathomable something unexplainable something undeniable something unique and the relationship of a life coach to a client no less so perhaps even more so.
There are two sides to the relationship and the best life coaches do not let you see the join. Rather the join is powerful yet almost invisible that the client has no suspicion that the relationship also has strong emotional elements and that is how it should be.
It is the unspoken part of the relationship and in my opinion the most important part, at least it is the most effective part. That is, recourse to it almost always produces great results. It is where you communicate with someone in an environment of total trust. That is, the point I started this article with has been reached 'influential enough to be credible'.
This trust reposed in you by a client has to be used carefully and wisely. It is communicating beyond the normal barriers people put up. Therefore it reaches down deep and a great life coach can really great affect change for the good. That is a huge responsibility and really should only be reposed in someone who is an exceptional life coach and who understands the scope and range of that responsibility.
A life coach is continually experiencing life, there is no other choice. But what sets a life coach apart is that he can dissect that experience even if it is excoriating especially if it is that way. The tougher the pain the better the lesson. But dissecting pure pain is not for everybody. For most it is too raw to learn from. For those who will go on to make great life coaches, there is no greater crucible.
Where do the great ideas generated in a life coaching session come from? Firstly it is a given that there is no great life coaching session without great ideas. Ideas are generated when the chemistry is right. That is someone who comes to you with the world's problems on his shoulders, no matter how great a life coach you are, you will not be generating ideas at least not initially. Because the client is not ready, you're not ready and the relationship is not ready.
As I alluded to above if life coaching is anything it is a relationship. Without it there is no life coaching. It takes time, it takes knowledge, it takes experience for a life coach to understand exactly what buttons to push. To first of all address what is going on and seek shelter from the storm in a favourable anchorage and then to even think about setting sail for a new course.
It takes working with many clients or a selected client over time (you learn lots either way) to understand exactly what tools in your carry bag to use, how to calibrate these tools and how to deploy in the most efficient way possible. Life coaching is a great learning experience and the best realise that start off pretty useless and as they get more experience, they hopefully will learn and learn quickly.
There is no magic or secret to being a life coach. It takes a confidence in your own abilities to resolve people's problems and issues and the capability to do it relatively quickly. For that you need pure intellect. But that is not enough you also need to be personable and able to develop the right chemistry between you and the client to get things done. On top of all that, you must be a smart and canny business person.
After all life coaching is a small business and a most demanding one at that. Because you are selling yourself, your warmth, your generosity, your analytical skills, your objectivity and above all your honesty and integrity. A tough job skills description. There are not many jobs as demanding. Not to mention the competition. There are at least 50 million web sites out there that deal in life coaching in one way or another.
To be a successful life coach, you must be a stand out in more ways than one. You must catch the attention by your own unique individual slant on life. One that is quirky but truth. One that resonates with the people out there searching the internet for anything and nothing and everything in between. Of course it goes without saying that once you begin to snare clients, you must work with them in an exceptional capacity delivering results. Life coaching is not about making people feel good about themselves. In some cases, it makes people feel bad about themselves at least at the point of initial contact. They're in a space they don't want to be. It is about making people reassess why that is and forcing them in some cases to make changes to their lives to get away from that unwanted space.
About Gilbert Labour
Mr Labour is a strategist, consultant, adviser, speaker and presenter on corporate restructuring, psychopathy in the workplace, life and executive coaching, project and program management, Six Sigma and Lean process improvement.
He combines all these skills in a unique combination, utilising Six Sigma and project management, to provide modern enlightened companies with truly innovative advice that will create a sustainable competitive advantage. Mr Labour exercises his skills and influence with compassion and deep understanding of the human condition especially where restructures result in overwhelming change and job loss.
He specialises in the following industries: legal and accountancy, telecommunications, transportation and aviation, banking and finance, insurance, government, IT and outsourcing and believes that his experience in these verticals is applicable across all industries, countries, languages, cultures and businesses generally. He has 30 years corporate experience in these industries.
Every single industry he specialises in (telcos, aviation, retail banking, insurance, outsourcing) faces fundamental challenges to continued survival and prosperity in the 21st Century and Mr Labour is well placed to provide a multi-disciplinary approach to uncovering insights for competitive advantage.
He sees the management of strategic, compliance and operational risk as one of the key issues facing executive managers on a daily basis. But not all companies can take advantage of formal Basel II and Sarbannes-Oxley (SOX) governance models.
For those companies that are not in the financial industry but still require strong governance around the management of operational risk, Mr Labour is an expert on creating strategies for managing operational risk supported by strong programme management structures to ensure compliance.
He has been extensively involved in process improvement initiatives within project and production environments. He has delivered Six Sigma Green and Black Belt process improvement programs that provide bottom line improvement whilst maintaining and enhancing employee morale.
He also owns and runs one of the world's most comprehensive web resources on the topic of life and executive coaching containing over 1500 pages of advice and more than 250 articles on life and executive coaching. He has also been quoted in learned papers, newspaper and magazine articles.
He has written a book on life coaching which provides an introduction to life coaching for the general public. He has also written a book on executive coaching, Executive Coaching for Process Improvement Excellence, that provides daily insights for top managers looking to succeed in today's fast paced environment.
He is also a pioneer in the field of coaching and project management having presented a landmark paper on this topic at PMISA 2004 (World Conference on Project Management) in South Africa in May, 04. His paper entitled Sane Project Management, a Life and Executive Coaching Approach has created both a new field in project management and a new area of interest and research for coaching and coaches around the world.
For PMISA 2006 (World Conference on Project Management) he has written a paper entitled Project Management and Six Sigma - a convergent and divergent model for solving business problems. He seeks to develop a theoretical and practical model to extract readily applicable business approaches from both divergence and convergence of these two disciplines.
He will explore whether coaching can facilitate the extraction of some of the benefits of this convergence? This will be continuing an exploration of the connection between coaching and project management that he first developed and presented at PMISA 2004.
Mr Labour acknowledges that in today's highly competitive and rapidly changing business environment, a busy consultant, life coach or executive coach must evince a compelling value proposition, as much for himself as for his product and service.
His unique value proposition is bringing to bear, on difficult even intractable business problems, a brilliant mix of both quantitative and qualitative approaches, embracing Six Sigma, Lean, project management, executive coaching, operational and line management.
He has a refreshing engaging and vibrant perspective on life and business in the corporate world. He is able to engage with any company in the world, within his industry expertise and beyond, and provide an assessment of the issues and problems that management suspects exists. He does this on a pro-active basis and confidentially.
He is also able to execute or be involved in the execution of any recommendations resulting from these engagements. He has previously managed large programs of work involving major restructuring, outsourcing and downsizing.
He forecasts a greater demand for people with his unique blend of skills in the future especially where established, staid inefficient companies in otherwise dynamic industries face head-on competition from more efficient home grown companies and those companies thriving in the tiger economies of China and India with their vast pool of cheap, educated and trained local talent.
Mr Labour will be holding an Executive Coaching Retreat in Mauritius between 26 September 2006 and 15 October 2006. Please contact Mr Labour for further details of the retreat. There are places for only 5 executives at this retreat which will focus on the growing opportunities in China and India.
Life Coaching Tips and Techniques No. 126
Life Coaching can help unhappy people
But really unhappy people don't want to let go of this pain, it is so comforting and defining
Emotional pain provides a story, a point of reference, a structure, a past but no future
Unhappiness is contagious. Unhappy people want to make other happy people unhappy. They want to make people aware that they're unhappy but they usually do it in a round about way.
They want to infect others with their contagion, with their agony. But because agony cannot be simply transferred or shared, they a will create a little drama and dissension in your life that goes quite close to mimicking what they themselves are going through.
They want to envelope you in a folder of distress and frustration and file you. But not if you know what to watch out for. You will find nothing overt or verbal to help you identify this distressed individual who wants to make you that way too.
Rather than being depressed about it, they are morbidly active and overtly but superficially happy. They are always willing to help you but behind your back they are always complaining about you. You are their victim don't you forget it.
There are some people who you can read unhappiness on their faces. They are emotionally bruised and have lost their inner smile. How do you detect? Just a blank look when formerly it was an active proactive look full of forward energy.
How to detect hidden unhappiness
The state of unhappiness is pretty hard to hide but some people have perfected this difficult art. Most do it poorly because the body language and the eyes give it away. But those who have mastered the inner turmoil and show a pleasant, kind and engaging personality to the outside world, how can you tell they're unhappy?
You will find this type in corporate environments. No matter how bad things are going for them, they still smile and plod (not power) on. The giveaway here is: they are a guided missile but with a faulty inertial navigation system that is stuck on one mode: autopilot and goes in only one direction only. Trying to get them to change tack is senseless and useless.
The next giveaway is a lack of deep and true emotional engagement in anything that is going on around them. They are at the wheel but with eyes shut. This lack of emotional involvement manifests itself in the inability (and reluctance) to adapt to new or change situations.
The third giveaway is that they look as if they are carrying an enormous weight of pain and suffering around them, inside them and outside them. It is a weight you cannot share with them not can they share it with anybody else. It is their own private pain and they possess it fully and no one will take it off them. In fact they don't want to let go of this pain it is so comforting and defining.
The fourth giveaway is a hugely diminished faculty of creativity and innovation especially when it is really necessary: when dealing with a crisis or other disaster. Creativity is usually associate with someone performing at the pinnacle but it is also useful when coming up with creative solutions for getting out of a slump.
It is as if they are paying a penance for a sin not yet committed or a sin committed long ago or an imagined sin. In other works the nexus between cause and effect is tenuous at best. It is very hard to understand what the root cause of the unhappiness as the real reasons are hidden in personal antiquity.
They are all wounds no scars. Scars have not yet had time to form. They carry big open wounds that bleed at the slightest touch so they are afraid to touch and be touched. Afraid to feel and to be the subject of someone else's feelings. Afraid to love and be loved. Too afraid to exist but too afraid not to exist.
The openness of someone healed surprises them but there is unknowing retreat into themselves, a headlong escape into the self which in reality means from prison to solitary confinement.
Love dies on their lips. Warmth chills on their breadth. Beauty petrifies on their face. The furnace of their love perishes. Their sourness bitters their life with bitterness.
Unhappy people are lost, have lost the plot. Don't know themselves anymore. Don't trust themselves anymore. They are on a bleak journey, know there is another more open journey full of sun but don't know how to get there. It exists but cannot be conceived much less found.
About Gilbert Labour
Mr Labour is a strategist, consultant, adviser, speaker and presenter on corporate restructuring, psychopathy in the workplace, life and executive coaching, project and program management, Six Sigma and Lean process improvement.
He combines all these skills in a unique combination, utilising Six Sigma and project management, to provide modern enlightened companies with truly innovative advice that will create a sustainable competitive advantage. Mr Labour exercises his skills and influence with compassion and deep understanding of the human condition especially where restructures result in overwhelming change and job loss.
He specialises in the following industries: legal and accountancy, telecommunications, transportation and aviation, banking and finance, insurance, government, IT and outsourcing and believes that his experience in these verticals is applicable across all industries, countries, languages, cultures and businesses generally. He has 30 years corporate experience in these industries.
Every single industry he specialises in (telcos, aviation, retail banking, insurance, outsourcing) faces fundamental challenges to continued survival and prosperity in the 21st Century and Mr Labour is well placed to provide a multi-disciplinary approach to uncovering insights for competitive advantage.
He sees the management of strategic, compliance and operational risk as one of the key issues facing executive managers on a daily basis. But not all companies can take advantage of formal Basel II and Sarbannes-Oxley (SOX) governance models.
For those companies that are not in the financial industry but still require strong governance around the management of operational risk, Mr Labour is an expert on creating strategies for managing operational risk supported by strong programme management structures to ensure compliance.
He has been extensively involved in process improvement initiatives within project and production environments. He has delivered Six Sigma Green and Black Belt process improvement programs that provide bottom line improvement whilst maintaining and enhancing employee morale.
He also owns and runs one of the world's most comprehensive web resources on the topic of life and executive coaching containing over 1500 pages of advice and more than 250 articles on life and executive coaching. He has also been quoted in learned papers, newspaper and magazine articles.
He has written a book on life coaching which provides an introduction to life coaching for the general public. He has also written a book on executive coaching, Executive Coaching for Process Improvement Excellence, that provides daily insights for top managers looking to succeed in today's fast paced environment.
He is also a pioneer in the field of coaching and project management having presented a landmark paper on this topic at PMISA 2004 (World Conference on Project Management) in South Africa in May, 04. His paper entitled Sane Project Management, a Life and Executive Coaching Approach has created both a new field in project management and a new area of interest and research for coaching and coaches around the world.
For PMISA 2006 (World Conference on Project Management) he has written a paper entitled Project Management and Six Sigma - a convergent and divergent model for solving business problems. He seeks to develop a theoretical and practical model to extract readily applicable business approaches from both divergence and convergence of these two disciplines.
He will explore whether coaching can facilitate the extraction of some of the benefits of this convergence? This will be continuing an exploration of the connection between coaching and project management that he first developed and presented at PMISA 2004.
Mr Labour acknowledges that in today's highly competitive and rapidly changing business environment, a busy consultant, life coach or executive coach must evince a compelling value proposition, as much for himself as for his product and service.
His unique value proposition is bringing to bear, on difficult even intractable business problems, a brilliant mix of both quantitative and qualitative approaches, embracing Six Sigma, Lean, project management, executive coaching, operational and line management.
He has a refreshing engaging and vibrant perspective on life and business in the corporate world. He is able to engage with any company in the world, within his industry expertise and beyond, and provide an assessment of the issues and problems that management suspects exists. He does this on a pro-active basis and confidentially.
He is also able to execute or be involved in the execution of any recommendations resulting from these engagements. He has previously managed large programs of work involving major restructuring, outsourcing and downsizing.
He forecasts a greater demand for people with his unique blend of skills in the future especially where established, staid inefficient companies in otherwise dynamic industries face head-on competition from more efficient home grown companies and those companies thriving in the tiger economies of China and India with their vast pool of cheap, educated and trained local talent.
Mr Labour will be holding an Executive Coaching Retreat in Mauritius between 26 September 2006 and 15 October 2006. Please contact Mr Labour for further details of the retreat. There are places for only 5 executives at this retreat which will focus on the growing opportunities in China and India.
Life Coaching Tips and Techniques No. 125
The mindset of a life coach
How do you go from mere mortal to life coach in the space of 30 minutes
As a life coach the client expects you to be high performing at all times especially when every minute is paid for in advance but how do you get into this mindset where you can be effective immediately?
Firstly, being a life coach is a 1500 metres race (no longer) but not a 100 metre sprint. So you have some time to create the right environment for coaching. You must use this time wisely. Probably in a session you will have the first say 20 minutes to create/recreate the coaching connection. Without this connection, there is no coaching possible.
What do you do in the first 20 minutes whilst you on the fly create the connection. You talk about the known, what has been occupying your client's time since the last session. You not only have to talk to keep this conversation going but you also have to think of the right entry point for your coaching for this session. So you need to keep one conversation going whilst working out how to start another one. You must create that entry point rather than wait for it.
Based on what was discussed at the last session and what the client has been doing in the last two weeks, you can work out the level of traction and progress made against what may have been agreed or discussed at the last session. Life coaching is not project management, it is not a task list. What is discussed and agreed upon from session to session has to reasonably fluid as unavoidable circumstances may derail the best laid plans and intentions.
After the first 20 minutes, you will then have a clear idea of what to focus on. There are a number of standard approaches that I use in my practice that I focus on generically. Sometimes this is tailored for the client but generally speaking these include platform for performance, approaches to keep the brain muscular and active, facing to/creating challenges in the personal and work sphere. Always looking to push the performance envelope.
Once platform is in place then the coaching journey can go where it may. It is like having a car fully charged with fuel and ready to go in any direction you point it. The work can lead into the personal arena looking at relationships for example and/or it can deviate into the work arena and look at such issues as executive health. I find in practice that the professionals I coach are usually workaholics. I can't help them until I can cure them of this addiction. This is a sump that drains away all effort, focus and energies. There is no time, space or energy for a life.
Coaching has a beautiful simplicity and symmetry. It is based on having the right chemistry, the right connection between two people. But it is much more than an emotional connection or bond. Because a coaching relationship is a professional one, the coach must retain a level of emotional independence because the advice you give must be impartial and right given the circumstances. It cannot be based on your own feelings or emotions. It is ironic in that it is a relationship that requires an emotional connection to work yet emotion can have no part in the outcomes or direction.
Clients can and do fall in love with their coaches. It is the nature of the beast. Coaches know this and keep the relationship on a relaxed but business footing. As a coach you are trusted implicitly and it is incumbent upon you to never violate or damage that trust. The coaching relationship cannot survive if the trust is not there.
Being a good coach takes time and experience to understand the right pacing and to not ever force the pacing of any session even though there might be other areas you would like to cover. Given the nature of this relationship, you must always create a bridge from one area to another. You must show how they are inter-connected and one supports the other. Ideas, even the client's, on their own have no place unless you can integrate them into where the client is going.
Given what I have said above, to be a credible life coach you must have a first class brain for working with people. But allied with this brain power must be an emotional maturity to be able to absorb everything the client tells you and reflect it back to them in ways that are new, innovative and creative yet which makes complete and absolute simple sense.
As a life coach, 99% of what you see and understand is left unsaid and unspoken. Therefore when you do speak it should have strong emotional power because you have distilled the best ideas and thoughts in some short, simple but powerful sentences and phrases.
You must have the ability to forget your own personal problems and worries for a moment and focus totally on your client. Sometimes it is hard to do that no matter how professional you are. But there is a space that is not where you are now and where you need to be to be of most use to the client in the shortest possible time. You must jump into that space either before or during the session. That way when the client tells you A, F, O, X, P you can work out that the equation is F = (A + P/O)*X and no other. This is not work for a hack or a poor professional but for someone at the peak of their powers, someone who is the best they have ever been. This is the price of entry for a job that pays $150 per hour.
Being creative is a curse, you are always thinking, molding, merging, sorting and producing. As a life coach, this means writing about what I do on a daily basis and coming up with ideas which I myself have no idea of where they come from. But I do read voraciously so it must have something to do with that. Great ideas about management and executive coaching come from all sorts of places: roman history, german history, Malcolm de Chazal, poetry, Galsworthy, novels of the nineteenth century. Anywhere the human species is flayed to the bone and exposed for scrutiny, study and pity.
A life coach need not have any of the qualities above. The benchmark for a successful life coach is someone who has a good client base and whose business prospers as a result. But I would say as a life coach myself clients only become regular when you start doing some of the things I have outlined above. People will not pay a life coach the large sums they pay them if they are no good, if they do not have an emotional connection with them that sees results.
About Gilbert Labour
Mr Labour is a strategist, consultant, adviser, speaker and presenter on corporate restructuring, psychopathy in the workplace, life and executive coaching, project and program management, Six Sigma and Lean process improvement.
He combines all these skills in a unique combination, utilising Six Sigma and project management, to provide modern enlightened companies with truly innovative advice that will create a sustainable competitive advantage. Mr Labour exercises his skills and influence with compassion and deep understanding of the human condition especially where restructures result in overwhelming change and job loss.
He specialises in the following industries: legal and accountancy, telecommunications, transportation and aviation, banking and finance, insurance, government, IT and outsourcing and believes that his experience in these verticals is applicable across all industries, countries, languages, cultures and businesses generally. He has 30 years corporate experience in these industries.
Every single industry he specialises in (telcos, aviation, retail banking, insurance, outsourcing) faces fundamental challenges to continued survival and prosperity in the 21st Century and Mr Labour is well placed to provide a multi-disciplinary approach to uncovering insights for competitive advantage.
He sees the management of strategic, compliance and operational risk as one of the key issues facing executive managers on a daily basis. But not all companies can take advantage of formal Basel II and Sarbannes-Oxley (SOX) governance models.
For those companies that are not in the financial industry but still require strong governance around the management of operational risk, Mr Labour is an expert on creating strategies for managing operational risk supported by strong programme management structures to ensure compliance.
He has been extensively involved in process improvement initiatives within project and production environments. He has delivered Six Sigma Green and Black Belt process improvement programs that provide bottom line improvement whilst maintaining and enhancing employee morale.
He also owns and runs one of the world's most comprehensive web resources on the topic of life and executive coaching containing over 1500 pages of advice and more than 250 articles on life and executive coaching. He has also been quoted in learned papers, newspaper and magazine articles.
He has written a book on life coaching which provides an introduction to life coaching for the general public. He has also written a book on executive coaching, Executive Coaching for Process Improvement Excellence, that provides daily insights for top managers looking to succeed in today's fast paced environment.
He is also a pioneer in the field of coaching and project management having presented a landmark paper on this topic at PMISA 2004 (World Conference on Project Management) in South Africa in May, 04. His paper entitled Sane Project Management, a Life and Executive Coaching Approach has created both a new field in project management and a new area of interest and research for coaching and coaches around the world.
For PMISA 2006 (World Conference on Project Management) he is presenting a paper entitled Project Management and Six Sigma - a convergent and divergent model for solving business problems. He seeks to develop a theoretical and practical model to extract readily applicable business approaches from both divergence and convergence of these two disciplines.
He will explore whether coaching can facilitate the extraction of some of the benefits of this convergence? This will be continuing an exploration of the connection between coaching and project management that he first developed and presented at PMISA 2004.
Mr Labour acknowledges that in today's highly competitive and rapidly changing business environment, a busy consultant, life coach or executive coach must evince a compelling value proposition, as much for himself as for his product and service.
His unique value proposition is bringing to bear, on difficult even intractable business problems, a brilliant mix of both quantitative and qualitative approaches, embracing Six Sigma, Lean, project management, executive coaching, operational and line management.
He has a refreshing engaging and vibrant perspective on life and business in the corporate world. He is able to engage with any company in the world, within his industry expertise and beyond, and provide an assessment of the issues and problems that management suspects exists. He does this on a pro-active basis and confidentially.
He is also able to execute or be involved in the execution of any recommendations resulting from these engagements. He has previously managed large programs of work involving major restructuring, outsourcing and downsizing.
He forecasts a greater demand for people with his unique blend of skills in the future especially where established, staid inefficient companies in otherwise dynamic industries face head-on competition from more efficient home grown companies and those companies thriving in the tiger economies of China and India with their vast pool of cheap, educated and trained local talent.
Mr Labour will be holding an Executive Coaching Retreat in Mauritius between 29 May 06 and June 11 06. Please contact Mr Labour for further details on the retreat. There are places for only 10 executives at this retreat which will focus on the opportunities in China and India.
Life Coaching Tips and Techniques No. 124
Disappointment
Not being disappointed is bad, being disappointed now and then is good. It means you are setting goals. It may also mean that you may not have the life skills and methodology in place to achieve them especially if they are set very high.
But it is preferable to set goals and fail that not set goals at all. It means you are trying at least. What life coaching can help you with is provide you with some tools and skills to turn the 'try' into a successful strategy.
If you're not disappointed every now and then it means that you are not setting your standards high enough. It means that you are not setting expectations on yourself or setting them high enough. There is no life which is an uninterrupted success or uninterrupted failure. Most lives fall in between the two, some cluster predominantly around the pole of failure.
Being disappointed is good. Not being disappointed in essence means that you have not set your expectations high enough. There is a tendency to go through life 'safely' and not being disappointed and as a corollary being surprised by exceptional performance.
But exceptional performance does not come about when you're not looking. It requires a conscious decision to get there. The conventional wisdom is that being disappointed is something that you should feel bad about because upsets the status quo (of doing little) and is a bad thing all round.
But in life coaching being disappointed is a good thing because it means the first of the two parts required to succeed is in place. The first is setting an expectation on yourself or others that is beyond the norm. The second part then needs to follow and that is providing the guidance and direction required to meet that expectation.
In corporate situations not being disappointed means you're not setting the bar high enough for yourself, your people or your company. There is no point not setting the bar high so as not to be disappointed at the result, that achieves nothing. The point is set the bar high but also provide the support and coaching to reach it.
About Gilbert Labour
Mr Labour is a strategist, consultant, adviser, speaker and presenter on corporate restructuring, psychopathy in the workplace, life and executive coaching, project and program management, Six Sigma and Lean process improvement.
He combines all these skills in a unique combination, utilising Six Sigma and project management, to provide modern enlightened companies with truly innovative advice that will create a sustainable competitive advantage. Mr Labour exercises his skills and influence with compassion and deep understanding of the human condition especially where restructures result in overwhelming change and job loss.
He specialises in the following industries: legal and accountancy, telecommunications, transportation and aviation, banking and finance, insurance, government, IT and outsourcing and believes that his experience in these verticals is applicable across all industries, countries, languages, cultures and businesses generally. He has 30 years corporate experience in these industries.
Every single industry he specialises in (telcos, aviation, retail banking, insurance, outsourcing) faces fundamental challenges to continued survival and prosperity in the 21st Century and Mr Labour is well placed to provide a multi-disciplinary approach to uncovering insights for competitive advantage.
He sees the management of strategic, compliance and operational risk as one of the key issues facing executive managers on a daily basis. But not all companies can take advantage of formal Basel II and Sarbannes-Oxley (SOX) governance models.
For those companies that are not in the financial industry but still require strong governance around the management of operational risk, Mr Labour is an expert on creating strategies for managing operational risk supported by strong programme management structures to ensure compliance.
He has been extensively involved in process improvement initiatives within project and production environments. He has delivered Six Sigma Green and Black Belt process improvement programs that provide bottom line improvement whilst maintaining and enhancing employee morale.
He also owns and runs one of the world's most comprehensive web resources on the topic of life and executive coaching containing over 1500 pages of advice and more than 250 articles on life and executive coaching. He has also been quoted in learned papers, newspaper and magazine articles.
He has written a book on life coaching which provides an introduction to life coaching for the general public. He has also written a book on executive coaching, Executive Coaching for Process Improvement Excellence, that provides daily insights for top managers looking to succeed in today's fast paced environment.
He is also a pioneer in the field of coaching and project management having presented a landmark paper on this topic at PMISA 2004 (World Conference on Project Management) in South Africa in May, 04. His paper entitled Sane Project Management, a Life and Executive Coaching Approach has created both a new field in project management and a new area of interest and research for coaching and coaches around the world.
For PMISA 2006 (World Conference on Project Management) he is presenting a paper entitled Project Management and Six Sigma - a convergent and divergent model for solving business problems. He seeks to develop a theoretical and practical model to extract readily applicable business approaches from both divergence and convergence of these two disciplines.
He will explore whether coaching can facilitate the extraction of some of the benefits of this convergence? This will be continuing an exploration of the connection between coaching and project management that he first developed and presented at PMISA 2004.
Mr Labour acknowledges that in today's highly competitive and rapidly changing business environment, a busy consultant, life coach or executive coach must evince a compelling value proposition, as much for himself as for his product and service.
His unique value proposition is bringing to bear, on difficult even intractable business problems, a brilliant mix of both quantitative and qualitative approaches, embracing Six Sigma, Lean, project management, executive coaching, operational and line management.
He has a refreshing engaging and vibrant perspective on life and business in the corporate world. He is able to engage with any company in the world, within his industry expertise and beyond, and provide an assessment of the issues and problems that management suspects exists. He does this on a pro-active basis and confidentially.
He is also able to execute or be involved in the execution of any recommendations resulting from these engagements. He has previously managed large programs of work involving major restructuring, outsourcing and downsizing.
He forecasts a greater demand for people with his unique blend of skills in the future especially where established, staid inefficient companies in otherwise dynamic industries face head-on competition from more efficient home grown companies and those companies thriving in the tiger economies of China and India with their vast pool of cheap, educated and trained local talent.
Mr Labour will be holding an Executive Coaching Retreat in Mauritius between 29 May 06 and June 11 06. Please contact Mr Labour for further details on the retreat. There are places for only 10 executives at this retreat which will focus on the opportunities in China and India.
Life Coaching Tips and Techniques No. 123
Life Coaching Case Study
Coaching for Life Coaches
T is a lady who was born overseas and emigrated to Australia a number of years ago. She is very intelligent but has a number of failures behind her. Some of which are still ongoing and yet to be fully resolved satisfactorily. The degree of loss is known but the exact number is not, at this stage.
She is an attractive person, warm and friendly. She is also severely overweight but her health is not currently seriously affected. Her husband has been stricken with serious life threatening health issues and this has created a lot of unbalance in her life. She previously lived a life as a high flyer supping with the best in the land.
She has made a number of investments on the assumption that her husband will be with there to make them work but unfortunately his illness has forced her to fire sale some of the these investment at quite a substantial loss.
She is currently reeling because the bad investments are now coming home to roost and in essence she will be paying for these mistakes for many years to come with no underlying assets to show for it at the end of the futile repayments. In addition to the above T has also bought a new business which is in its infancy and yet to become profitable and no other employment at this stage.
What to do? Where to go from here?
A life coach assists with this emotional stock taking by purely facilitating the process. There is no need to provide answers just subtle changes in the right direction. Guide the client ship with tiny imperceptible movements. Only when you are comfortable with the client can you make sudden shifts in direction but even then it must seem and feel normal and logical.
Prepare a balance sheet and quantify the loss in monetary terms. Do not count opportunity cost loss just realisable losses. Have a sum that you can look at and get used to. Think of it as financial closure. Of course it is not closure as you still to fund the deficit but from a moving forward point of view it does provide closure because it is a number than cannot get any bigger and cause any more damage. Do not move to the next step until you have done this accounting work. Seek help from an accountant if you can't do it alone or dispassionately enough but you must have a number to work with.
Now that you have the number of your loss, is that amount funded or not? In other words can you fund this loss from your savings or will you need to borrow money to pay it? If you need to borrow, what are the repayments and can you fund those repayments? Will you need a job to meet the repayments?
After you have settled the financial side of things now comes the emotional fall-out and formation of future baggage. The failure to resolve this may have led T to neglect her weight problem. This latter can take you eye off the ball. Without fitness there is no possibility of platform and without platform there can be no success no matter how talented you are.
Now the hard part but it may have to wait just as a cut takes time to form a scar and heal. There may be a period of time between paying off the financial debts of a failure and beginning to count the emotional debts of failure. Prepare an emotional balance sheet. What are the pluses and minuses in this balance sheet. Preparing this balance sheet requires a crystal clear honesty. So this might take some time when (and if) you get around to it. But until such time as you get around to this, you cannot move forward. Here you should be thinking about what it took you in the first place to give this chance a go? When did it all begin to wrong? The cost of you admitting to yourself that it wasn't going to work and the emotional penalties that admission then imposed. This taking stock of the past might take you six months if you were to do it alone with a life coach perhaps 1 month.
The moment you realised you have made a mistake when you're still buried up to your ears in it is a moment never to be forgotten. In fact you will not let yourself forget it. You do this by inflicting excruciating pain on yourself. At that moment there seems no way out but there is even if the way out leaves you naked on the sea shore after the shipwreck. That moment plus perhaps 3 to 6 months is when those people who will seek help seek it. The others never do and they are in a perpetual purgatory, in life coaching limbo unable to go back (too painful) and unable to go forward (no way or technique of overcoming the negative emotions holding them back).
A perceptive life coach is able to clear the way forward by providing a direction in quite small steps. It is not even a technique at this stage, just tentative steps. Coaching the client to see what works and what doesn't. What unlocks and is a step forward, what brings back old memories and is a step backward. In a way this is a mystery to be unearthed, a secret to be uncovered and hidden country to be discovered. This is the meat of being a life coach.
When the client comes to you with this sort of background, everything you do in a session must be towards unlocking the keys to this mystery. Everything they say you must know in advance what it will be and have already worked out the response (not in terms of words back to them) but in terms of the overall direction you should the session. You must be thinking on your feet at 100 mph but without the client knowing.
Being nervous plays no part in being a life coach. If you are nervous working with strangers on an intimate basis, then life coaching is not for you. The point is that you must be as perceptive and sensitive as an artist but having a solid platform yourself that is analytical and results oriented. It must so you are being paid a lot of money by the client. They are paying for real direction and results not some fantastic or artistic exposition of their character or habits.
BTW T is not a real person but a composite used for the sake of exposition and teaching.
About Gilbert Labour
Mr Labour is a strategist, consultant, adviser, speaker and presenter on corporate restructuring, psychopathy in the workplace, life and executive coaching, project and program management, Six Sigma and Lean process improvement.
He combines all these skills in a unique combination, utilising Six Sigma and project management, to provide modern enlightened companies with truly innovative advice that will create a sustainable competitive advantage. Mr Labour exercises his skills and influence with compassion and deep understanding of the human condition especially where restructures result in overwhelming change and job loss.
He specialises in the following industries: legal and accountancy, telecommunications, transportation and aviation, banking and finance, insurance, government, IT and outsourcing and believes that his experience in these verticals is applicable across all industries, countries, languages, cultures and businesses generally. He has 30 years corporate experience in these industries.
Every single industry he specialises in (telcos, aviation, retail banking, insurance, outsourcing) faces fundamental challenges to continued survival and prosperity in the 21st Century and Mr Labour is well placed to provide a multi-disciplinary approach to uncovering insights for competitive advantage.
He sees the management of strategic, compliance and operational risk as one of the key issues facing executive managers on a daily basis. But not all companies can take advantage of formal Basel II and Sarbannes-Oxley (SOX) governance models.
For those companies that are not in the financial industry but still require strong governance around the management of operational risk, Mr Labour is an expert on creating strategies for managing operational risk supported by strong programme management structures to ensure compliance.
He has been extensively involved in process improvement initiatives within project and production environments. He has delivered Six Sigma Green and Black Belt process improvement programs that provide bottom line improvement whilst maintaining and enhancing employee morale.
He also owns and runs one of the world's most comprehensive web resources on the topic of life and executive coaching containing over 1500 pages of advice and more than 250 articles on life and executive coaching. He has also been quoted in learned papers, newspaper and magazine articles.
He has written a book on life coaching which provides an introduction to life coaching for the general public. He has also written a book on executive coaching, Executive Coaching for Process Improvement Excellence, that provides daily insights for top managers looking to succeed in today's fast paced environment.
He is also a pioneer in the field of coaching and project management having presented a landmark paper on this topic at PMISA 2004 (World Conference on Project Management) in South Africa in May, 04. His paper entitled Sane Project Management, a Life and Executive Coaching Approach has created both a new field in project management and a new area of interest and research for coaching and coaches around the world.
For PMISA 2006 (World Conference on Project Management) he is presenting a paper entitled Project Management and Six Sigma - a convergent and divergent model for solving business problems. He seeks to develop a theoretical and practical model to extract readily applicable business approaches from both divergence and convergence of these two disciplines.
He will explore whether coaching can facilitate the extraction of some of the benefits of this convergence? This will be continuing an exploration of the connection between coaching and project management that he first developed and presented at PMISA 2004.
Mr Labour acknowledges that in today's highly competitive and rapidly changing business environment, a busy consultant, life coach or executive coach must evince a compelling value proposition, as much for himself as for his product and service.
His unique value proposition is bringing to bear, on difficult even intractable business problems, a brilliant mix of both quantitative and qualitative approaches, embracing Six Sigma, Lean, project management, executive coaching, operational and line management.
He has a refreshing engaging and vibrant perspective on life and business in the corporate world. He is able to engage with any company in the world, within his industry expertise and beyond, and provide an assessment of the issues and problems that management suspects exists. He does this on a pro-active basis and confidentially.
He is also able to execute or be involved in the execution of any recommendations resulting from these engagements. He has previously managed large programs of work involving major restructuring, outsourcing and downsizing.
He forecasts a greater demand for people with his unique blend of skills in the future especially where established, staid inefficient companies in otherwise dynamic industries face head-on competition from more efficient home grown companies and those companies thriving in the tiger economies of China and India with their vast pool of cheap, educated and trained local talent.
Mr Labour will be holding an Executive Coaching Retreat in Mauritius between 29 May 06 and June 11 06. Please contact Mr Labour for further details on the retreat. There are places for only 10 executives at this retreat which will focus on the opportunities in China and India.
Life Coaching Tips and Techniques No. 10
Obesity and the roller coaster ride from nadir to zenith and back
There are five journeys in obesity, which one are you on now?
Why are there obese people when there are people starving in the world? Is obesity a medical problem rather than
one of lack of self-control or perhaps even one using food for sexual/sensual gratification for masking (?) the real problems?
How successful is someone who is 250 kilos at 'masking' or hiding the problem?
The five journeys is obesity are -
Getting there becoming obese, this is the easiest journey of all and happens almost without you knowing. This journey is on the road to death.
Staying there at a steady weight, this is a hard journey because the tendency is to put on more weight not less. This journey is a slow death.
The next journey is one into hell and that is on the road to putting on more and more weight. This is the last journey these people even embark on.
This journey ends in death.
The penultimate journey and the one with the most difficulty starting is the road back away from obesity. The enormous journey back is not the problem
but the first step back, the first gram lost. This journey is not a journey of weight loss but a journey to lose the fears and problems that the weight gain had
temporarily put on the back burner. This second last journey is the life coaching journey and has much less to do with weight loss, exercise and fitness and more to do with
facing problems in their real intensity and fury perhaps for the first time since the decision taken to embark on the first journey.
The last journey and that is to keep the weight at the target weight after the massive task of weight loss because again the tendency is to put the weight back on
even faster than before and much much faster than it was lost. For every gram lost a kilo is put on.
Work with a life coach who understands your weight problem is not a weight problem but a personal problem posing, impersonating a weight problem. Someone who knows which
journey you are on and can make sure you either move to the next healthy journey or stay at the healthy journey you're on.
New Life Coaching Service Model - All Inclusive Platinum Service
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