Control your personal debt by curbing your impulse to have it now
Anything worth having deserves the time you spend earning it by hard work, effort and saving
Are you confronted, exhorted, cajoled, seduced by those commercials that tell you that you can have it and have it now without waiting or they tell you you can have it all and more for less. Either of these approaches leads to false expectations and in the former intractable consumer debt and in the latter expectations set and disappointed.
The former message is usually peddled by financial institutions begging you to borrow more so you can get your car, house, boat, holiday, furniture sooner and is pure bokum. A commercial that promises you results without effort has no connection with any reality. This view of the world held by the financial institutions to get consumers to
increase their personal debt is built on impulse, a quick fix and exhorting you to buy on credit things that you don't really need. It is as if, if you had the time to contemplate the purchase outside of easy credit, then you wouldn't go through with it but credit gives you no time for contemplation just for acting. My message is to ignore the message of
financial institutions to borrow for your lifestyle, work for it, save and buy it when you have the means.
One of the worst decisions I ever made was when I had a ready line of personal credit is to use it to the max. This orgy of spending on my part had major repercussions when my job was under threat and interest rates rose. Do not place yourself in this situation ever. Spend warily on credit unless it is an emergency but then really you should have medical
insurance or other types of insurance for just such an emergency.
The no wait gratification marketing hype is absolutely anathema to the life coaching credo. Being an expert both in retail banking marketing strategies and life coaching I am convinced that no matter what the lure of easy personal credit it must be resisted if you are going to have a chance of creating a new future for yourself which is essentially a clean slate
from the past and a new beginning characterised by high performance, better more accountable personal relationships, a future reasonably mapped out even if only in the rough, an understanding of your 1 year to 5 year outlook, a work outlook that has built on your previous achievements and a direction that is unwavering in the short-term at least (playing with the medium to
longer terms goals is normal). Now the platform that creates this for you is --- no personal debt, a job that you enjoy and provides you with the basis with a strong short-term and supporting relationships both at work and at home. I make no distinction between the two they are one and the same.
I think if you begin to accept that you can't have it now, right now it builds a certain discipline a certain approach that is consonant with the life coaching approaches I espouse. I do not believe a panic stricken knee jerk reaction to anything in your life serves you in the long term and a quick personal loan or credit card extension to purchase something now
which was not planned is the answer to life's problems. A nice holiday will not stop your partner leaving you if that is what they want to do. A nicer car will not get the kids to school any better or faster if you observe the speed limit. Buying Xmas presents on credit will not endear you to the family if they have to make sacrifices in January to March to pay for them.
When I worked in retail strategies we had a common technique that we would use just before Xmas, we would credit score customers who met certain criteria and if they passed (most did) they were given a pre-approved $1000 extension to their credit card limit. How could you say no just before Xmas? So as a consumer, you should give full credit to the people who work
in retail banking who know you, your spending habits, where you live (we used Geocoding and the census data extensively against the customer personal data) and your current and future gauged spending habits. They are not idiots after all I worked in this area for a year and got to know the lore pretty well so if you have a credit card limit of $10,000 and every month you roll-over
$9900 of that credit then you are their prime customer and target, so watch out.
There is great intelligence both in terms of the intellect of the people working in retail banking, the information they have at their disposal and the very sophisticated tools they use to target the right consumer with the right product at the right time to make them want to extend themselves. This is not an accident and the commercials exhorting you to buy now is supported
by an awful lot of great art (gut feel & marketing know-how) and statistical science.
About Gilbert Labour. Gilbert Labour has developed a comprehensive and free life and executive coaching resource for coaches and their clients. He has recently introduced a Sydney CBD rapid and targeted lunch time service for busy and stressed executives. In relation to this tip, he is a business expert on retail banking strategies and a technical IT expert on
database marketing strategies and the techniques of upselling, cross-selling, increasing roll-over, preventing or stemming run-off and other retail banking marketing approaches. He has used genetic algorithms and other pattern matching techniques in retail banking database marketing applications but most importantly knows this tip from pure personal experience and unendurable pain caused
by unbridled consumer credit spending. Pain, after all, makes the best long lasting teacher.
Life Coaching Tips and Techniques No. 28
If you want to introduce life coaching principles into your life where do you start and when do you end?
There are a number of key fundamental principles to be followed in deciding where the journey starts and where it may end
Life coaching is about change, about effecting change, about adjusting to change if you were not the one who initiated it and making change wherever
possible work for you. But along with making changes in your life, there is a degree of attendant risk, this risk is part and parcel of a change mentality.
For some people this is the fun, exciting part of change not knowing whether you will succeed or not. During your youth you will affect change without risk
management but as you get older you get smarter and you will naturally find that you will affect change (if you do) knowing some of the problems that could occur.
One of the reasons why we don't change as we get older is we become risk averse. This is a natural part of growing old and wanting to hold on what we have but in
this case nature must be denied otherwise there will be no change possible.
You start where you currently are, you can do no other. Don't try to start when you are in a better position that is the purpose of the life coaching to do that
to put you in that better position. But you start at nothing, achieving nothing, being nothing. Life coaching requires this humility no less. Nothing is achievable without this
deep self-prostration and openness. For example if you weigh 140 kilos don't wait till you find yourself more acceptable to yourself before you begin a life coaching program
to get to your goal weight. You start where you are if you are obese you start there. If you wait till you you're not then there is no need to proceed. There are difficulties
with starting something where the likelihood of success is uncertain but this is where you manage to your acceptable level of risk. If you are 50 years old and weight 170 kilos and
have never done any exercise in your life then there is a high risk that you won't start or if you do you will stop as you encounter the difficulties facing you such as injuries.
Because of the precarious nature of homeostasis, that is any number of things can throw you out of balance, it is preferable to keep the number of changes being contemplated low
no more than 1 or 2 at a time and for each of these changes stage them over a period of months.If something will take more than one year, break it up into a number of smaller much more
manageable changes.
Life coaching is not something you introduce into your life, something like a condiment that spices up your life, a sweetener for your life, a stabiliser for your moods, life coaching
must become your life. What does this mean? You must live every second, every minute alive, active and full of vivacity and energy on the lookout for the merest possibilities and opportunities for
yourself, your business, your livelihood, your family, your future and your hopes. In short, you must become a life coach in action, thought and deed.
If there is something in life you prize as worth having, then that is something worth fighting for, something you can and should make sacrifices for, something you can and should take your time
achieving, savouring every moment before because once you reach it another goal will (or should) immediately take its place. Make the effort and work of achievement the only journey the goal itself there
is no other.
When there are problems with personal intimate relationships where do you go to for the answers? If you seek answers in life coaching or from a life coach then make sure this life coach is very
savvy when it comes to relationships, that means being able to differentiate the objective from the subjective and knowing when to apply it in a practical sense. When dealing at any time with people's
raw emotions, it is best not to dabble unless one really knows what is going on. A life coach must then have the confidence to provide advice, support and guidance from a position of knowledge and experience.
I find providing relationships coaching one of the most difficult areas of life coaching because it is like talking to two people at any time you are talking to one and when you are talking to two it is as
if you are talking to one. So it is very hard to know exactly who you're talking to and where you as the life coach stands in all this. In terms of whether your advice is hitting home and whether it merits
being followed in the grand scheme of things. So life coach tread very warily.
There is a certain beauty in chaos and chaos in beauty. Raw is actually beautiful and finished/polished is actually ugly. The way that things are is sometimes only appreciated by the very few as exactly
the only way the thing could be, there is no tidying up required, no interference, no further editing or changing, it is as is. Therefore what is it about the nature of something that presents itself as such to
someone and not others. A raw thing is beautiful because it is honest and speaks the truth. Why only some recognise this and not others is probably related to the fact that some people appreciate poetry and others
don't. It is an upbringing/nurture thing, an innate thing, a deep painful easily hurt sensitivity, a talent for finding stories in emotions, for finding whole vistas, geographies and discoveries inside one's head,
for being and living inside. I don't think this is in opposition to the power of logic and being a rational person but rather an after effect of it, a consequence of being rational.
The power of separation. The separation of power. Apologies to Montesquieu. When two people, any two people meet, come together and get on like a house on fire or get on quite well, there is a certain chemistry that allows this to happen.
It is this chemical reaction that causes the hurt and pain when there is a separation. It is best not to underestimate this power within working relationships. If you have read these pages at all, then you know I do not
differentiate between a work or a personal relationship - emotionally they are one and the same. At work, powerful forces are marshalled and these forces create the cohesion we take for granted when talking about areas,
groups, sections and divisions. These groupings are built on love, devotion, respect, affection and friendship. There is no other way to look at it. Call it alliances, call it cliques, call it a cabal, call it office politics
at the basis of all of these is love pure and simple.
Knowing what is at the basis of work relationships provides a bulwark against the tyranny, hate and harshness of the workplace. It is not simply that love is an antidote to the tyranny of the workplace but that the chance of hope and redemption that love implies
that is at the heart of the hate neutraliser. It is this tyranny and harshness, lawlessness if you will and disorder that is at the heart of executive stress and health issues. An out of control workplace places great stress on the executive not knowing where the
next blaze will start. The uncertainty of the phantom pains. Executive health is a large and difficult issue with many causes but probably key to these causes is the driving unrelenting vaulting ambition to succeed at whatever cost, the cost to one's health being the merest one
of those which means anything else within the terrifying scope of this out of control energy will be swept away. The issue with executive health is not just the executive but the mental health issues caused by his out of bounds behavior.
Executive coaching therefore what is it? It is certainly about how to increase, guarantee even Executive performance but doing so at the least cost in mental health terms to the executive. This performance increase is at the service of the organisation that pays the executive coach
but it is much more complex than that. Executives can go on performing even when mentally ill or impaired by stress or the results of failure. It is the consequences on the organisation of wrong or poor decisions that is one tangible result of executive failure. Another result of this failure is on the
health of the executive and the after effects of this health failure on the executive's mental well-being and the knock-on effect on his colleagues and associates, his family and friends. Therefore, getting an Executive Coach in to help an executive cope with work responsibilities, to be more pro-active, to be more process improvement
oriented, to be more change minded, to be more courageous is only 1/3 of the story. There is two thirds of the story that is beneath the tip of the iceberg. Any Executive Coaching program must take into account the two thirds below the surface that in a sense create the platform for
executive performance.
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
Product Features
One new low totally all inclusive monthly fee ($400 AUS) - currently this is $500 AUS. Saving $100 AUS per month.
No contracts whatsoever, pay as you go month by month. Start when you want, stop when you want. No questions asked.
No need to furnish more than your first name. No notes taken during any sessions and no personal identifying details asked for, required or noted down.
Coaching can take place exclusively by phone and/or internet but it is preferred that an initial one on one session take place but this is not essential.
All inclusive, no exclusions, all services available (as per below).
Paid once a month at the beginning of the month (non refundable if cancelled during month).
Entitled to the full range of services (one on one, SMS, Mobile, Phone, ICQ, MSN Messenger, MS Netmeeting) on an as required basis. But does not
include CD and video conferencing products.
Use as much of the service as you require but please note as coaching is a relationship which requires and places responsibility on you to complete
agreed upon tasks, there will be regular scheduled feedback and catchup sessions. These are usually by phone or ICQ.
Clearly articulated and set goals such as embarking on a new career, changing careers, developing new small business, creating small business growth,
preparation for retirement, developing additional income in/for retirement.
These services include small business development coaching, product development and promotion, and press release preparation.
Payment and services commences in the calendar month of first payment and lasts till the end of the next month, then regular monthy payments commence on the 1st of each month thereafter (for example) ---
Paid 1 month on 15th of July - $400
Payment due on 1st August - Nil
Payment due on 1st September - $400
Payment and services terminates at the end of the calendar month of the last payment as follows (for example) ---
Payment made on 1st October - $400
Decision to cancel made 4th October and notice to do so received on that day or any day within the month
No refund policy but services available until 31st October if required
No further payments then required due to cancellation
The Platinum Life Coaching Product is now the only life coaching product available aside from
tailored programs and the featured programs.
50% Discount for bona fide students. The fee for students is $200 per month.
You will receive an exceptional level of service and care from one of the best life coaches practicing today.
Coaching Programs
555 Program
The 555 Program is complementary to the 333 Program and is part of a family of programs called The Numbered Series, a simplification of a plethora of products, services and programs into
a number of specifically targeted set of programs that target a very specific audience with a limited amount of time and resources to devote to a life and executive coaching program. The programs
covers a set of goals over a set period for a specific (one time only) fee.
The key goals of the 555 Program is to be able to run 5k in 5 months, to solve 5 life coaching issues or problems in 5 months and to investigate and resolve 5 executive coaching problems
in 5 months.
Life Coaching Portal Programs
Beyond the existing Diamond program being run on the portal, a series of additional programs are being developed to be run for specific audiences and which have very clear targets and goals.
These include the following.
The 555 Program
Gilbert Labour, will personally run this program. It will probably take in the region of 10 suitable people and run for 5 months. The program is multi-faceted and covers three main streams a fitness stream, a life coaching stream
dealing with personal issues and an executive stream to supercharge your work, business and corporate environment.
The first stream is a fitness element. The goal is to be able to run 5k (non stop) in five months and be able to lose 5 kilos in the process. This is a modest achievement and is considered a healthy approach to fitness generally.
I am a former fitness instructor and dance teacher and can provide guidance in this area. You will need a clearance from your doctor if you're over 45.
The second stream is a life coaching element. The goal of the life coaching is to investigate a number of current personal issues and focus on 5 for resolution in 5 months. One to be resolved or at least worked on each month.
The third stream is an executive coaching element. The goal of this element is to come up with five goals or issues to be dealt with in the 5 months of the program. These could involve working towards a promotion, changing jobs, changing careers,
leaving the corporate environment and developing a small business. For the hard core executives and other corporate thrivers and survivors there will be a number of areas that include executive interview training and executive decision making that can be covered.
There are many others and these can be chosen based on your current goals. The aim of this stream is canvass all the possibilities and focus on only 5 and work through each one.
The cost of the program varies. To take part on a one-on-one basis with Gilbert Labour will cost $5000. To take part in a group setting will cost $2000. Individual programs can start at anytime considered suitable.
To provide this program on a company wide basis (more than 10 people), please call Gilbert Labour for a quote.
Please call Gilbert Labour on 0409 223 436 if you would like to take part. Further information on the 555 Program is available from the portal.
General Information
I also do a small amount of pro-bono work in the area of life coaching. I belong to the Life Coaching Pro Bono Group (LCPBG), a group of life coaches I am putting together to do this type of work for people in need but who may not be able to afford the services of a full fee life coach. We make allowances for your circumstances and also on the understanding that once you're back on your
feet, your capacity to contribute to your life coaching will also improve.
Generally speaking, we will set clear goals, we will put in place plans to attain those goals, we will execute the plan effectively. We will monitor and survey the results and ensure our goals are met. In most cases, we will envelope what we are trying to achieve into a coaching programme.
I operate flexibly taking into account the needs of the client as we progress with the programme.
Please call me on my mobile (0409 223 436) for a confidential discussion to begin the journey of self discovery.
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