LIVE BOLDLY

The Critical Factors for Success: Interview with Lauren Mackler

Posted by Lauren - 02/18/10 at 10:02:19 am

Lauren Mackler, bestselling author, renowned coach, and relationship expert, talks about the most critical factors in achieving success. Lauren Mackler is one of the foremost visionaries in the personal and professional development field today. She has risen to international prominence as the creator of Illumineering, a groundbreaking coaching method that integrates family systems work, psychodynamic psychology, and coaching to help people free themselves from the shackles of their life conditioning, and create the personal and professional lives to which they aspire.

The Three Keys to Success

Posted by Lauren - 09/24/09 at 12:09:39 pm

Many people fail to achieve their goals because they never learned the skills that produce success. No one ever taught them how to set clear goals, create effective action plans, or sustain their motivation.

Whether you want to become a better leader, create a more fulfilling career, or bring greater balance into your life, there are three keys to achieving any type of goal: focus, strategy, and commitment.

Focus. A teacher of mine once said, “Where you focus is where you go.” Without a clear picture of what you want, you’re at the mercy of whatever life brings your way—and you might not like what you’re getting. To find your focus, ask yourself, “What would I do, be, or experience if I knew I would not fail?” Notice the things you feel passionate about or that you wish you could change. Finding your focus doesn’t have to involve taking a major leap over your comfort zone. It might be shorter-term goals like eating fresh vegetables everyday, or bigger goals that require a longer time span, such as completing a graduate degree or starting your own business.

Strategy. Your strategy is the road map for bringing your goals to fruition. It involves identifying the steps needed to accomplish your goal, and the resources that can help you achieve it. Ask yourself, “What are the steps I need to take to achieve this goal?” Be careful not to overwhelm yourself by taking on too much at once. Start with three to six action steps for each goal. Once your initial action steps are completed, identify the next three to six action steps, continuing this process until your goal is achieved. It’s also good to set a clear timeline for each action step and put them into your daily or weekly calendar.

Commitment. Being committed to your goals means honoring your agreements to yourself.  To be committed, you have to feel deserving of what you want to achieve, and you have to love yourself. After all, you’re not going to feel compelled to invest your time and energy in someone you don’t like very much. This is why so many people lose their motivation to follow through on their goals. Instead of extending patience and compassion toward themselves, they berate and judge themselves—further eroding their sense of worthiness. If you have a hard time keeping your commitments to yourself due to low self-esteem, developing a more loving relationship with yourself is a great first goal on which to focus.

These three keys are important tools for “living deliberately”—aligning your thoughts and actions with the results you want to have. As you start living more deliberately, recognize that you’ll slip into old, self-defeating patterns from time to time. Being committed doesn’t mean doing this process perfectly or following through on your action steps 100 percent of the time. It means acknowledging when you do slip up, being compassionate with yourself when you do, then gently moving yourself back on-course.  

Lauren’s keynote presentation, Live Boldly: Unleashing Your Potential in Life, Work, & Relationships uncovers the hidden drivers that keep people stuck in unsatisfying careers, relationships, and life circumstances. This is one of several events designed to help people live a life that’s aligned with who they are, and the life vision to which they aspire. Click here for more information on my workshops.

© 2009 Lauren Mackler all rights reserved

This article also appeared on The Huffington Post.

Positive Action Produces Positive Thinking

Posted by Lauren - 09/07/09 at 11:09:09 am

An old acquaintance of mine recently wrote an article about positive thinking—a subject that is often misunderstood. For many years I, like many people on the personal-development path, believed that by writing down and repeating positive affirmations (positive statements about yourself or your life, written in the present tense as if they were already true), I would think more positively and the changes I sought in myself and in my life would happen automatically. I hung them up all over my house, memorized them, and repeated them out loud, sometimes as much as a hundred times a day. But it seemed like no matter how many times I said them, the changes I hoped to achieve eluded me.

It would be nearly twenty years before I finally realized that while affirmations were helpful in clarifying what I wanted, positive action was required to achieve it. Positive action generates positive thinking, not the other way around. Positive action is a choice, one that can be challenging, especially for people who’ve experienced much suffering and pain in their lives—but it’s still a choice. For example, maybe you feel lonely and sad, but instead of isolating yourself, you do something positive like attend a cooking class, volunteer at a soup kitchen, or go out for a run—something that refocuses your thoughts and produces a more positive experience than sitting home alone eating cookies and feeling sorry for yourself.

Chronic negative thinking and the emotions it invokes is, like many destructive behaviors, a form of addiction. People become addicted to habitual, “gloom and doom” thoughts, as well as to the emotions they produce like fear and anger. It becomes their comfort zone—not very pleasant, but familiar. To break this addiction, you have to first understand its roots (nearly always found in your life conditioning), and consciously change your behaviors and actions to ones that create more positive results. Over time, you’ll build a string of positive experiences that solidifies a new internal reference point, and makes a positive mindset your new habitual way of thinking.

Tips for Hiring the Right Coach

Posted by Lauren - 08/14/09 at 09:08:18 am

There are no legal requirements for becoming a life, career, or executive coach, so it’s important to interview potential coaches about their qualifications. Inquire about their training, how long they’ve been in practice, their client results, and people you can contact who have used their services. Do your due diligence to ensure they have the qualifications to provide the services you need. Below is an overview of the qualities and expertise of a good coach, which you can use when interviewing potential coaches.

Effective methodology and processes. Ad-hoc and unstructured coaching are less effective than a structured program. Ask about their coaching method and processes, their strategies for helping clients clarify and achieve their goals, how much time it requires, and what their fees and payment policies are.

Expertise in psychology and human behavior. Personal-development work, life and career transitions, or meeting professional demands can take you to the edge of your comfort zone, triggering fears of failure, insecurity, or habitual, self-sabotaging behaviors. Life, career, and executive coaches with a background in psychology have the leading edge, as they can help you address your fears and self-defeating patterns at the root level, and change limiting patterns that can sabotage your success.

A supportive and comfortable environment. A good coach is compassionate, establishes trust, maintains confidentiality, and creates an environment in which you feel supported. Whether you’re doing phone or in-person coaching, notice how comfortable you are, and whether the person feels like someone you can trust.      

Exceptional problem-solving, goal setting, and organizational skills. The bigger the coach’s “tool kit”, the better able they’ll be to facilitate effective coaching sessions. Ask how they go about problem-solving and goal-setting, and notice how organized they appear to be. The more organized they are, the more ground you can cover in each session.

Fosters client accountability. Continuity, self-discipline, and follow through are critical factors for success—things that many people find difficult to develop or maintain. Find out what methods they use to help clients stay motivated, and how they get clients who’ve become discouraged or unfocused back on track.

In addition to the qualities and expertise listed above, below are added skills and expertise for specific types of coaching.

Career Coaching

Proven experience in the career transition field. This is a must-have for people making a career change or searching for a new job. Ask career coaches about their methodology for identifying a job or career that’s the best fit, and about their expertise in job sourcing, resumes and cover letters, self-marketing strategies, networking, interviewing, and salary negotiation.

Entrepreneurial and business planning skills: This is critical if you’re considering starting your own business. Find a career coach with a successful track record not only in helping clients identify a new business idea, but also in turning that idea into a business.    

A resourceful, innovative, and strategic thinker: To stand out from the competition, you have to think and do things differently than everyone else. Ask prospective career coaches for specific examples of strategies they’ve developed to help clients differentiate themselves, and how those strategies have helped clients achieve their desired results.  

Executive Coaching

Client Confidentiality: If your company is hiring an executive coach to work with you, ask how confidentiality issues will be handled. The more authentic you are the better results you’ll achieve in your coaching work. However, you need to feel confident that the coach can effectively balance honoring your confidentiality with meeting your company’s expectations for coaching results.

Business and Leadership Expertise: In addition to strategic business and leadership expertise, the best executive coaches have real-world corporate experience, giving them a deeper understanding of the complex challenges and demands of the executive role.  

Life Coaching

Expertise in psychology and human behavior: While it’s an added plus to find a career or executive coach with a background in psychology, it’s a must-have for life coaching. Without an in-depth understanding of what drives human behavior—and how to change self-defeating patterns that are often rooted in the subconscious—it’s very difficult to help clients achieve transformational and lasting change.

© 2009 Lauren Mackler all rights reserved

Life, career, and relationship coach Lauren Mackler is the author of the international bestseller, Solemate: Master the Art of Aloneness & Transform Your Life and host of the weekly Life Keys radio show on www.hayhouseradio.com. She is the creator of Illumineering™, a groundbreaking method integrating family systems work, psychodynamic psychology, and coaching to help people free themselves from the shackles of their life conditioning, and create the personal lives, careers, and relationships to which they aspire. Visit Lauren’s website at www.laurenmackler.com.

Becoming Who You Were Born to Be

Posted by Lauren - 08/13/09 at 10:08:53 am

In this video, coach and bestselling author Lauren Mackler talks about how the thought and behavior patterns of our life conditioning erodes our innate wholeness and keeps us from realizing our potential as adults. She reveals how to reclaim your innate wholeness and liberate your potential to become the person you were born to be.

Cultivating Healthy and Supportive Relationships

Posted by Lauren - 06/26/09 at 09:06:31 am

Living a rich, gratifying life has a lot to do with relationships—your relationship with yourself and your relationship with others. Ann Kaiser Stearns wrote that, “The most self-loving action any of us performs in a lifetime is learning to develop…close friendships.” Engaging in caring relationships is critical to our emotional health and well-being, yet most of us never learned the life skills needed to develop them.

Due to their life conditioning, not all people have what it takes to be supportive, and not all unsupportive people can be avoided—for example, sometimes you can’t escape family members … Read_more

Coaching 101

Posted by Lauren - 06/25/08 at 04:06:06 pm

When I started my coaching business in 2001, most people associated the word “coach” with someone who led an athletic team or worked as an exercise trainer. Today, while most people have heard of a life, executive, or career coach, there remains much confusion about what coaching is, how it differs from psychotherapy, and the circumstances in which coaching can be a valuable resource.

What is Coaching?

Coaching is for people who want to improve their personal and/or professional lives, or achieve specific goals such as making a career change, improving business results, creating healthier relationships, or gaining greater self-mastery. Although there are no legal requirements for becoming a coach, the necessary skills are similar to those of a psychotherapist, with additional competencies determined by the specific type of coaching. However, coaching differs from therapy in that it generally focuses more on the present and future than on the past, and is typically more focused on specific goals and results. Below is a list of the most common types of coaching, and the indicators for each type:

Career Coaching: for people in professional transition or who are looking to use their passions, skills, and experience to create a more fulfilling and rewarding career.

Executive Coaching: for business professionals seeking to enhance their leadership skills, accomplish specific business goals, or address performance issues and challenges.

Life Coaching: for individuals seeking to master specific life challenges, or move to the next level of success in one or more areas of their personal and/or professional lives.

Relationship Coaching: for individuals, couples, family members, business partners, or co-workers seeking to clarify the attributes of their ideal relationship(s), assess relationship strengths, identify and resolve points of interpersonal conflict, and bring their ideal personal and professional relationship(s) to reality.

Choosing a Coach

When choosing a coach, it’s important to inquire about the coach’s training, credentials, and methodology. When you’re interviewing a prospective coach, here are some questions you can ask:

Qualifications: What are your credentials? What is your training and professional background? Check to be sure the person has the training, background, and expertise needed to facilitate the specific type of coaching you’re seeking.

Experience: How long have you been in practice? What’s the primary focus of your work? What is your experience and success in working with the types of issues and/or goals I want to address? Do you have some clients I can speak to, who can tell me about the results of their coaching work?

Approach: What’s your approach or methodology? What does the process involve and how much time does it typically take?

Practical Information: How long does each session last? How frequently do we meet? What are your charges and payment policies?

Most importantly, you’re looking for someone who is supportive, compassionate, and non-judgmental. During your interview, look for someone who is 100 percent present, and focused on you and your objectives. Red flags include brusqueness, inflexibility, and a sense of distance. This must be someone you can trust fully. Ask yourself: Do I feel at ease with this person? Will I feel free to disclose personal information? Is this someone who is engaging with me in a caring and supportive way? If not, don’t hesitate to find someone else.

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