This exercise will work at the end of pretty much any soft skills course, and especially an NLP-based course. The aim is to help participants transfer their learning from the training room into real life, and anticipate challenges so as…
How To Align Your Team Members With Your Goals
How do you make sure your team members are all aligned with the team’s goals? Step one is to make sure that you are clear on your vision for the team. You need to bring it to life in your…
Do You Have The Wrong Kind Of Motivation?
There are two kinds of motivation, ‘Towards’ (something you want) and ‘Away-From’ (something you don’t want). Both have their uses, but, as Harry Hill would say, which is better for helping you to achieve your goals? Anger, irritation, fear, or…
Book Review: Age With Passion! A Boomer’s Guide To Fearless Aging
My friend and former co-trainer Margaret Nash has written a very practical and easy-to-read guide to finding your life’s new direction. As the subtitle implies, it’s written for ‘baby boomers’ (for readers outside the US who aren’t familiar with this…
How to clarify your values (2): Establish your hierarchy
Following on from the previous instructions on how to clarify your values for a particular area of your life, here’s the next step that’s vital to do before you set any personal goals – discover the order of importance of…
How to clarify your values (3): Check for Clashes
This article follows on from part 1 (how to elicit your values) and part 2 (how to discover your values hierarchy). What follows is an edited extract from my book, Achieve Your Goals (Dorling Kindersley 2006). —- Conflicting values (for…
Useful strategy-tracking template
I found this helpful ‘strategy tracking tool’ (actually an old-fashioned paper form) by Kaihan Krippendorf, author of Outthink The Competition. It’s simple, easy to use, and gratifyingly close to what I used to teach on my ‘Create The Life You…
What you absolutely must do before making any New Year’s resolutions: Clarify your values (1)
Most people have had the experience of setting New Year’s Resolutions and not sticking to them. One of the biggest reasons for failure is setting resolutions which you’re not 100% aligned with. If your resolutions are not aligned with your…
What motivational gurus don’t tell you about motivation
The biggest problem that people have in their strategies for motivating themselves is that they never get started. The could be because they are feeling overwhelmed by the size of the task, or just because of inertia – the tendency…
The difference between states and goals
Sometimes, as a coach, I’ve asked someone what their goal is and they say something like “I want to be happy.” And these are usually people who don’t seem to be that happy at the moment, so they don’t believe…