Symbiosis Coaching

Did you know that kids can start developing leadership qualities as early as their preschool years? The sooner children learn to use their leadership skills the more opportunities for success they will have.

Consider the follow strategies to help your children take command of their lives and grow up to be more productive and happy.

Understanding the Basic Principles of Leadership

1. Develop emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the basis for sound leadership. Kids can work on accurately identifying specific feelings in themselves and others and managing them constructively. This way they’ll solve emotional issues more easily, get along better with others and avoid destructive behavior.
2. Generate compassion. Keep the focus on caring for others. Let your children know that the purpose of becoming more influential is to have a positive impact on society. Life is full of opportunities to serve others and recognize that we’re all connected.
3. Take charge of your life. Show kids they can take an active role in making things happen. Help them to understand that they create their own outcomes rather than viewing life as something that happens to them.

Leadership Development Strategies for Younger Children

1. Delay gratification. There are valuable life lessons in learning to plan ahead and work for rewards. For example, help your kids to understand that by going to bed on time, they get a longer bedtime story.
2. Learn to read emotions in faces. It’s important to become sensitive to non-verbal cues. Play games with your own facial expressions or you can draw pictures. Discuss how someone may look if they were preparing to eat an ice cream cone versus surprised by a loud noise.
3. Choose your words carefully. Encourage kids to select words that convey their affection for others. Ask them to talk about what they like about their siblings or friends.
4. Practice teamwork. Demonstrate that it’s fun and effective to cooperate with others. Spend time washing dishes or picking up toys together. Sign up for softball or split up into teams for playing charades.
5. Mind your manners. Show kids how to act appropriately in different social situations. Praise your kids for mastering basic table manners and acting as gracious hosts when you have guests in your home.

Leadership Development Strategies for Tweens and Teens

1. Engage in conversation and public speaking. Communication skills play a big part in leadership. Use family dinners as an opportunity for an in-depth discussion of current events. Presenting a report in class is valuable training for their future careers.
2. Set goals. Kids naturally become more motivated and accomplished when they take ownership of their own goals. Present options to your kids but encourage them to choose the objectives they want to pursue.
3. Think like a critic. Support your child’s growing capacity for critical thought. They can evaluate their performance in different situations to identify areas where they want to improve. Even TV shows can be a trigger to discuss peer pressure and making ethical decisions.
4. Take on leadership tasks. Learning to motivate people and delegate tasks requires practice. Talk about taking the initiative at a summer job or internship to play a leadership role. It could be as simple as putting together a potluck family picnic.
5. Develop organizational skills. Young people can hone their management skills by overseeing complex projects. Appoint your teen to take charge of the logistics for a family vacation or college tour. They may even want to start a small business or charity.

Getting your kids off to a good start with leadership skills can create a better life for them and help them to become a positive influence on others. When children learn to manage themselves and get along with others, they’re better prepared for happiness and success.

 When you accept yourself with all of your flaws and unique talents, the world seems to become a more accommodating place. You’ll find that some of the causes of your stress disappear and you can gain more joy on a daily basis.

Accepting yourself completely entails courage, wisdom and compassion. If you’re plagued by negative emotions such as anxiety, jealousy, shame, anger, envy, or guilt, these may be signs of low self-esteem. To counter this, you can learn radical self-acceptance.

If you find yourself equating your worth with your achievements, love life or social status, what happens if these are someday diminished? After all, these are temporary conditions. Life has its ups and downs. Practicing self-acceptance will help prevent your self-worth from hinging on your current situation.

How Low Self-Esteem Can Hinder Self-Acceptance

If you have low self-esteem, you can get mired in refusal to accept your own uniqueness and capability for transformation. You may be a perfectionist, and when things don’t go well, you often tell yourself that you’re not good enough. It becomes a vicious cycle of negative self-fulfilling prophecies.

So what can you do to turn this around?

Suppose you start to appreciate the world around you. Then you’re aware of your place. You realize that just as others are important to your well-being, your existence supports others, too. Since appreciation is a prerequisite for self-esteem, you’re now well on your way to self-acceptance.

How to Develop Self-Acceptance

To develop self-acceptance, you must believe in your intrinsic worth and uniqueness. There’s no one else in the world quite like you and you’re constantly changing and developing. Your value cannot be measured by how others perceive you.

You’re also aware of the fallibility of human nature. No one is perfect. Even the most enlightened among us had to struggle to achieve their goals. Likewise, you must also work to improve yourself. Let this be your joy.

When you make a mistake, refrain from judging yourself. Resist labeling yourself as a failure or a bad person because of past errors. You wouldn’t label your child a failure or a loser because he failed a test. Be compassionate with yourself too.

Accept Your Mistakes and Move On

When you review your mistakes, you may feel remorse and disappointment, but these are healthy reactions. They’ll help you to change your behavior to something you like better.

Remorse and disappointment are different from self-condemnation, which can lead to depression, guilt and shame. These unhealthy emotions may cause you to give up or avoid facing your mistakes. Instead, look toward what you can do to change your actions next time.

Try these strategies to increase your self-acceptance:

1. Avoid excusing yourself from your mistakes. It’s okay to tell yourself that you’re human and prone to error, but if you use this to refuse to face your mistakes, you won’t grow. Instead, work on improving yourself. This will help you accept what you did but put it in the past and move on.
2. Use positive self-talk. Refrain from calling yourself names like “idiot,” “total failure” or “loser.” Get in the habit of complimenting yourself instead. Reinforce the qualities about you that you like by telling yourself things like “I can do this,” “I’m good at this,” “Forgiving others is perfectly like me,” or “I can find a solution to this challenge.”
3. Be tolerant and compassionate with yourself, just as you are with your friends. Judge your behavior, not yourself.

Following these guidelines will help you gain greater self-acceptance. It may take some practice to master these new ways of thinking about yourself, but the rewards will be worth it.

And if you are a Life Coach, don’t forget to make your clients become more accepting of themselves as well. Soon they will be enjoying life more and find it more fulfilling than they ever imagined!

It’s been well documented that highly successful people tend to make decisions quickly – and they rarely change their minds.
 
Does your client have these traits? Or does he struggle with making decisions and then waffles back and forth afterward? Having a decision making process for your client to follow can be a faster and more effective alternative.
 
This proven process has worked well for others; it can work for your clients, too.

As their Life Coach, discuss with them the following:
 
1. Consider your values: Project into the future and imagine how you’ll feel about your choice. It can be easy to go down the wrong path during difficult times; stick to your core values and you’ll feel much better in the end.

2. Avoid allowing fear to paralyze you: If you’re in danger of falling off a cliff, fear serves a purpose. However, if you tend to fear any change, then it’s wise to make a concerted effort to keep this fear out of your decision making process. A fear of change can prevent you from seriously considering any of your options and keep you from making any decision at all.

3. Make a list of pros and cons: What will you potentially gain and lose from each of the options available to you? Make a list of your options and look at things from that perspective. Draw a line down the middle of your page and put the pros on one side and the cons on the other for each option. This exercise clarifies your choices.

4. What are your long-term goals? What is your vision of your ideal life? Which option is most supportive of that vision?

5. Set a deadline: Decide how long it should take you to make up your mind and stick to it. Consider how much reflection and information gathering time you should need. When that time has come and gone, promise yourself that you’ll make a decision and stick with it. Is spending another week in turmoil really going to help you make up your mind?
 
6. Realize that it doesn’t matter (much): When you are faced with a couple of good choices, either choice may work out fine. For example, if you’re stuck between two different chicken salad options on the menu, is it really going to matter in the long run? Regardless of which one you select, you’ll likely enjoy it either way!

Simply making the choice and following through consistently will yield great results. Not making up your mind gets you nowhere fast. If you really can’t choose, flip a coin and get busy. You’ll be much further ahead than if you never choose anything at all.

Making decisions quickly takes practice. It’s counter-productive to become so worried about making a wrong decision that you never choose anything at all. Have your clients follow the process above and help them make a decision.
 
In most cases, the act of making the decision is the powerful aspect, not which option is ultimately selected. If you didn’t reject an option immediately, it’s probably not too bad.

So ask your clients to make up their minds and get busy living their lives!

Sangeeta and Vibha are sitting at a coffee shop. Sangeeta’s marriage is going through a rough patch and she is telling her friend all about it. To a casual observer, it looks as if Vibha is listening. But take a look at the thoughts running through Vibha’s head: Really, everyone has problems with their marriage; people get divorced all the time; it’s time to move on. It would help her if she got a job and lost some weight; that’s what I’d do. I hope this never happens to me.

Vibha thinks she’s a good listener. After all, she’s not interrupting or fidgeting, is she? But what Vibha is actually doing is hearing her friend. Like so many of us, she’s just not listening.

As toddlers, we learn to speak and to hear what others are saying. As we grow up, we learn to read and write, along with other useful skills. But few of us ever learn one of the most vital skills of all—how to really listen.

To really listen takes our whole attention and focus. The rewards are huge though: happier marriages and families, better communication at work, fewer misunderstandings between friends and others, calmer and less stressful lives. And another bonus: when you listen well, you become someone other people want to listen to.

I am constantly reminded of a quote I read somewhere a long, long time ago and that has since been etched in my mind – “His thoughts were slow, his words were few, and never formed to glisten; but he was a joy to all his friends, you should have heard him listen.”

As Life Coaches, really listening to our clients is a critical part of our interaction with them. If we do not listen well, we can lose critical information, miss subtle cues and end up hurting our clients instead of helping them. It also becomes more difficult to establish trust when our client feels that we are not really there when they are talking to us.

Real listening can be learned. Research and books such as The Lost Art of Listening: How Learning to Listen Can Improve Relationships, by Michael Nichols, and Mortimer Adler’s How to Speak, How to Listen agree on these key points about listening:

Anyone can learn to be a good listener. While some might be better at this skill than others, listening is not about being educated, rich or popular (although being a good listener can lead to being well-liked.) Men as well as women can learn to listen, and some of the best listeners are young children who have the ability to drop everything and focus intently on something or someone.

Listening is active. Many of us think of listening as a passive act, just showing up. But real listening requires paying attention, not just to words, but to body language and sometimes to what is not being said. It also means responding, not with words but with our facial expressions, head nods and exclamations (“uh huh”) that show we are present.

Listening means turning off the noise inside ourselves. To listen we have to ignore all those voices inside, those judgments and criticisms – Oh, I would never have handled that situation like he did or He just doesn’t realize what a big error he is making here. It means ignoring the urge to advise and give suggestions (unless asked for) and not trying to “fix” the problem or change the other person. Most people don’t want advice, solutions, criticisms or our own stories—they just want to be heard.

Listening means no defenses. Often, when someone tells us something we don’t want to hear, we shut down. Or we lash out in anger or try to offer justifications. True listening requires putting aside our emotional responses and the need to defend ourselves. Perhaps we believe the talker doesn’t have the story right or is being unfair; but we need to realize that it’s okay because it’s his story and it’s not about right or wrong, fact or fiction.

Listening is unselfish. Listening takes time and it takes patience – and who has a lot of that? It’s about ignoring distractions and the urge to interrupt with your own great story. As author Nichols puts it, “Listening isn’t a need we have; it’s a gift we give.”

Self-growth inevitably involves – even requires – change. Change can be scary. We experience new things, we work in new environments, we entertain different thoughts, and we leave our old ways behind. That can be disconcerting.

But change is essential for self-growth. Getting out of our comfort zone is critical to growing as a person – both personally and professionally.

However, there are many obstacles to self-growth, and as Life Coaches, if we have to help our clients overcome these obstacles, we first need to recognize them.

Here are 10 obstacles that can hinder self-growth:

1. Denial: It’s impossible to grow when you don’t see the need to. If you do not see any reason to change, or delude yourself into thinking that things are perfect just the way they are, then you will never take that first step towards self-growth. Listen to the quiet voice inside you. Heed your instincts. Hear what your friends and loved ones are saying. Get the support you need to see the truth.

2. Seeing yourself as a victim: If you always view yourself as a victim of circumstances, if you’re always one-down, then you cannot become the empowered person you are meant to be. The victim mentality is an ultimately self-fulfilling prophecy – you eventually end up as a victim. A victim, not of the world around you, but of your own negativity. What’s important is not the stuff that life throws at us but how we deal with it.

3. Substance abuse: It’s easy to fall into the substance abuse trap when life does not seem to be going your way. The temptation to take refuge in alcohol or narcotics and to “forget about it all” can blur the line between reason and fantasy. But the bottom line is – just because you can’t feel your problems for a little while, they don’t go away. The only way to make them go away is to have the will and determination to face them head-on.

4. Self-loathing: If you do not respect yourself, you will never be able to find the confidence to grow. And nothing banishes self-hatred faster than self-care. So, take care of yourself and of your needs. Be kind to yourself and you will find the ability within you to change and grow.

5. Blame: If everything is someone else’s fault, we never see our own role. If we are always pointing fingers at others, we will never acknowledge our own mistakes. And if we never acknowledge them in the first place, how can we correct them? So take responsibility for your actions and for your errors, and learn from them. That is the only sure way to self-growth.

6. Defensiveness: This is a bat we swing against anything that suggests we might be at fault. Try to see “faults” as opportunities to grow. Don’t try to explain away your mistakes – learn from them. And take corrective action when necessary.

7. Fear: In our overly macho society, fear gets a bad reputation. The undeniable fact though, is that fear has been a critical component in the evolution of human beings. Fear plays a crucial role in giving us pause before we act. Fear – as long as it does not paralyze us into inaction – is good. So, acknowledge the fear within you, use it to stimulate rational thinking and find the courage within you to then choose the right path forward.

8. Rage: Rage is one of the biggest hindrances to self-growth. It is the single most destructive thing that can happen to us as it affects not just us but everyone around us. We all get angry when things don’t go our way. But we have a choice. We can let our anger consume us or we can accept its presence, control it and move on. Make a conscious effort to accept your anger and channel it towards something creative, and you will see that it soon becomes an instinct.

9. Busyness: Being on the move all the time allows no time for the reflection or self-analysis that lays the foundation for self-growth. In an age where communication is instant and where everything is available to us at the touch of a key, we need to stop every now and then and allow time for introspection.

10. Unwillingness to admit error: Errors are an inevitable part and parcel of forward movement. Without errors, there would be no self-growth. It is as simple as that. Accept errors as a necessary component of growth. Embrace them and learn from them.