Showing posts with label Coaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coaching. Show all posts

Saturday, October 23, 2010

"The Game of Life" Start your own coaching: 7 days program

Have you ever been a coach to a neighborhood team? I know how it feels the first time I've coached a team of seven-year-old soccer kids and how much they can really test my patience, not to mention sanity as they run around kicking the ball like ants to a huge, white crumb. It feels strange at first, having to be stared at by a bunch of kids who they will know that I'm not the one in the field. Sounds wrong in a sense, right? But what is the dead about coaching?

Coaching is all about being a, well, 'coach' in the corporate world of handlers, front-liners and even a couple of benchwarmers biding their time to be given a chance to perform. I know how that feels when I go back to my regular day job. Some players are just MVP material, and some of them are just to support the MVP's so why bother sticking around? It sounds ironic when they say 'there is no I in team', but even the underachievers can be sore losers as well.

These are steps that can be done within the day, and no matter what, it takes determination to be a coach.

1. There is a WHOLE lot of talk these days about Corporate Team Building. There are many, many options: vacation packages, rope courses, on-going office games, ice-breakers, etc. Management can also purchase videos, books, and seminar packages to assist them in building up their organization into a team worthy of belonging. A little later I will give you some ideas of where you can go for information on these team-building tools.

2. The truth about motivation is waiting to be grasped! It is ripe and ready for you to put into action today. Don't settle for mind-numbing gibberish. Get practical in 3 small ways to begin looking forward to your alarm clock sounding off each morning before you huddle with the team.

3. Experience is the best thing despite of what course you graduated in. There is something about being a people person who knows how to stir the energetic side of one individual, and more so when you mix it up with an entire team.

4. To question a person by his or her performance is sometimes required, but never question their knowledge or their intelligence. Sadly, I have seen a few mistakes from past coaches who never seem to understand what a player has to go through to get the job right. It will lead to further aggravation and maybe even hostility. If you want the job done right, then go do it yourself. You'll see how it is to be at the receiving end and it will help your set a much better course for improvement.

5. Sending a player to the bench is probably the worse experience a coach has to go through, especially if your player is the top performer. In dealing with this kind of person, see to it that he spills his guts voluntarily. Egotism in a performer tends to make them lose their focus on even the smallest mistakes, then you can catch him or her red handed. Be firm, but understanding about it.

6. Don't allow your position to blind you from what you are supposed to do. Even coaches are human enough to think that they are far more superior, but only by rank. Even if you have been in their shoes when you were their age, it's better to dole out a piece of wisdom in order for them to realize that this will be for their own benefit.

7. Lastly, you should learn to trust yourself and your team. Decisions and performance are primarily your goals, and there are many of them to see if they could perform the task much more efficiently. So before you think about sending one member to the bench, have a good chat with him or her and see if they have any problems. If it's too personal, then just encourage them to do their best and it also helps to give them a good, encouraging slap on the back.

I guess there's all there is to it. Being a corporate drone myself, I know how important it is for a company to be successful, and we're all part of that success. Coaches are there not to make your work a little difficult just because you have either an attitude problem or not much a performer, but they're the guides who will help you perform as hard as you can possibly can. You'll do them proud one of these days, as well as you.

Friday, October 1, 2010

Wellness Coaching - How Cybertrone Therapy and Live Blood Analysis Can Transform Your Life!

Wellness Coaching

So what exactly is Wellness? And how can it help you? A traditional definition of Wellness extends beyond physical well-being, staying fit, exercising and eating healthy. It also focuses on aspects of mental well-being, including stress management and adopting healthy mental patterns. Wellness includes creating a deliberate lifestyle, swapping old habits for healthy new ones.

Physical Wellness

The physical aspects of Wellness go beyond mere physical fitness, to include the health of our internal organs, including the heart and lungs, lympth system, kidneys and even the health of our blood. Wellness Coaching also embraces structural alignment, and ensuring bones and joints are kept in an optimum condition

Mental Well-Being

Mental well-being recognizes the link between our mental health and our physical health, and treats the body as one unit, recognizing that both mental and physical health impact upon each other. A positive attitude is obviously a major part of this, and many Wellness Coaches go beyond this to look at habitual methods of coping with difficulties and stress. Our coping mechanisms often determine whether we see an event in our lives as a disaster or a challenge. Wellness Coaching recognizes that negative responses in difficult situations create poor body chemistry, in which optimum physical health becomes very difficult. Through sophisticated modern technology such as as Cybertrone Therapy and Live Blood Analysis, your Wellness Therapist can measure these deficiencies in body chemistry and correct them.

Emotional Fitness

Most Wellness experts make the distinction between mental and emotional health, recognizing that emotional fitness is fundamental to mental fitness, and that both interactive with physical fitness. A perfect example is whether we let the guilt associated with being overweight become something that depresses us, or something that becomes a driving force for change; properly and positively managed, guilt can be a very potent change agent.

Wellness Coaching and Exercise

One way in which Wellness Coaching differs from conventional attitudes towards exercise, is that it prefers to rely on "listening to your body" and working with the body, rather than a "no pain, no gain" approach. Wellness coaches recognize that over-exercising can be detrimental to good health, and emphasise an approach that works for people on an individual level, building steadily and incorporating progressive improvement.

Diet

Diet is obviously an important part of Wellness Coaching. Again, it goes beyond the conventional view of simply balancing calories to achieve a calorie deficit that will result in weight loss. It is fundamentally involved with body chemistry and ensuring adequate levels of vitamins, minerals and trace elements, together with antioxidants to combat free radicals.

Wellness Coaching Breakthroughs

While this has been the traditional view of Wellness Coaching, in recent years Wellness Coaches have made dramatic progress through the introduction of new technologies. One example is Live Blood Analysis. While most blood samples are sent to laboratories for analysis, this involves an analysis of dead blood, due to its short life once out of the human body. Live blood analysis on the other hand involves taking a very small amount of blood, putting it under a microscope, and allowing the client to see the blood in its live format, either on a TV monitor or laptop computer. From this, your Wellness Coach can determine the health of your blood, and manage its improvement.

Cybertrone

An even more modern development is using Cybertrone machines in the emerging field of bio-energetic medicine. Cybertrone therapy is a classic example of how Wellness Coaches are beginning to use the latest technological breakthroughs to work naturally with the body's self healing mechanisms. Cybertrone machines allow the collection of data at a cellular level, which shows the Wellness Coach what needs to be done to improve the body's own immune system.

Wellness Coaching recognizes that in any disease outbreak, such as a flu epidemic, some people will stay healthy, while some people are pretty much guaranteed to get sick. This recognition, that it is not so much the disease that is the problem, but rather the bodies ability to respond and overpower the disease, is a fundamental part of Wellness Therapy and recognizes that the body is the ultimate healing machine, provided it is kept fully tuned. Advances such as the Cybertrone machine allow a much finer level of detail on the body's present state, and management of improving your body chemistry by your Wellness Coach.

Amanda Franzi is highly qualified Queensland Wellness Coach, specialising in Cybertrone Therapy, Live Blood Analysis, and Wellness Coaching, both in person and online. Amanda provides hands-on Wellness Coaching for clients on the Gold Coast, in Brisbane, and in northern New South Wales. However, due to the sophisticated wellness technology that Amanda has, she is able to offer Wellness Therapy to anyone, through techniques such as hair analysis that do not require you to be present in person. This form of Wellness Therapy is particularly useful for the bedridden, children, the elderly and can even be used with animals.

Amanda has two websites, one for Wellness Coaching Australia and the other for Animal Wellness; her websites were built by Terry Fisher of Business Websites Gold Coast. Why not check out Amanda's websites now and see how Wellness Coaching Online can help you. In particular, check out the new Cybertrone Therapy and Live Bllod Analysis options.

Amanda is also an animal lover and one of the few Australian Wellness Coaches specializing in Animal Wellness. Check out "natural health for animals in Australia" today.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Wellness Coaching: Defining Wellness

Recently I was involved in assisting in the curriculum development for a wellness program for indivuals with chronic medical conditions at a Chicago area clinic. The process was a marvelous opportunity for me to distill 25 years of work in the fields of healthcare, coaching, martial arts, yoga, meditation, psychology and philosophy into a cohesive package. As so many individuals are interested in the issue of wellness, I thought I would share my thoughts with you as well. While the early parts of this article speak to those with medical conditions, the latter parts outline my model of wellness independent of medical status.

What do health care professionals define as wellness?

It may come as a surprise to you, but with volumes of criteria established to diagnose medical and psychological illnesses there is no uniform working model of wellness! If you are not content to define health and wellness simply as the absence of disease (or pain), I could not agree with you more. No doubt you have met many individuals in your life who have no apparent disease condition but who are not living balanced, healthy lives. Similarly, there are many examples of individuals with chronic medical conditions who appear to have transcended their disease state to embody what many of us would identify as wellness.

Can I achieve wellness if I have a chronic medical condition?

Wellness does not require that you be free of all medical conditions. That is good news for those of us with bodies! In addition to the reality that accidents and illnesses can impact us profoundly, we are all aging and, of course, we do eventually die. While at least the last two are natural processes, we are not always comfortable discussing these issues in our culture. You may even be wondering why I would bring this up in a discussion on wellness!

Wellness is about embracing the natural unfolding of life.

The author, Byron Katie, states, "When I argue with reality, reality wins, but only 100% of the time."

If you have a medical condition, it IS a part of your life. Understandably, you have likely spent a good deal of time on a quest to return to "your" life, the life you recall and identified with before your physical condition changed. Your physical condition was a misplaced chapter, maybe accidentally put in your life from someone else's book! Now, if you could just find the editor-in-chief to take it out so that YOUR story can continue as you were writing it...

Wellness is about embracing YOUR life as it unfolds.

That doesn't mean that you should become passive or give up. You may be familiar with the Serenity Prayer:

God give me the courage to change what I can

The strength to accept what I cannot

And the wisdom to know the difference.

Wellness is about learning the difference between what you can change and what you cannot and focusing your energies wisely.

You are so much more than the story of your medical condition. Whatever you are experiencing now IS your life. How you relate, or don't, to your body's condition and how you embrace or reject exploration your experience will determine the quality and richness of your life, regardless of the state of your body at any given time.

Even if a cure is not possible, healing is always within your reach!

Toward a Model of Wellness:

Most simply, wellness brings a sense of wholeness. Medical conditions are not a uni-dimensional phenomenon. Chronic medical conditions affect an individual physically, socially, psychologically and spiritually. Wellness is an integration of mind, body and spirit so that one has a sense of balance and harmony in life.

Wellness is a lifestyle. As you know, the world appears to be getting more complex every year. Developing a wellness lifestyle will allow you to revitalize and re-energize yourself so that you can continue to thrive in the face of the ongoing external demands of life, preparing you to cope with the changes that tomorrow inevitably brings.

Wellness is more than developing self-soothing techniques to get you through a rough day. You may have heard about or been taught self-help or stress management techniques that focus you internally and teach you ways to improve your self-care. Some people commit to taking hot baths or listening to music regularly to relax. Others write affirmations and stick them on their mirrors to promote positive thinking. Others may take up journaling. While these types of techniques are useful and certainly have their place in decreasing stress they can fall short for many people. First, new habits are hard to maintain. Just look at how many New Year's Resolutions end up abandoned in 3 weeks time! Secondly, too often these techniques are used in isolation and don't seem to relate to how a person is living day to day in relation to their family, their workplace or their circle of friends. The techniques then become little more than bandages for larger problems in a person's life.

Wellness promotes self-understanding. You are not your body. You are not your thoughts. You are not your emotions. One key aspect of wellness is to learn how to control your thoughts and emotions. This does not mean that you stop having them, but that you stop being controlled by them. Being able to stand outside yourself and gain understanding of your life situation and your reactions to it is a critical piece of gaining control in your life.

Wellness promotes a sense of flow. In our "GO GO GO" culture, we tend to over-emphasize external productivity. Many people identify themselves as "Type A" and take pride in that. As a result, learning how to pace is a big challenge for many people. Another component of wellness is to be aware, respectful of and in tune with your flow between external productivity and rest periods. A well-paced life allows for a sustainable level of productivity so that surges of effort followed by extended "crashes" no longer define one's life.

Wellness creates a sense of connection and meaning in life. Self-care and self-understanding alone do not define wellness. You are part of a larger system. You may have a family, friends, co-workers, a church or other community. Beyond our human connections, we also have connections with nature and you may also have a sense of spiritual connection to something greater than yourself.

Wellness is mind-body-spirit integration that promotes self-care and self-understanding and connects your life to the larger world. It is a state of being joyfully and enthusiastically engaged with your life, even when it doesn't turn out exactly as you had planned.

Laura Young, M.A. is a life coach and owner of Wellspring Coaching. A contributing author to several books including 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life with Jack Canfield, John Gray and Bob Proctor, coming in September, Laura specializes in working with individuals facing midlife transitions (personal and career), as well as those seeking relationship improvement, individuals coping with grief and loss and those seeking high level personal development. With doctoral training in counseling psychology, Laura has written extensively on such topics as stress management, motivation, finding one's life purpose, creativity,achieving life balance, cultivating a healthy lifestyle and improving communication in personal and professional relationships .Visit her website to learn more about her coaching services. Visit her blog, Adventures of a Dragon Slayer [http://laurayoung.typepad.com/dragonslaying/] to view her extensive resource base.

Wellness Coaching - The New Hourly Pay Boom For Wellness Coaches

The new pay boom for Wellness Coaching has reached grandiose heights. Wellness coaching is a form of life coaching specifically related to improving ones overall physical well-being and improving the quality of one's diet and fitness lifestyle.

In recent years, Wellness Coaching has increased in popularity in the health community because of it's foundation in holistic nutrition and alternative health. As more and more people become in tuned to the benefits of holistic health, career opportunities for Wellness Coaches, Holistic Life Coaches, and Holistic Life Counseling are sky-rocketing. Specifically, Wellness Coaches are reaping the tremendous benefits.

After teaching Wellness Coaching online since 2003, Carmellita M. Brown the lead instructor for Lose Weight While Becoming a Wellness Coach says: "Wellness coaching is now seeing a pay boom. More people are looking for someone to help whip them into shape."

According to Carmellita Brown, Fitness Trainers are not the only ones able to earn by the hour. "Wellness Coaches can earn as much as $150 an hour for their services," says Brown. With just 20 clients and twice a week visits, Wellness Coaches can earn a staggering $6,000 weekly.

So, what are Wellness Coaching clients looking for? Wellness Coaching clients are looking for eating plans for weight-loss and anti-aging, information on the lifestyle improvements, and a regiment for the entire family. Furthermore, the main focus on lifestyle improvements has included ways to increase live foods in the diet, promote natural weight-loss, and prevent disease through food and mineral consumption.

According to Brown, this is where the Wellness Coach shines, "Unlike Nutritionists who normally follow the Standard American Diet model, properly trained Wellness Coaches understand more about the benefits of live foods, food combinations, maintaining the body's pH levels, detoxification, and mineral supplementation." In addition, Brown emphasizes that Wellness Coaches who also understand spiritual principles and self-development techniques are the most effective in helping clients develop healthful habits and lose weight.

And how are Wellness Coaches building their list of loyal clientele? First, many Wellness coaches are using the internet as a viable resource for building clientele even in their own cities. With their own blogs, websites, and online social networks, Wellness Coaches are finding the internet a great resource for building clientele. Even in face to face transpersonal coaching (one on one coaching), Wellness Coaches can find clients in their own cities on the net.

Second, many Wellness Coaches use nutritional network marketing companies to expand their list of clientele. Many Wellness Coaches work with Network Marketing Sales representatives for nutritional products to reach new clientele. Many Network Marketers of nutritional products hire Wellness Coaches as speakers and trainers in order to increase sales. For this service, many Wellness Coaches may charge a fee of $200 to $500 for a 3 hour workshop.

Third, many Wellness Coaches succeed at writing books and e-books on subjects related to nutrition, physical health, mental health, and weight loss. Coupled with blogs and websites, this proves to be an excellent way for Wellness Coaches to build clientele.

And finally, the key to most Wellness Coaches' success lies in their ability to articulate the anti-aging process, the science of losing weight, and the ability to transform one's lifestyle. Training and access to the latest information about such matters can quickly evolve into a thriving career in Wellness Coaching and earn a Wellness Coach the new hourly pay boom.

Roslyn Randle is an accomplished Writer, Author, and Internet Marketer. She is Editor-in-Chief of Headline Articles and co-instructor for several online courses. To learn more about wellness coaching visit Lose Weight While Becoming A Wellness Coach at http://universalclass.com/i/crn/9478.htm Also discover your divine right to live in wealth by visiting Abundance Training 101: The Universal Law Of Abundance at http://universalclass.com/i/crn/14056.htm

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Why Coaching is the Way to Go in Team Management

When you hear the word “coach”, what comes first into your mind? Do you picture a basketball team with a man/woman shouting out directions? Or perhaps a football team with a man/woman pacing to and fro and calling out the names of the players?

Coaching is no longer reserved to sports teams; it is now one of the key concepts in leadership and management. Why is coaching popular?

Coaching levels the playing field.
Coaching is one of the six emotional leadership styles proposed by Daniel Goleman. Moreover, it is a behavior or role that leaders enforce in the context of situational leadership. As a leadership style, coaching is used when the members of a group or team are competent and motivated, but do not have an idea of the long-term goals of an organization. This involves two levels of coaching: team and individual. Team coaching makes members work together. In a group of individuals, not everyone may have nor share the same level of competence and commitment to a goal. A group may be a mix of highly competent and moderately competent members with varying levels of commitment. These differences can cause friction among the members. The coaching leader helps the members level their expectations. Also, the coaching leader manages differing perspectives so that the common goal succeeds over personal goals and interests. In a big organization, leaders need to align the staffs’ personal values and goals with that of the organization so that long-term directions can be pursued.

Coaching builds up confidence and competence.
Individual coaching is an example of situational leadership at work. It aims to mentor one-on-one building up the confidence of members by affirming good performance during regular feedbacks; and increase competence by helping the member assess his/her strengths and weaknesses towards career planning and professional development. Depending on the individual’s level of competence and commitment, a leader may exercise more coaching behavior for the less-experienced members. Usually, this happens in the case of new staffs. The direct supervisor gives more defined tasks and holds regular feedbacks for the new staff, and gradually lessens the amount of coaching, directing, and supporting roles to favor delegating as competence and confidence increase.

Coaching promotes individual and team excellence.
Excellence is a product of habitual good practice. The regularity of meetings and constructive feedback is important in establishing habits. Members catch the habit of constantly assessing themselves for their strengths and areas for improvement that they themselves perceive what knowledge, skills, and attitudes they need to acquire to attain team goals. In the process, they attain individually excellence as well. An example is in the case of a musical orchestra: each member plays a different instrument. In order to achieve harmony of music from the different instrument, members will polish their part in the piece, aside from practicing as an ensemble. Consequently, they improve individually as an instrument player.

Coaching develops high commitment to common goals.
A coaching leader balances the attainment of immediate targets with long-term goals towards the vision of an organization. As mentioned earlier, with the alignment of personal goals with organizational or team goals, personal interests are kept in check. By constantly communicating the vision through formal and informal conversations, the members are inspired and motivated. Setting short-term team goals aligned with organizational goals; and making an action plan to attain these goals can help sustain the increased motivation and commitment to common goals of the members.

Coaching produces valuable leaders.
Leadership by example is important in coaching. A coaching leader loses credibility when he/she cannot practice what he/she preaches. This means that a coaching leader should be well organized, highly competent is his/her field, communicates openly and encourages feedback, and has a clear idea of the organization’s vision-mission-goals. By vicarious and purposive learning, members catch the same good practices and attitudes from the coaching leader, turning them into coaching leaders themselves. If a member experiences good coaching, he/she is most likely to do the same things when entrusted with formal leadership roles.

Some words of caution though: coaching is just one of the styles of leadership. It can be done in combination with the other five emotional leadership styles depending on the profile of the emerging team. Moreover, coaching as a leadership style requires that you are physically, emotionally, and mentally fit most of the time since it involves two levels of coaching: individual and team. Your members expect you to be the last one to give up or bail out in any situation especially during times of crises. A coaching leader must be conscious that coaching entails investing time on each individual, and on the whole team. Moreover, that the responsibilities are greater since while you are coaching members, you are also developing future coaches as well.