Can Personal Development Coaching Improve My Leadership Skills?

Arguably the essential leadership skill is self-awareness. Without self-knowledge, it’s impossible to effectively develop or improve on any other skill. Personal development coaching aims to increase your self-awareness and help you cope with your work challenges. It will also assist you in establishing and achieving your career goals and aspirations. You will learn to assess your strengths and weaknesses so that you have the self-knowledge necessary to improve particular areas of your leadership style.

Why Does an Athlete Need Coaching?

Think about an athlete (you may even be one yourself). An athlete enlists the help of a coach to support and train them to achieve their sporting goals. Similarly, a personal development coach will support and encourage you to reach your life and work-related goals. You will learn expert techniques to help you feel confident and at ease in any changes you want to make as a leader or any changes that are forced upon you. A coach will teach you to be happy and proud of where you are and help you with any skills you wish to improve.

How Does Personal Development Coaching Work?

A personal development coach will strive to help you recognize not only where you want to be in your business life but how you can get there. A coach is skilled at identifying the potential that already exists within you and that you might be only partly aware of or completely unaware of. This is often accomplished via a series of questions designed to help you recognize, accept, and build upon your strengths and weaknesses.

Are You Happy With Your Progress?

You will be provided with the opportunity to assess your level of emotional well-being and how you are progressing in your working life. You will be encouraged to consider whether you are reaching your goals and are happy both with yourself and with your relationships with your business colleagues and coworkers.

A Personal Plan

Personal development coaching is not an authoritarian enterprise. A coach won’t tell you exactly what to do or necessarily offer you direct advice. Instead, they will offer support and guidance through a tailored personal development plan. You will learn how to set realistic goals for yourself and continue working on your self-development journey outside of your coaching sessions.

If you’re considering personal development coaching but are still hesitant, ask yourself the following questions:

·      Do I wish I could communicate better with my team?

·      Am I lacking in self-confidence?

·      Do I need to be more motivated?

·      Am I lacking a specific skill that is hindering my ability to be a better leader?

·      Do I want to be more content and happier as a leader?

Throw Out the Clutter

Personal development can be likened to a thorough reorganization of your house or apartment. You go through your home and throw out all of those things that are causing clutter and holding you back from a better living environment. A coach will help you evaluate aspects of yourself, throw out those cluttering up your mind, and put the useful ones in order of importance. Personal development coaching is particularly valuable in helping you reorganize your thoughts, wants, and aspirations and rating them through an objective point of view.

For personal development coaching to be effective, you need to feel ready to begin making permanent changes in your leadership style and be dedicated to achieving them.

How Shaping Development Can Shape You

A behavior analyst can help you accept your strengths, work on your weaknesses, build confidence. They will work with you every step of the way on a journey towards change and a more effective and happier leadership style. Shaping Development offers personal development coaching to enable you to develop your leadership skills. Sign up here for a consultation call to learn more.

Overwhelmed? Just start.

Life is busy. It's full of responsibilities, it's fast paced, and it's overwhelming. The phrase “sick and tired of being sick and tired" is commonplace. We live in an age where we have to intentionally prioritize slowing down. Our nervous systems are still evolving to the new fight or flight.  Instead of the sporadic threat of a predator, we have to process how to avoid a head on collision going 70 mph daily, while balancing busy professional and personal lives. This sounds like a simple evolution, except it's not. "Threats" are now continuous and they are everywhere. In an effort to combat constant stress and burnout, many people are seeking respite in mindfulness, self-care, and personal development. 

Having to take on the mental load of sorting through and determining what changes to implement into our daily lives guarantees that a lot of people just don’t. For many people, the investment of time (and often money) doesn’t seem worth it for an unknown outcome. For example, I’m a busy professional and I want to implement positive changes into my daily routine and lifestyle. I have very little knowledge in this arena, so I sit down and Google “self-help”, “healthy changes” or “self-care.” I am greeted with hundreds of websites directing me to implement daily meditation, gratitude journals, yoga classes, dietary adjustments, energy healing, shadow work, aromatherapy, and goddess bath routines. Immediately the sense of overwhelm consumes me. Where do I even start? With a few simple tips, I am confident you will feel less overwhelmed by this task and will be healthier for it.

1.      Just start.

Pushing through the overwhelm and implementing a single positive change, is by far the BIGGEST step. It often takes very little time to see improvements, which is both motivating and encouraging!   

2.      Listen to your intuition.  

When choosing which adjustments to make, pay attention to what FEELS important to you in the moment. Take note of what seems to be popping up for you. Maybe you keep seeing an ad for an application that provides seven minute guided meditations and think to yourself “seven minutes a day is not too bad!”. Also note what sounds effortless or fun.  Perhaps you know that you need more movement throughout your day but going to the gym sounds time consuming and inconvenient, but dancing sounds invigorating and fulfilling. Implementing something that resonates is more likely to stick and ultimately be more impactful long term.

3.      Make one small change at a time

It’s very easy to get into a motivated mindset and create a brand new life on paper. However, it’s often difficult to maintain a completely new routine with several unfamiliar tasks. Take dietary changes for example. How often do you hear a colleague or friend beaming about their new diet and workout routine and how wonderful they feel from it, only to hear them announce several weeks later that they fell off the wagon and need to get back to their diet and exercise starting Monday? This is to no fault of their own, but they overwhelmed their body and mind with too many changes. An alternative and more reasonable modification would be to add more whole foods into their diet or implement “meatless Monday”.  Naturally, as something becomes part of your routine, it becomes more intuitive, requiring less brain power, and allows you more mental space for additional adjustments.

4.      Hire a coach!

Sometimes we need a support system to make routine changes. Working with a coach takes away some of the guesswork and provides accountability. You will be met with compassion and a personalized plan that works for your very unique lifestyle and goals.

Life is already overwhelming, making lifestyle improvements should not feel burdensome. Do you have any tips for someone getting started? Please share in the comments!

Why Coaching is Important

In the world of Behavior Analysis, we follow a professional code which guides our performance while working in the field.  Part of this performance describes working within the realm of our competency and training, maintaining our competence through professional development, and supervising others in the field as they gain their credential.

While obtaining my BCBA credential, I had to gain 1500 hours of supervision while working in the field, with 75 of those hours being directly supervised by a supervisory BCBA (this description is not approved or endorsed by the BACB.  Go to www.bacb.com for more information on the BCBA credential).  During this time, I was directly coached by my BCBA mentor as I learned new skills to gain competence in the field.  Post-BCBA certification, this coaching is no longer required, except in instances where there is a behavior change procedure needed where a BCBA is not trained in the protocol.  This training can be acquired through professional development and consultation.

During the course of my certification, I have looked to models outside of our field to gain coaching experience rather than traditional lecture based models of professional development, and have become involved in a few behavior analytic coaching groups that foster training and professional development within our field.  I have found that personally, the models that foster peer interaction, and direct feedback and mentorship from a coach, have developed my skills better than the traditional professional development model of "training."  I think that more research needs to be done to evaluate the effectiveness of these models of professional development overall, but as a personal anecdote, this has been very helpful in developing my skills as a leader and behavior analyst.  As another benefit, these coaching groups have also provided me with peer support.  Sometimes in the field we operate alone, or as executives we find it difficult to connect with individuals that are our direct reports, so these groups have provided social reinforcement as well!

Interested in learning more about Coaching?  Shaping Development developed these groups in the form of our BCBA Supervision and Behavioral Leadership Coaching Groups.

Feel free to check it out!  We hope we can help you shape your development!

Sign Up for Our Newsletter!