I’ve been coaching teams, organizations, and individuals across a broad spectrum of industries and life experiences for nearly two decades. At the end of the day, regardless of who I’m working with, coaching boils down to two core questions:
- What do you want?
- What are you willing to do to get it?
In order to answer the second question, you must answer the first. And it is remarkable how hard it is to do that.
What do you want? It’s essential that you be able to answer that question off the top of your head with detail and with clarity.
If someone approaches me and says their organization has issues with communication, trust, and accountability, they might say they’re interested in how H.U.M.A.N. Strategies™ can help.
To which I’d say, “Great! In what way do you want things to be different?”
“Well, we want to be happier, we want to be better,” they’d say.
“Okay, but what do you want?” I’d ask.
“I don’t know. We want to be happier. I mean, I guess, I don’t want people leaving our organization.”
And now we’re really getting somewhere.
See, it’s next to impossible to make everyone happy. But reducing the number of people who up and quit? That’s absolutely achievable.
You might say, “I want to be a millionaire.” And I’d disagree with that.
The truth is, the vast majority of people don’t actually want to be millionaires. Hardly anyone knows how to (or wants to) manage that much money on a regular basis. And let’s not forget about what would probably happen in your life when people found out you had a lot of money.
What you probably really mean — and what is much more detailed and clear — is, “I want to have more money than I need. I don’t want to have to worry about money.”
If that’s what you want, let’s go there. Because that is likely a much easier — and more realistic — target to hit.
Knowing what you want is imperative. Getting clear on that increases the likelihood that you will actually get what you want. Because as the old adage goes, “If you don’t know what you want, any road will take you there.”
Once you are absolutely certain what you want, in detail, you have to decide how to get it.
So, what are you willing to do to get what you want?
That’s a bold question, especially for organizations where the status quo may be so deeply entrenched that doing something different feels uncomfortable and perhaps even risky.
What are you willing to do about the culture of your organizations? How are you open to adjusting expectations? How are you willing to hold people accountable? Are you willing to take a dip in production, performance, or sales while you redesign where you are and who you are in the marketplace (or who you are for your team)?
If you want to be a millionaire, what are you willing to do to get it? Are you willing to buy a lotto ticket every week? Marry a millionaire? Work 70 hours a week? Or only 20?
By asking these questions, you’re not eliminating the ability to become a millionaire. You’re constraining the options, so you’re not wasting your time with the things that are irrelevant and inapplicable to your goal. Instead, you commit to spending your time trying to figure out how to become a millionaire via your chosen method. After all, if marrying rich is your route, that’s almost designable — albeit not necessarily advisable — and a very different path than buying lotto tickets or working hard.
If you’re willing to work but only want to work 20 hours per week, we have to make sure that those are 20 very powerful hours.
Also, it’s worth clarifying what you mean by “being a millionaire.” By that, do you mean you earn a million dollars and you’re done? Do you earn a million dollars per decade? Per year? How many millions do you need to feel like a millionaire?
Those points of clarification are things we often don’t know. We usually have just a vague sense of them.
I’ve had people come to me for coaching and say point-blank, “I want to be a millionaire. I want to earn a million dollars a year.”
When we dive into why and what that money would do for them and what has to happen for them to achieve it, what they really find out is that they can have everything they want — and more than they need — at $150k or $250k per year, numbers that are infinitely more achievable.
Getting that kind of clarity is huge.
Next comes the work.
If you’re taking the approach I outline with H.U.M.A.N. Strategies and it’s not working, we need to dig into the two questions I’ve talked about here. And that takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. But it’s essential work.
To get started, contact me today.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
