Create Courageously
One of our favorite coaching resources to use for the achievement facet of well-being is the Future Self guided imagining activity. Try using this activity to co-create measurable goals with your client and their future self.
Choose Aliveness
In this skill refresh Megan explains the well-being facet of Achievement, and it’s importance in moving us toward fulfillment and flourishing together.
Megan Gilmore, Vanessa King, Angela Duckworth, Erica Eyer, and Aubrey Baker at the World Positive Education Accelerator in Dallas, TX (June 2018).
Discover Purpose
One of the greatest indicators of success is not talent, but rather grit - this combination of passion and perseverance that keeps us going toward our goals when things get hard. Angela Duckworth is the leading research in grit right now. You can use the Grit Scale that is available on her website to gain awareness around the current level of grit in yourself or your clients.
Develop Potential
Check out Angela Duckworth’s 6-minute TED Talk on Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
Lead to Serve
I was listening to a coaching podcast awhile back with Amanda Blake, and she shared a quote that a mentor had shared with her about awareness and practice that has stuck with me for weeks. She said, “Awareness creates choices. Practice creates capacity.” What an excellent way to bottomline to process and power of coaching. As we work with our clients to gain insight and new learning, their awareness expands and creates choices. I love how Jami Taylor has made that phrase, “That’s a choice?!” so popular when we run up against options that we didn’t realize were options before. And yet, if we stop at that aha moment without setting goals, crafting practices, and creating new habits, we will never increase our capacity for growth, greater capacity and that satisfaction that comes with more self-efficacy (this belief that we have what we need to overcome challenges and learn new things based on what we know about ourselves).
As someone that has struggled with feeling trapped in my own perfectionism at different times in my life, achievement can be a difficult facet of well-being for me to navigate with wisdom and precision. I love the adrenaline rush that comes with meeting my goals and the aliveness that I experience when I’m willing. I have also experienced the pain and depletion that comes with adrenal fatigue. So let me remind both of us, that we are already worthy. Our achievements do not make us more valuable humans, our performance does not make us more worthy of love, and we do not have to betray ourselves to get some place “better.”
Setting long-term, specific goals for ourselves and helping our clients to do the same with their coaching objectives (Big “A” agenda) is not optional if we also want to meet our human needs of significance, contribution and growth. Start dreaming big! Write it down. Say it out loud. Create your steps and get some accountability in place. The world needs exactly what your soul longs to create for it!
Reflection Questions:
What is the vision of something better that I see?
What difference does my soul long for?
What if I only had to subtract to get to where I want to be?
What practices can I begin that will increase my capacity for my goals to become reality?
Affirmation: I am worthy of all good things without adding anything. I can create good things for myself and for others - even when it gets hard.
P.S. Try creating a “Gritty Playlist” for yourself that you can play to get yourself going toward your goals when the going gets tough.