Archives for March 2011

March 27, 2011

If You Are Shy This Is Definitely For You

Many people try to make shyness seem like a cute and innocent trait to have.

Nevertheless, if you are shy and you know firsthand how shyness can disrupt your social life, you probably find it hard to view it that way. And if you have more than shyness, if you have social anxiety, the upheaval it breeds is even worse.

Well, today I’m going to let you know about an excellent ebook for people with shyness or social anxiety that I’ve reviewed and I sincerely recommend.

The Shyness and Social Anxiety System

The ebook is called The Shyness and Social Anxiety System. Its author, Sean Cooper, presents in it effective and little-known psychological techniques to destroy shyness and social anxiety.

You can get the full details about the ebook here.

I had an interesting conversation earlier this week with Sean about the way this book was born. Sean fought with shyness and social anxiety for many years. After loads of research and personal experimentation, he eventually discovered how to overcome shyness and implemented this psychological know-how successfully.

As a former shy, “invisible” guy myself, I find something fascinating in what Sean teaches in this ebook because you can tell he’s been through it, he knows personally what it’s like to have shyness and social anxiety, and he grasped how to beat it.

I think this is something few people who give advice on this topic can say. Many of them don’t really understand what it’s like to be shy; they just know part of the theory. As a consequence, a lot of the advice on how to overcome shyness is insipid and trite: “Just be yourself”, “Just do it”, etc. Yeah right!

I talk in more depth about this and issue and about the real science of social confidence in this free presentation.

My Review of the Ebook

I was pleasantly surprised by The Shyness and Social Anxiety System. It presents a both cognitive and behavioral approach to boosting social confidence, with a bit more focus on the behavioral part.

The ebook is extremely simple to read, to understand and most importantly, to apply. It contains ideas and techniques for beating shyness that you can take immediately and start applying, and you’ll see results.

On top of that, I find these ideas to be highly consistent with the scientific psychological research in this area, which is something I’m big on.

The Shyness and Social Anxiety System got me realizing things I wasn’t aware of about overcoming shyness. This is probably the finest proof I can give of the quality of this ebook, considering that I coach shy people almost on a daily basis and I believe I know a thing or two about overcoming shyness.

To conclude this review, if you struggle with shyness or social anxiety, coaching is out of your financial range and you’re looking for a quality information product to help you make real progress, this ebook is it.

Check out The Shyness and Social Anxiety System here.

Also, check out my Conversation Confidence guide here.

Shyness is a serious psychological issue to deal with and it can be dealt with successfully. But you need to use the best tools available.

Image courtesy of Ed Yourdon

Filed Under: Attitude, News, People Skills Tagged With: , , , , 1 Comment
March 22, 2011

Avoidant Personality Disorder

Think of avoidant personality disorder as shyness taken up a notch. It’s a condition that’s present in almost 1% of the general population, and its consequences on ones social life are debilitating.

As a communication coach, I deal with individuals with avoidant personality disorder quite often. The seriousness of their situation makes them keen on finding solutions to become more outgoing. So this article is my comprehensive intro to avoidant personality disorder and its treatment.

What It Is and What It’s Not

According to the forth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), avoidant personality disorder (AvPD) is a psychological condition characterized by a pervasive pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and hypersensitivity to negative evaluation.

It’s important to note that avoidant personality disorder is not a mental disorder. Also, be aware that if you have AvPD, there is nothing physically wrong with your brain or the way it’s functioning.

Any chemical imbalance that may exist in your brain is not the root cause of avoidant personality disorder, but a mere symptom of it. This is why medication, although it can improve the mood, does little to actually overcome avoidant personality disorder. It addresses the symptoms, not the causes.

AvPD is considered a psychological disorder. I even use this term lightly, because it often reinforces the belief people with avoidant personality disorder have that they are somehow broken, which they are not.

Overall, I think the best mode to look at avoidant personality disorder is as a learned way of thinking, feeling and behaving that doesn’t create results, sometimes based on certain predispositions. And the best news is that anything you’ve learned, you can also unlearn.

Avoidant Personality Disorder Symptoms

You can recognize avoidant personality disorder correctly by understanding its symptoms and taking note of them. The following are the most important symptoms visible in people with AvPD:

  • Avoiding social activities and spending huge amounts of time alone;
  • Having a very small social circle and only carrying brief interactions with the people in it;
  • A major reluctance to meeting new people and a strong feeling of inadequacy when dealing with them;
  • Being generally reserved and quiet when interacting with others, due to fear of saying something improper and being shamed;
  • Being over-preoccupied with how they are seen by others, due to fear of being disliked or rejected;
  • Frequently fantasizing about having social interactions that turn out the way they want them to;
  • Not rising up to their potential in their career, due to running away from opportunities that require them to be social;
  • Seeing themselves as socially unskilled, awkward or inferior to others.

Avoidant Personality Disorder Treatment

Although ‘treatment’ is the conventional word, it may not be the best one. Remember we’re not talking about killing a virus; we’re talking about learning a new way of thinking, feeling and behaving.

I’ll start off with what you probably want to know most: yes, avoidant personality disorder can be ‘treated’. It does take time and perseverance, and it does require using the proper methods, but it is doable and there are hundreds of documented cases that point this out.

Successfully getting rid of AvPD typically involves a three folded process:

1) Challenging and changing dysfunctional thinking. People with avoidant personality disorder tend to have a lot of limiting beliefs, plus an unrealistic view of social standards and of themselves. These need to be corrected by consciously changing the way they think.

2) Gradual exposure. People with avoidant personality disorder need to gradually face those exact situations they’re afraid of and they typically avoid. Systemic exposure, combined with combating unrealistic thinking will set their mind and emotions on the right path.

3) Improving people skills. Since individuals with AvPD avoid social situations as much as they can, their people skills have often atrophied or they’ve never truly developed at all. Thus, training key people skills and learning how to start a conversation, how to keep it going or how to connect with people is crucial.

The methods of intervention that have been proven to work best for overcoming avoidant personality disorder are cognitive-behavioral therapy and coaching. There is a raft of research that confirms the success of these methods. No other methods even come close to the elegance and effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral methods.

If you have avoidant personality disorder, the first essential step is to recognize it without making a big deal out of it.

The second step is to realize that there is hope for you and to fully commit to overcoming this condition. This can be tricky particularly because people with avoidant personality disorder will sometimes tend to avoid the very things that will lead to overcoming their condition.

Using cognitive-behavioral principles and techniques on your own, you will see progress. However, given the seriousness of the condition, initially working one-on-one with a competent coach or a therapist is a good idea.

You will make much faster progress, you’ll successfully get passed those first hurdles and get the wheels spinning in the right direction.

One more thing: If you want to learn more about building social confidence and overcoming your insecurities, then check out this presentation I created, in which I share some of my top advice on this topic. I’m sure you’ll find it very useful.

A rich and fulfilling social life doesn’t have to exist only in your daydreams. Pick the best tools to use, put them into practice and keep moving forward despite the struggles, and you will make it real.

Image courtesy of NicoleAbalde

Filed Under: Attitude, People Skills, Psychology Tagged With: , , 29 Comments
March 17, 2011

How to Be More Outgoing

If you’re somewhat shy or introverted, then learning how to be more outgoing is one of the smartest self-improvement steps you can make. There is no better way to solidify your social life than by comprehending how to be more outgoing and applying it

In my social confidence coaching practice, I frequently teach people how to be more outgoing and social, and I help them make real life progress in this area. I’ve realized that being social is much more a matter of attitude than aptitude, and that the attitude part needs to be handled above all.

Step 1: Outgoing = Out Going

One potentially illuminating way that I like to look at the word ‘outgoing’ is by dividing the two composing words and making it ‘out going’.

You could take that phrase literally, as in going out of the house more; because many of the individuals who aren’t very outgoing and social spend unordinary amounts of time indoors, alone, and this feeds their shyness.

However, to me it makes more sense to look at it figuratively. Thus, being ‘out going’ means putting your personality out there instead of keeping it hidden, it means expressing yourself fully.

There are multiple things you can do to achieve this. I recommended you start by watching my free presentation on Conversation Confidence. This insightful presentation will reveal to you the real key to gaining confidence and the proven formula for being more outgoing. Go here to check it out.

To assist you understand how to be more outgoing, I will list here some of the most effective ways that I know. These are ways I’ve used myself, and are recurrently used by my coaching clients.

Step 2: Break It Down and Then Put It into Practice

Do you know this joke: How do you eat an elephant? One piece at a time. Well, this concept applies extremely well for becoming more outgoing and sociable.

When you get frustrated with having few fulfilling friendships, it’s temping to just try to burst out and instantly become that super-sociable person you want to be. Unfortunately, human psychology doesn’t work that way. You don’t just change completely at once.

Real, organic change in how sociable you are happens by setting gradual steps for being more outgoing, and taking these steps one by one. For example, you may start by asking more questions in group settings, and when you become comfortable with that, you continue with making more statements in group settings.

In time, step by step, you’ll eventually find yourself becoming a lean, mean, socializing machine. In learning how to be more outgoing and social, it’s crucial to understand that this gradual process is what works best and to stick to it dutifully.

Step 3: Lower The Bar

One trait most shy people have in common is that they set lofty social standards for themselves. They demand of themselves to make a great first impression, to be liked by all, and they think that if it doesn’t happen it’s a tragedy.

Even individuals with very sharp social skills can’t rise up to such idealistic standards. Shy people only torment themselves by imposing this kind of standards on themselves.

For this reason, one of the best things you can do to become more outgoing is to lower the bar. If your standard for success is to get everybody to like you, then you’re bound to be shy. But if your standard is simply to have conversations with new people, then you’re bound to be more sociable.

The vital thing you may need to realize is that you don’t have to demand that much of yourself socially. You’re only human, you will connect well with some people, you won’t connect with others at all, and that’s absolutely OK. Accept it and live your life.

Step 4: Manage Your Self-Talk

I have a (rhetorical) question for you: How does a person set the social bar high for themselves?

The answer is that they do so through their self-talk. They say to themselves in their inner dialog “I must impress this person; they must like me” and other intelligent stuff like that.

Well, people who aren’t very outgoing tend to have many other dysfunctional ways of talking to themselves than the ones that create unrealistic standards. If you analyze their inner dialog, you’ll discover that it’s full of crap.

Thus, in learning how to be more outgoing and social, a very big step is managing your self-talk. This means identifying the stupid, unrealistic or dysfunctional things that you say to yourself and willingly correcting them. I talk in more detail about this in my confidence video presentation.

As you do so in a systematic way, not only that your habitual self-talk changes, but the underlying beliefs change as well. This helps you gain confidence and interact easier with other people.

As you become more outgoing, your people skills get put into practice more and they develop as well. This makes you even more outgoing and you get a positive cycle going, which ends up visibly enriching your social life. And the best part is that in this entire journey, the sky is the limit.

Image courtesy of NicoleAbalde

Filed Under: Attitude, People Skills, Relationships Tagged With: , , , 60 Comments
March 14, 2011

How to Meet People

Make no mistake about it: knowing how to meet people is a skill that will, depending on your case, either save or enrich your social life. Like most of us, you may live in a huge human settlement, but that doesn’t necessarily make meeting new people easy.

The essential benefit of knowing how to meet people effectively is that it gives you a lot more social options. Thus, you don’t have to settle for a crummy bunch of friends or to fool yourself that playing a MMORPG equals having a social life.

Meet People Proactively

Wouldn’t you love having a way to meet new people with barely any effort, from the comfort of your own home, and build fulfilling relationships? Well, I have news for you:

There isn’t any! You’re daydreaming!

The essential trait to master in learning how to meet people effectively is a proactive attitude. It means taking responsibility for your social life and acting in the outside world in order to meet people, instead of waiting for them to act and meet you.

I know that meeting people online is taking ground, and there are specific ways you can meet people successfully online. But that doesn’t mean that overall, it’s an effective method. It’s mostly proof that we’re looking for quick fixes.

Overall, if you want to make friends and enhance your social life, you’ll have to:

  • Get out of the house more;
  • Go to places where there are other folks who are eager to interact socially;
  • Start conversations, be friendly and outgoing;
  • Make conversation with people face to face.

Where to Meet People

Fortunately, there’s a plethora of methods and places to meet new people. Unfortunately, not all of them are that effective.

I’ve tested quite a few of them and my communication coaching clients have tested even more of them. Condensing these experiences, I believe there are at least three ways to meet people that are worth using:

1. Classes and trainings. Whatever it is that you fancy learning, there are probably a lot of people in your vicinity who want to learn it as well: from cooking to photography, from communication skills to playing the harmonica.

Taking a class or going to a training program on a topic that interests you is one of the best ways to meet new people. I personally use this method all the time and many of my best friends I’ve met in various classes and trainings.

2. Sports and physical activities. Every year I see more and more nuts (aaa… people) jogging passed me on the street; and many of them are in pairs. In general, exercising is becoming increasingly popular and it’s taking on an increasingly social form.

So the answer to the question “how to meet people?” might be for you to take on a sport that’s social in nature (translation: it involves more than one person). Think tennis, basketball, hiking, running, dancing, etc. There are organized groups, associations, and local communities in many sports, and they’re usually looking for new members.

3. Volunteer work. This is an excellent way to meet like-minded people who believe in the same causes you do. Most of the people who do volunteer work are not there just to make a contribution, but also to socialize.

Think about the things you would like to volunteer for and start searching for groups or organizations in your area that do those kinds of deeds. Get in touch with them and start getting involved in their events and activities.

Find Out What Works For You

Besides the ways to meet people that tend to work for nearly everyone, there are even more ways that work for particular types of individuals.

Learning how to meet people in church and applying it might be great for you if you’re a highly religious person. Learning how to meet people in bars and clubs might be great for you if you’re not a highly religious person.

What I encourage my coaching clients to do and I encourage you as well is to test it out. Experiment with various methods of meeting new people and be willing to get out of your comfort zone.

Eventually, you’ll find those ways to meet people that best fit your personality and you can focus on them. Learning how to meet people may also require you to make some adjustments to your personality and improve your people skills, but it will be worth it.

What you don’t want to do is act as if what works for others to meet people won’t work for you without giving it a shot, and to settle for a minutely exciting social life.

You live in a world with more possibilities for meeting new people and having great relationships than ever. The only person that could possibly stand in your way is you.

Image courtesy of CraigMarston

Filed Under: Lifestyle, People Skills, Relationships Tagged With: , , 4 Comments
March 9, 2011

Toxic Relationships and Navigating Them

One of my tenets is this: life is too short to waste it dealing with poisonous people and having toxic relationships.

If you believe you may have one or more toxic relationships in your life, then one of the key people skills for you to master is recognizing and managing such relationships.

In my work as a communication coach, I often help my clients navigate through and beyond toxic relationships. I can tell you than acquiring the proper skills and attitudes to do this is not an easy process, but if you share the above tenet with me, you’ll definitely find in worth your while.

Toxic Relationships Signs

Toxic relationships can be present in any area of your life. You may have a toxic relationship with your spouse, your GF/BF, your parents, your boss, a friend, a colleague or a business partner.

Before anything else, you need to be able to look the monster in the eye and name it. In other words, you need to recognize toxic relationships and acknowledge them if they exist in your life. The following are in my view the top five signs of a toxic relationship:

1. Lack of balance. One person gives, the other receives. One person invests, makes sacrifices and compromises for the sake of the relationship, the other person takes, expects and demands compromises.

2. Heavy criticism. Any relationship where at least one partner spends significantly more time criticizing, accusing and putting down the other partner than praising and supporting him or her is a toxic relationship.

3. Emotional manipulation. If in a relationship you often feel pressured to do certain things, if the other person frequently uses shame, guilt, fear or anger as tools to push your buttons and direct your behavior, you’re in a toxic relationship.

4. Persistent anxiety. Your mood while interacting with a person is a good sign of the dynamic that relationship has. If you frequently feel anxious or tense while interacting with a person, or even just thinking about it, the relationship is toxic.

5. Disrupting your growth. Healthy relationships help every area of your life flourish. Toxic relationships do the exact opposite. Toxic relationships in your family life make you unfocused and unproductive at work; toxic relationships in your career make you distant and cranky when at home.

Measure any relationship based on these five signs and you’ll get a pretty good idea about the number of toxic relationships in your life. Once you discover any, the next step is to decide if the best way to go is to try and save them, or to end them.

Ending Toxic Relationships

Now, once they fully realize they’re in a toxic relationship, many people have the instinctual reaction to try and fix it. They think it is the noble and proper thing to do. After all, we get preached to all the time on how relationships require compromises and we should fight for them.

Well, that may sound dignified, but the fact it that it’s often not the best path to take. Here’s one essential thing I came to realize as a communication coach: most of the time, you’re much better off ending toxic relationships than trying to save them.

It may be emotionally hard to do so, but trust me: in terms of costs and benefits, the best thing you can do is in all probability to end it without even thinking twice.

As a strategy for ending toxic relationships, I typically recommend biting the bullet and going all the way. Don’t try to distance yourself gradually from the other person and to play it all safe. It usually won’t work and it will cause you a whole lot of trouble.

Have a serious discussion with the other person and tell them: “Look! This relationship is not working for me. It’s causing me huge distress. I’m ending it”.

The other person will likely try to fight you on your decision and manipulate you into not ending the relationship. Keep in mind that it’s your choice, that you don’t need the other person’s consent to end the relationship, and stick to your decision.

Fixing Toxic Relationships

OK: if you truly believe that a toxic relationship in your life can be fixed and for some practical reason, trying to save it is a good idea, then by all means go ahead and try and fix it.

The essential concept you need to understand if you walk this path is that toxic relationships are co-created. Thus, saving it can only be done if both parts are willing to change. Overall, saving a toxic relationship involves three key steps:

1. An honest and straightforward expression, by both persons involved, of their needs, wants, opinions and frustrations related to their relationship. Honest, open communication is crucial in the healing process.

2. Acknowledging each others rights and responsibilities. If one person refuses to admit the other person’s needs and wants (often different from theirs) and to take them into consideration, there is no saving for the relationship.

3. Working towards a win-win solution. Once both sides of the story have been expressed, heard and accepted, the two parts need to collaborate to find the mutually advantageous solutions, and to rebuild their relationship based on them.

Effectively handling toxic relationships is not a matter of using a few simple tricks and tricks. It’s a matter of gaining confidence and developing key people skills for building healthy relationships. It’s an inside-out journey that begins with you and ends with your relationships.

Image courtesy of CowGummy

Filed Under: People Skills, Psychology, Relationships Tagged With: , , , 6 Comments
March 5, 2011

How to Make People Like You

Let’s face it: we’re all social animals and we want to be liked by others. That’s perfectly fine, as long as you don’t become desperate for people’s approval and feel shitty when someone doesn’t like you. It’s cool to want to know how to make people like you.

One of the central benefits of having good people skills is that you can increase your likeability factor. And the more likeable you can be my friend, the more options you have in your social life and beyond.

I’ve always been amazed by the ability to sweep people off their feet with your very presence. It’s one of the things that got me into improving my people skills more than a decade ago, and later into helping others do the same through communication coaching.

During this time, I’ve learned a thing or two on how to make people like you.

How Not To Make People Like You

girlThere is one way to make people like you that’s very popular and I’m adamantly against. That is being really nice with people and doing nice things for them all the time. Sure, you can get some people’s approval be being a nice guy or a nice girl. However, there are huge downsides to this strategy.

First of all, as many nice people exemplify, having a nice behavior towards others all the time often projects neediness and insecurity. That doesn’t make someone like you, it makes them either avoid you (if you’re lucky) or use you (if you’re unlucky).

Second of all, in order to keep people’s appreciation with this strategy, you have to keep doing nice things for them. Eventually, all the effort you put into pleasing the people in your life by being nice turns into a huge pain in the ass for you.

Want to know how to make people like you in the best way possible? Make them like you for who you are, not for what you do for them. This idea is a huge mental shift for many and it puts the focus on developing edgy people skills and a charismatic personality, not on being nice all the time.

Be a Positive Presence

It is a psychological fact that emotions are contagious, both positive and negative ones. When you can make people feel good, in a way they reward you for this by liking you.

Interestingly enough, the most effective way to make others feel good is not by giving them cheesy compliments or shallow encouragements, but by being positive yourself. Therefore, learning how to make people like you goes hand in hand with learning how to manage your emotional state.

A very helpful exercise for getting yourself in a positive state is simply faking it. You see, in your psychology, everything is connected: your thoughts, your emotions and your body. Walk, move and talk like a person feeling good and you’ll elicit that very state. You’ll feel positive because you act positive, and you’ll transmit it to others.

Share Yourself

There is some fascinating research emerging lately in the field of social psychology that points out one of the simplest and most powerful answers to how to make people like you is to open up and share yourself.

Not only that we tend to feel more comfortable with people who share themselves, but we also like them more. Thus, it’s not surprising that timid people are often not very likeable. They don’t put themselves out there.

Listening is a very important people skill to have, but so is opening up. Talk about yourself; put yourself out there in an authentic manner, even if you may find it hard at first. You’ll notice how people will grab on to what they know about you and like you more.

If you have a hard time sharing yourself, it’s probably because you lack social confidence. In this case, all I can say is watch this presentation, because you’ll learn from me in it how to overcome this problem, permanently.

Add Value in Every Conversation

There is a much better mode to add value in people’s lives than being very nice. It’s through the style you make conversation. Want you want is for people to end a conversation with you better off than they were when they started it.

There are many ways to do this. You can be the wise person who inspires others and talks about interesting things, you can be the funny person who gives a humorous spin to everything and gets people laughing.

Find the ways of adding value in conversation that fit well with your personality and develop those. Ultimately, people want to interact the most with those who can offer value, and by being a funny, witty, exciting or wise person you have an endless stream of value you can provide effortlessly.

Knowing how to make people like you permits you to develop very sharp people skills. When you can push people’s buttons through your personality, you open the doors towards a lifestyle of abundance that most people only dream of.

Image courtesy of Kam

Filed Under: People Skills, Psychology, Success Tagged With: , , , , 25 Comments
March 1, 2011

The Benefits of Coaching

In the realm of personal development, there are two things I passionately believe in: people skills as a worthy set of skills to develop and coaching as a worthy method to employ. I believe in coaching because I believe in the benefits of coaching.

Coaching can take your personal development further and faster than any other method, in whatever direction interests you. Articles, books and DVDs can all help you a lot, but in comparison with individual coaching done right, they’re like a tractor racing against a Ferrari.

The way I see it, training is also a second rate option in comparison with coaching. The more confidence coaching I do, the more I believe in the benefits of coaching and the less I believe in the effectiveness of training, which is why I now do little training.

The benefits of coaching are numerous. However, I think there are five benefits of coaching that take the cake and make coaching the ultimate personal development solution. Here they are:

1. Seeing Your Blind Spots

Often, there are critical things we simply don’t see. I call these our blind spots. We can have blind spots about the way we come across socially, the limiting beliefs we operate on, the real consequences of certain behaviors, etc.

Since you can’t change or take into consideration what you don’t see, blind spots typically keep you stuck and thwart your improvement. Well, the best way to see your blond spots is none other than individual coaching.

Some of my communication coaching clients made big leaps forward by seeing crucial blinds spots they had. Seeing one of their blind spots was occasionally so mind-blowing that it kept them awake at night. It’s quite the transformational phenomenon.

2. Choosing the Best Action Steps

Once you know what specifically you want to achieve, the key question is: How? From improving your people skills to improving your time management, from getting more dates to making more money, there are so many tools and techniques available that choosing the best ones can be a burden.

This is where good coaching comes in, as a way to determine the tools and techniques that work best and that work best for your context, your problems and your person. Thus, you can pick the right actions steps for you and make huge progress instead of running in circles.

3. Implementing Each Step Effectively

One thing I’ve realized as a confidence coach is the enormous difference between understanding an idea conceptually and applying it correctly. Most people tend to think they’re practicing a new idea properly, when in fact they aren’t.

Coaching provides a coach the opportunity to study how you’re implementing certain ideas and give you accurate feedback. Role-plays, practical exercises and debriefings are great tools in the coach’s toolbox for this.

Thus, a coach can guide you into implementing what you’re learning effectively and can ensure that you’re shifting in the right direction, that you’re evolving not just changing.

4. Taking Massive Action

Fundamentally, changing any area of your life is at most 10% theory and at least 90% practice. You won’t see real results unless you commit to taking the insights you get and the ideas you discover and acting on them.

One of the key benefits of coaching is that it can help put the focus on results and take massive action. A good coach will help you get motivated, trust your power to change, get out of your comfort zone and do considerably more than you would on your own.

5. Staying On Track

It’s convenient to say that every person is responsible for their personal development and that if you don’t stick to it, then you’re just lazy or lack willpower. But the psychological fact is that humans find it hard to stay motivated to do something, even if it’s important to them.

Even the most successful and strong-minded people can easily get distracted and they frequently procrastinate if they just rely on willpower. The good news is that you don’t need to rely on willpower alone.

Through coaching, you can get precious support in staying on track with your personal development. A coach can help you set specific goals, take action daily and remain committed to the process. You’ll make progress week by week and the cumulative progress will be huge.

One small warning in the end: Keep in mind that as effective as coaching can be as a method, it is only one part of the equation. Another important part is the coach, and you want to pick one that works in a professional manner and can help you obtain quality results.

It is only the right coach that can make the noteworthy benefits of coaching show. So if you decided to pick coaching as a personal development method, you have my congratulations. Now it’s time to pick the right coach for you.

Image courtesy of HikingArtist

Filed Under: Personal Development, Success Tagged With: , 5 Comments