Self Improvement Tips

  What hat are you wearing when you think?  Years ago when I was studying what makes an effective team I came across a book, The Six Thinking Hats by Edward DeBono.  One of the premises was that for effective teamwork that it was important to have different perspectives.  And, as a team leader it is important to have a variety of prisms in thought in order to be able to move forward on a project or task with greater confidence. First, it is important to understand that each team member has preferred ways of thinking.  As a leader, you may be able to discern what is the best hat for someone to wear. 1. White Hat Thinking- With this thinking you focus on the data available. You analyze from past trends and extrapolate from historical data. 2. Red Hat Thinking-  You look at problems using your intuition, not reaction and emotion. Your goal is to understand others’ response intuitively, even if they don’t know your reasoning. 3. Black Hat Thinking-  You lo...

Coaching is proven to work when two factors are present: • The client is willing to learn, grow, and take action • There is a gap between where he is now and where he wants to be. That`s all is necessary for a successful coaching relationship where you can develop the right strategy, implement an action plan, and achieve your goals. Anything is possible within the coaching relationship. With a coach you can: Take More, Better and Smarter Actions The first task together is to find out exactly what you really want for yourself. Once you create objectives that are clear in with your personal values and professional vision, you are much more likely to naturally and consistently take actions to reach them. Have A Balanced Life, Which Works Well Professional success , when you enjoy a sense of personal fulfillment and life balance. You need to be selfish yet responsible, and how to care out enough time so your life outside of work is exactly the way you want it to be. Make Better Decisions ...

Tugboats and trains perform distinct and separate functions in real life.  Tugboats operate on water.  Their mission is to push, nudge and help direct the barges and large vessels that cannot turn very precisely in the confined areas of a harbor.  Trains are designed to pull and transport heavy loads over steel rails to a specific destination. In business, to be successful, you must have both the tugboat and train.  You need people who are tugboats.  And you need people who are trains.  As a personal business coach in Houston and The Woodlands, I have seen successful businesses. the necessity for both over a forty-year career in business. Let’s look first at the train people.  They set a course, they lay down the processes, tracks and they have a clear destination in mind.  They are usually meticulous and very process-oriented.  They want the most direct and shortest path to achieving their business goals. Tugboat people see the same goal....

Faucets and drains are two things designed to work together.  Water comes out of a faucet and goes into a sink.  Once in the sink, it flows toward the drain and goes away.  Or you can stop up the drain and let the sink collect water.  As a personal business coach in The Woodlands and in Houston, I look for the faucets in a business such as cash flow, marketing, advertising, operational and financial processes, administrative and management style, and most importantly, the people. And I also look for the drains. Interestingly, there are several ways to look at faucets and drains in business.  A company invests a great deal of money in an advertising program.  The money is the faucet.  It pours out into the advertising program.  The advertising program is wildly successful at bringing in new and profitable sales.  The sink, the company’s cash reserves, start to fill up.  The drain, which is the money going out for advertising, is slower ...

There is a song by the musical group, Alabama, “I’m in a Hurry.” All of us appear to be in a hurry. Is that something that benefits us? At times we are in a season of hurriedness. That is understandable. But, if your whole life is that way I suggest that you are missing many things. The first verse of the song states: “I’m in a hurry to get things done Oh I rush and rush until life’s no fun All I really gotta do is live and die But I’m in a hurry and don’t know why.” In today’s world being in a hurry can be equated with being busy. We are busy because we are striving for greater self-esteem, wealth, possessions and property among other things. But, in looking at my own life and those of my personal business coaching clients I see that excessive hurriedness because we are always busy is a distraction. We rush and rush until life’s no fun. And we don’t either recognize or know why our lives are no fun. Being continually busy never gives me, you, or my clients time to rest and recharge. T...

One of the biggest challenges I have seen in my  personal business coaching  practice and in life over the past year is how to meet the challenge that fear, surrounding COVID represents. If there were a perfect answer, I would give it to you, and we could all happily move forward. But there is not. The ultimate goal in business and life is to first survive and then thrive. Many businesses and individuals have gone from thriving to surviving. And some have experienced the most feared outcome, death. For myself and my clients, we have fears. The fears are valid. Yet how we choose to act on them is our choice. Once again, if there was the perfect answer on how to react to our fears, I would be happy to provide it. Unfortunately, there is not.  But the philosophy you bring to a fearful situation is critical to putting the odds in your favor of having a more successful outcome. Notice I said putting the odds in your favor. I di...

  With the advent of COVID 19, almost a year ago in the United States, there has been a transformation in how we look at ourselves, our relationships, work, and as a society in general. Where pre-COVID we trafficked in a currency of confidence and a “can-do” attitude we now use the currency of fear. Fear shuts down connections. Fear shuts down conversations. Fear shuts down moving forward. Fear isolates us. As social human beings this last one, isolation, is the one that has wreaked the most mental and emotional damage. Fear causes us to grieve. We grieve because we have lost our sense of normal. We may have lost loved ones, our jobs, or our homes. Grief is the death of something. And fear triggers grief because we have lost our sense of normal and at the same time, as we move forward day by day, we have no sense of certainty about the future. In a way we are afraid to step out and move forward. Our fears are legitimate. A...