Welcome to this month’s L’Epée Coaching & Consulting Newsletter. A warm welcome to our newest readers, and as always, warm appreciation to our long-time readers.
My March workshop on Effective Communication Techniques focused mostly on how people function and communicate in general and how they behave in a given context. The benefit of the approach presented in the workshop is that discovering how a person operates and identifying his or her internal reality allows us to connect and communicate with that person in an efficient and productive way.
People tend to operate differently in different situations, and a lot depends on their frame of mind at any given moment. Each frame of mind describes a distinction of consciousness. What controls and runs our specific frames of mind are our “software programs,” which are called “metaprograms” in NLP (neuro-linguistic programming). Being able to recognize our own metaprograms as well as the metaprograms of others can lead us to communicate and relate to one another more effectively.
The next workshop Effective Communication Techniques: “Figuring People Out” will take place on April 5th.
Also, due to strong demand, the Career Assessment Workshop will be offered again on March 29th and April 12th.
Calendar
| March 1st | Effective Communication Techniques workshop |
|---|---|
| March 3rd | WIB – Women in Business dinner |
| March 5th, 12th, 19th, 26th | Biljana Pelic Music Workshops |
| March 11th | IWAP evening group |
| March 29th | Career Assessment Workshop Part I |
| April 5th | Effective Communication Techniques workshop |
| April 7th | WIB – Women in Business dinner |
| April 8th | IWAP evening group |
| April 12th | Career Assessment Workshop Part II |
| May 5th | WIB – Women in Business dinner |
| May 17th | Effective Communication Techniques workshop |
| May 29th | Career Assessment Workshop Part I |
| June 2nd | WIB – Women in Business dinner |
| June 10th | IWAP evening group |
| June 14th | Career Assessment Workshop Part II |
Communication Tip of the Month:
Making your New Year’s resolutions a reality
Many of you probably made several New Year’s resolutions at the beginning of the year, whether you casually thought about them, joked about them during a social gathering or diligently wrote them down. Unfortunately, too often it takes only a couple of months for these resolutions to fall by the wayside.
For those of you who are determined to follow through with your goals for 2003 and are resolved to make them a reality, the following coaching tips will help you succeed.
Be committed Are you intellectually or emotionally committed to succeed? Unless you have an emotional attachment to the achievement of your goal – meaning that deep in your heart you know that you have to make the change – it won’t happen. For example, if you want to work fewer hours, you need to know deep in your heart WHY leaving work by 6 p.m. three times a week is important to you and you must attach yourself to the PAIN you will cause yourself, your family and your colleagues, customers and your organization in the long term if you don’t allow yourself adequate time to recharge and revitalize yourself.
Assess each of your New Year’s resolutions now, and give yourself a score from 1 to 10 based on how committed you are to achieving it – with 10 being totally, fully committed and 1 being not at all committed. If any of your resolutions have a commitment score of less than 8, is there anything you are willing to do to push the score higher? Unless your commitment scores are 9 or 10 out of 10, I doubt that your resolution will last past spring.
Be clear about what you want Being able to envision very clearly what your achievements will look like will help you follow through with your resolutions. Remember the acronym SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and with a timeline). Write down in detail next to each of your resolutions how you will know when you’ve achieved success. What will you see, hear or feel after having reached your goals?
Be practical By being practical, I mean choosing a realistic number of resolutions. It is better to have 3 achievable goals rather than 10 idealistic ones. By overwhelming yourself with too many goals, you’ll end up dispersing you energy so much that you will not fulfill any of them. I suggest that you focus on a maximum of 3 goals or 3 key themes with more specific subgoals under each theme.
Take action Psychologists tell us that typically it takes 21 repetitions before something becomes embedded in our psyche as a spontaneous habit. Be aware of this fact and make sure that you give yourself 21 opportunities to take action.
Ask for support
Evidence shows that even the best-intentioned and most-motivated people need the support of others to follow through with their resolutions, regardless of how responsible or proactive they may be. Share your goals with a friend (one person for all 3 resolutions, or 3 separate people holding you accountable for one resolution each). After choosing the appropriate person for each of your resolutions, speak with him/her about your commitment, share how you’ll know you’ve been successful, and tell him/her that you will need his/her help to hold you accountable to 21 opportunities to take action.
How committed are you to make your dreams come true?
Yours truly,Karin