"No" is the New "Yes": Four Practices to Reprioritize Your Life
TONY SCHWARTZ — 8:12 AM Tuesday January 17, 2012

Excerpt:

I was sitting with the CEO and senior team of a well-respected organization. One at a time, they told me they spend their long days either in back-to-back meetings, responding to email, or putting out fires. They also readily acknowledged this way of working wasn't serving them well — personally or professionally...

Truth be told, there's also an adrenaline rush in saying yes. Many of us have become addicted, unwittingly, to the speed of our lives — the adrenalin high of constant busyness. We mistake activity for productivity, more for better, and we ask ourselves "What's next?" far more often than we do "Why this?" But as Gandhi put it, "A 'no' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble."

More...
http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2012/01/no-is-the-new-yes-four-practic.html

Source: HBR Blog Network: TONY SCHWARTZ: Tony Schwartz is the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything. Become a fan of The Energy Project on Facebook and connect with Tony at Twitter.com/TonySchwartz and Twitter.com/Energy_Project. 

Are We Happy Yet? The Unexpected Links Between Happiness and Choice

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — The key to happiness lies in the choices you make, or so they say.  

Yet, new research by long-time collaborators Jennifer Aaker, Cassie Mogilner, and Sep Kamvar suggests that people don’t make choices based on a single or shared notion of happiness. In “How Happiness Impacts Choice,” a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Research, by Cassie Mogilner (The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania), Aaker (Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business), and Kamvar (Stanford University Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering), they conclude that people’s relationship with happiness is a complex one, subject to factors both demographic (age) and psychographic (living in the present versus focusing on the future). Still, people’s individual experience of happiness can be influenced in systematic ways, and can lead to predictable choices.

In their 2010 collaboration, Mogilner, Aaker, and Kamvar identified two types of happiness. Some consumers define happiness as an “arousing” or exciting emotion. Others experience it as a calm, peaceful feeling. In their 2011 work, these researchers concluded that people can toggle back and forth between these two distinctly different experiences. Depending on which view of happiness they favor at a given moment, people will make different choices.

Based on earlier studies, the researchers believed that attitudes toward happiness — as either exciting or calm — depended largely on the individual’s age. “The Shifting Meaning of Happiness,” published in early 2011 in Social Psychological and Personality Science, summarized those findings. For that paper, the researchers analyzed 70,000 independent instances in which online bloggers wrote about feelings of happiness. Younger bloggers were much more likely to describe situations that reflected the happiness-equals-excitement mindset. Older ones tended to subscribe to the happiness-equals-peacefulness point of view. “We knew that as we grow older, our priorities change.  But what we haven’t known is that our definition of happiness also changes — in systematic and predictable ways — over the course of life,” said Aaker.

Yet, why would these effects hold? Why is it that people’s definition of happiness changes as they age?  The results of six new studies answer this question.  As people age, their temporal focus changes —whether they are likely to be focused on the here and now or on the future.  And it is this temporal focus that drives the basic effects. “We now think that individuals’ views of happiness depend far more upon their sense of time than their age per se,” said Aaker.

In one of the six studies, the researchers recruited young adult volunteers — individuals who they expected would perceive happiness as an exciting experience. They told half of the volunteers to focus on the present, and to relinquish thoughts of anything but the current moment. That group of volunteers was later far more likely to define happiness as “peaceful” than the volunteers who were not led to focus on the present moment.

As a result, “we now believe that attitudes toward happiness are highly malleable, and, in fact, easily influenced, simply by shifting the timeframe people consider,” said Aaker.

Businesses promoting the idea that their brand will make consumers happy should first consider which type of happiness (calm or exciting?) their products are most likely to evoke. They then need to place marketing images, slogans, or activities in a context that encourages consumers to think of happiness in the appropriate timeframe.

For example, BMW’s global “Stories of Joy” campaign includes a website where consumers can upload homemade videos that demonstrate the joy of driving. Whiskas created the “Happy Together” online community as a place people could share happy moments with their cats. Based on Mogilner, Aaker, and Kamvar’s most recent research, these brands could be more effective by “preparing” consumers to experience happiness in a way that puts the campaign in the best light.

BMW’s campaign clearly hopes that consumers will view happiness as an exciting state. To maximize its effectiveness, BMW should push consumers to take a long-term, future view of happiness. Alternatively, Whiskas’ website portrays happiness as an exceedingly peaceful emotion. It should provide contextual cues that encourage consumers to savor the present moment.

Since happiness doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone, marketers should consider what types of consumer they want to reach. They also need to consider how to convey happiness. As a benefit of using the product? As an aspect of brand personality? Even the colors they deploy in advertisements and collateral matters.

In one of the other studies detailed in their most recent paper, the researchers presented 50 consumers between the ages of 19 and 68 with a list of colors, objects, people, activities, and brands. The consumers indicated which items on the list excited them, and which ones calmed them down. Hot colors like red tended to excite participants. Cool colors like blue promoted a sense of peacefulness. Nike, Target, and Apple brands were deemed exciting, but Johnson & Johnson, Lululemon, and Borders evoked calm feelings. Even certain types of people (kids, friends) and activities (dancing, running) were considered exciting, whereas other types of people and activities (spouses, parents, reading, yoga) induced calm.

Brands that want to promise happiness should consider that these associations already exist in consumers’ minds. Although such associations will vary based on demographics (such as age) and psychographics (whether they are focused on the present or future), companies do have the power to shift them. To fully leverage investments in “happiness” campaigns, companies need to forgo generalized or generic ideas of happiness and focus on the real experiences their customers seek.

Source: Alice LaPlante, STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS; Stanford Knowledgebase © 2012 All Rights Reserved.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/knowledgebase/cgi-bin/2011/12/05/are-we-happy-y...

You're in a "funk." You've noticed that your state of being is other than "go-go-go" or "carefree" or whatever your preferred default state usually seems to be. So now what?

Three options...

Option 1: Live through it. Be the funk... Until it shifts. If it is truly just a funk, then it will eventually subside. (If it is a more chronic condition, then seek support from a confidant, coach, and/or healer.)

Option 2: Practice being the observer of your funk rather than being the funk. Understand that a funk is merely like passing weather within. Be the weather man, not the weather. Practice being in observance of your state, and then choose to act according to a plan or a vision for your actions. Act according to plan rather than according to your internal weather.

Option 3: Take direct action to alter your state. Go for a walk. Engage in physical exercise. Splash cold water in your face. Drink a cool, refreshing beverage. Drink a warm and soothing beverage. Listen to compelling music. Read inspiring ideas.

You are the author of your experience. You choose.

---

Source: Achievement Coach Greg Kilgore
360° Achievement Coaching
http://www.360achievementcoaching.com

So, what are your values as you seem them today? (Do you EVER ask yourself this question? Most people rarely, if ever, do.)

What are your high-level goals (your vision) for the rest of the week? For the next few weeks?

What are your action items today? Tomorrow?

Do your action items align with your vision?  (If not, it's time to re-commit to your values.)

http://www.360ACHIEVE.com

THIS IS YOUR MIND ON MEDITATION: LESS WANDERING, MORE DOING
By Melissa Healy/Los Angeles Times/For the Booster Shots Blog
7:41 p.m. EST, November 22, 2011

The brains of experienced meditators appear to be fitter, more disciplined and more "on task" than do the brains of those trying out meditation for the first time. And the differences between the two groups are evident not only during meditation, when brain scans detect a pattern of better control over the wandering mind among experienced meditators, but when the mind is allowed to wander freely.

Those insights emerge from a study to be published next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which looked at two groups: highly experienced meditators and meditation novices, and compared the operations of the "Default Mode Network" -- a newly identified cluster of brain regions that go to work when our brains appear to be "offline."

"I think it's safe to say this is brain-training at work," says Yale University psychiatrist Judson Brewer, who conducted the study with psychologists from Yale, the University of Oregon and Columbia University. "It makes sense," adds Brewer. "Anything you train to do, you do better."

By the definition of the latest study, mental control was defined as the ability to keep two key nodes of the default mode network from becoming active during meditation. The posterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex appear to be hubs of the brain's "neutral" setting--areas that come alive when we are not engaged in a task that requires more specialized attention and let our minds wander. (Not coincidentally, they are also areas that tend to become active when we remember events in our past and think about other peoples' motives and intentions.) In the 12 veteran meditators who participated in the current study, those two regions were quieter during meditation than they were in the brains of the 12 meditation novices with which they were compared.

The study also detected greater connectivity between some of the brain's key cognitive control areas and elements of the default mode network. During meditation and in the mental rest periods in between, a brain region known to be important in focusing and maintaining attention, the dorsolateral anterior cingulate cortex, was more likely to activate in tandem with the posterior cingulate cortex in regular meditators than in those who are new to the practice: that, says Brewer, suggests that during meditation and in everyday life, meditators may have more skill in reining in their wandering thoughts and bringing the brain back "on task"-- than those who don't routinely meditate.

Why would mental control over our daydreams make us more healthy? It turns out that having a well-functioning default mode network--one that lets us explore ourselves and our lives but doesn't intrude into our efforts to concentrate when that's what's needed--is critical to mental health.

Those of us who daydream more often are more likely to be depressed--either because we get caught in a cycle of rumination or because depressed people have poorer concentration (which comes first isn't clear). A study that tracked the daily activities and moods of iPhone users-published in Science magazine last November--found that those whose minds were wandering off task more often were more depressed. People who suffer from attention deficit disorder also have difficulty keeping mind-wandering at bay, which may be why many studies have found that meditation helps those with attention deficit disorder.

In fact, Brewer cites the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, who is quoted as saying" Practice doesn't make perfect: perfect practice makes perfect." Meditation, suggests Brewer, appears to be "perfect practice" in the skills that make undistracted work a possibility: the ability to detect the first signs of mind-wandering, to recognize and essentially forgive the impulse, and then gently to draw the mind back to the task at hand.

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

This article brought to you by...
Present² Awareness (P²A)© — http://www.PresentAwareness.org
360° Achievement Coaching — http://www.360ACHIEVE.com

"What to do..." for Monday, Oct 10th ~ http://onforb.es/ofeB9w (source: Forbes)

Excerpt:

Hope, Fear and Greed… the market is built on human psychology.

The amount of market data, economic news and research coupled with the media sensationalism could give an investor a brain melt.  Most of it is noise and very little of it is fundamentally important to investing. We have discussions every day running the Gamut of topics – some say that the world is ending and others say it's going to be just fine here in the U.S. Each day we discuss things like how to create jobs, global growth, CDS spreads, bond yields and the EU is crumbling into the ocean. So how can a retail investor ever begin to get their heads around all this information?... [Read more >>]

By Achievement Coach Greg Kilgore
360° ACHIEVEMENT COACHING and Group Coaching Forums

As a student of human performance, a productivity consultant, and a professional coach for more than twenty years, I've identified "Effects of Coached Collaboration" that help create and sustain change for individuals. It is human nature for an individual to become comfortable with discomfort and to procrastinate—even when s/he knows better. It is the habit of the mind to be preoccupied with the past and fearful of the future. Your willingness to strive for achievement beyond the foibles of the mind and to exceed your basic human nature improves greatly when a trusted partner engages with you to create and support your goals. "Coached collaboration" differs from mere collaboration in that a client's investment of trust with a coach creates a uniquely powerful and productive synergy. Several effects of coached collaboration that create and sustain change for individuals are...

The Partnership/Commitment Effect: It is a phenomenon of the human condition that commitment to intentions and goals intensifies and partnership is generated when a coaching client invests his/her trust and chooses to engage in collaboration with a performance and achievement specialist who is professional, broadly knowledgeable, trustworthy, unbiased, fun, enthusiastic, and whole-heartedly dedicated to the client's achievement.

The Awareness Effect: Peaked awareness, clarity, reflection, and heightened creativity are achieved for the coaching client through coached collaboration.

The Focus Effect: Collaborating with a trusted partner to give attention to the present moment and real-time circumstances produces focus on what is really going on and what has greatest priority.

The Discovery Effect: Coached collaboration allows for the realization of questions and the discovery of answers that cannot otherwise be realized if an individual attempts to explore alone.

The Revelation Effect: Engaging in collaboration with a coach reveals to the client that which the client did not know that s/he did not know. In other words: You can't have a breakthrough about what there is to do to succeed if you don't become aware of what you didn't know that you didn't know.

The Accountability Effect: Responsibility, confidence, keeping one's word to others, and follow-through increases and the client does not settle for that which does not work when engaged in coached collaboration.

The Momentum Effect: Coached collaboration fosters rapid turnover of methods and action-plans resulting in fast and efficient discovery of the best methods, processes, and action-plans to achieve the most desirable results.

The Breakthrough Effect: Each of us manifest beliefs and behaviors that seem second-nature, automatic, and sometimes even unconscious to us. When coached collaboration is at play, we have the unique opportunity to expose and become aware of judgements and attachments hiding-out in our "blind spots." Amazing breakthroughs happen when we become aware of and take responsibility for what's been going-on in our blind spots!

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Article: Effects of Coached Collaboration
By Achievement Coach Greg Kilgore
360° ACHIEVEMENT COACHING and Group Coaching Forums
--

When I look back, I realize that I was essentially arguing with myself.  Or a manifestation of myself anyway…  That’s what they say, right?  That each character in your dream is just “another projection of you” interacting with your main-character/dream-self, right?  So, that’s how my dream ended before I woke up with my heart pounding and adrenaline pumping:  I was arguing with a woman, who must be just another version of me in the dream, sitting behind a cluttered desk as she explains to me dumbfoundedly why her circumstances, grounded in ignorance and bureaucracy, are going to continue to block my path and prevent me from making way back to the conference room where Bill Gates is waiting for me.

She said to me, “Ooooh, Bill Gates.  Who’s that?”

Flabbergasted, I snorted, “Bill Gates, the founder and CEO of Microsoft!  The software-on-every-other-computer-in-the-world guy!  The richest man in the world!  Bill Gates!”

She didn’t seem to believe me at first, and then a wide-eyed look of realization slowly rose into her face as her cheeks became flushed and her eyes shifted from dim to bright looking back at me somewhat startled by her awakened state.

Then I woke up with a start in bed anxious and in a rare state of stark recollection about the dream my unconscious mind had just generated.

Although I am an ACHIEVEMENT COACH, I am still just a guy who lives with the day-to-day (minute-to-minute really) challenges of my human nature…  The very nature of who I am, and who you are, is to procrastinate, rationalize why “not good enough” is “good enough for me,” and to be comfortable with discomfort.  As an Achievement Coach, I “know” better and yet, being human, I still need a coach to support me in my efforts to achieve other than ordinary, or put another way, to be and to act extraordinary.  In addition to having a coach of my own, I also practice various techniques of relating extraordinarily to my mind and to my Self to heighten my self-awareness, accountability, effectiveness, and productivity.  These various techniques of relating extraordinarily to my mind and to my Self allow me to live as many of the moments of my life as I can with peace of mind and empowered to choose my state of being and my actions rather than allowing my mind to live my life for me as if I am walking through all of life semi-conscious in automatic-pilot mode.

One of the techniques I use to awaken my self-awareness, discover insights, and re-establish peace of mind is to meditate.  So, I immediately began to meditate on the clear and detailed memories I still had of the dream from which I had just awoken.  The insights I uncovered during that meditation are so profound that I am strongly inspired to share them with you here now…

It all boils down to this:  Bill Gates is waiting for you in the conference room.  Are your ready?

Put another way, the message that rang for me loud and clear over and over again during my post-dream reflective meditation is this:

What would it take for you to consider the next few moments of your life as so valuable that it is as if one of the richest and most influential people in the world was waiting for “you” in the next room?  And what would you be willing to do to be ready for that opportunity?

So, the dream started out that I am in a familiar role as a project manager and team leader inside of an unfamiliar (it is a dream after all) corporate setting…  A dreamscape of a what appears to be a mid-sized business building with a professional air yet somewhat dated décor as if the division of the company in which I am working isn’t the executive level, more likely the middle-management level where there’s a lot of maintenance of records, files, reports, accounting, and accountability.  The hallways are dark wood-paneled walls cluttered with file cabinets, stacks of paper and files, and rolled-up bundles of flipchart pages.

I’ve been rushed to my office through several crowded halls and hurried past the secretary at the junction of the last hallway on the way to my office.  As I am ushered through a backdoor into my office, I am told that “he” is here, and he is waiting for me, just standing there, on the other side of the front door to my office.  I know who “he” is, and suddenly my adrenaline spikes, my heart races, and I realize that blood has rushed from face and I am losing my composure.  My escort darts from the room, and I am left standing alone.  Rather than rush to the door, I turn to a shelf and I begin rifling through some papers as if I am looking for something that is important enough to make “him” wait standing on the other side of my office door.  As I rifle through the papers searching, searching, I can feel the tension rising, and I ask myself, “Why am I making him wait?”  Every second I know that he’s waiting, I am growing more and more tense.  So, I cease my busy fidgeting and I turn the door.  I’ve gulped down my tension and suddenly put forth a face of professional warmth and confidence albeit beleaguered.  I open the door.  The door slides open in slow-motion at first.  The door is open and Bill Gates is standing there.  Without hesitation, he blithely says, “Hello.”  And the tension I’ve gulped down into the pit of my stomach churns up my throat and erupts out of my mouth as a sputter and stammer of incomprehensible gibberish.  I abruptly step back startled and aghast at my outburst embarrassed by the baffled expression on his face.

I regain my voice and my wits just enough to apologize and say, “Excuse me.”  He immediately nods with a glance to me which communicates that he is used to people acting oddly and being nervous around him, and he forgives me nonchalantly for my spastic behavior.  My head somewhat down, I inform him that our conference room is ready, and I lead him out the back of my office down a corridor to a conference room.

When we arrive in the conference room, I offer him a chair.  He sits.  I excuse myself momentarily and step into the next room to ask my team of professionals to join us for the meeting.  As they begin to make their way into the conference room, I slowly realize that the room is very warm, the lighting is bad, and the room feels dank and uncomfortable.  In an instant, feeling the urgency to get this meeting started, yet suddenly preoccupied with the inadequacy of this conference room, I declare that I am going to go secure us a different room for our important meeting.  Before I consider the implications of abandoning my guest and my team who now sit waiting for me to lead them in a meeting, I dart out of the room compulsively to find a more ideal conference room.

In short order, almost instantaneously (again, it is dreamtime), I’ve found a brightly-lit, cool, modern conference room at the other end of the building.  So, I rush from my present location to make my way back across the building to round-up my team and escort my esteemed guest to the newly identified and greatly improved conference room.  The trip back across the building to return to my team and guest is daunting and at times harrowing as I navigate cluttered and crowded hallways, occasionally get lost, and come to realize that the building in which I dream-work is apparently not just a cluttered mess of information—but it is also actually a maze!  (Dreams!)

I am one hallway from my destination now, just down the hall from the original conference room, and I am very anxious about how long Gates and my team members have been languishing in my absence.  I am back at the intersection where a secretary sits like a gatekeeper to the hallway.  Unlike when I departed this hallway some time ago, the pathway is now blocked!  She has stacked boxes and piles of papers and folders in the intersection of the hall, and she is insistent that it is of the utmost importance that this clutter of stuff remain right where it is because she is working with the information.  I am insistent that she must move the stuff so I can pass and get back to Gates and my team.  “Ooooh, Bill Gates.  Who’s that?”  So, you know the rest.

Upon meditation about this dream I kept hearing these questions come up for me:  What would it take for you to consider the next few moments of your life as so valuable that it is as if one of the richest and most influential people in the world was waiting for “you” in the next room?  Bill Gates is waiting for you in the conference room…  Are your ready?

The states of affairs that led up to Gates’ arrival also revealed themselves to me…  I realized that the main character of my dream spent the workday as if it were any other—preoccupied by the work-a-day this’s and that’s to be completed on the day’s to-do list.  All the while, knowing that Bill Gates was coming in that day, yet allowing himself to be pre-occupied with the this’s and that’s that just popped-up throughout the day.  That’s human nature…  Just show up, if you show up at all, and then just react to this and that.  He neglected to survey the idealness, or even the appropriateness, of the conference room before Gates arrived.  He neglected to be fully prepared to greet him.  I don’t even know if he had an agenda prepared for the meeting?!

So, I meditate, and I hear:

(1)  Why do I allow mundane expectations to engage so much of my time?

(2)  Why do I allow myself to run on automatic-pilot mode being a reaction to this and that when I can empower myself to be aware and awake and a chooser-and-doer?

(3)  If one of the richest and most influential people in the world was waiting for me in the next room, what would I be willing to do to make the most of that conversation?  Will I be ready?

(4)  Ultimately, why don’t I experience many, or at least more, moments of my life with as much value, importance, and excitement as the experience of meeting Bill Gates in my dream?  Moreover, why don’t I chase down more opportunities that can be that valuable and exciting?

I actually know the answers to all of these questions…  The answer to each question is one or another attribute of human nature.  The attributes of human nature are who we show up as automatically.  Yet, these attributes do not need to be the last word on who we are, what we choose, or how we act.  Achievement coaching provides answers to these questions and strategies for making use of these answers for ambitious and excellence-driven executives and professionals who know that excellence and extraordinary achievements are accomplished through values, vision, emotional intelligence, ethics, accountability, and facilitated human performance.  At the risk of sounding to frou frou about dreams and dream analysis and the power of the sub-conscious mind, I came away from my post-dream meditation almost certain that the work I’ve been doing recently with my own coach resulted in the generation of this dream in my unconscious mind and in my mind’s trigger to awaken me with such a clear recollection of the dream…  Maybe not.  Or maybe so.

Either way, this story begs these questions:

Are you living the ever-valuable and ever-fewer moments of your life with the extraordinary possibility, enthusiasm and excitement of meeting with Bill Gates (or whomever my inspire you)?  Are you reaching for such opportunities?  What’s more, if Bill Gates is waiting for you in the next room, are you ready?

~   ~   ~
Achievement Coach Greg Kilgore
360° Achievement Coaching
Providing a 360° Perspective, Strategies, and Coaching for
Personal Empowerment, Professional Productivity,
Business Growth, and Extraordinary Achievement

When you are truly inspired by your clients and you serve your clients with authenticity, your clients will become your greatest champions.  I am blessed that as an Achievement Coach, I have been able to provide guidance, collaboration, and partnership to so many creative, ambitious, and excellence-driven professionals and entrepreneurs.  One client in particular comes to mind today...  She's a mother, a wife, and a professional with integrity.  She had discovered through self-introspection that her career no longer inspired her and that it had lost integrity for her.  She knew she needed to manifest change in her life, and so she turned to the services of an achievement coach for insights and collaboration on her journey of self-discovery and transition.  (Because I provide all of my clients confidentiality, she will remain nameless for this article.)

After earnest introspection, assessment, strategic planning, and follow-through, my client experienced nothing short of extraordinary transformation professionally and personally...  Today, just several years later, she is a successful entrepreneur with visions of owning yet another business and achieving success in yet another industry.  For years now, she has been making her own schedule everyday and is the author of her own choices at every turn.  She is a leader to her employees, her customers, and her community.  What's more, her success has been a reward to me several times over as well.

Year after year since she has grown her business and discovered greater satisfaction in her personal empowerment and professional success, she has been a champion of my coaching services.  She has referred many clients to me.  Whenever she is asked about her success, I am honored by the fact that she always mentions our work together as a turning-point and critical resource for her professional, entrepreneurial, and personal development.  When she was honored in an industry periodical for being a breakthrough leader and success story in her marketplace, again she took the time to mention me and to honor our coach-client collaboration.

I share this story not to sing my own praises or even to tout the value of achievement coaching services, but to share my appreciation for this client's courage to want more from life and work, to reach for it, and to live and work by a code of ethics in her achievement of her goals.  Foremost, I want to emphasize here that I acknowledge that it was not merely the collaborative power of coaching or the service I provided to my client that made the most difference, but it was that together we have achieved trust, respect, and authenticity with each other when we work together.  No amount of tactical insights or strategic development can have the impact for a client that can be achieved like a relationship of productivity grounded in authentic human-to-human synergy.

Want more clients?  Want more referrals from your existing clients?  Want more of your clients to be champions for you?  First, be open, honest, ethical, and real with your clients.  Next, be foremost dedicated to your client's achievement.  Next, be committed to ethics, best practices, and being excellent; and hold up excellence as the benchmark for your client's endeavors.  Lastly, and certainly not least, again be open, honest, ethical, and real with your clients.

The truth is that I could elaborate on what I mean by being "open" and "honest" and "ethical" and "real" with your clients.  But I will save each of those articles for another day.  I will simply leave you with a call to action here now:  Please take five minutes today, tomorrow, and the next, and ask yourself what being "open" and "honest" and "ethical" and "real" with your clients means to you.  Then, choose to live it, and open yourself to the extraordinary results for your personal empowerment and professional achievement.

~   ~   ~
Achievement Coach Greg Kilgore
360° Achievement Coaching
Providing a 360° Perspective, Strategies, and Coaching for
Personal Empowerment, Professional Productivity,
Business Growth, and Extraordinary Achievement

I know quite a few runners.  For a few years, I was even a coordinator and stand-in announcer at the finish line for the Austin Marathon.  Perhaps you know the typical runner's behaviors:  "Nope, I can't stay out tonight.  I have to wake up early tomorrow to get in my five miles before the sun comes up," and, "I'll just have tea with lemon, no beer tonight."  Yet, that's not even the half of it.  Many of the runners that I have gotten to know well are always conditioning themselves for the next race and marathon.  That’s where the intensity of intention and commitment really seems to be evident.

I think we've all heard how professional athletes need to condition themselves, train and practice with fortitude to succeed—and how athletes understand that they achieve more efficiently and perform better with the accountability to and leadership of a coach.  Well, I've heard that anecdote so many times that the novelty has worn-off and, I'm like, "So what?"  Yet something about what is going on with the non-professional, amateur, neighbor-next-door runner piqued my interest...  I wanted the answer to a couple of questions about the runners' lifestyle:  Why do you run?  Moreover, why do you run races and marathons?  The answer to the first question is what you expect:  Runners run to be fit, feel good, look good, relieve stress and be healthy.

As a professional dedicated to the development of personal empowerment and human performance and productivity, the answer to the second the question is particularly intriguing to me:  Why do you run races and marathons?  It seems that running simply to maintain wellness and achieve the basic goals of improved self-image and various levels of fitness is not enough to keep many runners inspired and motivated to continue running.  They want, perhaps even need, more significant milestones to achieve:  Completing a marathon.  Improving upon past performance by running faster with less fatigue and better efficiency than previous performances.  What's more, there typically seems to be a reward of improved self-confidence and pride in accomplishing these more significantly burdensome milestones.

Therefore simply put:  It's not enough to run for feeling and looking better.  To stay in the game of running for maintaining the essential benefits, the quintessential runner also needs to race and compete if even to only compete against his/her own past performance.

Of course, being an Achievement Coach, I have extrapolated the extraordinary intentions and commitments of runners to application in most, if not all, human pursuits for achievement and success.  The lesson to share here:

Enough!  Enough with "fine" and "good enough!"  Greater inspiration and, consequently, greater self-motivation is derived from stepping-up your game.  So reach higher, define grander goals, and step-up your game!  I've thrown down the gauntlet.

Now, very often, due to human nature being what it is, the novelty of solo/self-driven motivation lessens over time and leaves us again feeling uninspired, unaccountable, and disempowered.  Ready to step-up your game?  Engage a coach.  Why does coaching work?  The obvious benefit is:  A professional coach is a “performance and achievement specialist” specifically dedicated to helping you identify the ideal strategies and solutions to be personally empowered and achieve objectives.  In addition to the obvious benefit, I have also identified at least three fundamental principles that explain why coaching works.  The power of the Coach-and-Client relationship originates from three effects that are grounded in the competency of the Coach...

Firstly, the “Partnership Effect” of Competently-coached Collaboration is an association made by a Client of Coaching.  The association made by the Client is immediate and yields a state of awareness, clarity, and reflection.  In effect, a greater capacity for acknowledgement and discovery results for the Client from knowing that the Client’s ideas and observations will be considered, evaluated, and reflected back to the Client.

Secondly, the “Discovery Effect” of Competently-coached Collaboration allows for the discovery of answers and questions that cannot otherwise be ascertained when someone endeavors to arrive at solutions alone.  An especially dramatic byproduct of the Discovery Effect is the transcendence of the Client from not merely seeking knowledge which the Client already knew that he did not know, but to exploring knowledge that the Client did not know that he did not yet know.

Lastly, yet as significantly, the “Momentum of Accountability Effect” of Competently-coached Collaboration creates a state of responsibility and action—where the Client does not settle for that which does not work—yielding faster turnover of methods and action-plans and resulting in the earliest possible discovery of the best methods, processes, and action-plans to achieve the most desirable results.  Ultimately, results that may have or may not have been arrived at by a Client alone are achieved with greater momentum in partnership with a competent Coach.

Pick up the gauntlet.  Step-up your game.  Contact me, and let's create the extraordinary together.

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Achievement Coach Greg Kilgore
360° Achievement Coaching
Providing a 360° Perspective, Strategies, and Coaching for
Personal Empowerment, Professional Productivity,
Business Growth, and Extraordinary Achievement