SigmaU Blog

I was on a group coaching call last night and my coach and mentor made a statement that made me stop dead in my tracks.

He said, “Same distractions, same year”! BOOM!

What a concept and so incredibly true. He was walking us through an exercise to evaluate our distractions and things we needed to eliminate to focus on our goals in the coming year.  When he said that, I literally said “WOW” out loud, put down my pen and shook my head.

It got me thinking.  We will continuously have a carbon copy of the year before unless we shake things up! I once heard someone say something to the effect that people who live the same lives over and over each year stop living well before their dead!

As I reflected on this powerful statement, I started substituting distractions for other words.

Same distractions, same year.

Same associations, same year.

Same nutrition plan, same year.

Same workouts, same year.

Same date nights, same year.

Same habits, same year.

I...

I picked up Gary John Bishop’s book “Stop Doing That Shi*” at the airport before boarding a flight. I hadn’t heard of the book, and it wasn’t on my reading list so I had zero expectations.  What a ride it was! I gobbled up the entire thing cover to cover on my journey and wanted to share some of the insights with you.  As a side, Gary is from Glasgow and since my parents are Glaswegian, I enjoyed it even more as a I read through with a thick Scottish accent! :D

I had always been taught that you become what you think however Gary took it one step further and shared that you become what you say. He said that you create your reality and experiences by the narrative and language, the self-talk behind the experience. Not only that, but we also create our experiences of the future by our self-talk and then act accordingly. Um mind BLOWN - and we’re just cracking this bad boy open!

Regardless of our life experiences, it’s the way we...

When we think of big goals, we’re often excited when we first write them down. Then reality sets in and we start looking at what could go wrong, the skills we don’t have yet or the barriers that will stand in our way.

Often, the obstacles are self-imposed, created by our minds and given strength through our language. When we ask ourselves dis-empowering questions like, “How the heck am I going to reach this goal?”, we’re not setting ourselves up for success.

When we are careful with our language and how we construct questions, miracles happen!

Instead, ask yourself…

• “What is the best thing that could happen here?”
• “What would it take to reach this goal in half the time?”
• “Who can help me achieve my results even faster?”
• “How would I be thinking differently if the stakes were higher?”

Questions like this challenge the status quo. They make us think in broader and more creative terms, allowing for...

We’re in the homestretch for 2022 and for some this is exciting as you’re right on track with your goals. For others, you may feel a sense of frustration or even dread that the year is coming to an end, and you may miss the mark.

Now is the time to buckle down and get hyper-focused on the goals that matter most to you.

We’ve just had Canadian thanksgiving; Halloween is around the corner and the holiday parties will be starting up in November. This can be a dangerous time for the proverbial wheels to come off as we indulge here, compromise there, and the next thing we know it’s the end of the year and we’ve undone all our positive habits.

I want to encourage you to flip your thinking a little on a couple of concepts that I learned while studying to become a High-Performance Coach. One is that Christmas day is just that, it’s a day.  It’s not a week, month or quarter to celebrate so keep that in check so you feel proud of how you handle...

If you’ve never worked with a coach, I promise you, the return is tenfold! Coaching brings a new sense of self awareness.  A coach is an objective partner that will teach you the necessary skills to achieve self-mastery, and provide a gentle nudge of encouragement on your journey to success.  Here are some of the ways coaching has helped me recently…

1.  Stay on track with positive habits

Sometimes, we don’t realize that we’ve slipped up or fallen back in to old patterns until someone holds up a mirror for us. This happened recently while I was working with my coach. The topic we were covering that day was presence.  The deeper we got in to the conversation, the more I realized that I had completely slipped back in to an old pattern that wasn’t serving me! I was checking email first thing in the morning in bed, during lunch and after hours. I was back to having an umbilical cord relationship with my phone and I had stopped separating...