SigmaU Blog

As I was preparing for a group coaching session on the topic of Courage, I had a massive aha moment! This often happens when I’m preparing for workshops and sessions. The very thing I’m preparing for is often the message I need to hear.

During our session on courage, we’ll be talking about why we don't pursue our dreams or chase our goals to our maximum ability. Sometimes we hold back or even self sabotage. Why is that?

In High Performance Coaching™, we know that there are three reasons that hold us back from chasing after our goals and our dreams and having that courage to persist or pursue through something you’re currently facing.

Loss Pain

Loss pain is that sense of fear that stops us because we tell ourselves that by changing, we're going to lose something. We get in our heads and think we’ll lose something important to us. As I journaled about my specific dream, something funny happened. When I wrote down my...

Confession

I have a confession! I’m an internal optimist, which means that I tend to see the good and block out the bad.  It has served me well through most of my life until COVID.

See, if I’m honest, I never really spent any time thinking about what could possibly go wrong. I was always reinforcing my goals and dreams and had a deep sense of gratitude for all of the good in my life. While this is incredibly important, the biggest lesson that I’ve learned during COVID has been the importance of planning for the worst but remaining in hopeful anticipation of the best!

Knock Out!

During one of our team huddles, the speaker (I cannot remember which one) said these powerful words and it knocked me on the chin!

“It's not the thing that broke you that broke you. It's that you never even thought about the fact that you could be broken.”

Hot damn! It’s true! I never considered failing. Failing was never an option. Going backwards was a foreign idea...

What’s “the Suck?”

The suck is losing the big contract that you had your heart set on. The suck is being in quarantine with a limited lifestyle for over a year and counting. The suck is the lost friendship, broken marriage and devastating loss of trust. The suck is working on a project for four months, putting your heart and soul into it and seeing it fall completely flat before your very eyes! The suck comes in various forms and knocks us off kilter in different ways. We all experience it from time to time. Often it hits us over and over again and in business it can leave us feeling lonely and frustrated.

Why it hurts so much!

When we feel like failures and setbacks are coming at us from all sides, it can feel like our world is closing in on us. It hurts when we have finances on the line. It hurts when we show up, give our best and we get rejected. We question our competence and our resilience. I recently went through a massive failure that devastated me and so I...

Yesterday I had a great one-on-one with one of my team members and she said:

“I love that we measure our week based on metrics and not a gut feel! It makes me feel empowered because in the past I may have scored myself based on my emotions that day, but this way I either hit the mark or I don’t and the process is objective”.

This got me thinking about the power of clarity and expectations with teams and how they really are transformative!  Here’s why:

Psychological safety

There’s chaos when people don’t have clear instructions. They often work on what they believe is important, only to find out it’s not at all what their manager had in mind. When you provide metrics-based goals and objectives for team members you create clarity which puts people at ease. This provides a psychological safety net because it’s black and white. They either are achieving or they’re not! The emotion is removed and they know what needs to be...