Many people are aware that they do not like where they are at present. It is very difficult to take any action to change a situation if you are unsure where you want to be afterwards. People find it much easier to say what they don’t like than what they do like. Simply saying ‘I don’t like my job’ cannot help you get a new one. In coaching, we approach it in a way that is positive helping to define your new direction.
At some point in life, most of us need to make some big changes that can seem daunting. Perhaps it is leaving a safe job to start a business, taking a course to learn something new, pursuing a dream, writing a book, or taking up that fitness programme at last. All of these require sustained action, and can cause much frustration as time passes and you still haven’t managed to reach your goal.
This is not a question of not knowing what to do – but a problem of getting moving, gathering enough energy and determination to take the first difficult step and each step after that. To turn a dream or distant goal into reality requires sustained action and effort. However, if the benefits of the goal aren’t sufficiently clear, the effort may simply seem too much, so you don’t feel like taking the actions. This reluctance is a lack of motivation.
Research has shown that movement towards a clearly understood desired state is much more powerful as a motivating force than movement away from an undesired state. In other words, you need to want to reach the goal. Think of a ‘to do’ list, which is made up of things you have to do as well as things you want to do. The things that you want to do tend to win out against the ‘must do’ items. What coaching does is turn some of the things you ‘must do’ into things you ‘want to do’ by looking at all the benefits for you that come about as a result.
For motivation, visualisation exercises work well. Joanna would help you to visualise the results of reaching the goal – feel it, hear it, smell it, imagine all the senses in that ‘winning’ situation. This helps you mentally shift into the position of having achieved the goal already, and enjoy the feelings and experience of having achieved it. What this does is increase its desirability even further – enough for you to take and sustain real action and behaviour change, even through times of challenge.