This time of year is perfect for considering what our plans for next year might be. The first thing I like to do is have a review, or “Celebrate and Fix” for the current year. This involves celebrating and recognising yourself for all your achievements this year. It can be very useful to check against your year plan if you have one.

The fix part of this is not designed to be a negative look at your year, for me there is no value in this. Fix is to do with anything that you have achieved or things you have done which you can improve on for the future. This can be a very valuable session to have in Coaching as it can really help clear the way for focus on the coming year and your goals and desires.

How to deal with the items on your list that haven’t been done? Well, start by considering if they are still things you wish to achieve and are still excited about. Then if you are, they can go on next year’s plan if appropriate. If there are things on there you feel you should have done, then make a new commitment to yourself to get them done. To spend time concentrating on why you haven’t done it is not usually productive and ends up in self-criticism and lower self-esteem and confidence.

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Technorati Tags: Celebrate, Coaching, Fix, Goals, Plan, Review

Over the weekend, my daughter said to us that if she were to die, nobody would worry. Now she’s only just 3 years old, so it came as quite a surprise to us that she said this. My instant reaction was to say something along the lines of… if she did die, then we would definitely miss her. However the Coach in me resisted this jump in and fix the situation quick attitude and I simply asked her to explain why she had said what she said. Her reply was a simple, “When I die, I will have wings.” Quite a profound thing to say for a 3 year old. The next question, “Why will you have wings?” received the response, “Because I will be a bird!”.

Now, it’s very easy sometimes to interpret a situation like this by putting our own emotions and feelings into the mix and trying to fix. My overwhelming reaction at first was that here is a child who is struggling with the concept of death, and thinking that if she died nobody would care or worry about it. It would have been very simple to have tried to comfort her, when in fact there was no need. The situation was that here is a child, who is considering death for perhaps the first time and then imagining what it might mean and what might happen. There was no negative emotion in her at all, she simply added up all the experience she had in her 3 year old life and packaged it up to make sense of this thing called death!

Sometimes it’s all too easy to rush in with people and try to fix their emotional state, or attempt to prevent a perceived discomfort. The other person’s reality of their situation can be far removed from your own perception or interpretation - sometimes it’s a good idea to check before you leap in! I’m so glad to have experienced this with my daughter and her ideas of becoming a bird when you die is such a beautiful one, I may never have had the opportunity to hear about it.

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Technorati Tags: Coaching, feelings, Fix, imagination, parenting