How to Achieve Your Goals Through Coaching

by Ken Warman, The Leaders Evolution
We all have personal goals. For some, the goal is to become a better leader or build a better team. Others seek a more fulfilling role or desire to build stronger relationships or be a better communicator. What are your goals for the next year?  What steps are you taking to achieve them? ​ ​ Growth can be achieved through planning, goal setting and coaching. An experienced coach will assist you in creating clarity and momentum around setting goals, changing behaviors and removing barriers.

Articulating Your Goals
The first step in accomplishing your goals is to articulate them properly. The coaching process creates a dialogue and process that helps you articulate them concisely, fully and clearly. For example, rather than creating a goal of finding a more fulfilling role, a leadership coach will lead a person to consider more deeply the activities that cause fulfillment and the specific roles where they might find the fulfillment. The goals become more specific and the path to accomplish them becomes clear and achievable. The process of developing the goal creates engagement and ownership of the activities needed to achieve it, and it builds momentum and energy around action.

Behavioral Change
Most of the time, achieving a goal requires that we change our behavior. Achieving change, especially behavioral change, is difficult. Our brains are wired to follow the same patterns over and over without something to break the pre-established pattern. Our brains also tend to reject patterns or thoughts that contradict our mental model that has been developed over time. Due to this hardwiring, the ability to embrace and enact change is often the greatest barrier to accomplishing a goal. A coach can guide your journey to overcome this barrier! Coaching focuses a different lens on change and through deep discovery, can help you approach change from a new angle and successfully accomplish it. Coaching also creates accountability, which is critical to the behavior change that leads to self-awareness, self-discipline and transformation.

Fulfillment
Many people find that setting and achieving an ambitious goal brings a rush of positive energy and satisfaction. If the goal is aligned to core values and achieving your purpose, it produces fulfillment. The journey towards fulfillment is challenging and filled with learning curves, setbacks, mental blocks and traps. The journey is also filled with breakthroughs, energy and discovery. A coach creates the environment for growth and builds the discovery path for you to accomplish what you seek. In the end, fulfillment is the ultimate reward for all your hard work.

Let's Recap
● Goal setting, planning, and goal achievement are foundational for finding happiness and success in our lives and careers.
● Coaching is an active process that guides you to shape goals, create behavioral change and take direct action to achieve your goals.
● Coaching helps you clarify your goals and connect them to values, purpose and ultimately to fulfillment.
● Changing behaviors is difficult.

​A coach will guide you through and propel you to overcome challenges that have stopped you in the past, creating needed accountability around actions. We all yearn to accomplish something new, bigger and/or greater. Setting purpose-driven goals and achieving them, especially those that require us to change, is very difficult. It is particularly hard to accomplish completely on our own. A coach will guide you to success in the process. What is your plan for next year? What goals do you hope to achieve, and how will you accomplish them? Contact us to start the journey today!