What do you want? What do you really, really want?
Don’t worry, we’re not auditioning for the Spice Girls. This is a core question in coaching with compassion.
Coaching with compassion invites clients to explore what they really, really want. We invite them to share their dreams and aspirations.
As adults, we often forget to pay attention to our dreams and aspirations, focusing on problems or what we want to change, immediately in front of us.
Professor Richard Boyatzis is at the forefront of the Coaching with Compassion movement.
Coaching with compassion lights up the area of the brain associated with creativity and growth and helps us to envisage and importantly, sustain, lasting positive change.
By coaching with compassion, we are flipping the narrative from what is wrong to what could be, inviting people to share their dreams and aspirations.
Reflecting on our dreams and aspirations, creates the space for positive thinking.
Thinking about your current situation. Does this take you closer or further away from those dreams and aspirations?
What opportunities are available to move you a step closer to that dream or aspiration? Recognising there may need to be many small steps taken to get there.
We often hear of motivation. If that motivation is external (extrinsic), such as status or pleasing others, it can work in the short term.
Long-term motivation to change is more intrinsic such as enjoyment, personal identity or alignment with aspirations or dreams.
As we explored in the compassionate leadership post, we are naturally wired to concentrate on our flaws or short comings – often leading us to lack self-compassion.
Exploring our strengths can turn this on its head. We can reflect on how those strengths are going to take us a step closer to where we want to be.
If your coach works with you to build a skillset and vision, that will be present long after you have stopped working with them, that is a true gift of compassion.
We have witnessed some incredible breakthroughs with clients using the Coaching with Compassion approach.
So to ask again. What do you want? What do you really, really want? And how are you going to use your strengths to take you a step closer to what you want?
Apologies, if you now have Wanna Be playing in your mental jukebox.