Self-Coaching Skills For Midlife Career Change.

Inquisitive workmates, friends or close relations have most
likely asked anyone involved with Personal Development:
"What are you doing all this for?"

Have their questions ever made you stop and think for a
minute or two? And did you flunk the reply because you were
lost for words, felt embarrassed or just didn't want to
talk about it?

I've had similar experiences. Some of the most cutting
questions even had me regretting all the time and money I
had spent on personal development. Especially when I was
sometimes not so gently reminded that "real life" was out
there waiting to be enjoyed. And so I sometimes found it a
struggle to resist the temptation to start looking for what
might be "wrong" with me.

I must admit that I seriously considered getting rid of
most of my personal development courses and books and go
join "real life"...

As luck would have it, I was able to make positive use of a
fresh perspective to reframe the vast majority of these
concerns. And that particular perspective was grounded in
my belief that Personal Development is no more or less than
a useful tool to discover and experience more of my own
latent potential. I found myself no longer unduly lingering
on perceived character defects or lack of "God-given"
talent!

This new attitude really became embedded after I made a
decision to study at the International Coach Academy in
late 2004. At the time I had a demanding IT career in a
Global financial services Corporation and was not
anticipating a full-time coaching role. Some part-time
mentoring of junior staff was a possibility.

My self-proclaimed objective throughout the 1.5 years it
took me to complete the Certified Professional Coaching
program, was to find out how to use my personal development
experience in a self-coaching context. During the program I
made the following two life empowering discoveries:

Number 1: A growing awareness that any situation I am
involved with can be both frightening and uplifting.

Number two: I am free to choose my level of responsibility
for some or all of my actions.

'Constant change' is now almost a cliche in many western
multinational corporations. So, while I was in the middle
of the coaching course, it came as no great surprise to
feel the first waves of a global outsourcing project begin
to lap around the base of my career role!

With the knowledge that outsourcing was about to make an
appearance in my world, I decided to concentrate on
applying my two discoveries to help coach myself smoothly
out of a 20 year employee mind-set and into the new and
uncharted waters of Internet business ownership - and all
this in under two years! This PD-coaching stuff rocks!

Concurrently with the outsourcing project, I also made it a
daily habit of asking myself this question before the start
of almost every major task: "What is the point of doing
this?" This felt weird but I soon got used to it. What
remained tricky was to remember to pose the same question
when the task was completed!

If you attempt this you might be amazed to discover how
little you were aware of the "why" behind doing most of the
tasks given to you. And once you find yourself querying the
real reasons for engaging in probably 80% of the items
demanding your attention - the desire to change your game
has probably arrived!

In time, the replies I received from regular use of this
questioning technique led me to see that it was possible to
actively choose to take more or less responsibility for a
lot of this stuff. That is a tremendously liberating
feeling.

My encouraging results with this self-awareness technique
made me keen to delve deeper into the exploration of
additional as yet neglected capabilities - especially as I
had passed the halfway point of my 4th decade. I of course
knew that I could make some additional progress on this
journey within the known boundaries of my current employee
status, but I was more interested in following whatever
path the new role of "Business Owner" would take me.

All this pondering concluded with the emergence of a simple
but subtly effective self-awareness tool I refer to as "the
Bio Map".

The tool asks you to carry out 8 specific tasks that you
must give only a one-word "answer" to. Grab a pencil and
notepad if you want to have a go.

- Write down your given name.
- Write down your place of birth.
- Write down where you are residing now.
- Write down your existing job role.
- State one word that describes a successfully achieved
major goal in your life.
- Write down a major goal you want to achieve.
- Write down the date.

Well done! You just produced your success Bio Map. Now here
is the decider. Use the list of words above and construct a
short spoken or written autobiography of what these words
are implying about your current reality. And if you're
feeling really adventurous, go say them to the bathroom
mirror!

This marks the start of the goal creation process.