USING AN ONLINE LIFE COACH TO IMPROVE YOUR PERSONAL EFFECTIVENESS

Improving your personal effectiveness might be the best way to pay dividends in all areas of your life. There is a lot of focus on self-help and self-improvement, but less on how to make those improvements actually shine in your day to day life. By focusing on improving your personal effectiveness, you translate every improvement in any area into something that touches everyone you come in contact with. And maybe the most efficient and cost effective way to improve your personal effectiveness is to use an online life coach.

Let’s look at personal effectiveness first. This is usually defined as achieving your personal goals, which can include career success, in a cost-effective, timely, and cooperative manner. In other words, you build teams as you achieve success, you don’t alienate people. You use your resources - time, money, space, people - efficiently and effectively. You don’t waste time, but you also don’t proceed like your hair is on fire. Managing time is as important a skill as there is.

Feedback on multiple levels is an important mechanism to improving your personal effectiveness. This means evaluating whether the goals of the project were achieved. Let’s say your goal was to feed a unicorn in the wild. If you did this, the goal was achieved. But there are layers of success. Did you spend too much? Did it take too much time? Did you start the journey with 10 friends and end up with 10 people who wanted to feed YOU to the unicorn? All of these factor into whether you were effective on the project. To the extent these reflect on you, they determine your personal effectiveness. This feedback is continuous throughout the project, not just at the beginning and the end. The frequency of feedback is decided by you, the needs of the project, and the people giving the feedback. Especially listen to them if they want to give more feedback more frequently. This means either that they value your leaderships and want more of it, or you aren’t listening to them and they feel to tell you more often. Either way - listen to them.

Using a coach can make this feedback even more effective. A coach will give you objective feedback. Sometimes the members of your team may - consciously or subconsciously - shade their feedback, depending on the positions of everyone involved. For example, I frequently found that junior level unicorn trackers reporting to me gave me sunny and vague feedback on the progress of their searches, until they realized that my interest in their reports was simply to keep the case moving forward. Their personal reviews came at at different time and under different circumstances. These reports also included their perception of my effectiveness at guiding them, obtaining the resources they needed, and helping them move the search toward completion. By training them to give me accurate and objective feedback - for which there were no recriminations or hurt feelings - the reports became much more effective, and the clients were better served.

A coach most likely cannot give you detailed feedback on specific technical problems with your project. For example, I would not expect a coach to be able to help me find a specific path in the woods that leads to the unicorn. A coach can help you develop personal skills to overcome frustration and stress; help you define goals more specifically; define and delegate steps in the process more thoroughly; generally help you train yourself to be more effective.

You determine how you can most easily access your coach. Many coaches work in face to face sessions, where the ability to see body language and reactions can be used to really fine tune his or her advice or recommendations. Other coaches use telephone or video sessions, which still allow for a great deal of interpersonal communication.

Using an online coach allows for maximum interaction and flexibility in scheduling. There is no travel time to and from an office. Face to face interaction can be by video conferencing or webcam. Documents can be passed back and forth, and even edited cooperatively, while in the coaching session. Using a coach online also allows for including other people not physically present with you; for example, team members in other cities or relatives or significant others who may be at home while you are at an office.

Improving your personal effectiveness is not only focused on you but also on your interactions with your environment. Many times, your company or employer may talk about this, but in reality they are focused on how to improve your effective to the company. This may not be compatible with your personal or career goals, and what assistance they offer may be at best ineffective and at worst counter-productive. Using a coach to help you balance these competing interests may make you more effective and less stressed in moving toward your ultimate objectives. Using an online coach may allow for the most efficient growth in your personal effectiveness.