“Executive coaching is all about optimising the performance of talented individuals and teams. It allows people, in thinking partnerships, to identify common purpose and the best route to success. Today, it is leadership skills that businesses most need in order to engage people in the right business drivers and enable them to deliver responsible and sustainable performance. I am proud and grateful that we have partnered with so many businesses to help them develop their leaders – both as individuals and as teams” - Tom Preston, Founder & CEO, The Preston Associates
“Teamwork is the ability to work together towards a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments towards organisational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” - Andrew Carnegie, Scottish-American Industrialist
“The growth of people is the highest calling of leadership” - Harvey S. Firestone
“Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can change” - Napoleon Hill
“Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.” - Sir Winston Churchill
Useful tools to complement your new thinking partner.
This tool, known as the Nirvana Letter, is designed to provide you with clarity to two key questions that we all ask ourselves:
We all seem to have a vague notion of what we want in life yet many of us find it hard to break it down into a succinct description. This tool is designed to help with that problem.
The idea is to write a letter to someone you totally trust from the vantage point of a number of years in the future: 10, 15 or 20 years – or even longer.
Imagine that you are looking back to the present and that in the interim you have lived a perfect life. You are to recount all that you achieved, the sort of life that you have led and to describe the professional and personal goals you have attained. Keep this within the bounds of reality. For example, if you have made £10 million 15 years from now, you have done so through work and not by winning the lottery!
Start by describing where you are while writing the letter and the date in the future on which you are writing it. Then, as if you were counting backwards to the present, describe the events that led you to where you are. As you look back over your life to the present date, outline the major milestones you see.
This is a very powerful exercise. Once you have finished the letter you will realise that it has taken the form of a road map from the present to the future – but, of course, in reverse.
We are naturally accustomed to contemplating the future from the present. But this makes our dreams and desires appear distant, sometimes a little vague and unrealistic, and by consequence unattainable.
However, when you ask someone to imagine that their dreams have already become a reality by doing the dreaming in reverse, by imagining that future has already arrived, the wish list begins to have substance. This encourages us to regard them as achievable, engendering the belief of I can = I will.
Since the Nirvana Letter requires the steps along the way to be identified, it becomes a genuine road map to the ideal future. It will help to clearly define what is important to you and what core values you hold. It helps delineate the differences between what we have and what we seek. It thus helps us define what we want and what we need to do in order to get it.
What revelations will be in yours? Let your imagination open you up to the possibilities of all your potential, of all you are capable of being.