A while ago, when I have started considering coaching seriously as a way of personal development my coach asked me a simple question: what is your goal? What do you want to take out of this coaching session?

This question as simple as it is, stunned me. The lady was looking at me with an encouraging warm smile, waiting for me to speak. I couldn’t articulate anything…. I answered back: what do you mean? Goal in my personal or professional life?

In the past when somebody asked me this question, I used to answer back in a playful way “my goal in life is to do nothing”. With this answer I usually got away and people leave me alone. As a natural introvert I do not put myself out easily. But this time it was different. I felt like I wanted to get something out of this interaction, though not sure what.

I ended up in this coaching session out of curiosity, just wanted to see what coaching is. Few years back, while working in a multinational company I have attended a two days coaching course designed for managers to be able to support and develop their teams. Corporate stuff…At the end of the training I ended up being more confused than at the beginning….Although the concepts were very well presented by the trainer and I fully understood them, what confused me was how my fellow students/colleagues applied them during the role plays and practice sessions. While being coached I was bombarded with lots of advices and recommendations, although the course concepts stated different approach. Something was wrong there… and as I could not point out what, I left it aside. But it remained somewhere in the back of my mind and strangely, it surfaced in a moment when I was looking for different options in my life.

Coming back to my coaching discovery session and my goal for that first session, I embarrassingly admitted that I do not know. I was in a phase of my life completely demotivated in my job. My personal life was fine, I was having time for my favourite activities, spending quality time with my family and friends. But when about my work, I could hardly find my way. I was working as a marketer in the MedTech division of a multinational company. A job I absolutely loved and performed to the best of my capabilities for more than 6 years. However, after a merger with the change of management and the business approach, I lost all the meaning and motivation. What was truly putting me down was the attitude “we have never done this before, why should we do this now?” For me as a marketer, I have always valued the past, living in the present, but trying to invent and anticipate the future. I felt like Robin Sharma said, “the moment you get in love with your winning formula you are on a path of irrelevance”. And I did not want to take that path….

The coach calmly and kindly explained to me the importance of a powerful goal in simple words: it is like knowing your destination before starting the journey. This reminded me of a quote from Oscar Wilde “there are 2 tragedies in this world one is not getting what we want, the other one is getting it”. The key here is to set the right destination. And this can only come from daring to be true with yourself: self-awareness, knowing ourselves, understanding ourselves, being supportive to our dreams and ambitions. But this is not enough. We also need to stay focused and ignore all distractions and detractors we come across.

Somebody said once that the best goal settlers are the taxi drivers. When we get in a taxi the driver always asks us “where do you want to go?”. No answer, no ride. Even if we do not know the exact address or the language, we always find a way to make ourselves understood (landmarks, signs, simple words associations, body language) and reach the destination. And all because we know where we want to go! And we are determined to get there for a reason or another.

What if we do the same with our life: set a destination for our life and then choose a route to reach there. When the traffic jams happen or when we reach a dead-end just reconsider the options. Use our inner GPS to” recalculate” the route or ask for help and directions and keep going until we reach the destination. Having the clarity on the destination will make easy for us to recognize when we are there and celebrate the arrival. Something or somebody is waiting for us and we are happy to reach there. While we travel the path of our destination, we start recognizing familiar places. It makes us feel better and better, more relaxed and with a positive feeling of anticipation of the reward. Even if the road is difficult, full of detours and delays. We know our destination, stay focused and we reach there.

Of course, it will not be easy and it might get messy but if you think at the reward…. Just dare to be true to yourself and consider your desires and aspirations in the broader context to your life. Otherwise you may end up choosing and reaching the wrong destination and the result will be far from the desired one. Dare to “be yourself, everybody else is taken” (O.Wilde)

In a mini-research I conducted about coaching, when I asked people how they set their goals, like me with my coach, almost all of them paused. Like me, they clearly delimitated work-related goals from the life goals. When we continued and discussed about the challenges they are currently facing, one major theme that emerged was work life balance, many of them acknowledging that most of the time the personal life/family is the “loser”. This translated into emotional answers. They brought in mixed feelings like mental pressure and stress, frustration, being in denial, insecure, hoping they make the right decision, acceptance on learning how to live with the challenges and move away from them: move on or out. Those who have chosen the family over career were also experiencing mix feelings: as they felt trapped, not being able to break the glass ceiling and continue to grow and advance in their careers, struggling with time management and multitasking.

I wonder, should it always be like this? Should we always have to choose between personal life and career? In the corporate world managers are encouraged to apply the “helicopter view “and consider the bigger picture of the business/industry/economy they are in, put their teams in the context of the full organization (local or global), etc. What is stopping us to use the same approach when it comes to our lives and make plans to incorporate all aspects in it? To take that step back and consider our lives wholistic. I heard once in a recorded seminar one of the speakers (apologizes, I do not remember the name) encouraging the participants to consider their life as their company and ask themselves: are you the best manager of your life you could be? “If you had a life manager telling you to do what you are doing yourself with your life would you keep him/her in the job?”

I would love to hear your thoughts… feedback/comments.
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