One of the most important requirements for personal transformation is personal awareness. To effect a compelling change, you must know where you are presently, and where you want to be as a result of the desired change. You must know what you want; what you do not want (or won’t tolerate), as well as what you have inside of you as personal potentials.
It is those potentials that are appropriately unlocked, facilitated and unleashed to compel the desired change or ensure goal achievement. What all of these prove is that your personal awareness is the platform for a successful coaching engagement. Your personal awareness is the gateway to effective coaching.
For avoidance of doubt, personal awareness refers to, and describes your knowledge of self. This self-knowledge must of course be in relation to your personal life purpose, specific tasks to undertake, realistic goals to achieve and special plans made to achieve goals. It will also be in relation to your potentials or expandable personal abilities (capacity), energy (passion) and creativity (unique intelligence). Finally, it is in relation to your interactions with other people, as well as your operating environment.
In other words, personal awareness relates to your interaction with a specific, spatial and global environment, as you adapt to where you are. Your personal awareness will therefore signpost what you know. It will also highlight what you can exert personal control over or change in your sphere of influence. It will in addition showcase your knowledge of the set of external factors in your operating environment. These are factors, which you can neither control nor change and therefore have to adapt to, in order to move ahead and achieve your goals.
In the course of a coaching process or engagement, the test of your personal awareness will answers the following questions: Who am I? Why am I here? How did I get here? Where do I go from here? How do I get there? What do I really want here, now and/or the future? What abilities do I have presently to leverage upon to achieve my goal(s)? What other abilities would be required? Where can I get what I require to achieve my goal(s)? What will hasten my resourcefulness? Who do I need to achieve this goal? Where and how can I connect with such a person? Etc.
As has been mentioned above, your personal awareness is the major platform upon which a successful coaching engagement can be established. The importance of your personal awareness is that it indicates your knowledge of self and others. It proves that you are convinced that you are in the right place, with the right people, doing the right thing because you have the right goals.
You will also be convinced that you can develop an alternative but realistic plan of action if you realise that you are not really where you want to be. What all of these mean is that the lack of self-awareness is a drawback to personal transformation, as well as a hindrance to effective planning. The lack of personal awareness denies a person the benefit of proper self-evaluation, self-definition and self-confidence, all of which are essential for strategic personal and/or corporate goal setting.
Personal value systems are another very important platform for a practical and successful coaching engagement because they show your personal principles and highlight the issues that matter most to you. Value refers to the real and specific benefits that can be attached to the desired coaching outcomes. The important questions are whether the values are tangible like money and physical assets or whether they are intangible desirables such as joy, happiness, peace and fulfilment?
Personal values also relate to your personal perception of what, where and who is of high importance and great worth to you. Your values thus reveal what would often demand your personal attention and affection. Of course, related to these are the effects of the comparisons to you when the costs and benefits are measured.
You can know a person’s worth by his value systems. You can determine these by examining the following: What would he spend money and time on? Where would he spend his most precious moments? With whom does he associate? What does he love to do? A person’s sets of value systems therefore go a long way to suggest the person’s personal commitment, which is mainly due to the desire for perceived benefits.
The general assumption is that a person would not normally be committed to what is not beneficial to him or her. As a result, the person’s personal commitment, which is an evidence of his value systems, is demonstrated by his willingness to gladly invest the 3T’s of value, in order to gain even more value there from. The 3T’s of value are: Time; Treasure; Talents.
Obviously, the most realistic investments are those that are made in personal and people development. An experienced coach will utilise the information and knowledge of the value systems of a client to challenge him to achieve a set goals and attain the desired outcomes. You can read more about the transformational power of coaching at www.ceedcoaching.com.
Emmanuel Imevbore
