Celebrate the good stuff

At my cycling club, we started a committee meeting recently, following Nancy Kline’s advice, with a quick round robin of the things we each appreciate about the club. There’s only seven of us so it didn’t take long and no-one had any difficulty with coming up with something original, even when someone before them inevitably talked about the topic they were going to mention. It was wonderfully positive.

The point of doing this is to set a positive mental attitude for the meeting and to remind ourselves of our successes. Tick to both of these. What it also did was to move the focus of the meeting – each time we started to beat ourselves up that we’re not doing enough or we could be doing things better, someone said “but hold on, in our round robin, we said…let’s not lose sight of that.” The meeting remained relentlessly positive.

When the going gets tough, we can all fall into the trap of only seeing the stuff we want to improve, the problems, the difficulties. Holding on to the positives keeps us upright and motivated to do better, to do more, to enjoy our success.

One of my favourite coaching tools is the Tree of Life, where you write each of the good things about your career, your performance, your achievements on separate roots. It always surprises my coachees just how many roots they have and how deep they go. You then write each of the doubts, the worries, the fears on a separate leaf – and it often surprises people how few these are and how light.

The point is that your leaves are far less powerful than your roots, that your fears are never going to blow down your tree because your roots go too far down. You can take this analogy further, adding your values to the trunk, etc. but the basic version is actually quite powerful. Try it and if you’d like to try more tools, call me.

Your leaves are far less powerful than your roots, the fears are never going to blow down your tree because your roots go too far down.