Gill South sits down with leadership coach Sally Anderson to have herself pushed in the right direction.
Looking for a bit of direction in my life, I've called speaker and leadership coach Sally Anderson on the suggestion of Galia BarHava-Monteith, co-founder of the professional women's networking organisation, Professionelle.co.nz, and a woman who is far from gullible.
There is no regulation of these advisers so you get all kinds.
Sally, self-described as the "Gordon Ramsay of Personal Development," works with Australasian CEOs and executive teams and is launching in the US this year. Many coaches are quite analytical and tend to apply a project management approach, but there's more to coaching than that, she says.
Sally is more into the intuitive, sensory side of coaching. She specialises in "transforming the default (disempowered) identity" which many people slip into. In a nutshell, she helps people who have lost their mojo reclaim it.
As one who is always trying to find her mojo under a pile of washing, I ask her to come to my house for a free one-hour consultation. It will be like doing a personal audit she tells me, "resetting the foundations of where you operate".
We agree, given the relatively short period of time, that we will examine what motivates me and what my values are. Making a difference is one of my first suggestions. Anderson is looking for emotions that motivate me so she equates that to love as being my emotional motivator here. A certain level of achievement, I add as my second. Anderson calls this freedom. The freedom of being a freelance journalist, the freedom of being there for my family. The final one is a bit of a struggle to define - we talk about my desire to be a role model for my kids, showing them that I'm doing what I really want to do. Anderson tries to get me to guess what this emotion might be. She even tells me it begins with "p" but I am a slow pupil - I sit there going "p, p, p, p, p" looking up at the ceiling for inspiration. Passion, says Sally helpfully in the end.
The next thing we work on is incidents from childhood which may affect the way I approach decisions in my life. I think of three which made me feel frustrated, angry and confused. "You've got to understand why you are doing something as the adult. If you are driven by something that is unhealed, you will never find satisfaction," Sally says. She says we adopt disempowered beliefs and values as children that are held in our subconscious mind and we do not realise as adults that they are running the show.
Sally tells me to identify 50 things that I tolerate in my life and could do something about. I can't help thinking about the new battery run pencil sharpener I've just bought from Smiggle, which everyone in the family loves and means we have sharpened pencils for Africa, but I doubt this is what Sally is talking about. She tells me if I benchmark every decision I make by what I am motivated by, it sorts everything out. I'll add that to my to-do list.
