Coaching To Help Mental Wellbeing #4
Planning and Prioritising
(or ‘Our Time is Our Life’)
This is the fourth (and last) in a series of blogs about positive mental health.
The first blog - Knowing Who You Truly Are - outlined how coaching can help your mental wellbeing, with a positive space to explore who you truly are.
The second blog - Avoiding The Perfectionism Trap - showed it’s not linked to high performance, gave possible causes; and shared ways to address your perfectionism - including how to bypass it completely!
The third blog - Address Your Procrastination - defines what it is, why we do it, and it’s negative impacts; outlines surprising and helpful theories; destroys the ‘procrastinator’ label; gives a story of overcoming procrastination, and shows how you can address your procrastination.
Today’s blog starts with the importance of setting your true goal first, defines the planning and prioritising needed to reach it, and what the GB Olympic rowing teams’ success tells us. How judging timing can be important or might be a trap, and how ‘Our Time is Our Life’ as it’s so precious. How you’re free to use your time on what matters most to you, that “I didn’t have time” may be avoidance, and how coaching can help with all of this.
Set your true goal first
Before you think about planning and prioritising, you need to need to be sure about what you’re aiming for! How do you know what you really, really want? Your deepest heart intentions that lie within you?
It can be easy to want to copy others’ success. Or to follow their advice for our own lives. But we have to be ourselves! When we’re truly ourselves, doing what we’re called to do, we feel truly alive, and it brings us joy! Living our life as if it’s someone else’s, may look okay on the surface but leaves us feeling unfulfilled.
Life moves on. What’s right for you at one time in your life, may not be right for you now. So define new goals for yourself and let go of the ones that aren’t relevant anymore. This is the first, most important step. Because there’s no-one better than you to decide what will make you deeply fulfilled!
Then start to plan and prioritise
Being clear about your important goal can take some work. But once you’re clear, then plan to consider the important activities and conditions needed to get there.
With our planning, psychology distinguishes between two parts to it – our clear intention (or the goal we want to reach) and our commitment (our determination and adaptability to reaching it.) Obviously both are important to reach our goal. We generally have a positive intention to do something, but often we can fail to act on it. We may need help to increase our commitment to ensure that our intention will reliably lead to the desired behaviours, in order to reach our goal. ‘Implementation intentions’ are the agreed behaviours that do just that – they strengthen our commitment to act.
For example, an overall goal intention might be to run a marathon. But the implementation intentions will be the regular behaviours that help such as a changed diet, a running schedule, and a strategy of pre-planned responses to new demands or worst case scenarios.
Once this planning has taken place, you can then prioritise; deciding what aspects are most important or urgent, and creating an order of how to deal with them.
Without consciously taking these three clear steps, reaching your end result will be uncertain.
“Will it make the boat go faster?”
There’s a famous example of how single-minded planning and prioritising changed the performance of the GB rowing team. In the years prior to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the performance of the team wasn’t great, with no possibility of them getting a medal.
Then leading up to the Olympics they developed a new strategy that changed everything, focusing on what was important. They came up with a single question to ask themselves, as individuals and as a team – “will it make the boat go faster?” If the answer was “no”, then they didn’t do it. When they were asked to go to unnecessary functions or press events, they asked each other, “if we go, will it make the boat go faster?’ The answer was “no”, so they didn’t go. Instead they chose to train and get an early night.
This was an example of a pre-planned response (or ‘implementation intention’) which was simple and clear. It built their unity as a team, as well as their training and fitness. The team went on to win Olympik gold at Sidney.
This type of thinking may seem a little fixed and single-minded. But ask yourself, ‘Do I really want to achieve my goal?’ If you do, and you’ve struggled before with your commitment to it, it may be time to put something more focused like this in place.
The perfect timing to make a change
As a life coach, I’m not the expert on someone’s life – they are! There can be lots of reasons why it’s good for them to press on with change right away, to develop momentum and commitment to an idea and carry it through. And certainly that’s a common focus.
But on the other hand, with their knowledge and experience, there are times when someone may judge that it’s better to delay a change for good reasons. Other things may need to come into play first, in their personal life or in their organisation to make the change they want effective. For example, one of my coaching clients waited six months to move on to a new role until other crucial posts had been filled in their team. They felt that this was about their integrity, and helped the success of the team but also maintained everything that they’d built up in the previous five years. They were able to fill the roles and move on successfully, but had a plan B in mind, if they couldn’t fill complete the team in the six months they’d set for themselves.
Success in life is often about balancing our needs with other peoples’. It’s not simply getting what we want, when we want it. Sometimes it’s bringing about a good transition, through cooperation, which makes change effective and positive for everyone.
In my coaching, I work with people of all faiths and none. With everyone, there can be an intuitive sense of the right time to make a change, or a sense of calling to move on. Some people of faith call this ‘God timing.’ But sometimes there’s a trap in us using this ‘waiting for the perfect time,’ as an excuse, to avoid moving on and making the change. This can lead to us missing an opportunity. Through exploring things in coaching from a place of honesty and openness, it can soon become clear to someone if they’re ‘in avoidance’ and putting off a change. Coaching techniques such as visualization help them to imagine a new scenario and the best way to get there.
Our Time is Our Life – it’s that precious
Our planning and prioritising is closely linked to our time management. But our attitude to time management can be a trap if we look at it solely in order to do more and be more productive. And there are numerous books or courses on time management, many of which focus on helping us to work faster, and harder, to be more productive. The business world often repeats the famous quote that, "Time is money." But quoted out of context, this is misleading. It was written in an essay by Benjamin Franklin in 1748 as advice for tradesmen, some of whom had a reputation of slipping away to give themselves the afternoon off! Given that they were getting paid for a full day, their time away literally cost the company money in lost productivity.
But the general idea that our ‘time is money’ is not accurate, nor is it helpful to us. Many recent studies have shown that people who have this mindset, are more rushed and stressed, and less happy and less likely to help others.
Time is Life not money (it’s far more precious than that!) And we often only realise this when parts of our lives are taken away, and can’t be replaced. Overwork can cost us our mental or physical health, or cost us our relationships, or lead to premature death. You can probably think of examples, yourself?
If you think you might be overworking check out this blog Get a Healthy Work-Life Balance #1. It explains how to address external pressures that lead to overworking, such as negative work cultures, unrealistic job roles, or difficulties with colleagues, as well as family upbringing and financial pressures. It gives you the A, B, C to addressing this.
“I didn’t have time”
A coaching client, let’s call her ‘Karen,’ had worked out her clear intentions of what she really wanted to do. She’d discovered her deepest ‘heart intentions’ that really mattered to her. Then she’d worked out a plan and the tasks that she needed to get to her goal, using her knowledge and experience. Then she’d prioritized what was most important and agreed the tasks that she was going to take forward after the session.
Karen came back two weeks later, having not completed these agreed tasks, saying that she didn’t have time. We explored this together, as it was possible that her intentions, planning, and prioritizing weren’t quite right. Or that something had changed and there was a new priority for her now. But this wasn’t the case – she’d simply let other tasks get in the way.
I did gently point out that she’d estimated that the tasks would only take two hours and that there were just over 20,000 minutes in total in the last two weeks. I asked if she really thought that she didn’t have 120 minutes within that time? She had to admit that she’d simply got distracted by other things. She came up with a revised plan and a renewed commitment to complete it, which went on to complete.
You’re free to use your time on what matters most to you
I understand that this statement will be provocative to some of you reading this blog. But when you make a choice, you’re responsible for the outcome, and responsible for closing the door on an alternative. One of the things that coaching clients can realise is that they will have to sacrifice something, to spend time working on their goal. Sometimes it’s giving up a ‘plan b’ which looks attractive but isn’t what they really want. Sometimes it’s giving up their excuses or their ‘stuckness.’
It might be worth reflecting on situations where you regularly say, “I don’t have time.” Often it’s not true – you do have time. But what you might be saying is “it’s not a priority for me, right now.” Or simply “I don’t want to do it, at all!” and we simply need to be honest with ourselves (and perhaps others) about it.
But the tension in our lives comes when we say we don’t have time, but it’s delaying doing the most important things in our lives. Something else gets in the way, like it did for Karen. It didn’t mean that her goal wasn’t important to her anymore – just that she needed to increase her commitment to carry out what mattered most to her.
Not all coaching clients come with an aim of a work promotion and increasing the demands in their work lives. Some want to reduce their hours or change to a less demanding job to balance their life out. Only they can decide what it most important to them.
You can make this change today
Do you need to work out what’s most important to you? Do you know your deepest heart’s desire or calling, your yourself?
1. Be clear about what your deepest longing is. Work out what it is that you really want to do, to define and set your new goal or intention.
2. When you’re clear about your goal, work out a plan with strategies and ideas to increase your commitment to reach your goal.
3. Then start to prioritize your tasks to set the order and importance of the tasks involved, in balance with the other aspects and responsibilities in your life.
Can you relate to Karen? Do you find yourself saying “I don’t have the time,” to yourself or to others, for things that matter most to you?
Coaching sessions can give you a space where you can be really honest with yourself and help you to plan and make time for what’s most important. Supporting you to work it out and be committed to yourself for what matters to you most.
Next steps
You can set these new patterns to experience quick, powerful, lasting change.
Why not take these simple steps?
· Join the online discussion to learn more and share.
How do you know what’s most important to you? How do you plan to get there and commit to it?
· Have a free initial discussion with us about coaching – book here
· Find out how life coaching can help you - Take these two free simple self-assessments here
Prioritise yourself!
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Watch out for next week’s blog –
‘Secrets to success for your year ahead’
(or ‘If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?’)
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