Take Charge of You

How Self-Coaching Can Transform Your Life and Career

David Novak, Jason Goldsmith

• Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781646870899
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Mentorat et coaching

Acclaimed YUM! Brands CEO and author of The New York Times best-selling leadership book, Taking People With You, David Novak, teams up with Jason Goldsmith, the coach to some of the world's best PGA golf stars, to bring you groundbreaking lessons on personal growth and professional development.

Take Charge of You teaches you the secrets to self-coaching. Everyone could use a good coach to help them reach their full potential. Unfortunately, there just aren't enough good ones to go around, and the ones that exist are often too expensive or sought-after for most of us to even consider hiring them.

Your life is too important to leave your personal growth and professional development up to chance. Take Charge of You helps you define for yourself what you want out of life and give yourself what you need to succeed.

1

The Self-Coaching Conversation

Ask Yourself Some Key Questions

Your Self-Coaching Conversation Toolkit

Find Your Joy Blockers

Find Your Joy Builders

Discover Your Single Biggest Thing

Envision Your Destination

TIP KEY

TAKE CHARGE

SELF-COACHING

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.

—EUGÈNE IONESCO, playwright⁷

If you have found your way to this book, it probably means that you are searching for something. Perhaps you are not fully satisfied with how things are going in your career or your life. Maybe there’s a goal you’d like to reach or an issue you’d like to resolve, but you’re not quite sure how to get there. Or maybe you’re really pretty happy, but still looking for new ways to grow and succeed, to continually up your game.

It’s situations like these where a good coach can really come in handy—to help you gain perspective, develop a plan, work through the inevitable hurdles, and provide inspiration and motivation to see things through. So that the growth and change you’re looking for can become more than just a hope or desire. So that it can take shape and become reality.

If you’re going to coach yourself through all that, where do you start?

When either of us set out to coach someone new, we always start in the same place: with a conversation. You have to get to know a bit about the person you’re coaching—about who they are, what they want, what they believe is getting in their way—before you can begin to offer any useful guidance.

With that in mind, we are going to spend this chapter guiding you through a kind of conversation with yourself. We do this so we can begin to do two important things that will be key on your self-coaching journey:

1. 1) Gain a better understanding of how best to coach the unique individual that is you.
2. 2) Figure out what we will be coaching you toward.

Right about now you may be thinking, “I don’t need to do that. I already know enough about myself and what I want, so let’s just get moving already!” We know the feeling, but let us explain why skipping this step or rushing through it may not be the best idea.

The first thing we will guide you to do—gain a better understanding of how best to coach the unique individual that is you—comes from our combined experience as professionals who have coached a wide range of people and personalities. Through these experiences we have learned an important lesson: What works for one person doesn’t always work for the next. This means that while we can give you a process to follow, it’s not going to work unless, along the way, you take into account who you are and what you want, which isn’t always as easy as it sounds.

For his podcast, David interviewed Tom Brady, seven-time Super Bowl champion and quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who had a simple example of this. Back when he was with the New England Patriots, Brady discovered that a lot of his teammates, especially the younger ones, looked to him for encouragement. They wanted a shout-out when they did something right, and when they got it, it motivated them to try even harder. But wide receiver Julian Edelman was different. He didn’t want shout-outs. In fact, Edelman got downright uncomfortable whenever Brady told him he had done a good job. “If you say something nice, he doesn’t even know what to do,” Brady explained. Brady learned that challenging Edelman to do better was far more motivating for him than paying him a compliment. A simple shift in the way Brady communicated made all the difference, but it came as a result of something that wasn’t so simple: gaining an understanding of where Edelman was coming from and appreciating that uniqueness. It also helped him realize that he needed to find out what motivated each of his team members in order to get the best out of them because the same approach wasn’t going to work for everyone. That same insight applies to you—you have to know yourself in order to know how best to coach yourself to success.

The second thing we will help you do—figure out what we will be coaching you toward—is a practical necessity. After all, coaching should not be an aimless pursuit. In fact, if you don’t have a clear idea of your destination, you can easily waste a lot of time and resources only to go nowhere—or nowhere good. Jason learned this lesson the hard way before he became a coach. Back then, he was working as director of operations for a boat charter company in San Diego, and it was a good job. He made good money, received excellent benefits, and he really liked his boss. A lot of people would say that he was in an enviable position. The problem was that after twelve years with the company, Jason felt like he had outgrown his position, and there was nowhere to go. The only person above him was his boss, and Jason didn’t want his boss’s job. Jason spent his days outdoors, on the boats, interacting with customers and employees. In contrast, his boss could usually be found in his office, sitting behind a desk, interacting with files and a computer screen. Jason couldn’t imagine that for himself.

Jason found himself in a situation practically everyone will encounter at some point in their careers: He was no longer feeling inspired by his work, his motivation had waned as a result, and he was left feeling stuck, unsure what to do about any of it. It felt like perhaps it was time to try something new, but there was also a lot of fear and anxiety around whether that was the right choice and whether he would be able to find something better. After all, it had been a great place to work for a number of years, and his boss had been an important mentor to him. Under his guidance, Jason had gotten the chance to start developing his managerial and coaching skills, which are so important to the work he does today as a performance coach. It was a lot to leave behind, but after months of agonizing about it, he decided there was not much he could do but resign.

He and his wife, Elizabeth, then decided to try real estate development. They would buy a house, fix it up, sell it for a profit, and then repeat the process all over again. They were successful enough at it that they were able to sell their home in San Diego and move to Palm Springs, where Jason could better pursue one of his life’s biggest passions: golf.

The two moved into a house on the grounds of PGA West, home of the Bob Hope Classic, where Jason became a member. All of a sudden he went from squeezing in a few rounds on a public course before work to having access to nine courses at one of the country’s most prestigious private clubs. Thanks to the nature of his real estate work, his schedule was flexible enough that he could play anytime he wanted....