What are the things that you can do today? Not tomorrow, not next week. Today, right now.
What are the things that if you would accomplish today would make a big impact on your life? What can you do right now? I recently started to ask myself these questions every day, and they really help me to stay on track.
Some people spend a lot of money to hire a coach that will tell them things that they already know. You already know that you should work on your most important things everyday, that creating something remarkable is better than searching for the quick fix. Yet the reason we hire a coach is that even though we know what we should do, it’s easy for us to forget it. We have so many things to do and remember that it’s often impossible to keep track of the big picture. Or is it?
The job of a personal coach is to help you stay on track so that you can grow your business and personal life. You should definitely hire a coach if you have the opportunity, but you should also know how to be your own personal coach. The main reason is that at the end of the day you can only blame yourself if you didn’t achieve your goals.
So how do you become your own personal coach? The answer is through habits. In my experience coaching works because you exchange money on a regular basis for a specific amount of time with another person. You can’t miss it. Having a regular schedule is what makes the thing work well. It’s unlikely that you’ll see great results with only one or two sessions.
In order to become your personal coach you have to schedule a fixed amount of time each day in which you can critically analyze the areas of your life where you want to grow. For me twenty minutes every morning are enough, but you are encouraged to experiment with other combinations.
What you do in that time is completely up to you, but here’s how a typical session “goes” with myself:
- I quickly review what I did the previous day (I keep a journal of what I do every day).
- I write down the things that I know I have to do today.
- For each area of my life where I want to improve, I ask myself: “What are the things that I can do today that would have a big impact on my life?”. I write down the answers together with my previous list.
- I schedule the things that I’ve written starting from the most important first.
- I start working on them.
For this to work, I highly recommend having a journal of your accomplishments. Think of it as a log of your activities, but where you only write the important things that you did during the day. It also helps to have a list of the areas of your life where you want to work every day. My list consists of work, health/sport, my blogs, study.
What would happen if you would do this every day for the next year?