If your check engine light comes on in your car do you go on YouTube, buy some self help books, check with friends, ignore it as long as you can, and eventually take it apart in the evening after work in your garage?  Or, do you call your mechanic or car dealership to run a diagnostic?  The vast majority of us don’t have the technical skill to troubleshoot modern cars...but do we have the technical skills to troubleshoot our career and personal goals?

Have you achieved your 2018 goals?  If you are like the majority of people, you haven’t reached all your goals.  In fact, you probably have some pretty lofty projects left on the table.  Or, maybe the first eight months of 2018 were simply chaos for one reason or another and you haven’t accomplished what you set out to do at all.  Maybe you even had a career or personal setback that moved the starting point backwards!

Regardless of your individual circumstances, you are certainly not alone!  Rest assured that many other people are facing a very similar situation to what you are currently facing.

The good news is, there are four months left this year!  Four months.  A full third of the year.  If you are well on your way you have plenty of time to finish up, and if you haven’t started you have plenty of time to make real progress and start 2019 off right.  If you have achieved all your goals, you have four months to complete some bonus goals.

Again, without regard to your individual situation, you know you will have to work hard, maintain focus, plan, and execute a plan in order to achieve your goals.  Sometimes this isn’t as easy as that last sentence makes it sound.  Executive Coaching can assist you in reaching your goals in three specific ways:

Accountability

Simply having someone safe to fully know and understand your goals and, on a regular interval, hold you accountable to achievement benchmarks will significantly increase your ability to make forward progress.  Whether you believe the theory you should announce your goals from the rooftops for all to hear in order to create accountability, or are more of the school of thought that you prefer to keep your goals private, or even have proprietary goals that you need to remain private, a coach can be a confidential sounding board to keep you accountable. Having a coach almost serves as a happy medium between the theories as it gives you someone who can know about your goals without making you feel as though you’re on stage in front of the general public.

Focus and knowing your “why”

It is important that you really work through your goals and why you have them.  Over time our goals often become mismatched with our ultimate “why.”  It’s not uncommon for a client to have a goal and when asked why they seek to achieve that goal, they either don’t have an answer or realize that the goal is either no longer relevant in their life or is more relevant for someone else in their life.  Through working with a coach, you can develop goals that are consistent with creating a career you find fulfilling, a life you find rewarding, and more efficiently using your time and resources to achieve the best results.

An advocate for your success

There are very few people in our lives who don’t have a direct stake in the outcome of conversations we have about our goals, achievements, or career.  Mentors, subordinates, supervisors, partners, spouses, and family all have a particular viewpoint on your life.  Coaching offers a bias-free viewpoint to help you be the best you.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list of reasons coaching can help you achieve your goals.  Instead, this serves as a reminder that while we enlist people in so many aspects of our life to accomplish things we may not personally be experts at, when it comes to our aspirations and career, we sometimes miss a key component that can make an exponential difference in the outcomes we seek.  The value of coaching typically results in a significant return on investment in a much shorter timeframe than clients expect.

There are still four months, a third of the year, left to achieve your highest goals and go into 2019 strong.  Take the next few days to make a game plan for the remainder of the year, and remember to not save everything for the end, as the holiday season tends to get busier than we anticipate.

Remember we typically don’t fix our own cars, do our own accounting, or solve our own plumbing issues.  It is completely natural to seek assistance to create a more fulfilling approach to your goals, career, and life.  If you need assistance, or would like to explore coaching with Apochromatik, email us and we will be happy to chat with you about options to help you become the most successful, best version of you so you can reach your goals in the last third of 2019 and beyond.