Leaders are coaches. They just are.
It’s our job, and your job, to help your teammates find their individual purpose and step into their greatness.
The result is massive gains for your company and fulfillment in the lives of everyone around your business.
Sounds great, right?
But who coaches the coach?
How or who do you turn to in order to improve the leaders?
Well, you could always hire someone like one of my team at the Blue Collar Success Group or me, but here’s a secret: we can’t make you do anything.
Only you can coach yourself.
Confusing, right?
It’s true, and this is what I wanted to tackle today. I want to go over what improving leadership looks like. Specifically, I want to look at how to catch and coach yourself.
It’s this that will result in years of success and improvement in your life and business.
Let’s get into it, my friend!
Improving Leadership Through Self-Coaching And Reflection
I want to talk to you about how to catch and coach yourself.
I’m massively into coaching.
Obviously, I’ve built a market-leading coaching company for the blue-collar trades.
I coached in the life space.
I coach in the personal development space.
You know, I coach greatness with individuals.
I help people get out of their way and step into their greatness, as my friend and mentor, Les Brown, talks about.
But here today, I want you to become your own coach.
And I want to share a process that I utilize with myself.
So yeah, I get paid a lot of dough to help people out and help them see their blind spots.
But real transformation happens when you’re able to start catching yourself and seeing your own blind spots if you will.
I’m going to share a four-step process that I’ve built and kind of modified and worked through and utilize to help me as well as clients.
The first part of this process is catching yourself or avoiding those “Why Did I Do That?” moments.
It’s about realizing why you make the choices you do.
I go into detail on this in another blog post about slowing down your mind and reflecting honestly about your life and goals.
So if you haven’t checked that one out, you may want to hop over to the link, read it, and then come back here.
Reflect And Look For Those “Catching Moments
If you catch something that doesn’t resonate with you or doesn’t represent the individual, stop and think. This is where you improve.
Maybe you think:
I want to be the communicator.
I want to be the team leader that I want to be the business leader that I want to be the steward of my finances.
Right? We all have things we want to be for ourselves and others.
And so the key is to be in tune with yourself enough.
You can’t possibly self-coach if you don’t self-realize, right?
So there’s a level of being in tune with yourself, from your own feelings, how you catch yourself feeling at times.
Some call it getting down to your gut.
You know, I’m big on the gut (not from the standpoint of health where the gut is so important, which it totally is).
I’m big on the gut of knowing what’s right, knowing what’s right for you, and knowing when things are in alignment for you.
The gut always knows.
When you challenge me with that and, or challenge yourself and go:
I don’t know; I’m not sure, Kenny; I’m not sure that my gut knows what that is.
Is your conscious mind getting in the way of your subconscious mind?
Reprogram Your Subconscious
We don’t retrain our subconscious often, but we, as leaders, have to constantly be reprogramming it for what we want.
Knowing how you feel and what you want comes from clarity.
Number one, how do you want to feel?
And number two: being able to know when you’re not in alignment with that feeling clarity.
This is the first dimension in the Six Dimensions Of Change.
This is the book that I wrote for you on how to get what we want.
It begins with clarity, but I’m not here to sell books today (unless you want to buy it; that’s nice too).
What I’m here to do is help you change your life.
It begins with clarity and having an awareness of how you’re feeling, how you’re operating, and how you’re acting because most people go through life largely unconscious and largely not paying attention to how they’re operating, how they’re communicating, and how they’re making other people feel.
So one, it takes clarity.
Two, it takes awareness.
Three, it takes this desire to improve this.
This isn’t the four-step process yet. I’m just sharing what you need to start your journey.
You’ve got to have a desire to improve.
If you’re going to be effective at self-coaching yourself, you’ve got to want to improve.
Improving is dirty work. But it needs to be done if you’re going, to be honest with yourself.
Self-Honesty
If you’re not honest with yourself, you can’t possibly get clear about your own growth.
When you are not honest with yourself, you’re telling yourself a lie.
When clients hire the team or me at Blue Collar to coach and train, yet fudge on certain things, they’re not going to improve no matter how much time or money they spend with us.
You have to want to improve.
Be honest.
Here are the numbers.
Here’s what it is.
I’m going to tell myself the truth.
I’m going to tell my coaches the truth.
That’s what I really want when you self-coach yourself.
It’s a whole other level of truth because you’ve got to have the clarity to go:
Oh my gosh, that doesn’t feel good. I’m going to catch myself. Now. I want to coach myself. You’ve got to be grounded in truth.
You’ve got to be rooted in truth if you want to do this.
I’ve Got To Be Honest Too
I had the opportunity recently where I spoke out of alignment with something that felt good to me.
As soon as I said it, I knew that just didn’t really resonate.
That wasn’t the Kenny that Kenny wants to be in today’s world.
That’s not the Kenny that Kenny works to grow and to be common.
And there was some previous conditioning that reared its head.
Do you know how that happens?
Do you ever have your old self manifest and show up?
It kind of reminds me of the old cartoons where there are the devil and the angel on both sides of your shoulders.
And here you are in the middle.
My old devil popped up and did something out of behavior that I used to operate with, and I went:
Whoa, that doesn’t resonate with my new self.
Not that my new self is an angel by any stretch, but it’s more of who I want to be in.
When I know that I’m in alignment, I feel good.
And even when I make mistakes, I feel good because I know that I’m striving to be the best person that I can be.
Why? Because I have clarity.
I have awareness.
I have a desire to grow and improve.
And I am going to tell myself the truth to the best of my ability.
Improving Leadership: 4 Step Self-Coaching
Let’s talk about how you can implement this in your own life, your own relationships, and finance with four steps here.
My friend, write these down.
#1 Catch Yourself
It’s even in the title: “how to catch and coach yourself.”
You can’t possibly coach yourself if you’re not aware that you did something that you want to work on.
If you’re not aware that you’re out of alignment with yourself, if you’re not aware that you’re not possible in the full integrity of who you want to be, you won’t improve.
You’ve got to catch yourself, and catching yourself comes from that down below your solar plexus in your gut.
It’s where it’s like:
Oh man, that, that didn’t feel very good.
Be aware of those moments and stop right there.
#2 Write About It
Now I’m a big fan of journaling.
If you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you know, that’s a fact.
Journaling is a big part of my ritual for my steps for success.
But journaling also is just a label.
It’s just a name to call writing down your thoughts and reflections. I just write every day.
The world calls it journaling. I call it downloading my brain.
As soon as you catch something that doesn’t resonate right about that specific incidence.
For me, after this happened when I was speaking, I got up the next morning, and I just wrote that as part of my morning routine.
You don’t have to do it in the morning; you can do it anytime.
Journal in the evening time.
You can journal in the morning.
You can journal more than once a day.
I just encourage you to find a ritual that works for you.
You caught yourself. Now you write about it because now you’re getting it out of the subconscious mind.
You know, the subconscious is a master of manipulation of justification of minimization, of running programs over and over.
Do you think you’re working through it? No, you’re not.
You’re bouncing a lot of the same things around in your head over and over, trying to justify why you did something, trying to minimize what you said, or whatever it is.
Just write it down and write how you made you feel at that time.
#3 Review What You Wrote
Review what you wrote because I want you to just write.
Don’t even think; don’t worry about punctuation.
And don’t worry about spelling.
You’re downloading your emotional brain from the subconscious of what is in your head and in your heart.
So you just write, write, write, and then you go back and review it.
I like to journal, and then I like to review the next day or later that day.
Sometimes I’ll review it with my coach.
Yes, I have a personal coach.
I get coached in both group settings as well as individual coaching settings because I invest in myself and self-care.
I know that makes me better, which makes my team better, which makes my clients better, and which makes everybody’s life better.
This ties to my primary purpose, which is making a positive impact in the world around me, as well as growing myself each and every day to become the greatest version of myself.
The greatest version of myself I can is tied to what we’re talking about here.
It’s catching yourself. It’s writing about whatever it was that didn’t resonate with you.
Then go back and reviewing it.
#4 Release It
You’ve got to release it.
I live in Arizona now, but I spent a lot of time in Colorado.
You get up around Aspen; you’ve got what they call gold metal waters.
And you can fish those waters, but it’s catch and release, right?
So this process is much like catch and release, but we get some value.
So if you think about fishing, you catch the fish, you take a picture, and you weigh it.
You might take a few different pictures.
Then you release the fish, right? You let it go.
And it goes on and on about its way.
And it lives for another day.
Here’s the coaching process: it’s catch and release.
But in between the catching of what you did or said or do or feeling and the releasing of it, you’re writing about it, and you’re reviewing it so you can get the value out of it.
This way, get the understanding so you can get the lesson.
Don’t let a teachable moment miss you by or pass you by or miss for yourself.
Final Thoughts
You need to reprogram your subconscious.
Catch it, write it down, review it, and release it.
My friend, there is no reason to kick your own butt.
There’s no reason to hang on to it.
Once you learn the lesson, you have learned the lesson, and now it’s time to release.
This is how you go about catching and coaching yourself.
My friend, I’d love to hear from you.
Shoot me an email at kennyATchapman.com or join our email list.
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Until next time, make it a better-than-fantastic-day!