Questions for you
We would love to support you to be the Best Possible Leader you can be, so you can better enable success & wellbeing.
You most probably already know that it’s very difficult to achieve success & wellbeing on your own. Many great leaders have a strong support team to constructively challenge them, to be there for them and to help them develop key knowledge, skills and capabilities. They have the courage to look in the mirror and seek honest feedback: even when the feedback has been tough to receive, they use it to improve, change and propel themselves forwards.
We want to be there for you.
The best possible leader of your life & career
To help you think about whether or not you would like to use our services, ask yourself, “How well do I understand and manage myself?”
Click on each of the numbered circles below to help you answer this question. As you do this, know that it takes a lifetime to become the best possible leader of your life & career. Don’t get despondent with your answers. Think of them as a means to help identify where you are strong and where you could improve.
Reflecting On & Defining Your Success & Wellbeing
- How clearly and confidently do you know what success & wellbeing mean to you?
- How well informed are you about the real opportunities and threats with regards to your success & wellbeing in your private life and career?
- Can you name, succinctly and clearly, your short and long-term goals for your career and the whole of your life? Are they robust? Would you say the same tomorrow or next month?
- How well have you worked out all the things that will enable you on your journey to your desired life and career? Have you identified the things that could get in your way and need addressing / circumventing?
- Have you isolated the key activities you need to focus on to achieve your long-term goals?
- How well are you managing your energy and your time around the key things you need to do to achieve success & wellbeing?
- How engaged are you in actively learning what you need to know, and networking and building relationships with the people who will give you the information you need?
- Do your goals have strategies that ensure you are agile, nimble, and flexible enough as the world around you changes?
- Do each of your goals have plans, down to what you do each day?
- Can you, with assurance, name what enables and what constrains your success & wellbeing, and are you actively leveraging those enablers and managing those constraints?
These are just some of the things we help you explore and answer in Course 1 of the Understanding & Managing Yourself Programme. You can also explore them through Tailored Coaching.
Understanding & Managing Your Self-Concepts
- Nobody has high self-confidence all the time, unless they are fooling themselves. But how is your level of confidence – does it harm your chances of success? Do you know why, when and what batters or bolsters your confidence? Are you managing your life to give yourself the best chance of having high self-confidence? When you lose it, do you know how to regain it quickly?
- What about your sense of self-esteem, your view of yourself, your identity, your image and your sense of worth? How do you value yourself?
- What’s your self-compassion like? Are you too soft or too hard on yourself? Olympians we have worked with, have poor self-compassion; they do beat themselves up after failure, but critically, they move swiftly on to focusing their attention on their learning and next goal. Are you able to do that or do you ruminate on setbacks and failure?
- There is a term in psychology called ‘locus of control’. It is about how much you think you can affect other people and situations: do you feel it worth speaking out because it might change things, or do you think that no-one will listen to you? The amount of locus of control you have will affect your motivation and actions. If you’ve got too much, your ego and over-confidence will alienate people; you might get what you want, but there will be people waiting to stab you in the back at the first opportunity. If you have too little, you won’t make as much difference as you could. Do you get that right? Do you ‘get’ what has contributed to you having your habitual response?
- Would you like help in knowing what and how to manage these self-concepts to better achieve your success & wellbeing?
These are just some of the things we help you explore and answer in Course 2 of the Understanding & Managing Yourself Programme. You can also explore them through Tailored Coaching.
Understanding & Managing Your Strengths
- Can you confidently name your strengths? Have you identified your strengths through robust analysis?
- Those that know their strengths and consistently dial them up to the right level have been proven to achieve and be successful. How well do you remember your strengths when the pressure is on or you face a crisis? How good are you at dialling up or turning down your strengths to meet each situation/event/person you encounter? How easy is it for you to dial up your strengths when you are tired or in a bad mood? How easy is it for you to tone down your strengths in situations where it might not be wise or considerate to others?
- Do you use your strengths daily, to the point where you feel energised and full of vitality?
- What about your weaknesses? There really isn’t any point bashing away at the things you aren’t good at – unless they are ‘mission critical’; then, you either need to delegate them or if you have to do them, find strategies to improve those weaknesses. How actively are you managing your weaknesses?
- Do you know your vulnerabilities? These are things that unnerve you, make you feel bad, sad, incredibly frustrated or annoyed…things that bring out the worst side of you. How good are you at managing your emotions and thought processes, and behaviour when you feel vulnerable? How alert are you to the risks that you face – do you hide from the risk, do you ignore it, do you get busy on something else, do you meet it with aggression? How much would you like to meet risks with calm, assertive, resourceful demeanour?
These are just some of the things we help you explore and answer in Course 3 of the Understanding & Managing Yourself Programme. You can also explore them through Tailored Coaching.
Understanding & Managing Your Beliefs, Values, Attitudes, Mindsets and Attributions
- Our beliefs direct our attention, thoughts, emotions and behaviour – yet most of our beliefs are formed unconsciously. How much thought have you given to what beliefs you hold, how your beliefs were formed, whether they are logical, reasonable, fair, true? And, do you know how to change a belief to turn it into a positive, logical, reasonable, fair belief?
- How often do you consciously make a decision, exhibit some behaviour, that is directly in line with your values? How often do you make a decision, exhibit some behaviour, forgetting or flying in the face of your values? Do you live ‘comfortably within your skin’ or do you feel guilt, shame, embarrassment? Would you like to change that?
- Attitudes and mindsets, again, are mostly formed unconsciously, and they have a complicated and not always understood impact on our emotions and behaviour. So complicated in fact, that we tend to ignore them and don’t go out of our way to manage them. In today’s world, we can’t afford to do that: we need to be mindful of our attitudes. Just how well have you examined your myriad of attitudes, challenged them, and created new ones in order to create the world that you would like to live in?
- We humans all do it – we make ‘attributions’ about others: we imagine why someone did what they did, we ‘attribute’ their reasons to their behaviour. Would you like to learn a technique for examining your attributions, so you can shift your energy, mindsets and behaviour towards someone and go from not wanting to engage with them to being empathic and engaging?
These are just some of the things we help you explore and answer in Course 4 of the Understanding & Managing Yourself Programme. You can also explore them through Tailored Coaching.
Understanding & Managing Your Interests, Passions and Motivations
- Are you clear about what interests you and what doesn’t? Can you piece together your interests to find the perfect job/role for yourself?
- Are you experimenting enough with what interests you to ensure that you are learning relevant things?
- Have you found your passion? How sure are you that it is wise to follow it, and not folly?
- Do you know enough about motivation to predict what will keep you motivated?
- Do you know how to quickly get yourself out of the doldrums?
- How well do you really know what affects your levels of motivation, your urges, your despondency?
- How well do you manage your passions and motivation?
These are just some of the things we help you explore and answer in Course 5 of the Understanding & Managing Yourself Programme. You can also explore them through Tailored Coaching.
Understanding & Managing Your Intelligences
- Did you know that in psychology we now think there are between 5-12 core intelligences, all of which matter in today’s working world? Or are you still stuck on a narrow view of cognitive and emotional intelligence?
- Could you be in danger of over-rating your intelligence because you are just looking at your cognitive (IQ), old exam results, general knowledge and EQ?
- Are you underestimating yourself (and letting others underestimate you) by boxing yourself into narrow definitions of intelligence?
- How well are you developing your creativity and cultural intelligence: known to be two of the most vital intelligences if you want to remain relevant for the future?
- What might you be missing if you do not assess your team’s intelligence from a wider, evidence-based, modern approach to intelligence?
These are just some of the things we help you explore and answer in Course 6 of the Understanding & Managing Yourself Programme. You can also explore them through Tailored Coaching.
Understanding & Managing Your Personality
- Were you aware that neuroscience shows our personality can develop throughout our lives and that by leveraging the contemporary way of looking at personality, you can develop faster?
- How well do you know yourself? You might be good at predicting your responses but how well do you see yourself as others see you? How are you seen (recruited and assessed) by psychologists?
- What power do you have in managing the way you think, feel and behave? How well do you use that power?
- How deep is your insight into why others do what they do, feel as they do and what is the level of your ability to influence them?
- What most impacted on the early formation of your personality? What most impacts on it now? How well are you optimising your personality to meet your goals?
These are just some of the things we help you explore and answer in Course 7 of the Understanding & Managing Yourself Programme. You can also explore them through Tailored Coaching.
Understanding & Managing Your Mental, Emotional and Physical Health and Habits
- To what extent do you feel full of vitality and joy?
- How well do you understand all the factors that contribute to your mental health? Are you equipped to manage them?
- How far do you allow yourself to feel emotions? How well do you pause to connect with the people you deal with at home and work, emotionally?
- To what extent are you taking your body for granted, not giving it the best nutrition, rest, sleep? What is the natural course of events in this movie…?
- How much of your best energy is still there for your partner, your family and friends and community once your work is over at the end of the day or week?
- Amid the plethora of conflicting advice, how much have you crystallised to use as your key health indicators?
- What bad habits have you gotten into and what new habits would you like to form?
- What do you know about forming habits (there is solid new science around it)?
These are just some of the things we help you explore and answer in Course 8 of the Understanding & Managing Yourself Programme. You can also explore them through Tailored Coaching.
Understanding & Managing Your Knowledge, Skills and Capabilities
- Most of us know what we know and can do, but how ahead of the game are you – to what extent have you analysed what knowledge, skills, capabilities you will need to thrive in the future?
- With how much confidence can you state your market value, when judged against the world players in your field?
- How well are you testing yourself out all the time, learning new things?
- Be honest, how much curiosity have you shown about preparing your skills to be fit for the future?
- How much honest, solid, endeavour have you given to your development over the last few years?
These are just some of the things we help you explore and answer in Course 9 of the Understanding & Managing Yourself Programme. You can also explore them through Tailored Coaching.
Defining & Managing Your Personal Brand
- How breath-taking is your ‘lift speech’? Will it blow the boss away? Just how good are you at talking about yourself in a way that really showcases what you know, do, and could bring to the party?
- With what degree of certainty do you know what your reputation is?
- Are you excellent at managing your reputation?
- What do you want to make a difference on/for in the world? How well are you doing?
- How well are your goals, plans, strategies – and your time & energy aligned?
These are just some of the things we help you explore and answer in Course 10 of the Understanding & Managing Yourself Programme. You can also explore them through Tailored Coaching.