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leverage (lev'r ij) The power to act or influence.
ditch (dich) Slang, to get rid of; discard.
Finally, you hold in your hands a powerful tool that will show you how to take full advantage of — Leverage! — your strengths and most positive qualities, while at the same time discarding or getting around — Ditch! — whatever gets in your way.
Scott Blanchard and Madeleine Homan, co-founders of Coaching.com, share their groundbreaking program, honed by fourteen years of high-level executive coaching and consulting. They offer new perspectives on how to spend your precious and limited resources, time, emotions, passions, and energy to generate the best results.
The three-part process begins with a twenty-five-question self-assessment, then moves on to the Three Perspectives — major life queries that focus on how you are perceived, your own self-image, and self-imposed limitations. The final step, the Seven Leverage Points, offers fresh insight into the choices you make and how you conduct yourself in business and in life. You will find immediately applicable tools to appraise and manage your work environment and personal gifts. You will be guided to make tiny but crucial shifts in getting needs met and drawing boundaries.
Leverage Your Best, Ditch the Rest eliminates the stupid stuff that distracts you and gets in your way. It shows you how to capitalize on what you've got going for you and how to invest in yourself like a hot new stock.
*****
In addition, we have built a Web site, www.leverageyourbest.com, for those who have made a commitment to their own coaching journey. Coaching is a dynamic tool and you are a work in progress—-technology makes it easy to track growth. Leverage Your Best readers can use the Web site, the first of its kind, to work through exercises in the book electronically, keep a personal record of progress, communicate with other readers in an online coaching experience, and give feedback to the authors. A collaborative effort, the Web's online coaching community defines the www.leverageyourbest.com site experience, adding new dimensions to professional development...all for the price of the of the book . Visit the world's only online coaching Web experience and see what has people everywhere jumping in their cubicles. Enjoy!
What can coaching
really do for you?
Snapshot:
"Things are good ... Well, they could be better ... Actually, I'm really fed up, and I'm thinking of quitting my job. I'm chopping away here, and there are no chips flying."
John, a production manager for a software company, is speaking on the phone to his new coach. He runs his hands through his sandy blond hair, noticing again how much less of it he has now than he used to have. He smiles ruefully at his vanity, at how it pops up at the oddest moments. When he was in grad school, he just hadn't imagined that someday he'd be sitting at an overcrowded desk feeling like he'd somehow missed a train.
He isn't quite sure what he signed up for with coaching, but he figures at this point he has nothing to lose.
"I had six meetings yesterday, and I walked away from each one with so much work I don't even know what hit me. I'm working late every night, my wife seems permanently angry with me, I feel like I haven't seen our kids in weeks, and the best people on my team are all about to quit because the workload just isn't easing up -- it's getting worse."
"Wow," says his coach, "that sounds tough."
"Yeah," John says, "and what really burns me is that I seem to be complaining about the same things over and over again, and I just don't seem to be able to fix anything."
"Okay," the coach launches in. "Let's tackle this and see if we can't make some changes so that at least you can move on to some new problems."
John laughs and sighs. "Well, that would be a relief."
"Let's take a look at the whole picture. At how you're functioning in your work, personal and family life, and all parts of your life. We'll establish exactly where you are right now and where you truly want to be.
"I'll help you look through some different lenses so you have plenty of new perspectives. Once you can see your life more clearly I'll help you leverage some things and let a few things go and ultimately help you decide what actions you can take that will permanently eliminate reoccurring frustrations."
John likes what his coach is saying but still has some real doubts about getting this kind of help. He's never seen himself as someone who needed help. As far back as he can remember, he was a golden boy on and off the basketball court. He was always the guy people came to for advice. Why can't he do this by himself?
"Can you really do that for me?" John asks, excited but dubious.
"You're going to do it, John, not me, but I will show you some principles and a fail-safe process that will help guide you," says the coach. "Plus, I'll listen and nudge you toward what you say you want. I'll remind you of the many things you do that are working, and I'll keep your eye on the ball. How does that sound?"
A moment passes before John takes in a deep breath and says, "Good. Let's do it."
Get A Coach in a Book?
Sound good? To see yourself objectively, to cut through the layers of accumulated mental detritus, to make clear-headed choices, and to take effective action toward creating a life that works beautifully? Whenever we describe what coaching can do for people, the inevitable response is "I want a coach!" Who wouldn't? When someone works with a good coach, they are making an investment in themselves like they are a hot new stock, and it causes them to take off like a rocket toward the destination of their choice. This book is our way of offering you the coaching process and the best coaching tools available.
Replicating the coaching experience in a book is fiendishly difficult because the perception is that the power of coaching comes from a relationship. While this is partially true, the most relevant relationship coaching addresses is the one you have with yourself. As coaches, we do a number of things with all our clients. We create an environment in which people feel safe and will grow. Then we use a process -- a set of principles and a framework -- that is easily repeated. Long after we have stopped working together clients often say, "I still hear your voice in my head." But we know that it isn't the coach's voice they are hearing -- it's their own. Their own voice is now informed by a framework and a set of principles that helped them to gain clarity. Coaching helps people have better conversations with themselves; it helps people make better decisions about what is best for them on a minute-by-minute basis. Great coaches don't tell people what to do; they help people build their own personalized system to figure it out for themselves. This book can help you find a new mental framework and operating system. Call it new internal software, if you like.
What Is Coaching?
Coaching is a big, broad term that has heretofore meant a bus (a means of conveying people to and fro) or a professional who assists others in the area of sports and other skills. Confusion abounds. Today a business coach can be anything from a Ph.D. in organizational psychology to an entrepreneurial fast talker. Frederic M. Hudson, Ph.D., founder of The Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara, one of the most respected coach training programs, came up with a wonderful way to describe what coaching does for people in his book, The Handbook of Coaching:
If individual adults can develop dependable radar systems for guiding themselves in and out of the never-ending maze of daily life, they can sustain confidence, self-esteem and hope ...Continues...
Excerpted from Leverage Your Best, Ditch the Rest by Blanchard, Scott Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
What can coaching
really do for you?
Snapshot:
"Things are good ... Well, they could be better ... Actually, I'm really fed up, and I'm thinking of quitting my job. I'm chopping away here, and there are no chips flying."
John, a production manager for a software company, is speaking on the phone to his new coach. He runs his hands through his sandy blond hair, noticing again how much less of it he has now than he used to have. He smiles ruefully at his vanity, at how it pops up at the oddest moments. When he was in grad school, he just hadn't imagined that someday he'd be sitting at an overcrowded desk feeling like he'd somehow missed a train.
He isn't quite sure what he signed up for with coaching, but he figures at this point he has nothing to lose.
"I had six meetings yesterday, and I walked away from each one with so much work I don't even know what hit me. I'm working late every night, my wife seems permanently angry with me, I feel like I haven't seen our kids in weeks, and the best people on my team are all about to quit because the workload just isn't easing up -- it's getting worse."
"Wow," says his coach, "that sounds tough."
"Yeah," John says, "and what really burns me is that I seem to be complaining about the same things over and over again, and I just don't seem to be able to fix anything."
"Okay," the coach launches in. "Let's tackle this and see if we can't make some changes so that at least you can move on to some new problems."
John laughs and sighs. "Well, that would be a relief."
"Let's take a look at the whole picture. At how you're functioning in your work, personal and family life, and all parts of your life. We'll establish exactly where you are right now and where you truly want to be.
"I'll help you look through some different lenses so you have plenty of new perspectives. Once you can see your life more clearly I'll help you leverage some things and let a few things go and ultimately help you decide what actions you can take that will permanently eliminate reoccurring frustrations."
John likes what his coach is saying but still has some real doubts about getting this kind of help. He's never seen himself as someone who needed help. As far back as he can remember, he was a golden boy on and off the basketball court. He was always the guy people came to for advice. Why can't he do this by himself?
"Can you really do that for me?" John asks, excited but dubious.
"You're going to do it, John, not me, but I will show you some principles and a fail-safe process that will help guide you," says the coach. "Plus, I'll listen and nudge you toward what you say you want. I'll remind you of the many things you do that are working, and I'll keep your eye on the ball. How does that sound?"
A moment passes before John takes in a deep breath and says, "Good. Let's do it."
Get A Coach in a Book?
Sound good? To see yourself objectively, to cut through the layers of accumulated mental detritus, to make clear-headed choices, and to take effective action toward creating a life that works beautifully? Whenever we describe what coaching can do for people, the inevitable response is "I want a coach!" Who wouldn't? When someone works with a good coach, they are making an investment in themselves like they are a hot new stock, and it causes them to take off like a rocket toward the destination of their choice. This book is our way of offering you the coaching process and the best coaching tools available.
Replicating the coaching experience in a book is fiendishly difficult because the perception is that the power of coaching comes from a relationship. While this is partially true, the most relevant relationship coaching addresses is the one you have with yourself. As coaches, we do a number of things with all our clients. We create an environment in which people feel safe and will grow. Then we use a process -- a set of principles and a framework -- that is easily repeated. Long after we have stopped working together clients often say, "I still hear your voice in my head." But we know that it isn't the coach's voice they are hearing -- it's their own. Their own voice is now informed by a framework and a set of principles that helped them to gain clarity. Coaching helps people have better conversations with themselves; it helps people make better decisions about what is best for them on a minute-by-minute basis. Great coaches don't tell people what to do; they help people build their own personalized system to figure it out for themselves. This book can help you find a new mental framework and operating system. Call it new internal software, if you like.
What Is Coaching?
Coaching is a big, broad term that has heretofore meant a bus (a means of conveying people to and fro) or a professional who assists others in the area of sports and other skills. Confusion abounds. Today a business coach can be anything from a Ph.D. in organizational psychology to an entrepreneurial fast talker. Frederic M. Hudson, Ph.D., founder of The Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara, one of the most respected coach training programs, came up with a wonderful way to describe what coaching does for people in his book, The Handbook of Coaching:
If individual adults can develop dependable radar systems for guiding themselves in and out of the never-ending maze of daily life, they can sustain confidence, self-esteem and hope ...Leverage Your Best, Ditch the Rest
Overview
leverage (lev'r ij) The power to act or influence.
ditch (dich) Slang, to get rid of; discard.
Finally, you hold in your hands a powerful tool that will show you how to take full advantage of — Leverage! — your strengths and most positive qualities, while at the same time discarding or getting around — Ditch! — whatever gets in your way.
Scott Blanchard and Madeleine Homan, co-founders of Coaching.com, share ...