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By Dave Veale When you look back at 2009 what will differentiate it from other years? For me, this year is about practicing the art of being bold! According to Robert Frost, ‘Freedom lies in being bold’. If this is true, then I’d be crazy not to diligently work at it this year and hopefully create a habit. After all, who doesn’t want to feel free from the constraints of our busy lives and the barriers we often build around us?
So what is creating this interest in being bold? It actually started last year - 2008 was about possibility driven by a very cool book that I read, The Art of Possibility. Possibility, for me, is about pulling down all the walls around you in terms of what you think you can be doing with your life and thinking...what is possible here? Some amazing things happened last year – we received a business award, expanded our coaching team, collaborated on Airplane Journals ( a documentary about coaching), watched our business grow through offering new exciting services and coaching dream clients!
Late last year we showed the final cut of our documentary to a group of executive coaches - leaders in the industry from all over the world. At the end of it a very experienced coach commented "I love how bold you’re being about your business and getting the word of coaching out”. At that moment I thought, you know what, it is about being bold - for me, 2009 is going to be about being bold. It’s about telling people what we’re doing, and how excited we are about it.
Part of practicing the art of being bold is being less concerned about saying the right thing and more focused on getting our message out in a way that feels right, is authentic and is aligned with our values. In our case, we need to continue to educate people on what coaching is and that ‘not everyone needs a coach, but everyone deserves a coach’.
For me, being bold is also about being confident and really believing in yourself. John Whitmore says it best in his fantastic book, Coaching for Performance; ‘self-belief is key to the manifestation of potential'. As coaches we believe in people’s untapped potential and this core belief helps us to encourage our clients to chase their dreams.
I’m excited about what this year holds for me , in fact, there are already some specific opportunities that are presenting themselves as a result of me being bolder. Opportunities that, I must confess, I feel nervous about for all the typical reasons - fear of the unknown, fear of failure...all those gremlins. But, as a coach, I certainly can’t ask my clients to go to those places that stretch them out of their comfort zone if I’m not going to go there myself. This takes me back to this idea of possibility, I wonder what is available to each one of us if we put ourselves out there? What changes within us when we strike out and follow our dreams whether that dream is starting a new business, changing our career direction or leading in a more compassionate way?
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