What can we do for you?
Coaching
One of our experienced coaches will work with you on identifying and handling what is getting in your way, including the conflicts that are stopping you and your team from reaching your goals. By working with a coach, you will have a rare opportunity to get direct feedback from an independent, non-conflicted party, who is a committed listener focused on supporting you to move beyond your present (often unseen) constraints to help you achieve your goals. Importantly, the coach provides a safe container (safe environment) to the client within which complete confidentiality is respected.
Benefits you can expect from coaching:
- Your current perspective and the habitual ways you work to produce results will become crystal clear to you, including their benefits and limitations
- From discovering your blind spots, you will gain new perspectives on your current challenges and opportunities. You will start to look forward and see other options available to you beyond those you have seen before
- From the work together in our sessions, you will learn ways to create a change of perspective yourself that you can use at any time with any challenge you face
- You will become more effective by gaining a sharper awareness of your needs and what is important to you. By seeing more clearly how your emotions (pleasant and unpleasant) are impacting your performance, you will start to be able to recognise them sooner and can stabilise their impact, bringing you greater freedom to act
- You will strengthen your sense of what you are responsible for and can decide more clearly where you wish to take responsibility and where you wish to set limits
- You will learn how to set limits and to address conflicts in a peaceful, respectful way, according to established best practice, including Non-Violent Communication
- By gaining a new level of self-management, you will become more effective in leading and managing others. With improved self-management comes a shift in your awareness of what may be triggering the behaviour of others in your team, making it easier for you to ask the helpful questions and address the situation.
Mentoring
As your mentor, the role of your coach is to put their own professional experience at your disposal to help you develop further on your chosen career path, e.g. as a senior executive entering an international role for the first time, or wanting to build impact in a multi-cultural environment, such as within an international team servicing a global organisation.
Typical areas we would work on include:
- Establishing and aligning the expectations from your role and what you need to deliver. In a fast-paced environment, there is real value in reassessing the priorities, what value you are trying to provide and to whom, as well as understanding what barriers can get in the way and how to navigate them. For example, when was the last time you and your CEO/line manager met to confirm/re-confirm the role you have and the objectives you are aiming to fulfil?
- What does it take to deliver value effectively e.g. to an international membership organisation, across a scattered geographical structure to member firms whose first priority is to serve their clients? How effective are you are positioning projects strongly to gain buy-in, so that they are seen as valuable enough to stakeholders to gain their participation and active support? How can you master those cultural challenges that keep popping up and hampering collective decision-making?
- Keeping focused so that established projects move forward on time and budget, while maintaining the ability to prioritise and manage new projects that can appear out of the blue and can threaten to derail the established priorities. How will you set limits sensibly and respectfully so you can deliver what’s expected of you, while being careful to manage expectations and not send the message that you can always do everything?
How we work
LYP coaches help you define and reach the goals and ambitions that are important to you and your team, whether these be business-related and strategic, or are challenges of a personal nature that are impacting your leadership and wellbeing.
Our commitment is to take you seriously and sharpen your ability to take a stand for yourself and what you are committed to, no matter what challenge you are facing. We will help you raise your awareness of things that are presently hidden from you (blind spots) that are getting in the way of you achieving your goals.
We will challenge you and provide you with structured ways to reflect on your everyday challenges and to use the learning experiences from our sessions, so that you get to realise the full benefit of the coaching for your learning and development and can take new action in new ways.
At the core of our work, we will be raising your awareness of:
- Your personal responsibility: what action can you take and how can you have an impact, including what you can request of others.
- Reality/idealism: What phrases do you use (internally to yourself and externally to me) that are more in one of these directions than the other? How far are you focusing on external factors beyond your control, instead of on what you can influence? Why?
- How does your current way of operating affect your focus, energy and motivation and what can you do to regain stability and put yourself firmly back in action?
In our work together, as well as focusing on the content of the challenges you are dealing with, we will be getting you to look at the context in which the challenges occur, as this is vital for uncovering what is currently preventing you from taking effective action. Often this leads to consideration of such factors as:
- What silent conflicts can you observe in a particular working relationship(s) that is making a project harder to work on?
- What is the impact of the conflict(s) on your own focus and wellbeing?
- How do they impact your sense of time and energy?
- How can you peacefully address the conflict and request/express what is important for you?
- Where is there a lack of clarity around the goals of your project?
- What are the consequences of the lack of clarity?
- What would improve if you can gain the clarity needed?
LEADERSHIP, AS A
QUALITY YOU CAN LIVE
We chose the name Live Your Performance for our enterprise purposely because it speaks to personal experience of authentic leadership and the profound difference this can make both to leaders and those whom they lead.
We believe in everyone being able to live (rather than merely survive) moments of performance to the full. Performance includes moments like giving a presentation to an audience, delivering a musical concert performance, facilitating a professional or public seminar or workshop, etc.
Public and professional occasions call upon our personal qualities and self-management strengths as people and leaders differently than when we are working behind the scenes and more privately. A public occasion can either inspire us or fill us with fear and dread.
We are committed to helping people learn ways to manage themselves under pressure which inspire them to be courageous and step out and be themselves, whatever they fear may get in their way.
This is something our founder, Chris, is passionate about because he has learned from his own personal experiences of musical performance that these are skills that can be learned and can really set us free. We believe anyone can learn these skills, no matter what obstacles they have faced in the past and however much they are convinced they cannot.
So, learning to approach these moments differently – beginning with recognising and learning to manage our unpleasant emotions – e.g. fear of loss of control that can dominate our awareness minutes before we are about to step out on a platform and present/perform –– is so powerful.
It can transform us from being surviving leaders overwhelmed by nervousness and only able to focus on concerns about our self-image, to being living in-the-moment purposeful leaders who are free to connect with our audience in our own unique and special way.
Why not book a free discovery meeting with Chris via Zoom and find out how we can help?