06 Aug Make Empowering Choices
Excerpt of interview with Fran Fisher, MCC, by David E Wright, President of Insight Publishing
David Wright: Fran, welcome back to No Winner Ever Got There Without a Coach. What are some tools, tips, or practices that will help me make more empowering choices?
Fran Fisher: My top four practices increase self-awareness and help you make more empowering choices.
Create powerful statements, such as I am and Life Purpose statements that you can speak to yourself daily. These can be empowering tools for supporting you in setting the tone for your day or in preparation for entering a challenging situation. Holding these in your consciousness, you will naturally make more empowering choices in your day.
Focus on your top values. For each one, brainstorm ways that you already honor these values and ways that you can honor them more fully. For example: Ways I already honor my value of Spirituality include starting my day with a prayer ritual and my Vision and Purpose statements. I respect Mother Nature by recycling glass, paper, and plastic. I express my love and gratitude in my relationships with family and friends. Ways I could honor my value of Spirituality more fully is to forgive my sister and let go of past hurts.
Choose one of your values each day as a theme or intention to focus while holding the inquiry, such as “How can I honor this value more fully today?” One of my clients is on a team that meets weekly. At the beginning of every meeting, each team member checks in by sharing how they visibly honored one of their team values that week.
The Five Qualities Tool is a practice you can use to start your day or prepare for a challenging situation. Identify five qualities (no more, no less) that you choose to be for the day or for the situation. Write them with a ballpoint pen on the palm of your hand so that they are with you, embodied like a tattoo.
Examples of qualities of “being” for the day might be: bold, compassionate, courageous, kind, caring, etc. I have a client who sets her “being” intentions every morning using this tool. Sometimes she writes them on her hand. Other times she writes them on an index card and carries them in her pocket or purse.
I used this tool once when I was really stretched. I was delivering a coaching skills training in a different country to people who spoke a different language, working through an interpreter to an audience ten times larger than I had ever worked with before. The being qualities I chose were transparency, authenticity, playfulness, openness, and clarity. That was how I wanted to be and how I wanted to show up. I wrote the qualities on the palm of my hand every morning of the four-day course, and I kept making myself conscious of that intention. I also kept it private. At the end of the course, many of the participants lined up to acknowledge me. Imagine my surprise when they acknowledged me for my transparency, authenticity, playfulness, openness, and clarity. That certainly is a testimony to the power of intention, isn’t it?
Re-framing obstacles as opportunities or gifts. I often ask my clients, when they are stopped by an obstacle, overwhelming circumstances, or stuck in a limiting view, “What is the opportunity?” or “What is the gift of these circumstances?” or “What is the empowering view?” Embracing these questions will shift your mental, emotional, and spiritual state of being.