Like everyone else, I enjoy doing a lot of things. But I realised I needed one thing I could be exceptional in. I decided that would be coaching. I gave up a lot of passions like painting and baking to spend more time on coaching. This was a conscious decision. Yesterday I happened to meet a friend, the founder of a successful business venture. She is a recognized expert at what she d...

Jack Ma’s company Alibaba debuted last week in the US stock market and raised about $25 billion. At about the same time, Ma, a former English teacher, said he was happy making $20 a day as a teacher when he graduated. He said those were ‘fantastic days.’ That leaves me with the question: What constitutes happiness? All my coaching engagements begin with a questionnaire and one of t...

I meet a lot of people who have dreams but never seem to be in an execution mindset.   I hear sentences like these:  ‘I want to lose 5 kilos but…’ I want to save money for the vacation but...’ ‘I want to learn baking but…’ I find that when these people talk about their dreams, their eyes light up. But as soon as they speak the word ‘but’, their brains stop being resourcefu...

When faced with a challenge, how do you react? Do you feel helpless or do you feel empowered? How you feel depends on the rule book about yourself that you carry in your head. Psychologist Albert Bandura has defined self-efficacy as belief in one's ability to succeed in specific situations. One's sense of self-efficacy can play a major role in how one approaches goals, tasks, an...

Experience shows us that our best laid plans can fail. But fear of failure is not a reason to keep us from achieving our dreams. To reduce the fear of failure of Plan A, one needs to develop a Plan B. What’s plan B? Plan B, as we know already, is what you will follow if Plan A doesn’t occur. Plan B can also be a corrective action against Plan A. The trick is to have Plan B worke...

As a coach, I understand that whether a problem is big or small is a matter of perspective and personal strengths. Emotional intelligence and maturity can go a long way in helping some of us cope better with our problems. That said anyone can take better stock of what’s bothering them if they break it down. I like to think of the problem as a mountain and breaking it down involves whi...

Imagine this. You’re considering switching jobs. One part of your brain is focused on all the great things about the new job. But another part of your brain is pulling you in a completely different direction. This part of your brain is raising alarms: What if this is a mistake? What if it doesn’t pan out? What happens when I’m out of a job? In other words, this part of your brain is floo...

What makes us do what we do? Why do some of us excel at writing, some at managing tasks, and some at building consensus? The answer is motivation. Whatever we do at any given point is driven by a motive. But sometimes, we don’t know our own motives. When that happens, we have less knowledge of who we are and cannot control how we feel.  All our actions can be traced back to six mot...

A friend of mine was once passed up for a promotion to be COO of the company she was working in. It was a small place and she had helped it grow significantly from the time she came in. She has a strong work ethic but over the years, had grown into a high-strung person with a lot of pent-up rage. I used to wonder about this but she told me it was just the ‘pressures of work’ and other st...