Last weekend I attended a conference in Denver called “The Absence of You.” It could also have been subtitled, “I Know What I Want and I Know What I Need to Do So Why Aren’t I Doing It?!” A very timely topic for me these days.

I made the decision to become a professional coach a couple years ago and since then have made a lot of changes. I’ve started a business, Murdoch Coaching, taken classes through Coachville, and done an awful lot of thinking on what the focus of my practice should be. I’m very enthusiastic and interested by nature and you’d think choosing a practice focus would be pretty easy. It’s been a surprise to me that it’s been so difficult.

The irony is that much of what I like to help clients with is on product development and marketing. I feel very comfortable working with clients to understand what their customers want and how to market those products to customers. And I can’t seem to take action to do it for myself. I get really frustrated when I think about it. Which is why I don’t think about it too much these days. Thinking doesn’t work.

Which gets me back to the conference.

It seems to me that there are two separate issues most folks face when they want to make a significant change in their lives. First is getting clear on the change. It’s one thing to say “I hate my job!” People say it all the time. It gets tricky when you know you don’t want to get a job in the same industry. You used to be a programmer and getting another programming job is entirely unappealing.

So now you need to start getting clear on what do you want to do. Change careers? Start your business? Both?

And once you get some clarity, you have to begin taking the action to get yourself there. That means doing things like picking up the phone, doing research, sending emails.

Coaches work with their clients on both.

What’s interesting though is why we don’t do what we know we need to do. For example, I KNOW I need to make some phone calls to get a book project going. In fact, it’s been on my “to do” list now for about three weeks. So what’s up?

And that’s where the Core Dynamics come in.

OK, I’m tapped out for now. Hopefully I’ll feel like writing Part II tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2004 at 10:49 am and is filed under What I'm working on.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.