11 Mums Who Coach on a Canal Boat
On Wednesday I ran a Business Retreat Day for the “Mums Who Coach” groups I mentor. As you can imagine, when a group of working mums get together, nothing is off limits and anything goes!
However, whilst our canal boat crew were all mums, we were also all coaches, and the purpose of the day was to focus on our coaching, how we can be the best coaches for our clients and how we can build successful professional coaching practices…..whilst also juggling our commitments as mothers!
Here are three of the main themes that weaved throughout the day, no matter what was on the agenda…
- Be yourself
Success comes when we truly know ourselves – not from trying to be like someone else, but by accepting ourselves. That may sound obvious, but more often than not, we’re too busy as working mums to stop and look at who we really are and how we are evolving. Two of the coaches said yesterday, “I am just me.. and I’m happy being me”. By really getting to know and accept yourself, you will, quite simply, be happier and more successful.Coach yourself question
Who are you when you peel away the label of “mum” and all the other labels you use to describe yourself?
- Enlist Support
We all need it, we all recognise the difference it makes when we have support and how difficult it is to be successful in any venture without the help and support and encouragement of other people. This is true for anyone, and particularly for you as a working mum!Coach yourself question
What support do you need right now?
- Confidence
I have never met a working mum who is supremely confident in ALL areas of her life. Apart from the challenges we deal with at work on a daily basis, let’s face it, as parents we are on a a constant learning curve: Just as we become confident feeding the baby, he becomes a toddler and presents us with a whole new set of challenges. The toddler becomes an adolescent, who becomes a teenager who becomes an adult and in between all of these stages we will face thousands of mini and major learning curves. Our confidence only grows as we learn to deal with something new and the only way we can learn is by just doing it, even if it’s trial and error!There is no simple answer to the question “How do you increase your confidence?” other than to get out there and face the situation in which you’re lacking confidence. Confidence is like stretching – the more you stretch your body, the further you’ll stretch. But you have to do it little by little and you have to keep doing it!Coach yourself question
Think of an area of your life in which you are lacking in confidence right now. What is one tiny thing you could try to ever so slightly increase your confidence?
