I was recently watching a TV show with a couple experiencing the infancy stage of their relationship. You may know how that feels because you have probably been there. This is the time period in which everything is going well, you are in tune with your partner, and you both are affectionate and loving.
The beginning of a relationship is generally the best part of any relationship. You cannot wait to see the other person. You are both being communicative and willing to settle disagreements quickly. But, in the back of your mind, you may be thinking to yourself this is just too good to be true.
This is when things can get cagey and you may start to self-sabotage your relationship. Fortunately, you can prevent this from happening.
Art Sims of WVON 1690 and I recently talked about some ways singles can prevent the holiday blues. Here’s what we discussed during the talk radio show.
It’s that time of year again. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s bring lots of holiday excitement. There is much emphasis on seeing family, friends, and loved ones. But when you are single, the holiday season can feel lonely.
Most people have high expectations around the holiday season. There is much involvement with family, visits and parties with friends, a lot of holiday anticipation, and excitement coupled with stress. There is pressure to give the perfect gift, have the perfect meal, and experience the perfect holiday. This can lead to pressuring yourself to expend a great deal of energy in order to please everyone. This is usually followed by exhaustion and emotional letdown once the holidays are over.
Whenever a celebrity reveals that he or she has a sexually transmitted disease (STD) known referenced as Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI), the media explodes with the “news.” Then most of us talk about it. How could this have happened to a rich, successful icon? Did he do something to deserve the affliction? Why did he fail to prevent it?
Charlie Sheen is not the first celebrity to admit to test positive for HIV status. Nor will he be the last. And while his lifestyle placed him at a higher risk, this was not necessarily the direct indicator or predictor for contracting a STI. However, Sheen’s diagnosis is a reminder that sexually transmitted diseases do not discriminate based on age, gender, or socioeconomic status. No matter who you are, if you do not make a conscious decision to have safer sex, the results can be life changing.
Life is a crazy thing and very inconsistent. It can be lovely, devastating, and uncharacteristic for the most part. You start off your life with good intentions. You don’t see divorce, death, illness and setbacks as part of your lives. We are eternally optimistic. In fact, we feel we will overcome much of the strife that we actually will in fact face. But, the reality is that we are likely to experience one or more of these events as we go though our lives.
Divorce selfies are trending on Twitter and Instagram under the hashtag #divorceselfies. This is an interesting phenomenon involving people who wish to publicize their divorce. They typically post a happy picture of themselves as a couple following the finalization of the divorce. Many acknowledge how glad they are to have had the relationship, but speak of accepting that the relationship did not work out. This is a sign of couples opting to bow out gracefully during the process of divorce.
This is a new trend in divorce. Gone is the acrimony, the fights, the anger and bad blood. Instead, many couples are admitting that the relationship did not work for them, choosing instead to end things on good terms. They are celebrating the good that happened in the relationship, honoring the marriage experience, and moving on to friendship or even to working together to co-parent post marriage.
Not that long ago, there was a stigma attached to being divorced. You were odd man or woman out if you were a single parent. People felt ashamed when a marriage ended up in divorce. This new trend is a completely different way to look at a failed marriage. In fact, the progression marks a significant social change.
A recent interview with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie indicated several impressive aspects of their relationship. I wasn’t surprised. But many people might be. After all, the general public has a range of reactions to the two superstar celebrities.
If you polled people about Brad and Angelina’s marriage and how they feel about the couple, responses would be polarized. Some find their relationship romantic and inspirational. But many people cling to opinions from the past. They think Brad was stolen away from Jennifer Aniston, to whom he was married when he fell for Angelina. They may claim Angelina was a home-wrecker who broke up Brad’s marriage.
I beg to differ. I believe the truth lies somewhere in between and what we did not see is more important than what was told to us via tabloids, gossip, and third person accounts.
I am not sure why, but failure gets a bad reputation.
If you study the lives of individuals who are highly successful, failure is almost always the stepping-stone to their success. In fact, without that failure, these highly successful people might not have been able to understand, achieve, or maintain their success.
Failure is not celebrated in our society. We focus on the one who succeeds and wins, not the one who fails, even if he or she eventually wins. But, inevitably, failure is a key factor in everyone’s success.
Statistics bear this out. It took Thomas Edison over 1,000 tries before he experienced success with his invention of the light bulb. When Edison was asked how he felt about failing 1,000 times before he figured it out, he stated, “The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”
Edison realized that it did not matter how many tries it took him to invent the light bulb. What was more important was what he learned during each of these tries, which led to him eventually figuring out the right process.
Michael Jordan, one of the most iconic players in the history of basketball, is often noted for his successes, his comebacks, and his game winning shots. However, Michael Jordan has candidly explained that his success would not have happened without his failures.
Michael missed over 9,000 shots during this career. And, in 26 instances when he was trusted to take the winning shot, he missed them. As a kid, he wasn’t even chosen to play on his high school basketball team. Still, he did not give up. And by not giving up, having failures and moving past them, he became one of the most successful basketball players of his time.
HOW DOES FAILURE RELATE TO COACHING SUCCESS?
When people first start coaching, they are ready to help others change their lives. But what they don’t realize is this: success will come, but not without failure(s) first.
When you start off as a new coach, you want immediate success. You have taken this leap of faith because you think that you can teach and help others. And this may be true for you.
However, whenever you are building any type of business, there are always some learning lessons along the way. These lessons may not be indicative of immediate success, but they are an important part of long-term success.
I used to get stuck in those moments when I did not see my efforts with clients come to fruition. It was frustrating, difficult, and I often wanted to quit. One time I did quit. I’d had enough.
But then I had some revelations. I reframed what I perceived as failures, and started looking at them as learning experiences instead.
I was able to look back on times when I did not have success in other business or personal endeavors and use these examples to remind myself how often in life I did not have immediate success. It often took time, patience, effort, and repetition of actions to get things going in the right direction. Sometimes this meant long hours of thinking through different scenarios, leaning on people who had more experience and asking for help.
Sometimes it meant letting go and seeing how things turned out by taking a step back. It’s all part of the process to attaining and maintaining success.
MOVING FROM FAILURE TO SUCCESS
WHEN YOU BECOME FRUSTRATED WITH YOUR COACHING BUSINESS AND FEEL LIKE GIVING UP, I ENCOURAGE YOU TO DO THE FOLLOWING:
Reflect on why you started on this path and use that to motivate you through the peaks and valleys.
Find others who have established the kind of coaching business you admire. Reach out to them for advice, feedback, and inspiration. You will be surprised at how responsive and helpful people are in sharing their experiences, set-backs, and successes, and how asking for help can shorten your learning curve.
Be open to continually changing and adapting. Without adapting and changing in a business, you will become stagnant and lose momentum.
FOCUS ON RECOVERY
In order to succeed, you need to reevaluate the way in which you look at failure.
A great analogy for this is the game of golf. While we see the great shots in golf, what we often do not give golfers credit for are the bad shots. Professional golf players take thousands of practice shots in order to figure out what works and what does not. They are only able to craft the perfect shot after they have made many imperfect shots.
Even with all of this practice, often during an 18-hole tournament a player will make bad shots. What differentiates the better golf players is the way they recover from the bad shots.
After making a bad shot, a good golfer does not focus on the bad shot but on how to recover and adjust from it. They will accept the bad shot and adjust how they hit the next shot, to keep moving forward towards finishing the game.
Coaching can be viewed in much the same way.
As your coaching business grows, you will learn which clients are a fit for you and your business, and which clients are not. You will figure out how to navigate coaching with a person based on their personality and demeanor so you can drive results for them.
You will figure out that you may not always have the answer for a client, but as you see various coaching scenarios play out over and over in different situations, you will strengthen your ability to become a better problem solver.
But this can only happen by taking the first step, the second next, and the next step. And when things get tough and you want to throw in the towel, take the time to recollect all the steps you took which led to your previous successes.
This will help you to see it through, keep going, and achieve the ultimate coaching success.
KEEP GOING
As Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”
Keep this in mind. And when you feel as though you are failing in your coaching business, keep moving forward.
Remember, any so called failures are actually the essential ingredients you need to move you towards a successful coaching business.
Elizabeth Overstreet is a Life Coach who resides in Chicago. She has a daughter in college, so she is using this time to pursue her passion with writing and helping others live their best life. You can visit her blog at www.relationshipinvestigator.com
As we get into the political season yet again, the pundits take aim at single parents, blaming us for increased crime, drug abuse, incarceration, poor parenting, poverty, and pretty much everything else under the sun.
As a single parent who raised a good, successful child, I get incensed just listening to the rhetoric. I am tired of the blame shifted to single moms for all of these ills. After all, it takes two to consummate a relationship and have a child.
If there are single moms, there are single dads too. So why isn’t the turmoil seen as a joint responsibility instead of all the blame being focused on one parent? Why don’t the pundits ever acknowledge the fact that single parents have certain advantages that two parent homes don’t? Why aren’t we helping those single parents struggling to raise their kids by providing them with what they need for raising a successful child?
In order to open up a dialogue about the topic, I want to dispel the myths.
Bill Cosby and other fragmented African-American men are a sore topic these days. Black males in America have been demoralized throughout our history and, as a result, the black community has become protective of their image, character representation, and how we discuss them in public.
Race discussions can be highly charged. We are hypersensitive because of the backlash associated with racism. Nobody wants to be perceived as a racist. There is also a troubling social double standard so whenever a minority male does something wrong, the reflection on the African-American community as a whole makes the matter worse.
I am a part of the African-American community. What disturbs me is when we either fail to address or try to justify bad behavior to protect a member of the black community. This does not have good consequences for us as individuals or as a community.
