Coaching Blog
The Coaching Group Of Switzerland

You’re crushing your job interview. You’ve nailed every question thrown at you, and nothing has tripped you up. As the conversation winds down, you’re oozing confidence. Then your interviewer hits you with one final test:
“So, do you have any questions for me?”

It’s your last chance to impress the employer and make sure the job is a good fit for you — but you need to tread carefully. If you ask the wrong type of question, or the wrong number of them, you risk leaving a bad impression.
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We’ve consulted with hiring experts to come up with seven questions to ask — and a few to avoid — to end your interview on a strong note.

How to prepare questions for your interview

Many of us submit to the comfort of living in our herd, but this doesn't have to be you. Through personal transformation, you can find what you value personally and break free from imposed beliefs by creating your own.
I got to a point in my life where I went on a journey to find myself. I took time out to think about what I really wanted, what my life would look like if I knew I couldn't fail.
My herd would have kept me in a legal career; what about all my other interests and passions? I decided to pluck up the courage and follow my aspirations of being a therapist. My herd thought that I was strange; I just wanted to explore how I could help people in a more emotional way as well as a practical way through law.

On my journey, I met phenomenal people. I realised that this 'self-awareness' is the foundation of being a great leader.
This article describes four simple steps based on Nietzsche's philosophy that will get you started on finding yourself.

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN an indecisive person. What to wear, which menu item to pick, when to do house chores, always thinking through scenarios before committing to even the most trivial of choices.
If this sounds like you, you’re certainly not unusual: Many people struggle with these issues. Our new research may not be able to help you choose which restaurant to go to, but it might reassure you. Decisive people may be more confident in the choices they make, but they are no better at making decisions than the rest of us.

One of the worst mistakes founders and execs will ever make is to hire or promote someone into a leadership role who manages through an insatiable ego as their driving force for every thought and decision.
But it happens. And when hubris becomes a stronghold in your culture, it can be the cause of much conflict and unneeded drama for employees. A quick example: Managers who destroy morale by putting themselves on a pedestal as the source for all the answers, and use it to wield power over their people.

The damaging effects of hubris
Research says that people exhibiting "hubristic pride" (as opposed to a more healthy and authentic pride) were found to be narcissistic, reflecting feelings of arrogance, grandiosity, and superiority. They also experienced more interpersonal conflicts and, ironically enough, were prone to shame. 
Truth is, these people hurt businesses in many ways. In my own observations as an executive coach, I have seen these behaviors in leaders exhibiting hubristic pride:

• Taking credit for other people's work, thereby distancing themselves from others.
• Exaggerating stories and accomplishments, because the simple truth doesn't get enough of a reaction.
• Feeling entitled to star treatment because of their position or title. 
• Lacking accountability and failing to exercise active and respectful listening.
  

As Henry Ford so wisely stated: "If you think you can, or cannot - either way you are right".
In other words if you think and therefore believe something to be true, then it is your truth.

• If you believe you cannot do something... you cannot and most probably will not even try, or try to find a way, to do it.
• If you believe you can figure something out ... you will find a way.
  
  

Your beliefs can be negative or positive, therefore limit or empower you.

If you are not quite 'the person you want to be', then it pays off to find out if it is a thought (belief) holding you back.

The thought could be anything from 'I do not know how', 'I do not have any support', 'I do not know where to start', 'I am uncertain about this,' etc.

Sometimes it’s necessary to provide feedback, but it can be a delicate situation.

You’ve probably heard that people don’t quit jobs; they quit bosses. In today’s hiring market with record numbers of employees resigning, that may or may not always be true. But bad bosses can definitely be a factor for employees who decide to leave.

“I think that a lot of people are saying, ‘Hey, I’ve been putting up with this manager for way too long. All of a sudden, we are in an incredible job market, and I’m going to take my chances and test it out and see if there is a better fit and a better opportunity available,'” says Stephanie Lovell, head of marketing for Hirect, a hiring app for tech startup founders.

If you’re considering leaving your job because of your manager, consider this: What if your boss is a fixer upper? A diamond in the rough? Someone who just needs some input on how to do a better job? Giving your boss feedback may not only be a way to correct your frustration; it can be helpful for your boss, too. It can also be tricky.

But instead of diving into a list of grievances, consider these steps:

Do you often feel overwhelmed, that you have too much for you to do and you can't get to it all? That's a very common feeling, says Anna Dearmon Kornick, certified time management coach and head of community at Clockwise, which makes time management software for teams. But the reason for that feeling may not be what you think it is, she says.
It may not be because you have too much work to do. It could be that you have too many different important matters to focus on at once. "All of that context switching leads to ovewhelm," she says in an interview with Inc.com.

Worse, it can create the illusion that you aren't getting anything done. "We're basically making an inch of progress on all our projects, instead of making a lot of progress in one area," she says. "It's so small that you get frustrated by the fact that you're not seeing major progress, which gives you negative feelings about the projects, which causes you to feel bad about yourself or think you're not good enough."

Managers expect a lot from their employees, but let’s turn it around: what should employees be expecting from their managers?

Whoever manages a team doesn’t just manage their to-do list, targets and professional roles — at the end of the day, they’re dealing with people. And we all come with our own list of demands and needs, both inside and out of work.

It’s time employees were put first. Not out of greed or to be spoiled, but to become more efficient, productive, engaged employees. Here’s how your manager should be supporting your lifestyle and helping you achieve your career goals.

1. Are they offering valuable wellbeing perks?
A lot of times, managers get well-being in the workplace all wrong. Let’s set one thing straight: well-being can never be managed or established in only one place. If you want your employees to feel great at work, take care of them outside of work. Let’s break down what well-being is all about, first.

Many of history’s famous philosophers, artists, scientists, writers, and creators valued value walking as much as they valued productive work. Aristotle, Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Friedrich Nietzsche and many others made time for long walks.

They used long walks for contemplation, reflection and problem-solving. They found walking helped them think better, ponder over ideas and get more done once they got back to writing, creating, designing or composing.

"The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow,” Henry David Thoreau, a philosopher, poet, and environmental scientist, once said.
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Aristotle used to conduct some of his lectures while walking on the school grounds. William Wordsworth once said walking was “indivisible” from the creative act of writing poetry.

Charles Dickens used to walk for 20 miles after writing in the morning.
“If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish,” Dickens once said.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant walked at the same time in the afternoon and took the same route almost every day.

Friedrich Nietzsche used to walk for an hour in the morning and three hours in the afternoon. “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”

• For small teams or Start-Ups that are focusing on crucial projects, the BG5 assessment and intervention allow you to see the underlying mechanics of the team and engineer the way to high performance. 
• You find out what key business and team skills are missing on the team, e.g., planning, administration, accounting, oversight, sales, marketing, coordination. These gaps are a problem because they become the focus of the team, distracting from the important work at hand.
• With BG5, you can explore practical ways to fill the specific gaps on the team—often without hiring more staff.
• You can also see the interpersonal communication challenges on the team—and when conflict is good and when it’s not.

by Susan Begeman Steiner, Career, Team and Executive Coach
Photo credit: Unsplash

Remember that life is complicated and can be more difficult at times. Sometimes it feels like a rollercoaster ride! Cleaning your life up, getting rid of the deadwood, and finding your place of balance forms a wonderful grounding foundation to build on. Feeling you are in balance is the best, most powerful place to work from and a place to come back to when things are difficult. Being familiar with the feeling of being in balance allows you to know exactly what you want to get back to. This also offers you the goal to strive for. Life will always contain difficult times. Trusting yourself to handle these difficult times gives you the confidence to deal with them.
 
If your life feels like it is a mess and you are ready to take some action, there are many different approaches to consider. Support from a professional or wise friend, meditation, spiritual beliefs, sometimes even just taking a “time out” holiday is incredibly beneficial. Find the option that suits your personality and lifestyle best. You are looking to be more grounded in the present, calmer, which will offer more clarity.
 
You are more likely to stay on track with making the necessary changes with a realistic clear mind.
 
To get yourself on track to feeling better and living the kind of life you wish for, ask yourself:

Statistics show that over 20 percent of newly established businesses in the U.S. close within the first two years. That equates to around 155,000 companies, which is quite an astounding number. If you do not want your startup to be a part of these statistics, it may be time to start thinking outside the box. 

One way to ignite the creative spark within you is to create mind maps. Online mind mapping is a tool that is readily available and can increase innovation. Entrepreneurial creativity is now a necessity in this changing business landscape. To survive, business people need to be adaptable and innovative.

Let’s examine how mind maps can act as the key to unlocking an entrepreneur’s creative side.

Develop Creative Habits
People think creativity is something you are born with. However, that is not always true.

Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, has wise hiring advice for companies seeking good leaders.  
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While you may think his advice is firmly entrenched in the common sense camp -- I mean, it should be a non-negotiable requirement when hiring for top leadership positions, right? -- it's often not common practice. Buffett once said,
We look for three things when we hire people.

• we look for intelligence,
• we look for initiative or energy,
• we look for integrity.
  
  

And if they don't have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you're going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb.

An assumption is a thought or conclusion drawn when someone says or does something. It is a reaction.  You do not have the full picture or asked any questions yet to be able to make an informed decision.  Conclusions are often based on assumptions which could be incorrect. They are not backed up by fact yet treated as the truth. 
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Assumptions have the potential to confuse a situation, and everyone involved. For example, silence or nodding does not always mean the person agrees. They could be simply acknowledging they heard you.  They might not agree yet in that moment are not ready to comment. 
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You cannot  know if what you are assuming is the truth unless you ask questions to get more information and clarification. Listen carefully and ask questions if you are not sure or need further information to form an opinion.

Most people assume that the solution to their emotional struggles is to do more:

• I’m feeling anxious, so I need to do some kind of coping skill like deep breathing or mindfulness meditation to calm myself down.
• I’m feeling angry at the memory of the abuse I suffered as a child so I need to try and understand and analyze why they did that to me.
• I’m feeling sad that my daughter has left and gone away to college so I should probably call her.

But here’s the problem…
The more you do to try and get rid of emotions directly, the stronger they’ll get.
Take sadness, for example:

• If every time you feel sad, you immediately try to get rid of it by doing something, you’re teaching your brain that it’s bad to feel sad.
• This means the next time you feel sad, you’re going to feel fear and shame on top of the sadness.

The solution is to develop emotional anti-skills.
A skill is when you learn how to do something in order to achieve a positive outcome; an anti-skill is learning how to not do something in order to achieve a positive outcome.

Here’s how I think about mental strength:
Mental strength is the ability to control your mind instead of being controlled by it.
For example:

• Instead of getting sucked into spirals of self-criticism and shame, mental strength is what allows you to redirect your attention and thinking somewhere else less destructive — like that conversation you’re having with your son or the report you’re supposed to be drafting.
• Rather than impulsively responding to your spouse’s sarcastic comment with a witty jab of your own, you are able to resist the impulse and either say nothing or mention assertively that you don’t appreciate the sarcasm.

Now, obviously there are aspects of your mind that you can’t control… Whether a specific memory pops into mind, for example. Or whether you feel afraid of almost getting run over by a car.

So becoming mentally strong doesn’t mean you are able to exert complete control over everything that goes on between your ears.
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Mental strength means understanding which parts of your mind you can control and being able to do it well when it matters. For example:

Happy holidays to you from the Coaching Group of Switzerland. Suzie, Davide, and Susan thank you for all you are doing to bring light to the world. 

Core values are personal to each individual. They can be described as your code of ethics, your fundamental principles, your standards, or personal rules. I like to refer to them as the bricks you build your foundation on. Knowing what you truly value in life, what makes you feel fulfilled and gives you a sense of meaning, connects you to your true self and is an important part of your personal development.
 
Core values are about YOU – not what society, the media, your education, your colleagues and friends or family deem as important, or of value, but what is important to you, what you value.
 
Stress tends to set in when you are not treating these values with the respect they deserve.
 
Not respecting your core values means you are not respecting your true self. In turn your self-esteem could suffer, which of course in turn decreases the quality of your day-to-day life. When the feeling of being calm and peaceful is present, and the quality of day-to-day life is high, you feel good about yourself and who you are. Your self-esteem and self-worth benefit from this.

Caroline Myss, a five-time New York Times bestselling author and internationally renowned speaker in the fields of human consciousness and mysticism, says, “Being able to speak and live with the truth, your truth, means you have to become comfortable with having your power, be comfortable with all that is true about you, all that is beautiful about yourself, this is being okay with yourself.”
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Consider the Core Values Process I offer as a gift to yourself.
The focus can be on your life, your overall life which would include your career, your career alone or your leadership values (this is a great exercise to do as a new leader or to update your existing leadership skills aligning them with your personality). 

by Suzie Doscher, Executive Coach, Life Coaching - Focusing on Personal Development, Self-help Author: Balance - a Practical Handbook for Life's Difficult Moments
​Photo credit: Shutterstock

Lessons from Rebekah Taussig on honoring and celebrating our bodies.

Self-acceptance is essential to self-care and our overall well-being. If we can’t accept ourselves, our well-being is going to suffer, regardless of how diligent we are about any other physical and mental health practices. 

Still, even with all the progress we’ve made in recent years on body positivity and mental health, the radical act of accepting ourselves for who we are has never been more challenging. Our society surrounds us with images of what supposedly healthy and perfect bodies look like. And of course, much of that is fueled by social media, which, in study after study, has been shown to damage our body image and self-acceptance. So how can we learn to accept ourselves and show up for ourselves in a way that nurtures our well-being?

To begin to answer this question, I had the privilege of talking with Rebekah Taussig on a recent episode of Deloitte’s “WorkWell” podcast. Rebekah is a writer, teacher, and advocate, whose popular Instagram feed, @sitting_pretty, is filled with what she calls “Mini memoirs.” I was thrilled to talk to her about her new book, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, in which she chronicles her journey to self-acceptance with her trademark candor, humor, vulnerability, and authenticity.

You did it. You made it out — hopefully with some shred of sanity and sense of personal self-worth. But even if those things feel unrecoverable, they aren’t. You can get them back.

Maybe you’ve moved on to greener pastures. If that’s the case, well done. You’ve taken an important step towards preserving (or gaining back) your emotional and physical health.

Maybe, although less likely, your boss either moved on or was fired. Most of the time, these situations don’t fix themselves, as for some reason senior leadership would rather keep a single toxic boss employed than the multiple high-quality employees who leave because of them.

In either case, there’s a residual emotional and physical toll that lasts well beyond the end of the boss-employee relationship. I know; I’ve been there.
In the span of just two years of reporting to a toxic boss, I went from being a high-performing, high-potential engineering leader to nearly leaving the company I’d spent 15 years at because of one single person. My boss. That’s how badly I needed to get away from her.
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What you do changes the trajectory of your life — not what you think.
Don’t get me wrong; smart thinking influences our actions more than we think. But to make real change that gets you close to what you want, you have to take become a doer.
Aristotle was right, “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”
The only way to close the gap between where you are now and what you want for your future self is by taking the right action consistently.

Choosing to take action is a choice that comes with responsibility, sacrifice and a lot of grit. Nobody can practically push to do anything more than yourself.

Instead of convincing yourself that you can’t do something, say yes to the right opportunities, habits, routines and behaviours that guarantee real progress or a much better life.

An assumption is a thought or conclusion drawn when someone says or does something. It is a reaction.  You do not have the full picture or asked any questions yet to be able to make an informed decision.  Conclusions are often based on assumptions which could be incorrect and not backed up by fact yet treated as the truth. 
​
Assumptions have the potential to confuse a situation, and everyone involved. For example, silence or nodding does not always mean the person agrees. They could be acknowledging they heard you but do not agree yet in that moment are not ready to comment. 
​
You cannot  know if what you are assuming is the truth unless you ask questions to get more information and clarification. Listen carefully and ask questions if you are not sure or need further information to form an opinion.

The brain is wired to keep you safe and fulfill your core needs such as nutrition, shelter, community, pleasure, reproduction, and emotional expression. This establishes an idea of where you are, who and