Coaching Blog
The Coaching Group Of Switzerland

by Suzie Doscher, Life and Executive Coach - The Coaching Group of Switzerland

Learning how to respond to a situation rather than reacting brings huge rewards. Needless to say, it is one of those behaviour changes that are easier said than done. However it can be achieved.
Being able to respond to /act upon means you are in a mindful place - a place where you are aware of your thoughts and feelings. This means you have considered the situation and the response that best suits you.
'Responding' rather than 'reacting' means you are  choosing your behaviour. To 'react' indicates that a button has been pushed – something triggered you not to take the time to think and consider your response. This can often leave you in a position at the mercy of others.
Some of the benefits by stopping the knee-jerk type reactions are:

• Sense of strength,
• Sense of achievement
• Power to influence – yourself and the situation
• Calmness
• An increase in your self-esteem

The rewards will be felt not only in your private life, but also at work. 

 By Marcel Schwantes 

Ever wonder if you're true leadership material? Perhaps you've been told you are, but the question is, by what standard? Thousands of leadership books are written each year, many of them with marketing agendas to rehash and repackage what has been talked about for decades.

What is true about leadership that will remain unchanged through the centuries is this: It's about people and relationships. And that requires that leaders have a natural bent for both. If you're not into either, you're not a leader.

And you can start with the proven fact that great leaders aspire to lead by serving the needs of their people. You don't need flavor-of-the-month books and expensive formal training to learn this concept.

But you do need to develop and measure yourself against the standards of great leadership (which I strongly propose to be servant leadership). Here are four top leadership characteristics I have witnessed that float to the top. Do any describe you?  

BY STEPHANIE VOZZA - 4 MINUTE READ

​Ever have to psych yourself up to go to work? If that’s the case more often than not, your job might not align with your personal motives, says Carter Cast, author of The Right (and Wrong) Stuff: How Brilliant Careers are Made and Unmade.
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Strengths are your natural skillsets, and motives are the place from which you draw energy, says Cast. They differ from values, which are what’s important to you. “If you ask someone what their values are, they can rattle them off quickly,” he says. “Motives are much harder to identify because we’re often not conscious of them. They’re the river that flows under us.”
A mismatch in job and motives will wear you down and eventually cause you to fail to live up to your potential, says Cast. “Currently, the assumption is that if you took this job, it’s the right job for you,” says Cast. “But people who are smart, don’t have a skill gap, and are good interpersonally will underperform if they don’t have energy for position.”

by Cayla Vidmar posted on Thrive Global

I lay in bed in the middle of the night, looking at the ceiling when my chest seized up in excruciating pain. This chest pain was something that had been going on for some time, but this was next level. At that moment I realized something was wrong: I hated my job, the one I had worked so hard to get.

My job itself wasn’t overly stressful, but I couldn’t shake the thought that my life still wasn’t what I thought it should be, and it was quickly ticking by, with every year being the same as the last.
The work I was doing wasn’t changing people’s lives, I wasn’t helping anyone, I didn’t feel like there was any meaning in my day to day life.
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On top of that, I couldn’t figure out what my purpose was, or what I’d rather be doing. I was running in circles, consuming as much information as I could about starting businesses and flip-flopping from one passion to the next.

By Peter Barron Stark
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On a scale from 1-10, how would you rate your productivity as a leader? Many of us, if not all, wouldn’t rate ourselves as high on the productivity scale as we would like to be. Sometimes leaders feel like they are constantly busy but are somehow still unable to accomplish their goals. Have you ever started your workday with a list of things to do and at the end of the workday STILL had the same number of things to do?

If you are nodding your head in agreement as you read this, take a look at our recent blog post [1] which will walk you through conducting a time audit [2]. Once you have completed at least one time audit, you will be able to take a more objective look at how you spend your time. Chances are good that you will have several tasks on your list that can be delegated to your employees, freeing up more of your time to work on higher level assignments that will help you and your team achieve the organization’s goals.
 
It’s important to remember that as we rise further up the ladder in organizations, our responsibilities change from less emphasis on the operational or the “doing” tasks and more emphasis on the leadership tasks (managing, planning, leading).