Coach offers tips for success in life, business

What are your biggest business challenges? Attracting new clients, marketing your business, controlling cash flow, educating your staff, balancing work and play?

A new approach to business and life is geared up and ready to help people here in the Valley.

This new approach is called business and life coaching. Business coaching is designed to bring additional resources to entrepreneurs, small businesses and even large corporations, and provide new solutions.

Life coaching is an integral part of the process because work is a time- consuming but very necessary part of the lives of many people. Business and life coaching is a way to turn problems into profit, according to Lavonne Boyd, a business/life coach and owner of Coach on Tap, which is based here in the Valley.

"Coaching is a confidential relationship where the client brings the content," Boyd said. "The process is based on respect, growth and achievement and focuses on the results you desire within your business and life."

Through either a team workshop environment or in a one-on-one session, a coach could act as a mentor providing guidance through difficult situations, as a sounding board or even just someone for a client to talk with about the ins and outs of business and life.

Coaching can be used when someone wants to reach for excellence in leadership, accelerate movement toward solutions and bottom-line results, receive inspiration for ideas and strategies geared toward success, exceed performance expectations, detect problems early, build better performing teams, accelerate business growth and better balance work and family life.

Before the first session even starts, Boyd sends an e-mail with some questions she would like the client to answer or, at the very least, think about before the session. She said a client's focus should not be on the "should'ves, would'ves, could'ves," but to focus on the present and future.

The first thing she asks clients to do is write a short description of where they are in life right now -- encompassing everything from personal, spiritual to business and financial aspects of their lives.

Boyd emphasized that clients could share as much or as little with her as they wanted, but that it was important for them to know where they are now and how they got to where they are. Only then, she said, would they be able to know how to get where they are going.

The next exercise prior to the session is for clients to make a list of their five personal and business values and identify whether they were the same or different.

"For the most part, people seldom identify their own values," Boyd said. "Many times people will adopt their company's lofty values and then get burned out because the office culture doesn't even come close to these ideal corporate values that they were striving to meet."

Once they've identified what their personal and business values are, clients are asked to think about some of the positive and negative beliefs associated with these values. Are a client's values driven solely by earning money or are they driven by a desire for strong customer relationships? Are they faith-based values structured around religious beliefs? The goal is to find just what sort of things a client puts emphasis on, and why.

Another thing clients are asked to think about prior to the first session is whether they had a statement of purpose for their business or personal life.

Business owners focus on this issue in the beginning with their mission statement, which oftentimes falls to the wayside because they get too busy or never really put much stock in the mission statement in the first place -- viewing it more as a step for starting a business rather than as a foundation on which to ground an entire business.

According to Entrepreneur magazine, "A mission statement is a key tool that can be as important as your business plan. It captures, in a few succinct sentences, the essence of your business's goals and the philosophies underlying them."

Boyd suggests writing down a statement of purpose which may or may not be a business mission statement -- not just as a tool for business but also as a tool for life. It can serve as a personal reminder of where a person is going in life and how he or she plans to get there.

In people's business and personal lives there are many things that are tolerated, largely due to time restraints and the constant press to deal with the "bottom lines" in business and life.

These things can involve anything from a frustrating filing system to a disheveled sock drawer. The point in identifying these small annoyances is to help a person make a concentrated effort by setting aside the necessary time to deal with these issues.

"By making time to deal with these annoyances we can ultimately create more time for more important things," Boyd said. "Then we don't have to suffer through tolerating things that could have been fixed simply by taking the time to do it."

Just as a business develops both a short-term and long-term plan, Boyd suggests that clients also design and develop a life plan. One of the next questions Boyd asks clients is whether they had designed and put into writing a life plan for the next 50 years.

What do you want to do and see before you die? What do you want to leave as a legacy to the world? What kind of impact do you want your life to have on people, based on your actions? These are all difficult questions that require a great deal of thought from most people.

However, just as the business plan helps a business stay on track and get money from lenders, the life plan helps individuals stay focused and encourages saving time and money for things they want to accomplish.

Another question asks clients what their five most pressing challenges are. Everyone has some measure of difficulties, and whether they are personal or business related doesn't make that much difference, according to Boyd.

"When a person puts in eight to 10 hours a day at work," Boyd said, "most people are not able to make that separation between personal and business life because your work is your life."

By writing down or even talking about pressing challenges, clients can ensure those challenges have been identified and that they realize the importance of dealing with these struggles.

Once that stage has been accomplished, Boyd said, clients need to choose the most important of those challenges to deal with first. She advises them to take the time to identify the challenges, then develop a plan and set aside more time to deal with them.

Boyd also encourages her clients to participate in three exercises:

Meditate at least five minutes every day. The goal behind the meditation is that you take the time to settle down and focus inward.

Write a short gratitude journal every night before you go to sleep. The goal of this exercise is to focus on the important positives in your life. "It's easy for people to focus on the negative or discouraging aspects of their life," Boyd said. "By writing down the positive things, you're shifting your focus and will be able to sleep easier and just feel better."

Following the same premise as the gratitude journal, spend some time in the evening writing down five of your successes for the day. This allows people to determine a sort of measuring system for their success and take steps to get closer to reaching their goals.

"The experience of working with a business life coach is different for every person," Boyd said. "Some people don't think they need a coach, which is fine, but that's why I offer a free complimentary session."

For more information on business life coaching, go to www.coachville.com or contact Lavonne Boyd at 892-4220.

Contact Michael White at mike.white@frontiersman.com.