It occurred to me that at the weekend that 13 years ago this week, I took my first steps to establishing a career as a Corporate and Executive Coach.

How quickly that time has gone and I am so pleased that I acted on the little voice inside of me that said I should find out more, when I saw an advert in a newspaper that stated “Train to be a Coach”.

When I started my training to be a coach, we had to undertake practical sessions with our peers to develop our knowledge and experience. In my first session my colleague asked me what I would like to achieve in life. My instinctive reply was that I would like to be happy and successful.

He then asked me a very simple but powerful question. How do you define success and happiness? “Good question” I said, because I had not clearly defined it for myself.

During the remainder of the session, we then spent some time coming up with my personal definition of happiness and success.

The way we did this was to take a sheet of paper and write down 10 bullet points that reflected both happiness and success for me. It doesn’t have to be 10 bullet points (it can be just 5 points).

Following the end of the session, I developed the framework by giving a score out of 10 (1 being low, 10 being high) for each of the bullet points. These scores reflected my satisfaction with each element. For the areas where I wanted to improve the score, I set myself a target score and noted down a few action steps to help me achieve this. I then regularly rescored the areas to see how I was progressing.

It was a simple but really excellent exercise and I have recommended it to many people since. It gave me clarity and a great framework to compare how I was doing in life against my own unique definition. I realised in that moment that if you are not specific with your goals you have no clear way of determining how you are doing.

Something that I have noticed when I have done this exercise with customers is that when I asked them to describe their definitions for happiness, their descriptions often include things that do not cost a great deal of money and in some instances are free. Perhaps there is some truth in the old saying “the best things in life are free!”

We get one life, it’s short. Everyone has the right to be happy and we can all do our best to not delay or defer our happiness. Choose to be happy starting right now!

This week I suggest you take some time to define what happiness means to you? You might want to do the same for your definition of success too.

Once you have completed this initial step, you may want to give yourself a score out of 10 for how satisfied you are with each element (10 being high, I being low) and come up with a few action steps to help you improve your satisfaction scores.

Quotes for the week:

“Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.” W.P. Kinsella.

“People are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.” Abraham Lincoln.

To arrange a free no obligation consultation, please contact Stephen Pauley via the contact form or by e mail: Stephen@befirstclass.co.uk