Updated July 26th 2023
A friend of mine said to me recently: ‘You know if you live to be 80 years old, you will live 4,000 weeks?’
That shocked me to hear, put in that way! When I thought in weeks, I wondered, how much of each week do we all spend actually doing the things we want to, or should be doing?
Think about it, in the past week, how much time have you spent doing the things that you want to do? How effective have you managed to be? Have you implemented any changes aimed at enhancing your well-being and happiness? How much have you learnt or grown as an individual in a week? How many items are there on your list of things to do before you die, that you have not yet done? And another week has just gone by?!
How many weeks do you have left to live? None of us can say for sure!
We all often make promises to ourselves that we are going to do things differently, be that for the sake of our health, wellbeing, relationships, job etc. Then we find it difficult to have the discipline to see that promise to ourselves through.
The thing is that if we don’t see it through, the new behaviour never becomes automatic and so it eventually becomes too much of an effort. The only way to create new habits, is through repetition, until the new neural pathways are stronger than the original neural pathways (the ones that had you doing things the way that isn’t working out so well for you).
For most of us, it is not enough that we WANT to change something. What can often get us through, is having someone else hold us accountable. Having a family member or friend is often not enough, they may hesitate to hold us strictly accountable due to the importance of their relationship with us. In many cases, when we request someone close to us to fulfill this role and then encounter difficulties, we may inadvertently rebel by pointing out their own flaws or areas needing improvement. Hence, having a coach, someone who is not in a relationship (romantic, friend, family) with us, is often the only answer.
Most people who are achieving the success they want, have a coach, (some have many coaches). Most successful people will attribute much of their success to this coach, the person who won’t let them make excuses, or who will hear out the excuses, and then assist them in finding a better or more creative way to achieve what they want through effective coaching.
At Adaptas™, we have a strong focus on building coaching into our programmes, (face-to-face and online) to assist our delegates to keep moving forward, and to repeating the behaviours they need so that the brain changes take place that are required to make the behaviour automatic.
If you are struggling, how many more weeks of the 1, 2 or 3 thousand, you may or may not have left, are you going to wait, before you start working with someone, who will truly hold you accountable to living the life you desire?