Newsletter - Gita Coaching

* Life Coaching in Krsna Consciousness *

Over the past four years, I had been using coaching to help devotees improve their sadhana, japa, relationships with other devotees and family members, leadership and management, and skills they need in their service. Coaching provides structure for exploring what we want to achieve in Krsna consciousness and how we will please our spiritual master and Krsna.

It helps us become more focused and self-disciplined. I have been helping devotees to apply the verses from the Bhagavad-gita As It Is in their daily lives, like those in the Seventeenth Chapter that describe austerities in the mode of goodness. My service is helping ISKCON devotees to learn and apply Srila Prabhupada's instructions with enthusiasm and determination in order to achieve maximum spiritual success in this lifetime.

Srila Prabhupada wrote that when a diamond is set in a golden ring, it looks very nice. The gold is glorified, and at the same time the diamond is glorified.
The Lord and the living entity eternally glitter, and when a living entity becomes inclined to the service of the Supreme Lord he looks like gold. The Lord is a diamond, and so this combination is very nice. This is the goal of this Newsletter and of our Gita Coaching service to ISKCON devotees.

* Coaching on the Internet *

I will be posting coaching links in this Newsletter where you can learn about coaching. Please use whatever you find helpful for your spiritual life and ignore whathever is too mundane. If you need assistance, I am at your disposal. To start with, here's a link to Smart Question Coaching:

www.smartquestion.com/whyquestions.shtml

***

Newsletter #2

How to Identify Bad Habits

Be aware of the habits that are not working for you. Many of our habits, patterns, idiosyncrasies and quirks are invisible, causing one renowned author to observe, “We all need an education in the obvious.” So let’s look more closely at the habits that are perhaps holding us back. We are probably conscious of a few right away. Here are some common ones I have received from my coaching clients:

Not chanting attentively.
Not attending the morning program.
Not reading Srila Prabhupada's books daily.
Not returning phone calls on time.
Being late for meetings and appointments.
Poor communication between devotees.
A lack of clarity about expected outcomes,monthly targets, goals, etc.
Not allowing enough travel time for outside appointments.
Not attending to paperwork quickly and efficiently.
Allowing bills to go unpaid, resulting in interest penalties.
Talking instead of listening.
Hitting the snooze alarm several times in the morning before getting out of bed.
Not spending enough time with family.
Having a fast-food meals program Monday to Friday.
Eating at irregular times of the day.
Socializing too much on the telephone.
Making travel reservations at the last minute.
Not following through on time as promised, with other people’s requests.
Having mobile phone on all the time.
Controlling every decision, especially the small stuff you need to let go of!
Procrastinating on everything from filing taxes to cleaning out your garage.

Now check yourself out by making a list of all the habits that keep you unproductive. Block off an hour or more so you can really think through this process. And plan it so you won't be interrupted. It's a worthy exercise and will give you a strong foundation for improving your results in the years ahead. In fact, these bad habits, or obstacles to your goals, really act as a springboard to your future success. Until you clearly understand what is holding you back, it's difficult to create more productive habits.

Another way to identify your unproductive behavior is to ask for feedback.
Talk to people you respect and admire, and who know you well. Ask them what they observe about your bad habits. Look for consistency. If you talk to ten people and eight of them say you never return phone calls on time, pay attention. Remember this - your outward behavior is the reality, whereas your inner perception of your behavior is often an illusion. If you are open to good honest feedback, you can make adjustments quickly and eliminate bad habits permanently.

Coaching Website

www.thesuccessprinciples.com

Newsletter #3

What is Life Coaching?

Coaching is a partnership that helps devotees achieve solid results in their spiritual lives. Through the process of coaching, devotees learn more about themselves and their goals, improve their service and enhance the quality of their spiritual life.

What Happens in a Coaching Session?

The coaching process is designed to make the devotees more focused and aware of their spiritual and material choices, and through this helps them to achieve their Krsna conscious goals more quickly. The process concentrates on where devotees are today, what they want to achieve and what they are willing to do to achieve it. The coaching process depends on the devotee who is coached taking responsibility for taking action, and making their own decisions, not on the coach providing solutions.

In each coaching session, the devotee chooses the focus of conversation, while the coach listens and contributes observations and questions, with the aim of clarifying the devotee’s positions and options, in order to move them forward into taking action.

It is the coach’s responsibility to help the devotee discover and clarify what they want to achieve, encourage the devotee to discover more about themselves and their potential, work with the devotee to achieve Krsna conscious solutions and hold the devotee accountable for taking action.

The coaching relationship is built on trust and respect. It is non-judgmental, impartial and totally confidential. The coach and devotee will often draw up a coaching agreement, which helps clarify expectations and mutual responsibilities.

How is Coaching Delivered?

The most important thing in a coaching session is that both the devotee and the coach have committed their full time and attention to the session. The session itself can be delivered face-to-face, by email or by telephone. The telephone is so far the most popular medium for coaching as distance is not an obstacle and communication is clear.

Why Coaching?

We use the term coaching to differentiate between other types of help, training or intervention. Coaching is not:

• Teaching - is a transfer of knowledge
• Consulting - is a transfer of professional knowledge, expertise or experience • Therapy - is dealing with problems from the past to improve the future

Coaching may also help a devotee with their professional choices and career, as this may be part of the devotee’s life.

Executive or business coaching is more likely to primarily focus on work, but will also address life issues as a part of this process.

Whether you choose life coaching or executive coaching depends on your own personal circumstances or choices. In either case, you will receive the benefits of focused time and attention, the opportunity to think clearly about what you want to achieve and where you want to go, with no interruptions from other things happening in your life.

Influences

There are many influences on the field of coaching - from the familiar ground of sports coaching to philosophical and psychological models. Other influences include education, consulting, mentoring, training, counselling, leadership and organisational development and personal development.

The field of coaching is constantly developing. The Gita Coaching is carefully observing this development and using the available knowledge and tools in serving Krsna's devotees.

Coaching Link
www.coachville.com

Newsletter #4

What Makes Someone Become a Coach?

It's this two-way partnership that attracts people to coaching both the
coach- devotee and the client-devotee will benefit. Personal development is a huge part of coaching and you'll find that you'll grow yourself before you start helping others to do the same. An excellent coach finds out new things about themselves and is on a constant learning curve. Indeed, becoming a coach means a lifelong quest for your personal excellence. And it's this quest that might be your motivation to become a coach in the first place.

Assisting devotees discover where they want to go and helping them to get there is a tried and tested method that works - which is why there is now such an increase in the popularity of coaching.

Coaches share many of the same reasons for entering the profession:

- They like people and want to bring out the best in them
- They want to do something more fulfilling in their lives
- Their family, friends and colleagues previously turned to them for advice and help - they have natural "people" skills.

Coaching is all about helping yourself grow and become more self-aware, and at the same time, helping others to overcome obstacles which are stopping them from reaching their full potential.

Benefits that devotees can have by becoming a coach:

1. Provide accelerated personal growth and understanding of self 2. Elevate consciousness to the mode of goodness 3. Enhance current roles in devotional service and life 4. Better focus and clarified priorities 5. Provide more options in devotional service and life 6. Give you a skill and craft that is measured by the amount of service you put in 7. The ability to help devotees make lasting, positive changes is pleasing Lord Krishna and devotees

Newsletter #5

Enabling Process

Coaching is an enabling process. It fits well into the world in which we now live because it is diametrically opposed to a command-and-control approach to leadership. A coach assumes that devotees have inherent capacities, can learn what he needs to learn and, when correctly focused and inspired, will give his best; in many cases, he might out-perform what he and his authority though was possible. An effective coach helps a devotee to discover the best way of moving forward.

Interferences

One famous coach gave this formula for performance:

Performance = Potential - Interference

We all have tremendous dormant spiritual potential. Yet due to our conditioning by the modes of nature, we also have the ability to interfere with it. Limiting beliefs is one form of interference. Other internal factors include a negative inner dialogue, confusion, a feeling of being overwhelmed, fear and an inablity to focus. External distractions can include an insensitive superior, an excessive serviceload, a lack of communication and unclear expectations.

Newsletter #6 4/4/08

"Personal Excellence" Power Point (in English) from our recent seminar in Zagreb Croatia.

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