One of the great things about being a coach is that it enables me to indulge in my penchant for reading personal development, motivational, organizational and social science books with wild abandon. It also gives me the opportunity to write them all off on my taxes, but that’s an entirely different post. There are a lot of choices out there in every type of category you can think of. Let’s look at Amazon.com for a start. Interested in developing your creativity this year? You’re in luck! Amazon delivers 11,546 choices. Want to be more motivated? A quick search comes up with an impressive 25,798 tomes to choose from. If you want to take more risks this year, there are a staggering 75,150 offerings all ready to be delivered to your door with a click of a button.
If you spend anytime reading books or blogs, attending seminars, watching videos about any sort of process whether it be creativity, management or even cleaning out your closets, what you’re going to find is a lot of contradictory information. First you develop a system, no wait, first you dive in to see what you’re working with. The number one secret is understanding your employees and giving them the structure they need, unless you ask them what they need and allow them to create it for themselves. Start slowly with baby steps except you should start by taking massive action as a way to commit yourself entirely to the process.
You get the idea.
There are literally more than a million books out there that will give you advice on how to do just about anything. And each of them will expound on a different way to help you accomplish your goal. But how do you choose which way to go? Protein or Raw diet? Cry it out or attachment parenting? Structure or free form? Don’t forget about asking your friends their opinion too- they ALL have something to say about with path you choose.
Truthfully, though, all of these choices boil down to one thing: Does it work for you?
Sometimes, we can only tell if something works for us by trying it and evaluating the outcome. Will Julie Cameron’s concept of “morning pages” change the way I creatively orient myself on a daily basis? The only way to figure it out is get up every morning for several weeks and try it. Sometimes we can inherently realize an outcome of a particular system because we understand ourselves. There are people who have had life-altering experiences after being dropped in the desert for a week with only a tent and their wits in a modern-day vision quest. But I know without doing it myself that killing a rattlesnake with my bare hands and eating it raw is not going to help me see my life clearly.
You know yourself best. You understand what works and what doesn’t – maybe innately or maybe sometimes you have to try the process and see, but you always know best. Remember when authors or speakers or trainers tell you “this is the only system you’ll ever need,” what they are saying is, “Here’s what works for me.” If it works for you too, great. If not, it doesn’t mean you are a failure or you can’t follow through or there is something wrong with you. It just means you haven’t found your way yet. You will. Don’t trust me just because I say so though, trust yourself.








