Horizon Point Consulting

Category: General

Horizon Point writes about dozens of leadership, career, workplace, and workforce topics. Sometimes we write whatever we want. Read this category for general blogs from the HPC team.

  • Want What Is Best For Your Child? Be A Coach To Them.

    Want What Is Best For Your Child? Be A Coach To Them.

    Last week, I discussed how many parents often discourage their children without even knowing it by the comments made about career and college choices. We do this with good intentions. We want to see our children succeed and be better off than we are, and as older and wiser parents, we should know what is best for them, right?

    There is, however, a good way and a bad way to impart our wisdom in shaping decision-making. Taking on the role of coach may be the best way to do this when it comes to giving career and college advice.

    In What I talk About When I Talk about Running, the author, Haruki Murakami describes how he finally found a swimming coach that was able to help him improve his stroke.

    Below are the reasons she was a good coach. These lend themselves well to how we can be good parent-as-coaches in order to help mold our child(ren)’s paths:

    A good coach:

    1. Seeks to know and understand the person’s goals. They do not force their own   person goals onto the one being coached. The coach, at times, may need to help the person become self-aware if they don’t know what their goals actually are.
    2.  Does not try to “reinvent” the one being coached. Instead the coach works to create positive habits through action that slowly help to mold the person in the direction they want to go.
    3. Seeks to address both skill and will issues that may prohibit the person from reaching their goals. For example, a lot of what was hampering Haruki’s swimming was not the skill of swimming, but what went on in his mind when he entered a crowded race to swim. He was actually hyperventilating when races would start. The coach worked to modify his behavior through breathing techniques to keep him from hyperventilating thus reducing his anxiety and helping him get back to competing in triathlons.

     

    Like this example, confidence may be a key issue in helping your child achieve success, and you, more than anyone else as a parent can help make or break their confidence through the type of encouragement or support you provide them. I’m not advocating for helicopter parenting when I say this or advocating for giving them a trophy when they come in 13th place, but I am advocating for having dialogue with them that helps them work through, themselves, the issues that plague teenage and early adulthood confidence. Being supportive of who they are and what their dreams are (not who you are and what your dreams are) is an important step in this process.

    How has someone who has acted as a coach for you helped you to achieve success?

  • Book Review 2013

    Book Review 2013

    Reading is key to writing, or so I believe, so 2013 started with a personal goal to read 30 books. I’ve got a few weeks left until the end of the year, and I’m on number 28. I’d like to make a habit of creating a year-end book review to point others in the direction of what reading I found most insightful and meaningful.

    The 2013 list:

    Topic: Personal Leadership

    Choice: First Things First

    Blog posts from this year that include excerpts or ideas from this choice:

    A Lesson in Personal Leadership 1: Define and Focus on What’s Important

    Personal Leadership on Purpose

     

    Topic: Leadership

    Choice: The Way of the Shepherd: 7 Ancient Secrets to Managing Productive People

    This short gem of a read tells the story of how an MBA professor teaches the lessons of leadership to a student through the analogy of raising sheep. The people you lead are your “flock.”

    Quote from the book: “What distinguishes a great leader from the mediocre one is that a great leader has a heart for his people.”

    Blog posts from this year that include excerpts or ideas from this choice:

    2 Questions for Striving Servant Leaders (this has been our most viewed blog post this year)

    Servant Leadership

    The Es of Leadership

    Runner-Up in Leadership: Leadership and Self-Deception

     

    Topic: Career Development

    Choice: The Alchemist

    Really a novel, like the choice for the year on leadership, most often the best points about a topic are made through a story. Many lessons on career and life pursuits are interwoven through the story of a young shepherd boy (maybe I have a thing about sheep and shepherds considering this years picks!…) seeking his Personal Legend.

    Quotes from the book: “….when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.”

    Blog posts from this year that include excerpts or ideas from this choice:

    Are you Offering your Child Gold for Career and College Advice

    Topic: Novel

    Choice: And the Mountains Echoed

    Khaled Hosseini author of The Kite Runner, has an exquisite way of painting the human condition across cultures and economic boundaries. He demonstrates through his storytelling that whether we realize it or not, we are all connected.

    Quote from the book: “….one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person’s heart.”

    Topic: Miscellaneous:

    Choice: What I Talk About When I Talk about Running by Haruki Murakami

    Many of you know I run (although much less now and much slower at, currently, six months pregnant). I run for my sanity, as a way to cultivate meaningful relationships with some of those that I love the most, as a way to stimulate my thinking, and as Murakami so poignantly describes in his memoir, running in many ways, is a metaphor for work and life.

    Quote: “Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals, and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running and a metaphor for life.”

    Our blog post on Thursday of will pull from this book as a reflection on what it means to be a good coach through the perspective of parents taking on the role of coach in helping their kids make wise career and college decisions.

    A category all its own:

    The Bible– through The Message translation

    I took on the 90 Days with the Bible Challenge this summer. No, I did not finish it in 90 days. A beach trip to cap off the end of the summer resulted in catching myself up by reading the entire New Testament (I was really behind), but as a lifelong Methodist I’ll have to admit, I was not taught nor trained to read and study the Bible as much as some other denominations do. Reading the Bible all the way through was something I had to do in order to be able to relevantly understand, question and strengthen my faith.

    What I found in reading it through as a story of humanity is that we are all flawed (I couldn’t believe what some of the people in the Old Testament did! But its really not much different than all of us today) and that the best form of redemption, grace, and love has to come in the most unlikely way. Humankind’s paradigm had to be shifted, and God’s love had to come in the form of human relationships in order to truly be made real.

    Quote from The Message related to work: From the intro of Nehemiah “Separating life into distinct categories of ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ damages, sometimes irreparably, any attempt at a whole and satisfying life, a coherent life with meaning and purpose, a life lived in the glory of God… the damage to life when separating the sacred from the secular is most obvious when the separation is applied to daily work… work, by its very nature, is holy.” Italics mine

    Blog posts from this year that include excerpts or ideas from this choice:

    Leadership Lessons from Moses

    What was your favorite read of 2013 and why? Please share your favorite quote from the book with us!

  • Are You Offering Your Child Gold for Career and College Advice?

    Are You Offering Your Child Gold for Career and College Advice?

    I wish I had a dollar for every student I talked to about career and college choices that has said something along the line of “….but my dad doesn’t think that’s a good idea” or “my mom told me not to go into that.”
    Even though most parents don’t think that their teenaged or college aged children care at all what they think, the truth is, they internalize what you are telling them about career and college choices and often, rule out things that they might be drawn to because of your words. Even your words that may have been mentioned in passing.
    As a parent, I know we all have the very best of intentions for our children (I have already made a mental note that when my child gets to this age, I will re-read my own advice, because I’ll most likely be eating my own words),  but I think some advice to parents about how to help a child self-explore and discover the right path is needed.
    So over the next few weeks, I’ll feature some parent-directed advice about navigating the difficult territory of steering our kids in the right direction when it comes to college and career choices.
    First,  the best thing to realize is why we give advice and our reasons behind it. They aren’t bad reasons, they may just be grounded in a way that leads us to offer discouragement instead of encouragement.
    Consider this excerpt from the Alchemist  where the shepherd boy is having a conversation with his father:
    “People from all over the world have passed through this village, son,” said his father. “They come in search of new things, but when they leave they are basically the same people they were when they arrived.  They climb the mountains to see the castle, and they wind up thinking that the past was better than what they have now. They have blond hair, or dark skin, but basically they’re the same as the people who live right here.”
     
    “But I’d like to see the castles in the towns where they live,” the boy explained.
     
    “Those people, when they see our land, say they would like to live here forever,” his father continued.
     
    “Well, I’d like to see their land, and see how they live,” said his son.
     
    “The people who come here have a lot of money to spend, so they can afford to travel,” his father said. “Amongst us, they only ones who travel are the shepherds.” 
     
    “Well, then I’ll be a shepherd!”
     
    His father said no more. The next day, he gave his son a pouch that held three ancient Spanish gold coins.
     
    “I found these one day in the fields. I wanted them to be part of your inheritance. But use them to buy your flock. Take to the fields, and someday you’ll learn that our countryside is the best, and our women are the most beautiful.” 
     
    And he gave the boy his blessing. The boy could see in his father’s gaze a desire to be able, himself, to travel the world- a desire that was still alive, despite his father’s having to bury it, over dozens of years, under the burden of struggling for water to drink, food to eat, and the same place to sleep every night of his life.”

     

    Like the shepherd’s father, our advice to our children is often grounded in us wanting to either 1) Live vicariously through them or 2) see them better off than we are. Neither are bad. But unlike the shepherd’s father, our desire to live vicariously through our children, to see them better off than we are, often comes in the form of discouragement, instead of 3 gold coins with a blessing to pursue their desires.

     

    So before you open your mouth with an opinion about what might be best the best path for your child, knowing full well the you just want to see them “better off”, consider if you’re offering gold or not.
  • Our best leadership movie pick! Up at December’s International Leadership Carnival.

    Our best leadership movie pick! Up at December’s International Leadership Carnival.

    My favorite movie for Leadership (and career) Development is Coach Carter.  The reason I have chosen this movie is because of the following quote that one of his players stands up and shares after the coach has made a profound point with his players and the school board about priorities and what it means to be a leade:
    “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous- Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to manifest God within us. It is not just in some of us, it is in everyone. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”
     The irony in servant leadership is that leaders serve others through shining their light, not extinguishing it.  And when they do, they start a fire. Your Light is a blog post about this concept.
  • Learn and Do

    Learn and Do

    In a work skills class I teach, each person takes a learning style quiz.  Usually, more than half the students identify themselves through the assessment as a kinesthetic (learning by doing) learner, yet most of the way education is structured today is geared towards visual (read it or see it on a slide presentation) and auditory (hear it in a lecture) learning, not learning by doing.  Yet it takes all of these methods in order to maximize learning, regardless of your dominant style.

    A key to discovering your talents, passions and values is to actually do something to see what you like and don’t like.  In addition, one of the best ways to maximize what you do like, thus leading to more talent, is to practice, which requires doing.  No one can stop you from learning and practicing.

    Interested in pursuing something you have an interest in? Learn about it, and then do it!

    Here are some cool sites to aid in your learning:

    • Helpouts by Google
    • Udemy
    • MOOCS (Massive Online Open Courses)- List of courses.  You can also search top universities for their MOOC courses.

    What’s your game plan for learning and doing more?