Effective Coaching to Achieve Your Personal Goals in Life: Part I

What kind of personal goals should you be setting in your life, and why is coaching helpful in achieving them?

Our Natural Inertia

Coaching is helpful in setting meaningful life goals just as coaching is in athletic pursuits. We have a natural lethargy. It is easier to NOT do something. We have inertia. We have procrastination. We tend to be too nice to ourselves and let ourselves off the hook.

Someone who has engaged a coach is savvy enough to enlist someone’s help in overcoming these natural tendencies. When you engage any coach you are inviting them both to encourage you and badger you.

Our first thoughts about goals may be not aggressive enough. Sometimes we base our ideas on the resources and energy that is right now at hand. There are times when we need to embark with a little risk bank on resources and verve that will undergird us when we need them.

There is something of the metabolism of a life of faith in God that doesn’t make plans based merely on the existing playing pieces. Christians are not dare-devils and risk-takers necessarily, but they are believing in their approach to planning believing that God will be with them “then” just as He is with them now or more so.

Meaningful Personal Goals

Temporary personal goals can be helpful, but the motivation they provide does peter out. A goal to finish a class or a degree is great, but when you are done, there is no goal.

People often find a vacuum of meaning when they complete a temporal goal. If you are in a motivational slump it may be helpful to take inventory with a coach on what goals are ending, and what new goals should be defined.

Long-Term Personal Goals

Setting long-term or life goals as a Christian is actually lofty theology. We will talk more of this later, but a thumbnail would be this: as a Christian, things will make sense if you make your long-term goals in light of your discipleship.

I call this your prime objective. Companies often give great clarity to their employees by keeping their mission well-defined before them. Every decision and strategy has to somehow further what they are about, what their mission statement is.

Another way of saying that is if you are clear about your prime objective of being a disciple of Christ, you can think about major decisions and goals relative to that: “How do plans I am considering align with my prime objective?”

The Nature of Pursuit

A sampling of verses that paint the picture for us that the Christian life is not passive, not just holding the fort; there is something[s] of great value to be pursued and secured with all the effort you can muster:

Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win. – 1 Corinthians 9:24

Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead,  I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. – Philippians 3:13-14

Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. – Hebrews 12:1

But flee from these things, you man of God, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance, and gentleness. Fight the good fight of faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called, and you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. – 1 Timothy 6:11-12

And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope until the end. – Hebrews 6:11

So, in being a disciple, there are great things to be pursued. We can get further inklings of that in this verse:

But just as it is written, “THINGS WHICH EYE HAS NOT SEEN AND EAR HAS NOT HEARD, AND which HAVE NOT ENTERED THE HEART OF MAN, ALL THAT GOD HAS PREPARED FOR THOSE WHO LOVE HIM.” For to us, God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. – 1 Corinthians 2:9-16

Make your long-term personal goals in light of this avid and focused pursuit of lofty things that are not temporal at all.

Coaching

Call our office if you would like to engage a Christian counselor in encouraging and badgering you, as well as helping you to define goals in light of the centrality of Christ in your life.