Impact: Greater confidence in approaching goal attainment
Materials Needed: One pack of Winning Attitude Cards
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You can download this guide here
Professional Use:
Who is Coaching for Goal Achievement for?
This exercise is useful to any coach or other growth and development professional working on performance and goal attainment with a client. It is likely to be particularly useful in boosting confidence and a sense of self-efficacy.
How does the exercise help with Achieving Goals ?
The exercise creates a space for people to explore what it is about the way they think, and the way they tackle goal attainment and task completion, that helps them succeed. Being able to articulate this means people are more able to activate their ‘winning attitude’ when needed to help or boost their performance.
Preparation
Remove instruction card and have all the cards appropriately paired e.g. the two B cards together, the two C cards together. In a pile.
How to run the exercise
Start by explaining to your coachee how, while knowledge and skills are key to performance, so is attitude. This session will be about helping them understand how their particular winning attitude profile helps them with their goal achievement.
Explain that the terms and concepts on the cards they are about to encounter are all based on research with people who have excelled in their field.
Take the pile of cards and separate it out into the 10 pairs of cards, from A – J
Explain that in each pair, both attitudes can be a winning attitude, but some people lean towards one more than the other. What we are interested to do is to find their preferences.
Ask them to select the card from each pair they feel best reflects their attitude towards achieving goals.
There is information on the back of each card to help with understanding the concepts, and of course, you can discuss these with them. If they struggle, ask for examples of goals they have achieved and how they did that. Feedback your observation of how what they have said relates to the cards in front of them.
By the end of this exercise, they should have selected 10 cards.
Next, ask them to select what seem, to them, to be the key 5 cards from their selection. Which five cards best reflect what they believe to be the attitude they bring to successful working and goal attainment?
Explore their selection with them asking questions like: When has believing this or thinking like this really helped you keep going, or make the most of an opportunity?How does this approach help when you get stuck/ things change very suddenly/ an unexpected opportunity opens up?
The ambition here is to make the words come alive as lived behaviour.
Now relate what they have learnt to their current situation or challenge. How can activating their best mindset help right now?
An extension of the exercise
If time permits, there are other ways to finish the exercise, for example
- Ask them to write a composite statement that sums up their ‘winning attitude’
- Whittle the top 5 down to the top 3
- Devise a personal motto that reflects their winning attitude. It can be one already available like ‘Courage favours the Brave’, ‘Eyes on the Prize’ or it can be one they make up themselves.