Do you write? It might be jottings or articles or blogs or LinkedIn posts or books. Whatever it may be, how do you feel about it supporting your personal development, perhaps alongside your professional development?
I’ve never been much of a diary writer except when I went travelling. I haven’t journaled much until recently either.
But my voice has developed as a result of the many years that I have been writing blogs, posts and books.
When I talk about my voice, I think I mean three things:
- My style
- My point of view
- My confidence in the above two.
Confidence is often something that people bring to coaching. I have an emerging wondering about whether it might be useful to them to write as a way of building that confidence. I don’t mean going straight into publishing that writing – that’s a few steps along the path. But just writing what they think, feel and want to say, for their own edification to start with. I’m going to muse on that as a possibility although I rarely give suggestions to people so it may be a moot point.
Confidence does come from trying things though. I don’t know who first said this, but if you want to get good at something, you’ve got to be willing to be bad at it first. I suppose that’s what personal development is all about—trying things that you’d like to try, knowing that you might not be great at them to start with. But the more you practice, the better you’ll become (as long as you reflect along the way). Just like this lovely thing called coaching.
As we near the end of this series, what have you taken away about your own personal development that might complement your professional development? Things that might not feel obviously developmental at first, but which stretch you into new ways of being and new ways of becoming? Also perhaps ways of belonging. And that opens up a whole other conversation for us to look at some time. In short though, where and with whom can you be yourself, such that you can develop your confidence in being that person who you were meant to be?
On the subject of writing… my latest book Cultivating Coachability is now available on Amazon pre-sale, it launches on October 17th, pre-order now and you can be among the first to receive it!
