What’s your interference?

I want to take you on a journey, a very pleasant journey. Take a few minutes, sit down quietly and day dream…. Imagine yourself working to your full potential. What would that be like? You might be full of energy, really positive, everything you think of and do is the right thing, decisions are easy and straight forward, you are stress free, content and happy. Do you like the scene and how you feel? Is it a bit too good to be true? Well what gets in the way of you feeling this way? In Coaching we call the things that get in the way of us working to our full potential INTERFERENCE.

Have you ever dropped your phone and cracked the screen and damaged it? It’s fuzzy and you have to strain to make out the picture. Well just so is the picture in your head when your own individual interference gets in the way of you working effectively and efficiently.

So what sort of interference are we talking about. Stress, negative attitude, anxiety/ nerves, bad health, other people, emotional baggage. All these things can contribute to your interference and hold you back.

I recently had a client who came to me with a lot of interference with regard to interviews. He realised that his career was affected by the fact that he didn’t like doing interviews, felt that he was no good at them with the result that he was missing out on opportunities of promotion. What was happening was that he had one or two bad experiences in interviews and so had developed the belief that all interviews that he had done went terribly wrong. Through the coaching process we reflected on whether this belief that he carried to every subsequent interview was serving him and of course there was a resounding no! His perception of interviews had become distorted and was holding him back. With coaching he was able to identify and address his ‘interference’, learn techniques and do a successful interview with no apprehensions!

We may know what our interference is but it is a different ball game to do something about it. Coaching not only helps the individual identify their own personal interference but also directs them in developing ways to eliminate this interference and so work to achieving greater effectiveness. Just as you would, over time, get used to and accept a cracked screen, so also do we get used to and accept our own interference. That is until someone shows you something on their phone, with a lovely clear picture…then you realise what you are missing! So is it time for you to upgrade your screen?