I went the entire month of June without wasting time in aimless surfing during the weekday evenings. In addition, not a single drop of alcohol passed my lips.
And so that Guinness I enjoyed on Thu 1 July was all the sweeter for being well-earned!
Aside from the productive time gained each week – an extra 10 hours – it was also gratifying to know that a new habit can be programmed in about a month or so with the aid of ’spotlighting’ and some degree of public commitment. (However, your mileage may vary as there’s some research evidence out there, the link escapes me just now, that suggests people who make their goals public tend to underachieve. Oh dear! All I can say is… it depends!)
By the way, this time around I did not use the ‘MotivAider’ gizmo to automatically remind me of my intention. I suspect that the (almost) daily comments I added to the 3-day accountability blog post acted as their own reminder and helped keep things on track. It was all rather effortless (after the first few days!)
I don’t post Miley Cyrus videos (!) but will make an exception just this once.
Why?
Well, the young lady I know as “that eighth-grade middle schooler”, our daughter, will become a high school student from this September. And some of her school choir classmates sang along to an uplifting acoustic guitar version of Miley’s song, “The Climb”.
It’s hard to believe that the years have flown by so fast.
Yet they have.
At her graduation celebration (the school prefers that word over “ceremony”) there were encouraging and moving speeches from both students and teachers about change and growth.
Of course, as a parent and a teacher, I was proud of all their achievements and the basic goodness of these young people. But at the same time I was also a little saddened at some of the problems (global, national, local and personal) they may confront in the years to come.
However, if they can approach these mountains with even a fraction of the power revealed in Ms Cyrus’s lyrics, “it’ll be beast”
The idea of having a place in cyberspace for Japan-based coaches has been bouncing around my cranium for a while.
It probably would have stayed in neural orbit but for the positive effects of meeting up and talking with other coaches here. (You can read more of the background in this post about ICA Coaches in Japan.)
The next steps for this project’ are:
Get more Japan-based, ICA-trained coaches on board.
Add a stream of articles based around a ‘coaching in Japan’ theme.
Start spreading the word.
Enjoy a celebration dinner. (Coaches love celebrating!)
As you might imagine, there’s a very large and vibrant Japanese coaching environment, in what is still the World’s second-largest economy. We are definitely not trying to compete with the Native Japanese coaching world.
Instead, our focus is on serving people interested in working with ICA-trained coaches who have had experience of living and working in this wonderful country.
In many cases these coaches are likely to be foreigners in Japan – though we do have at least one Japanese ICA student who has attended our events. The more, the merrier!
Finally, the following coaches deserve special mention for stepping up to the plate and helping get the site from idea to launch pad:
If you have any suggestions for what you’d like to see from this new coaching site please leave a comment to this post or visit the ‘Coaches in Japan contact’ page.
