Title:  “How to become a Leader in 15 minutes per day”

Subtitle:  ‘Resolve challenges to grow yourself into a leader’

Dr. Paul Koeck will show how investing 15 minutes per day in your personal and professional development as a leader will help you:

• Resolve any type of stress
• Focus on who you want to become (instead of focusing on day-to-day problems)
• Discover your deepest dreams and realize them
• Discover your personal talents and utilize them
• Choose your right priorities in function of your goal

This workshop integrates elements of Stress Management with keys to successful Leadership because the path towards leadership starts with cleaning out what keeps you from progressing, resolving your issues, bottlenecks and stress. Once you master this skill, you will get a clearer insight in how you can grow as a leader and create your own vision to guide you towards discovering how you will use your existing talents better to reach your goal and fulfill your dream.

Preparation: for those who speak Dutch, we invite them to do the “online self scan” at www.mijnkwartier.be and print the results and bring them to the workshop. We will discuss your score at the start of the seminar and explain you how you can use them to grow. There is no English translation of this test available yet, so the internationals can skip this test and still attend the workshop without any problem.

Trainer: Dr. Paul Koeck (Coachteam.com)

Paul Koeck studied medicines, philosophy and sports medicines in Leuven, management at the Vlerick School for management and was professionally trained as a Solution Focused Therapist, systemic coach and therapist and as a master in Ericksonian hypnosis. He trained leaders in most continents all over the world: USA, Argentina, India and most European countries and coached leaders in several Fortune top 500 firms. His concepts are teached at different universities over various continents. Further, he works as a physician and therapist in Antwerp and developed an online self-help program to offer online psychotherapy for participants who prefer to cure themselves without attending a therapist.

He authored four books on personal development, stress management and therapy who are available at www.mijnkwartier.be

His websites are:

1. Business & Leadership coaching at www.coachteam.com
2. Online therapy at www.mijnkwartier.be
3. Personal blog at www.paulkoeck.com

“Hey, I am ok … very good!”

Listen to our conversation:

- Feeling better than last year?

- Much more !

- How did you make that change?

- Just understood that I am the best friend of my own and I love myself and thought that I am the best. I love my life!

She teaches us a wise lesson: as long as we look for friends or others to make us happy, we will suffer because we are dependent on others. The day we understand that we are our own best friend to love, live becomes sunny again, and depression fades away from our lives and turns into satisfaction and happiness.

Sometimes we can help others to discover their love for themselves by giving them our love. But never can we expect others to give us love … because waiting to be loved, makes us dependent, scared, helpless and depressed.

When you hear a friend talking about love with an undertone of expecting to be loved, then we know he or she will suffer more before finding inner peace. When his or her speech changes into “I desire to give Love”, then you know that Love is coming soon. My clinical practice show this truth over and over again: if a patient starts to love and accept himself, then i know i will see him with a peaceful smile the next time he enters my consultation. If a patient starts to give love (without sacrificing the own needs), then cure is happening.

- “When exactly do you feel most stressed? What happens at that specific moment?

- “Well, phone calls are happening all day long and I do feel overwhelmed and not prepared to answer”. (He works in the financial sector and get phone calls from anxious clients who are worried about their investments during this financial crisis.)

- “How many of the phone calls you receive are from this type of overstressed clients?”

- “About six of them”

- “Are those mostly the same six clients calling you?”

- “Yes!” , he replied.

- “Ok, and how many of them are really important clients that you cannot afford to lose?”

- “Two, and they call me almost every single day”.

- “How much time would it take you to study their file as your first job when you enter the office in order to prepare your answer to their questions?”

- “I guess about 5 minutes for each of them, that means 10 minutes all together”

- “Would it make a difference to you if you prepare as your very first job in the morning their file and call them yourself before they call you?” , was my next question.

He smiled and said “Yes, of course. I would feel much better. I would not be afraid to be overwhelmed by their calls any more!”

My client implemented the small change and felt more ‘in control’ of his work. After his first success, in our second session, he started to suggest other small changes that increased his impact on situations, and some weeks later, he could hardly remember how there had been a time where work was so unpleasant. This practical case study illustrates nicely what research has discovered already some decades ago. The researcher “Robert Karasek” discovered that the amount of  ’subjective’ control you have over your work situation, has a stronger impact on your distress level than your ‘objective’ work load. So what this case nicely illustrates is that helping someone see new solutions to increase (objective or subjective) control over situations, decreases distress and lower distress leads to more self-confidence and creativity to find even more solutions.

More Leadership video’s and interviews with CEO’s at www.coachteam.tv and in future blog posts here.  A Dutch translation of this video is available on the Dutch pages of this blog.

Full Interview at http://www.vacature.com/blog/van-rompuy-wel-een-goeie-leider

English                                                                  Lithuanian (simultaneous translation)

The topic of the training was: „How can Leaders and Governments resolve unemployment with „Solution Focused Reactivation Strategies“?

1. Reflect on your ‘Decision Process’:
   1. analyze how you take decisions in your life: become counscious of how you took your succesfull decisions and make reflecting on your decisions a habit. This will lead to creating a personal decision style.
   2. success is the consequence of the quality of your decision processes, and long term success of the quality of your improvement process of making better decisions
2. Selfconfidence: trust your own decisions
   1. Be consistent in your decisions by learning to trust your own decision process
   2. flexibility and adaptability to circumstances are not a contradiction to consistency on condition that you choose yourself your own strategy
   3. Keep following your plan, and do not let others distract you from your plan.
   4. choose your own style and play your own game

The reason why I want to share this with you, is because it correlates with the findings in our coaching survey: clients who have been coached succesfully, all report that the main added value of their coaching process is “reflection”: they all report that they have learned to reflect on their decisions.

Last saturday, I was interviewed in Budapest by Hungary’s psychiatrist & celebrity, Dr. Joszef Telkes about our new online e-therapy business:

Internet Assisted Psychotherapy interview by Jozsef Telkes.

In 1959, Jay Haley, the famous family therapist, asks his mentor, Milton H. Erickson, MD, the words most renowned hypnotherapist and psychiatrist: “If you were to describe what a good marriage is, how would you describe it?” Milton H. Erickson replies: When I describe a good marriage to my patients, I point out to them that there are essentailly four kinds of Love:

1. The infantile type of love, “I love me.”
2. The next stage, “I love the me in you. I love you becaue you are my brother, my mother, my father, my sister, my dog. The ‘me’ in ‘you’.
3. Then the adolescent type of love, “I love you because your dancing pleases me, and because your beauty pleases me, and because your brains please me.”
4. The adult stage of love wherein, “I want to love you and cherish you because I want to see you happy, because i can find my happiness in your happiness. The happier you are, the happier, I’ll be. I’l find my happiness in yours. Il” find delight in your pleasure and intellectual persuits. I’ll find a delight in your enjoyment of dancing.” So the mature love is the capacity to find enjoyment in the enjoyment of the other person’s enjoyment. It works both ways.

Dr. Erickson continues: ‘So in a good marriage upi’ll see some of the “I love me.” You should expect that. You’ll see some of the I love the me in you. You’ll see some of the adolescent variety of your good qualities that please me. But there should be a very considerable percentage of the enjoyment of the other person’s state of happiness.
It isn’t enough to just enjoy your wifes cooking. You ought to enjoy the “pleasure” that she has in cooking. You ought not just enjoy the fact that she keeps the kids quiet while you are working. You want to enjoy, really, the pleasure and satisfaction that she gets out of dealing with the kids, even though you can’t understand why that particular dealing with the kids gives her so much satisfaction. It is beyond your capacity to understand, but you are so glad she enjoys it. You know that as long as she ‘s happy, enjoying inexplicable things, you’re going to be happy too.’

I wanted to share this wisdom with you. Who would not dream of such a lasting loving relationship? Paul

P.S.: A friend has sent to right now another interesting related quote:
Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’
Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you’

1. First, I remembered that I started to develop this pleasant feeling right after my first years of being a professional. Probably one needs to build ‘competence’ first, to feel selfconfident in what one is doing. So, if you read this and are still building competence in your profession, just accept that learning takes effort. And that there will be a day where you feel ok with what you do. Your customers will let you know when you do a good job and that will reinforce you.
2. Second, this pure concentration on one person – no phone calls, no interruptions – gives our brain the time to tune in, the time to focus and as we know from litterature: focus is that what provokes “flow” in a human beings. Focussing relieves stress & tension and opens us up for joy. I remember from my philosophy classes the quote of Jean-Paul Sartre, in “L’Être et le Néant”, describing self-consciousness as  ”Conscience de soi de quelque chose” (being aware of yourself through being aware of something).  Now, years later, I start to see that we become more ourself, indeed, when we focus on something else with dedication and concentration.
3. Third, in working with clients, one knows -after years of training- that one can only focus on one small concrete result at the time. Your client needs this, or (s)he would get confused or lost in your words. Since you focus on small & measurable results, you automatically start to do that what is good for yourself too:  breaking big & complex projects into small measurable steps, so that you setup for visible success. Focussing on big & vague goals leads to confusion and “Learned Helplesness“.
4. Fourth, the feeling of contribution, is probably another important contributor to happiness. By focussing on helping others, one feels useful. And we are born “social animals“. We need contribution for our own personal survival and satisfaction. We exist partially in the eyes of the others, we become more ourselves through adding value to others.

There are certainly more factors that have contributed to my happy feeling this morning. I just wrote about those that came first into my mind. Paul

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAqjQvoPKuk