The eagle-eyed visitors to this website may have noticed the Liz Taplin Coaching strap line (on the blue banner along the bottom of each page): Dream – Explore – Discover. And I’m confident there will be one or two readers who will immediately want to say ‘Liz got it wrong – it should be Explore. Dream. Discover’! Well, they would be right and wrong! Yes, it’s Explore. Dream. Discover. It comes from this oft quoted farewell bidding “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover”. Mistakenly, Mark Twain is often credited with writing these words, but it seems the words are more recent and should be accredited to Sarah Frances Brown, mother of American writer H. Jackson Brown, who uses the words in his book ‘PS. I Love You’.
Putting the question of the source to one side, I have to say that the words take my breath away every time I hear them. “You will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” The perfect reason to think about how we want to lead our lives and how we might want to change things. The perfect reason to take action.
But if the words are so perfect, why did I change the order when applying them to my coaching practice? Well, I was thinking about the coaching process; what I aim to do in my own life; and what I hope my clients will do as a result of being coached.
Step 1 of the process is to Dream. And to dream big. What is it that you want to do or achieve? How do you want to lead your life? Publisher and author, Mark Allen, challenges us to ‘Dare to dream’. But he also says that as soon as we start to dream, our thoughts focus on our doubts and fears. Step 2 is to Explore. We explore how to navigate the doubts and fears and we begin to consider our options. Step 3 is to Discover. Gradually for some, more quickly for others, insights and realisations begin to reveal the way forward. We discover what we want from life and we are empowered to take action. I also ask my clients this simple question: ‘What’s stopping you?’ Perhaps this is something we should ask ourselves more often. What’s stopping you from Dreaming? Exploring? Discovering?