Coaching Case:
Eric Mcguire
Digital Marketing Manager | Web Designer | Creative Media
I first met Eric shortly after I had enrolled in my masters program with OU in spring of ‘24. He was a manager at a local radio station in Columbus and was hiring for promotions assistants for the station. I was looking for something part time to do while in school and the job was an excuse for me to get out of the house and go to a few concerts. Immediately I could tell Eric was wearing a lot of hats for that organization and had made himself an integral member of the team.
Working for Eric even in the limited capacity that I did, I began to respect his leadership approach and management practices. He was highly prepared for every event and treated his people with respect. During the winter, Eric had suffered an injury with his back that ended up limiting his capabilities to a small extent, but he worked through it. It showed me resilience and dedication.
Eric had to take some time off due to a surgery, and though I was not often present in the office, I could tell the organization struggled without his leadership. He did, however, do a great job preparing his team for his absence to ensure they were still able to operate. Shortly after his absence, Eric made the decision to leave the company after over 20 years, choosing to move on to something different.
I will not get into the circumstances of his decision, but this is where Eric and I began to develop a close relationship. You see I was about to graduate from my masters program and was beginning to build my business, M&L Mentor LLC. Because of Eric’s expertise in digital design and marketing, I turned to him for help with my venture. Eric showed me a great deal of generosity and agreed to help. My end of the bargain was simply to offer my coaching services in exchange for his services. This was a better agreement than I could have hoped for with anyone else.
We began discussing some areas Eric wished to improve, both personally and professionally. Prioritization, goal setting, time management, health, and some particular leadership skills were a few areas Eric mentioned. Eric was also beginning a job search, starting his own business, and working on developing a business with a friend of his. In his words, this was a perfect time to work on these areas of personal management.
To help with delivering on my end, I shared what I had completed of the book I had been writing since winter on personal management, development, and productivity. A lot of what my first few chapters covered were right in line with what Eric wanted help with and was a great way for him to learn some of the content I cover and my ideas for personal management. We then started taking a deeper dive into the content and ideas in our coaching sessions.
Because we were beginning our approach this way, I aligned our journey with the order of the book. Chapter 1 is about prioritization. Eric was struggling with prioritization partly because he had so much on his plate, which he had grown used to due to the many hats he had been wearing at the radio station, and partly because he was unbalanced between his home and work life, also likely due to being used to being unbalanced for so long.
We began by identifying priorities in the way I describe in the book. The objective is to identify the things in life that are most important to you. It is not so much about prioritizing specific tasks as it is about discerning what greater “why’s” are worthy of exhausting personal resources, like time and effort. What is equally important is discerning what things are not important in order to distinguish the many things we waste our precious resources on.
After this first session, Eric began to see improvement in his day to day, being able to focus on the things he felt were truly important to him. Some of the priorities he had identified were finding his future career, his family, and his health. He found that he often did not see certain things like his health and personal wellbeing as priorities, and so goals and tasks associated with maintaining them were pushed to the back burner. This is common for many of us. If we don’t list something important to us as a priority, we will fail to offer that something the personal resources necessary to get the fulfillment we seek from the expense of our resources.
We moved onto setting goals. In my book, I produce a new way of designing goals and the tasks associated with accomplishing them in a way that combines elements of outcome-based and process-based goals. This then ends itself to weekly and daily planning. The idea is to start with an outcome-based goal that can be seen as a long term goal. We then break that down into short term goals necessary to accomplish that larger goal.
Broken down further into general tasks, we begin to enter more of the process-based goal structure considering the actions and processes necessary to engage in order to achieve each short-term goal. These general tasks are what we should be writing out in a weekly plan. Finally we break those general tasks down to specific tasks that outline the specific behaviors and actions needed to accomplish each general task. These are the specific items you would write out to make up your daily plans. These specific tasks often align with the behaviors you would determine in a process-based goal.
One of the most profound insights he gained was the necessity to create realistic goals, as well as create realistic plans for each day. He found he often overloaded himself each day with one master to-do list. Each day he would look at this massive list and frantically trudge through the list. Each day he failed to accomplish it all, and so he felt he accomplished nothing. He felt less motivated to work through the list because he couldn’t see the progress he was actually achieving. All he saw was a small portion of a growing list getting done each day.
By starting with priorities and then creating a goal/task structure around each, Eric was able to clearly define the connection between the specific tasks he needed to accomplish each day with the deep rooted why, or outcome, he hoped to achieve around each priority. He also reported that this method improved his daily and weekly planning in a way that helped him feel motivated to accomplish each task on his to-do list and feel accomplished at the end of each day instead of feeling overwhelmed by the reach of his goals.
Balance was the third major topic. Our entire life exists with dozens, even hundreds, of continuums that require balance. Eric and I discussed some of these important continuums in great detail, as well as some ways to measure your state of balance, learning from the edges, setting thresholds of balance along each continuum that fit the individual, and how certain continuums lend themselves to greater topics in the context of personal development and personal management. Some of these continuums are:
Contentment vs. accomplishment
Discipline vs. Indulgence (Intent)
Discipline vs. Impulse
Training vs. Recovery
Autonomy vs. Connection
Insecurity vs Arrogance (Confidence and Efficacy)
Optimistic Outlook vs. Pessemistic Outlook (Neutral Outlook)
Past vs. Future (Presence)
A lot of how you find balance in any continuum, including the age-old work and home life balance, is setting boundaries and learning to accept the tradeoffs associated with upholding them. Eric and I discussed different areas of imbalance along these continuums and others and found solutions specific to him to find his thresholds, or boundaries, and hold himself and others accountable for staying within those thresholds.
Eric found that practicing balance in this way helped him with prioritization, achieving his goals, and gaining fulfillment from his time and energy spent each day. He was moving through each day more motivated and more accomplished.
There is a great deal more that we discussed around prioritization, goal structure, planning, balance and motivation that contributed to the success he had with the concepts. There is a lot more to the book that I have been able to work with him on as well. The way I delivered information was subjective to him and his particular circumstances, as well as what content would best connect with him. What all worked for him might be different for others and vice versa. For this short case study, I simply wanted to introduce some of the early conversations we had that significantly changed the way Eric manages his personal resources, ensuring he gets the most value for every resource spent.
To this day I still work with Eric, and he continues to be an incredible resource to the growth of my business. For that I will be forever grateful. I hope you see his story and make connections with your own. We have all struggled with personal management at some point, some more so than others. But if you are willing to do the work, change and improvement are very possible.