Rasheed is a life coach, business coach and speaker. He works with singers, performers, the public, entrepreneurs and small and creative businesses. He runs workshops and talks and has appeared on TV and radio. Rasheed is currently developing a range of tools, including CDs, relating to his work.
www.rasaru.com
My approach
I am a life coach though not a typical one. My background brings together the two high-profile worlds of music and business. My first career was in the media, public relations and organisational strategy business. I worked variously as a publicist, press officer, media trainer and communications manager and as an organisational spokesman. In my role I helped organisations boost their profile, campaign to achieve their goals, develop a powerful message to reach their target audience and boost sales. My interest in people, my work as a media trainer, and the listening skills that I developed as a volunteer with the Samaritans all helped me nurture some of the skills I would later develop as a coach.
Ten years ago I took redundancy to pursue my true passion, being a singer/songwriter. I continued to work part-time in this field and spent a fair amount of time using my skills from business to help other artists to promote themselves. I was struck by how many of the talented performers I met struggled with confidence, career progression, worklife balance, and stage fright. I began working with a former actor friend of mine to help artists develop more holistically. I then trained as a life coach and later in NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) to add tools that would help people achieve their personal and professional goals.
I am passionate about people and their possibilities, but I am more interested in who somebody is today than what they might achieve in three months. Appreciating who we are and the qualities we possess is the seed of both happiness and success. This appreciation is the very cornerstone of confidence, high performance and progress. It is from here that competence and excellence can grow. Increasingly, I work creatively and intuitively with my clients. I am traditional in that I recognise the three key factors to success a clear compelling goal, self belief, and taking action and I use a range of traditional coaching tools and NLP. But I also work on a deep level to connect with my client and listen as carefully to what is not being said as well as what is.
Ultimately my job is to help people identify and achieve their true goals. This requires working with them through all the fears and ideas that they hold onto about who it is they feel they should be. To me, coaching is the process of gently nurturing a flower. The client is already whole, talented and has rich potential. All the fears and ideas that hold us back have come from the outside world from our childhood to our careers. We are born full of potential. My job is to get clients in tune with themselves, to discover what’s blocking them and to move ahead, working from their untapped strengths.
Performers’ issues the top 10
1 Career direction, career progression and job uncertainty
2 Self-belief and confidence
3 Performance nerves and creative blocks
4 Technical skills vs self expression
5 Money worries
6 Individuality vs external pressure expectations
7 Motivation and inspiration
8 Stress and worklife balance
9 Appearance and image
10 Relationships
Brian’s story
Brian is one of the gifted singer/songwriters whom I coach. But when we met he had a “shopping basket” full of limiting beliefs. He believed he was too old, untalented, short, ugly, and would never make it. The list went on. Basically he wanted to be someone else.
Brian is a good example of how everything he had been led to believe about himself becomes a problem. This stopped him seeing the accomplishments he’d already made, made him a nervous performer, and almost made him give up. Traditionally, coaching means that we work on someone’s weaknesses. But the key is to identify and build from strengths. Brian works part-time with computers. Working together, week by week, Brian got to observe that it was not the computer (himself) that was the problem, but rather its programming (all the ideas given to him by parents, peers, colleagues, and the music industry). We brushed away these ideas, and put him in touch with his core skills. He’s gone on to develop new and positive beliefs about himself. He is in touch with his skills, confident, and working to record and tour with his own album next year.