Last week we had the privilege of spending a half-day with Fast Forward Group coach, Debbie George, who helped us zero in on how to achieve a higher performance lifestyle, professionally and personally. If you haven’t heard of Fast Forward yet, allow us to introduce you to what they’re all about, and sing their praises!
What is Fast Forward Group?
In their own words, The Fast Forward Group’s mission is to help leaders and teams dramatically elevate performance and fulfillment in all areas of their lives. Fast Forward’s training and coaching is based on our regimen for High Performance Living, which fuels growth and has a lasting impact on business, culture and lives. Founded by women, Fast Forward is also known for high impact women in leadership programs. Our clients include Facebook, Google, NBCUniversal, CBSi, JPMorgan Chase, Visa, iHeartMedia, Bloomberg, Nike and Unilever.
How does a Fast Forward coaching session work, you ask? We’ll walk you through it!
Step 1: Pre-work and Vision Exercise
About a week before our in-person coaching session, our entire team was given a 2-part writing assignment to complete, aptly known as “pre-work”. This is a writing assignment designed to help us imagine visions of our best lives as well as the potential obstacles that could prevent us from achieving them.
The first part, and the reason the program is called Fast Forward, is because you have to actually visualize your life in a year’s time – this is the vision exercise. You’re literally fast-forwarding your life by one year! This is not supposed to simply be a description of where you think you’ll end up in a matter-of-fact and realistic way, it’s supposed to be written as if it were the most ideal possible outcome of your life that you can possibly imagine. The goal is to write an essay about what your best life entails, and what you achieved in the past 12 months, as if it were fact. It’s a picture of the life you truly want for yourself. The second part of the exercise it to write down all of the potential obstacles you could face that would prevent you from achieving the goals outlined in your vision statement ー because let’s face it, we’d probably all have everything we want by now if it were easy, and we didn’t each experience a form of self-doubt.
The goal of this exercise is to create some accountability for yourself, and have your mind prepped to think and talk through what’s holding you back from the life you want ahead of the coaching session. Throughout the program, your vision exercise serves as your “north star”, which you will follow relentlessly until you arrive at your best life.
Step 2: In-person Coaching Session
Like nearly all team building activities at Clarity, we started with food! A quick breakfast got us revved up, and then we handed the floor of our office living room over to Debbie. From head-clearing exercises to an impactful and motivational presentation, Debbie guided us through actionable tactics we can use to perform better in our lives, including:
- Creating a bold vision that provides clarity, focus and inspiration, professionally and personally
- Tools to help prioritize and stay in action
- Practices to fuel confidence, relationships and fulfillment
- Communication skills to elevate influence and impact
- A deep connection that fosters collaboration, respect and inclusion
Step 3: Implementation of your new regime!
After the session, most of us realized it was okay to be more honest with ourselves and our goals, so the next step for us is to refine our vision exercises to reflect accurately what we want to become. We’ll all be working on these over the next 1-2 weeks. In order to make sure we all stay on track, we’ve been assigned buddies to check in with every 2-3 weeks to keep each other accountable.
At Team Clarity, we value the principles we learned through Fast Forward greatly! Everyone needs a reset now and then to check in with their goals and purpose, and this was a deeply rewarding way of doing so. We plan on discussing our visions with one another in a variety of new contexts throughout the year and working together to live the lives we want, and to achieve higher performance in all areas of our lives.
Thank you again, Fast Forward Group, for helping us open our hearts and minds so we can stretch to become our best!
Check them out so you and your team can do the same, we promise you won’t be disappointed!