ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at personal barriers to achievement. It identifies and explores ways of overcoming the barriers to achievement and presents an organized system for managing barriers. The 'barriers are skills deficits' assumption encourages self-responsibility. Barrier management is conducted in several stages. There are three occasions in the coaching or mentoring process during which barrier management will be used: at the objective setting and planning stages, and during the implementation phase when the inevitable non-anticipated barriers emerge. But planning and executing an alternative which is more effort- and time-consuming just to avoid an easily cleared obstacle is patently counter-productive. The coach can encourage the management of organizational barriers in the same ways that personal barriers can be handled, namely by avoidance, use or confrontation. The empowering beliefs of achievement should be permanent, pervasive and impersonal and held with the level of expectancy and intensity of an absolute fact.
