CASE STUDY – Lisa van den Berg
If you met Lisa, you would soon see she is a self-starter and a true leader. Married for 19 years, and originally from South Africa, she was living in England when, in 2013, having gone through a life changing time of conquering cancer, Lisa and her husband decided to completely change their lives at 42 and 45 years old. They were dissatisfied with the demands of her husband’s corporate career which had kept him away from home a lot. Career wise Lisa was setting herself up as a life coach and motivational speaker, but was told by a spiritual mentor that she wasn’t spiritually ready to go where God wanted her to go. So, with their daughter grown up, they decided to leave everything to pursue more of God, moving to Redding, California to attend Bethel School of Ministry.
Towards the end of Lisa’s first year at ministry school, she attended a 2 day life coaching workshop; called What do I do next? run by Tina Southgate.
Breakthrough and Progress toward Key Life Goal
Lisa is not someone who is typically afraid or slow to move forward, but someone who intentionally sets very clear life goals. At the workshop, one particular coaching exercise brought breakthrough in one of Lisa’s biggest, scariest life goals where she had become stuck for years. The goal: to become a motivational speaker to the business arena.
Lisa continued, “I have a very high sense of self confidence and belief in what I am here to do. You could drop me in the deep end of anything and I’ll swim, but this specific area I needed God’s help. I can’t do it in my own strength. I have been blocked in it all my life. It felt scary for me”.
Lisa said, “During one of the coaching exercises, this big scary goal became tiny. It became very clear to me how to transfer successful strategies I had used in the past, to what I’m now afraid of”. Lisa continued, “Consequently, I made more progress in the three weeks after the workshop on this goal than I had in years!”
Lisa went on to explain, “For me, I’m very much forward focused. The coaching exercise helped me see how I achieved a past goal and then apply that to where I was blocked in this goal. I was able to see that if I had be able to achieve such a big goal in the past with the Holy Spirit, then this big goal I am facing now can also be achieved.
Consequently, more has happened in the 3 weeks since the workshop than the 3 years before on this goal. And there’s all this hope that, God can do it for me. I don’t need to be afraid.”
Getting started on the big scary goal!
Lisa continued to explain what brought her breakthrough. “There were two things. It was the fact that we actually had to do the work at the event. Tina didn’t teach us and say “this will work for you. Go away and try it.” We actually did the exercises there and then!
I actually sat and wrote things out. I had something to go away with to start working on, broken down into simple little steps that I could just go and do. A lot of what happens with people not taking the next step after they have been to a seminar is that they have a lot of information, but then they have to work out how to start and apply it. From this workshop I just carried on the momentum instead of stopping the workshop and having to start something big by myself. Tina had already made me identify the goal with a timeline against it and what I needed to do to actually make it happen.”
Finding Motivation
“Secondly, to solve the problem of us being more motivated in a group of people than we are sitting at our kitchen table at 6 o’clock the next morning, Tina adds an addition to the traditional SMART goals model. She asks, “is your motivation sufficiently high to get you to do the goals?” Then she helps you to identify what is affecting your motivation and deal with it there and then. She knows if you don’t have a sufficient motivation level you are not likely to achieve it.”
Lisa’s first step was to start practicing her motivational speech linked together with other short-term goals she identified. This gave her sufficient motivation to start working on her speech straight away. Lisa explained, “it was always a big scary goal and nothing got me to do the steps to get there. Now it’s in action and I feel I can get there!”
Hearing from God
Lisa enthused, “the soaking times were amazing and particularly useful to have the Holy Spirit input into the practical things that we were doing. Tina gave us time to sit and ask The Lord what this really looks like. How do we walk this out? What have You got to say about what I’ve put down on the paper? That was beautiful, adding a whole other dimension and strength and confidence to take it away”
Lisa concluded, “The atmosphere that Tina created was peaceful, safe and encouraging, which is very different to a Tony Robbins motivational seminar where you are walking on coals, etc. There are different ways to motivate and inspire people to their greatness and to step out. In this workshop, Tina created a great safe place to be able to do that, which was unique. I’ve been to just about every type of these seminars on the planet. This was unique and beautiful.
Each one of us left with what we needed, which was brilliant. Everybody stood up and said they had taken a different thing away which means there was something for everyone.”