Are You The Boss You’d Like?

Well, are you?

If you were your own boss (and maybe you are, as I am) would people be queuing up to get in your team based on how you treat yourself?

Try honestly answering the following questions:

Do you treat yourself well? By which I mean do you look after yourself when working?

Do you take regular breaks? Grab some fresh air at least once a day?

Do you have a proper lunch break away from your desk/workplace at least three times a week?

Do you regularly praise yourself for a job well done?

Do you celebrate your successes?

Do you invest in yourself, take advantage of training on offer?

I hope you can answer yes to a good few of those. if not, time to give yourself an appraisal! Got to dash. the sun is shining and I’m going into the garden for 15 minutes!

Please share your ‘look after yourself’ tips!

Photo Credit: Arte Ram

The Answer to Your Problems in 10 Letters!

Seeking answers to the meaning of life? Got a problem to solve?  I have the answer for you -

It’s Crosswords!

Probably….

Problem Solving

Regular blog readers will know that I love crosswords. My favourite is the Sunday one which is particularly cryptic and takes me most of the week to complete (I say ‘complete’; usually there is one clue that drives me bonkers and I never solve!)

Over time I have got to know the style of the setters and try and tune into it on starting. So some I know will be tilting towards anagrams and others have a bias toward general knowledge for example. So when looking for clues that’s where I start; I’m either looking for anagrams or dredging up my general knowledge.

Stuck with a Problem?

And when I get stuck I put the puzzle down and pick it up the next day when the answer will often be staring me in the face! How could I possibly have missed it the day before?

The truth is of course, that I have been looking at the same problem for too long and got stuck in my self imposed terms of reference. As in:

“This is probably an anagram as the same amount of letters are in the clue as in the grid and this setter loves anagrams.”

When I take a fresh look and (crucially) forget about the anagram thing I seem to leave space in my mind for the answer to appear!

Like life, eh? Sometimes we have a problem that we’re just stuck with no matter how much time we have devoted to solving it. Sometimes we need a fresh pair of eyes to look, either our own or someone else’s. And sometimes we have to let go of our sacred cows, our own internally imposed restrictions and parameters.

Problem Solving Exercise

If you’re problem is a person try to imagine them as someone else. Let go of your preconceived ideas of what you think they are like and try to really LISTEN to them afresh. Imagine you know almost nothing about them. Your ideas of where they are coming from probably means you’re not really hearing them but instead are:

a) thinking of your next riposte

or

b) only hearing the bits that fit your preconceived idea of what and who they are.

Neither is particularly helpful in arriving at a good outcome.

And if your problem is not people focussed, try leaving it for a while and coming back to it. Go for a walk, try doodling, listen to music. Put your focus elsewhere and give your brain a boost and then come back to it and get creative!

If you enjoyed this, take a look at this article from the archives on problem solving. If you’re facing a problem there’s lots of advice on the blog – hope it’s helpful to you!

And if you’ve been thinking about working one to one I have some spaces available very soon! Give me a call on 01761 438749 or use the contact page. I promise you I don’t talk in anagrams!

Photo Credit: Katia Grimmer-Laversanne

The Secret of a Great Life!

How to change your life? It’s a question I’m often asked when coaching and here is an analogy I often use. If you’re feeling a bit stuck with life I hope it helps.

Do you ever get in your car, drive, and arrive at your destination (usually somewhere you go regularly like work) and not remember much about how you got there?

You’ve arrived and it’s taken you the same amount of time that it usually does but you were unaware of the journey. It passed in a haze. Maybe you were thinking about the day ahead, or the day just gone. Maybe you were fantasising about a dream life post huge lottery win!

We all do it and it can be a bit scary. What have we missed on the way?

Change Your Life

The reason we drive to work and have no memory of it is that our brains have developed that pathway; it’s a groove we easily slide into. So much so that if our holiday route begins with our work route we may find ourselves halfway to work before we realise. We’ve gone into auto pilot. We need that facility or we’d go mad (imagine having to remind yourself how to do every single thing you know. You’d go bonkers!) but if we live too much in the groove we miss out on so much of the possibilities of our lives.

The good news is it doesn’t have to be like that. Whatever age you are it’s never too late to start to live consciously, to make the most of your life. It’s only too late if you never start!

Change and Grow

So how to change your life? Well, for one thing you could investigate new routes to work and vary it now and again. You’ll notice so much more and quite possibly drive better too! And open up a new pathway in your brain!

And you can investigate new routes in your life too. The more you give yourself new challenges, stray from automatic pilot, the more life opens up its possibilities to you and the more rich your experience of life can be. Sometimes that means having a destination or a goal, sometimes that means maybe taking a risk and following your instincts.  The point is that whatever you are doing you are fully experiencing your life and not cruising through your precious life on auto pilot.

So, what could you change today to make your life great?

P.S Ten Tips for a Brain Work Out will help kick start your thinking!

Photo Credit- Niels Jansen

Your Friday Happiness Audit!

Happiness is very subjective and hard to define. What makes one person happy does not make everyone happy. But you probably know what makes you happy.

Unfortunately we’re not always good at recognising when we’re happy and living in that moment. We do seem to be quite good though, at remembering the less than fabby things and trotting them out in our heads, often. Which can give them a bigger place than they deserve in our memories.

Research on Depression

The *latest research on managing severe depression is quite clear. Dwelling on what is wrong makes you worse and reinforces the tendency towards more depression. Talking about what ails you makes it worse.  Therapy which focusses on your problems, on what is wrong with your life, is unhelpful.

Happiness Tip

So here’s my tip for this week end. You know how to make yourself feel sad – think sad things. You know how to make yourself feel better, think happy things! It’s as complicatedly simple as that. Like everything you need to practise and retrain your brain from it’s habitual path of dwelling on what went wrong. As you finish up the week ask yourself:

How many good things have happened to me this week?

How many times have I smiled?

What makes me feel good?

Have a great time!

Want more? Take a look at Nostalgia Makes You Happy

*Check out ‘Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy for Depression‘ by Segal, Williams & Teasedale

Photo Credit: Cynthia Turek

Are You Unhappy at Work?

One of the effects of our economic recession is that feeling that if you’ve got a job, you’d better hang onto it! That’s fine if you’re happy with your job, but what if you’re not? What if you’re really unhappy at work but can’t see a way out? There are always bills to pay and very few of us can take the risk of unemployment for any length of time, however tempting it feels on a Sunday night to just chuck it all in!

Research in Happiness at Work

Stephen Wood and L.M. De Menezes of the Cass Business School in London, published some research earlier this year* which supports what I have been saying for some time. When you can’t actually switch jobs, working on making your existing job better, improving your working life, will increase your sense of well being and happiness at work.

They advise trying to make your job as enriching as possible and taking opportunities to be more autonomous and grasp opportunities which may enhance your CV. So no falling into the “I won’t help ‘them’” trap as actually being more co-operative can actually help you!

They also found that knowing what was going on, being kept in the loop, helped employees feel more content with their lot. This is no surprise as in any times of stress and change we need to feel we have a say in what is happening, that we can exert some control somewhere in the process. And one way of doing that is to increase communication with your manager or your HR department. Find out what’s happening in your business, whether it’s your immediate company or your industry as a whole.

Plan Ahead for Next Job

Don’t see this time as ‘dead’ time. Yes, you need to hang in there for a while but there are still opportunities to plan ahead. Don’t wish your life away but a bit of judicious planning for the next step, when it becomes available, is good career planning. Maybe get yourself on a course within work, or invest in one yourself outside of work; (a lot of participants on my Renewyou course are doing exactly this).

If you don’t know what that next step is, but you do know that you don’t like what you’ve got, listen to my free visualisation and see what it comes to mind!

You spend a lot of your life working, so it needs to work for you as well as your employer! Make a start now on enriching your working life!

Photo Credit: Gokan Kohur
* High Involvement management, High Performance Work Systems…Journal of Human Resource Management 2011

If you’ve enjoyed this article, check out these 3 Essential Questions for Women

Two Questions to Ask Today!

Just for today, why not try and have an Appreciative Inquiry day?

• Appreciation means to recognize and value the contributions or attributes of things and people around us.

• Inquiry means to explore and discover, in the spirit of seeking to better understand, and being open to new possibilities.

Put the two together and this means that by appreciating what is good and valuable in the present situation, we can discover and learn about ways to effect positive change for the future. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Of course it’s not quite that simple, especially if we have got stuck in another way of behaving. But if you practice it does become easier, I promise!

Have a go at it for the next 24 hours. Think of it as your Pollyanna personna!

Your two questions for today are:

1. What is working well in my life, what is good?
2. How can I do more of it?

That’s it! Just two simple questions. Give it a whirl and let me know how you get on. No negativity allowed all day…

Photo Credit: Andrejs Pidjass