Work Life Balance – Have you got it?

Over-Working

It seems we Britons continue to work the longest hours in Europe. More than 4 million employees in full time roles work more than 48 hours a week (that’s 700,000 more than did during the 1990s), and one in six regularly works more than 60 hours a week.

According to the TUC, the UK working week is now up to 43.5 hours – three hours longer than the European average. It also found 5.26 million Britons work an average of 7.2 hours of unpaid overtime a week. I’m worn out just writing that!

Technology which has made our lives so much easier on so many levels has also meant it’s much harder to escape from work. It’s always there: in our electronic notebook, our whizzy phone or lap top, staring balefully at us from our briefcase like a silent reproach. How long do you wait before succumbing to those emails? And how many times have you been caught up in the  ‘I can send a work email later than you’ game?’ Be honest!

Stress at Work

You may absolutely thrive on stress at work; indeed maybe you can’t get motivated unless there’s an important deadline looming. This is fine if it works for you. For most of us, however, there comes a point when we need to take a break. (See ‘Do You Give Too Much‘) If you let the balance get out of kilter you’ll start to experience the classic symptoms of stress (see Top Five Symptoms of Stress). Play smart and try and stop it before it starts!

Work Life Balance Exercise

Try this for one week. Keep a time diary (otherwise known as a time and motion study on yourself!). As accurately as you can jot down everything you do every day over 7 days with a note of how much time you spend on it. Work could be broken down into tasks if you can manage that. Then you’ll probably have family or friends time, your hobbies, professional development (which includes things like reading a professional magazine). There will be things you do for others and things you do just for you. Just log it, don’t make a value judgement.

Once you have your week’s worth of data sit down in a comfortable chair and look through it. Honestly assess yourself; there is no right or wrong balance to achieve. You will know yourself if it’s getting out of kilter. At different stages of your life you’ll be applying your attention & time in different places. Listen to your intuition; if it feels right it probably is right. But if there is a nagging doubt, pay that doubt some attention and think about some alternative strategies. Get to the stress before it gets to you!

How do you know when your balance is tipping too far in one direction?

Picture Credit: Juanita De Paola

Are You a Fox or a Hedgehog?

Do you wish you cope with change better?

We’re in changeable, unpredictable times. Sometimes it feels as if nothing stays static for long and depending on your personality this will alarm or excite you, or you may be very stoical in the face of change.

I’ve worked within many organisations and businesses undergoing major reorganisation, often where people will be losing their jobs. The effects of the change touch everyone, not just those whose jobs are at risk; inevitably sickness levels rise and productivity tails off if attention is not paid to the emotional needs of the employees.  In my experience most organisations begin with good intentions and are committed to looking after their staff but as the change process rolls on this becomes lost in the complexity of doing what is required.

Fox or Hedgehog?

Not everyone is bad at dealing with uncertainty and most of us can improve our coping abilities if  we can find an area where we can exert some control. In my one to one work that’s one of the things I’ll focus on; sometimes the only control we can have is changing how we feel and consequently how we deal with what is going on.

Foxes, it seems, are good at this.

Professor Phil Tetlock from the Psychology department at Pennsylvania University thinks there are 2 styles of thinkers: Hedgehogs are uncomfortable with uncertainty and complexity while Foxes are more able to accept that the world is an uncertain place. Foxes, he posits, use more analytical tools than hedgehogs, and draw their information from many different sources. They are comfortable saying:

“Well, this or that may happen, but I may be wrong“.

They are better at making decisions; the ability to realise they may be wrong about what they are predicting means they make decisions that will have a positive outcome taking into account all possible outcomes. They spread their options and have no problem with being humble.

How to be Good at Change

Become a fox! In essence being a fox means becoming more humble and appreciating that humanity is fallible. You acknowledge that you will make mistakes and plan for them.

Dan Gardner, author of ‘Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail‘ (Amazon link) suggests that if you find being humble difficult you sit down and make some predictions about things you think you know about. Then hide away your predictions for a few months after which time take them out and read them. This he says, will help you realise that you are just as fallible as everyone else as probably you will have not predicted anything with great accuracy.

Flexible Thinking

When times are good we tend to assume they will remain so, hence the huge shock at the economic collapse in 2008. When times are bad we tend to assume that they will only get worse. To be more fox like we should assume the good times are temporary too and be a little more cautious: this is the approach that women often take, see Neuroeconmics – Put Women in Charge. Similarly, when times are bad, remind yourself that they will get better. (I am put in mind of ‘this too will pass‘ my stock mantra)

Predictions

Gardner suggests that if you want to be more flexible in your thinking, when you have a judgement or prediction to make, write down all the reasons why you think that decision is correct. Then think hard about all the reasons why you might be wrong.  I do something similar when working one to one and it can be struggle. Try it though, however difficult. It will help you identify your biases or tendency to ‘magical thinking’; it does help you make better make quality decisions.

Be a foxy lady!

Photo Credit: Christopher Hall

What Every Woman Needs to Know about Confidence

Confidence is such an elusive concept. How do you define something so intangible? (That’s both a rhetorical and an actual question! I’d love to know what you think!)

I’ve written many times about women and confidence as it’s often  a feature of my coaching with women. Some days we’re brimful of it; others it simply deserts us.

And once we start to feel a lack of confidence it can become all consuming. We begin to focus so much on it that we soon become enmeshed in a downward spiral and can think of little else but our lack of confidence. Making us feel less confident…

Be More Confident

A survey by Gallop found that people were happiest at work when they had an opportunity to do what they did best every day.

Research into coping with depression and stress has found that focussing on the negatives in life does not lift the depression; you know you can make yourself feel miserable by thinking about something miserable in your life.

On the plus side you can make yourself feel brighter by thinking about something good in your life. Try it now. A famous sports photographer said he gets his subjects to think about the time they won a great competition and than snaps away as he sees that sparkle come into their features. Think about a good time in your life, when you felt confident and in control.

You can make yourself feel more confident by doing something you are good at! When the dip strikes don’t spend ages beating yourself up up about it or struggling to find a cause. Nip it in the bud as fast as you can by doing something that makes you feel good, that gives you a boost. And then in that frame of mind, go back and take a fresh look at your issue and you’ll see it from an entirely fresh perspective. You might not be able to see it at all.

RenewYou Women’s Course

If you’d like to spend a whole day with me looking at your life from a positive perspective and learn techniques to increase your confidence come and join me in Bristol on my Renewyou course!

And if you have your own techniques and tips to keep your confidence high, please share them with us!

Photo Credit: Katarzina Lipinska

3 Life Coaching Lessons from Cats!

I have two cats; I am, in fact,  a mad cat lady in training. That soubriquet was given to me in fun by Jim Connolly a few years ago when I first acquired my two rescue kittens.

I like the title (heaven knows, I’ve had much worse!) Cats have a lot to teach us; my cats may be a tad atypical as they were rescued at a very young age and were not brought up by a cat, but by me! But this is what I have learned from cats and these could be good lessons for you to follow this week end:

3 Life Coaching Lessons from Cats

• Eat and sleep when you need to, not when others think you should.
• If you need a hug ask for one (although not necessarily by rolling on the ground exposing your furry stomach. You know what I mean!). Let people give you a stroke now and again. And offer the odd snuggle back as you’ll find it results in more hugs!
• To your own self be true. If doing something doesn’t feel right to you, it’s probably not right for you. Trust your instincts and care more about what you think of yourself than what others think of you. Be an individual cool cat!

What life lessons has pet owning taught you? Please share!

Photo Credit: Pepiotana

Top 5 Symptoms of Stress

Stress Management

If you’re going to rise high in an organisation or your business, you’re going to get stressed from time to time. Fact. In fact, stress is a much maligned word and generally used to mean something undesirable. Yet a  bearable amount of stress, like when we venture to try something new, can be enormously beneficial. It can actually advance our careers. It’s getting the balance right  that is difficult. If you always tried to avoid stressful situations you’d never advance, never learn and change your ideas. You’d stay where it’s always comfortable. (This is a significant point for ambitious professional women as generally speaking we emerge from surveys as being risk averse and also as disliking conflict. I’ll cover this in a future post)

When the balance gets out of kilter it can have disastrous consequences, for ourselves, and others. Work overwhelm is a serious business.

Work Life Balance

I was listening to an interesting seminar from Julie Hirst the other day (courtesy of  a Women in Logistics seminar, many thanks to them). Julie had been part of a project which  had run for ten years looking into work life balance and how stress affected people. An interesting distinction emerged. Working long hours which spilled over into your personal life were not such  a huge cause of stress for people at the top of an organisation as for those lower down.

In Control of Your Work

The variable factor is actually feeling in control of what is going on. It’s about having a choice; people who felt this was imposed upon them exhibited other symptoms of stress too. When we feel out of control at work serious ill health is sure to follow and then we are NINETEEN times more likely to make a major error. And I mean major error. The survey invited folk to give examples annonymously of mistakes they had made at work. The results were scary, down to actually causing death.

Having an element of control as a factor in helping manage stress is not surprising. The same thing happens in organisations when they are undergoing significant organisational  change. The feeling of not knowing, of having no control is the one which produces the most stress and leads to higher than average sickness levels.

Top 5 Symptoms of Stress

1) Sleeplessness on a regular basis.

2) Fatigue, again feeling tired most of the time, even when you’ve done little.

3) Inability to focus and concentrate

4) Irritability with others and with self

5) Pains in the neck, head and shoulders.

So, if you tick any of these boxes it’s time to start taking your well being seriously.

Sometimes it’ s impossible to take control of the external events, even if you are at the top. And that’s when we have to look within ourselves. There is one place where we can always have control. We can control and manage how we react to the external events. I don’t mean to sound trite, because it’s not as easy as talking positive (although that is a part of it). But it is possible.  Take steps to recognise your stress and then take steps to address the cause when and however you can. But always, take care of what is within your contol- you and your feelings.

Epictetus: “We are not touched so much by life events themselves but by the view we choose to take of them.” Wise words from a Stoic philospher AD 55-AD 135.  There is always a choice.

How do you manage work place stress? Do please share your ideas. The best thing I ever did to manage my work stress was to run my own business! And there are 3 tips here. Or, try listening to my free visualisation and see if you find that calming. Loads of women have told me how much they love it.  Here’s the article that accompanied it : What’s your perfect working day?

Photo Credit: Irum Shahid

Women in Business – How are you with change?

It’s a pretty unpredictable business world at the moment. To be honest, for most of my adult life it feels like it’s always been a pretty unpredictable business world; this time around the stats are telling us that women in business are getting the worse end of the financial crisis, (somewhat ironic in light of a new book published on neuroeconomics, highlighting how if women had been in charge we probably wouldn’t be in a downturn!)

However, we are where we are and our attitude to change will be a significant factor in how we survive.

How do you React to Change?

There are two ways of responding – try to ignore and resist it and adopt the ‘if I stay quiet it won’t notice me and will go away’… stance. Of course, it won’t go away and you will feel weak and powerless and a victim of circumstances. This victim mentality will not help you deal with whatever life is throwing at you. Although for a while it can be a comfortable place to be as we rant and rave at the powers that be, frequently quoting how different it might be if women had been in charge! Be warned, the apparent comfort of moaning is a terrible trap to fall into….it won’t help and it may harm you.

And the second option? Don’t give away your power. Life throws rubbish at us from time to time but we always have a choice – recycle or drown in garbage. Recycling is so much better!

Keep the End in Mind

It might not be exactly what you want because you’re making it from what you’ve actually got, not what you’d choose, but it’s better than the alternative! Even when times are tough there are solutions, you just have to look a bit harder.

Don’t stop looking ahead and making plans for your future. Don’t stop investing in your career. Perhaps you can’t afford a course but you could could get a good career relevant book or an on-line course. Tap into all your resources., including friends and colleagues and give back too.

Know where you want to be ultimately, even if for a while circumstances mean you need to do a bit of fancy footwork. and make some compromises. If you can keep those longer term aims in sight it makes the interim stuff much more bearable.  See it for what it is, a deviation on your route which might mean the route takes longer. Keep your eyes fixed on the end goal and one day you will be doing just what you want to do!

Photo Credit: Dieter Joel Jagnow