Simon Sinek says: “Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress; working hard for something we love is called passion.” We talk about good stress and bad stress, but what’s the difference and how do we know which is which? It’s believed that good stress is a ‘short-term’ thing, which inspires and motivates you, focuses your energy and enhances performance; whereas bad stress, is the type that wears you out, leaves you nervous and can harm your health. Bad stress, or distress, can then lead to anxiety, confusion, poor concentration and decreased performance. We usually feel passion when it’s something we’re interested in. For example, we can have a passion for a sport, hobby, or an activity. When we feel passion towards our job, work, business or occupation, this is usually because we have a positive emotion towards it. If we have a purpose, and that purpose
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You've likely walked past your kitchen bench and seen near-rotten bananas and thought to yourself, oh, I'll make a smoothie tomorrow with those. Then the next day you see the same bananas and think, guess it's time to make banana bread! On the third day, the bananas are collecting flies, and there's not a smoothie or banana bread in sight. We do the same thing in our businesses, often without even noticing. We set unachievable goals, with high expectations of ourselves, setting ourselves up to fail, instead of SMART goals that relate to our personal and professional goals. We write To-Do lists galore, never working through them, always putting them off to the next day; the list just grows and grows making us feel more and more overwhelmed. We have loads of ideas that pop into our heads at all sorts of the day and night, that constantly sit at
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As a business coach & mentor and personal life coach it’s so important to encourage, inspire, motivate and empower clients to grow personally and professionally to achieve their dreams, goals, ambitions and aspirations. Often it can be hard to exactly see how we might do this when there is fear, doubt, and negative mindset. Here are some suggestions on how you might grow yourself or your business: Self-esteem – even although this can be hard we need to recognise the things we are good at, focusing on our strengths rather than our weaknesses, develop positive relationships by surrounding ourselves with good people who want to support us. Focusing on the positive rather than the negative, be kind to ourselves and see obstacles as opportunities rather than challenges. Confidence – if our self-confidence is low, we can reflect on where this lack of confidence comes from and imagine what having confidence
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Often when we show empathy with someone, we only see what’s sits on the surface. We don’t see what’s underneath. We may struggle with being empathetic if we don’t feel the same way as the other person or we haven’t experienced what they have or are experiencing. We can make the right replies and say the right things thinking we are being understanding, however, we can’t and don’t know exactly how the other person is feeling and so being empathetic is often only high level. The things we see in others i.e. what’s on the outside, what they are wearing on their sleeve is their body language which we may notice is different or ‘down’. We may notice their facial expressions or their changed behaviour – communication and interaction will or may be different. Like an iceberg, this is just what’s seen, however, the things we can’t see perhaps is
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I recently read an article referring to coaching which talked about what your coaching is really worth. The writer referred to an experiment which I thought I’d share with you (shown in italics and quotes below). I feel we could all learn from this, no matter what business you’re in, whether you are selling a product or service – either way we need to know our worth. This also applies of course to us personally too. How many of us sell ourselves short? Discount our services or even give our products away? Often, we have an assumption others may not be able to afford what we have to offer and question our or ‘its’ worth. When we reduce our prices what message does that send out to others? Certainly not one that will help us grow our businesses. After all, if we devalue ourselves or our services or products then
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My Success Factor Wednesday Wake-Ups are usually inspired by something I’ve heard about, read or come across through a conversation. This week is no different and came from Marshall Goldsmith talking about the most often work on leadership skills. This got me thinking about how we could all benefit from improving our leadership skills to help us in all walks of life, whether as a parent, coach, in work, business or with friends and colleagues. Some of the key elements of leadership are what we do naturally and perhaps even do well, however, we are all a work in progress and can always benefit from some great tips to help us continually improve. I thought listing some of these might spur you to consider what areas you might want to work on yourself or encourage others to develop. Remember as leaders we can and should develop leaders. Respect – this
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What does building relationships mean? Relationship building happens when the mutual understanding between or among individuals is increased and in a way that is of mutual benefit to all parties. Some examples of this are as follows: Creating a supportive environment for you, your employees, colleagues, clients and customers. Ensuring each interaction is memorable, positive, inspiring and motivational. Enjoying the process of creating a positive and enjoyable experience for all parties means relationships will get better and better Positive feedback and acknowledging great work. If we make time to give positive feedback to others this will come back to you. By giving positive feedback to someone you can absolutely make their day, it’s like giving a gift, something special to them and costs absolutely nothing. Imagine how you feel when someone has ‘given’ this to you, giving back means it will come back to you in spades full. Respect which
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Whether personally or professionally we all want to earn a great reputation for what we do and don’t want to lose that reputation, but how can we do this and what happens if something happens to affect this? We know that bad news travels fast, no-one wants to hear good news. And there’s the old adage, there’s no smoke without fire. Nowadays, a bad review or comment can hugely affect a business and hurt business owners too. We can work tirelessly as business owners to ensure we keep a great profile and a good reputation and there are a few things we can do to help us do that. Retain clients – as business owners we are of course wanting to generate income and grow our businesses, however, it’s not always about just gaining or acquiring new clients. If we don’t look after the clients or customers, we have then
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We all say we are listening to others’, don’t we? However, are we just hearing and what’s the difference? Hearing and listening may seem very similar, however, there are quite specific differences. Here are some differences for you to ponder. Perhaps you can see how much you really listen or are you mainly just hearing. HEARING is a passive process whilst LISTENING is an active process. HEARING does not require an understanding of the other person whilst LISTENING depends on the person really understanding what the other person is meaning. HEARING is easy requiring little if no real effort, whilst HEARING requires a degree of concentration, focus and attention of what the other person is saying and meaning. We can go through the physical process of hearing a sound or what someone has said, however, listening involves us understanding and responding to what we have heard and being empathetic of
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I’m sure you like me have gotten to the stage when you’ve just wanted to give up. You’ve picked yourself up several times before and there becomes a time when you feel it’s just not worth getting up again just to be knocked down. The last two to three years has been and continues to be a challenge for all of us and at times when things are tough and challenges feel just too hard and ongoing, we feel like giving in and giving up. But why do we give up and is there a way in which we can help ourselves by developing strategies and tools to protect ourselves from feeling like we want to give up or give in. Below are some examples of why we might feel like giving up – see if any of them resonate with you. Expecting quick results or quick fixes Lack of
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