Is your communication good or bad?

You would think it was easy for us to communicate with each other, wouldn’t you? However, if we look at how we communicate, when we communicate, and who we communicate with, I am sure we would agree, that in most instances, our communication isn’t the best it could be. We may avoid certain communication because we fear it may be confrontational, or fear the outcome of the discussion. Communication is more than good or bad. The timing can cause a problem. The method we are using i.e. telephone, video conference, text or email has its pros and cons. If we measured how often our communication is good, positive and successful we would see how well we communicate with others, and vice versa. Communication has a sender and receiver. When communication breaks down, or the message isn’t received in the way it was sent, is it the ‘fault’ of the sender

Good at suggesting great things to others but not to yourself?

When it comes to communication, we are often good at communicating with others but not so good about communicating with ourselves. Are you one of those people who is great about offering great ideas, suggestions or advice to others, but not great at giving them to yourself? Did you know we can help ourselves through auto or self-suggestion, where we can encourage our conscious and sub-conscious to believe in what we are saying? Auto and self-suggestion is a form of self-induced suggestion where individuals guide their thoughts, feelings, or behaviour, and can be creative or destructive; positive or negative. Sometimes pretending we are offering the suggestion to someone else is a good place to start. How can we be better at suggesting great things to ourselves? Here are some tips to get you started: Statement of your desire – be clear what you want and start putting statements together of

Being in the moment with your listening

You may have read the quote “the biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand we listen to reply.” I know for many of us we find this difficult, but why do we find this so hard, and how can we listen more to understand than reply? Let’s look at the problem with us listening to respond. If we are formulating an answer in our minds, then how can we possibly be listening? We miss the main point of what the person is saying and give the person a huge dis-service by not being fully present nor actively listening to what they are saying. Let’s look at the benefits of actively listening. If we are truly listening to the other person, we are showing a real interest in exactly what they are saying. Following up with questions about what they have just said not only shows we are

This is the way to do it!

What are the main things that stop us from focusing on our goals? What are the main distractions which prevent us from completing our daily activities? How many minutes do we spend on time-wasting activities? How well do we manage our time? We all know that if we want to get anywhere in this life we need to be organised, super-efficient, motivated and focused, don’t we? How can we stop the madness of our crazy lives and push the pause button, so we can just get things done, so things can just go the way we want them to. Here are four results which are tried and tested and may help you become more focused and achieve more in your working day. M-MANAGE – sometimes we just need to better manage what we are doing and try to deal with short-term crises and problems that can arise by thinking ahead

Chiefs and Indians!

Chiefs and Indians! I’m sure you’ve heard the expression too many chiefs and not enough Indians? Usually this saying is in relation to having too many bosses and not enough workers, and all the bosses telling the workers something different! Let’s look at another scenario using the same saying but in a business sense. I often hear from friends, colleagues and clients, that when they ask others for advice or tell others of a situation or difficulty they are in or struggling with, they are always offer their advice. There are a few problems with this scenario: How do you know the friend or colleague is an expert on that problem, or is an authority in that situation? Very often these friends or colleagues’ advice nearly always conflicts with what others say, so you end up totally confused and overwhelmed, wishing you’d never asked in the first place! The other

What do you see when you focus your eyes?

I am continually amazed at how many tips and articles there are about how to keep focused, and pretty much they all say the same thing in terms of uncluttering your desk, removing those distractions etc. But let’s start with asking you a different question. What do you see when you focus your eyes? When a camera focuses something, e.g. a flower. It makes adjustments so we see only that one thing, causing everything else to be out of focus. As we know our eyes do the same thing. We focus on that one thing, our eyes focus on the flower, and everything around us blurs out. Let’s look at the meaning of the word focus. It derives from the verb focus, which means to fix on a central point. It’s strange that we all know what it means, we can do it with our cameras and with our eyes,

How Focused Do You Want To Be?

Today is going to be different! I will be more organised from tomorrow! I WILL focus and not be side-tracked! Do one or more of these statements ring true for you? Have you been guilty of saying exactly that or similar? Well you are not alone, but why? Why is it so hard to be focused and just get things done? We can all be full of good intentions but for some reason as the day goes on they wane. So how can we fight being unfocused? Here’s some helpful tips to help you be and stay focused: Define and write down your daily goals – be really clear what those daily goals are and by writing them down you are committing to them – score them off one by one as you complete them to gain that feeling of accomplishment Organise your breaks – sometimes when we get going

The Only Way Is Up!

I don’t know if you remember the song ‘The Only Way is Up’ by Yazz from 1988, but those words have resonated with me and some of my family for various reasons. The words are quite poignant “We’ve been broken down to the lowest turn, being on the bottom line, sure ain’t fun”; other lyrics talk about holding on! It’s not that easy sometimes to hold on and sometimes we feel we just want to run away and move somewhere else, just doing something else or being somewhere else will somehow make it better – but does it? We need to focus on moving onwards and upwards and take active steps in replacing unhealthy coping strategies with healthy ones. Easier said than done – perhaps, but avoidance and procrastination doesn’t make things go away, it makes things fester and grow bigger! It allows the stress to build up, which is

Imagine Stress Being the Same as a Fall

As children, we have no fear. We fall over and think nothing of it, the hurt is brushed away like the dirt and grit from a graze on our knee. As we get older, we don’t ‘bounce’ the same. When we fall it shakes us and our confidence and hurts us when we land, often breaking bones, pulling muscles or tearing ligaments. But the fall isn’t the end, is it? It’s all the stuff afterwards that ‘hurts’ us, the pain and strain of managing the aches and pains, a continual reminder of the ‘hurt’ reminding us we fell and hurt ourselves. I recently had a fall and the aftermath as above. This made me think of the parallels of how we get stressed and how stress affects us in the same painful way a fall can. Stress can hurt us, just like a fall. It hurts us mentally, emotionally and

Are you in control of your life or is your life controlling you?

If I was to say to you that managing stress is about you taking control of your life, would you agree, or would you say you can’t do anything about it – that stress can happen to any of us, like catching the flu? We can all manage stress, we just have to identify where it comes from, what has caused it and why it’s affecting us in the way it does, and then look at how we can best manage it. Stress has many guises and is different for us all, it affects all of us in different ways and so doesn’t it figure that managing stress needs to be different for us too? One size doesn’t fit all! Let’s start by identifying typical sources of stress in our lives. We know that chronic stress can be caused by big changes in our lives, e.g. changing jobs, moving house,