Do you have a dream?Do you know what your dream is?Are you on your way to achieving your dream? Whatever your answer to any of the above questions, we all need a dream, we need something to strive for and work towards.Our dream provides us with a clear vision – consider drawing an image in your mind or develop a vision board so you and others can ‘see’ what it looks like and keep this where you can see it regularly.Any vision requires goals being set that measure our performance and help us achieve our dream. These goals need to be SMART providing tangible milestones and clear steps to ensure you are ‘conducting the orchestra’ and leading your own destiny. The goal is your long term and final objective that harnesses your vision.Goals require actions where we need to determine what we want to achieve and how we are going
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It is said we should never stop learning and that we should ALWAYS learn – no matter what! When we were at school, we perhaps didn’t appreciate how privileged we were back then. Now when we want to learn, it often feels too hard, and we don’t have time. Either way, to learn, we have to have the right attitude to learning. By continually learning we are more than likely to achieve our actions and goals. Why? Because we are always growing. Remember, it’s not always about reaching our destination, but enjoying the journey, enjoying the moment, the process, no matter how hard. Seeing the benefits of this and that it is an opportunity of personal and professional development as well as bettering ourselves in various ways. Not only must we see the value of continuous learning, but we must also have a growth mindset. Every day we must ask
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How often have we said, “I haven’t got time”; “I don’t have enough time”; “I lost time” and many other statements we make when the reality is we all have the same hours in the day, we can’t bank it or save it. We can however waste it by not making the best use of our present time. Time Management IS and should be part of our self-care. We only have one life, time is very precious and a limited resource and one which should be used wisely, making use of the present more than ‘later – later – later’, which often means never doing them. Do you want to reach old-age feeling you’ve lived a life of regrets? When you fear taking yourself out of your comfort zone and moving into new pastures and feel nervous about taking these steps into the unknown. Stop for a moment and consider
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Amelia Earhart was quoted to have said “The most difficult thing is the decision to act; the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do.” The paper tigers she refers to means “something or someone that claims or appears to be powerful or threatening but is actually ineffectual and unable to withstand challenge.” I often talk about perceived obstacles, barriers or fear with clients, in that they may feel very real but they’re actually not, however, we must try and act on fact and evidence rather than feelings believing them to be reality. When we are working towards our vision or aiming to obtain our goals, setbacks and bumps in the road are inevitable and unavoidable. To enable us to get past these roadblocks we need tenacity, determination and perseverance to see us through. This can be hard when we are
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We know we have attributes and skills, however, sometimes it’s hard to determine what the difference is between them both in terms of what we can learn and what we have inherently within us. An attribute is seen as a quality or characteristic of a person, place or thing and is seen as inherent rather than something that is taught. A skill on the other hand is seen as something that can be learned through training and something we can improve on to better ourselves. If skills are learned and attributes are inherent then which is called upon in the face of adversity? At times of adversity, we need to use our resilience. This is another word which is used a great deal, and none more than the last year or so, but what does it mean and what steps or strategies can we use to help us cope? Here
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Personally: Do you know what your personal values are? Would you be able to reel these off if and when asked? Do you live up to your personal values, or are they something you aspire to? Professionally: Does your business have core values? Does your business uphold your values? Could you define your business core values if you don’t have them? What are our values? Our personal values are our moral compass which help define us and help guide us through life. They may determine our friends, partners, behaviour and even decision-making. Often, we are more aware of the values we hate or can’t stand. Those deal-breakers we absolutely won’t tolerate on any level, and sometimes this is the place to start, what we don’t want in our lives before we can determine what we do want in our lives. When we do take time out to define our values
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Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could see into the future or have a crystal ball and know that what we are doing will lead us to the destination we want and that it will be good for us. We can dream about our future, more of a pipe-dream perhaps where we imagine all sorts of things that are probably unlikely for us to ever achieve, but it can be good fun drifting away into this fantasy land every once in a while. However, if we take this down a level and instead of day-dreaming pipe-dreams we instead consider what our desired future could be, so we can not only see what it could look like but even feel what it might be like. Visualisation is such a powerful exercise and can be inspiring and a source of creative power that can motivate us to propel forward often giving us
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As a business owner, do you know and understand what your business features are? As a business owner, do you understand what the benefits you provide to your clients or customers? If you don’t, then how can you promote yourself well, confidently and articulately! As business owners, we need to understand how we are different to other similar or same businesses and be able to shine uniquely. When asked, can you say in what way your business is unique or different? Can you explain specifically what your point of difference is? There are a couple of things that can hinder us from doing these things. One is confidence in ourselves as a business owner; having self-belief in what we do and who we are, and well as feeling comfortable in our own skin to be proud to say what we do AND that we are good or even great at
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Now I’m sure you’ve heard of the story of the tortoise and the hare? “The hare is very confident of winning, so it stops during the race and falls asleep. The tortoise continues to move very slowly but without stopping and finally it wins the race. The moral lesson of the story is that you can be more successful by doing things slowly and steadily than by acting quickly and carelessly”. Have you ever thought that to GO SLOW or SLOWER you might achieve more? If nothing else COVID-19 and lockdown this time last year taught us, was that we can get caught up in the ‘carousel of life’ wishing we could ‘stop the bus’, but not knowing how or even when. COVID-19 and the lockdown caused the whole world to stop and when we did, we had time to think, to breathe, to reflect, to contemplate where we are,
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For most of us, we were encouraged to ‘try, try and try again’, ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try again’ and many other sayings that were drummed into us as children. Whilst it’s important to keep trying, it is equally important to know exactly when it is the right time to let go and give up. We need to have some indicators that tell us we are now ‘banging our head against a brick wall’ and it’s time to ‘call it quits’, to ‘walk away’. We need to manage our emotions, because they could be screaming at us to keep going or yelling at us to give up! Which one do we listen to when they are both so loud, we can’t ‘hear ourselves think!’ We know that in our lives we are continually learning and growing, and that our growth and development isn’t going to be easy, and
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