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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We all know that we should set goals, and that our goals should be SMART, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timebound. We also know that our goals give us our ‘end’ result, enable us to imagine what the end result looks like and provide us with a roadmap on how we are going to get there. However, not all of us have goals, let alone write them down. And for those who do write them down, they still aren’t achieved because they get forgotten, are too hard, or being avoided. We are quite selfish and want to know ‘WIIFM’ (what’s in it for me). In other words, there needs to be a reward, an incentive, an emotional benefit, otherwise we are less likely to even start our goal, let alone work through it or even achieve it! But there is another step that comes before all of this, and that
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Time management is probably one of the biggest areas I work with clients on, as without good, structured time plans days can be wasted, time lost, and productivity decreased which in turn affects income generation. One of the causes of not achieving tasks or activities is procrastination, however, I would suggest that it depends on what we procrastinate on, why and what we do with the time we’ve gained by procrastinating in the first place. Before we judge ourselves for procrastinating, we should delve deep within ourselves to determine WHY we procrastinate in the first place and on what before chastising ourselves for this ‘bad habit’. Delaying or rescheduling something important that has a firm deadline of course is not good and can affect our income, our business or our job. However, delaying or rescheduling something for a justifiable reason could be seen as being sensible and cautious. For example,
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Most of what we show others is the best version of ourselves. This may be a façade, our armour, our uniform, hat or ‘face’ creating this invisible ‘shield’ that protects us and stops others from seeing the real us, i.e. what’s going on inside. What we see is people exuding certain behaviours when they know they are being observed, i.e. in work or in public. But what about the invisible things, the things that others can’t see, sometimes those things that even we don’t want to see or acknowledge. Our emotions when things are difficult can be strong and obvious and we try to keep them hidden, covering them up to try and show ourselves and others we are strong, can cope and manage with our current situation. What can make our emotions worse is what we think. And often our negative thinking, fixed mindset and bad habits cause our
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When we think about taking a leap forward, we may initially think of a reactionary jump rather than a planned leap. When we do make that leap, we need to be mindful what we might land onto or into! You will be aware of the phrase ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’ which is used to describe the situation of moving or getting from a bad or difficult situation to a worse one, with this often being the result of trying to escape or flee from a bad or difficult situation. Of course we want to avoid this, instead taking planned leaps into or onto something better or more positive. Whether we are talking personally or professionally, work or business we can apply the same methods. Look at L-E-A-P below and see how you can use these steps to progress in a planned way to move forward and
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How much do you challenge yourself?Why do you challenge yourself?Do you challenge yourself for the right reasons?Do you benefit from challenging yourself? What if we paused, pondered and reflected? What would that do and how might it help? What if we prepared, planned and regenerated? Imagine what difference that would make? What if we told ourselves to never give up, never be scared and to be strong! I’m sure we would be more confident, motivated and productive! Challenging ourselves needs to be done in a positive constructive way Where we are kind to ourselves and not harsh Or setting unrealistic goals or too many tasks We may be working hard or hardly working, having a feast or a famine, and constantly trying to better ourselves. Remember trying is just as important as succeeding, effort just as important as achievement – becoming is much better than being! Take these SIX steps
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It’s interesting when clients, colleagues or friends say they wish they had engaged a business coach & mentor earlier or sought help and support from a source they identified when they needed it, they would have saved themselves a great deal of time and possibly money. We know the saying, ‘prevention is better than cure’ but how much do we practice this? Boiling this down, the question really is how proactive or reactive are you? How much do you plan for the unexpected? Have you identified potential issues, blocks, risks, challenges and created a plan of action? And of course if not, why not? There are a lot of reasons why we don’t do what we know we should do when we need to do them, instead of procrastinating or avoiding them until we end up in dire situations or reap the consequences of putting something off that was urgent
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As you may already know I get my inspiration from many sources and this week it came from a poem I saw in a shop which talked about the traits of a willow tree. From this I thought I would use the Willow Tree as a metaphor and see how we may use some of our existing skills or adopt some skills we didn’t previously have to become more like a Willow Tree. The Willow Tree is felt to be the rebel of the tree world in that it is anything but conventional; and zigs when other trees zag, its roots are intriguing and daring in that they seem to find their way past or through every obstacle that may be in their way. They have the flexibility to bend when other trees break even in the fiercest storms, taking these challenges in its stride. It constantly reinvents itself, continually
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Now is the time we need to be considering what we want to achieve personally and professionally whether in work or in business. We do need to think about what we want the end result to be i.e. where do we see ourselves by the end of 2021. We need to take into consideration what support we might need, what challenges we might face and what obstacles may get in your way. We may need to upskill, this may be reading books or signing up to a course or workshop. We might want to consider where we want to stretch ourselves, which areas are we less strong or knowledgeable in where we could minimise our lack of knowledge or reduce our weaknesses. But, where to start? It may feel like a mammoth task, feeling like there’s a whole lot of ‘work’ to be done before you can even set those
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Are you focusing your attention on your intention?What are your intentions?Do you have any intentions?Is your attention in focus? Before we can set our intentions, we need to identify where our attention lies and check we are being attentive in the right areas to do the right things. Then we can determine what our intentions are and aim to keep them. But first we need to determine what the difference is between intention and attention. Attention usually is observing or listening on something or someone, paying close attention and taking in what we are seeing or hearing. Intention is usually a course of action taking us from where we are at present into something we picture as being our future, where we might see ourselves. An intention is our goal or aim, our purpose, something we intend or mean to do, determined not to put it off and not to
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