What is change all about and why do we fear it the way we do? We have two choices to embrace it or resist it! What makes us choose which option and why? Change is a huge part of our lives. They say the most consistent in our lives is change, and yet for most of us we fear it or avoid it like the plague! Change is the constant, although totally unpredictable and can affect us in many ways. I see there are two key categories of change, one where the change is imposed upon us, for example, your job has changed, you are made redundant or you are no longer able to work. The other is that upon which we impose upon ourselves, for example, where we want to personally or professionally improve. We know we must change to keep up with others or stay in business, but
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I was mindful of how much mindset is in our lives, with a busy schedule for most of us, deadlines to meet, full days, insufficient downtime and having those goals which we set ourselves often putting pressure on us to achieve even more next time. Whilst having goals are all well and good, so is listening to our bodies. We often ignore what our bodies tell us due to the pressure of work, deadlines and pressure sometimes from our peers or employers. It’s interesting when an animal feels sick, let’s say a dog or cat, it finds somewhere quiet and often dark to rest and recuperate. What do we do? We ignore the signals are bodies tell us, because we see these outside pressures as more important than listening to what our bodies are telling us. This led me to wonder why we might do this. The reasons are ones
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Why is it the jobs we don’t want to do and push ourselves to do are SO hard? Everything just seems too big to handle or to accomplish! I was reminded of this when I was running and speaking to a colleague recently which helped me change my mindset and attitude towards something, I’ve made myself do but hate doing. I started running a couple of years ago. I’ve always run on treadmills and hated them, now run on park runs and other community runs as part of my fitness regime, but still just ‘hate’ running, always have and always will! It’s a challenge to get out of bed every Saturday morning and run, especially if it’s cold, dark, wet or generally uninviting. Twice last year and so far, twice this year I’ve run 10km and noticed how different my mindset was when I started. At the start I kept
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At this time of year, we know we should be putting together a framework for the year; planning our goals, setting our actions and putting together doable SMART tasks for each week to help us achieve our aims! This can add pressure to us and feel more like a challenge than an incentive to grow or business to where we want it to be. Sometimes it can feel overwhelming, like there’s so much to achieve, not knowing exactly where to start or even how we are going to get there. We need an emotional benefit with every goal to build in that incentive, that reward, that ‘good feel factor’ to spur us on to plan. We know we need to take time from our business to focus on our strategy, but sometimes we are caught up in the operational activities the long-term goals just get put to one side. How
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Are you someone who keeps trying and trying and never seeming to get anywhere fast? Do you have dreams and hopes which never seem to materialise? Do you often feel like all the hard work and effort you’ve put into things was hardly worth it? It’s interesting how we measure ourselves against how well we feel we achieved. We often see others performing much better than us, or do they? Isn’t that just our perception? We always revert to the default of being our own worst enemy, only seeing our flaws and our failings, focusing only on what we didn’t do rather than what we did. What do you live or hope for? Have you ever asked yourself that question? Do you know the answer?If you have asked yourself and answered yourself, are you working towards that goal? We know that we avoid setting goals for the fear of failure,
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To do things halfway means to leave the job or task unfinished, to fail to do much that was necessary or expected, to take half measures. Normally, we wouldn’t drive to the middle of nowhere, turn around and come back. Likewise, we wouldn’t just climb up the stairs or walk into a room, then turn around and climb back down again or walk back from where we started (unless of course we forgot what we were going there for!). It’s said that we need to “Be all in or get all out. There is no halfway.” And this is true isn’t it, halfway measures don’t get the job done and leaves things unfinished and incomplete. It could be said as John Updike said, “Halfway isn’t all the way, but it’s better than no way”. Whilst this might be true, in that it’s better to get started than do nothing, but
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I started running the 5kms local Park Run a year or so ago and have also run in a couple of other runs of 9kms, 10kms and 11kms. I enjoy the community aspect of it but still don’t enjoy running, although enjoy the countryside whilst running. Whilst I’ve always used the gym most of my adult life, I’ve always hated the treadmill and feel there’s nothing more monotonous than running aimlessly on one spot. Every park run morning I force myself to get out of bed to run, telling myself it will do me good and being fit and keeping active will keep me healthy. I manage to ‘make’ myself do things I really don’t want to do by using mind over matter. We all know it means we work hard at building our own willpower to work towards being able to use our mind over matter. There are things
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This is the time of year when we all set goals with every intention of achieving as many as we can. We tell ourselves that this year will be different from last year and we won’t make the same mistakes again, that we’ve learned from our errors. We may or may not start with imagining what our business will look like at the end of five years, ten years or even one year! Imagining or having ideas doesn’t necessarily make them happen! Goals do! Actions do! We do however have to ensure our goals are SMART (specific, measurable, actionable relevant and timely). Vision – We need to have an idea or concept of what our business dream is; what might the ‘end’ product be; what will the business look like when fully mature. To have this clear in our minds is a good way to start as this gives us
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How many RE-s have you got? How many RE-s do you want? How many RE-s are you going to introduce into your business in 2020? Perhaps you’re feeling like you’re glad that this year is about to end, and you want a period of time and space to REcover and REcuperate, recapturing any wins you might have had to carry forward to next year. REset; RE-arrange; RE-organise – A New Year can encourage us to REthink how we do things for the forthcoming year; being creative about what we do and why and considering if there’s another, perhaps easier way to do things Sometimes we may feel all we’ve done is REpeat the same things in the same way; we may often feel we should RE-start, REstore or even REbuild our business to RE-invigorate how we see our business and how others may see it. Be REflective – I’m sure
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As we approach the end of the year, and whilst you enjoy your Christmas Day reflecting on how the year has been for you and your business you might be thinking about what your business ‘personal best’ was and how you might seek to achieve a new business ‘personal best’. To do this we need to have a plan, a strategy, goals and actions or steps to enable us to have clear focus, direction as well as be able to pace ourselves to ensure we can achieve what we’ve set out to do. The definition of ‘personal best’ according to Andrew Martin, Scientia Professor and Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of New South Wales are “goals that are specific, challenging; competitively self-referenced goals that involve a level of performance that meets or exceeds an individual’s previous best”. Often, we spend more time focusing on our personal best for
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