Bringing Value and Balance into your Life!

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Bringing Value and Balance into your Life! We talk about work / life balance, bringing positivity to our lives instead of looking at what defines us as a person, what makes us tick, what makes us value ourselves as a person. We all have values and these change during our lifetime. This could be due to a change of job, career or circumstances. Our values define what is important to us in our everyday lives. But do we know and understand what our values are, and can they help us feel more positive about what we do and why we do it? For most of us we have different values for each aspect of our lives, professional and personal, and so need to determine what these are and how they describe us. Would you agree that values are important as they help define what we think, what we say and

Give Yourself a Grateful Kiss!

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Give Yourself a Grateful Kiss! Sometimes things happen in our lives that turn us inside out and back to front, whether it’s the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job or our health, but somewhere most of us find the strength to mentally get back up, dust ourselves off and manage to keep going, other times we feel we just can’t get up again, and why should we as we will just get knocked down again. Have you ever had this feeling? Have you ever felt this way? What did you do? What can you do? As children, our mothers gave us that special hug that ‘makes everything better’ or a kiss on our ‘hurt bit’ that makes the pain go away. As adults, this doesn’t work as we realise that wasn’t real. How can we bring back positive thinking? How can we re-ignite our motivation? How

When Even The Snow Looks Black!

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When Even The Snow Looks Black! When we think of positive thinking, what do we think about? Stopping negative thinking; starting positive thinking! Black vs White! Supposedly easy, but easier said than done! We know that positive thinking is beneficial to us mentally and emotionally, but to enable us to even start thinking positively, surely it will help us if we consider the consequences of negativity, and how negative thinking desperately impacts our lives and wellbeing! When we can’t feel positive, we know we focus on negative things which becomes a downwards spiral - a self-fulfilling prophecy. So how can we kick-start positive thinking and banish negative thinking? Here are 5 easy steps on changing the negative to a positive to give you real results. List the things that create negativity in your life, work or business – in doing this it will help you to identify what your perceived

Frame Your Work!

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Frame Your Work! Have you ever thought that things we can think of a strength are often a weakness? Take being a multi-tasker for example, we call it juggling many balls in the air. However, this is a great strength to have if being a finisher is also part of that strength. What is the point of having all these great ideas, jobs or tasks on the go at the same time if we don’t finish them, and worse still if we don’t finish them on time. We are all busy people, whether working for an employer or ourselves, but being able to sustain this over long periods isn’t healthy or productive. Here are some 6 tips on how to become more productive, creating new and effortless habits. Prioritise and group what you do Many of the tasks we do are similar or routine. Improve your work-flow by grouping these

Pilot or Passenger?

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Pilot or Passenger? I’m sure like me there are some days when you wish you were the pilot and other days the passenger. I’m not talking about taking a trip on a plane to some exotic faraway place for some respite to get away from it all, although I’m sure that’s often on your minds! Instead I’m talking about those days when we wish we could sit back and let life just go by instead of having to be in control of our lives to manage our time as best we can. I often reflect on what we say about how fast holidays go and yet the week at ‘work’ can sometimes drag – well why is this? The time is the same whether it’s a week day or a weekend, a holiday or a work day. It’s no surprise to us that time can be our master or our

Do One Thing Every Day That Scares You!

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Do One Thing Every Day That Scares You! Have you ever wondered why we fear things? Our fears cause us to avoid things in our business or working lives stopping us achieving. We all have fears, whether it’s fear of success or failure; fear of change or public speaking; fear of changing jobs or starting up a new business. Often a lack of self-belief or confidence, or doubting ourselves, a reflection of how we are feeling right now; times of low self-esteem or perhaps having had a run of bad luck, giving us a feeling of immense insecurity. By delving into the route of our fear and what we are afraid of, it is likely to be our fear of failing or not being able to handle addressing our fear head-on. This could be a fear of dealing with a difficult client or employee, a fear of what the outcome

Values – Soar or Sore!

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Values - Soar or Sore! Are you flying in the wind or flying by the seat of your pants? Are you like a bird in the wind flying on the thermals with a clear direction of where you’re going before you take off, or are you making it up as you go along, deciding on a course of action as you go! I feel we can fall into the ‘sore’ trap by either being prone to distractions or reacting to someone else’s demands, requests or problems, to the detriment of our work, business or personal life! We fall into the trap of putting others first and ourselves second! Why do we do this I wonder? Is it because we don’t value ourselves enough, or at all, or is it because we don’t value what we are doing enough to stay with what we’re doing, instead fighting someone else’s fires or

Don’t Waste Your Time Reading This!

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Don't Waste Your Time Reading This! We hear it all the time! I’ll get around to it! I don’t have time! I’m trying to save time! I need more time! I don’t have enough hours in the day! I feel I’m wasting time! We know we all have the same time; and that the only time we can control is the present. Articles tell us that successful people plan their days; don’t let interruptions hinder their day; that they deal with priorities first – so what does that make us? Not successful OR human! I believed my time management was good, but recall many years ago, attending a one-day ‘time management’ seminar which proved the opposite, and recall three tips I was given and still use today. Paper-mover – Every time you pick up a document or paper on your desk and don’t do something with it, i.e. action it,

Don’t Worry – Be Happy!

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Don't Worry - Be Happy! Do you worry, over-analyse or over-think things?  If yes, then when? Bedtime? Morning? At work? At home? Maybe all the time? Remember the song ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ by Bobby McFerrin? One line in the lyrics say, ‘in every life we have some trouble’, and I believe this is true for all of us, don’t you? Do you feel that sometimes ‘troubles or problems’ seem to arrive on our doorstep in many forms, personally and professionally, throwing us ‘off kilter’ and sending us reeling off course into a dizzy turmoil of endless worry and hopeless despair? The trouble is, when this happens we forget where we were headed, what tasks we had for the day, or goals for the week or month, instead focusing on the ‘problem’ that has arisen taking over our thinking, our focus, our direction. When this happens to me, and I’m

What do you answer when asked?

what do you answer when asked?

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One of the most common questions in a job interview is ‘What motivates you?’ Whilst some of us may have our ‘go to’ answer for this to ‘please’ the prospective employer, what we aren’t addressing is answering the question for real – for US! Wikipedia says – “Motivation is a theoretical construct used to explain behaviour. It gives the reasons for people's actions, desires, and needs. Motivation can also be defined as one's direction to behaviour, or what causes a person to want to repeat a behaviour and vice versa”. Now if you are like me, I read this and think – how can I translate this into something I can usefully integrate into my daily working life. Some of us are lucky enough to be in a job we love, or perhaps we run a business providing a service we are passionate about. In these instances, one could argue