I have read so many reviews and heard so much about the new Julia Roberts film, Eat, Pray, Love in the last few weeks I'm not sure I really need to go to see it at all! Of course, in the end, I will go. If only to stay part of the conversation with my girlfriends over the next few weeks.
It's interesting, the Elizabeth Gilbert book on which the film is based was a book we read at my village book club when it first came out. I might even have been the one who introduced it having picked it up at an airport somewhere. The reviews from each of us, a dozen middle-class, middle-aged women, the perfect target audience, were mixed. For those of us who had relatively recently experienced our own 'bathroom floor moment' (the phrase, emerging into everyday speak, for that moment of realisation that every decision you ever made was a bad one) we could tap into the angst Gilbert suffered and empathasise with her journey. For those lucky enough not to have got there yet, or to have bypassed it completely, the book has a somewhat self-indulgent, slightly neurotic tone.
How many people, I don't believe it's only women who go through it, reach a point in their lives when suddenly (or through a more gradual dawning) they feel as though they haven't lived the life they wanted or planned for? How many people wake up one morning and realise they are married to the wrong person, in the wrong job or following the wrong dream? I think, or maybe I hope!, this is normal, absolutely normal. Most of us go through it at some point.
The really hard bit is what to do next. How do you get up from the bathroom floor, physically or metaphorically and change your life? Julai Roberts will, of course, show us the way. Sadly, we don't all have time, or money, to take off on a year's sabbatical of self-discovery.
So what's nearer home, closer to real life? I've been doing lots of work and thinking lately around 'Confidence'. It seems to be a recurring theme, both personally and organisationally. For me confidence has been the key to changing my life. Discovering at 40-something that I was living the life I thought I should live was hard. To realise that I am a people-pleaser, conforming to my parents' view of how to live my life, to my husband's and my childrens' view. To realise I had no idea what 'I' thought or wanted left in a quiet space alone for an hour was a terrifying moment. One I worked really hard to avoid completely for the next 3 years, with some success. Even now, as I type, I look at the words and I'm transported back to a darker place. I know now though that I have the key, although it can still be a stiff and awkward key, to change things. To move forward in MY chosen direction, taking those I love with me, leaving the chains behind.
So yes, I'll go see the film, preferably with a lot of friends and we'll spend the next few weeks over our Pinot Grigio unpicking our personal journeys....We might even learn something new about ourselves or each other! Julia Roberts, eat your heart out!
http://www.zestbusinesscoaching.co.uk/
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Wednesday 22 September 2010
Friday 20 August 2010
Beyond Multi-Tasking
Well it's ages since I last posted anything on here. In writing a brief for a client and in looking at what I have been up to over the last few weeks I am reminded very clearly of the old adage that 'we should practise what we preach'.
Kids on school holidays, business to run, endless stream of visitors staying and the inevitable washing, cooking, cleaning still to be done....does this sound like the perennial cry of the working mother these days?! I am so not immune to it, and yet I run workshops, and I'm about to embark on running a long programme, entitled 'Beyond Multi-Tasking'!
This workshop represents the anti-thesis of my daily life and that of many people these days. It will challenges the myth of multi-tasking and looks at the fragmentation and ultimately the depletion of energy that is inevitable when we try to take on too many tasks at once - talking on the phone to a client whilst supervising the destruction of my kitchen with 4 children in lunch-making mode, springs to mind as yesterday's example! We look at what is to be gained by focusing energy into one task at a time and ask delegates to do a personal energy audit to gain a deeper self-awareness of the times in their day they are most likely to be effective at their various challenges requiring physical, intellectual or emotional focus. I have learned that my brain works best in front of my computer at 5am and that if I want to exercise I'm most efficient at about 4pm. There's a really good body clock, The Human Circadian Rhythm, I found on Wikepedia that explains why this should be so. I teach people to recognise that personal energy is a precious resource and challenging it wisely is crucial, made more so when organisations are facing difficult times and more is expected of fewer people.....now, how to take these themes in a practical way into today?!
Wish me luck!
Wish me luck!
Friday 18 June 2010
What's on YOUR mind?
I have been thinking lots about blogging since I started last week and my biggest challenge has been to think about what I want to say and what is my purpose in saying it.
So now, already, after just one sentence I have two themes going on! One is about the purpose in whatever we do, the 'And So What?' question. I'll deal with that next time! The other is the thinking about what I want to say and what I need to say first.
Often my thoughts don't come along in any particular order. To focus what I really want to say I usually need to do what I refer to as 'downloading' first. I try to recognise that this is true for many of us. I encourage all my clients to think about what they need to say first at the start of every coaching session and workshop I run.
So what exactly do I mean by downloading? It's the bit I have to do before I can think clearly about something specific. My MSc in Coaching described it as a technique called 'front of mind'. It's the bit where I encourage clients to say what's immediately on their mind before we can progress with the task in hand. For instance, if a client arrives a few moments late for a meeting or a workshop, then their downloading may well be the traffic they have battled through, the exciting phone call they took as they were leaving, the argument they had with the cab driver. In being given space and opportunity to download this information for a few moments and it being acknowledged by the coach or the rest of the group it allows them to put it to one side and move into the real focus of the meeting. Not downloading can have a similar effect to asking your laptop to do too many tasks at once, it gets stuck and does nothing at all!
Front of my mind at the moment is the Charity Ball I'm running to raise funds for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust next weekend. I had a very odd experience this week when a client called me in the office to discuss a piece of work she had submitted for an ILM assessment. I had offered to give her feedback and told her to give me a call. However, when she did so, I was bogged down in writing and rewriting table plans. Who to sit with whom? The perennial curse of the event organiser, the pivot on which the success, or not, of an event seems to turn! So when my client phoned there was no way I could flick the switch in my brain to think about whether she had fully addressed the question of the place of executive coaching and mentoring in leadership development! Fortunately, she was understanding enough to allow me to explain my lack of focus and we laughed about a friend's wedding she had helped plan the previous year. I was then able to find the notes I had made on her work and we happily turned our attention to that.
There is definitely a lesson for me in allowing people to download, to say what's at the front of their mind before asking them to focus on the real business. Maybe it's about being human and connected with everyone we meet regardless of our purpose in meeting them. We each have our own agenda going on in our heads, loading our agenda into someone else's thinking without acknowledging theirs first seems a certain road to me to 'stuckness'. So, I'm determined to make more effort today to ask 'What's on your mind?'.
And in the meantime, keep your fingers crossed I get the table plan right.....!!
So now, already, after just one sentence I have two themes going on! One is about the purpose in whatever we do, the 'And So What?' question. I'll deal with that next time! The other is the thinking about what I want to say and what I need to say first.
Often my thoughts don't come along in any particular order. To focus what I really want to say I usually need to do what I refer to as 'downloading' first. I try to recognise that this is true for many of us. I encourage all my clients to think about what they need to say first at the start of every coaching session and workshop I run.
So what exactly do I mean by downloading? It's the bit I have to do before I can think clearly about something specific. My MSc in Coaching described it as a technique called 'front of mind'. It's the bit where I encourage clients to say what's immediately on their mind before we can progress with the task in hand. For instance, if a client arrives a few moments late for a meeting or a workshop, then their downloading may well be the traffic they have battled through, the exciting phone call they took as they were leaving, the argument they had with the cab driver. In being given space and opportunity to download this information for a few moments and it being acknowledged by the coach or the rest of the group it allows them to put it to one side and move into the real focus of the meeting. Not downloading can have a similar effect to asking your laptop to do too many tasks at once, it gets stuck and does nothing at all!
Front of my mind at the moment is the Charity Ball I'm running to raise funds for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust next weekend. I had a very odd experience this week when a client called me in the office to discuss a piece of work she had submitted for an ILM assessment. I had offered to give her feedback and told her to give me a call. However, when she did so, I was bogged down in writing and rewriting table plans. Who to sit with whom? The perennial curse of the event organiser, the pivot on which the success, or not, of an event seems to turn! So when my client phoned there was no way I could flick the switch in my brain to think about whether she had fully addressed the question of the place of executive coaching and mentoring in leadership development! Fortunately, she was understanding enough to allow me to explain my lack of focus and we laughed about a friend's wedding she had helped plan the previous year. I was then able to find the notes I had made on her work and we happily turned our attention to that.
There is definitely a lesson for me in allowing people to download, to say what's at the front of their mind before asking them to focus on the real business. Maybe it's about being human and connected with everyone we meet regardless of our purpose in meeting them. We each have our own agenda going on in our heads, loading our agenda into someone else's thinking without acknowledging theirs first seems a certain road to me to 'stuckness'. So, I'm determined to make more effort today to ask 'What's on your mind?'.
And in the meantime, keep your fingers crossed I get the table plan right.....!!
Tuesday 8 June 2010
Zest!
We know we need a blog, everyone has a blog these days! We're hearing it at every networking meeting we go to and now the kids are coming home and saying to me 'Mum, where's your blog for the business?'. Aaaaaargh! We're 3 partners all very capable and enthusiastic about what we do but we're all mid-forties and didn't grow up in an age where technology was normal. Slide rules and log tables were the norm in Maths lessons at school, if we wanted to do research then the Encyclopedia Britannica was the order of the day. Now we're finding out how to move out of the dark ages!
We're business coaches and what we do is specialise in re-energising people. Yeeha! What we love is the energy of the people and the businesses we work with. The tricky bit is to channel the energy into the direction that helps achieve goals and that's the fun of what we do. How we do it varies from one day to the next.
That's enough of the sales-y speak, that isn't what this blog is supposed to do. Actually, secretly (if its possible to be secret on a blog the world can see!) I'm practising for writing my first novel. My English teacher at primary school told Mum 'She has no imagination, she can't write essays to save her life', in the days when teachers were allowed to speak their minds! He's dead now but I'm still trying to prove a point - bring on the therapists!
Right, what I'm going to do now, is to see if this works - post it! Do I need stamps?? And of course if it doesn't work the whole exercise becomes irrelevant and you'll never be reading it anyway - a real Shrodinger's Cat dilemma.....
We're business coaches and what we do is specialise in re-energising people. Yeeha! What we love is the energy of the people and the businesses we work with. The tricky bit is to channel the energy into the direction that helps achieve goals and that's the fun of what we do. How we do it varies from one day to the next.
That's enough of the sales-y speak, that isn't what this blog is supposed to do. Actually, secretly (if its possible to be secret on a blog the world can see!) I'm practising for writing my first novel. My English teacher at primary school told Mum 'She has no imagination, she can't write essays to save her life', in the days when teachers were allowed to speak their minds! He's dead now but I'm still trying to prove a point - bring on the therapists!
Right, what I'm going to do now, is to see if this works - post it! Do I need stamps?? And of course if it doesn't work the whole exercise becomes irrelevant and you'll never be reading it anyway - a real Shrodinger's Cat dilemma.....
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