This Coaching Business

O for Optimism and Overwork

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 16:27:58 GMT

Optimism is really a Thing these days, and there are websites and programmes devoted to promoting it. This is because adopting an optimistic attitude, and behaving in certain ways, really does improve your sense of well-being.

One of the best sites I know of is the Australian initiative Project Optimism . They suggest that optimism is 'a belief that things will work out in the end, and if they haven’t, it is not the end.' They identify fourteen habits of optimists that we can learn to adopt, in a free course that takes less than an hour.

Here are three of them,

Smile
Laugh
Ask yourself, what makes you optimistic?

This third one, 'what makes you optimistic?', is really interesting. It seems that even asking yourself this question raises your level of optimism and thus your well-being!

Couldn't we all do with that little bit more optimism? What do you think?

I am hoping you are not suffering from O for Overwork, but the way things are these days, you probably are! The pandemic probably made us think about this more clearly. Fundamentally Overwork is bad for us when we do it and also for the people who receive the results of it. We get stressed when we overdo things and then we go into survival mode, where we don't think so clearly, and we easily make mistakes. And depending on the work we do, these mistakes can have enormous consequences - I am sure you can imagine!

In emergency situations - as we have seen in the pandemic and in the recent fires and floods around the world, it's unavoidable to experience the intense stress in the moment (our nervous systems are actually set up for exactly this kind of sudden emergency). But it's absolutely necessary to prioritise recovery afterwards, as soon as you can. It's not wimpish to take time out where you need to - it's an essential part of well-being.

We can also see this tendency in what's become known as Presenteeism (as opposed to Absenteeism), where people show up for work when really they are too ill or too exhausted, because they fear they will be seen as not pulling their weight, and then lose out on promotion or even the job itself.

What about you? Are you overworking right now? If so, what's one thing that you could do, or not do, to improve that?

N for Noticing and Needing

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 15:46:26 GMT

Noticing things is all about attention, and where we choose to put it. This is one of the areas where we do have control in life, along with the responses we decide to make in the situations that face us. We can choose what we attend to. I recall my mother saying to me as a child, when I was off on some reverie, 'Pay attention!'

And she was right! We do need to pay careful attention to what's going on. Then we have better information about this reality we're in (whatever that is!) and therefore to make better choices for our actions.

Mindfulness comes into this too. Basically mindfulness is the deliberate practice of paying attention, without judgment, to whatever's going on right now. Not what happened before, not what might happen tomorrow, but right now. It's the training of our attention - just as we train our bodies for physical health, so we can train our minds.

Why not just sit for five minutes (it will feel a long time if you haven't done this before) and just notice, maybe, one thing you can see, one you can hear, one you can touch, maybe even something you can smell and taste. See how it feels!

Here's another N - N for Need. Do I really Need it, or do I just Want it?

It's very easy to confuse the two, yet with our new-found powers of attention, we can get used to just sitting with cravings and desires and see what they really are.

Do I really Need that yummy-looking doughnut my daughter has left me or do I just Want it? To find out, I didn't eat it straight away. I let the feeling that I would like to eat it wash through me and see what it felt like. Actually after about five minutes I realised I didn't even want it, as I remembered hearing that a lot of what passes for food these days is in fact just 'food-like substances' and I certainly didn't need it. And honestly, I really didn't eat it!

Maybe there aren't that many things we really really need, such that if we don't get them we'll die, sooner or later. Air to breathe, water and supportive relationships come immediately to mind - what else, do you think?

M for Move and Motivate

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 15:41:16 GMT

You might say that Move and Motivate and aspects of the same thing - getting on and doing something! In terms of physically moving, the human body is designed for movement and it's not good for us when we don't move about. There's a striking story that suggests we evolved as we have, precisely in order to move about and find food. Picture the little sea slug, wafting about in the ocean, looking for a nice little rock to call home. When he does, he attaches himself firmly to the rock and filters food out of the passing currents. Having no further need to move about, he forthwith inwardly digests his brain and spinal cord that got him here, and focusses all his energies on eating!

I'm not suggesting we do the same, although there sure are times when it's tempting, but it does point to the links between movement and brain. Movement is essential to our wellbeing and so it's always good to build in that little bit more. It's been said that sitting is the new smoking, such is the effect of inactivity. Here's an entertaining vide o that tells you more.

Meanwhile, how could you get just ten more minutes a day of movement?

Then once you've got Moving, how can you increase your Motivation? Recently I've been introduced to the work of Carole Gaskell, who works in the area of coaching and neuroscience. She gives lot of practical tips for improving our brain fitness, most of which impinge on general well-being too.

I was especially interested in her take on Motivation. What gets you out of bed in the morning? Why do you do what you do?

Briefly she suggests there are nine Motivators, the first few being The Defender, who seeks security and stability, The Director, who seeks power and influence and the Creator, who seeks innovation and expression.

She asks, which of these is most important to you? And then, which is the least important, and what might an awareness of that teach you?

One example was of someone whose least engaging motivator was The Builder, who seeks money and material satisfaction. (Many coaches and therapists feel like this, that somehow they shouldn't be thinking about money.) But when she really investigated her feeling about the Builder, she realised what she could do with a bigger income and stopped it holding her back from being of service to even more people. Money - or more than she thought she should have - was not necessarily incongruent with her values; it depended on what she did with it.

It's brilliant work and I'm looking forward to learning more - you can see it yourself here .

Is Coaching like Lego?

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 09:36:31 GMT

Don’t you just love Lego, and all sorts of kids' building blocks that really, we're 'too old' to mess about with these days?

Recently I had occasion to visit Copenhagen, and was pleased to find a Lego shop there, full of wonderful colourful possibilities for all kinds of models and creations. You have all these lovely bricks and components in all shapes and sizes and you can make pretty much anything out of them. I’ve seen for example the football stadiums of the UK, Buckingham Palace, the Taj Mahal, dinosaurs – the possibilities seem infinite. And it’s such fun playing about with Lego!

I then got to thinking, how might this be a metaphor for coaching? Some forms of coaching can feel a bit like a Lego construction kit; here are the materials, here are the instructions, and now, this is what you do. This is the process, step by step, and if you follow the process, success is assured.

Well, it can be like that sometimes. We might just need another perspective on what’s facing us and when we put our thoughts out there and view them from the outside, the way forward often just falls out and it’s obvious what we need to do. And a systematic inquiry into all parts of our concern can be really helpful.

So far so good.

Yet there is ‘a deeper magic’, to quote C S Lewis, when we start with no preconceptions, no kit, no instructions or model – just an openness and alertness to the person before us. They may simply have a vague sense that something needs to change, but they are not clear on what it is. Careful listening, skilled questioning and the unhurried use of silence can create a space in which real innovation and creativity is possible. And I guess the people who dream up new Lego models might work like this, and say, we need such and such a new part to make this creation work!

Coaching is not a one size fits all activity – there are different levels according to the complexity of the issues you start with. And one can lead to the other, back and forth, in an iterative, generative spiral.

Why The Matter with Things Matters

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 01:21:45 GMT

Dr Iain has impressive and impeccable credentials; whilst a literary scholar at Oxford University, he wrote a book called ‘Against Criticism’ in which he includes the experience that both I and my husband had when we were taking English Literature ourselves. That is, that the teaching focused on the form, context and structure of the work, rather than on its meaning and on the experience it evoked in the reader. This dissatisfaction eventually led him out of literary studies into medicine and psychiatry, where he became especially interested in the fact that the human brain (and that of most other mammals at least), is divided into two halves; the left hemisphere (LH) and the right hemisphere (RH).

He examined this phenomenon in the most overwhelming detail, with hundreds of references to scientific papers, in the book ‘The Master and his Emissary: the divided brain and the making of the Western world’ . Why is the human brain (and that of almost every other creature) divided into two halves? A starting point is how each side pays attention. Imagine you are a little bird pecking for seed on the ground; whilst you need to pay focussed attention to what's going into your beak, you also need another kind of attention, more general and background, to notice the predator who is intent on having you for lunch. The former is the tendency of the LH, the latter that of the RH.

He then relates these different kinds of paying attention to the habits of thinking and assumptions by which the West tends to live now, suggesting that we have gone too far over to the LH tendency of reductionism and mechanistic thinking, forgetting the wider, more balanced view of the right.

In his more recent, even more dense and enormous book, the one I am recommending, ‘ The Matter with things; our brains, our delusions and the unmaking of the world’ , he takes this work further, providing a detailed analysis of our current psychological, social, political, environmental and spiritual state in the West, based on rigorous scientific research, across neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, physics, and spirituality in its widest sense.

The LH and RH tend to deploy different kinds of attention; like the birds pecking for seed amongst all the other tiny things it would not want to eat, the LH has focussed, narrow attention. It looks for what is useful; what can be manipulated and controlled. It provides a representation of reality (whatever that is) such that we can survive within it, take it apart to see how it works and create machines of our own. Studies where one hemisphere is temporarily suppressed reveal strange characteristics; if asked a question to which it does not know the answer, the LH will not admit this but make up an explanation, however bizarre it might seem. It is narcissistic, self-centred and self-referential; almost a hall of mirrors. To work properly it needs to co-operate with the RH, which takes experience in directly, intuits the whole, and tolerates ambiguity and paradox.

The RH is supposed to be the Master, whilst the LH is the Emissary. But, as in the old story, where the Master sends out his Emissary to the far reaches of his domain to oversee it and report back, the Emissary has forgotten his place and tried to take over. As the Amazon review says, ‘despite its inferior grasp of reality, the left hemisphere is increasingly taking precedence in the modern world, with potentially disastrous consequences.’

Reductionism, materialism and ‘nothing buttery’

The prevailing world view of ‘the West’ in the last few hundred years has tended towards materialism; there is nothing in the universe but inert matter; to see how it works we can take it apart, breaking it into its smallest components and look; there is nothing in the universe beyond matter. Religion is an empty fable and we ourselves are of no enduring significance. We are ‘nothing but’ a few kilos of mostly carbon, water and a few other elements. Love is nothing but the action of hormones on our physical bodies. The Earth is nothing but a lump of rock spinning in an infinite void.

I do not believe this. I never did; but being very short of any religious and spiritual guidance in my younger days I didn’t know how to answer in the language of my culture.

Now, with this work, I have some idea how. I have read the two latest books linked above; that is, I have exposed my eyes to the print at least once…and I am hugely relieved that someone has done the work that I couldn’t do.

A few insights

To understand it all, you have to read the book, more times than I have done so far! But here are a few things that stood out for me, and I give the merest amateur outlines,

· The sense of the sacred – this is the title of the last chapter in ‘ The Matter with things; our brains, our delusions and the unmaking of the world’ . Bear in mind that this is a scientific and philosophical inquiry, not an overtly ‘spiritual’ book. Dr Iain’s publishers and colleagues begged him not to write such a chapter. You will lose all credibility, they said. You will undermine your scientific credentials and respectability, they said. Happily, he did it anyway, and he reports that it was the most difficult piece of writing he ever did, yet perhaps the most satisfactory. His inquiries lead him to the point that the spiritual traditions have always known, for example ‘by love He can be caught, but by thinking never [1] ’. We are not separate from Nature, but intimately joined to it, in co-creation, always drawn towards what we can intuit but never understand and grasp, ‘something outside our conceptual grasp but nonetheless present to us through intimations that come to us from a whole range of experiences we can “spiritual”’ [2] . The Eastern Orthodox apophatic traditions understands this very well. It is probably a good idea to read this last chapter first, for all its exciting conclusions, and then refer back if you want to know how he arrived at them.

· He examines ‘consciousness’. Such a study would fill libraries; the crucial question is, although we can to some extent map the physical properties of the brain, measure neurotransmitters and hormones, describe different kinds of neurones and so on, we cannot get from these observations to an explanation of how this fairly small blob of pinky goo between our ears can result in the rich experience of consciousness, aliveness and sheer awe that we all know. One image I find very telling is this; he compares a TV set to the brain, suggesting that to an observer from another planet, just as you could not tell by looking if the TV set Emitted the programmes, or Transmitted them or Permitted them, so he argues that the brain does not so much Emit consciousness as Permit it. It’s as if consciousness is ‘out there’, a fundamental property of the universe itself. I find this very exciting – especially when said by a scientist.

· He goes on to suggest that Values, even Love, are also fundamental; that Truth is ‘not a human invention’. [3]

· The title – The Matter with Things – contains a number of puns and paradoxes. When we say, there’s something the matter, we generally mean, there’s something wrong. Dr Iain does mean this; there is a lot wrong with the way we are attending to the world and this is leading to environmental catastrophe. But there is more; he goes into the discussion of what Matter actually is, and concurs, of course, with the physics of the last hundred years or so, that it is largely empty space, and concludes that relationships are more fundamental that what we think of as Things. He quotes a biophysicist Don Mikulecky, ‘”…it isn’t the atoms and molecules that are at the hard core of reality; it is the relations between them and the relations between them and things we call processes which are at the core of the real world [4] .’” This brings to mind for me the perichoresis, the dance, at the heart of the Trinity.

· So, we need to see Things differently – not as solid fixed items but processes of different speeds and time scales. Compare a wave on the ocean, which to us appears very quick, with a rolling landscape, that changes like a wave but over far longer, geological timespans.

Conclusion

Fundamentally, this is a comprehensive rebuttal of reductive materialism written in language that the West itself invented. I have not read the Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas, but I understand that it is a thirteenth century synthesis of all theology, at a time when science and religion had not yet developed the spurious opposition that has been dreamed up in the last few hundred years.

Dr Iain’s work seems to me a modern synthesis that can point the way out of a number of terrible dilemmas and impoverished ways of being that our civilisation has fallen into. It’s a challenging read but I think it’s of crucial importance.

I end with his own words, from his equally comprehensive website ,

…I search out what it is we have lost sight of, all that is there for us to see, if only we were not blinded to it: an inexhaustibly, truly wondrous, creative, living universe, not a meaningless, moribund mechanism. By bringing to bear up-to-the-minute neuropsychology, physics and philosophy, I show not only that these are in no way in conflict with one another, but that they all lead us, time and again, to the same insights. And that this is not in opposition to, but rather corroborates, the wisdom of the great spiritual traditions across the world.

All this converges on a vision that is necessary if we are to survive; and, even more importantly, if we are to deserve to survive. What I hope for my readers is that, if they are willing to accompany me on this adventure, they will never see the world in quite the same way again.

[1] ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’

[2] P 1846

[3] P1729

[4] P1541

L for Love and Letting Go

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 11:29:44 GMT

L for Love

In English we have only one word for this; but in Greek there were at least four. So when we use the word in English we are thinking about several different things. Would you agree that these are different sorts of loves?

I love cats
I love doing jigsaws
I love my children
I love my spouse
I love God
I love Star Trek

Greek had all this sorted out centuries ago. There are at least four words for our one word of Love,

Storge
Philia
Eros
Agape

C S Lewis, in his wonderful book 'The Four Loves', describes them in detail; in brief, Storge is the love we have towards familiar people, and perhaps best understood as Affection. It's not intense but comfortable, like an old pair of slippers. Philia is the love we feel for our friends, that we have chosen, and this can be very deep. Next up is Eros, often thought of only as sexual or romantic love, but can also be seen as the urge to life itself, striving to grow and develop; then, greatest of all, Agape or unconditional, love that 'looks on tempests and is never shaken...Love alters not with [Time's] brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom...'(Shakespeare Sonnet 116).

Why does all this matter? Because it seems to me, and even to many management theorists these days, that the most important aspect of life is how well we have loved. Our relationships, at whatever level, can be our greatest joy or our greatest stumbling block. This matters at work as well - after all we do spend a lot of time there.

What do you think?

Then we have L for Letting Go...

This partly relates to what I've said previously about Forgiveness; and it's useful in other contexts too.

In the pandemic we faced loss, uncertainty, anxiety, vulnerability and a lack of control. When we really think about it perhaps we see that in fact we do not have very much control at all about what happens in our lives.

Sudden illness strikes. Terrorist attack. Cars crash. And everything changes in an instant. At such times we see that our illusion of control is just that, an illusion, although a 'very persistent one'.

It's tempting and even normal to grieve for what we had, say Before Covid, but sooner or later we have to 'let go' into the new situation so that we are open to that, and to what it may bring us. I'm realising this myself these days, not so much because of Covid, but because of a serious family illness that we are now living with, up close, every day.

I keep in mind what Viktor Frankl famously said; everything can be taken from a person except their freedom to choose their response.

What would be a good choice for you today?

K for Knowledge and Knitting

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 11:17:29 GMT

K for Knowledge - There's a whole science and philosophy of what knowledge really is, how we know we've got it, how reliable it is and what kinds of knowledge there are. It's a huge subject to cover properly and I would need a lifetime to do that. So I'm just going to make a couple of points that I hope will be helpful to you in your life and work.

First, it seems there are different kinds of knowledge. There's factual, mostly scientific knowledge where scientists agree that, for example, there are ten planets in our solar system, the human body is mostly made of water and the coronavirus vaccination does not enable Bill Gates to control you from a distance. This kind of knowledge is reliable (until science finds something better and more accurate, and then they report it).

'Alternative' facts, on the other hand, are simply not true. Much of what goes around on social media is in this category and is best ignored.

There are other kinds of knowledge too. For example, how do you know if you love someone? I don't suppose you make a list of things that suggest you do, and things that suggest you don't? Rather, isn't this something you just know, in your heart? English has only one word for these two different sorts of knowing, and maybe other languages do it better.

So we've got at least factual knowledge and heart knowledge. What might go wrong if we were to mix them up, do you think?

Then we have Knitting. I sort of retired a couple of years ago - that is, I don't now do salaried work, only coaching for private clients, which I like doing. So when I retired, I said to my friends, I'm not just going to sit around knitting, you know!

But then I thought about it and I realise that actually, knitting is very good for you! It can be very restful in that it's something to do with your hands (so we are less likely to smoke or eat!); if you are any good at it you might get at least a scarf out of it; and knitting patterns certainly make your brain work.

There's more! Can you believe that's there's a whole 'thing' about knitting anatomically correct models of the brain, neurons and so on? This link tells you more. You can even download a whole book of knitting patterns to make crafty models. Apparently people get together to have neural knit-ins - anybody fancy that?

So actually, yes, I do sit around knitting, at least for part of the time!

What's Existential Coaching?

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 09:20:54 GMT

What's it really all about?

Existential thinking - about the really big questions in life - is beginning to be a real Thing in coaching these days, so how might it help YOU?

Here are some of the areas we might look at

Finding your purpose
Working out what really matters to you
Homing in on your deepest values
Eliciting what you really believe

Then we would look at some ways to make changes in these areas in accordance with your expressed goals, aims and wishes.

Existentialism concerns itself with the Big Questions, as also do the faith traditions. It acknowledges ‘that the world [is] a difficult place to be in, that the mere act of living life [can] be incredibly tough and challenging, even for people in seemingly affluent environments.’ ( Jacob 2019, xxix ), and that some level of anxiety is therefore part of life.

It differs from the faith traditions in that it presupposes that there is no intrinsic meaning or single truth in the universe, and that we have to create it for ourselves. As Sartre said, ‘Man is condemned to be free’ (quoted in Jacob, op.cit, 49 ). You may have a faith tradition, in which case you will not believe that there is no intrinsic meaning; however, it is still important to have thought about the Big Questions and to be clear in your answers. So an existential inquiry may well still be relevant for you, so that you may arrive at what the renowned theologian Paul Tillich called ‘the courage to be’ (quoted in Jacob, op.cit., 54 ).

Here are some of those Big Questions,

Why am I here?
How can I be happy?
How do I make sense of suffering and pain?
What does my life mean?
Is this all that there is?
What is the right thing to do?
How can I cope better with my life, and even thrive?

We could say that those questions group around these ideas,

Death
Meaning
Isolation
Freedom
Uncertainty
Taking responsibility, making decisions

Your coach will not give you the answers. Rather, they will facilitate a conversation to uncover, in a sense of partnership, non-judgment and acceptance, your own answers, by deeply examining your own experience and going from there into insight, change and action. This is based on the method of ‘phenomenological inquiry’, where we aim simply to gather data, to describe what is happening, without, at this stage, attempting to interpret in any way. There are parallels here with the practice of mindfulness, which also aims to raise awareness of what is happening, right now, right here.

Some brief exercises (more detail when we work together) to help elicit this information include

Just Being. ‘I am…’ as many as possible and then imagine losing the labels
Thinking of scenario, then how many different interpretations can you find?

We can also consider existence under these dimensions (the Four Worlds model)

Physical – time, death, endings (or not); environment, body, home
Social - Isolation, belonging, relationships
Psychological – authenticity, identity, ‘bad faith’, your thoughts/feelings landscape, describing emotions
Spiritual – meaning and purpose – not necessarily religious. What you can’t live without

We can then explore your ‘map of meaning’, making it explicit so that you can act from a place of self-knowledge. Ways to do this could include

emotional literacy and labelling - what am I really feeling?
free VIA strengths analysis
Funeral/epitaph - what would you like people to be saying about you at your funeral?

Another way we might structure our sessions could be the MOVER model. We can start at any point and continue round the process as often as seems right,

M for Meaning
O for Opportunity
V for Values/Beliefs
E for Evaluate your choices
R for your Responsibility…and round again as needed.

We might also explore making decisions, which can often be difficult. Making one decision necessarily excludes all others, and we can never be certain we were right, and this produces a sense of anxiety. We have to accept the consequences of our decisions, for good (we hope) or ill. And even if we don’t make a decision, that in itself is a choice, to stay where we are, and the same applies. No wonder we can get uptight about making them!

All the more important then, to be fully aware of where we are starting from, as well as looking at the pros and cons of doing/not doing.

Another aspect of existential coaching is to get fully involved with your life as it is now. Time may be short so let us seize the day! These points summarise some authentic ways to live that you may find helpful. What resonates for you?

Be aware that you have choices in every moment
Do something, even if it feels a bit scary (with due consideration of course!)
Don’t expect never to feel anxious
Accept responsibility for your actions and choices
Do not fear conflict and confrontation – it is sometimes necessary
In relationships, value the other as much as least as much as you value yourself
Remember, it’s up to you - your actions matter.

How does this all seem to you? You can reply or comment below if you'd like to!

(With acknowledgment and thanks to Yannick Jacob, whose excellent book goes into more detail.)

J for Joy

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 13:24:20 GMT

A little while back I said a bit about Happiness, and I think Joy could be part of that. Even when there is difficulty, as we all know all too well in these times, moments of Joy are possible if we look for them. Sometimes, as C.S.Lewis recounts in his autobiography, ‘ Surprised by Joy ’ it can find you. Joy is kin to Gratitude, Hope, Mindfulness and more, and it’s good to remember such moments.

This morning I felt OverJoyed to hear of a young couple’s new twins arriving safely, bringing new life and hope. And the flowers bursting through every possible crack in the rock garden I’m looking at just now.

In what small thing can you too find Joy, here, now? And hold the memory?

Excuse Me for Interrupting!

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 13:22:21 GMT

There’s a lot of this about, especially at the moment. Normal life, whatever that ever was, has been dramatically interrupted these days for a whole host of reasons, and we all get things in daily life that hold us up. For example I’ve been without my laptop for nearly two weeks while it’s being repaired and I can’t believe how much I can’t get at and do. Then there are the people who say, Can you just...and you still don’t get stuff done!

But there is a deeper sort of interruption that I’m thinking about today - the sort that goes on in so many conversations, where we are dying to say our bit if only the other person would stop talking! Finally we can’t stand it and we leap in with ‘But...’ This of course is not nice for the person being interrupted. In fact it’s worse than that - it stifles their thought. If we all decided that for just one day, we would not interrupt, not speaking until we are sure the other person has finished, I am sure that peace would abound!

Coaches don’t do interruption. We give a space where you can do your thinking and we won’t be afraid to leave enough silence for you to do it.

This is so important that Nancy Kline wrote a whole book on it.

H for Happiness, Helping and Hope

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 13:02:46 GMT

H for Happiness

Are you happy?

I wonder if this is a question we often stop to consider, in the busy-ness of daily life. If we did, what would be the markers of happiness? What is it, and how do we know we've got it? Is it just a sense of well-being and general satisfaction, or is there more to it than this 'subjective well-being'?

You won't be surprised to hear that researchers have looked at this too. One very well-regarded writer in this field is Sonja Lyubomirsky, and she takes the idea of Happiness further to include a sense of purpose, describing it as 'the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile'.

In her book, The How of Happiness , she gives twelve Happiness Strategies that really work. Here's the first three,

Express gratitude
Cultivate optimism
Avoid overthinking and social comparison.

You can see the rest in her book at the link above. Which one appeals to you?

H for Helping

Carrying on from my comments before about Giving and Receiving, I wanted to extend that context a bit into the general area of Helping as a whole, of which it's part.

It's been wonderful to see how much 'helping' has been going on in the UK over the last year, in the most difficult of times. By the end of March 2020, over 700,000 people had already volunteered to help the NHS in different ways, and I find that so heart-warming and encouraging. Then there are lots of small local groups that have organised and risen to the challenge.

We've had Captain Tom and many others raising funds to help the NHS - which is ultimately helping people, all of us - and on our local news we have a daily 'Shout-Out' to thank people who've gone the extra mile to help someone.

You could say Helping is an extension of Kindness, and it really does circulate good will and well-being, linking the giver and the receiver of 'help' in a wonderful virtuous circle

What's not to like? Even more, what's one thing you could do to help today - in whatever area you feel called to act?

H for Hope

I'm sure you've heard of the seven deadly sins - but did you know there are also three theological virtues?

Hope is so important that it's one of them! And it turns out that Hope is really important for well-being too. If we have no hope we soon fall into despair and apathy, and who wants to be down there?

It's clearly similar to Optimism, which is one of Sonja Lyubomirsky's Happiness Strategies, as above, and it is possible to cultivate it by deliberate practice. In these times of pandemic, war, climate change, floods and I don't know what else, it's worth putting some effort into checking our pessimistic tendencies. It's much more motivating to be optimistic as it gives you a sense of control, however small that might feel.

A good exercise to do is to imagine how your life can be in the future, when everything's turned out all right. When you really step into that vision it can become a compelling image drawing you forward and making it more likely to happen.

What do you really really hope for? And what's one thing you can do now to help it along?

What can one person do?

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 19:25:38 GMT

As I think about the terrible devastation wrought upon our climate, the natural habitats of the Earth and the catastrophic decline in so many species, I, like so many, wonder what ‘on Earth’ I can do to make any difference.

At first I thought that I was too small and insignificant to make any difference. What can just one person do? I am an ordinary woman with a privileged Western lifestyle that I probably don’t even notice until it’s threatened. Isn’t it the extraordinary, heroic, unusual people that step up and do amazing things?

Now I’m beginning to think differently about this and about many related issues.

I’ve become interested in the idea of Systems – how things are connected together and how they influence each other. And there are two aspects of this idea that especially excite me.

One is that Systems occur at all levels of scale, from the swirling spiral galaxies, through planetary systems, social systems, families, the internal workings of the human body, the interactions of plants and animals in an ecosystem (that word again) right down to the molecular level and beyond. Whatever scale you look at, you find an organised system.

It seems that Reality, whatever that is, is in one of its expressions, fractal – ‘the same’ kinds of patterns repeating with tiny variations on every scale. This is well illustrated by the remarkable animations we can see of the Mandelbrot Set – a mathematical entity generated by a simple repeating equation, now made visible by our modern computing power. Here’s a good example – but hold onto your chair! https://youtu.be/0jGaio87u3A

The second thought that excites me is that although we do see systems at every scale, when a system reaches a certain level of complexity there is a tipping point, and new characteristics emerge that could not be predicted from examining the parts that made it up. Perhaps the human body is a good example of this – we can measure the amount of simple substances in the body and even stack them all up together, so much water, so much iron, some potassium, sodium, a dash of chromium and lots of other elements. Yet it is the relationships between them in the living body that gives the miracle of a human being, with all its life, creativity and unexpectedness.

So coming back to the thought of how can I, as a tiny individual, make any difference? Now that I appreciate how connected all things are, I feel a kind of equality – I am part of this grand system just as much as any star or microbe, and I do affect it. It’s simply true that everything I do , or don’t do, is ‘noted’. So it matters what I think, what I do, and I don’t need to know the measure of it.

There is a sort of ‘surrender’ here, in the sense that the spiritual traditions understand this word; not as a giving up in a kind of despair and not caring what happens, but more a sense of giving to – an agreement that my energies may take their place in the unfolding of this great system of life on earth. In my own tradition this feels like ‘Thy Kingdom Come’, and perhaps a Buddhist would say something like, ‘May all beings be happy’.

This is a different feeling to getting out there and FIXING things. Certainly in terms of climate we do need to do things differently but there is a risk that this becomes mere mitigation – tweaking the system we are already in and thus perpetuating and protecting it. This kind of change within the current system is certainly essential – necessary, but not, I feel, sufficient. Is there a sense in which we can surrender to an emerging level of complexity that’s really different?

This may seem very vague talk, and it’s true, I don’t know where this is leading; but I was reassured to read about Theory U from the Presencing Institute, where the first stage is ‘holding the space’ and listening to what you are being called to do. In that space we do not know, and do not have to know. It feels to me that what’s required is to be open to what is emerging, and then to do what seems right within it.

G for Gratitude, Giving and Good News

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 14:59:35 GMT

G for Gratitude

Bad things have been happening in 2020 and 2021, and this can be very, very hard. In such times it's tempting to focus on what's gone wrong, what's difficult and what we're struggling with.

Yet there is a huge body of research that tells us that even in the midst of difficulty, we can be thankful and grateful for the many good things that are still there, and that this orientation towards gratitude is good for us. Here's just one reference , with twenty pages of further sources. I'm not suggesting you read it all, just that this is a robust observation!

We can be grateful for even very small things too - the robin I can see in the tree outside, the excellent coffee I have just enjoyed, the comfort of good shoes.

Can you think of three things that you are grateful for, in the noise of everyday life?

G for Giving

It may seem paradoxical, but there is much truth in the saying 'it is better to give than to receive'. Certainly it's good to receive, with gratitude, yet giving too is good for you. We enjoy the enjoyment of others as well as our own, and it is good to do caring things for those we are close to.

I've been interested to note the growth of what's becoming known as 'the gift economy' where exchange is based on informal gift-giving rather than on exchange of commodities with a defined monetary value. 'The emphasis in a gift exchange is on strengthening the bond between the givers and receivers', as you can read here , and this is part of what helps a community to flourish. Gifts do not have to be 'stuff'; they can be service, or just your time, maybe phoning a person who'd be glad to hear from you.

We have seen a lot of giving in our ongoing Covid crisis, and it's most heart-warming.

How did you feel about the last gift you gave, or received? What else could you give?

G for Good News

I know I sometimes watch too much TV news - there's a horrid fascination that almost compels me to keep looking at the latest Covid statistics, and it's very definitely not good for me .

We do tend to be drawn to bad news; it's been said that we are like Teflon for good news and Velcro for bad! Perhaps from an evolutionary point of view that was originally to do with helping us survive, but it has its downside.

If we know about this bias we can be careful and deliberate in how we access our news. For myself I try to limit myself to two news bulletins a day and I skip the lunchtime news. Another thing that helps is to actively seek good news - and there always is some, just as there's always something to be grateful for. Here's a good place to get some good news, and maybe you can find some more.

F for Forgiveness, Friends and Flourishing

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Fri, 11 Jun 2021 12:57:50 GMT

I know this is a tricky one. People do dreadful things to each other and some of them it's hard to imagine how they could possibly be forgiven.

Yet there is a lot of evidence showing that when you do forgive, you also release yourself. Here's just one reference out of many, and I could also mention Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu in South Africa, Gordon Wilson in Northern Ireland, who all put this into practice with wonderful results.

How does this sound to you? Is there something you could perhaps forgive and let go of?

F for Friends - Close relationships are essential for our well-being. We have seen this very painfully since March 2020 by the enforced absence of most of the closeness we took for granted. I can't get out of my mind the scenes of older people dying alone and thinking they had been forgotten...it must have hastened the deaths of many.

In our society we hear a lot about the importance of the individual, but you could say this is a very modern idea and not widely shared throughout human history. I do believe that each individual is of value in and of themselves - but I'm also emphasising the importance to us all of our close relationships.

In lockdown it's easy to just let the days flow by, and I had begun to notice that I might not have called a friend for weeks! So now I make a point of contacting at least one friend every day, and that feels better.

Who could you call today?

F for Flourishing - this is what Positive Psychology is all about - the study of what human beings actually need in order to thrive. Relationships is certainly one of them, as I've just been saying. Dr Martin Seligmann pioneered this approach and summarises it as PERMA,

P for Positive Emotion,
E for Engagement,
R for Relationships,
M for Meaning, and
A for Accomplishment

Does anything stand out for you from this list, that could use some attention?

E for Exercise, Energy and Evidence

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Fri, 11 Jun 2021 12:45:25 GMT

I'm sure you know what I'm going to say. If exercise had just been discovered, and they could bottle it, well, the Government would be putting everybody on it! It's pretty much the best thing you can do for your health, whatever your age. I have just finished reading ' Age is Just a Number ' by the award wining nonagerian athlete Charles Eugster, and it was most encouraging - he was really healthy well into his old age.

You can do exercise even if you are stuck at home, as we all have been for far too long, and personally I have been doing that myself. I've got a good routine now of 30 minutes doing something almost every morning and I aim at a walk outside each day, as the light also is good for us. Even when I don't feel like it, I know I will feel better afterwards, and so I do it.

Is there something you could fit into your regular routine?

Energy can certainly be raised by exercise, which is a good thought if like most people you want more of it. From a physiological point of view, there are some basic things to do to keep it topped up, as you probably know, such as enough sleep, a varied diet and social connection.

It sounds very basic, and it is. But all these things really make a difference.

In these times of remote working we can also suffer from the energy depletion of Zoom calls, as you probably know! Things we can do to combat that include; minimising your picture so that you are not constantly looking at yourself as well; applying 20-20-20 to reduce eye strain, that is, look away from the screen for 20 seconds every 20 minutes at something at least 20 metres away; and, paradoxically, paying attention and not multi-tasking if you're not on video, as this depletes mental energy in itself.

What do you think could help your energy?

Finally, E for evidence - here I'm considering why we think the things we do. So often they are just not true! Such as, I can't go for a more senior job, I'm not good enough, So-and-so doesn't like me...I am sure we can think of plenty more along these lines.

But when you really think about it, what evidence do you really have for any of these beliefs? How do they look when you write them down? Would it stand up in court? Would you stake your life on its truth? Probably not?

D for Determination, Do it and Delegate

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Fri, 11 Jun 2021 12:38:45 GMT

We have three D's today, and the first is Determination. It's an interesting word and for me it brings up images of power, resoluteness, finality. Like so many words in English, it has changed its meaning over the years. Originally it was about settling disputes, terminating or putting an end to them. Then it shaded into working out facts, as in 'determining the weight of something', and now it seems to have more the meaning of making sure something gets done, not being swayed from your purpose, absolutely intending something, not negotiable. So today I am thinking, I am Determined to get out there in the garden and sort it out!

What could Determination mean for you?

Determination could lead on to a sense of, I'm just going to Do it, as a well-known sports brand might say. Do you ever find that you don't do the things you meant to do? You have a great long list of things that must be done today, and you just don't do it? And even go off and do a whole load of other things that you never planned to do? Well you are in good company. Even St Paul said, 'For the good that I would I do not...' It can help to look at all the things you mean to do and pick one, and then with Determination just Do it. You can give yourself a small reward for afterwards, which can increase your motivation. This reminds me of the 'Eat That Frog' technique, where you take the most difficult thing, the one you don't want to do, and just get it out of the way. It feels good afterwards!

Is there something that you need to just Do? (For me, it's the ironing...)

However, some things aren't ours to do, which is where Delegate comes in. For instance, I quite like messing about with spreadsheets, and I even like algebra; but when it came to doing my tax returns, I eventually decided that someone else needed to do it. Given enough time, I could puzzle it out, but there were lots of things I would rather do, so I pretty soon delegated it to my lovely accountant lady and never looked back.

That was good for me; and delegation can also be good for others too, especially if it's a task that you do so well that they think they can't compete. When you do trust them to do it, and they succeed, then that is a win-win situation.

(So who'd like to do my ironing?)

Courage, Calm and Consciousness

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 11:41:25 GMT

Courage is a much-trumpeted virtue and those who possess it often don't know they have it. Isn't it easy to look at people who have done seemingly impossible things and think, I could ever rise to such heights? Yet maybe courage also consists in carrying on doing difficult things, precisely when they are difficult, because they are the right things to do.

I'm thinking about, all the medical staff working so hard against Covid, parents doing their best to home school their children with insufficient resources, looking after a relative who needs support, dealing with our own, possibly life-threatening illnesses. All these situations require steady, daily, unrelenting Courage.

Looks like the need is infinite! One thing that helps me when I think about these hard situations, is where the word comes from. It's from the Latin for 'heart' - 'cor' - which to me seems to tie it up nicely with all that's most important to us.

So, 'Courage, mes braves!'

Then we have C for Calm , which might also go with Courage, but not always. When we're in a place of Calm, not upset, emotional or disturbed, even in the midst of difficulty, we can make better choices. It's almost always a bad idea to make a major decision when we are in the grip of any strong emotion, as our thinking brains are turned off at such times.

We can get to a place of Calm by turning on the body's own inbuilt calm down system - basically the parasympathetic nervous system - and one way we can access this is by paying attention to our breathing. What's called 7-11 breathing is easy to do. Just breathe in for a count of 7 and out for a count of 11, several times. Simples!

You can find lots of apps that will talk you through some more ways to get and keep calm, for example - you guessed it! - Calm!

Now I dare to take on the topic of Consciousness ! I am not going to say much, because a thousand lifetimes would not suffice, but there are a couple of things that I think could be useful to you. I'm currently studying an intriguing understanding called 'Three Principles'; fundamentally, the understanding of the Three Principles (Mind, Thought and Consciousness) is that our experience is created from the inside out by our thoughts, and the feelings we experience are a direct result of the quality of that thinking.

Just as we all have a bias towards good physical health, if we don’t interfere, so a cut finger heals up on its own, so also we have a bias towards good psychological health if we let the mind settle.

Think of a snow globe – you shake it up and there’s snow everywhere. To get it to clear you just leave it alone for a bit. You don’t go on courses about snow globe management, or try lots of different angles to make it settle faster, or look for a snow globe expert. You just realise its nature and know that you have to let it settle.

Thoughts are just that – thoughts – and in themselves they have no reality. We can frighten ourselves with all sorts of plausible stories, and when we see they are not true, and that thought is just what the mind does, there is great liberation.

I only want to whet your appetite today, so here‘s a good resource to read more. Meanwhile I leave you with this question – ‘If I didn’t believe everything I think, what would this open up for me?'

What do you think? Which C resonates with you today?

Beauty, Beliefs and Bendiness

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 10:38:14 GMT

This is the second of my themed blogs for this year, taking a tour through the A - Z of resilience, wellbeing and effectiveness.

They say that Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I would certainly agree with that, since, as I have previously noted, everything we see is created by the way our brains interpret it for us.

I suppose a good starting point would be that Beauty is the label we give to that feeling we get when we experience, with any of our senses, something that feels right, is full of harmony and proportion, that may evoke in us a sense of awe and wonder, and even make us emotional.

For example, I got all teary the other day when listening to a piano arrangement of Brahms' Lullaby. It wasn't overly clever or complicated, but clear, simple, harmonious and just so satisfying.

I think this is important. When we do experience something beautiful, it takes us out of ourselves for a moment and reminds us that we are part of a larger whole. We can even feel transcendence.

Do you have enough Beauty in your life? How can you find even a little bit more?

Then we have B for Beliefs - I don't mean your overall philosophical or spiritual take on life the universe and everything, although that's also relevant. I mean today the things we say to ourselves,

'I can't go for that promotion'
'I'm not good enough'
It's just the way I am'
I can't do maths'

I am sure you can think of plenty more along these lines! We pick up these beliefs uncritically, perhaps when we are very young, and if we really look at them, perhaps in discussion with another person, we may see that they are just not true.

What could it mean for you, if what you thought wasn't actually true?

Then finally, Bendiness is a good word to describe that quality of flexibility, adaptability, that we all need in our lives. I'm thinking of that phrase about how a plant stem that bends in the wind does not break, precisely because it bends. This thought can be helpful in lots of situations - for example when we give ourselves a hard time because we felt we didn't measure up, we could instead cut ourselves some slack and be as kind to ourselves as we probably would to a friend.

What do you think? Can you find one example of each of these Bs that appeals to you?

Autonomy, Agency and Acceptance

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 16:30:44 GMT

Here are a few words beginning with A that are important in wellbeing.

Autonomy is when you have power to act of yourself, because you have decided to, not because someone else says you have got to.

Of course there are times when it's good to do what you are asked, even if you'd rather not. How many of us, for example, really want to follow the coronavirus restrictions just now, when we would much rather see family and friends and go where we please? Yet we can autonomously decide that we will comply, and be at peace with that decision.

It's also one of the biggest predictors of workplace happiness - if in your job you have a lot of freedom in exactly how you do it, rather than being micromanaged in every respect, you are likely to be more satisfied in your role.

Autonomy is very important in coaching - unlike consulting, teaching or training, a coach will not generally give you advice or run your agenda. We are there to hold the 'thinking space' for you so that you can work on your own 'stuff'. There are some exceptions due to legal and safeguarding situations, but on the whole, a coach is working to your agenda and you are autonomous, and therefore much more likely to carry out the actions you thought of and committed to.

Agency is similar, with more emphasis on the power to act at all. It often comes up in the context of control, where we really look at how much control or responsibility you really have. Many of the things we might worry about are in fact totally outside our control, and although we might experience fear or anxiety about them, there is nothing we can actually do. (I'm thinking about asteroids on a collision course with Earth here.) There will be many things closer to home, where we can do things differently, and that's where it's most effective to put our energies.

Our third A, Acceptance , is also good in directing our energies more effectively. There's no doubt that bad things happen, especially as we have seen in 2020, and they're awful and we wish they hadn't happened. Yet the first step in making sense of disaster or difficulty is to start where we are, with the facts. As a friend of mine often says, 'It is what it is', and that's it.

It doesn't mean that we think whatever has happened, or the wrong that someone has done us, doesn't matter and that we should just try to forget about it; it's rather that we step into the experience and the feelings and acknowledge that this is how it is, this is what we've got. Then we are in a better position to respond, with kindness and compassion to ourselves as well as to others.

This is the basis of several powerful approaches, such as Tara Brach's Radical Acceptance, and I really recommend her books. You can find out more here .

Which of these A's resonates most with you today?

Is there one new thought or action that you can keep? Maybe you have a diary or a journal, some way of remembering the insights that arise.

Changing the story

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Tue, 29 Dec 2020 13:21:29 GMT

At this time of year maybe we reflect on how the year's been, and this one's been like no other. And over the festive season we might look forward to relaxing in front of the TV with a nice film and popcorn and so on.

In both case we are making or sharing stories, whether they are ones we tell ourselves or those that others tell us.

Every culture there has ever been has understood the value of stories and metaphors in making sense of our experiences and in bonding us together into communities.

Some time ago we watched 'Saving Mr. Banks', starring that remarkably versatile actor Tom Hanks. It was nice, entertaining but for me nothing out of the ordinary, until we arrived at one truly stunning scene.

P. L. Travers has just run away from Walt Disney because she doesn't like what he wants to do with her creation Mary Poppins, and there she is, sitting tearfully and alone in her flat back home, when there is a knock at the door. Lo and behold, it is the great man himself, come personally all the way across the pond to persuade and reassure.

Now I'm coming to it.

He is determined to win her trust and to reassure her of his integrity and his care for her creation, and as they sit by the fire together (a very good place for story telling, actually!) he begins to tell the story of his own life, which began very hard.

And then he says, 'I'm tired of remembering it like that'.'

I think this is so powerful that I'm going to repeat to myself what he said.

I'm tired of remembering it like that.

What really grabbed me is the implication that we have a choice in how we remember things. Certainly the things that happened have some objective reality - we were in a particular place at a particular time with particular people - but it is we ourselves who provide the meaning. And that can change, if we change the way we think about it. In fact every time we get a memory out to look at it, we put it back in a slightly different form, and we have some influence over that.

As Walt Disney goes on to say in that beautiful scene, ' We storytellers, we give hope.'

What hopeful story will you look at over Christmas and New Year? (I will probably plump for 'It's a Wonderful Life' - again!)

Got a new job? Here's to your first hundred days

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 12:09:04 GMT

Many people have lost jobs in 2020 due to the sudden impact of Covid 19, and may have to be very inventive and novel in what other work they may be able to do. It could be very different from what you've done so far. So it could be quite anxiety provoking as well as exciting, to have to start again at this time. Nevertheless, there are some good tips for making the best of this, and here's a few that can be helpful,

First of all, relax and treat yourself. Acknowledge your success. You got the job! Then it's time to get down to business and plan your campaign for your first hundred days.

It helps to get very clear very fast on what you are actually supposed to be doing. Most good jobs will have a job description, so it's good to read, mark and inwardly digest this. And watch out for the catch all section which is often tucked in at the end and says something to the effect of 'any other tasks which may reasonably fall within this role'.
Know who your immediate line manager is, who will help with all the documentation you have to complete. A good employer will also arrange for regular supervision so you want to get that booked in, and remind them if they don't do it.
Take your induction period seriously and use it to find out all you can about the company and the people involved. What? There is no induction? And you accepted the post? You'll need to ask even more questions then. So you might get a notebook or something online like Trello and at the end of each day make a note of anything significant. Mostly this will be about the people involved.
When I say people I mean not only where they fit in the official hierarchy of who reports to who, but more importantly what the personal alliances and feuds are. Who likes who, who can't stand who, who tends to avoid certain people and so on. (Apologies for grammar there - I know it should be 'whom' but it doesn't sound right!) Soon you will be aware of where the real power and influence lies - and it's not always at the top. So observe, observe, observe!
Make sure you get enough rest and recreation while you are settling in. Starting a new job can be stressful, even if it's a great job and you really wanted it. I'm talking about stress in the sense of having to learn and process new routines and information - it does take up energy and makes extra demands on your reservices of attention and you need to replenish it.
Even if your manager does undertake supervision, it's a good idea to keep a reflective journal a few times a week and ask yourself - what went well? What can I be pleased about? What can I do better? What do I need in order to enable me to do better? How do I feel about this day, this week? Looking back over such a diary can be very illuminating, even surprising. And of course most professional jobs will expect you to keep a record of Continuing Professional Development, so this will kill two birds with one stone.

And finally - congratulations on the new job!

What's in a letter?

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Sat, 28 Nov 2020 14:57:05 GMT

I'm a bit of a words geek, especially around Latin and Greek words that we've borrowed. Here's a neat one - ACRONYM, which is, as you know, taking the first letter of each word and making a new one. This can be irritating when we don't in fact know what they mean, but I'd like to share with you a few that I find really useful.

First, STOP. There are several versions of it but the basic idea is as follows - when you find you are getting uptight or upset over something - STOP.

S for Stop what you are doing (assuming of course it is legal and safe to do so!)
T for Take a deep breath.
O for Observe what's going on. What are you thinking? Is it accurate? For example, 'My friend didn't ring me when she said she would, so she clearly doesn't want to be friends any more'. Might be true but there are lots of more likely explanations - like her phone's just died?
P for Proceed with understanding and kindness - kindness for yourself as much as for others.

Then there's HEAL - from Dr Rick Hanson, based on his book 'Hardwiring Happiness: The Practical Science of Reshaping Your Brain - and Your Life'. In it he describes how the brain has a 'negativity bias', suggesting that this may be explained in evolutionary terms in that the brain is always looking out for threats to our survival, or anything that may be dangerous to us.

This was fine in the Stone Age when life really was physically dangerous for most people - you either got away and then relaxed in blessed relief, or you were something's dinner. Now, the threats are not physical for many people, but more psychological, yet we still have this negativity bias which tends to make negative experiences stick and positive ones slide off.

He tells us that it is possible to 'rewire' our brains so that we keep more of the benefits of positive experience, and downplay the negativity bias. The acronym he uses is HEAL, and it's like this,

H for Have a positive experience (this could be something as simple as mindfully eating a raisin, enjoying the company of friends, marvelling at a beautiful sunset), then
E for Enrich that experience, really wallow in it, by dwelling on it, becoming more conscious of all the ways it engages all your senses, then
A for Absorb it into yourself, think of it 'sinking into' your whole being.
The last step, L for Link, is, as he says, optional but powerful. It is to do with linking these positives to 'soothe, reduce and potentially replace negative ones'.

The regular practice of these steps, in just a few minutes a day, will help to lay down new neural pathways that bias you more towards positivity.

The last acronym, that I came across only the other day in Psychologies magazine (which I heartily recommend) is HALT. If you're feeling upset or out of sorts, see if it is something you can easily do something about, by checking out, are you

H for Hungry?
A for Angry?
L for Lonely?
T for Tired?

If any of these apply, we can see if we can deal with the cause ( I'm off to the biscuit tin, myself).

Lists and how to survive them

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Sat, 28 Nov 2020 14:42:52 GMT

I love lists.

I'm forever making nice new ones, often in Google Calendar or Trello, where you can have lots of lovely bright different colours for different areas of your life - and haven't we all got complicated lives, full of different things we have to attend to?

We do, don't we? We really have to get through everything on our to do list, or else, why did we put it there in the first place?

And there's lots of stuff out there to help you Manage Your Time...but actually we all have the same time. It progresses at roughly sixty seconds per minute and we've all got it.

The difference is, what we do with it, how we react to it. Just as I said earlier, it's about how we react to what's happening that matters. I'm sure you can think of an example where you got so caught up in what you were doing that you totally forgot the time. And when you're a child, doesn't it take ages for Christmas to come! Now we are all grown up it seems we have only just got over the last one before the next is upon us.

You can see where I'm going. It's all a matter of perception, how much time we've got - and we have some choice in how we do this.

Back to the lovely lists - here are a few tips on how to ensure you manage them and they don't manage you.

It helps me to remember that they are only lists - marks on a page, pixels on a screen - and they have no reality in themselves, only what you give them. So with that proviso, let's see how we can best use them.

Have as many things on your list as you like. Put everything on that you can think of, when you think of it (then it won't hang around and haunt you).
Each morning when you start your day, pick from that list the three things that absolutely must be done, or there will be undesirable consequences.
Write down the time and do the first one. Just do it. Set a timer, or keep an eye on the time and don't go past an hour without a break or a rethink.
Notice how much time it has taken you.
Do the same for the next two items.
Then do something completely different - go for a walk, dance round the kitchen, phone a friend, practice your scales - whatever takes your mind off it. In NLP we call this 'breaking state', putting the attention somewhere else for a few moments.
Then back to the list. If there are three more things that must be done today, follow the same steps.

(And notice that not many things really are important in life. Ask yourself, will this matter in five years, a year, a month, a week? Most things won't.)

But on a day to day basis we want to be efficient at work. Stephen Covey, who wrote 'Seven Habits of Highly Effective People', distinguished between things that are important and things that are urgent. Often we get swallowed up by the urgent things, whereas if we took care of the important things first, like planning, we wouldn't be forever fire fighting.

What do you think?

What's so good about growth anyway?

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 13:22:00 GMT

There is a debate about why we want growth at all - one point of view is that we already have quite enough in the way of consumer goods, at least in most of the West, and that we should be looking more at how to hand on and replace what we use for future generations. I've even heard it said that uncontrolled growth is cancerous (I know this all too well: I had it myself a few years ago and thanks to the NHS I don't any more) and in the same way we do not want that for our surroundings.

Another way to think about it as a living system. For example, a plant, a microbe, a human body, is a dynamic living system that continually interacts with its environment, exchanging energy and transforming it. So growth in this way is more about maintenance, repair and new birth. This kind of idea can be applied to business, for example in the work of Giles Hutchins. I've just read his 'The Illusion of Separation' which seems to me really important.

Coming back to the ILM, they quote the Bruntland Commission of 1987 with a great definition of sustainability which seems good to me - 'development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs'.

So it's great to see more and more businesses considering this, and thinking about the Triple Bottom Line of Planet, People and Profit, where Sustainability is at the intersection of the three. You can read more at this link.

How sustainable do you think your own organisation is?

What do you see?

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 13:13:53 GMT

What do you see?

I've been thinking lately about how we don't see the world as it really is, whatever that might possibly be, but as we create it. Happily we agree amongst ourselves just enough most of the time to get along, but we often misinterpret what's right in front of our noses.

I'm very keen on photography these days and I enjoy taking out my new toy (fairly posh new camera) and snapping away.

I've progressed to some of the smarter things it can do, and I particularly enjoy experimenting with the colour filters. This sets the camera so that it will only pick up certain colours and the rest is black and white. You can get some really effective shots, say, if you just set it to yellow tones, and I've had some amazing shots in this way.

This leads me to think what filters we use in every day life. Bearing in mind that there is no colour 'out there' (whatever that is), and that light itself has no colour, and that what we perceive as colour is actually the action of electromagnetic waves on specialised cells in the human retina, we have to conclude that we ourselves provide the colour and the interpretation. This is deep stuff and I won't go into it further, but I think you get the picture!

Like the time I was in my kitchen on a hunt for the salt cellar, and I finally saw it on the top shelf in the cupboard. As I reached up to take it, it literally dissolved in front of my eyes and became a pot of garlic salt. This was an amazing insight into my brain in action!

In a nutshell, we tend to see what you are looking for. So, to paraphrase the old saying 'be careful what you wish for,' it pays to take care what we seek. What do you think?

Decisions, decisions...

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 14:39:10 GMT

Life is full of choices and decisions, especially in these very difficult days of Covid -19. So how can you make good ones?

Perhaps paradoxically, emotion is very closely involved in decision making, often at an unconscious level. Our brain seeks immediate gratification over long term gain and it can be hard to over-rule that. I was fascinated to read recently about the case of a person who had lost all emotion due to a brain injury and was then simply unable to make even the smallest decision, like what to wear. Considering that we make about a hundred each day, that's really tough.

So how to do it?

Clearly if you are responsible for huge budgets and enormous projects at work you're going to need tested models and strategies, and you can find out about some of this here. But what about personal decisions, of all shapes and sizes,

What shall I wear today?
Shall I look for another job?
Shall I take the opportunity of a relationship with this person?
Should I move house?

You can try to work out the pros and cons of each, and it's often helpful to enlist another person in this undertaking, but in the end you need to feel you have done the right thing.

One helpful technique is to force the decision and say, If I had to decide right now, what would I do? Or flip a coin and say that will make the decision. The interesting thing here is that you will have a feeling about the result - if it's a strong 'gut' reaction either way then that tells you something about the rightness of that decision.

So it seems that emotion is important in decision making. What do you think? Have you made a difficult decision, where your gut feeling was right? Or not?

The importance of beauty

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 14:32:12 GMT

A few years ago I did a whole series on the things that affect our well-being, and I thought it would be good to bring that topic in again here, because of the positive impact on our well-being and mental health.

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I would certainly agree with that, since everything we see is created by the way we interpret it.

For example, I can easily get all teary when I listen to a certain piano arrangement of Brahms' Lullaby. It's not overly clever or complicated, but clear, simple, harmonious and just so satisfying.

I think this is important. When we do experience something beautiful, it takes us out of ourselves for a moment and reminds us that we are part of a larger whole. We can even feel transcendence.

Do you have enough Beauty in your life? How can you find even a little bit more?

Continuous partial attention

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 14:28:42 GMT

Here's a scary looking phrase for a scary phenomenon. It's a version of the technology rant - except that it's serious.

We all know that smartphones and digital distractions in general do steal our attention, and probably we all think we should do less of it. I remember reading this in the paper a couple of years ago, and it's come back to me,

'Hourly worker productivity...flat-lined since the 2008 financial crisis, and the UK [began] to lag far behind rival economic powerhouses such as the US and Germany....'

...and they went on to say that Dan Nixon, a senior Bank of England analyst, thought it could be due to workers spending so much time checking devices that it affects their productivity.

I've noted before that when we think we are multi-tasking and being super efficient, just checking our phones, we are in fact continuously switching attention. And this really depletes mental energy.

It leaves us in the unhappy mental state of 'continuous partial attention', never really present to anything. I can't help thinking about this when I see see children trying to attract the attention of carers engrossed in their phones - what are we modelling to them?

What do you think? Is this a real problem or am I bigging it up?

Clearing the stage

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 12:16:00 GMT

It has often been remarked that Shakespeare is full of quotations, and here's one to ponder -

'....All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances...'

If I dust off my English Literature studies, I recall this is from 'As You Like It'. It came into my mind when I was reading this fascinating book, 'Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long'. I want to share just one of those strategies with you.

The author likens the prefrontal cortex, the bit behind your forehead, the executive centre of the brain, to a theatre, imagining that thoughts leap onto the stage like actors, in ways that may or may not be useful. We don't always want every actor on stage at the same time, just as we can't keep track of too many things in our heads at once.

As the author says, ' the mental stage is smaller than you might expect' (loc 415 in Kindle edition).

But we can deliberately say to the less useful thoughts, Exit stage right until I want you! This can really help with focus. I say to my extraneous actors, thank you for the thought but I'm not ready for you at the moment - go and sit in the audience and I'll call you back later.

It can also help with sleep when you have thoughts buzzing round your head. I imagine the theatre director (i.e. me) turning off the lights in the theatre, bringing down the curtain and saying, The theatre's closed just now; come back tomorrow.

Why not try it and let me know if it helps?

KIndness

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 11:45:50 GMT

In our current lockdown (April 2020) it's wonderful to see how much people are helping each other. The NHS staff in particular are going way above and beyond, and many voluntary groups are springing up to help people who are isolated.

It's a win-win situation. And research does show that helping others and being kind is good for you. There are lots of references about this, and here's just one. There are lots more on the Random Acts of Kindness website.

Wisdom and spiritual traditions knew this all along, of course, but it's interesting to see that science now backs it up. By the way, kindness is good for business too - people work better when they feel cared about!

It doesn't have to be anything really huge, to make a difference, and it doesn't even require you to suffer first! Here are a few examples of easy but kind activities,

Giving way in traffic
M aking a friendly phone call
Giving a compliment
Doing the washing up even if it isn't your 'turn'
Sending flowers just because...

You can set an intention to do five kind things every day for a while and see how it makes you feel.

I'd love to know how you get on!

Vision, risk and readiness

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 11:39:49 GMT

We've been looking in recent blogs at the Dimensions of Leadership as identified by the ILM . Today we are looking briefly at two aspects of Vision in a leader: Risk and Readiness.

Risk is all about the potential for harm, how likely scenarios are to develop, how bad they would be if they did, and how we might mitigate the risk. We have an all too familiar example just now; the risk of pandemic was well known but it seems the UK government was slow to act and so many lives have been lost. Pandemic was not even unlikely!

Organisations too must factor in risk - not just our old friends Elf and Safety, important though they are, but also strategic risk - can we keep up with change? for example the very sudden need for remote working. Financial planning is a risk if our plans don't work out as we expected; there are operational risks if, for example we rely on one supplier who then goes under, and even the weather can pose significant risk these days, what with fire, flood and tempest.

And in terms of our staff, we should not be so risk averse that we punish people for mistakes. Every mistake is an opportunity to learn and do it better next time, and even to prevent disaster by revealing flaws in the system.

So are we ready?

These days, the past does not easily predict the future and we need leaders who can think flexibly and creatively even in the midst of uncertainty and change. They need strong analytical skills and an understanding of data so they can spot trends; they certainly need to be resilient, inspirational and ready to take action.

A tolerance for risk and ambiguity is also very important - relating back to what I said earlier about the things we can control and the things we can't. Just one example of all this is around talent management - we have to be ready for our older and more experienced staff to retire, taking their wisdom with them!

What's one thing your organisation needs to be ready for and maybe isn't?

Swimming lessons

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 13:31:45 GMT

Even though we can't go swimming at the moment because of the pandemic, I have a few watery reflections for you!

You see lots of different kinds of swimmers; those who just dive in, look fantastic in Lycra and swim effortlessly up and down for a hundred lengths as if they'd been born to it.

Then you get those who make a great splash, all over everybody else and they're really messy and inefficient. Sometimes they get in people's way too; they don't get the lane discipline and which way you are supposed to swim in the lane. They don't see that they are stopping you doing your nice long clear lengths either! You really find out what rules you have in a pool when other people transgress them!

There are lots of life lessons in a swimming pool. When I get in I just surrender to the water and go right underneath, where I can't breathe; and it takes trust to know that nevertheless, I will be all right. And I swim best when I don't fight the water, but go with the flow, working with it rather than against it. So now I can do a pretty decent front crawl whereas before I struggled to get the breathing right. A big change for me.

And there are lots of metaphors around swimming, water, flow, immersion. The appreciation of metaphor is nothing new in human culture, but now there is more understanding, especially in clean language and clean coaching. The governing idea is that we think in metaphors and pictures (as you saw I did at the start) and that when we become aware of them and develop and investigate them, this can lead to dramatic shifts in our understanding of any situation, clearing the way (see what I did there?) to changes in behaviour, attitudes and life as a whole.

It's a different way to look at a situation, and the two main questions will almost always get you started in finding a new viewpoint.

They're very simple.

Let's say your topic, issue, concern, wish is X.

The first question is, What kind of X is that X?
Then - is there anything else about that X?

You can ask the second question several times to get more detail.

Without going through the full clean coaching process, you can apply just these two questions in your daily life, in conversation with others or even yourself. The results can be striking!

Why not give it a go, and let me know how you get on?

I hope it goes swimmingly!

Vision: strategy and change

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 13:13:41 GMT

Recently we've been looking at how Authenticity helps a leader to be effective, and now we have reached the topic of Vision. The ILM identifies a number of components of Vision, and so today we're taking a very brief look at Strategy and Change.

It seems very apposite in these lockdown times. Strategy is about seeing the bigger picture and planning for the future, rather than managing day to day tasks. So strategic goals could include the creation of a new product, or entering into a new market, perhaps in a new geographic location, or in a different way, such as moving online.

I venture to hope that many large businesses, especially the airlines, will be thinking strategically about how the world will look after Covid19. So many of us have been forced to work at home and online, which is a big change for those of us tied to a regular commute. There have been some advantages to this move and organisations may decide to make this a part of their explicit strategy now. There are many analytical tools to support the development of strategy but the basic idea is to ask, Where are we now? Where do we want to be? How can we get there?

All this of course implies Change; and so a leader has to be able to promote and guide people through it. Resistance is almost certain and never futile!

Good leaders understand how people feel in times of change, and help them discover the benefits of change rather than forcing it upon them, wherever this is possible. Communication is crucial - not just a memo on the staff noticeboard, but real one to one listening and discussion, so that people feel involved. Honesty is required; change may be necessary and uncomfortable and we've got to be open about this.

Looking more widely, we have huge systemic change forced on us at the moment by the pandemic, that we certainly didn't choose, and it may be helpful to think of the 'stages of grief' as we go through whatever this change will bring us. These stages, which may occur in different orders and even together, are recognised as,

Denial (it's not really serious, it will die down in a few weeks)
Anger (I've suddenly lost my livelihood through no fault of my own)
Bargaining (I've been in full lockdown for a month, surely I deserve an outing to the seaside)
Depression (It's hopeless, we're all going to die)
Acceptance (this is how things are, I am still here, how can I now make the best of it?

Is there one more thing you can do to support your staff, and yourself, in these times?

What is resilience anyway?

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Fri, 03 Apr 2020 13:55:45 GMT

As we are in need of resilience now more than ever, I thought it would be good to say a bit more about what it is and how we can get more of it.

I love to see where words come from, as this can be very revealing. Inside RESILIENCE there is a Latin root, salire, meaning "to jump, leap". It's amazing how many abstract words come from such embodied, physical meanings.

So, jumping back up, with energy...it makes me think of those vintage Kelly Man toys that no matter how hard you hit them they bounce right back up.

For us in our daily lives it's about what we do with adversity. Everyone experiences it and no-one can escape it, as we are so painfully seeing now, across the world. But you may notice that some people seem to sail through life no matter what happens, and others are floored if they break a fingernail.

The good news is that acting resiliently is a skill that can be learned. It's not entirely an inborn capacity that you either have or you don't. You can make changes to your thinking, behaviour and lifestyle. Here are some ways to improve your resilience,

Look for positive interpretations in a situation
Keep things in perspective - how much will 'it' matter in a year? six months? even a week?
Accept help - that's a sign of strength, not weakness
Control the things you can and don't stress about what you can't
Look after your physical health, especially your sleep
Help other people - it's good for you too.

You can read more from Michael Neenan, an expert in this field, here .

How resilient do you think you are? And is there one thing you could do today to increase it?

The importance of trust

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Fri, 03 Apr 2020 13:51:23 GMT

Trust is fundamental to good communication and relationships.

As Stephen Covey puts it, 'trust is the glue of life'. I've said before that all this is reflected in our neurology: when we feel under threat we are flooded with stress chemicals that quite literally turn off our rational brains and we can't think straight. In contrast, when we feel safe our neurochemistry is very different, with oxytocin more predominant. And when we feel safe we do our best work.

Therefore at the very least, if I dare say it, it makes good business sense to promote trust in your workplace!

Trust in respect of a manager or leader is made up of several things, such as openness, effective communication, making timely decisions, integrity, empathy, caring, commitment, reliability. You can find out more here, with some free resources.

Is there one thing you could do to increase the trust of your team in you?

Helping you get through the lockdown

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 09:45:28 GMT

Every website you've ever used, every company you have anything to do with, every list you're on - of course they are all talking about the Covid-19 pandemic that we're all struggling with right now in March 2020. And here's my contribution - we all want to do whatever we can to get through.

I'm hopeful that in the end we may, taking a global view, do more than just get through. Maybe we'll have learned afresh how important it is to nurture our relationships, while we still can. Maybe we'll be keeping the planet cleaner and spare our descendants worse problems to come. Certainly, in the end, it will have been the biggest threat that the human family has faced for decades.

But right now, how to get through?

The principles of well-being and resilience are the same; Connect, Learn, Give, Notice, Exercise, and so they will apply to this situation too.

Relationships are crucial. When we can't hug our loved ones, or even see them, we can still keep in touch with the amazing technology we have these days. We might even go all retro and write a proper letter, reviving the art!
As for Learn - what I would say here is that, okay, you might think, I've got three months at home, I can learn Chinese at last; but you might be better served by raising your awareness of what's true and what's not. Already there are lots of fake posts on social media which are downright harmful, and it's good to get the real facts, and deliberately ignore the rest. Here are some of the good guys - the BBC, the UK government website, the responsible journalism page called The Conversation, and even Facebook is redeeming itself by providing an accurate information hub.
In the UK we have a glorious abundance of giving. Over 700,000 people have volunteered to help the NHS in different ways and that is so heart-warning. Then there are lots of small local groups that have organised and risen to the challenge. Giving is such a win-win; of course the recipient benefits, but so do you. Giving is good for you!
Suddenly we are noticing what we can't do just now, and I'm sure we'll appreciate it so much more when we can. What a street party we're going to have when this is all over! Noticing is a mindful thing to do, and it keeps us in the present, which is actually all we really have. It's also something we can choose to do, one of the things we can control in these frightening times. It's related to gratitude, for the good things we have, and again this is positively good for us.
Finally, exercise! We know it's good for us but we don't always do it. At this time of isolation we really will benefit if we do it. It helps to underpin our physical health, which in turn helps us sleep, supports our immune system and generally keeps us in the best shape for the battle we are fighting!

I hope you are all right, wherever you are, whatever you are doing, and I want to add my hugely grateful thanks to everyone working in essential services, especially the NHS, who keep civilisation going all the time. It's just that now we really notice them!

Complimentary calls

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 10:42:02 GMT

With this Covid-19 pandemic we should be staying at home as much as possible and drastically reducing social contact. For me, so far, so good - my circumstances make that not too onerous, at least for now.

But I know that for others it may be very different, and while I'm able, I'd like to do what I can to help.

So if you find you are in need of a safe listening ear, I'm offering a couple of complimentary 45 minute phone/Facetime/Zoom coaching sessions each week, for whatever helps. No strings attached. If I think you need something other than coaching, I'll say so. Whilst we are cutting down so drastically on face to face contact, it's really important to keep other ways of contact open.

Just click on the link and it takes you to my booking page.

Stay safe, stay well, stay home - if you possibly can.

Words that touch

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 10:34:46 GMT

I'd like to commend to you a couple of books that you may like, even though at the moment in this pandemic, we have to temporarily reduce touch. These books may be good to read if you are isolating for now.

One is Words That Touch , and it's about the application of Clean Language (more about this another time; for now, think of this as the art of asking very clear, simple questions) to body therapies such as shiatsu, chiropractic and physiotherapy. It is aimed at body work therapists (which I am not) but what fascinated me was how it shows what the body knows. We can even apply it to ourselves, investigating physical symptoms and seeing what they can tell us.

I pulled my back once and had a few physiotherapy sessions during which I mentioned this book; the next thing I knew was that the physios were queuing up to read it! What did the back ache tell me? well, one thing was that I was doing too much. So I made adjustments and soon felt better.

The other book, which I have only just started, is called The Listening Space . It's another Clean Language application, this time with a focus on mindfulness and how these two approaches can work together. It's a delightful book, appropriate to a wide audience, very kind and comforting.

Challenging leadership

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 10:26:53 GMT

Sooner or later, especially if you are any sort of manager or leader, formally or informally, you're going to come up against a challenge, large or small, that demands a response of you, and you have to be really clear about this. Not everyone will like it, whatever you do, so it can be uncomfortable at best.

Maybe you have found something wrong, or that just feels not quite right, in the actions of your organisation or even of individual colleagues. Or you've got to call out the unacceptable behaviour of someone in your team. You will get to a point where if you fail to act in accordance with your values, you have this feeling of letting yourself down.

So how best to do this and still come up smelling of roses? The ILM suggests that to honour your value of Authenticity, you could consider the following,

Be as ready to challenge yourself as you are to challenge others. After all, it might be you!!
Be really clear on your facts and get the best information you can before acting, and then be decisive
Try to see how the situation might feel for others, whom you may suspect of acting wrongly
Think how you can anticipate and manage potential risks and benefits

Sometimes we just have to act brave, even if we don't feel it. (I'm sure there is a Winnie the Pooh meme in here somewhere!)

As I write this, in the early days of the Covid 19 pandemic, I'm thinking how this may feel for our leaders. Politics has gone by the board and we need courageous leadership more than ever. I'm really thankful for how everyone is pulling together to get through this.

Teflon or velcro?

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 13:58:52 GMT

Today's book recommendation is by Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The Practical Science of Reshaping Your Brain - and Your Life.

Rick Hanson is an American neuropsychologist with strong links to the Positive Psychology movement. In this wide ranging book he explains that our brains have a negativity bias - bad experiences 'stick' like Velcro and we tend to dwell on them, whereas good experiences are more likely to slide away like a poached egg off your Teflon coated frying pan! He says this is because we are hard wired to survive, and so we see threats more readily than we see sources of pleasure and contentment. He gives ways to counteract this Stone Age mentality so that we can savour and hang on more to our many good experiences, especially of safety, satisfaction and contentment. He calls this the HEAL process,

Have a positive experience
Enrich it
Absorb it
Link positive and negative material ( optional but powerful - using positive thoughts to 'soothe, reduce and potentially replace negative ones').

It's an exciting read with lots of practical advice. I hope you enjoy it!

It's really true what they say about exercise...

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 13:51:46 GMT

There's lots of evidence that exercise is good for us, even essential. If it was discovered as a treatment now it would be the new wonder drug!

It doesn't have to be hard, or even too frequent. But our bodies are designed to move and be active, and there are all sorts of undesirable consequences if we sit about too much.

Here's a fascinating animation - https://youtu.be/aUaInS6HIGo- that tells you why! It's only a few minutes but very instructive. Skip the ad and don't be put off by the monotonous delivery - it's worth sticking with it.

If you want to build in that little extra over and above the good habits I am sure you've already got, it needs to be something you'll enjoy and stick with and that becomes part of your routine. For me, it never used to be the gym. I tried it but for a long time it just didn't fit with my routines. So I would swim. I would go down to the pool first thing in the morning several times a week, whether I felt like it or not (such is the power of established habit that it soon seemed odd not to do it) and by the time I woke up properly I'd be half way through and set up for the day.

However, now it mostly is the gym! I learned on a neuroscience course last year that resistance exercise is excellent for building cognitive reserve, especially as you get older. So that's what I do now - but it doesn't really matter as long as you do something. Even planning a walk as part of your routine is good - but it needs to be something that will stick.

What could it be for you?

Supporting your staff

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 13:42:29 GMT

As a manager or leader, you've got to look out for your staff. Your job is to enable them to do theirs, and one way to do this is to remove obstacles, not just the obvious, legally required ones around health and safety, but also the more subtle ones like excessive pressure, bullying and harassment.

Maybe you could encourage people to be open to fun at work - not everyone is going to join in after work socials and so on, but you can make it clear that you value each person as an individual. Happy people, working in a friendly atmosphere will be more productive than if they are always looking out for the next telling off!

You can demonstrate the behaviour you want to see in your staff - courtesy, patience, kindness - and be a good example.

This doesn't mean that you don't call out poor performance; it's part of your role as a manger to do that in pursuit of the business aims, but keep it strictly to observed behaviours, without involving the personal worth of the worker themselves.

What do you think? Have you experienced contrasting styles of management yourself? Where did you flourish best? It's been said that people leave managers, not jobs - this is a thought worth pondering!

Another aspect of Authenticity in a manager is how your personal values align with those of your organisation. If there is an obvious mismatch - for example you believe strongly in the importance of good health, but you work for a tobacco firm, then you might have a problem.

It's helpful to know what our true values are. We might aspire to certain values but on honest reflection we may realise that our actions don't in fact support them. Here's one that's uncomfortable for me personally - I have got involved with climate matters recently, yet I took a very carbon intensive flight to New Zealand only a few months ago.

It looks like I value contact with my daughter more in the short term than the safety of the planet in the long term. I am looking at how to offset the carbon for that trip, but it's still a painful example of value conflict.

Maybe the bottom line is to show up as yourself, with honesty, and to be the same person at work as we are at home.

What do you think?

Something new

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 16:32:36 GMT

Why is novelty so engaging?

It's often been said that a change is as good as a rest, and there's much merit in this from a neuroscience point of view. Learning or doing something new is quite simply good for us.

By learning, I don't just mean go on some course, unless it's really engaging and we're not just sitting at the back thinking about something else. I don't just mean learn some new facts in an academic setting, I mean anything new, anything that has novelty, as it is the combination of novelty and emotional engagement, that energises us. If it's something new, and you enjoy it, then it's going to stick!

It could well be something to do with work, something that challenges you and makes your job more interesting, and perhaps even more rewarding financially. Although that's less of a driver than you might think! Then of course you might take up a new hobby, new sport, visit somewhere you've never been.

Whatever it is, it's the combination of novelty and emotion that makes this such a powerful activity.

Good conversations

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 16:22:29 GMT

A really important management competency - not to mention your life! - is to have skilful conversations. There are not many situations where a leader has got to say, Just do it, now! - perhaps only in front line emergency services - and there is a growing understanding that management is much more about partnership than authority. I do know myself, warts and all, and I'm painfully aware that if I am TOLD to do something, I tend to bristle. But if I am involved and consulted, well, I flourish and go the extra mile.

Here are a few tips,

Listen carefully, as much to what is not being said as well
Say what you want clearly and emotionally - don't apologise for asking
Ask for suggestions
Say thank you for a job well done

One of the best modern books on this topic is this one - it's called ' Conversational Intelligence ', and it's all about how to have conversations, in work and life, wherever you are, that make people feel safe, put them in a space of trust and thus lead to deep interactions, partnerships and creative results. It's a big advert but I think it's worth it.

The author, the late Judith Glaser looks at the neurological states we are in when we feel afraid - lots of cortisol, which quite literally turns off our rational thinking brains until we feel safe again. And that can take up to 22 hours! In contrast, when we feel trust and safety, we are high in oxytocin. That's been dubbed the 'love hormone' (a good one for today!) and whilst it's more complicated than that there is a lot of truth in it.

Here's just one example of what you could change in daily conversation,

Instead of 'who's responsible for this mess?'
Say this - 'let's talk about what's been getting in the way'

What would you rather hear?

What would be most likely to engage you positively?

Authenticity and self awareness

Mon, 27 Jan 2020 16:50:39 GMT

In my regular updates this year, my theme is around what leaders and managers need in order to be their best, not only at work but also in the whole of their lives.

Indeed, one of the questions I ask when I take on a new executive client is around whether you think you are one person at work and another at home.

We started with self awareness in my updates because the Institute for Leadership and Management has identified this as one of the first factors in Authenticity, which in turn is one of the five dimensions of leadership and management.

So self awareness is one of the first components of authenticity, and very important if you want to be a credible leader or manager. It means that basically you know what you're like - you know your strengths, the things that tend to knock you off your perch, what motivates you (and just as importantly, what doesn't). You'll have an idea of your basic personality type, and this can give you an edge when you're facing situations that you know in advance can be difficult for you. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say. There are many ways to categorise and describe personality types, and so here's a free test to get you started.

Self awareness feeds into your preferred leadership style and your emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman, one of the first pioneers of emotional intelligence, suggests six leadership styles - coercive, authoritative/visionary, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting and coaching. Your self awareness will help guide you to the most appropriate style for you and the situation.

Want the next thrilling instalment? Subscribe safely here to my regular updates and receive some free useful stuff straight away.

The meaning of life

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 16:41:00 GMT

Did you say '47'? That's what Douglas Adams came up with!

But seriously folks, we all need to feel that who we are and what we do matters in some way. Whether we articulate this consciously or not, we all need some reason to get out of bed in the morning and go and do whatever it is we do.

Often, of course, it's around earning a living and providing for our basic needs and those of our families, and I know very well how busy that can keep you for years on end!

But eventually it always comes down to more than that. One place to start is with the exercise recommended by the renowned Steven Covey, who suggests that you step back and think about the whole of your life and imagine what people might say about you. How would you like to be remembered? What is your legacy to the world?

I did this a few years ago and I came up with 'You could trust her', and 'She was fun'. Now I might add, 'She did what mattered' - and that is not going to be, 'She met all her KPI's on time'!!

How is it for you? Is your life congruent with your deepest values? If not, what needs to change?

How many brains have you got?

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 16:36:46 GMT

We all know we have a brain in our heads, but did you know that effectively you also have one in your heart and in your gut? Strange but true.

I heard a story that this didn't get into the original edition of Gray's Anatomy because the publisher fell out with the only anatomist that knew about this at the time. Anyway we now know that there is a huge amount of neural communication between the heart, head and gut. You only have to notice some of the things we say - ' I had a gut feeling', 'I knew in my heart,' - to realise how embedded this is within our human awareness.

I want to recommend to you an amazing book that tells you all about this.

There are so many purple passages in it that it's hard to select one, but here's a taste -

'...when the three brains, the three 'souls' or intelligences, are out of alignment or are fighting with each other, they cause psychological and emotional problems. Incongruence between the three brains leads to undermining success and creates aberrant behaviours and outcomes.'

Better still, the book tells you what to do about it, so that all three brains work together as well as possible.

How to plan your career

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 14:51:56 GMT

Here's some excellent advice from the University of York about things to consider when you first become a senior manager.

Clear objectives and goals are essential, and will help to raise productivity. Motivation is important, and you may be surprised to hear that it isn't always money, especially in the higher paid jobs. It isn't all about work - the achievement of personal goals can have beneficial effects on workplace performance too, since we are integrated beings. After all, we don't just go to work, however much it might feel like it sometimes!

There's a comprehensive resource and further information section too, so you ahve everything you need to get started.

Here's the link - https://online.york.ac.uk/resources/aspiring-senior-managers-guide/benefits-of-career-plan

Let me know if it was useful!

Coach or business consultant?

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 12:56:57 GMT

Do you need a coach or a consultant for your business challenges?

The short answer is that you probably need both, perhaps at different times in the life of your business.

A business consultant will give you specialist advice and work directly in your business to help you improve it, such as designing a business plan, marketing, staff issues. The Institute for Apprenticeships describes it like this -

'provide business advice to public, private and not-for-profit organisations. This usually involves helping them solve a challenge of some kind, such as how to grow their business, how to make it more efficient or how to organise and structure itself in a different way. Some specialist consultancies have a particular focus – for example, how to write proposals for new work, or how to change an organisation or how to develop their workforce.'

A coach will use coaching skills in a structured way to focus on how YOU are showing up in your business, how you fit in the larger system, how to make this better. They will be led by your agenda and support you to develop goals and actions for the improvement you want. This could include vision, time management, motivation, limiting beliefs, clarity, self-care, action planning, dealing with procrastination, personal organisation. They will help you investigate where you are now and for you to decide what needs to change and how.

What do you need now?

Keeping it clean

Thu, 09 Jan 2020 15:31:37 GMT

It's not what you think!!

'Clean' is a method of coaching that can get great results very quickly.

You may have heard of Clean Food and that sort of thing, and in a way this is similar in that it takes out what gets in the way. It's all about shining a light on your inner mental representations, uncovering the metaphors you use and how you actually do think.

'What would you like to have happen?' is a good question to ask at the start of the year ( especially when we've all let our gym memberships lapse and we haven't kept our resolutions) and especially when starting to work with a coach.

Clean questions strip out all the assumptions I might make about your situation and focuses your attention on what you want. Even if I ask you, What do you want to change, I am assuming that you want a change, when actually you might need a different way of looking at where you are already. Another good effect of this sort of questioning is that it takes the focus away from what you don't want. Remember being asked NOT to think of a pink elephant?

So, y ou might say to me - I feel stuck. Then so that you know what this really means (this is much more important than that I know), we would start with a series of iterative questions, as follows,

(And) what kind of stuck (is that stuck)?
...until finally...
(And) is there anything else about stuck?

The insight gained from this process can be huge! So, can you say, what you would like to have happen?

Have you ever met an Accidental Manager?

Thu, 09 Jan 2020 15:24:44 GMT

One of my themes this year is to share professional information about what makes a good manager or leader. We'll get on to that in a minute.

But first, why is this even important? Do managers have a place? Aren't they mostly the problem in many organisations? Haven't we all left jobs because of our awful managers?

J ust because you are good at your job, whatever it may be, it does not follow that you will be a good manager in that context. The skills of management and leadership are well defined and they don't grow on trees or come upon you by osmosis. Many of the people I work with have suffered from what's been called 'the accidental manager' who knows all about the job but not how to facilitate and lead others to do their best work.

Let's look at what the ILM sees as the necessary qualities of good management and leadership. You might be surprised at some of them. This is what the research done by the ILM sees as the five dimensions of leadership, each with several components. Here are the five dimensions,

Authenticity
Vision
A chievement
Ownership
Collaboration

You can access some of the ILM resources for free and all of them when you are a member. Why not try the free questionnaire and share your thoughts here?

Assertive or aggressive?

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Thu, 09 Jan 2020 15:14:06 GMT

What do we mean by assertiveness?

This can be a problem for many people - even the most surprising ones. You'd be amazed how many glossy super shiny people, who seem to have everything taped, are actually quaking in their boots.

Then there are the nightmare work colleagues who are always on your back and never happy with what you're doing and even come over a bit aggressive - we've all experienced that! Maybe they are behaving like this for reasons unknown to you; but also they may not know the difference between aggression and assertiveness. It's an important distinction and one that will have a big impact on how you present yourself, especially if you are a leader.

Have a think about what it means to you.

Sometimes people think that if you are assertive you are pushy, and bolshie, and getting above yourself, and other thoughts along the same lines. I'm sure you can think of plenty more.

A good way to approach the meaning is to contrast it with the idea of aggressiveness on the one hand and submission on the other.

It's easy to think that aggressiveness consists of doing anything you can to put yourself first and get what you want. And on the other hand, that submission is quite the reverse. This is where you behave in ways that don't get you what you want but allow other people to have what they want without thinking about you. Submission is not a nice place to be!

Assertiveness is the best of both worlds. It is simply to state your position, unemotionally, firmly, confidently, and resolutely, without causing any sorrow or distress to others. It is based on the belief that it is all right to have what you want, and that you are worthy of being listened to. So, it is linked to self-esteem and confidence.

It's not about dominance, power, overcoming others and getting what you want, no matter what the effect on other people. It's about standing in your own truth, firmly in your own place and stating just how things are.

Making the most of an earthquake

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 01:58:07 GMT

Reflecting on our travels in New Zealand, we still see evidence of the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch. Much energy has been expended in reconstructing the city and surrounding areas and it's astonishing to see the level of resilience shown by the New Zealand people. In the city centre, despite all the ongoing repairs to infrastructure, people have still found time to create beautiful large artworks on buildings, even when they are scheduled for demolition. It's really inspiring to see. There's now a new cinema and many other memorable buildings.

There are earthquakes here every single day, but the world only hears about the big ones. If you live in New Zealand you live with risk!

There was another Big One in November 2016 affecting Kaikoura, a well known base for whale tours. It destroyed the scenic railway and the tour infrastructure - but they rebuilt it and it's even better than before, according to their website .

Isn't that just resilience in action!

Timeless Healing and Remembered Wellness

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 19:16:09 GMT

FIve years on from some pretty serious surgery, I'm reflecting with gratitude for my life. Looking back, I recall that I did a lot of sitting around in hospital waiting rooms, and I was determined not to waste the time. I read a lot of books, and this one in particular I want to commend to you. It's called 'Timeless healing:the power and biology of belief'. You can find it on Amazon via my link here.

Early in his medical career, the author, Dr Herbert Benson, studied the placebo response, which at that time was viewed as an irritating factor that had to be got rid of in double blind trials. He came to believe that far from being a problem for research method, the effect is fundamental to our ability to regulate and heal ourselves. He found evidence that what we believe is enormously powerful. For example he reports (p32) a 1950 study where pregnant women were given a substance that they were told would reduce morning sickness. However that substance was syrup of ipecac, which is usually given to induce vomiting. Yet these women were cured of the sickness - because they believed it.

(Not sure this would get past a modern ethics committee though!)

He came to refer to the body's power to heal as 'Remembered Wellness' - what a lovely phrase this is. It goes on all the time in ways we don't think of as remarkable - if you cut your finger, in a few days it will have healed over all by itself and 'you' didn't have to do anything!

Earlier in his career Dr Benson had identified what he describes as 'the relaxation response' which can be very easily learned and will put you into a calm physical and mental state. There are only two basic steps, although if you read the book you will learn more detail. First, repeat a simple word, sound, prayer or muscular movement. Second, 'passively disregard' any thoughts that float up and just go back to your repetition.

In later chapters of the book he links all this to spirituality, indicating that we just might be 'wired for God'. It's an exciting read and I can thank Shola Arewa for it, as it was she who first told me about it.

Thinking straight

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 19:06:33 GMT

Thinking is of course a huge subject, philosophically, psychologically, neurologically, and we could go on for hours about how and what we know about the processes of thought.

But what I'm interested in is helping you to make changes in your life that stick, so I'm going to be focussing on really practical things you can do that will make a difference.

Much of what we think is expressed in the language we speak. You could say that our language and the words we use to describe what goes on around us are a sort of map, that helps us to negotiate the terrain of reality and to find our way around. This is a good thing. Indeed, the human brain is about the most complex and marvellous system in the universe; a permanently switched-on miracle, much more impressive than our wonderful iPads and other gadgets! (And we all have one of our own!) Nevertheless, there are ways in which we use language, and ways that we think, that are not so helpful to us, and this is what I'm talking about.

What we think affects the way we behave. For example, if we think (for whatever reason) that the world is a nice friendly place, we are likely to behave in a sociable and friendly manner ourselves. You can easily see the other side of this. If we think (for whatever reason) that everyone is out to get us if we don't get them first, and that life is always hard, then we are likely to be at least a bit anxious, risk averse and not very jolly. Notice that I am making no comment at all about whether life really is as either of these two opposite scenarios might suggest; my focus is on what you or I actually do think.

So, if our thoughts affect our behaviour, it's reasonable to expect that when we change our thoughts our behaviour will alter. This is the basic premise of the cognitive-behavioural approach. NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) also has a great deal to say about this subject and this is the angle I shall be coming from here.

In NLP, it is suggested that there are three main categories of thinking errors that we can fall into. They are

Distortion
Deletion
Generalisation

We have to do this to a certain extent because we have so much perceptual input coming at us from our environment every second. For example, do you remember every inch of the last drive you did, or did you get to your destination with very little memory of how you got there? I know that happens to me frequently!

So far, so good - but sometimes we get into problems when we aren't aware of how we are thinking.

For now, we're going to look at just one or two thinking patterns based on distortions. The first one is Mind Reading. This is where we claim to know what someone else is thinking. A simple example is where we say, 'So and So doesn't like me.' Or, 'my boss thinks I'm inadequate'. I'm tempted to add the infamous 'my wife doesn't understand me', but this leads us down too many other paths for the moment! Anyway, back to our distortions. The statements might be true but the point is that we just don't know, and if we're wrong, and if we behave as if the statements are true, and they're not, then we can get into quite a tangle.

So - watch out for times when you say this to yourself. Ask yourself, How do I know this is the case? What is the evidence for it? Are there any other explanations that might fit what I have perceived?

You could keep a notebook for these reflections.

Just one more for now, which goes by the rather technical name of Lost Performative. This is where we make a value judgment, without stating who actually made the judgment, as it were plucking it out of the ether. So we might say, 'It's important to work hard', 'it's wrong to lie', 'it's bad to avoid paying your taxes'. The question to ask here is, who says? And do I believe them? Are there some circumstances where I might disagree with these statements? Is this value right for me?

Can you think of any values you hold that are like this, where perhaps you are not sure where they have come from? Time to get that notebook out again!

What's in a word?

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 19:01:12 GMT

As a coach I've become very sensitive to words and questions. The other day I was thinking again about that deceptively simple little question ' What do you want to have happen?' This seemingly innocuous little question hides a lot of complexity. I've noticed that many people, especially women, don't actually know what they want as they are so bound up in looking after and helping other people. Often they don't even know that you CAN want something, that it is OK to long for and to express your own purpose. It's much easier to say what we DON'T want, yet that doesn't move us forward much.

Another one that I particularly like is from Star Wars ( personally I'm more of a Trekkie, but this is a good saying!). Yoda, when training Luke Skywalker, says to him, 'Do, or do not, there is no try.' How often do we say, 'Well, I'll try....' and actually this is full of doubt and gives permission to fail whilst claiming the credit of attempting the task. Obviously we don't get everything right first time but if we let this little word loose inside our heads we might as well tie our shoelaces together!

One more tiny little word that can change everything is BUT. It has the effect of negating what comes before. So if you say, 'I really want to run my own business and work for myself BUT I don't know how to do it/I might go bust/ nobody will buy/it costs a lot of money', and so forth then you are hampering yourself before you start.

Try a little experiment - whenever you nearly say BUT, say AND instead. See what a difference it makes.

Are you a PUPP?

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 18:54:34 GMT

Well I used to be one, so I know what it's like to be a Professional Person Under Pressure! I was a PUPP for years, when I was involved with the management of older people's homes in a large local authority. I know how it is - you don't go into a role like that for the money, you want to improve the quality of care for the people you are responsible for. And then you get rammelled up in staffing problems, rotas, paperwork, medication rounds.....how do you ever get through it?

Then there was nursing - I was a student nurse long enough ago to remember with every bone of my body the 'Back Round'. This meant going round every patient in an old fashioned Nightingale ward and attending to their personal hygiene. Nothing got missed. Everyone was made comfortable. The beds were tidy. You had a sense that everything was under control, and nobody was going to go without a drink or any aspect of basic care, as, shamefully, seems to happen these days. It was marvellous and very rewarding - but oh, so tiring! How do you pick yourself up to just go round and do it all again?

Ultimately it's a question of getting focussed on where your efforts will have the most effect, and to keep in mind your larger purpose. Coaching is one of the ways you can help yourself to do this.

In my PUPP days I wish I had known someone like me, to tell me that I would get through, and that all would be well, and it wasn't my fault. So now I want to spare people in that position from unnecessary stress. There are lots of things I know now, but didn't now then, that will certainly help.

Here's just one of them - the STOP technique. When you're starting to feel overwhelmed, STOP. That's S for STOP. Then T for Take a deep breath - so often we do not breathe enough! Then simply Observe what's going on, as it you were reporting it in a newspaper, no judgment or thought. Finally, P for Proceed - with kindness towards yourself as well as to others.

An original Christmas gift!

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 14:22:04 GMT

What about a voucher for a coaching session?

I know it's a bit early but there's nothing like getting ahead, is there.

So here's an idea - You can give someone the benefits of a 60 minute gift session of personal or executive coaching with me. This could change their life!

The voucher is priced at £80, with 10% off further sessions if you or the recipient book again. The voucher is valid for three calendar months from 1st Jan 2020. The session can be undertaken via skype or in person, depending where they are, anywhere in the world excluding US and Canada.

You can get a virtual voucher, which will bear its own reference number that the recipient must quote, by contacting me directly by email for an invoice. There are a limited number of these vouchers available, and I will end the offer when it is full, so that I have time to honour them all within a three month period.

For a small additional cost of £3.50 (separately invoiced), I can post a physical voucher as well to the recipient so they have something to unwrap! Please contact me directly if you would like this. Vouchers will be posted out from 14th December.

(Important: For coaching to work, the person must be comfortable with the whole thing, so before you shell out for personal sessions or packages you should check out with the recipient that they would like this. I always offer a free phone call before we start anyway, of about 15 minutes, to make sure this is the right way forward for them.)

Please note:-

all coaching takes place within my usual terms & conditions and contract, which can be found on my website
the contract is between me, Barbara Bates, and the named recipient of coaching, not the purchaser
in particular, gift vouchers for coaching are NOT VALID until and unless the time and venue are personally arranged and agreed with me, Barbara Bates at my sole discretion
if a physical gift voucher is supplied the ORIGINAL must be shown at the session. If is not a face to face session then you must supply the code from the voucher. No photocopies can be accepted.

Gift vouchers are not transferable but if any problem arises I promise to do my best to rectify it, e.g. by extending the period of validity.

I will suggest that the recipient completes some forms as preparation, starting with this one,

Personal Life Analysis at https://reciprocoach.com/forms/25929132690747018112

Any questions, just email me to ask!

Each Next Thing

Thu, 19 Sep 2019 10:44:37 GMT

How to know what to do next

A few years ago I had some serious surgery from which, thankfully, I seem to have completely recovered. It was, paradoxically, in some ways a time of peacefulness, and that little phrase 'Each Next Thing' kept popping into my mind, and still does. To quote the film 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind', I thought to myself, this must mean something!

I'm usually very busy, fully occupied and always Doing Useful Things. At that time, I just couldn't, and I had to slow down and accept it. Then I found this to be a blessing all of its own. I would notice things more, now that I wasn't whizzing past at the speed of light. It was like getting out of my great big fast car and ambling along my the roadside. Or even better, getting on your bike and getting fit as well, as my cyclist hubby would say.

So I would go, Ah! I am awake. Right. Have a cup of tea. Get showered and dressed. Do my prayers and mindfulness. Go and get breakfast. See to the laundry. Think what we'll have for dinner. See if I need to contact anyone. Practice my recorder scales and that really hard arrangement of Bach's Second Violin Partita....each of these things being done one at a time, slowly and with presence.

If I didn't know what Each Next Thing was, I would just sit there and 'be' for a bit until I did know. Sometimes there not being a Next Thing was actually the Next Thing. So I would sit some more.

Reflecting back on this now, I see how valuable this still is - concentrating on what I am actually doing now. My studies with Sarah McKay of the Neuroscience Academy have taught me more about why this is so important. For example, we can only do one thing at once; if we think we are multi-tasking we're not, we're switching our attention and depleting our mental reserves pretty quickly!

So, Each Next Thing. In this moment, what's yours?

Anxiety awareness

Thu, 19 Sep 2019 09:40:21 GMT

There's almost always something you can do about it...

Do you struggle with anxiety yourself, or know someone who does? Most of us will be troubled by anxiety at one time or another. It's very unpleasant and can be debilitating.

One of the things the The Mental Health Foundation does is to raise awareness of anxiety - what it is, how to deal with and how to live with it. Go t o https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/a-to-z for lots of help and advice.

There are clear links with well-being here, so it's a good time to remind ourselves of some simple things we can do to improve our level of well-being; that is Connect, Learn, Give, Exercise and Notice.

What can you do this week in each of those areas? Could you...

speak to a neighbour that you don't usually have much to do with
start reading an interesting book about a topic new to you
send flowers to a friend
go for a walk
just sit for a few minutes and notice the beauty of the world around you?

Remember - there's pretty much always something we can do to make a difference, however small.

How is your work going to change over the next few years?

bmbates55@gmail.com (barbara bates) — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 08:22:46 GMT

New forces shaping work

Here’s a really helpful book for you to think about! Especially if you are at a bit of a crossroads right now.

It’s called ‘The Shift: the future of work is already here’ , by Professor Lynda Gratton. It’s all about how work is going to be different over the next few decades and how we can use the knowledge of these trends to SHIFT into a working life that suits us.

She identifies five forces that will shape our futures,

- Technology– powerful technology is getting cheaper and more accessible; we will become more connected and the ‘wise crowd’ will develop further; there will be far more opportunities for ‘micro-entrepreneurs’

- Globalisation– we have a 24/7, always on world; China, India, South America will emerge strongly as markets; urbanisation will increase

- Demography and longevity– the Baby Boomers will soon be retired whilst Generation Y, the first to grow up with established computing; longevity will increase whilst work opportunities will change; global migration for jobs and education will increase

- Society– family patterns will continue to change; people will think more deeply about what they really want; happiness may decline since increases in consumption beyond a certain point do not improve happiness; leisure time may increase and we will want positive ways to use it.

- Natural resources– as energy prices increase, so transport may have to decrease; there may be more environmental catastrophes and people will have to migrate; sustainability will be an increasing necessity.

Lynda then provides a series of stories about possible futures based on this analysis – the first she refers to as ‘the dark side of the future’ and it is chilling – particularly the thought of ‘fragmentation’ of our time, when because we are ‘always on’ we never relax deeply and do not engage fully with our lives. However, she then goes on to imagine how we might ‘craft’ a better future, based on reflection on these five forces.

So what can we do ?

Lynda describes three fundamental shifts in our thinking, leading to the right changes that we will have to make.

- From ‘shallow generalist’ to ‘serial master’; it will no longer be useful to know a little about everything – we will need ‘deep mastery’ and competences. We might have more than one career over a lifetime, where we ‘slide or morph’ into related areas.

- From ‘isolated competitor’ to ‘innovative connector’; building a group of people around you, based on trust, reciprocity and expertise. This will probably be mostly virtual, but we will also need a ‘regenerative community’ or real people where you can have deep relationships that sustain you.

- From ‘voracious consumer’ to ‘impassioned producer’; we cannot continue to produce and consume more and more – we will need work that is creative and meaningful and is not based solely on the money we make.

What do you think? How do you envisage your work in five, ten, fifteen years?