I'm on the road again today but actually I'm going to write about going home. When I got home last Friday, the first thing I did was to go and look at my chilli plants. After every trip this year, I go in, drop my bags and check my chillis. There's a child-like excitement at seeing things grow, magnified particularly at the moment because its something to eat - I haven't grown things to eat since I was about 10 years old.

It made me consider my attitude to other things and realised that stuff growing is actually part of my value system - I have always been keen on 'learning' but maybe I ought to broaden that word in my thinking to 'growing'. I have always loved learning, gaining new knowledge, knowing more facts. This translates into a lot of the work I do where teaching has been integral.

However as I look at how excited I have been at being able to do new things - not learning as such but definitely growing - I have realised that growth is key for me. From simple steps like being able to drum and sing at the same time now where I couldn't a year ago, to developing and using new NLP concepts in my coaching work, I get a real buzz from getting better and developing, in any direction at all.

Last week, I was working with a group of young people from Orkney and the week's highlight for me was easily the moment when one of the girls talked about how abseiling had boosted her confidence and she had learnt what she was capable of. You hear it in her louder voice and see it in the way she held her head up - like she had almost literally grown in a physical sense.

So, some questions, that actually link back to my last post:

• How have you grown and changed over the last year or have you endeavoured to stay the same?
• How happy are you with the developments you made?
• What developments do you now want to make?
• What is your next smallest step towards achieving that step?

If you want some help in defining the steps or actually taking them, to get closer to your goals and feel bttr about it then you know where to come!

Whilst Dunoon ferries have been in the news a lot recently, its not the recent decision about passenger-only services that got me thinking this week. If you want to know more about that, go to the Dunoon Observer page

Instead it was a trip on a Western Ferry yesterday that had me pondering change and how we respond to things around us.

With the strong winds this week, there was a bit of a swell running across our track and so the ferry was rolling a bit. Stood inside, I was watching the waves break away from us, heading  towards the fog-shrouded shore at Cove. After a few moments I became aware that the glass was almost against my face! Had I been overbalancing, swaying with the rhythm, entering a wave-induced trance? No, I was still standing upright in relation to the waves and the horizon. Instead, it was the boat moving under me causing the glass to move back and forth.

This then brought me back to thinking about the phrase in the title which has been quoted frequently during my NLP training course (for information on what NLP is, checkout Sugar NLP's definition here), "You can't not change". Even though I was standing still, because the environment was changing around me I was having to adapt to my immediate surroundings. I was doing it almost subconsciously as I looked at the horizon.

How often is that true of us in other places? Things change around us but we don't want to be different so we try to remain the same as we were last week or last year. The very act of sticking to the model though will require change! I was working with young people earlier in the week who experienced some challenging activities and consequently changed their view of what they were capable of. They could however have chosen to ignore the facts in front of them and held to their previous views that they couldn't do it. That would also have been a change though; deliberately reinforcing a negative view of themselves by ignoring evidence to the contrary. It sounds daft but yet many people still do it regularly.

So as you look at things altering around you, and feel some of that change inside, what do you do about it? Are you reacting really well to differences or is your subconscious doing what it thinks you need without asking you if that's what you want? What thoughts are going through your head even as you are reading these words?

Even if you don't feel the need to make big changes, people say that talking to a coach is a good way of coming to terms with the status quo. You could get in touch for an exploratory chat to see how much of a difference it will make for you.