My latest newsletter was about dealing with people you find hard, because you don't like or respect them. (If you haven't subscribed yet then click here to read it). One of the things I talked about was not bitching about them behind their back. Today, amidst all the talk of giving up things for Lent to make yourself a better person, I suddenly thought, "why don't we ever use this time for personal development, for changing our attitudes for the better". We only tend to talk about fasting and missing out food like chocolate but increasingly people are looking at a broader understanding of giving up things. Granted, the idea of giving something up is as a sacrifice, to prepare us for Easter and to mirror Jesus fasting in the desert so maybe developing ourselves by giving something up might not fit for some of you.
If you have no other plans for Lent though, consider sacrificing one of the habits that you are least proud of. Maybe it will be something related to how you deal with your colleagues and co-workers. What could you do differently that will make you easier to work with? How could you stop being annopying in return, to the person who constantly winds you up? What poor reactions do you want to stamp out when someone frustrates you at work?
Whilst this might be harder than giving up chocolate and may not have such a visible effect, it could be the start of new ways of behaving that ultimately make you a more attractive person to deal with. If you need help working out how to manage the change or make it stick then get in touch for a free chat
"If you're scared you can't be helped. You're finished" At least, thats what Christine Ohuruogu, the reigning 400m Olympic champion, said about athletes in a Times article recently. So she doesn't do fear on the track - she is scared of other things.
Her statement did make me think about whether it is also true for us non-athletes too? I can certainly think of a couple of instances coming down a mountain bike track and realising that there is a drop in front of me that's bigger than I'm comfortable with and slamming on the brakes. As soon as I hesitate, I'm lost. Sometimes its possible to go around the drop and avoid it altogether. On other occasions, you can walk down the track, examine the drop from different angles, choose a line to steer, rationally gauge the real size of the issue and consequently get your head around it. Once I see the size of the problem, I start to feel better and after that I can tackle it again. If I were to remain in my fear though, and do nothing, I could never make a second attempt. So for me, I would alter Ohuruogu's bald statement to say, "If you stay scared, you're finished!"
Does it also apply to normal daily life? Yes, I would say it's as true of confronting a difficult person or making your first speech or whatever - if we do nothing about it and stay scared, we're finished. If we never replace those feelings of fear we will always perform the same way (since behaviour is driven by feelings) and get the same (poor) results.
Maybe that's okay for you but I know for me I want to work on my fears to improve my performances and get more out of life. Sometimes its just a case of 'manning up' and getting on with it. At other times, a rational look at the issue makes it seem smaller and easier. Often though it will come down to managing and controlling our feelings. One of my friends said yesterday that she performed well in an exam recently because she didn't care about the result so much which made her relax - bingo! The state we are in can have a huge adverse effect on our achievements. Conversely, if we sort out our feelings, we can suddenly excel. Even deep phobias can be worked on and eliminated. You can allow yourself to feel better - or not; the choice is yours.
And Christine Ohuruogu's fears? They are all about the legacy of the Olympics. As a Stratford local, she wants to see all the potential for long-term good brought to fruition, so that people are not only inspired but have real chances to develop and improve.
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!
Even if you don't follow football, you may have come across the news about Andy Gray and Richard Keys making (wrongly) critical and sexist comments about the female assistant referee, Sian Massey (left), during the Wolves vs Liverpool match at the weekend.
Sky Sports was not impressed with their employees and you can almost hear the MD, Barney Francis telling them to stop doing it, because it is "entirely inconsistent with our ethos" blah blah.
I suspect (although I may be wrong) that Sky are more upset about the effect on their viewers than they are by the nature of the comments and want the pair to stop behaving in that way. However when you listen to Alyson Rudd and Karen Brady who have both commented on it, they have a diferent take on it - that people should stop thinking in that way and therein lies a difference.
I have talked often this month about stopping doing things that are unhelpful for whatever reason, and that seems to have resonated with a number of you. We know it to be a useful practise even though it can be hard. How much harder though is it to stop thinking in a particular way?
If you were to examine your attitudes and ways of thinking, would you find thoughts that need to be altered, assumptions that need to be challenged, beliefs that need to change? Are you willing to even look, knowing how painful the results of that examination might be?
It takes boldness to challenge ourselves and maybe we need to empower a close advisor to do it for us. Only then can we look at altering our mindset and changing what we think.
How much more powerful is it however to change our thinking? Rather than merely treating the symptoms we are going to the root cause of a malaise. If we just behave in a different way, that is inherently contrary to our thoughts, we will develop internal stresses for ourselves and naturally revert back to something in line with our thinking.
To see ourselves as others see us is no longer enough. We want to be able to look inside ourselves and read our thoughts and be willing to change them if necessary. Its a big task but with a big effect.
"Education is nothing but a diminishing lie" Lindsay and I were chatting to a friend recently and the subject of education came up for discussion. In the last few weeks this has been a recurring topic, particularly the idea of teachers contradicting themselves as you go further through the system. They used to introduce a concept in the early years using such a simplified model that in later years they had to admit that they lied to you to help you understand; "Welcome to the new model" (but is that accurate either?)
That then made me think about becoming more self-aware. Is that also a diminishing lie? I think there are many people in this world who want to be something or someone that they are not. "But we can all pretend, can't we?". Pretending is not the end of the world so long as we are completely aware that it is a little piece of fantasy that we have introduced for a short space of time. In a healthy sense we can call it imagination and we encourage it in children and people in creative jobs - although its surely a good thing in anyone, but that's a story for another post.
However if we continually live in the fantasy world it becomes unhealthy and we call it delusion. This is one of the reasons it is so important to become more aware of who we really are and lessen the lies that we tell ourselves. Sometimes that will hurt - we don't want to hear the bad news. Or alternatively, we know inside what the issue is and how to rectify it and that is the bit that will be hard work. So we lie to ourselves to avoid dealing with the issue. But until we deal with it, like any conflict scenario, it will always be with us blocking our path.
But...there are some people whom we would generally describe as bashful who never really recognise the talents that they have. I watched some of Masterchef professional last night - down to the final three, making desserts for the famous pastry chef, Pierre Hermé. Afterwards, he commented to one finalist that her offering was so good he could have sold it in his own establishment. Her reaction to that, she said, was to gain confidence in her own abilities. To which I thought, if she is in the Masterchef Professional final she must have a wee bit of cookery talent. Presumably she knows it deep down otherwise she wouldn't have entered the competition, but I know of lots of other people who are completely blind to their skills. It frustrates me sometimes to see them willfully ignoring the potential that they have but are not using.
Self awareness is not just about seeing how we match up alongside the competition - that can make us proud or despondent. Instead it is about ignoring the lies and objectively looking at what our weaknesses and strengths are, working on the first but revelling in the other. Let's continue to 'diminish the lie'.
One of my friends was recently involved in an incident out on the Clyde, resulting in him being air-lifted to hospital on his birthday. He made the front page of the local paper and has caused a bit of a stir for a small town.
Apparently (though I must confess I haven't read it yet) a letter has been written to the editor this week castigating my friend for taking risks. This makes my blood boil - cue angry response letter to the Ed.
Why does it upset me so; because I have seen so many cottonwool-encased children turning into risk-averse adults, sheltering behind the latest health and safety legislation becoming decreasingly capable of making decisions for themselves. Rumour has it that there has even been talk in parliament of advising people to change their bed-sheets every week - what kind of a society do we now inhabit?
Where are the chances for children to experiment and practice, failing often, getting hurt sometimes, but growing and gaining experience. What has happened to the idea of people developing themselves by trying new things? How small are our comfort zones becoming?
How long before people take no risks, with the consequence of more injuries because they can no longer accurately judge how hazardous things are? “To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk pain. To try is to risk failure, but risk must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.”
This anonymous quote is one of my favourites and I refer to it often. We need risk because without it we stagnate, we stop growing and developing, and life becomes dull. Surely this is the greatest hazard in life - that by our own hand we make our own lives less worth living.
I applaud my friend for making the most of a gorgeous day to go paddling on a flat-calm sea in the warming winter sun. I hope he continues to do it, because he has no doubt learned lessons which would otherwise be wasted.
So, is this the greatest hazard in life - what are your thoughts? Click on Comments above to add your response.
Working with clients this week who were doing some introductory climbing and abseiling, I was struck by how willing they were for me to exhort them to greater efforts, to put them in scary situations and to actively push them, although rarely physically, to bigger and better achievements.
This then made me wonder, how willing are people to be pushed? Do we normally want to be challenged - if we thought about it most of us would say 'of course'. Without some form of challenge or excitement, life can become dull and boring - we thrive on a little bit of stress. Baz Luhrman suggested that we should do one thing every day that scares us but we can easily ignore the advice and lapse into cosy routines that bob along from one day to the next.
So who do we empower to push us beyond our comfort zone? If you look round at your circle of friends and regular acquaintances, how many of them have your permission to say hard things to you, to be critical or to set you targets that will be hard to reach? What gives them that right? Have you explicitly asked them to, or is it simply a feature of a long term, trusting relationship - you know that they have your future best interests at heart so you wilingly forgive them for trying to make your life a little harder in the hear and now?
If you can think of no-one who goads you and motivates you to go that little bit further then stop now and make a plan to find someone to assist you because however much you think you can push yourself, there will always be times when someone else will do it better. When you simply want to relax into a rut of easyness, even if just for a short time, who can you find who will challenge that mindset? Maybe its time to look for a life coach who will hold you accountable, who will challenge your procrastination and 'I'll do it next week' mentality, thereby helping you to reach your goals now, instead of 'sometime in the future'.
Maybe though, you read the title and thought it spoke of someone else forcing you to go where you don't want to, making you work harder than you want, not a friend but a foe. Are you struggling to meet the demands placed on you? If so, its maybe time to look for a way out, a change that takes you away from the pusher, however you choose to make that happen. Again maybe life coaching can be an answer, but there are other options. Simply gaining some more assertiveness might make a difference but so would punching his lights out. Please note I only recommend one of these options, although there are numerous more that could be pursued.
Ultimately though, the question comes down to 'how far do I want to go?' or maybe rephrased as 'how much do I want to achieve?' which needs to be answered before you think about people helping to push you there.
I was working with a group of young people at an outdoor centre this weekend and the word that we kept coming back to over and over was 'improvement'. Many of them had been at the same centre for a similar course the previous year and had already tackled a number of the challenges I was due to set them. However, they had either not completed them previously or had done so hesitantly or without style. This weekend they were quite fired up and ready to go, and were willing to push themselves really hard to reach new heights of achievement. Consequently they did. And when each challenge was completed, they were incredibly proud of themselves, because as they looked back to last year they could see the difference. How often do you look back at your progress with satisfaction? Or do you look at the goals you haven't completed yet. Or the things you still haven't managed, despite having tried often. Maybe its a half full/half empty scenario. Which are you? They say that if you aim for the stars you might only get to the moon, but even the moon is a good achievement and could be the stepping stone to something greater still, but we need to recognise we've got that far already. Take a moment today to look back at how far you have actually come and use it as motivator to push on further.
Newsletter
If you like this, sign up here for the monthly newsletter as well
Author
Nick has been writing for mass consumption ever since he was sending newsletters home from the Philippines 20+ years ago. He has carried on putting finger to keyboard, branching out into magazines, manuals and recently submitting lots of words for books. He has always aimed to be entertaining but at the same time challenging. If you like something, feel free to pass it on to someone else, but if you are challenged by it then even better - write a comment, start a debate, add to the fun.
RSS Feed