Archive for January, 2008

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WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU LOSE CONTROL

Friday, January 18th, 2008

Like many people, I try to keep ‘me’ safe by taking control of as many of the variables in my world as possible. Recently, I have found myself in a situation where I control almost nothing! Not only that, but I know very little too. I will be travelling to strange places and working with strangers, organised and supported by more strange people. It is more than enough to trip my , flight-fight mechanism.

This is something a lot of people face every day, and we are each triggered by different things. What trips me, is a breeze to you, and vice versa. So what to do when you are ‘triggered’:-

  • The first and perhaps most important step is to recognise it. After all, you can do nothing about it whilst you re still in denial, and that is most people’s first port of call (“I’m alright… no really..”)
  • Next thing is to breathe. Sounds daft, but breathing fully and calmly changes your body chemistry that is at present awash with ‘Danger’ hormones.
  • Accept that you are triggered and don’t have access to your usual resources, so:-
    • Don’t trust yourself and your instincts as much as usual
    • Accept any help offered
    • If necessary, ask for help
    • Take the time you need, don’t be rushed
  • Stay open to these new experiences. The Universe has a great way of giving us just what we need, just when we are ready for it. More than likely, this is just what we really require to move onwards and upwards
  • Be honest with others about your feelings. Honesty is disarming, and when one of the gazelles in the herd smells danger, he becomes triggered too, and his reaction may be fight, rather than flight, and you don’t want to attract that response

I wish you luck with this, just remember, that despite all our instincts, we aren’t running this world, not even our world, and ‘The Management’ probably does know best!

“Between stimulus and response is our greatest power – the freedom to choose” Stephen Covey

 

 

Posted in Flight / Fight, Hints, Tips & Techniques, Mini-Articles, Personal Change, Values & Philosophy | No Comments »

PERFECT ADAPTATION

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

The other day one of my clients was telling me that he had just discovered that he needed hearing aids. His wife had been telling him for some time that he wasn’t hearing right but he wasn’t aware of the problem. He eventually went and got tested only to discover that his wife was right, and that he couldn’t hear a whole range of sounds. The thing was these were the sounds that tend to mark the start and finish of words, so how come he never noticed this problem?

It turns out that what he had done was learn to lip read at the same rate as he had lost his hearing. In other words he had so perfectly adapted to this change that it was totally invisible to him. It is quite amazing how cleverly we can change to avoid having to change!

He now sports 2 incredibly clever, hi-tech ear pieces that can be programmed to match exactly the frequencies he needs and also the environment he is in! We human beings are incredible in what we can do and what we can get used to. It seems, though, that most of our energy is deployed trying to keep us just where we are today, where it is safe, because it is known. History documents also sorts of terrible environments that we have learn to survive in and once we have a strategy that works we fight to stay where we are.

Take leaf out of his book, try something different and your life can change in all sorts of wonderful ways.

The miracle of friendship can be spoken without words… hearing unspoken needs, recognizing secret dreams, understanding the silent things that only true friend know.”

 

Posted in General, Personal Change | No Comments »

HOW TO SAY “NO” … without appearing negative

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

Last week, I was asked by a client who runs a service function how to say “NO”, without appearing negative, unresponsive to customer needs, or unwilling. It is a good question, and it was brought to mind by another blog I was reading yesterday (“Because you say Yes”). This is quite a common way to get ourselves into trouble. As a result of saying “Yes”, when we shouldn’t we end up:-

  • Stressed, if we didn’t have the time or proper resources
  • Stressed, if we don’t really know how to do it
  • Stressed, if we were really not willing to do this
  • Disappointing those people we ought to please if we let them down
  • Disappointing others if we are now not able to meet their needs
  • Depleted, if we have somehow worked the miracle and pleased everyone
  • Up against false expectations of what we are willing and able to do next time (we have now created a precedent)

Before saying “NO”, explore with them why they are asking for this, understand what they want to achieve. Listen to them and ask questions.

So, it is perfectly fine to say “NO”:-

  • And explain why you can’t (or don’t wish) to do this. You should explain it in language, and using criteria, that mean something to them
  • And tell what you can do
    • It maybe they are asking for something complex, when you have a simple solution
  • Not now, but tell them when you are able to do it
    • A variation on this if they are already someone you are doing work for, is to offer them a choice of which of their requests you met and let them prioritise them for you. If it is a colleague, then you can suggest going to your mutual customer / boss and letting them decide the priorities
    • You may even need to ask them to have this conversation at another time, so you can give it due consideration
  • Unless the required additional resources are provided, at which time you will say “Yes”
  • Unless the scope, timing or time frames are altered

More people will accept a well delivered “No” than we fear, and there are usually multiple ways for them to resolve their issue, so don’t lose your focus, and your control over carefully establish priorities for the sake of one little word.

“The art of leadership is saying no, not saying yes. It is very easy to say yes.” Tony Blair

Posted in Hints, Tips & Techniques | 2 Comments »

INTUITION… that still, small voice

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

I don’t know if it is a sign of the times or just a backwash from a long period of ‘Science knows all’ but it seems to me that, these days, more and more people are interested in, and prepared to take seriously, Intuition.

I was a reasonably bright little boy, very curious (still a defining feature!) but only so-so in school and like everyone, I developed a series of strategies that I used to navigate my world and keep me safe. I may not be the brightest bunny, but I always had a pretty quick, agile mind, and so it isn’t surprising that I soon learnt to use it as one of my key allies in this quest. Ask questions, gather data, deduce meaning and act – was pretty much what I did. I had a pretty average middle class upbringing within a family who ‘got on with it’. Once I left school I joined the accountancy profession in the City of London, certainly not a place to focus on much other than facts & data.

However, again, like so many of us, I had a small ‘passenger’ within me who was much more sensitive and intuitive and ‘in touch’, but as I never paid him any never-mind, I was barely aware of his existence. Then I embarked upon a journey that was to change me and my life (it built on roots I put down when I was around 11, but this a blog not an autobiography, so back to the blog!). Through it, I learnt a series of disciplines that enabled me to get much more in touch with the intuitive part of me and over the years I have come to rely on it more and more, to the extent that these days I make major decisions largely based on the ‘gut feel’ and then analyse the data.

So what is Intuition? Here is my theory: our brain is taking in information every moment, every day. Think about it: all those bits of sensory data that you are ignoring right now. Stop and listen and become aware of all the different sounds that you have been shutting out. Notice how your body is feeling; hot, cold, comfy, the sensations of your skin etc. It is literally millions of bits of data and we would be totally overwhelmed1 if we tried to handle it all, so we have developed a filter2 that shunts off all the stuff it regards as unnecessary into a data dump for background processing by the unconscious (which, if you like, is a secondary processor that never sleeps and just trawls through this data shifting for meaning and value). When it comes up with something, it attempts to pass it to the conscious mind, using, I believe, the mechanism we call Intuition.

I don’t think it is magic or comes from otherworldly places (although there is more data available to us than just what coming in through our 5 senses). The more we use it, the easier it gets. In my life, it has paid huge dividends, hooking up an amplifier to that still, small voice. I wonder what yours is telling you now, if you stop and listen?

 “The only real valuable thing is intuition.” Albert Einstein

 “Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.” Robert Graves

 

 

 

  1. In fact we can only handle about 7 pieces of information at a time (plus or minus 2)
  2. I will write more on this soon, as it is very useful to understand how it functions

Posted in Hints, Tips & Techniques, Mini-Articles, Values & Philosophy | 2 Comments »

HEARING OTHERS … rather than just listening!

Monday, January 14th, 2008

For those of you who have been following these blogs, you may recall some issues I had with my mother over Xmas [Christmas Gifts]. This has left the usual legacy of “I/ we have do something about this…” and that then circles in a decaying orbit with no one being quite sure what the best thing to do is. So this time I am clear, I am going to gently ask her to not bother with the whole gift thing, which she plainly has problems with. In this case, literally, nothing is better than something! My daughter actually felt relieved when she thought she had been missed out this year! So I am determined to stop this for once and for all. I believe in Change, so I have a built-in expectation that everyone is capable of doing it and it is the responsibility of everyone to achieve it.

Yesterday we are driving my eldest back to university and she takes it upon herself to challenge this decision. We have quite a long discussion that strays into heated at times… this is raises so many tough issues. Still she sticks to her guns, sure that she is right. I explain my position, justify my decision and tell her that I have a right to feel hurt by all this… and yet in the end, I found myself wondering if she wasn’t right.

It is a tough pill to swallow, and I find it tough to believe this is do’able but hers is the higher path. The very scale of the challenge she has thrown down to me and my siblings tells me she is right, and I can tell you I am squirming! I only became aware of the anger I felt about this when my father died a couple of years ago, and somehow it tells me that it has a right to ‘life’. She is saying that it serves no purpose and only more hurt can flow from it, I need to accept my mother’s behaviour, see her for the flawed human she is and still offer her the best of myself.

Wisdom out of the mouths and babes and sucklings eh…

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” Lewis B Smedes

Posted in Personal Change | No Comments »

THE KEYS TO PERSONAL BRANDING

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

I was working with a series of clients last week, all of whom work for the same big company, and a numer of them have issues with personal branding. This is a nice, voguish term for thinking about the impression we make on others. Reflecting on the strategies we put n place I think there are just two key secrets to doing this successfully:-

  • Communication, communication, communication: With our ‘brand’ we are trying to communicate the essence of who we are, what our values are and what we have to offer the world. One of the key things to dong this really successfully is to ensure that the messages you are seeking to ‘sell’ are true and congruent with who you are. We are all too familiar with the slimy politicians who want us to buy some image that we just know is only skin deep. There are three reasons for making it real:-
    • It takes a vast amount of energy to maintain this false façade, and we all have better things to do with our energy, and
    • We are at our most successful when we are fully aligned with our true selves, and
    • Human beings have a hard-wired bull sh1t detector! (We literally have a programme that scans for incongruities, which we are predisposed to believe no matter what words we hear. More on this another day)
  • Rapport: this is the name for what we do when we blend with those we are with. It is a legacy of evolution that, like a herd of grazing gazelles, we have sensors that scan for anything that isn’t a fellow gazelle. We can’t afford to let those lions creep up on us can we?! So we are always subliminally alert for whether people are like us (and therefore by definition ‘Safe‘) or different and ‘Dangerous‘! We do this in many, many ways
    • Do they talk like us (same language, same accent, same pace, same volume even)?
    • Do they look like us (same skin colour, same clothes, same height)?
    • Do they do what we do (odd habits or mannerisms, manners, hobbies or interests)?
    • Are they the same as us (colour, race, age, sex, background, education)?

    This is why it was always important to have gone to the ‘right’ school, college etc, because that made you ‘one of us’.

Now I am not suggesting that you can necessarily change the items in 2 above, but understanding their impact and how this mechanism works can help you to avoid situations you don’t want to get into and put people at their ease, whilst you are communication who you really are. The thing is once we feel we understand a person, they get a ‘Safe’ sticker (rather like the gazelles don’t run away from the birds that land amongst them). It is so easy to trip other people’s mechanisms and get attacked, it has certainly happened to me! Hopefully this will help you to stay safe….

“The music industry is a strange combination of having real and intangible assets: pop bands are brand names in themselves, and at a given stage in their careers their name alone can practically gaurantee hit records.” Richard Branson

Posted in Business Change, Hints, Tips & Techniques, Personal Change | No Comments »

WHAT EVERY GLOBE TROTTING BLOGGER NEEDS…

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

Change isn’t just about attitudes and philosophies, sometimes it can be helped along with the odd tool that helps us move into new behaviours, so as a real technophile, who loves the odd cool gadget, I’ll be talking about some the toys I acquire and use to help me on my way.

Having started writing a regular blog, I’m obviously spending much more of my time at de old keyboard, bashin’ away! However, it has coincided with a patch of work which needs me to do a fair bit of travelling and being loathe to weigh myself down, I leave the laptop at home whenever I can get away with it. I can’t stand the weight, and I feel responsible for it too.. .what if I lose it or drop it?! Stupid I know, but there it is. I could spend a small fortune of one of the latest micro laptops, but the one I have is great for everything but lugging around… so what should I do?

Then I came across this little baby; an Asus EEEPC701. It is a tiny laptop, the size of a hardback book, weighing less than a kilo, and here is the big thing, it is available from under £200! For those of you who remember, this is a bit like the grandchild of the old Psion. It is linux based, and has a 4gb solid state disk, has wifi & Bluetooth, even a little webcam.

Now, I have no idea how well I will cope with the non-windows environment. For almost double the price I could have got a similar sized conventional PC from Belinea (Belinea Laptop VIA C7-M ULV), but I thought that this one was worth a try.

After all, it is a radical change and it has already got a big swell of underground interest and loads of geeky support1 for nothing, if you scan the web. So my fantasy is that I’ll take this with me down to the café, and sit tapping away whilst sipping my espresso, watching the world go by. I’ll let you know how it works out, and of course if you have one already let me know how you are getting on with it.

 

  1. http://www.eeeuser.com/

The Full Spec:

Measuring just 22.5 x 16.4 x  2.15~3.5 cm and weighing a mere 920g, the ASUS Processor –

  • Intel Celeron Mobile CPU Chipset – Intel
  • Integrated Network
  • Form Factor – Notebook  
  • Memory (Maximum) – 512MB (512×1)DDR2  
  • Hard Disk – 4GB
  • Monitor – 7ins (800×480)
  • Sound Device – Integrated Intel High Definition Audio compliant audio chip  
  • Speakers – Built-in Stereo Speakers (1.5W)
  • Audio Features – SoundBlaster Pro Compatible  
  • Wireless – IEEE 802.11g
  • Modem – Intel High Definition Audio Modem Integrated  
  • Operation System – Linux
  • Camera Resolution – 0.3 Megapixels
  • Card reader – SD/MMC
  • VGA Port – 1
  • Headphone/Audio Line Out – 1 x Headphone-out jack  
  • Microphone In Port – 1  
  • RJ-45 Ports – 1 x RJ-45  
  • USB Ports – 3 x USB 2.0  
  • Software Included – Open Office 2.0 Security – BIOS Booting / HDD User Password Protection and security lock Kensington lock hole Trusted Platform Module
  • Battery – Lithium-Ion (3Cells) 2400mAH  
  • Security Locking Mechanics – Kensington Lock Slot
  • Dimensions – 22.5 x 16.4 x  2.15~3.5 cm
  • Warranty – 24 months UK warranty(6 months warranty in Battery), collect and return within UK

Posted in Gadgets & Technology | 1 Comment »

WHAT IF… it never happens?

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

The other day I was lying awake in the wee, small hours in some strange hotel bedroom, my mind drifting like a bird in a late summer sky, suddenly aware of fretting about some obscure, future ‘what if’ problem, analysing what I could / would do when I realised that:-

  • I’d probably deal with it, if and when it occurred,
  • It would probably not matter a great deal whatever the outcome

So why was I wasting my time (time that should have been spent sleeping!) worrying away at it, like a dog with a bone? I realised that it was

  • An unknown ‘danger/risk’
  • A situation in which I had little power or control

My father always used to say that worry was the ‘interest’ you paid on a problem before it was due, and I seemed to be in the grips of a loan shark!

There was not only nothing I could do, but nothing that needed to be done. This kind of thing is often at the root of so much stress, tension and ultimately illness. So what can we do about it? I think the main answer is we need to trust. Trust in the Universe to look after us, trust our own ability to deal with situations as and when they arise, trust that with an ounce of planning and wee bit of care we will avoid these pitfalls. I realise that trusting is a big ask in a world that often feels unsafe, but the alternative seems to be that we live each of our worst fears a million times before they can even occur!

Today try trusting a little more, and worrying a little less and the energy it will release will enable you to fly over these bear traps! Good luck..

Every evening I turn my worries over to God. He’s going to be up all night anyway.” Mary C Crowley

“When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened” Winston Churchill

Posted in General, Hints, Tips & Techniques | 8 Comments »

LETTING OUR LIGHTS SHINE … PART 3

Friday, January 11th, 2008

Over the last couple of days I have been reflecting on the importance of having the courage to let our / my light(s) shine out. At the same time, I have also been seeking some help in finding a good PR person to help me get some of my articles etc published. Some kind soul sent me a glowing endorsement of someone he had used and closed with the note “Good luck with your ‘quest for fame!’

This got me thinking; what if everyone started taking what I said to heart and we were all busy trying to outshine each other … what would that be like? Would we be behaving like a bunch of ego-mad thespians all trying to upstage each other in order to be the ‘star’?

The answer, of course, is “No”, pure and simple, because once we are brave enough to step out and ‘be seen for who we truly are’ then we move beyond the drives of our egos into authenticity. The sky at night is big enough for countless million stars, all twinkling away; I think that this world will allow a few more of us the space to shine too.

We are all the heirs to the twin, and conflicting, drives to ‘be seen’ and to hide our lights least we be judged wanting. So today’s challenge is not only to continue to take the risk of being the ‘real’ you / me, but at the same time to make the space for others to do the same! Encourage them to be brave, explore what they have to offer. I guarantee that they will love us for it and there is no better strategy to make friends than take a genuine interest in others.

“People love others not for who they are but for how they make them feel” Irwin Federman


 

Posted in Personal Change, Values & Philosophy | 4 Comments »

THIS LITTLE LIGHT OF MINE… Part 2

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

I was talking to my wife this morning about the stance Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has taken about chickens, and the fact that Jamie Oliver, the friendly face of Sainsbury’s, has publicly supported him against the supermarkets. These guys are two great example of shining your light and what you can achieve by doing so.

Jamie, who could so easily have been just been another Essex kitchen worker that no one had ever heard of, followed his passion and was discovered by a producer making a film about the River Cafe. He never tried to clean up his image for TV, he just was himself, followed and shared his passion, and was hugely successful as a result. Rather than just sitting back, feeling complacent and racking in the ‘dosh’, he continued to follow his heart and worked to give others the chance he felt so lucky to have recieved. He set up his Fifteen Project to give youngsters who had a tough life the chance that he had had, and then championed the health of the nation’s kids with his school dinners campaign.

So here is a young man (early 30s), who has changed his world simply by being and sharing himself and his values. So, what lessons can we learn from his story? I think it is that you can be more successful than you ever dreamed of if you don’t give into fear (of failure, of being different, of being ridiculed etc) and let your light shine*!
So often, we give up before we even start, because ‘everyone’ knows that it is bound to fail..

When we fully express our truths, when we fully show who we are and what we care about we are incredibly powerful. The Universe aligns itself with our own internal alignment and supports us; surely with all of this going for us it is worth taking a risk?

Go on… give it a go! Good Luck and let me know how it goes…

“Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.” Anais Nin

“Only as high as I reach can I grow, only as far as I seek can I go, only as deep as I look can I see, only as much as I dream can I be.” A Karen Ravn

*(For those who didn’t read it, see yesterday’s blog.)

Posted in Leadership, Personal Change, Values & Philosophy | 2 Comments »

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