Archive for the ‘Belief’ Category

Start the year as you mean to go on. I would ask of you to commit yourself to this one thing this year: more time out just for YOU.

The daily grind of emails, meetings, deadlines and finance can unquestionably drain your creativity.

One of the brilliant things about the brain – and there are so many brilliant and undiscovered things about the brain – is that your subconscious works for you, looking for the answers to your questions, problems and issues, while you are in a relaxed state. The subconscious does all the cleaning up and problem-solves those things the conscious mind cannot.

If you don’t allow that time, then frustration sets in and creativity is stifled.

Create a relaxed state by doing what you love –whether it be writing, walking, reading or some other exercise – or spending time in a favourite place or with loved ones. This will help your mind come up with those ideas and solutions. It is at those times – when you are doing an activity that’s so easy that you forget what you’re doing – that you allow your mind to run free. You may already know how you do this or it may take you a few different activities before you find what works best for you.

Commit to YOURSELF and build TIME OUT activities into your day, week, month and year. Take that time out for your brain to live, soar, imagine and create – and ultimately live a happier life!

At this time of year, we are all looking at how we can better our lives. For many, the biggest commitment we start with is the New Year’s resolution.

Have you noticed that sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t? Why is that?

Sometimes they don’t work because we didn’t really want to put the effort into the goal in the first place, or because something we consider much more important or enjoyable got in the way. However, it’s not always as easy as that.

The biggest reason why we don’t accomplish the goals we set out at the beginning of a year is because they are not aligned with our values, purpose or vision. This may sound like gobbledygook, but just think about your own values for a moment. Even if you have never done a values exercise, there are certain values that you believe and hold. When you set out to achieve something, you unconsciously match it up with your values. When the goal is incongruent with the values then you are already in a battle, that to be honest, you just don’t need.

On most occasions when I explore my own lack of achievement regarding my goals or when I’m in discussion with others about their lack of achievement, it always comes down to not being linked to values.

You see, we need to be motivated by the goals we set and if they do not fit with our values, how can we possibly be motivated?

Take some time to make sure that you align your New Year’s resolutions with your values, purpose and vision for the future because if you don’t, then you will not achieve what you set out to do! Plan how you will achieve these goals. Then commit to reviewing and celebrating your milestone achievements along the way.

Happy Resolution and goal setting!

Now here’s the biggie… honesty, what do you believe it to be for you?

Maybe when we first think of the word honesty, we think of staying true, not telling lies, integrity or maybe you have your own take on honesty.  You see that is part of the problem… we all have our own interpretations of honesty.

Yeah, sure we all understand right and wrong and we all understand honesty and lying on a very simple level.  On the purest and simplest level, honesty is not lying, cheating or stealing!

The question is do we really do our best to live up to the simplicity of honesty?

However let’s look at a specific scenario that complicates the simplistic view of honesty:

You are talking to a work colleague and the conversation gets round to one of the other people you work with and how they haven’t been pulling their weight in the work stakes over the past few weeks.  Just at that moment the other person walks in and says “are you two talking about me?”

What do you do?

Be truthful and say yes, or lie and make up something on the spot?

In this scenario it’s not that simple because we have others peoples’ feelings and emotions to deal with.  This is where the simple word honesty, becomes complex. Whatever you answered will be based on your past experiences of honesty.

An important aspect about honesty is where is it coming from?  Because being honest is a moral dilemma, start with the other person in mind. Make them the centre of your decision making process, not you!

Think about the consequences of your honesty

…on others and only then the consequences on you.  Normally the consequences on others are greater.

When we are honest with ourselves over the real reasons for our actions and behaviours, then we can be completely satisfied that we have made the best decisions for everyone concerned.

One of the easiest ways of working out what works best for you is to just stop and think, see or feel, the times that we judge what we deem dishonesty and check that we know all the facts and understand all points of view, checking in on where our own feelings are coming from.

At this point we can truly and honestly have our own thoughts and opinions on the situations or behaviours, however others may agree with us or disagree; that will all depend on their own life experiences!

I’m sharing another personal moment with you in this second article.

Every so often I share an email update with friends and family on how our lives are progressing on our new adopted country.

In my latest update – which was a long one as I was covering two months that included the festive season – I talked about events in my usual fun, matter-of-fact style. I had not thought about how I was writing the words or how it would be interpreted as these were people who knew me. It was just what had been happening, that’s was all.

A friend replied to me, sharing a fantastic positive experience that she instigated for her company. As a training manager, it had an amazing impact that affected every person involved, and this had been fed back to her by all.

She then pointed out something that I had not given a though to in my email. Let me share this with you.

“One of our keynote speakers was a psychologist who presented in a very humorous way the hard facts (actual research papers) relating to happiness and positivity. The magic ratio appears to be 5:1. Truly happy people have a ratio of 5 positive thoughts, feelings and stimulus to one negative. Surround yourself with positive like-minded people and bingo it’s contagious.

So what’s the point to this experience sharing of mine? In your newsletter you have proved the theory right. So much could have been gloom – cancelled flight, cloudy Christmas, 12-hour drive, no coal to first foot, the list goes on … but each of these you have turned into a positive and got the ratio about right. It’s not so much that bad things don’t happen to you but more the fact that you deal with them in a positive way.”

I’m not sharing this to show you how great I am as many people live in the same way I do; just to share that it is the attitude and belief systems that you choose that determine how you shape, enjoy and live your life.

Live the best life you can!

I’d like to share an experience I had recently as an example of what we deal with many, many times in our lives – dilemmas that we create in our own heads through self-talk.

Get the self-talk right and it’s bliss; get it wrong and it can be miserable and even lead to divisions.

As I mentioned my mum arrived to stay with us for a couple of months. At the same time, as I have just moved to a new country I was trying to get my business up and running here in Oz.

I was being invited to meetings and networking gatherings, and various opportunities were presenting themselves to me. At the same time Mum would only be here for a couple of months.

Do I spend time with Mum or do I attend networking meetings and get out there meeting people and promoting my business?

So therein lies the dilemma!

However, it wasn’t as straightforward as that. When faced with difficult situations, just to complicate matters, we then need to deal with the self-talk, which at times creates untruths.

The judgmental self was telling me that Mum would be expecting me to spend time with her – she can’t drive, so needed me to take her everywhere and had come all this way not just to sit in a house all the time.

Then there was the “I need to get the business up and running as quickly as possible”; my plan was to start promoting the business as soon as I came back from the Sydney ECI Coaching Conference at the end of November.

Not only was the judgmental self ruling those thoughts, it also started to build up feelings of resentment, guilt (and I don’t even do guilt), annoyance and frustration.

So I sat myself down to look at the facts of the situation.

Of course, there were no facts regarding the thought process concerning my mum, as this was all in my head and nothing had been checked with her.

And yes, I had made plans and set goals regarding my business but they are never set in stone and all I needed to do was defer them.

After looking at the true situation, I focused on what my real needs and wants were: what was important to me and what would make me and others around me happy?

I realised that if I still lived in Scotland, I would never have spent this much time in my mum’s company.  Also, I had no idea when an opportunity like this would come my way to find out more about Mum’s life, passions or best memories – all the things we very rarely talk about. Here was a chance to make some fabulous memories of our own and here I was wallowing in self-talk about something I can easily delay for just a couple of months, which is nothing in the bigger scheme of things.

My decision was made

– enjoy my couple of months with my mum and really start pushing the business in February.

Since I made that decision, work has come my way without me doing anything, and Mum and I have made so many great memories that will be treasured for a lifetime.

Just remember

– check that your self-talk is built on facts and make sure the decisions you make are for the right reasons and will make you happy!

I was out having a meal the other night with a group of people that I had just met.  To begin with there were five of us in the Turkish restaurant waiting for one more to turn up.  We were all chatting, laughing and asking each other questions to find out more information: our likes and dislikes. The other person was running late so we ordered for all of us.

We were all eating the wonderful Turkish starters when the person arrived.  She was completely full on, accusing people of arranging to meet at the hotel.  When it all came to light it turned out that she had been having major problems with her mobile phone and only received the message that had been left for her when she sat down at the table.

The whole event reminded me of times when I have rushed in accusing someone of something that they are either not responsible for or, as in this case, turned out to be a misunderstanding.

Our own insecurities show up dreadfully in these situations, due to our head imagining so many different reasons for the problems or issues we think we have.  In the majority of cases it is a simple misunderstanding.

When we do come in with all guns blazing, we usually end up with egg on our face: feeling embarrassed, stupid, silly, flustered, self-conscious and many other feelings too.

How can we avoid these embarrassing mistakes?

• Firstly, stop allowing our imaginations to run riot
• Don’t allow anger, fear or paranoia to build until we have the facts
• Find out the real situation from the other person’s point of view before blabbing out our own opinions
• Discuss it in a calm and non-judgemental fashion
• And don’t forget to laugh about it!

It is just not worth the grief we cause ourselves and it is all our own doing!

In this part we will concentrate on the mistakes made by some service providers (SP) with the customer’s point of view in mind.  Whether we are selling a product or service we all have internal and external customers and need to serve them well if we want return business and referrals.

However we are all human and mistakes are part of our make-up, although they also presents an opportunity not just to learn, but also to turn an unsatisfied customer into a valued loyal one.  I’m sure there have been times when you have had what you perceived to be a disaster on your hands, and then you apologised and put everything right with knobs on.  At this point you then find out you have not just kept this customer but they have remained with you over the years and recommended you to others.  Well…that’s how it should be.

Treat mistakes and disasters as opportunities to excel at customer service and you will not just survive, you will flourish.

It is important to know what not to do as well as what you must do. So here are two lists checkers:

Do Not

• Build unattainable customer expectation
• Ignore customer communication
• Lie
• Hide from your customer
• Put off dealing with the situation for any length of time
• Use/make excuses – customers don’t care
• Blame others – this is your problem not someone else’s
• Forget or decide not to apologise
• Treat your customer as a burden
• Fuel the fire by invoicing for cock-ups

Do

• Deal with the customer’s expectation right up front
• Communicate well, returning calls as soon as you can
• Listen to your customer’s complaints – find out the problem from the customer’s point of view
• Apologise if you have made any mistakes
• Find out what would make the customer happy again and then do something more to exceed their expectations
• Make your customer feel they are the most important customer to you – think what you would need if you were in the customer’s shoes
• Deliver everything you promised and more – on time and in full

Customers are vital to any business/service, and if we don’t handle them in the best way possible they can inflict major damage.  If on the other hand, we look after our customers even at the time of problems then we don’t just retain them, we gain others.

Remember the old adage – people will tell 3 others of the great service they have had, but inform 10 people of bad service provided.

So it is worthwhile investing the time and energy!

This article and the next are borne out of both my own mistake and the mistakes made by a service company.

Let’s deal with my own mistake first

As we (Paul and I) were in a stressful and frustrating situation, with our lives on hold and only waiting for one thing to happen before we could completely move forward again, desperation set in after 13 weeks. We had to make a decision on picking up a new service provider (SP). We had already met, and were happy to work with, one SP1. Then we looked at another service provider, SP2. I had asked a question regarding belief systems, a subject which is very important to me. When I asked them both the question, SP1 was slightly unsure and SP2 was very sure when they answered. So we chose to work with SP2.

At this point I usually check out any Red Flags* and my instinctive gut feel. From the beginning of our working relationship, SP2 was flying a number of Red Flags and they appeared more and more as the weeks rolled on. Some of the Red Flags were; SP2 turned up 3 hours late for an appointment and I had to phone to find out where they were, one and half hours into this 3 hour period; SP2 also never returned calls from either Paul or I. We always had to phone.

However on this occasion as desperation set in, I totally ignored my very good instinctive intuition. In business, I would not expect any of my customers to go through what we were being put through. Neither would I ever accept it from a SP in my business life, so why was I allowing this to happen in my personal life?

This was to be a very big and expensive lesson for us to learn from. It was brought home to me that, in business, I had learned to be less emotional and to listen to my gut feel, focusing on facts when making big decisions. Also using fairness, looking for any incongruence and using my intuition has led me to make very good business decisions. In this situation in my personal life, however, I was still using total emotion to drive my decisions and was ignoring Red Flags, intuition and expectations.

Paul is usually also a good source of practicality and objectivity; however the emotional roller coaster we had been on over the last few months had taken its toll on him too.

It is good to reflect and know that by using some simple but effective techniques you make better decisions. I held my hands up to our new SP1 and admitted that I had made a big mistake by not going with them in the first place and would they work for us. They agreed and we feel very happy and in perfectly capable hands. The communication and teamwork we now have has brightened our moods no end. We’re back on top and feeling very positive again because we have learned from a very difficult situation and then put it right.

*Red Flags – just in case you have not come across this phrase before – are things that are incongruent with the situations, events or what is being said. They usually make you feel uneasy or unsure. Things just don’t seem to add up.

I’m sure you have heard this phrase many times.  It is very true!

Each time we take on something new to us, there are many others who have already been through the experience and who we can learn from.  People we know, others who have written about the area, experts in the field, mentors etc.

We can either take a long-time view (which costs us in many different ways) re-inventing the wheel and trying to do it ourselves.  Or we find out how we can take a short cut to gaining that information and knowledge quicker.  This enables us to put the knowledge into action rapidly, saving us time, money, and pain.

So the next time you take on a new project, try to break into a new market or take on a new role, make sure you choose the easiest, most painless path, to knowledge and ultimately the power to use that knowledge in the best way possible.

A Quick Mention On Positive Belief

As Bruce Lipton talks about in his book, The Biology of Belief, the conscious and subconscious are interdependent, the conscious mind is creative and able to summon up positive thought, whereas the subconscious is strictly habitual and works through our instinct and life learning experiences.

What most people don’t know is that the subconscious mind is millions of times more powerful than the conscious mind (we are talking about neurological processing here).

Just Think Back To When You Were Talking About New Year Resolutions.

In the majority of cases the subconscious has already won – those old habits are back. We are very good at self-sabotage.

But We Can Overcome The Worst Habits And Experiences.

And the conscious mind can win through. You only need to think of the mother whose hands lifted the one-ton car off her child to release them from danger. She needed to totally override those subconscious thoughts that tell her she is ‘too weak’, ‘too small’, ‘just a woman’, ‘doesn’t have the strength’. To overcome all her previous behavioural thinking and feelings and focus on the life of her child, her thoughts control her body by producing the adrenaline needed to create the strength to lift such a weight.

So no one could ever convince me that our beliefs don’t have a massive impact on our lives.

How Healthy Are Your Beliefs At The Moment?

A good friend of mine introduced me to this book and I’m so grateful. Thanks B!

Your belief become your thoughts
Your thoughts become your words
Your words become your actions
Your actions become your habits
Your habit becomes your values
Your values become your destiny.
- Mahatma Gandhi