When past and future collide…

Watching Morgan Tsvangarai and Robert Mugabe announcing their power-sharing government the other day, I was struck by something. There’s such a clear divide between the two men and what they each represent. Tsvangarai stood clearly for the future, movement, creation; Mugabe for the past, stasis, recrimination. Zimbabwe has to choose – unfortunately, it looks like even if an overwhelming majority of its people wants change it’ll be difficult to put it into effect.

How starkly that reflects the dilemmas we all face every day. They all could be reduced in a similar way to future-focussed creation and movement versus past-focussed stagnation. Take a look for a moment at some aspect of life. Notice how if you’re focussing on the future in that area, you can feel the pull towards it. If you’re stuck, unable to move forward, notice that you’re focussing on the past in some way. Try it for a few different things, so you get a couple of each.

Mugabe clings to the rhetoric about the colonialism of the past, which ended 28 years ago. In the areas you find yourself stagnating, try asking yourself – what rhetoric about the past am I clinging to? And what does it keep in power?

Trading struggle for celebration

Here’s a nice wee nugget of wisdom:

“The struggles of today are the celebrations of tomorrow.”

To some ears it might sound a bit “inspirational quote”-y, but there’s a lot of truth there. Struggles can take many forms – divorces, credit crunches, decorating, meeting deadlines, Christmases. The thing is that struggle feels static, endless. It traps us by making us feel there’s no other way to be. That’s the slippery slope to feeling incompetent/unfulfilled/frustrated/bored/overwhelmed etc. All the things we don’t want to be but fear we are.

What struggle makes us forget though is that things change, day to day, moment to moment. It’s like there’s a part of us that prefers struggle, and doesn’t want us to think about change. Hey, at least struggle’s familiar – and better the devil you know, right?

So how do you get to celebration?  Simple – embrace change. Don’t be afraid to look at what you’re struggling with from a different angle. Then another. Try playing with it, not problem-solving. Maybe you’ll learn something, notice something new, find a new approach that works better. Then – guess what, you’re not struggling any more.

(Tip: remember to chill some champagne in advance, so it’s ready to celebrate when you are.)

Life Clubs 16th September: “Presenting Me”

Next Tuesday the Edinburgh Life Club is back after its summer break!

We return with a Confidence workshop – “Presenting Me”.

Without necessarily realising it, we present ourselves – “sell” ourselves, you might say – to others every day. It can be very difficult to have the confidence not to undersell ourselves. Most of us are all too ready to hide our light under a bushel. This can be just as true of apparently outgoing and confident people as the more retiring.

The good news is you can take control of how you come across to others, and that’s what we’ll be exploring in this workshop. We’re not talking about acting or pretending here – if anything, it’s the reverse: getting the real you across to people.

Time: 7.30pm – 9pm
Place: Central Edinburgh – email me for details!

Life Clubs are held across the country – for more info, including the locations of other Clubs, go to the Life Clubs site.

Business Lounge, and the journey

Yesterday evening I launched Business Lounge, the new workshop and coaching program for Scotland’s one-person businesses. It really feels like a great milestone. I’ve tried out a part of it before, but this was the first one with the complete thing in place. And it was different from how I’ve envisaged it, and it was a success. Now I’m really looking forward to the next one, and I’m clear that it’ll be even bigger, better and more juicy!

When you’re working on a project, there’s always that uncertainty about how it’ll turn out in the end. Now all the preparation’s come to fruition I feel relieved and happy that people seemed to benefit from it. And yet of course, this is the beginning, not the end.

Which brings me to something I learned this week – it’s about the journey. I noticed I’ve been stressing about getting Business Lounge really perfect. Finished, flawless, unimprovable. And I also got that stressing about the result actually prevents me creating the result. Creating things is about being in the process. The BL process involves reading, writing, having ideas, conversations, stuff like that. When there’s a workshop, a group of us dip into the process and see what it can tell us. Simple as that.

I recently saw a retrospective exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’ work in New York. You could really see that journey thing at work; over the decades, each artwork represented a dip into the process at a particular time. Her job as an artist isn’t to get the individual work perfect, it’s to be in the process. That’s what gives the works somewhere to live and grow.

It’s the same with what I do. And whatever you do. Don’t worry about perfection, just be in the process, and good things will come forth!