Part of the family

Our relationship with the past is a powerful thing. An important aspect of coaching is stopping the past dictating your future, and creating the one you actually want instead. In this week’s Edinburgh Life Club we’re doing an exercise which sheds some interesting light on this area. We’ll be zooming out and taking a big overview of our pasts – over several generations of our families.

I’m really looking forward to this. I’ve recently become very interested in my great-grandfather, Billy Gaunt. He  was a great entrepreneur, a wool baron in the 1920s. There are many wonderful stories, and I find him very inspiring. I wish I’d met him.

So it’ll be very interesting to consider what we might have in common. And perhaps, what I wish I didn’t have in common with him. Or, indeed, with some other part of my family tree.

The thing about getting a big perspective like this is you can see things in the round and take charge. Be a general, not a corporal. Then it becomes easier to actually do something about those family traits you’re not so proud of!

Grabbing the bull by the horns…

We certainly live in interesting times. As stock markets and banks lurch from crash to crash, pundits alternate between blaming banks, politicians, regulators, City traders and anyone else whose scalp is conveniently poking above the parapet. What’s clear is that under the rosy surface of apparently stable growth, problems have been lurking. It’s in the way of these things that they don’t get seen most of the time; but when they do, all hell breaks loose. That’s when we do crisis management.

So it is with all of us, managing our own lives. Most of the time things are fine. It’s only now and then that we experience difficulty with confidence, relationships, decisions or whatever it might be. So it can be easy to think of them as something that’s not generally relevant or important.

But they’re there alright, waiting for things to come to a head. They’re always there, probably having much more of an impact behind the scenes than you realise, but they’re elusive. And that’s how those “crisis points” can be a real opportunity. When you’re confronted by these things is when they’re most accessible. So that’s the time to take a hold and make the change you want.

Just like the markets need to do right now. Now’s the time to see what’s not working for them and correct it, while it’s all out there to see.

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!

Being Your Own Best Friend

It’s funny what shows up in the things we say. How often do you hear yourself say “I’m my own worst enemy”? What about “I need more self-discipline,” or “I’m no good at motivating myself”? We say things like this when we’re stuck – when there’s something we’d like to change or achieve, but it’s just not happening.

What’s good about these remarks is they show you know you can do it, and you know the only thing stopping you is some internal obstacle. “I know I could do it, if only I were more organised.” It’s not something external you’ve no influence over. In other words, it’s within your power to overcome it. And on some level, you know that.

So how come trying harder and harder doesn’t work? Because you’re pushing against yourself – trying to boss or bully yourself. The part of you that isn’t the boss or the bully just feels pushed around and small.

So try something different. What would a really good friend be like when you’re struggling with something? Well, they wouldn’t make you feel guilty and inadequate about being stuck. They wouldn’t be in a hurry to discipline you or motivate you, to dangle carrots or brandish sticks. They’d understand your frustration, not condemn it.

Your friend, being on your side, might well ask what YOU need. A break? Some fresh air? Some help or advice? Maybe they’d recommend you set aside the time you need, or the space to look at things more objectively. Perhaps they’d suggest you put your mind at rest about something that’s distracting or disturbing you. You know better than anyone else what that friend would say.

So look out for when you’re beating yourself up, and when you notice it, start being a good friend to yourself instead. It’ll take a little practice, but here’s a hint – your friend would say that’s OK too. You’ll get there.

NEW!!

Following my history geek instincts the other day I was watching a program about Anglo-Saxon England. It was a non-literate culture – and then came writing (along with Christianity, but that’s another story). It was revolutionary – you could now have written laws to refer to; written title deeds completely changed how ideas of property and ownership worked.

And you could write down ideas, compile knowledge in books and spread it around. Naturally the name of the Venerable Bede came up – he wrote hundreds of books, on history, science, theology and more. But he wasn’t the only one – it was a time of frenetic activity in writing, the like of which hasn’t been seen since. Imagine – it’s a completely new thing, nobody’s done writing before, then suddenly the technology’s there. There aren’t any rules – what do you do? You make it up. There was an amazing outpouring of creative energy, and a whole new dimension of our culture was born.

I love that freshness, that blank-canvasness. It’s one of the reasons I love 60s TV. It was the same deal then – nobody really knew how to do it, because no-one had done it before – so people made it up. It was vibrant, exciting, a place where the unexpected could happen.

This is what is called in Zen Buddhism “beginner’s mind” – coming to everything with the view-point that this is something new, a totally fresh experience.

Here’s a challenge: every day, treat something in your life as a totally new thing, a blank canvas. Find its freshness, make a new set of rules or a new approach to this new thing. See what you discover, and have fun!

Man Bags: the truth will out

I’ve been receiving some great contributions to my man-bag contents researches – my grateful thanks go to everyone for their input. Notebooks are common; one chap carries three. Wow. In contrast, Filofaxes appear to be rare, and generally little used. Food and unposted letters seem especially popular amongst the regulars on the Scottish Business Forums site, leading Photographer Brian Mcintosh to utter the immortal fauxtation

“No Man Bag is complete without a buttered scone.”

Which has triggered a discussion as to what’s inside everyone’s scone, of course.

What’s in your man-bag?

I love my man bag – a very tasty Katherine Emtage number in Harris tweed like this:

and I’m writing an article about what guys carry in their bags for Bite magazine. I thought it’d be interesting, given the mystique we chaps traditionally cling to surrounding the contents of women’s bags.

So if you’re male and use a bag – courier bags, DJ record bags, lap-top bags, and even briefcases count – what’s in yours?

The contents of mine, by the way, include a Swiss Army knife, folding picnic cutlery (very handy at baked potato shops that give you those terrible flimsy “sporks”), Molskine notebook, pencil case with pens blotting paper and pencil, laptop… Oh, and several scrunched up receipts and a rather old Breakaway bikkie.