by Jonathan-GB | Oct 8, 2015
A recent CIPD survey found stress to be the leading cause of long-term absence in non-manual workers. 28.2 million is the number of days lost due to ill health in this country in 2013/14 and work- related stress accounts for over a third of all new incidents of ill health. Each case of stress, anxiety or depression leads to an average of 23 working days lost and about one in six people say they find their work either very or extremely stressful. No wonder this is such an important area of concern. My own experience teaches me that we all have coping mechanisms and yet we can also ignore the signs and symptoms until it may be too late. Some years ago I was developing a short questionnaire, based upon others research, that had 30 points of stress, i.e. if you were high scoring you were very stressed…low scoring quite unstressed, well I scored 19/30! However I justified this as being the nature of my exciting job, up in front of audiences, trying to convince them to adopt new ideas and behaviour (so always seeking new ways to put my message across) and travelling a lot! But I was definitely on the high side and did find ways to slow down and continue to have enormous amounts of fun, because if you know me, you know I love my job!! But many people, particularly those in business drive themselves very hard and don’t know how to cope with the adverse reactions of long term stress. In fact in many businesses it is seen or thought of as weak to...
by Jonathan-GB | Aug 31, 2015
Our story begins in a western suburb of London, it is a weekend and there is a public event about to take place. People have paid to attend and listen and learn from a well known expert in the field of human behaviour and they are all excited to be here. Well all except the lady sitting across from me at the coffee table. (Let’s call her Peggy) Peggy is terrified. ‘I know I really want to go in and hear him, and it’s cost me lots of money, but how do I go into a room full of so many people, how do I talk to them and get to know them? I wish I could just sneak in and sit quietly at the back’. The course will involve us getting into smaller groups and working together as well a listening to the speaker. We will be expected to network and meet others, for our professional development as we continue to attend this programme, so to be brutal – you just have to get on with it. I wanted to help Peggy, as I had gone through this feeling myself and found networking difficult to start with. So I talked to her, in a random act of kindness, kind of a way, and shared with her a few ideas; ideas that transformed her approach, to the extent that two weeks later she came and found me to say what a difference my ideas had made. Here’s what I said: JGB -“What do you believe as you enter the room?” Peggy – “That no one will want to talk...
by Jonathan-GB | Aug 21, 2015
Anxiety! What kind of anxiety? I have never met anyone who didn’t suffer from anxiety at some stage in their life, or who couldn’t relate to the concept from recent experience. It is a human condition and often quite a debilitating one, where the sufferer can only seem to focus on the worse case scenario to the point of paralysis to act upon it. When they are in this state of mind they are hard to help. Often others will try to persuade them that the worst won’t happen or be as bad as they imagine. This is an act of kindness, but seldom releases their state; they bounce back into it as they flex their imagination to the justification for the anxiety. And yet the state is quite temporary, it automatically ends once the event has happened. Susan Jeffers book – Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, is all about this and as Brian Tracey stated…”do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain”. Here are the ways which I have found of genuinely getting someone beyond anxiety and into action, to reduce the worst case scenario which might inevitably be the outcome of being fixated on failure, in fact, focusing on what they DON’T want! Reframe it – most would come to agree, that we have conscious mind – its function is to process the meaning of things and to figure out what we will do in response to situations – a useful mind we can’t function without. But we also have an unconscious or sub- conscious mind which runs most other things...
by Jonathan-GB | Aug 13, 2015
Many years ago I was listening to a Canadian speaker- the writer of Eat That Frog, Brian Tracey and he was talking about a delegate on his course who used an affirmation each day. It was strange to hear and yet it has stayed with me for all these years, as a way of starting each day and more especially when I think I will have a difficult or challenging day ahead. It always enables me to start or continue in an optimistic frame of mind and very often I believe, leads me to have a much better day, if only in quite small ways. The affirmation – I guess you are wondering what it is by now. Well it is this; ‘I believe something wonderful is going to happen to me today’. I often have to say it 2 or 3 times before I really get it and believe it, but I have come to trust it to change my day every time. How do I know this? Because each evening, if not before I recount my day and remember the wonderful things that have happened. Sometimes huge things, like winning a client or a piece of work, sometimes my children call to they have passed an exam or got a job. Yet sometimes it is the fact that I stopped to notice a flower in a hedgerow, the sound of a bird in my garden, or the view from the motorway as I travel to work. By setting my sights on something wonderful each day, my life is full of wonder and each day feels exciting as...
by Jonathan-GB | Jul 30, 2015
This is an expression I have come across a lot and I am pausing for thought and sharing some stories and ideas which I hope may amuse, cause pause and even inspire. What do you stand for? I regularly ask this of groups of young leaders; they are soon to be called managers and will need to lead by demonstrating their vision of the team or department and by showing how they are worthy of that team, in their style and servitude (I am a great believer in servant leadership – see Robert Dilts for more). As a leader, what do you stand for and do others see this and agree? What do you stand for? We humans will fight wars over our beliefs and become outraged when our values are dismissed by others. Yet sometimes I find I don’t know what I think until I hear myself saying it with passion, we don’t truly know unless and until we are tested. One simple question we can ask is: What is important to you…about: life, work, family, friends, teamwork or even our reading and watching habits. Asking this question to ourselves or of others will usually get a list of ‘criteria’, words or sentences and if you then test each against each other (you choose only one each time), we can get a clear hierarchy, which can be very valuable in building and maintaining relationships. What do you stand for? Do we stand up for ourselves? I was privileged to come across a most marvellous demonstration of assertiveness, from a young woman and a very senior older and much...
