by Jonathan-GB | Oct 8, 2015 | Uncategorized
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 | Uncategorized
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 | Uncategorized
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 | Uncategorized
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 | Uncategorized
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...
by Jonathan-GB | Jul 16, 2015 | Uncategorized
20 things we should do but still don’t! When I started this blog, this was the title, but I realised it would get too long and maybe boring! So I have changed it to become an on-going challenge instead, but of course the list of 20 still exists and can be drawn on at will! The idea is that we all have some great knowledge and skills and if asked by an eager mentee, would readily share them, but do we ourselves use them regularly? Maybe this is all about me and my world, but probably not as the Inadvertent Saboteur – Discovered by Laurence Coen is in all of us, messing good things up with unwanted interference. Such as not doing the things we know will make a huge difference, if only we did them! So here goes, here is a short list of 5 things which I know to be really helpful and make me and others more effective and efficient, just do these and forget the challenge if you like. Organise with the end in mind – when you place something down like a set of keys, your phone etc, think about where you will find them and put them there. Since you thought about the location carefully, it is very easy to recall it. The same principle works for filing on the PC, where will I find this, versus, where did the system place it (logical though it is it is not normally our logic!) Review your day – We can learn so much if we just take a few moments, in a peaceful space...
by Jonathan-GB | Jul 9, 2015 | Uncategorized
Random Acts of Kindness Some years ago I was being trained in NLP as a master as a matter of fact. One of the most powerful aspects of the training turned out to be the concept of doing random acts of kindness. In a way, it was apparently nothing to do with the training itself, as it was expected to happen between the sessions and didn’t necessarily involve the use of any NLP ‘technique’. However it taught me a great deal about the nature of being human and how I could in fact get enormous pleasure from very simple actions, which really had no cost. This in itself is a metaphor of what NLP can do and is for me – a way to make huge differences with very simple interventions; but this isn’t about that… A random act of kindness, is about noticing, noticing where we can make a difference to another human (or creature, in fact). Having noticed the need acting on their behalf, with apparently no self interest. So a couple of examples – paying a compliment, allowing someone out of a busy junction, giving up your seat. Seize the opportunity to experiment with this and in so doing notice how you feel and notice how it feels if someone returns the...
by Jonathan-GB | Jun 2, 2015 | Uncategorized
“A dammed good listening to” The alternative to a dammed good talking to, which we get all too often!! One of the key challenges anyone faces today in communication is getting listened to. Many people are just so wrapped up with their own environment, their own objectives and their own feelings that they don’t seem to have the time to listen properly. This can lead to problems in our relationships and how we achieve important things together. The key is listening and being listened to… People who feel listened to will tend to value the relationship more greatly. As customers they will be more open to our good services, as staff they will be more inclined to follow our leadership and in other relationships our personal value increases and people will tend to speak more highly of us. All good reasons for you to spend more time and effort listening. Think how you feel when someone does it for you, do you feel more worthwhile and your opinions more valid, even when they are not necessarily agreed with? Do they go up in your estimations? Do you feel more inclined to listen to what they have to say? I believe the answer is yes, and what is that worth? So are you a good listener? Many of us think listening is the other half of talking, you speak I listen, I speak you listen…but the reality may be closer to….we wait to speak, rehearse our response, mentally doodle and more often than not interrupt when we have heard enough. What can we do to improve and become the kind...
by Jonathan-GB | May 20, 2015 | Uncategorized
P = P – I A Managers Main Job Tim Gallwey, in his books The Inner Game, put forward the formula for performance as P = P – I, where P is Performance, being equal to Potential less (minus) Interference. This has inspired me for many years, as it seems so simple to tap into greater performance just by releasing our potential. However the interference is stubborn and in my opinion is both internal and external. So let’s quickly examine this idea: Internal – the inner voice of doubt, the tonality of critical adults in our childhood and in more recent times telling us – ‘you can’t do that, I bet you’ll mess up if you try, so don’t try etc’. I guess we can all fill in the gaps on this. External – the ‘reasons’ which get in our way, sometimes others who say we can’t or even systems which appear to conspire (“computer says No!” As David Walliams put it). Whichever it is, as a manager I believe it is our job to remove such obstacles from our staffs path to success. In practical terms by recognising how they might be more efficient if certain factors were altered or removed, such as Internet connection failure or stressful work patterns perhaps. Or in the case of our internal gremlins, the power of praise and recognition for targets achieved or encouragement through stretching assignments well delegated. When we focus our attention on Potential before Performance and recognise the interference at play, it may be that we all find a greater benefit than when we focus on Performance Management...
by Jonathan-GB | May 6, 2015 | Uncategorized
I have just been reading an interview between Daniel Pink and Tom Rath (see below for ref.), both are well know authors and thought leaders and it stimulated me to express a thought of my own. Tom is quoted as saying “I’m increasingly convinced that the “pursuit of happiness” is not only misguided, but potentially damaging. Most people should stop chasing their own happiness today and do something that improves the life of another human being instead”. I disagree. I have so often found that happiness is a decision we take in the moment or in my case, at the beginning of each day. Now maybe I am especially privileged and cannot comment on the misery suffered by many millions, but the simple act of deciding helps me to look out on my situation in an optimistic way, whilst realising that life doesn’t always go my way. By knowing (deciding consciously) that I am happy, it helps me stop chasing happiness and be more content with what I have already and always have had life full of potential. Having said this, I have been drawn to the practice of ‘Random Acts of Kindness’ taught to me by Ian McDermott many years ago and this falls I think into the realm of what Tom is talking about and is so beautifully illustrated in the film ‘Pay it Forward’. When I was asked by Ian, to do random acts of kindness (RAK’s) I discovered the sheer joy I could experience in making a difference to someone else, even a simple act, such as helping two lost German people on a train...
