See you at the coffee machine

How Heavy is stress?

2010-01-21T12:21:00.000Z

Have you ever considered how heavy stress is or how it works?

Lets say that your burden is small, as light as a feather, it's not the weight that's important it's how long you try to hang on to it.
Hold a feather at arms lenght for a minute, no problem!

After an hour your arm may start to ache, a day and you could be in serious pain any longer and someone might have to call you an ambulance.
Same weight but over time the burden justs gets greater and greater.
It's the same with stress, if we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later,
they become so heavy we simply can't carry on.

As with the feather, if you put it down for a while the next time you pick it up if feels that mich ligher and easier to carry. The same is true with stress, you have to put it down for a while and rest before you pick it up again.
Before you go home tonight, put the burden of work down. Don't carry it home. You can pick it up tomorrow.
Whatever burdens you're carrying now, let them down for a moment if you can.drop them off at the gym, remove them with your work clothes or finds somthing to do that means you have to put then down for a while!

Sometimes life is too serious to be taken seriously accept that some days you're the pigeon, and some days you're the statue.

The wonder of Wellies

2009-03-11T10:07:00.002Z

Will Wellworths be the new Microsoft or Virgin? For those of you that haven't read the story , an innovative and adventorous ex Woolworths store manager has raised enough money through consortium funding to reopen the Woolies store in Dorset as Wellworths. This is a great story, Claire Robertson (remember that name as she could soon be mentioned in the same breath as Gates and Branson) worked her way up from Saturday girl to store manager and is now employing 22 former employees in the new venture.

I bet when Woolworths were considering their future and wasting a fortune on expensive turnaround consultants they didn't give Claire a 2nd, 3rd or even a milliointh thought! What a shame, I would have put money on her having anwers for many of the chains problems.

The real shame is that thousands of businesses are in the same boat, the financial crisis is hurting their business and the traditional response is to reduce cost and get rid of people. When it comes to removing people from a business there is no real logic to it. Managers, apparently, make their decisions based on "legitimate" business criteria? The reality is far from the truth the decision is most likely made on salary, service function etc, the really scary factor and the one no one will admit is that many decisions are made on feeling! Like it or not these decisions are made by people not machines and peoples decision making process will be influenced by feeling.

The danger of the traditional approach to downsizing is that is takes no account of either the value of each individual in terms of their human capital value (how much they have cost to develop and how much they contribute) or their "real" and often unseen influence in the organisation or how innovative they are. There are some fantastic tools out there that can do all three. The real tragedy is that if these tools were used for performance improvement as opposed to survival there would be no need to down size in the first place.

Who do THEY think you are?

2009-03-06T10:18:00.003Z

I had an interesting chat with my Mother in law this week. A good friend of hers has a son who is very senior in a major UK company. As he would be a great be a great contact for my Leadership coaching and Innovation development business I asked for an introduction. After a bit of an awkward silence she said that she was not comfortable as she didn't know what I did? I was amazed, I assumed that after 16 years she would have some idea (beyond plumber, shelf fixer upper, taxi driver and son in law).

I guess the key point is you are whatever people think you are not what you believe you are.

This is really important in all aspects of our lives non more so than our professional lives in the current climate.

Your boss is going to make decisions about your furure based on what S/HE thinks of you!
Your current clients will only offer you new business if THEY think you can do it.
Your network will only recommend you to others if THEY know what you are.

I have experienced that sense of frustration when clients have told me how hard it was to find a leadership consultant, exec coach, innovation consultant etc. for a major project!

OK deep breath, calm "Why didn't you ask me"-- Embarassed silence "Oh, I didn't think of you! I thought you just did training!"

The reality is that only you can manage what others think of you. If it is important to you personally or professionally YOU have to take responsibilty for what others think of you.

This often involves a raised awareness of how dress, what you say, how you say it and how you behave. There are dozens of ways to manage these things, far too many to go into in a blog, but perhaps the simplest place to start is to ask questions (the right ones of course).

Who have you put into a box that might be too small for them?

Alcohol should we regulate or educate?

2009-03-05T10:44:00.004Z

I took part in a discussion this morning in BBC radio Berkshire about the problem (percieved or real) of teenage alcohol abuse. It has always been there, I have memories of beer binges, fags and strong mints in our den. This soon gave way to house parties and party sevens (that will age me no doubt).

This weekend friends held a teenage disco for their 14 year old daughter. Out of nearly 60 teenagers one managed to sneak a bottle of vodka in and got slightly over refreshed and one other was acting drunk but was clearly acting for the sake of cool (or should that be Kewl?).
Two from 60 would not appear to be a problem (both boys), or am I deluding myself because it was a nice middle class party?

I do consider myself blessed that both my teenage girls have have healthy views on smoking and drinking despite my less than exemplary role modelling. Thank god they could never have known me as a teen!

There is an argument that the availability and cost of alcohol is a critical factor in teenage alcohol abuse and that increasing cost and decreasing availabilty is the answer. I am not sure, prohibition in the States did little more than drive alcohol underground, fuel gandland profit and power and take tax out of the ecomomy.

Surely education is the key. If the majority of society clearly understand the risks and make sensible choices then there isn't a significant problem. Of course there will always be those that make the choice to abuse or develop problems, but if they are an educated minority the cost will be much lower (financialy and socially) than trying to regulate our way out of a problem.

So should we educate or legislate?

As a coach I have to come down on the side of education and personal responsibilty. People make the best choices they can given there knowledge, understanding and circumstance. The choices some people make may seem bizarre, criminal or insane to the the rest of us, but then we might have a very different set of criteria to make our choices from!

The importance of the right pitch. Less is more

2009-03-04T09:21:00.006Z

I had a great day on Monday with a group of people who have come together to pool their expertise to inspire teams to ever greater performance.
http://www.winningteams.co.uk/index.html

I am a great reflector, and what struck me was that we all had so much to say about what we do that we lost the message in the words!

We are overloaded with information, blogs, newletters, twitter, social networking sites, email et-al.
Whether you are selling yourself at a job interview, a product or your own company you have such a small window of opportunity before your audience switches off.
How many are still with me? Not as many as started because I have not promised anything so have broken the rules already!
If you do need to grab attention read on because I am going to show you in less than a minute how to make your point within a minute.

It only takes 6 elements, so if you keep each to less than 10 seconds you've said everything you have to in less than a minute.

1. Who your are.
2. Who your message is for. (target audience)
3. What they /want/need/fear.(statement of compelling reason to buy)
4. What you are talking about. (product name category or label)
5. How it helps.(statement of key benefits)
6. Your differentiator. (primary competitive alternative)

There is obviouly far more to conveying a compelling message than words alone, some would say that words account for only 7% of the message that you convey. That being the case then you should choose your words carefully and adapt them to suit the listener!

Smoking , is it the greatest con of all time

2007-06-14T09:02:00.000Z

I have just been invited to appear on BBC local radio again.. I don't know why I get so exited as I have done it many times before, I guess I secretly hanker after a career as a presenter. I have loved and listened to radio all my life. I was a member of the generation that listened to radio Caroline under the bed sheets, I can even remember the unique smell that came from the circuitry of my red leatherette radio as it warmed up.
The reason I was invited is that I have, I think, a unique view of the smoking habit.
Basically it is easy to quit but everyone out there who claims it is hard either has a vested interest in maintaining the myth, are ignorant of the facts or have been seduced by the prevailing belief system.
As a professional coach and trainer of NLP the way people construct their beliefs (or have them constructed) facinates me. Beliefs drive everything we do (or don't do) they can support us or restrict us we even have beliefs about beliefs.
Beliefs can be learned and confirmed through life experience, culturally ingrained, things like religion, accepted as truth based on trust or rejected as false based on mistrust. Wars are fought and lives are taken based on them.

What does all of this have to do with smoking?
Consider this. How do you really know that smoking is so hard to give up?Any one who has tried and failed were already handicapped by the belief that it would be too hard, failure simply confirms the "truth".
Anyone who has given up is unlikey to admit that it was easy as they might be written of as mad or arrogant (as an ex smoker I have been accused of both).
So who is perpetuating the myth and why?

Tobacco companies? Obvious, they want to keep you hooked.
Nicotine replacement manufacturers. Who would buy their, very expensive, cigarette alternative if people believed quitting was easy. It wouldn't suprise me if the tobacco industry owned the nicotene replacement industry. After all its not (alledgedly) the nicotine that's addicitive its the habit!
Think about anyone that promotes smoking as tough to quit, then question either their motivation for perpetuating the myth or their qualification to have a view and you might surprise yourself.
If we woke up to a world where everyone believed that smoking was a doddle to give up who would the winners and loser be?
Why not challenge me. Let me know who you think is telling the truth about smoking (being hard to quit) and I will offer a reason or motivation for their thinking.

The voices in my head are out to get me!

2007-04-11T12:34:00.000Z

Or at least wreck may golf score.
Our Easter weekend was spent with the family in Herefordshire, what a fantastic weekend for weather. The added bonus was that we never got caught up in any of the usual traffic snarls ups synonymous with bank holiday weekends.
My brother in law further added to his DIY skill by constructing a wooden Summer structure on the site of the old green house (wrecked by winter gales, another victim of global warming). It acquired the title of "Nigel’s incredible erection". You can't begin to imagine the sorts of suggestion as to what he could do with an erection of this magnitude, actually you probably can.
I had a couple of rounds of golf over the weekend. My expectation is never great as I only play a few times a year. It never ceases to amaze me how your mind can so totally dictate your performance in the real world. I deal with the inner voice or self talk as both a trainer and a coach as it is exceptionally powerful both in success and failure. Learning to recognise and master inner talk or self talk can be key to mastering personal performance in all aspects of our lives. For most of us we take it for granted, or don't even notice it as it is so familiar, such a natural part of us.
So there I was on the first tee, I have read the "inner game of golf" by Tim Gallwey so know the importance of mastering the self talk game, I put my first ball straight into the driving range. No great disappointment, teed up and put the second exactly where I put the first. My inner chat suggested I "don't do that again" so I dutifully followed the command "do that again" (the brain cannot process a negative command). One nil to the voice in my head.
The same happened on the second, two nil to the inner voice". On the ninth I put my first ball out of bounds. Despite the lost balls I still put together an enjoyable round.
The following day things had improved until I put my first ball on the ninth out of bounds (3 nil to the inner voice).
What this did was remind me that mastering any skill takes practice. While I had dutifully grooved my swing, practiced my putting and chipped to every corner of my garden I had failed to practice the inner game. Like any muscle maintaining control over what and how you are thinking requires discipline and practise if you want to perform well in any aspect of your personal and profession life.
Cast you mind back to the last time you excelled in anything, you can bet your inner coach was at its best! Shame you can't do that all the time isn't it?

Happy as a pig in ...it

2007-04-03T10:44:00.000Z

Old adages fascinate me. An old family friend had a comprehensive library of old wives tales that he was happy to trot out at the most appropriate time year in year out. You could set your watch, and calendar, by his cheery announcement of "never leave off a clout til may is out". If he were alive today he would repeating it in all sincerity followed by a huge I told you so. Yesterday was glorious so I left off a "clout", I tried to do the same today and am sitting here freezing!
I have always dismissed this "wisdom" as uncorroborated wives tails, today at my peril.
I could also be equally misguided about "being happy as a pig in shit"! Scientists at Bristol University have found a link between a friendly bacteria found in soil and increased levels of Serotonin. A lack of serotonin can be the cause of depression, there could also be a link between mood and the immune system. I guess it could account in part for why me and my cohorts laugh uncontrollably when one of us falls of our bike into (what we hope is) mud on our regular jaunts across the Berkshire/Oxfordshire countryside.
As a coach I am acutely aware of the mind body link in that what you think or feel has a direct relationship to how you behave and that a change in behaviour effects how you think and feel. I have learnt to calibrate minor changes in behaviour, physiology and language to help me get behind what could be blocking clients, it now appears that it might be worth developing a scanner for both friendly and unfriendly bacteria that could be having an influence on the success of my coaching sessions?

Email friend or foe

2007-03-30T13:22:00.000Z

A recent client of mine has returned to the workplace after years running her own business. I called her at the end of her first day, she was both excited and optimistic. Her new colleagues were welcoming and she was looking forward to a long and enjoyable relationship with her new career.
I called her at the end of her first week and found her completely overwhelmed with the amount of mail she gets on a daily basis. From the moment her name hit the corporate address book she was bombarded with more than 70 mails per day. The problem was so bad that she is was considering resignation. We are now working with her to develop strategies to manage mail and stay productive.
Her situation may not be unique, a significant number of our clients state email as a significant issue. Seventy mails a day to some might seem like a luxury to others it's overwhelming. What do think about email? Is there such thing as email addiction? What is enough/too much? How do you stay on top of your mail?

Is the criminal activity of the banks employees as bad that of the Banks?

2007-03-23T11:04:00.000Z

I got round to watching the whistleblower programme on banks last night (aren't PVR hard drive recorders fantastic, I can now have a huge archive of programmes I never get to watch without having to fill the shelves full of unlabelled video tapes and DVD's)
The thing that struck me wasn't the content of the programme. It came as no surprise whatsoever that the organisation employed a minority of individuals that broke the rules or took part in criminal activity or bent the rules for personal gain. It didn't even surprise me that the perpetrators were so willing to talk, to an almost complete stranger, about what they do. Values and beliefs are a weird and wonderful thing. These people intrinsically know they were breaking the rules, yet still felt ok to both do it and talk about it. Why is that? Essentially it comes down to their own value set and what they believe is right wrong good bad or just down right criminal. My good friend and mentor Dr. Wyatt Woodsmall says "from whatever value system you live from, all other systems seem at best dull and boring, at worst, criminal and insane". The investigative reporter didn't even need to agree with her victims to get them to open up. Their value system was so strong that not disagreeing or judging their activity was enough for them to assume the reporter shared their value system! Why wouldn't they? After all there's nothing wrong with a bit of innocent corruption, is there?
As a regular "morality panelist" on BBC local radio it always makes me chuckle when the same person who thinks it's fair game to accidently get away with not paying for a DVD player from Tesco's would condemn "real criminals" to 20 years of hard labour.
What did surprise me, a little, is that the senior exec, when interviewed could not believe that there were people in her org that were clearly not living the values of the Bank.
It should come as no surprise really beliefs and values are capable of blinkering all but the most aware. There are few companies that do little more than pay lip service to owning and staying accountable for their culture, possibly because they don't know how!
Come up with a nice set of values that your customer's want to hear, plaster the words all over your marketing collateral and expect the rest of the company to toe the company line. That should do the trick, shouldn't it?

Why the coffee machine

2007-03-20T13:28:00.000Z

Having dived off the corporate merry go round in 2004 to to swell the ranks of the self employed one of the things I do miss is the coffee machine. Not the coffee, (the withdrawal symptoms left years ago and thankfully my tastebuds have made a full recovery) but the culture and the environment. The coffee machine is a great place to catch up on gossip, network, take a break and even find yourself coaching or being coached. I never gave the coffee machine a second thought when I handed in my final corporate membership pass and never in my wildest imagination would I have thought I would have dedicated a blog to it. I still take coffee breaks when working from home and I still sample the various flavours (Yuk!) of coffee from the machines of my corporate clients but it's not the same. The relationship with the coffee machine, and the people that use it, builds over time, casual visitors are always welcomed at a superfical level but it takes time to gain full membership to the inner sanctum!
I have even dedicated the title of a book to it "The Coffee Machine Coach"! It may be some time before I get it into publication. The intent is to collect my experience in coaching into a useful manual for both professional and amateur coaches. The inspiration for the book and my new career came from an old colleague called Jeff Hambidge who took the trouble to thank me (at the coffee machine) for helping him make a career decision through a quick chat at the coffee machine.
Sadly Jeff died a few years ago so I won't get the chance to let him know that his coffee machine words were also to have a profound effect on my career direction. Trading the safety and comfort of a senior management role and all the corporate trimmings for the relative insecurity of a career in coaching training and writing, thanks Jeff.
It may never replace the real thing but you never know who you might meet at the virtual coffee machine?
Steve.