Wise Wednesdays

“F-E-A-R has two meanings: ‘Forget Everything And Run’ or ‘Face Everything And Rise.’ The choice is yours.” Zig Ziglar FEAR IS A SIGNAL Have you ever become very upset at work or in a relationship only to realise you blew things out of proportion and were wrong? Our reactions are usually out of proportion to the stimulus as shown by emotional intelligence research (see Dan Goleman). The implication is that any fear you experience is likely to be based on a distorted understanding of the situation causing you and others unnecessary suffering. In fact, you’re more likely to be afraid of some imagined negative feeling in the future than you are to be responding to what’s actually going on in your life right now. What’s worse is that you can get used to living this way. The anxiety becomes a familiar emotional home and you start believing that if you weren’t anxious and stressed something would go wrong, you would drop the ball or nothing would get done…A deadly p...

It’s Soulful Sundays! Replacing this week's Wise Wednesdays which was delayed as I had to focus on the launch of the Royal Society of Art's Coach-Link - a project to promote coaching for social impact by offering pro bono coaching. Dilemma thinking… You know the type: “If I do this, then I get that but I don’t get the other thing; and if I do that, then I get this but I don’t get that other thing”… And on you go around and around to the edge of frustration and back. This can be a career decision, life decision or which pair of shoes/car to buy. Dilemmas can be addictive, by the way, (see video). One of my five 2017 goals was to take part in a sports competition (fencing). The opportunity came up and I was encouraged to take part. It was the logical thing to do. But I wasn’t convinced and brain fog set in… It took me back to my career wranglings when I really wanted to do international public health but the logical thing to do was NHS/community public health; mainly becaus...

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”…   Right?   Not quite. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of making a brilliant plan, only to find it didn’t work. In South Sudan, a water and sanitation NGO invested heavily into building toilets in a village to reduce infectious disease outbreaks and did so very efficiently, only to find noone would use them because they were facing East which was the direction of prayer. In 2010, I started my PhD funded by the Wellcome Trust to research obesity in Egypt. The plan was to visit the Upper Nile region and collect crucial data using a unique study. But the Arab Spring erupted and the study was halted…Oops. Ironically, this painful experience has been a great life and leadership lesson.   YOUR PLAN IS NO MORE THAN A HYPOTHESIS Of course, you should have some sort of plan. If you’re on this list, you’ll have had experience of project management of some kind and been on a career track for a while. But, ...