Wise Wednesdays

A wave of creativity can bring joy but also complexity in your life. As I sat yesterday thinking about the communications around the Leaders Circle, the next Presence Power Possibility 3-month group coaching programme (which starts soon) and a full 1:1 client roster, I wondered if I'd be able to write Wise Wednesdays this week. My mind went to a future where I stopped writing Wise Wednesdays altogether which felt sad. And, then a new idea for a different format for Wise Wednesdays emerged which I'm excited about but would add more to my plate. My clients hear me say this all the time: there's no such thing as time management. It's choice management. So the real question is: what's the basis for your choices?... CIRCLES OF EMPATHY We often prioritise based on urgency rather than what's important (and non-urgent i.e. long term). But I also believe business is about relationships which require time and patience. And we intuitively know how to prioritise in relatio...

Another earthquake hit Japan this month. It’s exactly 10 years since the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded launched a Tsunami on the same area of Japan, led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster and took almost 20,000 lives, overnight. A survivor in a documentary I watched last weekend tells of how he recovered his daughter’s body, and that only his uncle’s body was missing now. If they find his then they’ll have recovered the 15 members of his family who perished. I remember visiting the East Coast of Japan after the devastating tsunami, near the city of Sendai while working on the UN Disaster Risk Reduction framework. My colleagues took photos of the ingenious anti-tsunami defences that were being built.   It felt eerie, as if the full impact of what had happened was just beyond my grasp. It wasn’t the first time I’d been exposed to tragedy through work. But a part of me decided it was best not to feel into it fully to avoid overwhelm while on a work assignment. This is t...

“How do I let go of regret?” I was asked this deep question in a coaching conversation. Transformational Coaching is about going deeper after all. It’s not therapy but it can be therapeutic. I was happy to be able to help because I’ve had many conversations with family recently around regrets and grieving due to my aunt’s unexpected passing away from Covid at Christmas. But also because grieving (in the widest sense) has been a feature of our experience over the past 12 months. The past year has given us much to adapt to. Every adaptation requiring a little grieving of things we lost from our daily lives. Whether you realise it or not, you’ve been asked to grieve a lot this past year! So give yourself a big pat on the back and a warm self-hug. If you’re experiencing persistent frustration, anger or confusion; or feel stuck in some way, it’s possible that there’s something you haven’t quite faced or that your grieving is incomplete.   In many cultures, grieving is much more visible ...

A  couple of years ago, I sat procrastinating over my book. I grabbed a cup of tea and gazed out the window at the flitting birds. Then the idea came: why don’t you get a publisher?   “Whaaat? How would I do that?” Then another idea came to contact someone I’d met recently. One thing leading to another I ended up submitting my first ever book proposal and the rest is history. This year, I found out the book had been nominated and has made it to the finals of the Business Book Awards 2021. You can see some of the fascinating titles here . https://www.businessbookawards.co.uk/shortlist2021/ I’m grateful to my clients who allowed me to learn with them and include their journeys in the book, those who supported the process (including Wise Wednesday readers!) and my publisher Kogan Page. I’m also grateful to “procrastination” and what it taught me in that moment. Without it, I may still be pushing myself to write the book alone. You see, procrastination isn’t a time management prob...

I feel confused!’, the good doctor said at the start of the coaching conversation. ‘Is that a problem? Or just an observation?’, I replied. Or as Tony Robbins puts it: ‘You’re confused? Congratulations!’ We live in a culture that values expertise – a knowledge economy. You’re valued because you have the answers, immediately. But that’s not how life works.   THE SPACE BETWEEN STORIES We used to have rituals to honour periods of ‘confusion’ when we might move from one social role to another. Native American people still practise them like Hanbleceya (which you may know as ‘vision quest’). Young adults would go out in to the wild to work out their stuff and come back with an idea of what they wanted to do in life. They would be guided by elders in the process and only return after communicating with spirit animals and facing all manner of discomfort to connect with a special idea of some kind that would then be interpreted.   In fact the proper translation of Hanbleceya is ‘cryin...