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What I’m discussing with my clients right now

Have you ever wondered what goes on within a Coaching session?

Well, this week, I am peeling back the curtain and sharing with you the most common topics that my clients and I are currently talking about!

It’s interesting because across an array of businesses and professional situations, there is an alignment of talking topics. To be clear, I am of course not going to share any specific information about individual situations (client confidentiality is highly respected!), but rather, the common focal points and areas that we’re working on at the moment.

Many people are actually working on the same thing, but just in a different context!

And this means that there’s a good chance that you will relate to these challenges too!

So here are the consistent talking points within my coaching sessions at the moment:

Workload
Balancing large workloads and the ebb and flow of business projects is a regular topic we talk about. Some months are just flat out busy! When you’re building and growing a business, you want to create more work and inevitably the work can come all at once! These busy periods can be particularly challenging on a number of levels: staffing, impact on personal lives and health. It’s important to have a“game plan” for these busy periods! And that’s what I help my clients create and maintain.

Can you use the three D’s? Delete, delegate, delay. You need to be flexible and to do things differently for the busy period in order to manage the new workload. You may even need to take a step back and adjust your own expectations about what is realistically achievable.

Staffing & relationships
Relationships are key to any business operation, regardless of industry. Having the right staff, enough staff and managing staff is a talking point for many of my coaching sessions. We also touch on creating ways to maintain the important relationships within the business and professional networks of my clients. This can be traditional networking, informal catch-ups or reaching out to others through mutual connections or on LinkedIn. Having the right relationships working well is important.

Habits
One of my roles as a coach is to help my clients create and maintain(or break) habits. This is common to all of my coaching sessions. Whatever the business or professional situation, it usually requires growth. My clients need to change as the business grows or change in order to make the business grow! This means acquiring new habits!
As a coach I provide the support that my clients need throughout the habit acquiring process. And as it’s a bumpy ride most of the time, this is of great value. There is much information about acquiring habits in short amounts of time but little information about what is required to stay the course. It’s not about willpower! It’s about having a system and understanding that the process involves getting of track for some of the time.

Marketing
Most of the professionals and business owners I work with operate within a small to medium-size enterprise. This means that marketing is in-house. So many conversations lead to marketing and lead generation. While not everyone is enthusiastic about marketing, all clients realise the importance and inevitability of it. We often discuss implementing marketing plans and how to maintain these as part of a business system. While some clients prefer to outsource the marketing tasks, the strategy and outcomes are always designed by each client themselves for their own unique situation.

Self care and boundaries
I have kept this topic on the agenda for all of my clients, particularly after the challenges we’ve all experienced within the last year. Change and disruption has impacted business and ways of working in a big way! This has meant more stress and the changing of-or complete erasing- of boundaries. It’s important at these points of disruption to our routines that we become mindful of where our boundaries are between work and leisure, professional and personal, being busy and relaxing to restore energy. I consistently ask my clients about their workload and their self care activities. Regardless of how busy you are, you must have self care practices that you do on a regular basis. This helps to restore your energy and, most importantly, prevent burnout.

Are these topics your current challenges too?
If so, do consider registering for my FREE Coaching Introduction Session. It’s an opportunity for you to discuss your current situation & challenges and ask all your questions about Coaching.

Would love to chat with you. Register here.

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To reduce stress, increase your mind space

Stress manifests for each of us in different ways. Whether you experience stress in a very physical way in your body or more of an overall attitude slump, the cause is always your mind. 

Our thoughts create our feelings. So if we’re feeling stressed, we’re having stressful thoughts.

Or perhaps we’re just having too many thoughts in general. What do you notice about your thinking patterns when you’re stressed?

Noticing your thoughts is the first step towards creating some mind space for yourself. If you can notice or observe your thoughts, you are not your thoughts. There opens up some gap where you can be the observer and be less attached to the thoughts.

That’s why mindfulness and meditation are so helpful in reducing stress. These practices help create more of what I like to call mind space.

Today I’d like to share with you 4 different practices that can help you to create more mind space and reduce your stress. You can easily integrate all of these practices into your routine, but if you are starting out, maybe just try implementing one practice for a few weeks to start with.

  1. Download your thoughts
    Write your thoughts out. Get them out of your mind! You can do this by journaling or simply by doing what I call a thought download. You can choose a specific project/goal to write about or focus on your current situation generally. You basically write all of the thoughts you have about that situation down. All of the thoughts, without editing.  This gets rid of all the thoughts rolling around in your mind clanging like marbles and creating noise.
  2. Meditate
    You can’t overestimate the value of meditation to your short and long term mental health. I say start today if you don’t already meditate! If you’re a beginner, it might be best to start with a guided meditation and then over time progress to just focusing on your breathing and not thinking. This requires practice. The whole point is to focus your awareness in the present moment and spend less time thinking. 
  3. Use the Focus Technique
    This is a very simple but effective exercise. Again, it has similar principles to meditation. You are to focus your attention and observe without thinking or feeling. Here are the steps:
    – Select a small personal object that you like a great deal. It might be an item of jewellery, an ornament or  a favourite tool for your hobby.
    – Focus all your attention on this object as you inhale and exhale deeply for 1-2 minutes.
    – While you’re doing this exercise, try not to let other thoughts or feelings enter your mind. If they do, just return your attention to the object. Observe it closely and breathe.

4. Find your out-of-mind activity
There are many activities that help us to become more present in our bodies and/or be “in flow” when we are not thinking at all. These activities are usually a physical or creative practice eg. running, yoga, dancing, cooking. Think of an activity that you can get so wrapped up in that you are no longer thinking or taking in information. You are just in the moment and there is no mind chatter going on. When you find your activity, you simply need to do it regularly! This will help you to remain present, as well as create and maintain mind space.

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Giving up on goals

This week I’m asking you: Have you abandoned any goals or commitments in the last few months?

For most of us, the answer to this question is “yes”. It’s just after the first quarter of the year and that is around the time that the wheels can start to fall off our carefully laid plans.

In some ways this is a natural thing. For example, if you set too many goals in January that were all due for completion in the first half of the year, you’re likely giving up on a few of those by now. 

Then there are the other reasons why we’ve thrown in the towel in the 4th month of the year. This is what I want to discuss today. It’s these other reasons that contain within themselves the key to your success.

Yes, paradoxically, the reasons you give yourself for giving up, are also the doorways to your success.

Huh? How does that work?
Well, the excuses that we give for not committing, not following through, actually reveal the exact obstacle we need to overcome. Think about the most common excuses given giving up on a goal:
“I didn’t have enough time, I’m too busy”. Not enough time.
“I’m too old/young/late/early..”. The wrong time.

You would be forgiven for thinking that these excuses are about time itself. On the surface it looks that way. But what if I ask you:
Is that really true, that you have no time?
Can you be 100% certain that you have absolutely no time?
This is when the excuse starts to get a little shaky. A tiny spec of doubt starts to creep in and the absoluteness of your answer/excuse starts to waiver. 

Perfect. This is exactly where you are meant to be.

You see the excuses that we give ourselves and reasoning we use are just stories that tell ourselves. I don’t meant that your purposely lying to yourself. I mean that we all construct stories (mostly unconsciously) to make sense of the world and our experience in it. It is these stories that will ultimately confine us or set us free.

For most of us, our stories have been playing over and over in our minds for years without being questioned. Stories actually do help us manage our way in the world but they do need to be updated from time to time when they are holding us back.

If you want to change your story you can start by questioning it.
What’s my excuse or reasoning?
Why did I give up on that goal?
These are the first steps to questioning your story. These questions will reveal your story to you.

Then ask yourself: 
Can I be 100% certain that that is true?
What would happen if it was not true? What would I like to do then?

These questions create awareness of your story and give you the opportunity to decide if you want to keep your story. It will open you up to options that you otherwise thought you never had.

Remember to approach this process with genuine curiosity and less like you’re interrogating yourself or beating yourself up. There is no judgement here. It is a process that works best with curiosity to learn about yourself.

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The power of your TRUE strengths

It is only very recently that I discovered the difference between a strength and a true strength.
And…wow, how it has changed my life! 

I don’t think I’ve truly learnt any really new productivity and wellbeing hacks for years. So often it’s the same thing over and over again. Batch you tasks. Use your calendar. Eliminate distractions… heard it all before! And I’m already doing it.

So, you can imagine my excitement when I came across this one thing that I hadn’t heard of before. It was seriously a game-changer!

We’ve all been aware of utilising our strengths in our roles at work and in business. Maybe you’ve done a strengths assessment test or training. I think we can all agree that knowing our strengths is important and can be used strategically to maximise outcomes.

Well, what I’ve learnt about true strengths will take your strengths strategy to the next level!

There is a world of difference between your strengths and your true strengths. Both are things that you’re good at, or even amazing at doing. But only one of these is sustainable… can you guess which one?

Yes, your true strengths are the the skills and aptitudes that you can use over and over again and they actually GIVE you energy. So after using your strength(s) to complete a task/project you feel invigorated or energised (and NOT depleted).

So if your true strengths give you energy, the question is:
Which of the strengths that you are currently using are giving you energy?

Answer that question and you have one of the most powerful productivity & wellbeing hacks I’ve seen in many years!

When you understand what gives you energy, you know you can spend larger amounts of time with these activities. When you know what doesn’t fuel your energy (tasks you are good at and will continue to do) then you can break these tasks down into smaller pieces.And…maybe even sprinkle a little of the energy-giving tasks in-between.

You see where I’m going with this?

Knowing you true strengths is power!
Make sure you ask yourself today:
Which of the strengths that I’m are currently using are giving me energy?

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Are your work habits sustainable?

I’ve been talking a lot about burnout over the last 12 months, and with good reason.

It is in times of change and uncertainty that stress increases and insecurity can sometimes drives us to do more in an effort to adjust quickly and avoid failure.

If you also add in the changes to the way we work and subsequent blurring of work/home life boundaries, then what we have right now is a situation that is ripe for burnout.

So, I ask you: What do you know about burnout and especially burnout prevention?
Because it is preventable, regardless of the situation.

However we do need to be informed and to understand what to look for and what to do now in order to avoid ending up there.
This is important for your own wellbeing as well as that of your team or family.

I have created a FREE webinar Burnout: What you should know for yourself and your team, to help inform you about what burnout is, what causes it and how to prevent it. You can register here.

For the moment though, you can start by asking yourself:
Are your current work habits sustainable?
Answer it honestly. If they are not sustainable, then you should assess if the situation you find yourself in is temporary or not. We all have crazy days and weeks of flurried activity, but they should subside and calm down.

If you suspect that slowing down won’t happen over the next few weeks, then you need to start thinking about implementing practices that will ensure the sustainability of your health.
Ask yourself:
What boundaries do you currently have between you work and leisure time?What selfcare practices do you do regularly? (Selfcare practices restore your energy and help you rejuvenate)

The great thing about our current situation is the amount of opportunity for all of us.

As individuals we can learn to value our wellbeing as much as our work
and find strategies to prioritise both. 

I invite you to join my FREE webinar on Tuesday 23rd March at 7pm to better understand what you can do ensure that no matter what the situation this year, your work practices are sustainable.

It’s a good feeling to be confident that at the end of the year, you will have your goals achieved without sacrificing your own wellbeing.