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How to learn from lockdown

Have you spread you wings and ventured outside a little further recently? If so, I hope it has been enjoyable. I have been out and about, slowly bringing back some of my favourites activities after this last lifting of COVID rules.

I have to confess that I am enjoying it very much! I now know just how important some things really are… like seeing friends in-person. A luxury once taken for granted.

 I have learnt a lot about what is important to me in lockdown, have you?

Whether you loved it (introverts and home bodies) or hated it (extroverts and social people), it created a moment in time, like one giant pause on life.

Sure, lots fell into that gap…new hobbies, cooking complex dishes, Netflix…But there was a lot of opportunity for us all to ask ourselves some quality questions, along the lines of…does <insert thing> really matter?

Perspective, that’s what a pandemic can give us.

And while we’re still emerging from the cocoon, now’s the optimal time to write a few things down!

Yes, I know you have learnt a lot.
I know you know yourself better.


But what exactly have you learnt?
Can you articulate it?
Can you record it, so you can reference it later?


Today I share with you the best questions to ask yourself in order to maximise your learning from lockdown. 
Think about it, this may be the only time in your lifetime that you ever are forced to stop and reflect. Let’s harness that wisdom now, before we’re off again and too busy to think about it!

Start here:
What did I really miss the most in lockdown? How can I create more of this in my life moving forward?
What did I stop doing in lockdown? Do I want to pick it up again or not?
What did I start doing in lockdown? Do I want to continue with it?
Who was my“soft place to fall”(supporter) for the duration of the lockdown? How will I thank them?


More, for those of you who are keen…
What did I learn about myself that surprised me?
How did I manage my mental health in lockdown? What practices will I continue with into the future?
What did I struggle with the most in lockdown?
What will I never do again after lockdown?
How did my habits change in lockdown? What do I think about this?
How did my values become more clear or change during lockdown?
How would I like to move forward, using this time as a pivot point in my life?

As a Certified Coach it is my role to ask quality questions that create awareness and possibility. And there is no better time than after a big challenge like lockdown, to ask yourself some of these powerful questions (and write your answers down).

I hope you find these questions helpful in harnessing some of the learning you’ve experienced over the last while.

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3 sure signs that your work doesn’t match your values

What is your experience of your work?

Whether you have your own business or are an employee, this is an important question. We all have difficult days (sometimes weeks), but overall would you rate your working life as a positive and fulfilling experience? Or, are you holding on by the skin of your teeth, doing it for the money or convenience?

When your work feels stressful or difficult for a lot of the time, this can be an indication that you are working in a role or environment that is out of alignment with your personal values.

Our personal values are an intrinsic foundation to our experience of wellbeing and fulfillment. If you ignore these values, or are just unclear about them, then you can find yourself in situations that are ultimately unhealthy for you.

Here are 3 signs that your work may not be in alignment with your personal values:
1. You feel like you’re walking on eggshells
Are you feeling hyper vigilant? Are you on high alert to avoid making any mistakes or causing any problems? This is you walking on eggshells. This is not sustainable over the long term and creates a built-in systemic anxiety around your work. You can’t really relax into focused work. As you can imagine, this depletes your energy and enjoyment of your work.

2. Work drains your lifeforce
Are your activities outside of work changing or becoming less frequent? When your work is in conflict with your personal values, it takes a lot out of you physically and mentally. It will reduce your capacity to give in other areas of your life. You may do less outside of work or find you need more downtime and can’t handle certain activities or socialising. This is a sure sign that you are over-taxed in your work.

3. You aren’t being your true self at work
Most work environments require us to be a little bit more formal than what we’d be socially, but if you find that you need to repress other aspects of your personality at work, this could be a values clash. Do you disagree with the way certain things are done within the organisation? Do you disagree with the priorities?

If what is important to you needs to be completely set aside when you go to work, this is real values clash. 
It means that in order to function and be successful at work, you will need to ignore what is important to you. This is perhaps the situation that is most challenging and draining. If you find yourself in this situation, you must consider changing the situation either from within the organisation or leaving it altogether.

So, could you relate to one of the three situations? At some point in our careers and lives, we’ve all likely experienced one of these scenarios. It is actually an important part of the journey we are on. Learning to recognise when these situations are present will help you to better understand what is and isn’t working for you and to then use that information to guide you in an alternative direction that will ultimately be better for you.

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How to do 2021 differently

How to do 2021 differently

Change begets change.

2020 thrust upon us change in almost all areas of our lives and routines. Much of the change was unwelcome. But the curious thing about change is the way that it makes us re-evaluate what is important to us and what we really want.

Many people were doing this last year. I know I was. And the resulting outcome is that many of us are wanting to do 2021 differently. We want to drop some things and we want more of other things.

The change that was so de-stabilising last year has jolted us into initiating our own changes for this year.

If you have also felt the pull towards a change but are not sue where to begin, then you’re in the right place! Here’s how to begin:

Get specific about the change you want by first defining WHERE you want changes to happen. Decide which life domain your proposed changes will be in 2021. Is it just your work habits you’d like to change or are you thinking of your health and wellbeing? Make sure you understand the WHERE of your changes.

Next you need to define WHAT specific changes you want to make. It’s easy to become clear about this by answering a few powerful questions.
Thinking of the life domain that you have selected above, answer the following:
What do I want more of in this life domain in 2021?
What do I want less of in this life domain in 2021?
Is there anything I want to completely stop in this life domain in 2021?

It’s important to have a time-frame in mind such as WHEN you want to start the changes. Is January the right time to make changes in your family domain or will it work better in February when the kids go back to school? Or when you are fully back into work mode?

Consider if you have the resources to take up the new changes now.  If you are dropping some things, consider whether you need to wrap a few things up first before letting go of them.
For example you may decide to delegate things and you may need to do a handover or training. This will help you define your “when”.

HOW will you make the changes? It’s important to have a plan in mind that establishes how you will start and manage these important changes. I recommend that your approach be slow, small steps at first. You can always move forward quickly once you’ve established the initial changes. What is required in order for you to make these changes? What steps do you need to take?

You should assess the impact of your changes on your schedule as well as others. Anticipate push-back from others if your change effects them, as it will take some adjustment for both you and them to get used to this new way of doing things.

The second part of the HOW is to create a system to maintain the changes you want to make. Do you have a friend or colleague who is also making changes? Perhaps you can agree to check-in with each other every week to see if you’re maintaining the changes. You might also consider an accountability partner or working with a coach. The key is to stablish a system that works for you to keep you on-track.

This WHERE, WHAT, WHEN, and HOW approach is an excellent foundation for the changes that you envision ahead for you in 2021.

If you need any help, reach out for a FREE 1 hour Coaching Introduction session to get you on track for your best year yet!

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Now’s your chance to pivot

How have you been managing?
I promise that I have been thinking of you all even though I haven’t been writing. There’s been lots to process for all of us and of course we each do that in our own way. Enduring a number of significant changes in a short space of time can really take it out of you, right?

Change is tiring.

I decided to take a number of things off my to-do list for a while in order to manage my own health. I hope you are doing the same. This is not a race. Over the next few months as restrictions ease, we will be given opportunities to do more. Initially – I imagine- everyone will jump at the chance. But before you jump back into doing what you used to do, take a moment to reflect.

Ask yourself: How do I really want to live my life?
Because now is the best time to pivot, to turn a corner, to make those changes you really wanted to make.

Why? Because your“normal” has been disrupted and you have slowed down.

This is the perfect opportunity to reassess (if you haven’t already been mulling this over during lockdown) your priorities, essentially your values.

You don’t have to resume your old habits and ways of living.
You don’t have to go back to your“normal” if you don’t want to.

Think instead about creating a new “normal”. What do you want the new normal for you to look like? How do you want to spend your time?

Have you enjoyed not having to race around over the last few weeks? Have you enjoyed more nights in than out? What silver linings did you find amid the lockdown? Perhaps you got more creative in the kitchen, enjoyed the quiet of the streets, not having to commute. What did you miss? For me, friends and family, date nights outside of the house 🙂 and just sitting in a cafe. Simple things I once took for granted.

While the exact landscape ahead is not exactly clear for us, the one thing we can become very clear about is what we want to create for ourselves and our families moving forward. What does that look like for your lifestyle, your business, your job? Now’s the time to become clear and begin a new path of your own creation that truly aligns with your values.

What will your “new normal” be?

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Forget pro’s and con’s, create your own decision system!

How do you make the important decisions in your life and your business? 

If you don’t have a specific way of weighing up options, I suggest you consider developing a personal decision system. I’m talking about the bigger decisions here, the decisions that we know will change the trajectory of our life quite significantly. Much time and energy can be spent weighing up options, or procrastinating making a significant decision. This is because we don’t have a specific process to help us to make a big decision.

Traditional approaches to making important decisions have often involved weighing up options by sorting the pro’s and con’s of each option. I’m not a fan of this. It makes it more confusing and assumes equal weight for each pro and con, and frankly, that is rarely the case. Some things are more important than others. This is the fundamental base of our values system. Some options will actually make us more fulfilled(as they align with our values) and as such should not weighed as an equal to other options. 

Let’s look at an example: If we are weighing up whether to take on a new work role that will mean less time with our partner or family. If we use the pro’s and con’s method, in the pro’s column we would have things like:
More income
Excellent learning opportunities

In the con’s we might have:
Less time with partner/family
Longer commute

We are treating all of the pro’s and con’s as being equal. You may be able to come up with many pro’s and con’s, but the reality is that not all of them are equally important to you. If one of your core values is love/connection, then treating the“less time with partner/family” as an equal factor to all the others is not accurate. 

What aligns with your values will always weigh more, will always be more important to you. 

So, how do we weigh decisions without talking pro’s and con’s?

I suggest you develop your own decision making system.

It’s a system that you design and use for all of the bigger decisions you need make. Having a system will not only make the process more efficient and less arduous, but it will help you assess the outcomes based on your own unique priorities and values. A personal decision system makes sense, as only you truly understand what you are willing to tolerate and ultimately what will be fulfilling in the longer term for you.

To get you started on creating your own decision system, try one or incorporate a few of the following approaches:

Use a series of questions
You can run decisions through a series of unique questions to help you weigh up options. These should be unique to you, so take some time to reflect on what you really need to assess with decisions. Questions can help you understand the impact of the decision in the short and long term. Some examples of questions you could include:
How will this option affect my life in the next 6 months/5 years?
Who will be impacted by this option?
What will change in my daily schedule?
Would I need to drop something to take this on?

Check it against your values
As I mentioned before, some things are more important to us than others. Everyone has their own unique value system. It’s important to understand your own. Knowing your core values means that you can hold your options up to the values and see if they align. If financial stability is a value of yours, then your decisions can be assessed on whether they impact your financial stability. It does not matter how many benefits an option has, if it will be detrimental to your financial stability, it’s probably not good for you. (Discover your values by reading my blog here.)

Seek professional advice
There are some decisions that do warrant a professional opinion. Some financial and business decisions will benefit from having input from a professional in their field. You still need to understand your own priorities, but it’s wise to incorporate a professional opinion, particularly in regards to areas where you do not have specialised knowledge. eg. getting your accountants advice for a business financial decision.


Visualise the best outcome for each option
If you’re deciding between a few options, it can be useful to imagine what each optimal outcome would be. You can do this by taking each option and imagining the best possible outcome for you if you took that specific option. The trick is to do it for all of the options you’re weighing up. This way you’re comparing apples to apples- best case scenarios to best case scenarios. This helps you to get a sense of if it“feels right” and will help you realise which of the best outcomes would be more fulfilling for you.

Use your intuition
Whether you call it intuition, a hunch or a gut feeling, they’re all the same. You are using another sense(or all of your experience and wisdom) to make the decision. There is no rationalising with this type of decision, you rely on an instinct, a knowing feeling. Some of us are more in touch with this tool than others. If you’ve used your intuition in the past and it’s served you well, then consider incorporating it for all of your major decisions.

Get persective
It’s hard to see the forest for the trees, as they say. As such, it’s hard to make a decision when you remain in the context of your everyday routine, in the thick of where the decision is. It works to get an outside perspective. It doesn’t take much. I find a day trip out of my city alone can do wonders for perspective. It allows you to on the outside looking in at your current situation. Some people can achieve this by being in nature, or going for a long walk. The key is to relax and free up space in your mind, which enables you to think more clearly.

So, which of these options will you incorporate into your decision-making system?

Would love to hear your thoughts!