The past two years have brought new challenges to most of us. Struggling to find your balance during a pandemic is natural. For some it's worry, anxiety and for some it's guilt. These emotions can be non-resourceful and affect your behaviors. Maybe even resulting in negative outcomes for your health, relationships and career. These losses can shake your confidence and have you second guessing your decisions and splintering your focus.
Feeling shattered is no way to start the New Year.

A more resourceful state is that of strategic optimism. An optimism supported with a plan. How will you improve this year? An athlete trains, not just shows up on game day to perform. What is your training regimen?
A good development plan starts with an awareness and acceptance of weaknesses and opportunities. If you are blind to these two forces, I suspect new learning opportunities will be seeds sown on barren soil.
This brings up a couple of key questions. How to spot these areas for growth and where to ...

A brief overview of the five shifts required as leaders expand their areas of responsibility

Recently I was caught in a lockdown and confined to a hotel room in Manila. In that time I created a few videos to help you deal with Coronavirus and its impact on you, your organization and those near to you.

The intent is to ensure that we all make it through the COVID-19 concern as unscathed as possible, on both personal and professional fronts.

The subsequent videos will take you through:

• Video 1 - The cause of “Panic” thinking

• Video 2 - Simple strategies to calm emotions and thinking

• Video 3 - Leverage a difficult situation into resilience for the future

" her family wasn't very good at talking about important stuff. And of all of them, she was the least good at it. When she tried, it felt like all the chains on all her imagined safes and trunks started rattling”

Does that sound like you? It's not always easy to talk about the important stuff. In fact, it can be damn scary at times. The idea of all those trunks and safes springing open and releasing the demons, the memories, the toxic thoughts could turn most people to stone quicker than a stolen glance at the great Gorgon, Medusa.

Childhood was when you probably first set up this unholy zoo of caged fears. And as you rambled through life you collected a few more characters to cage. School certainly offered up a couple. How about your career and family? Think you might have a demon or two adopted from those relationships?

But it takes more strength to continually check those locks and tighten those chains than to finally free yourself of their powers.

Answer me this; how often do...

"your life was one long emergency", a great lyric from one the worlds greatest songs. This works in the context of art designed to move you emotionally. Where this is less attractive is in the real world when your emotions are hijacked by those close to you. If this is happening in your world, reflect on it. Who is really being served in this "victim-rescuer" relationship. Sure, there is a pay off for both parties but at what cost? One stays small and the other martyrs. This can happen in the workplace, not just families & friends. 

If this is showing up in your life, and you want to change it - you may want some support in designing a way forward.

Coaching can help

If we could time-travel to a point in the future when all your goals are achieved, how would you answer these four questions?

Learn the lessons and apply them now.

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Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's famous book on achieving peak states shows us just how easy it is to design a life of fulfillment and happiness. This has been an area of focus mine over the past few years. The combination of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Abraham Maslow result in some great ideas.

Contact me to bring more flow into your life.

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I was speaking with a fellow coach recently and she spoke of how she was uncomfortable with her wedding vows including the phrase “ A woman leads by walking ten paces behind her husband”.

A few years later as she was preparing for her start in an Alaskan dog race she noticed she took exactly ten steps from harnessing the lead dog to her place of command at the back of the sled.

She was in fact – Leading from behind.

This reminds me of the “servant leadership” concept.

“The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

“The difference manifests itself i...

A common frame for may is to look for others to blame for their problems. In this short video I ask you a tougher question.