Success

November 7, 2016 by Christine

How to Push Yourself Without Crashing

Hi, I’m Christine, and I’m a recovering overachiever.

As is my good friend Mandy Lehto.

A couple of weeks ago, Mandy invited me onto her fabulous Moxiecast, her feel-good show over on iTunes. Such an honor to be one of the people to whom she has spoken.

Anyway, in our conversation, we jammed on how it’s possible to achieve success in a self-caring way.

Listen to it here!

We talk about what prompted me even to try to achieve what at first felt like the holy grail of having a good business and a great life.

We talk about what self-care means. (No, it’s not sitting on the sofa and eating chocolate the whole time.)

Some of the key ways to enable it.

And how to notice when you’re getting off-track of yourself.

Hope you love listening as much as I loved chatting!

May 22, 2015 by Christine

On The Business Benefits of Being Grateful

Love heals.

Two words that form part of our Keeping It Real creed. They have immense reach in the world beyond business. But could they be relevant within business too?

I’m sure Terry* was skeptical when we started talking about it during a coaching conversation.

Story

Terry, a Partner in a consulting company, was young, and keen to do even better than he already had within his firm. He had a team of Managers and Directors working for him. He found the younger, more ambitious ones quite easy to work with. But he struggled a little with people who were a little older than him; who were maybe good enough at what they did, but were topped out in their careers.

On an earlier call, we’d discussed this whole thing in general: how was it for him to manage people that he didn’t quite gel with? This challenge had clearly been around for him for a while as he shared with me conversations he’d had with this or that fellow Partner of colleague who’d coached him on this or that tactic he could use to try to get these people to change in some way.

I didn’t have any fresh tactics to offer Terry, but I did reflect to him the judgment that I heard in him. And wondered aloud how much of Terry’s issue was the people themselves, and how much was the way he was thinking about them? How much was about Terry changing, versus them?

And I wondered what might be possible if Terry could replace his judgmental thinking with compassion. I didn’t use the word “love” overtly, but that was what I was pointing to.

We didn’t then talk for a few weeks, but on the next call, Terry shared with me a huge breakthrough he’d had with John*, one of the people he’d found himself most struggling to manage.

Terry was honest and said that he’d seen John as a huge pain in the neck, always needing Terry’s time and attention, and instead of taking responsibility for making things happen, often seeking Terry’s prior approval.

Terry told me, that after quite a punishing week, he was driving home one Friday evening and John’s number came up on his phone.

“I just thought, ‘Oh God, here we go…'” he said, “but I answered anyway.”

He told me how John had wanted to update him on a client review meeting he’d done earlier, during which he’d discovered there was a prospective piece of add-on consultancy work. He wanted to run it past Terry because he was planning to do work on it at the weekend before going back to the client early the following week.

“At first it sounded like a really small piece, worth about £25K,” Terry said. “I had other proposals in the melting pot that week, all worth significantly more than that, and I just thought, why is this guy wasting my time on a Friday night? But all of a sudden I remembered the conversation you and I had had about judgment. And I stopped myself in my tracks.”

I just listened as he spoke.

“Something shifted in me. I just started to have the most enormous compassion, not just for John, but myself too. And I found myself saying to him, ‘Look, John, it’s Friday evening and we’ve both had long weeks. I’m sure neither of us is at our best right now. And actually, you don’t need to be working on it this at the weekend. Why not give yourself a break and let’s talk again on Monday?'”

“Huh,” I said. “And…?”

“It just diffused the tension I felt between him and me,” he said. “We even ended up having a joke about something.”

“And did you end up talking again on the Monday?” I said.

“We did,” he said. “I decided instead of another rushed phonecall, to actually invest face-to-face time with John. We ended up having a much different conversation than I think we’d have had if we’d just continued talking that Friday night. It was like, by Monday, two different people turned up.”

It seemed to me that the story would have been pretty cool already had that been where it ended. But he went on.

“Incredible thing is,” he said, “that because by Monday we were seeing one another in a different light, the conversation we ended up having about the client piece was different too. We got a whole lot more creative in looking at the problem John’s client was trying to solve, meaning that the intervention we ended up offering was worth about £200k.”

“Wow,” I said. We were silent for a while as we just held the whole magnitude of that.

“So, what did you take from all of that?” I said.

“It’s about what becomes possible,” he said, “when you bring gratitude and humility into the mix. I just found myself having huge compassion for John. It can’t be easy to know in your heart of hearts that no matter how hard you try, your career is going nowhere. And I appreciated him making the effort, irrespective. I also think that that had been the first time I’d honestly created real time and space for him; gave him my full attention and respect. The quality of our connection was therefor so much better. And so, it’s no wonder, we got a totally different result.”

Love heals

And that’s my point.

What Terry did there was, in a moment of feeling challenged, choose a loving, instead of a judging mindset, and the whole landscape of his relationship with John shifted, as did their collective business results.

Awesome!

And, I wonder, where and could you shift things on your business landscape? What results might that bring you?

*Names changed to protect confidentiality.

February 27, 2015 by Christine

Frustrated With Your Results? Check Out This Simple Mind Shift!

Shining your light often means digging deep into yourself and pushing past your barriers. Even when you think these barriers are outside you.

What do I mean?

Let’s look at three things I’ve heard people say this week:

“The market is just that way right now; what am I supposed to do?”
“Our Managing Partner is completely closed-minded. So, I just can’t influence him.”
“I just can’t sell. I wish I enjoyed it like you do. But I don’t, which means I’m always struggling to get business.”

These things were said by super-bright people, all of whom have big ambitions and big lights to shine, all of whom were frustrated about not making progress. Each of them believed they were relatively powerless to change things.

Now, I’m not saying that markets can’t be unpredictable, or that senior bosses aren’t sometime intransigent, or that some skills aren’t a ballsache to master.

What I am saying, however, is that, at every juncture in life, we have a choice about how we will deal with things.

Even when at first it might seem like we don’t.

Like Mandy Lehto says, inertia is an epidemic. It’s quite easy to sleepwalk through life at the relative mercy of your circumstances. Senior leaders and business owners are not immune.

Steve Chandler calls this way of being, the way of the victim. And he contrasts it to the way of the owner.

An owner is someone who owns their own spirit, energy and response in any situation.

A victim on the other hand see that forces beyond them dictate the direction of their life and the level of their happiness.

Owners use life. They are proactive. They come from a place of intention. They learn even from tragedies and mistakes. They allow life’s challenges to strengthen and build them. They choose what they’ll do – even if that sometimes means doing things they don’t like.

Victims infer that life uses them. You may hear them say things like “that’s life” or “life is unfair” in the process disempowering themselves even further than they already are. They do things that they feel obliged to do. There’s a lot of “shoulding”.

The vital difference is where they see the power lying for themselves and their lives.

Victims feel trapped by their personalities. Owners understand that, beyond their small egos they have limitless resource. They don’t say, “I can’t make this happen” like a victim would. They ask themselves:

“Who do I need to be to make this happen?”

And so they find the power within and beyond them to push through.

Of course, we can all morph from one state to the other sometimes, depending on what’s going on and how good our energy is.

Also, business and corporate cultures often have implicit invitations for you to play victim. Because for all their hype about change and transformation, they’re mostly invested in maintaining the status quo.

Watch that!

The key thing is always to remember that you have choice. Deciding to be an owner isn’t something you have to work at. You can make that choice at any time; in any moment.

When my examples switched their mindset from victim to owner, the results were profound:

“The market is presenting some challenging opportunities that I’m going to figure out and get on top of.”
“Knowing that my boss is that kind of guy, I need to show up differently in my relationship and conversations with him, so that I can serve him better.”
“I’ve decided that I’m going to learn to love selling – even if it kills me!”

You have a choice about how you turn up to life. On what you’ll focus attention. And who you’ll be in the face of this or that opportunity.

As you decide to get your beautiful bright light out into the world, how will you choose to turn up? Who will you decide to be?

February 6, 2015 by Christine

How To Shine Your Light When Everyone Else’s Seems Brighter

I’ll let you into a secret.

For years I had a bunch of things I’d do to make myself feel more sparkly and confident when these were the last things I was feeling.

A selection of go-to pieces in my wardrobe I’d wear that brought I believed made me feel pulled-together. A favorite shade of lipstick I told myself made me look – and therefore feel – more kick-ass. Okay, I admit, some lingerie that under corporate wear would give me a sense that I was being bold, even if I was more subdued on the outside.

The vulnerable change agent

If you hold any sense of personal vulnerability – and, let’s admit it, who doesn’t ?- it can be tough sometimes to work in a professional arena where everyone is smart, focused and impactful.

Especially if you’re in a leadership role or hold the energy of being a catalyst for change.

It’s not that you’re not these things, but at times it can feel like everyone else is just more sorted or together than you.

How do you dare to put your genius out there when she wants to be home under the duvet?

At least that’s a battle I used to have.

I had highs and lows. The highs were good. When the highs were here I needed no tricks to let my light shine. I just engaged with whatever it was I was doing, or whomever it was I was working with, and stuff just happened.

The lows were bad. That was when I felt my light was dulled and needed all the tricks it could get in order to burn brighter. Anything, really, to get back to that good place where flow happened.

In the last couple of years, however, I’ve come to some shape-shifting realizations:

Your light is a constant

It may seem to you, as it used to do to me, that when I was having a meh day, I’d lost access to my brightness.

Now I see that that was never true at all.

Sure, maybe it had been eclipsed by some cloudy thinking or a dip in personal energy. But, the way I look at it now, it’s kind of like the sun. Even on the darkest of winter days, the sun is always there somewhere doing its job. It may look as if it isn’t, but in fact it really still is.

The same is true of your own natural genius. You may feel that that magic mix you can pull on as if from nowhere in your best moments has escaped you. That it’s gone. When in fact it’s just a little obscured.

Trust that.

Ebbs and flows are natural

There’s a lot written in psychology about good and bad feeling; of ups and downs. Till now a lot of it has assumed – like I did – that one is good and the other bad. One desirable, one not. One more natural and normal, the other some kind of problem that we need to do something about.

But what if the ebb and flow was the more natural state?

So many guru life coaches point to babies and children and tell us how naturally happy they are. How that’s our birthright. How we learn, thanks to our upbringing, to be unhappy.

I disagree.

I don’t have children, but I’m an aunt (and a godmother, as of last weekend, but don’t let me digress!!) and my experience of children is that they laugh and cry. In fact, that their psychological state, if you want to call it that, can vary widely in any one day.

It’s not that they don’t have ups and downs like us. It’s that they don’t make anything out of either. So they have nothing on being in either state.

What if we stopped judging the ups and downs and just saw that that’s how it was?

You don’t need to do anything to feel good

The consequence of realizing that your light is always there and that highs and lows are the natural order of thing, is that you don’t have to do anything at all to sort your state out or to get your genius back.

Don’t sweat it.

The up will come when it’s ready. In the meantime, just notice where you are.

Importantly, don’t feel any need to look beyond yourself for answers or to fix things. How many times do we, in our less up moments, see other people’s brightness as having something that will help make us feel more whole? These moments of insecurity, when you click on that guru adviser’s sponsored ad on Twitter or Facebook, are just that.

You don’t need fixed. Life and time will bring their own next up-wave.

Everyone deserves to find and shine their own light

This is a theme we’re going to be talking about here during the month of February. If you want to follow along, make sure you’re on the VIP list for updates by subscribing here!

December 22, 2014 by Christine

10 Business Books and Resources to Keep You Grounded in 2015

As someone who likes to think for themselves, it’s hard to find resources that you can trust to give you new ideas, while allowing you to keep your feet on the ground. Here are 10 of my current favorites that I think achieve that. I’d love to know what yours are!

Good Life Project Podcasts – Jonathan Fields

Good Life Project

Jonathan Fields is on a mission to inspire and enable others to develop businesses that align with their core and has for the past years produced some amazing interviews with people, many of whom are already in the public eye. He has a wonderful knack of getting his guests to tell the story behind the story in ways that allow a glimpse of the unique journeys people have been on in creating these standout businesses, perfomances and works of art that we can so often take for granted. Check out in particular his conversations with ultra athlete Rich Roll; master marketer Seth Godin; and vulnerability goddess Brené Brown.

The Icarus Deception – Seth Godin

The Icarus Deception

We all know the story of Icarus, whose father made him wings, but then warned him not to fly too close to the sun, lest the wax holding the feathers together melt, plunging Icarus to a certain death. In this excellent book, Godin points out for us the prevalence of the messages of that story archetype in our society: don’t try too hard; don’t be too clever; don’t be too cocky. And how many of us disguise anything that’s unique about us for fear that we may be judged as being different from the norm. He argues that, in today’s society, if we truly want to serve, and be who we are, we need to wake up to the less well known moral of the Icarus story: that flying too low may cause another kind of failure.

In talking to the creator in all of us, Godin reframaes what it means to be an “artist”. So, it’s as much a manifesto for edgy business owners and maverick corporate types as it is for writers, actors and other “makers”. Besides anything else, Godin inspires us to quit fearing success and dare to get on with standing out in our own unique way.

Fierce Conversations – Susan Scott

Fierce Conversations

According to Scott, life and business revolve around our conversations. The ones we have with ourselves as much as the ones we have with others. One of her key arguments is that, if we want to be ourselves, if we want to manifest who we are and what we’re trying to do, then what we say to others matters. We have the choice to compromise for the sake of keeping the status quo and avoiding upset, or to speak our truth whatever that happens to be. The more our words align with what we’re feeling, the clearer we can steer our path in life.

How to Fascinate – Sally Hogshead

How to Fascinate

Even if you’re clear about who you are or what you offer the world, it can sometimes be a challenge to describe it in language that doesn’t have people’s eyes glazing over. If you’re looking for inspiration in this department, check out Sally Hogshead and the fabulous work she has done, looking at how people instinctively see us, and how we can language that in ways that are clear and vibrant way and remain true of us. Do the online questionnaire, and you’ll find your fascination style described as one of forty-nine archetypes, each one a marriage of your two fascination advantages. While no personality system is ever one hundred percent, I’ve found this one provoked useful insight for several of my clients during 2014.

Made to Stick – Chip and Dan Heath

Made to Stick

One of the toughest aspects of creating a business your way is getting yourself and it out there. Particularly if you’re shifting to something new and away from something you’ve been known for in the past. Based on their own research into businesses that have some lasting buzz around them, Chip and Dan Heath look at six features that contribute to making things standout, engage people and stick. Where many marketing books offer a painting by numbers formula, the Heaths avoid this by using entertaining examples to whet your appetite in a way that offers food for thought around how to have folks swarming around you.

Resonate – Nancy Duarte

Resonate

There can be nothing more boring in business than having to sit and listen to a presenter wade her way through a hundred plus fact-based, bullet point slides. So how not to be that person? Especially if it’s important to you – and the world – that you get your message across? In Resonate, Nancy Duarte has done a superb job of spelling out the importance of engaging audiences, and then in bringing the art of story to creating presentations and written pitches in a way that brings people with you. I particularly like how she maps Hero’s Journey story architecture (the story architecture that’s used to underpin most blockbuster films these days) onto how you can piece together your message. If you check her out online, you’ll also find some fabulous pre-formatted PowerPoint slides for you to dive into.

Quiet- Susan Cain

Quiet

Much of the business world values extroversion and all it implies: working in teams; being seen as outwardly impactful and dynamic; acting first, thinking later. Many of the extroverted cultures I’ve worked around expect their introverted talent to adapt themselves in order to “fit in”. As if introversion was a handicap. In her superb book Cain however makes the case for introverts. She allows all of us, irrespective of our extroversion/introversion preference, to understand that in devaluing introversion, we lose vital richness of depth, insight and consideration – qualities missing not just from business but from much of life in general.

Stillpower – Garrett Kramer

Stillpower

Business is about performance. With no performance, there is no business. And yet some of us find it easier than others to achieve the kind of results for which we aim. Garrett Kramer’s book, written for athletes and their coaches, but just as relevant to life and work, talks about this phenomenon. Often, if we find ourselves falling short of something, the way we know to overcome it is through use of willpower and determination, perhaps with a sprinkling of tools and techniques we can adopt from time to time to get ourselves over a hump. But, instead of piling on the effort, Kramer suggests we do the exact opposite and think less. He looks at the mental state we all know as The Zone, and at the psychological principles that underpin it. And he offers us a new understanding of how we can achieve that for ourselves more and more.

Clarity – Jamie Smart

Clarity

Talking of misunderstanding, Jamie Smart looks at some of the taken-for-granted paradigms in psychology and offers a radically different way to see and experience things. Drawing on the work of Syd Banks, and informed by new observations across a variety of disciplines, including quantum physics, Jamie enables us to understand the extent to which the world we so take for granted as being “out there” is first of all created in our mind. This extraordinary realization challenges us to consider all kinds of things, including the sources of stress and overwhelm. In a world engulfed with advice on how to cope with things in our environment, that reframe allows us immense choice over our entire experience of life.

Creating Affluence – Deepak Chopra

Creating Affluence

There’s much talk in the news these days about the distribution of wealth in our society. Look around you, compare yourself to others and it’s so easy to think that you’re not doing so well or that you are somehow less than. But what does wealth really mean? In this beautiful little book, Chopra argues that, far from being a hard-to-win state, affluence is our natural condition. He considers the related nature of everything, and offers inspiring words that enable us to shape-shift any sense of scarcity or lack we might be feeling, replace it with the knowledge that we’re already rich, and then encourage us to watch what happens when we engage with our worlds from this place.

So, what’s your current top book and/or resource, and why? I’d love to hear!

Photo attribution: Steven Durbin Photography