Savouring & Reminiscing

I’ve just spent 2 weeks on the beautiful island of Skyros.  I was invited by Skyros Holidays to run a couple of week long workshops.  The first week I ran a workshop called Raise Your Game, based on the content of my first book (Raise Your Game).  The course attracted participants from far and wide – and although I’d expected participants of working age – there were a couple of retirerees, still curious – still lively with bright eyes – showing signs of life and curiosity of the world around.

The second week I ran a workshop on happiness.

One of the themes from both weeks was that of positive emotions.  The link is perhaps more obvious to the workshop on happiness – but there are also strong links to success.  It’s probably useful for me to say that I believe that “success” is personal – we each can and should define what success means to us.  It will be different for each of us.

Anyway, back to positive emotions …. (traditionally) successful people are often driven by goals – by the attainment of something in the future.   Sometimes they find that “something” is lacking in their life.  Research (Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005) is beginning to show that success is linked to happiness.  Not that happiness is a result of happiness – but success follows our happiness.

Not surprisingly when people achieve – achievement triggers feelings of happiness.  But what happens after a day when things haven’t gone to plan …. Perhaps our happiness goes out of the window, and thus begins the beginning of a slow downward spiral.  Fortunately for most of us, the downward spiral is reversable, and often we intuitively do things to “cheer us up”.  However – it’s worth being aware of the importance of doing things to “cheer us up” – and perhaps having some new strategies to employ.

I’ve described TIME PERSPECTIVES before, and the importance to our well-being of having the balance between past (positive), present and future.  And as mentioned above – many “successful” people know what they want and deliberately set out to achieve these things – and thus have a future focus.

One of the tools therefore is to cultivate our awareness and enjoyment of the present moment, and to take some time to positively reminisce about the past.

Oh yes, it’s easy to do whilst on a beautiful Greek island.  Good food, great company, turquoise blue seas and sandy beaches.  Shared experiences become the source of laughter, giggles and smiles.  We have time to sit and share a coffee, to build new memories and to savour our past experiences.  We can meander through the streets and enjoy the moment.

The question is – how well can you integrate “savouring & reminiscing” into “normal life”?

References & Acknowledgements:

Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success? Psychological Bulletin, 131(6), 803-855. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.131.6.803

Photograph, courtesy of Kel Portman

Sun, sea and increasing your personal effectiveness

Whether or not you’ve started to think about your summer holiday, I’d like to let you know about a workshop that I’m running on the Greek island of Skyros.

Skyros Holidays have been running what they call “alternative” holidays for several decades – and are celebrating their 30th year this year.

If you believe in the mind / body /soul connection  – then no doubt you’ve come across this type of holiday before.  Skyros holidays are a fantastic combination of relaxing in great surroundings (a Greek Island, with other like-minded individuals), with morning yoga practice for the body, and coaching to develop the mind.

I’m delighted to be running 2 coaching programmes there during the 2 weeks, 14th – 27th June.  I have a couple of discount vouchers. Please email me if you would like more information or a discount voucher.

Unstuck

We’ve all been ‘stuck’ at some point, not knowing what to do next.  There is time for quiet reflection, and there is time for action.  Doing something, sometimes anything differently.  The question is, how do we get unstuck?  How do we start to make progress in a particular direction, rather than being, er, stuck.

We might ask someone for advice … and have you ever noticed that the other person rarely has the same information that you do – and often you end up saying “yes, but it’s not quite that straightforward because …..” and then go onto elaborate the details of the current stuck state.  Essentially you ignore their advice because they don’t really understand your particular situation.

So often the only person who can move you out of your stuck place is you.  And getting unstuck can sometimes take a little creativity on your part.   Often some of the limitations that we perceive are outside of our awareness, and are often only limitations in our mind.  But when you’re in the stuck place it’s hard to see that we’re limiting ourself.  So how do we break from this place of “stuckness”?

I’ll give you one method, and the first thing to remember is that it’s not a solution in itself, the idea is to generate options.  Just the act of generating options starts to give us some choice in the situation.  I often run this process with my clients – but you could take the role of the coach and ask yourself the “coach” questions.

Client:  “I don’t know what to do”

Coach: “What could you do?”

Client: “I don’t know”

Coach: “What would [respected person 1] do”

[respected person could be someone in business, Alan Sugar, Richard Branson, Anita Ruddick someone respected in sport, Sir Steve Redgrave, Sir Clive Woodward, Jennifer Ennis … or a movie hero, Superman, Wonderwoman, …. your boss, respected colleague ]

You can repeat this question for different [respected persons].  The idea is JUST TO GENERATE IDEAS.  DON’T EVALUATE THE DOABILITY.

Coach:  “What the worst thing that you could do in this situation?”

This just gives information, again to start to break the ties of being stuck.  If the realisation is that the worst thing is “do nothing” … then all of a sudden “doing something” seems like a good option.

Once you have come up with some fantastical ideas you can start to look at what you can do with the resources (time, money, people) that you have.   So whilst for example you might think that Richard Branson would solve the problem with £1m in marketing … you have some information that you think investing in marketing would be a wise thing to do.  Perhaps you don’t believe that your business has the cash to invest … so you can ask yourself to come up with some creative ideas to get round this problem.   But NOTICE – You now know what to do!

Knowing what to do is a great first step.  You can explore how you can get it done and think about who can help you do that.

 

References

Image from: http://caseydecker.deviantart.com/art/Whitnee-Stuck-In-Glue-196149936

 

Informal and supportive Christmas

In a previous blog I mentioned that for many years I’ve hosted friends for Christmas, I described that I’m now curious about finding out the different Christmas traditions of friends and family, and how I sought to honor some of those traditions by asking people to complete the phrase “Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without …“. Although I’ve hosted Christmas, its not because I’m the best cook (I’m not), or the best hostess, but for pragmatic reasons of having a slightly larger home where everyone can sleep over.  Many of my friends live in London, and I’ve had a cottage in a village somewhere which was slightly larger and could accommodate more people.  

The thought of “doing everything” and running myself ragged whilst my friends lounged around never really appealed to me.  I don’t think it was really their expectation either.  The agreement has been that we all chip in and bring food and do the cooking.  

However after a moving home I wanted to “renew” the ownership they felt, and explicitly expand it to be more than food ….One year wanted to come up with a way for everyone to feel engaged and part of creating our Christmas.  

I wrapped up household items, and gave them out on arrival – to signify “ownership”.  Of course is wasn’t ridged, but symbolic.  For example, I wrapped the corkscrew … you’re in charge of charging our glasses.  The stereo remote control was wrapped you’re the DJ – ah, the days before iPad shuffle!

I wrapped firelighters for the pyromaniac of the group, who really needed no encouragement to get the fire burning in the grate.  Actually, to be fair the symbolic owner of the corkscrew probably needed no encouragement either – but I guess it was a great ‘permission’ for them to take ownership rather than to be looking to me to check it’s ok to open a bottle, light the fire or change the music.

Whilst symbolic gifts are a slightly unusual side to Christmas – it is a way to ensure that everyone chips in – everyone was involved in creating our Christmas – and guess what – we all had fun.

If you’d like a bit more assistance at Christmas, consider some of the tasks that people could help you with and perhaps find fun (and public) ways of “assigning” them.  Certainly this worked for us.   Let me know your thoughts or variations that work for you.

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without …

For many years I’ve hosted a Christmas gathering for friends.  One of the things I’ve really enjoyed, and I’ve found fascinating is finding out the different traditions that my friends have for Christmas.  Sometimes these are things that they’re not fully aware of, simply because they’ve always done them that way … and yet if these traditions weren’t there, the day would somehow be “not quite right”.  It’s not always easy to find out what these things are, perhaps at some level we expect everyone else adheres to these traditions too.  

For my mum it’s cracking nuts and putting them to soak in Cherry Brandy, for a little treat a few days later.  As a kid, I hadn’t realised this was a ‘family thing’ – I assumed this is what everyone did with their nuts!  Nuts in cherry brandy is about the full extent of my mum’s alcohol habit, so as a teenager when I first met friends who had a Buck’s Fizz on Christmas morning – well that was a bit of a shock to my system – but a tradition that I’ve now fully embraced!

One friend HAS to have Yorkshire pudding with her Christmas lunch.

I was talking with a friend earlier this week about her family traditions.  She described how her family always cracked the nuts for a nut roast together on Christmas Day morning.  However this year, with 3 grandchildren she thought that she would do the nut roast in advance – much to the horror of her daughter.  For her daughter Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without sitting as a family cracking the nuts for the nut roast.

Are you aware that you’ve got any “family specific” or quirky Christmas traditions?  What are they – I’d love to hear about them?  This is not about turkey or crackers – I think they’re cultural norms.  

For you, or perhaps your guests, complete the phrase …..”Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without ….”

Great Days at Work – Launches

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Great Days at Work, my second book.

I studied for a Master’s degree in Applied Positive Psychology – and with my background in training & coaching professionals, I quite literally applied the science and studies to my work. The result is Great Days at Work (published by Kogan Page).

I launched the book today, by emailing my contacts and sending out lots of tweets – and am thrilled that the book made it to number 2 best selling, after Drive by Mr Pink – a man whose work I admire hugely!  The book is currently available from Amazon UK, it’s available for pre-order for Amazon US and it’s out now on Amazon Kindle.

 

 

If you’re wondering what the book’s about (yes, the title is designed to give you a strong clue) , I created a short YouTube clip:

From Stressing to Thriving

Memories

Memories: Creating Fabulous Memories

Here in the UK, we have what we describe as a long weekend. Monday is a public holiday, we call it a bank holiday. During this extra leisure time, you might be spending time with friends and family. I’m sure you’ll have a wonderful time, and the question I ask you is how can you ensure that the wonderful time translates into wonderful memories?

Professor Hood, in his book The Self Illusion, suggests that most of us expect our memories to be stored like recordings on a DVD …however he suggests that thinking of them as being more like a compost heap might be more accurate. If you’ve ever looked in a composter you’ll know that some things disintegrate immediately, and there tends to be just the occasional item that doesn’t decompose. Our memories have this tendency to decompose.

That may not be a cheery thought – BUT there is a way to inoculate our memories from this inevitable decay. The way to do this is to give your experiences and then the subsequent memory energy. You might wonder how you give an experience and memory “energy” … essentially it’s really easy, and probably something that you already do to some extent. To give an experience energy you talk about it, you share it, you re-live the experience.

Now this does come with a word of caution. ALL MEMORIES can be inoculated, not just the FUN ones. So if you give energy to negative events and experiences, those memories will be the memories that take longer to decompose.

So, my tip for you on this bank holiday weekend is to do something FUN, and then to share the experience. My personal experience is that if you’re not used to talking about positive experiences shortly after it happened – it can feel VERY odd.

Let me give you a quick example, the first time I tried this was a couple of years ago. I visited the National Gallery in London with my partner. We enjoyed the gallery and deliberately went out to dinner to talk about our experience. There was a little voice in my head that was screaming “you were there, we saw the same stuff, why are we talking about this?” My natural tendency is to look to the next thing, to the future. But this experience has shown me how powerful “giving energy” to positive events is.  I describe time perspectives (our past, present or future focus) more fully in a previous blog.

If you’ve enjoyed this blog, you may be interested in a previous blog on positive emotions.

REFERENCES:

HOOD, B. 2012. The Self Illusion, UK, Constable & Robinson Ltd.

Positive Emotions

Emotions

All emotions have their purpose.
Today I created my first YouTube video.  The footage is from the book launch of my first book: Raise Your Game – how to build on your successes and achieve transformational results.  A free chapter is available here and for more information see the raiseyourgame.biz site.  Take a look, it’s less than 2 minutes long.

I would would love your comments – and I’d really appreciate a “like”.

Share this:

A great photo from Chloe The Writer … and also my first ever reblog.

Chloe the Writer

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