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Leaning into Joy (and being intentionally purposeless!)

Why we need to lean into playing, having fun and doing things that are inherently purposeless!  JOY is on my mind this month  Last weekend I had the entire weekend by myself, to do as I pleased.  I'm not proud to say I spent most of the weekend working, cleaning the laundry after the departure of two cats and redistributing stuff from one end of the house to the other.  I even laminated until 10pm Saturday. At 4pm Sunday I forced myself to watch a movie an...

You're afraid? Yeah me too (said every leader ever)!

I'm falling more and more in love with my mahi every day.  Recently I've been working with an organisation with some of the most 'professionally' successful people I know.  And we've been unpacking what is beneath the 'iceberg' for each of us.  It's both inspiring, and sadly thought provoking. Inspiring because it reminds us, how we are all, every single one of us, so similar and connected. We all want the same things in life really.  Connection, belonging, purpose, resp...

Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

I should call my mum everyday, I must not ever fail, I’m a bad person if I yell at the kids… Inner Rules.  We all have them.  We may not always be able to articulate them, but they guide our behaviour on a daily basis. Hanging around in our subconscious and nudging us towards doing or saying something that is consistent with them. Like most things in life there are good ones, and bad ones, healthy ones and not so healthy ones. An inner rule like “Good people don’t gossip�...

Running out of Time? What about Attention?

Only when we harness our attention can we truly get the quality and quantity of our life's work done! Never enough time 'at the end of the day'? Always too much on your TO DO list?Can’t keep up with what’s being asked of you?Perhaps you have more dirty clothes than clean clothes, you’re earning frequent flyer points at the local takeaways… and if you could only remember where you left those tickets you printed….Hang on, why did I even come t...

No One Even Minds - Honestly!

This is a story.The beginning - the habit of 'striving to be perfect', constantly comparing and thrashing myself to the point of exhaustion (burnout).The middle - having an epiphany on the yoga mat about where my fear of being judged and compared really stems from. The end - realising that anyone who truly matters to you, doesn’t care HOW imperfect or messy you are. My Personality. Rewind 15 Years. I was once told I was the personality type least likely to do yoga. And the perso...

When The Heat Is Rising, and You're Tempted to REACT, Just Breathe...

Turning a reaction into a response using your breath can be game changer!  My kids returned to university and school this week.  And it started to rain. If it wasn’t for the fact I heard a forecast overnight low of 22 degrees tonight I could be excused for thinking summer had ended!  The first week of February often reminds me of the year I had 5 kids at 5 different schools. Almost the definition of insanity. Well the school notices were piling high. Donations, station...

Leading From The Inside Out

Leading from the inside out means letting people see your humanness, your bad days and your imperfections.  You may or may not remember, last month I promised to share some tips on how to ditch perfectionism and become a ‘perfect stuffer-upperer’ 😊 Here we go... I was recently talking with a woman who was struggling with an anxious teenager.  Mrs P was immaculately dressed and groomed, her house looked like a show room and her Christmas tree was, well, ‘picture ...

Building Resilience & Mining Pearls of Wisdom - Reflecting on 2021 BECAUSE it was TOUGH!

It’s so tempting at this time of the year – and after the year we’ve had DTC* - to wish our lives away in the hope that on 1 January 2022 our lives will be different! Yet on 1 January we’re highly likely to wake up in the same environments, same thinking patterns, same jobs, same habits, same relationships… as we did on 31 December.  Maybe with a hangover thrown in for good measure and a list of resolutions our ‘last-year-self’ thought would be fabulous for our future-sel...

How to Get People to Open Up to You

How to Get People to Open Up to You including how to get teenagers out of their rooms and talking (nicely, calmly.....) Stick with me – even if you don’t have kids, the three tools I’m going to share today, when practiced (!!), will change every relationship you have, and every one you will have! I'd always had ridiculously ‘perfect’ ideals about who I would be as a mum, and who my kids should be....the amazing holidays, meals and memories we’d make together. A bit like the...

How to Cope - Are You a Headless Chook? Or Have Your Head in the Sand?

The way in which we cope with lockdown uncertainty, adversity, or just the queue at the supermarket, comes down to our assessment of what’s in our control. Often at the start of a coaching session, a client is, not surprisingly, feeling stressed.  However, when my client builds awareness that they’re stressing about something which is out of their control, there is an enormous sense of relief.  A lightness.  And a sense of possibility, power and purpose – to then set ab...

What To DO When You're Knee Deep In It!

Sometimes it's just another day... Other days life is total overwhelm, right?! The everyday bumps and inconveniences are taking their toll on some of us more than ever at the moment – some days we can roll with the punches, other days it's complete overwhelm and stress at the smallest thing  How can I 'help you help yourselves' in just 5 minutes on the page? Because I can’t change your mindset or attitude or your TO DO list, right? What I CAN do is share an excerpt from my webinar prese...

Lean into Joy & Get Yourself OUT of The Happiness Waiting Room

Ok, so I was going to try really hard not to mention our lockdown situation in this email ....  but it's so hard!  So hard on all of us, and this 'death by a thousand cuts' approach to lockdown, as days are added on here and there, is making it even harder.    This morning I spent 45 minutes on the phone with a woman who has an admin role at a hospital and without going into too much detail: my definition of 'lockdown-hardness' was swiftly put into pe...

Unhooking from Others' Criticism & Praise!

Imagine!  Living independently of what others think and not having someone else's opinion determine how you feel about yourself.  It's so simple. But not easy! Because it's very natural to rely on praise and criticism to determine our self worth. We're wired to be alert to the negative to ensure our survival and sadly this means the positive feedback slips away like Teflon and the negative - well, think Velcro! It comes up often in my coaching sessions: where we - w...

Confused with Compassion, Empathy & Sympathy - What TO DO and NOT TO DO!

Compassion, Empathy, Sympathy - confused?! I recently had the honour of facilitating some Train the Trainers training - it's truly inspiring to have your own work presented back to you, and to acknowledge we're always learning!  Conversations, sharing and vulnerability abound. One topic was Compassion, and it became apparent to me that there is quite of bit of 'grey' here.  What is compassion (compared to empathy and sympathy for example)?And how do you 'do' compassion?With i...

Resilience = the most overused and misunderstood word since COVID!

I was recently interviewed for a post-grad research assignment, subject – resilience – something I am equally passionate and qualified to talk about!  Specifically, how effective are workplaces in NZ at developing and implementing resilience strategies in your experience? And which strategies do you feel are the most effective? I felt really invested in this!  My views are borne from four core beliefs:  Resilience is an overused and misunderstood termResilience is about cultur...

Done it again? Knee jerk reaction instead of calm response?

Your brain is a very beautiful thing, it’s an unbelievably incredibly sophisticated computer right on top of your shoulders!   And while some aspects of it are the very thing that distinguishes us from other mammals – for example we have will-power, memory, intuition, imagination, reason, perception – there are also some parts of our brain that are really, well, so similar to that of an animal, that it can act against us in our man made environment!  Here we cover the l...

No TIME to stop what you're doing, to be BETTER at what you're doing?

No time to sharpen the saw? It makes sense if you're tired! I'll hit you between the eyes on this one: the truth is resting is NOT lazy.  Regardless of what we have been raised to believe, looking after yourself, which includes resting, is one of the very best things you can do to improve your attention, productivity and communication.  And who doesn't want to be more focused and present on what they're doing? Have better conversations with less confusion!? Or get more done in les...

Being the Pilot of a Soft Landing into Christmas (not a CRASH landing!)

Does the sound of Christmas carols and hearing your colleagues telling you its 1 month, or 2 weeks or 5 days to Christmas trigger you? Do you spend the first 10 days of your holiday catching up on yourself, maybe even sick in bed??It’s especially tempting to squeeze as much as you can into the last two weeks before you break for Christmas, holidays, summer, end of school, end of term, end of year….  In the southern hemisphere this temptation is epic! We waltz and groove between var...

Three Ways to Find What's Most Important to YOU

As promised, THREE WAYS TO HELP FIND WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO YOU1. Try the Hedgehog principle from Jim Collin's book Good to Great (actually originally from a Greek parable that states, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." The parable states that the fox uses many strategies to try to catch the hedgehog. ... but the hedgehog, however, simplifies the world and focuses on a single, overarching vision, which they then achieve).The intersection of three circles is the swee...

What will serve you best? Finding Your Why - or Acting on Whats Important?

Feeling a little lost in this reintegration and recovery state of play? Often we get overwhelmed because we are trying to “do and be everything to everyone else”. Maybe you’re regularly triggered into a stress response, or you’re operating in default mode, on autopilot, when you know you have to shift gears?In these situations we end up living the life that others want or need us to have. This approach to life will not be serving you. It will be holding you back, perhaps even h...

What’s the most important thing you’re doing right now?

“Well I’m reading this blog, but I have a presentation due tomorrow, I’m writing a board paper at the moment and I’m thinking about what to have for dinner and I’m keeping a list going in my head of all the things I need to talk to my manager about at my performance review next week plus I’m keeping an eye on Jackie’s whereabouts because I need to speak with her before she leaves at 4pm….” Does this sort of answer sound familiar? It’s just the way our mind works, process...