Tag: #learninganddevelopment

Overcoming the fear of letting people down

I’ve always prided myself on the ability to be consistent. Generally, when I say I will do things, I tend to do them.

Whilst this is a rather positive trait to have, I’m also starting to see where it can fall into unhelpful behaviours too.

I’m someone who wants to make space for people in my life and be available for them. It’s only become evident recently how difficult I find it to say no if someone wants to see or do something with me. I quickly feel guilty if I turn people down, and the feeling of guilt can hit me pretty hard.

Plant the seeds for the life you want to live

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

Our lives are created based upon the seeds we are planting. If we want a field of sweetcorn, we better plant sweetcorn seeds. That makes sense for us logically, but this also applies to what we want in life. For example, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want a happy, positive and fulfilling life. So the best thing to do is plant happy, positive and fulfilling seeds. It is very simple, yet very effective.

Many of us want these things – happiness, success, love, money or any other number of things. Yet the seeds we plant are the opposite.

Our anxiety is stopping us from making positive change

Through my professional and personal life, I’ve come across many extraordinary, driven individuals who want to make a positive impact in the world.
Unfortunately, what I also see is a lot of stress, anxiety and overwhelm. There is an increase in the amount of burnout which is negatively affecting people’s personal sense of wellbeing. This is sad in of itself – everyone deserves to live a happy, fulfilling life.
But also, when we are stressed or burnt out, we are also becoming far less effective in making the change we want to see in the world. This means the positive change is severely limited.
But the great news is that we can change our outlook. One of the big revelations for me was recognising that the barrier to my own performance was the way I treated myself.

The Life and Times of an ‘Author’​

One of life’s great achievements is to write a book. But what happens when you achieve it?
I started my book, Make Diversity Matter to You in 2020. After the events of Black Lives Matter, I wanted to do more to make a positive change in the world. I had previously worked in Diversity and Inclusion in the UK government. My experience demonstrated that the way in which diversity was polarised made it inaccessible to many people who would care.
So writing a book, what an amazing achievement right!? In fact, when I told people they frequently told me how I should be extremely proud.
Except, I wasn’t.

The limits to intellectualizing our life decisions

When we make decisions, many of us try to look at things very logically. We research information or ask friends for guidance. Maybe we’ll write a pros and cons list.
But can we really make a pros and cons list to as big a life decision as getting married? How about having kids? How about moving country? How about doing what you love?
One of the biggest downwards spirals I had with my life was trying to logically decide what I wanted to do. I would turn my brain to overdrive to figure out what the answer to my career and life were. I saw life as a puzzle – if I simply stared at it longer and spent more time trying to figure it all out, I would know what I was meant to do.

I learnt that the mind is not always the best tool to understand or decide bigger things in life.

Why people use personal coaches for development

Who uses a ‘coach’, and what are they exactly?

The word ‘coach’ comes from the idea of an old coach carriage, which could take you from one place to another. A coach does the same thing, only rather on a development journey rather than a physical one.

Coaching can be far more than a simple motivational tool. It can help genuinely develop people in a way that courses and books cannot as it takes a far more individual approach to personal development.

When I received coaching, I never realised how much certain implicit beliefs I had built up were holding me back. For example, I had this subconscious view that to be successful in my career I had to be unhappy.

If you want change, you need to want something new

When we want to change something, it can often be hard to figure out what we want to change. The easy part is to say that whatever we have right now is not working for us, and that we need to shift this into another thing. But the harder part is deciding what this new thing we want to do should be.
The focus can quickly become on how bad everything is right now, and therefore the change is needed to fix things. Change in of itself becomes the solution, whatever that change might be.
Whilst this is perhaps a good starting point, most of the time it is not enough to want change for change sake.

Feeling Uninspired? Challenge yourself by learning something new

Remember the excitement of our first day at work, or taking up a new hobby – When was the last time you experienced that? If it hasn’t been for a while, perhaps you might want to think about finding something new to do to rekindle that creative energy.

If you feel like you’ve got some room for some inspiration, why not learn a new hobby or skill?

Change your relationship with learning new skills

As the old life-script goes, we are born, we go to school, we work, we retire and we die. The suggestion is that we spend the early part of our life learning, until we hit the working age where we are ‘doing’ until we retire.

In modern times however, this script no longer works. Unfortunately our education system was not built to prepare us for these new realities, pushing us to focus on what we are ‘good’ at, rather than developing the skill of getting better at what we are ‘bad’ at.