The Detox In Brief

Here’s the journey we’ve been on that’s helping you get a grip on things:

• First, Set Yourself Goals gave you an exercise to help you get clear about what you really, really want from life.
• The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus challenged you to consider the key things you ought to be concentrating on if you’re serious about getting off the hamster wheel.
• How Is Time Spending You? got you confronting the realities of how you’re actually spending your energies right now. And,
• Time Shifting For Success had you figuring the difference between what you say you want and what you’re currently doing. And zeroing in on what really needs to change.

So, you’ve got lots of things that you’ve begun to put into action. But how do you keep up and build on your own momentum?

What Gets Focus Gets Results

The organising power of the brain is immense. Give something enough thought and attention and you’ll bring it to life. Consider this: all of the best works, be they artistic or entrepreneurial, began as ideas in someone’s head. It just so happens that their creators dared to put the energy and focus into manifesting them.

Those goals and plans you’ve just spent the last two weeks hatching now need similar commitment and belief from you. They need to be nurtured. They need you to have an active system of planning, doing and reviewing that turns them into hardcore reality.

Today’s challenge is for you to decide how to do just that.

What works for me is to hand write my goals in a beautiful notebook and review them regularly. 5 minutes a day is all it takes. I’ve got a routine of taking myself to my local coffee shop, treating myself to a good strong coffee, and checking in on myself. Every day, I figure out one or two key things that, if I do them, are going to help me progress my life plans.

Morning coffee might not be your cup of tea, if you’ll excuse the pun. But find your own routine. Your own positive habit that’s going to make an ongoing difference. And don’t just take my word for it that this kind of process works. Check out fellow blogger Karen Ruby’s view on it too.

Whatever works.

The point is to bring what you want to the forefront of your mind even if briefly every day. And if you can build in a longer weekly or monthly review so much the better. If that feels like a chore, find ways to put fun into the equation. Go somewhere quirky to think and write. Use funky pens or your favourite note-making tools. Put your favourite music on and rock it.

Make the decision to do it, and watch day by day as your life and work change.

So, that’s the end of the series, folks. Thanks for being here with me. I look forward to hearing how things are changing for you!

Related posts:

1. Introducing The Two-Week Work Detox Series
2. The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus
3. How Is Time Spending You?

In fact, if you take a look at the ideal week you created in the third post, with the 24 hour snapshot you made in the fourth, chances are you see quite a mismatch.

So, today your answers to three questions will help you zero in on what really needs to change.

What needs to stay in your life?

What’s already good that just needs to remain as is? Remember that change doesn’t mean throwing the baby out with the bath water.

What needs to go?

What are all the things you’re doing that have reached their sell-by date? What are the attitudes you’re holding onto, implicit in what you’re currently focusing on, that need to be ditched?

What one thing can you do right now to begin the process of moving away from these things?

What needs to be added to your life?

What’s missing that you need to start doing? How are you going to add these things? What’s the action you can take right now, today, that will get the ball rolling on this?

As you work through all three questions, think too about who can help you, and what resources you can lean on.

So, off you go and make some changes, not forgetting of course to share some of your decisions and insights with me.

Join me again on Friday, for a wrap-up discussion talking about how you keep your good intentions alive over the longer term. If you want to be sure not to miss it, sign up here to get it by email!

Earlier posts in the series

Introducing The Two-Week Work Detox

First, Set Yourself Goals

The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus

How Is Time Spending You?

photo credit: nnes

Related posts:

1. First, Set Yourself Goals
2. The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus
3. How Is Time Spending You?

But what are you currently focussing on?

You’ll get the answer to this question by looking at how you’re spending your time. Bottom line, if you’ve been feeling that work and life need a bit of a sort out, the chances are there’s a mismatch between what you should be focused on, and what you’re actually doing.

I take some of my coaching clients through this process in detail, and the occasional one says, “yes, but there are lots of things I have to do.” The thing is we don’t have to do anything. You may imagine that you have little choice about how you spend your time. That, my friend, is mistake number one. That, indeed, is allowing time to spend you. It’s giving over your focus to things that are not in keeping with who you are and what you say you want.

We’ll get into more detail about the whole mismatch thing in the next post.

But today’s exercise is all about getting to grips with what an average day in your life actually looks like.

A Day In The Life Of…

Over the next 24 hour, what I’d like you do, is step back and review your moment by moment activities. Set a half-hourly, recurring alarm using the timer on your computer, phone, watch or whatever. And when the buzzer goes, make a note of just how you’ve spent the last 30 minutes.

No need to analyse. No need to change what you do. Just observe and make notes.

Bring them back here on Wednesday, ready for the next stage in the process. If you want to be sure not to miss it, sign up here to get it by email!

What occurs to you as you set yourself the task of doing this exercise?

Earlier posts from the series:

Introducing The Two-Week Work Detox

First, Set Yourself Goals

The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus

photo credit: Robert von Bangert

Related posts:

1. Time Shifting For Success
2. How To Maintain Your Work Detox In 5 Minutes A Day
3. The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus

You may have noticed, as a few of the commentors did, that the questions around goals in the last post were deliberately open. They did not ask you to focus on your current job or your status quo life. They may have taken you, to use Marion Anderson’s words, into the realms on “how else…?” or “what else…?”  That’s fine.

If they didn’t it’s time to go back to your answers to those original questions and challenge yourself. Are you really stepping up to your own plate in the way you’ve approached them?

Off you go and check. I’ll be right here when you’re ready.

Ready?

Today’s key takeaway point

Goals only get realised when you decide you’re going to achieve them, and then put your focus and energy behind doing just that.

It’s that simple. If you say you want something, but you do something else, you’ll get something else. In which case you haven’t got goals, you’ve got fantasies.

Exercise

So, what are the things you must do to enable you to achieve your goals? Start off with a list, or a mindmap, or whatever works for you when you’re thinking freely. Then look at your list, and figure out the few things that, if you gave them all your attention, would really allow you to motor.

Then

What proportion of your time would you ideally need to spend on these things to see them gain traction?

Note, I’m not asking you to think about what proportion of your available time after you’ve done your job and all your other chores. I’m asking, blank sheet of paper, if you were reinventing your life – because, in a way, you really are – how much time do your key activities deserve?

Draw yourself a blank grid of seven days and map it out. Or, better still, download my Ideal Week pdf and use it.

Create your ideal week, step back and feel how good it is to see your life mapped out in front of you, full of the things you really want to be doing.

This is the blueprint you need to take your work detox to the next level on Monday. Meantime, have a great weekend and don’t forget to let me know how it’s all shaping up for you!

Introducing The Two-Week Work Detox Series

First, Set Yourself Goals

photo credit: Dominic Sayers

Related posts:

1. How Is Time Spending You?
2. First, Set Yourself Goals
3. Time Shifting For Success

Often at work and in life we become so accustomed to living out other people’s expectations of us we spend most of our time on automatic pilot doing task after task without consideration for whether it actually serves us any useful purpose or not.

What do you really, really want?

That’s really the crux of today’s post. Because unless you can answer that question clearly, and put your energy behind achieving it, you’re going to find it difficult to break free from any toxic work practices.

So, the first step of the detox process is to take time to figure out what your own goals are.

Now, I’m not asking you to regurgitate the targets you’ve agreed with your board or senior manager, or the goals you’ve written in your 2010 goal-setting form. They may – or may not – be part of the equation. Rather, I’m challenging you to think about yourself.

Here’s how.

Take half an hour or so – longer if you can – and set your imagination free. In your mind, picture yourself having the working life of your dreams:

• What are you doing?
• Where are you doing it?
• Who is working with you? What role are they playing in your picture?
• When are you doing it?
• How are you doing it?
• What purpose does this work serve in your life?
• How does it reward you?
• What else, other than work, is integral to this picture.
• Who, other than your work colleagues, are important to you in this picture.
• What are you thinking, and how are you feeling about considering your working life in this way?

That’s it for today, folks. The next post, and the next step in the detox process is coming up this Friday. Don’t miss it. Subscribehere for email updates.

If you want any help with this, email me at christine@adifferentkindofwork.com, pick up the phone on +44 (0) 7767 244977, or catch me on Twitter.

Oh, and don’t forget to leave a comment and let me know how you get on!

Introducing The Two-Week Work Detox Series

photo credit: TheMarque

Related posts:

1. How Is Time Spending You?
2. Time Shifting For Success
3. The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus

The problem is that, unless you do something fundamental to change your status quo, the feel good factor from your expensive break will last about two days.

Then you’re once more back on the hamster wheel, living only for your next break.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Welcome to The Two-Week Work Detox, a series of six articles coming to you over the next couple of weeks. It’s going to work like this:

• Each post will have a brief but chunky bit of content, followed by self-coach homework and/or questions.
• You’ll need something to capture your thoughts, ideas, and actions in. A funky notebook, a Moleskin, your iPad, laptop, or voice-recorder. Whatever works for you really.
• Tune in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for each update. Better still, make sure you’re subscribed to the blog to get each new post via email.
• Bring your courage, enthusiasm and determination to kick your work-life in the ass.

Sound good?

So, before we get started with the series, I’d love to hear what aspects of your working life you’d like to change? And how can this series help you achieve that?

photo credit: coolinsights

Related posts:

1. How To Maintain Your Work Detox In 5 Minutes A Day
2. First, Set Yourself Goals
3. How Is Time Spending You?

As I wrote elsewhere, James has the smartest way of looking at the world of anybody I know. I’ve been paying attention to the things that define him in the hope I can learn a thing or two.

Excitement

The term “zest for life” sounds like a cliché around this wee guy. He whoops and whirls and has this take-your-breath-away enthusiasm for things that’s just so compelling. We’ll be chilling in the garden, or walking along our little countryside pathways, when he’ll spot something. A kite flying directly overhead. A rabbit darting into a hedge. The wild ponies on the hill. His entire being lights up as he sees it and stops in his tracks mesmerised.

His sense of wonder in things is so refreshing.

And it makes me consider how much we take for granted in our adult world. How retrieving a sense of awe would feed the child in us.

Fun

My living room currently resembles an art studio. I’ve got quirky hand drawn posters of my village in one corner and a cast of toys lined up in another. My iPhone, Mac and music library have been commandeered for video making purposes. Not kidding, but this child is teaching me how to use iMovie

He squeals out loud when he finds something funny. There’s no self-judgement or monitoring.

And he causes me to think about how much – or, indeed, how little – we allow ourselves to unreservedly indulge our playfulness. How we sometimes just need to relax and allow a belly-laugh to knock something crazy into shape.

Spontaneity

Can’t do something we imagined we might? No problem for James, there’s always some other exciting possibility of where to direct his attention. Can’t do that walking route you’d mapped out because it’s raining? Let’s make another video, or even go into town and watch Toy Story 3.

“Holidays are for chilling,” he told me the other day as I was obviously getting a little too structured in my planning of things to do. So I backed off and let him chill.

His approach made me reflect on how often, when things don’t work out as we imagined, we get caught up in our disappointment, instead of putting our attention where things can work out for us.

“Are you having fun?” I asked him today.

“Yes,” he said.

“More so than when you’re at school?” I asked. Perhaps I was looking for admiration. Perhaps putting onto him my expectations that school would be boring, holidays not. Whatever, his reply surprised me.

“No,” he said. Huh.

“So, you like school and holidays equally?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“You’re pretty happy with life in general, whatever you’re doing?” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“What is it about life that you so enjoy, then?” I said.

He gave this question some serious thought. A flash of inspiration suddenly caught his face.

“Basically, I enjoy anything you can get yourself stuck into,” he said, smiling widely.

Flippin’ ten year old wisdom. You’ve got to love it!

Related posts:

1. The Last Summer Holiday You’ll Need?
2. How To Get Paid For Eating Chocolate Cake
3. How To Use The Turning Of The Seasons To Support Your Development

They spend years, not to mention thousands of pounds, on the next book, coach or workshop that offers the key to the holy grail.

Meantime they feel pretty miserable doing whatever it is they’re doing – or not – right now. And beat themselves up for being a lesser person because, unlike the zealous peddlars of the vocation myth, they haven’t found what work it is they’re really supposed to be doing.

Experiments

In working with clients having this experience, I encourage them to take all that forward-looking pressure off themselves and live in the present.

What if they could allow themselves to find something meaningful in what they’re doing right now?

What if they saw their current work or lack of it as an experiment, telling them something about themselves, their lives, and what they most enjoy?

What would they discover? How could they use that learning to course-correct their current situation, or future work decisions?

Not one calling but several

In my client work, as in my own life, I see time and time again how what we do shifts and morphs over time. The picture of vocation as a static, certain thing into which we can plough ourselves for endless years is misguided.

Sure, some people know early on that they’re called to be a doctor or singer or lawyer or whatever.

But for others it’s a discovery process of finding one jigsaw puzzle piece of ourselves after another in the different things we do. Without valuing the purpose of the bit we’re doing right now, we’ll never get to understand the full picture.

Implications

If you’re someone searching for your one big calling, I encourage you to sit and think about this today:

How might you be diminishing yourself by constantly yearning after some other thing than what’s right in front of you?

I’m not saying that there’s not something bigger waiting for you.

What I am saying is that, if you put yourself back into the flow of what you’re doing right now, you’re more likely to find it more quickly and more powerfully.

What do you think?

photo credit: alicepopkorn

Related posts:

1. The Birth of a New Work Pioneer
2. Doing Your Real Work
3. Split Work-Life Personality? Join The Club!

Photo credit: Steven Durbin Photography

If there’s one word I’ve heard clients use a lot recently, it’s the word reality.

It has come up as they’ve talked about what’s happening in their businesses right now. Because some of them are once more finding their pipelines to be a little short on flow. After a few months of order books starting to fill up again, they’re having another moment when the phones aren’t ringing.

Maybe it’s buyer uncertainty around how the new Cameron-Clegg coalition will pan out. Or market panic about the Eurozone crisis.

Whatever its cause, the return of relative silence brings back gut-wrenching, immobilising fear.

In coaching, clients want to put aside what they suddenly see as being the terribly indulgent work they’ve been doing on themselves.

“Right now I have to get back to reality,” they say.

Sometimes their tone is punishing. As if by supporting their personal development I’ve somehow lead them astray and am to blame for the stasis in their business development.

When I ask what getting back to reality looks like, they express different, pressing coaching needs.

“I’ve never really had to market myself before. Help me get my head round that.”

“I need to build my confidence in going into completely new networking situations.”

“Help me get over my fear of proactively calling people.”

These are the issues that are alive for them, and so we’ll go there. And yet I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t give voice to the panic that I intuit. Or question the clinging after control that I feel.

My clients are successful people in their own regard, irrespective of what hand life is currently dealing them. Whether they’re prepared to say so or not, they experience themselves as having much to lose. It’s not just money. It’s their reputation that’s at stake. Their power and influence. Their perceived competitive position versus peers and colleagues.

What has all the effort been for, if it can just all be swept away?

One guy told me of a dream he’d had. A nightmare, really. He’d been at the top of a mountain, and watched on, horrified, as a climber on an adjoining peak accidentally slipped on rubble and fell freely to certain death.

You don’t have to be an analyst to figure that one.

But such conversation takes coaching to a different place again. People want to move forward. At the same time they feel the weight of their own fears. Which need do they address?

Surely, I argue, the answer has to be both?

By all means, explore what you can do differently to open up your business-getting options. Look at your offering. Address your marketing weaknesses.

But don’t make the mistake of cutting off from yourself in the process. Don’t think that self-development is something you do after the crisis has passed.

Facing things in this way allows new questions to emerge:

• What responsibility might you be inappropriately shouldering for the current situation?
• What deep down failing do you fear is about to be unmasked?
• Who are you without your professional reputation and business persona?
• What gives your life meaning beyond this profession; this portfolio?

Life and nature bring times of uncertainty and silence. What if this lull was a normal, natural state of affairs? What qualities and resources in you, other than your cleverness and control, is it calling you to develop?

This is the opportunity in the silence: the chance to integrate; the chance to listen to your own soul.

Great, meaningful, deeply significant work happens when you really marinate in the meantime. It is not a distraction from the creative process, it is the creative process.

Pam Slim, Escape From Cubicle Nation

What silences have you faced recently? What opportunities have you allowed them to mean for you?

Related posts:

1. What If There IS No Work?
2. 7 Warning Signs That It’s Time To Quit Your Job
3. 4 Reframes To Get Your Career Groove Back

I don’t know about you, but for me the last three months have been pretty full-on. It has been a long and hard winter here in the UK, and I’ve felt as if I’ve been in a dark, if fun and productive, little cocoon.

It’s still biting cold. But driving back from the farmers’ market this morning, I could tell that spring is undeniably in the air. There are buds appearing on trees, lambs skipping in fields, and daffodils carpeting grass verges.

I’ve been looking forward to this UK Bank Holiday weekend as a chance to push back a little and have some well-earned rest. At the same time, I want to use the turning of the seasons as an opportunity both to acknowledge my gratitude for the one just leaving, and to anticipate the possibility in the one ahead. To experience things coming into being for me after a winter’s gestation. To feel myself at a point of further growth and potential. In short, to use it as a way of fostering my own and my business’s development.

The last months have been awesome and I feel really grateful for what they’ve given me. A chance to settle better into country life; the space to do the hard work to diversify my business so that it has more of a social media slant to it; the opportunity to form such incredible connections with people online who are making all of this such a joy.

At the same time I feel excited about what’s ahead. I have the prospect of building The Manifesto for New Work Pioneers, in collaboration with you, beginning just next week. And there are other irons in the fire too about possible speaking and other engagements that are going to help me connect on this and other themes that matter to professional people who are choosing to take a conscious approach to their working lives.

To flesh this out further, and get the full benefit of the spirit of the seasons’ handover, I’ve written myself a handful of self-coaching questions I’m going to be reflecting on over the weekend. As I haven’t yet come across virtual chocolate, I’d also like to offer them as my Easter gift to you. They won’t make you fat and they may even help you get yourself in a good mindset for the months ahead!

• What has been gestating for you over the last three months?
• What shoots of growth and change are you seeing in your life and in yourself as a result?
• What has enabled this, and for what are you grateful?
• How do you want things to grow and change for you from here?
• What do you need to do, think and  feel to ensure that you give yourself the best chance of manifesting your picture in the way you want and deserve?

I’d love to hear whatever you have to share. Meantime, have a good Easter.

Related posts:

1. Looking At Life Through The Eyes Of A Child