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Tired Of Thinking Like An Ugly Sister? Step Into Your Cinderella Slippers and Rock!

Christine — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 12:14:03 +0000

It’s epidemic.

Smart, talented people, out of touch with how capable they are.

Waiting for some fairy godmother to come along and make it okay for them to wear the coveted crystal slippers.

You know how it is. The boss you want to endorse you. The client you want to adulate you. The community you want to follow you.

Of course, that’s not what you show the world. Out there you put your best face forward and get on with things. But behind the mask, the theater make-up is cracking.

You come to me because you feel you should be more than you are. Confident, successful, happy. A mixture of all three. You want to stop feeling so fearful and anxious about things that other professional people seem to sail through.

Cinderella, you just don’t get that the crystal slippers were yours and yours alone in the beginning.

And, while you’re getting your head round that last line, here’s a little more story to share how the metamorphosis from ugly sister to Cinderella happens.

Feeling phony

In the beginning you use words to describe yourself that bring tears to my eyes.

“I’m pathetic,” you’ll say. Or, “I’m crap.”

“Any moment now and I’ll be discovered for the phony person that I am,” you say.

Like your years of study count for nothing. Like your hard work has never been translated into great job offers, promotions and client wins. Like there’s not a group of folks around who have only solid respect for you.

Indeed, you share your surprise for the nice things people say about you. It confuses you. Doesn’t make sense.

I offer back your paradoxical positions. That other people rate you. That you don’t rate yourself.

You start to get a little curious of the gap.

The Gap

You start to see that it’s such a painful place to live. And yet you know it so well. It has been a constant throughout your life.

Except now it’s killing you. You’re tired of it. The energy required to keep managing the difference between the outside and inside you is huge, and taking its toll.

You do a little reading around or even talk to some other folks. There are badges you can wear to explain why it’s okay for you to think like you’re an Ugly Sister when you’re really Cinderella.

Control freak is one with which you identify. Closely followed by Perfectionist. There are loads of them in the business world. At least identifying with them gives you a faint sense of belonging.

Dig further and you might find some psychologists telling you that you have an Inferiority Complex. That you live in a perpetual state of needing to prove to yourself and others how good you are.

They may even snigger and nod and tell you that most of the people in top jobs and in positions of power have this kind of thing going on. That it’s what drives them to set higher and higher expectations for themselves from which other people benefit.

I ask you if these labels really serve you; if they really help assuage the tension in your soul. If they help the Cinderella locked inside, tending to the fireplace, when she really wants to go to the ball.

You tell me, “Not really.”

How come?

But you do want to understand how come Cinderella got locked away in the first place. And, en route to unleashing her, we spend some time on the backstory.

Often there’s the tale of the bright child whose ability was so taken for granted that you were never able to cement it in the foundations of your own being. The parent who always went looking for the missing 2% of a 98% exam success. And how you learned from this never to see how phenomenal your achievements are, but to focus instead on your inevitable human errors.

Alternatively, I hear the one about the parent whose own need to be validated and endorsed was ahead of yours, leaving your hunger for positive mirroring unsatisfied. So, that you learned to seek, but not to expect or take in, validation from folks you interact with.

Poor Cinders

I feel sorry for your pain.

But we don’t dwell there. Ugly Sister thinking may have held you back in the past, but it doesn’t mean you’re destined to feel like the poor relation forever.

So I ask you what was missing from back then that you need to give yourself right now.

“Permission to be okay,” you say. “No matter what.”

“Permission to sparkle and shine?”

As I ask you that, I see you cringe. You don’t want to be big headed and pseudo-egotistical like some of the people you brush up against.

So, I now challenge you with the polarity of your options. “On the one hand, you feel you need to disown your strengths. On the other, you think you have to rub them in people’s faces. Isn’t there another way?”

You shall go to the ball

You’re silent. Thinking. Daring to touch the gift of who you are.

“I suppose there’s also my own way,” you say.

“Your own way?”

“Yeah, just allowing me to be myself.”

“Stepping into your own Cinderella slippers and rocking?”

You laugh. You’ve changed state and I can hear and see it.

I ask you how it feels to connect with your own way.

“Liberating,” you say. “Like I’ve just cast off the weight of the world.”

“That’s because you have,” I say.

This is no fairy tale

Thing is, this is not a fairy tale. It’s the kind of place people get to in daring to do deep change work on themselves. It’s the kind of work I love being party to. And I’ve seen it for real, in different formats of this, in my life and work this week.

So how about you? Do you have what it takes to step out of Ugly Sister thinking and into Cinderella’s shoes.

Or are you going to keep waiting for someone else to do it for you?

photo credit: Denzil~

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Why You Need To Trust Yourself When The Wheels Come Off Your Career Wagon

Christine — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:48:09 +0000

What do you do when the wheels come off your career wagon?

That’s a question that brings a lot of people to me. People who’ve expected their work – and lives – to go in a certain direction. To have just the same enthusiasm today as they always had yesterday.

But then something happens.

Someone close gets very ill – or they themselves do. A relationship hits the rocks or, conversely, an unexpected one is kindled – an affair, perhaps. Unexpected performance feedback hits them deeply. A business they’ve expected to do well fails. Their job disappears, or is restructured in an alien way.

Maybe their passion for what they once did ebbs away and they have to confront the gnawing reality that something about them is changing.

Whatever, there’s suddenly a crisis of meaning. Life no longer bobs along in the same knowable, predictable way. Work just doesn’t feel the same or they don’t feel the same in it.

If you recognise yourself in this, you’ll recognise too the struggle to reassert yourself. You strive to get your energy and focus back to where they were, and you notice how exhausting that is. Because there is no going back, only forward.

You search for answers outside yourself; words of wisdom to buoy you up or give you some structure. These may work for a while, but sooner or later you have to admit to yourself that they’re not the real deal.

The decision to trust yourself

The only solution that in my experience really works, is to look inside yourself for the direction you need to take now, and for the resources that will help you. There’s so much noise out there. So many gurus with The Answer that it’s difficult to trust that your own being knows more about you than they ever could. But that’s how it is.

Of course such discovery work is often best done with a guide; someone who knows this territory and can help you make sense of and give shape to your journey. But the starting point for it is always you, and the self-belief that you can get yourself out of whatever porridge you feel you’re currently wading through.

Trusting yourself starts with a clear decision. Sure, it sounds easy, and does hard. But once you’ve made that decision you’ll be amazed at how your own and other people’s energy mobilise to take you forward differently. You need to be ready to pay attention to all of the subtle as well as obvious ways that will happen. The longer you hesitate, the longer you stagnate.

So, what about you? What’s stopping you in your tracks right now? How would trusting yourself help you move forward? What are you waiting for?
photo credit: ganesha.isis

How Safe Is Your Career From Extinction?

Christine — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 12:27:10 +0000

With temperatures reaching 20 degrees centigrade, it’s been summer again over the weekend here in the South of England. But, with David Cameron’s call for us to pull together to get Britain back on track, at the same time as Civil Service Unions were negotiating redundancy payment terms that could allow up to 100,000 job losses, there’s no doubt that winter is on the way.

Some of my people are right in the middle of this, already feeling destabilized and wondering what it all means.

Others are working for firms who have made a living from selling to the public sector, and are feeling a draft as budgets for IT, consultancy, recruitment, advertising and other services are slashed.

I’m imagining that the UK government believes the slack they’re about to pump into the system will be picked up by the private sector. But that’s certainly not what’s happening in the US, where 64,000 new private sector jobs, were significantly outweighed by 159,000 US Government job losses in September. And although there’s upturn in some UK companies, I’m still hearing stories of folks having just survived third and fourth rounds of cuts.

With all of this going on, I fear that we’re about to live through the death of certain traditional professional, administrative and support service jobs. It’s the twenty first century equivalent of the demise of the mining industry. But it’s likely to be even more insidious because the skill sets involved are associated with less obvious or tangible outcomes. There will be no silent pit heads; no derelict mines. The wastelands will be more virtual and emotional.

And I suspect too that my focus here on the public sector is only the tip of an iceberg. That we’ll only understand the full impact of our respective governments actions on the shape and nature of jobs and careers as their whole economy-saving measures unfold.

Still, it’s a very real and current problem. How confident are you that you can take your years of highly specialized training and experience and find a home for them elsewhere?

Dinosaur or phoenix?

I sure don’t have all the answers, but it seems to me that as the world of work morphs from the known to the unknown, we each have an individual choice about how we frame our response to the challenge.

Will we be dinosaurs, doing nothing other than keeping our heads down and imagining that the problem will blow over? Or that catastrophe is inevitable?

Or will we be phoenixes? Will we choose to understand that life may indeed be burning our current way of working to a pile of ashes. But that we can use a metaphoric death to give us new energy, vitality and sense of direction?

Assuming you choose the latter, there are things you can do now to ride with the tide of reinvention.

Conventional solutions

For a start there are some conventional things you should be doing as standard. Like doing a stock-take of yourself, your skills and your personal qualities, and putting together a compelling CV or resume. My friend Julie Walraven is a phenomenal resource in helping you get market-ready. She’s also brilliant in supporting you to pitch for things you decide to target, and in helping you use social media in the process, especially LinkedIn.

These things help to build your confidence and get you thinking about how you might reorient yourself for different jobs that use your current skills set.

Unconventional solutions

But these are unconventional times. So, in addition to having good basics in order, let the threat of change give you the permission you need to think laterally and creatively about what you do for a living.

So, you may be a department manager in the civil service right now, and could apply for general management jobs elsewhere. But what else could you do?

What else would you love to do?

What areas of growth do you see opening up that could allow you to use your talents in radically different ways?

What’s small now that’s going to get bigger?

How could you think about work differently than you have in the past and what does that unlock for you?

And don’t just think about what you’d do. Consider how you’d do it.

If you were working your notice, with a threatened layoff now about to become reality, what would you be doing differently? How would you be prioritizing work versus family, friends and interests?

How would you manage your time differently to give you more of the balance you’ve been looking for?

How would you play political games differently so that you felt less taken for granted by your bosses?

Even before the latest scenario on public sector jobs, I was talking about a band of folks who’d already taken it upon themselves to recreate their relationship with work. This most recent development is but another catalyst in a sea of change.

Don’t wait till the economy or the government decide that your career is extinct to act. Get your own plan and start bringing it to life today. Even if you end up keeping your job, you’ll feel a hundred times better about it if you’re in the driving seat.

What changes are you seeing in your area of career expertise? What’s the challenge in that for you and how are you responding?

photo credit: Radio Saigón

How To Maintain Your Work Detox In 5 Minutes A Day

Christine — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:00:57 +0000

Post six of The Two-Week Work Detox Series, and by now some of the angst and overwhelm you’d been feeling about work is starting to recede as you whip your work and life into shape.

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!

Time Shifting For Success

Christine — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 11:00:45 +0000

If you’ve been reading The Two-Week Work Detox Series, and following along with the exercises, I suspect you’re already starting to suss out that how you’re focussing your time and energy right now is out of step with what you really want.

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

How Is Time Spending You?

Christine — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 11:00:32 +0000

So, if you’ve been following The Two-Week Work Detox Series, you’ve built a picture of what you want from your worklife, and what you need to focus on to achieve it.

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

The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus

Christine — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 11:00:42 +0000

If you’ve been following The Two-Week Work Detox Series so far, you’ll have a good idea now of what you want to achieve from your working life.

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

First, Set Yourself Goals

Christine — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:00:31 +0000

This is the second post in The Two-Week Work Detox, a series of 6 posts coming at you this week and next.

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

Introducing The Two-Week Work Detox Series

Christine — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 11:00:31 +0000

Like I said in The Last Summer Holiday You’ll Need, a lot of people around me are frazzled right now, and ready for a holiday.

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

Looking At Life Through The Eyes Of A Child

Christine — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:00:33 +0000

My most favourite nephew in the world is staying with me this week from Glasgow. He also happens to be my only nephew in the world, but that makes him more, not less special. Suffice to say, we’ve been having a lot of fun.

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!