The Swamp of Good Intentions

Well, it’s nearly the end of March so we’re almost a quarter of the way through the year. It only seems a few weeks ago that we were celebrating Christmas! I hope the first part of the year has gone well for you.

If things haven’t gone to plan it could be because you’ve got bogged down in the Swamp of Good Intentions. Let me explain.

I’ve recently teamed up with Sarah Wilson of Perspectives on Business (www.perspectives-on-business.co.uk) to run a series of business development workshops. Last week we were working together on the content of the first workshop and we were thinking about the action plans that we’ll be encouraging the delegates to take away with them. So, we were talking about goal setting and Sarah mentioned an idea called SWAMP. Now at first I thought this was an acronym (a variation of SMART perhaps) but I was wrong. In fact it refers to the swamp of good intentions that we can be sucked into if we set our actions plans too far into the future and place too much reliance on others to complete the action. In a nutshell, if we stray too far into the swamp our chances of achieving the goal can reduce significantly. Here’s a diagram that I hope illustrates it:

It’s an interesting idea and I’ll be keeping this in mind as I plan my activities in future. I’m sure, like me, that you don’t want to get mired in the swamp.

Best wishes

Neil

We’re Half Way Through the Year

The other day I was listening to Bon Jovi on the radio belting out “Living on a Prayer”. For those of you not familiar with this classic the chorus goes something like:

“Whooooah, we’re half way there;
Ohhhhh, Livin’ on a prayer”

Great lyrics, I’m sure you’ll agree. And this reminded me that we are of course now half-way through the year. So it’s a great time to review how things are going. Here are a few suggestions to think about:

• How close are you achieving the goals you set yourself at the start of the year?
• What’s left to do?
• What’s changed?
• What’s not gone to plan and what can you learn from it?
• How have you celebrated the things that you’ve achieved?

So, have a think about this and then give me a call to book a free one-hour session to get the second half of your year off to a flying start.

I look forward to hearing from you

Very best wishes

Do you want to transform your life?

Hello, I hope you had a great Easter. I just wanted to let you know about an exciting new service that I’m launching today…

…but if your life is perfect then this is not for you.

If not, then I can help.

We all encounter issues in our life.  Often we’ll soldier on knowing that things could be better, but never getting round to doing anything about it.

Well if that sounds familiar then now’s the time to take action and my personal check list is a great place to start.

You can down the checklist from here:

http://bit.ly/10pIy7L

Go through the checklist and then contact me to book a free 1 hour coaching session to review the results and take the next step to transforming you life

Take the first step to a better life today.

Best wishes

Neil

A Very Special Offer

Happy New Year

I hope that you had a great Christmas and that 2013 has started really well for you.

To help make it go even better I have a very special offer for you.

For limited period I’m offering you a free one hour coaching session.

You can use it for whatever is important to you. It could be:

• A long held ambition that you want to achieve
• Something you want to change in 2013
• Talk through some ideas
• Kick start your year in a positive way
• Or just review where you’ve got to and where you could take your life next

The only conditions are that you need to book it by 15 February and take the session before the end of March.

So, whatever it is that you want to achieve this year, get in touch with me now to book your place.

Best wishes

Neil

The Answer is 42

I have a confession to make. I am a big fan of Douglas Adams’s cult sci-fi comedy The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I was hooked as a teenager in the late 1970’s by the original radio series and remained a fan through its various incarnations over the years which includes books, TV series (oh dear) and  a film – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy

So what has this got to do with anything? Well, the other day one of Douglas Adams’s lines came into my head. It is:

“If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliway’s, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?”

Now you may not have managed six impossible things this morning but I’ll bet that you have accomplished many things that at first you thought were impossible.

We often impose constraints and limits on ourselves that can mean that we miss out on potentially wonderful opportunities. Our internal critic pipes up and can trigger off negative thought processes. We might be thinking things like:

“I can’t do this”

“I’m not up to it”

“This is impossible”

“I might as well forget it”

Now, self-doubt is perfectly normal and actually is probably essential to stop us behaving recklessly, but the problem is most of these limiting beliefs are simply not true. If you notice these kind of thoughts crossing your mind, try replacing them with positive alternatives such as:

“I can do this”

“I can handle this”

Better still, say these things out loud – and mean it (it’s a good idea to do this somewhere private to avoid funny looks!)

A good example is Sir Roger Bannister, the first person to run a mile in under 4 minutes in 1954. He did this despite many people, including doctors and scientists claiming that that this was impossible and you’d be putting your health at serious risk if you tried. He clearly didn’t believe this and proved them all wrong. Hundreds of people have now achieved this feat.

So, go out there and achieve the impossible today.

(and for those of you who are not Hitch-Hiker fans 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything)

It’s Spring Cleaning Time

Your Personal Spring Clean

Despite some unexpected snow last week we’re now well into spring.  Up here in the hills the daffodils are out and the lambs are playing in next door’s field. So as it’s spring time, it must be time for some spring cleaning.

As well as tidying up our home it’s also a great time to do a personal spring clean – clearing out the things that are no longer required, making room for anything you may want to do more of (or anything new you want to start) and get ready for the summer.

A lot of us hold onto clutter – both in our homes and in our lives. If you’ve got too much clutter in your life, now is a great time to deal with it. These could be things you’ve wanted to do but haven’t had the time and space to start, issues that you know you need to deal with, but haven’t addressed yet, or you just want to take stock.

By sorting though the jumble you may come across something really important and valuable that you’d forgotten about.

So get ready to spring forward, make the most out of the longer days and (hopefully) warm weather.

And if you’re ready for a personal spring clean give me a call for a free 40 minute coaching session to really get moving.

Remember: If the cupboard is full you have to take some things out if you want to put something new in.

Excuses, Excuses

I like making to-do lists. Well, perhaps like is too strong, but I find them very useful. Like most people these days I’m very busy and I haven’t got the greatest memory, so the to-do lists help me keep track of the important things that I want to do. I also find it satisfying to cross things off the list when I’ve completed the task.

Anyway, the other day I was glancing through one of the notebooks that I use for these lists and I had a bit of surprise. Through the crossings out between “finish painting airing cupboard” and “empty compost heap” was what looked like “excuses”. I was perplexed as I tried to remember why I thought I needed to create a load of excuses, after all it’s many years since I needed to play the dog ate my homework gambit. However, after a bit of squinting at my raggedy handwriting I solved the mystery. What I’d actually written was “exercises” (related to a foot injury I had).

This episode got me thinking about excuses and how we often make them to avoid doing things. Sometimes this is not a problem as the “thing” we are not going to do is of little or no importance. But often – I would suggest most of the time – these excuses prevent us from doing really important things – even things that can change our lives. What’s even worse is that these excuses usually reinforce very negative perceptions that we have of ourselves – and they are usually WRONG. For example:

“I can’t give up smoking/lose weight/get fit because I haven’t got the willpower” – you almost certainly do have this

“I really want to change my job/start that college course/turn my business idea into reality/ take up scuba diving, but the time isn’t right” – when is the right time? If it’s something important to you then the right time is almost certainly now.

“There’s no point in me applying for that job because I’m almost certain not to get it.” Well, the best way to guarantee failure is to give up and approaching a task with the expectation of failure is the next best thing. And of course when we do fail it gives us the chance to say “I told you so” to ourselves. To quote Henry Ford “Whether you think you can or that you can’t you are usually right.”

Like most of us I’ve trotted out plenty of these excuses myself over the years. For example, we’ve been renovating our house since we moved in four years ago. We’ve now almost finished the work but if I’d listened to my inner voice I wouldn’t have started. I lost count of the number of times I thought “I can’t do that!” when confronted with the next big task, but each time I proved myself wrong and did it.

There’s double benefit to this. Not only do you get more done, but as you do more things that you initially doubted you could achieve your confidence will grow.

So next time you find yourself avoiding something take a moment to think about why this is the case. Pay heed to that inner voice – what is it telling you? There may well be very good reasons not do something that make perfect sense. Just make sure that they are reasons and not excuses that don’t really reflect reality and only serve to hold you back.

Good luck

What Do You Think I Do?

Are you getting your message across?

Well in the past I wasn’t.

Over the years that I’ve been coaching, several people (who hadn’t been coached by me) told me that they didn’t understand what I did. Occasionally when I’ve been feeling brave I’ve asked them what they think I do – and I’ve received some weird and wonderful answers! Clearly I wasn’t getting my message across well enough so I made some changes to address this. Job done, or so I thought…

Now, fast forward to last December and the launch of this blog. Well, to celebrate this I offered a number of free coaching sessions. I’m glad to say that these went like the proverbial hot cakes and have proved really useful for the people who took them up. Unexpectedly they also proved very useful for me, particularly for the feedback I had from one of the people I coached.

I’m paraphrasing but what they told me after the session was: “I now understand what you do. You should do this all time so people can really find out what coaching can do for them.”

Well, I’ve taken their advice and from now on I’m offering a free, 40 minute telephone coaching session for all prospective clients. This is a proper coaching session on issues that are important to you – not an extended sales pitch from me. There’s absolutely no charge for this, nor any obligation on you to sign up for a coaching programme with me.  If it’s not for you that’s fine.

This gives you the chance to really find out what coaching is, the tremendous benefits it can deliver, and fundamentally if it’s something that’s right for you.

So as part of my effort to give you all  a very clear explanation of what coaching is about I sat down to write a definition (If you search the web you’ll find some very worthy and wordy explanations of what coaching is about, but I prefer to keep things simple.) My definition of what I do is:

“I enable people to identify the things that are really important to them in life and take actions to turn their goals into reality.”

So if that sounds interesting get in touch with me to book your free coaching session

Best wishes

Neil

Forget About Your Goals

Last time I wrote about New Year’s resolutions and some of the pitfalls that prevent us from achieving them.  Well we’re now well into 2012 so I thought I’d share some other ideas I have about what we can do to increase our chances of achieving the goals we set ourselves.  In a nutshell what I suggest is:

Forget about the goal…

Have I gone mad? Well, read on and then judge for yourself.

Actually, that’s only half of my suggestion, the rest of it is:

…and focus on the activities that will take you to your goal.

So, what am I driving at? Here’s an example.

One of my goals this year is to lose weight and get fitter. Let’s say that my goal is to lose two stone in weight by July 2012. Not a bad goal and reasonably SMART, but July is a fairly long way off and there’s a good chance that I may lose motivation well before then (as I have in the past when I’ve attempted to slim down).

So what I plan to do is to forget about this distant goal and concentrate on the activities instead – the things that I need to do – repeatedly – that will take me towards my goal.

So for me I will:

1. Reduce (or even eliminate) my consumption of less healthy foods (beer, biscuits, cakes, etc.)
2. Moderate the size of meals I eat (from huge to merely large)
3. Do more exercise (particularly cycling and walking)

Clearly this is no quick fix! The trick is to work out the right activities (deciding to sit down more and increase my consumption of chocolate chip muffins wouldn’t cut the mustard) and then repeat them – to stick at it over a long period of time and not give up. So, if I do these three things consistently for the next 7 months I’ve a good chance of achieving my goal.

So, forget your goal, but work out the activities you need to do and keep doing them.

Good luck and to quote Winston Churchill “Never give in. Never give in.”

Welcome

Hello and welcome to my blog, I really hope you enjoy it.

Over the coming weeks and months I’ll be sharing my thoughts with you on a range of topics, but usually related to my special interests, which are:

Personal success and making the most of every second we have to achieve that success. I’d love to know what you think so please do leave your comments.

To celebrate the launch of my blog I have a very special offer for you:

I’m offering 6 half price coaching programmes to the first 6 people who contact me at: contact@neilrosecoaching.co.uk

This offer applies to all my coaching programmes: face to face, telephone or e-mail and is on a first come first served basis. See the Services page for details of the coaching programmes I offer.

New Year’s Resolutions

To kick off the New Year I’ve been thinking about New Year’s resolutions. I have to admit that I’ve never had much success with these. I’ve made plenty over the years and they were usually things that I’d dreamt up in the early hours of New Year’s Day after a few celebratory beverages. Needless to say I rarely achieved them, as in the sober light of day they tended to be about things that weren’t really that important to me.

So, by all means make New Year’s resolutions but make sure they’re the right ones. There’s nothing  more demoralising than making a long list of things you want to do and then failing to achieve any of them.

My three top tips for reducing the risk of failure if you decide to set some New Year’s resolutions are:

1. Focus on things that are really important to you and will make a big difference when you achieve them. This will help you maintain your momentum. On a scale of 1 to 10 how committed are you to achieving it? If you don’t score it as a 10 the chances are that you won’t achieve it – what could you do to make it a 10?
2. Make sure that they are consistent with your personal values. You’ll quickly lose motivation if they’re not. For example you might say that you’re going to join  a gym and get fit, but find that at the times when you are able to visit the gym (say, first thing in the morning, or after work) that you’d rather do other things (like spending time with your family)
3. Be realistic about timescales. Most of us tend to be wildly optimistic about how long it will take to achieve things so take some time to think through what will be involved. And when you think you’ve worked out how long it will take, add a bit more time on for the unexpected events that always happen.

Whether or not you decide to set yourself some New Year’s resolutions I wish you a happy, healthy and successful 2012.