This morning as I was waking up and on that lovely edge of wakefulness and sleep, my mind was quite quiet and I just let myself lie there for a bit, snuggling into my duvet a bit more, on what was a cold frosty morning here. Then I had one of those sneaky little a-ha moments where suddenly the way to open a team-working workshop next week came into ... Read On
Giving feedback and understanding performance
Giving feedback: the task of a manager that most managers most detest! Oh, how easy it is to put it off and never quite get around to it (even though we all know that one of the golden rules of giving feedback is to make it timely). It doesn’t have to be that way. The trick is to be clear about what you want the conversation to achieve and to know ... Read On
Do your people get out of bed to do a shitty job?
Do your people really get out of bed to do a shitty job at work? Employee performance is something that has interested me for over 20 years and this is a conversation I’ve had hundreds of times over the years with managers at all levels and across numerous industries. What is going on when someone isn’t performing? When they’re not stepping up, ... Read On
Why stress is not a performance state
For so many people right now, managing stress continues to be a real challenge. Having good tools is essential to stress management - and actually it's not about managing stress, it's about transforming it. How we think about stress is the first step, and we need to understand that it doesn't have a role in true peak performance - at work or in any ... Read On
More on how to beat overwhelm at work
What I notice for a lot of people wanting to beat overwhelm, lower their stress and feel more control in their day, is that they’re not taking that control. They’re bobbing on an ocean of busy-ness, demands and distractions and going where the merry water will take them. They may occasionally try grabbing an oar and shuffling some water, hoping to ... Read On
How to beat overwhelm at work and rock the house
It turns out that I am excellent at overwhelm. I do it brilliantly, and sometimes it can be thoroughly paralysing. That feeling of, there is so much to do, it’s so overwhelming, I CAN’T DO ANYTHING. That has meant I have also learned over the years, the many ways to NOT DO OVERWHELM. Quite helpful I’ve found. Lately I’ve worked with a number of ... Read On
Three tips for truly switching off from work
If you’re like most people, life is busy, work is full, and it’s really easy to find that come the evening a bunch of mental post-it notes are whizzing around in your head vying for your attention while you’re innocently trying to bath the kids, read a book or chop vegetables. And then there’s the frazzled, fried feeling of being too tired to deal ... Read On
Don’t believe everything you think
You've probably had some brilliant thoughts go through your mind today. Perhaps you came up with a great solution to something, or heard yourself articulating an idea with marvellous flair Perhaps you've also had some thoughts today of the more ‘dodgy’ variety – I’m talking about worrying, what-iffing or giving yourself a hard time. Stuff like ... Read On
The risky business of ‘borrowed motivation’
For my whole childhood I was a fervent nail biter. And I don’t just mean that you’d occasionally see me with my fingers in my mouth. Oh no. I bit my dear little fingers down to stumpy skin and beyond. As I got a bit older I began to wish I could stop. And of course lots of people in my life had the same wish for me, and would quite incessantly tell ... Read On
Five things that will bring balance to your day
For those of us in the southern hemisphere at least, we’re at that time of the year where we’ve had a holiday, it’s summer and we’re a little in cruise mode, easing our way into work, and perhaps the workload hasn’t picked up yet. Things feel quite easy to keep in balance. That makes it a perfect time to start putting some simple practices in place ... Read On