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By Karen Amos

I just thought I’d share a few thoughts following Social Enterprise Yorkshire and Humber’s interesting and stimulating 2018 annual conference. The theme was ‘Positive Disruption‘.

It was a great opportunity as a coach to build resources to help shape thinking, change mindsets and encourage positive, creative future change.

Here are just a few quick points I picked up:

• To be Positive Disruptors, we need to be good leaders of people.
• Positive Disruption often starts with just one person, who speaks up that something isn’t working and who wants to do something different about it.
• It’s about being ambitious and not always going for the ‘low hanging fruit’.
• Don’t make assumptions – ask questions – start conversations – collaborate – connect.
• Change behaviour by changing viewpoints and mindsets – create a ‘new normal’.
• Don’t jump to finding solutions before you’ve worked out what you’re trying to solve.
• Look outside your current industry or situation for patterns, similar issues and solutions that you can apply to your problem.
• Be passionate about what you do and believe there’s a better way when you encounter problems and difficulties.

Disruption is an oft-used term at the moment, but it was clear to me that we all have the power to make change if we care enough.

Thanks to Kathryn Sowerby, Shaun Doran, Sarah Armstrong, Joe Micheli, Richard MacCowan and Elliott Turnbull for sharing their thoughts and ideas.

Karen Amos is the owner of BrightBird Coaching & Training and is a qualified Executive Coach and Professional Development Trainer.

OK, so it’s time to turn off the cat videos and knuckle down to some work…

You know those jobs that you put off, when you convince yourself that dusting the skirting boards is oh so important? Well it’s time for me to finish off my ILM 7 Executive Coaching Diploma assignment. I’ve already gained the certificate qualification and love my work, but it’s so hard to find the motivation to sit down and get on with it sometimes.

Here’s a tip if you’re struggling to find motivation… create what we coaches call leverage for yourself. There are two ways of doing this – positive and negative.

Positive leverage is where I remind myself how great I’ll feel when I’ve achieved my Diploma and can give myself a reward for this.

Negative leverage is often more powerful and involves imagining the negative consequences of NOT doing my assignment – e.g. I won’t gain my qualification, I’ll be disappointed in myself, it’ll be hanging over me for ages….

It’s important you really reinforce both of these scenarios visually and also really tune in to what you’ll feel like. Make it as real as possible.

Right… now to turn social media off and get down to work!

Have a good day, no matter what you choose to do!

Karen Amos is the owner of BrightBird Coaching & Training and is a qualified Executive Coach and Professional Development Trainer. 

To find out more about how BrightBird can help you and your business, school, or organisation, visit our website at www.bright-bird.co.uk

The latest figures from the Office of National Statistics show that in 2016, 137.3 million working days were lost to sickness or injury in the UK.  Of these, stress, depression and anxiety accounted for 7.7%. (‘Serious Mental Health Problems’ were counted in a separate category) That’s over a million days lost.

The cost of this isn’t purely financial, there are also other impacts which are often more difficult to quantify.  These include high staff turnover, lack of productivity and low levels of motivation and morale amongst teams, along with the risk of longer-term and serious mental health and physical wellbeing issues.

Stress is often now seen as an inevitability.  A recent survey in the not-for-profit sector showed 79% of staff stating stress is a fact of life in their work and 46% saying they feel stressed all or most of the time.  Just check back on those figures again – nearly 4/5ths accept stress as a fact of life and nearly half feel stressed all or most of the time.

Having managed teams for over 20 years, I know that circumstances, often out of our control, can have a negative impact on staff and teams.  My own past experience of suffering severe stress and seeing the effects on others drives me to do what I do, to ensure people have as positive a working life as possible.  After all, we spend so much of our time at work and many of you will know that negative experiences at work frequently spill over into our personal lives.

I believe there are two issues to address here – communication and responsibility.  The responsibility for work-place wellbeing lies with everyone.  With the employee to flag up any issues and difficulties and to be willing to take positive action to resolve these.  With the employer/manager to truly acknowledge difficulties and challenges faced by the staff team and to be willing to give genuine, positive support and assistance where needed.

As a coach, I often find that a recurring barrier to a positive working life is lack of communication.  Employees often don’t speak to their managers about their difficulties for a variety of reasons, for example being afraid of damaging career prospects, appearing incompetent, or even negative past experiences.  Everyone makes assumptions that staff/managers ‘should know‘.  A recent report called Thriving at Work, recommends employers encourage better communication and involvement and routinely monitor employees’ mental health and wellbeing.  Remember, ‘monitor’ isn’t about forms and clipboards, it could be as simple as a manager taking time out to ask employees genuinely how things are going and being prepared to take supportive and positive actions to resolve any difficulties.  Lack of communication can become self-perpetuating, whereas building positive communication and problem-solving approaches can produce a ‘virtuous cycle’ of increased engagement, wellbeing and productivity.

Karen Amos is the owner of BrightBird Coaching & Training.  She is a qualified Executive and Professional Development coach and trainer.

Want to know more?  Check  out BrightBird’s open training workshops on Manage Stress and Build Personal Resilience and also Time Management and Work-Life Balance.  To find out more and to book, please click on the link – www.bright-bird.co.uk/book-a-course

If you’d like to know more about Brightbird’s professional development services and how we can help you and your business, school or organisation, please check out our website at www.bright-bird.co.uk, or email [email protected]

And find out exciting news about our forthcoming alliance with GEM Compliance Training and Yvonne Sinclair Consultancy.

Well here I am – clear evidence that not all people in business are Richard Branson… I’ve several deadlines to hit this week, so taking bank holiday off, just isn’t an option. This isn’t so unusual for me and many other self-employed people, but the problem is today I’ve got the dreaded accounts to finish.

Yes, like many people, this is far from my favourite job, but of course it has to be done and my lovely accountant is eagerly awaiting the finished item, ready for our meeting in a few days time. (Amazingly it appears some people actually choose to do this stuff).

Prof. Steve Peters has a brilliant way of getting yourself to do things you wouldn’t usually want to do. He calls it ‘giving your chimp a banana’. The very basic tenet here is that your inner chimp is the bit of you that wants to go play/sleep/[insert own non-account-based activity here] – in other words chimps do NOT like accounts. One way of getting around this is to do a bit of a deal with your chimp. Prof. Peters calls this ‘Giving your chimp a banana.’ In basic terms this is you saying, ‘Hey chimp – I know you’re not happy, but if you sit here quietly and let me do these pesky accounts, then afterwards we’ll go out and play/socialise/[insert own chimpish, fun-based activity here].

This has the added advantage of getting the important, but boring stuff done, but also ensures you get to schedule the nice stuff in too!

So whatever you’re doing, hope you’re having/had a good bank holiday weekend. Now where’s my stapler…

If you’d like to know more about Prof. Peters’ work, I can highly recommend his book – Peters, S. (2012). The Chimp Paradox. London. Vermillion.

Tony Robbins often coins the phrase, ‘If you lie down with dogs, you get fleas’ and this, I think is the moral of my tale – not that I am saying Malcolm has fleas mind you – but rather, had I have hired an electric bike, or done the easy-peasy routes with the less advanced cyclists, I’d have never have improved (or had such a good time). What actually happened is that Malcolm would hurtle ahead of me on his bike and I’d rattle along behind, doing my best to keep up, but knowing that because he’d done it, it was in fact possible. As a result, I raised my game and got WAY out of my comfort zone.

But here’s the really interesting point I think – every time I broke that comfort zone barrier, that became my new ‘normal’. It really didn’t take time after time to do this, just doing something once became just ‘what I do’. This I believe, is the real key to personal improvement of any kind – growth and development will only come hand in hand with some discomfort or difficulty if it is to be truly meaningful and worthwhile, whether that’s in business, professional life, or just life in general.

So what’s your next challenge – and who are you going to enlist to help you get there?

I’m recently back from a super holiday in the French Alps and wanted to share a few coaching related musings I’ve had on my travels.

As I possess the boredom threshold of a small butterfly if sat on a beach, I’d been looking forward to an exciting fortnight of mountain biking and hiking.

The problem is I’m not actually that good at mountain biking, having a ‘More Enthusiasm Than Ability’ approach to most of my hobbies. The plan was that we’d stay in one of the ski resorts, which double as mountain bike destinations in the summer. A fantastic idea I thought – ‘get a ski lift to carry my bike up, then it’s all downhill from there’. Literally!

Having grown to the dizzy heights of 4 feet 11 inches in my 49 years, I guess I’m what could be called ‘diminutive’ in the mountain bike world. Especially when we arrived in resort to find clouds of testosterone filling the bike scene, with full suspension bikes, full-face helmets and body armour being de rigueur. I’m not sure anyone really noticed me with my little blue bike, complete with bell (I don’t really use the bell, but I like the dinging noise when I go over a bump!). Up I trotted to the ski lift, before promptly getting it stuck in the barrier because I went through the wrong way. (Much to the amusement of the trés cool barrier attendant – yes, laughter does transcend all boundaries!)

What I did find however, was that I became a ‘non-person’. My partner Malcolm, would ask for directions, or advice on the difficulty of a trail and the other mountain bikers would happily chat away to him, completely ignoring my presence. The final straw came when I asked a guy in an adjacent campervan to ours about his ride, for him to say, ‘Are you the pit crew?’

So what to do? I was pretty annoyed at myself for caring, but also quite intrigued about the assumptions that were being made. I then came up with a cunning plan/social experiment – if I made myself look more like the others, they’d think I was a good rider like them! Having ruled out growing a foot in height overnight as being a bit impractical, I trotted off to buy a biking jersey like everyone else’s, which I promptly named my ‘Rufty-Tufty Jumper’.

I saw this post on social media and thought, ‘Wow!’ This is so powerful and really taps into our personal values and why, when these are compromised, we find ourselves in difficult situations, working under pressure and often, increasing stress.

Whilst there are obvious practical difficulties with ‘doing the right thing’, particularly in large businesses and organisations, imagine the freedom of being able to live to your personal values and at least begin to voice what’s ‘right’. Remember, change has to start somewhere and your voice alone has the power to influence and begin a process that could improve things for the benefit of many…