We normally think of mindfulness as an antidote to the difficult things in life. But it’s also relevant when things are going well, for example on holiday. You see, our minds are wandering about 47% of the time. We pay good money to go away and get the finest experiences – the place, the weather, the food, and […]
Does Stress Awareness Help?
It’s National Stress Awareness Day. Taking the theme literally made me wonder – is it helpful to be aware of stress? My conclusion: “It depends!” It depends on what you bring your awareness to, and how you do it. Say you’ve just been landed with an additional big project, or someone just said something cruel about […]
Dawood’s Strengths
Dawood had been imprisoned and tortured in Iraq. He’d successfully escaped and made his way to Australia, but his problems were far from over. His social worker identified him as suffering from sleep problems, debt, gambling, relationship difficulties, a highly chaotic lifestyle and possibly depression. “Avoidance Mode” thinking would have him investigate each of these […]
Burnout – back from the brink
Stewart had been pushing himself for years – achieving great results, but at a price. He’d got used to being stressed, but now something very strange was happening. He felt like he’d gone into a vague cloudy world in which nothing really mattered. He’d completely lost his edge. Then he came for coaching – just […]
How Niklas resolved a 2 year deadlock in 5 minutes
As CEO of an IT consultancy, Niklas knows how crucial security is to his customers. Yet there was one potential issue he and his team had been grappling with for over 2 years. Despite 20 or 30 attempts, they hadn’t even been able to define the problem. Then he changed tack, and within 5 minutes […]
Double (or halve) People’s Creativity
When you’re leading, the way you communicate can make a huge difference to people’s creativity. In one mode, they can be twice as creative as the other. How so? Fleeing an Owl or Seeking out Cheese? In an experiment at the University of Maryland (Friedman & Forster 2001), students were asked to solve a simple puzzle. […]