Tag: Fulfillment

Today is referred to as Bonfire Night in the UK to remember the plot to blow up parliament by radical men who wanted to create change in their country. They saw the parliament as an obstacle to the country they wanted to have.

There is a Zen proverb which states “The obstacle is the path.” Guy Faulks and his men, who tried to blow up parliament, may have agreed with this proverb, but taking lives and destroying property is never the right path

What I think the proverb means is that when we face difficulties in our lives, such as writer’s block, overwhelming workloads, or social anxiety then we should lean into the difficulty. Freezing or running from our difficulties will only give them strength.

Make the decision to move towards difficulty and seek support from those around you, as well as upskilling yourself by reading books or accessing online resources. You will grow in confidence and the difficulty that was magnified by your mind becomes something you can break down into small chunks and you can find a way forward. Go, go and be your best self and you will get to the other side.

Means To An End

It is often said that a particular action or actions are a means to an end, usually meaning that the means are unpleasant or undesirable but they will lead to the end result that is wanted.

The problem with this well warn approach is that it is seen by many as an excuse for poor behaviour. There is also the assumption that the means by which we reach the end don’t really matter.

I would argue that the means are more important. We all need something to aim towards, otherwise we can go around in circles and not get anywhere. However, how we act will dictate all of our relationships. If we take take take from those around us, because it is a means to an end, then the relationships we have will break down and trust drops off.

What I am advocating for is what you might call morally right behaviour. It could also be called ‘being a nice person.’ Rather than seeing people as commodities to exploit, see them as human beings.

I am also advocating for you to do work that matters, work that lift others up and makes positive change in the world. It requires an infinite mindset not a finite one. It requires means with excellence.

Disagree More

Often we spend time with those we agree with on the majority of things we have an opinion on. This is good, in that we are spending our time with like minded people, but if we rarely disagree with anyone we can find it difficult to do so and maintain a positive relationship when a disagreement arises.

Social media also does not help with this for two reasons. Firstly, if we disagree with someone that we interact with on social media then we can find it easy to go on a full on rant, as we are not face to face with them, or we can ‘ghost’ them by unfriending and blocking them. An easy solution that does not resolve the disagreement.

Secondly, the content we see on social media is collated to show things similar to what we have liked, commented on and even spoken about within earshot of our device. Google is always listening. This is because the social media companies are selling our attention to the those who pay for it. Our attention is a commodity.

This creates a kind of echo chamber where we only hear our own views reflected back at us in the content we see. This removes the opportunity to develop the skills to disagree with someone respectfully, as many people spend more time online than they do interacting with people face to face.

My advice would be to spend more time interacting with people face to face and to practice disagreeing with them respectfully. Debate topics with people that you trust to be respectful back.

When the opportunity arises to give a different point of view, do it, because what you have to say may well be valuable. We learn more from each other through debate than we do through simply agreeing to avoid conflict. It is not an easy skill to master, but an essential skill to be successful in life.

Don’t Look For A Mentor

This is something that I picked up from Seth Godin. I have been watching a lot of interviews with him on YouTube and there are many wise insights to be had, and this is just one of them.

A lot of performance coaches and motivational speakers will tell you to go and find a mentor who is doing what you want to do and ask them to mentor you. The point Seth Godin has is that the number of people who could be mentors is small and the number of people who are looking for a mentor is high, so the likelihood of getting a mentor to support you is really low.

It is better to find Heroes. Find someone who is doing what you want to do and use the internet to find out what they had to do to get to where they are and reverse engineer your own success.

It is easier to find a ‘hero,’ or more than one, and the insights that their journey and daily practice can provide are freely available, if you do the research. This is a better approach because it has better odds of succeeding and you can do it today.

Sometimes people will use the excuse of not being able to find a mentor to let themselves off the hook, so they don’t have to do the demanding and scary work of putting themselves and their work out there into the world. Be brave, find a hero and do the work you need to do to move forward.

Being Together

Happiness, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Yesterday we went to a Halloween party as a family. The children played musical statues and musical chairs and everyone ate well, danced and had a great time. It was good to be with other people.

There is something special about coming together for a shared celebration and just having a good time. This is something that left a hole in our lives when such things were banned during the several pandemic lockdowns over last year and this year.

We thrive when we are part of a ‘tribe’ and we celebrate together. The shared experience solidifies relationships and helps us to feel as if we belong. To be happy, successful and ultimately fulfilled in life we need to belong and spend time with those in our tribe, our community.

Spending Time

In the UK between the last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October Greenwich Mean Time goes forward one hour to take advantage of there being more light in the evening than in the morning during the Summer. Which means the clocks went back one hour today. The aim is to give the like of farmers more time to do their work during the Summer.

This moving of time and the hours of the day are agreed upon to allow us to all work to the same timescale. It is a practical use of the time that we have each day, by dividing it into portions that can be allocated and measured. This is without getting into the physics of relative Spacetime.

This brings up the point of how we allocate our time during each day. Many of us will spend a lot of our time on social media or watchng TV or a streaming service like Netflix, which could be seen as a good use of our time or not. A better question would be, is the quality of how we spend time good?

If you spend most of a weekend binge watching a series on Netflix the hours spent on that is high in quantity but I would argue that it is low in quality. Spending the weekend with friends, you could argue, is higher in quality. It depends on what you value, which is different for each of us.

Doing an audit of how we spend our time and thinking about the benefits of each thing we do can mean we move the arch of our lives towards a more meaningful existence.

Communicating With Others

Happiness, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Recently, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp stopped working and for many their world suddenly stopped, as they are all owned and operated by Facebook. To be fair it was a shock.

We think of the availability of these apps as a certainty, as if they will always be there, like the air or the sky, but they are just mobile and computer applications and technology does not always work.

There is an argument that we crave other people ‘liking’ or ‘sharing’ one of our posts or someone ‘follows’ us, as if our self worth is tied to it. I think it has more to do with the hit of dopamine we get when we get acknowledgement via a like, share or follow, and how addictive this is.

Many of us use these apps to communicate with others, but often we use social media apps as entertainment or to just sustain our attention, so we can switch off and not have to think.

The problem is that when we get absorbed into the infinite scroll we check out of reality for a while. All sorts could be going on around us but we would have no idea. This is the power of social media.

Communicating with each other is supposed to he done face to face with eye contact and hand shakes and pats on the back. When we spend a lot of time with our eyes down and our attention on a mobile phone we avoid the opportunities to develop the skill of socialising. The ability to make friends and influence people is a skill that is becoming more scarce due to the lack of practice.

I saw the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage as a blessing to unplug and socialise the old fashioned way. It also highlighted our dependency on technology and social media in particular. We need to rebalance ourselves and reduce screen time and increase actual facetime.

Building Trust

Happiness, Leadership, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, and often it does. The difficulty comes when technology promises to make your life easier and then it does not deliver. This is kills trust.

I have a pre-payment electicity meter, which is a Smart Meter that is not so smart. I can top it up easily enough on the company’s website using my debit card and the promise is that it will reflect on my Smart Meter in my home within 60 minutes. It never does.

When you search for guidance on how to top up the meter manually, you find a video on the company’s website where a man gives instructions on how to manually top up the meter by entering a twenty digit number, one digit at a time.

Each number requires you to press the button repeatedly; eight times for a number seven and once for a zero, twenty times. The man even suggests, in his mannerisms and words, that this is a common problem.

The point I am making is not to have a moan about this poor service. My point is that the company appears to find it easier, and possibly cheaper, to make a video explaining how to manually top up the meter rather than fixing the problem to allow the meters to top up automatically once they are topped up online. This may benefit the company in the short term but trust is lost with their customers, which may be more costly in the long term.

This is a business relationship between a business and a customer, but the same can be said for personal relationships. A quick fix in the short term will not build a strong relationship. For example, you cannot buy trust, you must trust others and act in ways that allow others to trust you, this takes time and consistency.

As another example, if you said that you gave £10 to a homeless person this morning you might get a vague well done. If you said that you gave up your weekend to help paint a community centre then this will be much more respected. The point is that time spent helping others has more meaning and value than money spent, which is quickly done.

The very definition of money is that you are giving an IOU for someone else to provide goods and service in the future, it states this clearly on all bank notes. In effect you are passing the buck.

The fact that it takes time and energy to build trust is true in all human relationships.

The Power Of Asking

There is a saying, “If you do not ask you will never know.” This, you might say, is old school wisdom, but it is still wisdom.

Yesterday I was at work in a call centre and in the canteen area a lady was stocking up the vending machine. I decided to politely ask why they were not stocking the Hummus crisps and only had the standard potato crisps and chocolate options. They used to stock them but stopped. I asked as potato and chocolate unfortunately do not agree with me, but that is a tale for another time.

The lady said she would arrange to have some sent over from a larger call centre near by to stock the vending machine where I work. I thanked her and went on with my day. This story is not remarkable, but it got me thinking about the power of asking. If you are polite and clear with what you ask for, the person you are asking it from are more likely to say yes, if they can.

This applies in many areas of our lives where we are too scared to ask because of the dreaded word “No.” The world will not end if someone says no, it is simply not an option to get what you wanted from that person, and now you know. You could ask someone else or ask for something else, depending on what you need. It is not necessarily the end.

So, just ask, you never know what blessings you might receive.

Back To The Office

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Many of us have been working from home over the last 18 months or so while we found a way through this pandemic. We are still in the midst of the pandemic, but it feels like we are closer to being free from it than we are in the middle of it. Over the past couple of months many of us who were office based before the pandemic are returning to the office, even if it is as part of a hybrid way of working, which means we are still working from home some of the time.

I work in a call centre and at my place of work we are using the hybrid model and yesterday was a day when we were all in the office and it felt claustrophobic and as if my senses were on overload. Going from working in a room on my own at home to being surrounded be people talking to customers and with each other felt like too much.

At the end of the day I wanted to relax and switch off, so I watched a film. The film I chose was the Superman film Man Of Steel. In this film it shows the Superman to be as a boy in school dealing with his hyper sensitive senses, seeing his teacher with x-ray vision, hearing talking and sirens in the distance, hearing the whispers of his class mates, etc. It got so much he ran and hid in a store room.

His solution was to focus on his mother’s voice, when she came to help him. He went on to practice and learn to manage and then master what he focused on. To me, even though it was just a film, to me this was a metaphor for how we can get used to being back in the office. It was initially strange to work from home and now it feels strange to be back in the office.

In the end we have an amazing capability to adjust and adapt, the human body is an adapting machine and this new way of working will become normalised. Think of it as an opportunity to develop your ability to adapt and still be effective at your job, and whatever else you put your mind too.

Re-Centre Yourself

Often in life we feel stressed or confused or just out of our comfort zone. In these moments we need to recentre ourselves.

In life we are on one long journey or many short journeys, depending on how you want to think about it. When we get into a primal state of stress or anxiety we need to stop, re-centre ourselves and look at what is ahead of us to decide our next step.

Re-Centre

If you use Google Maps on a mobile phone there is a feature that allows you to tap a symbol on the screen and the app uses the GPS on your mobile phone to bring the map to your exact location. Stopping and re-centring is very much like this, it is being mindful of your present, and moving away from thoughts about what has happened and what may happen.

We live most of our lives thinking about either the past or the future, and these thoughts are more often negative rather than positive. Being mindful and present will solve a lot of our problems and will usually reduce our anxiety.

Opt Out Of Negativity

Google Maps also has a feature where you can choose to avoid motorways or toll road, etc. In life we can also choose what we focus on. We can choose to begin with a new more positive belief about our capabilities or how the world works and opt out of the negative thinking. We can choose to believe that the universe is working for us rather than against us. These beliefs can fundamentally change our world view.

Change Your Beliefs

I heard an example recently of a successful entrepreneur that was out with some movers and shakers and felt that they didn’t belong there. This man was a believer in God and his life coach asked him why God would put him in the wrong place on a Friday night. This man suddenly realised that, to him, this would mean that he belongs everywhere he is. This is a fundamental shift in his world view. He changed a limiting belief to an empowering belief, because he realised that the limiting belief was untrue, more importantly he realised that the opposite was true.

It is almost always the case that our limiting beliefs are untrue. If we look at them and consider what the opposite belief would be and look for evidence of this belief, then we empower ourselves to move forward with confidence.

Don’t Quit, Adjust

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

When a plane sets off from an airport and the wind starts to push it off course the pilot doesn’t turn the plane around and land, so they can try it again. They adjust their altitude and direction to bring the plane back on course. Often in life we quit new ventures before we get very far because we have come across adversity. Here are some of the reasons why and how to keep moving forward.

Perfectionism

Often we feel that new ventures need to be perfect before we begin. Whatever it is that you want to do, the conditions will never be perfect. Sometimes the conditions are a serious hindrance and waiting is the right thing to do, but most of the time the conditions are fair but not ideal.

Hiding behind wanting things to be perfect is a way of avoiding getting started, because we fear failure. The problem is that every success requires failure, and if we build it into our process and we learn from it, failure can be the reason we succeed. So, whatever it is just start, take the plane into the sky and start your journey.

Fixed Mindset

When we come up against adversity, those with a fixed mindset will either keep pushing forward until they crash and burn or they just quit. A fixed mindset is built around believing that you are clever or beautiful or creative or anything permanent. A growth mindset is built around believing that you are hard working or a good problem solver. A growth mindset looks at a problem as an opportunity, a fixed mindset sees a problem as a barrier.

In basketball, when coming up to the basket, defenders will inevitably try to stop you, but once a player has placed both hands on the ball they have to shoot or pass. If a shot is not possible they will pivot, keeping one foot still, and look for another way to get the ball into the basket, they look for and find an opening to another player. When life throws up barriers, see them as an opportunity to find another way and pivot.

Have A Goal

An example that Simon Sinek gave illustrates this well. If you were asked to walk in a straight line and after a few steps I put a chair in front of you then you would likely stop in your tracks. However, if I asked you to walk to the corner of the room and after a few step I put a chair in front of you then you would likely walk around the chair and keep going.

The point is that when we have a clear goal the method we use to get there can be flexible and adversity causes us to rethink our strategy rather than stopping all together. The strategy we use should never be fixed, it should be flexible, and the goal should be fixed.

Integrity Matters

Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

There are two types of integrity. The first means that you do what you say you will do, to yourself and to others. This could be seen as just being reliable, but if it is done as a matter of principle, then, for me, it falls into integrity, rather than reliability.

The second is living by your values and beliefs. This is being kind, even to those who treat you badly. It is finishing what you started, because you always do. It is a path less travelled, but an honourable path to walk down. In a social media filtered, fake it til you make it culture, living by your values and beliefs is unusual, but essential.

Be Curious

George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer, was out hunting in the Jura mountains in the 1940s and he wondered why cockle-burs were sticking to his trousers and his dogs fur. He became curious and took one home to look at under a microscope. He discovered that the cockle-burs had tiny hooks that grabbed hold of the loops in the fabric of his trousers.

He had a light bulb moment and Velcro was the invention that followed. Velcro is taken for granted these days and is used in clothing, bags, tents, travel cots, and the list goes on. All because a man was curious. He could have been angry or frustrated or just found it funny and left it there. When we have a curious mind we make connections, we make inventions and we change the world.

Collaborating With Colleagues

Achieving Goals, Leadership, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

If you work in a role that means you attend meetings, then there may be times when you lead a project or need to get colleagues on board. Take the example of starting a project. There will be a temptation to decide how it will work, what the vision is for the project and who will take on which role, etc. Sometimes it is your role to decide this. Sometimes it is not. However, this advice will work either way. It may also be useful if you are pitching an idea to colleagues too.

Plan Together

A good way to get your colleagues invested in the project is to involve them in the planning of it from the very start. Some things will be decided by circumstances outside the project, but there will be things that can be discussed and planned together.

Highlight Strengths

Many of your colleagues will have skills and experience that will benefit the project. Highlighting these strengths will make your colleagues feel respected and valued. You could start a Skills Bank where colleagues share their skills and experience and it all get collated and shared amongst the team, so each will know who to go to for specific advice. This could simply be a Word document made available on a shared drive, by email or uploaded to Microsoft Teams.

Listen Before You Speak

If you explain the project and tell everyone what you think, your colleagues will be less likely to contribute. However, if you hold off from giving your opinion and wait to hear everyone else, then they will feel heard and you get the benefit of their opinion before you give yours.

Empowering Yourself

The idea of karma is something that often divides people, though many in the western world don’t spend the time to consider its implications, as they are more familiar with the monotheistic religions. I personally do believe in karma and I was thinking about it recently and I had a couple of insights that are relevant for everybody.

My understanding of karma is twofold, my present circumstances are a result of my past actions and my response to my current circumstances will result in my future circumstances.

If you find yourself in a good situation, you could think to yourself ‘I earned this.’ If you find yourself in a bad situation, you could think to yourself ‘I earned this.’ Owning your current situation based on your past actions is powerful. Thinking this way about bad situations could be seen as a negative thinking pattern, but not if you apply the second insight.

After considering your current situation, ask yourself ‘what do I do now to make things better?’ This will mean that you respond to the situation rather than reacting to it. You are asking yourself to put together a plan of action, you are empowering yourself to own whatever situation you find yourself in and move forward. This opportunity is always available, no matter what your present circumstances are.

Finding Your Passion

There is a lot of talk, particularly from motivational coaches, around finding your passion. Some will give the advice that you should do what you love. This is advice I am inclined to disagree with because there is a danger that you will turn what you love into work that you hate to do. There are two other ways to think about this.

Find Your Why

Simon Sinek explained this very well in his book Start With Why. The idea is that once you have figured out the ‘Why’ behind all that you do, the DNA of your decision making and how you treat others, then you can apply this to ‘How’ you live or work and ‘What’ you do, based on your ‘Why.’ This will allow you to be more passionate about what you do because it will be aligned with who you are.

Be Passionate About What You Do

Seth Godin suggests that if we choose to be passionate about the work we are already doing we are empowered by the act of choosing and it is better than expecting the work we do to give us passion. We will be doing what we choose to do, not what we have to do. The narrative changes.

We can then put our energy into making a difference and creating things that were not there before we decided to do them, and we will also be more fulfilled than we would by trying to do what we love.

I feel that both of these approaches are valid and some mixture of the two will certainly be better than doing what you love.

Be A Hero Not A Superhero

I came across this note I made in my journal some time ago and felt it may resonate with some of you.

I was having a dream that felt like it was happening, but I also knew it was a dream. I was part of a team of superheroes trying to stop bad guys doing something bad, I can’t remember what. I clearly remember a lady I used to work with, who has just had her second child with her husband, appearing in a corridor as I was about to go into ‘battle’.

She said “do you have any milk I could borrow.” I stopped and calmly said, “of course, it’s in the fridge down the corridor on the right.” I then joined the other superheroes to save the world or something. The revelation for me is that when I calmly gave my previous colleague what they needed, this was me being who I am, someone who helps others, not a superhero. This is enough for me.

Also, to help others in simple ways can sometimes make us a hero without intending to be one.

Be Unmistakably You

Doing something for the first time is scary, more so for some and less so for others, but it is still scary. So what we often do is settle for copying how it has been done before. We feel safe on this already trodden ground. But doing the same thing as others have done, or are doing, is rarely of significant use of our time; it does not often improve the lives of others, or ourselves.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak took the idea of using a mouse and being able to move things around on a computer screen and put an Apple personal computer that almost anyone can use into people’s homes, where before in order to use a computer you had to learn to code or use the keyboard to navigate through endless DOS menus by picking option 4, then option 23, and so on.

This changed the world. It is not that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were special people, it was that they pushed their thinking until they got to the boundary of what was deemed as possible and stepped beyond it, because it is beyond this boundary that things of use are created. If we do things as they have always been done we never find a better of doing them. I am not saying that you need to be a Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, what I am saying is that what they decided to do was a choice, a choice that we all have.

We often fear the embarrassment and the risk of going first, but those we hold up as exceptional did something new, whether it be Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak or the painter Jackson Pollack or the author Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird, they had not done what they did before they did it. They were unmistakably themselves, and what I am inviting you to do is to be unmistakably yourself. Not similar to those you wish to fit in with or different from the people around you that you disapprove of. It is to be unmistakably you.

How To Live A Good Life

I have been thinking recently about how we often hide from taking responsibility for our own journey through life. This story illustrates what can happen if you don’t take ownership. It is a made up tale, but it has a good point.

In a valley there was a town that was starting to be flooded. A van pulled up in front of a man’s house and offered to take him to safety, as they were evacuating the area. He said, “No, God will save me.” When the water level rose up to the first floor of this man’s house a boat came by to take him to safety and again he said, “No, God will save me.” When the water level had reached the rooftop a helicopter came to take the man to safety but again he said “No, God will save me.” The man drowned and when he went up to Heaven he got quite cross with God and asked him why he did not save him. Of course God said, “ I sent you a van, I sent you a boat and I sent you a helicopter.

The moral of the story is that we need to take responsibility for our own journey through life, to be our own rescuer. We also need to be our own cheer leader and take that which scares us as a sign that perhaps it is the direction that we should move in; to do the thing that rhymes with our true selves. To do the work of figuring out what our calling is and go all in on bringing it to life. This is the life long work of living a good life.

The Power Of Imagination

We suffer more in our imagination than we do in reality. This happens to many of us more often than we would like. We look into the future, or the future we think will happen, and we lean towards the worst case scenario. Our brains are wired to do this as a survival mechanism, but it is, I would say, the main cause of stress in people’s lives.

The way to avoid this is to pay attention to our thoughts and find the beliefs at the root of the thoughts and examine them. Most often they will be untrue and if the belief is untrue then some form of the opposite must be true. What then would this look like? If this new belief is true then what actions should then be taken?

Following this process will move you from a disempowering state to an empowering one. If you do this over and over you will change your belief system and the future will look less scary. You will then be able to imagine the future that you do want and how you might act, what you might do and how you might feel.

Your brain does not know the difference between your imagination and reality, so the future you imagine is more likely to come true, because your beliefs dictate your thoughts which influence your actions which cause your results, which reinforce your beliefs, and on it goes. Your future is yours to create.

Dare Greatly

I would like to begin this blog post with a quote from the American president Theodore Roosevelt.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

I became aware of this quote when watching a talk by Brené Brown. Prior to the recent talk I watched, she did a TED Talk called The Power of Vulnerability, which I recommend you watch. The TED Talk went viral and inevitably the trolls of the internet began commenting with personal attacks rather than listening to the very wise content of the talk. Brené Brown stumbled on to this quote after reading the horrible comments about her.

Since then she has decided that if you are not in the arena getting your arse handed to you, if you are not putting your work out there, then she is not interested in your feedback. What I would like to advocate for you is that you do two things. Firstly, have the courage to dare greatly and secondly, to ignore feedback from those who are not daring greatly themselves.

The Dangers of Seeking Reassurance

I have been think lately about why we seek reassurance before we step into doing new things or things that have creative risk and something happened to me this week which illustrates my thoughts on this. I work in a contact centre in a business park and walk for 15 minutes to catch the bus home. Now there are two buses with the same number which stop at my bus stop, one of the buses ends part way along the route and the other goes to where I live.

One bus came by so I waved it down to check if it was my bus, but it was the other bus that I needed, which promptly arrived and overtook the bus I had waved down and drove on by. While sitting at the bus stop waiting 40 minutes for the right bus to come by again I was thinking about why we seek reassurance and I realised that what I had done is outsource responsibility for knowing which was the right bus to the bus driver of the wrong bus.

If I’d have taken ownership of finding out which was the right bus, I could have checked the details on the bus stop timetable and compared them to the details on the front of the bus and could have been at home eating my dinner at the time the next correct bus arrived at the bus stop.

This to me illustrates the consequences we pay for seeking unnecessary reassurance that the thing we want to do is the right thing to do. Not taking responsibility for things in our lives, because we are worried about failing or choosing the wrong path is always the wrong path. We miss opportunities and we are left waiting for others to help us, or save us in some cases. No one is coming to save you, you have to save yourself and those around you will support you on this journey.

No one will give you the perfect answer as to what you should do either, because they are judging it based on what they would do, and they are not you. We need to make a choice and go try it, whatever it is. If it doesn’t work and we fall on our faces, we have learned something. The trick is to know that you will always pick yourself up and try again. A bird does not avoid landing on a tree branch because it is worried that the branch may break, if they did they would never land on a tree branch. A bird’s faith is not in the branch not breaking, it’s faith is in the ability of it’s own wings.

5 Rules On How To Build Trust

Trust is one of those things that can be hard to actively create with other people. We have all built trust with those we spend a lot of our time with, whether they are family, friends or colleagues. The longer we spend with people the more opportunity there is to build trust, so we often trust our friends and family more than we do our colleagues. However, trust is vitally important if we are to work and live together well.

Here are a few rules to follow in order to build trust with others.

Firstly, trust must be shared and we must go first. Always doing what you say you are going to do does not make you trustworthy, it just means that you are reliable. We must give people a certain level of responsibility over something important to us and leave them to do it. The more you do this the more the person feels trusted. They will then trust you with something and on it goes.

Secondly, if someone trusts you to do something or to keep something secret, you must do so, every time. This is the second part of the human covenant that is trust. It must go both ways. Over time the process builds strong trust.

Thirdly, gossip is a trust killer. When someone gossips to you about someone else it does two things; you know that they will share other people’s personal lives and their secrets behind their back to gain attention and that they will likely do it behind your back too. If you gossip you will not be trusted.

Fourthly, the giving of trust should not be given regardless of whether the trust is honoured. Sometimes you can trust someone over and over and the person proves themselves untrustworthy. At some point you need to draw a line in the sand and withdraw your trust. When trusting someone begins to effect your wellbeing it is time to withdraw that trust.

Fifthly, all people should not be trusted equally. The nature of human relationships is that each is unique. This involves differing levels of trust with different people. This is normal, and you should not feel that everyone should always be trusted. Trust is an aspect of a relationship and rules one to four should be applied in each relationship.

Rhyming With Who You Are

When we put ideas or thoughts out there into the world inevitably we get feedback from other people. Some think your ideas or thoughts are great, others will think they are not. Often we pin our self worth to what other people think of our ideas and thoughts. This is a mistake, it is giving away our power to others in the hope that they will validate our existence.

Social media is an extreme version of this. Every day people share their lives with followers and ‘friends’ hoping to get a like or a share as validation. What comes back is essentially feedback. If we listen to all of it, then we can become lost in the variety of ways in which other people think we should live. It becomes just noise, like the feedback when a microphone gets too close to the speaker it is linked to.

What we need to do is to provide our own feedback, and follow what is in our hearts. Our ideas and thoughts should rhyme with who we are. Then we will live a life that rhymes with who we are, and this will be a life well lived.

Mastering Your Work

While we work we are often asked by our Manager to complete a Personal Development Plan. This is often limited to office based work, but applies to any field of employment. This can be seen as another task to do or it is seen as a tick box exercise. The PDP is in fact a huge opportunity.

It is an opportunity to actively develop yourself, to take ownership of your career and progress to the level or role that gives you the most fulfilment.

In my opinion your PDP should begin with the values of the company you work for as well as your own values. This is because it is important that these values are compatible. You should include how you learn, how you work and what your skills and experience are. This will give you a good foundation to build your PDP from.

Set short goals, usually weekly, mid-term goals, usually quarterly and long term goals, usually yearly. I would also review your progress against these goals on a regular basis. I will be trying daily reviews at the end of my shift to highlight what went well, what I could have done better, what I learned and what actions I will take from the learning.

I feel that daily reviews will speed up my development and make sure it does not plateau at a low level. Try it yourself and see how you go. If it is too frequent, try weekly reviews. You will not regret it.

Building Self Credibility

Often, without meaning to, we make promises and break them, both to others and to ourselves. It could be that we say we will start going to the gym or that we say we will do a friend a favour, but then don’t.

When we break promises, no matter how small, we lose credibility with ourselves. We start to believe that we are unreliable and slowly our actions follow our thinking and we do.

If, however, we decide to go to the gym and we do it or we decide to get up when the alarm goes off, instead of hitting snooze, and we do it or we do the friend a favour when we say we will, then we will build credibility with ourselves and people will see that we mean what we say, that we are reliable and trustworthy. It is a matter of integrity, because integrity is a verb.

What Can Our Struggles Teach Us?

When going through difficult times, it is important to be grateful for everything that we have, which includes our tough experiences. The valleys we go through serve to highlight the euphoria of reaching the summit of the mountains we climb.

We all have, to varying degrees, the ability to choose how we want to feel, by choosing what we focus on. For example, if we are unwell, do we focus on how that is making us feel or do we focus on still having the ability to do the things we enjoy, even if the illness reduces these options. We all have the ability “…to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” (From Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E Frankl).

On the flip side the valleys will teach us lessons that the mountain peaks never can. Every struggle is an opportunity wrapped in unpleasantness. Every struggle is an opportunity to learn. I try to be in a state of flow, of effortless action, as often as I can. When I find myself in a negative state of mind or I fail at something and I come out of flow, I now ask myself three questions.

What can I learn from this situation?
Where are the opportunities?
What should I do?

These questions help me re-centre and I then actively bring my mind back to flow. They are also fundamentally proactive, which means negative thinking patterns do not get a chance to sidetrack my mindset. Give these questions a go or come up with your own, you will not regret it.

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