When you are finding yourself struggling to focus, less motivated, low in mood and just not at your best, how do you manage to get through your day? Is it a case of battling through or perhaps something to be tolerated as the day passes? What if you could find a better way?
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Can you think of a time when you had a real gut instinct that things weren’t right in a way that made you uncomfortable? Perhaps when someone else was being excluded either unintentionally, or worse still intentionally, or when a course of action felt unfair to another? What did you do? Face any anxiety you may have been feeling and decide to act in some way to change things? Think about it for a while and then decide it wasn’t a battle you were ready to step into?
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Are you a team leader who is finding you are having to adapt your leadership and management for a ‘new normal’? Last month I addressed some tips for team members in adapting to the ‘new normal’. What’s it been like for team leaders?
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Wherever you are in the world as you read this, there is a strong likelihood that your working life is different from how it was 5 months ago. We are hearing a lot about the concept of a ‘new normal’ and yet that implies some stability; at the moment, it feels as if the ‘new normal’ is a continuum where the reality of our context for work and life changes a little with each month that passes.
Given this transitionary state, how can we best lead our teams, and how can we, as team members, best lead ourselves in order to function well in our performance and for our mental well-being?
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Whether you are a team member or a team leader, you’ll no doubt have had experiences where you’ve been talking with a number of other people and had something you wanted to say on the tip of your tongue but thought better of it. If what you wanted to say was coming from a positive place of wanting to support the team or an outcome then that’s a waste. What happened and what can you, or your team leader, do about it?
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Do you lead a team? Are you finding it hard to maintain your own levels of motivation let alone those of your team members during this testing time? You are not alone. I’m a coach. I support others when they need to find direction, overcome barriers, gain confidence, inspire through leadership etc. So, I should be able to do the same for myself, right? Well yes .. and sometimes no .. even if only temporarily!
It has been interesting to see how I’ve responded to the uncertainty brought about by Covid-19 and lockdown. Early on, I struggled with direction, motivation and focus which is quite unlike me normally. I found a way to move through this that I’ve shared with a couple of clients who found it useful and I’m sharing key elements below which may help you to help yourself as well as your team members. (more…)
We’re all adjusting to life being a little different at the moment whether as working parents who are trying to balance work with activities for their children, family mental health and being safe, or as carers of elderly relatives, or as employees getting used to connecting virtually to get things done, or as front-line workers facing unsettling emotions, long hours, and uncertainty. What we all have in common is a need to do the best we can for ourselves. By this, I mean managing ourselves such that we are more resilient in the longer term rather than less. (more…)
My father has been ill with Parkinson’s for a little while and sadly passed away at the beginning of this month. My world has changed in a way which is hard to describe. I’m taking the opportunity to use this month’s blog to reflect on the lessons I’ve learned from him about leadership, love and family and hope that something from what I write will resonate with you too. (more…)
I’ve been reflecting recently on so-called ‘negative’ emotions such as anger and anxiety. The other day I had had enough of having to try to get my Dad’s glasses fixed when the lens had fallen out for what must be the 5th time and I uncharacteristically telephoned the optician while experiencing my frustration and anger; I would normally have waited until I had calmed down. While polite, there was no doubting how I was feeling and the result was a quick resolution of the issue. In the past, my unconscious strategy in dealing with negative emotions like these was to try to diminish them as quickly as possible. Now, in part as a result of reading ‘The upside of your darkside’ by Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener, I’m trying new strategies so that I can maximise the benefits of such emotions which include better performance, optimism, motivation, problem solving, creativity and ideas and wellbeing. If you’d like some of that too, read on! (more…)
As the holiday season fast approaches, I am reminded of the messages in Christmas carols that hold meaning not just for this time of year but all year round whether we have religious beliefs or not, messages of peace, goodwill, glad tidings and joy. Sadly, with the recent general election in the UK as well as other causes of differences of opinion in the world, it seems that we can too readily become entrenched in our own views and see anyone with views different to this as ‘other’ and therefore a threat.. .at least that’s how it appears following various social media threads. At this point, thoughts of peace and good will seem to go out of the window!
