Grace Marshall's Blog, page 8

Teaching our kids (and ourselves) about trade-offs, habits and screen time

How do you get kids to spend less time on screens?

Nag them? Set time limits? Declare screen free time zones? We’ve tried all sorts of tactics, with limited success.

Our latest experiment has been quite surprising though – and has uncovered some interesting lessons when it comes to changing habits, delegating and the importance of recognising trade-offs.

Inspired by an idea in Brad McKeown’s brilliant book Essentialism, we’ve started a token system:

1. Each week, each child gets 10 tokens.

2. They can exchange each token for 30 minutes of screen time, or 20p at the end of the week.

3. They can also earn extra tokens with brain-friendly activities, for example 30 minutes of reading, writing, homework, maths, spelling or music practice – even tidying, which if I’m honest is more for my brain than theirs.

The choice then is theirs, how much effort they put into earning vs spending, into saving vs spending and whether they blow it all on a 5 hour Minecraft marathon, spread it throughout the week or save it all for cash.

Here’s what happened:

We stopped nagging! Instead of telling and policing, we set the parameters and gave them the responsibility to make their own choices. We effectively delegated the decision. We still have to remind them to set the timer, make sure they weren’t trying to sneak in extra time, and manage the tokens. But we no longer have to micromanage how they spent their time.

It became about trade-offs, not chores, rules, do’s and don’ts, should or shouldn’ts. So often, spread ourselves thin and never get round to doing what we really want to do, because we avoid making the trade offs. We try and say yes to everything, and inevitably things fall off the list. When we are clear about the trade-offs, it stops being about what you can’t do or what you don’t have time for, it becomes a question of what you choose to do above (and instead of) something else.

They started thinking carefully about how they wanted to spend their hard-earned tokens – in fact they starting thinking more about everything. Whether to spend, save or earn, and what they really, really wanted (turns out my daughter’s ultimate goal was simply to have more tokens than her brother!)

It challenged their habits. Instead of defaulting to the screen without even thinking, they had to consciously choose to spend a token. As Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.” Sometimes, simply making our defaults more deliberate, remind ourselves that not choosing is a choice too.

They totally bought into it. The thought of being able to double or even triple their pocket money had them hooked. The reward made sense. It was something they wanted to do, rather than something we were imposing on them.

In fact, the first full week we implemented this, the TV hardly went on. They accumulated £5 and £6.60 each in pocket money! We realised this was going to cost us, to put our money where our mouth was, but that trade off was worth it for us too.

Homework became a way of earning more tokens – again, no more nagging! (We still had to gently remind the eldest to record his independent reading in his learning log for his teacher though…) Online homework became screen time that didn’t cost a token but actually earned you one – bonus!

They also learned that there was life outside of tokens. What do you do when you don’t want to read/write, etc but you didn’t want to spend a token? Go outside and play, jump on the trampoline, play hide and seek! My son has even started saying “I’m going to do another half an hour of reading in a minute, but I’m going to have a break on the trampoline first.”

They asked a million questions. Does this count? Does that? What happens if we play on the Wii together – does that count as one token or two? What about when we watch Bake Off as a family? They started negotiating, testing boundaries, and thinking creatively to see how they could get the most out of the system. They even managed to get ‘colouring in’ as a brain friendly activity – which is to an extent a practice in mindfulness, but we later limited that particular one to one token per day!

Which goes to show, that if you delegate a decision, rather than just the task, you get so much more engagement, creativity and brain power than when you call all the shots and require compliance. Yes, sometimes the other brains will surprise you but heck it’s SO much more fun than nagging!

Everybody wins. We haven’t recorded all the in’s and out’s, just grand totals at the end of each week. After the initial week where they got a bit obsessive, it seems to have settled at a rate where they have roughly doubled their pocket money, quartered their weekly screen time (and are still enjoying it, just not as addicted to it!), tripled the amount of reading they do and dramatically reduced the need for nagging. (Let’s be clear – we do nag about other things!)

It’s still early days, and yes it may lose its novelty after a while, and we may need to reinvent and re-experiment, but most of all, our kids are learning to make choices for themselves. Which is the biggest win of all.

Over to you: how do you deal with screen time when it comes to your kids – or even yourself? What trade-offs are you unconsciously making? Leave me a comment, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

5 reasons why we resist self-promotion

A while ago I was nominated to put myself forward for an award in the Forward Ladies National Women in Business Awards. Had I not been nominated, I wouldn’t have done it.

What is it about self-promotion that makes so many of us procrastinate? Whether it’s putting yourself out there as a business, or putting yourself forward for a promotion, writing your own CV or the ‘about me’ page on your website – why do we have such resistance when it comes to self-promotion?

Why don’t more people put themselves forward for awards? I got chatting about this with my coach Amanda Alexander in an impromptu interview last week, and here’s what I’ve come to realise:

1. We think there are others more deserving

My first thoughts to being nominated for an award were, Wow! quickly followed by Who me? and Surely there are others more deserving?

We tell ourselves if there is someone else more deserving then we shouldn’t bother. As Amanda pointed out, it’s like wanting to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, then thinking But what is Kilimanjaro compared to Everest? – “there’s always someone who’s climbed Everest and that’s always going to be bigger and a better achievement.”

But why should that be a reason not to celebrate your achievements?

2. We compare our behind the scenes with other people’s highlight reels

I love hearing other people’s stories. Where they’ve come from, what they’ve overcome, where they are now. It’s beautiful. But sometimes I forget that what I’m seeing is their highlight reel – even the ones that allude to the lows as well as the highs.

We often don’t see our own stories in the same light. When we are in the middle of our own story, events are jumbled up, and don’t make sense. Highlights are scattered and momentary. And the journey gets replayed so many times in our heads, it becomes mundane. We focus on our behind the scenes and compare them to other people’s highlight reels.

We also very rarely look at our own highlight reel in its entirety. We see it dotted in and amongst the much larger landscape of pot holes and wrong turns. When I stopped and made myself write down all my achievements, aspirations and acknowledgements, I looked back and realised ‘actually that makes pretty good reading!’

3. We don’t practice self-promotion

Self promotion, along with dealing with conflict, is an area ripe for procrastination, because we don’t get enough practice.

We are not taught it from an early age. In fact, some of us may have been actively discouraged from bragging, boasting or bigging ourselves up. No wonder it’s outside of our comfort zone. It’s uncomfortable because it’s unfamiliar. We’re not used to handling it because we don’t give ourselves enough practice.

Culture has us conditioned to wait to be picked, for someone else to notice us and validate us. Indeed, I wouldn’t have completed the application for this award, had I not been nominated by someone else in the first place.

But something interesting happens when you start to practice self-promotion. At first it’s awkward. It feels self-indulgent, egotistical. But when you press through that, it makes you more self-aware. You become more aware of who you are, as well as who you’re not, where your strengths lie, as well as where they don’t. You become much clearer about where you shine and give your best – and as a result, you can be of better service to others.

4. We don’t want to be a star

Don’t get me wrong, when I’m stood on stage in front of an applauding audience, it’s an epic feeling. But purely being centre of attention for the sake of it, that’s not me. I enjoy recognition, absolutely, but I don’t naturally gravitate to the limelight. In fact, I only ever want to have a stage when I have something to share!

What feels even more incredible than the applause, is the individual conversations I have afterwards, when I hear about people’s lightbulb moments and action plans. When I see the personal change they’re taking away.

My deepest satisfaction and my strongest motivation comes from serving others, not myself. My lightbulb moment came when I realised that for me, it’s about being a light, not a star. A star says “Look at me!” a light says “Look at you!”.

Being a light is about serving others. A light shines the way and makes the path clear. A light breaks through darkness and brings clarity to confusion. A light brings life and encourages growth. A light reveals someone else’s brilliance. But to be a light, you have to shine. Be willing to draw attention, be visible and be seen.

5. We fear rejection

The problem with avoiding rejection is that we can only completely avoid it by taking ourselves out of the running. In discounting the possibility of rejection, we discount ourselves. The real question is, do we risk being rejected or do we reject ourselves?

As a Marianne Cantwell posted on the Free Range Humans Facebook page last week, about picking up painting when you’ve told yourself for years that you’re not an artist: “Turns out that creating perfection is only one reason to paint.”

Perfection is only one reason to do anything, and as Marianne said, “I’m not even convinced it is a good reason”.

Perhaps winning is only one reason to enter an award. Perhaps a better reason is simply to stand up and be counted. To show up, give your best, and give other people permission to do the same.

Over to you. Where will you shine this week? What will you put yourself forward for? I’d love to hear from you – drop me a line in the comments below.

PS. If you’re in the Nottingham area on 9th October and fancy joining me at the Midlands regional heat awards lunch, with inspirational speakers & networking, let me know!

The one email that can cost or save you hours of work (and tears)

I’ve been deliberating whether to write this post. Because it is a bit of a rant.

It’s about communication. The kind of communication that saves pain, confusion, conflict, and hours of work.

Ok, so today’s world of work is unpredictable. We live and work in a world where information bombards us at a ridiculous rate and plans change weekly, sometimes daily, even hourly. What we need isn’t bombproof planning, but agility and flexibility to dodge bullets and think fast on our feet.

I get that.

But how much of our curveballs are genuinely unpredictable? And how much is just down to bad communication?

Take a friend of mine this week, who turned up to do a day shift only to find an email sent during his off days telling him he’d been swapped to nights.

Or another friend who found out completely by accident, that she was on a volunteer rota, thankfully before the event actually happened.

Or the extra 20 hours of painstaking work I put in over the summer, making corrections to my manuscript, after an overly formal edit job had been done and sent straight to the typesetters.

Or indeed the shock of opening up a second round of proofs to find that the 20 hours’ worth of corrections had been substituted with a scarily inaccurate find and replace job.

Not to mention the extra time it took to reword the profuse swearing that came flying off my fingertips into a serious, concerned, professional ‘we need to talk’ email.

One thoughtful bit of communication would have made all the difference. 

If I had just had a heads up on that second proof, something along the lines of “Hey, bad news. We made some mistakes but we’re working to fix them. Don’t worry, it will be right by the time it goes to print, and here’s how I propose we proceed…” that would have saved me a couple of hours of email rage, where I could be working on fixing the problem rather than raging about how on earth this could have happened.

If my friend had had a call or even text, to say that his shift had been swapped, he could have easily rearranged his schedule and had some sleep before his night shift.

If my other friend had had an email to say that she was on the rota, there would have been no surprise, no close shave of nearly letting a whole bunch of people down.

Indeed if the copyeditor had stopped to check whether my manuscript actually needed a textbook grammar makeover (that must have been a huge job for them!) it would have saved us all a ton of blood, sweat and tears.

Much of our frustration around change isn’t around change itself. It’s around the way it’s communicated (or not!) 

We can deal with change so much better when we know it’s coming. When we get a heads up to prepare us for the incoming curveball, crisis or muck up – we can be ready, best foot forward, arms open, ready to tackle whatever comes our way.

But when it’s thrown at us like a virtual hand grenade wrapped up in an innocuous email, it doesn’t just cost us emotionally – in frustration, confusion or rage. It costs us our productivity – the extra work we end up doing or redoing, the time we spend on the back foot, in firefighting mode, which always takes more energy and gives us less in return.

It costs us in our working relationships – in resentment, in conflict, in faith lost, in erosion of trust and team spirit, and the depletion in motivation, when we feel undervalued, overlooked or dismissed. And the ridiculous thing is, no one is out to get us. We’re not at war. The people we work with are not our enemy. My editors, when I get to speak to them, are actually really lovely.

How much extra work do we create when we fail to communicate well?

And how much more productive would we be, if we stopped to give each other a thoughtful heads up more often?

Over to you. Have you experienced email rage or unnecessary workload as a result of poor communication? Or is it just me? Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Eliminating choice

Have you ever found yourself clearly out of your ‘zone of expertise’?

I did recently, when I found out I was shortlisted as a regional finalist in the Forward Ladies Women in Business Awards and realised I had to figure out what to wear!

Recognising I was out of my depth, I enlisted the help of personal image consultant Lyn Bromley of First Impressions Training.

What I discovered, was not only a fascinating education in dress shape, shade and style, but also a valuable lesson in productivity.

Our day started with a colour and style analysis. It amazed me how much detail and depth we went into – shades of colour in six different dimensions, body shape, face shape, proportions, as well as personality – all to determine the difference between a dress that makes you look good, and a dress that wears you.

But the result when we went shopping, was that we could eliminate whole racks in the shops at a glance. We could hold up a dress on the hanger, apply a few key criteria and know whether it was likely to be a good style or not. Instead of my usual method of taking half the shop with me into the fitting rooms, I only really had to try things on to check for fit, rather than an elusive ‘does this suit me?’

It made the whole shopping experience much easier, by eliminating choice.

As Greg McKeown puts it in his book Essentialism,

“We often think of choice as a thing. But choice is not a thing. Our options may be things, but a choice – a choice is an action. It is not just something we have but something we do.”

There is a difference between having a choice (options), and making a choice (action). And frankly when there is too much choice, we risk not being able to choose.

Shops are designed to give us plenty of choice – not just because there are lots of different customers to serve, but naturally it encourages us to buy more. When we are not sure between this dress or that dress, we might buy both, and see how we feel when we get home.

The problem for us though, is that we take those unmade decisions home with us, and end up with a wardrobe full of ‘maybe’s instead of a selection of ‘hell yeah’s – and the same thing happens with our to-do lists.

Far too often we add things indiscriminately onto our to-do lists, and find ourselves faced with a myriad of options. We dive into ‘doing’ mode, without spending time ‘thinking’ through our criteria and eliminating our choices, because ‘doing’ feels productive, and ‘thinking’ feels like a luxury we don’t have time for. But the reverse is true.

Thinking is the work. When we spend time eliminating our choices, it means that all our ‘doing’ is spent on what really matters. When we spend time getting clear on what really matters, we establish the criteria that allows us to eliminate choice easier – and earlier – rather than agonising later.

A decision made once saves a thousand tiny decisions later.

How clear are you on what really matters? Do you have clear criteria? Or are you having to revisit the same decision over and over again?

Sanity check

They say choose your battles, but how do you know which battles are worth fighting? Which battles to pick, and which ones to stand down and let pass?

When you’re in the thick of it, how do you tell the difference between single-mindedness and narrow-mindedness? Between strength and stubbornness? Between self defence and paranoia? Or between letting go and letting yourself down?

I had a few moments recently, where I needed a sanity check. Moments where my instinctive reaction to something was at odds with my usual trusting, accommodating nature.

“Am I mad? Is it just me…?”

I needed to know whether this battle was worth fighting, or whether I was just being picky.

So I asked: people who had been there before, people who knew me well, people I could trust to give me their no holds barred honest view.

Overwhelming the response came back, confirming my instincts. “Don’t settle.” “Give them hell” “No this isn’t how it has to be.” “You have to fight tooth and nail for what you want as I did.”

That was the rally cry I needed – to stop questioning myself and fight my ground.

Sometimes we can be too close to a situation to have a clear perspective, or we can have too many conflicting perspectives to follow our instincts. Sometimes we find ourselves in new territory where we don’t know the lay of the ground or the rules of the road, let alone whether to fight.

That’s when a sanity check can be so helpful.

Someone to challenge our habits and tolerations, to highlight what we’ve come to accept as normal.

Someone to challenge where we short change ourselves, go into self-destruct, or make downright bad decisions, to pull us up and say “what the hell are you doing?”

Someone to point out the stuff we’ve been avoiding, to get us to look right where we don’t want to look.

Someone to be the calming voice of reason encouraging us to stand down when it’s not worth it, or the rally cry we need to stand our ground and fight when it matters.

Someone we can turn to and ask, “Am I mad? Is it just me…?”

Do you have someone like that?

What do you see?

We’ve had a big weekend in the Marshall house, with the last day of school coinciding with my son entering double digits. There’s been lots of partying, lots of taxi-ing (and dodging traffic) and of course, lots of cake.

Here’s one I made on Sunday, with the finest of my dark chocolate stash. As we tucked into this beauty, I asked my kids for their verdict.

“What’s a verdict?” asked my son.

“Kind of like what they do in Masterchef.” I told him.

“Well it is a little bit dry, and the chocolate is a bit too rich, and I would prefer Smarties instead of M&Ms…” he started

“Yeah and the M&Ms aren’t in a pattern…” my daughter chimed in.

They tore my cake apart.

Hang on. Something wasn’t right. What I was hearing did not add up with this slice of heaven I was tasting, so I changed the question: “Do you like it?”

“YEAH!” came the resounding answer.

Isn’t it funny how what we choose to see, and say, can completely redefine our experience? (And when we go looking for things to criticise, we can miss the glaringly obvious, that what we have is good)

This weekend hasn’t just been full of fun and cake. A couple of my good friends are currently going through some really tough times. When I was searching for something to encourage them, I came across this in some notes I made last year:

“I see you.”

“Then I am alive.”

I’m told it’s a Zulu greeting, a beautiful way of saying hello.

What we see we bring alive. When we are seen, we come alive. 

To one of my friends I told her I saw strength. Even if she didn’t feel it right now, I can see it, therefore it is alive. In a coaching conversation last week, as a client described to me her fear and doubt when trying to prove herself in a new arena, I saw evidence of the very thing she didn’t feel confident in. I saw it in plain sight, but it wasn’t until I spoke it out that she saw it too.

We all find ourselves in that place from time to time, where we need someone to see something inside of us to know that it is there. For someone to say “I see you, and this is what I see in you”, for a word of encouragement to speak life into it, and into you.

Who can you encourage today? What do you see in them, that they may need reminding of? What can you speak life into today?

It goes the other way too. What we see, we bring into being. As the saying goes, “Worrying is using your imagination to create something you don’t want.” – Abraham Hicks

When we focus on the things we don’t want, we bring them to life too. As human beings, we have an amazing ability to create something out of nothing. Everything we create starts in our imagination. It begins with what we see.

When we see fear and frustration, that’s what we bring alive. When we see hope, strength, possibility and courage, those are the things that come alive in us.

What will you create today with your imagination? What do you need to see? What vision do you need to reimagine, to bring back to life?

I’d love to know your thoughts – what do you see? And what do you need to see? Let me know in the comments below, and give me a shout if you’d like to do some reimagining together.

The Happy Helpful Human approach to selling

 

We had our “International Ninjamboree” at Think Productive last week, where Productivity Ninjas from around the world congregated in Brighton. In one of the sessions, I was asked to share how I do ‘selling’ which was rather amusing, as in my mind, I don’t do much selling at all!

Despite being a business school graduate, I seem to have an allergic reaction to formulas, numbers and ratios, so here’s what I find works for me – the completely unscientific Happy Helpful Human approach to selling:

1. Build relationships, not empires

I don’t have sophisticated funnels, big budgets or a marketing machine churning out numbers. Heck even my mailing list is tiny by most marketers’ standards.*

My biggest asset is my relationships – people I’ve met along the way, shared experiences with, helped or connected with. Most of my clients, bookings and opportunities – including both book contracts – have come from these relationships.

* Before you add me to a mailing list to tell me how you can triple my figures, I do know people who specialise in these techniques and I know how powerful they can be…

2. Earn the right to have a conversation

In a world where we have more and more ways of communicating, we find ourselves having fewer and fewer genuine conversations. Human conversations that go beyond the transactional “What do you do?” and “Can I tell you about what I do?”.

You know you’ve had a genuine human conversation when you come away with random information – like his love for dark chocolate, her triathlon training or your mutual allergy to camping – as well as insight to the project they feel completely out of their depth in, the member of staff they’re really worried about or the event they’re currently trying to source a speaker for.

In conversation people get to experience you too. You become more than just another email in the inbox, or another phone call they don’t have time for. You become the person who made them laugh, shared their frustration or gave them that brilliant tip about how to keep the kids from getting bored over the summer. You become the person they can see themselves, or their team, working with.

Be the person who makes other people feel good, valued and listened to.

3. Think serving, not selling

Every conversation I have, my focus is on one question: “How can I help?”

Not “are you useful to me?” when I’m networking, or “can I sign you up to my newsletter?” when I’m marketing, or “do you want to buy a workshop?” when I’m in a sales meeting.

But rather “how can I help?”

What’s on their mind right now? What are they working on? What’s the best way I can help?

Be the person who helps people to find a solution.

Whether that’s with a word of encouragement, a listening ear, or a fresh perspective, an article, book, blog post or resource. Sometimes the helpful thing is to send the session overview, arrange a follow up call or book in a workshop. The difference is, when you find out what’s helpful to them, it no longer feels like selling. It becomes natural and enjoyable – something I look forward to, rather than procrastinate on.

Sometimes the best way you can help has nothing to do with what you sell, but when you help anyway, helpfulness has a way of coming back to help us. A local car body shop once got some work out of me after giving me advice on Twitter about where to find my hashtag!

4. Saying no can be helpful 

Being helpful isn’t about being a doormat, or about saying yes to everything. Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is to say no, or to offer an alternative.

When I had to turn down speaking at a couple of networking events this month, I offered to send them books to use as a resource instead. When I was asked to talk about Intercultural Working at Coventry University, I referred them to a friend who specialised in that area.

I even turned down working with Hugh Grant once, when a friend asked me to help with an event, saying I was the most organised person he knew(!). He was looking for an events manger (which I am not) and so I put him in touch with someone who was a much better fit for the job. She was naturally delighted, and so was I. It’s not everyday you get to give a friend an opportunity to work with Hugh Grant!

5. When you have a reputation for being helpful, people come to you

This week I’ve had a LinkedIn message asking me for advice on project management training – which I know nothing about! I’ve also had a message from someone who’s moved to a new organisation asking me for a quote on Inbox Zero workshops.

When I get booked to speak at public events, I often share tweets and posts to help promote the event. I’ve also been known to help set up rooms, pour coffee and make last minute slide adjustments to get around technical issues. Why? Because it helps to make the whole experience better for my audience. And if it makes life easier for the organisers, it makes it easier for them to book me again.

When you seek to serve, everybody wins. That has certainly been my experience.

What about you? I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments below…

5 Resilience lessons from a 9 year old’s school test

Last week was a big week for us. My son took his first grammar school entrance test, and I spoke to my largest audience so far: 300 sales professionals at a corporate conference (although my son told me he wins, because he’s performed to an audience of 400 in a school choir)

We’ve never been pushy parents, and we decided from the outset we weren’t going to get a tutor or drill him for the test. After all, if he had to push himself to the limit just to get in, then he would have 5 years of hell, pushing himself every single day just to keep up.

We told him it wasn’t about getting it right or wrong, it was just to see if the school would be a good fit for him. We bought some exercise books and practice papers, just to get him familiar with the style of questions.

Even so, the days running up to the test were an eye-opener. We had tears, we had trouble sleeping, we had tears when he couldn’t get to sleep, because he wanted to get up early the next day to do part of a practice paper before school.

I realised my job wasn’t to prepare his maths, comprehension, verbal or non-verbal reasoning skills. My job was to prepare him – to be confident, resilient, to be at his best, so he could do his best work.

Here are some of the lessons we learned together:

1. I don’t know is ok

Isn’t it funny how as soon as we notice something we don’t know, we can find ourselves focusing on all the things we don’t know? Our weaknesses, our gaps, our uncertainties.

That’s exactly what I saw my son doing when he scanned down a practice paper, picking up on all the words he didn’t know the meaning to and questions he didn’t understand.

I told him to shift his focus. Go for the questions he did know the answer to first. Focus on the words he did understand, and see if he could work out an answer based on what he did know. Then come back to the rest.

There will always be things we don’t know, but if we focus solely on those things, we can end up overlooking what we do know, or running out of time to do what we can do. Don’t let the things you don’t know cloud what you do know.

2. You know more than you think

At the same time, when he got past his initial “I don’t know”, and read the question carefully, there were actually more questions he could answer than he realised.

Sometimes we jump to the conclusion that we can’t do something, when it’s new and unfamiliar. Often we can do far more than we think.

3. You need sleep!

On the run up to the test, we realised that the best way we could prepare him was to make sure he was well rested.

We all know that when kids are tired, they are more sensitive, grumpy, hyper, irrational, unreasonable, and likely to zone out or melt down.

We often forget that the same thing happens to us as adults too.

4. Mindset unlocks knowledge: how you think matters

It doesn’t matter how much you know, if you can’t think clearly. And it’s scary how quickly we can wind ourselves up. I stepped away from the table once for five minutes to help my daughter with something. When I came back, my son was in tears. He couldn’t even see the questions, let alone think straight or answer then.

I realised the best thing I could teach him was resilience. Ways of managing his emotions, so that he could do his best thinking.

How do you teach a 9 year old mindfulness? Keep it as simple as possible. Take a sip of water. Take five deep breaths, slowly in through the nose, out through the mouth. And if that doesn’t work? Use humour. (In through the nose, out through your bum…) Yes, I told fart jokes. It worked.

5. It’s not a point of failure, it’s a learning line

We often see tests as a measure of whether we’re good enough. That every question you get wrong is a point of failure. But what if it’s not about finding your limits? What if it’s just about finding your learning line?

We told our son it wasn’t about getting it right or wrong, it was just to see if the school would be a good fit for him. If the learning they provided would be pitched at the right level for him.

What’s more, it’s easy to confuse being good at something with being good enough. To let our abilities dictate our self worth. I know certainly I’ve fallen into that trap from time to time, but there’s something about seeing your child face the same thing that gives you such clarity.

Which is why the message I sent him before the test was “I love you, I’m proud of you.” I wanted him to know that before he did his test, so he knew he didn’t have to prove it or earn it.

And the mantra I shared with him the night before was one I picked up along my travels, and when I heard him speak it out – especially when he swapped the ‘you’ for ‘I’ – now that was worth more than any test result:

Be brave, be bold, because you are already enough

and perfect just the way you are.

Over to you. Which of these lessons speak to you? What would you add? Let me know in the comments below – I’d love to see your take on this.

The curse of the capable

“I wish there weren’t so many things that I can do!”

My husband said this a little while ago. He was at a crossroads at his career, and was trying to decide which direction he wanted to steer in.

His problem was, he was too capable. For most of his career, he had followed his competency – and the money, opportunities and promotion that had come with it – and found himself doing a job he was very good at but didn’t enjoy.

“It would be easier if I was only good at one thing!” because then he wouldn’t have to choose.

It’s easy to say no to things you know you can’t do. I can’t speak Italian, or fix a car, and my gardening skills are limited to killing things. Those things are pretty easy for me to say no to.

It’s a whole lot harder to say no to things I know I can do. Things I can turn my hand to, things I can figure out, things that if I try hard enough I can master pretty well. Things other people might well ask me to do, because they know I’d do a pretty decent job at it (I once got offered a job by my financial advisor!). Even things that are easier to do than the work I know I should be doing!

But these things are not my strength, because they don’t strengthen me. They often take more time to figure out, more energy to complete and give me fleeting satisfaction rather than lasting fulfilment. Satisfaction that is limited to short term achievement “hey look I did that!”, people pleasing “somebody asked me to and I don’t want to let them down” and probably a dose of personal pride “ask a busy person…”

Ultimately they drain me, and distract me from the work that brings me alive, the work that calls the best out of me, the work that only I can do.

The problem with being capable is there are far too many things we ‘can’ do. And when we say yes to all those things, we end up with nothing left to give to the things we truly want to do.

Sometimes we need to say no, not because we can’t do it, but because it’s not the right thing for us to do.

Sometimes we need to say no, not because we can’t do it, but because someone else can.

Sometimes we need to say no, because we need to make space. Space for what we do best. Space for what we love. Space, so we can say yes wholeheartedly to what matters to us.

What do you need to say no to today?

Diving Deep

I’ve realised lately that most of my work happens in two distinct modes. Scanning and deep focus.

Scanning is when I’m responsive, agile, on the ball, adapting to what’s around me. When I’m in scanning mode I am quick. I can respond to emails, turn around enquiries and answer journalists’ requests with lightening speed. And that can feel great. To know that no-one’s waiting for me, that I’m surprising and delighting people simply by getting in touch, and I’m ticking things off before they’ve even had a chance to touch my to-do list, let alone gather dust.

But when I’m constantly in scanning mode, something changes. I begin to feel restless and agitated, like the more I do, the less it seems to matter. The busier the day becomes, the less I’m sure of what I’ve actually achieved.

And a weird thing happens. My brain actually starts to scan more – for more quick wins, more fires to fight, more links to click and more messages to respond to. The more I scan, the less satisfying the work, and yet the more addicted I become to scanning. Like a craving that I keep feeding, that leaves me more and more unsatisfied.

On the other hand, there’s the deep focus work.

The kind of work that requires your concentration for more than a few minutes, more than the first thought that comes into your head, work that’s less about ‘picking’ your brains and more about drilling deep.

This is the work that actually brings me joy. The creative work. The untangling of thoughts. The penny drop moments of insight. The conversations that change everything.

And yet when I spend too long in scanning mode, this deep focus can be frustratingly hard to reach. It’s like every time I try dive deep, something drags me back to the surface. A last minute request, an urgent crisis, my unwitting reputation for fighting fires catching up with me, or more often myself, scratching that itch to scan and check in just one more time.

That’s when I know I need to retrain my brain. Actively protect myself from external distractions by unplugging and practising stealth and camouflage, but it’s also when I need to practice delayed gratification.

My son asked me to time him the other day. His challenge was to see if he could sit still for a minute at the dinner table. Several times, he got carried away in conversation, and found himself out of his seat. Several times, he had a thought and found his feet following that thought before he had even realised. We had a lot of fun catching him out (and he caught himself several times too). But when he eventually made it until the timer went off, he cheered – then stayed in his seat for the rest of the meal. Somehow the itch to move had passed, and he was settled.

My brain works the same. When it becomes addicted to scanning, I can find myself distracted without noticing. But if I persist, if I insist on delaying that instant gratification of scratching that itch, and keep bringing my attention gently but firmly back to where it needs to be, after a while I find myself immersed. Lost in the flow, deep in focus.

And when I resurface, I’m pleasantly surprised by how natural it feels, how the urge to check has subsided, and in its place is a sense of calm, and choice. Perhaps I’ll check in now, I think. And when I do, I realise nothing remarkable has happened. Nothing’s changed. The world has carried ticking along, but in the meantime, I’ve been somewhere amazing, deep in my world.

Most of us have work that requires us to be in scanning mode, as well as work that needs much deeper focus.

The tricky part is switching between the two. If we’re always in deep focus, those small things pile up and become a rude awakening. But if we’re always scanning, we don’t get the chance to dive deep, into the work that really matters, the work that calls the best out of us, and gives us the most satisfaction.

And when we’ve been stuck in scanning mode for too long, it might seem like the world has conspired against us, that the nature of our work or our industry is such that we can’t stop scanning, but the truth is, the biggest conspirator to that reality is ourselves. Our own belief and our brain’s addiction that holds us prisoner to perpetual scanning.

If that sounds familiar to you, here’s my invitation to you. Give yourself an opportunity to dive deep this week. Whether it’s for half an hour or half a day. Persist past the itch to scan, shut off the outside world and dive deep into your own world. And see what happens.