Happy Holidays to all our readers – whether you celebrate this holiday as religious festival or just get caught up in the spirit of goodwill.

Spend your Money like a Wise Man

If you want to be happy this Christmas you may or may not be surprised that research proves that spending money on other people increases happiness.

It Really is the Thought that Counts

Other research shows that giving money does not give a message of ‘intimacy’.

I had an interesting conversation with Alysson an HR director about her team wanting to increase the value of a Kriscringle from $10 to $25 because it was so “hard” to find a gift for $10. Alysson rejected the request saying that it was not about the money but the effort, it cost very little to bake some cookies but it really shows thoughtfulness.

In the past I have found buying presents a chore and usually spent too much at the last minute. This year I have put in a bit of extra effort to buy more thoughtful (and less expensive) gifts for my wife. The effort was pleasurable for me – I hope do hope she likes them

Eat Drink and be Merry

I have no research to back this last statement but experience tells me that eating and good conversation with friends and family will increase happiness and refocus us on the important relationships in our lives. A caveat is that you don’t need to overeat or get a hangover to get maximum satisfaction.

So have a great Christmas and I look forward to sharing more self leadership tips in 2010.

In 1984 the number of internet devices was 1000, in 1992, 1,000,000 and in 2008, 1000,000,000!

To reach an audience of 50 million it took Radio 38 years, Tv 13 years, iPod 3 years and Facebook 2 years!

In 2007 there were 2.7 Billion Google queries/month in 2008 31 Billion! Who did we ask those questions BG (before  Google)?

And the internet is changing our lives in other ways; in 2007 one in eight couples who married in the USA met on the internet!

It is so easy to take the internet for granted and Gen Y have never lived without it – and people ask the question , “what’s next?”

The other question is, “what remains the same?”

People still need to exercise self leadership, they still need to communicate effectively and influence others; they still need to learn, grow and find meaning and happiness in what they do. Thankfully the internet helps us to find the resources to do these things.

As a wake up call to all of us I thought I would post  13 ways to mis-manage your health and seriously reduce your happiness and life expectancy.

1. Believe you are immortal or believe that illness only happens to other ‘weaker’ people. Never have a health check or listen to advice.
2. Don’t exercise; avoid all types of physical activity especially anything that makes you lightly puff.
3. Smoke 2 packs a day.
4. Bottle up all your feelings; avoid sharing with friends, family or any strong social support group.
5. Drink alcohol excessively.
6. Drive very fast and drink alcohol excessively.
7. Get angry with everyone and everything, blame others and take no responsibility for your situation.
8. Never take a break or time to relax, holidays are for wimps!
9. Ignore your bodies warning signs like chest pains, headaches, shortness of breath and dizziness.
10. Over eat especially high fat, high sugar junk food. Aim to become morbidly obese.
11. Multitask and have a strong sense of time urgency. This will you to cultivate being angry when anyone interupts you.
12. Worry constantly especially about things that may never happen; this will prevent you doing the things you need to do and help you to maintain a depressed state.
13. Practice being really selfish: Whatever you do don’t laugh or share a kind word with another human being.

Feel free to add to the list via your comments, but most importantly exercise self leadership and,  in the words of Mr. Spock of Startreck,  “Live long and prosper.”

Well, if the answer is yes to any of the two questions, you have probably fallen in the same trap so many people fall every day…the trap of Procrastination!

But how bad is it to procrastinate anyways?

Well, The Procrastination Research Group (so it even has its own research group!) made a survey on 2,700 individuals and asked them how much negative impact does procrastination have on their happiness? 46% said that very much and 18% said that an extreme negative effect.

Pretty bad, don’t you think?

So let’s explore what are the most common reasons of procrastination:

• Care Too Much About What Others Think

It happens that sometimes you want to impress others so much that when given a task you feel so much pressure that it delays your work.

• Striving For The Perfect

It sounds weird, but perfectionism can be what causes procrastination. You may want to strive for perfectionism so much that you feel disheartened even before you begin. This is because a goal that seems unachievable (and who can ever be perfect, anyway?) can be demoralizing.

• Doing Things Totally New To You

You need to embark on a totally new project and you have no idea at all on how to tackle it. The first reaction is to procrastinate. The uncertainty of the result of this task causes you to delay commencing the project.

• The Task Isn’t Meaningful And Motivating

This is another main reason what causes procrastination. The task at hand isn’t motivating to you, as it does not match your aspiration. It is not meaningful to you and therefore you drag your feet in completing the task.

• The Lack Of Confidence

Another common cause of procrastination is the lack of confidence in completing a task. It can be real that you lack the skills but sometimes it may be a perception that you lack the skill. Because of this you may totally avoid completing the task.

OK, but enough with the causes, here are seven solutions:

1. Give up being Perfect! (Nobody is and nobody will ever be!) It is much better to do a task 80% good, rather than wait until you are 100% satisfied and never actually manage to deliver it.
2. Just as most people can’t eat a whole birthday cake in one bite, some jobs cannot be done all at once. Some people come to realize that it is harder to put something off if they slice a job up into manageable pieces and do the task piece by piece, little by little. This might mean breaking down the time required to-do a task into smaller chunks that are spaced over several days or weeks. Some people don’t like large doses of something distasteful. They find that smaller doses spaced over time makes things easier to do and less procrastinatable.
3. Another way some people have reduced procrastination is to begin with an easy, an enjoyable, or the least distasteful piece of a job to get started.
4. Many ex-procrastinators have realized that working with someone else makes it less likely that they will put something off. Perhaps this would work for you.
5. It could be that you will come to realize that making a commitment to someone or setting a deadline for completing a task is one way to make procrastination more difficult. It is known that for many people, setting a goal results in motivation. For this to work, ex-procrastinators have found that the goal must be something they want to achieve.
6. Maybe you will discover that doing a job in the least distracting environment makes putting off work a little harder. For many college students, homes, dorm rooms, or apartments have many distractions and potential distractions. Perhaps you will find a place like the library to study where it is quiet and is going to stay quiet until you are ready to leave.
7. Like many non-procrastinators, you may find it enjoyable to reward yourself for doing a part of a job and for completing a task. Some examples of rewards are treating yourself to some delicious fruits, going to a movie, visiting with friends, or just doing something that you enjoy.

Happy Year of the Ox, Andrew and the Team at Self Leadership International

Fear is a part of our every day lives and to achieve Self Leadership we must understand and work with our fears so that they do not prevent us achieving our objectives.

Or as the bard,  William Shakespeare, put it, “Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we might win, by fearing to attempt”.

Fear takes many forms and can vary in intensity from a mild discomfort to a paralysing phobia. You may be surprised to realise that most people have some type of fear that is preventing them reaching their full potential in life or business.

Fear of… flying, public speaking, meeting people, commitment, success, failure, cold calling, criticism, ill health, death, closed places, confrontation, snakes, spiders…etc. etc.

Fear can a survival mechanism with the purpose of prevent us from engaging in dangerous activities, but overdone it can be extremely limiting.

With the Self Leadership we can ‘step back’ from our fears and question whether our fears are real and valid or blown up out of proportion; and if our fears fall in the latter category – to overcome them.

It is worth considering that FEAR is an acronym for…
False Evidence Appearing Real.

NLP and Neuro Semantics teach us that we react not to reality itself but to our mental representation of reality. Our fear is a reaction to the movies we play in our mind about past and future events.

I was once  giving a training on presentation skills when one, otherwise successful bank vice president told me she had cold sweats for three days before each presentation. I asked her what mental movies she created when she thought about a training – “Well first I see all the people staring at me without blinking and I see their faces getting bigger and closer to me and I hear a voice inside my head saying – you are going to freeze, you are going to stuff up”. That certainly sounded like a horror movie to me, no wonder she is afraid to present.

In this case the fear was out of proportion to the risk. Presentations aren’t life threatening. They can be career threatening if you don’t prepare and speak with confidence and in this case our bank VP was robbing herself of confidence.

If you change your mental movies you change your reactions. To do this you need to be able to step back from the movie and realise it isn’t real.

There is a Moorish proverb that says, “He who is afraid of a thing gives it power over him.”

Have you ever hired a video or DVD and then realised that it was a really bad film? Would you hire it and play it again? Of course not! Why is it then that when we have a bad experience we play that mental movie over and over and over again?

With this current financial crisis are you playing horror movies of how bad things are? Or are you playing mental movies of how to best position yourself and your company for future success?

To de-power an unresourceful mental movie you need to step back from it and create distance so that you realise it’s only a movie. In addition if you change you movie to black and white you will find it has less power over you. You did know that you could change the quality of your internal movies – didn’t you? Editing our internal movies gives us power over our states of mind (self leadership).

If you would like to erase a movie that has been playing over and over, follow these steps.

1. Start with a black and white, still frame that just precedes the start of your ‘fear’ movie.

2. With the movie in black and white and you distanced from it (as if you are in the projection booth), run the movie to the end, and keep on running it until you reach a pleasant scene (this might be quite some time after the original movie).

3. Step into the pleaseant scene, fully experience it.

4. Now run the movie backwards to the first still frame. It helps if you can make the whirring sound of a video recorder being fast rewound.

5. Step back into the pleasant scene and rewind the movie 5 or 6 more times.

This process has the effect of scrambling your neural association to this movie and frees you to make new meanings in your mind for what is empowering for you.

This is an abbreviated description of the fast phobia cure that is taught in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Neuro-Semantic (NS) practitioner trainings. If you know a coach who is trained in NLP or NeuroSemantics you can also ask them to run this pattern with you.

“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.”

Realising that there is a way to release you fears, large or small, is now the time to let them go?

’’Come to the edge,’’ He said.
They said, ’’We are afraid.’’
’’Come to the edge,’’ He said.
They came. He pushed them… and they flew.

- Guillaume Apollinaire

How often do you hear someone say, “I love my job?”

Our career coach, Jass Malaney says, this is rare.

Conversations at work are more likely to be along the lines of, “Thank God it’s Friday” or “When my lottery numbers come up I’m out of here”.

Confucius said, “Man who loves what he does, never does a day’s work in his life”.

Is it possible to love your Job? Do you know someone who does?

People who love their jobs rather than just turning up for the pay check, are engaged by it and gain meaning from it.

Research by the Gallup Organisation has identified that employees need the following to feel engaged by their work:

• Role clarity: Employees know what is expected of them at work.
• Talent utilisation: Workers have opportunities to use their talents in their roles every day.
• Recognition: Employees receive recognition regularly and feel cared for.
• Communication: Workers receive ongoing feedback on their performance and have regularly scheduled progress discussions.
• Bonding: Employees have strong bonds with their coworkers.
• Development: Employees have opportunities to learn and grow.

You might consider these factors to be the responsibility of your manager or your organisation to provide. It is true that organisations that value their employees and managers who understand people leadership will have these factors in mind; however you do have a self leadership responsibility for your own engagement.

Psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied thousands of people and discovered that we bounce between two extremes: during much of the day we live filled with the anxiety and pressures of our work and obligations, while during our leisure moments, we tend to live in passive boredom. The key to happiness is therefore to challenge ourselves with tasks requiring a high degree of skill and commitment and to become fully engaged in these activities.

When we are fully engaged in an activity we enter into a state of ‘flow’, a state where time goes away and the task seems effortless. We tend to experience such ‘flow’ moments when playing a sport or engaged in a hobby. Imagine skiing down a mountain with all of your attention focused on making the turns, you are unlikely at this moment to be worrying about trivial issues. Another aspect of a flow moment is that feedback is immediate; the mountain climber knows he or she is one step closer to the goal.

So how do you create more flow moments in your job?

1. Constantly find challenges that will stretch your skill level, especially if it requires learning something new.
2. Set goals and request feedback that lets you know how you are doing in the short rather than long-term.
3. Find meaning in what you do

Meaning
A craftsman knows why he does what he does. The industrial revolution, with its soulless assembly lines, robbed many workers with the sense of meaning for what they do. Victor Frankl, who survived a Nazi concentration camp, suggested that we can stand any “what” if we have a big enough “why”. Find the meaning in what you do; what does your work mean to you? To others? To the world?

For example a teacher might find meaning in that they get to share what they have learned and the more they teach the more they know about the subject. Their teaching impacts a generation of students and those students will change the world, even if only a little bit at a time.

To find meaning at work, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What does this work mean to me?
2. What does it mean to my clients, customers?
3. What does this work mean in the context of my life?
4. How can I give this work more meaning?

When we combine meaning with our actions we become self-actualised, our life has purpose and passion and we can truly love our work.

Often when we think of someone who loves their job we think that they are engaged in a vocation rather than work (think doctors and nurses).

Aristotle said, “Where talents and the needs of the world cross, therein lies your vocation.” Today we might use the word passion rather than vocation.

The needs of the world are not just for excellent health care, but also for excellent customer service, sales people, accountants, technicians, builders etc. etc. etc.

Sometimes we think we will be happiest sitting on a beach doing nothing (passive boredom), but in truth we are happiest when we are doing something useful.

So do you love your job? Feel free to comment.

Andrew

In 2009 I will be writing on this blog about how to turn thoughts into actions and actions into results, so what I want to know from YOU is…

What are your resolutions for 2009?

Please respond by clicking on comments below… thanks, Andrew
Oh and have a Happy New Year!

Today I read a great post by Jonathan Fields entitled, “Six timeless rules for my 6-year old daughter”, it made me laugh, it made me cry and made me wonder what I am in for as my daughter grows up!

Please read it and enjoy.

You have! Wow that’s good I thought it was just me

To make error is human, we all screw up or we are not living.

As I write this blog I can still feel the fresh emotion of embarrasment from a recent mistake. Yesterday  I posted on a forum and had not framed my communication in line with my intention. The result was that I was publically attacked for what was perceived as a ‘superior and glib’ attitude.

When we are attacked our first reactions are to fight or run but with self leadership we can choose our response and learn from a situation.

My self leadership which creates self-awareness, caught my first thought of vengeance for the attack, and asked the question, “is this useful?”

My immediate second thought was, “how can I hide this mistake?” and again my self leadership asked the question, “is this useful?”

Once my reactivity has settled I was able to assess the situation.

• Could my post be perceived in the way my attacker said? – yes, I can now how see how it could.
• Have I made a mis-take? – yes.
• Am I perfect? – no, I am human.
• Can I learn from this – yes, this is valuable feedback, perhaps I do have the potential for a superior attitude and this is not in line with my highest intention. This is something to work on.
• What is the best response? – Aplogise, explain my intention but make no excuses, change my behaviour.

By sharing my thought process I hope I have illustrated a method to handle mis-takes.

1. Don’t react
2. Accept that you are human and not perfect
3. Aplogise and make amends
4. Learn from the experience

It has often been said that, “If we are not making mistakes, we are not doing anything worthwhile.” I would agree with this sentiment as I think we learn more from our mistakes than our successes; unfortunately we live in cultures that are often intolerant to mistakes and these are cultures that don’t learn.

Perhaps it is true that without the self leadership to handle mistakes we will never be happy and without the courage to make mistakes we will never have leaders.

(copyright Andrew Bryant, no reproduction without permission – thank you)