It’s the Budget today and as yet none of us know what might happen.  Something I feel strongly about is the need for each of us to think carefully about the choices we make in both work and personal budgeting.  In running my own business I notice every small expense and question it – one taxi ride may make life easier but eats into my profit.  But I see individuals in both the public and private sector wasting both time and money without thought because the budget is coming from their organisation’s coffers, not from their own pocket.

Dan Ariely has written a fascinating book Predictably Irrational which demonstrates how people will take stock from a company’s stationery cupboard but would not remove physical bank notes.  They don’t consider the first to be stealing but they do consider the second to be theft.  My point is that each of us needs to consider carefully how we spend each penny and, indeed, whether it is ours to spend.  There is always a consequence and rash spending or waste can bring down a country or bring down a company.

The Tax Department and the Ministry of Defence, among others, have apparently lost considerable sums of taxpayer’s money through incompetence or through badly thought-out procurement contracts which have landed the country with millions of pounds worth of uncollected tax and contracts for helicopters that won’t fly in cloud.  I am also aware that there have been profitable contracts for management consultants within the NHS and other government departments.  Were this their own business, their own money, would they have paid out these sums with such alacrity or would they have considered more carefully whether they have the knowledge and expertise to do the work internally?
When Jamie Dimond came in to JP Morgan, the investment bank, he introduced the concept of fortress accounting – ensuring that every penny spent was well considered.  The story is that he went up the street outside their New York headquarters tapping on the windows of all the taxis and chauffeur-driven cars waiting outside, asking them for whom they were waiting and then checking whether each journey was essential to business need.  As with taxpayer’s money, people in large organisations can lose touch with expenditure when it is not coming out of their own pocket and need to be reminded that combined spending by many individuals can bring an organisation down.  Just as over-spending or waste in the public-sector can result in massive deficits.
It is self-defeating to try to label one sector the angels and the other the devils.  What can be helpful to make the UK economy grow is for each of us to consider the daily small choices we make with expenditure so that other people’s money is not wasted.  At the same time as money needs to flow to make an economy prosper, if we do have the budget then we can enjoy spending what is ours to spend!

On Air

The birds in my garden don’t listen to the news

can’t know of Assad’s brutality

or of families struggling in poverty

their exuberance counters John Humphrey’s bombast

the midges floating in spring scent disregard Ahmadinejad

or Israel’s threat of nuclear holocaust

the buds burst forth despite the Greek debt

the leaves hiphop to the wind’s gentle tune

drowning out the Dawkins’ rant

with the oblivious chatter of resurgence.

March 2011 – enjoy these spring days!

I’d just like you to stop and think a moment… if you are a woman do you feel you always respond as your husband, partner, colleague, brother or son might respond to a situation?  If you are a man do you think and respond like a woman?  Or are you aware of some differences of perspective?

We may talk in a spectrum of stereotypical thinking, which may now be outdated.  However, when one asks young or old professionals what their grandmothers told them you often find that those stereotypical beliefs and messages live on in today’s behaviour.  Equally most people in relationships, whether work or personal, do often comment that they respond differently to their colleagues of the opposite gender.  Not always, but often.

What does this mean?  It is an asset not a problem.   We are more likely to solve the world’s challenges with an equal distribution of male-female experience and creativity than with only 50% of the population making decisions, as is now generally the case.  Surely all governments, organisations and teams (whether family team or business team) can benefit from the diversity of approach and response that is gained from mixed viewpoints.  See also http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/comment/comment/women-in-boardrooms-make-for-better-businesses-7543254.html.  A woman has a different experience of life because she has a physically different body and also because of how others respond to her, just as does a man.  This results in diverse perspectives, ideas and solutions to problems.  The brain and emotional responses are also stimulated and shaped by differing hormones.  Testosterone causes different behaviours to oestrogen.

So let’s take action to move towards a world where men and women share power at the top of business and at the top of government.  Surely this has the potential to result in a more balanced view to shape the crucial decisions taken on our behalf.

You may have seen the Horizon programme about The Truth about Exercise which featured Dr Michael Mosley investigating various proven theories about exercise and its health benefits.  The clearest message that came through to me was that sitting in a chair with little walking exercise each day kills you.  Gradually your body will deteriorate and the chemical balance destabilises.

Many of my clients have very sedentary jobs working within large organisations.  Despite my own and other people’s efforts to encourage managers to support daily exercise and help their staff to take frequent breaks there is still a depressing amount of sedentary presenteeism occurring in the workplace.  Perhaps noone has fully understood how sitting in a chair kills us?

One or two of my more enlightened client organisations encourage their staff to take breaks every hour, set up rota systems whereby people can move away from their desks to walk around or go to the gym, exhort staff to stop for a proper lunch rather than munching sandwiches over their laptop.  Not only is this kind of practice better for health – and especially long-term health – but it is also better for creative thinking and clarity of thought around decision-making.  Most people gain their best ideas away from their desk so why be chained to the least creative area of your life for the major part of the day?

What could you do today to ensure you get a good 60-90 minutes of walking?  It is proven to reduce your likelihood of diabetes and long-term health problems so it must be worth it.  As they say – YOU must be worth it!

I was an anxious child and one of my problems was that I heard noises at night, making me think that our house was under attack.  My mother would assure me that all was quiet in our house in the middle of the countryside but inside my head I could hear armies of marauding people stomping through the house.  Thinking about this now I realize that I was probably experiencing tinnitus which is a condition where people hear sounds in their ears.  It is exacerbated by stress and anxiety.

My mother was patient with me, reassuring me.  She took me by my hand through the house to demonstrate that we were not under attack and that there was no-one in the house other than our family.  This was sensible as when one is anxious it is easy to create imaginary scenes that fuel the anxiety – in my case the sounds in my head attached themselves to images of our home being under attack.  None of this was actually happening so watch where your imagination takes you!

There were two actions my mother helped me to take that are still useful to my clients today – 1. checking reality and staying in the present.  Anxiety usually results from our creating imaginary scenarios in our head of all the things that could go wrong.  These scenes may never happen so one is only making oneself anxious as a result of an over-active imagination.

2. focusing on something other than the sounds in my ears such as putting on some music, or repeating another sound, or repeating a mantra or positive phrase.

Both of these are basically helping you to stay in the present and focus on the positive through controlling the focus of your mind and senses.  I hope these tips may help any of you reading this who experience these problems.

Many years ago I woke in the middle of the night thinking I was experiencing a heart attack.  I was breathless, my heart was racing and I felt faint.  I was living on my own and the whole experienced frightened me.  I calmed my breathing down, relaxed my body and eventually returned to a state of equilibrium.  It was my first experience of a panic attack and I realized afterwards that it was my body warning me that I was doing too much and that I wasn’t taking time during the day consciously to address the challenges I was facing at the time.  My father was dying of cancer, I was in the midst of a divorce and setting up on my own in a new business, my sons needed support, my mother needed support, and I was revising for the finals of a History Degree that I had undertaken as a mature student.  It was all too much for my nervous system but I hadn’t allowed myself to think about all this, so it took my body to tell me to stop and have a rest.

Later I was grateful that I had had this experience as it has helped me to understand my clients when they describe these symptoms to me.  I have then been able to support them to look more realistically at their challenges and find ways to meet their personal needs even within times of great difficulty.  Small things can make a difference.  Getting control of calm breathing to prevent hyperventilation is important as is stopping anxiety-inducing thoughts.  But as you can see from this You-tube clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3SLGt8smTw your body knows you are upset even before you do so do take the time to stop and quietly look at the challenges you are facing and work out strategies that will help you manage them.  Planning how you will take care of yourself in the midst of problems enables you to keep your head even if others all around you are losing theirs!

I want to share three stories which have given me the understanding that life can provide experiences even better than the goals we set  ourselves.  The first was many years ago when I went on a retreat in Hampshire.  I was writing a paper on Renaissance philosophy and wanted some peace in order to think and write.  In my mind’s eye I had visualised an atmospheric garret room in a Gothic building so I was frankly disappointed when I rolled into the drive to see a rather modern square house .  The monk who greeted me then explained that because I was the only person staying that week they had decided I should stay in the Gatehouse.  He pointed to the end of the drive.   There was this perfect Victorian Gothic gatehouse building and I was to have it all to myself for my stay, with my own room, sitting room – AND my own chapel attached!  This was all BETTER than I had ever imagined it could be.

A few years later I set up Positiveworks, hoping that I had it in me to run a consultancy to support others in achieving their work and life goals. As you know, Positiveworks is still going strong 17 years later.  I remember thinking that it would be fun to travel with this work but did nothing specifically to seek work abroad.  I was reading The Famished Road by Ben Okri at the time and it stirred my imagination about Nigeria.  A month later I was called up by two Nigerian consultants inviting me to run some workshops in Lagos.  It was an amazing  experience.  After that I found myself travelling all over the world with my work – from Hong Kong to Australia, from Switzerland to Hungary, then all along the Middle East and on to Lebanon, Kuwait, Dubai, Bahrain, Egypt.  I used to pinch myself, wondering how this had come about.  I had done no specific marketing but somehow these clients had come towards me from one direction and another and there I was standing up running training and coaching sessions to wonderful and fascinatingly diverse groups of people in different parts of the world.  Once again I found myself in a situation even better than I had ever imagined it could be.

More recently my partner and co-author David Beales and I decided to visualise our future life together.  We took paper and coloured pens and drew a picture of a house and garden incorporating all the features we felt would create a happy home for us.  We imagined a place from which we could work, and where our children, grandchildren and friends could easily visit us.  Here I am today sitting in this beautiful thatched cottage looking out at our flower-filled garden.  My cats think they have landed in paradise after Fulham!  And so do I.  Once again, it is even better than I could ever have imagined it could be.

It wasn’t all plain sailing, of course.  Life is full of swings and roundabouts and hard work, so I am not trying to pretend there is a Polyanna world out there.  But I share these stories because I have become convinced from my own experiences and those of friends and clients that we create our own future and that sometimes this can be better than we can possibly imagine it could be.

I am sure that you will have had similar experiences.  Why not think about them and share them with family, friends, children, colleagues?  And then as those of you in the UK and Europe take off for your summer holidays perhaps you would like to cast an imaginative eye over your future now and begin to think of specific things you might like to bring into your life.  How you feel on the inside on a daily basis is always more important than what happens on the outside so include the qualities of life that boost your happiness, whether these are adventurous or peaceful.  Relax and trust your creativity to help you imagine the inside-outside experiences that you want to bring into your life.    And once you have identified these goals open your mind to the possibility that life may just throw you something EVEN better than you could imagine!

Have a happy August,

Helen

‘I shall probably do the usual at Christmas – row with a relative!’ a friend said to me last week.  The family reunion at Christmas can be wonderful, or challenging!  We can be confronted by relatives who have well established perceptions of who we are – but perceptions and expectations of one another can be difficult to shift.  You may find yourself reverting to old behaviours or being treated as the youngest, the oldest, the ‘clever one’, the ‘sporty one’, ‘the difficult one’, ‘the clown’, etc.  But these labels can be outdated and lead to misinterpretation.  The expectations of others – and those we have of them – can limit us from revealing our true selves.

Being back within the family reminds us of the messages we received growing up: some encouraging, some critical and some no doubt frustrating!  So returning to the hearth, or having family to stay, can remind us of how our identity has been shaped and gives us the opportunity to question whether this identity is still relevant today.    What might it feel like if you were able to remove those old perceptions and labels and start again?   For a moment to imagine you have no history, no name, no role, status, or reputation within your family.  What might that feel like?  For me this felt both frightening and yet also liberating.

We all have a responsibility for our impact on others.  How might you help your family to recognise who you are today rather than seeing you as the person you were last year, or ten years ago?   What do you need to express differently?  How might you approach members of your family with new eyes and see beyond the image you may have constructed years ago, especially if that has been negative?  It’s easy to imagine that people don’t change but everyone evolves, and sometimes it’s even for the better!

If you find other people irritating over the festive period consider what their pressures and intentions might be.  See beyond the behaviours.   There’s no book of life and how to live it.  We all muddle along and try to find our way.  Sometimes this results in developing unhelpful defensive behaviours.   But we can choose not hook in to old patterns or give other people the power to upset our day.  We can choose compassion. 

How might you set old relationships up on a new and more constructive footing that reflects the present rather than the past?   What would this look like?  How would you be acting differently so as to reflect the person you are now, the person you wish others to see and acknowledge? 

In that spirit of enquiry I wish you all a very happy Christmas and a new year that brings you and those you love happiness in 2011.

Sorry, I haven’t written the blog for ages because I have been busy moving house and dealing with builders.  It’s a good thing that despite teaching memory techniques the memory cleverly fades out the stressful demands of renovating house and home!  But the reality is that it is exciting and also that we, Dr  David Beales (my partner and co-author of Emotional Healing for Dummies) and I created it through visualising exactly what we wanted in the way of house, home, location, life … and it manifested itself with almost no hesitation or effort at all, as those who know me will tell you.

So whether scientists can prove a creator God or not doesn’t prevent you from creating the life you want to lead, the work you want to be involved in, and developing the potential that lies within you to be the person you want to be.  As this new phase of my life has begun and is unfolding I become increasingly convinced that we do create our tomorrows in the personal energy, thoughts, behaviours and actions we focus on today.  If you focus on pessimism, helplessness, or negativity then you can manifest problems (I know from experience!); if you take time to create a real picture of what you are looking to bring in to your life, and begin to act as if you have it, then the more likely it is that this will come into being.  It isn’t infallible but when it does happen, often with very little effort other than a real intention, it feels like magic but in reality you were the creative force within the process.  As Professor Richard Wiseman’s book The Luck Factor points out, luck is made through attitude, action and creating opportunity.

So we owe it to ourselves and others to create a positive energy around us every day.  Not in a mindless way that denies our emotions because experiencing all emotion heightens the good times but in a way that makes each day as good as it can be.  My observation is that this is spirituality, however you personally define the word, as daily practice.  So maybe take time this week to crystallise what you would like to bring into your life.  Begin with reflecting on the life and experiences you have already created; accept and enjoy where you are now and then identify goals that will enhance this further.  Complete the process by developing the thoughts, behaviours, verbal and body language, and personal energy of the person who already has this in their lives.  Have positive expectations of yourself, others and life.  Let go of stress and doubt as these not only block the process, they lower your immune system too.

It’s easy to be cynical about this process – where is the proof of how it works or that it will work?  But Einstein said ‘not everything in the world can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts’.  Despite scientific advances there are still many things in life that cannot be fully understood.  Analysis and cynicism can be helpful in certain situations but not every situation.  So you might like to just give it a go - as Wayne Dyer said ‘you’ll see it when you believe it’.

Healing emotion is incredibly important.  We all experience emotions every day of our lives and each one of us has had happiness but also sadness, disappointment, resentments and anxieties.  Some of these can get ‘stuck’ in our bodies through our emotional memories.  Our body has an intelligence and is constantly monitoring our emotional state for basic survival reasons but also to ensure that our emotional as well as physical needs are met.  The body stores information about how you tensed up when you gave that presentation to your boss, or were told off by a teacher in the classroom, were fearful at night in the dark as a child, were bullied by a colleague, felt dejected at the end of a relationship, or excited by the prospect of a new home.

Descartes separated mind and body, saying that only God was in charge of the mind but he lived before the era of science .  We are one system, mind and body and now that we are able to view the inner workings of the brain and body with fMRI scans we can see that what happens in the mind immediately affects the body by sending out stress alert signals that change our chemistry and what happens in the body immediately affects our mind by altering the balance of oxygen, CO2 and blood that is available to our ‘thinking’ brain.

All of this is highly relevant to each one of our lives whether at work and needing to think clearly about complex things or at home where we are juggling personal relationships and tasks at the same time as trying to take care of our own needs.

I have been thinking a great deal about this recently in writing my new book EMOTIONAL HEALING FOR DUMMIES which I wrote with Dr David Beales, a medical doctor specialising in mind-body and behavioural medicine.  Sharing experiences of clients and patients we realise that people who are having difficulty speaking up either at work or at home may experience problems with their jaw, those who are feeling ‘put upon’ by others may have physical ailments around neck and shoulders as the ‘burden’ of demands becomes too difficult to manage, others who have back problems as they need to stand up for themselves in some way, people who are fearful go into spasm.  So our emotional feelings impact our health and daily wellbeing but we can heal them by focus of mind – exploring the issues, taking a breathing space to reflect on what it is you personally need to do or say in the situation, learning new thoughts and behaviours that will help you to take action to solve the problems.

So roll over Descartes: my argument is that it is you who are in charge of your mind and your health through what you choose to focus on.  If you have emotions that are causing you difficulties – old resentments at the way your parents treated you or what life has dealt you, or anger at a partner who walked out on you then it is likely that it is not only disturbing your everyday life but is also impacting your health in a negative way.

So take action on this and improve your quality of life by taking a look at our book on EMOTIONAL HEALING FOR DUMMIES – we can offer you a special offer of 25% discount including free postage and packing if you go to http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470747641.html and quote the promotional code VA682.  You can use the same link to get a 25% discount on my book COGNITIVE-BEHAVIOURAL COACHING TECHNIQUES FOR DUMMIES too, quoting the same promotional code.