Focus on today

As the New Year heralds the usual messages of resolutions and beginnings, we pause to consider how this New Year we might be different.

Last year felt unprecedented in terms of the surprises that played out on the world stage, and the subsequent uncertainty that we start the year with is both worrying and hopeful.

We encourage ourselves to chose hope over worry: “ hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act” R. Solnit

But because of this uncertainty we may choose not to launch into usual new year, new resolutions activity, but instead to take the opportunity this year to use this uncertainty to have a more reflective and measured start: to better consider the complex issues society, organisations, teams and indeed individuals are facing

It may be more appropriate in the space of this uncertainty to consider instead the ‘ seeds’ of change that we want to grow and also how we can right now be more of who we want to be?… Read more...

“Fire” by Judy Brown

What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.

So building fires
requires attention
to the spaces in between,
as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build
open spaces
in the same way
we have learned
to pile on the logs,
then we can come to see how
it is fuel, and absence of the fuel
together, that make fire possible.

We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.
A fire
grows
simply because the space is there,
with openings
in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn
can find its way.… Read more...

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, 
or how I comb my hair,
but ask me what I am living for, in detail,
ask me what I buy CBD products is keeping me from living fully
 for the thing I want to live for (Thomas Merton, 1915-1968)

What is this?

• A process of determining how our past has shaped us into who we are today, or put another way, how we got to be the person we are today.

Why is looking back at what has gone before important to the coaching process?

• Much of how we behave as senior leaders has its origins in the emotional processes of earlier life
• Much of this behaviour is not conscious, it is so well laid down and repeated that we are generally not aware of any thought processes that drive these patterns of behaviour.