How to have a great 2008!

John McConnel, a stress management trainer and coach, has sent me a useful checklist for having a great 2008. You can read it and/or download it by clicking here.

He is happy for you to make what use you like of it as long as you attribute it to him.

How to Solve Problems

Here’s a relatively simple method of gaining insight into problems that face us. Often the reason we can’t solve a problem is that we don’t concentrate on it long enough to look at it from enough different angles or give our brains time to process our ideas subconsciously.

Step One

Take a sheet of paper and write across the top “Questions I could ask myself about this problem include…..”

Then write down as quickly as possible between six and twelve different ways of finishing that sentence. Don’t think too much about what you write — the aim here is quantity not quality.

To take an example (completely fictitious of course!), I have a problem keeping my desk tidy. So I might write:

Questions I could ask myself about this problem….

• why is this problem happening?
• why does it matter?
• how could I overcome it?
• what problems does it cause?
• who could help me overcome it?
• what benefit am I getting out of it?
• why is it so difficult to be tidy?
• and so on…..

Put the sheet of paper away and go through Step One again the following day on a fresh sheet of paper without looking at the first sheet. You will probably find that you can find another six or more endings without duplicating anything you wrote the day before.

Step Two

Take both sheets of paper and extract from them the four or five questions that you feel are most helpful, relevant or useful. Then rewrite them as sentences for completion. So for example I might end up with the following list:

• Reasons this problem is happening might include….
• This problem matters because…..
• One way of overcoming this would be…..
• The benefits I get out of being untidy include….

Then do a similar exercise to Step One but this time use each of the sentences you have just written. Again aim to write between six and twelve endings to each sentence. Then put your sheet of paper away for 24 hours and do the exercise again. You will probably find that your insights have developed overnight.

You can do this for several days running if you have the time and the problem is not too pressing.

Step Three

Examine all the ideas you have written out and decide which ones you are going to put into effect.

What Feelings Are You Creating Right Now?

Imagine you come across a traffic jam when you are already running late for an appointment. How do you react? If you are like most people, you will go “Oh, no!” and sit there fuming and cursing the traffic. As a result when you do finally get through the hold-up and arrive at your appointment you are hot and flustered and hardly capable of giving a good impression.

There is an alternative way to react which is to sit there calmly and just accept the situation. OK, so you may be a few minutes late, but at least you will be cool, calm and collected when you do arrive and can get down to business straight away.

Very often it’s not the problem that is the problem, but our reaction to it.

When I broke my hip a few years ago and found that I was going to be on crutches for over a month, I could have regarded it as a disaster. Certainly I had to struggle with my feelings quite a bit at first, but I knew that it would only be a disaster if I made it into a disaster. So rather than focus on what I couldn’t do, I put my entire focus into what I could do. The result was that I had one of the most creative and successful times of my working life.

One of the most useful tools I discovered to keep my attitude right was the question “What feelings am I creating right now?” It made me aware whenever I started to create a disaster scenario, which incidentally included an entire alternative universe of the things I could have been doing if I hadn’t had the accident!

Why not ask yourself this question this very moment as you are reading this blog posting? “What feelings am I creating right now?” Are you interested and inspired or bored and distracted? Some people reading this will be one thing, others another. This posting is exactly the same newsletter for all of you. How you react to it is your own creation.

Feelings are important. They are what distinguish us from robots or computers. How else would we know what to do? Without feelings there would be no way of telling what is valuable to us or not. A computer has no feelings. It couldn’t care less whether it’s word-processing, signing on to the web, adding figures or running a game. Can you imagine your computer complaining because you use it to play too many games or getting upset because you don’t spend enough time with it? No, if there’s going to be any complaining it will come from one of the humans in your life!

So the question “What feelings am I creating right now?” helps us to identify which feelings are useful to us and which aren’t. The process of observation in itself helps us to dissociate from harmful feelings and make them more manageable. The question also points us towards accepting responsibility for our feelings. We run them – they don’t run us!

Think back to a time recently when you got upset about something. Imagine yourself back in the situation and ask yourself the question “What feelings am I creating right now?” You may become aware for the first time that it wasn’t the situation that was upsetting you. It was you who was upsetting yourself over the situation. You could have reacted in a different way. And if you had you would probably have been able to deal with the situation more constructively.

What isn't working?

The next question in my series on powerful questions to ask yourself is "What isn't working?"

This is a great question to ask yourself when you don't feel that things are going quite as well as they could. It's also a great question to ask when you are reviewing your priorities with a view to cutting them down.

Negative signals are just as important as positive ones. Indeed often they are more important - because we are much more likely to ignore them than positive ones. When things are going well, we have a natural tendency to ride the crest of the wave. But when something starts to perform less well than expected (especially if it used to be successful), we often prefer to ignore the signs or rationalise them away. It's really important to keep our projects under review. Knowing when to stop something is as important as knowing when to start something.

When we continue to work on a project long after the time that we should have abandoned it, we are only ensuring that our energies are dispersed, and ensure that we are not going to focus enough on what really could be working.

Like most of the questions in this series, this question can be asked in many different ways:

• What isn't working (any longer)?
• What isn’t working (at all)?
• What isn’t working (as well as it could)?
• What isn’t working (and never will)?
• What isn’t working (when such and such happens?)
• What isn’t working (and what could make it work)?

Exercise: Have a look around your office or your workplace and ask yourself each of the above questions. Maybe it's your filing system that isn't working. Maybe it's the way you deal with your email. Maybe it's the way you tidy your desk (or fail to) at the end of the day. Is this something you could put right? If can't put it right, what needs doing instead?

This article is taken from the latest issue of my newsletter

What will happen if I do nothing?

(This article features in today's issue of my newsletter)

For the first in my series of powerful questions, I am starting with a very interesting one: "What will happen if I do nothing?" There are many ways in which we can use it and many meanings we can give to the question. We can use it when we feel stuck and we can use it when things are going well. The answer to the question may be negative, or it may be positive. It's a question which can be asked by an individual, or by a team or by a whole organisation.

First of all we can ask the question when things are going well. When our new business has finally taken off, it is easy to think that success is our birthright and that it is going to continue that way for ever. Yet the fact is that nothing is static. As the saying goes, “Change is here to stay”. When we reach the point where we are comfortable with what we have achieved, we may well have also reached the point where we have become complacent. The result is that we do nothing which is out of our comfort zone. Eventually we wake up one morning to find that life and the market have moved on and we and our business have been left behind. Businesses that don’t keep up to date with the latest developments are not going to maintain their success. Regularly asking "What will happen if we do nothing apart from what we are already doing?" can wake us up to the danger of stagnation. It may make us aware of the trends that are working against us and which will overwhelm us if we don’t start to do something about them.

This question is even more useful when things are going badly. In these circumstances our greatest enemies are fear and inertia: fear - because any step we could take seems fraught with risk; inertia - because any effective action is likely to lead us way out of our comfort zone. The question “What will happen if I do nothing about this situation?” can alert us to the fact that doing nothing is likely to be just as risky and uncomfortable as any of the other courses of action. When we don’t make our mind up to do something, we are in effect making our mind up to do nothing. Doing nothing is one of the decisions. We are seldom faced with the choice, do I do X or do I do Y? The choice is really Do I do X, Do I do Y, or do I carry on as I am? We need to examine the effects of doing nothing just as closely as we look at the effects of doing X or Y.

Of course, doing nothing is sometimes the correct answer. Governments in particular seem to have great difficulty in believing that every news items doesn't require a reaction from them. Bearing in mind the old adage "There are no circumstances so bad that government interference can't make them worse", most of us would be only too glad if our governments would concentrate on the fundamentals rather than shower us with new initiatives at the drop of a hat.

Sometimes we just have to allow time for the right solution or the right decision to appear. Meanwhile we can reassure ourselves that the course of action we are taking at the moment is the right one. If we can't make up our mind about a proposed course of action, then that is probably as good a sign as any that we shouldn't be taking that action.