Always checking your emails?

Giving yourself an email holiday could be good for your health – why don’t you try just checking your emails once an hour for a week and see what difference it makes?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2148754/Why-ignoring-emails-good-heart.html


Kate Gare

Are you a Stress Junkie?

Answer the following questions to find out:

1. Are you one of those people who say 'I thrive on stress'?
2. Do you strive for perfection?
3. Do you get by on less than 7 hours sleep?
4. Do you rely on coffee and/or cigarettes to keep going?
5. Do you find it hard to switch off/relax?
6. Are you always too busy for a holiday?
7. Do you feel anxious when you’re not busy?
8. Do you often eat on the go?
9. Do you worry a lot?
10. Are you always leaving things to the last minute? (See Time Management blog).

Please note this is not a scientifically designed questionnaire.

If you find yourself answering yes to:

2-3 of the above questions, you may be a stress junkie.

4-6 of the above questions, you are probably a stress junkie.

7-10 of the above questions, you are definitely a stress junkie!

Whilst we know that a bit of stress can improve performance, being constantly in a state of stress can cause problems.

The Stress Response, also known as the Fight or Flight mechanism or the Physical Emergency Response, is designed to keep us safe. So if our ancestors were faced with a tiger, this response would be triggered to enable us to either fight the tiger or run away, by releasing hormones that primed the body for action. However, if we are constantly activating this mechanism, it can suppress our immune system, interrupt our sleep patterns, and these hormones can cause a whole host of conditions, including heart problems.

Help is at hand. You can learn to break the patterns that result in stress junkie behaviour and learn how to calm the stress response. P4 is designed to teach people how they can perform at their best even in high pressure situations, without being a stress junkie!

Simon Pimenta

Choose to be Calm

Paul Wilson in his "Calm for Life" book says,

"When it comes to being calm, and feeling good about your work, your relationships and your life in general, you have choices. It may be difficult to accept this while you feel trapped in any particular work or lifestyle routine, but these choices do exist. It's not always easy to see this, but you have the power to be happy or unhappy, to be tense or relaxed, to be contented or depressed, to be rich or poor, to be well."

The idea of you being more influential in your life and in your health is something we firmly believe and teach on our Lightning Process and P4 Training Courses

Why choose calm?

Because from a state of calm solutions and clarity can be found and from these states of mind success is soon to follow! Calmness is the key to success.

Claire Brooker

5 Tips for Building Rapport and Trust

1. Be yourself - value and accept the person that you are and recognise your strengths.

2. Be professional - make sure you both look and act the part, and make the right impression.

3. Be curious about others - if you are genuinely interested in people and what they have to say, they will be drawn to you.

4. Have a conversation - avoid just pitching to people especially if you are meeting them for the first time.

5. Tell stories - have stories and anecdotes that are relevant to keep people interested and entertained.


Helen Harding

1 minute to… Present Powerfully

Public speaking made easy
I've worked with thousands of people, including myself, who had a paralysing fear of public speaking. Very often they would be people who were incredibly confident in many other situations including chatting with strangers, but somehow when the idea if speaking public came up, they just collapsed.

The secret to becoming confident at public speaking lies in your neurology. You have actually learnt this skill, as a child you would have been very confident making yourself heard and screaming in public! However through practice, both during presentations and by running over a future presentation in your head, and seeing it going disastrously wrong, we unwittingly wire our brains to prepare to be scared.

To resolve this all we need to do is rewire our brains using a process called neuroplasticity (see video in one of my previous posts) to get different, better, more confident brain pathways firing instead.

Follow the steps below to rewire your brain and so you can start to imagine any forthcoming presentations in a new and powerfully confident way:

Step One
Remember a time when you felt confident, ideally it will be a time when you were speaking with someone, but if it's confidence in another situation then that's fine too.

Step Two
Takes those feelings and imagine you are a bird flying over the presentation. See yourself from a distance being calm, confident and in charge.

Step Three
Beam those feelings down from the bird into that you that is getting ready to speak. Notice how confident they look, how easy it is for them to speak.

Step Four
Float down into the audience and see how it feels to watch you being confident. Listen to the voices inside their heads of the people watching saying 'wow I wish I could do that'.

Step Five
Float into the future 10 years from now when you have already become brilliant this simply through practice. Step into the you that you are in 10 years time, and feeling how that feels beam those feelings all the way back to the you who is standing presenting at the forthcoming event.

Step Six
Step into that new calm you on the stage and feel how that naturally feels to be confident, calm, powerful and excited about letting people know what you have to offer.

That's it job done!

Let me know how brilliantly you do in your next presentation.

Phil Parker

The Importance of Employee Engagement

Director at Employee Engagement and Wellbeing Specialists, Professor Ivan Robertson's, recent piece in The Guardian talks about the importance of employee engagement during these difficult economic times. Robertson says that there are many ways to engage employees including organisations commitment, job satisfaction and organisational citizenship.  May research studies show that there is a link between higher levels of engagement with better performance and productivity, more customer satisfaction and lower rates of absence through sickness.  

Sadly, in my experience, in testing times the very engagement that can have such a measurable impact is often one of the first budgets to be cut.

Kate Gare

How are your Time Management skills? Part 2

Meetings:

Plan to get there early. Work out what train you would need to get in order to get there on time, and get an earlier train. Then if a train is delayed, it is still possible to get there on time. Someone I met used to get to appointments 2/3 hours before the allotted time. Personally I find that unnecessary, but taking reasonable steps to allow for delays is sensible.

Plan:

If you have a project deadline, consider how long you think the project might take. People often underestimate how long a task will take, so add 50-100% more time. Schedule when you are going to do the work.

Leaving the House:

If you have to leave the house at a certain time, let’s say 10am, plan to be ready before the allotted time. If you are ready at 9.30am, and start doing a task, for instance writing a letter on your computer, decide when you need to stop this task and allow time for turning off the computer.

Holidays:

I have borrowed a strategy from someone who has good time management skills. He gets his suitcase out a week before departure, and starts putting things in the case as he thinks of them. 2 nights before departure, he will look at a packing list, to see if there is anything else he needs to buy, or to put in the case. The night before departure, he will go through his list and pack everything properly.

Planning is the key to good time management!

Simon Pimenta

How are your Time Management skills? Part 1

1. If you have a meeting do you arrive:
a)   Early
b)   On time
c)   Late

2.   If you have a project deadline, do you:
a)   Work on it steadily during the time frame
b)   Stay up the night before, working through the night if necessary
c)   Fail to meet the deadline and have to ask for an extension

3.   If you have to leave the house at 10am to catch the train, are you:
a)   Ready to leave in advance of 10am
b)   Starting something at 9.30am, then having to rush to get out of the house on time
c)   Leaving the house after 10am, rushing to get to the station in order not to miss your train

4.   If you are packing to go on holiday, do you finish packing:
a)   At least the day before travelling
b)   In the wee small hours
c)   Moments before you have to leave to get to the station/airport?

If you answered:
a)   You have good time management skills
b)   There is room for improvement in this area
c)   You have time management issues and are probably creating a lot of unnecessary stress!

If you mainly answered b or c read Wednesday's blog post for simple strategies to help!

Simon Pimenta

Should people accept that pressure is a fact of life?

Matthew Syed, author of ‘Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice’ has teamed up with the BBC to look at the psychology of pressure – why some people are particularly prone to pressure, while others cope well.  Interesting stuff.  To take part in the test (and maybe learn something about yourself along the way) see here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17874450

Kate Gare

There's never enough time in the day!

"There's never enough time in the day!" Sound familiar? Read on for some solutions...

Break projects into bitesize chunks
Apparently the optimal amount of time to spend on a task is 40-90 minutes. After that take a break and recharge before you move on to the next job.

Do a bit of what you're avoiding
If you even do 5mins of this task, you'll realise how much of the anxiety was created in your head.

Relax
Not only will you feel better, you'll also be more effective.

Let me know how much time you've saved. The more time you make for yourself the happier and healthier you'll be!

Claire Brooker