Being in business or working in a senior executive role brings a lot of responsibility. The more senior the role, often the more stress. You have a lot of people looking to you and relying you to provide a good work environment that will enable them to thrive as well as earn a decent living. They look to you for inspiration and security.
The decisions you have to make on a daily basis are challenging. It’s not easy to have the clarity to make these decisions when there’s a thousand other things to do and so many people to communicate with, from customers to suppliers.
It can be a lonely place at the top and having someone to bounce ideas with and discuss options seems like an impossible luxury. This is where working with a coach works so well.
You will have someone you can trust, who will listen to you without prejudice , without criticism. Who will challenge thoughts and behaviours that are holding your back, who will congratulate you unequivocally where it’s due, and help you find the oh so elusive work life balance.
How to deal with someone trying to wind you up
We’ve all experienced this. Someone in our lives, be it family, colleagues or friends even, who just seems to know which buttons to push.
It feels like they derive joy from seeing you get wound up. That smirk on their face! They know exactly what they’re doing.
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Trust is the invisible ingredient that creates stronger relationships. At work, it’s the foundation of effective teamwork. Without trust, people are less collaborative, less open, less prepared to commit to the team and others. Think about someone you don’t trust and consider how you might behave. You may be more guarded, less generous, less likely to respond positively and be receptive to requests for help.
If you prefer to listen, you can access my podcast here.
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A question that comes up regularly in my meetings as a leadership and executive coach is what makes someone a good CEO.
Whether a founder CEO or not, there are certain qualities when it comes to leadership, communication and behaviours that increase your impact as a CEO and indeed, when adopted and honed, can make life a lot easier and less stressful.
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Do you feel like you’ve lost control? Does it feel like everyone else is powerful, things are working for them, but you just find that nothing works out how you want it to? Then realising that you have choices may help.
Choice is such an important part of life. Most of us, are lucky enough to be able to make so many choices about how we behave, how we work and live. We can choose how to react to others, to situations – we are not powerless. This is often too easy to forget in the day to day busy-ness and stress of life. It’s too easy to be passive and react to situations with frustration, anger or hopelessness, blaming circumstances or others for what happens when the most constructive thing we can do is recognise our options and move forward.
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During my time training as a resilience practitioner, I learnt many useful resilience techniques. Learning that through adopting these, we can develop and become good at resilience was hugely inspiring as previously I don’t think I completely understood how much influence we have over our own reaction to challenging situations.
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