We all want to improve the quality of our life, don’t you too?

Although improving the quality of life is what we all want dearly most people don’t know where to start. One proven way is to schedule a coaching session to help clarify priorities and define an action plan. If you want to try this feel free to get in touch for a free initial session.

However, for a variety of reasons, some people aren’t quite ready yet to commit to a coaching relationship.

For those and for others who are simple interested in personal development I have recently  launched an initiative called the Club of Qualities. This weekly meeting, open to all, aims to discuss informally a personal quality that when developed will help improve the quality of our personal and professional lives. You could consider it a chilled-out group coaching session.

I have designed the Club of Qualities as a program that gets Club Members to focus their attention on one quality each week. People can join one, a few or all meetings depending on their level of interest in the week’s quality being discussed. Yesterday, our fifth meeting in Lisbon (but online presence is available for our international guests) we discussed the quality of altruism.

The previous four qualities were: curiosity, resilience, ambition and efficiency.  The next will be self-confidence. You get the gist I guess. In the first round there will be 52 i.e. one per week for a full year.

The format is fairly straightforward yet strikingly effective. We start by defining what the quality means as this isn’t always as clear as one may think. Clarity about what each quality is about is of paramount importance to facilitate and ground the discussion. Participants then share suggestions and experiences about how to develop or better manage the quality being discussed. The open and informal discussion is very enriching and provides some great food for thought and action. Finally participants are given a week, until the next meeting, to observe and develop the quality in the context of their life.

I am sharing this because I think it is a simple yet powerful initiative to gain focus and strength to develop a set of individual qualities on a weekly basis. The end goal is to pull together the weekly improvements so that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

I am pleased to report that the Club of Qualities is delivering what it promises as participants are not only enjoying the meetings but also experiencing tangible progress in their weekly personal development journey.

Should anyone be interested in joining the Club of Qualities please do get in touch.

Join us in improving the quality of our respective lives one quality/week at a time.

To celebrate the new year I have just published my book Happiness Design: How to Design Your Ideal Life and Make it Happen. It’s now available on Amazon.com (.co.uk, .it., .es, etc.)

The book is about happiness. More specifically it’s about designing happiness. In other words it’s about learning how to define, clarify, plan and realize your very own set of conditions that, when fulfilled, make you feel happy.

In the book I include step by step instructions on how to figure out what is important to you and leverage that knowledge to generate life plan options, pick the best and make it happen.

I introduce practical tools and techniques from the field of applied psychology including Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Interpersonal Communications, TimeLine Therapy as well as more practical considerations coming from the field of change management and project planning.

I wrote this book the way I live my life: with passion. I hope it will inspire you to take your life’s design in your own hands and to live your ideal life on your own terms.  

You can get it for free on Amazon only from Wednesday 22nd of January to Saturday 25th of January  and again on Thursday February 13th via this link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HVI3VQO 
After this promotion it will be available for purchase any time via the same link. 

If you go for the free download option I would appreciate your constructive reviews to help position it on amazon.com.
Feel free to share the book with those you care about.

 Wishes of a happy and productive 2014!

I have noticed an interesting trend lately. I seem to meet more and more people who, when asked the customary: ‘So what do you do?’ don’t simply answer: ‘I am a X’ (substitute X for ‘lawyer’, ‘manager’, ‘painter’, ‘salesperson’ or any other established profession). Most people seem to be doing a number of different things at once.

Sounds odd? Think I live on another planet? Just check the profiles on LinkedIn and you’ll see what I mean. Increasingly people’s LinkedIn profiles read something like: “I am a X & Y and also do a bit of A and B  and occasionally C”.

A ‘designer’ is now someone who works in “design, social media and event management and launching a crowd-funding platform startup” and a ‘therapist’ is now an “expert in alternative medicine, manager of an online distribution business, health blogger and also a musician for corporate events”. Even employees and executives in large companies may have a side gig where they take on another part-time business such as real estate, semi-professional poker players or offer some kind of professional service (un)related to what they do in their day jobs.

But this is not all, there are also others who will answer the same question differently based on who asks. So the same person may be a therapist, an online distributor, social media manager and an entrepreneur at different times of the day depending on what the person who asked does and needs.

Without going into a full sociological analysis, I think this trend is very telling of the economic and social context in which we live nowadays. Internet makes everything easier to access and faster to achieve. We can all reinvent ourselves and find a stimulating and rewarding profession if we set our mind to it. Increasingly it seems that the days of a training/job for life are becoming, well, a thing of the past . Not only this ‘for life’ label is starting to feel somewhat boring for some people but even for those who appreciate the stability of a fixed job these are getting harder to come by and not as secure as they used to be. Even getting hired in a large and stable corporation doesn’t guarantee a fixed job until it’s time to retire.  

On the other hand technology enables us to work anywhere and anytime. So people are making the most of technology and information and are reinventing themselves professionally all the time. And whilst you are it why limit yourself to just one activity when you can learn and do many things? The truth is that we all want to make some extra cash (ideally tax free). Also, acquiring basic ‘technical skills’ is getting easier (you can find an online course often quite fast and even for free). So provided the state is not in the business of regulating the access and practice of your chose new profession (such as medical doctor, lawyer, etc.) anything is within you reach.

We are constantly being stimulated to get used to multi-tasking. At work they tell us that we need to take on side projects and learn to juggle between roles and responsibilities or else. At home, where time seems to be shrinking all the time it is not uncommon to do many things at once simultaneously: eat, surf the net, watch TV, chat and answer an instant message.

Does all this multi-tasking stress you out? Is this parallel professional configuration starting to eat into our sense of professional certainty and identity?

If so consider this.

To regain a sense of grounding it may be helpful to reframe it. If you break all this down you find that it doesn’t really matter what you do or even how you are anymore. Above all we are all salespeople who need to source their clients and find ways to add value to them. Since knowledge is easier to obtain what is the tricky part is to get clients willing to part with their cash in exchange for whatever you may be able to offer them. So the key becomes finding clients and being both competent and flexible in giving them what they want. This is why people seem to be taking on more professional identities. They instinctively understand that what matters is the ability to source and service demand. The more they have to offer, the more they can leverage their skills to cross-sell the better it is. Suddenly a real-estate agent can double up as a sport psychologist and a social media manager may also be an online distributor for a multi-level marketing company. 

The exact configuration of what we do is less important than the overall ability to be creative, feel free, enjoy a sense of growth and contribution and whatever else the sum of the different things you are doing may be bringing you.

If you think this is only relevant to professionals who run their own business think again. Even in the corporate world people need to be able to display an image of competence and flexibility, willingness and ability to take on new roles (often in parallel to their official job spec) as demand comes in. If not, guess who will be on that list when the next merger, acquisition or downsizing hits (and it will sooner or later)?

So where does this leaves this growing group of multi-identity professionals? It depends. For some, those who have successfully made the transition by adapting and getting comfortable with this new multi-tasking professionalism, things are looking good. At times it may get a bit hectic but all in all it’s ok. 

For many others though it is really hard to keep smiling all the time. They clearly enjoy the feeling of freedom and creativity that this multi-tasking brings. In many ways once you get started taking on new roles adding yet another professional identity isn’t very hard and can even be fun. You kind of get used to it. After all the real skills required are already there: learning and selling something else.

So where is the problem?

Unfortunately for some this multiple professional identity can turn into a split-personality syndrome where they start feeling pulled in many directions without really knowing who they are any more.  If you are one of these multi-tasking pros you know what I am talking about. It’s stressing having to check 3 or 4 different email accounts, feed content to a number of social media networks and be quick in finding the right business card amongst the 3 or 4 in your wallet.  

Eventually some may start to desire a return to the good old “I am a X (and nothing else thank you very much)” scenario. Just one thing at a time: nice and easy.

So if you are feeling the pain of living in this multiple identity paradigm how do you go about it?

First, take a step back and find out exactly what is frustrating you. As people tend to enjoy what delivers their desired outcomes chances are that the issue is not the split-personality but rather the lack of proportional results given the amount of time and effort put in. This is the most likely scenario since one of the main reasons we do take up other activities because just the one may not be fulfilling at all levels and especially financially. 

In other words, before you jump to the conclusion that you are simply uncomfortable with doing too many things at once, you may first want to imagine what it would feel like if you could be doing these two, three or more activities and getting satisfying results from them all. Does this change your state of mind? If so you may want to review the issue and reframe it as a management problem. In other words what could you do more or differently to get the results you want? Are you getting your priorities right? Is your time management efficient? Are you leveraging the right resources? Can you get some help? Can you automate tasks?

On the odd chance that you are getting the results you want but still feel frustrated then your issue is even simpler to resolve. Simply prioritize and delegate or drop one or more activities and only focus really feels right for you. Typically your best seller may be the right candidate to focus on as you people tend to enjoy more what they are good at.

Once you have taken the steps above, and only then, you may want to consider a deeper assessment of how each activity and professional identity is aligned to your core values and basic human needs.

Some activities may be generating some frustration because although they align well with some of your values they may not deliver others aspects that are also important to you. Example you may feel that activity X allows you to satisfy your need for helping others but doesn’t make you feel that creative any longer. If creativity is a core value for you then it is clear that this activity may be losing appeal to you. In certain, more extreme, cases this misalignment  can go all the way towards generating an internal conflict. This happens when you feel that a certain activity is bringing you something you value whilst at the same time bringing something you dislike. As an example think of a salesperson who loves what they do as they get a thrill from closing deals but knows that what they are selling isn’t really as good as it is claimed to be. This can generate an internal conflict where achievement is in conflict with another important value: integrity. Ideally this person would recognize this and come up with a way to design an integrity-based selling approach. With a bit of creativity, resilience and passion almost anything can be achieved but, as we have seen in previous posts, not always is this possible. In these cases it may be best to move on to something else where the two values may coexist and even enhance each other.

However there is another crucial question to ask before you make a significant decision such as dropping one of the things you do. You need to go back to your six fundamental human needs and be fully conscious of how much, in particular, you value stability over variety. As I have explained in a previous post we all share six fundamental human needs and although all are important for us we tend to favor one or two. 

When dealing with the challenge of being many things at once we need to be honest with ourselves and understand the relative weight that the need for stability and variety have for us. If we need stability over variety it is likely that at some point this multi-tasking may start to take its toll as we go back to what is in essence a conflict: the creative part is satisfied but the stability-seeking one is not. As mentioned earlier it is often possible to reconcile dissonant parts.

 In the next post I shall explain how to do that.

As usual: stay tuned and get in touch if you need any help to make sense of this in the context of your current challenges and objectives.

Now that you have learned about your basic human psycological needs, your values/ criteria and you rules, you are well positioned to take on the next piece of the puzzle that defines why you do what you do and shy away from certain things: your belief system.

What is a belief system and why does it matter?

A belief system is a set of beliefs or thoughts that you hold to be true (often despite the evidence) and that shape and give meaning to your experiences. These beliefs can be limiting or empowering, and as such they will hold you back or propel you forward as you deal with challenges and opportunities in your life.

We speak of a system because they tend to support one another and end up creating an integrated system of beliefs and thoughts that over time can lead you to lose the ability to see things from a different perspective.

As an example, think of what happens in you when an idea of yours is shot down by someone you know well or not at all. This could be at work or at home or with friends. Some people react by shutting down as they give in to the belief that their ideas are never good, that nobody cares for their input and that they just aren’t worth much. Faced with exactly the same situation others react by leveraging their belief that every feedback, good or bad, is a learning opportunity. This pushes them to review their idea, take in the feedback and come up with a new version of the original idea that they are happy to sumbit again.

In the first case, the limiting belief triggers feelings of inadequacy, fear and insecurity that not only lead to pulling back at the time but will also influence character and attitude over time.

In the second instance, the empowering belief leads to trying again from a different angle and boosts resilience, confidence and attitude that can and will be leveraged over and over again in the future.

So where to beliefs come from?

In essence, they are the product of a complex set of factors including innate character traits and above all early experience and education during the formative years. In this sense beliefs are learned and embedded in your way of thinking and being as a mechanism to protect you from negative consequences.  You may, for instance, have been severely punished as a child for venturing away from your garden or block and getting lost. As such you may have developed a belief that taking on risks will always lead to bad outcomes.

But don’t think that this means that if your beliefs tend to be of the limiting sort you are doomed. It’s never too late to change even though you are no longer a child. The good news is that as an adult you are fully in charge and control of your personal development process and you can decide to assess and change your beliefs to make them more empowering and less limiting.

Although there are many limiting beliefs they all stem from three basic inner fears that are common to all human beings to a greater or lesser degree. These are:

1.       The fear to fail

2.       The fear of not being worthy

3.       The fear not to be liked/loved

If you think carefully and honestly about this you will find that whatever limiting beliefs you may have they can all be mapped back to one or more of these three fears above.

The reason why people typically don’t like to speak in public or dance is that they are afraid to fail and make a fool of themselves. Some believe that they aren’t worth much and therefore they don’t take on challenges, or do so only halfheartedly, because they don’t truly believe that they could ever deserve to make it. Finally others are so afraid about what people will think of them if they decide to challenge the status quo and try something new, that they get used to stay put in their current condition. They do so in the belief that it is the only way to preserve that little connection and love that they have with their peers.

Any of this sounds familiar? 

In the next post I will explain how to go change all this.

As usual stay tuned.

Until then remember that you give meaning to what happens around you, not the opposite.

As we have seen in the last post the first step to take on or move on is to make sure that you are aware of what really matters to you. 

Without a clear understanding of what you need and value any new project/task that you take on or that you are deciding to let go you are unlikely make the most of the experience.

It doesn't matter if you are at the start or at the end of a journey. It doesn't even matter if you are successful or not. What matters is that you have clarity about your needs and values. With this understanding in place you can fully access your potential and strength to deal with what is needed to succeed or to deal with failure constructively so that you can take the learning into your next challenges.

So how do you go about understanding your own needs and values? 

Needs and values are related. But what are needs and values? Needs are basic conditions that must be met to be fulfilled and are universal to all human beings. Values are more specific to each person and are about what they value in a certain sphere of life (professional, relational, health, leisure, etc.).

According to Human Needs psychology there are 6 basic human needs.
The need for Certainty (security, comfort, stability) which is balanced and challenged by the need for Variety (novelty, stimulus,  adventure).  The third is about need for Significance (feeling special and recognized) which is paired up with the need for Love/Connection (going beyond oneself and reaching out to others). Finally the last two goals are about Growth (focus on our personal development) and Contribution (focus on giving to others). 

We all need to satisfy these 6 fundamental needs if we are to experience fulfillment but typically we tend to focus and favor two out of the six. Those on which we focus and what we do to meet them shape what we do and what we don’t do. They influence our level of commitment and drive as well as limiting patterns and bad habits. In other words even negative or destructive behaviors have a positive intent as they are about trying to satisfy a certain need. As an example over-eating gives the illusion of satisfying needs of certainty and connection with one self. Aggressive behaviors are about generating the illusion of significance. When a behavior satisfies two or more needs intensely (say 8 or above on a 0 – 10 scale) we start to get addicted to it. 

These are well known emotional patterns but most people indulging in destructive behaviors don’t quite realize it. If they truly did they would open up to the possibility of finding empowering alternatives to satisfy those needs. There is a lot more to be said about this but this is not quite the aim of this post. Instead we will move to the next concept. 

At the next level up in this process of self-understanding we find personal values. They are the answer to a simple yet powerful question: What do I value in this aspect of my life?

Example: what do I value in my professional sphere? 
In my experience the word ‘value’ is quite loaded and for most people this word brings up concepts such as honor, religion, family or country. In the context of coaching and change values are much more practical and simply define the key criteria that you use (consciously or not) to assess opportunities and situations in different areas in your life. This is why the word criteria may be more helpful but the two can be used as synonyms.
Examples of random values/criteria linked to the professional area are: freedom, creativity, independence, recognition, collaboration, status, trust, routine, stretching targets, etc.

Whereas the needs are universal, the criteria are inherently personal. The best way to discover your values or criteria is to think and remember what you value(d) more in a certain area of your life. For example you may remember with joy a job where you felt you were being given latitude to be autonomous and creative.  This tells you that you probably value these things.

The trick, when defining your list of criteria, is not to be confined to your past experience but rather to open up to a full spectrum of possibilities. A brainstorming process where you list ten, twenty or even thirty values may be a good way to break through of limits imposed by what has been, instead of empowered by what could have been.

Once you have a long list of candidate criteria you may want to prioritize them so that you can come up with the top 5 or so. These criteria are a very useful tool for decision making because any option that you have can now be ranked in terms of how well it meets your criteria. If for whatever reason the options available aren’t particularly good then you may want to take a stab at considering and finding other options. 

These key criteria will always be linked to your top human needs. This is so because everything we do (or don’t), everything we want is conditioned by the drive to satisfy the needs. Take a look at your criteria to see if and how they support your needs, especially the top two or three of the six.

Now that you have a clearer understanding of your key needs and criteria and how they are connected you are in a much stronger position to take on or move on.  

In the next post I shall explain the concept of rules and how they are linked to values/criteria before pulling needs, values/criteria and rules together and how they can be used for deciding what to do about your project and challenges.

Stay tuned!

Coaching is all about setting objectives, planning and executing relentlessly to make our dreams
come true. However there are times when, no matter what we do, it just seems that thing just don’t
work out. At some point one has to ask a very hard question: “Has the time come to move on?”

Clearly this is not an easy question to ask oneself and it takes a lot of courage and inner strength to
look inside and come up with an honest answer. This is especially true the more one has invested,
financially, emotionally or in sheer time, in trying to get their dream to take off.

Thanks to the popularisation of positive psychology and coaching increasing number of people
are learning that it is possible, indeed that it is advisable, to believe in ourselves and take on new
challenges in pursuit of our dreams. Popular self-help books like ‘The Secret’ lead many to believe
that any dream can be realized as long as you really want it and focus on it.

This paradigm shift in our culture is great and represents a huge improvement from a time when
most people did not dear to dream and even flirt with the idea of being the masters of their destiny.
Forever condemned to live lives somewhat empty of passion and personal development, fenced off
from ever facing the fear of failure (the most powerful psychological force humans may encounter)
within their comfort zone.

However with more and more people daring to challenge their own status quo it is possible that
some may not make it and thus be confronted with facing the dreaded feeling of failure/rejection.

This post is about recognizing early on this possibility so that those who are about to embark on
their change journey, and those who are facing this tough question, may be equipped to deal with a
fact of life: sometimes things don’t quite turn out the way you want.

How? Here are 3 critical pillars to support you:

1. Ensure that the dream is fully aligned with our values and turned into a smart objective.

2. Focus at all times on what is within our reach rather than depending on or blaming outside
factors recognizing and overcoming the greatest of barriers: our limiting beliefs.

3. Define some clear ‘mission abort criteria’ and if and when the time to give up comes focus
on the learning rather than on failure.

Without respecting these three conditions one is likely to put a lot of effort into something that at
some point will fold and may leave us scarred. As the previous post suggest one should not be afraid
of failure but one should be prepared to accept it and deal with it should it, despite all our efforts,
come to be.

The next three posts will focus on these three points.

Feel free to contact me via the contact form on this site if you are coming face to face with this most
difficult question and need some personalised assistance in dealing with this tough question.

People who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.

Experiencing failure is inevitable on your journey to be successful. Each defeat is merely an installment to victory.

You'll find that the number of times you succeed is in direct proportion to the number of times you fail and keep trying. You won't be judged by the number of times you fail, but by the number of times you succeed.

Failure is nothing but education, nothing but the first step to something better.

You can't be a winner and be afraid to lose.

What have you be holding back about? Your regret-free life starts here....

Recipe for a regret-free life:

1. Focus on what really matters
2. Find its meaning and relate it to your purpose
3. Create your plan
4. Take action
5. Assess results and extract the learning
6. Back to step 1.

Welcome to the blog of CHANGE and its management. 

This blog is dedicated to share ideas and tools to define and manage your  change. As such, these posts aim to be practical and hands-on. I will, however  share, from time to time, some resources, such as links, videos, case-studies,  articles, etc. that I think can be inspiring or  helpful.

Although I shall focus primarily on  personal change, a lot what I shall share can also be adapted to be used in an organisational setting and at work. I do this on a daily basis with my executive  coaching and change management consulting clients.

So, without any further ado, let's get started...

Why is change so important? 

First of all because whether you like it or not, change is out  there and is coming towards you at break-neck speed. You can run, but you can't  hide. Secondly because the only way to get better results, whatever that means and in whichever area of your life, depends on start doing or thinking about  what you do (or don't) differently. In a word: change.

Where to start?

Let's start with the challenge of defining what to change. Without knowing where you want to go there is no point in learning tools or getting started. Once you really know WHAT you want, and only then, can you focus on the HOW.

Most people, when asked what they would like to change in their life, have no idea. Some, when pressed, end up saying they would like to win the lottery (HOW). This is a bit like saying: "I have no clue what I want but give me the money and surely I'll figure out how to be happy". I am afraid you need to know that this strategy is unlikely to work out for you. I am not saying that money doesn't help or that these is something wrong with it, but ultimately it is a tool not an end in itself. A lot of people who have lots of money end up living quite miserable lives, as the biographies of many millionaires have shown. The point is simply that money will not bring purpose, but it can indeed help to achieve it. In future posts I shall show you that the key to happiness is understanding what really matters to us and why and linking those insights to shaping our identity and purpose in life. But more on that later. Let's start with a simple step.

So, as a first practical suggestion, why don't you take a few  minutes to figure out at least in which area of your life you feel that change is more urgent?
Is it at work? Or it may have to do with your relationships and  how you deal with people? Your health perhaps? Or maybe your finances? Could it  be how you use your free time to develop and have fun? If you  are not sure in which part of your life change is more needed, think about each  of the above areas and assess from 0 (min) to 10 (max) how satisfied you are. 

Then step back and take a look at the results. Is one standing out as having a big gap? If so that is where you are likely to find a significance. Does it also feel particular urgent? If so, congratulations, you have now narrowed down the
options and can focus on that area.

In my next post I will explain how to do just that. So watch this space.

Should you feel the need for support or more information regarding the suggestion above, drop me a line.
I am always happy to assist you as you try to define what needs to change.

Remember that as a coach I am content-light and it is always up to you to decide what really matters. I just provide the context, the structure, the questions and help you focus to get going and stay on track in your change journey.