Are you involved in developing a team – maybe a team you lead, or your peer group? This simple principle can make all the difference:

people and teams will develop to the degree that they feel safe.

What do I mean by safe? Oh c’mon, you know!

Are you aware, in some conversations or meetings, of suddenly feeling unsafe? Do you notice when the mood in the room shifts to a threatened, defensive environment? That’s what unsafe feels like.

When we’re working with people, sometimes we just want to push them to do better, or get the truth on the table. The tricky thing is, we’ll only be able to get better results, or the truth on the table in a productive way, to the extent that we have created a safe environment in which to do so.

Without safety, we can’t do anything.

So what creates safety?

Lots of things, and the most important of them all is rapport – your rapport with individuals and the group, and their rapport with each other.

Start with rapport, and focus on rapport as a success measure for your team. Does rapport mean always agreeing? Absolutely not. Rapport means we can disagree and stay in right relationship with each other.

Try it and see. And remember, safety first.

It’s true.

Horses are exquisitely sensitive to our presence, feelings, energy and non verbal skills.

They provide instant, non judgmental feedback that we can use to make useful adjustments to our communication skills.

My friends June Simmonds and Jo Simpson are doing excellent work using interaction with horses to develop teams in an unusual way.

Check out what they are up to by watching this video (it was made by my good friends at UKS&V):

Let me know what you think!

It covers all the basics of good presenting, and is a must watch if you are looking to brush up or develop your presenting skills. Two of my favourite tips occur in the first couple of minutes of the video.

1. Put people at their ease. An audience can’t engage with you, hear your message, and learn anything until you make them feel comfortable.
2. Remember that it’s OK to pause. Actually, pauses are even better than that – they are powerful. When we pause when we are speaking, we give people time to ponder what we just said. And, non-verbally, we appear highly credible.

What’s your favourite tip? Leave a comment after watching.

Today is a special day for me. Why? Because I’m celebrating the success of my business over the last year.

3 years ago, I made an agreement with my bank manager. I set a financial goal for my business, and we agreed that if I reached it he would buy me lunch. If I exceeded it by 25%, he’d buy me lobster for lunch.

Year 1 of the bet came to an end and I was nowhere near my goal. Year 2 was better, but not quite enough. Year 3, however, was very different, and today I’m claiming that lobster lunch!

Here’s the thing: life is so busy, and already the achievement of that goal seems a long time ago. I’m the kind of person who finds it easy to forget about an accomplishment the moment it is in the past. Sometimes, this stops me really enjoying that success.

So today I’m going to enjoy every minute of being taken out to lunch to celebrate. After all, it’s taken me 3 years to achieve this goal. As I think about celebrating, I am grateful for the support of my bank manager. His belief in the potential of my business helped me achieve my goal. Thank you Steve Dewey of Lloyds TSB!

Well, I don’t know anybody who doesn’t get something out of Steve Jobs’ famous commencement address at Stanford University.

Watch what this remarkable man had to say about his life and work.  I love his motto ‘do great work’.  It’s the only way to be satisfied in life.

It’s also worth watching for his unusual perspective on death, and how reflecting on death can cause us to pursue what matters most to us.  It’s great inspiration and sound career advice to create a working life of significance.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Have your heard about the 10,000 hour idea? Both Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, and Matthew Syed, in Bounce, advance the notion that peak performance – excellence – in anything is a product of practice.  10,000 hours of practice, to be exact.

Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Spending 10,000 hours practicing the wrong things won’t make you excellent (although you’ll probably still be pretty good by the end of it).

What interests me is the idea that practice is an end in itself. So many of us are focused on improving ourselves and our performance.  What if we just practiced, instead?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately in terms of how coaching relationships develop. As a coach, sometimes I perform well, sometimes less well, and sometimes we’re just engaged in the discipline of the coaching approach. I’ve seen continued engagement with the practice of coaching produce huge results for my clients. And for me.

So, the next time you feel anxious about your performance, remember this: some days you perform well, other days less well, and lots of days you just practice.  Focus on putting miles on the clock, logging hours of experience, as an end in itself, and watch what happens.

Over to you, let me know what you think in the comments section below.

When you think about connecting with people, do you ever feel that you don’t have much to say?  I’m the most extroverted person I know, and yet sometimes I just don’t feel like talking.  Other times, I’m with people and I feel myself come alive.

There’s something here about maintaining a balance or rhythm of attending to our inner and outer worlds.  A teacher of mine once described human actions as a pattern of contact – release.  We engage with other people, or with life, or with our goals, and then we let go and withdraw.

Many of us work in demanding ways, and expect ourselves to remain switched on, in contact, all the time.  This constant engagement is at best exhilarating, yet is can become so exhausting.  Remember to attend to our inner world by releasing can enable us to reignite our enthusiasm for the world around us.

Today, are you craving more contact?  More withdrawal?  Or are you nicely balanced?  What do you need to do next to increase and extend your sense of balance?

Chuck is a business visionary, and I find his blog posts really stimulating.  I find the way he lives his ideas in his own life even more inspiring.  To see what I mean, read this post: You Get What You Intend Not What You Hope For

Those of us who work with NLP know the value of setting clear intentions.  Chuck’s story is one of the best examples I’ve found of how clear intentions = results.

Happy reading!

We don’t see things as they are – we see them as we are Talmud

I’ve recently had an excellent example of the NLP technique called reframing in my own life.  I’ve had some really challenging experiences in recent months.  In April, my father in law passed away.  During July, after a period of feeling unwell, I was diagnosed as needing an urgent operation.  This – as you can imagine – was distressing and has left me needing time to recover physically.  Because of my surgery, we had to rearrange our long-awaited summer trip to California to visit my family.  And, to cap it all, my husband was diagnosed with benign skin cancer and had to have stitches in his back.  At one stage, neither of us was well enough to walk our dogs and we shuffled around like old people!

A friend remarked at the time ‘gosh, this has really been a terrible year for you, hasn’t it?’  And here’s where the reframing comes in.  I just thought ‘actually, it’s been a fantastic year’.

And it’s true.  Professionally, I’ve had a wonderful, wonderful year.  Personally, despite these challenges, life has been terrific.  I’ve had three wonderful holidays with my husband and family, I’ve enjoyed our new home, I’ve felt happy and upbeat.

So that’s my reframe.  Yes, aspects of this year have been very challenging.  And at the same time, it’s been an amazing year.

What’s the story you are currently telling yourself about your life?  Would you like to reframe it?

Readers of my recent blog post about Susan Scott will remember that she quotes Ernest Hemingway’s character’s description that he goes bankrupt ‘gradually, and then suddenly’.  I just love this description about how most significant good and bad things in our lives truly unfold.

This summer, I’m entering into my 6^th year of working for myself.  I’ve been very fortunate to love the work that I do, and to enjoy a degree of success doing it.  When I consider how my business has developed, it has grown ‘gradually, and then suddenly’ – and so have I.  Often, I’ve applied the same level of effort over several years, getting gradual results initially, eventually followed by suddenly amazing results.

It’s like when I lost 45lbs in weight in 2009/2010.  I lost the weight gradually, and yet suddenly one day I really was slimmer.  Those incremental losses suddenly accumulated into a noticeable result.

The thing that’s great about understanding ‘gradually, and then suddenly’ is it gives you permission to not see spectacular immediate results.  The other thing that’s great about ‘gradually, and then suddenly’ is that it’s a reminder that when we gradually let things slide, they will tend to suddenly catch up with us.

Where do you notice ‘gradually, and then suddenly’ showing up in your life and work?