Are you letting yourself be defined by your job, and if so, why? The first question most people tend to ask you when they meet you in a social situation, after asking your name perhaps, is “So, what do you do?”

Where does this come from, I wondered? Perhaps it’s a throwback to a bygone era when people chose an occupation and stuck with it until they were pensioned off with the proverbial gold watch.

In today’s modern world though, occupations are fluid. It’s almost gone to the other extreme in that if you were hiring an employee today and you found that their CV showed only one previous job, you’d be a bit suspicious and think, ‘What’s wrong with this person? Why have they only done one thing?’

Don’t get me wrong here, if someone has found their true vocation and stuck with it because it brings them joy, I say ‘Fair play to them’. One of my schoolmates, Steve knew at the age of about eleven that he wanted to be an airline pilot just like his dad and he stuck with that dream. When the airline cancelled the training and admission course he was booked onto, he didn’t give up. He took the long route and started by building up his flying hours as an Assistant Flying Instructor in the UK. He came back to Jersey and landed a great job (excuse the dad joke pun there!) as the Chief Flying Instructor at our local Aero Club. That led to a job as a First Officer with a small airline, then a Captaincy, a bigger airline job, and ultimately, last I heard, he was a British Airways jumbo jet Captain. He followed his dream, aimed for the sky (another pun, sorry, not sorry) and soared like an eagle (Ok, I’ll stop now!).

My Dilemma – How to Answer

When people ask me this question, ‘So, what do you do?’, it always makes me feel uncomfortable to be pigeon-holed and I don’t know what to say. Maybe it’s partly because, at 65 years of age, what I do for a living doesn’t really matter as much – I don’t really need to impress anyone, and it certainly doesn’t define me or encapsulate who I am, but I understand that it’s an innocent icebreaker.

Just for giggles, when I awoke the other night and couldn’t sleep, I made a list of the things I’ve done in my life to ‘earn a crust’. Some might say that I can’t hold down a job, and that has become true, because I don’t need or want to be limited by just one job. And I’m not claiming to be a special case here. As I said, the world has changed and people are now expanding their options and exploring different possibilities about what they do enjoy and what they don’t enjoy doing for a job.

That said, whatever I have done in life, I have always endeavoured to follow my father’s guiding principle that ‘If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.’

I paraphrased his quote for the title of my second book: ‘If Life’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing Well’.

My History of Jobs

Just for fun, here’s my jobs list for illustration purposes, and please skip past it, if it’s not of interest. I’ll explain the point afterwards:

School Job – Junior Sales Assistant (supermarkets, various departments);

Family Business Growing Up – Hotel Barman; Trainee Hotel Manager; Deputy Hotel Manager; Hotel Maintenance Assistant (All in family business from childhood);

College Holiday Jobs – Painter and Decorator; Potato Planter; Gardener; Aircraft Cleaner; Casual Rental Car Detailer;

Adult Jobs in Jersey – Trainee Supermarket Manager (all departments); Deputy Supermarket Manager (3 promotions in 6);

Sponsored Migration to Australia – Retail Management Jobs – Trainee Department Store Manager; Department Store Area Sales Manager (2 promotions in 2½ years);

Settled in Australia Jobs- Semi-franchise Toys Supermarket Manager /Licensee; Financial Planner / Insurance Agent; Life Insurance Agent (2 companies); Sales Manager / Deputy Store Manager – Department Stores (different company & promoted within 2 years);

Temporary & Side-Hustle Jobs – Casual Cleaner; Telemarketer; MLM Business Owner; Leaflet Delivery Person; Strata Building Chairman (3 buildings) & Caretaker;

Back to Retail Management Jobs – Reject Store Manager & Store Manager Trainer (2 years);

Travel Jobs – Traveller; Farm Worker;

Back to Retail Management Jobs – Reject Store Manager (same company as before – another year);

Travel Break –Traveller again;

Past Entrepreneurial Businesses – Backpacker Hostel Business Owner /Liquor Licensee (14 Years);  Short Stay Apartments Business Owner (12 years); Adventure Tours & Charters Business Owner & Tour Guide (10 years) ; Car Dealership Principal & Owner (10 years); Car Servicing Business Owner (9 years); Car Rentals Business Owner (10 years); Property & Office Cleaning Business Owner (1 year); Vehicle Towing / Roadside Assistance Business Owner & driver (8 years); Employment Agency Owner (1 year); Office Furniture Removals Business Owner (1 year); Promotions Business Owner (1 year); Loyalty Card Business Owner (2 years); Film Production Business Co-Owner (1 year – produced two documentary films and several adverts).

Present Businesses – Life Coaching Practice and NLP Trainer (2011 to present); Small Business Coaching & Mentoring Practice (2011 to present); Strata Cleaning Business Owner (2009 to present); Live Music Events Business Owner and Musician (2026 to present); Disability Support Carer (19 years); Author (2 books published, third in progress – 2011 to present)

***
The Point of All That!

If you were interested enough to plough through that and you’re good at maths, you probably worked out that some of those things overlapped. In fact, I did run small five businesses at once for many years, which is not something that would appeal to a lot of people, but I found it to be immense fun and an adventure at the time. I still do.

I’d like to quote Sir Richard Branson from his autobiography, ‘Losing My Virginity’:

“Fun is at the core of the way I like to do business, and it has been key to everything I’ve done from the outset.”

He also said, in that same book:

“Some 80% of your life is spent working. You want to have fun at home; why shouldn’t you have fun at work?”

And:

“I don’t think of work as work and play as play. It’s all living.”

So, when people want to pigeon-hole you to understand who you are or to make some kind of judgement about how you fit into society, they need to be aware that your current occupation doesn’t equal your potential value to society.

There are times in life when you may have to take on some temporary work, just to get by or to pay the bills, while you look for the next opportunity that is more in keeping with your other talents.

I once asked a young lady what she did for a living, as we do, and she gave me an answer I absolutely loved, and I’ll never forget. She replied:

“I’m a creative!”

To be honest, I haven’t used it because it feels like I’m being a smart-arse, so I tend to waffle on about being semi-retired, but still having business interests, blah blah, and watch people lose the will to live! (Just kidding). When I was a child, my parents used to say I was a ‘man of many parts’, because I’d be dressed up as a cowboy one day, an Apache Indian the next, or a professional footballer the day after that.

A Quick Example of Judging People by Their Job

When I owned a tow truck business, my main driver had an accident where he fell off the back of the truck and hurt his ankle, thus preventing hm from driving until it healed. We took on one of our enthusiastic backpackers and I trained him while he awaited his driving test for the heavy vehicle license. Unfortunately, he unexpectedly failed the test at the first attempt on a technicality and had to wait another six weeks for the next test booking. Both my mechanic and my car yard manager could also drive the truck, but I needed them more in their other roles, so I found myself stuck being a temporary tow truck driver until he passed that second test.

One day, I attended a major car dealership to collect a broken-down car and take it to a specialist repair shop. The receptionist at the dealership initially ignored me – wearing my steel-capped work boots and my high-visibility vest that was grubby from grovelling under cars to attach a tow hook cable. When she finally deigned to acknowledge the grotty individual before her, and looked down her nose at me, I explained why I had been asked to attend. She called the appropriate person to come to reception but then felt she could no longer ignore me. When I explained that I was the Managing Director of my company, but I was covering for an injured driver, her whole demeanour instantly changed, and she was then gushingly polite to me. I found the change in her attitude, based on her judgement of my appearance, quite amusing, but also quite insightful.

Create Your Own Definition

In summary, my point today is that you can chase your dreams, but you can also be brave and experiment with different directions. Part of why I became a Life Coach was that when I owned my backpackers’ hostel, I’d be having a chat with a young person over a beer in the back yard and helping them figure out what they wanted to do with their life, and I found that not only was I good at it, but I also really enjoyed the interaction with people and being able to help them gain different perspectives and ‘aha moments’. Those backpackers would do almost any job that would help them to stay afloat financially while they continued their travel adventures.

Don’t let anyone put you off following your dreams; don’t let anyone define you by your present occupation – your current job does not limit your potential as a human being; and beware of judging anyone else, solely by what they are doing today.

I hope that’s of some benefit to you, and I’ll catch you on the next blog. Until then, keep chasing those dreams and being of service to other people.

Cheers,

Tony

The post Are You Allowing Yourself to Be Defined by Your Job? appeared first on Mindset Coaching, Life Coaching and Business Mentoring Tony Inman.

Solving the Problems of the World

It’s a dangerous thing, letting an Aquarian go on holiday. Our restless brains find themselves unshackled from the daily grind of leadership and management (though we do find joy in these pursuits) and with insufficient distractions to quell our overactive imaginations, we liberate our powers of observation of the mundane and are free to focus on the problems of the world. I like to frame it as creating the space and being present enough to witness the ‘extraordinary’ in the ‘ordinary’.

Global peace and harmony are at the core of an Aquarian’s aspirations. War is a barbarian enigma and humour is the greatest capital you could hope to acquire. I know that money is like oxygen because you can’t live without it, but if you can’t see the funny side of life, then your soul is missing something of far more meaningful use, IMHAO (in my humble Aquarian opinion).

I went to bed thoroughly exhausted from a day of awakening at ‘sparrow’s fart’ to catch an early morning flight to Perth’s extended suburb aka Bali. This was after an unusually stressful week of dealing with staff issues (one of the two greatest challenges faced by entrepreneurs IMHAO) and that of seeking to manage customer expectations (the other gargantuan task, which can be akin to attempting a moon landing in a rusty old Mini Minor, whilst steering with your hands tied behind your back). Add in the third factor of supporting my bestie wife who manages the daily needs of a ‘disabled’ teenager trapped in a man’s body, whilst navigating the intricacies and frequently contradictory elements of the NDIS system (for which we are eternally grateful btw) and you could say that our spirits are in dire need of a respite break.

Sleep deprivation is used as a torture technique in war situations and is probably a no-no under the Geneva Convention, but for Carers, it’s just a way of life that you get used to. That’s why an exhausted brain can grab a mere few hours of sleep and be reactivated in the wee hours of the night with a head bursting with garbage that just needs to be set free.

So, there’s the context for my inane drivel. I awoke from a dream where an Uber driver was at the door, and my partner wanted me to get up and answer it. Once awakened, I find it really hard to just roll over and go back to sleep, much as the tortured brain might crave that luxury.

Why an Uber driver, and why stereotypes? Get to the point, you demand.

Our travel day yesterday began with a 3am wake up alarm after I had been tying up the loose ends of my never-ending to-do list (small business owners and Carers know what I mean) until an absurdly late bedtime.

I summoned an Uber pickup at around 3.30am and we were collected by a lovely young man from Pakistan. Our driver, Usama was only six alphabet letters away from making me wonder whether the car might contain an incendiary device and that we were unwittingly about to be embroiled in a mission to blow up our amazing, newly refurbished airport. The words of my unapologetically ‘racist’ mother-in-law burst into my mind – “Those ‘darkies’ all think the same!” Don’t be offended – I’m merely quoting one of her ‘truisms’, which I refuse to consider as anything but comical. One person’s truth, whilst true beyond refute for them, can be another person’s source of emotional turmoil or mirth – we each choose the lens through which to view the theory.

If you don’t know me well enough, my truism as instilled by my hotelier parents, whose lives included the negative impacts of a world war, is that ‘there is good and bad in all nationalities of the world’. This perspective was exemplified during my childhood of living in a hospitality environment and reinforced later on when running my own backpackers’ lodging house business for fourteen years and entertaining and hosting over 35,000 guests. As both a business owner and a global traveller, I’ve dealt with people from almost every nation on the planet at some point, and I still look for the good in people until they give me a reason to think otherwise. That might be naïve of me, and whilst some people have let me down, so many more have enriched my life that I prefer that lens as my default filter.

As I age, I find myself becoming more like my mother. Once a shy boy, I now engage in conversations with just about anybody. I like to think that her interest in people is what helped her live to one hundred and still be as bright as a button until cancer took her from us in the very end. My dad was worn out by ninety, but it was still a great innings. Dad could leave Mum alone on a centre aisle bench in a shopping centre while he nipped into a store to buy something, and by the time he emerged, he’d find she had made friends with five new people from all over the world and had exchanged life story excerpts with conversations gusting at 40 knots.

Thus, Usama and I had a good old chinwag during the Uber ride. He was a geo-chemical, bio-mechanical software engineer, or some such title that went blah blah in my brain. The point was that he was a smart lad and he was Uber driving to save money to marry his lovely fiancée back in Pakistan and bring her here to raise a family in this country, so his children could have a better life. He had lived in Australia for two years and was working his butt off to achieve his goals, which brings me to the topic of stereotypes and the great ‘monoculture versus multi-culture debate’.

Usama had, to use the buzz word of the day, ‘assimilated’ and he was up at this un-Godly hour to make extra cash. His skin was a few shades darker in tone than my pasty, freckled mixture of Celtic Mancunian white, that turns red in the sun, but he shared my work ethic, my willingness to strive to achieve my goals, and my determination to add value to the nation and its culture that I had chosen to adopt as ‘my Lucky Country’. His accent was even easier to understand than that of my first wife, a Glaswegian Scot, who had assimilated with me some forty years earlier. We too had moved here to raise a family with the dream of a better life and had been willing to work hard and add value to our new homeland. I didn’t ask, but I’d assume he was probably of Muslim faith. My father used to say that ‘religion was the cause of most wars’, so he flatly refused to adopt one, but he would add that he lived his life ‘according to Cristian values’ and to him that simply meant ‘trying to be a good person and being honest and fair to people’. I’d agree with his aspiration though I’d add that IMHAO it’s not religion per se that is the problem, but people’s interpretation and manipulation of the various faiths’ scriptures to suit their agendas that cause the problems of the world.

Usama came across to me as a very likeable and industrious, young man. He was humble, polite and respectful of the opportunities that he been blessed with. Yet some anti-immigrant obsessed Aussies would want him ‘sent back where he came from’ because of his faith or the colour of his skin.

Now, excuse the pun, (I’m a Granddad joker, so I can’t help myself) but it’s not just a ‘black and white issue’ is it?!

Where Did this Multicultural Experiment Take Off?

Australia began its multicultural push in the 1970’s under the Whitlam Government, encouraging migration from all over the world, ending a previously predominant leaning towards those from so-called ‘white countries’. Back in 2015, European countries followed the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel’s lead of welcoming refugees and immigrants to help solve their ageing population problem – a problem that Australia now faces with increasing urgency. At first, this was a great initiative with a positive intention, but as the decades rolled on, it led to ghettos, streets that spoke a different language, practiced a different culture and religion, and even whole districts adopting tribal laws that conflicted with the laws of the land. Teachers found that their classrooms contained kids who didn’t speak the native tongue. Unemployment and the welfare economy was rife in these areas and that led to gangs and increased crime statistics. Ironically, it had been a coloured politician, Enoch Powell, who had warned Britain decades ago about what was to come when adopting an ‘open border’ immigration policy.

Whilst multiculturalism was the goal, division and social unrest was the end result, and one by one, these countries began to realise that the social experiment was not achieving it’s intended purpose. One by one, the European nations began to toughen their stance on border controls and immigration policy. They sought to put the cork back in the bottle, but the genie was already in the room.

As my father had expressed so astutely, religious faith became an issue, not because some people simply worship a different deity or collection of them, but because religious extremism and mankind’s inherent desire to impose their chosen beliefs on a different culture is an unquenchable thirst that has haunted us since our cave dwelling days. The media has become a fear-provoking demon that thrives on sensationalism for its very existence. We are bombarded with tales of radical extremism and that people who are ‘different to us’ are dangerous and should be exterminated or at least kept at arm’s length. We saw in 1930’s Germany how that one worked out.

It’s not hard to poke that bear either. We all remember ‘9/11’ or the ‘Bondi Massacre’, or if you’re old enough, the ‘Je suis Charlie’ shootings in Paris, the Ariana Grande concert bombing in Manchester, or the Bali bombs. The list goes on. Do we even understand why the perpetrators did what they did? Not really, in most cases, except perhaps that they are different to the mental illness motivations that led to school shootings or serial killings. The world has always contained such injustices since day dot, but today’s technology beams it instantly into your loungeroom. Then there’s the great political divide. Americans are no longer simply Americans – they’re either Republicans or Democrats, whose increasingly bitter divide has been exploited for personal gain by the most divisive President in living memory, and it is tearing families apart.

Australia has its own demons. Unless we’re Indigenous, they say, we’re all immigrants. Perhaps, but even those people were early settlers, arriving in boats from another continent. Even the dinosaurs were only temporary residents. Whatever your take is on that issue, in our fledgeling nation we have developed our own unique ‘Aussie culture’. The country has for decades welcomed immigrants who were willing to work hard, add value, assimilate and follow the ‘Aussie way’. Italian tilers were belittled as ‘Dings’ and ‘Whops’. The English were called ‘whingeing Pommy bastards’, every settling faction had to overcome their demeaning nicknames and earn their stripes, yet everyone blended and brought their diverse impact with them in our skillsets, our food, our entertainment, our sporting successes and so on. Australia became a global model for the potential success of multiculturalism.

So, what has changed? Back to my story…

Multiculturalism in Action

Usama dropped us off at the airport ad we genuinely wished him well for his impending wedding and future life. We checked in for our flight. If I remember correctly, I think the counter lady was an Asian Aussie and was chirpy and helpful. The Customs Officers were a diverse group of friendly people, mostly Caucasian I think, with possibly a Kiwi guy among them. The Security screening guy was of Indian descent, I think. The first lady I encountered in Duty Free looked Japanese and she rudely blanked me to serve someone else. No offence taken, as she was busy, but I remember reflecting that Japanese people are stereotypically the politest people you’ll ever meet!

The Duty-Free guy who served us was Indian and he was super helpful and friendly. The female bar tender was Scottish and insanely chirpy for that time of day. Our flight was delayed, so I was able to watch the end of the World Cup Final soccer, one of the greatest, most unifying forces in sporting history, yet even that contained niggling conflict between some of the Spanish and Argentinian players. Don’t even get me started on the complete numpty who presented the trophy and tried to make the event all about him!

Our pilot on the flight to Denpasar, Bali was a white, ‘dinky di’ Aussie. The Head Stewardess was a female Singaporean, whom I suspect was a Lesbian and the male Stewards were clearly all gay Balinese guys.

The lady who tried to arrange a taxi at Bali airport but couldn’t, was a Japanese looking Balinese girl. Then, our taxi driver, with whom of course I chatted, told us how his employment contract in hospitality had not been extended, because at 45 he was considered ‘too old’. Thus, he had resorted to taxi driving three months earlier, to feed his three young children. He was grateful to have a job.

As we relaxed and drank well-deserved cocktails overlooking the lovely Sanur beachfront that afternoon, it occurred to me that we were drinking Jamaican rum, Mexican tequila and Russian vodka and nibbling on Vietnamese spring rolls on an Indonesian promenade. We would later continue to enjoy Irish food with wine made from Australian grapes, served by Balinese staff, while listening to a Mexican band playing hit classics from the UK and America.

Throughout the afternoon and evening, I engaged in my love of people-watching. People have always fascinated me. What drives us to do the crazy stuff we do? What makes us tick?

I observed people simply sharing the unifying trait of being human. It was a melting pot of nationalities because Bali draws tourists from across the globe. Children of all races and creeds splashed playfully in the water’s edge. Families walked along the promenade, taking in the sights together. People rode bikes, walked or jogged; some were pushed in wheelchairs or walked with frames. Young, old, gay, straight, white, coloured, disabled, able-bodied, fat or fit, they were all human beings. Some of us were even ‘rangas’ or in my case, a white-whiskered redhead, who’s turning blonde (Ok, just about turned blonde, damn it!)

I saw no fights, no radicalising, no terrorism – thank you Universe. I just saw people, sharing joy.

Meanwhile, around this planet, the debate for what constitutes the right path to follow rages on – a ‘Monocultural Policy’ or a ‘Multicultural Policy’. Everyone has an opinion of some sort on how best to proceed, but there’s one unifying force I hope we can all incorporate – the Aussie spirit of giving people ‘a fair go’, or as they say, ‘a fair crack of the whip’.

What It Means to Me to Be Australian

I was given that opportunity to migrate and let me add that I worked hard for it. I came to Perth on honeymoon, I convinced an employer to sponsor me, and I fought my way through an eighteen-month endurance test of red tape and bureaucratic bs before gaining permission to migrate to the land ‘Down Under’. That was over forty years ago. Since then, I’ve paid God only knows (Allah/ Jehova /the Universe/ insert your choice) how much in taxes; I’ve employed thousands of staff; I’ve coached hundreds of entrepreneurs and executives; I’ve hosted tens of thousands of holidaymakers and I’ve provided services for probably hundreds of thousands of customers. All that, yet I was once considered ‘another bloody Pom – a title I refuted, because I was in fact a Jerseyman (Channel Islands, not New bloody York!)

Nevertheless, I’m now absolutely a proud Aussie, living in the greatest nation on Earth IMHAO, and I’m blessed with a wonderful wife and family with Aussie kids and grandkids. I hope we can all remember that what unites us all is greater than that which divides us, no matter where we choose to live and whatever faith we chose to hold, or whichever politics we choose to support. That said, I believe that those immigrants who are welcomed by our country and who then commit crimes or preach hatred towards the very country who opened its doors to them, should be penalised by sending them back from whence they came.

Maybe, the multicultural concept is flawed – that’s up for debate, but what has worked is ‘embracing diversity’ whilst seeking to negotiate a common vision to aspire to. Values of fairness and mutual respect are the key. Let’s hope we can work that out between us all.

See you next time!
Tony Inman

The post Stereotypes and the Whole Monoculture Debate appeared first on Mindset Coaching, Life Coaching and Business Mentoring Tony Inman.

Being afraid of success is one of the most common problems that holds people back, along with being afraid of failure.

For most of our lives, especially in our early years we are told to conform – sit down, be quiet, and don’t do anything different to anyone else.

That starts because of (a) the need for parents to have some quiet time and (b) the way the education system is structured.

Our Education System

The common school was started by the British industrialists because they needed the poor people, the workers, to be able to follow instructions and work in the factories.

To understand and obey, they needed at least a basic education. Thus began the three ‘R’s of reading, (w)riting and (a)rithmetic.

That is why our education system is structured so as to teach compliance – the ability to do as you are told and follow the teacher’s instructions. Maverick behaviour, wherein young people challenge the status quo and seek to create and/or innovate is often viewed as disobedience and non-compliance. Thus, that creativity and self-expression is stifled.

Teachers will argue that we need discipline to avoid anarchy, that people need to be trained to follow the rules of society and of course there has to be some of that for our western world to function properly. My disclaimer of course is that there are many great teachers out there, who do their best to do an amazing job, but they too are often hampered by the system.

Shouldn’t the system be designed to help students discover who they are, who they aspire to become, and how to navigate the real world, rather than just achieve qualifications?

The Origins of Compliance

Our compliance behaviour dates right back to our caveman ancestry. If we stray too far from the cave, from the safety of the rest of the tribe, we put ourselves in danger. As human beings, our most fundamental motivational influencer is our need to feel safe and secure. If you were to drop us in a jungle or on a desert island, our first priority is to ensure that we find somewhere safe to shelter or some kind of weapon with which to defend ourselves and to feel safe from the potential threat of wild animals or dangerous creatures. Then we immediately seek out water, because without that we won’t last very long, closely followed by food.

Cavemen understood that the tribe was powerful – there was safety in numbers. People who strayed from the tribe or tried to do things differently were scorned.

Often they were mocked because the other cavemen felt jealous of the courage that the maverick was displaying, courage that they wished they had themselves, so they mocked the maverick. “Who does he think he is?” they’d ask. “Does he think he’s better than all of us?”

Being the maverick was also a challenge to the leader of the tribe, because only he was allowed to take risks for the greater good. So the leader would try to put you back in your place, unless of course he wanted you to be eaten by the wild beast and believed that you would be!

So it is in our DNA to fit in with the tribe and yet we have a creative side to us – one that is bursting to get out.

Whenever we try to use it though, our jealous tribe members will put us back in our place with helpful (not) comments like, “That won’t work?” or “What makes YOU think you can do that?”

We want to be liked. We want to fit in with our families and our tribe.

One of my coaches used to use the example that a man (or woman) born into a family of criminals, thieves and vagabonds will actually feel guilty if he tries to go straight. That guilt, that shame caused by no longer belonging to the family (demonstrated by adhering to their values and behaving just like them) will eventually pull him back into the tribe, unless he is extremely strong-willed.

So we come back to the fundamental issue of our own identity. Who we think we are is the one thing that we will fight ferociously to defend. When you strip a person of their identity, you destroy them.

The Quest to Establish Our Identity 

When the Greeks invaded Egypt, they set about chopping off the noses of the statues of the gods. Why didn’t they just destroy the statues you might ask? The Greeks knew that the Egyptians worshipped their gods and their beliefs were a fundamental part of their national identity and culture. They argued that if the Egyptian gods were true gods they would not allow their symbols to be damaged. So they kept the damaged statues around to reinforce the question mark about their real powers.

When you label a person, you are challenging their identity. If they admit to one of their faults by themselves, they now believe it to be true, so that’s ok, but if YOU try to label them with that same fault, they will most likely defend themselves and refute your accusation.

So, little wonder that when we try to (figuratively) step outside the cave, go outside of the safety or comfort zone, the rest of the tribe feel uncomfortable and try to drag us back. Even if we overcome that, we still have that little voice in our head that says, “This probably won’t work. It’s probably dangerous. Who am I to think that I can achieve this? I’m not that special – I’m just like the rest of the tribe.”

So, sadly, just as we were making headway, we allowed the waves of doubt to wash over us and we returned to the safety (the comfort zone) of the tribe, where they welcomed us back, reassuring us that we belonged back in the cave with them. That way they didn’t have to ask themselves why you had dared to be different and they hadn’t.

Identity matters today as much as it always has – this is why Hitler labelled the Jews as ‘rats’ – to dehumanise them, to strip away their true identity, so that the rest of the population could hate them more easily and justify their awful treatment. Trump has followed the same playbook – blaming the country’s problems on the immigrants. Vance even admitted to making up stories about the Haiitian immigrants stealing people’s pets and ‘eating cats and dogs’. This was for the same reason – to strip away that identity and make them the scapegoats and common enemy of the rest of the ‘good and wise’ people. The same tactic is also being used to label all the ‘terrorists’ in Iran. Granted some people from Iran have committed acts of terror, but you can see why the other ‘peace-loving’ people in Iran might view the Americans as ‘terrorists’ for blowing up schools full of children. There’s an old saying that ‘one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter’.

The point is not to get into a political rant, but to illustrate that ‘identity’ is an individual matter first. To simply label all people of a race, colour or creed with one common adjective or noun is absurd. There are kind people just as much as there are evil people in every nation throughout history. It’s way too easy in this age of spin and misinformation to blindly believe everything you read or watch on the media without applying critical thinking to question the agenda behind the news.

Success Requires Change

Being afraid of failure makes total sense to most people – we don’t want to feel or look stupid, inept, weak or incompetent. But why would we fear success when most people to some degree at least crave more of it?

Because success requires change, and that means stepping outside the comfort zone. Our default is to ‘stay safe’, which means ‘do nothing at all’, or ‘do nothing different!’

Here’s the problem though…

If you carry on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting the same results you’ve always got!

Einstein said, “You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” Some suggest he said you’d be insane to expect a different outcome from repeating the same actions, though this never appeared in his notes, so he may have been incorrectly credited with that statement. Nevertheless, the implication of insanity holds true.

Change represents the world outside of the cave. Change represents danger. Change requires us to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. For some of us that pressure overwhelms us. Yet, when we make smaller, more manageable changes, we begin to believe.

If we venture a few yards further from the cave each day, the tribe doesn’t notice so much and doesn’t feel so threatened. We gain in confidence until one day, we find a new level of comfort and possibly even a new tribe! That doesn’t mean you have to give up all your dear friends in order to succeed, but it may mean you allocate more time to new people on your new wavelength. It will almost certainly involve learning new skills or gaining new knowledge.

When you look in the mirror who do you see? Is it the person you’ve always been; the person everyone else wants you to be; or the person you know you truly are capable of being?

If you need any help with defining your ideal life and overcoming those fears, don’t hesitate to contact me, Tony Inman to set up a time for a chat.

The post Could You Be Afraid of Success, and If So, Why? appeared first on Mindset Coaching, Life Coaching and Business Mentoring Tony Inman.

Do Your New Year’s Resolutions Seem Like Groundhog Day and What Can You Do to Change That?

If you’re like many of the population who find the beginning of the calendar year a good time to reflect on your goals and set ‘New Year’s Resolutions’ for yourself, do you also find that several of your goals feel like déjà vu as in the movie, ‘Groundhog Day’.

In that timeless film classic, Phil the weather man, played by actor Bill Murray awakens each day to find that every day is the same as the previous one and that no matter how he tries to change it with his actions, he is trapped in some kind of time loop and he experiences the same things with the same people, over and over again.

So, why is it that many of us seem destined to realise that the goals we want to achieve may be the same unfulfilled goals that we set at the same time last year?

There can be many reasons for this tendency to appear stuck in the same kind of weird, but annual, time loop that Phil was subjected to on a daily basis. Let’s explore why this happens and how you can break free from this apparent curse.

Lack of Clarity

People often set a resolution such as for example, ‘This year, I’m going to get myself fit!’

What does that even mean? How fit? What does ‘fit’ look like? Do you measure it by your ability to walk up the stairs without getting breathless? Does it involve fitting into an old pair of trousers that you wore when you were ten years younger? Is there an arbitrary figure on the scales that would signal success?

The point is that vague = meaningless. You are setting yourself up to fail because you haven’t clearly defined how you will know when you’ve achieved it, or even if you are ‘on track’ to achieve it. In short, you need clarity and specifics. Most importantly, you need to be clear about why it matters to you, and you need a plan. I cover more on this topic in my book, ‘If Life’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing Well’, especially in relation to ‘SMART’ goals.

Lack of Motivation

The first question that you should really ask yourself is ‘Why is this important to me?’ If you can’t answer that, you’re onto a non-starter. If you’re reliant on willpower to get you through the testing times but you don’t have a big enough ‘Why’ then you’ll probably cave. That’s why most New Year’s Resolutions fall by the wayside before the end of January. You simply weren’t serious or sure enough about why it mattered. If you want advice on this, I’d highly recommend Simon Sinek’s inspirational book, ‘Start with Why’.

Lack of Action Plan

Another big reason why many New Year’s Resolutions are abandoned is simply that you don’t have a clearly defined, written plan of how you will achieve it. Chunking down the big goals into smaller steps will massively increase your chances of sticking at it. If you want some excellent help on this, I’d recommend reading James Clear’s excellent book, entitled ‘Atomic Habits’. James points out that when you fail, it’s usually because you didn’t have a good enough system to succeed. He offers invaluable tips on how to stack the odds in your favour by creating new habits. For example, if you want to go running, change your identity to think of yourself as a ‘runner’ and leave your running shoes by the bed, so that you see them first thing. If you can do the new habit for even two minutes a day, and you build on that, you’ll soon become the new you that you aspire to be. Having a clear, structured plan will also help you overcome procrastination. Tony Robbins, the ‘Mindset Guru’ always says that you should never set a goal without immediately starting with some kind of action step towards its accomplishment.

Lack of Skills or Knowledge

We often fail to achieve our goals because we lack either the required skills or specific knowledge to achieve the desired result. Both can be overcome if you are willing to put in the effort. The amount of information available either via YouTube, Google or AI is simply mind-blowing. If you study enough on your chosen topic, you will find an abundance of ‘how to’ material.

Lack of Resources

As with skills and knowledge, resources can usually be tracked down easily via the internet, AI or through personal contacts. As they say, it may be a case of ‘who you know’, not just ‘what you know’. The more you can surround yourself with friends and associates, the more people you can reach out to on any given topic, and people are usually more than happy to help with information or connections when you ask. If you want people to help you, be a person who helps others.

Wrong Mindset – Fear of Failure (or Success)

This one is a big determinant of success – how we think of ourselves, bearing in mind that we are often our own worst critics. An excellent book on this subject is “The Imposter Cure’ by Dr Jessamy Hibberd. We can also really learn to acknowledge but still repel those negative thoughts as are brilliantly explained in Eckhart Tolle’s book, ‘The Power of Now’.

Lack of Confidence

You build belief through action. You will almost always have some setbacks, but as you overcome those challenges, you realise that you are in fact capable. You become competent by doing, failing and going again until you master something. Think about how you as a baby first learned to crawl, then walk. You probably won’t remember that far back but think about other things you have achieved in your life – perhaps learning to ride a bike or drive a car. You could probably drive down a street so effortlessly that you’re on autopilot, planning what you’ll have for dinner that day, yet when you first sat in the driver’s chair, you had to concentrate intensely to put the car in the right gear and interpret all the road signals. In other words, you CAN develop confidence if you’re brave enough to get started. A brilliant book on this is ‘The Obstacle Is the Way’ by Ryan Holiday.

Lack of Discipline

One of the biggest reasons for abandoning those resolutions or goals is our inability to stick at the new habits and actions that are required to implement the changes needed. Most of the books I’ve already cited will touch on this aspect, but you can also find a comprehensive list of self-help books on my website. Discipline can be better achieved by ticking off all of the above issues: gaining clarity; understanding how you and/or others will benefit; creating and immediately beginning to implement the first steps of an action plan, acquiring the skills and knowledge required; sourcing the necessary resources; overcoming any limiting beliefs or fears; building confidence as you go; and generating the discipline to see it through.

Finding a Mentor or Coach

One of the best things you can do in life is to ask for help and guidance. Seek people who can mentor or coach you to achieve your goals. Model the actions of those who have already done, or are still successfully doing, what you aspire to do. As a Business Coach and Life Coach I have helped many people to work through the issues mentioned above. I too have sought advice on my own journey. In fact, if you really want to learn something and master it, try teaching it to others. In helping them, you too will challenge yourself to grow further.

I hope this has helped you and I wish you the best of luck to escape the ‘Groundhog Day’ trap this year. If you need any help, feel free to get in touch through this site.

The post Do Your New Year’s Resolutions Seem Like Groundhog Day and What Can You Do to Change That? appeared first on Mindset Coaching, Life Coaching and Business Mentoring Tony Inman.

Are you grateful for all the good things in your life? Or are you too busy focusing on all the problems you have to solve?

My mum lived to be 100 years old and like everyone else she wasn’t perfect, but as my days are passing by and I hurtle towards the ‘vintage’ years of my life, I reflect increasingly on some of the life lessons my parents taught me as they navigated the incredible changes in lifestyle and technology that have come about since the days when they listened to their wireless radio and the internet was not ‘a thing’.

My dad also lived to reach his 90^th birthday and their 70^th Wedding Anniversary before he passed. You try finding a 70th Anniversary card – they don’t make many of them! Consequently, they both gratefully received several cards from the Queen, and for their 70^th, they even received cards from the Prime Minister of Australia, the Leader of the Opposition and the Premier of WA. I guess that all adds up to acknowledging that it’s no mean feat to achieve that milestone in this day and age.

The Gift – How Gratitude Bestows Resilience

One of the glues that kept their marriage stuck together until death literally parted them, and I also think was a major component of why they lived such long and vibrant lives, is that they both had ‘attitudes of gratitude’.

To begin with, they were grateful for having met and falling in love. My mum was an unmarried mother, a truly scandalous situation in her younger years, whereas now it’s fairly commonplace. My father fell for her at first glance – one of those Hollywood-style thunderbolt moments and he took on her son as his own without hesitation. They went on to have another five children together, though sadly one girl didn’t survive, and the brother I never met, Michael suffered a heart issue and died after only six months.

They were married in war time, in 1941, and at just nineteen years old, my father found himself on Malta as a Flight Sergeant, overseeing a young team of engineers who worked on the Hurricanes and Spitfires that were fighting the German and Italian air forces, while the Island was being bombed relentlessly. They were starving because the island was under siege. Convoys of ships bringing supplies were frequently sunk by German U-Boats.

It was vital that the British and Maltese held on, for the security of Montgomery’s allied army in North Africa. Had Malta fallen, the German planes could have used the island as a base from which to bomb the British Eighth Army, possibly turning the War. Meanwhile, my mother worked back in England in a munitions factory to support the war effort and was living on food ration coupons.

They had several big reasons to be grateful. My father once avoided a bomb that landed where he would have been had he not stopped to talk to a colleague. On another occasion, a bomb destroyed the barracks where he would have been sleeping, except he and his team were working 24 hours on and 24 hours off.

One day, back in the relative safety of Chester in England, my mother answered a ring of the front doorbell to find an RAF officer waiting to meet her with a telegram in his hand. She knew what that dreaded telegram meant. All the wives waiting at home for their man to return from the War knew what that piece of paper would tell them.

She opened it and read the first line, “Mrs Inman, we regret to inform you that your husband…”

Vera fainted in the hallway.

When she regained consciousness, she discovered that he had not in fact been killed in action, but that he was gravely ill with meningitis and had been admitted to St. Paul’s Hospital in Malta. A flicker of hope was restored.

Despite the relentless bombing, despite the hunger, and despite the illness, Flight Sergeant Inman pulled through. When Malta survived its siege and held out against the Nazi blockade, he travelled with his squadron to both Italy and Egypt, keeping the RAF planes flying.

As World War Two ended, Bill and Vera were reunited and stationed in Aden in the Middle East. They had a new fresh start to married life together after the War, feeling initially like strangers again, and were filled with gratitude that they had survived the ordeal. Many people didn’t.

Their sons, Peter and Geoffrey were healthy, and they had a good lifestyle in Aden, with Bill playing the accordion while glamorous Vera sang and featured as the lead role of Robin Hood in the RAF pantomime.

Then came baby Michael, but he had a heart problem. They returned to England to seek treatment for the baby, a condition whereby he could easily have been saved today, but not in those days. He died at six months to the grief of the family. When the RAF NCO in charge of accommodation callously remarked that with one less child they would be much lower on the married quarters waiting list, Bill was so angry after everything he had been through to serve his country, that he bought himself out of the RAF for 50 pounds.

Although they had lost a child, they were very grateful to move to the English Channel Island of Jersey, a haven for British tourists, to start over and add Cheryl to the family.

How Struggles Are Conquered by Gratitude

Bill was a man who could fix anything. He’d just take it apart and figure it out, then put it back together again. It’s what they had to do to survive on Malta. So, he worked as a mechanic for six months before joining as an Engineer with British European Airways, who later merged with BOAC to form British Airways.

They bought their first home. Then calamity struck. Bill contracted polio and Vera had to take in a lodger to help pay the mortgage.

Once again, he pulled through this serious condition and the tradition of turning a bad situation into an opportunity, the idea of a lodging house stuck in my mother’s mind.

They were fortunate to get a loan to buy a guest house. Vera had also worked in Chester’s Grosvenor Hotel in her youth and had learned a lot about the hotel business. While he worked on aircraft, she ran the guest house. Then I came along unexpectedly!

They worked extremely hard and were so grateful that they had the opportunity to do so. Gratitude generates optimism and self-belief, so it was no surprise that the light of a golden opportunity shone on them.

An elderly couple had a hotel that they wanted to sell, so they agreed a deal to vendor finance my parents into buying it. This was a much bigger hotel, with a bar, chefs and silver service waitstaff.

Bill and Vera were a tremendous team. She had the business brain and could talk the leg off a chocolate frog to welcome new guests, and he could decorate, renovate and fix anything. He also played music in the lounge bar with his band. As a toddler, I even sang in that bar. They rose to the challenge of running a business, whilst he held down a tough job and they raised a family.

As my mother would say, ‘To cut a long story short…’ (always the start of a very long story with multiple deviations from the main tale), they bought and sold businesses as my mother developed, then grew tired, before getting bored, and going back into business, several times. I also grew up in that environment, learning the hotel business and about management from them, helping decorate, taking bookings, serving in the bar, cleaning the kitchen, shopping for supplies, checking in late night arrivals – you name it, I did it.

My first real job after school was washing and delivering hire cars for Hertz, whilst helping run the hotel, including manning the bar, for my keep. When my parents took a holiday, I managed the bookings for the coming season. Eventually my mother admonished me for not getting a ‘real job’ and I became a Trainee Supermarket Manager, becoming a Deputy Store Manager at just nineteen.

Key Philosophies around Gratitude

Later on, after a career in retail management, I found myself taking on my own lodging house with sixty guests, getting my own bar, playing guitar and singing in it, and with a fleet of my very own hire cars, and several apartments nearby. This was evidence of one of my mother’s beliefs that, ‘What goes around comes around!’

Or, by extension, ‘Do as you would have done to you’. (also called ‘The Golden Rule’) So, ‘Treat people well and that’s what will come back to you. Work hard and it will pay off. Do the right thing and don’t lie – always be honest!’

Sure enough, I gained the experience, worked hard and reaped the benefit of all that experience and hard work later on. As Steve Jobs said in his famous Harvard speech, ‘You can connect the dots backwards.’

Whenever my parents suffered setbacks, and they had many in both life and business in their time, she would adopt what I now know to be part of Stoic Philosophy, and say, “Never mind, it obviously wasn’t meant to be, but there will be something better around the corner.”

She was able to work with what she could control and surrender to the Universe those things that were outside her control.

When things were very bad, especially for example when she suffered health setback in her old age, she would say, “I mustn’t complain. There are plenty of folk out there who have it much worse than me.”

Bill’s biggest mantra that stuck with me was, “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” I think that was one he got from my grandfather, who had served in the artillery in the First World War. I was so grateful for this maxim that I paraphrased it and entitled my first coaching and self-help book, “If Life’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing Well”.

He had incredible tenacity, especially when it came to fixing things and solving problems. He wouldn’t give in until he had exhausted very possibility. I think the War taught him that one.

I am extremely grateful for the upbringing and education they gave me. When I look back, they sent me to a fantastic school, but they taught me way more about who I should aspire to become as a decent human being. Money was never really their focus, other than paying their bills and never letting anyone down.

They were grateful for the rewards of their efforts, and they travelled, a lot! On many occasions I went with them as a child and absorbed their fascination for the big world out there. We were very grateful to British Airways because one of Dad’s perks was heavily discounted air travel. No surprise that my sister became a BA Stewardess. One brother became a helicopter pilot in the services, then flew privately for a multi-millionaire, and I gained my Private Pilot’s Licence at 19, and set up many of my own service businesses, whilst the other brother became a Police Inspector – all service-oriented jobs which prioritised people.

My Personal Gratitude

I’ve enjoyed a really varied and interesting life, taking the baton from my parents and balancing working ridiculously hard in my younger years, whilst still having fun, and now massively relishing my chance to give back, through life and business coaching and mentoring work, and by presenting and writing. I like to help people to learn both from my successes and my setbacks, but I especially love to see them achieving their potential. Sometimes people need to see that someone else believes in them even when they may struggle to believe in themselves.

I ran my accommodation business and my other businesses – car sales, hire and servicing, serviced apartments, adventure tours and charters, cleaning services, to name a few, all following the same mantra as my parents – ‘Look after the people first, and the rewards will follow.’

These days, in my slightly slower paced lifestyle, I love studying Stoic Philosophy and self-help books with my wife, taking our dog for a walk in the amazing Perth Hills, swimming with our grandchildren in the pool, playing guitar and singing in a local bar, and travelling to amazing destinations and meeting new and interesting people everywhere. Our family and friends are the ultimate gift and we’re extremely grateful for the life we lead.

I believe that focusing on the things you’re grateful for, every day, will change your life for the better. You will literally manifest the good stuff into your life. (It’s the Law of Attraction). And always remember that ‘Every cloud has a silver lining’. (Another of my parents’ quotes.)

• What are you grateful for, right now, in your life?
• Write it down and remind yourself. Try it for thirty days and see what happens.
• Then keep doing it! Enjoy

The post Why Being Grateful Can Improve Your Life So Much appeared first on Mindset Coaching, Life Coaching and Business Mentoring Tony Inman.

The gentle sounds of the River Nile lapping against the side of the boat and the opportunity to relax in decadent luxury on a sunbed, being served drinks as the world floated past had already put me in a contemplative state, when I glanced towards the banks on the luscious green side. I saw a local man in a kaftan going about his business, and I wondered ‘What meaning does life hold for you over here, in this place, with your country’s customs and traditions?’

He was filling a container from the flowing waters. I don’t know if he planned to drink it or if it was for the animals that were near him, presumably he was tending them as they grazed peacefully beneath some shady palm trees.

The boat kept moving swiftly and although I captured the fleeting moment with my phone camera, I didn’t reach its conclusion of finding out who was the recipient of the water. The serenity of that scene has remained in my memory banks though as one of innumerable special reflections on a life blessed with a multitude of journeys around this planet.

A Fortunate Life

There are many people who have travelled far more than I, yet I am so very grateful for the incredible variety of people, places and experiences that I have been blessed to encounter.

I’ve clambered through subterranean caves in Malta and Mallorca; the catacombs full of human skeletons beneath a Church in Lima, choosing a resting place as close to their God’s home as possible; a Pharoah’s chamber in a pyramid at Gaza; and I’ve climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Eiffel Tower and trekked the Inca Trail through the Andean Mountains to Machu Picchu; my feet have trodden on a floating reed village in Lake Titicaca and 150 metres of ice on the Athabasca Glacier in British Columbia, as well as the muddy trails of the Amazon Jungle. I’ve scuba dived inside shipwrecks to as much as 63 meters below sea level in paradisiacal locations like Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands.

I’ve ridden camels, quad bikes, jet skis and elephants. I’ve piloted light aircraft over France, Belgium and England, been on South Pacific boats, and flown on hundreds, if not thousands of planes around the globe. I’ve been in helicopters over the Iguazu Falls of Argentina and the Red Centre at Uluru. I’ve been on hot air balloons over the Valley of the Egyptian Kings, the Parliament House at Canberra and the Australian Outback. I’ve sailed on yachts and a houseboat, plus cruise ships to Alaska and Asia. I’ve met sharks, snakes, spiders and crocodiles; I’ve played with a pod of dolphins by the Cocos-Keeling Islands and held the calming gaze of whale sharks in the clear blue oceans of the Ningaloo Reef and the Philippines. There are too many adventures to list, but I’ve loved them all, and my bucket list seems to grow ever longer.

I say all that not to brag or ‘big note’ myself, but to give context and provide contrast. Most people have travelled, at least in my privileged Western World anyway, though many people I’ve encountered on these journeys have not been so fortunate. Many live in abject poverty and can only dream of one day, going somewhere, other than where they were born and raised.

I was fortunate indeed to be born into a family whose thirst for travel and adventures was in my blood. But above all these things I have mentioned, what do you think remains with me the most?

It’s the same thing I think that enabled my parents to live long and interesting lives.

I inherited from them a great interest in, and fascination for, people.

For Me, It’s All about the People

When I think of the places and the adventures, the added icing on the cake, and the real meaning of the journeys was all about the people we met along the way.

My parents were hoteliers. My mother who lived to 100 years old, was always interested in people. My Dad used to joke that he could leave her sitting alone on a waiting chair in the middle of a shopping centre while he went into a store to buy something, and by the time he returned she’d have a bunch of new friends around her! He was a little shyer than her, so he kept working with the aircraft he had loved since being a young RAF engineer on Malta in the War, but he helped run the hotels outside of his airport job, and he lived to see their 70^th Wedding Anniversary and his 90^th birthday. One of his mantras was that ‘Everyone you meet has something to teach you.’ They were decent people with humanitarian values and strong principles.

They didn’t care too much about money, though they worked really hard for what they made. But, as long as they had enough to raise the family, live comfortably and travel, they considered themselves very fortunate. Their friendships were their currency.

So, when I think about our many travel adventures, I remember the smiles and charisma of our tour guides, Mark in Australia, Edwar on the Inca Trail, Sherif and Mohammed in Egypt, and Holly through America and Canada to name just a few who spring to mind. I think of our scuba diving guides, like Dharma in Bali, Neil in the Solomon Islands, and the German brothers, Flo and Fabian who taught us to dive.

I remember people who ran bars, restaurants, and hotels around the world, or just worked in them, and people who drove taxis, like the young lad in Rio, who proudly told us about his mother’s chocolate cake business. I have a good memory but not an encyclopaedic one alas, so many of the names escape me, but a host of stories linger fondly in the recesses of my mind.

You Don’t Have to Travel to Find Meaning

You don’t have to travel though to be an observer and student of human behaviour and to be mindful enough to conduct self-examinations of your own. You can do that in your everyday life, right where you are. After all, not everyone is lucky enough to travel.

My love of travel became a lower priority, as are many other people’s, by helping to raise children in Perth, Australia and running businesses. I compromised by following in my parents’ footsteps. It is said that ‘If Mohammed can’t go the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohammed.’ So, I operated a backpackers’ hostel business for 14 years, which meant tens of thousands of travellers came to me from all over the globe, living under my roof. Taking after my mother, it was never about the money, it was always about the people, the stories, the sharing of ideas, cultures, and experiences; I could write a book about it and I loved it.

After years of coaching people in business and life transitions and cramming in loads of personal development courses and reading hundreds of self-help books, I’ve developed a great interest in the philosophy of the Stoics, hence the existential title of this blog.

‘What meaning does life hold for you?,’ is a question for each one of us to answer according to our own unique interpretation of our individual and collective purpose. Is it merely to exist? To pay the bills and get through the working week? To get the kids through school and off your hands? To pay off the mortgage? To be a volunteer in the community? All of these things may claim priority at different times and there have been many studies and a plethora of books exploring the answers to the question. Certainly, a life that involves helping others seems to be a fulfilling factor.

If you don’t know the meaning, perhaps your mission is to find the meaning?

A Parting Thought on Your Legacy whilst Living in the Present

I’d like to think that I learned much from my parents, such as to be a decent human being; to respect other people; to seek to keep learning and improving myself; to be grateful for the joys life brings you and not grumble at the adversities, because there are always others who have it worse than you; to work hard for what you want, but through service and never at the expense of others. I don’t remember them explicitly telling me all those things, but they did it most often by example. I’m not perfect, so I stumble like everyone else, but I keep trying every day, and I know that I’ve been able to help and positively influence many of the folk I’ve encountered along the way. That knowledge is the true power that eludes the power-hungry and it means more to me than money ever could.

One day, unless you do something truly extraordinary, and probably after your grandchildren pass, most people will never even know that you existed, and that’s a sobering thought, right? But today, right now, you know, and those who know you and care about you, know that you exist. So, what meaning will you choose to make of it?

Good luck in finding an answer that works well for you. I hope you do. Asking the question of yourself is the first step.

I’ll conclude with the unforgettable words of Sherif, our tour guide through the antiquities of Ancient Egypt in 2007, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, get ready, because today is going to be the best day of your life!’

And as Jean-Luke Picard of Star Trek would say, ‘Make it so.’

The post What Meaning Does Life Hold for You? appeared first on Mindset Coaching, Life Coaching and Business Mentoring Tony Inman.

There are many traits that a small business owner must have to survive and thrive in today’s world, and ‘resilience’ is one that comes up in most expert’s key elements list. With the forces of change gathering pace at an explosive rate, however, resilience has become increasingly important, not just in business, but also in everyday life. It’s hardly surprising then that we are so drawn to tales of courage in what has become known as ‘The Hero’s Journey, a framework used by writers and filmmakers – more about that in a moment.

Tales of Resilience in Business

Resilience is an aspect of successful leadership has been a fascinating study topic for me since I first went into my management career as a young man. I was intrigued by the case studies outlined by authors, such as Peter Drucker and John Adair about how CEO’s of major companies not only survived major setbacks, but turned their fortunes around with a sheer determination to survive and succeed. Napoleon Hill wrote about this trait after years of researching the top businessmen in the U.S. Today’s top authors have continued exploring this tenacity, with writers, such as Stephen Bartlett, Mel Robbins, Seth Godin, Brene Brown, Ariana Huffington, Angela Duckworth, and many others, all attesting to the vital importance of developing resilience.

One of my favourite stories is that of Jan Carlzon in ‘Moments of Truth’, and how he became CEO of Scandinavian Airlines in the 1980’s. His story combined resilience, adaptability and innovation to turn around a loss-making organisation into a highly profitable airline.

Tales of Resilience in Life

Perhaps among the most powerful for me were the personal stories of overcoming adversity, such as Turia Pitt in “Happy’ where she graphically relives her survival of a bush fire in Australia’s north whilst running in an ultra-marathon event. The journey back from being horrifically burnt, to rebuilding not just a normal, average life, but an extremely inspirational and very successful one, is a testament to her incredible resilience.

Another standout for me was Viktor Frankel’s tale of surviving unimaginable cruelties in a Nazi concentration camp in ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’. He explored the question of why so many prisoners lost the will to live and simply gave up, versus those who found purpose in the struggle to survive.

Many years ago, I was blessed to hear a man speak on stage in the Perth Entertainment Centre, named John Perkins, who had survived a nearly fatal accident when a steel drum he was cutting with an oxy torch, that was thought to be empty, exploded. His story is told in the book, ‘Get Perky’ by Vailima Calton, where he had to teach himself to talk and walk again after suffering severe brain damage. Not only did he bounce back through a long and arduous journey, but he then cycled across Australia to raise awareness and funding for head trauma research.

Another person whose story blew my mind was that of mountaineer, Tom Whittaker, who lost a leg in a vehicle accident, but was challenged by a friend to pursue his dream of climbing Everest, despite his disability. Reporter Jim Waley did a feature in his Sunday program about the incredible resilience shown by Tom in overcoming various setbacks to achieve his goal, including being trapped in a storm three quarters of the way to the summit, then developing altitude sickness and having to go back to Basecamp, before using every ounce of his strength to go again all the way to the top.

Resilience in ‘The Hero’s Journey’

Screenwriter, Christopher Vogler is attributed to have outlined this story-telling structure that is used by many filmmakers and authors today as a go-to template. His book, ‘The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers’ described the twelve steps that your standard hero has to take on his or her journey.

1. Ordinary World: The hero is in their everyday life
2. Call to Adventure: The hero is faced with a challenge that starts their journey
3. Refusal of the Call: The hero hesitates to answer the call
4. Meeting the Mentor: The hero gains knowledge and confidence from a mentor
5. Crossing the Threshold: The hero leaves their ordinary world
6. Tests, Allies, and Enemies: The hero faces challenges, makes friends, and meets enemies
7. Approach to the Innermost Cave: The hero gets closer to their goal
8. The Ordeal: The hero faces their biggest challenge
9. Reward: The hero earns a reward that allows them to take on the biggest conflict
10. The Road Back: The hero returns to their ordinary world
11. Resurrection: The hero experiences a final moment of death and rebirth
12. Return with the Elixir: The hero returns with something to improve their ordinary world

As you can see, there are several challenges along the way that build the tension and keep the audience in suspense about whether or not the hero will succeed, but it is his or her resilience in persevering, despite the odds, to finally triumph.

Is Resilience Enough to Succeed?

I did an AI search on the key traits for a small business owner and it came back with these suggestions:

Key success traits for a small business owner include: adaptability, passion, resilience, strong leadership, creativity, risk tolerance, customer focus, strong communication skills, financial literacy, and the ability to learn and adapt to changing market conditions; essentially, being able to pivot, take calculated risks, and stay motivated while providing excellent customer service in a dynamic environment.

Wow! That’s a lot – no wonder small business success isn’t always easy! So, there are a lot of ingredients needed for the results you want.

Consider this though – whilst resilience is of course not all you need to succeed, its absence would mean that you would probably crumble in the face of adversity, no matter how talented you are.

So, how do you build resilience? I’ll answer that one in my upcoming book.

Stay tuned!

The post Why Resilience Matters So Much in Business and Life appeared first on Mindset Coaching, Life Coaching and Business Mentoring Tony Inman.

Most of us periodically set some kind of goal or resolution, but then we come up against the challenge of following through with the actions we need to take to make it happen.

Set the Intention

When is a goal not really a proper goal? When it’s just a wish, or what some people call a ‘Someday, I’ll…”

Ok, you’ve made a ‘decision’ but decisions are fickle, because we humans are emotional creatures who are prone to being swayed by other people’s opinions, or by external circumstances. Consequently, mere wishes can soon be discarded, with the excuse that, “I wasn’t very serious about it anyway.’

To make a goal real, ideally you want to follow the SMARTS formula. Write down your goal and address these headings:

S – Specific and detailed, but preferably simple.

M – Measurable and Meaningful– set parameters around it.

A – Attainable – if not, you’re setting yourself up to fail, but always remember that if someone else can do it, maybe you can too. Affirm it as if you have already achieved it.

R – Relevant – To you, or to someone you really care about. If they’re not, you’ll soon lose interest in the execution.

T – Time-framed, with milestones to check on and reward progress.

S – Steps required – break it down into small, manageable chunks.

If you can write down the goal and answer all of the above, then you’re well on your way.

Clarify the Motivation

One of the great motivational speakers with whom I’ve had the privilege of working, Dr John Demartini suggests that, having set a goal, you should write down 200 reasons why this matters to you. Now that’s a tough gig!

I’d highly recommend though that you really work at writing down at least 50 reasons ‘why’. The first ten or even twenty perhaps are usually easy enough to rattle off fairly quickly, but then you may struggle. It will make you really think about the significance of the goal itself. You may also find that some of your answers feel a bit repetitive, but you can tweak them to differentiate from your previous answers.

The goal may be for your own personal gain in some way, or it might benefit other people, such as family, friends or simply people in need.

If you really like a challenge, you could write down the consequences of not following through on your ‘decisions’.

Your job is not yet done though…

Maintain Focus

This is where most of us fall over. We set the goal, then forget to keep it front of mind. Having written your 50 reasons, you need to remind yourself on a regular basis. Some ‘experts’ recommend reading them aloud first thing and just before bedtime. If that sounds like something you wouldn’t be disciplined enough to follow, then you should at least have the goal, and ideally the reasons why it matters, (a) written down, because the act of writing them helps your brain to remember them and re-read them as often as you can, and (b) have the goal displayed somewhere in your regular line of vision.

This may seem a little ‘woo-woo’ if you haven’t read anything about neuro-science, but most of us, when we think about things in our future, tend to find that the pupils in our eyes will look up and to the right when we are imagining things in the future, whereas for most of us, our eyes will look down and to the left when we are remembering things from our past. If you are left-handed, this may be the opposite, plus not everyone will always follow this pattern for different reasons that I won’t go into here.

Let’s say that you have a workstation, and your computer desk is in front of a wall or partition, you should ideally place the written goals on the wall, up and to the right of your normal line of vision. Your peripheral vision will then catch sight of these goals and remind your sub-conscious about the goals and why they matter.

If this isn’t practical, you might have a vision board somewhere that you see daily. I once had a board on the toilet wall, so that every time I visited, I was reminded of my goals!

This is just one of many tips that I give my clients when coaching them, or when they are following my programs. I’ve used it many times, and I can absolutely assure you that it is extremely effective.

Another key support is to find an accountability partner to whom you must report on progress. Some people use a system of rewards and penalties to add extra weight to their need to act.

Recap

I hope this post may have helped you at least realise why you may not have achieved goals you set in the past, or better yet, to help you set and achieve new goals despite the challenge of following through.

Remember these key points.

• Set the Intent – Write down your goal, using the SMARTS process.
• Check that you’re serious by writing down your 50 reasons (and perhaps 20 consequences of not succeeding.)
• Keep your focus on the goal with tools, techniques and rituals to keep them front of mind.
• Find an accountability partner to keep you on track.

Feel free to contact me for assistance or help in these regards.

The post The Challenge of Following Through appeared first on Mindset Coaching, Life Coaching and Business Mentoring Tony Inman.

On significant occasions like Christmas, New Year, birthdays or anniversaries, near death experiences or bereavements of friends or family, many of us make decisions to change certain aspects of our lives. We make decisions about who we are now versus who we want to become, or how we behave now versus how we would ideally like to behave. Many of these changes can be minor adjustments that are easy to make, or they may be major shifts that require solid focus and dedication. Either way, the change we seek always starts with a decision.

You may query that statement in light of certain situations that you feel were not of your choosing or not your fault. For example, you didn’t choose for the boss to fire you or for the car accident to happen. Nor did you choose for your friend to succumb to illness, or for your business to fail. These scenarios can all perhaps be true in a way but consider these alternative perspectives.

Every Decision Has a Consequence

You are where you are now today in this moment because of millions of small decisions you have made in your life so far.

• You couldn’t have been fired had you not chosen to take the job rather than any other job or career path you might have pursued.
• You wouldn’t have had the car accident had you not chosen to drive today. If you want to go further down the rabbit hole, consider that it was you who chose to even learn to drive in the first place.
• You didn’t choose for your friend to be ill, yet you wouldn’t have even known about it had you not befriended them.
• Your business mightn’t have failed if you had learned better business management skills, or had you never even started the business.

That might all seem a bit cheesy or glib, but you can see my point that your life today is something unique that you have created with the intersection of all your previous decisions in life. Everything has a cause and an effect. Also, the world is constantly changing, and your life will too, whether you like it or not, so you may as well choose to keep improving yourself and your situation!

Every Decision Depends on Your Chosen Perspective

I’m sure you’ve probably heard the phrase, ‘It’s not what happens to you that matters; it’s how you choose to respond to what happens to you that counts.’

Every single one of us is a unique human being with our own unique set of beliefs, our own unique collection of life experiences and our own unique characters and complex personalities. So, every single one of us chooses how we interpret, or make sense of, any situation we are presented with, both consciously, and sub-consciously.

Therefore, whenever we are baffled by why another person chooses to perceive a situation or event differently, and therefore perhaps to behave differently than we would if we were ‘in their shoes’, we need to remember that they are ‘not us’. They have their reasons, even if those reasons make no sense to us.

The Effectiveness of Your Decision Depends on Your Motivation

In acknowledging that we are all a unique blend of beliefs, attitudes and experiences, we can see that how we choose to make sense of a scenario and how we will then decide to act, will depend on the strength of our motivation to act.

It’s often been stated by behavioural analysts that we are motivated away from the things we fear and towards the things we desire – pain or pleasure. Generally, it’s agreed that fear is a more powerful agent in this regard. We all have fears, but some of us allow them to paralyse us into inaction, whereas others choose, as author Susan Jeffers calls it, to ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway’.

Overcoming the Inaction Default

Human beings have evolved to where we can send probes deep into space and make incredible technological advances, as we have done with artificial intelligence for example, yet in our everyday lives we often allow our fears to dictate our choices.

Human behavioural scientists generally agree that when confronted with the unknown, or the potentially uncertain, our default setting is to do nothing. Our primary motivating force, which is a legacy of our caveman past, is one that has enabled us to survive and outlive the dinosaurs and a multitude of other species, and that is our concern for safety. The known, present state represents safety because of its familiarity, even when it makes you miserable. The default is that it’s better to be unhappy, unfulfilled and safe than to expose yourself to a potentially beneficial, but uncertain risk – hence the status quo remains.

To this end, those whom many describe as crazy adrenalin junkies, push themselves outside of their comfort zones to achieve insane objectives like skydiving, mountaineering, scuba diving and so on. By overcoming their fears, they prove to themselves that they can conquer the more banal, everyday challenges, like career choices, relationship management etc. and instead rely upon their imagination and their steely self-determination.

Our imagination can either trap us in our own fear-induced cage or it can propel us to higher levels. As Seneca said, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

The Empowering Conclusion

I’m guessing that if you’ve read this far, no matter what has caused this self-reflection, there’s something in your life that you are contemplating changing and it requires a decision to be made. Here’s the key takeaway, from my perspective anyway (yours might be different!):
By understanding and acknowledging that all of the decisions you have made in your life thus far have led you to this moment, you can then draw great comfort in knowing that therefore you also have the power to make new decisions that will help you create your own idealised version of lifestyle, career, relationship, health condition – physical and mental, indeed anything and everything that you want to change can be changed.

It begins with your decision to change, often caused or inspired by a pivotal moment. That decision must then be followed by another decision to follow through with that intention.

Next, you’ll need good systems to increase your chances of success, but we’ll come to that in my upcoming blog post. If you need any help with mapping out the changes you want to make, let’s have a chat.

The post The Change You Want Starts with a Decision appeared first on Mindset Coaching, Life Coaching and Business Mentoring Tony Inman.

Same Inner Critic – Worlds Apart

In Downtown Los Angeles Boris woke up with that gnawing feeling in his stomach. He hadn’t slept well. In fact he had tossed and turned all night, wondering if his latest assignment on thermo-nuclear dynamics would be good enough to get that ‘A’ grade he needed to give him a shot at going to Harvard.

“Mum!” he shouted from behind the cosiness of his protective fleecy bedspread, “Can you read through something for me?” He knew that it made no sense because his Mum actually knew nothing about the topic, but at least she’d know if it was good enough – she always did.

Meanwhile, the same day, but of course in a different time zone, Sally was about to go to a networking breakfast in Perth, Australia and give her ‘elevator pitch’ – that spiel you give to Richard Branson when you’re stuck in a lift with him and hoping not to break wind as you proffer the dream business proposal that he has been awaiting throughout his entire, unrequited life.

Her stomach was already growling at the thought of it. “All those eyes will be looking at me. What if they find out that I’m not as good as I appear?” She looked in the bathroom mirror, wiped an imaginary speck away from her mascara and called out to her husband, who was still curled up in bed waiting for the snooze button on his alarm clock to go off. “John, she said, in a voice that somehow wasn’t her own, “Can I run through my pitch again and you tell me if it’s ok?”

Validation

Have you ever woken up one morning and thought about why you sometimes feel the need to check with other people about why you want to do a certain thing and whether that’s the right thing to do?

If you have done that, you’ll know that it often makes no sense. The person you’re asking may not know anything about the subject – they may not even care about the outcome, and yet we still do it. Why?

It’s because we’re looking for that reassurance, that safety blanket on a dark and stormy night; that validation of ourselves that can only come from an external and somehow trusted source.

Boris could hand in his assignment and tell himself in his mother’s voice now that it was good enough. More than that though, she could reassure him that HE was good enough.

Sally could stand up at the breakfast meeting, and protect herself from the invasive gazes of 14 sets of eyes with the shield of encouragement provided by a half-awakened John who had been more focused on his morning ablution ritual than on the trite mumblings of his ‘girl-powered’ wife.

Strangely enough, when Boris’s lecturer marked his assignment, he didn’t even notice the paragraph that the acne-ridden youth had agonised over. Sure, he made a few critical remarks about other sections, some of which irked our hero beyond belief, but overall the armchair critic adjudged him worthy of a pass with merit, with no marks deducted for pimples at all. Boris had disturbed his own sleep patterns for nothing really.

Sally had made an incredible impact at breakfast, though not in the way she had expected. A veritable array of industrial experts had in turn delivered their stumbling and shaky verbal business advertisements, which had been wasted on Sally because she was so busy rehearsing her own speech in her own head that she had hardly taken in a word of the other ‘spoutings’.

As she arose from her chair, magnificent and polished, with every morsel of mascara intact and aligned, her hand caught her coffee saucer, causing the cup to leap into the air like a Houston rocket and splatter the nervously unconsumed remnants of brown fluid all over her DKNY blouse. With every attempt at self-mopping and every “Oh, you poor thing” from the audience, Sally’s perfectly prepared script had oozed its way out of the rosy-redness of her blushing head. When the mopping stopped and the speech began, she had forgotten every word, so she did what she had no other option but to do – she winged it.

As Sally finished delivering her totally unrehearsed substitute blurb, the strangest of things happened…

Sally received a thunderous ovation, not to mention a couple of cheers and some stereo-typical Aussie “Good on ya’s!”

Later that day, had you asked any of the audience what Sally actually said, they would have confessed with a slightly pained expression that they couldn’t exactly remember, but that she had spilt her coffee (poor girl), but recovered brilliantly and given a hugely uplifting and authentic pitch. John had of course claimed the credit for all that helpful rehearsing he had helped her with in the bathroom that morning whilst reiterating that he had never doubted in her ability for a single moment.

The Common Link

So, what did Boris and Sally have in common? And what do they have in common with you and me?

We all spend way too much of our lives wondering if we’ll be good enough. When the two school team captains are picking their teams, one at a time, from the nervously trembling pack of children, we’re all hoping that we’ll be considered good enough, that we won’t be the last kid to be picked and clearly the one with the least talent and who may as well jump off that bridge now, forever typecast as the ‘rejected failure from class 3F’.

Sometimes we worry ourselves sick. We get nervous about details that nobody even notices or cares about. We worry that ‘they’ might discover that it’s all a sham, that we’re actually not good enough and that we’ve just been winging it all this time. 

Guess what though – when you surrender to the impossibility of pleasing everyone else and just BE the best YOU that you can, you actually allow your inner creative being to shine. The only thing stopping you is you, clichéd though that certainly is. Nobody has all the answers; nobody is ‘perfect’ – yet you are a perfect creation. You can learn whatever you don’t know and need to know. You can choose yourself from the pack. You can give it your best shot and however it comes out, that’s ok.

It’s ok to get advice, sure; it’s ok to practice, absolutely. It’s also ok to just do your best, subject to my obvious disclaimer that if you’re a heart surgeon or an airline pilot, or a Manchester United penalty taker, please do check and please do get it absolutely right (you know what I mean!) To summarise my (obviously perfect’) ramblings in terms that a modern audience of readers can relate to, consider this: “If there was a zombie apocalypse tomorrow, would what I’m stressing about really be that big of a deal?”

Now get out there and pick yourself.

If you need any help figuring out the ideal YOU, feel free to contact me about the benefits of life coaching.

The post Your Inner Critic – What to Do about Self-Doubt appeared first on Mindset Coaching, Life Coaching and Business Mentoring Tony Inman.