Let us get rid of the idea of a Work Life Balance

This was a post I made a few years back and I think its relevant to you and your teenage life. 

Work / Life Balance ......As a concept it was never going to work in the modern age. Balance your work and life …. What a joke! Why add yet another task to your already very demanding to-do list! Why beat yourselves up every year because you had made little or no improvement on your work/life balance.

So you are now free of this dreadful burden, and can now do what you want when you want to, keeping yourself and your key people in your life happy in whatever way you please.

Why has it taken us so long to come to our senses!!!!

F R E E D O M !!

The above does express my personal sentiment

WHAT NEXT?

Isn’t it great, what a wonderful feeling, but do I detect a hint of concern that nothing could be that easy?

What do we put in its place?

How do you keep your everyone happy?

Ahhhhhh! Glad you asked!

SIMPLER, SMARTER, QUICKER

Well yes, it really isn’t that easy, as you will need to learn a new way of managing your time, but it’s far more practical and it will give you immediate benefits, so let’s get going.

First I must get you thinking in a different way, as the investment manager of your Time Bank.

My guess is that up until now you have been making some pretty bad investment decisions but with a little bit of help we will get you on the right track. Let’s start by identifying your 'people'as they are rather important in this whole venture.

·      Partner (husband / wife),  Children,  Parents, Boss / Bosses boss,  Direct reports, Peers    Etc  How would each of your stakeholders rate you as a time investment manager?  Poor,  Fair,  Average,  Good,  Excellent

Let me guess, the people you care about the most tend to get the worst service? 

FUNNY THAT! 

Do you want to make a change?

More to follow but for now  here is an interesting TED talk to start you thinking about how to invest in the small things that do make a difference.

Note: I love this video as the presenter combines humour with a lot of common sense.

Learning mindfulness with the Calm app

I learned mindfulness after a very sad time in my life. It is a wonderful life skill that everyone should learn! Recently we were heading to the O2 to go to the Andrea Bocelli show. We left Godalming at 4:00 leaving us plenty of time to get there (estimated time 1.5 hours) and have  something to eat before the show. Then the skies opened up and torrential  rain, multiple car accidents, a few wrong turns and we only got to the theatre at 6:40, 20 minutes before the show. I used mindfulness to calm myself down and didn't bash my steering wheel or say fuck once. I did my breathing exercises, calmed myself down, listened to my apple satnav and always believed that we were going to make it. We did make it and it was the most wonderful show and it wasn't spoiled by the drain of getting there. 

What is mindfulness?

After my wife died I attended a eight week course on ‘mindfulness for stress’ and it was life changing. I had long wanted to learn mindfulness, but always put it on the back burner as a nice to have. However, I desperately needed help, and it was no longer a nice to have, so I did it. 

I learned how to meditate, use breathing techniques, self compassion, accept my sad situation, but learned to be grateful for all the good things I still had in my life. I soon felt that I had more control over my life, that I could deal with my emotions better and then hope and my passion for living started to come back. 

After the training, initially I used the audio recordings from the course to continue my practice and then experimented with various apps. The app I kept coming back to was Calm, which I liked a lot.

My advice to everyone is learn mindfulness NOW, don't wait for a life event to compel you to find help. There are enough challenges in the world to justify you investing in mindfulness training. You don't have to attend a training course to start practising, just use the Calm app.

The Independent summarised it as follows:-

Open the Calm app and you’ll immediately be greeted with the gentle sound of the outdoors. It varies from person to person, but we loved this touch and found it helped us on the path to relaxation (you can change it to rolling waves, pouring rain, crackling firewood or crickets). 

We loved Calm when we tested it previously, particularly its guided Daily Calm sessions, which helped us unwind and refocus our attention. But the app has bolstered its already-great offering this year, with the addition of a new daily meditation series called the Daily Trip. Narrated by Canadian author and meditation teacher Jeff Warren, the Daily Trip offers a more adventurous – and enjoyable – practice. We found we learned more in these daily sessions than any of the others we tested. 

If you fancy something a little different, you can also pick from exclusive music tracks engineered to help you focus, relax or sleep, including remixes from stars Sam Smith and Ellie Goulding. There are also several new celebrity-narrated “sleep stories”, with calming tales from the likes of former One Direction star Harry Styles, and actors Idris Elba, Cillian Murphy and Chiké Okonkwo. We got a childish pleasure out of these and found they helped us unwind in the evenings, bringing back the nostalgia of being read a bedtime story. 

The latest version of the app includes a new gratitude check-in feature, which we used to remind ourselves of the things we’re grateful for each day. With plenty of content and at just £29.99 for a subscription that lasts the whole year (there’s no monthly offer but that equates to just under £2.50 a month), we also think this app is great value.

My partner and I regularly use the sleep stories and they work, dare I say it, like a dream! We reckon we are getting at least 2 to 3 hours more sleep each night which makes a difference to our health and energy levels. We take in the daily calm and daily trip, love Tamara and Jeff. 

The following video is a little demo I recorded a while ago covering what to expect from the Calm app. 

The power of the simple checklist

 Many years ago when I was doing my TQM facilitator training I was introduced to the simple checklist. It was so simple that I rather arrogantly looked down my nose at the concept.

The Collins definition:

A checklist is a list of all the things that you need to do, information that you want to find out, or things that you need to take somewhere, which you make in order to ensure that you do not forget anything.

When I started to run a lot of training courses I was guided by a productivity coach to use checklists. My training department and I developed a one day training course to introduce everyone to total quality. We were about to run the course for over 300 people spread over a 12 month period. What we did as a team was to brainstorm all the tasks we needed to get done in order to successfully run each one day course. From our brainstorm we were able to create a master checklist. Each task was broken down into logical grouping and sorted into date order. In those days we did everything in paper so we opened a folder for each course and glued the checklist onto the inside cover. This meant that anyone in the training department could pick up a folder and see how well it was progressing. It was a fantastic demonstration of how a simple checklist can help improve the productivity of a whole department.

I still use checklists, particularly when I travel. The screenshot is of a cruise we did on the Duoro in Portugal. I now use Apple Reminders for my checklists and have saved the layout as a template ready for my next trip. The photo below gives you an idea of some of the many steps you have to go through for each holiday. You will note that 'English Breakfast Tea' is not ticked. This is because we couldn't get a decent cup of tea, so we added it to the checklist to make sure we always take tea bags with us when we go on holiday. (Oh dear I am now officially old!)

This video gives you a very good idea on how to use Apple Reminders to improve your productivity. It is particularly useful if you have an iPhone, iPad and Apple watch.

Accelerate your learning - V.A.K. learning styles

As part of my development as a trainer I was introduced to VAK learning styles, a model of learning designed by Walter Burke Barbe and later developed by Neil Fleming.

The VAK learning model divides people into three categories of learner:

• Visual learning style involves the use of seen or observed things, including pictures, diagrams, demonstrations, displays, handouts, films, flip-chart, etc.

• Auditory learning style involves the transfer of information through listening: to the spoken word, of self or others, of sounds and noises.

• Kinesthetic learning involves physical experience - touching, feeling, holding, doing, practical hands-on experiences.

Here is a link to a questionnaire if you would like to assess your learning style.

VAK Questionnaire plus a nice energetic quiz and tips.

In my experience it not so cut and dry and I think people have a combination of all three styles. I know in my own case I do have a preference, particularly in the early stages of learning for visual material. This gives me the 'roadmap' that I will follow. It was with this in mind that years ago I attended a 'Graphic Facilitation' training course and it blew my mind. I learned how to create 'Learning Maps' and participants to my workshops loved this method of teaching. BUT, the learning map was just the launch pad to multiple learning activities that effectively used all the styles. Thinking back, the learning map provided the meaning behind what we were doing and the content just look a lot more cool and fun. 

I remember running a workshop in Ghana, just using a colourful learning map on a flip chart. As I was enthusiastically explaining the map, one of the participants, smartphone in his hand said 'Ian can I film you explaining the learning map'. Of course I loved the spontaneity and said 'yes but please share it with the group'. We were effectively combining visual, auditory and kinesthetic ... and it wow did it work!

HOWEVER be aware .....

The belief in learning styles is so widespread, it is considered to be common sense. Few people ever challenge this belief, which has been deeply ingrained in our educational system. Teachers are routinely told that in order to be effective educators, they must identify & cater to individual students' learning styles;  it is estimated that around 90% of students believe that they have a specific learning style but research suggests that learning styles don't actually exist!  This presentation focuses on debunking this myth via research findings, explaining how/why the belief in learning styles is problematic, and examining the reasons why the belief persists despite the lack of evidence.

So please watch this TED talk