During my time training as a resilience practitioner, I learnt many useful resilience techniques. Learning that through adopting these, we can develop and become good at resilience was hugely inspiring as previously I don’t think I completely understood how much influence we have over our own reaction to challenging situations.
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It’s probably true that we could all do with some work on our presentation style. I’m not particularly talking about standing up in front of an audience and delivering a speech, but more about the day to day dealings with others at work. I’ve spent a great deal of time observing how others come across and realise there is much we can do to improve our impact.
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We make so many assumptions when it comes to communicating with others. We have to, as we generally don’t have time to read between the lines. This leads to snap decisions and judgements. Much of the time, this is OK and no harm is done. However, if we make a snap decision that someone doesn’t like us, or is moody or ungrateful , or whatever… it is very unlikely that we will change our minds on this.
Steve has enormous entrepreneurial talent and grew his first business quickly and successfully. His company was approached by a larger business who wanted to buy, and wanted him to stay on to run that part of the business. As an entrepreneur, this was a whole different ball game. Used to putting plans in action quickly, he found the structure of the larger firm stymied his creativity and he became frustrated. He believed that he would be sidelined and would lose control. He was aware that his way of communicating didn’t fit in with the new, larger organisation’s expectations. He contacted me and explained that he wanted to become regional managing director and not find his way out of a job, as he feared might happen.
In my journey through the charity shop self help books, I came across Susan Jeffers’ follow up to her successful “worldwide bestseller” Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway. I had read this and can’t remember that much about it to be honest. But, I do like the title and it sort of captures the essence of the book pretty much – that instead of shying away from uncomfortable, ‘out of our comfort zone’ situations, we need to just go for it. The sense of achievement afterwards is usually huge and that particular situation becomes just a little less fearful. Read more
