The phrase 'balancing work and family' has become a bit of an empty mantra for many of our clients who are struggling to maintain harmony between their professional and personal lives. Who amongst us really feels like work and life are truly “balanced” on any given day?

By striving after that ideal we are often setting ourselves up for disappointment, because life’s demands come in unpredictable spurts and surges.

Getting the balance right means we are neglecting neither work or family needs over time, sometimes over a whole lifetime.

What is the true limit on human potential? There isn’t one. And this applies to you and me both. 

Unfortunately though, we have an incredible knack for imposing limits on ourselves with a host of limiting self beliefs. We are so used to hauling these limiting self beliefs around that we barely notice they’re even there. Too often, we mistake these beliefs for reality.

Few people realise that creating a personal mission statement is like creating a compass for ourselves; it’s a way of staying focused on the things that are of ultimate meaning and importance in our lives.

Creating a personal, value-driven vision/mission statement makes us alert to opportunities that will add value to our lives that could be otherwise overlooked in the busyness of day to day life.

If you want things to be different to being ‘on the go’ every day and then collapsing into the numbness of screen time…The chances are that you are experiencing overwhelm.

When the demands placed on our attention exceed our capacity to mentally process them, the symptoms of overwhelm begin to show up.

We are going to show you how freeing up time to take on a new project is not only possible, but essential if we are going to keep things fresh and growing and avoid succumbing to the stagnation of the daily grind.

We’ve compiled 5 strategies and 3 weapons for you to implement to free up your time. 

There are some pretty straightforward routes to becoming a better listener. We can teach ourselves by practising a few straight-forward principles we’ll share in this blog.

By becoming a better listener to friends, family, colleagues, even strangers, we can create and strengthen relationships, avoid misunderstandings and therefore minimise conflict and social stress. We can even improve our emotional intelligence.  

We have found that the key to planning and starting a new project begins with getting 4 essential pillars in place before we begin. These pillars are set by asking 4 indispensable questions.

Pillar 1: WHY. Sharpening up our notion on the purpose and value of the project lays the strong foundation that every project needs. You’re tapping into the emotional motivation to get started and to keep pushing on with it when it runs into any challenges. 

Have you ever experienced depression? Or been close to someone who has been through it? If you’ve answered yes to either question then you don’t need me to describe the magnitude of the suffering it puts people through. Simply put, it’s like being locked into a psychological box of hell.

Part of my morning routine during the early weeks of lockdown was spent ploughing through ‘The Archaeology of the Mind’ an absolute door stopper of a book by Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven.

An important book but not an easy one, at least not for me.

One thing that has become clear to a lot of us since lockdown began is what a lifeline time spent in nature is.

Whether it’s pottering around your garden, enjoying Spring in all its vivid charm when out walking in one of Bristol’s park, or traipsing through the woods, for many, it has become a source of sustenance that feels almost as important as eating.

Exercises that generate conversations and an exploration of ideas promotes open communication in the team, horizontally, across departments and vertically too.

With good communication, ideas can flow between interns and management as much as they can within teams. Diversity of opinion, different perspectives and richness of feedback, it all drives up quality and deepens work relationships.

One of the reasons why leaders need to take workplace resilience seriously is that it creates an organisational culture that is fit for the future.

Almost every one of us has an awareness that we are living in times of massive change. The old world is passing away and the emergent world is not yet in full view.

A team that knows how to manage their time will be less stressed, higher achieving and most importantly of all, they will have more room left over for the things they enjoy and the things that develop them.

Research suggests that if you let people be self-directed (in the context of clear parametres and support) it will boost commitment to the organisation, not diminish it. Once an organisation embarks on a sincerely felt mission to foster employee wellbeing, all sorts of weird, wonderful and unexpected directions or travel emerge.

It seems there is always stuff flying into the inbox, the in-tray, and no sooner is something scratched off the To Do list, 3 more things get added onto the end of it.

Spending most of our time in ‘just about keeping up’ mode is a serious culprit for why so many of us feel stressed when we’re ‘On’ and too knackered to do anything meaningful or enjoyable when we’re ‘Off’. But there is hope!

A successful team is nothing if not a motivated team. Broadly speaking, empowerment is a short-cut to motivation.

Knowing each other in a social sense, not just a role sense, knowing what makes everyone tick as individuals, and communicating the company vision in a way that strikes a chord with all, that fosters that sense of belonging too. 

Not always harried and stressed by looming deadlines and unexpected set-backs, but calm and in control, planning and doing things ahead of time…. This leaves the headspace we need to stay cool and sort it when the inevitable glitch/crisis/hiccup/catastrophe does strike.

We have a list of things To-Do we’d like you to work with. It’s a little ridiculous, so prepare yourself for a fun, team-bonding experience! We’ll share the To-Do list with you, then we’ll give instructions on how to run this activity. This list is ready for you to print it out or to copy onto on a large sheet of paper.

Have you got an away day to organise? Don’t want to take the team paint-balling again? Here are 3 alternatives if you’re in or near Bristol and looking for something a bit different for your dose of team building this time.

How does a good leader lead? And how does leadership affect the culture in the workplace?

We all know how bad leaders lead – we’ve all heard about, or directly survived the bosses from hell who create organisational cultures that are poisonous. See our list of the symptoms of a toxic work culture.