Life & Leadership · Cultural Awareness · Healthy Transitions
Have you ever wondered why some people seem to have an advantage in life? Why some people seem to sail through life and take the knocks and scrapes and bumps in their stride.. or, at least, seemingly more so than others?
It might be to do with their outlook on life.
True or False? “Optimists aren’t born, they’re made.” Why should we care anyway? A recent seminar got me thinking about why choosing a positive outlook really gives us a life advantage. AND that we don’t have to become a die hard optimist to benefit.
How we deal with regret will affect how much we can grow, develop and push forward. As we looked at last time, regret can eat us alive or be food for thought and growth going forward… In this post we look at how to make sure it’s the latter.
It wouldn’t surprise anyone who has experienced the gnawing, consuming discomfort of remorse to discover that the word originally comes from the Medieval Latin ‘remorsum’ meaning literally “to bite back, bite again.”
So how can we deal well with our life and leadership regrets without them eating us alive?
In the first part we looked at how crustaceans leave one shell when they outgrow it. They break out of their old, tightly restrictive shell to grow a new one. It’s a natural reality but also an apt metaphor for … Continued
Change. It sometimes comes like a blessed relief, a liberation, a much needed shift. At other times it makes us want to crawl under a rock and hide in the dark. Most times, it’s a curiously perplexing mixture of the two: we feel exposed and we feel released. So how is it that change has power to bring both spacious freedom yet also intense vulnerability? Turns out, Mother Nature has some wisdom on this…
Our cultural perspective affects how we learn and imagine, and hence how we understand and communicate events with others. Here’s a simple story that reveals hidden cultural assumptions.
What capabilities mark out those growing in cultural awareness? How can we build these characteristics in ourselves, our teams and our organisations? Cultural awareness might be something that you grew up with or were born into. Perhaps your parents’ decisions, … Continued
When Ottoman Sultans attended ritual prayer at an Imperial Mosque, they performed their namaz (prayers) from a raised, gilded loge, an ornately screened religious equivalent of a theatrical Royal Box. These loges (Hünkar mahfili) led back into a secret first … Continued
My visit to Standen House was the result of happy chance and coincidence. Flying in to Gatwick, I had researched places of interest en route to the south coast and on a whim we decided to swing past and take … Continued