Monthly Archives: October 2011

What are you having for breakfast?

 in General life improvement

“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”

(Ken Blanchard)

Sometimes my work involves me delivering feedback. Sometimes people are just interested in the facts, the objective experience. On other occasions they are more interested in the subjective experience – how those facts could be interpreted.

For instance, lets take an everyday experience of visiting a shop.

If I was to give feedback in an objective style of a shopping visit I could describe precisely how many staff were serving, how long I had to wait to be served, how many products were on the shelves etc.

If I was to give feedback purely in a subjective style on the same shopping visit I may say that there were not enough staff serving, that I had to wait a long time and there were lots of stock on the shelves.

I can also blend both objective and subjective feedback, which would give the facts to justify my opinion and interpretations. So I may say that “There were 2 staff serving, which I felt was not enough. I had to wait 5 minutes to be served – longer than I expected.” etc

All forms can be useful depending upon what they are to be used for. Still using the above example, a shop may find the objective feedback useful to determine how that store performed against their policies and use the information for training purposes. The subjective style they would find useful to find out what their customers actually felt about their experience so that they can establish if what they are doing is getting the results that they want. A blend of both can provide information about which parts were working well and which are not.

This seems pretty common sense to many people when they are looking at giving or asking for feedback to or from others. However, I’ve noticed that when it comes to giving feedback about their own work then the style that is most often used is just a subjective one – so they may say things like “It was great” or “I was rubbish”. Without the acknowledgement of the objective facts then it may go un-noticed if that feedback is justified or how it can be made stronger in the future.

I’ve done it myself – when I came back from the recording studio a couple of years ago after recording my first CD my coach asked how it had gone. My initial response was all subjective. With his usual sense of humour he got me to include far more objective responses which made me realise that I’d based my initial response on an expectation of recording the whole CD in “one take.” Including objective feedback about the quality of the content, the sound of the final recording and that actually I hadn’t taken any longer to record than was allotted for a piece of this length, changed my subjective response.

This week I invite you to be aware of the style of feedback you are using for your own work. Notice the difference including both subjective and objective styles makes.

Have a week full of feedback

Love

Jen

This was originally posted on www.YourChangingDirection.com

The Power of Living with Intention 1

 in Guest Post  tagged action / business coach / business coaching / challenge / charging / client / clients / coach / coaches / coaching / coaching courses / coaching qualifications / coaching skills / coaching techniques / coaching training / confidence intention / Create Yourself / creative / different / executive coach / kindness / leadership coaching / life coach / life coaches / life coaching / Louise Gillespie Smith / love / nlp coach / peace / performance coaching / personal coach / personal development / play / Thought

In today’s guest post coach Louise Gillespie Smith shares a personal experiment that she now uses with her own clients.

The Power of Living with Intention

by Louise Gillespie Smith

Six months ago I began an experiment to see what would happen if I fully lived with intention for a whole year. The idea is to set a different intention every month and to fully immerse myself, by directing my thoughts and action in alignment with each one.

I am in the middle of the experiment now and it’s been quite amazing how the different intentions I quite flippantly set for each month at the beginning have all flowed into each other perfectly. The timing has been right for all of them.

Why am I doing this?

Setting my intention for a yoga class or situation has always worked for me. I have found it quite a fun and empowering way to choose how I want to be and act around anything I do. So I thought, what if I was to expand this and see what would happen if I lived with a different focus each month.

I have always dreamed of travelling around India for 6 months and this is going to be part of the journey, I leave in January. As a coach I also believe it’s good to step outside your boundaries and challenge yourself. I find I am more a more effective coach when I am developing and stretching myself as well as my clients.

The intentions so far….

I began with “being creative”, I had not done any art for well over twelve years, it was always something I had loved at school but ever since have just become stuck with. My intention lead me to drawing again, visiting different art galleries each week, going on a graffiti hunt, and watching a street dance show.

It was amazing, I found just sitting down with the intention of being creative with no expectations just helped me to start doing art again. I was drawing nearly every day and I discovered that art is a great meditation, once you are immersed in a picture you think of nothing else.

What has been interesting since I have moved on to new intentions, I have not done any more art which just proved to me the power of having an intention.

My next intention for June was to “do things differently”, now this was a challenge. I literally aimed to shake everything up; I ate different food, I walked different routes, I listened to different music, I gave up TV for a week, I went to new places basically anything that was routine was changed.

I had no idea how much mental effort this would take as most of what we humans do is habit. Luckily my creative juices were already flowing from the previous month so they were put to good use.

Since then I have focused on kindness, love, play and now peace. Kindness and love opened my heart, I felt extremely connected with people and an intense feeling of love, play bought out my spontaneous side which had lain dormant for a year or so and I had an unbelievable about of fun. My intention this month is being peaceful, this is perfect timing as I have just moved from London down to the seaside.

What I have learnt

  • Living with intention creates how you want to be in your life.
  • It doesn’t have to be for a whole month, it could even just be for a particular task you need to complete. When I have to do something that I really don’t want to do I’ll set an intention that will support me to make it easier for example being powerful or playful always creates a shift.
  • Setting an intention around what you want to create in your life can help your focus on making it happen.
  • Sticking my intention on post it notes and posting them in obvious places helps to keep my intention in mind.
  • I use this when coaching my clients now too, they create their own intentions around what they would like to achieve. We create mini challenges for them to do to stretch them with in their goals and build their self-confidence.
  • Setting an intention for each session also is a powerful tool to make each session unique and have the right energy for what is needed that day.

Have fun with it, it can open all sorts of experiences that you would never imagine!

You can read about my Journey of Intention here; http://ajourneyofintention.com/ or follow me on Twitter LouiseatCreate.

About the Author/Further Resources

Louise is a confidence coach and image consultant, she runs a business called Create Yourself supporting people to create lives they love.