#embrace the discipline of discomfort to stick with something new for a later goal that can and will be yours

[alixanderkrex]

she’s right. idr where i read this, years back but fr, it’s so true and always helps me build or get back in touch with some goal. good luck on whatever you’re working on <3

[kiingocreative]

The Structure of Story is now available! Check it out on Amazon, via the link in our bio, or at https://kiingo.co/book

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There are some buzz words everywhere and, in the writing world, and it feels to me like ‘journaling’ is one of them. It’s something everyone seems to be doing.

It took me a while to build a journaling habit, and I wouldn’t say I’m quite there yet with my Journaling discipline, but whatever experience I’ve had with it has been incredibly beneficial.

What’s Journaling?

Back to the old trusted dictionary! Journaling is defined as:

To write in a journal or diary.

Simple, right?

For those of you with a penchant for etymology and random fun facts, the word ‘journal’ comes from the Latin ‘diurnalis’, or ‘diurnus’, meaning ‘daily’. In late Middle English, a journal originally referred to a book containing the appointed times of daily prayers. (If you use this as an ice-breaker at your next dinner party, please let me know!)

Nowadays, journaling is a lot more about keeping track of one’s praying schedule, and much more about recording one’s thoughts in an informal, free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness manner.

It’ll take different forms for different people, and the great thing about it is that (in my view) there isn’t a right or wrong way to journal. The only right way to do it is the way that feels right to you. As with any form of writing, craft or art in general, it’s all about individual preference, and highly subjective. And because Journaling is generally something that remains personal and private, you can do whatever the heck you want with it.

Pretty great, isn’t it?

Why Journaling is Good For You.

Based on my own experience, I’ve found a few benefits to journaling:

Pressure-free writing.

I’ve found that Journaling, because it follows no set rule and isn’t meant to be shared, is a great chance to write without any pressure. To write just because you want to write, with no other agenda than indulging in your love of putting words together on a page.

To me, writing without an outcome in mind is always liberating. It’s a chance to reconnect with your craft in way you might not if there was a clear purpose to it, like writing a book due to be published or a blog article meant to be posted online.

Experiment with your writing.

Journaling is also the perfect format to experiment with your writing, and try your hand at something new. Maybe you normally write fiction, and Journaling is a chance to give poetry a go. Maybe you generally blog, and your journal can start hosting plots and ideas for a novel, regardless of what you make of it later. Maybe you’ll want to try writing exercises—like jotting down ideas from a prompt or in a specific style. Or you could start recording dreams and memories you can remember.

Discomfort is where we grow, so putting yourself in those situations regularly is a great opportunity to expand your writing abilities and hone your skills. Who knows, there may be writing gold in there somewhere!

Never forget an idea.

I don’t know about you, but I often get ideas for my writing and beyond at the most inconvenient moments—in the shower, whilst cooking, doing the dishes, or picking up dog poop (I know, oh the glamour of a writer’s life!). I always think that I’ll remember these, but the truth is, most of them get forgotten, never to be retrieved again from the confines of my mind.

Journaling is a great way never to lose sight of an idea. My Journaling involves a lot of notes about random ideas I have for a plot, a story, a post, or life activities in general. They serve as inspiration for the future. Writing them down helps me rest assured that I can go back to that list and explore it later, whenever convenient.

Free your mind &notice trends.

One of the most important things I’ve notice happen when I journal, is that it helps me empty my mind fro ma lot of the never-ending thinking loops I tend to fall victim to. By putting thoughts down on paper, I’m able to see them more clearly, and my brain finally feels like it no longer needs to hold onto them. Jotting things down is a great way to break your pattern of thinking (or, if you’re like me, obsessing) and to allow yourself time to take a step back and look at the big picture.

Whether it’s something you’re stuck on in your writing, or in your life in general, journaling on it is powerful, especially if you do it regularly. Not only will you create more space in your mind for better and brighter things—say, your next brilliant writing idea!—but it’ll also give you a chance to notice trends and recurring themes. And that’s a great way to build awareness about your own patterns of behaviour, and start eradicating your most negative or toxic thinking habits.

Keep a record.

Performance coach Tony Robbins (yes, him again! What can I say, I’m a huge fan) says that ‘if your life is worth living it’s worth recording’. I couldn’t agree more. Journaling gives you a chance to be your own life historian. To keep track of where you’ve been and how far you’ve gone. To look back on those day-to-day accomplishments that may look minute at the time but all add up to something big and wonderful in the end.

Looking at your own existence and experience as something that’s worth keeping a record of also sends your subconscious mind a clear message: that’s you’re worthy. You’re enough. Every moment of your life has an impact, the good and the bad, and helps mould who you become.

I’d say there are few more powerful truths to embrace in your lifetime!

Getting Started with Journaling.

That’s all well and good, you might say, but where do I start?

Fear not, my friend, here are some suggestions to get you started.

1. Set a schedule — If you don’t make time for it, chances are it won’t happen, because life has a habit of getting in the way. Identify a time that works best for you—whether that’s morning, midday, evening etc.—and schedule it in your calendar, setting a reminder so you don’t forget about it. If finding time daily feels daunting or unrealistic, why not start with once a week, or a couple of times a week?

2. Make it a habit — Stick to it! Whether it comes naturally or not, be disciplined about it. Embrace whatever comes, both the joys and the discomfort of it. Set yourself a goal—every day for a week, every other day for a month etc.—and sit with it for the entire duration you committed to.

3. Set a timer — Journaling doesn’t have to take a lot of time. I tend to journal for about ten minutes at a time on average, sometimes less and sometimes more. If you’re unsure what duration to start with, set a timer for ten minutes and see what comes up.

4. Let it flow — As I mentioned above, Journaling may or may not feel natural at first. It may feel great or it may feel uncomfortable. Whatever comes up for you, let it flow. Why not journal about the sensations and feelings the experience of journaling brings up? It may end up being one thing one day and something altogether different the next. Whatever it is for you at any given time is what’s right. Be open-minded, remember this is unique and personal, and no one—not even you—should ever judge it.

The Power of Rituals.

If you’re still unsure about the value of journaling, or about getting started with it, let me say this one final thing: the most important piece of the puzzle, as with anything else you do, is defining your ‘why’—i.e. the reasons behind your decision to start (or continue) journaling. Ask yourself:

Why do you want to start journaling?

Why is it important to you?

How do you think it’ll make you feel? How do you want it to make you feel?

What difference do you think it’ll make to you, to your life, to your writing?

Clearly defining your ‘why’ and your intentions will help you maintain the habit. More importantly, understanding the value this holds to you will take journaling from a mere habit—which can feel like a chore—to a ritual of self-care. That’s the difference between doing it because you think it’s cool, or because everyone is doing it, or because you think you should do it, and doing it because you know for a fact, in your core, that this will make you and your writing better and stronger.

This will go a long way in making it more enjoyable. It’ll help you build rituals around it that are nurturing and caring. Get yourself to acknowledge why it’s good for you and why it’s pleasurable, and then set up the environment to make your journaling time feel like an absolute treat. Maybe that’s setting the scene in the room where you journal with a candle or some background music. Maybe that’s selecting a nice notebook if you’re doing this by hand, or picking your favourite writing spot, at home or beyond.

Eventually, these will all act as triggers to get you into the right journaling mindset whenever you’re sitting down for it.

And if you’re not quite sure what that all looks like for you… Well. Isn’t that a great topic to start journaling about?

[personalcoachingcenter]

Secrets To BUSINESS LEADERSHIP – Even In This Down Economy

New Post has been published on https://personalcoachingcenter.com/secrets-to-business-leadership-even-in-this-down-economy/

Secrets To BUSINESS LEADERSHIP – Even In This Down Economy

Many people say that great leaders are simply born, but in our opinion they must be grown. While someone can start out with the capability for great leadership, they will not achieve greatness without the skill set and willingness to move forward. Here, we have compiled some expert tips on what it takes to become a great leader. Use this as part of your educational component, and start to grow your leadership abilities.

Learn your employee’s names. A great leader takes the time to learn the names of his or her most immediate staff, and even the names of the top performers under them. It shows them that you care enough about them to know them not just as a worker, but as a real person.

Always remember that a great leader builds up and does not need to tear down. Do not be overly critical of those on your team. Be quick to give commendation, praise and recognition. Even when people fail, commend the effort and inspire them to get up and try again to succeed.

If you have an employee that goes above and beyond the call of duty, do not hesitate to give them extra praise and rewards. Even though it may seem like you are playing favorites, you are giving them what they deserve. be open with other employees about it so they are aware of what rewards come with hard work.

Stepping Into Leadership and More Questions

coachingforleaders.com

“On this week’s question and answer episode, Bonni and I responded to questions on stepping into leadership, handling insubordination, influencing without authority, and sticking to strategy. Here are the most useful links from this episode: Full audio and show notes Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play* by Mahan Khalsa, Randy Illig, and Stephen R. […]” https://coachingforleaders.com/stepping-into-leadership/

Treat all of your employees well and never get involved in office gossip. Employees are usually happier in an environment where their work is appreciated and valued on the same level as any other employee. Spend time working with all of your employees so that you understand each person’s contribution.

Work on building trust with the people that work with you. People need to feel that they can trust their leader. This can motivate them to succeed and help build cooperation and understanding in the company. You should inspire others so that their trust in you can help tasks get completed properly.

Learn to delegate nonessential tasks to your employees. Delegation allows you to focus on the essential things that must be done to make your company successful. Additionally, delegating tasks to your employees gives them a sense of pride and ownership in the company. Although it is tempting to try to do everything yourself, delegation is beneficial to your company.

Promotions, bonuses and raises should always be fairly distributed and based on performance. Don’t simply promote the person who has been working with you the longest or hand out the biggest raise to a family member. Your employees will be more motivated when they know that they can earn tangible rewards for working hard.

Your Definitive Guide to Leadership and Conflict Resolution

johnmattone.com

“Conflict is a basic and inevitable part of the human experience. Workplace conflicts have been around as long as workplaces have. Sometimes we even experience conflict within ourselves that we must resolve. Most of the time, we think about conflict as between two or more people, between two groups, or in existing in multiple directions […] The post Your Definitive Guide to Leadership and Conflict Resolution appeared first on John Mattone. ” https://johnmattone.com/your-definitive-guide-to-leadership-and-conflict-resolution/

Hire a diverse group of people to help build your business. Diversity will enable you to have many different perspectives within your company. Do not just hire people that are like you. This stifles innovation within your team. It also risks failure based on compounding your personal weaknesses.

Adopt an eternal attitude of learning. While this article has great tips in it, there’s always something more to learn. Business changes and evolves and you need to keep up with it. Always be reading books, newspapers and blogs. If possible, attend classes and workshops. Those are chances to learn and network.

Focus on your personnel decisions. Many leaders think that giving many great speeches will move a company forward, but it’s actually their personnel decisions that do. The team that you choose has the ability to make or break a company. This not only includes who your hire, but also who you fire and who gets assigned the most important tasks. Take great care when making these decisions.

As a leader, you are responsible for forming the goals and aspirations of your team. Come up with a best-case scenario for your team, and your vision for the future. Share these goals with them, and ask them for their feedback and suggestions. A true leader has a team under him that is focused on the same goals, and how to achieve them.

How to Foster a Growth Mindset in Your Team

www.dave-bailey.com

“One of the hardest challenges to overcome as a leader is something many people don’t even consider: yourself. Often, it’s not resources, desire or incentives that hold us back. It’s something deeper. As a coach, I discovered that ‘limiting beliefs’ are extremely common place in the workplace. Even if you set out to embrace failure as an inevitable part of building products, managing people, and growing businesses, that plan rarely survives contact with the real world.

Here are limiting beliefs that you might find at your company: ‘I don’t belong here’; ‘They don’t belong here’ ‘I can’t do it’; ‘They can’t do it’ ‘I’m not worthy’; ‘They aren’t worthy’ ‘I don’t matter’; ‘They don’t matter’ But in reality, things are rarely as clear cut. Limiting beliefs are wrapped up in the questions we ask and the excuses we give, and where we focus our time and energy. They often manifest themselves as a persistent worrying, around questions such as, ‘Am I good enough?’ Do you recognise these patterns in your company? While much of the research focuses on social issues, the underlying techniques can be applied, with care, to your company. Try these four techniques to create wise interventions that will help your team to flourish.

1) Harness the power of positive labels We all have a need to belong. Positively labelling the group of which we are a part — and any ambiguous or challenging situations that our group faces — can nudge us in the right direction. One study found that asking citizens, ‘How important is it to be a voter?’ increased voting rates more than an alternative question, ‘How important is it to vote?’ It turns out our need to belong to a group is often a stronger motivator than our need to act in a certain way. In another study, disciplinary letters sent to struggling college students were adapted to describe the grounds for the discipline as ‘reasonable challenges facing students’ — a more inclusive and less stigmatizing wording than the college’s standard disciplinary letter. By de-personalising the issues, those students receiving the reworded letter demonstrated higher rates of re-engagement at school, compared to those who received the standard letter. How to apply this to your team: Create a positive-sounding label to describe the people at your company and use it to foster a sense of belonging. Be clear that the challenges facing your team are common and reasonable to anyone that wants to achieve something difficult.

2) Prompt new interpretations (without giving any answers) It’s not enough simply to tell someone what their new beliefs are. Participants need to own their beliefs, and the best way of achieving this is for them to come up with an adaptive interpretation by themselves. A carefully-crafted leading question can cause people to reinterpret information that otherwise reinforces a fixed mindset. For example, social workers have noticed that abusive parents often view abuse as evidence that either ‘I’m a bad parent’ or ‘they are bad kids’. By asking variants of, ‘What else might it be?’ social workers encouraged the parents to come up with a more adaptive interpretation by themselves — ‘Maybe they just need some more sleep,’ for example. This small intervention was shown to radically reduce further abuse compared to other interventions. Another technique is to provide specific information that supports a new interpretation. In another study, students were taught that physiological arousal during tests (i.e., stress) means that the body is getting ready to accomplish something important. Simply altering the interpretation of stress raised GRE performance months later. How to apply this to your team: If you catch a fixed mindset, ask the question: ‘What other ways are there to interpret this?’ Use Thomas Edison’s famous reframe: ’I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.’

3. Leverage ‘saying is believing’ Finding out that we hold conflicting beliefs feels uncomfortable. Psychologists call this ‘cognitive dissonance’. To avoid this discomfort, we all have a motivation to see our own behaviours and attitudes as consistent. Some of the most effective wise interventions leverage this by getting us to say something out loud. One approach is called ‘pre-commitment’. In a classic study, when a random selection of beach goers were asked to watch another person’s belongings, 94% of them chased down an accomplice who attempted to steal a radio, compared to 20% of those who weren’t asked. Agreeing to a behaviour in advance increases the likelihood of following through. An even more powerful technique is to ask participants to teach others about a particular idea. In another experiment, asking college students to advise struggling middle school students about a growth mindset raised the college students’ semester grades. When we say something out loud, we’re more likely to internalise it. How to apply this to your team: Ask new employees to commit to giving constructive feedback quickly rather than holding back and letting it build up. Get existing employees to teach new recruits about your company’s cultural values, rather than presenting those values yourself.

4. Encourage active reflection Researchers have shown that just answering certain questions, without any other information, is enough to change how meaning is made. You can lead people to develop a more adaptive view on their own by setting open-ended writing exercises that actively reflect upon personal values, existing conflicts, and future challenges. In another study, married couples were asked to identify a conflict in their marriage.

Then, they spent seven minutes writing answers to three questions (paraphrased): What would a neutral third party who wants the best for all think about the conflict? In your relationship, what obstacles do you face in trying to take this third party perspective? How might you be most successful in taking this perspective in your interactions with your partner in the future? By repeating this process three times over the course of a year, the couples’ marriages were positively impacted, as compared to a control group, leading the media to dub the study, ‘The 21-Minute Marriage Cure.’ How to apply this to your team: Ask open questions in performance reviews that allow employees to reflect on how they live your cultural values. In a challenging situation, try the question: ‘What would a neutral third-party who wants the best for all say here?’ Magic Bullets? Wise interventions themselves aren’t enough to generate positive outcomes. The setting must also offer opportunities to learn. However, if psychological obstacles go unremedied, improving opportunities to learn will not be fully effective. While the results of wise interventions can be statistically significant, interventions won’t work for all the people, all the time.

However, their potential to help participants foster new mindsets that lead to better results — and the short amount of time they take to set up — mean it’s worth asking how you can use them in your company. As Henry Ford said, ‘Whether you believe you can, or you can’t — you’re right!’” https://www.dave-bailey.com/blog/how-to-remove-limiting-beliefs-from-your-team

Always listen to feedback. The opinions of your employees are important and can be helpful. Some criticism might be hard to take, but try to be receptive to it. Make sure your workers know they can come to you with any feedback they might have. Point of views that differ from your own are valuable.

Don’t take exceptional employees for granted. Reward your best workers. Give them more varied responsibilities and better opportunities. Match their pay to their performance. Don’t let hard work go unnoticed. Make sure that you are reviewing the performance of your workers on a regular basis. If someone is truly going above and beyond, reward them for it.

If you want others to trust and respect you as a leader, you need to keep promises. You should never say you are going to do something and then do the exact opposite. If for some reason you are unable to follow through on what you promised, honestly explain why the promise could not be kept.

Make sure that you are approachable. Spend time with your employees. Let them come to you with their concerns. If you have a busy schedule, try and find an hour or two when you can handle interruptions. Make sure your employees know that they should feel comfortable approaching you with any concerns or questions during these hours.

Create an atmosphere that people will enjoy working in. While you want to be stern and in charge, you also have to do everything you can to make sure your team is productive. If the environment is pleasant, people will be more likely to love the place where they work.

While some great leaders are born, most take years to fully grow into their roles. If you are trying to grow into your leadership role, the advice presented in this post will undoubtedly help. Review these tips time and time again, and do all you can to master them. By doing that, you will most certainly become a person that any team would be glad to call their leader.