Do you like poetry?

I was struck by this poem by Samuel Ullman. I hope you like it.

Youth is not a time of life - it is a state of mind,
it is a temper of the will,
a quality of the imagination,
a vigor of the emotions,
a predominance of courage over timidity,
of the appetite for adventure over love of ease.

Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years.
People grow old only by deserting their ideals.
Years wrinkle the skin,
but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
Worry, doubt, self-distrust,
fear and despair - these are the long,
long years that bow the head and
turn the growing spirit back to dust.

Whether they are sixteen or seventy,
there is in every being's heart
the love of wonder,
the sweet amazement at the stars
and starlike things and thoughts,
the undaunted challenge of events,
the unfailing childlike appetite
for what is to come next,
and the joy and the game of life.

You are as young as your faith,
as old as your doubt;
as young as your self-confidence,
as old as your fear,
as young as your hope,
as old as your despair.
When the wires are all down
and all the innermost core of your heart
is covered with the snows of pessimism
and the ice of cynicism,
then you are grown old indeed.

But so long as your heart receives messages
of beauty, cheer, courage, grandeur
and power from the earth,
from man and from the Infinite,
so long you are young.

Piers Carter
Leadership Coach and Consultant

Do you know how to play?

Here is an exert from an article by George Sheehan, former runner and philosopher. The longer version is in his book Running and Being, one of the best books I’ve ever read. I like it and I thought you might too.

Play is where Life Lives

To play or not to play? That is the real question. Shakespeare was wrong. Anyone with a sense of humor can see that life is a joke, not a tragedy. It is a riddle and like all riddles has an obvious answer: play, not suicide.
Think about it for a minute. Is there a better way to handle "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" or take up arms against "a sea of troubles" than play? You take these things seriously and you end up with Hamlet or the gang who came back from World War II, wrote Wilfred Sheed, "talking about dollars the way others talked about God and sex."
Neither of these ways work. Neither will bring us what we are supposed to be looking for, "the peace the world cannot give." That is part of the riddle. You can have peace without the world, if you opt for death, or the world without peace if you decide for doing and having and achieving. Only in play can you have both.
In play you realize simultaneously the supreme importance and the utter insignificance of what you are doing. You accept the paradox of pursuing what is at once essential and inconsequential. In play you can totally commit yourself to a goal that minutes later is completely forgotten.
Play, then, is the answer to the puzzle of our existence, the stage for our excesses and exuberances. Violence and dissent are part of its joy. Territory is defended with every ounce of our strength and determination, and moments later we are embracing our opponents and delighting in the game that took place.
Play is where life lives, where the game is the game. At its borders, we slip into heresy, become serious, lose our sense of humor, fail to see the incongruities of everything we hold to be important. Right and wrong become problematical. Money, power, position become ends. The game becomes winning. And we lose the good life and the good things that play provides.

I play mostly when I am on my bike, my mountain bike. I go out nearly every Sunday night between 20.00 and 23.00 and me and some friends get muddy and have fun. It gets me through the winter months, it inspires me in the summer, it is social and keeps me off the red wine for an evening and out of trouble. I think about the last ride until about Wednesday then look forward to the next ride from Thursday onwards. It makes me a better husband and father and feeds a part of my soul which I haven’t found a better way of feeding. My riding is evolving and the latest project is unicycling ... now that’s play!

What do you do to live a life with play in it?

Piers Carter

Leadership Coach and Consultant

Are you capable of remarkable things?

We all are. I believe so anyway. It all depends on your definition of remarkable. For some, it is a sales target, for others it is a sporting achievement. Some see it as a business growth thing and others as acts of kindness and charity.

My point is we are all remarkable and can do remarkable things; we just have to set out the parameters of remarkability - the standards by which we measure how remarkable we want to be.

Once you know that the rest is easy, well, when I say easy there is some planning, hard work and a little luck topped off with some good old fashioned motivation.

What would be a remarkable thing for you to do today?

What would you need to do to look back say your life was remarkable?

On Friday I saw something being done which was remarkable. Sarah Outen set off to go from London to London via the world - all by ‘Sarah Power’. Just to be really clear, she is kayaking, rowing and cycling round the world. The 20,000-mile trip will see her cycle across Europe and Asia and row solo across the North Pacific. She will then get back on her bike to cross North America before rowing home across the North Atlantic. Do you realise how few people have rowed the Pacific? Check out www.sarahouten.com

Rosi, my wife, and I went to see her off from Tower Bridge on April 1^st, very apt some might say. We thought it was so remarkable we took our 2 boys out of school to wave her off from HMS President.

    

Think of all the remarkable things Sarah had to do to get to the start line. Training, both mental and physical, selecting kit, arranging sponsors, supporting 4 amazing charities, talking to the thousands of school children, route planning, getting support crew and PR people in place etc, etc and now she is only 5 days into a 2 ½ year journey ... remarkable.

For me, she is an inspiration; she is a catalyst to be my own kind of remarkable. The important thing is to choose how I want to be remarkable. I’ll never be her, do the same as her but I know I can be good at being me, in fact I know I’m the best in the world at being me.

How good at being you are you?

How great would it be to have that level of clarity and to go out there and to feel it, touch it, be it, achieve it, live it, grasp it by the horns?

Now, round the world adventures may not be your thing, it might not ‘float your boat’ (pardon the bad pun) but the thing about Sarah is she knows what is remarkable in her mind, what she needs and wants to do to be true to herself and her life.

Do you?

Piers Carter

Leadership Coach & Consultant

What happens when we talk to people?

I’m self employed, have been since 1997. I don’t think I am employable any more. This gives rise to some challenge at in the current economic climate. Between September and Christmas last year work was very quiet, I used to think the good people, in my business, were busy and the bad ones were quiet – I’d always been busy so I assumed it was because I was good ... then I got quiet.
It dawned on me, I was either bad at my job or any of us could be quiet. I then had 2 options, sit there and wait for the phone to ring, as it always had, or start talking to people.
Now, even as a confident person socially, I’ve always disliked the ‘selling’ word, felt it was pushy or manipulative. That was until a good friend of mine, Richard, showed me another way, a different perspective. If you are reading this Richard, thanks and hi. Actually, selling could be just talking to people, about stuff, about what is important to me and what is important to them and sometimes, there is a cross over and we can do business.
So for 3 months I started talking to people and amazing things happened. I met some very interesting and fascinating people, I travelled to some great places, I learned some really interesting things and, since Christmas this year, I have been really busy.
Funny that, I started talking to people and I started working again.
I wonder how that happens, what forces are at work?
On the question of what I say and what do we talk about I have taken to contacting people with whom I might have something in common and asking to meet up, asking for advice, asking questions about what they do and how I could help them and their work. Yesterday I met a guy called Julian, I’ve featured his creative artwork stuff on my blog previously, and we had a great chat about everything from business and permaculture. If you are reading this Julian, Hi.
Will I get any work from it? I don’t know and as I think about it I’m not sure I really mind. I think he will be great for one of my clients and I’m going to put them in touch. If I can be of real use to my clients then they will keep me in mind for the stuff I can do and if it isn’t my specialist area then I’ll introduce them to someone whose it is.
Those forces I asked about above, I think they will bring it all back around somehow anyway.
What happens when you talk to people? You set the forces in motion, the ripples begin to spread out and when they reach the edge of the pond they bounce back and you feel the effects of them again.
Who have you talked to lately?
Piers Carter
Coach & Leadership Consultant

What can we learn from our elders?

This is an extract from a longer article by Richard Leider, councilor, author and a founding partner of The Inventure Group, a Minneapolis-based training firm whose mission is to help individuals, leaders, and teams discover the power of purpose. I think you might like it. If you do and want the full version please email me and I’ll send it to you.

For nearly 25 years, I've been doing interviews with senior citizens, asking them to look back over their lives and talk about what they've learned. I've conducted more than 1,000 interviews with people who were successful in their jobs, who retired from leading companies after distinguished careers. Almost without exception, when these older people look back, they say the same things-things that are instructive and useful for the rest of us as we make decisions going forward in our lives.

First, they say that if they could live their lives over again, they would be more reflective. They got so caught up in the doing, they say, that they often lost sight of the meaning. Usually it took a crisis for them to look at their lives in perspective and try to reestablish the context. Looking back, they wish they had stopped at regular intervals to look at the big picture.

They also sounded a warning: Life picks up speed. The first half of your life is about getting prepared and getting established. Then time shifts gears. You hit the second half of your life, and everything moves faster. Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, and all of a sudden, you're 65 years old. Looking back, they say, you realize that time is the most precious currency in life. And as they got older, having time for reflection became even more important.

Second, if they could live their lives over again, they would take more risks. In relationships, they would have been more courageous. And in expressing their creative side, they would have taken more chances. I think it was Oliver Wendell Holmes who said, "Most of us go to our graves with our music still inside us." Many of these people felt that, despite of their successes, their music was still inside them. Almost all of them said that they felt most alive when they took risks. Just being busy from business made them numb. Aliveness came with learning, growing, stretching, exploring.

Third, if they could live their lives over again, they would understand what really gave them fulfillment. I call that the power of purpose: doing something that contributes to life, adding value to life beyond yourself. Purpose is always outside yourself, beyond your ego or your financial self-interest.

We all want both success and fulfillment. Success is often measured in external ways, but there's an internal measure of success, and it's called fulfillment. Fulfillment comes from realizing your talents-adding value and living by your values. Fulfillment comes from integrity, from being who you are and expressing who you are as fully as possible. It doesn't have to do with your job description or the specifics of your work. It has to do with how you bring yourself to your work, regardless of what that work is.

Richard Leider is available on the Internet at www.inventuregroup.com.

Piers Carter
Coach & Leadership Consultant

What do you want and how will you know when you’ve got it?
Tough question. Have you ever asked yourself this question? Do you know the answer? How important is this question in your work/life?

We spend 60% of our time either working or getting ready for work so if you’re saying I’m only doing this to pay the bills I think you are missing something important. That means you are trying to get money to pay for the remaining 40%, half of which you are asleep for anyway.

That’s not to say we all have to ‘follow our dreams’ like we hear so frequently from reality shows and talent selection programmes. Sometimes there is hard graft to be done or unpleasant phases of life to be lived, it is more to say are you doing things with intent or by accident? And is it affecting your happiness?

What do you want and how will you know when you’ve got it? This applies medium and long term.

Is it money? Is it responsibility? Is it a certain item or possession? Is it a feeling inside or a state of mind?

For me it is a state of mind which I can achieve when I balance;

·       Work I enjoy or I learn from (and pays the bills)

·       Time with my family

·       Time for myself

How I define these individually is my business but if I get this right I know I’m there. I can feel when it is out of balance – I imagine myself on a triangular wobble board with the above 3 factors on each point - I am always trying to keep all points in the air. Crucially I can feel when I haven’t got the balance right and I can feel when I have and I register it and, either do something about it or consciously recognise it and value it for what it is.

Money comes and goes. Awards, titles, job roles are there for a while and then grow old, get phased out and get forgotten by others. Possessions get lost, broken, stolen or are superseded by something else. It’s the feeling inside no one can take from you, your state of mind that only you can own.

For a wonderful blog with a talking heads film about exactly this issue check this out http://www.soulbiographies.com/2010/11/the-riddle-of-here/

What do you want and how will you know when you’ve got it?

Piers Carter

Coach & Leadership Consultant

Are relationships important in business?
How do you measure the success of a business? Could it be as simple as the amount of money it makes? Is its contribution to the society it is positioned in a measure of success? Public Sector and Third sector business are becoming more and more accountable in terms of revenue generation however their success is often measured on the service they provide to the ‘end user’. Some businesses are content to maintain their position in the market place whilst, more commonly, growth is a measure of success.

Whatever the parameters for success, I am going to suggest that business, good business, is all done on or achieved through relationships. Relationships form the foundations, corner stone and building blocks of a successful business.

• ·       Relationships between bosses and employees
• ·       Relationships between business and society
• ·       Relationships between sales people and their clients
• ·       Relationships between the employees themselves
• ·       Relationships inside the business and relationships outside the business
• ·       Relationships across the business sectors and relationships up and down through the  organisation

And relationships are based on productive conversations.

As a self-employed person, I get most of my work through word of mouth, through networking. The more people I am talking to the more business I have on my books. Even with a structured marketing plan and an awareness of social media methods of selling and publicity, good relationships are essential. In fact, a good social media campaign is, in essence, a relationships tool to build business and brand awareness.

Let me give you a simple example. I always take my car to a local mechanic in the next village. I have done for 14 years. It was Christmas Eve and my exhaust went, I knew he was going to be closing soon for the Christmas break. I went along to see him to ask when was the soonest he could fit me in. He looked around the forecourt at the many cars awaiting attention and pointed to a series of vehicles which had been dumped outside his doors that morning with post it notes on the dash demanding urgent work. No pleasant requests just demands. No understanding of the pressure and work load he was under. He did my car there and then and said if the other customers didn’t have the courtesy to ring or ask then they could go to the back of the queue.

I have always asked him if he can fit me in and not to worry if not and he has always made every effort to do right by me – we have a sound relationship built on trust and respect.

What are the relationships like in your business? If you want something doing by another department how well do you know the person you are asking? Do you invest in the relationships outside of the transactional piece of work you are doing?

In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey talks about everyone having an emotional bank account, from our friends and family to our colleagues and customers. Too many withdrawals and you’ll be overdrawn, keep making deposits and you’ll be in credit – allowing the occasional withdrawal.

·        Business is done on relationships, how are your relationships and are you making more deposits than withdrawals?  Are you in the red or in the black?

Relationships aren’t just important in business; they are business – the better your relationships, the better your business.


Piers Carter