Off on holiday for a week or so to the beautiful environs of Conwy Marina.

Thank goodness - I could do with a break!

Back in the office on Monday 11th June 2007

I’m quite severely off-balance at the moment.
Something’s going-on, not quite sure what the cause might be.

Symptoms:

- I’m angry all the time; generally just “quite ticked-off” and occasionally psycho, shouting-at-strangers type angry
- I’m making lousy decisions and my judgement is way off beam
- nothing that would normally ‘re-charge’ me or make me happy has any pleasure or enjoyment to it
- It feels like I have a thousand-and-one things to do and I don’t really give a sh!t about any of them; none of them are for me.

I notice it’s been coming on for a couple of weeks. Initially it felt like a refreshing kick-arse mood that is sometimes helpful. And that’s also something that makes it tough for me to deal with, I actually like the feeling of energy and power that comes from that kick-arse place. Of course, right now, all I’m getting is frustration because I’m seeing too much red to actually achieve anything other than a bloody forehead.

And another thing, when I’m in this place of gnnaarrgghh it seems almost impossible to get a clear diagnosis, to understand what’s going on.

If I’ve googled something and the results come up so that the first link on the list is the one I was looking for but is also one of google’s “sponsored” links (i.e. the website has paid for it to come top of the list) and the same link also appears further down the list in the un-sponsored part - I scroll down and click on the un-sponsored link.

Why is that?

Does anybody else do the same?

Obviously it says something about my attitude towards stuff.
I don’t think it’s part of my ongoing issue to be OK with money…?
I feel annoyed that it’s possible for someone to pay to influence the results of my search and I want to punish them for sullying the top of my search results.
Ah, it’s a control thing - that’s what it is. How dare they try to tell me what link to choose!
Bugger-off and let me decide for myself.

Waste of effort on my part really, isn’t it?
In a vain effort to not be controlled, I’m wasting time finding the right link AND just being controlled by my anti-control habit!

See how vigilant you need to be to make sure that this subconscious stuff doesn’t run your whole life?

I don’t know if you’ve ever had much contact with BusinessLink?

Years ago, I was part-time seconded from my job just for a couple of months to sort out one of the London BusinessLinks, where our company’s HR Director was a Trustee. I’d just finished my MBA and this was my penance for all the sponsorship I’d had.

Anyway, it was a real shocker. The place was run entirely for the benefit of the staff, services which were really needed in a deprived part of London, like business start-up advice, were ignored - or, at best, provided by idiots. I recommended it be closed and re-launched with a new management team, which it was.

Here in the Northwest, things are now getting to be very different. The Northwest Development Agency (NWDA) undertook a big review of BusinessLink, consulting with lots of business people and organisations, and re-launched the whole service this year, with a very different approach.

Importantly, they will no longer be providing services directly themselves but will instead act as a kind of broker, making sure that business in the region has access to the kind of high-quality services it needs. This is good for service users, because it means businesses will no longer have to choose from a small range of “favoured” suppliers. And it’s also good for service suppliers, who now have their rates and ‘take-up’ determined by the market, not by some arbitrary relationship with the people at BusinessLink.

If you haven’t already registered as a supplier and would like to - here’s the link:
www.businesslinknw.co.uk/suppliers

And if you might have a need for some practical help or advice for your business, try here:
http://www.businesslinknw.co.uk

I’d welcome your comments on this - is it a good development? Do you have experience of using or providing to BusinessLink and, if so, how was that? Should the public sector be involved at all, or should businesses be left to find their own help and advice directly from the market?

This little action figure and his podium turned up from the USA via UPS today:

“THE CUBES
MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER
Every few months the employees of GigantaMegaCorp are forced to listen to Tom, the motivational speaker. His lectures are based around audience participation and role playing exercises. His jokes are rarely funny.”

Thanks very much to my so-called friend Jon Willis, who is actually quite a cool guy.

Jon, I promise, I’ve never done “motivational speaking” and definitely no role-playing (oh, actually, now I think about it, probably have made people do role-playing - sorry!).

If you haven’t come across The Cubes yet, take a visit over to: www.cubefigures.com where all will be explained.

Working in cubicles never really caught on over here in the UK did it? We just seem to have very noisy, messy open-plan offices. Or maybe I’m just shown into corporate offices via the back-door and ushered in so no-one notices the boss is getting coached - and so I never get to see all the cubes toiling away.

…Head out on the highway,
Lookin for adventure…”

No, actually just trying not to spend a lifetime getting my vehicle tax disc renewed, and have just renewed it online - took about 4 minutes from start to finish.

Is this a sign that here in the UK we might actually begin to experience some efficient government?!!

Aside from the view that a flat-rate tax on vehicles is just plain crazy, this does actually feel like a step in the right direction.

More info here:
www.direct.gov.uk/taxdisc

and here:
http://www.egovmonitor.com/

and here (warning - right-wing think-tank ahead):
http://www.adamsmith.org/government/index.php

I don’t know if you’ll be able to see much on this photo, taken on my mobile, but on Sunday we went to Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall for one of the Halle Orchestra’s Family Concerts - “A Pirate’s Life for Me.”

It was a load of fun, everybody got dressed-up as pirates, including all the orchestra and we danced around to The Sailor’s Hornpipe.

I liked it so much that I’ll adopt being a pirate as another handy metaphor for my personal and coaching kitbag.

It’s a pretty rich metaphor to play around with - swooping in out of nowhere, taking what you want, camping it up as you go Johnny Depp-style. Ruthless, sentimental and bold; gorgeous Caribbean beaches, windswept Cornish coves; armed to the teeth with your bunch of hearty cut-throats alongside you; the sails of your sleek corsair cracking in the wind. And just waiting for the taking, out there where X marks the spot, treasure and riches beyond your wildest dreams.

Aaarrggh, it makes you weep matey, don’t it?

And how about you, me hearties?

What be your inner-pirate a-dreamin’ of?

I’ve been trying to practise some of what I preach just recently by making some time during the morning for some “stillness”.

I just sit on my office sofa (and drink a cup of tea - but that’s not obilgatory) and make sure for the next ten minutes that I don’t DO anything.

My intention with this stillness is simple - I want to get more conscious of how I run my day - to be more conscious of the choices I make during the course of it and of the way that I approach things.

And it’s not until you start trying this stillness that you realise just how much you normally run on autopilot. I like to have busy days with plenty of activity and a sense of achievement at the end of it. So I’m normally one task after another, bish-bosh, job done. Nothing wrong with that - but without some reflection I notice that my choices of what and how I do, and of who and how I interact with other people are much narrower; my thinking so much more linear, my ability to create opportunites, to succesfully influence people,  etc are so much more restricted.

With stillness, some of the additional benefits include a greater sense of clarity and an increased ability to focus on the ‘right’ priorites. Not bad for an investment of ten minutes and an Earl Grey teabag!

 - But don’t think it’s all so easy.

Sitting for ten minutes without doing anything can be fairly challenging if you’re anything like me. At first, my head swims and my hand is itching to at least grab a post-it and write a To-Do list. Or I’ll get half-way through composing an email in my head before I even realise what I’m doing.

And then, as my head starts to get a little clarity and calm, my body starts. I may feel hungry or tired or excited or that I’ve got a cold coming on, or even get a little horny. I believe now that the stillness doesn’t cause these feelings - rather it just lets me ‘hear’ what my body has been trying to say. And once you ‘hear’ them, you can create some options and choose what to do about them!

We had our first kite-flying outing of the year this weekend, at Hare Hill near Alderly Edge.

We took along two kites, both cheap things we’d bought on various trips. The first, a blue polythene box kite which goes really well in a strong wind and was ideal for the sahara-like environment of Southport beach where we bought it.

The second kite is a Winnie-the-Pooh Disney plastic thing, which cost £2 from Woolworths, bought on a trip to York and hadn’t been used before. It doesn’t have a frame, just two open-ended tubes of polythene which fill with air to give it some rigidity in flight. And which turned out to be a fantastic flyer in the gusty, moderate breeze we had on Sunday!

It was such a surprise that this £2 kite should be such a great flyer that I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere or at least a useful lesson in simplicity through ingenuity - but it was actually just really great to be out on a hill having fun with my family.

Get Your Proper Kites Here