Showing posts with label work life balance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work life balance. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

7 Benefits of Working Collaboratively for Life Balance

Two years ago, my partner Jacque and I set the intention to work easy. Since then we have worked collaboratively to teach people how to release their emotional baggage quickly and easily, and give them back their lives.


Working collaboratively has been invaluable for both of us in our business. Here are the benefits we have received: 

Less Money
It was clear I needed to do more to promote my coaching practice but I thought I would have to spend more money to do so. Working together we combined our resources for Maestro Conferences and Constant Contact to promote our businesses. Plus we invested in the development of a blog at  http://workeasy4lifebalance.com/ 

Saves Time
We joined forces to collaboratively promote our businesses by jointly writing a monthly newsletter and blog articles. In less than an hour each month we were able to quickly outline each month’s newsletter. Developing the articles felt like a breeze. Plus jointly developing and delivering our Emotional Hot Button Removal Workshops, rather than competing, saved both of us a lot of time.

Creativity and Productivity
Working together we came up with more creative ideas to promote our services. Instead of struggling on our own through the process of coming up with ideas for articles we have a conversation, and the knowledge we want to share freely flows out of us. We also decided to start the free monthly Catalyst LIVE! tele-call to share our conversation about living magical lives with listeners. Working collaboratively has greatly increased productivity as well as enhancing the quality of ideas we generate.

Learning
We each have unique talents and strengths that we can share as strategic business partners. Jacque brings vast knowledge of business to our relationship that I can draw from in my own business and to support my entrepreneur clients. She has appreciated and grown with my knowledge from 20 years of spiritual exploration and teaching in both formal and informal settings.

Support
Mastermind partners are a huge source of support. This is especially true for Jacque and I as we are both coaches. We use our coaching skills to support each other’s personal growth and business development; especially if either of us is emotionally triggered. We are able to use our unique coaching techniques to bring our emotional reactions to completion and keep moving forward.

Accountability
Our agreement to meet regularly every Monday morning has kept us on track to keep building our businesses. Our commitment to one another has been invaluable to take on new challenges. With dividing my time between my business and serving Self Employment Program clients, without our scheduled meetings it would have been very easy to lose focus on the promotion and development of business and to let our workshops lapse. Most of our business meetings start with a check in, allowing us to clear anything that might keep us from being at the top of our game. Our partnership has kept both of us focused on all aspects of our business.

Fun
Finally, another intention we set was to have fun and do work that we love. This way work would feel easy rather than hard. By bouncing ideas off each other we inspire each other, giving us more energy to pour into our work and life. We have fun, get things done with ease, and produce better work together than either one of us could have done on our own.

Working together really has made our lives easier and given us life balance. Who could wish for anything more for their life than inspiring work they love and a sense of balance in their life?

Who could you work more collaborative with?

Lynne Brisdon, PCC
Lynne@LivingInVision.com
Living In Vision Enterprises

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Your Vision for 2010

What’s your vision?

Do you have one for your business or career path? Is it aligned with your personal vision? Having a clearly defined vision, increases the odds you will bring your desires to fruition. Ask any successful business person and you will find they started out with some sort of a vision.

Working closely with start-up entrepreneurs provides me with an insider’s view of what happens in the first year of operations. Those most likely to succeed are the ones who have a clear vision, which resonates deeply within.

Often inspired, these business owners have a clear image of where their business is going. One story I heard a few years ago from the founder of a now multi-national franchise chain started when he was a student looking for summer work. Eating at the Golden Arches one day he noticed a pick-up truck full of junk at the drive through window. “I can do that”, he thought and within a couple of years had 3 or 4 trucks running. Knowing he wanted to achieve growth, and inspired by “Good to Great” Jim Collins, he mapped out a five year vision plan. When I heard Brian Scudimore speak in 2003, he was a month away from that 5 year goalpost. 1-800-Got-Junk was situated in 29 of the 30 cities he’d envisioned and was 3 stores away from the 150 he’d targeted. Oh yes, he was in negotiations with new franchise owners in city number 30. Impressive! To this day you’ll find revenue and growth targets emblazoned across a vision wall at the “Junction,” the company’s head office in Vancouver.

A vision doesn’t necessarily come in a blinding flash of inspiration. It can be crafted, dreamt up; sometimes it is a subtle feeling of recognition, at others it seems like a far off and distant fantasy. A vision may constantly be amended as we move through time and learn new information. Ideally it is aligned with your core values and your highest intentions. (see last month’s post on Intention) The vision that comes to fruition is the one that is believed and that we are compelled to move toward; the one we never let die.

Living Your Vision
Achieving it has everything to do with experiencing the possibility of it becoming real in the present moment. Consider that you have a particular business milestone you would like to attain. Perhaps it is serving a particular number of clients, speaking to a group of a certain size, or for many of us there are specific financial targets we want to hit. Imagine for a few moments that your vision has been attained. Let yourself fully experience what that feels like, imagine the scenarios associated with this achievement: the activities you’d be engaged in; the sights, the sounds, even the smells. Allow yourself to ‘live’ in your vision for a few moments. Doing this starts to build synaptic connections in your mind so you can recognize the opportunities that lead you to fulfill your vision more immediately. Not to mention all the metaphysical principles which come into play when you focus on your vision. “Ask and it is given”, “Believe it and you can achieve it” “Boldness has genius in it, begin it now”. These are not empty words, but quotes from masters who achieved great things.

Sometimes we get stuck envisioning what we don’t want. The propensity to worry about the future and imagine the worst possible outcome is due to the human trait of gravitating to negative potentials. But consider how much energy it takes to keep insisting and convincing yourself, based on previous experience, that something bad will happen. What if you directed the same amount of energy toward believing that what you desire can happen too? If you find that you are habitually projecting negative outcomes you may have some internal barriers to resolve before your vision can be realized.

Vision is quite simply having a clear sense of where you would like to go. If you need more clarity or should you need to resolve some internal barriers, help is available.

Lynne Brisdon
BC: 604 570-0764
WA: 360-393-8996
lynne@livinginvision.com


Join Lynne Brisdon and Jacque Small of Catalyst Business Coaching for a conversation about Vision on the Catalyst-LIVE! Radio Show on Wednesday, January 6th at 12 noon. Follow the link below to register.


http://myaccount.maestroconference.com/conference/register/XGM3SW23U4G1UEPJ

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Clarifying your Intention

As we get closer to the end of the year we start to cast our thoughts and desires toward the coming year.

Want to have a full sense of enjoyment and satisfaction in life? Want better work life balance, more simplicity and ease? To be successful you need to know what you want to experience, and the outcomes you would like to be participating in.

Knowing clearly what you like and what you want comes from a deeper place than logical analysis of likes and dislikes. This sense of knowing comes from being in connection with who you really are and being able to access your intuition. Your ability to be present to your intuition and perceive what’s next on your path brings clarity to your intention. Intention statements come from a place of deep inner knowing.

Intention Statements
An intention statement is a declaration of who and how you will “Be” in the experiences you want to have. Who you are “being” is a conscious choice to live into your desired experiences and have the feelings you most want to feel.

Intention statements can relate to broad aspects of your life such as experiences you’d prefer in work or business or they can be more narrowly focused on a specific event or series of events.

An Event Specific Intention
Say you have an up-coming sales presentation that is vital for your business. In addition to preparing the presentation there is the question of what you would like your experience to be during this meeting.

A good intention for this situation might be to be “present, grounded and curious in every moment”. The experience that you desire might be one of being focused and engaged in an easy and open dialogue.

The Global Intention
The global or broad scope intention relates to overarching experiences you want to have in your life. What would you be doing? What would be happening? What inspires you? When you are inspired, how do you feel?

Your global intention might sound something like this: I am an internationally recognized coach and trainer. I collaborate with fantastic business partners with ease and enthusiasm, inspiring and being inspired. My business allows me to travel, write, speak and deliver training events all around the world. My work and recreational activities are intertwined and I flow between them with fun and excitement. I live a vibrant, abundant and meaningful life and my work allows me the freedom to enjoy nature’s splendour and the planet's magnificent beauty.

Barriers to Intention
Most of us have a hard time coming up with clear and authentic intentions because we’ve lost touch with our intuition. To sense what is right, we need to have access to our intuition, our gut feelings, which provide us with direction. Too often we override our gut instincts in favour of an analytical story that our mind has created as the logical solution.

The biggest barriers to being present to our intuition are feelings of overwhelm tied to struggle and feeling alone. We ignore our intuition because we want to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the experience intuition is informing us about. For example, you have an inspired vision to become internationally recognized expert in your field but you get nervous about being in the public eye, so you let the vision die.

Fear and anxiety are great examples of feeling overwhelmed. We have a gut feeling about something we want to do but then we override the gut feeling with various sensations of doubt. We then cancel out any action we would have taken to follow through on our intuition.

As a result we feel stuck in the same old places we have always been. We feel trapped by our circumstances and don’t feel like we can move forward to have the life we truly want.

Solution
The good news is that we’re not stuck with these barriers. We can delete overwhelm, anxiety, fear, doubt, from our human software to gain full access to our intuition and knowing of what we truly want. Deleting these barriers is like deleting a virus off of a computer. We no longer have to live with the notion that it’s “just the way we are”. Contact me to learn how.

Join me in a converstion about INTENTION at noon on December 2 - follow the link to register.
http://myaccount.maestroconference.com/conference/register/K7BURW1PYW2LVW1