Archives for category: General
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The 25 Positives of Being at Home

March 25, 2020 //
0

The current climate has brought out my public spiritedness in the form of writing some good cheer. I’ve been making good use of the time I would have spent blogging these last 2 months to progress the publication of my book, but now is time for another post.

Here are 25 positives I can think of to an enforced and lengthy period of being at home.

You’ll have plenty of time to remind yourself how totally awesome the people – and their partners – on the front line and in the caring professions are, how they continually put other people like you and your sick rellies before their own, and how lucky you are that they chose to directly serve the community they live in

You can be safe in the knowledge with your young kids that if you can parent through this, you can parent through anything and you might actually be a record-breaking, all-time, Olympic podium-clinching parent

You get to spend more time with your immediate family instead of being like ships passing in the night

You can re-discover the undiluted joy of doing large jigsaw puzzles and playing with other toys and games

You can help your kids with their homework and generally parent in a proper fashion, like you wish you could have done when you busy out gallivanting

You can take a perverse pleasure in the fact that your elected representatives are finally earning their crust and fulfilling what they signed up for

You can take box set bingeing to a whole new – and hitherto unachievable – level

Your lack of outside activity, mixing with your fellow humans and not making enought stuff is allowing the planet to take a massive, deep and well-earned healthy breath of air

You finally get to run down the food in the freezer and defrost the damn thing

You can be thankful for that enormous mortgage you took on to move into a bigger house, which is still worth less than you paid for it years ago, because now your family has some breathing and personal space for the long haul

You get plenty of chance to hug your partner and offspring and remind them you love them, unless you’re self-isolating

You can share your diary, blog, and social media posts as a pick-me-up to the population

You get to practice cooking, baking and other life-handy skills

If you do have to head out, you can be astonished by how friendly, tolerant, helpful, community-focused and pulling-together the vast majority of people are in the face of adversity

If you’re managing people remotely, you get to practice several times a day your skills of empathy, concern and ‘it’s OK to take your foot off the gas abit, these are unique, surreal challenging times’ words of comfort to the people who depend on you for a good portion of their financial and emotional wellbeing

You can finally get to that long list of things to do around the house; the list that until now never seemed to get any shorter

You can spend time writing and sending physical letters – the ones that used to go in an envelope with a stamp on – to your nearest, dearest

Failing that, you can take time to text, email, SnapChat, WhatsApp – and so on, other delivery mechanisms are available – your entire circle of friends and acquaintances, individually, to wish them well and let them know you’re thinking of them. Copy, paste and some subtle but judicious editing works a charm here

Now that you’re working from home, but with a family audience, you’ll be so much more productive because they’ll see first hand how often and how long your breaks are

If you’re laid off, you can use the power of internet-based devices to let your entire network know that you’re available for hired help, no job too small. ‘Essential supplies’ providers can’t get additional people fast enough and you get a new experience for a few months

You can get your kids to design home-based exercise and nutrition plans for you

If you’re like me, a veteran home worker, you can give tips and tricks on how to stay productive and sane in the home office, even if your home office is a shared room, and not really an office at all

If you’re OK for cash, and you can earn money from home and you live alone, there has never been a better time to lock yourself away and pen that first novel

You can amuse yourself with the hundreds of hilarious memes and videos, created by people who are lightening your load, going round the social universe and making laugh out loud and in an unrestrained manner, thereby releasing good-time endorphins

And finally, you can use the word ‘carnage’ to describe the world you see without a trace or irony

I’m going to stop now, as I think I could go on forever. I’m sure you have a million more you could add, and that’s probably mot much of an exaggeration.

Tags , , , , ,
Categories General, Uncategorized

Glass 50%

January 10, 2020 //
0

Are you a glass half full person, or a glass half empty? Tradition has it that the optimist is glass half full, the pessimist half empty.

But what’s the realist? I like to consider myself a realist, borne out of experience. This realism is often misconstrued as pessimism. I admit it, I’m a whinging pom sometimes, and I’m in the second age category that Wilde refers to when he says ‘the young know everything, the middle aged suspect everything, the old believe everything.’ But I’m still a realist, there’s no contradiction there in my view.

Consider these phrases, which I attribute to realism:

  • Hope for the best, plan for the worst
  • Sh*t happens
  • C*ck-up theory
  • Chance, happenstance and circumstance
  • It is what it is

To continue the glass metaphor, that makes me a glass 50% kind of a guy. It’s not half full, it’s not half empty, it’s simply half.

You can work and plan to improve the 50%, and that’s where your experience, track record and realism comes in. Hoping it’s going to happen, and fearing it won’t happen; they’ll do you little good.

Tags , ,
Categories Communication, General

Peaks and Troughs

January 8, 2020 //
0

Life is a series of peaks and troughs, it’s almost never straight line, until life is over I suppose. These peaks and troughs can cover dietary, fitness, work, energy levels, lifestyle, family. You’re either busy or you’re not, and if you’re in the middle it tends to be not for very long.

What usually happens around holiday times is that people take time off to re-charge, and often this is when they succumb to illness or viruses, since their bodies might be at a low ebb and their defences are down. They’re also socialising more. Unscientific, but anecdotal, and true, I think.

So it is with me over the holidays. I try to avoid emails, and I’m much less strict about the food and drink I consume. I even let in the foods that can cause me to be unwell, since it’s, well, the holidays. So it is, then, about early January time, that following a holiday trough and before a work peak that it all catches up with me and I wonder whether it was worth it to indulge to such an extent.

Ah, but the memories! If only I could find a way of slightly levelling out the differences so that I still have a great time and the come down isn’t so epic.

Back to work for a rest, as they say. The younger ones I presume.

Tags ,
Categories General

Aspirations

January 6, 2020 //
0

New Year’s resolutions are old hat, apparently. The new new year thing is New Year’s aspirations.

I suppose the logic is that we resolve to do something and then it falls flat – maybe it’s too lofty a goal, or we can’t sustain it – whereas an aspiration is something more realistic, something we can ease up to, to give ourselves time, to make a gradual behaviour change rather than go cold turkey.

I don’t really start my New Year’s stuff until a few days after the first of January, usually my first working day of January, which is today in fact. There’s too much of a social hangover from the holidays for you to stop dead in your tracks and change direction. You know what they say: stop smoking gradually, the way you started. Also, I tend to be away for New Year’s and then you end up getting home a couple days after the start of the month, and it’s hard to effect real change when you’re travelling.

I like the idea of New Year’s aspirations, though. It fits in with the science of effecting true behavioural change. You prep for change, you change, and then you enforce the change repeatedly until it’s the new normal.

I wish – or aspire for you – a great new normal.

Tags , ,
Categories General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Gemütlichkeit

December 30, 2019 //
0

The Germans have a word, actually I’m sure they have several other such examples, that conveys something that’s really hard to express in English without using a far less economical explanation.

Wikipedia describes the word as ‘a state or feeling of warmth, friendliness, and good cheer. Other qualities encompassed by the term include coziness, peace of mind, and a sense of belonging and well-being springing from social acceptance.’

Whenever I think of the word I imagine being in a warm chalet half-way up a ski slope, with a roaring fire, comfy chairs, a bunch of friends and family, and a glass of gluhwein or a bowl of gulaschsuppe with a hunk of bread. I don’t ski very often at all, but I hope I’m conveying that feeling of snugness, without I hope, the feeling of smugness, that we can all experience without going alpine.

One of the wonders of there being loads of different languages is that they all have certain words relating to their own culture and are so idiomatic that you need a paragraph or even a book to do them justice in your own tongue. Another example would be the Danish word hygge, which is surprisingly close to gemütlichkeit in its meaning.

Whatever your own preference of word, I wish you much of it.

Tags
Categories Communication, General, Language

C’est La Vie

December 27, 2019 //
2

C’est la vie – this is the life! Or, as my good lady’s aunt pronounces it, ‘sest lav eye’.

What better phrase is there to sum up the pinnacle of being alive in a great moment? When you’re lying down with the sun on your face, or admiring an amazing view from the comfort of a chair, or enjoying a drink with friends in a place with gemütlichkeit, it’s those precious times when you are conscious of how lucky you are.

I wrote recently about the importance of enjoyment, and making an effort to enjoy whatever it is you’re doing. The self-help best seller and blogger Tim Ferriss also alluded to it in his 5-bullet Friday email when he picked for his ‘quote I’m pondering’ a Kurt Vonnegut line from the book A Man without a Country:

‘And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’

Which, I guess you could say, is the exact North American translation of c’est la vie.

Tags
Categories Communication, General

Christmas Trees

December 25, 2019 //
0

You can’t beat a lovely looking natural Christmas tree.

These days, the argument over natural or artificial is an environmental one. The natural brigade point to the difficulties of disposing of an non-recyclable artificial tree. The artificial aficionados argue that their version lasts for years and years without having to uproot a tree every single year, and clear up after it as well.

As long as you’re buying from a source that is self-sustaining, natural Christmas trees win hands down for me. We get ours from Galway Christmas Trees, and I love the whole ritual of arguing over which one is the best, before we settle on our favourite, get it netted up and bring it home.

Not only is the natural look more welcoming, but the smell of it is great too. It’s like having a bit of forest in your own home. And, if you buy one that comes with a root ball, you can plant it afterwards and watch it grow – winner!

Tags ,
Categories Customers, General

Enjoy

December 20, 2019 //
0

How to live a long healthy life, stimulated in both work and play, with a loving family and trustworthy, supportive friends?

I was watching this video recently from BBC Reel about a certain region of Japan where they believe they’ve found the 4 secrets to long life. It’s probably no surprise that the world’s longest living nation puts its longevity down to diet, exercise, the ability to help yourself and a mutual help system, otherwise known as a socialising – at least in my book.

Speaking of my book, what do I think the secret of a long healthy life is? I’m barely half way to the age of Japan’s famed centenarians, so I’m hardly an infallible data point. But anyway, I think the secret is to enjoy. Enjoy who you are, what you’re doing, and the company of those you hold dear.

The enjoying who you are bit I think is the most important element. Being comfortable with who you are, what you do well, what you do less well, what you like and what you don’t like. A key part of being comfortable with who you are is being easy on yourself. Give yourself a break. Being down on yourself is almost always counter-productive.

That’s why I always try to have a one word parting gesture when someone’s about to embark on something they’re looking forward to, and, if I’m honest, on something they’re not looking forward to: enjoy.

Tags ,
Categories General

Reality is Not Real

December 18, 2019 //
0

I’ve always detested the so-called Reality TV genre. Really can’t abide it at all. It doesn’t matter what topic: celebrities, regular folks, dancing, surviving, loving, hating, watching reality TV. I find it awful and depressing.

I think this is because reality is not real. At least, reality television isn’t real. It’s an edited down, souped up, hammed up, extreme version of real life. All the good bits, the dramatic bits, put together for our entertainment. Packaged up as real, but not really real at all; simply entertainment, of a type.

It doesn’t convey real life, and I don’t think it was ever meant to. Real life is running all the time, and has always run, and you simply can’t convey the huge periods periods of not much happening, periods of normalcy, not even with vlogging. Normalcy is not viewable as entertainment, not even if you attempted some Truman Show-type of constant coverage. If you did you’d get the view the camera gives you, not your view, the individual’s.

When I was much younger, well before reality TV emerged, I sometimes day-dreamed about what it would be like televising me driving on a long journey, exploring my musings and regaling myself and my unseen audience with my wit. How would that ever be interesting to others, even if you had the most charismatic person in the world, unless you presented the highlights?

You can’t ever replicate the individual’s perspective of the reality they see and experience. Maybe there’s a different format yet to be explored which will do justice to real life. But probably not.

Tags , ,
Categories Communication, General

Have Lots

December 13, 2019 //
0

I used to think they’re were two groups in society, the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. It turns out there’s a third group.

I didn’t realise this, and I never heard the phrase before. There are the haves, the have nots and the have lots.

The have lots have loads of money, and can pretty much stay in a hotel any night they wish, and any hotel too. They can pretty well do what they want. So can we all, I might argue, but there’s always a fairly large ‘within reason’ hanging around. Money stops the vast majority of us doing literally anything.

Now obviously there are tiers within tiers, and not all the have lots can buy a Premier League football club. But, it must be a funny feeling if you can do what you want, without compromise. How do you choose? Does it make choosing more difficult?

Tags ,
Categories Customers, General
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »