Archives for posts with tag: Positive

The Inverse Quarantine Meme

April 8, 2020 //
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We’ve all seen those quarantine memes – either the before/after video of the girl bouncing up off her beach towel and flick-flacking her way down the beach into the sea, followed by the ‘after’ shot of the larger lady rolling down sideways and sloth-like, or the ‘day 31’ shot of someone enormous who has eaten the contents of their house – and in fairness some of them are very well done.

This idea that when you’re stuck indoors you eat more, either out of boredom or as a comfort palliative to anxiety, is a common one and one that people who are not used to being in the house all week can fall prey to.

Now is the time to buck the trend and strive for that inverse quarantine meme where your after is way better than your before.

Now is the time to grow that experimental beard, hit the yoga mat or get your kids to devise some indoor circuit training, safe in the knowledge that the only people that will see you are well used to you in a state of mild undress, or with bed hair.

Now is the time to recover those lapsed new year’s resolutions, with minimal distractions, and make a change for the better.

Now is the time to focus on that beach body, even though it might be July 2021, or December 2020 if you live south of the equator, before you can show it off.

Now is the time to resist the cookie jar. Go make a cup of tea or coffee instead, just the way you like it, rather than the awful cuppa Dave in accounts used to make.

Get that quarantine quest for greatness and fitness moving. Remember: when they zig, you zag. There’s cohesion and strength in small numbers, especially when that number is one.

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Categories General, Uncategorized

The 25 Positives of Being at Home

March 25, 2020 //
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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.

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Categories General, Uncategorized

January Retrospective

January 30, 2019 //
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I blogged about January earlier this month, about how it’s a ‘kiss me arse’ month. I wrote about January, however, in mid-December or so, since if you blog regularly you tend to have a stock of posts scheduled at any one time.

How did January turn out? Well, you’re reading this at nearly the end of the month, so for you it’s my January retrospective, but I’m writing this with the guts of 10 days to go. I can give you pretty clear steer on it though.

I came back from a great break in the UK with dose of ‘man flu’, which I hardly ever get. It took me a week to get rid of, by which time it had migrated to a chesty, flegmy cough that warranted a trip to the doc’s and the parting of €63 for the visit and the accompanying anti-biotics. About the same time I also re-tweaked my troublesome left calf playing my first game of table tennis for a few weeks, before turning over in bed a few mornings later and precipitating a sore trapezius-back-of-the-shoulder-blade thingy which subsequently reminded me how often I unwittingly engage it in every-day movement.

This is all my own fault of course. I always view January as the necessary evil we all have to get through, the hangover from the party period of the previous month. I had it coming, in that self-fulfillingly prophetic way.

I’m going to take a leaf out of my mate Gaz’s book next year though. He’s always glad when Crimbo is out of the way and looks forward to January. A clean slate, get some things started, that new year, new you kind of a thing.

So I’m looking forward to an awesome January 2020. A new decade, and the world’s my oyster. Bring it on, except not just yet. I have 11 stellar months to enjoy first.

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Categories Communication, General, Strategy

All Good Things

July 20, 2016 //
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All good things must come to an end, or so the saying goes. The implication being that they wouldn’t be good things otherwise.

This is usually my standard retort when my daughter is complaining about the limits on her screen time, the last day of a holiday, or the time she has to come back from a friend’s house.

Sometimes this is a hard argument for me to make, as it would take a long time for an extended holiday to become boring and not like a holiday, I think. To a child, the idea that all good things need to have an end-point is a hard one to grasp.

When this conversation was last revisited in our house, I offered my standard objection-handling response, to which my daughter replied, ‘Yeah, if they didn’t come to an end, they’d be great things.’

Which got me thinking: why should all good things have to come to an end? Furthermore, why do we even have that mindset, namely that if one thing is good then another thing we don’t enjoy as much can’t be good as well?

Shouldn’t we strive to make good things everlasting, for our customers, friends, family, so that they might at least last longer? Shouldn’t we strive to make the less good things good as well, by working harder to make them enjoyable and goal-oriented?

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Categories Communication, General

Stay Positive

December 23, 2015 //
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In business and in life it’s important to listen to sporting leaders. Those at the top of their game tend to have a whole support system to help them be the best they can be, among which is usually the professional psychologist.

That’s why you always hear them saying things like ‘we’re taking it one game – or shot – at a time, we’re not getting ahead of ourselves, we’re staying in the moment, we’re staying positive.’ Being positive is a conscious, current thing.

These people understand the power of the human mind, and the things it can do when it’s harnessed in the right way. Why risk unleashing its negative forces when you can benefit from the positive forces, forces that affect in you in a good way?

Fear and safety have a lot to do with the negative side of the human spirit. All the more reason, then, to stay positive, look on the bright side, consider the upside and banish fear and comfortable mediocrity.

Stay positive. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing

Beware the GVV

November 18, 2015 //
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There is a certain type of person, a certain type of character, that it’s unhealthy to be around for too long. I call this person the Good Vibe Vortex, or GVV for short.

The GVV is not a positive person. Stuff happens to the GVV. Sometimes it’s of their own making, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes they don’t even know they are a GVV, sometimes they do.

The GVV is hard work, they’re painful company. They suck away your positivity like a hoover, and you can feel your good vibes, your good energy, the great mood you were in, ebbing away. They are depleting your life force. It’s not simply what they say, there’s something about their whole aura that spells ‘d-o-w-n-e-r’.

This person is not always as obvious as the blue character in the film Inside Out but you get a feeling pretty quickly that they are someone who sees only – and therefore gets bogged down by – the sad, the hurdles, the difficulty. And lo and behold, the self-fulfilling prophecy occurs and stuff happens to them again, taking you with it if you’re not careful.

Yes, beware the GVV. Beware the invasion of the good vibe-snatchers…

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Categories General