A New Year - making positive changes

There’s something about a new year that inspires us to see things differently and to believe that we can do things differently.

And yet, as I’ve written before, – most new years resolutions fail.  In that previous post I encouraged you to review the past year and to build on the things that had gone well.  To take a strengths-based approach to making changes and use the energy and motivation from previous positive and satisfying experiences to plan the next year.

This time I want to suggest you take a longer-term view.  There’s a positive psychology exercise I often use when coaching that helps people to consider how they might be in the future if everything worked out the best possible way.

Click to read more ...

Happy New Year

And best wishes for your life, your family and your work in 2014.

Here in Australia as I write this on a hot Sydney day it is January 2, 2014.  It’s a business day in Australia, unlike New Zealand where the day after NY is also a public holiday. I think of family and friends there, who are relaxing.  And I think of friends around the world for whom it’s still New Year’s Day.  

It’s a day that tends to bring out the optimism in us.  A new year brings new possibilities.  A new chance to change the things we want to change, or become the person we want to be, to build the relationships we want to have.

Statistics show that about 50% of people respond to that feeling of possibility and make NY resolutions. 

Click to read more ...

A New Year and New Ideas

Christmas over we flew back to Sydney on New Year’s Eve. On the Air New Zealand flight I watched the BBC drama celebrating the life and achievements of Dr Ludwig Guttman.  There are many amazing aspects to this man’s life but the drama focuses on his work at Stoke Mandeville hospital in Britain from 1944.  Here he treated soldiers with spinal cord injury.  

At this time, treatment for such patients involved encasing them in plaster and sedating them.  There was limited chance of people with spinal cord injuries surviving due to the medical “care” they received and those that did were usually left to a life with little hope or purpose.

Ludwig Guttman saw things differently. 

Click to read more ...