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Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

Being Present Centred

15 May 2016

When we are stressed, tired or nervous, it’s easy to resort to archaic behaviour, in order to imagine that we are taking care of ourselves. I say ‘imagine’ because we create our reality to suit ourselves and often this can lead us to ignore the facts. Our archaic behaviour might be for us to over-work, so that we feel productive and have more ticks on our to-do list at the end of the day than would otherwise be the case. We learn a lot of our successful strategies as children, when we have exams to complete and are trapped by the school timetable into forcing ourselves to revise, or complete hated homework. Then as adults we resort to these strategies in order to keep our business on track, ignoring the facts that we are now in charge and can made grounded, rational decisions about what to do and how to do it.

If we are tired then being present centred means acknowledging the reality of our situation and instead of doing more work we can stop and rest. Maybe take the weekend off and go to bed early. Maybe we can take a proper lunch break each day and not skip through our lunch hour by doing more work and so enter the afternoon already fatigued.

Being present centred means to see the reality of our situation and to respond accordingly in thoughtful, responsive ways.

For example, at this time of year I often get anxious about how the business year will unfold and can feel myself rushing to chase up potential sales and to book meetings into my diary. And yet the reality is that I have a good system for logging enquiries and history tells me that the system works well and that as long as I pace myself all will come good. My present centred approach is to recognise that I do have a system and that it does work, so there is really no need to fret and jump about.

If a business relationship isn’t working for us we may try and try again to make it work, to push our concerns to one side and to expend ever more energy trying to fix something in order to claim a win. A present centred approach is to recognise properly that something isn’t working and however much we might find that hurtful, or stressful, to maybe end the relationship and expend our energy on finding new and better people to be with.

So, this week take a long hard look at something that isn’t working for you in your business and instead of defaulting to archaic behaviours about how to handle it, stop, be present centred and acknowledge the truth of where you are. Then decide rationally what to do about it. Good luck!

Next week: The Answer Is Yes