Don't take it personally....

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Secret 4: Don’t take it personally

“I believe that one becomes stronger emotionally by taking life less personally. If your employer criticizes your report, don’t take it personally. Instead, find out what’s needed and fix it. If your girlfriend laughs at your tie, don’t take it personally. Find another tie or find another girlfriend.” -Marilyn vos Savant

The old adage says that “business is business – it’s nothing personal”.  This is a healthy lesson for the world of work.

Whether you’re an employee, temp, contractor or entrepreneur, you’ll face criticism, rejection, anger, fear and disappointment in the world of work.

• Your brilliant project that you worked all night on will be torn up by the partner.
• Your best customer will suddenly quit with no explanation.
• Your boss will unload on you for no reason.
• Everyone in your new workplace will treat you like a pariah and make you get the tea.

How does anyone survive this?

The answer is to not take these things personally.  A few thoughts that have helped me with this:

1)   Most people spend their entire lives in a self-obsessed bubble, barely noticing people around them.  If someone is ignoring your email, 90% of the time it is not because they hate you, but because they are too busy worrying about buying their new house, the fight they had with their husband, or which pair of shoes to wear today.  Don’t take it personally

2)   Knock-backs, failures and rejections are great.  They mean you are trying.  The more you fail, the more you are likely to succeed.  The rejections don’t mean you are doomed to eternal failure.  They mean you weren’t the right person at the right time, this time.  Keep knocking on doors and the right one for you will open.

3)   You always have a choice.  If things are getting out of hand and consistently unbearable, you have a duty to yourself to find another way to make a living.  There are always better choices.

Secret 5: Ask for help (and give it back)

“I’m just no good at asking others to help – I feel like I have to do it myself”.

If I had a pound for every time I’ve heard this phrase, I’d be writing this post on the beach in Waikiki, rather than on a train in Wakefield.

If you’re an expert in everything, skip this step.  If you’re a normal human being then you’ll have strengths and things you’re not so good at.

Whatever you are hoping to get out of work – enjoyment, learning, growth, meaning – there will be times when you need to ask for help.

It’s amazing the lengths that people will go to in helping out.  Since I started my business, I’ve had friends and acquaintances help me with my marketing strategy, my PR approach, my web presence.  I’ve had a huge amount of feedback and help from people I really respect.

In my office based days, I got help on any number of things – how to use Excel, how to deal with a difficult team member, what to do when the boss melted down 24 hours before the end of a long project.  Without this support, I’m not sure I’d have made it through and I certainly wouldn’t have learned much.

The bottom line is learning to ask for help can make you better at your job, help you learn and grow, help you enjoy your work more and build solid relationships that can transcend jobs and even go beyond work.  Learn to ask for help.

In return,  help others generously if you can. Do your best to genuinely and graciously give back when you are the expert.  If you believe in karma, its good karma – if not it’s just the right thing to do.

And, no this lesson doesn’t clash with Secret Number 1 (You get out what you put in).  You will only get help if you know exactly what to ask for and who to ask. You have to actively seek the right help at the right time.

Secret 6 Know why you are at work

If you haven’t seen the movie Office Space, it is one of the best films ever made about the world of work.  In this scene, the hero Peter tells the management consultants about his typical day at work.

Peter is the ultimate demotivated employee – “The truth is I probably only do about 15 minutes of real actual work” Peter’s attitude is “It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s just that I don’t care”.  He has no motivation to be at work.

The average human works for somewhere in the region of 75,000 hours during their career. There is no right answer for anyone to be at work, but without a good reason to be there it can become soul destroying.

Some of the most important reasons to be at work include:

• Doing something meaningful – making a difference to the world around you
• Learning something new – developing new skills that you can use profitably
• Doing something you enjoy – work can provide energy and fun
• Enjoying and being surrounded by great people – finding a great work culture
• Making a good living – this is a good reason to work, but on its own sometimes this isn’t enough

Knowing why you are at work provides the motivation to get out of bed every day, and to get through the inevitable tough times.  If you’ve been spacing out for an hour a day and living on Facebook in the office, it may be time to take a long hard look at yourself and figure out a better way to get through those 75,000 hours.

To check out part 1 of career success secrets, click here.

If you want to get started figuring out why you are working, click here to find out more about career coaching.

Photo credit: Taylorkydd (Flickr Creative Commons)

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Do what matters

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Bored? Frustrated? Stuck in a rut? Work feel meaningless?

You probably spend at least 40% of your waking hours at work.

What would it be like if you really enjoyed that time, if it felt like you were doing something important and meaningful, something that mattered?

I spent a decade working as a forensic accountant.  I hate details and I’m not a big fan of numbers.

I didn’t see the point of what I was supposed to be doing – it felt pointless. I struggled to find any joy in my working day.

Suffice to say that 40% of my life was not ideal.

I put work in a painful box, and kept it away from the rest of my happy life.  I felt drained of my life force every day.

I felt trapped by my job – after all, I was objectively successful, relatively well paid and had the “security” of working for a big global company.  What right did I have to ask for more?

It was only when I talked to a good friend about her career that I started to think differently. She had a clear vision for her work – to improve society using smart, analytical business ideas.  She was completely passionate about her career, dripping with enthusiasm.

My friend did work that she believed made a difference in the world around her – it impacted the lives of others, and the community she lived in.  Whilst I could hardly get out of bed every day, she couldn’t wait to get to work.

I realised that it was possible to enjoy making a living. To find work that felt meaningful.  To make a difference in the world.

This spark inspired me to start my own journey to doing work that matters.  It has been a long road and not always smooth sailing.

Now I help others who wish to find work that matters and I love my work every day.

In talking with hundreds of people who have felt stuck in a career rut and made radical changes in their work lives, I’ve found some five striking reasons to find work that matters:

1 Identity “You are what you do.”

Work is a key component of our identity. Our work helps to define our place in the world.

When you meet someone new, one of the first questions you’ll inevitably be asked is “what do you do for a living?”

Answering that question helps to tell your personal story, the way that others perceive you.

Work helps you to express your individuality and express yourself.

If you love your work, it aligns with your values and who you are a person.

2. Quality of Life. “Work takes up 40% or (much) more of your life”

Given this, work has a huge impact on your happiness and quality of life.

Work can be hugely energizing and bring us a great deal of challenge and joy.  It can also suck the life force from us and leave us devoid of the energy to do more than lift the remote control.

Finding work that works for you can change your whole life.

3. Personal Development. “Work pushes you to grow”

The work we do is one of the main ways that we interact with the world around us.

You can take on new challenges, learn new ideas or skills and develop your ability to interact with others.

You can work with different people who can teach, inspire and challenge you to be the best you can.

The right work stretches you, dares you to be better.

Work allows us you to develop as a person and find out more about the world that we live in.

4. Purpose. “What were you put on earth to do?”

The work that we do can help us to answer some of those bigger questions in life.

I often hear someone saying that they want to  “do something meaningful”, “something that makes a difference to people” or “makes a difference in the world”.

When we find work that we love, it is sometimes called finding our vocation, or “doing what we were put on earth for”.

Finding work we love helps us to make sense of our existence and find meaning in life.

5. Making a Living. “If you have to work, why not do something that matters?”

Like it or not, most of us need to work to make a living.

We need to make money in order to create the life we’d like to live.  Receiving financial reward for what we do enables this to happen.

As we need to work, why not try to do something that we enjoy and that motivates us?

I’ve met too many people who put life on hold for that well paying job they hate, yet the idea of sticking that out for another 20 years is killing them.

These powerful reasons tell me that doing work that matters is vital to living life to the full.  I’ve learned my lesson here, now its..

Over to you

Please share your thoughts on work:

• Why do you go to work?
• How important is to do work that matters for you?
• How have you found work that you enjoy?
• What is stopping you from finding work that you love?

Answers on a postcard – or better still, leave a comment.

If you’d like to explore finding work that matters, take a look at my career coaching services. If you’d like to find out more drop me an email to phil@lessordinaryliving.com and we can find a time to chat.

Photo Credit: Tinyfroglet (Flickr Creative Commons)

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Get off the Hamster Wheel

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Have you ever felt like you’re stuck on the hamster wheel – running as fact as you can and going nowhere?

Life can be seen as the sum total of all the choices we’ve ever made.  Every day we’re faced with hundreds of decisions – some inconsequential such as which brand of toothpaste to buy, some very important such as choosing a new career direction.

It is what it is….

Many people believe that our life is determined by fate and that there is no way to influence what happens to us.   This theory suggests that we have no choice in any events in our life.  Living by this philosophy can lead to giving up on life.  In this world, our life is little more than a piece of driftwood floating on the stream of fate.

The Smarter Choice

The alternative mindset is that we live in a world full of choices.   From this view point, the world fills with possibility.  In a given situation we face a huge range of options. If you are in a meeting with your boss, you could choose to answer her questions earnestly and to the best of your ability, you could choose to be challenging and stand up for your views, or you could choose to run out of the door screaming and never come back.   Each choice has potential consequences and inevitably some consequences may appear preferable to others.  However, we have the power to choose.

The Hamster Wheel

Even if we believe in choices, it is easy to close ourselves down to our options.  We can get into a routine or a rut.  Life becomes about survival.  Welcome to The Hamster Wheel.

Getting off the Hamster Wheel can give us tremendous energy and power.  It allows you to feel in control of a given situation.

Choose Life

Over time and through self-reflection we can learn to slow down and see the bigger picture.  Once we realise we have options, life stops being about survival and starts to become about possibilities.  We step off the hamster wheel.

When we are making deliberate choices it becomes easier to take responsibility for our actions.  When we choose and commit to our actions we can own the results regardless of the apparent level of success.   We make choices, we commit to them, we accept the results and we grow as a person.

Exercise – Getting off the Hamster Wheel

This exercise is a quick way to get off the hamster wheel and learn to see all the options.  You can work through it in advance to plan your biggest decisions by doing it every morning.  This also works in the moment when you feel stuck on the hamster wheel.  Asking these questions opens us up to the reality that we do face options.

• What is the challenge that I face today / am facing right now?
• What are my options?
• What other choices could I make (regardless of how feasible they may be)?
• What could I do if I had no fear?
• Which choices best align with my values and who I am as a person?
• What support can I get in taking this choice with power and committing to it?

Getting off the hamster wheel and choosing life is a tremendously powerful approach to life.   Try it today and see what happens.

Picture credit – Sebastien Davies (from Flickr – Creative Commons)

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Are you still keeping your New Year’s Resolutions for 2009?  A quick show of hands please.  To the valiant few with hands aloft, congratulations.  For the rest of us mere mortals, don’t despair.  A study by clinical psychologists at the University of Scranton showed that of people making a resolution, only 75% made it past the first week and less than 50% were maintaining their resolution after 6 months.  New Year’s Resolutions are one way that we try to make our lives happier, so how can we improve our chances of keeping them?

Making a resolution is usually a commitment to a lasting behavioural change – whether it be exercising more, eating healthily or changing the balance of how we spend our time.  Changing ingrained habits and behaviour can be extremely difficult.

New Year’s Resolutions are typically an all or nothing immediate leap into the deep end of change.  They are the equivalent of putting all your chips on number 23 at the roulette wheel of life.  Psyhcologists who have studied successful change have found that taking a longer-term approach which has a clear strategy can dramatically improve our odds of successfully changing.

The powerful “States of Change” model created by James Prochaka and Carlo diClemente in the 1970s outlines a robust six step approach to making lasting personal change.  Following these steps with due care and effort has been proven to increase the chances of making a successful change:

Step 1: Precontemplation. Prior to making a change we need to admit we have something to change. In this stage we have yet to admit that something is worth changing, although the issue may be buzzing around in the back of our mind.  This stage is sometimes thought of as being “in denial” due to our claims that a pattern or behaviour is not a problem.

Step 2: Contemplation. During this stage, we start to consider the benefits of making a change, however we often focus on the downsides.  This creates fear of change and can lead to extended procrastination and delay before moving forward.  The contemplation stage is about admitting that we want to change and seeing the positives of the change (for example, if I were to lose weight I would feel healthier, happier and fit into my old clothes in the wardrobe).

Some of the key questions to answer at this stage are:

What is your motivation for wanting to change?

What are some of the benefits of changing?

What may be holding you back from changing?

What are some factors that could assist you in making a change?

Step 3: Preparation. During this phase, we start lay the groundwork for the wider change ahead.  We may start to introduce smaller changes into our life.  For example, if you are planning to get fitter, you might start walking to the next bus stop each day on the way to work.  This stage requires creating our plans for a successful change.  Good preparation is vital to success and some of the key things to do include:

• Find people with a similar goal that might support you, or find others to hold you accountable.
• Research as much as you can about the area you want to make a change in – find out about others who have been successful in making the same change and how they did it.
• Identify and write down your motivation and inspiration for making the change.
• Create a clear plan for change and design a process for monitoring and rewarding progress.
• Design contingency plans for “falling off the wagon” and prepare yourself for this happening.

Step 4: Taking action. This is where the rubber hits the road.  If your preparation has been thorough, you’ll start executing on your plan and using your support systems.  Its important to take action in the knowledge that changing personal habits takes dedication and time to achieve.  Ingraining a new habit can take months or even years to achieve and will almost inevitably involve ups and downs along the path.  This step will need you to reward success and forgive yourself for slip-ups.

Step 5: Maintenance. Once you’ve taken action successfully, you’ll start to see the fruits of your labours.  If you’re objective was to stop smoking, you may last a day, or a week without a cigarette.  The key to maintenance is to find ways to avoid being tempted to relapse (for example, avoiding a trip to the pub with your old smoking buddies) and rewarding yourself for success (for example, treat yourself to a massage to relieve the stress of nicotine withdrawal).

Step 6: Relapse. Relapse is a normal and inevitable part of making a life change.  If not managed correctly, relapse can undermine all the good work that you have put in, and take away the self-confidence you’ve built up.  The key to moving through a relapse is to understand the reason for falling down, and to work out the best way to avoid a repeat.  Remembering that everyone who has successfully made a change has been through this process can be helpful in forgiving yourself.  Once you’ve understood the relapse, it is best to go back to the preparation phase and “get back on the horse”.

Finally, the best chance of keeping your resolution in 2010, is to start at Step 1 today.  Following the six-step change model above, and particularly focusing on the preparation phase prior to jumping in, is proven to increase your chance of making a lasting change in your life.  So get started on making 2010 your best year yet!

If you missed our three step guide to Thinking Big for the next decade, click here to get started….

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The Lost Art of Being Happy – by Tony Wilkinson – Reading time : 3 minutes and 24 seconds

The Lost Art of Being Happy

It’s tempting to think that happiness is achieved by solving life’s problems. But if you wait to be happy until all your problems are solved you will never be happy, because when today’s problems are gone others will take their place. If you are going to live happily you have to live with your problems.

I worked for twenty years in the City of London, but few of the rich and powerful people I met seemed happier than poorer folk. In the course of writing my book, The Lost Art of Being Happy: Spirituality for Sceptics (Findhorn Press) I finally realised why. The book shows that living happily depends on cultivating inner peace. It’s a very old idea, of course, but I’ve worked on the practical details as they can be applied today.

Living happily depends mainly on your inner life, meaning your thoughts, emotions, desires – your entire mental and emotional scene. Happiness is about what you think and believe, how you feel, how problems affect you. This may sound obvious, but often we focus instead on our external lives, on getting and spending and “having fun” and then wonder why we are not happy. But it’s when our inner lives are serene that we are happiest – and this is inner peace.

The difficulty is that our inner lives are based on patterns and habits. You don’t choose, occasion by occasion, how you respond inside. This happens and you feel angry; that happens and you feel sad. Because of these habits, events don’t necessarily leave you with inner peace. So the key is to change the patterns and acquire new inner habits.

Deliberately learned habits are of course skills. Inner skills are very like virtues, but if you think of them as skills rather than virtues you benefit from a liberating shift. Instead of “I must become a better person” you can think: “I could live more happily if I worked on my skills”. It’s a process of training yourself, like all skill learning.

I suggest five main groups of skills, although the training system is less important than the commitment to devote time to improving your inner life skills. Practice is the key and it requires effort but the reward is what we all want most – deep happiness. Here are the five:

1 Mindfulness: The problem most of us have with thought is having too much of it – the worrying and mental “chattering” our minds are prone to. Mindfulness is awareness without the chattering. Concentrating on your breathing is one way to practise but many people achieve the same focus through sport, dance or martial arts. Mindfulness is a key inner skill because, as it gets stronger, it lets you focus on your own inner life and catch your habits in the act. Once you can see what they do the change you are seeking often happens of its own accord.

2 Benevolence: It comes as a surprise when you first hear it but benevolence or love starts off as a practical skill which counteracts negative emotions like anger and hatred, terrible wreckers of happiness. Try it the next time someone annoys you: put yourself in their place and ask yourself what they might be thinking or feeling to behave like that. It doesn’t mean they should get away with it, but if you get into the habit of thinking more tolerantly – understanding that their actions are also ruled by inner habits – you’ll find you can react with less anger. And less anger equals more happiness for you.

3 Story skills: Your beliefs, including the ones you are almost unaware of because you have never questioned them, have great power over your life. Start to think of them as stories and it is easier to accept that other things might be true as well, or even instead. Even true stories only select the little bit of reality we are focusing on at the moment: no one story is the whole truth about any situation. This is not about make–believe, it’s about ‘reframing’ situations to look at them from a different perspective and see a different truth.

4 Letting-go: This is particularly helpful when we are unhappy not getting what we want. Generally, we are encouraged to think that more will make us happier, whether it’s clothes or money or even love. But wanting is a treadmill and to be happy you either have to satisfy all your desires (which is unlikely) or let go of some of them. Sometimes what we want is revenge or retribution, which is why forgiveness is an important letting-go skill: it’s not about letting anyone else off, it’s about letting ourselves off the hook of anger about the past.

5 Enjoyment skills: This last group includes patience, humour and especially gratitude. You don’t have to be grateful to someone, it’s enough to cultivate gratitude for things. Our minds naturally scan the environment for dangers, probably once a useful mechanism but it can make us unnecessarily pessimistic – focusing on the 5% we lack rather than the 95% we have. Cultivating gratitude will help redress the balance.

The important thing is to practise your skills, preferably until they operate without you thinking about them. Practice itself can be a rewarding way of life, a path between religion and materialism. I look on it as a form of secular spirituality, spirituality without any supernatural belief, because it has so much in common with traditional religious spiritual practice. But that’s just my way of looking at it. It’s the path to living happily if you follow it.

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Reading time: 2 minutes and 42 seconds

How can you create a successful and fulfilling career in the 21^st Century?  The traditional post-war model of a job for life and relying on a company to provide for retirement has rapidly crumbled over the last couple of decades.  We’ve all been impacted by revolutions in technology, logistics and communications that have created a global economy.  Many leading thinkers argue that the traditional definition of a career is dead including Reid Hoffman, CEO of Linkedin:

“I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not. . . . Average job length is two to four years. That makes you a small business. . . . You are the entrepreneur of your own small business. How do you get to your next gig? How do you do your career progression? All these things now fall on the individual shoulders.”

This change of mindset challenges us to be much more active in managing our careers.  It is important to assess the rewards of our current role and ensure that they are the best ones for our personal small business. The revolutionary changes in the world mean we have more career options than ever before.  If your current role is not giving you what you need, it might be time to start considering the next direction to take your enterprise.

As an individual entrepreneur, the first step in making a change is to understand which rewards are most important to us.  Career rewards include:

• Financial reward – work allows us to earn money which provides short term quality of life and the opportunity to plan for the long term
• Balance – certain roles require more personal commitment of time, and energy to be successful, others leave more time for other personal priorities
• Benefits – different roles allow us to work full time or part time, be more or less flexible in location and hours, take more or less vacation, provide healthcare and other services or not and provide other perks
• Meaning and fulfilment – choosing work that provides personal fulfilment and feels meaningful and important can provide huge personal satisfaction and pleasure
• Culture – we can choose whether to work in a big or small organisation, whether we are part of a hierarchy or flat structure, and many other considerations

Think about what is most important for you with your work? Traditionally, work has sometimes been seen as a means to an end – a pay cheque that allows us to put a roof over our head and if we’re lucky enjoy some of the better things in life.  As a personal entrepreneur, you get to choose how to employ your talents and time and what rewards you get for that.

My personal choice was to take a less orthodox path and to start my own coaching business, leaving a good job in the corporate world behind.  This has certainly meant a short-term sacrifice of financial reward, and benefits.  In return, I’ve found work to be truly meaningful and been able to create a flexible working culture I love.  At the time of leaving the corporate world, it felt like a risky path, however the immediate benefits and the long term potential rewards outweighed the risk for me.

As in my example, the choices you make about the rewards of work come with accompanying risks which need to be assessed as you take control of your career path.  However, Reid Hoffman believes that the reality of these risks has changed:

“But I think that one of the key things — the reason why I think risk tolerance is important is because what happens is people delude themselves they’re not taking risks. They say, oh, I’m going to get a job at, you know, Hewlett-Packard or I’m going to get a job — and that’s not risky. Well, look at current economic climates. Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it. And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don’t.”

As the CEO of Me Ltd. you have a choice about where you employ your talents.  Taking time to realistically identify the short-term and long-term rewards and the associated risks can really help to make smart choices.  The key lesson is that you need to be actively planning the direction of Me Ltd. as the world changes.  By doing so, you give yourself the best chance of having a successful and fulfilling career in the 21^st Century.

What do you think about the idea of everyone being a career entrepreneur?

How do you manage your personal business?

What are the rewards you look for from your work?

What risks are you most concerned about?

Please take a minute to comment on this article.  If you’d like to think these ideas through and are ready to take control of your career, please contact pbolton@colosseumconsulting.com or carly@carlygoldsmithcoaching.com .

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Less is More Extraordinary – Terminator Salvation

 You may be wondering what the movie Terminator Salvation has to do with living an extraordinary life.  It’s simple really, when presented with limited options; our choice can be a gateway to the less than ordinary experience of deep appreciation and greater satisfaction.

My husband and I spent the past week at his family’s lake house in the Adirondack Mountains of NY. It was just the two of us taking some much needed time to recharge our batteries.  We had little plans other than reading, walking, talking, hiking, kayaking, and enjoying the incredible nature and wildlife that surrounded us. But as Friday rolled around, we thought we’d head into town, mingle with other people and see a movie. 

The Strand movie theater in Schroon, NY has one screen.  It plays one movie a week and has 3 showings – Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 8pm.  This weekend, it was Terminator Salvation.

I have always had a belief that more possibilities are better.  It helps us to feel less trapped and more in control of where our lives are heading.  But that belief was challenged this week at the movies.  There I was, making the choice to see a movie I otherwise wouldn’t have (summer blockbuster action films are typically not my thing). Yet I can say I was truly happy in the theater watching Terminator Salvation and enjoying myself more than I would have had I had my choice of 16 different movies playing at 5 local theaters, at my choices of at least 100 different show times throughout the day. 

Why was this I wondered?  And then it hit me – sometimes less really is more.  With all those choices typically in front of us, we have to make the perfect choice – that’s what all those options imply is attainable, right?  We can’t be happy unless it’s the right theater, the right time and the right movie. 

But I noticed sitting there at the Strand that night how the limit of choice allowed me to fully appreciate the little things about the experience.  The friendly projectionist who also sold us our tickets, the $1 bottle of water, the restored art deco interior, the old piano up by the screen left over from the days of silent films, the conversations amongst us movie-goers (aka strangers) as we left the film.  And I have to admit, I allowed myself to be entertained by the movie.  Was it great film? Certainly not.  But on that night, it was perfectly extraordinary.  

I walked away with a reminder of a valuable lesson. Seeing possibilities and feeling at choice is not about collecting a laundry list of options and trying to find the perfect combination.  Choice is about seeing what’s in front of us – even if it appears to be an undesirable option – and choosing how to be in relation with it.  Happiness and satisfaction can come to us in the most unexpected of ways if we allow it.   

Bring Less is More to Your Own Life

Where in your life or work are you stuck and feeling like you will never find the perfect choice? 

How can you see the options in front of you with new eyes and appreciate the satisfaction they can bring you?  

The Strand

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