To be clear...Take time to celebrate and...Consider how to reintegrate

Published: Wed, 06/01/22

Dear ,

Welcome back to "To Be Clear..." - a refreshing sip of regular coaching clarity in your inbox where I share a couple of brief ideas which I hope that you can apply in your work life.

First of all, thanks to readers who got in touch off the back of the last issue and came to visit my new office - it was great to spend time with you and to show you round! The office excitement continues and so does the invitation to any readers who are in Central London.

This week's issue looks at a topical and often neglected element of professional progress as well as offering a creative but effective approach to fixing what is no longer fit for purpose in your work or business.

Time to celebrate...

Image: Courtesy of Son Dakika

As UK readers will know, this upcoming long weekend is our first ever Platinum Jubilee celebrating 70 years of the longest reigning monarch in British history - Queen Elizabeth II - and it will be marked by four days of celebrations across the country from local street parties to a State Carriage procession up The Mall. In the meantime, there are Union Jacks flying everywhere (see above).

On site this week with my client, Courier Media, I had a thought-provoking conversation with a team member there about the value of communal celebration. We were talking on a national level but I was struck how those same values apply to our work and businesses - so here are four reasons to build celebration into your professional practice.

1. Celebration refreshes us - As we come into the summer period (at least in the West), time off and breaks are a key part of ensuring that we can maintain the clarity we need to work sustainably and effectively going forward. If fitting in proper holiday is tricky right now, stopping to celebrate big or little wins at work can be good way to feel energised ahead of a real break* - leave a bit early, have an impromptu lunch or drinks with your team or suppliers, send a gift to your customers or clients with the express purpose of celebrating something that's gone well recently or a milestone in your work or professional relationships.

2. Celebration reminds us - Work is so often about doing things but taking time to celebrate allows us to recognise what's already been done. Last week, one of my clients very generously took me out to celebrate achieving an outcome on which he had worked with me. We had a lot of fun and, as he noted how far he'd come on a number of fronts since we first started, I was reminded why progress is one of the key pillars of my practice.

3. Celebration refuels us - As Chrissie Easom and I said in our seminar on Drive, stopping to reflect on our progress so far is a key way we maintain and regain motivation and drive at work. Celebration puts us actively in the vital Recovery Zone, readying us for future performance. Athletes know this as does anyone slogging on with long term rehab or physio**. Certainly, one of the key roles I play in my practice is helping clients to see and to celebrate their progress so that they can gather the resolve and energy to keep going towards their desired Outcomes in their work or business.

4. Celebration reorientates us - It's so easy to get bogged down in our current issues at work. Celebration helps us to lift our gaze from the negative to the positive, from present problems to future possibilities and, most of all, from ourselves to others. Celebration sparks gratitude and reminds us that we achieve nothing on our own. Every piece of good work, every project or deal or term completed, every delivery made, every professional milestone reached has involved some form of collaboration or input from others - it's never all been on you even when it most felt like it. This liberates us from the sense of drudgery and overwhelm that work can sometimes bring.

How can you build some celebration into your professional practice over the coming couple of weeks? Do get in touch and let me know what that might look like for you. And to the one reader who I know is celebrating their birthday today, I look forward to celebrating with you shortly...

Next up, and more briefly, a good question to ask as we come across things that are not working as well as we'd like in our work or businesses.

Time to reintegrate?

One of the best presents I received last year was a kintsugi kit. Kintsugi (which means "golden joinery") is the Japanese art of fixing broken ceramics using resin and gold flakes to produce something both functional and more beautiful. You can see one example of my early attempts above***. Kintsugi is all about reintegration, unifying or making whole what is broken, and making it better as a result.

Sometimes, at work, our systems, processes and even professional relationships reveal themselves to be no longer fit for purpose. The temptation at that point is to either deny that there is a problem or to apply quick-fix solutions - sellotaping the pieces back together and just hoping they'll hold. We may even be tempted to scrap whatever's not working and start from scratch - look elsewhere, build a new system, recruit a new person - and, sometimes, that is a good solution. But, as we work together, many of my clients realise that when things are not quite working at work, there is often no need to reinvent the wheel but rather to refashion it, to reintegrate the different elements in a creative way.

I think of one organisational client whose struggle to recruit in a key area has revealed that their processes in that area are no longer suitable or sufficient. Rather than scrapping this area or making cosmetic changes, my client is taking a kintsugi approach, looking at each piece of the system and then reintegrating key elements to make it both more functional and more attractive to potential employees so that my client stands out in an industry (hospitality) where recruitment is tough for everyone right now.

Think of a current challenge or issue at work, how can you reintegrate key elements so that it might both look better and work better for you and others?

Wishing you a Happy Jubilee weekend and a clearer week ahead.

As ever,

Ranti

* - You still need to plan a real holiday...

** - Look no further than all-time-great, Rafael Nadal reflecting, after his history-making win at this year's Australian Open that he had been on crutches just a few months before. No doubt, taking time to celebrate that kind of progress has informed Nadal's form since. Vamos Rafa!

*** - This was my second attempt, my first was considerably worse.

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