I have previously written about stress and I have also shared my own story about how I managed to free myself from stress. I know from the feedback I have received, and the work I do with project managers, that feeling confident and at ease is an on-going challenge. We work in hectic environments and are at times just getting by – trying to keep the client happy, staying on top of our inbox and avoiding conflict. Wellbeing is not the word that springs to mind when we think of project management. Wellbeing is something we may focus on in our spare time to recover and get back to balance. 

​But what would it take if we really wanted to feel better whilst working on our projects? Dr. Richard Davidson, the founder of the Centre for Healthy Minds, claim that wellbeing is a skill we can all learn and that the effects can be observed in the mind. All it takes is practice. The more we practice the more we will strengthen those circuits in the brain that promote higher levels of wellbeing.
 
Let’s examine the four ingredients that lead to wellbeing.
 
Resilience
The first ingredient, resilience, is the ability to bounce back and recover from stress and adversity. In other words, it’s the speed at which we recover from unexpected changes and difficult situations. Some people recover slowly and other people recover more quickly. It turns out that scientists can measure the time it takes for our brain to bounce back and that this time span is critical for understanding resilience. Individuals who show a more rapid recovery have higher levels of wellbeing. They are in many ways protected from stress and the many unexpected events that happen on a project.
 
To strengthen your resilience, train yourself to see the opportunities in every situation. Projects are dynamic with risks and issues popping up on a daily basis. The more you resist and fight against them the more prolonged your stress response will be. Instead, accept that changes and problems are inevitable, even with the best risk management approach. When a problem occurs, do what you can to resolve it without getting caught up in a negative emotional spiral. Reframe the situation and see the positive angles. There are always opportunities to grow and learn from adversity, we just need to train ourselves to see it. Some of my biggest personal transformations came from the biggest challenges on my project.
 
To bounce back and recover from an unpleasant piece of news, first become aware of the physical impact on your body. Your heart rate will increase and your palms may get sweaty. At this moment, don’t panic or start to give orders. Instead, pause and take a deep breath. In fact, take three deep breaths and let go of the negativity and the urge to react. From that place not only will you feel better, you will also be in a better position to make rational and intelligent choices about how to resolve the situation.
 
Positive outlook
The second ingredient that leads to higher levels of wellbeing is to have a positive outlook. In this context a positive outlook is the ability to see the positive in other people. It’s the ability to acknowledge team members as human beings and to recognise that they have qualities of innate basic goodness. People who suffer from depression show very little activity in this part of the brain. The good news is that with just two weeks of loving-kindness meditation this part of the brain will get stronger. All it takes is 30 minutes of daily practice where you meditate on feeling love and compassion towards others.
 
To get started, download a meditation app that can guide you through a loving-kindness meditation. This type of meditation is one where you send kind feelings towards people around you. Initially spend just 5 or 10 minutes focusing on feeling love and kindness towards family members and friends who you hold dear. As the days pass expand the mediation to 20 or 30 minutes and begin to incorporate people within your project environment. Focus on your team members, clients and stakeholders. Take them into your heart and send them loving kindness too. This is a very powerful exercise, which not only will bring you more wellbeing but also help transform your interpersonal relationship and the atmosphere on your project.
 
Attention
The third element, attention, is about being mindful of the work you are doing and to not let your mind wander. A wondering mind is an unhappy mind. Scientists claim that on average 47% of an adult’s waking time is spent not paying attention to what they are doing. In a project environment you can work with this element by being present and by simply showing up. If you’re in a meeting, be present and pay attention to what other people are saying. Don’t check your phone or drift off. If you’re on a conference call, be fully present and decide not to check your emails whilst you’re on the phone. When a team member speaks to you, give them your full attention and deeply listen to what they are saying. When you eat lunch or walk through the building be mindful of your surrounding and the food you're eating.

To get started, examine your diary and your upcoming week. Make a note of the meetings you need to attend and the most important tasks you need to complete. Block out time in your diary for these important tasks so that you can dedicate your full attention to them. On a busy project you need to be available to support your team and won’t be able to block out the entire day. Your best bet is to set 90 minutes aside in the beginning of the day where you can work single-mindedly on your most important and difficult tasks. Tell your colleagues that you would like to not get interrupted during this time or find a quiet meeting room. If your mind wanders, bring it back and remind yourself that the more attention you give to this present moment the higher your level of wellbeing.
 
Generosity
The fourth ingredient that leads to higher levels of wellbeing is generosity.  The more you engage in generous and altruistic behaviour the more you will activate circuits in the brain that are key to wellbeing. Luckily there are many things you can do on your project to be generous: Lend a helping hand to a colleague who is struggling with a challenging task, treat a team member to a coffee, mentor or coach a younger member of staff, give well-deserved compliments to your colleagues, volunteer to organise the next team event, or give back to the project management community by sharing your knowledge.  Make a decision to nurture your working relationships by carrying out just one random act of kindness every day. Just imagine the positive effect you would have on your project.
 
In summary, wellbeing is a skill that can be learnt and that we should all take responsibility for. Make an effort to be more present and mindful on your project. Cultivate a positive outlook by seeing opportunities in every situation. Be more generous and send loving kindness to your team members and stakeholders.
 
 
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As we enter 2018 many of us naturally consider what we would like the New Year to bring and what we would like to do and achieve. For me it will be no different. But for the first time in many years I will have more mind-set-related and behavioural goals than external achievement goals. ​In recent years my goals have been related to writing project leadership books, starting my business, attracting clients and travelling to new exotic locations. These types of goals are not about refining my behaviour, improving my thought patterns or cultivating personal attributes within myself. They are related to achieving things in the physical world. I sense that 2018 will be different as I’m trying to put less emphasis on external achievement goals. Instead I will trust that as long as I do the right things, I will attract the right experiences into my life. 

​It’s not that there is anything wrong with setting physical goals. We all have a need to feel that we are progressing and that we are moving forward in work and in life. We can feel a strong sense of accomplishment from obtaining a certain qualification, finishing a particular project or landing that dream job. Setting SMART goals and acting on them, definitely help us achieve our objectives. But we also need to allow ourselves to just be. We often put unnecessary pressure on ourselves by feeling that we need to be in a certain job position by a certain age or by constantly having to prove ourselves. We may feed our ego by accomplishing a lot, but we don’t necessarily feed our spirit.
 
I always tell my coaching clients that the real work is the internal work. If we spend time looking inwards, acquiring the right mind-set, then the rest will follow. I coach a lot of people who have low self-esteem and who tend to compensate by holding on to physical things, frameworks or achievements. But that will never create true fulfilment. The real work is to strengthen our self-belief and to challenge our perceptions until we feel a warm glow of self-love inside.
 
In a similar vein I often come across individuals who experience a high degree of conflict with people around them. There is always something wrong with their boss, their clients or team members. But instead of wanting to swap projects or organisations, the solution is to look inwards and review our attitudes and behaviours. If we acquire the belief that everyone has something valuable to contribute to every situation, then we will take a greater interest in others and give them more space. The result is better relationships in all areas of life. It is by looking at how we can think and act differently that we can create the greatest transformation in our personal and professional life.
 
I’m self-employed and at the back of my mind there is often a little fear that perhaps I won’t be as busy this year as I’ve been in the past. But I’ve always been fine, and each year has in fact been more rewarding than the last. I need to get my mind-set right and take my own medicine! As I go into 2018 I don’t want to be steered by this fear and I don’t want to numb it by setting lots of external goals to make my ego feel better. Instead, I will look inwards and concentrate on acquiring the right mind-set. I will appreciate each moment and the opportunities that it brings. When I find myself in an unfamiliar or uncomfortable situation I will try to take a step back and objectively evaluate it. From that vantage point it will be easier to consciously decide how I want to respond. 
 
What kind of mind-set do you need to acquire in 2018 to become more fulfilled? And in which ways do you need to refine your behaviour? Perhaps you can find inspiration in the three P’s below: Purpose, Presence and Pause. They form the basis of my own goals for 2018.

​PURPOSE – In order to attract the right things into your life, you need to start each day feeling connected with yourself and your purpose. With the right mind-set, every day can become a great day. It doesn’t matter what you choose to do, but you need some kind of morning ritual that connects you with the essence of who you are and what you want to bring to the day. Some people meditate whilst others go for a brisk walk. Personally I like to start the day with a few yoga exercises that wake up my body and my mind. In 2018 I will become even more mindful during my yoga practice and be reminded of my purpose, which is to use my talent to contribute to the world around me.
 
PRESENCE – One of the biggest gifts you can give someone is your time and your attention. But it’s also one of the biggest gifts you can give yourself because it has the potential to transform all of your relationships. When you are fully present with another person, listening to them and trying to walk in their shoes, they will feel that you understand them. I’m convinced that there will be far fewer conflicts and misunderstandings in our personal and professional life if we take the time to listen to and understand each other. In 2018 I aim to be more present in my interactions. I will fully listen to and engage people who I cross and make them feel understood. 

PAUSE – On your project or in your private life you may at times snap at someone or disengage because of a challenging situation that triggers you. Whenever you feel uncomfortable, irritated or upset in the New Year, press your pause button and just breathe. Let the emotion wash over you without acting on it. These strong emotions can distort your sense of judgement and make you do and say things that don’t serve you. Instead, step outside of the situation for a couple of minutes and evaluate what is going on. What are your beliefs about the stressful events and why is it affecting you? When you’re able to you see the situation clearly you will be much better able to choose how to respond. This is something we can all get better at – including myself.
 
I hope you’ll have a wonderful 2018 full of purpose, presence and mindful pauses.


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Stress is interesting. As the below stress curve shows, you do need some pressure in order to perform at your best, but too much pressure (or stress) leads to declining performance and potentially burnout. If you get close to burnout you may lose your energy, drive and proactiveness. You will feel overwhelmed and find it difficult to respond to external demands and it could take you a while to recover. Too little pressure on the other hand is also not ideal. If you don’t feel that there is a need, demand or desire for your skills and capabilities you will slowly lose your confidence and feel less motivated to contribute. We call that “rustout”. 

​In order to be as resourceful as possible and operate within your zone of peak performance it’s important that you get the balance right between too much and too little pressure. Your role requires you to deal with several things at once, maintain the overview and delve into the detail when required. You need full access to your brain to embrace challenging moments, make decisions, resolve issues, delegate and motivate.
 
Taking on too much work pressure can be a major hindrance for being resourceful and for performing at your best. When you let external events stress you, it’s your “emotional brain” that takes over and that makes you feel unsettled, constrained and tense. This also means that you are not making full use of the frontal part of your brain where your reason and logic resides. Fortunately you can keep negative stress at bay by understanding how it comes about.
 
Negative stress is a feeling of not being in control. It is something you experience when the demand for your time and services exceeds what you feel you have to offer – or when there is a significant difference between what you expect and what actually happens. A key point in relation to stress management is your subjective feelings and perceptions. What is stressful to one may not be stressful to another.
 
Many people believe that stress is a direct result of external events and stressors, such as a demanding stakeholder or boss. But emotional stress doesn’t stem directly from external events. It stems from the beliefs you hold about them. The meaning you choose to attach to an event is the meaning it takes on. When you interpret an event as being negative or bad, you get into a negative or stressful state and vice versa. Therefore, it’s not the events themselves that determine how you feel, but the meaning you attach to them. It is with stress as with so many other factors of life; you need to look inwards before you look outwards.
 
There are numerous types of situations on a project that could cause you excessive stress if you don’t pay attention and actively work on your beliefs. This could be anything from being asked to plan a new large project, having to quickly make major decisions, presenting the to steering committee, managing a growing inbox, dealing with unexpected issues, facing off to senior executives, dealing with challenging team members and having to justify project estimates and timescales. The list goes on.
 
Whereas you may not be able to control an unreasonable stakeholder or boss, you are able to control how you respond. The key is to pause when you begin to feel stressed, and to count to ten in order to prevent your emotional brain from taking over and generating and automatic reaction. As you pause, look at the situation from several angles and ask yourself which meaning you attach to the event that you find stressful. At that time, also remind yourself that you can only really grow and develop when you're being stretched and tested. When you’re under pressure you get the opportunity to show your real strengths and to come up with creative solutions.  Many people perform really well at the edge of their comfort zone.
 
Finding the right balance between negative and positive stress is also relevant with respect to the teams you manage. If you don’t put sufficient demands on your team members, you are unlikely to lead them to high performance. If on the other hand you put too much pressure on them without providing the necessary support, they will begin to feel overly stressed and will under-perform. The best way to find out how they feel isn’t just to observe them, but to ask them. As a project leader it’s your responsibility to monitor your team’s stress levels as much as your own.

Have a look at the next post in the series where I provide the Ten Timeless Techniques to Combat Negative Stress.
 
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​Have you ever considered how important your values and beliefs are to the results you get (or don’t get) in your personal and professional life? Beliefs are so powerful that they shape your attitudes, decisions, actions, and ultimately determine your results. They are something you accept as being true or real. They are firmly held opinions about what you think you can and cannot do. Henry Ford said it very well; ‘whether you think you can or can’t either way you are right’.
 
Beliefs play a large role in how we interpret the world and serve as a kind of lens through which we look. The things we see, experience, think and feel are all adjusted through this lens to fit with our beliefs. If we believe that change is good and that opportunity is everywhere that is what we will see. Likewise, if we believe that leading a project is stressful, that customers are demanding or if we doubt our own abilities, then that is what we will experience. Unfortunately most of us are not aware of what our beliefs are and of how they impact our behavior. All we experience is a stressful or annoying situation, without understanding how our beliefs and attitudes are contributing to that situation. To make matters worse, the majority of our thoughts and beliefs in a day are said to be negative. The reason may be that as we grow up we are being made aware of the things we can’t do as opposed to the things we can do.

In her book, The Influential Leader, Rebel Brown explains that over 95% of our decisions and actions are driven by beliefs in our unconscious mind and that our conscious mind never even gets involved. She states that whereas our unconscious mind takes in 11 million bits of data per second, mainly from our eyes, ears and feelings, only a very small percentage – 126 bits per second – is selected and presented to our conscious mind. This means that we are in many ways slaves to our unconscious mind and that we are not as logical and rational as we might think. It is the beliefs in the unconscious mind, that filters out the data and decides which part is being passed onto our conscious mind, and which part is being withheld. If we want to change our reality, and the results we generate, we have to change our beliefs so that a different set of data will start to come through to our conscious mind.

A positive and empowering belief system will carry you a long way, and when you master it, there is very little that can stop you in your leadership track. Some of the studies that have been carried out come from educational circles where teachers and groups of pupils have falsely been led to believe that they were significantly more accomplished than the rest of the class. The results of these studies consistently prove that the students who (falsely) believed that they were more accomplished ended up with increased self-esteem and higher grades than their peers.
 
One of the essential ingredients in transforming into a leader is to replace the beliefs and behaviors that are not serving you with something more empowering. You can begin the process by identifying areas where the results you generate are less than ideal. What you need to look out for are any situations which you experience as complex or problematic – for instance where a team member is disengaged, you have disagreements with peers, user communities are resistant, you feel stressed out, or people are not meeting their commitments. These situations, and the results you generate, always reveal your underlying beliefs if you take the time to look at them in detail.
 
You can gain further insight into your beliefs by examining the below questions: 

1. What do you believe about your successes, your abilities as a manager and your role as a leader?
2. What do you believe about your relationship with senior managers? Do you for instance believe that they are more important than you and that you are not entitled to hold them to account and say no to requests? And what do you believe about your relationship with people who report to you?
3. What are some of the stories you are telling yourself? Do you deserve to be successful? Do you feel that you are good enough, skilled enough and that you have the right gender and age? Do you tell yourself that you are destined to be a great leader – or not?
4. In which positive and negative ways are these stories and beliefs impacting you? Are they moving you further towards or away from the things you want to achieve as a manager and leader?

 
 
If you would like to read more, please check out The Power of Project Leadership. 

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As you continue on your journey to become a better project manager and leader you may be considering which habits to kick and which habits to start embracing. But you are also aware that your good intentions - and new habits - may not stick. 

In order to create a new habit and achieve your goals, you have to change from the inside out. You have to take control of your internal world so that your thoughts and feelings can positively influence your outer reality. The best way to do that is to foster a positive and empowering mindset that will allow you to pursue your goals without hesitation. 

Let’s examine what this kind of empowering mindset looks like.

I am in control and I choose my own responses
The most empowering belief you can adapt is to know that you are in control and that you always have a choice. You choose your own beliefs, you choose what you want to focus on and you choose the decisions and the actions that you take. This is a very powerful belief system because it means that you take full responsibility for your actions without having to deflect blame onto others. It is true that you don’t have control over everything that happens around you, but you can control the meaning you assign to external events and how to react to them. If for instance you work in a very busy, competitive and reactive environment, you can either see this as a reason to emulate the behavior and get stressed, or instead define your own way of working based on what you know will generate the best results.

I have faith that the right things will come to me as a result of my actions
Part of having a positive and empowering mindset is to trust that as long as you do what can reasonable be expected of you, then the right things will happen. There is no need to worry unnecessarily that things might not work out or to imagine what failure looks like. In fact, focusing too much on the things that you don’t want is likely to derail you because you attract the things that you focus on. Your beliefs determine your reality. If you believe you will fail, chances are that you will. If you encounter a risk, by all means mitigate it, but then let it go. Spending time worrying about the things you cannot control is lost energy. Empower yourself by being proactive and by focusing on the right strategy and trust that success will follow.

I see the opportunity in every situation
A great way to set yourself up for success is to make sure that you don’t get discouraged or distracted by the issues or obstacles that you come across. We all encounter issues, but the difference between successful people and those who are not, is the way in which they deal with the unforeseen. Successful people approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided. When something unexpected happens, ask yourself how you can move forward in spite of the issues and which new opportunities have opened up as a result. Your job is to focus on the opportunity and the way forward rather than the obstacle itself.

I believe in myself and I am my own best cheerleader
In order to achieve your leadership goals, you first have to believe in yourself. You won’t come across as trustworthy, impactful and inspiring if you don’t have a strong regard for yourself. You have to feel that you are worthy of achieving the things that you dream of, and you have to have absolute faith that as long as you take the necessary action, then you can be every bit as successful as everybody else. This belief in yourself is not about being arrogant or putting yourself above the team. It simply means that you feel worthy of the things you desire. Feel this worth in every cell of you body and don’t leave your home in the morning until you fully embrace that feeling.

There is no such thing as failure; only opportunities to grow and learn
An empowering mindset is also one in which you don’t let fear of failure hold you back. If you are afraid of stepping up and showing yourself as a leader out of fear that you aren’t good enough – or that others might laugh at you – then you won’t get very far. You need to alter your view of failure into something constructive and allow yourself to feel the fear and do it anyway. Your failures provide the opportunity to learn and grow and will genuinely move you forward as long as you take on board the lessons. When you change your thinking pattern into one that doesn’t see failure, you take away an enormous chunk of negative energy and worry. You free yourself up to pursue that which is truly important.

When I decided to give up my job and become an independent project leadership coach, I faced a huge amount of fear. I had been an employee for 17 years and never before run my own business. Would I be good enough? Would people want to work with me and would I be able to make money? It took me many months to come to terms with this fear and to not let it control me. At the end of the day I had to have faith that as long as I did what had proven to work for other successful people, I would be successful too. I began to study all the great entrepreneurs around me and stopped focusing on failure. In fact I began to see my business as an experiment that I would learn from, in one way or another, even if one day I were to go back into employment.

Be fully committed to doing what it takes
Becoming an inspiring leader who adds value in everything that you do may not be achieved in a matter of days. It will take you months or even years and will require you to be fully committed to doing whatever it takes and to learn and refine your approach. Sure, there will be times when you lose sight of the overall goal, but your drive and commitment and positive frame of mind will get you back on track. At the end of the day it is your grit that will keep you going. All successful people have needed to rely on their determination to get to where they wanted. So stay committed to your goals. With a positive and empowering mindset you will reach them.