PS: We are launching an exciting new course, The Business Soul Sessions, very soon. We can’t reveal the details just yet, but let’s just say it will completely change the way you think of business, and offer you a whole new blueprint for creating a soulful business that generates significant profits you can be proud of. Hop on the waiting list today to find out more and get:
The chance to shape upcoming contents and the new course by answering our simple Business Soul Sessions survey hereabout what challenges you are facing starting or growing your business. One person who responds by Wednesday 8 April will win a free place on the course when it launches later this Spring!
Your free copy of ‘Your mission in business’ (interactive worksheet to dig deep into what makes your business tick).
The opportunity to get an exclusive early bird offer for course registration (it’s HUGE) – only available to those who join the waiting list.
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We just had to share this powerful TEDx Talk about the power of imagination and how our lives are not determined by what happens to us, but by the choices we make…
This is a guest post by one of the UK’s leading experts in digital distraction and digital detox and author of The Distraction Trap: How to Focus in a Digital World, Frances Booth. Find out more about Frances here.
Email management is something that many of us tend to ignore, or not even think about.
Despite email being such a big part of our daily working lives, and presenting such a big chance to make productivity savings, many of us just resort to a default always on mode to deal with our emails.
It can sometimes seem like all we’re doing is clearing messages, desperately trying to empty our inbox faster than the flow of new messages coming in. Or, we spend hours just wading around in our inbox, feeling overwhelmed. We know we’re spending our time unproductively, and feel like we’re fighting a losing battle.
Yet still we don’t tackle the core issue – the way we’re choosing to use email.
images in this post from the fab workshop I took with Philippa Stanton (@5ftinf on Instagram)
I woke up at 5am on Sunday morning stressed about one of the projects I am working on. I couldn’t get back to sleep, as one particular problem kept going round and round in my head like a siren. Mr K got up and made me a cup of tea, we talked through it and I felt better. But I still felt like I needed to do something about it, to spend the day working on it, even though it was Sunday. And not just any Sunday, but Mothering Sunday.
The ever-thoughtful Mr K was planning to have Sienna for the day while I took a workshop with Philippa Stanton, known on Instagram to her nearly-half-a-million followers as @5ftinf, famous for sharing stunning still life photos of flowers and objects laid out on her wooden kitchen table. This was to be my first creative workshop in months, and I had been looking forward to it for ages. But as I sat there eating my toast and giving Sienna her breakfast I nearly cancelled the workshop, feeling guilty about wasting money if I cancelled, feeling guilty about wanting to work on Mother’s Day, and so it goes on. I am sure you know the feeling.
But Mr K encouraged me to go anyway, to forget about everything else and have a nice time. It felt very indulgent – six whole hours arranging objects into pretty configurations, when I had other pressing things to do – but I went, and I am so glad that I did. Those six hours disappeared in a dreamy haze of colour exploration, meditative composition, nosing around Philippa’s lovely house, picking flowers from the garden and sharing stories over tea and cake with the five other mothers at the workshop.
Snacking is a normal part of 21st century life and, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it’s estimated that by 2015 the world snack foods market is expected to reach almost $335 billion. So why is the industry growing so fast and why are we snacking more now than we ever have before? It seems that longer work weeks, busier schedules, irregular meal times, and stress are all key triggers, and that we also snack for comfort or to give ourselves a pick-me-up if we’re feeling low, tired, lonely or bored.
Snacking isn’t necessarily bad; it can even be healthy. But it depends on the food you choose. When a snack attack strikes, instead of heading for the vending machine, opt for foods that are high in fibre or protein and low in sugar which will stop your hunger pangs and keep you going until your next meal.
Here are some simple healthy snack ideas for busy people on the go…
This is a guest post by Louise Armstrong. You can read more about Louise here.
In my last two posts I looked at how we can embrace our ever-changing world and evolve the way we live by adopting some simple techniques to help us survive and thrive in the future. Today, in my final post, I wanted to share with you the most powerful technique of all: it’s one that will help you to unlock your own potential and inspire you to make the most of the human experience. It’s the power of imagination.
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”– Albert Einstein
We all know what it’s like to dream, even if we can’t remember what we actually dream about, and scientists have now proved that dreaming plays a central role in our emotional health, our memory, our learning and as a way to help us find creative solutions to our problems. They’ve also discovered that over half of our waking thoughts are daydreams and that this is when we ‘unthinkingly’ do our best thinking.
In fact some of the biggest inventions of our time came about through daydreams – the Internet, robots, rocketry, test tube babies, the list goes on. All these things were dreamed up by imaginative people; people who went beyond facts and thought globally and synthetically, made serendipitous associations and came up with surprising and novel solutions.
“Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” – Gloria Steinem
Imagination really can change the world because new ideas can change the world and it takes imagination to have a new idea. Imagination fosters empathy – the ability to “walk in someone else’s shoes” – and it also enables us to find creative, innovative solutions to problems. By unlocking the power of imagination for ourselves we pave the way to a life of awareness, fulfilment, freedom and personal power. Imagination is not the product of a gene pool lottery; it’s inherent within us all.
Here are my top tips for developing your imagination:
1. Create space for your imaginationto roam free
“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.” ― Philip José Farmer
Allowing yourself to dream is like making a statement of intent: you are giving yourself permission to explore the possibilities and opportunities that open up when you free your mind. In our hectic daily lives, we don’t always give ourselves the time or the freedom to dream and yet it’s one of the most valuable gifts we can give ourselves.
I make time to dream in the morning when I first wake up and I write my thoughts in a notebook – it’s fascinating to see what emerges. Sometimes I daydream while I’m cycling to work. It’s amazing what thoughts pop into my head and very often I’ll come up with the perfect solution to a problem I’ve been having.
When do you give yourself time and space to unlock your imagination and dream?
2. Share your future truths
We all have dreams – big and small – but all too we keep them to ourselves. When you put yourself out there and start to share you find that amazing things can happen. Often you realise that other people are dreaming the same thing too! Unlocking the collective imagination goes a long way to counter all the negativity and angst we face in the media.
This happened for me recently as a result of a little project that I started in my own community. The Peckham Coal Line began as a seed of an idea we had to turn a bit of disused railway into a park. The dream was shared on Facebook and then we built a simple website to raise awareness. Before we knew it 50 people in the local community had emailed me to show their support and offer up their time to help. It is still early days but the project is gathering momentum and this is allowing us to talk to the local stakeholders and ride out the collective imagination of the local community. It’s so exciting to see the dream come to life.
A forgotten space: view of the west part of the coal line route from the Bussey Building with the city skyline behind
What’s your dream? Where are you going to share it? It might be a conversation with someone you know, a stranger, or a post on social media – start small and be open to where it takes you.
3. Create a prototype: make your dream a reality one layer at a time
Have you ever noticed that the ‘hi-tech’ communication devices you used to see in Star Trek look just like the early Motorola phones? It’s a commonly held idea that fiction informs reality and film props add that element of believability by making ideas a little bit more tangible.
The idea of developing and prototyping future concepts is widely accepted in design circles – so why can’t we apply this same idea to our own lives by adding layers of reality to your dreams? By experimenting with our dreams and taking small steps to bring them to life, we stop feeling stuck or overwhelmed and instead start feeling excited and that we’re making progress.
One project I worked on this way is IoTA – a space to help non-techy people make use of the ‘internet of things’ technology that is set to grow massively in the future.
The first thing we did was to draw out the idea. Then we described it. And then we made a film about it. We didn’t think much would come of it but when we shared it on social media people loved it. Before we knew it we were running a session with teenagers at a school in Manchester to put the ideas into reality. Being open to possibilities has meant that the project has now won some funding to enable us to develop the ideas further and we’ve created a new company as a consequence. It sounds grand but in retrospect all we’ve done is kept adding more layers of reality to grow our idea.
What can you do to add a layer of reality to your dreams? Maybe you can draw it, paint it, or make a little model. Maybe you can act it out, or do something productive towards making it happen.
4. Be your future, today
We think about the future being far away, and so it’s easy to put things off and tell ourselves that we have all the time in the world to realize our dreams. The fact is the future will be here before we know it so we may as well start living it today!
“The future is radically open, and it is shaped by who we choose to be in the present” – Maureen O’Hara, Dancing on the Edge
You owe it to yourself and to the world to make your dreams come true and sometimes you have to think outside the box and be imaginative in order to help bring your dream to life.
For instance my dream for my future is to feel aligned in my mind and body. To get there, I know I need a better work/life balance. So today I decided to experiment with my work day. I worked in flow with my natural energy patterns and decided to go for a swim at noon, which boosted my creativity, motivation and productivity in the afternoon. Ok, I’m not making huge life changes, but starting small makes it manageable and when my goals are manageable I know I’ll stay committed. I’ll keep experimenting until I find what works best for me, and this will take me another step closer to the big dream of living more holistically.
The big question is: what will you do to unlock your imagination and realise your dreams today?
If you have a business you want to grow, please take a moment out of your day to read this. It could be very important for you.
If someone told you it is possible to start a new business in a recession, grow it to seven figures in under five years, be cash-flow positive every step of the way, and have happy customers in 50+ countries around the world, you’d want to know the secret, right? If someone told you your work could make a real impact, and there was a way to massively grow your audience so you can make serious money whilst making a real difference, you’d want to know about that too, right?
Well that is exactly what we have done with Do What You Love and, in a nutshell, here’s how we did it:
On my happy list – an inspired coffee break
