I remember feeling rubbish at my job. I also knew that I was my own worst critic and set very high standards for myself. After struggling for a while, I decided it was logical to measure my peers using the same scale I applied to myself. When I did this, nobody did very well.

That’s when I thought, we are all rubbish at our job. This didn’t make sense, it seemed very unlikely - why would the organisation employ all these people that were rubbish at what they were doing?

At New year people will often take stock and look at what they can do to improve their work situation. Naturally if things aren’t quite right, thoughts turn to a new job somewhere else. But is this using a sledgehammer to crack a nut as my grandad would say? Is it just something about your current role you need to change? Could you be overlooking the potential in your existing role?

Job interviews seem to hold a particular place in people’s hearts. And it’s not a good one.

A client came to me recently who had been out of work for a little while. They’d been applying for quite a few things and getting invited for interviews but that’s where it ended. It was becoming a disheartening routine.

Most of the time you can work out what you need to do if you hit a roadblock at work. Maybe you talk to people you trust and this helps you find a way forward or maybe you reach for a solution that’s worked for you in the past. Sometimes though you can get stuck with an issue at work that you can’t seem to resolve using your tried and tested methods. This is when coaching can help.  

We humans love a story. We love telling them, we love hearing them and we certainly love watching them on TV. In fact, we tend to think that everything has to have a story behind it, it makes us feel more comfortable.

Feedback is something that’s essential to increasing our self-awareness so we can make more positive choices about how we behave or respond to others. Whether it’s about the report we’ve written, the way we handled a meeting or the meal we just cooked. It helps us to gauge what works, what we’ve done well or what we could improve on. But often when we get feedback, we don’t hear it, or don’t want to hear it. We’re often too distracted by an emotion or the way we are reacting to it to listen properly. And in doing so, we’re missing an opportunity to be better.