“Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It’s the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston Churchill.

Starting over, rebooting or reinventing often begins with recovering from failure. Failure, whether personal or professional, can be crushing. Recovering from failure is about making peace with the loss of the dream (at least for now). Every failed marriage, every business failure, every professional failure confronts us with “a dream deferred” and even a dream denied.

Face the Brutal Truth
It also confronts us with ourselves – our imperfections, our miscalculations, our personality flaws and our triggers. We can choose to face the brutal truth – which is the key to growth and change – or we can try and protect ourselves with denial. We can blame the partner who ripped us off; we can blame the ex-spouse who is a relentless bitch/bastard/cheat/whatever; we can blame the economy; we can blame apartheid – pick your scapegoat. We all know that blame, no matter how justified, and refusal to take accountability for our own lives keeps us stuck in the past.

Decision Time
Making a fresh start is a series of decisions. It starts with the decision to leave behind us what has gone before. Sometimes this is the decision to stop trying to pursue something that is clearly not going to work out. My father used to say “the nicest thing about bashing your head against a wall is when you stop”. I think that is true. Of course, there are many instances where you just need to get up one more time than you are knocked down; and there are other instances where you just need to get out of the ring.

Eyes Forward!
Another aspect of the decision to leave something behind us is the decision to focus eyes forward and take one step after another towards the future we want to create, no matter how difficult. It is often the eyes front thing that can be the most challenging. It is tempting to look back at the cause of our failure – but continually looking backwards keeps us in the past. We CANNOT move forward while looking back over our shoulders.

Forgive Yourself
A second decision that we need to make is the decision to forgive ourselves – and anyone who has wrestled with forgiveness of any kind will know (i) it is something you do for yourself in order to free yourself of the past, and (ii) you have to do it over and over and over again every time the memory of that wound consumes your thinking. Forgiving oneself is no different. No matter how blameworthy someone else may be in your failure, you were still part of it.
Perhaps you turned a blind eye to an alarm bell; perhaps you neglected to deal with something you should have dealt with early on; perhaps you were relying on someone else to create your big break and they let you down; perhaps you simply didn’t see something coming. In any event, you were there and you were part of it. So self-forgiveness is critical, and it is just as challenging as forgiving another person – over and over again you will need to say “I forgive you”.

Forgive the Other
A third decision is to forgive the other, if there is one. Forgiveness does not make the wrong ok. What it does is it frees you of the tyranny that the wrong wields over you. In so many instances, the person who did you wrong has gone on to live their lives with zero concern for you at all. In many instances, there isn’t a single person who has wronged you, but an entire system. Your holding on to the wound, the anger, the resentment has NO impact on the other. But it has an enormous impact on you. It keeps you stuck, it stops you from making your way, it enslaves you. If you want to be free to move forward, you have to let go. That is what forgiveness is – letting it go.

Envision the Life You DO Want
Once you are working with these decisions, you can think about and envision the life you want to create. This could be:

• The business you want to build
• The relationship you want to have
• The dream job you want to find
• The new life you want to create

You have turned your back on what you DON’T want. Now it is time to get clear on what you do want. Here are some questions you might entertain (depending on the relevance to your situation):

1. Building a business

• What is the problem you will solve?
• Whose life will be better because of your solution and how?
• How will your solution make the world/community/market segment a better place?
• How will your own life be enhanced by the business you seek to build?

2. Finding the relationship you want

• Describe that relationship in all its aspects;
• What kind of partner do you want to be?
• How will you change and grow in order to be the partner you want to be?
• What kind of partner do you deserve?
• What kind of life do you want to create with that partner?

3. Finding your dream job

• Who will you serve and how will you make their lives better?
• What (kind of) company do you dream of working for?
• What is it about your dream job that will get you up and excited every morning?

4. Creating a new life

• How do you want to live?
• Where do you want to live?
• What contribution do you want to make? (work or community)
• What do you want in that life? (family, social, activities, hobbies, etc.)

These questions are not exhaustive, and I hope they will lead to more of your own questions. What they do is they move your attention into the future. If you can envision something that you really really want, you will be able to move towards your new you and your new life. It’s an important start and the basis for any planning and action that will result.
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Contact Me
If you recognise that you need to start over, reboot or reinvent yourself, email me on [email protected] and let’s discuss your coaching programme.

Lao Tzu said "New beginnings are sometimes disguised as painful endings." For these painful endings to provide fertile ground for a new beginning, we need to make peace with it. There are 2 ways to make peace: either we need to make meaning of the experience and extract whatever learnings there may be; or we need to make peace with that experience being random - that it happened, it was not sent to teach us something, there is no good to be extracted.

In this video, I talk about how you could do this.

Contact Me
​If you are struggling to craft a new beginning and are still stuck in a painful ending, email me on [email protected] and let’s discuss your coaching programme.

Periodically Review, Refresh and Refocus
With the coming of spring in the southern hemisphere, it is a good time to review, refresh and refocus. Whether you do it in spring, at the beginning of the year, around your birthday or at some time when the need presents itself, taking stock, regrouping and gaining new focus is an important process in tapping into a good source of energy when one needs it.

Throughout life we experience successes, setbacks and failures. Sometimes we find ourselves just moseying along doing ok, making ends meet but not shooting the lights out. Sometimes we wake up to the fact that we’ve just been bored for a very long time and need to give our lives a vitamin B12 shot. These are all times when we need to make a new beginning.

Often when it becomes apparent that one needs to refresh and make a new beginning when one is a bit down in the dumps. I don’t mean depressed in any clinical sense. I just mean that one’s life feels a bit “meh”. At these times it is often difficult to identify exactly what one is dissatisfied with, so here’s a process which may help you. All credit goes to Jinny Ditzler, who’s book, “Your Best Year Yet” is the inspiration for this.

Set Aside Some "Me Time"
It’ll take you a couple of hours, so either set aside about 4 hours of “me time”, or break it into chunks of about an hour each over no more than a week – and trust the process. Why no more than a week? Because you will lose momentum and not give it the effort it deserves. Get yourself a journal, if you like writing on paper, or download the Word document below, and use that to keep your notes.

Question 1: What did you set out to achieve over the last 12 months?
Here you will write down everything you set out to do over the last year (you can make it 2 years if that makes more sense). These might be work goals, personal goals, study goals, travel goals, financial goals – anything that you wanted to do or achieve, even if you didn’t write it down anywhere or tell anyone.

Question 2: What did you actually do or achieve?
Write down all the things you did do or achieve; the things you partially achieved; the things you did or achieved instead of what you had set out to do. Also include things you did or achieved that have nothing to do with question 1. This might include setbacks you overcame, how you helped or supported someone else. It should be a generous list covering as much space as possible. If you get to 10 items, try and think of another 10. Try to fill at least one A4 page. It is important to give this real effort – it is too easy to lose sight of things you did despite the odds; how you made someone else’s life easier; how you settled a debt. If you find yourself getting stuck, take a break and go and ask some people who witness your life or your work. Let them remind you of all that you have done.

Question 3: What were your disappointments?
What did you not do or achieve that you had set out to do? What did you not even get to? What did you give up on? What old patterns did you repeat? What happened to you through no fault of your own – life’s blows and setbacks? Just write them down. Don’t judge them – put them down and get them out.

Question 4: What did you learn?
Look back over your answers to the previous 2 questions and identify the possible lessons. What did you learn about what works? What did you learn about what doesn’t work? What did you learn about yourself? What should you have done differently if you had known then what you know now? What advice do you wish someone would have given you?

Question 5: In what areas of your life are you not succeeding? What are your reasons/excuses?
This is a tough question because it asks you to look in the mirror and confront the brutal truth. We all have 101 really good reasons why we are not achieving what we would like to achieve – but many of them are the excuses we use to let ourselves off the hook. What excuses do you make? How it none/some of this not your fault? What does this reveal about your beliefs? Which of these beliefs are limiting?

Question 6: What do you want to achieve or do in the coming 12 to 24 months?
Break your life up into some critical components/roles/goal areas. These areas could include (but are not limited to): parent; child; friend; traveller; money manager; leader; learner; follower; faith; physical fitness; health; weight; leisure; hobbies. Limit yourself to about 8 areas or you will become too scattered. For each of those areas define some specific things that you would like to do or achieve in the coming 12 to 24 months. Make sure these goals are SMART: specific; measurable; achievable; relevant (to your life and values) and time bound. When you describe each goal to someone else, they must be able to clearly visualise the achievement thereof. List your goals in priority order so that your TOP 10 goals are clearly set out. Nobody can achieve a shopping list of goals, so if you focus on your top 10, you have a good chance of being at least partially successful.

Question 7: What do you need to believe about yourself and what is possible in order to achieve your new goals?
Go back and review your answers to question 5. The excuses you have made for yourself in the past say something about the beliefs that hold you back. What do you need to believe about yourself, about life and about what is possible if you are to have a hope of achieving all your goals? Write your new beliefs down – if necessary put them on the mirror where you get ready every morning.

Question 8: What one or two things can you do in the coming month to move each goal forward?
Don’t overengineer things. We want progress rather than perfection – so for each goal set down 1 or 2 things you can do in the coming month. Set time aside for them in your calendar to actually get them done.

Finally, implement some simple disciplines.
Your best friend in getting things done is your calendar. If you are using Microsoft Office (which most of us are) your Outlook calendar is your one stop shop. Use it to block out chunks of time for:

• Getting things done (make it an appointment with yourself);
• Planning (take 30 minutes once a month to look at your goals and plan the 1 or 2 things you will do in the coming month to move things forward;
• Setting follow-up dates for tasks that have dependency on others;
• Delegating tasks to others with reminders for follow up.

It's Never Too Late
I love this quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“It’s never too late to become who you want to be. I hope you live a life that you’re proud of, and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over.”
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If you are starting over, rebooting or reinventing, I hope this process is helpful.
 
Contact Me
​If you have any struggles as you go through this process, please drop me an email or a WhatsApp message (+27 82 5519504) and I’ll give you some guidance.

If you recognise that you need to start over, reboot or reinvent yourself, email me on [email protected] and let’s discuss your coaching programme.

Collaborating with Inspiring People IS inspiring!
Inspiring others is something that is expected of a leader. Those of us who assume it is about charisma sometimes don’t even get started. But charisma is perhaps the shallowest form of inspiration. Far deeper and more impressive is when the leader is seen to consistently deliver excellence in their own work; when leaders take time to build relationships with the people that they lead; when they know people well enough to empathise with them and tap into what inspires THEM. But perhaps most inspiring of all is the opportunity to collaborate on important projects with inspiring people.

Inspiring People are Catalysts for Creativity and Innovation
Inspiring people are not necessarily those high up in the chain who have achieved status and power – although it may include them. Inspiring people are those who have interesting ideas, are willing to experiment and fail, don’t mind being wrong, try new things, and move projects forward with energy and enthusiasm. Their energy and enthusiasm becomes infectious, and collaborators around them are inspired to try new things themselves. It is in the presence of inspiring collaboration that innovation and creativity are at their best.
Think about a project you have worked on that seemed to just limp along. What was the problem? Was the objective unclear? Was the team uncommitted? Was the job too hard?

Energize Your Projects
When you bring interesting, energetic and inspiring people onto a project team, something changes. Their individual energy becomes a collective thing, especially if the project leader does some of the following things:

• Helps the project team to get excited about the vision for the project – projects are intended to create something better and exciting for a business, and inspiration starts with knowing that you are participating in and contributing to something bigger than yourself;
• Guides the team in the establishment of clear “rules of engagement”. Project teams do not have the advantage of time in which to work these things out. The team leader needs to set the tone by getting the team to talk about and reach agreement on commitment to deadlines, how missed deadlines will be addressed, the nature of the participation that is expected, etc. After all, most team members have full-time jobs that they do in addition to working on the project, but that can’t be an excuse for reneging on commitments. Rather commit to what is achievable than commit to the unachievable and use your “day job” as an excuse.
• Gives team members freedom to get on with things, try things, make adjustments and report back. You put people on project teams to get things done – so expect them to get things done and stay out of their way. Be available when needed, but trust people who are committed to the vision – they have a stake in it.
• Allows/encourages people to speak for their own work – people who can speak about what they have done and what it took to get there feel valued. It is also an opportunity for them to become better known – and this is good for their careers. It also encourages others.
• Celebrates the achievement of milestones. Most projects are difficult – especially because people work on them in addition to their day job. Every achievement against tight deadlines or tough problems is worth acknowledgement. Celebrating milestones doesn’t mean always having pizza and beer (although it might), but it does mean taking a moment to savour the achievement and slapping each other on the back, so to speak.

​So if you have team members that you’d like to inspire to punch above their weight, think about how you could pull them into some interesting projects – projects that expose them to interesting, energetic people, that stretch them, that give them the opportunity to contribute to something important.
 
Contact me
If you are a leader/manager and you recognise that you need to become a more inspiring leader, email me at [email protected] and let's discuss your coaching programme.