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Trevor Cousins on the BBC
From January 2003 to November 2005 I presented a weekly life, career and work coaching feature on BBC Southern Counties Radio drive time show with Dominic Busby.
Although I have now moved on to pastures new, I am available to speak to journalists about issues related to career coaching, coaching executives in business, coaching teams.
I am particularly interested in the power that our personality, strengths and values have in shaping us.
Below are details of three of my broadcasts on the following subjects:
- Negotiating to get what you want without hurting others
- How to relax and go with the flow of life
- Overcoming inertia
NEGOTIATING TO GET WHAT YOU WANT - WITHOUT HURTING OTHERS
Life is about compromise and bartering. We start negotiating as children – “Mum, I don’t want to go to bed yet, can I stay up for half an hour longer?” The important thing if you are to have a happy and fulfilling life, is to make sure that you are a winner and not a loser in your negotiations.
If you feel resistant to being a winner, just remember that all negotiations are completed with an agreement or else they break down. In most cases the agreement will be acceptable to both sides so don’t worry about exploiting other people – you won’t be. There are instances when winning a negotiation is achieved without agreement through abuse – of power, physical strength, personality or wealth. However, if you win a negotiation through abuse, you will be well aware of what you have done – that’s something for your conscience to tackle.
So how do you negotiate better? Well there are three main aspects
- Know your upper and lower limits
- Enhance your position by offering perks
- Take a break if the negotiation isn’t going your way
Enhance your position by offering perks: what can you offer the other party which makes their position seem better but which actually costs you little or nothing? For example, at work, if you want a colleague to write a report and they are likely to miss the deadline, you could agree to extend the deadline slightly. In addition, you could offer to let them use your office so they can have some peace and quiet. Lending your office would cost you nothing but could make the proposition more attractive to the person you are negotiating with.
If it’s not going your way – take a break: never allow yourself to get into a position where you accept the unacceptable. If you feel you are losing in a negotiation, ask for a delay and time to think. This will give you space to review your position and what you can offer, enabling you to strengthen your case.
HOW TO RELAX AND GO WITH THE FLOW OF LIFE
A recurring theme that my clients bring to their coaching sessions is striving to make things fit in their life. There’s often a certain impatience to “get things done” or to “fix things”. Clients have decided what they want and they will try to do everything they can to make things work out. Often this is accompanied by lots of trying and striving and heartache and frustration.
I was talking to a client recently who was struggling with making a University course fit her needs, and I told her that it seemed to me that she was trying to fit a football into a shoebox, and however hard she tried, the lid just wouldn’t fit.
She was feeling very exercised about the whole situation because logic said it was the right thing to do but it just didn’t feel right.
The problem here is that the client is failing to:
- Listen to their intuition
- See the big picture of their life
Often. elderly people look back on their life, the good parts and the bad, and say that they wouldn’t change anything. Being able to look back on a long life, they realise that the trials and tribulations as well as the successes and joyous moments have made them what they are. They have come on a journey, never being able to predict where they would end up.
I often reflect on the fact that when I was growing up in Bedfordshire, I never imagined I’d be a coach living by the sea in Brighton but that’s where life’s journey has bought me – so far.
When you think about your current situation as just part of your journey of life – not the rest of your life – things can start to feel different. It enables you to relax in the knowledge that there is plenty of time for other decisions and other paths.
So, if you find yourself feeling frustrated about where your life is going or about a particular situation, try the following:
- Listen to your intuition – is your heart telling you that this isn’t really right for you or it’s not going to work out in the long run. If it is telling you this, really listen to its wisdom.
- Remember that if you decide to give something up – that’s fine. It’s not a failure. It’s simply a recognition that it wasn’t the right choice for you.
- Be aware that while you are spending all your time focusing on fitting a square peg into a round hole, you don’t have time to spend looking for the round peg.
- Remind yourself that whatever happens in the current situation, you will learn from it, and be able to avoid the situation recurring in future.
OVERCOMING INERTIA
When you want to make change in your life, there’s nothing as annoying as just not feeling up to it, just not being bothered to get off the sofa. If you ever feel this – you’re not alone.
But here are some tips you could try to get you on the move again.
Go for a walk:
If you remain sedentary through the day you are sending your body signals that it does need to do anything – no wonder then that getting started is difficult. So you need to get off the sofa, turn off the television and get out of the house. Take a 15-30 minute walk around the block and breathe deeply to get some air into your lungs. By getting the blood pumping a little and breathing in lung fulls of air, you will waken up your body and mind and prepare them for action.
Focus on what you need to do – then do just one thing:
Sometimes we have so many things to do that getting started seems pointless – it won’t make any difference. Often the list of things to do is not as bad as it seems. Simply write a list of all the things you need to do – under three headings: “Important”; “Can wait”; “Fun stuff”. Next, choose just two things off the list – one “important” and one “fun” and do them in whichever order you want to – but do both of them. This should get you feeling that you are making progress on the important stuff but also it will encourage to enjoy yourself at the same time.
Create the right mood to get started – make a hot drink, put on some nice music. Do whatever you need to do to lift your spirits a bit.
How to stop procrastinating and get those jobs done:
Give yourself a realistic deadline then act now or wait until later if the deadline will allow you to do this. Setting a deadline will allow you to focus on whether you are procrastinating or whether the job isn’t as urgent as you thought.
Do it as quickly as you can:
Challenge yourself to complete a task in a certain amount of time and keep your eye on the clock. Think about it. If you want to leave the office on time because you have a social occasion to go to, isn’t it amazing how quickly you can work.
Delegate:
If you don’t want to do the task because you don’t enjoy it or you aren’t naturally good at it, can you find someone else who could do it better than you or who would enjoy it more? Maybe you could do something for them? Or if it’s a regular task like the cleaning or gardening, why not employ someone to do it if you can afford it? You’ll be giving someone employment and freeing yourself up to do the things you enjoy.
Short bursts of activity – do a short burst of activity until you reach your tolerance level then have a break. So, for example, if you don’t like cleaning the house, why not clean the bathroom then do something else for 30 minutes. Then clean the half of the kitchen and take a break. When you do these shorter periods of work, try to do them as quickly as you can so that you will shorten the time you spend on them overall.
Be kind to yourself:
Imagine you are a friend of yours. If they were to read your list of things to do, what would they say to you if they were being kind? Would they advise you to knock things off the list, put things off, not be so ambitious? Sometimes we just need permission from someone else to drop a few things off our list, and simply lightening the load can get us going again.
Focus on the benefits:
Write a list of all the positive and negative aspects of the things you have to do. Then focus on the benefits – are they attractive to you? Can you see that by doing them you will be better off? If you can, then what are you waiting for? If there are lots of negatives, try one of the other exercises as this one won’t work for you.
Fear:
You may be putting something off because you are scared of what might happen. In this situation it’s often useful to write down how you feel. Simply putting pen to paper makes you feel that you are doing something positive. Very often, the process of writing helps us to work through our emotions. Seeing things in black and white often makes them seem better than you imagined. However, the only way to get over a fear – sometimes described as “False Expectation Appearing as Reality” – is to seize the moment and get on with it. Action is the only cure for fear.
Treats and rewards:
If you are the kind of person who needs a bit of a carrot to motivate them to get going, what treat can you give yourself for completing the first job on your list? Think of a treat, set yourself a deadline when you have to complete the task by, then get on with it.
Finally, if you are an avid TV watcher, I’d like to share with you a slogan that I spotted in one of the “Open Houses” during the Brighton Festival (when artists display their works in their homes and invite the public in to view them). The line I most liked was:
LIFE - NOT HAPPENING ON TV
So, now you have read this, what are you going to do today? I challenge you to commit to trying at least two of these exercises today.
