Many thanks to Kelly Sonora for sending me this link – 100 positive thinking exercises. My advice would be not to wait until you’re having a bad day to put these into action – once you’re in a negative frame of mind it will require more effort and self-control to get yourself out of it. Trying practising some of them everyday starting from today – create some new ‘positive rituals’. This will make it all the more easier to continue once the going does get tough.

Image: wadem

100 ways to use visualisation and creative thinking to identify, explore and resolve business issues, presented in a brilliant Periodic Table format. This is a must for anyone looking for new ways to communicate visually – whether its data, concepts, strategy or metaphors that you want to illustrate.

This is a fantastic tool – if you hover your mouse over the Table, examples of each type of illustration pop up to show you how to use it in context.

You can use and/or adapt a fair number of these in Coaching too e.g the Story Template. I loved the Iceberg (so many businesses attend only to the bits they can see and hear, and ignore the more important bits which they can’t…), the Feedback Diagram (simple but effective) and Zwicky’s Morphological Box (brownie points for the jargon). The Failure Tree is the only one I could see that focuses exclusively on the downsides – not something we advocate if you want to win people over, although it’s a useful technique for analysing complex system problems.

And what about the Hype Cycle? I was considering its application to Coaching and Positive Psychology.WRT Coaching, I think we’ve survived the Trough of Disillusionment, and are travelling gently onwards and upwards through the Scope of Enlightenment to our destination which is the Plateau of
Productivity.

As for Positive Psychology, well in the UK at least, we’re still programming the Tom-Tom to get us to the Start of Media Infatuation. Put your seat-belts on, it’s going to be a bumpy ride…

With thanks to Sarah ‘Intellagirl’ Robbins, on whose blog I discovered the Periodic Table, and of course to the guys who invented it, Ralph Lengler and Dr. Martin J. Eppler from visual-literacy.org.

Of course I’m an avid supporter of the Open University – I did my MBA at their Business School in the late 90’s and have worked closely with them ever since. So I was delighted to read in the Independent yesterday (5 Dec 2006) that they are partnering the Trades Union Congress to provide a 10 per cent discount on entry-level university courses for TUC’ members, all 6.4 million of them.

This is a fantastic opportunity to start your own personal development. Of course, balancing work life and studying can be pretty tough (I’d rather not be reminded of that now so you’ll have to ask Jenny) especially if you also want to have some time for a social / family life, however, it also seems to be true that there is rarely any gain without pain (I wonder who really said that). Incidentally, one of the ways I got through my studies was to think ‘If other people can do it, so can I’.

So, how can you motivate yourself to get started on what could in all likelihood be a life changing course of action? (….There are some truths to “Educating Rita”).

A top tip, tried and tested by many of our coaching clients, is to visualise the outcome . Visualisation isn’t a new technique, you probably do it frequently already although you may not be very aware that you do it. So for example if I ask you to think about what you had for breakfast this morning, or who your best friend was at school, the chances are that you’ll remember this by creating a picture in your head.

So how can you visualise your goal? Well, you can do this in a number of ways: in your head by relaxing and mentally creating a picture of your outcome, you can get out your kid’s crayons/felt tips/paints and start drawing, you can use the whiteboard or a flipchart in an empty meeting room, or put those magazines to good use by cutting out the photos which appeal to your senses and make a collage out of them.

Choose whichever method which appeals to you, put aside a good 45 minutes and as you’re going through this creative exercise, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What it is that I want? Think about this in as much detail as you can.

Then imagine yourself having achieved this goal. Ask yourself:

2. When and where have I achieved this goal, and who is with me?

3. What has changed in my life as a result of achieving this goal?

4. What is my experience of having achieved this goal?

5. What has achieving this goal got me?

If you have plenty of time to spare, just go with the flow; you’ll be surprised what springs from your imagination once you give it a free rein.

Once you’re happy with the image you’ve created, spend 10-15 minutes reflecting on it. In our future blogs we’ll explore practical ways to use visualisations to achieve goals.

Whichever visualisation technique you use, it will help you see and experience the goal for real, and create a very powerful motivator which is 100% personal to you. We’ve had lots of positive comments from clients who have tried visualisation, and whose personal images stay with them. We’d like to hear how you get on with it!