New Year Spruce Up (part three)
Hello to you!
I am here with the last part of the New Year Spruce Up! I’m very sorry it is a week late! I notice that this is exactly what happened last year, and I was determined to fit it all into January this year (new year, brilliantly different Ella!! Ha!) but in the end, as I’m sure happened last year, life got in the way. Anyway, I’m hoping that perhaps, like me, you are also running a week late. And perhaps this is coming to you at just the right time. I hope so!
So this week we are getting to setting some intentions. I like to think of it as setting intentions rather than resolutions and this is why...
I remember aaages ago at work a woman called Caroline Webb came into work to talk to us about her latest book How to Have a Good Day. The book was about using “recent findings from behavioral economics, psychology, and neuroscience to transform our approach to everyday working life”. I found her lecture completely riveting and read the book afterwards, and I remember finding loads of helpful and valuable insights from it.
One that stood out was where she spoke about setting intentions. From memory, her example was (and I’m paraphrasing here): Imagine the scenario... There was a particular meeting she had booked in with a client and a fellow colleague. She was in a bad mood that morning and feeling grumpy with that particular colleague. From past experience she knew that they were likely take the lead in the meeting, talk over her and generally not give her chance to participate. Lo and behold, when the meeting happened she found she got more and more irritated with the colleague and left the meeting furious! I think after that meeting she did research on setting intentions and how they influence your results. The meeting was booked in again and this time she took 5 minutes beforehand to decide what she wanted to get from the meeting. And so when the meeting took place, instead of focusing on her colleague’s behaviour, she focused on her own particular aims. She said the meeting was much better! For some reason that always stuck with me, and ever since then, I’ve tried to set intentions for myself when I feel I’m a bit stuck or unsure about the future. And I use them at the New Year instead of resolutions.
Ok, so on with the Spruce Up!
So I have made two worksheets for you.
Part one is designed to help you bring together everything you’ve been working through the last few weeks and to find some common themes and threads.
Part Two is for you to find some intentions and then I have a system I like to use to help narrow things down and find a bit of focus in it all. After you have filled it in, you should feel clearer about what intentions you want to set for yourself and I like to use the Three Rocks system for setting some immediate goals. This is how it works. I have made a video which explains it all, but here is a summary:
Imagine you have a jar, a bunch of sand, pebbles and rocks. If you put the sand in first, then the pebbles, you won’t be able to fit your rocks in. But if you put the rocks in first, the pebbles can fit in around the rocks, and the sand can fill in all the extra little gaps.
The pebbles are all the little worky things you have to do all the time, like emails, meetings, planning, working on your website or portfolio. Whatever you can quite easily fill your time with if you’re not careful. The sand is all the rest: life stuff, calling your mum, cleaning the bathroom, cooking, washing… the idea is that you set one goal, and then choose three things (these are your Rocks) that if you do those, and prioritise them over everything else - put them into your jar first - then everything else takes care of itself anyway - the pebbles and sand slide in around your Rocks. It’s a super effective way of approaching setting goals or intentions, as I like to think about them.
Here’s the video: