What’s better?

Hello and welcome to this first post on the SFC Blog. Thanks for exploring my site. This blog will share thoughts, ideas, and practices to help you and your organisation respond to and adapt to change. The blog will have content in all sorts of formats to mix things up: some traditional written, and others will have audio and video snippets just for variety.

A good blog is a conversation between the writer and readers and I do enjoy a good chat. Let me start things off with a question.

“What’s better?”

That’s an odd question to start something with, isn’t it? And if your first response is “Nuthin.” stick with me and I’ll explain how this question is useful.

Our brain has a negativity bias which is very good at letting us know about everything that’s going wrong in the world. Asking this question, “What’s better?”, is a little tap on the shoulder to temporarily adjust your focus to notice other things. All the other stuff is still there and not going away but we are just shifting your awareness to see other things as well.

Once we begin to notice things that are going better, even just a little bit, then we might get curious about how those things happened. Sure, some are just random chance but more often, you somehow had something to do with making those things better. So how did you influence things to be better in some way?

Take your time to think about these questions. That will be a feature of this blog - I’ll ask unusual questions you may need to ponder. Allow these questions to ruminate and incubate in your head for some time to see what pops up. The mind always tries to answer a question it’s asked.

“What else?”

So maybe you came up with a quick answer to the first question and have rushed on to keep reading because there’s a notification nudging your attention and that email that you need to reply to before you get to the next meeting. Thanks for sticking with me.

What else is better? There might be more than one thing if you take the time to ponder a little more. There might even be a few things if you give yourself some extra thinking time. Make a note of these in some way, even if it’s just popping open another window and quickly typing them.

Like your first answer, there was maybe something you did that helped these things happen as well. How did you contribute to them? Add this to your notes.

“How did that make a difference?”

You have some things that are better, even just a little bit, and you contributed to those things happening in some way. How did noticing these things make a difference for you?

I’m guessing you now realise that you have some ability to influence events, just a little bit. Maybe you have another idea of something small you can do that doesn’t take much energy. There is lots of power in small actions. They help us get out of a stuck state of feeling overwhelmed by trying to solve all the world’s problems at once.

If you were to take that next small action, how might that make a difference?

Let’s continue the conversation

The first post on a blog is usually about me and how I can make a difference in your business and why you should pay me lots of money (yes, please!) but as I said, I like to have conversations, and I really like learning more about you. If the above questions made a difference in some way for you, please let me know in the comments.