Author: Vera

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It’s your response that matters

There’s no denying that throughout life, stuff happens. Events happen and they aren’t always what we label as ‘good’. The company we work for restructures and we lose our job. We become ill. Our spouse leaves. Someone we love passes away. The economy takes a dive. A global pandemic strikes. These things happen. And they will continue to happen.

Isn’t it interesting how we equate these events with the results we see in our lives?

We look at life and say: Event = Outcome

But there is a measure that is missing from that equation. Response.

As Jack Canfield, the renowned author, speaker and trainer puts it: 

Event + Response = Outcome

Viewing an event as the only driver that determines outcome is playing into a victim scenario. This is the space where we find pain dwellers. Those are the people who seem to constantly play the victim of circumstance. Everything is someone or something else’s fault. The economy. The family they were born into. This illness that’s befallen them. The cheating partner.  It’s the boss who won’t give them a pay rise.  

You know, it’s very convenient to blame someone else and whilst we sit in that blame space, we do nothing. We make no progress. We take no control whatsoever. And the longer we stay in that space, the longer we leave control of our life results in someone else’s hands or in the hands of some random external event.

However, if we acknowledge our response as being part of that equation and if we take ownership of our response, then that demonstrates just how much influence we actually do have on the outcomes for our lives.

You’ve heard this before: you may not be able to control what happens to you, but you can certainly control how you respond.

If you’ve fallen into the habit of blaming others for the way your life has turned out, then get curious as to what your response is whenever difficult circumstances arise. Do you join the pain dwellers, leaving it up to others to determine your fate, or do you decide on a different response – one that gives you back some level of control and influences a different outcome?

Perhaps it’s time to start owning your part of the equation.

Event + Response = Outcome

If you’d love to learn more or to get started in creating real change in your life, then join me for my upcoming webinar.

The webinar runs for 60 minutes and provides you with the opportunity to define, design and experience your vision for the life you would love to live.

For more information and to register, visit: 

Are you on the right path?
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Direct your energy to the right place

Many years ago, I went to a conference on corporate communications and I remember that one of the speakers asked us to brainstorm a list on all the possible ways to get employees who were resistant to organisational direction or strategy changes, to support and participate in the change. 

We’d all come across these people before, so this was easy. We spent a few minutes brainstorming all the things we would normally do and came up with a pretty standard list:

  • explicitly ask for their support
  • explain why maintaining the status quo is a problem for the organisation
  • spend more time with them to understand their fears around what was changing
  • make them feel heard
  • give them even more facts, more often, from more sources

These were all good ideas that work in most cases and yet, as many of us have learned, there are some people who just won’t accept any change to the status quo, regardless of the amount of effort you put into get them over the line.

The speaker then told us the most pragmatic strategy for dealing with people who resisted change. He said:

If you’ve tried all of those things that you just listed and it hasn’t worked, then stop putting any more time and energy into trying to bring these people along for the ride. Instead, use your energy to inform and support the vast majority of people who are willing to come on the journey with you.

Directing your attention to the nay-sayers, those who are glued to how things are today, will keep you stuck with how things are today.  Instead, direct your attention, and the attention of those in the organisation, on the future. Focusing on the vision is what will maintain the momentum for moving toward that new future. 

And this is sound advice for when you are creating change in your own personal life.

When you embark on your own personal journey of change, you’ll soon work out who in your life – your partner, the family, friends, colleagues, and social groups – is willing to support you in your personal transformation and who is not. 

There will be those who jump on board to support you from the get-go. Others will wait to see some progress before they start backing you, and of course, there will be those that, no matter what support you ask of them, what you do, what progress you make – well, they’ll refuse to accept the changes you are making in your life. 

When we finally work out what we want from life and we start making changes, the resistance, and even sabotage, from those closest to us can feel devastating. Our natural response is to want to persuade them to see how important this is to us and to get them to participate in our life-changing journey. But the bottom line is, there are some people in our circles, who, no matter what we do, will not buy into it.

There are many reasons for that resistance and I’ll explore those in a future article. But this isn’t about them. This is about you. It’s about what you need to do to keep moving forward.

Any significant change program within an organisation will see relationships between the organisation and some individuals end. Some people will move on by their own choice and for others, the choice will be made for them.

The same can happen in our personal lives. When you find you are no longer willing to sacrifice your future in order to maintain someone else’s comfort with the status quo, you are likely to find that some people will decide to opt out of your circle, and you may also find yourself distancing or even removing yourself from those who won’t support you and your new future. 

Creating change in life takes energy, so stop putting your energy into those who deplete yours. This means you need to stop trying to convince those resisters. Stop trying to justify why you need this change for your life. Stop putting your energy into addressing their fears and issues.  Stop doing those things because putting your attention and energy onto the nay-sayers means you’ll have no energy left to move yourself forward.

Instead, dedicate your energy on creating the future you would love. That’s what will get you there. And those who truly support you will willingly come along for the ride.   

If you’d love to learn more or to get started in creating real change in your life, then join me for my upcoming webinar.

The webinar runs for 60 minutes and provides you with the opportunity to define, design and experience your vision for the life you would love to live.

For more information and to register, visit: 

Are you on the right path?
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Why you need a roadmap

If you come from the world of project management, or if you run a business, you would be well versed in the concept of having a roadmap. There’s a start point, an end point that defines where you want to get to, and numerous milestones plotted in between.

But have you considered applying the same concept to your own personal life when you’ve wanted to create different results to those that you’re experiencing right now?

You can. And in fact, if you are really serious about creating something new in your life, you must.

The first step in creating a roadmap is knowing your destination. This is the most important step, yet it is the step that most people don’t take. They want something different, but they don’t clearly articulate what “different” is or by when they want to have it.

The second step is to map out a couple of key milestones. These are the places that you would expect to be at certain points in time as you move toward you goal. For example, if you have a particular result you want to achieve one year from now, you might set milestones at the 6-month, 3-month and 1-month marks.

Milestones break up that big, audacious goal into manageable chunks and keep us from feeling so overwhelmed by the gap between where we are today and where we want to be a year from now, that we don’t even bother starting.

You can think of milestones as mini goals. However, unlike the final goal, milestones aren’t necessarily set in stone.

The point of milestones is to have checkpoints against which we can assess our progress and course-correct, if required, to ensure we stay on track toward achieving our goal. The thing to remember is that when we set milestones, we base our expectations on a certain set of assumptions, which themselves, are based on our knowledge at this particular point in time. As we progress, we learn more and we will find that some of the assumptions we’ll have made will prove to be correct and others, incorrect. We might find that we achieve our milestone earlier than we thought we would or we might not be as far along as we thought we would be. And that’s okay. We’ll just re-set the next set of milestones using our new knowledge.

The third key step is to start taking action. Only once we start taking action – starting from where we are, knowing what we know, with the resources we currently have – will the next set of actions we need to take, appear.

The thing is, when we embark on a significant journey of change in our lives, we don’t know, and we cannot know, every single step that we’ll need to take in order to get to that goal. Similarly, we can’t know each and every action we’ll need to take to reach the 6-month mark or the 3-month mark, or even the 1-month mark. But we’ll have an idea of where we expect to be. We’ll have a direction. It’s only once we start moving, once we start taking action, only then will the next action steps become clear.

When I work with clients we get really clear on 3 things: (1) Wishing for different results won’t get you those results unless you take action; (2) Taking action without a clear destination in mind will simply keep you busy but won’t necessarily get you anywhere; and (3) Not having any milestones to guide you along the way will either stop you from starting in the first place, or will see you getting off track and missing your goal. 

The bottom line is that if you are serious about creating change in your life, you are going to need a roadmap: a start, a clearly defined destination with a date by which you want to achieve it, and a set of milestones to break up your journey into manageable chunks that also keep you on track.

To learn more and get started on creating a roadmap to your dream life, join me at an upcoming complementary webinar.

These webinars run for 60 minutes and they provide you with the opportunity to define, design and experience your vision for the life you would love to live.

For more information and to register, visit: 

Are you on the right path?
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Keep your eyes on the prize

You know an organisation has done a good job in embedding their vision when you hear their leaders and their employees all using the same language to describe their company and its future. Written communications and conversations with leaders all contain some link to key strategies or values fundamental to the future state.

There is consistency in messaging, and well-skilled leaders know how to re-frame someone’s negative statements or questions back into the perspective of the compelling vision. They don’t get distracted by the problems, nor do they allow themselves to be drawn into the negative statements about why things won’t work, why it’s not possible, or everything that could go wrong.

It’s not that they don’t address problems, nor are they pretending that risks and issues don’t exist. They certainly get addressed. But that’s not where their focus lies. 

To use an old saying, “they keep their eyes on the prize”.

And that’s a great approach that we can apply in our own lives. But first we have to overcome our conditioning that keeps us looking for, and finding, why things won’t work, why what we want isn’t possible, and putting our attention to anything and everything that might go wrong.

For most of us, we’ve never even noticed that our standard ‘go-to’ position when someone shares an idea with us is to list off all the things that they should watch out for, all the things that could go wrong, and come up with all the reasons that idea just won’t work.

For most of us, that is our default position. That is, until we notice that this is what we do.

And that’s a pretty big step. To catch yourself out jumping straight to the negative.

Staying focused on what could go wrong is the best way to guarantee staying stuck in our current circumstances. Our energy goes into where our focus is. So, if you continue to focus on the problems, your energy will keep you mulling around in those problems. But shift your focus onto your goals, then your energy will propel you towards those goals. Dealing with any actual problems will be by-the-by. You’ll deal with them, but you won’t put any more energy into them than is required because your energy will be directed at moving you toward what you are focused on: achieving your goal. 

If you’d like to learn more about staying focused on your dream or vision or if you’d love to create a vision for your life, then join me on for one of my upcoming complementary vision building webinars.

These webinars run for 60 minutes and they provide you with the opportunity to define, design and experience your vision for the life you would love to live.

For more information and to register, visit: 

Are you on the right path?
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Visions aren’t just for organisations

As a professional change manager, I often work with organisations to develop the strategies to, not only get them from Point A to Point B, but to also define, with clarity, what that Point B is. It’s the goal, the target, or an aspiring vision.

A compelling vision is the life-force of a thriving business. Great leaders understand that a compelling vision is what drives every decision and every action within their organisation. It’s what motivates, energises and inspires employees, and it is what keeps everyone moving in the same direction.

But did you know that, as individuals, we also need a vision, something compelling to work towards? We do understand this on some level. When we envision a significant event such as a wedding day, a milestone birthday, or even a holiday, picturing that event motivates us, energises us, inspires us, and it’s also what keeps us on track to creating that event.

But what about life as a whole? I find it fascinating that people will invest extraordinary levels of energy, time and money to envision and create a one-off event, but not apply the same, if any at all, energy, time or money to creating a life they would love. 

Have you ever sat down and simply thought about what you would love your life to look like? Perhaps with this Covid-19 situation you’ve finally had enough down-time to really look at your life and re-evaluate what’s important to you, how you want to spend your time, and who you want to spend your time with. Perhaps you have finally had enough down-time to re-think what you’d love to do with your life and to contemplate what you’d love your ‘new normal’ to look like. 

Well, that my friend, is the beginning of creating a vision for your life.

So what’s next? Well, if you’ve given this vision some thought already, or, if you simply have felt an inkling that you’d like something different for your life but aren’t sure exactly what it is, why not join one of my monthly, complementary vision webinars?

These webinars run for 60 minutes and they provide you with the opportunity to define, design and experience your vision for the life you would love to live.

For more information and to register, visit: 

Are you on the right path?