Claudia's Blog

Insight #2: Surrender (to what life presents you with)

Surrender – not a word anyone really likes, right? The connotation is rather negative. It smells and tastes like giving up. Losing. Not being in power and control anymore.

The thing is: life can be wonderful. And really shitty.

And throw things at us which we consider as horribly bad, heartbreaking, extremely difficult or challenging, tiring or exhausting or even unbearable.

And it rarely unfolds exactly as we want it to.

Very often these are situations we cannot change or don’t have any control over. Or life presents us with stuff we have not planned (if we consider it good or bad is a matter of perspective. A topic for another time)

We get fired from a job.

Our partner ends a relationship.

A person is treating us horrendously bad (we could change the situation, not the person though).

Our assets shrink to nothingness due to a downturn in the economy.

We get sued for something.

Our job is suddenly being moved to a...

Insight no 1:

Whatever someone does “to” me, has nothing to do with me and all to do with the other person.

 “He never said thank you – he’s ignoring me….I’m not really important”. We’ve all been there. Someone treats us horrible, outside of our set of values or understanding. We start interpreting, put a label on the behaviour, judge, and unfortunately, the judgement often has to do with beating ourselves up on some level.

It must be me, right? Why would this person say that otherwise (or ignore me, or be rude, offensive or whatever)?

WRONG.

We all go through some struggle. So does the person we might have issues with. Most of our thoughts circle around ourselves (this is why we take things so personally!). So do the thoughts of the other person.

Their rudeness, offensiveness, negligence or dismissiveness has nothing to do with us and all with him or her. How he sees the world, what kind of challenges the person deals...

Too much to do (or so it seems) and too little time. A common disease which attacks me as well from time to time. Suddenly things seem to pile up and before we can blink, the day is over.

And the pressure increases.

And voila: we feel stressed, thoughts start racing in our head, we're urgently looking for solutions, start rushing and trying to be even more efficient than usual. 

More often than not with the result that we're even more stressed AND still not all things are being done, we start lagging behind, which boosts stress again.

A pretty damn horrible spiral. 

Thankfully there are some strategies that help us getting out of that. In this video I talk about the 3 I found really helpful and most effective (there are many more - still, got to start somewhere, right?).

No time to read or watch?

Well, that's exactly the trap we fall into when we got so much to do. Instead of hitting the brakes and changing something, we continue doing more of what we've done in the...

87 % of all people in Central Europe are stressed - regularly. From a bit of stress to burnout symptoms. Stress creates havoc in our life. In our bodies. And for relationships. Time to deal with it - let's start with some measures for acute stress.

We all have learned to deal with stress - some more, some less. Most solutions are rather intellectual: Raise your awareness, don't let people get to you. Think positive. 

All those measures make sense. 

Often though, we find ourselves reacting with stress so quickly that the awareness is out of the window - or we find ourselves permanently stressed, as it built up slowly and we did not hit the brakes early enough.

If we're in the middle of high stress, our body tries to protect us. Which is great. 

The thing is though - we're not made for constant stress. This reaction was supposed to put our body in an alert situation to bring us out of range. And if we're permanently alert, the chemistry in our body creates havoc.

...

Are you rolling your eyes inwardly (another annoying person telling me how to do more!) and still getting drawn into the topic? “Wow, I know that there is so much to do that I have not done and I clearly did not achieve everything I really wanted” and “this headline really triggered me…and not in a good way”.

Well, now you are here you might just want to check out if there is anything NEW that you can do to actually achieve more, faster.

 In my last article in which you could score yourself where you are on the scale of  Personal Leadership, I gave you 9 questions to go through (in case you missed it go through the test and get your results right away – here we go). 

One of the them was, “how productive am I”? If we strive to live the life and have the career we desire, we have got to get things done. Otherwise there won’t be any progress. “Oh, I don’t want progress”, you might think now. In...

Quite honestly: 5 years ago I did not have a clue what Personal Leadership was. As I simply did not give it a thought. The definition that is.

Instinctively though I realized that there is something wrong with the way of how we learn to lead.

When I had just passed my mid-twenties and I worked for a start-up in the IT business (not that we called it like that 25 years ago) it was the first time that I managed a team. I had 3 people in a sales team to lead. And I failed miserably.

None of my team was in the slightest inspired by me and I had simply no idea what I was doing. Even when I read up about what I could do how and tested things out, it did only marginally get better. The second time around leading a team in a different organisation went better, still not great though.

Well, I could have assumed that I was simply a lousy leader. I realized later though, that I had started at the wrong end.

Start leadership at the right end 

What is the right end then?

Quite simple on one...

No, I’m not suddenly mad. And no, I don’t enjoy suffering either. I simply realized that the adversities in my life were the most useful, even if not enjoyable moments. And often those difficult situations happen between people: Disagreements and arguments.

My reaction to them tells me an awful lot about myself. In fact, often stuff I’m not really aware of.

This counts for everybody. And it represents one of the biggest chances for us to grow AND to get a good look into our subconscious mind.

Let me take a step back and tell you a little story.

A couple of weeks ago, I suddenly found myself in a difficult situation. An incredibly important relationship in my life was suddenly in danger of falling apart. We had a call and suddenly I learned about something which let me stop, fill with anger and disappointment top to toe, and quickly one word led to another.

I felt betrayed and unsupported by something the person had done – and the other person felt that I had...

Last week I attended a panel discussion with high ranking people from politics, academia and economy in Geneva. Including an ambassador for the UN who’s also an Executive Director in the Secretariat of the High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation (I had no idea such a position existed) and the Director General from the ILO (International Labour Organisation). The event was part of the ILO 24-hour Global Tour to celebrate its Centenary.

The topic of the discussion: “How to shape a future that works”. Transforming the global response to the future of work.

I won’t go through all the details what was discussed (as many of it was pretty theoretical anyway). What was clear though was, that on this level a lot of policies & regulations are being discussed from a 100-miles above view, which does not really help the individual.

The world (of work) is massively changing

The world keeps changing and Richard Baldwin, Professor for International economy at the...

Today was a glorious day here in Geneva: sunny, spring-like temperatures and fresh green all around me. I’m a total sucker for this new life sprouting out of the soil, trees and bushes and so I took a number of photos.

Gosh, it’s SO easy nowadays….when I was a kid there were still these films that had to be developed…oops, I’m digressing.

In the park opposite of where I live, I saw this art installation, which was erected a couple of years ago in recognition of Nelson Mandela and his promotion of peace.

I pass this thing basically every day. Today I went into the installation, looked up and took a photo. And took another one when I was a few metres away from it.

You would not believe that we’re looking at the same thing – when looking at the resulting photos.

Same thing – looking completely different.

And there was my inspiration for my weekly blog!

How we look at things

We see, hear, say and experience a plethora of things...