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Welcome!

The monthly e mail newsletter for business professionals who want growth from Energise Brand Communications Ltd and Rachel Brushfield.

The purpose of this newsletter is to share simple tips and tools to make your life and work easier and help you to market yourself and your business as a unique brand.

This month’s theme is about…………… Making BIG decisions.

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Making decisions can be difficult and the bigger the decision, the more is at stake and so we feel overwhelmed and fearful, worry and procrastinate more. Growth and change is part of being human, but when you are standing at a key life, career or business crossroads and there’s no signs pointing where to go next, it can feel very scary indeed! Resisting change and staying stuck can cause illness. Knowing when to play safe and when and how best to take a brave leap is key.

If you’re standing at the edge of a ravine wishing to be at the lush pasture on the other side, looking down into the ravine is not the best place to focus on. The best place to focus on is the other side, the outcome, and then work out how to get there.

Remembering a time in the past when you successfully made a big decision and how you achieved this can be useful, making you resourceful for the big decision you face now.

Which big decision are you facing? Common big decisions include:

  • Getting married
  • Changing job
  • Changing career direction
  • Getting divorced
  • Taking early retirement or voluntary redundancy
  • Setting up a company/becoming self employed
  • Broaching a difficult subject e.g. about bullying at work or the issue of drugs with your children
  • Moving somewhere new
  • Downshifting
  • Splitting from a business partner (s)
  • Choosing a new house or car
  • Emigrating or moving abroad
  • Having kids or choosing not to have kids
  • Selecting a pension
  • Restructuring a department/company and making staff redundant

In this newsletter:

  • What makes big decisions so hard?
  • Common blocks to wise decision making
  • Top 10 tips to help you make the right decision

What makes big decisions so hard?

  • The stakes are high and consequences great - you feel that there’s no going back
  • You worry that you’ll fail, make a mistake or look stupid
  • You believe that you’ll lose something that’s important to you e.g. status, respect, choice or freedom for example
  • You fear that you’ll upset others or be rejected if you do something that’s right for you
  • Your imagination runs riot and you picture the worst; that the change will be stressful, painful and a disaster and you’ll have egg on your face and your tail between your legs
  • The decision affects people apart from yourself e.g. moving to a new area means uprooting kids from their friends and school
  • They have long-term consequences e.g. a pension and how much money you have to live on in old age
  • You fear being criticised, judged and blamed if it doesn’t go according to plan
  • You don’t know if the decision you make is the right one, because it is impossible to know
  • If young, there is little experience to compare against and you feel weak if you ask others for advice
  • Everything is always changing so you never quite know where you are
  • Humans are not robots so emotional/unconscious drives not just logic affect your decision process
  • You feel under pressure to decide quickly because the pace of modern life is so fast

There is no right or wrong answer to most big decisions and there is usually more than one route to get to the same outcome. What is vital is to be clear about who you are, what you want and how best to get it. Coaching helps you with this.

Taking a philosophical approach can help with big decisions. Life is about the journey; it’s not just the destination. The older we get, the easier it is because we have experience of making big decisions and more knowledge to draw upon to benchmark our decisions and thought processes.

Common blocks to wise decision making

There are many things that block us from being wise in our decision making:

  • We do what’s right for other people and not ourselves
  • We don’t think decisions through enough
  • We listen to the advice of people who have an agenda or who put their fears about change onto us, instead of seeking out objective advice from colleagues, coaches or mentors who we trust
  • We don’t trust our own judgement and are overly collaborative, using this as an excuse to put off making the decision, making things even more complicated because of the number of opinions that we need/want to take into account
  • We procrastinate because we feel overwhelmed by the decision, instead of breaking it down into step by step mini decisions
  • We lack time and feel stressed, so can’t effectively review our options from different angles
  • We allow ourselves to be taken in by sales people or propaganda instead of asking intelligent searching questions
  • We don’t trust ourselves and listen to our instinct and intuition
  • We don’t fact find and gather information, so make hasty decisions without all the key facts at our fingertips
  • We get paralysed by fear of change and uncertainty instead of ‘feeling the fear and doing it anyway’
  • We settle for second best instead of believing that we deserve the best
  • We don’t know what we really want and what’s important to us
  • The weight of the consequences of the decision inhibit our ability to think clearly

Identifying the blocks, both actual and perceived, is the first step to addressing and overcoming them.

10 tips to help you make wise decisions

Here are 10 simple tips to help you with any big decisions that you are facing. Let us know if we can help too as our job is to be an objective, supportive and confidential sounding board, helping you to think things through and come up with your own answers.

  1. Give yourself quality time and space to think through a decision and its consequences
  2. Picture yourself months/years after the decision and consider the possible consequences, positive and negative
  3. Pinpoint what specific things you currently have that you like and want to keep and whether they will remain in any change from the decision you face. How might you still get them, but in a different way?
  4. Ask the advice of people who you trust and respect, someone who has been through a similar decision or get an objective coach or mentor to help you think things through carefully and plan the change in simple steps
  5. Imagine that you change nothing and nothing changes. What’s the consequence of this for you compared to what you’ll experience if you make a change? Weight things up.
  6. Gather information from reliable sources to help you to make an informed decision
  7. Remember that fear of change is natural and don’t let yourself be stopped by other people’s fear
  8. Define a very clear goal with specific success criteria
  9. Trust your instinct and listen to your intuition. Know how to notice it so that you don’t mistake wishful thinking for intuition
  10. Have no regrets and trust that everything happens as it’s meant to be. If things turn out differently to how you expect, remember that there’s a learning in everything

You can never really know if a decision is right. All you can do is make an informed choice with the resources available to you at that time. Most decisions are not a cul de sac. Remember that there are always different ways to get to the same end – equifinality – the key is knowing your final goal or outcome and how you’ll know that you’ve reached it. Good luck!

We look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers

Rachel Brushfield ©
Director, coach and marketing mentor
Energise – Insight & Clarity for Growth

Previous newsletter topics include: managing yourself; being specific; rewarding relationships; career crossroads; 2005 stock take; becoming unstuck; self-promotion; safe risk; optimism; more health, wealth and happiness; how to handle ‘difficult’ people; how to stop wasting and save time; maximising your potential;how to do absolutely nothing; listening; career choice and change; stress; focus for results; procrastination; reflection; fear; rapport; productivity; self-branding; beliefs; time management and S.M.A.R.T. goals.

If you’d like to receive a back copy of any of these, please e mail us to mail@energisingconnector.co.uk putting the Energise Tips & Tools newsletter of interest in the subject box.

Contact

Rachel Brushfield
Energise Brand Communications Ltd.
t +44 (0) 845 22 55 010
m +44 (0) 7973 911137
mail@energisingconnector.co.uk
www.energisingconnector.co.uk/
Offices in WC2 and Chiswick W6

Helping business professionals make leap ups.

Energise - Insight & Clarity for Growth

Our services are:
C areer coaching, CV design & personalised outplacement
A ction learning sets
M arketing & brand mentoring
E xecutive coaching
L ife coaching

More tips and tools

Our web site has a ‘Tips and tools’ section, which is regularly updated, sharing free tips and tools to help make life easy. Why not check it out? Visit www.energisingconnector.co.uk and click on the Tips & Tools button

Why Energise?

There are lots of coaching companies, so why choose us? Here’s some facts about Energise:

WHY:

We feel strongly about helping people to help themselves and are passionate about addressing low self-esteem & lack of self-belief in society that so often acts as a brake to people maximising their potential. Often people don’t recognise their own talents and potential, so with our background in marketing and brand communications, we help our clients to market themselves as a unique brand so they maximise their potential

HOW:

We personalise our service to the individual and get to the heart of the matter fast, so are time and cost effective. We are down to earth, focused and focusing, practical, human and energising. Unlike many coaching companies, we do not insist on a contract, so coaching is flexible from as little as 1 hour a month.

WHO:

We work with: big companies including Diageo, Sony Ericsson, Cranfield University, AWAS and Clifford Chance, small businesses and many individuals. We also do pro-bono work for selected charities e.g. working with disaffected young people and prisoners.

WHERE:

Our central London office is on Denmark Street, WC2 - the Energise ThinkSpace which is also available for hire, we coach from our West London home office in W6 and on the telephone

WHEN:

Energise was set up in 1997 so we have an established track record of 8 years plus 10 years full time experience before that. We coach our clients from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday – Friday. We work with people at a crossroads/point of transition in their lives and jobs, helping them to define their goals and realise and maximise their potential.

WHAT:

Our services are:
C areer coaching, CV design & personalised outplacement
A ction learning sets
M arketing & brand mentoring
E xecutive coaching
L ife coaching

Memberships

Energise have professional memberships with:
The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM)
The International Coaching Federation (ICF)
The Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD)
Business Network International (BNI).

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