I’ve been aware of a certain feeling of dread creeping into my days of late. Weaning myself off the umbilical cord of home had to come, but am I ready? I’m not sure. I’ll have to be by Thursday because that’s the day I’m due to run my first face-to-face workshop in nearly four months. I’m also due for my first face-to-face meeting with a new coaching client. It’s legal in my state to do all of the above now, but it’s curious how reluctant I feel, even though I love my work and I usually really enjoy getting out and about and connecting with people.


I know I’m not the only person who feels like this. Some of my friends on our regular zoom check-in yesterday expressed similar sentiments, even the most extroverted and peripatetic among us. Another announced that she has decided not to go back to her previous job. We were discussing the need for her to mark the ending of her long-standing role even though she is is not returning to it, because endings are the first and most important step in navigating transitions. 


Author and change specialist, the late William Bridges identified transitions as the psychological process humans experience as they navigate change. Change is the external event or experience, while transitions are the inner process of adapting to change. Bridges identified three phases in transitions: 1) ending 2) the neutral zone and 3) new beginning. Bridges research with individuals, in organisations and in his own personal experiences of transitions, found that the more comprehensively we mark the ending of the last phase, the more smoothly and, in some cases, more quickly, we can move though the neutral zone to the new beginning.


It took a while, but this morning it dawned on me that it’s not just my friend who’s leaving her job that needs to mark the ending; the same applies to me and perhaps to us all as we re-emerge into a world that still requires mindful choices, social distancing and careful connection with others and with our environments. 


I certainly didn’t mark the ending of Life as We Knew it, back in March when we suddenly found ourselves in lockdown or, at least, in isolation and for some, in quarantine. We were too stunned at the radical events rapidly unfolding in a startled world around us - the closing of countries’ and our own states’ borders, unprecedented (that became one of our most commonly used words) cancellation of major events including the Olympic Games, unimaginable prior to this virus. 


We went straight to the Neutral Zone, that often uncomfortable place where we were no longer living our ‘normal’ lives but nor were we in the next version of ‘normal’. We were in transit. Up one day, down the next, watching the world’s burgeoning COVID-19 statistics with horror, doing what we could to flatten our own curve and hoping for the best. Some of us were home schooling, while working out how to apply for job seeker or job keeper payments, worrying about whether we would even have a job or a business to return to at the end of this and how relevant our work was anyway in the face of an international disaster of this magnitude.


Isolation has been a wakeup call for many of us. We now realise we have been living life on a trajectory that we never or rarely questioned. Coming to that realisation is a massive shift in thinking and the actions we now want to take to readjust our lifestyles to our new values and priorities are all part of the seismic shifts we are experiencing. Let’s not forget or underestimate the toll that takes on our psyches.


Some of us have learned new skills, discussed how to turn uncertainty into opportunity during this time, others have begun to compile research to help us heal from our various losses and still others have been busy trying to patch together ideas and options for what we might like the future to look like. But in reality, until there is a vaccine, the virus may wax and wane but it will not go away and we are destined to stay in some version of the neutral zone until it does.


Where does that leave us? 


I’m proposing that we go back to the ending we never had, celebrate the lives we had pre-COVID to help us through the neutral zone of this time, even as we start to engage in the outside world again. How do we do that? Well, not necessarily with a party, but you could find a safe way to celebrate with a small group of family or friends. It’s entirely possible to celebrate alone  - you could write a letter, create a drawing or painting or song or poem or anything that expresses and represents the life you had before isolation, and particularly the highlights, achievements or proud moments, what you learned, what you most enjoyed, the things you’re grateful for and the things you’ve missed. I have often recommended to coaching clients that they write a eulogy for a job they’ve left, anything that marks the ending and celebrates the life of that job or phase of life, just as you would for a person you have known well. Who are the people you’d like to thank and how will you thank them?


Once we’ve marked that ending, we’re free to navigate the neutral zone with less ‘stuck-ness’ - which may feel like sadness or hankering for what was or anxiety about what’s to come - and with more mindfulness and acceptance of what is, right now.


The next task, and this is my task right now as I prepare psychologically to re-emerge into the real world of work, is to mark another ending - the ending of this quiet, cosy, safe hibernation we called ‘isolation’. I need to identify and appreciate all the things I’ve enjoyed and achieved in this past few months, the fancy scrolls I’ve baked, the book I’ve half written, the daily yoga I’ve (almost always) practiced and to acknowledge the anti-social introspection I’ve felt, the sadness about people and things I’ve missed, the fears I still have of travelling into the city and re-engaging with the world.


Only then, I now realise, will I be psychologically as well as physically prepared to face the new world.




ere to edit.

Having discovered my inner novelist in Tropical North Queensland in August (see previous blog post), I’ve now found another voice - my singing voice.

Spurred on by a desire to optimise life and maintain good brain and general health, I joined a local choir early this year, the Gospel Groove at Willunga. We first heard them singing at a concert last Christmas and, apart from getting goosebumps at their glorious sound, i was taken by the diversity of the large group of choristers and even more by the enthusiasm with which they embraced the music. When one of the choristers urged me to ‘Come along next year’, I readily accepted.

I hadn’t sung much since childhood where I was part of my local school and Sunday School choirs. My parents and I often harmonised on long car trips and I loved that too. But a few years of smoking in my twenties took the edge off my voice and I lost confidence in singing, even as a guest at church weddings, something I once relished.

Joining the Gospel Groove has been a wonderful experience. There’s something about people who sing; they are warm and friendly and from the first night, people welcomed me with big smiles and checked in afterwards to make sure I enjoyed it. The choir leader is a fantastic warm and generous person who, apart from his massive skill at teaching us complicated harmonies and enabling us to sound fabulous is a very short space of time, is also lighthearted and great fun to spend a couple of hours with each week. He doesn’t seem to mind if we don’t always stay in tune - he’s much more concerned that we enjoy ourselves, and we do, without fail. 

Learning new things as we grow older is an important part of keeping our brains healthy and able to change. (I was disappointed to learn that doing samurai sudokus every day doesn’t cut it; it only improves my ability to do samurai sudokus). Singing in a choir allows us to learn new lyrics, new tunes and often co-ordinate those with movements such as rhythmic steps and clapping, with look easy and are surprisingly difficult to synchronise. Above all, connecting and sharing this experience with others of all ages is great for our brains as well as our hearts and souls.

Recently, my resident fellow chorister and I took our newfound singing voices to another level. We joined a group of fifty or more people mainly from all over Australia and New Zealand and formed ‘The Ephemeral Choir’ for a week of singing in the Blue Mountains. Led by three extraordinary choir leaders, Tony Backhouse, Anders Nyberg and Sue Johnson, we simply had the time of our lives. 

The grand old Carrington Hotel in the heart of Katoomba was our home for the week. We took over the ballroom for daily singing sessions, starting the minute we arrived before lunch on the first Sunday. After an impromptu warmup with Sue, which had me in tears in the first ten minutes because we sounded so beautiful, we separated into our different sections: sopranos, altos, tenors and basses and began learning new songs. Each day our brains had a gigantic workout as we practiced these and learnt more and worked also on remembering our fellow singers’ names. Slowly new friendships blossomed as our confidence and our voices began to soar together. Joy had kicked in.

One evening, we were entertained by members of the Melbourne Georgian Choir who came for the express purpose of singing for us and, the next morning, teaching us to sing in their special polyphonic style. We learned some of the history of Georgian music from prominent ethnomusicologists, Dr Joseph Jordanian and Dr Nino Tsitsishvili and, to our surprise, made a reasonable fist of singing one of their songs. 

The whole tour was organised by a charismatic and creative genius, Raymond Hawkins who herded us good-naturedly in and out of the ballroom each day, on and off buses to scenic places in the Blue Mountains where we gathered together and sang at lookouts, at hotels to thank the staff for their food and service and, a highlight, at the Cathedral cave at Jenolan Caves. Raymond specialises in surprises and arranged one night for us to have our own screening of Anders’ Oscar nominated Swedish film “As it is in Heaven” in the tiny cinema at Mount Victoria. On our final night we sang our hearts out for an audience of local choirs at the garden of the Norman Lindsay Gallery.

While our double-decker bus was heading to the Carrington Hotel for our trip back to Sydney, we gathered in the ballroom to listen to a magical recording of our voices in the cathedral cave. Finally, we linked arms in a large circle to sing a favourite ‘All I ask of you is forever to remember me as loving you’. To call it memorable is an understatement.

I have learned some surprising things this year from singing in choirs. First, it's not about your voice. So many people tell me they can't sing and it doesn't matter, unless you're auditioning for a closed choir. It is all about connecting; connecting with others to make astoundingly beautiful music together, connecting with and trusting in the skills of the choir leaders as well as the wisdom  of the choir (when you can't remember a single word let alone the first note of the song you're about to sing). Most importantly, I've learnt about connecting with oneself and with the joy that has been there all along just waiting to be unleashed.

There's a line in one of the songs we learnt in the Ephemeral Choir "Don't postpone joy, start singing now, right now, right now". Be warned though - once you let that genie out of the bottle, it's had to contain it. So we're not even trying. Fellow chorister Moira Were and I are bringing Melbourne's wonderful Sue Johnson to Adelaide for a singing workshop on Sunday 8 December, to spread the joy. Come along!

For tickets and details: https://events.humanitix.com.au/come-to-the-music-singing-workshop-with-sue-johnson

Work/life balance issues often surface in my work as a coach and mentor. I’ve never liked the term work/life balance; for one thing it infers that work and life are two distinctly different things and for another, it suggests that there is such a thing as balance between the two, that somehow the scales should be evenly weighted and that time spent working should be balanced equally with time spent enjoying life! Whoever manages that? Striving for this elusive idea of balance can lead to feelings of perpetual failure and guilt. 

This is not a simple issue but here are some ideas to consider.

Let go of your ‘open-door policy’. If you feel strongly that you want to be accessible and approachable whenever team members or clients need you, you’re making a rod for your own back. Carve out some uninterrupted time each day, at work, for your own work and let people know that you’re doing this and why. Put it in your diary and communicate a clear signal, eg a closed door or earphones that makes it clear when you are not to be interrupted. Tell people when you will be available and make a time to catch up then. 

Switch your email signals off and resist the urge to check every email as it comes in. Make two or three times a day to check and respond to emails and let people know that’s what you now do. Managing the expectations of others is important in making this work.

Delegate. Outsource. Call it what you will, but give some of that work you love to do to others. How will they ever learn and grow if you do it all yourself?

Coach your team members. When they pop their heads around your door or desk with a question, resist the urge to tell them the answer and ask them what they think instead. What would they do if you weren’t there? Who else could they ask? What’s one approach they could try? What’s another?What else? What’s their preferred approach? When will they give it a try? You might be surprised (or even disappointed) at how quickly they become self-sufficient if you stop spoon-feeding them answers and instead encourage them to think for themselves.

Have a good hard think about your priorities and list them. Whole of life priorities, not just work ones. These will change from time to time, so it’s a good idea to do this regularly. My top priority has been, for the last 15 years, to spend time with my husband. It took me a long time to find him and I don’t want to waste a minute of the time we have together. Having said that, I’m currently on the home stretch of a large piece of work that I’ve invested a lot of time being trained for and I really want to make the most of my opportunity to enjoy delivering the last of this work over the next three months. I’m also, with a colleague, reaping rewards from our Leading in Complexity programs we have been delivering over recent years, so this work is currently a high priority too. I also have a 100 year old mother, a large extended family, friends and neighbours who are very important to me.

The way I manage these competing priorities is to think carefully about what I say yes to and what I say no to. Having clear priorities really helps with this, so it’s easy to say both a straightforward yes or no to work and social invitations that don’t fit with my priorities.

If you’re clear and firm, people are surprisingly accepting of your choices and that results in a powerful sense of freedom.

I suspect if we aimed for a yes/no balance, instead of a work/life balance, freedom would be the outcome.
​

Like most people, I’ve been horrified at this week’s revelations about Cambridge Analytica harvesting Facebook users information to manipulate democratic processes and swing election results. My first reaction, especially when I read about the #deletefacebook movement was to, well, delete Facebook. Then I decided to wait for a few days to see if I felt differently when more information came to hand.

After Mark Zuckerberg’s lame apology-for-an-apology, and the news that Facebook offered Australian political parties access to user information to target campaign messages to marginal seats during the 2016 election, I have now chosen to say my goodbyes and #deletefacebook anyway. Truth is, I’ve been using it less and less as a result of the algorithms that keep sending me creepy ads and the same old messages and not much diversity of opinion and ideas, which interests me more.

But I do want to say goodbye to all the good times, and the friends who have faithfully liked my sunsets, agreed with my occasional outrages and kept me posted with their weddings, babies, birthday celebrations, amazing holidays, news and family celebrations (and responded warmly to mine).

I particularly want to thank Niki Vincent and Susy Daw who convinced me over dinner after a Leaders Institute Board meeting about 10 years ago that I could go on Facebook and got me started by inviting me to be their friends. Initially I felt very shy about sharing myself and my life but loved spying on the younger members of my family who were living or studying in far-flung places. Then i discovered there were times I’d rather not see what they were getting up to, after all. 

As the popularity of sharing photos on Facebook grew, it encouraged me to further develop my interest in photography, although I hasten to add, I’ve never been much of a selfie-taker or sharer. My husband requested right from the start that I not mention him in any of my posts and this helped when it came to considering sharing anything too personal. I remember taking a gorgeous pic of our cute 8 year-old grandson and asking him if I could put it on Facebook and he said No. I really admired him for that, even though I was dying to show him off to the world.

There’s no doubt that Facebook has exposed me to articles and ideas that I’d not have otherwise known about and, for a time when I was extremely cynical about newspapers, Facebook became my main source of information. But then FB outsmarted itself by filtering my feed too much and I started to lose interest. I joined Instagram and found posting photographs much more fun there and found, also, a whole new tribe of followers, including some Facebook friends. I’ve met other neighbours on our beach photographing sunsets and we support and inspire each other.

When I think about what I’ll miss on Facebook, it will certainly be seeing my friends’ lives evolve, their babies and kids grow into interesting people, it will be reading those articles in publications I don’t otherwise see and it will be the encouragement to keep posting my regular blogs and sharing sunset photos.

So now we’ll have to find other ways to keep in touch. I post my sunsets (and other quirky photos from time to time) most days on Instagram @kayhannaford. if you want to keep reading my blogs I also post them on LinkedIn and you can read them directly on my website www.kayhannaford.com/insights. 

If you want to actually talk to me in person (yes really!) my mobile number is on my website.

So bye Facebook. It’s been (mostly) fun. Sayonara.
​

​I’ve been wrong about quite a few things lately. It makes a change from always being right and I’m quite enjoying it. I’m noticing a loosening of the reins, so to speak, as a result.

I can’t even remember what I was wrong about to illustrate my point. (Maybe they were insignificant matters, or perhaps the fact that I didn’t mind being wrong rendered them insignificant). But I do remember saying aloud, several times in the last couple of weeks, “I was wrong”. It was both funny and freeing.

Being right is so hard-wired for most (all?) of us that it’s usually difficult to even contemplate that we might be wrong. Being right is like an addiction, a designer drug that has the effect of shoring up our confidence in ourselves and setting our opinions in concrete. 

And the best fun of all is that its major side-effect is making someone or something else wrong! 

Righteousness shows up everywhere, the world over. It’s the basis for every war, political and workplace conflict, domestic argument and schoolyard scrap. When someone is adamant they’re right (and you’re wrong) it’s irritating, to put it mildly. At worst, it results in hurt, offence, violence and abuse. 

What is it about being wrong that we recoil from so assiduously? It probably has its basis in childhood when we were punished, embarrassed or ridiculed - or all three, for breaking rules. Of course, laws and regulations are there for a purpose to keep us safe and its wise to to play by the rules, but being right or wrong applies across a much broader spectrum than the laws of the land or game-playing.

It seems ridiculous since most issues, when stripped bare, are only differences of opinions, values or beliefs. But we are so wedded to OUR OWN opinions, values and beliefs that we find it very difficult to see the world or particular issues through someone else’s. We firmly pronounce ours as RIGHT and hang onto them for grim death mostly because they just FEEL right to us. 

But what feels right to us, when closely examined, is often a hand-me-down view from someone else or something we just made up, all by ourselves. 

Rarely do we ask ourselves “What else might be true?” 

Perhaps it’s easier to be wrong about insignificant things than big important issues, especially those in the public domain. For politicians, for example, there’s a huge price to pay for changing their minds (a euphemism for admitting they were wrong?) - loss of trust, slurs on their judgement and reputation, to name just a few. But not admitting you were wrong can also be costly, in some instances. Toughing it out in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, or damaging public confidence can also extract a high price.

Timing is everything in admitting you were wrong. The sooner you do it, the better, all round, it seems to me.

And the best thing about saying you were wrong, is it’s not only surprisingly liberating, it’s completely disarming. The difference of opinion or argument dissolves in a puff of smoke.

You could gradually soften your stance by prefacing your utterances with “I might be wrong but...” or “This is just my opinion”...

Maybe practice on small things like “I put the egg-beater in the wrong drawer. I was wrong to blame you” and build up to the big stuff. Go on. Give it a try!

​My mother recently celebrated her 100th Christmas and, two weeks later, her 100th birthday. (It took me a while to work out that she did have her first Christmas two weeks before her first birthday and that makes us all a year older than our actual age suggests). 

When I say she celebrated this milestone, I should add that she was a reluctant guest of honour. The thought of almost all of her 28 direct descendents gathering for her milestone Christmas left her feeling “like a specimen in a bottle”, she grumbled. And she was more resigned than excited about the low-key afternoon tea we arranged to mark her actual birthday. Yet, she enjoyed herself immensely on both occasions and confessed, when it was all over, that she didn’t know why she was always inclined to say no to celebrations.

What do you do with your milestones? Celebrate them, ignore them, hide or avoid them, or relish the opportunity to plan something special to mark them?

It depends, of course, on the milestone. Some are more appealing (and marketable) than others but all are opportunities to at least observe, if not proclaim, honour and celebrate a significant event, progress toward or attainment of a milestone.

Personal milestones occur all the time and those who love a party have plenty of opportunities with birthdays, weddings, rites of passage  and anniversaries of all kinds. Reaching financial, weight or fitness goals, or ticking off bucket list items are all good excuses to celebrate.

Last year my husband and I both had big birthdays. He was predictably reluctant to do anything about his and I felt the opposite way about mine, so we eventually compromised. We agreed to have a combined ‘season’ of birthday celebrations with different groups of friends all around Australia over the course of the year. It took a lot of arranging but I enjoyed hunting out old photographs and designing invitations, choosing caterers, introducing special friends who didn’t know each other and especially the opportunities each event provided to publicly acknowledge our families and friends. The decision to mark these milestones resulted in 2017 being a year we’ll never forget. In the process, we made a deliberate effort to catch up with and express our gratitude to the people who, when all’s said and done, have long been there for us and continue to share and bear witness to our lives.

Professional milestones also occur all the time, if we’re alert to them. Simply achieving goals or kpis often goes undetected or unannounced but are always a cause to celebrate, in my book. And acknowledging the milestones of others can be heartwarming and gratifying for all.

Milestones can be focal points for counting your blessings, acknowledgement and even mutual admiration. They don’t need to be just about you. It’s an opportunity for genuine humility and to review and consider the purpose of everything you do, who supports you in being successful or happy and contented. They can be occasions to consider and address some of the big questions. Seen as a bridge or transition between one stage and another, be it in life or work, acknowledging milestones can become an important philosophical and psychological turning point and allow acceptance and smooth progress to the next phase or project.

We only have one life and that life has many milestones, if you care to consider them and use them for reflection, reassessing priorities, reviewing what you’ve achieved and who you’ve become. This can allow you to go forward with a clarity of purpose and confidence as result.

I’m always very touched when people take the trouble to send a card or to mark my birthdays and important anniversaries in some personal way. It’s a gesture of love and respect for what’s important not only in my life but in our friendship or kinship; an opportunity to deepen and really appreciate relationships.

My mother had a nasty fall ten days after her 100th birthday. She’s okay, recovering, but it could have been much worse. If we hadn’t celebrated her big milestone, even in the face of no agreement from her, we’d all have missed the richness of this grand occasion and been much the poorer for it.

One of the most powerful concepts to adopt is the notion “I am enough, exactly as I am”.

The mere idea can be quite shocking if your whole life has been predicated on the idea that ‘someday’ actually exists.

In my line of work, I often encounter people who believe that someday they will be successful, confident and happy but they need something else before they can achieve their dreams - another qualification, a partner, a bigger office, a quiet space, to lose weight or get that book written and published! 

Taken individually, all these things are fine ideals to have, but considered as essential or as reasons/excuses for not getting on with living our lives, they serve only to reinforce our own inadequacies and limitations. 

The same applies to the addiction to busyness. People who are driven to be busy all the time are often motivated by the idea that that have to do more and more to be valued and deserving of reward. The idea that “I do enough” is anathema to them. They can never do enough, in their own minds. So they work late and on weekends, run themselves ragged looking after everyone else’s needs and yet, sadly, are rarely, if ever, satisfied that they have done enough.

Then there’s our addiction to consumption. “I don’t have enough art, clothes, houses, food, fresh flowers, devices, gadgets, pets, hobbies, tools, rooms, jewellery.....” is so common I’m cringing with recognition as a write. 

What is enough? How do we evaluate or measure it?

In fact, it’s a personal judgement that any of us can make at any moment in time. When enough is enough, we can simply declare it and be mindful about getting sucked back into the great delusion that we need to be more than we are, to do more than we do and to have more than we already have.

And to prove to myself that I have more than enough, I’m taking up the 2018 Declutter Challenge for the 31 days of January, starting tomorrow. (Google it!) The idea is to throw out 465 possessions in a month, one on the first day, two on the second and so on up to 31 things on the 31st January. I guess you can keep going if there’s more and you’re still having fun! You can recycle stuff, regift it, take it to a charity shop or to the tip. 

I’ve also taken up Adam Ferrier’s suggestion in his article ‘From Mindless to Mindful Consumption: and black fingernails too’ to paint my fingernails black as a reminder to be mindful about what I consume.

So today, the final day of 2017, I have painted my fingernails black to remind myself not only to consume mindfully, but also as a reminder to declare: 

I am enough. I do enough. I have enough.

Enough!

Happy new year!
​