A Mile in My Shoes
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Quote of the Month
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water
Mark Forster's Autofocus System
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Quote of the Month
Tony (cropped)
"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one." - Albert G. Hubbard 
Issue: 1 September 2009
Greetings!

To those of you who are new to my coaching tip, a very big welcome. For those "old timers" amongst you, apologies that it's been so long, but I am in fact back.
 
Seeing as most of my ideas for my coaching tips seem to come to me when I'm out running these days, I have decided to rebrand the tip as "A Mile In My Shoes", so here goes.
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water
 
Balance scales
As long term readers of my coaching tip will know, I flip flop between using structure in my approach to managing my tasks and abandoning all structure to encourage my ideas to come to me creatively via my intuition.
 
On the one hand, the advantage of some sort of to do list helps me to keep everything in one place and therefore allows me to see the full picture.
 
The alternate approach is when I let my to do list unfold while I'm on my morning run, recording my ideas with the voice record feature on my mobile phone. This approach certainly has an energy that goes with it that inspires me for the day.
 
Both these opposing approaches work well in their own way but only for a while.
 
When I operate in intuitive mode, after a little while I begin to notice that a number of tasks that I know I should be doing are getting left, ignored and forgotten. As a result I ditch my intuitive way and go to my structured lists.
 
When I work with my structured list(s), there comes a time when the list gets too big. Even looking at it overwhelms and paralyses me. So what do I do? Of course, I go back to the intuitive way. Hence the flip flop.
 
The challenge I am now taking on for myself is to start with a structured approach that allows intuition to influence it (see the link below to Mark Forster's Auofocus Time Management, a system that I recommend). When I find that it isn't quite working for me, what I commit to doing is to examine what it is that's not working and also to acknowldege what about the system is working.
 
That's the commitment I'm making with my time management - to blend and balance structure with intuition.
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Where in your life do you throw the baby out with the bath water?
 
It could be with time management, or it could be with your relationship with your partner, wife, husband, or work colleague, or maybe with your approach to obtaining new business?
 
What is the tweak that you really need to make?
 
Afer all, you chose your current sytem, relationship, job because something about it worked for you.
 
So throw out that water and wrap a towel round the baby.
 
See you soon.
Mark Forster's Autofocus system
 
As I mentioned in my above article, the best time mangement system that I have found so far, which combines structure with intuition is Mark Forster's Autofocus system.
 
Click here to take a look and see if it might be a good starting point for you: Autofocus Time Management 
Until next time.....
 
Sincerely,
 
Tony Phillips
The Coaching Approach