By Tricia Kidd

Sometimes you need a psychological umbrella to protect you from the emotions that come raining down on you from your higher management. You are a bit like a child in the management family and when the upper managers start having issues with each other or even themselves, if you care about them, you can unwittingly absorb their stress.

By Vania Pokraeva

With Christmas just around the corner, we realize yet another year has passed and we tend to look back at what we have accomplished, or we start beating ourselves up about the things we have set as goals, but somehow the year slipped away and we didn’t manage to do.

By Vania Pokraeva

There you are, freshly appointed as a team leader, you have finally got the job you dreamt about. Not only that, but the people in your team are all enthusiastic and welcome your arrival, which is, let’s be honest a celebration in itself!

You are on cloud nine, elated by this amazing opportunity. The only thing that casts a shadow on your happy feeling is the question: how will you effectively manage and inspire a team that is spread across different locations, and you very rarely meet and chat face to face?

By Tricia Kidd

Do you ever have the feeling that you’ve lost your way? It can creep up on you like a slight mist that becomes increasingly dense, or you’re walking in a familiar town but then find that you’ve turned into an area that you don’t recognise. Something has changed.

By Tricia Kidd

It’s lovely to work with people who are helpful. Being helpful is a wonderful thing. If someone in your team is helpful, they reduce the weight of the tasks ahead and get things moving. It’s like having someone in your rowing team who is strong, reliable, and never gives up, even when tired.
We say that they ‘pull above their weight’, meaning that, not only do they move themselves through the water, but they also add extra pull to the whole boat. But how do you know if you’re exploiting a helpful person or if by being helpful, you are being exploited?

By Tricia Kidd

It’s not uncommon to refer to heartbeats in all sorts of contexts. The heart often is seen as a kind of timer. I’ve had this long held idea that there are various heartbeats in a business and somehow you are most at ease when the heartbeat of your role matches the length of time you like to focus on something.

By Tricia Kidd

Do you feel you’re carrying a big burden of responsibility? Is it heavy, unbalanced and liable to fall? There are two things you can do.
Let’s first paint a picture of responsibility: it’s like going on a long hike and taking the children. You put a lot of thought into what to take, but everything, for everyone, must go in your rucksack. Wise parents share the load with their children, not because it makes their life easier now, but because it helps the children to take responsibility later. The children probably have a tiny rucksack in the shape of something like a ladybird and it contains a drink and a favourite toy, and if they are lucky, some sweets. 

By Tricia Kidd

I’m no psychologist but I have noticed that there are moments when I feel more connected to myself, more alert, happier and more creative and conversely there are moments when my mind seems to be in a bit of a fog. In these foggy moments, I feel like I’m not tethered to anything solid and the result of this is that I can’t build something creative, because somehow, I have no platform upon which to build. I don’t know if I have described that disconnected feeling very well. But I have identified when it happens.

By Vania Pokraeva

We all have days when we feel completely exhausted, it feels like our energy level is at absolute zero. It is a wonder if you can even manage to read one paragraph from your book before you go to bed or watch something on TV for longer than 10 minutes before you hopelessly fall asleep. Although this doesn’t happen very often, when it does it feels like we are so overwhelmed and are literally done with everything.

By Tricia Kidd

There are moments at work that can mess with your head, kind of ‘unseat’ you, slightly niggle at your confidence, make you feel vaguely uneasy – or simply knock you down. One of those moments can be when you feel like either a ‘boring old incumbent’ or its opposite, the ‘cocky usurper’.

By Tricia Kidd

Things happen that can make you feel disappointed. I’m talking about small disappointments, the kind that appear a bit petty, they are so small that they are not worth acting upon; you have too many other things to attend to. But these petty disappointments can strike at any time at home or at work. They may seem small individually but left untreated they add to each other and create a negative mass of their own.

By Tricia Kidd

Some people can validate who we are. They can confirm that our responses to certain situations are on track. This is how we connect with some people as more than just colleagues. They validate how we feel about situations by sharing the same response as us. In a global business world of increasing diversity, it’s a challenge to work with many different viewpoints and behaviours, it requires more work to communicate ideas and to reach consensus.