I know I’m not alone. Talking about the speed at which life is hurtling us forward is becoming as common as discussing the weather. In fact, it’s becoming so common, I think it deserves its own acronym – LISUP – Life Speeding Up Phenomenon!

We seem to feel quite anxious about LISUP for two reasons. Firstly, we might feel that somehow life is taking us over, that we’re losing control of life, like being on a runaway train with no driver. Secondly, we might feel that at some point in the not too distant future the train will get so fast we’ll be flung off the tracks and into oblivion!

In this day of multiple demands, information overload, and pressure to do more, have more and be more, we often find ourselves just surviving – scurrying and scrabbling to get from one end of the day to the other. Whilst being busy and getting involved in interesting and challenging activities is a good thing, if you’re just cramming stuff in for the sake of being busy, to tick things off your list, or to meet other people’s expectations, it’s no wonder you’re exhausted and feeling like life’s out of control.

So here’s my top 3 strategies for coping with LISUP:

1) Be Present: Most of us spend more time re-hashing the past or worrying about the future than fully engaging in the present. Cultivate the skill of being fully present in every activity you’re doing. If you’re having lunch with friends, but worrying about your next client, of course time will feel like it’s racing by. Stop and take notice of everything within the present moment. Now is the only moment you have.

2) Savour: Don’t forget to take time to savour positive experiences. Even in tough times, life is full of small but powerful moments of positivity that we often skim over or fail to notice completely. Delight in positive people, revel in positive sensations, bask in positive emotions, and don’t forget that reflection and sharing your positive moments with others magnifies the impact.

3) Say No!  Take stock of what’s really important to you, then work out what you can stop doing or say no to. Take back control of your life. If you’re not sure how, start with defining or reminding yourself of your core values. Values are the highest principles and beliefs you stand for that make you uniquely you, and represent how you want to behave on an ongoing basis. It’s amazing how many people I see who aren’t aware of their values and therefore have difficulty prioritising and maintaining focus and motivation in tough times. If you would like help to identify your values or to implement other strategies to get back in control of your life, please email me for a confidential discussion about how coaching can help you.

And for our many readers outside of Adelaide, don’t forget that phone coaching is available, and is often preferred by many clients.

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Clearly both these men had enormous talent. But great talent is not enough to make a man great. After all, we see plenty of examples of people with great talent who we shun because of dubious character traits (my ten years of working in sports doping reminds me of this).   What we really admire in others, what inspires us about their greatness, and what we aspire to ourselves, is the great human qualities, the strength of character and moral virtues that our heroes display. As well as their talents, both Stynes and Hall were undoubtedly men of strong character, possessing buckets of self-discipline, determination perseverance, and courage.

But what I really admire about both of these men is what they have contributed to the world beyond their expertise in their chosen field. Stynes founded the Reach Foundation, an organisation that mentors and inspires ‘at risk’ youth to believe in themselves. Hall founded the Australian Himalayan Foundation to raise money for Himalayan schools. Both worked with humility, passion and dedication to these programs until the very end.

Right there, in these two men, we see three of the foundations of what positive psychologists say makes for a happy, flourishing life: accomplishment, serving a purpose that’s bigger than yourself and the cultivation and use of character strengths.

Whilst only a small proportion of us will ever develop the stamina or skill of a great athlete, all of us have the capacity to develop and use our character strengths in a way that helps us to lead a purposeful, flourishing life. Interestingly, over two thirds of us aren’t aware of our own character strengths, either because we’ve never stopped to think about them, or because we take them for granted. So as a first step to your own personal greatness, here’s a couple of suggestions for recognising your core character strengths.

Think back over your life to a time when you were at your best, when you were really feeling and acting at a high level, when you felt really alive and when you felt like you were being your true self. What were you doing, how were you behaving, what characteristics were you showing? If you have difficulty with this exercise, tell your story to someone else, and ask them to identify three character strengths you were using at that time.

If you’re still not convinced, a great way to get in touch with your unique character strengths is to undertake an online survey at www.viacharacter.org. The VIA Assessment was developed by positive psychology pioneers Martin Seligman and Chris Peterson and measures 24 universal character strengths. Once you complete the survey, a profile of your personal character strengths is automatically generated. The survey takes about 30 minutes and is free. Click on the ‘Discover your character strengths with the free VIA survey’ button on the right of the VIA home page to get started.

Knowing your character strengths gives you a great sense of confidence and self-esteem, and we use strengths frequently in coaching to help clients increase energy, meet challenges, improve life satisfaction and maximise well-being and performance. If you would like help to understand and capitalise on your character strengths, please email me for a confidential discussion about how coaching can help you.

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Courage is a willingness to act in spite of fear, personal risk and an uncertain outcome. We mostly associate courage with physical acts of bravery, but courage can take many forms. People who are morally courageous take action to stand up for what’s right. Social courage is taking a personal risk in the context of a relationship or a group – public speaking or asking someone on a date is socially courageous for most people. You might show psychological courage (facing up to painful aspects of yourself), or even financial courage.

Courage is an important strength and it can be learnt. Being able to manage our fear, cope with uncertainty and take appropriate personal risks enables us to grow and learn and develop our talents and character strengths. Allowing our fear to hold us back may well keep us safely in our comfort zone, but is this where we really want to spend our lives? As Dr Russ Harris, author of The Happiness Trap, puts it, our comfort zone should be called our ‘missing out on life’ zone!

Courage at work is particularly important. We know that successful leaders show very high levels of courage. But for all of us who face increasing challenge and uncertainty at work, often combined with high levels of self-doubt, we can use our courage to tackle our fears, doubts and challenges, and maximise our potential.

So let’s tap into your courage. Think of a time when you’ve taken action despite fear, personal risk and an uncertain outcome? You may not have rescued your colleagues from a burning building, but have you spoken up when you have seen something unfair? Have you voiced your opinion even when it was unpopular or dissenting? Have you agreed to take on a project or a job when you felt deep down you weren’t up to it? Have you given someone some difficult feedback in order to preserve the relationship or help them move forward?  All of these things take courage.

And remember, apart from a few obvious acts of bravery that everyone would find courageous, most courageous acts are very specific to you. So don’t compare yourself – an act of courage for me may be pretty straight forward for you, and vice versa.

So think back over the last week and write down the small things you’ve done that were personally courageous. Then think back over the last year and through your life, and write down the bigger, more memorable milestones where you showed courage. Once you start to recognise that courage exists within you, you gain strength and confidence to take courageous actions in the future.

Courage can be learnt, and people often seek coaching to help them overcome what most commonly holds them back – their fear. Fear of failing, fear of falling, and even fear of flying.

Coaching is a proven strategy which helps people identify what’s holding them back and develop personal strategies to overcome obstacles and move forward. So if fear is holding you back, or you want to develop your strength of courage, please contact me for a confidential discussion about how coaching can help you.

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Christmas is supposedly a time of connection – we send cards to strangers we haven’t seen all year, we get drunk with people we don’t really care about, and we often endure family gatherings for the sake of tradition rather than genuine connection. We live in an age where our social connectedness is measured by the number of our Facebook friends rather than the quality of our relationships. More than ever at Christmas time, we get caught up in our own stuff. We get carried away with the trappings of happiness – over eating and drinking, rushing about ‘getting stuff done’, and stressing about the perfect present.

What if we used this time of peace and goodwill to really stop and think about connectedness and its importance to individual and community well-being.  The behaviours and emotions of connection are centred around kindness, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, trust, empathy, engagement, appreciation, and of course love. What can each of us do differently right now that demonstrates a genuine and intentional commitment to connect with others?

Imagine if even just one person in every family took time out each day between now and Christmas day to really connect with another human being. What would you do? Who would you connect with? How would you reach out and in what way would that connection change you and your community?

Here’s some ideas:

• call someone you haven’t seen for a while just to see how they are
• compliment a friend – and then a stranger
• do a random act of kindness
• buy a Big Issue – and chat to the vendor
• tell someone in your family you’re grateful to have them in your life
• spend time with someone who’s lonely
• sign up to volunteer
• make a commitment to listen more

And if you want some more inspiration, need a prompt or just want to connect with like-minded people, check out one of the many on-line Action For Happiness or Acts of Kindness Advent Calendars. Just like an actual advent calendar, it’s packed with daily surprises that will help you connect with others, and is guaranteed to boost your happiness. That’s my Christmas present to you!

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I know I’m busy, I know all my friends are busy, my work-mates are busy and my family members are certainly busy.  Yet here’s the remarkable thing. No matter where we live, no matter what we do, no matter how much money we have or what our social, economic, intellectual or any other circumstances, we are all fundamentally equal in one unequivocal sense. We all have precisely the same amount of time available to us in any one day – 24 hours, 1440 minutes, 86,400 seconds. The exact same amount as every single other person on this planet. Of course we all have differing amounts of time available to us over a life time, because we all die at different points in our life, but as far as I am aware (despite being a bit of a fan of Dr Who!), no-one has yet invented a way to increase or decrease the number of seconds we have available to us in a day.

So whilst this is true, we do have countless ways that we can use our 84,400 seconds. Our choices about how we spend our time are of course, reflective of our social, cultural, economic and geographical circumstances. But for the majority of us living in peaceful, first-world countries, where we do not have to spend our time either foraging for food or dodging bullets. we are relatively free to choose how we spend our time. We can chose to sleep in or get up and go the gym, to do housework or go to the pub, to work late or get home in time to see the kids, to check our emails and Facebook, or call a friend who’s been feeling down. Sure, there are consequences to every one of these choices, but we do have choices.

How we choose to spend our time should reflect what is most important to us. If our health is important, we’ll get up for the gym, if a relationship with our kids is important, we’ll figure out a way to not work late, if our friends are important, we’ll factor in time in our busy schedules to spend time with them.

Being busy is not a justification for not spending time really living our core values – everyone is busy, and everyone has the same amount of time. If you chose not to spend time on something, then admit to yourself (and others) that it’s not as important as other things for you right now. Don’t use lack of time as an excuse – it’s actually not about time, it’s about priorities. And the first step in getting control of our time and using it wisely is to get clear about our core values and how these translate to daily, weekly and annual priorities.

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I find it humbling and inspiring that someone who has suffered so much grief is able to cope with her loss without resorting to blame, bitterness or revenge. It would be so easy, following such a senseless tragedy, to be consumed with anger towards the pilot. But Anne recognised vey early after the crash that she would need to direct her limited energy and resources into positive rather than negative channels, so she could deal with the substantial practical matters of the accident as well as her own grief, and so she could go on living a rich and satisfying life without her partner.

Unfortunately, loss, adversity and trauma are part of life. Most of the time we can’t control these events, but we can control how we react to them. Whether the adversity is a single, traumatic event such as a plane crash, whether it is self-imposed adversity (just think of how Cadel Evans rode through 3,500km to triumph in the Tour de France), or whether your adversity is more of a longer-term, relentless struggle such as conflict with a colleague, an unsatisfying job,  a health challenge, the struggle of self-employment or demanding caring responsibilities.

Blaming others and feeling resentful might work as a short term emotional release, but in the longer term it stops you from moving on from adversity.  Letting go of blame, and cultivating positive experiences and emotions again, will help you to bounce back and regain balance and energy for the future.

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Sport teaches us that being your best is not only about skill and talent, but also requires tapping into the vast pool of psychological resources available to us. By way of example, look no further back than those three sleep-deprived weeks in July, when Australia witnessed one of our greatest-ever sporting moments – Cadel Evans winning the Tour de France. The Tour, 3,000km of relentless physical and mental endurance, is the most gruelling sporting event in the world today.

What does it take to win the Tour? Well, apart from the obvious physical capabilities, including skill, fitness and stamina, there’s grit, determination, courage, persistence, focus, desire, resilience….. the list goes on, and Cadel has them all.

But here’s the thing – we may not all be elite bike riders (or musicians or scholars or leaders), but every single one of us, no matter what our level of skill, talent or circumstances, can be better. We all have the capacity to develop these psychological traits that give us the edge and help us realise our full potential.

Look for ways to learn and grow and be the best you can be in whatever you chose to do with your life, and remember that success is not born from talent alone. I hope my Personal Best blog helps cultivate in you a desire to be your best, and provides some information, stimulation and inspiration to get you there!

Lead Your Personal Best Life

Each PB Life Blog features tips on leading your Personal Best life, and we also post news and events of interest to our readers in the fields of leadership, resilience, performance and positive psychology.

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