My friend called in for a cup of coffee and a chat and found me doing the ironing. I made coffee and she pulled up a kitchen chair as I resumed my work. Although she was telling me her latest news I noticed her watching closely as I transformed a crumpled heap of fabric into an immaculate, crisp white shirt.

“You’re good at ironing.” It was as much a question as a comment.

I excused my ability to execute this mundane household task with such precision and finesse: my Mum taught me when I was young, I was a keen dressmaker in my twenties, the window-dressers in my retail career showed me…

Why not just acknowledge the compliment?

Instead I made it a fault:

“I’m so good at it, it takes me ages. I used to have to pay someone to do it badly for me!” It’s kind of a joke. Or is it?

The real truth is, I’m a perfectionist. Almost whatever I do I want to do well. Really well. Perfectly, in fact.

And it was never an issue until I started joining personal development programmes in my thirties. There I learned that perfectionism is regarded as a disorder. It attracts pitying glances and patronising comments. I played the game and pretended I wanted to rehabilitate.

But I never really changed in that respect. I learned a lot about myself and about what drives me. I discovered how to manage my emotional reactions and respond to other people’s. But secretly I still wanted to be perfect.

So, for all the other un-reconstructed perfectionists out there and everyone else who didn’t even realise it’s supposed to be a bad thing, here’s my guide to the ups and downs of being a perfectionist.

It’s a problem being a perfectionist if:

• You obsess over small details and never feel that a job is actually complete
• You can’t get started on a job because you’re anxious about getting it – not wrong – just not perfect
• You get annoyed with other people who don’t share your desire for perfection
• You constantly feel that nothing you do is good enough

It’s okay to be a perfectionist if:

• It makes you keen to learn and practise new skills
• It motivates you to work hard and do your best
• You enjoy the results – high quality output and a sense of satisfaction
• You feel proud of your achievements

You see, the thing I realised recently is that the idea that Perfectionism is a Bad Thing is born of the belief that nothing can ever be perfect. Therefore seeking perfection is a waste of time and energy and creates stress.

I hold a different belief. I believe that perfection is attainable. In my opinion, that crisp white shirt is perfectly ironed.

I also believe that it’s good to strive towards unattainable goals. Far better that than slouching towards something you can do with no effort and can derive no satisfaction from achieving.

Those of us who get labelled as perfectionists may sometimes suffer stress because of it. But I’d rather keep my high standards and my drive for perfection than descend into the well of mediocrity that seems to be the outcome of all that well-meaning personal development advice.

How many people do you have in your team? Four? Five? Ten? More?

If you have a large team, the idea of conducting weekly one-to-ones with each person can seem overwhelming, so it’s not surprising that lots of people report that their manager regularly cancels their one-to-one meeting.

Some people are disappointed by this; others don’t care. Some tell me the meeting is usually a waste of their time anyway. But if you’re a manager of people and you’re not having a regular, scheduled, structured one-to-one meeting with each of your direct reports, you’re missing out.

Why?

If you don’t have a regular, scheduled, structured meeting with a person, you won’t know what’s going on for them, you won’t know how best to support them and you won’t be able to help develop them.

Some managers excuse themselves from conducting one-to-ones on the basis that they ‘see everyone all the time’. ‘If they have something to tell me, my door is always open’. Worse still, there are senior managers who think that because their direct reports are all managers in their own right, they don’t need regular one-to-ones. They can manage themselves, can’t they?

Wrong!

The weekly one-to-one needs to be just that. A regular weekly meeting just for the two of you. When your team members know they’ll be speaking to you within the week AND they know exactly when that will be, they save up non-urgent questions, reports and discussion and bring them to the one-to-one. If they don’t know when their next one-to-one will be, you’ll get a lot more interruptions to your day with non-urgent conversations.

So having a regular scheduled session with each person in your team helps your time management. It funnels a lot of conversations into planned meetings instead of having them crop up at any time.  Of course there will still be the urgent discussions and problem-solving sessions, but you’ll have more time and energy to deal with those once the non-urgent stuff is under control.

Four or five or ten or more regular meetings in a week might seem like a lot, but in fact, the one-to-ones need only be 10-15 minutes.

That’s why you need a structure. A ‘standing agenda’ if you like. The value of this is it gets you into good habits. Your people know what you expect and can come prepared.

For example, the meeting might include the following:

Successes: the best strategy for getting the best from every person in your team is to focus on successes. Help people build on their strengths and learn from their successes. The more you know about what’s working and why, the easier it is to achieve more.

Challenges: your role as a manager is to make it easy for your people to succeed. If you know the challenges, you can discuss the support you can offer and monitor the degree of challenge to ensure it’s right for each person. Some people love a big, impossible goal; others are content to stretch in smaller ways. It’s your job to harness that into great business results.

Updates:  share the latest information relating to clients, suppliers, projects, products, campaigns – whatever your work is all about use the one-to-ones to keep each other informed.

Plans, targets and goals: what’s on the agenda for the coming week? Once you know what each person is planning to do, you can offer support, monitor progress and encourage everyone to do their best.

So you see, a weekly one-to-one is a mini coaching session as well as chance to swap information. Use it as a means of encouraging and developing your people and you’ll soon see their performance increasing.

Furthermore, when you stick to a regular schedule of one-to-ones you show your employees you respect them, you care about them and they are important. You also show them how to manage their own team and how to manage time effectively.

What could be more important than that?

There is a basic principle of NLP that says ‘the mind and the body are all one system’.  So as well as taking care of your mindset, how about taking care of your body?

It’s probably all too familiar to you that it’s hard to do your best work or make good decisions if you haven’t had enough sleep, had too much alcohol or you’re suffering with some physical ailment. Most people will do the ‘sensible’ thing and go to bed early the night before an important meeting or event.

How often though, do you take care of yourself simply to face an ordinary day in the office? And do you know what physical factors make the greatest difference to your overall well-being? For example, lots of people drink several cups of coffee in a day. For some, that’s fine. For others, who are not aware of their sensitivity to caffeine, those regular cups of coffee could be causing a level of physical stress that would be a barrier to working effectively.

Some people work in cramped conditions, huddled over a laptop in a corner of the dining room or spare bedroom. If that’s you and you don’t remember to stretch regularly, your mind will become as cramped as your body.

So today, take stock of how well you’re treating your body and become aware of how you can enhance your mindset by boosting your physical well-being.

Every business leader wants their people to be motivated. Preferably to do what the leader wants them to do!

There have been a lot of wise words written – and backed up by research – about what motivates people. In NLP we’re also interested in how people are motivated. That is, we look at the thought processes that create motivation.

You may be familiar with the idea of Towards and Away From motivation.

Towards motivation is the kind of motivation that is focused around the positive benefits of a particular course of action. “If I do this, I get something I want.”

Away From motivation is focused around avoiding something undesirable. “If I do this, I’ll avoid something I don’t want.”

Because of this, some people regard Away From motivation as negative and less effective than Towards motivation. But the point is, both ways of thinking produce motivation – they create the drive to do something.

It’s been pointed out to me that Away From motivation peters out once the worst has been avoided. That can mean that someone using an Away From motivation strategy can end up not achieving very much – just avoiding a lot of problems!

I’ve often been asked how to change a habit of Away From motivation for one of Towards motivation.

And yet…

Some of the most successful and goal-oriented people I’ve met are Away From motivated.

I started digging a bit deeper to figure out how that works.  And this is what I discovered:

It’s all to do with the time frame someone uses.

If you are focusing on the present, then once the immediate problem or discomfort ends, the motivation will run out. If you are focusing on the future, it’s a different matter.

A lot of very successful people are driven by the need not to fail in achieving their goals. That need to not fail keeps them working hard until the goal is achieved.

In the same way, Towards motivation that is present-oriented will have you lounging on the sofa, eating chocolate or drinking beer – because it feels good now!

Towards motivation that is future oriented will keep you working towards your goals, even if it’s painful today, the rewards will come tomorrow or next week or next month.

The key to success is not in the style of motivation you habitually use, it’s in the time frame that gets most of your focus.

Very few of us are taught how to learn. As a small child learning is as natural as breathing. The world is full of new experiences and objects to discover and we are constantly adding to our store of knowledge, skills and memories.

We go to school and the process continues, except that now we are surrounded by other children and we’re all supposed to be learning the same things at the same time. Some thrive in this environment and others find it challenging. The amount we learn varies.

At the end of ‘full-time education’ we celebrate. No more lessons, no more homework, no more exams! Fantastic!

And then, after a little time or a lot, we realise that we still have a lot to learn…

So, as an adult, how do you learn? There may be opportunities to attend a class and learn as part of a group, recalling your schooldays for good or ill. More than likely, a lot of learning goes with your job – you learn from experience or from a colleague. Maybe you hunt out information on the internet – ‘Google is your friend’ people say, or ‘Just YouTube it’ (when did YouTube become a verb?)

All very well, but do you know what actually works for you? What makes it easy for you to absorb new information, assimilate new experiences or extrapolate from one incident so judge what might happen in the future?

Here’s a way of finding out:

Take some time out, probably about half an hour. Equip yourself with pen and paper and some form of liquid sustenance and get out of your normal environment – somewhere you can have some uninterrupted privacy.

Write a list of 5-10 things you have learned as an adult, that you learned easily and enjoyed learning as well as finding the resulting knowledge or skill valuable.

Divide the list into knowledge and skills – there might be different factors involved that it would be useful to see.

For each one, write down the process you went through to learn it. Recall as much detail as you can. What motivated you to start learning this? How did you go about it? How did you know when you’d ‘got it’?

Take a break, enjoy your liquid sustenance and the knowledge that you have successfully learned all this.

Now, look at the processes and seek out the patterns. Are there some common factors in what motivated you to learn? Are there patterns in the way you went about it? Any common features? How do you test your learning?

From this, you can probably figure out your own strategy for learning, which means that next time you have something new to learn, you’ll know the best way to go about it!

Everyone learns in their own way, at different speeds, at different times for different reasons. However you do it, is right for you. The important thing is to keep learning.

1. Think BIG!
If your goal isn’t a challenge and doesn’t represent an important achievement for you it’s unlikely that you’ll be motivated enough to sustain the effort required to complete it. Forget all that SMART goals stuff about ‘realistic’ and ‘achievable’. That pattern was devised for setting goals for other people who work for you in a big organisation. All the research shows that people set much more challenging goals for themselves than the goals others set for them.  It’s all to do with choice, I think.

2. Look at your whole life.
If you only have goals and plans for your working life, that’s where you’ll tend to spend all your time. If you have important goals outside of work, they will focus attention outside of work as well. If you want a balanced life, make plans for all aspects of life.  Remember to include your nearest and dearest in the planning for goals that affect your life outside of work.

3. Get clear about why each goal is important to you.
Your values drive your behaviour so your goals need to connect with your values if you are to take the necessary actions to achieve them. If the goal isn’t really important, it’s unlikely you’ll achieve it unless it can be done quickly and easily – and where’s the satisfaction in a goal like that? For each of your goals, ask yourself, “Why is this important to me?” and “What will that do for me?” Keep asking the questions until you’re clear about what each goal means to you.

4. Work out how you can achieve the goal.
Or at least, what are the first few actions you can take that will get you started. Sometimes the entire path isn’t clear at first, so don’t allow that to be a barrier to getting started. Identify the best way to make some initial progress and plan in time to work out the later steps as you go along. You may not know how to do something, you may need to do some research or take lessons to learn a new skill, but there is always something you CAN do to get going.

5. When you make your plans…
Set aside specific time slots to do the activities that will move you closer to each of your goals. This could be a regular time of the day, week or month, depending on the goal.  If your life doesn’t lend itself to lots of routine, simply make a list of the amount of time needed for each activity and then allocate each activity to a specific time each day, week or month.  The key here is to make sure that you are making regular progress towards your goals.

6. Write your goals down and keep them somewhere you will see them often.
In your diary or time planner, your wallet, as a reminder on your phone or tablet or a poster on the wall of your office, kitchen or favourite place to think. Some people like a visual representation of the goal, others prefer the words. Experiment to find out which is most motivating for you.

7. Build into your plan plenty of time for ‘standing back’ and taking stock of your progress. 
As well as reviewing the plan, amending it and also celebrating your successes along the way. You’ll need to keep track of how well you’re doing if you’re going to sustain the activities for a big, long-term goal. Equally, avoid checking progress so often that you can’t see any changes. Keep the intervals long enough that you can see you’ve achieved something every time.