Greetings Folks,
I hope this note reaches you in good health, both physically and mentally.
A number of people on this list have asked me, “when are the Coach’s Notes coming back?” I’ve been hemming and hawing about this for some time now. I enjoy writing the Notes, and it’s a good reflective practice for me. But there’s only so much time in a day (as cliche as that sounds, it’s true) and I have a number of time-hungry projects on the go. So it hasn’t been a question of will but of priority. Although I like to pretend I can do everything in a day - reality says otherwise.
That said, we are now in lockdown, round 2, in the UK. I’m saying that like it’s going to give me some extra time to do stuff, but in reality, it’s not. With my current workload and personal projects, going into lockdown isn’t going to change much for me. So it’s back to priorities and me carving out time to write The Notes by letting some other things go. And I’m OK with that.
I know The Notes have taken on different formats over time as I experimented with the newsletter genre and its evolution from a pure marketing platform to a closed network of intimate communications with a tribe of people who enjoy my thoughts and points of view on the world of self-development and learning.
If you are a regular reader of the Coach’s Notes, I’d like to hear your thoughts on which format of The Notes you liked the best. Hit reply and let me know.
For now, I’ll go with the version where I share with you what I’ve been reading, seeing, hearing, and thinking about during the week.
And here we go…
#Things I Did
A lot of things went down this week. We had the U.S. Election, the start of a month-long lockdown, and it was International Stress Awareness Week.
I made a couple of videos on stress management, but I’ll share this one with you because it’ll give you an insight into one of the development tools I use. Plus it’ll give you an insight into me and what happens to my behavior as I go into an overextended stress situation.
After the video, I reflected on the conversation I had with Nicola Jones. And a question I think I need to spend some time with is “How does being with others bring out the best in me?” As you’ll learn in the video, I tend to withdraw from people when I’m in stress mode. But that might not be the best thing for me to do.
#Things I Read
If you’re a regular reader of the Coach’s Notes, you’ll know I always have at least a half-dozen books on the go at any given time. The book that held my attention this week was McLuhan in an Age of Social Media, by Paul Levinson. I’m super fascinated with social media and being familiar with Marshal McLuhan’s work made this title jump out at me.
McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work had a massive impact on media theory. He’s the one who coined the phrase “the medium is the message” and the term “global village” and as Wikipedia points out, he predicted the World Wide Web 30 years before it was invented.
In this book, Paul Levinson applies McLuhan’s ideas to the big social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and Snapchat. One concept is the tetrad of vision, which is a way of mapping the impact and interconnection of technologies across time.
The model asks four questions of every medium or technology:
What does it enhance or amplify?
What does it obsolesce or push out of the sunlight and into the shade?
What does it retrieve or bring back into central attention and focus - something which itself had been previously obsolesced.
And what does the new medium, the pushed to its limits, reverse or flip into?
The Table of Contents:
#Things I Saw
In keeping with International Stress Week, I watched a number of videos on stress and stress management. This one from the BBC gives a good overview of stress and the mechanics of stress:
Make sure you are taking care of yourself!
#Things I Heard
As you know (or may not know), I’m constantly experimenting with media and tech. Music is a HUGE part of my life. While I use it in my own wellbeing practice, I haven’t really used it with others (apart from using music in my live training courses and events). For stress awareness week, I tapped into my Yen-side and made a piece of audio designed to help you relax and focus and bring a little calm to your day. I’m thinking of expanding this into a radio show and podcast. Have a listen to this mini-episode and let me know what you think:
Click the graphic which will take you to my Mixcloud account:
#Tools I Used
The main tool I used this week was Lumina Spark, which I am a practitioner of. I use a number of psychometric tools in my work - from Myers-Briggs to Insights Discovery, to DiSC and Clarity4D - but my psychometric choice these days is the Lumina Spark model which takes the best of Jungian based psychometrics and the Big 5 psychometrics and combines them into one tool that measures 8 Aspects and 24 Qualities, which you can see from my Lumina Splash model and my Word Cloud
#Final Thoughts
I remember now what I miss - sitting down to reflect on my week and write these notes. It’s a great way for me to capture my learning from the week and to clear my mind as I get ready for the next week. I also get a chance to share some things with you that will hopefully add some value to your day.
As always, feel free to hit reply. I always have time for your feedback and your thoughts.
As I get back into the habit of writing the Notes, I will also use some of Substacks other features like the forum discussion post and the audio post. Hopefully, we can get a little community going here.
Anyway, my friends, enjoy the rest of your day, evening, or afternoon. Stay safe.
Clay