paul hollywell coaching

FREE Executive Coaching Offer for Non-Profits
Having retired in April from my engineering consultancy job and spent the summer relaxing, I am now eager to volunteer some of my spare time. I am offering my executive coaching skills and experience free to those who could benefit from them but might not normally be able to afford them. This includes staff within charities, voluntary and non-profit organisations, though there may be other opportunities as well.

If you believe you could benefit from this, contact me to discuss how coaching can help. Alternatively, if you know someone who might benefit, please share this offer with them.

Executive coaching is like having a personal trainer for your professional life. A coach works with managers and leaders to help them grow their skills, set and achieve goals, and handle challenges more effectively. Its aim is to unlock potential, overcome barriers, boost performance, and achieve greater success in their roles.

Coaching can be particularly beneficial when someone transitions from a technical or clerical role to a management or leadership position within an organisation. It’s equally valuable for early career professionals, guiding them through worries and negative thinking to develop the confidence and skills they need. Overall, coaching improves the wellbeing and health of all employees at all levels by promoting better self-care.

Coaching sessions, whether in person or via video call, are customised to meet the needs of both the coachee and the organisation. Following an initial discussion about the objectives, the structure of the coaching process is agreed upon. Typically, each one-to-one coaching session begins with identifying a key issue, followed by an in-depth discussion and exploration of potential solutions. By the end of each session, it is crucial that specific outcomes and actions to resolve the issue are agreed upon by both the coach and the coachee.

From Monday 7th March 2022 - Special offer price of 99p for 7 days only. Kindle Edition from Amazon.co.uk.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09RPSTZ3H/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_1J0SP0M1HAW7CRTPRNZ5

Gratitude is so important to our mental health. Read more about it here ...

How gratitude and being positive can improve mental health Experts explain to how to incorporate gratitude practices in your daily life

My Self-Coaching Guides can be accessed at: https://www.paulhollywell.com/self-coaching-guides.

How to Reduce Zoom Fatigue

These days many of our meetings are held via virtual platforms apps (e.g. Zoom, Google Meet, Teams). Many people, however, find these types of meetings draining and regularly complain of ‘Zoom fatigue’. Understanding what makes video meetings different from in-person meetings can help us reduce what makes video meetings exhausting. Academic researchers are now beginning to discover that what makes video meetings tiring has a lot to do with how we process our conversations.

During in-person meetings, we quickly and effortlessly pick up nonverbal cues, such as facial expressions and body language. This helps to guide our conversation in very subtle and complex ways. Video meetings provide few nonverbal cues, which is stressful. Also, there is a very slight delay when speaking to someone, and therefore our brain works hard at filling in the details that we would normally get from speaking face to face. Using these different skills, and the extra workload from needing to handle the constant uncertainty about what is going on, is very tiring.

In face-to-face meetings, we look around (at our notes, out of the window) and typically move around. We know who is looking at us and can choose who we look at; usually the person we are speaking to. In video meetings, everyone is sat in front of a fixed camera, looking at everyone else all of the time, unable to move very much. This is unnatural. It makes it hard for us to concentrate as we tend to either look away, or tense up our bodies as we try not to look away so as not to appear distracted or uninterested. Not being able to move around naturally, turn our gaze to avoid the continuous eye contact, or focus on one person at a time, is really challenging for us; it is highly stressful and very tiring. And on top of all that, there is the influence of seeing ourself on screen all the time, which is also unnatural, and can cause us to self-evaluate and experience negative emotions.

So, how can we tackle the above issues and attempt to reduce ‘Zoom fatigue’?

• Reduce your stress and workload by limiting the number of video meetings you attend each week. Use ‘audio only’ meetings more often or take ‘audio only’ breaks in a meeting.

• Reduce the time spent in video meetings by staying only to discuss your topic and then leaving. Be creative and suggest ways to get information from meetings without having to attend (including meeting notes, or recording the meeting and listening to it later).

• Reduce your constrained physical mobility by remembering to move around, and relieve the tension that could be building up in your body. Listen to your body and if you notice that you are tense in your back, shoulders, or digestive systems, take a break, get up, and stretch.

• Reduce the amount of continuous, direct eye contact from faces seen close up by shrinking the app window and distancing yourself from the screen. This relieves the discomfort you have from not maintaining enough interpersonal distance from people you are not intimate with.

• Reduce the self-evaluation from seeing yourself on the screen by hiding the ‘self-view’ video window. Turn your camera off when a meeting is not particularly important or when you won’t be required to speak much. This takes down the mirror that is being held up constantly in front of you.

Just a thought for today ...

If you would like to ask any questions about sleep or life coaching in general, just send me a message and we can chat.

If you would like to know more about getting a full night's sleep, send me a message and we can chat about it.

Send me a message if you would like to discuss whether coaching could be helpful to you.

Languishing - What many people are experiencing due to struggling with the emotional long-haul of the pandemic. This fascinating article has gained global interest by naming what has been an extremely difficult feeling to define.

There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing The neglected middle child of mental health can dull your motivation and focus — and it may be the dominant emotion of 2021.