Tag: mindful coaching

Having one of these days?

Posted on by

Heart MeditationWhile working and feeling a bit overwhelmed today with all sorts of things happening and different emotions passing by at the same time, suddenly a mail popped up in my inbox. I get quite a lot of newsletters and blog entries on a daily basis, hence am not reading them directly normally. This one though, caught my attention as the first line that I saw read the following:

“Recognize that you are feeling disturbed, overwhelmed, depressed or some other depleting or negative emotion”.

I thought, oh, yes, ok… I acknowledge that I am feeling kind of disturbed today, maybe I should do something against that and simply send some kindness to myself instead of judging and ruminating.

So I continued reading the newsletter and immediately felt better after some moments of stillness. As we all have our good and less good days, I wanted to share this little exercise with all of you. It is called “Soft Heart Tool” and comes from heartmath.org. Hopefully it will help you too!

  1. Recognize that you are feeling disturbed, overwhelmed, depressed or some other depleting or negative emotion.
  2. Acknowledge that it is not these or other emotions that cause you to feel drained or out of sorts as much as it is the significance you give them.
  3. Find your Soft Heart attitude by intentionally feeling love, care or appreciation for a person, pet or something you truly care about. This helps take you to a soft place in your heart and increases your ability to feel care and compassion for yourself.
  4. Soak and relax any unwanted feelings in the compassion of your heart, letting the significance dissolve a little at a time. Take your time.

Jenny

 

 

Have you ever tried out Coaching or Counselling services?

Posted on by

I have! Long before I became a professional coach myself and when I was still living in Canada, I had the pleasure of closely working with an excellent coach, who helped me quite a lot on my professional path, navigating the stormy waters of life in an international organization. Jenny Ebermann | Coaching

As a matter of fact, I decided to become a coach myself back in 2007 as I had been constantly training and mentoring people in global settings across the globe. Then living in Zurich, I began looking out for an adequate and professional school as already back then many people called themselves ‘coach’ without really having followed a thorough education (even without having ever coached anybody)!).

Two years, many coachings, supervisions, sessions and a dissertation plus Swiss level exam later, I finally had my credentials in hand. Naturally, being myself and international chameleon and speaking/writing many languages, my specialty became coaching/counselling in intercultural and global settings. Expatriates, foreigners living in or planning to move to a certain country, professionals working in an international environment and their spouses have since then been a main focus of interest.

In addition, practicing mindfulness, and related techniques since many years, I am bringing this knowledge into my day-to-day work. It really is amazing how self-awareness, openness and non-judgment enable you to deal with differences in a very effective way. Especially, as uncertainty is a more or less persistent companion nowadays, leading to stress and ambiguity, mindfulness techniques brought into coaching and linked to dealing with intercultural issues and situations of difference are a powerful tool that everybody can learn.

If you are:

  • Dealing with a challenging situation in your career or at home
  • Settling into a new environment, be it a different culture or other
  • Working in an international environment
  • Planning to move abroad or to another region soon
  • Dealing with uncertainty, stress, ambiguity
  • Looking for help and guidance on your way forward
  • Looking for personal growth and development
  • …

Coaching/Counselling can support you on your journey. You are not alone and nobody knows better than yourself how you are feeling and which way to go. You might simply need some clarity in your thoughts and insights as well as a fresh look at your issues. Everybody can grow and you might learn things about yourself that you would not have expected. Coaching really is for everybody and the various tools and resources can have incredible results. Be it face-to-face or online, you are the architect of your own life!

Register today and get 50% off your first 1 hour trial coaching session (online or face-to-face if you live in the French-speaking part of Switzerland)! Prices usually start at 150 CHF/hour and can be adapted if you are a student, unemployed, with an NGO or still in training and the offer is valid until the 11th of May 2014. Once registered you will receive all details by email and will then be able to decide if you want to take advantage of the offer or not (the offer is valid for the first 20 subscribers).

 

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Jenny

 

Checking-in with yourself

Posted on by

RocksMany of us have been extremely busy during the last months and still are. While the days are slowly becoming longer and the sunlight warmer – at least here in the French speaking part of Switzerland – let me give you some ideas for your daily informal mindfulness practice (and even if you are not practicing every day, this will also be very helpful for you, I am sure).

  • First of all, please take a moment to settle in with yourself, take a deep breath and become aware of the air streaming in and out of your body. Try to feel your feet and how they feel on the ground, whether you are walking, standing or sitting. Move your toes and explore the sensations that you are having right now, in your feet. It might sound strange but it is actually an excellent exercise for grounding yourself and becoming more centred.
  • Secondly, become aware of the tensions in your body; how are your shoulders feeling? What about your neck and your back? Is there any particular sensation in one or the other part of your body? If so, try to stay with that sensation for a moment. Explore it in a non-judging way.
    • Is it possible to release the tension, intentionally?
    • Is it possible to breathe deeply into it?
    • Does the feeling change, soften or maybe even go away?

If you are at home, you could also observe yourself in the mirror, watching out for tensions that you are able to see in your face, your jaw in particular.

    • Are you clenching your teeth?
    • What happens when you smile at yourself, does the tension go away?
  • It would indeed be helpful, if you could try to ‘check-in’ with yourself every time you are encountering strong emotions (positive or negative).
    • What is happening in your body and where during these strong emotional moments?

Doing this on a regular basis will make you accustomed to your bodily reactions and will help you noticing what is happening even before your brain knows what’s going on. Try it for yourself, you will be surprised of what you’ll find out!

Have an excellent week,
Jenny

Multitasking: An Impediment to Thinking & Behaviour

Posted on by

Man multitaskingMore and more articles on the web state that multitasking and doing 10 things at a time, not only hamper creativity and innovation as well as reduce people’s ability to behave in an ‘emotionally intelligent’ way; even worse, it can affect your memory and lead to stress, thus illness.

Whereas these facts are more or less known, little action is taken to reduce multitasking in work environments. On the contrary:

  • People spend most of their days in calls
  • At the same time they receive an enormous amount of emails, many of them ‘urgent’
  • Very often, latest findings and messages have to be simultaneously posted on various external social media channels as well as fed into internal communication channels
  • Urgent calls are also coming in which were not scheduled beforehand
  • And: maybe you are even supposed to be in a face-2-face meeting during the day

Fortunately, we cannot clone ourselves (yet); we simply cannot be at different places at a time and do various things at once. In order to cope with the daily workload and demands, we usually try very hard to live up to everybody’s expectations.

For a certain while, we might even be able to handle all the demands and inputs successfully… but then, we normally feel overwhelmed or at least we cannot remember properly what was said in a call (where we were on ‘mute’ doing something else in the meantime) or when our colleague came to our desk to talk to us.

What should we do? We need to learn to scale down and approach tasks, demands and workload in a different, mindful way. Nobody can handle everything at the same time and people – yourself even more – deserve your unbiased attention.

You also might want to try implementing these little tips:

  1. Prioritise your emails: only answer the ones which are of major importance and where you are the direct recipient (not in cc and not in bcc).
  2. Instead of responding to chains of mails, make a quick call. Your issue might be solved in a couple of minutes
  3. When attending phone conferences, ensure that there is an agenda, clear objectives and you have an active part to play. You will find that most calls have no outcome and that very often your attendance is not necessary.
  4. When you do attend a call, switch off your other phone and concentrate solely on what is being said (without writing mails or surfing on the net on the same time); make notes and write down action points to make the most out of it.
  5. When attending face-2 face meetings or speaking with somebody, ensure you have enough time and switch off your various devices so that your attention lies on your discussion partner or the people in your meeting.

If you feel too overwhelmed and would like to speak about it, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I would be happy to coach you (even online) so that over time you can find strategies that work for you and adapt them. Mindful and systemic approaches are very much needed to ensure that your time is spent in an effective and creative way.

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend! Jenny

“Mantras” for the New Year

Posted on by

key

Dear friends and readers, 2013 is here and the world has obviously not stopped to exist… As I am not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions I did not make any; but I think that it is worthwhile to remember a couple of things as most of us already started or are about to start with our busy lives again:
– Happiness lies within yourself
Running behind dreams and believing that something more interesting and better waits for you around the corner makes you miss the most important things that are given to you, namely the present moment. Live all of your present moments to the fullest extent! You are the key to your own happiness!
– Solutions are never far away
Even if you have major issues and problems, there is always a way out. It might not be easy and it might not be solved fast but there is always a solution. Very often we are so deeply entangled in our own schemes and routines that we don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. Try to shed light from a different angle on what you are going through, reach out to other people, don’t be shy to speak up. Solutions are never that far away!
– Stop running
Easily said and not easily done, I know! Setting objectives and goals even in your personal life in order to find more time for yourself and the things you want to do really helps! If you don’t know how to do this, ask me. I am more than happy to share tools and insights with you! Even small chunks of time for yourself are already a great start. And: it is possible! You can do it…
– Don’t fall into the same pitfalls
Learn from your mistakes, analyse what went wrong and why. You could even write this down if it helps you. It will make you grow and ultimately make you stronger!

With this in mind, I wish you an excellent start in the New Year! Looking forward to reading/hearing from you!
Jenny