Special Moments with Family and Friends

My 3 daughters and I have made it back to Bali after our 6 week annual 'girls tour' to the UK.  We had a terrific time renewing bonds with family and friends. It was a good feeling being able to pick up from where we left off and was well worth the effort of travelling a 14 hour flight to keep in touch.

When I first moved to Asia 11 years ago, I re-assured my Mum that even though she wouldn't see us often, when she did, we would have quality time together. For both lots of Grandparents, three weeks each of putting up with our belongings strewn around the house, no matter how much running around I did to clear up after ourselves (the biggest challenge for me was keeping up with flushing the toilet, particularly as my 6 year old seems to think that because the Green School has non flushable, environment friendly toilets that everywhere should be the same); mass food shopping and eating as though we're about to hit a food shortage; using the washing machine until it wears out the mixed colours cycle to breaking point; sabotaging the TV so that it only plays children's programmes in constant repetition and a mass siege of every computer in the house, can affect the quality side of things but both Mum and Dad and my in-laws continued to show remarkable skills of patience, resilience and tolerance to put us up and put up with us for a long stretch and all in one go. They took us to theme parks, the seaside, crab fishing along the sea front (kept the girls amused for hours), to shopping centres, out for lunch, dinner and picnics, cooked us wonderful food and dropped all their commitments to be there for us. While we created chaos and disruption like a tornado that comes and goes, special moments were created that last a life-time for all of us.

Being referred to as 'gypsies' by our friends' 12 year old son made me think to myself  'he's absolutely right' as we travelled the country looking for a place to stay, our bulging suitcases jam-packed tightly in a hire car, and causing a backlog of vehicles behind us due to our heavy load. We were fortunate to have friends and family welcome us warmly, regardless of us temporarily hijacking their homes. Our friends in London, Sharon and family, even let us extend our stay with them by offering their home for a weekend, while we fed their 3 black cats and they went on their first mini camping break in Southern England. Judging by their reports of being extremely uncomfortable and freezing cold at night, (Sharon's husband had his broken arm stiffly set in plaster cast at the time which is especially not recommended for first timers) and in spite of having a deluxe tent which they could stand in and had a fancy awning, they clearly got the worse deal. While cat and house sitting, we attended an emotional memorial service for a dear Mum and Grandmother of one of our closest ex-patriate friends, Kim. Sharon and her family knew the female vicar who was conducting the service (small world) and the vicar beamed at me as though she had known me for years when she realised who I was in response to her question 'are you local?' and I said that we had flown in from Bali. Although I had never met this lady before, we were instantly connected by having mutual good friends.

At the gathering after the funeral, we were welcomed with open arms by Kim's family and relatives, some of whom had travelled to London from overseas. Kim's Mum emigrated to London from Guyana, the north-east edge of South America in her twenties. As a result, we learned about Guyanese culture and thanks to Kim's relatives finding a Guyanese take-away in London, we experienced tasty Guyanese food, including curry, dumplings, pepperpot (beef stew), roti, cookup rice (similiar to the Caribbean rice rice and peas) and my favourites were the beef patties and pineapple tarts.  Over an extended family weekend, we joined their big family picnic at Dulwich Park in London, playing rounders and enjoying a beautiful British summer's day as the relatives, friends and children bonded together - a fond memory that will always be with us.

Our good friends in Thame, Oxfordshire, rolled out the red carpet for us as they let us take over a wing of their home and welcomed us with my friend Fiona's fabulous English cottage pie followed by a scrumptious apple pie made by their 14 year old daughter.  The next day they fired up the barbecue and we sat out in the cold, as we stoically didn't let the predictable, unpredictable British weather get in our way and we laughed our way through the afternoon while reminiscing and talking about our latest adventures. Further down south in Oxfordshire, near Goring-on-Thames, our long-standing and loyal friends whom we hadn't seen for 3 years, invited us to their impressively renovated home and my dear friend Kate made me feel extra special by treating me to her delicious cheesecake - I never used to be a fan of cheesecake until I tried Kate's cracking cheesecake many years ago when we lived together in London - the only drawback was that I now had to share this best ever cheesecake with all our children who asked for seconds and devoured it like a pack of hungry wolves.

In Wales we were lucky enough to visit my Welsh friend Alison, whom I got to know in Singapore. She now lives in Dubai, but happened to be spending her last night in her renovated house in Cardiff, so we popped into see her. Alison welcomed us with afternoon tea, cakes and sandwiches and even though we hadn't since each other for a few years, we quickly picked up on all our news and gossip. We also met up with my faithful, old school friends and their children and I gate-crashed on an entertaining girls' evening out with their cousins.  We shared fun moments catching up on the news, while our children swam in the river (my girls jumped in fully clothed) and apart from the odd shivering moment, they seemed oblivious to the cold. It was a much wiser decision to sit in my brother and sister-in-law's hot tub that they generously let us use and was quite an experience going from hot to cold as we left the hot tub and made a quick dash to change back into some warm clothes at their house.  My younger brother took time off work to be with us and walk his fun loving Alsataian dog in the woods, as well as picking lots of blackberries, which when we got into the swing of spotting ripe blackberries, became addictive. My 6 year old loved seeking out blackberries and judging by the purple stains on her clothes and face, she relished this fruit that was to be found hanging from briars among the hedgerows.

Make time and effort to be with your family and friends .  It's a wonderful way to deepen bonds and remember special moments. As Cesare Pavese puts it so well:-

"We do not remember days; we remember moments."

It's these moments that make a difference in our life and when we become close so that:-


"The best part of life is when your family becomes your friends, and your friends become your family."
---Danica Whitfield
 
Enjoy your time spent with family and friends.  Life is too short not to.

Janet

Nitpicking

Have you ever found yourself feeling glad that you haven't had to deal with a certain situation and then it happens to you? No matter how many precautions you take or how you manage to avoid something (whether you take great pains for prevention or you think / hope that it won't happen to you), inevitably you have to deal with it. My daughters were not totally amused when they found out what I was blogging this time. I would have felt this way a while back, before it happened to me and these facts of life can happen to us, so now I want to proudly say, I've mastered it and know how to deal with it and there's a funny side to this learning that I want to share with you too. Enjoy this life lesson! 

When my family and I moved to Bali, I was given two pieces of advice that stand out in mind. The first was to hire a chef. The second was to be equipped with head lice solution and fine tooth metal combs purchased from Singapore. It is impossible to buy this stuff in Bali and according to my children, head lice love living in the bamboo at Green School (I have no evidence to verify this and head lice were prevalent in their old school in squeaky clean Singapore). The challenge of Bali is that with no proper combs or solutions, infestations are hard to control. Now, I must tell you that you do not get this kind of advice when looking up websites on living in Bali.  No, you have to be connected with the Bali underworld to understand the finer and more practical details of living on a paradise island. I chose to ignore the first piece of advice as it felt far too decadent to employ my own chef. I did, however, take note of point number two, as my family had managed to avoid these wretched things while living in Singapore, in spite of notes being sent home from school warning parents of outbreaks. Determined not to be 'caught out' in Bali, I raided many chemists in Singapore. Like a soldier ready for war, I was armed with all sorts of head lice paraphernalia ready for any kind of attack in Bali.

It wasn't until nearly two years later, when I had to deal with head lice and we weren't even in Bali when the outbreak occurred! The long summer break had started and my children were staying at our Singapore office. I had just returned from a great, start to the day coaching session, when my children soon brought me hurtling back down to earth. As I opened the office door, I was hit by the suspicious smell of freshly bleached toilets. The team in the office were head down, quietly getting on with their work but something strange was going on at the far end of the office.  I suppose you can call it a mother's instinct but I knew my girls were up to no good when I found the three of them huddled in the small office bathroom. My youngest daughter came out to greet me, her hair looking as though it had been dipped in a bowl of cooking oil and proudly announced 'We have nits Mummy', as though she had won an award for academic achievement.  Luckily the word 'nits' is a common UK term used to refer to head lice, so my Singaporean team wouldn't necessarily understand what we were talking about. Extremely embarrassed, I quickly scooped up my daughter into the bathroom, gesturing to my children to be quiet and hoping that nobody had heard in the office. Somehow all four of us managed to squeeze into the small bathroom, the smell of bleach strongly wafted past my nose and my other two daughters' blonde hair had turned dark with oil.

"You haven't put bleach in your hair have you and why does your hair look so greasy?" I whispered alarmed.

"No Mummy, we've used the bleach to kill the eggs and nits and we've put baby oil in our hair so they slip out" my middle daughter rationalised intelligently and led me out of the toilet towards the sofa, where she showed me a lid off one of the toiletries that was filled with bleach.  As she tried to hand over the evidence to me, I jumped back in fright, wanting nothing to do with these blood sucking things.  The lid fell straight onto the navy blue sofa, instantly changing its colour to blue with a big streak of white and we had just sold it to the next tenants because we were moving office at the time. What had happened to my good start to the day?

After a full investigation, it transpired that all three daughters had head lice and because we had all been sleeping together in close proximity, my middle daughter who seemed to know what she was doing found four eggs in my hair too!  On this news I freaked out and the whole office discovered our plight.  Curious to know what these nits looked like, my daughter took on the role of a National Geographic Correspondent and demonstrated with a magnifying glass to the office what an egg looked like (a miniscule brown dot) and what a head louse looked like (tiny creature with little legs that ominously moved). As all my head lice stuff was in Bali, I ran out to the nearest chemist.  It seemed that every chemist in Singapore (well that I visited) had stopped stocking metal combs, so all I could do was buy solution and hope for the best.

I thought I had put the whole episode to rest, when a month later, there was a resurgence of head lice on one of my daughters. These troublesome things were still persistently hanging on. This time though, I knew what I was doing, I had mastered the art of 'nitpicking' and was ready to deal with those annoying bugs that so easily camouflaged themselves. Like an obsessed monkey, I picked out every little egg until we were officially nit free (I also found the use of a head lamp worked really well).

While busy nitpicking, I thought to myself what a great analogy it was. Things happen in life that we hope to avoid but when we do have to deal with these situations, we come out stronger, and even more so when they come back to haunt us. I once had a very nervous participant attend my Presenting workshop and he explained that he had even changed his job from accounting to IT to avoid presenting - something that absolutely petrified him. His organisation decided that it wanted to change its IT system and the participant not only had to present the new system to all staff, he had to influence them to use it too. After the training and when he was 'out there' presenting, he gained the confidence to deal with it. Sometimes we have to face situations to be able to deal with them.

When it comes to nitpicking, I've been there, done it and know how to deal with it!

"Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it."

Jodi Picoult

Be re-assured of what you're capable of when you least expect it.

Janet

Awash in the Wash

There's nothing like a 10 mile walk in the British summer during our annual vacation to the UK. With unrealistic optimism of the weather staying sunny and getting better as we traversed our way across the Wash, we were soon reminded of the unpredictable climate. But with true British stamina, we didn't let the rain stop play.

Packed with a picnic, we decided that it would be nice to take our two older daughters to do the 'Peter Scott Walk', stopping half way near a little island to sit and admire the view and eat our sandwiches while basking in the sun. (Map here) Sir Peter Scott was the only son of the Antarctic explorer, Robert Scott who died when Peter was only two years old. Sir Peter was knighted for his contribution to the conservation of wild animals and he lived in the lighthouse on the East Bank of the River Nene at Sutton Bridge.

We started out from Sir Peter Scott's lighthouse with great optimism, feeling fresh and excited about what we may discover en route. As we walked along the top of the old sea bank, at the edge of The Wash, with a skip in our step, we were inspired by the landscape that was so flat and open, you could see for miles and miles across the green marshland of the north Fens.

One hour later, the sky started turning grey and we could see dark, heavy rainclouds heading straight for us.  Luckily we were equipped with waterproof coats and hoped that the storm would pass as we trudged our way with wet trainers across the path. Fortunately, the storm did pass and the sun appeared with perfect timing to dry out our wet jeans and trainers. Just as I was getting used to feeling warm and dry again, another rainstorm hit us and this time it lasted longer and was much wetter. While receding into the hood of my waterproof coat like a tortoise hiding in its shell, the journey reminded me of the analogy of running our business (or likened to life in general) where we start off optimistically, with a spring in our step and then walk into unexpected storms, some harder and longer than others.

Two hours into our walk, we were ready for our picnic and with no sign of the weather abating, we stopped opposite a little island (the second of two artificial islands created as part of a 1970's fresh water experiment)  our half way point, as planned. We shivered while eating our sandwiches and even though I was tempted to turn around, we had come so far, we moved on again quickly to gain momentum and warm up. Life too is about moving on.

We experienced two more rainstorms and sunny intervals in between, before we finally made it to the end of our journey. The last two miles seemed to go on forever, moving forward a slow step at a time with aching limbs and what seemed little progress, but we made it with an outcome in mind and it felt good when we reached our destination.  Looking back on our long journey and with blisters to show for it, we had made it from one county Lincolnshire to the county of Norfolk, at West Lynn and the ferry crossing to King's Lynn - what a feat!

In spite of experiencing some uncomfortable patches in our journey, we achieved what we set out to do which is a great feeling of accomplishment. It may have not happened in the way we had imagined it to be, however by walking our way through the rougher patches, it made the whole journey even more worthwhile. As Buddha quite rightly says:-

"If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking."

Keep on walking in the right direction and you'll get there.

Janet

Valuing Nature to Put us in a Good State

How often do we stand back to appreciate what is around us?  How often do we take a moment to admire nature and what it has to offer? When was the last time you walked in a forest, garden or park and noticed the good feeling that it gave you?

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been experiencing the value of nature.  The first situation that alerted my awareness was while running our NoLimits leadership programme in Bali where one participant, a successful Chief Executive Officer, talked about appreciating nature as one of his top values.  Although a somewhat unusual response from a CEO (he said he surprised himself too) his comments allowed me to reflect and think to myself  "This guy is right. How much do we take for granted nature that so easily forms itself around us? How often do we admire what nature has created?" The CEO further explained that while appreciating nature, he sees colours more vividly, he hears the sounds of nature more clearly and his good feelings are amplified. What a great state to be in. The next day while riding in our jeep to our training venue, the sun was shining brightly, the sky was powdery blue and the gentle breeze amplified my good feelings. I was much more aware of my environment than usual and by being in touch with nature, I could switch off my incessant self talk and pre-occupations of life. 

We were also extremely fortunate to be running our leadership programme from a wonderful, luxury villa in Bali called 'Jagaditha', where  its breathtaking views overlook the Indian Ocean and the beautifully landscaped tropical gardens are sympathetically designed to fully embrace the exquisite qualities of nature.

This is the ideal location to learn and reflect, be in the now of the natural environment and be stress free from the usual interruptions of a busy life. The senses of seeing the beauty of  nature, the vibrant colours of the tropical flowers, the blueness of the sea and skies, hearing the lapping of the waves and the birds singing and the feeling of happiness are all amplified.  By connecting with and heightening our senses we are so much more easily able to learn while these moments become all the more magical and memorable. We are able to open our minds, be more curious and learn so much more by being inspired through nature.

Another magical time with nature was when my family and I recently climbed Mount Abang in Bali with a group of friends and their children. I was completely awe-struck when I climbed along a narrow path that overlooked a spectacular lake that formed the bottom of the crater of the volcanic mountain.

I didn't know whether to be scared as I gingerly tip-toed my way forward so not to slip down a steep and rocky ravine, but as I caught a of glimpse of what was below me, I couldn't help and be amazed at the wonderful landscape.  All my other thoughts, concerns and things to do that usually keep on alerting my mind - like a pop-up screen on the internet - stopped, as I climbed the mountain and caught glimpses of the dramatic, jagged peak capped view that took my breath away.

How often do we admire what nature has achieved? Do we appreciate the qualities of nature and what a good emotional state it can give us? Albert Hofmann, the man who discovered the psychedelic effects of the drug, LSD and took it quite a few times as part of his experiments, noted that you can easily get to that same place of wonder and ectasy by simply wandering a long forest path, or watching the wind blow a field of yellow chrysanthemums.  His advice to get into a good state was to:-

"Go to the meadow, go to the garden, go to the wood. Open your eyes."

Start opening your eyes, admire what nature has created and notice the good state that it puts you in.

Janet

More information on Villa Jagaditha

Do or Do Not - There is No Try

How empowering are the words that you say to yourself? Do you realise which words could be doing you more harm than good? Do the words that you say to yourself give you the leadership drive to be proactive and take action or do they unknowingly hold you back?

Recently I have been doubly reminded of the importance of empowering words. I've just re-surfaced from running a 7 day intensive leadership development programme in Bali where, at one point, we considered the influence of words to empower us and following on from this hot topic, my work colleague happened to send me an email with one little disempowering word in it. This little 3 letter, seemingly harmless word was 'try'.  I know my colleague wanted to be modest so he used the word 'try'. His words were "Thanks for believing in me. Will definitely try."  Having recently discussed the disempowering effect of this word, it alerted me like a siren ringing loudly. In an instant, I was able to quickly empower my colleague by sharing with him the famous Star Wars quote by Yoda:- "Do or do not, there is no try."

"Ok let's do then!" came back the empowering response from my colleague.

Although my colleague is too young to remember Star Wars, he was most impressed with the excerpt I shared with him from the film and now wants to share with students at the universities in Singapore.  It makes me feel good when I can share classics with younger generations and say "I went to see this at the cinema when it first was released!"




What a difference a word can make and it's this difference that can make all the difference.  For example, if you say "I'll try to do my best", how likely will you do it? The word 'try' gives your brain the message that you don't have to do it if you don't want to, or that you may not be able to, so don't do your best.  Whereas if you say "I'll do my best", it's a much more assertive and empowering statement. You've given your brain the message that you have the capability and you've given yourself permission to make it happen.

It's good to be aware of what we say to ourselves. Notice the difference it makes for you by replacing 'try' with 'will' or 'will not', 'do or do not'. It's so simple and yet so effective.

Janet