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My first forays into writing were really an attempt to capture amazing experiences and freeze them on a page. Keeping travel diaries helped me develop the discipline of regular writing. Throughout the ‘90s, I wrote poetry inspired by travel. My first poetry book ‘Rhyme Over Reason’ was self-published for family and friends. While running a business in the Philippines in 1996-97, I kept a diary of the most extraordinary experiences involving WW2 Japanese gold, rock stars, lost tribes and treachery that became the famously unfinished “Wood-ducks and White Monkeys’ – a surefire bestseller!
A decade went by of career transformation from business owner to business coach, and once again, it was travel and amazing experiences that got me writing again. From 2008, I have been travelling to France every two years to cycle the Alps and watch the Tour de France. Each trip has been blogged, using a variety of platforms, and again, for family and friends. Each night after a tough day in the Alps, I would write of the day’s adventure. My cycling compadres would read my post in the morning, and we would discuss over breakfast if I had captured the day correctly. At the end of the trip, the blog would be turned into a hard-cover for the coffee table.
While coaching a business in Singapore, fly-in fly out, between 2013 and 2015, I had five hours each way once a month of writing time, so I committed to writing my first business book, RAPPORT. It’s one of the texts we use for our business coaching, and it’s due for its first revision. In 2017, I organised a collaboration with nine other consultants from various disciplines to pen “Small Business Wisdom”.
The Enjoyment Plan®, my latest effort, has nothing to do with business. It reflects the changing view of life, and turns the old model of working hard as a means to an end and then retiring on its head. Retirement is an outdated concept. Waiting until we have finished work to enjoy ourselves is just mental. Too many of us never get that far. Life is to be enjoyed, not endured. We spend more time planning for our holidays than we do for our retirement, largely because retirement is viewed negatively and too far away.
We need to enjoy each day as best as we can, which, of course, is up to each of us.’
As part of my business coaching skillset, I became a mindfulness teacher. Most business owners experience stress as part of their experience, and I needed some skills to assist them with this. My mindfulness education informs The Enjoyment Plan®, largely because it’s our moment by moment experience that becomes our life. Jon Kabat-Zinn says that ‘it’s not what happens to us, but how we view what happens to us that is important’. Noticing what’s right in our life, not what’s wrong with it. Paying attention to the right things. There is such wisdom in mindfulness.
The Enjoyment Plan® helps clean up your unenjoyable bits, and refocusses your attention on the bits that bring joy. Connecting the joyful bits makes for an enjoyable life.
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"Coaching isn't therapy. It's product development, with you as the product." - Fast Company
Current and Alumni Clients
The Enjoyment Plan®
The Enjoyment Plan® is less to do with business and more to do with life in general. It reflects the changing view of life, and turns the old model of working hard as a means to an end and then retiring, on its head. Retirement is an outdated concept. Waiting until we have finished work to enjoy ourselves just doesn’t make sense. Too many of us never get that far. Life is to be enjoyed, not endured. We spend more time planning for our holidays than we do for our retirement, largely because retirement is viewed negatively and too far away. Holidays have a high personal pay-off, and so we invest time and energy into that. Retirement, not so much.
Flipping retirement into enjoyment, flipping later into now, going from employer to enjoyer, from employee to enjoyee, and from employment to enjoyment. Embracing the Okinawan concept of ikigai, finding out what you love to do, what you are good at, what you can be rewarded for, and doing that, forever!
Work is central to our lives, and finding enjoyment in our work, or finding work we enjoy will help to shape our experience of life. Work gives us so much more than we admit to, and its only when we are out of work, or not required to work that we realise how much it meant to us.
The Enjoyment Plan® deals with the Five Realms of our life; the mental, physical, emotional, spiritual and financial aspects, and explores how to enhance our joy, and to reduce what kills our joy. Getting clarity on your own Enjoyment Plan® can help you get out of our own way, and help you enjoy the one life that you remember – this one!
For couples, finding a complementary Enjoyment Plan®, where you don’t try and do everything together, but find where your Enjoyment Plans® intersect, and do that. This can reduce stress on couples who need their own space, but want to cherish their ‘couple time’. A Couples Enjoyment Plan® can extend relationships, and bring appreciation and respect to differences.
For conferences, doing an Enjoyment Plan® workshop can really build the gratitude for what we already have, what’s great about our life and work, and look to let go of what reduces our enjoyment of both.
An Enjoyment Plan® keynote might be just the thing to build some hope, empower the audience, and warm the heart.
We need to enjoy each day as best as we can, which, of course, is up to each of us.