Swim Jump Fly
Here they all are. There’s no order, other than I wrote the first one first and the second one second…. you get the picture. If you fancy going back to the start of all of these, then head to the first one dated February 2020. But don’t feel obliged to, you could just as well rummage around and read what you like.
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Chance encounters
A few months ago I promised you a new blog. So, here it is… a little later than anticipated, but here, nonetheless. Each post will be a short nugget from my book Swim Jump Fly, or a theme from my coaching, or just random thoughts that might be helpful in your life and work. I promised…
My my… it’s already July
Well hello. I know, it’s been a while. Seven months to be precise. In the intervening weeks you’ve got on with your life and forgotten all about this blog and little ol’ me. I don’t blame you. I left you sitting on the doorstep with not so much as a goodbye. Things have been busy…
Letter from the future
Hello and welcome to the final week of my Advent Calendar of Change; 12 bite-sized exercises from my new book Swim Jump Fly: A Guide to Changing Your Life. As we’re at the end of 2022 I’ll finish with stories about the year ahead. The end of the year can be a time full of contrasts -…
The stories we tell
Hello and welcome to week eleven of my Advent Calendar of Change; 12 bite-sized exercises from Swim Jump Fly: A Guide to Changing Your Life. As we’re nearing the end of this blog (and the year), I thought we might reflect on storytelling, particularly the stories we’re telling ourselves about 2022. Stories are everywhere. On our…
Even more trip hazards!
Hello and welcome to week ten of my Advent Calendar of Change; 12 bite-sized exercises from Swim Jump Fly: A Guide to Changing Your Life. Last week we covered seven trip hazards and how to avoid them. Here are another seven. 1. Stuck in second gear Are you driving too slowly, not dedicating enough time or energy to your…
Trip hazards and how to avoid them
Hello and welcome to week nine of my Advent Calendar of Change; 12 bite-sized exercises from my new book Swim Jump Fly: A Guide to Changing Your Life. Someone once wrote, “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” This contains two helpful notions – 1) that change is hard and…
Measuring progress
Hello and welcome to week eight of my Advent Calendar of Change; 12 bite-sized exercises from my new book Swim Jump Fly: A Guide to Changing Your Life. Have you ever built a sandcastle? Perhaps you remember being engrossed in making turrets and digging out the moat. Maybe you forgot to stop and check if the…
Life is an experiment
Hello and welcome to week seven of my Advent Calendar of Change, where I’m sharing 12 bite-sized exercises from my new book Swim Jump Fly: A guide to changing your life. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.” Let’s take food, as an example. Perhaps you’re…
Ready for the climb?
This is the Swim Jump Fly Advent calendar: 12 bite-sized pieces of advice from my new book Swim Jump Fly: A guide to changing your life. In this post I’ll share the resources you might need for your change project. Why not check if you have the right ones in place, by asking yourself these questions: Mindset: How you…
Stuck in a knot with your whats and your hows?
This is the Swim Jump Fly Advent calendar – 12 bite-sized pieces of advice from my new book Swim Jump Fly: A guide to changing your life. Here we’ll cover another stage in my 5-Step process, looking at the what and the how. What is the thing you’re doing that you want to change – friendships, relationships, the place you live, physical or…
Do you need to swim jump or fly?
This is the Swim Jump Fly Advent calendar – 12 bite-sized pieces of advice from my new book Swim Jump Fly: A guide to changing your life. In this post we’ll cover the size of the change you want to make. When we’re working through change there’s no point putting in more effort than we need. Animals move in…
Which way from here?
This is the Swim Jump Fly Advent calendar – 12 bite-sized pieces of advice from my new book Swim Jump Fly: A guide to changing your life. I’ve already introduced focusing on your why. This time we’ll look at your where. Lewis Carroll writes about where in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. You may remember the story includes the Cheshire Cat and a…
Knowing your ‘Why’
This is the Swim Jump Fly Advent calendar, 12 bite-sized pieces of advice from my new book Swim Jump Fly: A guide to changing your life. I’ll be posting all the way up to the end of the year and this week I’ll share the first step in my 5-step process – focusing on your why and your where. I’ll start…
The Swim Jump Fly Advent Calendar
Since there are 12 weeks until the end of the year, I’m going to share 12 bite-sized pieces of help from my new book Swim Jump Fly: A guide to changing your life. Think of these as an online Advent Calendar. Each week you can open a door to discover a new tasty morsel. So here…
Swim Jump Fly has flown
Well, hello. It has been a while. How have you been? In the ten months since I last posted, I’ve been writing a book. You may remember it’s based on my research interviewing 108 people going through shifts and is called Swim, Jump, Fly: A guide to changing your life. I’ll admit it was rather a…
Get up offa that thing!
Here we are in October, with the leaves falling and the sun shining in between all the rain. Back in the heady days of August I said “au revoir” to my Spoon-by-Spoon blog and I gave you good people a break from my incessant scribblings. But as we know, au revoir isn’t goodbye, it’s simply…
Sooner Than Expected
I know, I know… so much for taking a break – I can’t keep away. Here I am back at my regular Tuesday morning slot, writing to you. I will lock my laptop away after this, I promise. Whilst I’m closing the drawer on my blog it’s an opportunity to give my podcast an airing. I’ve recently thrown myself into podcasting with a series I’ve called…
We’ll meet again
Last week I wrote about the art of taking a break – time off from our endeavours to keep things fresh, to see the world through different lenses. So here I am letting you know that this is it – I’m bowing out. I may be back in the autumn with something similar, or something different,…
Learning the art of the break
We learn from each other all the time. From our children, our parents, colleagues, clients and friends. Even Donald Trump has taught us a thing or two – the perils of fake tan and trying to tame hair in later life. He has also reminded us to trust our instincts. When The Donald was in…
How long is a piece of string?
This is a good question. If you’re in the market for string you can buy it in many places. DIY store B&Q has 60 metres of cotton twine for sale. Their natural garden twine comes in at 50 metres. Mosey on down to supermarket chain Sainsbury’s and you’ll get general purpose string, although somewhat shorter…
So close and yet so far
Welcome to summer! Normally a time to explore new places, eat different cuisines and stretch our horizons. But this year is different. Many of us will be vacationing closer to home. Holidays that will be far enough away from our neighbourhoods to feel like a break but reducing the risks by staying in our own…
What we see isn’t there
When I was a child, I came across an old book of prints tucked away in a dark corner of the library. There was a particular print which caught my eye. It was called Relativity by the artist Escher. I was drawn in by the faceless people (or was it one person) walking up and down…
Improve your life in six seconds
Om Mani Padme Hum. Or, in its original ancient language of Sanskrit – ॐ मणिपद्मे हूँ If you’ve done any yoga in the past, this chant might be familiar to you. There are debates about its meaning, but “Mani Padme” is often translated as “jewel in the Lotus.” The Lotus flower is ubiquitous across India, East and South-East…
Painting with words
“I’m an Olympic swimmer standing in a bucket of water.” That’s how Marcia started our Spoon by Spoon conversation. She painted a picture of everything she needed to say in just ten words. Marcia is from Brazil and has worked in different countries, trying her hand at different types of roles. When we caught up, she was…
Why nothing stays the same
There is no such thing as forever. We’re constantly shape-shifting – getting fatter, getting thinner, getting wiser, getting fitter. Meanwhile trees and plants are growing, buildings are changing, people are coming in and out of our lives, and our moods are constantly fluctuating, like clouds scudding across the sky. We have a strange relationship with…
Conflict can be collaboration and friends can be foes
By the time I got to know my granny, she was a little old lady who wore aprons with pockets full to the brim with bits and pieces. She had short, grey permed hair and glasses that hung from a cord – sometimes so full of crumbs that birds would perch for a feed. She…
Where’s the finish line?
There Is No Finish Line. These are not the words you want to read as you’re running for a third day in a row, with no end in sight. “Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra” is a race like no other. Justin Goulding writes about it in this BBC article here. Since its launch in 2011 Gary Cantrell…
Don’t die as a caterpillar
We all know how children develop: first words, first steps, bikes with stabilisers. Then, in no time at all, they’re driving cars and off to college. But what happens after that? How do we continue to learn and grow as adults? Dr Robert Kegan is a developmental psychologist, author and Harvard University Professor. For years…
Our obsession with new
Nothing is new. Everything is derivative. We’re all building on what has gone before. Look at Sir Isaac Newton (1642 – 1726). Physicist, astronomer, philosopher and author. A key figure in the scientific revolution. A great mathematician and one of the most influential scientists in history. Yet despite this glowing CV (resumé), he humbly said this of…
Why we need to dig deep
Life can be dispiriting at times. We put huge effort into an endeavour (art, music, love, work) for it to go nowhere at all. Or we find ourselves toiling away, creating, building, refining, and then have only a modicum of success. Neither seems to match the blood, sweat and tears we’ve expended. I was reminded…
We can all stickle it
Growing up in the 1970s, I was fed a diet of BBC children’s programmes like Bagpuss and The Clangers. If you’re unfamiliar with them, please allow me a short childhood reminiscence. Bagpuss was first shown in 1974 – the story of a magical cloth cat that came alive. Every episode a young girl, Emily, would…
Trusting your gut
Guts are having a renaissance. It’s 2021 and it’s now perfectly acceptable to bring them up in conversation. Look in the bookshop window and the shelves are groaning with guts. The gastrointestinal tract is merely a 4.5 metre tube, yet it’s the most densely populated spot on the planet. A place that 100 trillion microbes call…
The name for people who are lost
Collective nouns do what they say on the tin – they’re the names for collection of things, like a herd of cows, a hive of bees or a pride of lions. These are easy ones that a five-year old would know. Here are more everyday examples: a fleet of ships, a panel of experts, a pod…
The relative size of things
The time we spend thinking about something often doesn’t match its importance in our lives. If we parked all our worries in a line, they would stretch to the horizon. When is the ‘eat by’ date of the yoghurt? Did I use the wrong title on the presentation? Should I smile more at the check-out…
Being a frog in a well
Count the number of times I’ve included Japan in my blog posts and you’d think I was in love with the place. Japan appears every few weeks – here on regrets, here on career advice, this on the power of words, one on having a calling and here on the strength of letting go. I use the word “appearing” as I’m not doing…
Why we’re always learning
“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” The author of this saying is lost to the mists of time, although it’s routinely attributed to The Buddha, the Chinese text The Confucian Analects, The Theosophics, or even Tao Te Ching (in a longer form): “when the student is ready the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready,…
Being lost and also found
Who doesn’t love a horror film? Me actually, but many people do. Why do we snuggle up on the sofa to watch gore? Why do we invite terror into our homes? Isn’t life stressful enough anyway? Christian Jarrett wrote about this in The Psychologist magazine. “Fear coils in your stomach and clutches at your heart. It’s an…
When life is two sides of the same coin
The expression “two sides of the same coin” refers to things that seem different but are actually related; tragedy and comedy for example or love and hate. According to The Cambridge Dictionary “violent behaviour and deep insecurity are often two sides of the same coin.” The Longman Dictionary has “great opportunity and great danger are…
Why I’m better than him, but worse than her
Gaussian Curve is the name of a music trio – an Italian, a Dutchman and a Scot. I’m not starting with a culturally insensitive joke though. The direction I want to take is a mathematical one; the statistical Gaussian Curve from where the band takes its name. A Gaussian Curve describes the normal distribution of things,…
Words, schmerds
“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.” Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll, 1871 Words are funny things. They’re a jumble of letters and sounds which intrinsically don’t mean anything. A few words are onomatopoeiac – the ones that sound like the things they…
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Charlotte Sheridan 