Many problems we shoulder are heavy. Difficult conversations, hard truths, issues with clients, differences of opinion. The burden you have to carry – only you, and no one can carry it for you – is like a backpack. A load is like a boulder. Something you literally can not (and are not supposed to) carry alone.
Author Archives: Karen Reyburn
I walked a literal marathon last Saturday. I wanted to go walking and exploring – i have a list on my phone of places I want to explore, which I haven’t been able to travel to for the past year. And now the travel ban has been lifted I’m heading out as often as I can.
I got distracted this week. I had brilliant new ideas about how to help our clients and a message I wanted to make sure we get across, and ended up spending most of a day working on a video and some content on this topic and all the new ideas when really…I would have done better to just keep going on the projects I’ve got before me.
When I was growing up in Arizona, we had a swimming pool in our back garden (our “backyard”, to use the American term). I remember well the day we moved into that particular house – we’d just moved from California, and it was the height of summer in Arizona – July or August. Even hotter
At the beginning it’s “hard work, and saying yes to just about everything”. This is how you succeed.
You move to working less, and saying no to almost everything. Hard work you replace with creativity (the ability to see opportunity) plus risk (the willingness to go for it). And instead of saying yes to almost everything, you work on saying no to almost everything.
There is SO much more to question asking (and answering) than we realise. As the owner of a creative agency whose purpose involves understanding our clients better so we can help them create better marketing…asking questions is one of the most important skills we have.
How we ask questions and how we listen, can entirely change the answers we receive.
Last week we had a 3 day team retreat, and it was amazing and inspiring and difficult and challenging and we did things wrong and we did things right. As a team, we read the book Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar…
“I just trust my gut”, you think. You hire someone you feel right about, and reject to the ones you don’t. A new prospect says and does a few things which feel dodgy, but seems like a nice guy, so you take him on as a client anyway. Many weeks or months later something happens and you think, “I knew it. I KNEW IT.”
When you hear yourself (or someone else) say this phrase, it’s actually all over. The supplier. The company you hired. The employee. The strategic partner. The accountant. The client. The advisor. The minister. The author. The influencer. The lecturer. The date. The….whoever. I have heard this phrase used by so many people for so long,
This image is me. In every major achievement in my life, I’ve gotten cold feet or slowed down or hesitated or got sick or something, right before the end. Depending on how significant the achievement is, it might be a day or a week before I get there, or it might be a few months.