A recent report commissioned by More Th>n Business which surveyed the over 60s found that 71% of people had significant regrets over not having been more ambitious.

Whatever your age now, do you have regrets, in your career or life?  I love the quote, from an Orbital CD, that we regret more the things that we didn’t do rather than the things we did do.

Is there something that you have been thinking of doing but something holds you back … perhaps you could visualise the future, imaging what happens over different options – in business it is called Scenario planning.

So for example, with a career or personal dilemma – what will it be like if you say yes to the option, or say no, or what other options so you have?

If there is anything you would like to share, please do get in touch.

Catostrophizing

Do you ever find that once one or two things go wrong that you blow it all up and expect the worst?  Some of my clients get like this over work situations and I have found myself having catostrophizing thoughts recently.

 Catastrophizing is an irrational thought a lot of us have in believing that something is far worse than it actually is. Catastrophizing can generally can take two forms

The first of these is making a catastrophe out of a situation. such as because you made one mistake in one document all future work is going to be unacceptable.

The second is imaging the worse. I have worked with a client who left his job before he was sacked and is now concerned he will never get another job as all future employers will see him as a failure.

There’s a good article on this available here:

I should probably have written this post months ago, as it’s a subject that regularly comes up with my career coaching clients.

The fear, or lack of confidence that stops people doing something.

I encourage my clients to arrange to talk with people that are doing a job that interests them. Sometimes this involves them finding people to talk with, but sometimes I put them in touch with previous clients of mine.

But they don’t always make the call.

I was talking about this with an ex client yesterday, and i’d made the intriduction, but theyhadn’t followed up.  She said " but I know what it’s like.  It takes ages to get round to phoning people who could be a real help to talk to .. I’ve certainly experienced that, and when I did make the call, it was so easy – I didn’t know why I’d left it so long".

Reminds me of Paul, who I gently coached to step outside his comfort zone. We did a trial go, with him calling me twice, once I was nice supportive Denise, the next time I played the part of someone who was more off hand, probably worse than he woud face. This did mean that he was well prepared.

A brilliant book around this subject is Feel the Fear and do it anyway, by Susan Jeffers. You can read more here.