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Sticky Learning Lunch #31: Feel Like Your Constantly Stuck in the Office?
When working from Home I Feel like I am Always Stuck in the Office. Discover ways to separate home & work, and be much happier in both.
You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:
Nathan Simmonds:
Good afternoon. Sticky learning lunches. Just waiting for the last couple of people to arrive. Looking forward to doing this session today. Good afternoon. Just waiting for people to get in. Good afternoon, Claire. Good to see you. Colin. Great to see you again. Thanks for being here. Fabian, wonderful to see you again, Gareth, splendid. Laura and Tim, thanks for being here. Just what given to give it 30 seconds as always, just as I’m having a mouthful of tea, before we dive into this, make sure we’ve got our phones up. Let’s make sure our phones are on flight mode. Cancel out the distractions. Give yourselves a hundred percent attention right now. Let’s see. Just gonna give it 30 seconds.
Nathan Simmonds:
Question for those that were already here. What is, we’ve been in lockdown for, what? 11 weeks, 12 weeks now? It feels like a long time. Maybe. Maybe I’m exaggerating that. Firstly, how long have you been in lockdown for? And secondly, what’s the strangest randomest thing that you’ve actually, you know, learned to do or, or put your time into doing While you’ve had all this extra time, let me know in the questions box or the chat box, how long have you been in lockdown for?
Nathan Simmonds:
What’s the strangest thing that you, or the newest thing that you’ve been learning to do since you had the all this extra time to play with. Just as we’re waiting for the people to arrive. And let me know in the questions box and I’ll share with you my new project in just a moment. Completely unwork related, sort of good last few people just arriving. Focus on them, the colleagues, always focusing on them.
Nathan Simmonds:
Alright, pens in pockets ready to go. Welcome to today’s Sticky Learning Lunch with me, Nathan Simmons, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM Making Business Matter. Excited to be here again. Been doing this for six weeks. I think I’ve worked out earlier, just over six weeks now. We’ve been delivering these lunchtime, learning these micro learnings to give you ideas that’s gonna help you be the best version of you in what you do right now and prepare you for the return to work, whatever that might look like over the coming weeks and days and weeks.
Nathan Simmonds:
Welcome to this sticky lunch. So for those that don’t know or maybe new to making business matter, MBM is the home of sticky learning. We are the leadership development and soft skills provided to the grocery and manufacturing industry. And I just wanna share some core ideas just to help you push your concepts in thinking forward. One of the most valuable things that we do at MBM is we make learning stick. And what does that mean for HR professionals and, and l and d professionals and leaders out there?
Nathan Simmonds:
Is the way that we deliver our training. Makes sure that the training and the learning is embedded and stays there and is getting used. Too many training providers go in one day, deliver a piece of content and then exit. And then maybe they do kind of their, their evaluation sheets or maybe they have a bit of a conversation a couple of months time, but they don’t go back and revisit or address or support or tweak and adjust that content as those learning experiences start to adapt and evolve in the live environment.
Nathan Simmonds:
So, making business matter, the way that we structure our learning and development is all about making sure that these new skills, these new ideas and these new concepts stay in, get used and create results. One, one of these, you know, the elements of, of what we are doing here, right at the beginning of this situation in lockdown, we went through a model called mindset. And it was all about your mindset and, and how you are dealing with certain elements of the lockdown situation.
Nathan Simmonds:
And what we are doing today is we’re coming back to revisit some of the core elements in there just to make sure you are refreshing and a and a and keeping that think and evolving about how you are interacting with this current circumstance. How you are making the most of it, how you are adapting to the new working world that we’re in.
Nathan Simmonds:
And this session is about coming back to that, doing the revisit, doing the redress on it and making sure that we’re recalibrating and pushing it forward. So what does mindset stand for? Well, the first part of mindset is about manage. It’s about managing yourself and managing what you do and how you are working on a daily basis. Bear with me, my laptop is just decided to do something a little bit peculiar and it’s about having routines.
Nathan Simmonds:
It’s about how you manage yourself in the process of what we’re doing. One of the key things I wanted to talk to you about today and just remind you in this first part is making sure that you have a to-do list and also making sure that you have a to don’t list because it is really easy. When we are in isolation, which is the other part of the mindset model, it’s really easy that we start to lose focus on things.
Nathan Simmonds:
We don’t want to get involved in new projects and we may still be feeling that now. We may be challenged by certain situations are work, home, life balance and whether we are homeschooling or how that’s working. And because of some of these things we get thrown off kilter, off, off balance and our routine starts to get taken, takes a bit of a knock. How many people here have a really robust routine on a scale of one to 10, one being terrible, 10 being phenomenal, what is your daily routine like right now? Let’s see what we’ve got. So 10 weeks, 10 weeks in lockdown so far leading teams and keeping them around up from a distance.
Nathan Simmonds:
Absolutely. It’s a, it is a skillset in itself. Hmm, good. So morning routine seven some days three on others. That’s good. I like there, there’s a varying there, you know, a couple of other sevens coming in. What’s the thing question here, you know, going into, into the, into the group, what’s the thing then that really knocks your daily routine off? What’s, you know, what really really take, you know knocks your attention and really kind of throws the whole day out for you? What are the things that made that happen?
Nathan Simmonds:
Got an average of 8.5 surprises, unplanned events. Good. So it’s the ad hoc stuff, the curve balls that come in. The routine and establishing that routine is making sure that we have the breaks. It’s making sure that we have the to-do list so we know what we need to do tomorrow. We know what we’re starting. We know when we start the day, we give ourselves 10, 15 minutes at the beginning of the day just to go back over the things that we know we need to do and making sure we’re documenting them. Also going back in there and, and like I say, having that list and having the to don’t list and making sure you are putting things on there that you are guaranteed that you are gonna say no to.
Nathan Simmonds:
Because the question from me to you is if you say yes to them, what are you actually saying no to? This makes sense. If you say yes to the things that you know that are not gonna be productive, that are gonna hold you back or cause a problem. If you say yes to those things, what are you actually saying no to? To think about that for a moment. When we look at the things like surprises and events, if we go back to that Brian Tracy analogy, which is about eat the frog.
Nathan Simmonds:
And for some of you that may have heard this phrase before, do eat the frog. Why? Because it’s probably the most repulsive, disgusting thing you can think about today. Eating a frog, that’s disgusting. I’m not doing it. The idea, come on though, when you do your to-do list, what is the most difficult thing on that list? What is the thing that you are procrastinating about? What is the thing that you’re trying to avoid doing and wish someone else would do?
Nathan Simmonds:
And in truth, if you’re working from home and you’re on your own, no one else is gonna do it. So what you need to do is make sure that you eat the frog first. Get your to-do list, get your todo list. See what the most difficult thing is challenging thing that you need to get done first on that list and get it done. ’cause Then what happens is when the surprise comes in, when the unplanned event comes in, you are guaranteed to still feel success ’cause you did the difficult thing that’s still not weighing down on you.
Nathan Simmonds:
The idea is that when we end the day, we don’t feel like atlas. I’m not sure if it was the Greek or Roman gold with the whole world on our shoulders being weighed down in truth, you know, potentially it’s just a giant frog. We just need to chop it up into small bite-sized chunks and just eat it. Hope this is useful to do List to don’t list. Eat your frogs. This is the first part I wanted to go back over with it just to help you deal with some of those surprises. The second thing I wanted to get in there was around structure.
Nathan Simmonds:
So the, the one of the biggest challenges that we have in isolation is going through the guilt part of it is we suddenly feel guilty because we’ve got all this spare time and then so we’re going do more work and then we feel like we’re going into overwhelm and doing too much and we go back and we’re not sure. So we’re going busy, busy, busy freedom, freedom, freedom. And we’re still going through little waves of that depending on the projects et cetera that we’re working on. So it’s really important that we are taking time to breathe and, and we’re structuring our day.
Nathan Simmonds:
Again, it comes back to that routine. Where are you taking your breaks and how are you looking after yourself? One of the things we talked about yesterday was setting up accountability sessions with each other. So maybe if you’re working on a certain project, if it’s with a person or if you just wanna get some work done, if setting up the the timer, you can do pomodoro online for 20, 25 minutes. You do some work and then have a break. Two minutes, three minutes, five minutes, get up, stretch, move, then go back into the work. When you’re doing this with an accountability buddy, it might be that you have them on an open zoom link course Skype line and just have a chat with each other at 25.
Nathan Simmonds:
What did you achieve? What did you find? Oh I’ve got this done. Just to have those regular check-ins so that you can set yourself an agenda and have someone hold you to account on that. And this is about making sure that you have that structure in place to keep the thinking in the right direction. The other part I wanted to talk about, which was from the mindset model was actually around with deliverables. What sort of conversations are you having right now with your leaders in your teams and the leaders you are reporting to?
Nathan Simmonds:
What’s the strength of those conversations? How understanding are people being when you’re talking about when you are gonna deliver on projects, when you are gonna respond to those emails? Yes or no? Who’s had a conversation with their leaders or with their leader to kind of set some expectations around when they will get responses to emails or when certain projects will be done? Yes or no?
Nathan Simmonds:
Got one coming in. Good. So I’ve got a few yeses coming in. Good to see you Stuart. Yes, but goalposts, keep flexing. Absolutely. It’s super important we understand this because the landscape is changing when we’re looking at our deliverables. Yes. You know, it’s fantastic. Now we’re having those conversations. People know when they, when we expect they’re gonna answer us, maybe they’re homeschooling.
Nathan Simmonds:
So maybe we send an email, we don’t get a response for four hours because that’s the new world. And we’re also adjusting what those business objectives are in the deliverable side of things. Having that conversation and working out what actually is critical, what is it we need to be focusing on? How is this gonna help us right now? Is this gonna help the business grow the team evolve and secure us and support us in the outcome of this or not?
Nathan Simmonds:
And really having that idea about, okay, working with your team and saying, okay, is this critical? Is this urgent? Is this important? And if it isn’t, and if it’s not moving the team or the business in the right direction, just park it. Have those conversations with the individuals in your team. Make sure they’re included in the dynamic of the conversation that’s going on so they can see what’s changing for them. ’cause When you talk about, you know, these goalposts keep moving.
Nathan Simmonds:
If you are playing football, what’s gonna be the most frustrating thing is if the goal actually either gets smaller, bigger, goes further away, or keep, you know, what do I shoot at? What do I aim at? And it’s the same for your team actually. If they’re making the decisions of what’s gonna be worked on, they’re gonna be included in the conversation. They’re gonna be included in the outcomes and where the business is going.
Nathan Simmonds:
And then you can ask ’em, okay, so what’s the situation? Or also can ask them what’s the situation at home? How, you know, how are you gonna, how are you gonna work? How’s working, changing in your environment now? When are you gonna be able to respond? When will you be doing your work? Is it gonna be later at night, earlier in the morning? And as leaders and business people, it’s about connecting with those people and helping them to work in the best possible way for them and supporting their new approach and their new dynamic so they can give you the best possible results.
Nathan Simmonds:
So the three concepts, you know, is making sure you’ve got the routine. Is there a structure in the place to dos to don’ts, frogs? Also looking at, you know, overworking. How are we feeling about what we are doing? And also making sure one of the key elements we looked in the mindset model is making sure that you’ve got time for yourself in your own creative pursuits.
Nathan Simmonds:
In, you know, you may find that actually ’cause you’re working at home, you are gonna be more focused and get more work done. And some people are finding this, they’re actually getting five days worth of work done in three days and they’re wondering what they were doing with the other two days while they were in the office previously mostly talking around the printer.
Nathan Simmonds:
But, but that’s a conversation for another day, is making sure that we know we we’re taking the time to keep ourselves energized. We’re taking the time to get creative with our own thinking, work on our own projects. ’cause Working on your own projects is gonna help you to get some of the stuff out of here onto paper, which creates more space for other ideas to come into or come in for you. And they may be related to your own projects or work projects or two of those things coming together.
Nathan Simmonds:
Who here has heard of hackathons? Who, who here has heard of a, of a hackathon? Yes. No, no. A few yeses and a few no’s. Well, the idea of my understanding of a hackathon is you are able to work on your own project. So a lot of businesses do this. John Lewis I believe openly advocated that one day a month you could spend training on your own on anything you like. It could be wicker work, it could be fruit and red veg growing. It could be anything.
Nathan Simmonds:
But you have that one day, you know, focus on your own personal development. ’cause You enable, your enable to happen is two ideas converge, here’s my work life and here’s all all my other ideas going. And actually, if we create space where people can spend a day of their work time just working on a creative project, it helps ’em to be more enthusiastic about the other stuff they’re doing here.
Nathan Simmonds:
But what you find is as those two ideas kind of brush up against each other, you end up with a third idea. And some of these projects here end up getting taken on by the business. Some of these become viable product projects or products or ideas and concepts which actually go back into the business and help the business flourish in different ways. So it’s about creating the time for yourself to be creative and to stimulate new ideas.
Nathan Simmonds:
And if we have the opportunity with in businesses as we create these spaces where people can collaborate on stuff that seems like it’s unrelated, but as you kind of, you know, those two, those two separate entities knock together, the third object gets created as we start to transfer and relate different ideas together. Didn’t expect to mention that. I hope that’s been useful. I wanted to give you 20 minutes or about 20 minutes of just some reminders, some key elements to be thinking about that’s that’s gonna help strengthen what you’re doing. What’s been useful from today’s session. What have you taken away from the last 18 minutes or so that’s useful to keep the mind focused on where you’re going today.
Nathan Simmonds:
Let’s see what’s coming up, what’s being useful to don’ts? Absolutely remember what you know by saying yes to those things. What are you actually saying no to? Everyone’s loving the, the two don’ts. It’s hard to say as well, by the way, the to don’t list good. Remember to do the most difficult things first and they absolutely. Tim Frogs e the frogs,
Nathan Simmonds:
I think, I believe it’s the world’s largest frog, weighs in at around about 3.3 kilos and stands approximately four feet tall on its hind legs. Not as in kind of when it’s squatting down. That’d be horrendous. Motivate ourselves with, with personal projects that stimulate creativity and, and, and energize. Absolutely. It’s when we are doing our day jobs, you know, 98% of the time we’d like just do, do, do we know and we feel like we chain to our desk and we don’t have time to stimulate, especially when we’re working from home as well and we don’t have all those conversations that may be the beneficial conversations we need.
Nathan Simmonds:
It’s about understanding that there are things that you can be doing that kind of just interest you rabbit holes and being mindful of, you know, watching, you know, rubbish on YouTube or whatever. Go, well actually what I did, what, what’s, you know, what’s interesting me? How do I want, you know, what else can I get involved in? And like I say, what you have is you have seemingly unrelated ideas and when you dive into it’s like, oh actually that, that starts to make sense. I can use that and apply that here.
Nathan Simmonds:
Let me give you a strange example. I’m currently watching videos in my spare time about break dancing and body popping. It would seem unrelated when you look at my martial arts history in that there is, there is an element of dance in the martial arts that I used to study, but now as I’m starting to study some of these, the, the footwork and the movements that go with this one, yes I can combine it with my kung fu and martial arts. I’m doing it now. At the same time though, if I’m talking on stage or training, it just enables me to coordinate my body in a different kind of way.
Nathan Simmonds:
You know, I think about where I’m moving my hands and what I’m doing. So what I do is I start to bring this what seems like a separate, you know, two separate ideas. I start to understand my, my physical mechanics and movement so that when I’m presenting, I use my body in a different way. And I start to think about rhythms and flow and use of language that helps me to get my point across. Hope this makes sense. So is is look at those things and do things that are fun and, and that are kind of make you happy. And you’ll start to see how those ideas converge based on what your philosophy on the world is and what your values are.
Nathan Simmonds:
And through everything that you do, there will be a golden thread of philosophy that runs through all of those elements as to why you, why they stimulate you and why they excite you. Good rub it. Thanks Colin. What questions have you got me for me today that are gonna help to support your current working from home situation as well as your returning to work? If that’s also happening at this point in time, what questions have you got for me that I can help with or support you with right now that’s gonna help you deliver great work right now?
Nathan Simmonds:
What questions have you got for me? It could well be long questions. I’m just giving it a moment for those to come in. While those questions come in two more session, we are starting to get into negotiation tomorrow. So we are starting to look at negotiation tactics, strategies and mindsets that are gonna help you enter into conversations in a different kind of way. The link for tomorrow’s session is in the chat box. We’ll come up in just a moment.
Nathan Simmonds:
If you haven’t registered for tomorrow’s session, now is the time to click on that link and make sure you are with me tomorrow. Live in the room at one o’clock. It is something I’m passionate about from an emotional point of view. Darren and I have been working on this fairly closely. I talk about the emotions and negotiation and, and how we interact with people and Darren and, and Andy and the team here at MBM.
Nathan Simmonds:
And we have a structure of the way that we approach certain negotiations and certain conversations. So we’re gonna bring those two best parts of those idea to get the emotional content as well as the structural idea and bring them together for the next three days. Looking at negotiation skills. So we’ve got the link down there for tomorrow’s session to register also, and I haven’t talked about these for a while, maybe since the, you know, the end of last week is the coaching cards.
Nathan Simmonds:
If you have not gone and had a look or purchased your copy of the coaching cards, the link is gonna be available in the chat box as well. We have everything there from category management, time management, leadership skills, grow coaching model, mental health conversations, all in a selection of coaching cards, whatever’s appropriate to you to support you having those really, you know, robust, strong conversations.
Nathan Simmonds:
There is a set of questions in each of those decks of cards. This is gonna help you to enter that conversation really cleanly in a different kind of way and get even better results as a result of those questions that you are asking. So again, the links for those in the chat box as well have that. Any questions come through. Oh, as I said, that one appeared as if by magic how to adapt to this way of working long term.
Nathan Simmonds:
I’m pretty sure that this working from home style will be for a long time, longer than a long time. It is gonna, it is the reality. There is no returning back. Three predictions that I’ve made in certain conversations is will be the fate or is sorry, the failure of certain businesses for not adapting to this. One of the key things that I predict that some businesses will attempt or you know, will do is they will think that everything, everything’s gone back to normal covid nineteen’s over, right?
Nathan Simmonds:
Everyone back to the office, we’re turning homework and off everyone back in. And what you’ll see is what for some people that works and for some people that doesn’t. And on certain projects it works and on some projects it doesn’t. So there’s gonna be an amount of time where each individual actually does work from home and there’s gonna be a certain amount of time where maybe you are rotating desks, et cetera, for the next few weeks or whatever months where people come to the office.
Nathan Simmonds:
But it’s not gonna be all or nothing. Now it’s gonna be a mixture of those things and that mix is gonna be different for different people based on their personality traits, their personality styles, and how they think. And guessing, you know, there’s gonna be an individual conversation and part of that is gonna then be the strategy and the planning to make it work. When do you have your team meetings?
Nathan Simmonds:
When do you have project meetings? When and how do you have your one-to-ones? And actually on the other side of that, as I’m saying it, it gives you more freedom to actually go and see people where they live and work or no local to them. Do you want to have your one-to-one at Costa rather than the staff canteen? What, you know, what doors is this open for you?
Nathan Simmonds:
So what you need to be looking at is, okay, well how do I make sure that I’m bringing the people in the right at the right time together? And then also facilitating other people’s wants and needs. So it’s gonna be individual conversations with each person in your team. Great. We find out what each of the individual does and then as you know, as a leader of a team, what is the kind of the collective expectation that you need to set for them to help work with you?
Nathan Simmonds:
Like I say, when is the team meeting? When are the project meetings, okay? When do we bring people together and how do we make sure those people work? And there’s gonna be a certain level of self-management as well. So if people are working on different projects and Bob’s in the office and Jenny isn’t and Bob said, well I thought Jenny was gonna be here, well that’s not your responsibility to manage that.
Nathan Simmonds:
Your responsibility is to make sure that Bob is checking his diary or Bob is making sure he is doing the plan. Okay. You do that part and it’s for those people to then self-manage and make sure those collaborations happen in the best way. And if they don’t, then flex, which is exactly what we did, you know, you know, 10, 11 weeks ago. Flex our style with the technologies that we’ve got to make sure that conversation still happens, but this is the new normal, you know, or pretty, pretty close to the new normal.
Nathan Simmonds:
And like I say, the, the businesses will fail when they attempt to put people back into the office and start monitoring based on the number of hours that you’re sat at your desk rather than the results you’re generating for the business. Richard Ransom was, you know, fairly wise in this when he gave the unlimited holiday thing. As long as your projects are done, you can take as much holiday as you’d like. And for that, you know, was is is wise thinking, especially in the new world, we’re moving to.
Nathan Simmonds:
Hope that’s helpful Gareth. Lemme know if it is or if there’s anything else you want to bring up and I’m happy to continue that dialogue. Thank you Gareth. Like your dancing videos, hindsight is brilliant and you can see other uses like balance when delivering. Yeah, absolutely need to ask myself more why and then preempt these links. Just a random set of thoughts, sorry, but it is.
Nathan Simmonds:
See what interests you. When you understand what your values are, you understand what it is you bring to a conversation or situation and you understand what your what it is you contribute a deep level, a genetic level, you can then understand that you can link certain things. Well why is that interesting? Why is that interesting to me? And when I do that, how, how is that enabling me to display my values more, you know, more often than not.
Nathan Simmonds:
So if I look at three of my distinct skill sets, one is coaching, leadership development, two, martial arts, three is gardening. So I have these three separate kind of pots of areas, but in each one it enables me to demonstrate my skills and my values in the way that I think I garden very differently. I know when I’m teaching, I’m working in martial arts and I’m, I’m, I’m applying challenge mentally and physically. And when I’m coaching and doing leadership, I’m, you know, I’m sharing ideas that are pushing people’s buttons to help them take up up another level.
Nathan Simmonds:
So when we see that thing we want to dive into, go into it, but apply your values and apply your thinking and your desires and drives into it to see and then extract all the good stuff out of it. Be a, a magpie of thinking, you know, you go for the shiniest objects and incorporate that into what you’re doing. So then it just takes your, takes what it is you are doing in a slightly different direction to the next person. It creates that unique superpower that USP normally it’s unique selling point or unique selling proposition. For me it’s a unique superpower that only comes from experience collaboration and, and amalgamation of ideas.
Nathan Simmonds:
We are at 1 28. If now, what other questions have you got? And if you haven’t got any, I’m also okay with that. So if you can just put no in the chat box or the question box, say no, you haven’t got any more questions and if you do have any, fire them in there ’cause I’m happy to answer them. I hope this has been useful. None from Tim. Thank you. I hope this has been useful just to give you that again, that recalibration of thinking to to help you focus what you are, what you’re doing on a daily basis to support the working from home and make it even stronger. USP that’s a good one. Absolutely. Thank you very much Stuart.
Nathan Simmonds:
Everyone’s got 1 14 90 5% of the world are actually in denial that they have none from me. Find these sessions very useful. Sarah, it is absolute pleasure to be here and, and to share with you. Thank you very much everyone. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Absolutely. It is sunny here in Hastings. Get outside, get some fresh air. Reinvigorate your thinking. I’m just about to open the window. I’m currently growing a pineapple on the window ledge from a cutting.
Nathan Simmonds:
Told you I’m doing strange things I haven’t done before. Open the window, get some fresh air, get yourself outside. Re recharge your batteries. You know, spend some time with the family just to reconnect with them and make sure you are invigorating your brain so that when you come back after your lunch, it’s even better and it’s even stronger. Have a wonderful day and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow for negotiation skills.
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