Please join me at my other blogs!

My business site Key Coaching – Your Key To A Better Life is where topics like coach, mentor, business and networking happens. There is also some about personal developemnt.

My personal site Bengt’s Notes – Discover Your Self is about personal development from a body-mind-spirit perspective as well as about presenting and presentations, blogging, music and some fun.

I love to write but I am no longer keen on maintaining more blogs than really needed. A self-hosted WordPress blog requires maintenance, work behind the scene. My solution is that I cut down on the number of blogs I have.

Forty Plus Two will be discontinued, new posts will appear in Bengt’s Notes which will be my main blog in English. I will gradually transfer older posts from this blog to Bengt’s Notes.

Forty Plus Two focused on coaching and personal development plus some on related topics such as networking, business, job and career. They will continue at Bengt’s Notes. Side topics like blogging and WordPress will be less but they will be at Bengt’s Notes too.

Please join me at Bengt’s Notes, let us stay in touch!

Source: mammoth-strategy

Let limitations guide you to creative solutions
There’s never enough to go around. Not enough time. Not enough money. Not enough people.

That’s a good thing.

Instead of freaking out about these constraints, embrace them. Let them guide you. Constraints drive innovation and force focus. Instead of trying to remove them, use them to your advantage.

This is a timely reminder for me. I am working at growing my own coaching business, Key Coaching, and I at times think along the lines of “there’s not enough of….”. After reading the text above I shall embrace these limitations and start working with what I have.

Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work.

One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up.

As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean.

He came closer still and called out “Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?”

The young man paused, looked up, and replied “Throwing starfish into the ocean.”

“I must ask, then, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?” asked the somewhat startled wise man.

To this, the young man replied, “The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them in, they’ll die.”

Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, “But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can’t possibly make a difference!”

At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said, “It made a difference for that one.”

The lesson is – even small deeds can make a big difference.

Credit: Photo Starfish on the Beach.

The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant – talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.

They conclude that practice makes perfect but it has to be practice that is focused on improving performance – challenge your comfort zone in that area – and gives you feedback:

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

The article then goes to the business side:

How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements – you can practice them all.

Still, they aren’t the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information – can you practice those things too?

The key according to the article is to change your mindset: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it. It is about constant improvements, Kaizen, and seeking feedback and ways to measure your progress.

In summary, change your mindset – aim to get better at what you do – and then practice to make you great.

I have created two new index pages here, using the AZIndex plugin. You now find an Index by Tag and an Index Alpha (on post titles) in the header navigation.

Over time I will reshuffle older posts, especially those from side topics, in order to make my core topics more visible.

Refocus = put again into focus or focus more sharply.

The side topics at Forty Plus Two will be covered in my new blog, Bengt’s Notes, which will help me get a clearer focus here. It will be back to the core topics which are coaching and personal development.

This is how it will work with my blogs from now on:

• Key Coaching, my coaching business with a blog in Swedish.
• Forty Plus Two, my blog about coaching and personal development.
• Zen and more, my personal blog about self-discovery.
• Bengt’s Notes has quotes, links and notes – on various topics that interests me.
• doodling, a blog for fun stuff.
• CoachGuiden.se, a Swedish site about coaching.
• Bengt Wendel is my hub which connects my sites, blogs and projects.

This means it will be easier for me (and my readers) to know what each blog is about. Bengt’s Notes sounds as “miscellaneous” but apart from quotes it will mostly be about blogging (WordPress), software, Twitter, tips and tools.

If we want to have any hope at making our dreams a reality, we have to carve out our own path. We have to find a way to get paid to be ourselves. We must drop conventional wisdom (collective assumption) and break away from the herd.

Jonathan writes about two things in this post:
• Stop caring, and…
• Break our uncertainty threshold.

Getting outside our comfort zone is scary but necessary if we want to grow. As I posted, I have decided to walk my talk and will work in order to make that dream a reality.