Reflections from the Children's Ward...

🏥 Last week, I spent eight days and nights in the hospital’s children’s ward with my son. Thankfully, he's in full recovery now, and we're back home. ❤️‍🩹 In the aftermath of this challenging and emotional experience, I learnt more about how we, as human beings, develop, learn and change.

📈 Continuous Improvement is Not Really Continuous

When it comes to getting better—whether that is physically recovering from an illness or generally improving on your health and wellbeing—improvement is rarely truly continuous. While in broad lines, we may be healing or improving, if you visualise it as a graph, there is a top line that goes up and up. But I now also see a second line that is squiggly up and down all the time. When we’re seriously ill, that second line can be very hard to deal with because even though you know you’re getting better, what you’re mostly experiencing, minute by minute, is that second line with all its ups and downs.

🔹When working on your own personal development, it can be helpful to understand that you're making progress, even if what you experience mostly are the ups and downs.

👍👎Positive and Negative – Measuring Progress

When you’re critically ill, every important stat that can be observed is measured. Key data points are taken regularly, and all your input 💦 (and output! 🤮) is recorded. I have spoken about the importance of measuring progress before and I was reminded of this again this week: When the nurses started to say “You’re in the negative”, it is of course really worrying, but the beauty of it is that it means you can do something about it. In our own learning and development, when do we go into the negative? I know that when I don’t take time during busy weeks to read a book or article, attend webinars, or listen to a podcast, my mental fitness goes into the negative – I have to recharge ‘my battery’ by doing the things that give me energy and keep me fit!

🔹What do you do to stay positively charged with energy? Do you measure it? How do you know you’re slipping into the negative?

💬 Language Matters

I noticed throughout the week that during moments of crisis, the nurses, doctors and surgeons only ever spoke in language that would encourage a positive state of mind. While as a mum, I would be tempted to say, “You poor thing, this is so hard, and you’re doing so well”, they would only ever say things like, “You’re so brave! You’re doing so well! Well done, this is really good.” 🙌 They would acknowledge the difficulties behind us: “That was really tough, but you’re doing really well”, but not in the moment of crisis trigger any negative thinking. From my work with Positive Intelligence™, I know that the expression of sympathy (not empathy) might evoke the Victim Saboteur, allowing the recipient to feel disheartened, sorry for themselves and discouraged, while their relentless positivity was during times of crisis absolutely critical to my son feeling better about what he was dealing with.

🔹What do you say to others or yourself that might evoke a negative way of thinking? What could you say or think instead?

(Note that I’m talking about a very specific context here, in the moment of a child in crisis. There is definitely a time and a place to deal with difficult emotions, process them, accept them for what they are, and then give them a place – such as encouraged in Acceptance & Commitment Therapy.)

✨ Wisdom Thrives

If, like me, you’re human 😉 you’ll have experienced those moments when you end up shouting at your children, the dogs or your loved ones, 😠 even though you know it doesn’t achieve anything, it doesn’t make you feel better and you know it doesn’t help anyone in the long run. The experience we’ve just had brought us right back to what really matters. There were no raised voices, there was no anger, frustration or stress – we were calm, focused, and while we were at times feeling enormous waves of emotions, we ‘kept it together’ and were caring and kind. In Positive Intelligence™ language, we tapped into our ‘Sage’, our inner wisdom, to remain calm and thoughtful and be our best selves towards each other. From this experience, I take the gift of inspiration – I feel renewed intention to practise this, and share this with others too. 💙

👉 Would you like to do your own Saboteur Assessment? It’s free online – plus you get a free DISCOVERY call included if you share your report with me. ✨

🌍 Do your FREE Online Saboteur Assessment now and share it with me at cecile@workinglife.co.uk for a FREE Discovery Call.

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👋 Hi, I am Cécile Jenkins

🎯 I empower top leaders with the introspective insights they need to excel again

✨ I am a Positive Intelligence practitioner and coach, double-accredited with EMCC & ICF💪 Giving busy people their mental fitness and wellbeing back💫 So they can feel energetic and purposeful again – at work and at home.

🪴 Founder of Working Life and Executive, Leadership and Life Coach

🔔 Call, text or WhatsApp me on + 44 (0)7379 149470

🌍 Or find out more at workinglife.co.uk

💙 I look forward to hearing from you