Everything you do, is a choice. There is very little that you have to do. Breathe, eat, drink, sleep. These are the things you have to do, you are compelled by your biology to do. Pretty much the rest of it is a choice you make.
Every day.
Life can suck and you feel compelled to make certain choices because of the people you have in your life and how they rely on you. So if you are compelled to do certain things from respect, courtesy or duty, you may not feel you have a choice about what you do, but you can have a choice about how you feel about it.
Just by viewing everything you do as a choice, can allow you to re-frame the way you think about it. It is amazing how in control you can feel about your own destiny. It can make you view the actions you take through a different lens and consider certain activities differently. Sometimes you may even go out on a limb and do something you didn’t even feel possible. Like saying no to someone, for example.
It is amazingly enabling to think about all you do and consider what choices you have made to get to where you are. Would you make different ones if you did it all again?
For me the biggest impact on me was something my father told me about a couple of the jobs he held. He told me that he wished he had given one of them up sooner, but he had a family of 4 children to feed. After he told me that, I promised myself I wouldn’t stay in a job that made me miserable.
It took me a few months into a situation at a previous role to realise that I was doing exactly the same thing as my father, just because it paid the bills. Once I realised that, the way I was being treated and felt was a result of a choice I had made to stay, I realised I had to go.
It was one of the most freeing decisions. I now look at all situations as a result of a choice I have made and not something that has been foisted upon me. They may not be the best choices, but they are mine. And when I make a bed, I know I have to lie in it!
In the simplest terms, I support people to prepare to profitably scale. What you do with a room full of people is very different to how you do it when they cross cities, continents or oceans.

​You may enjoy our Being Brilliant and human newsletter, where we curate and share human, practical and realistic approaches to life and work for those who are following their own path and are juggling multiple projects or streams of focus.

Ghilaine Chan
​​Activating people to work better together and flourish. Working on interesting projects with people I like to work with, strengthening how you motivate yourself and collaborate with others.

No judgements, no preconceived ideas, no preconceptions, no expectations. Who knows what you will find, who knows who you will meet, who knows what help you can provide, what help you can receive.
Come as you are, with your strengths, with your skills, with your abilities, with your awards, with your talents, with your examples
Come as you are with your weaknesses, ignorance, with your failures, with your lessons learned, with you war wounds, with your knockbacks, with your paranoia.
Come as you are with your legacy, with your super-power, as a role model.
Be yourself, in all your glory, good and bad. What is most important is the self-awareness that this journey has given you. We don’t have to be all things to all people, we don’t have to be brilliant at everything, but we need to be self-aware enough to know the difference between us and the next person. Where we can complement, add value, be of benefit, share collaborate.
Come as you are, be who you be and learn about what you can become.
In the simplest terms, I support people to prepare to profitably scale. What you do with a room full of people is very different to how you do it when they cross cities, continents or oceans.

​You may enjoy our Being Brilliant and human newsletter, where we curate and share human, practical and realistic approaches to life and work for those who are following their own path and are juggling multiple projects or streams of focus.

​Ghilaine Chan
Activating people to work better together and flourish. Working on interesting projects with people I like to work with, strengthening how you motivate yourself and collaborate with others.

There are certain times of the year where overwhelm can hit us hard. Just before we go for a holiday or a break, or just after we get back.
Often there is the shared sense of overwhelm we all seem to get at the beginning of the school year. September seems to have hit some people hard. You may be one of those people who didn’t get a chance to catch up over the ‘quiet’ August or perhaps you didn’t get a quiet August. That is a good thing to have in a lot of cases, but it doesn’t help you with that ever increasing long list of things to get done.
The first thing that can happen is that it starts to effect the way you handle your clients, customers, or employees. Responses take longer, things get pushed back. You feel like you are in a situation of fire-fighting or digging sand. However much you do, there is something else to deal with. How do you get on top of it all?
Firstly, take time to just take a breath. Sit for 1 minute, concentrate on your breathing and just calm yourself down. Taking one minute out will not impact anyone or anything, greatly. If you can take 10 minutes to walk around the block or to the office kitchen, toilet, stairwell, and back, then do that. Get out of this rut immediately.
What you need to do is allocate some time to get this stuff out of your head and into some form of actionable plan. This will take some time. I know, you don’t have that right now. If you don’t allocate some time to this, it is not going to change. I think the best way to allocate some time to getting yourself on the straight and narrow is to book it into your calendar and then tell everyone that you will be out of action for 3 hours. Let all your employees, customers, and clients know when you will deliver what you need to. With most things, if you set expectation proactively, most people will understand. Those that don’t would need a good excuse to not give you the space to get straight.
When the time comes, get all those things out of your head and onto a piece of paper (or whiteboard). Everything and anything that is worrying you or you feel needs to get done.
This is the first step to feeling lighter. Once it is out of your head, your brain stops rolling it around and around. Now look at that list and prioritise it. In my view the priority is, you, family, employees, customers, friends, everyone else.
Against your list, add deadlines and whether there is flexibility. Now you can prioritise based on your own version of the list. Some of those things may be ambiguous and you feel that they are important, but cannot decide if one trumps another. This is where you need to add the layer of your own business strategy to help you sort through.
I hope this will give you some thoughts about getting out of your own head and into a sense of productivity. One thing it may give you is the ability to throw some activities out as not relevant or useful or maybe some things that can be delegated. Not having the sense of overwhelm will also free some brain power for something more important!
In the simplest terms, I help people to get ready to profitably scale. What you do with a room full of people is very different to how you do it when they cross cities, continents or oceans.

​You may enjoy our Being Brilliant and human newsletter, where we curate and share human, practical and realistic approaches to life and work for those who are following their own path and are juggling multiple projects or streams of focus.

​Ghilaine Chan
Activating people to work better together and flourish. Working on interesting projects with people I like to work with, strengthening how you motivate yourself and collaborate with others.

I am amazed with how many people who are surprised by the amount of 'in person' 1:1 networking that I do and evangelise about. Me, on the other hand, am not surprised at all. I come across so many people who don't feel connected at all even though they are active on so many of the social media platforms available. Whist technology has made it possible and convenient to stay in touch with your first friend at kindergarten, it doesn't necessarily make you feel more connected to them in any meaningful way unless you interact intentionally and actively, regularly and often.
This is the words that are missed out with all this technology around us. It is not the connectivity we need, it is the intentional interaction, actively, regularly and often. This is the basis of any good relationship. The technology (or not) that you use doesn't improve anything on its own.
We read all the time about how more and more people are feeling more lonely and less happy with their lives because of what they see people doing online. This broadcasting of a great life that we all do, some more than others, is a way to make us feel better, but doesn’t manage to achieve that as soon as we see someone else's bigger and better post 2 seconds later, broadcasted to the masses. When we speak to that person 1:1 we manage to get to the bottom of the bigger and better and find out a little more about the work involved to get to it.
It makes us relieved, or with an action plan or example to follow. Something we have the chance to achieve ourselves. That connection is what people crave.
Technology is giving us another way of doing what people have been doing since time immemorial - finding others who we have something in common with. Technology is not making it better, necessarily. It is making it possible in different ways.
We need to remember this when we consider the world we live in. The same senses apply, the same mechanisms of humanity, the same need for company, connection, warmth and interaction.
Some things cannot be replaced with technology, no matter how close the robot resembles your mother. We need to remember that when we consider a new platform for this or that, or the new Facebook of this or that, in the end, it is still a human at either end, trying to make friends with each other in some way or another.
Thanks for reading!
In the simplest terms, I help people to get ready to profitably scale. What you do with a room full of people is very different to how you do it when they cross cities, continents or oceans.

​You may enjoy our Being Brilliant and human newsletter, where we curate and share human, practical and realistic approaches to life and work for those who are following their own path and are juggling multiple projects or streams of focus.

​Ghilaine Chan
Activating people to work better together and flourish. Working on interesting projects with people I like to work with, strengthening how you motivate yourself and collaborate with others.