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.

There ain't no point moving on till you've got some where to go. The road that I have walked on, well it filled my pockets but emptied out my soul.George Michael, Waiting
I was sitting on the train last week, listening to my music and this song came on. Often I have it as background noise to cut out the rest of the train carriage so that I can concentrate on my book, but today the words broke into my concentration. It reminded me of a few conversations I have been having with people recently.
In business it is especially important, moving takes effort, resources and often money. Even personally, you won't get to where you want to be if you don't know where that is.
The second line resonated with me even more. This journey we call life is not all about getting as much money into your pockets as possible. You need to remain true to yourself and keep some of you soul. What you may think as a small thing may grow to something larger and before you know it, you are doing things you never thought you would do. This is well summed up in The 'not to do' list.
I have a 'not to do list' and so far, I have managed to stick to it, perhaps more through luck than judgement, but I have turned down a couple of potential projects based on my list. I sometimes find it a struggle to know what I want to do when I grow up so I have a rule that it is a yes until it I know it is a no.
The no comes from the fact I have my not to do list. Everything else I move forward with until I know enough to say no. This has had the benefit of me having some new and unusual opportunities come my way, that I would not have known how to search out if I had looked for them.
Continuing on with this post in a more coherent way, if you start along a path and it doesn't go in the right direction because you don't know where you want to go, after a few steps you can turn back and go the way you wanted, but carry on for a few miles and you will end up a long way from your desired destination and you will wonder why you allowed yourself to be carried along for so long.
This post was inspired by the song and this post from James Clear about the Helsinki Bus Station Theory. You need to stay on the bus!
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.