by Gundula Welti
29 May 2021
Lifesavers
Many people are “lifesavers”: helping others, allowing them to escape from poverty, taking their mind off being sad or ill, with good advice. We love to help and do good all around us.
Do we ever ask ourselves if the people we want to save really want to be saved?
We often plunge in and rush to help people who have not asked us for anything.
Is this to help other people or to help ourselves? Isn’t our feeling of being useful just an illusion?
Should our role as a “saviour” not be more about trying to get the other person to want to save themselves… possibly by asking for our help?
What about you? Do you offer YOUR solutions or do you listen to what others are really asking for?
by Gundula Welti
22 May 2021
Dream BIG
There are countless methods of personal development that invite us to dream big, to imagine total success, to feel it and sniff it to find out what it is actually like, what it is made of.
Our ‘benevolent’ education, on the other hand, tries to make us act reasonably.
What if we revolted against what is “reasonable” and started dreaming? Not just day-dreaming along the lines of “what if I was rich” or “what if I was different”. No, dreaming a big, beautiful dream that we create with images, words and shapes, etc.
Our brains will have time to tame our ideas so we can get used to them. And as they – our brains – are very clever, they will find all sorts of ways to do this.
Why, then, should we set ourselves a reasonable objective, when we can dream BIG? If we put all our will into it, all our enthusiasm and all our energy to bring it about, we can get there.
Would you like to think big this year?
by Gundula Welti
14 May 2021
Children
Our children are our teachers. Children teach us every day what it means to be totally immersed in a task without worrying about the world around you. Being 100% present in what you are doing.
They show us our limitations, they push their ideas as far as they will go, making us measure whether we will also stick with our convictions right to the end.
They are a fantastic mirror, making us face up to our inconsistencies, and can make us fly off the handle all too easily.
Our children teach us about unconditional love, not to mention forgiveness. Even when we’ve told them off, they are indulgent and can show us just with a cuddle that they have forgiven us for losing our temper and that they still love us.
Anyone who has contact with a child will confirm that that child has touched them in their inner being, helped them progress or made them aware of something essential.
The wisdom of the child lies not in knowing but in being.
So, why don’t we go back and connect with our inner child and listen to their advice?
by Gundula Welti
08 May 2021
Unique
The names of our jobs have changed a great deal. Our grandparents were accountants, mechanics, or farmers. Something you could say in one single word. Recently, bartenders have become beverage dissemination officers and shop assistants customer experience enhancement consultants.
The American-style CEO and CFO arrived, then the “Chief Happiness Officer” crept in and is now an accepted term.
I hesitated before putting the word coach on my business card because I am not only a coach and what’s more, I’m not a coach like other coaches. I’m much more than that and, above all, I am unique in my field, as indeed are all my colleagues.
The word on the business card doesn’t tell the whole story, far from it.
Do you know what it represents for you?
Would you like to assert your uniqueness?
by Gundula Welti
30 Apr 2021
I don’t know
There is very little that we know in an absolute, scientific sense. Professor Stephen Hawking, although honoured for his discoveries, insisted on proving that what he had discovered was false.
When we claim that 1 plus 1 makes 2, we are only partly right. Because 1 plus 1 can make 3 thousand billion…. when we’re talking about a sperm and an egg.
By being totally certain about something, we exclude any possibility that falls outside of our field of vision and other fields of possibility.
‘Debating clubs’ make use of this idea. Two people present a subject, each holding an entrenched point of view. They then have to exchange places and arguments. These debates always turn out to be at least creative, if not quite mind-blowing.
So what if we set aside our certainties to make room for creativity and unexpected solutions?