As a coach I’m in the business of helping people make changes in their lives, a kind of change management consultant if you like.

Sometimes the journey needed to get from where you are to where you want to be seems enormous and the size of the change needed can be overwhelming.
But I remind my clients that Small Is Good: a small change can make a big difference. Every change you make is like dropping a pebble into the pool of your life and the ripples will go on emanating outwards for a long, long time.
If you need proof, try this: think of a relationship you have that needs improving. It might be your relationship with your significant other, a friend, your mum, your next door neighbour…anyone. And if we’re honest, most of our relationships will benefit from a little extra TLC, so I figure you’ll have lots of options here.
Choose one, and decide for yourself what one small thing you can do to improve things: it might be something as simple as saying “I’m sorry” or “hello”; you could decide that you need to change your mindset a little and start thinking about them more positively or that you need to respond differently. Or maybe you need to be upfront and actually say something like “how can we make things better between us?”
None of these things involve moving mountains (or making them out of molehills!) and none of these things is going to mean you have to have a huge upheaval in your life.
But the effect of such small changes can, over time, build into an entirely new and wonderful situation.
Small change, big difference.

Focusing on what’s going on around you rather than what’s happening in your head is a powerful way to change your mindset, and one I highly recommend.
The whole looking outward topic came up at a Power Presentations workshop I was running; it was fascinating to see what a difference focusing inwards or outwards made to the participants.
When they were doing their own presentation – and focusing inwards – they were much more nervous than when, minutes later, they had to give an evaluation of someone else’s presentation because, clearly, they were focusing on something outside themselves. They looked and sounded 100% more relaxed and comfortable when they were evaluating and not just to my practised eye  –  everyone noticed the difference.
It was a valuable lesson in how your mindset has a profound effect on the way you act: my group went away promising to practise their presentations while focusing on their audience rather than on their own performance.

Why? If you’re, say, a furniture polisher or a widget builder, why does it matter whether you can deliver a brilliant presentation or not?

The answer is simple: people buy people. You are your best ambassador for your goods and services providing, that is, you’re not a bumbling, mumbling, red-faced bundle of embarrassment when it comes to your turn to speak.

If networking plays an important part of your marketing strategy – and if it doesn’t, it really should! – every time you go to a new event your presentation skills are put to the test. Speak fluently and confidently about yourself or your business or both, even if for only sixty seconds, and you have a much better chance of winning new customers than if you’re tongue-tied or, worse, if your lack of confidence makes you sound stern or brusque.

Here are three simple ways to improve your presentation skills:

1. Visualise yourself making a brilliant presentation. If you’re nervous your negative side has probably pictured a poor outcome hundreds of times; improve your chances of a positive outcome by consciously creating mind-movies showing you delivering an absolutely wonderful presentation. Picture the audience cheering at the end of it, picture yourself looking calm and confident, knowing you’ve done a great job.
2. Check your material. All you need for a simple, brilliant presentation, is a beginning, a middle and an end. If what you say seems to have rather more elements than that, think again and remember that simple is good.
3. Practise. Practise and practise some more. Practise in front of a mirror first, then in front of a friend or friends, listen to their feedback and ACT on it!

Check out Your One-Week Countdown to a Brilliant Presentation, here.

Psychologists say we talk to ourselves in our minds up to 55,000 times a day and most of what we say is negative.

Using both neutralizers and affirmations doubles your power in banishing those negatives and giving yourself a positive environment in which to flourish.

Neutralizing means you respond to negatives, which can come from your own mind or from other people, with a simple positive. You may have an all-purpose neutralizer or you may want to create a specific neutralizer for every negative that comes your way.
For example, if you’re spending time with a family member who makes you feel worthless, you could use a neutralizer like “I’m doing great, thank you” which you’d say out loud or repeat in your head. If you’re in a meeting at work and you know there’s going to be conflict, your neutralizer could be “We’re working well together”, aloud or in your head, whichever is appropriate.

Affirmations are your way of taking control: use them whenever you want to and be proactive about banishing negative scripts. For example, if your negative script was “I am hopeless at bookkeeping” a good affirmation would be, “I am very good at bookkeeping”. Your feeling about saying this positive version is an indication of how powerful the negative was, by the way. If you think: “I can’t say that because it’s just not true”, remember that your negative script was probably not true either, but it gained credibility every time it was repeated in your subconscious until, eventually, it became true. The same principle applies to your new positive script. 
Simple affirmations such as: “every day in every way I’m getting better” can have a profound effect on the way you think about yourself.
Make your affirmations strong, in the present tense and brief.  “I think I will be all right joining that new club” will have much less effect than “I’m confident and keen about joining the new club”.
Repeat your affirmations daily. Print them on postcards or post-it notes and stick them to your keyboard or monitor at work, the fridge and bathroom mirror at home, your bedside table – anywhere and everywhere. The more often you say them, the more they’ll embed in your subconscious and those negatives will be less likely to return to hold you back from living your best life.

If you want to build your confidence, why not try some modelling? Not the sort of modelling that stick-thin beauties on a catwalk do, but copying or imitating someone’s style. Modelling is a marvellous way to fake it till you make it and, even when you have built up your confidence to a really high level, you may still find that modelling your behaviour on someone else’s can be great way of developing new confident moves and gestures.

It’s powerful on several levels. First and most obviously, if you look confident – even if you don’t feel it – people around you will assume you are confident and will respond to you accordingly. This will steadily build on your confidence over time.

And secondly, your confident posture and gestures will have an effect on your own subconscious. Interestingly, your subconscious finds it almost impossible to tell the difference between fact and fiction. If, for example, you give your subconscious regular signals in the form of drooping posture, dreary gestures and negative conversations, that you feel fed up, well, your subconscious will obligingly direct every cell in your body to create the perfect environment in which to be completely downhearted. Actors who play demanding roles often say it can be difficult to get out of character once the play is over; that’s because their subconscious has responded to the “reality” they created while they were in their role.

Equally, if you send lots of signals to your subconscious to say you are confident, your subconscious will jump right on the bandwagon and direct every part of you to be completely comfortable in your own skin, cool, calm and collected.

Sometimes, people who have little or no self-confidence feel awkward when they suddenly put on the mantle of confidence; it’s a foreign country and they feel uncomfortable and self-conscious. So I suggest trying it out for the first few times in a non-threatening environment, perhaps with one or two close friends. Don’t make a big deal of it, don’t announce it or make excuses, just do it and notice the effect it has; I’m prepared to bet you’ll get nothing but positive responses. So the next time you try it will be easier, and the time after that easier still, until it’s virtually second nature to you to slip into your confident skin.

Work through the simple exercise below and then think about when you can slip into your confident mode for a non-threatening rehearsal.

Here’s how start your modelling career

First:  Identify someone whose confidence you admire. It might be someone you work with, a friend, a character in a movie, or even someone you’ve seen doing well in a similar situation to the one you face.

Next:  Get a really clear picture in your mind of this person in action, so clear that you can see what it is about them that makes them look and seem so confident. There will be certain aspects that you’ll need to clearly identify, things that are common to every who is confident. Things like:

• their posture – they’ll be standing tall and relaxed
• the way they speak – slowly, with plenty of pauses and a firm tone
• their manner – cool calm and collected
• their facial expressions – relaxed and rady to smile.

Now see yourself behaving just the same way as them; see yourself “being” them in a situation where their confidence will be needed. Practise, in a non-threatening environment, behaving the way your role model behaves; get used to getting under their skin and using their confident gestures, language and posture.

Finally:  Adopt your role model’s characteristics when you’re in the hot seat. Remind yourself how your role model reacts and responds, and act accordingly. It’s amazing how well this works: no-one but you will know you’re all of a-quiver inside and the more you practise, the less you’ll quiver!

And if you feel guilty about copying, remember imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

We all experience stress, every day; some of it is “good” stress that helps us to perform well and stay motivated. “Bad” stress elicits a negative reaction from you and leaves you with feelings of dissatisfaction and anxiety. Self-belief and the determination to change the way you respond to what the world throws at you are the keys to taming the negative stress and turning it over to the positive side.
Whatever causes you to feel stressed, believe that YOU have the power to turn it around and respond calmly. There are many ways of reaching the conclusion that, yes, you do have control over your reactions. Believing that you can change is vital. If you believe you have it within your power to change yourself, anything is possible. Limiting beliefs, those often unreasoned and unsound ideas we unconsciously carry around with us, get in the way of your desire to change, so think about what negative internal scripts may be holding you back, and get rid of them.

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Developing, and continuing to develop, your self-awareness, is crucial if you want to change. Start by simply spending 10 or 15 minutes a day thinking back over the last 24 hours: how did you get on? Did you respond calmly to irritating stimuli? Did you over-react or become too passive? Could you have handled situations in a more constructive way? Was there conflict and, if so, how did you respond? Then think about how you will manage similar situations next time round in a much more positive and constructive way.
Make some physical changes as a precursor to the mental and psychological changes that will follow. Start taking at least two 15-minute walks each day, or develop a simple exercise and stretch routine; join a yoga group or take up running. Physically making changes can help to prise you out of the emotional rut you may have been in.
Take heart from this true and inspirational story: Victor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, was imprisoned in the death camps of Nazi Germany in 1942. His parents, brother, and his wife died in the camps. Despite the horrors that surrounded him, Frankl, who had always worked on examining the meaning of life, discovered a freedom that could not be taken away. He was a self-aware being; his identity was intact; he could decide for himself how he would react to the things happening around him. In the small space between what happened to him and his response to it was his freedom to choose how he would respond. With this thought, and his continuing examination of the reasons for existence, Frankl found peace and stability, and went on to help fellow prisoners and even prison guards to find meaning in their lives even in the most degrading situations.

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Once you have prepared to change, use these 10 tips to help you cope with whatever stress comes your way:

1 BREATHE!  Anxiety can make us take short, shallow breaths which can mean we’re starved of oxygen at the very time we need it most. Take control; take time to breathe deeply

2 SMILE. A smile is the simplest “anchor” of all, so use it. And while you’re at it,  set another positive anchor or two:  anchor good feelings so that you can revisit them at any time at all.

3 LAUGH. It’s difficult to hold on to tension when you’re laughing. Practise the inward laughter technique. Remember the times when you’ve laughed out loud. Do a fun audit and mentally prepare for your next good time.

4 MEDITATE. You create your own reality in your mind; use meditation to take control of your reality. Twenty minutes’ meditation a day will have long-lasting, far-reaching beneficial effects. Even 10 minutes a day will help you to cope with whatever the world throws at you.

5 USE THE ‘A’ TEAM. Either change the situation by Avoiding /Altering the source of stress or change how you react by Adapting / Accepting the source of stress.

6 AFFIRM AND NEUTRALIZE. Positive self-talk offsets any negatives. Affirmations need to be in the present tense and wholly positive and work best if they’re repeated throughout the day. Neutralizers are your personal stress-blockers, words or brief phrases you repeat out loud or in your head that take the sting out of whatever negatives come at you.

7   BE BODY LANGUAGE POSITIVE. Body language is a two-way channel: your subconscious doesn’t know the difference between the truth and fiction, so if your body language is from the “confident and relaxed” stable, your subconscious will make your psyche align with that concept. 

8  SPEND TIME WITH HAPPY PEOPLE.  Make a positive effort to spend time with people who are relaxed and happy, to offset whatever stressful environment you have to endure.     

9 TAKE THE HELICOPTER VIEW.  Ask yourself  this question: “In 10 years’ time, will this really matter?” The answer is invariably ‘No’!

10 GET MOVING. If you feel anxious, irritable, angry or frustrated, do some exercise. Stretching’s good if you’re stuck in the office or in a meeting, say, but if you can get outside and go for a walk in the fresh air, so much the better.
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Time management is a crucial part of your self-confidence toolbox because if you take control of your time, you take control of your life and there’s no more powerful weapon in your battle with anxiety!

There are many ways of developing a time management programme that works for you as an individual; what works for you may not work at all for your best friend or your partner.

One way of finding out what might be a good starting point is to think about a time in the past when you’ve really felt good about the way you managed your time, or when you were particularly efficient. Analyse how you came to be working so efficiently and effectively and see if you can apply the same principles to the task at hand.

You can also work through this simple exercise and then, using the Urgent/Important matrix below, get a clear picture of your time management at the moment, as well as some pointers as to how you can make key changes to the way you work so that you can always use your time to the max.

1. Take an average day, or build a picture of an average day with selections from three or four days, and list every activity you undertake.

2. Allocate each activity into the appropriate box in the Urgent/Important Matrix, below.

3. Now work out how you can put EVERY activity into Box Number 2, the “Not Urgent But Important” box. To begin with, you may think it’s not possible to shoe-horn every activity into that box, but with a little lateral thinking it is definitely doable, and you’ll be amazed at how much more you achieve! 
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The Urgent/Important Matrix

Motivation is the rocket fuel that boosts our effectiveness and dynamism; it is the crucial, mysterious ingredient in everything we do that can mean success or failure, fulfilment or disappointment.

If there was a simple equation, such as

will to succeed + determination = motivation

everyone could be totally motivated all the time.

Unfortunately, there is no magic formula because we each have different triggers that launch us into “get going” or “keep going” mode.

However, there are ways of discovering your triggers and hot buttons, so that you can find ways of boosting your motivation whenever you need to.

And once you can do this, you are on your way to becoming dynamic, successful and fulfilled.

All you need is a self-belief and the will to use these three dynamic tools in combination:

1. Visualisation. Spend some time before you start on your course of action imagining the world as it will be when you have completed it. Create a mini-movie in your mind of the way things will look, sound and feel when you’ve achieved your goal and, once you’ve created it, run it in your mind regularly. Your subconscious will become a powerful ally in helping you to achieve your goal because it will pick up on this mini-movie and the new “reality” it creates, and will subtly enhance everything you do that takes you towards this new reality.

2. Self-awareness. Knowing yourself and what your real values in life are will make it simple for you to decide whether what you plan to do aligns with your deep-seated beliefs. For example, if family life is one of your key values, you will much more likely to achieve goals that take this into account. If you were to embark on a course of evening classes to learn a new skill which would help you to achieve your goal, you might find it difficult to keep your motivation for the classes high if it meant that you had to miss out on important family time.

3. Self-confidence. If you feel confident that you can achieve your goal, you give yourself a huge, automatic motivation boost. Conversely, if you have even the tiniest doubt in your mind that you can actually achieve what you set out to do, you may find your enthusiasm flags quickly. You can boost your self-confidence in many ways, one of which is to step outside your comfort zone frequently and reflect on what you’ve done. A great way of checking your confidence as you start working towards a new goal is to assess how easy it is to visualise the world as it will be after you have achieved it. If you find it difficult to create your mini-movie, try adjusting your goal until it becomes easy to “see” what your world will be like once you’ve achieved your (more realistic) goal.

These three simple, powerful tools will help you to stay on course and give you the ability to boost your motivation whenever you need to. Using them will enable you to achieve the success you deserve. Good luck!
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Setting and achieving a goal means you are going to create a new version of your world. So first visualise your new version of the world and then work out exactly what you need to do to achieve it. If necessary, simply jot down all the things you will have to do, in no particular order. Then create a plan with realistic timescales. Schedule milestones and key turning points – especially important if your goal is a long-term one  – and review it again to ensure your motivation is still high. These seven steps will help you to create great goals that will help you to create a beautiful new world.

1. Visualise: You may already have a clear goal in mind, in which case, simply visualise how the world will be once you have achieved it. If you want to change your life and are not sure where to start, think about how you would like to live your life: what would a typical day be like in your perfect life? A typical week? Who would be part of your beautiful new life? How would you spend your time? Do not try to rush this. Allow yourself time and space to really think about how you would like your life to be, who will be part of it, where you will be and what you would like to be doing on a regular basis. Visualise your new beautiful life and “see” yourself going through the motions of a normal day; make your internal video as vivid and lifelike as you possibly can. Run through this internal video several times so that you can return to it whenever you like.

2. Align: Now ask yourself what your values are. Sometimes, the hurly burly of our lives can distance us from our own true values but our values drive everything we do, so it’s important to identify and acknowledge them and align our goals accordingly. You may recognise your values in the following list, but you may have many more to add.

honesty         beauty         charity         comfort        health         family         trust         money         art

religion        faith         generosity        security        kindness        power        friends         creativity

3. Select the values that resonate most strongly with you, those that are “must-haves” in your beautiful new life. Run your internal video in your mind again, and just check that your values are implicit in your new beautiful life; if does not fit with the values you have identified, you may need to have a rethink, either about your goals or your new life…or both.

4. Identify: Now you have a clear goal in mind, you must make it SMART, that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. If you want to lose weight, for example, saying “I want to lose weight” is not a goal, it is a wish. A SMART goal is “I will lose 2lbs a week for the next six weeks”. Or “I will reduce my calorie intake from 2000 a day to 1500 a day, and factor at least one hour of exercise every other day for the next month”. Losing 2lbs a week for the next six weeks is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. Cutting calories from 2000 to 1500 is also specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. “Wanting to lose weight” is not specific, measurable, achievable, realistic or timely.

5. Plan all the activities that you need to undertake to achieve your goal. Give yourself a clear timetable and make sure it is specific, achievable, realistic and timely; you may like to set milestones along the way and give yourself rewards when you reach them. If you are making major changes to your life, you may want to break them down into several goals so that you are not overwhelmed by all the differences. If your goal is SMART your plans will be too.

6. Remind yourself of your goal: good ways of doing this are to tell people around you what you are doing, so that you will be accountable to them; use written reminders in your diary or calendar. If your motivation flags, visualise the world as it will be when you’ve achieved what you want to achieve.

7. Review your success. Once you’ve achieved your goal, think back over all the activities you undertook to achieve it, and congratulate yourself. Keep your success at the front of your mind, because it will help you stay motivated in every new goal you set.
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Choosing change is a way of living your life that can help you to be more positive, more dynamic and, eventually, more fulfilled and successful. To take control of change in the most powerful and meaningful way, you will need to set clear, time-bound goals, with realistic action plans.
We can categorise change in a hundred different ways, but there really are only two types: those we want and those that are forced on us. The two types are inextricably linked, because the action of making a change we want always brings with it side effects – other changes – about which we may have no choice.

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Every change is like a pebble dropped into the pool of activity and experience that makes up our lives: it will cause a splash, and then ripples that will emanate outwards for a long time.
Making a dramatic change to our finances, for example, might mean our relationship with our partner has to change too; changing our relationship with our partner may mean we have less time to spend with friends; spending less time with friends might result in more changes in our relationship with our partner… and so on, ad infinitum.
The best changes are those we choose and of those, the most successful and life-enhancing are the changes we want that we express as clearly defined goals with straightforward, time-bound actions plans in place.

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You may have heard the much-quoted urban myth about Harvard MBA graduates who were asked if they had set clear, written goals and made plans to accomplish them. Three percent had written down their goals and created action plans; 13 percent had goals, but had not written them down; and  84 percent had no goals at all. Ten years later, these graduates were interviewed again. The 13 percent who started out with unwritten goals were earning, on average, about twice as much as the 84 percent who had had no goals.
The three percent who had written down their goals and their plans of action to achieve them were earning, on average, 10 times as much as the other 97 percent put together.
It is a great story but Harvard researchers claim to know nothing of this fabulous study — and let’s face it, they would hardly have forgotten it.
So how to prove that it is worth writing down your goals?
Give it a try. Spend a little time today, now, thinking about one thing you would like to achieve during your lifetime. It may be something amazing and huge like climbing Mount Everest or walking the Great Wall of China; it might equally be something fairly simple and straightforward like losing 20lbs.
Write down your goal and, very important, this, the date by which you will achieve it, in a notebook or diary, somewhere you can refer to it regularly.
Over the next few days, think about how you can achieve it. Do not rush this stage; give yourself plenty of time and space to allow both your conscious and your subconscious mind to get to work on it.
As the ideas come to you, jot them down. Gradually, a plan will begin to emerge and, once you really begin to see the possibilities, you will find your motivation rises steadily.
When you have a complete action plan, review your goal and your deadline to see whether it is still viable.
Then start taking action.
You will have taken control of this change in your life and it will feel wonderful!