Building Success: Winning the Inner Game in Construction

By Melissa Boyle

Do you work in the construction industry?

Are you a business owner?

Feel stressed, overwhelmed and chasing that dream of success?

Melissa Boyle has gathered years of experience into Building Success so that you can fast track to a more balanced life with a clear direction to attain your goals.

Her exp

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melissa Boyle Coaching
• Release date: Jun 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781925949834

Melissa Boyle

Melissa is an author and marketer. She strongly believes that mental health needs to be an honest and open conversation, and is all about breaking down walls and stamping out stigma. She hopes that by sharing her journey, she can help others to feel less alone. Melissa has also written for BH Living magazine and Metro.

Book preview

chap1

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When we are juggling different priorities and demands, running at full speed in all areas of our lives, it can leave us feeling really stressed out, overwhelmed and out of control. Taking a step back and slowing down to become more effective may sound counterproductive, however in this chapter, I would like to show you why and how it works.

Slowing down your pace gives you a chance to look at your life, evaluate what’s working, what’s causing the stress and acknowledge what you would like to have working better. You benefit by identifying these areas and breaking them down to smaller chunks, bringing a sense of calm and clarity of thinking, allowing your mind to focus on specific areas, rather than everything at once. This really helps to build your effectiveness as to see what you need to do, and it becomes clearer how to take positive action. This helps you develop a higher level of optimism with increasing energy to move forward. Our confidence and overall performance is affected by our mood. And overwhelm can diminish it.

Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.

Khalil Gibran

Did you know stress affects the structure and function of the brain areas critically involved in learning and memory? This makes moving through our day more stressful as it becomes harder to recall information from our memory.

Stress is a natural reaction to a real or perceived threat, impacting our ability to learn new things and making it harder to focus our attention. We can also feel stress in our body through loss of appetite, feeling ill, and it may cause difficulty sleeping.

When we avoid issues because we don’t know how to handle them, they can build in intensity, taking up more of our headspace and energy over time. Situations and tasks become overwhelming, stressing us out and affecting our ability to think clearly. There are many reasons this can happen. It might be a fear of failure, or another fear that makes you anxious and worried. Overanalysing tasks, procrastination and trying to make things perfect, self-doubt or over-commitment because you didn’t know how to say no. These and more are based on fears or beliefs that limit your thinking and affect your ability to act with confidence. Left unchecked, these can build into a huge mountain that we don’t know how or where to even start to climb.

Science tells us a calm brain works best. It allows us to process and retain information, reasoning and judgement, to make good decisions throughout our day. We can support ourselves by focusing on one area or task at a time, and not spread our focus too thin or juggle multiple things at once. This may seem impossible at times in the construction industry. However, learning more skills around planning, prioritizing and boundaries will help you take control. We will go more into this in chapter 7.

In this chapter, I will be talking about bringing mindfulness into your day, acting and planning with intention, and the benefits of gratitude to build positivity. I will also focus on how contributing to our wellbeing supports us to become more resilient in tough times.

Action brings clarity

When I first start working with clients that are in overwhelm and really stressed, I have them fill out a worksheet called the ‘Wheel of Life’. This is like a pie chart with eight sections labelled with major areas of life such as work, relationships, health, etc. Clients rank each area from one to ten. One being not very satisfied and ten being very satisfied. In doing this exercise they get to focus on one area of their life at a time, which helps break information overload down to smaller contained areas like a filing cabinet. From here, we can identify where the stress is coming from and look at other areas that would benefit from some focus, and begin to plan some goals. After this first session, clients have said they feel less stressed, have clearer thinking and feel more organised. I have included a link at the end of this chapter to download and complete your own ‘Wheel of Life’, to help you on your way to clearer thinking!

When I started working with my client Paul, he had reached the tipping point, juggling many areas and had become overwhelmed. Paul was on a downward spiral, a build-up of worries had grown around work, home and finances. Paul had let his worried thinking continue for some time and it was now affecting his wellbeing. His ability to think clearly and find solutions was compromised and his mind was racing in all directions. We started working on the wheel of life to get a birds eye view of what was happening, once we broke the areas down we used the information to determine what was a priority and what we could park. This allowed Paul to mentally off-load some less pressing items and free up thinking space, knowing that they were still there but didn’t need his attention right now. We could now prioritise time and focus on the most important areas giving Paul a sense of order and progression in moving forward along with other strategies.

We started working on bringing more mindfulness into his day by utilising focusing techniques and meditation. The science-backed benefits of meditation include reducing stress, increase in focus and improving sleep to name a few. As you can see, meditation promotes emotional health and wellbeing. Becoming aware of our thoughts is vital to managing them and building our emotional intelligence.

When Paul was at work and his mind would start to wander towards worry (about something outside of work and out of his control at that time), he would quickly evaluate if it was a true concern and whether he could fix it straight away.

The answer was normally no on both accounts. If it continued to stay on his mind, he would make a note to address the cause of worry when he got home. Then he would re-focus on what was in his control and what he could work on now. This could happen multiple times during the day until he retrained his thinking to become a new habit. He became more present and more effective with what was in front of him. At the end of his work day he would spend a short amount of time planning the next day, and this would also signal the close of his work day. On his commute home, he felt a sense of achievement from being more productive during his day. He would then mindfully switch his focus and energy, as he arrived at home. knowing that he would pick up in the morning where he left off. Paul felt a greater sense of balance, he felt happier and less stressed.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is taking time to consciously reflect on thoughts and feelings internally, then focusing just on external influences. Being present and aware in the moment helps you act and respond appropriately to what’s happening around you. Also, when we dwell on things in the past that didn’t go so well, it can make us feel bad as we can’t change it. We can only learn and move forward. The key here is not to relive the event with attached emotions and feelings that may have been unpleasant, but rather review it objectively, then use that information for making better decisions in the future. We don’t have any control over yesterday or tomorrow. The power is in this moment now, where we do have choice – being mindful and choosing what you say and do now to avoid frustration and worry tomorrow.

Don’t let yesterday use up too much of today.

Will Rogers

Organisation

Another area I see that causes overwhelm in coaching and mentoring people is lack of planning and organising – where the day runs the person, due to no or minimal prior planning or focused thought put into their day. Its more then writing a job list on autopilot.

This is where we create and apply strategies and actions to take control of the day and create a