Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the podcast today, we have Gail Gibson. Gail, welcome.
Hi, thanks for having me on.
It is my pleasure. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Sure. I am a performance and leadership coach and I help business and corporate leaders to achieve peak personal performance. Now I do that through using a can do approach, which I have created over many years of coaching. I’ve been in business now for almost 16 years And I’ve been coaching for 13 of those. So I created this approach through my own life experience and through my coaching experience and gaining knowledge and using skills and tools etc. And I have worked globally and lived globally. So yeah, I guess that’s really who I am and what I do at this stage. Well, if you’ve been coaching for 13 years, you’ve probably seen maybe some commonalities, some recurring themes of people who come to you for coaching, what would you say?
The recurring themes are in relation to people who are reaching out for help. The recurring theme that has come up for me is when people are really stuck. So they are at a crossroads, whether it’s in their career or in their business. So, because I work with leaders and focus on leaders, a great deal of my experience when I was living in the UK was working with small business owners who were wanting to develop themselves and wanting to develop their brand and their business. So, a lot of the time I worked with it was women who were coming to me and saying, you know, I don’t have the confidence to become a successful business person, so they were, they had limiting beliefs, they didn’t know how to sell themselves, they really didn’t understand how to network themselves and creates this, create impact and engage with their audience. So what I quickly realised was that there was those self-leadership and those soft skills that needed to be developed first, and then we worked on those and then we grew business, grew the business, but what I found then in the leadership work that I was doing with corporate leaders was exactly the same. People had got to crossroads maybe in their career and they were doing something that they weren’t necessarily enjoying anymore.
They lost that joy in their work actually, and it was had a lot to do with people were not living their true purpose or their values weren’t aligning with the goals of the organisation. So I think it really comes down to what I have discovered now and it’s all part of the three stages of my can do approach is helping people to a live with purpose. So they need to discover what it is first that their purpose is helping them to create meaningful work, so that it aligns with their goals and it inspires them to want to do more. And then the third part of it is to reach their personal best, so when they know what they know why they’re working towards something, they’re doing the work that really does inspire them and excitement and in lines with their goals, then they can reach their peak performance, so they can be at their best and deliver the best work for themselves and within their organisation or their clients. So that last part of your answer, that’s your can do approach.
Yeah, that’s correct, yes, the three parts. So, what are some of the ways that you’ve helped people achieve or work towards their peak performance or their personal best? Okay, so one if I just talk about one of my clients and she came to me and we’ve had a very long working relationship with one another. We she first approached me over 10 years ago and she was again one of those people who were stuck, she had just started up an organisation with her friends, so they had set up a limited company and they were providing professional organising services and she was stuck because she was wanting to go in a different route than her business partner. And through the coaching with me, she started off, she had, I very quickly realised, and she did as well, there were a lot of things that she was holding herself back from achieving, because she hadn’t worked through maybe some of those conditioned belief, some of those limiting beliefs, the self-worth and lacking in confidence that she hadn’t resolved within herself first.
So she was being limited by not being able to let go of thoughts, behaviours mindset. And so the first thing that we did was work on her mindset, so we started to bring in some habits that she could look at changing. And I think one of the things to emphasis here is when you work and want to change habits and change behaviours that you have had in yourself for many, many years, for whatever reason, it’s a process. So it does take time. And so I worked with her and she started to chip away at and win through some of these behaviours and changes that she wanted to bring about. So she was starting to get into a position where she was feeling more confident in herself and she was ready to take flight and to actually have that discussion with her business partner and say we’re going in two different directions, let’s have a think about what do we want the business to look like, where do we want the business to go? This is what I would like to do and does this align with what we are wanting to do together.
And it was at this stage because of this growth in confidence that she had developed. She actually, her and her business partner parted ways and she then set up her own business with her own aligned goals, her own vision, and she was creating that meaningful work that she wanted to be doing and delivering for the clients that she was winning business with. So we have built over the last 10 or more years, a very successful ongoing relationship because what she’s always tapped back into is the accountability coaching, which is a key part of the service that I offer to business and corporate leaders. Now, once you coach somebody and get them into a position that they have adopted habits and they have maybe changed behaviours and they’re taking new actions. They have their goals in hand and they’re working toward achieving them. It’s about sustaining that growth and that development that they’ve taken on.
So accountability plays a key part next. So what I do with my clients as well after I’ve finished maybe a coaching program with them is we set up accountability points at quarters throughout the year. So once every three months we meet up with each other, we have a session where we talk about what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, what’s the push to move next. So what do we want to do to elevate to really stretch those goals and get to the next stage. So we’ve had this accountability working relationship and client partnership going for all of the years that has been happening. So in in to bring that to a close that one particular client she is now somebody if I reflect back on where she started and the person that first came to me, she is now I liken it to somebody who is soaring high, she’s like an eagle. She has a really great view of what’s going on, she has strength, she has conviction, she is running a really successful business now.
She is growing it globally and she’s in a really great position for herself as well. So I guess that’s my reward as her coach to have witnessed that and shared that journey with her. Sounds like a good example you touched on limiting beliefs. So I suppose I wanted to ask you, I think people are aware of the generally speaking people are aware of the concept of limiting beliefs, but I wonder what’s your thoughts on the percentage of people who are aware, consciously aware of what they’re limiting beliefs are. Like, do you, in your view, do you think people are conscious of it? Or is it something that runs in the background and they’re not really aware of it? I think there’s a bit of both and I’ve seen that as in two different ways. So I think what you’re saying is I think a lot of the time people, it is, it’s that background cog and they’ve got them and they may be a little bit aware of them, but it’s until they’re forced into maybe a situation where they want to grow or they want to change something that they really come to the forefront because those are the things that hold people back there, the things that we give permission to, to say there’s that little monkey on the shoulder or I like and limiting beliefs, I call them little bastards and I hope it’s okay to swear on your show, but it’s those limiting beliefs, those things that are holding that we allow to hold us back.
So I think you’re right in saying are we aware or are we not aware? And I think the awareness comes through coaching when we, when I discuss those topics and bring those things to light with my clients and help them to realise that those are the reasons why they’re holding themselves back. It’s like a light bulb, it does go off and then they go, oh I know why that happened and when we can get to the root cause of it and then we can move forward. But what I’m, what I’m saying there by going to the root cause I am not a counsellor and that’s one of the challenges for a lot of coaches out there is where do we draw the line between counselling and coaching? So what I mean by going back to the root, cause we look at some of the environmental factors that may have contributed to that person having that limiting belief. It may have been to do with upbringing, religion, the culture that they’re in the society that they are in their work environment, there’s so many reasons why people develop these limiting beliefs because they’re often condition behaviours that are told to us by somebody else and we believe them and we feel that they serve us, but when we allow ourselves to let go of them and we talk about how they’re impacting what holds us back, and when we realised that we can start to let them go and we can move through a process of letting them go and then we get to the stage where we go, you know what, they don’t serve me anymore.
And when I’m not allowing them to serve me, then I can move forward and I can have greater confidence, I can have a voice, I can speak up, I can share my share myself with the world in a different way. So it’s it is very much about awareness and that’s bringing that awareness to the surface. If I understand correctly, people can sort of take along and not really address those things until they want to achieve something and then when they want to achieve something, they come to you and you recognise that those beliefs aren’t serving them and in order to achieve that thing, then they need to address those beliefs. Is that about right? That’s correct? Yes. You summarise that perfect thing and what are some examples of limiting beliefs that you come across, the limiting beliefs I see are mostly around those self. So it’s self-worth. So they’re not believing. So in business and in corporate you may have heard of the term the imposter syndrome, so that is a huge standout limiting belief that many people that I have worked with have had.
So they don’t believe that they are worthy of holding a position or they may be worthy of taking the promotion that they’re ready for them, even though their managers are saying, well, you’re the right person to take this job, they have this belief in their head, that is no, I can’t do that. How can I leave these people? How can I step up to deliver this to this organisation? Or how can I take on this team of people in my small business and lead them? So it’s that imposter syndrome, am I good enough, Can I do that? So that’s one example and I guess that links into self-belief as well, but I think one of the key ones that I work on and work on a lot more, because I’m doing a lot more corporate leadership, work in my business now is self-leadership. So that is a limiting belief in itself is saying I want to be a leader, but I don’t know how to be that leader and again through the experience of wanting to move up in an organisation.
I’ve worked with people who have kind of just coasted along in roles and then they see a great opportunity and they want to take advantage of it. But because of the self-belief and the self-worth that’s holding them back the imposter syndrome, they don’t have the skills to be able to self-lead themselves. So they don’t have the confidence, they don’t have that drive in them, that they don’t have that voice, they fear that upward management move and they get stuck, they get frozen. so those are, those are often the two key areas that I see that are really holding people back from becoming who they can be. And do you have any tactics if you will to tackle something like imposter syndrome or do you have to personalise it? It is, it is highly personalised, but if you think about it in quite a wider view, when you feel that you have imposter syndrome, the only person that’s telling you that you can’t do it is yourself.
So it’s flicking the switch in your mind and saying, let’s look at the strengths that you have, let’s look at the things that you are good at. So, off the top of your head, naming three things that you are really, really good at. So when you start to build yourself, it’s kind it’s like putting a it’s like building a muscle is putting power into that muscle. And so when you put a positive power into the muscle, you can be saying, you know, I do believe I can do this, I want to believe that I have this strength and I can do this and reflect on where you’ve used that strength before, in what type of environment or situation that you’ve used it in. So it’s powering up that muscle to say, you know, I can have resilience against this, I can build this so that I’m not being negative about it and I’m not allowing myself to give myself permission to hold myself back. So it’s about saying I am not an imposter, I can work through this, there’s lots of different tools and techniques, but it does take time.
It is once again part of a process to be able to move forward from telling yourself that you are that impostor I do like the can do approach, I tend to be a very positive person. b I do like to get people’s opinions on the self-imposed limitations. And telling yourself you can’t do something when you can versus telling yourself that you can do something that you actually can’t have. You got any thoughts on that? Okay, I think that is that’s a really good question, because that does that bring in the idea of the whole imposter syndrome. So, are you digging up yourself that you can do something when you don’t necessarily have the skills and one of the, one of the things that I have learned over the years, and especially when you’re running a business or you are in a team of people is even if you say yes to something that you can do it and I think this is I’ve been taught this and read this from a lot of gurus out there and when you say yes to something, if you have a strong network of people around you that can support you and that can help you achieve that, then you can say yes to something.
So what I’m saying here is it doesn’t just have to be a solo effort, it can be that you can say yes to something, even though you may not be able to do it, but somebody that can support you and within your network, who you trust, who has the skills to do that can step up and do that for you? Okay, so you’re referring to sort of like mentoring or delegation now, it could be a combination of both, it could be the support from somebody who can get you into that position to be able to do it or you can have that delegation within a team situation or a delegation within your own small business as well. Okay, I read on your profile that your can do approach somewhat comes from your own story. So, and I’ve mentioned it before on the podcast where people who are able to teach this well have actually gone through it themselves. So does that apply to you and would you like to share your story of you? Sure, Yes, yes, So I think my can do approach came from, well I know it did, it came from stems right back to my childhood.
So I had a childhood that was pretty, pretty free and easy, free spirited, quite harmonious. But there were challenges to my childhood as well. And when I think back now as I reflect on it, I think the challenges that I had to face then set me up for life. So going through situations that were difficult, going through struggles. Sometimes it allowed me to adopt and develop the key traits of what you need to have when you adopted growth mindset. So when you’re faced with a challenge or a setback in your life, you learn to overcome it. It may be tough at the time, but it teaches you something and if you if you take the approach and say well I can get through this. So even if I reflect on as a child, when I was faced with quite a challenging situation in my home life, I was somebody who would go outside of my home to ask for support. So I had a strong, I was fortunate to have quite a strong network of friends and family around like adults that I could turn to, I had relatives that I could turn to.
So I had that outlet to go and talk through things. And so what that helped me to do was talk through my challenges and to get somebody else’s perspective to help me and by doing that, that helped me to be more resilient toward what I was going through. So from childhood I then go through to my education and I took a can do approach and thought, you know, I’m just gonna, I’m gonna get my education finished and I’m gonna spread my wings and fly. So travel became my next big can do moment, I guess in life. And the first thing that I did which helped me to be faced with quite a big challenge of going somewhere I’ve never been before. So, you know, I mean if you are a traveller yourself, there’s always that first time you get on a plane and you go to a destination that you’ve never been to before. You don’t know what it’s going to look like. You don’t know what’s going to happen, you don’t know, you just don’t know what’s going, what it’s going to be like, how you’re going to feel when you get there. But I know from that experience on that plane I was leaving family behind, I was leaving a friendship group that I’ve had for many, many years, I was leaving security and knowing people and I was going somewhere where yes, I had a job to go to, but I didn’t know anyone and I was fearful and yet excited at the same time.
So by having those emotions when I got there, what I quickly learned that is I had to adapt to the situation. I had to be flexible. I was learning new things about living in a new country, luckily the country I went to was I could speak English, so I didn’t have to learn a new language or anything, which probably would have been another challenge and maybe another one that would have helped me grow. But there were different customs and different traditions in this particular country as well. And so I guess being resilient and getting through the fact that I was missing my family and I was missing what I had had. But I was also embracing new experiences and a new life and it really captured my imagination and became a core part of my life from that day forward. So I spent the time over there. I spent six months living there, came back to Australia. I met my husband and we’ve been traveling the world ever since. So we have embraced this whole can do approach to saying, you know, keep adapting, keep meeting people, keep having conversations, keep challenging ourselves to live in different places and take on whatever that teaches us to have those life lessons.
And so with that I then lived in the UK, I left Australia came to the UK. And we lived there for almost 25 years and then we took another giant leap of faith and we moved to Malaysia in 2018. So coming here has probably been one of the toughest challenges over the last 30 years that we’ve been traveling together in that it was, I guess we’ve been traveling here for many years, so we were aware of the cultural differences, but when you live somewhere it’s very, very different. So we had, we had quite a few setbacks and challenges we had to win through and adapt to be flexible to take that can do approach and say, you know what, we’re not going to give up, we’re not going to throw the towel and we’re going to keep going, we’re going to keep winning through and then lo and behold the wonderful global pandemic hit, which we’ve all had our own challenges for. And so I think it’s the strength of keep, I’ve kept building this whole, can do mindset throughout my life and so by using those tools and and building that as part of my life purpose.
I use it now as a very strong coaching approach to help others to develop a growth mindset, to think about how you can to build, can do into your mindset into your body and into yourself so that you can achieve peak performance in your life. Well, thank you for going through that. I would imagine, I don’t know this to be true, but I would imagine that there are other people who have travelled and they’ve been a bit miserable. They’ve been a bit like a a grinch attitude rather than a can do attitude. What do you do differently in order to have a can do attitude either in travel or just generally speaking, I think that I have just always been, I’ve always taken a very positive outlook, you know, even when you get on a plane for the first time, when you go somewhere and even if you’ve had a difficult experience, so we’ve all experienced delays in airports and cars not turning up or hotels being changed or something happening, but it all depends on the perspective you take in the attitude you take now in the moment you might get a bit angry and you might look at it and just think why is this happening to me, what am I going to do about it?
But a lot of the time, a lot of it is out of our control. So these things change. These things happen in the moment and if we harbour on that in the moment, I’m going to hold myself back, I’m just going to stay in this cycle of anger and limiting belief and not see this situation for what it really is. Then you don’t, you keep your blinkers on, you don’t remove the blinkers and actually see what’s there right in front of you. And so from an experience like that in traveling, I’ve learned that, you know, the situation happens, you may get delayed things change and Instead of holding yourself back, get out there and just embrace where you are at the moment. And nine times out of 10 you get another room, another car turns up the travel, turns into something, okay? But what you do learn about that experience is you learn that if you have those feelings, it’s okay to acknowledge and accept those feelings for how you did feel at that moment.
But if you can allow yourself to let them go and say if I change my approach just a little bit and I opened myself up to the opportunity and have a positive outlook, imagine what can happen. And it gives you that more of an adventurous spirit that explorer mode to just go, you know, I don’t know what else might be around the corner here. Something good will come of it. And I think a lot of people do struggle with that. But if you can tap into it and accept it and acknowledge it and then move on from it. You’re in a bit of situation and I think the same has happened. You know, right now, my husband and I are just going through a situation here where we’re looking to get our long term Visa. And so with Covid changing on a daily basis, we are faced with, we’ve been faced with in the last two weeks, four different flight cancellations because we have to go to a different territory to get our Visa endorsed. And it’s like each time the flight cancellation email comes in and you just go, okay, it’s happened. It’s out of our control.
What can we do about it? So you talk to the airline, you can change flights, but it might seem for some people it becomes quite relentless and at the moment travel plans change at the drop of a hat. But it’s keeping being aware and saying, I’m not going to hold on to this. I’m not going to let it overtake my life and I’m not going to just pursue this relentless negative energy and waste the energy, take a step back. Do what you can do. The rest is out of your control and let it happen. Let what’s going to happen next happen. Have you got anything? What would you say to someone who is really struggling with that? Let’s say like they’re seeing red. They’ve got all that pent up anger about the fact that their flights cancelled or whatever that scenario might be. What would you say to them? I would just say to them, you know, just for a moment, just take a breath because that breathing is one of those, one of the best ways of ever calming ourselves down. And I have to remind myself about that. We’re humans, we get we can get angry and we can get caught up just because I created and have this can do approach life isn’t always fantastic.
And we all get angry sometimes and we do hold on to things and we have to remind ourselves and say stop pause for a moment, take a deep breath and exile again and take another deep breath and then exhale again. And you know when we do that, we’re actually saying to our minds were saying we’re slowing down for a moment. We’re trying to calm ourselves down just in that moment and it’s such a powerful thing to do. And I know it’s helped a lot of people. It does help me as well. You just think a situation like a travel plan changing and when somebody is seeing red and we’ve seen those programs on tv where people are screaming at poor airline staff because their flights being cancelled and how are they going to get home and they need to be back at work. And it’s in those situations that that breath can be so important and to take that step back and think, you know, this is out of my control. If I hold on to this, I’m trying to control everything. But if I let it go, let’s see what can happen next.
And when you have, when you take that approach in the poor airline personnel can actually not see red as well because it must tie them out so much mentally that they’re being shouted at all the time. But the person that’s doing the shouting too, it lowers your blood pressure. It just calms everything else down. So breath I would suggest is the best way to do it earlier on, you mentioned putting it out to your network or networking. Have you got any thoughts or advice regarding remote networking Because you know I would imagine people at least at the moment anyway people can’t physically go out and network. So if you’ve got any thoughts on that. Yes. I did two webinar sessions last week for international coaching week for my coaching body that I’m attached to. And the two sessions I ran were on networking. Because my first book that I wrote in 2009 is called making connections. And it’s all about how to network effectively to build better business relationships. I’ve added.
Yes, I have. But that was that was back in the time when it was all face to face networking. This was well before the advent of online zoom meetings and masses of people all over our screens. But the thing is what we can still do today is still show up but we can do networking on an even smaller scale. So one of the things that I’m suggesting to my clients at the moment is tap into the networks that you’ve got existing. Don’t forget the people maybe you haven’t heard from people for a few months or several months and we know that everybody is caught up in this global pandemic. But just tap into those clients, those clients that maybe have been a bit quiet recently. And so working with one of my clients in London, she recently did this and she made a list of 12 people that she had realised had gone quiet in her database. She’d done work with them maybe 6, 12 months ago and they had been clients who had regularly re-booked her services. But as I said, they’ve gone quiet. So she actually actively engaged and made contact with them now, not just an email, but she actually picked up the phone and so she had conversations with them and she got to chatting with them and saying how were they really what had been happening in their businesses?
What had been happening in their lives as well? And she sent me an email about three weeks ago and she managed to through that networking just by picking up the phone and visiting the quiet ones. She picked up eight new, she re-booked eight client sessions out of the 12 that she got in touch with. So I think it’s just tapping back into the existing networks we’ve got and how can we add value to what we have done for clients already. So just see if that can work for you as well. So it’s not necessarily about a particular media, it’s more about the relationship you have with that person maintaining. Yes. And tapping back into the strength of the network that you’ve built. I mentioned as well that you help people either leaders or people with in leadership positions. Have you got any thoughts on that topic? You must you’re feeding me at the moment because I just published another book this year, I co-authored a book on leadership.
It’s called The C. Nine to the Rise of C. 19 Leadership see beyond and become the leader you were born to be. So the C. 19 is a play on our Covid-19 topic, but it’s SE. So it’s about seeing beyond. So the idea came up one day when my co-author and I were writing a chapter and we wrote online together during the pandemic. We started writing in June last year and we finished our book by December and we co-wrote everything online on zoom call. She would do the typing and we would work through the ideas to go into the book. So we were talking one day and I said, you know, our leadership idea is all about seeing beyond. And so that was the play on words. So it was C. 19 and then we work that into our chapter title. So the leadership work that we have eight pillars in our leadership book. And we based it on the practical experience that we have seen through the pandemic and these we’ve addressed some of the shortfalls we’ve seen in leadership.
Now we talk about some of the historical, really successful leadership traits that have continued forward, which is where people have collaborated with their teams, where people have led from within the team. So it’s not just leading from the top, it’s leading and finding out what’s going on with their people and moving forward from there. But then we’ve also noticed the shortfalls in such things like empathy, so and being very inclusive about how we work with our teams in organisations as well. So with remote working casting staff off to homes and all over the place, leaders, some leaders have shown that they were unable to work out how to keep their teams together and keep them working effectively and tapping into finding out really what’s going on and what’s working for them, especially with families at home who may have young Children, they’re doing home schooling, they’ve got bandwidth problems, they’ve got their partner also working in another room, the work life balance.
It all just gets very blended together and it’s like what’s happening to people, what’s happening with their wellbeing? Are they able to get away from their work environment? Are they able to get away from the people in their house for a while, all of those kinds of things have come to the surface, that we noticed that one of the key areas is prioritising self-care? So when we can look at self-care, which taps in and links very much to the personal performance work that I do. When we look after ourselves, we can start to look after those around us because we’re looking after our mind. We’re looking after our body and we’re looking after our inner self and so we can start to radiate that out towards the people that were working with. So we become more caring in our approach. We listen more deeply. We become more inclusive with our leadership as well. An empathy has risen to the top of the leadership traits that more and more leaders need to adopt going forward. And the one other one I just wanted to highlight was about adapting quickly and still continuing to lead effectively.
So this links to the daily changes from the governments all over the world. The epidemic hit us all at different levels and different governments took different strategies. They listen to different medical advice etcetera. And we know what’s happened all over the world. And so as a result, people who are running businesses, whether it’s a business leader or it’s a corporate leader, they had to be keeping, keeping their teams abreast of these changes and what was happening and what was the impact all the while they’re trying to still generate and produce whatever it is that they’re producing as an organisation. So the best leaders were the ones who were keeping their teams well informed. They were still checking in with their teams and they were being able to adapt maybe systems processes and this growing advent of digitisation in organisations as well. They were embracing all of these changes and being able to do this while still running their organisations successfully. so those are those are just two of the two of the pillars from our book that we wrote and published just in February this year.
What was that process like? Did you enjoy it? Loved it, absolutely loved it and I think it brought out a lot more of both of our strengths and it really got it really captured the voice of both of us together because we collaborated and we were so dedicated to working together and a large part of my coaching work that I do now with leaders in organisations. I we co run together my co-author and I so we’re building programs for organisations here in in Malaysia, were running, currently running a women’s self-leadership mastermind program for the next 12 months. We’ve got a female leaders from all corners of the earth and yeah, we’re working with them through all those different self-leadership and soft skill leadership skills to take forward. We touched upon self-care. How does one practice self-care? Okay, that’s a great question. I’m somebody who is very passionate about it and I bring it into my life daily.
So self-care is all about taking time for yourself in amongst all the craziness that’s going on and a lot of it is about helping the leaders that I work with as well and myself to step away from the busy nous of what’s going on to step away from the noise, the chaos of everything that’s going on in our lives. A lot of its macro noise that’s hovering around us and it and if we let it impact us then it really slows us down and it makes us unwell, it makes our mental health drop etcetera. So one of the things that I do on a daily basis before I even start work in the mornings, I have a two hour window where I have a routine of exercise meditation, mindfulness and looking after the nutrition, my nutritional needs as well. So hydrating, I do my stretching, I go out in the morning and I set myself a goal this year to do 10,000 steps before 10 a.m. Every morning and I very proudly do that. and it’s my time to just be alone.
I don’t take technology with me. It’s just I go outside and walk around our biggest state here. I’m lucky we have jungle at one end. We have lovely paths to walk around. So I just, I’m at one with nature and I can just let all my crazy thoughts that might be in my head start to filter down and it gives me a chance to actually set my intention for the day. So once I’ve done my exercise, I come back and I do some stretching and I go into some meditation and just quieting down everything and sit and sit in silence and um, it’s a powerful routine that I have embraced and I do encourage in others to find something that really works for them. Self-care has to be a very individual thing just because I do 10,000 steps and I meditate and I am very mindful of myself and setting my intention for the day, that doesn’t necessarily work for somebody else. I mean, do you have a self-care routine for yourself then?
I’m not, I’m not sure if, because it depends on the definition. Right? So, I mean I exercise, I like to control the environment and I was going to ask you about that, but I think, um, I think it kind of meets the criteria that you already talked about, so when you go out you don’t have to check with you. So like I control the amount of tech that can reach me at one particular time. I do like to stretch and so yeah, I think it’s similar. I don’t know that I’m as habitual as you are, so you sound very disciplined about what you do, but yeah, I find that the times where I don’t practice that is where I feel the grittiest. Yeah, that’s, that’s a great realisation too. And I think that’s what I see in my, in the coaching work that I do as well, when people get, they get stuck maybe thinking they have to be working all the time and this relentless desire to get that finished, get it finished and they don’t take time out for themselves.
We see it in ourselves and we feel it in ourselves as well. People get neck problems, they get they get headaches, they get shoulder problems, they posture gets very bad, they don’t sleep very well, their moods get very erratic and everything like that. And I’m not saying that’s just because they’re not getting up and looking after themselves and going for a walk or a run or swim or whatever it is that there choice of activity is it’s just that we when we allow ourselves to get tight and we get restricted and we don’t do anything that allows our body to kind of all get back into where it’s meant to be. Then we do feel grotty as you said and we do feel like we haven’t achieved something. And an example to share with you is yesterday I was interviewed on a podcast in the US. So I had to get up really early for this call. So I was on the call at the time that I normally would go out walking and so the call came to an end and then of course it was too hot by the time I could have gone out walking and I don’t walk in the heat of the day.
I walk at dawn. So it’s a beautiful time here and so the rest of my day then occurred and I had coaching sessions and I had some other sessions with people in the afternoon and before I knew it, I realised that I hadn’t done my walk for the day and I just didn’t feel like my day had gone according to how it normally does. I did feel a bit, I felt quite unsettled and I think because you said before, I have a very habitual routine, it’s something that’s really embedded in me and I was just like, wow, it does feel weird to not do it. And the first thing I noticed this morning when I went out for my walk is as I was walking along just down one of the path, I started to actually physically feel that all of my vertebrae were starting to realign themselves because I wasn’t sitting down anymore and I’ve been sitting down a lot yesterday and it just felt very natural to just think all of a sudden everything just started to align again and I was feeling like I’m joyful again.
I mean my happy space and this is a very important part of my day. And so I, yeah, I mean yesterday was one of those times, I didn’t harbour it, I didn’t hold on to it, I didn’t let myself, it didn’t serve me to hold on to it because I knew this morning I got up, put my fitness clothes on and I went out the door and I made it happen. So I feel much better today. Yeah, well you mentioned about, you know how you feel, you can feel yourself get almost better as you’re, as you’re exercising. I do find that um, I don’t know whether it’s just like muscles, but you, I find that I almost do it to myself if I don’t get out and recognise get some air and relax a bit. So we’re like concentrating, we’ve got the muscles in the face like that. And then until you come away from your work and get some space, you don’t realise that you’re doing it right. Mm that’s exactly right. Yeah, yeah. And you just feel looser and lighter, don’t you when you do do some exercise. So yeah, simple. But it works.
It does, it does. Can you share your goals? Yes. Okay. So I guess one of my goals is to write more. So these are longer term, longer-term goals for me. So my primary goal and my real drive in my life is to write a few more books. I’ve written to business books. I’m currently halfway through co-authoring a third book, which is another business book. But one of my Real passions is to write a trilogy, historical trilogy and I have done a lot of research on the topic. It’s an 18th century novel across many different places in the world and I think it’s this whole travel in me and reading being the voracious reader that I am as well. So that is a long-term goal for me, is to write my three series novel. Another goal for me is to I think this is more of a this is a short-term goal, is to get my complete my new rebrand.
So I’m not completely rebranding my business, but I’m going through a process at the moment where I’m getting a new website designed. I have, I guess in a way I have up leveled my content, I’ve been working with a copywriter if it’s had some new photographs taken as well. So this is just a refresh of my brand, but it’s a goal of mine to get it completed before the end of May. So that’s another goal of mine. And I guess a personal goal for me moving forward in my life, and I think it’s just, I think it’s just a time in my life that I’ve got to, and it’s about giving back more to communities. I think one of my big goals for next year, let’s hope we’re out of more of the pandemic situation that we’re in and we’re not in and out of lockdowns continually, but I want to, there’s something in me that just wants to become more involved in a community and charity and really give something back, whether it’s my coaching expertise and support whether it’s Copyrighting and content because that was the first business I ran when I first went into business back in 2005, I had a communication services, so it’s, I don’t know what it completely looks like yet, but it’s an act of paying it forward.
And so yeah, I’m still researching and finding a vision and a mission and purpose for that goal going forward. No, it sounds like a cool goal to implement. I did have some had someone on the show who said that, you know, they did everything they wanted to do from a business perspective and they had like an accident. So it’s like a near death experience and the only regret or thing that they hadn’t felt like they’ve done is like, as you say, um, give, give back and share some of the success they had by helping others, essentially. Yes, Yes. And also not to forget your 10,000 steps every morning, right? Yes. Yes. Well, that is going really well for the year. I do my, I’m dedicated to it and yeah, when I can’t make it, it’s okay, I’ll make up for it the next day. Does that mean 20,000 steps? I did say that to myself. I thought by the end, by December, the end of this year, I think, what am I going to do next year is going to be 15,000 steps or is it going to be 20,000?
It’s a big ask and it’s a lot more time implication in the morning, but perhaps I will just rejig my steps allocation for next year. Is there anything that you think that would be valuable that I haven’t asked you about today? I think you’ve actually covered. It’s really nice. You know, just from the pods that I’ve done is I’m getting lots of different questions being thrown at me, which is fantastic. And I feel that I have said all I need to say for this one. You gave me a chance to pitch both my books, which was fantastic. But no, I’ve really enjoyed talking to you and I think I’ve shared everything I’d like to share today. Okay, well, when you did say, you know, you’ve got a goal to write more. I was like, you’ve already written two books, I’m not sure the third one on the way, but they’re all business books. I’m gonna write something from a non-business perspective I’ve always wanted to. So okay, well, I hope that passion project goes well.
Gail Gibson, where is the best place for people to find you?
Okay, so I have my website, which is gailmgibson.com and you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m not a big social media fan, but LinkedIn is my platform of choice. I do have a newsletter that you can sign up to on my website as well and I have my own podcast that can do way. And on that show I interview people from all over the globe who have stories of resilience, success and growth to share. So whether people have been through a life experience or they just feel that they have learned something in life that’s given them this can do mindset as well, so they’ve won through a particular situation or challenge in their life. There are the stories that I love to showcase on my show.
Sounds very valuable and I’ll link that in the description and thank you very much for your time today.
Thank you. Thank you very much for the opportunity.