We’ve all had at least one: the terrible boss, the one you dreaded spending time with, who never saw you in a good light, no matter what you did. Some of them yell and scream, some pile on the tasks and some of them just ignore you. What they all have in common is that they have created a bad experience that can be very scarring.

There are lots of great tips on the internet on how to deal with this, mostly focussing on what you can do to manage them or the situation but I want to focus on the opportunities having a bad manager offers you. “Opportunities?” you say? Yes, opportunities. You may learn more from a bad boss than from a good one. Lets go through a few possibilities:

• First off is that you learn some bad boss behaviours that you know to avoid in the future. Most people don’t get much in the way of management training or guidance so they are totally unaware of what they should be doing or what it feels like to be on the receiving end of their behaviour. By experiencing it first hand, you know to eliminate it from your own leadership style and your future colleagues will be grateful.
• Recognise which saboteurs are driving them - and you! When we are little, we develop guidelines that help us feel safe and some of them don’t translate well into adult life because the follow a child’s simplistic logic.  Take the saboteur test and see if you can spot what drives you and how that may be interacting with what drives your manager.
• Learn not to take things personally. This is a really great perspective to tune into. Your manager is unlikely to want to destroy your life. He/she probably has a lot going on and isn’t managing it as well as you might wish. They also may have formed an impression of you that isn’t entirely correct. It’s a lot easier to step back and think about how to change the situation if you don’t think it’s targeted at you, personally.

• Learn useful conflict resolution tactics. Conflict arises when expectations are mismatched. Is there something you can do differently that will change the dynamic? It may sound cliche to say it but the only thing we have full control of is ourselves and when we change what we do and how we are, it has the potential to change everything.
• Get better at asking for what you need. Many of us hesitate to ask for what we need or give the whole story because we think it will make us more vulnerable, but telling a boss about the impact they are having on you can be exactly what is needed to get things to change. Your boss isn’t psychic and may not realise they are not explaining things well or asking you to do more than you have time for.

In short, sometimes a bad boss can teach us more than a good one. Remembering that, and using it as a learning opportunity can help transform how we feel about a situation. If you see it as a gift, you can even get excited and curious about dealing with the situation - and that will help you at the time and forever afterwards.

When was the last time you...
...lost your temper and later wondered how that even happened?
...said yes when you knew you should have said no? 
...went on FaceBook for ‘a minute’ and stayed for a few hours?
...said you’d start a diet and then ate a piece of cake?

... were hijacked by your saboteurs?

Our saboteur thoughts come from our early years, when life was confusing and sometimes scary. How ever good or bad our childhoods were, each of us came up with simple guidelines to try and stay safe. Rules like "don't make adults angry" or "don't make mistakes" or "lie low and you'll stay out of trouble" and somehow, we cruised into adulthood without ever checking that those edicts still hold water. And, because they have been with us all our lives, we trust them implicitly. Middle-aged me can be intimidated by people with a certain kind of confident demeanour because my inner child instantly sees them as as being more powerful than I am. Effectively, we're all following a map that has parts that were laid out by our five year old selves and we wonder why we sometimes get stuck in the mud.

I have yet to meet someone who is saboteur-free so its great news that there is a tool that can help us all defeat them. Rooted firmly in neuroscience, cognitive and positive psychology, and performance science, Positive Intelligence is a easy-to-adopt protocol, neatly slotted into an app, that can reduce the unhelpful thought patterns and behaviours all of us have picked up in some way during our childhoods and replace them with positive, constructive thought strategies, 

It consists of three steps that work together to rewire your brain to make new default behaviours:

• Identify and weaken your saboteurs: triggered by the smallest threat, just recognising them and exposing the lies they tell us reduces their power significantly.
• Build your self-command muscle: using simple micro-mindfulness techniques to centre and become present and calm - whenever you need to!
• Strengthen your sage powers: drawing on our more sophisticated thoughts, employing the skills of empathy, curiosity, creativity, and fearless, clear-headed action (instead of defaulting to old habits).

There are 10 saboteurs and each of us have all of them to some degree, with some being more influential than others for each of us. Here is a brief summary of each of them:

If you are interested in finding out more about it you can:

1. Take the saboteur assessment and see which saboteurs are influencing you most today
2. Get in touch so I can talk you through the program options in more detail 

Isn't it time to silence your saboteurs? I'd love to help you discover what life would be like if there was nothing stopping you!

Disclosure: I was invited to be one of the first cohort of coaches, called PQ pioneers, who trained with Shirzad Chamine, the creator of the program, and are still working with him to develop a way to spread the word and bring this amazing tool to the world. 

​Life is full of surprises; some are good and some are not so good. Our ability to stay flexible and positive under pressure can have a huge impact on our wellbeing. Resilience is not an innate capability; it's more like a muscle that can be built and strengthened. There are 4 pillars to well being: mental, physical, emotional and social. Each of these can be fortified to help us handle life's ups and downs, reducing the negative impact and allowing you to take it in your stride. In this session, we will talk about a few research-backed techniques that can help you bounce back when you need to.