From the Desk of Janet Barclay

As promised last week, today I begin sharing some of the valuable information I learned at the recent Forum on Virtual Assistance. My first workshop was with Mary-Lou Ashton, a VA coach and trainer who has been part of the industry in Canada since 1997. Her session, Your Professional & Personal Foundation: Tolerations, Needs and Values, was about identifying the little things we put up with in our lives that may not seem like a big deal, but can drain us of our energy and hinder our productivity.

The workshop consisted of a series of exercises designed to help us explore those issues, which I’ll describe below. I hope you won’t mind that I’m not sharing my answers, but I’m sure you can appreciate that a lot of it is very personal in nature and not something I’d care to publish online.

In the first exercise, we each made a list of things we are tolerating. It’s quite surprising how many things you can identify when you start to think about them in this way, and in many cases, they are things that can be easily rectified. For example, I often get frustrated with my computer not running as fast as I’d like. I realized not long after buying it that I should have requested more RAM, but nearly two years later I still haven’t got around to doing anything about it. That’s an easy fix!

From our list, we had to identify the toleration that would have the biggest payout if we found a way to deal with it, instead of continuing to tolerate it. Lastly, we developed a plan to address the toleration, including a completion date.

This exercise was very eye-opening, but it was just the beginning!

The second exercise focused on identifying ten things that we need in order for us to be our best. We were provided with a substantial list to work from. Mary-Lou cautioned us to pay particular attention to words that we might tend to skip over, because they might be needs that we have not admitted to ourselves for some reason. Of course, if we haven’t admitted them, we probably haven’t done anything about getting them fulfilled! After narrowing the list down to the four most important ones, we had to choose which one we wanted to work on first.

Mary-Lou explained that there are two sides to ensuring that our needs are met:

1)    establishing boundaries that don’t allow others to hurt us, distract us, use us, or command our attention

2)    raising the standards we hold ourselves to

That was a lot of soul-searching for one morning, but there was one more exercise to go!

The Values Exercise began by writing down our defining moments. Several years ago I bought a copy of Dr. Phil’s book, Self Matters, but I set it aside when I got to an exercise like this one, because I just couldn’t wrap my head around it, or maybe I just didn’t want to look that deeply into myself. This time I was more successful, so maybe that means I’m more self-aware now… either that or I just needed to be held captive in a seminar room to make sure I finished the exercise!

We then looked at our defining moments and what they say about us, and from that identified our four most important values.

Eliminating what’s negative from our lives will free us to be whole and present and attract more of what’s positive. After all, the Law of Attraction isn’t just about visualizing what we want and waiting for it to appear – it’s about gaining clarity that allows us to take the necessary actions to bring it about.

It was a lot more work than I expected to do when I went to the conference, but it was a very rewarding series of exercises, and definitely something I will revisit from time to time.