Welcome to you are awesome

YOU ARE AWESOME!

Welcome!

Welcome to You Are Awesome!

This blog is a celebration of the achievements of ordinary people who have decided to tackle something they had perceived as really hard at the outset. My aim is to document other people’s achievements in the hope that it inspires you to take on your own big personal challenge.

I love hearing about the inspirational stories of ordinary people who change their mind set and go on to achieve extraordinary things. They often talk about how it has totally transformed their lives and taken them in an entirely new direction that they would never have imagined possible a few years ago.

We are all capable of so much more. Often all that holds us back is simply not knowing just have how awesome we really are! Achieving things which are hard gives us an immense sense of achievement. It makes us feel alive and worthwhile which in turn can have a profound effect on our mental well being.

My Awesome Challenge!

I work for Network Rail, running one of their property portfolios. I have a team of nearly 90 people. Our aim to generate new sources of income to fund the UK railway and reduce the burden on the tax payer. We intend to do this by growing our income over the next 5 years by over 25% through investing in our portfolio of railway arches. This is harder than it sounds. We need to be more creative and much more wiling to take calculated risks. We need to be much less fearful. The fear of failure is what holds many people back from trying new things. 

I believe we only overcome our fears when we challenge them head on. So often when we do, we find they were far more imagined than real. When we overcome them, we move on and become bigger people.

At our annual conference in November 2014, working with Steve Stark of Then Somehow, I challenged my entire team to take on an awesome challenge. My own challenge was to find a way to motivate at least half of them to actually complete the challenge. The rules were simple:

1.     It had to be something they had always wanted to do

2.     It had to be something that to them at least, seemed beyond them

3.     It had to be something they could complete in the next 12 months

4.     It had to be a challenge in their personal life and not their work life

The Rules Explained

It had to be something they always wanted to do - Achieving our dreams in life is one of the biggest  gifts we have as humans. It gives us a feeling of satisfaction and inner peace and happiness. It makes us feel alive and is a source of comfort during the dark times. My team work incredibly hard to achieve our corporate targets. It was time for me to help my guys achieve what they wanted to in their personal lives.

It had to be something that to them at least, seemed beyond them  - Firstly everyone has their own perceived limits. These arise through our own life experiences to create our unique comfort zones. Things that seem beyond us are often daunting and even scary. We can only overcome our fears when we face them head on and do it anyway. When we do, we become bigger people with more stretching comfort zones. Secondly, achieving something that we think might be beyond us gives us an enormous sense of achievement. It makes us feel alive and worthwhile. I love that feeling and I really want my now team to experience it too.

It had to be something they could complete in 12 months  - 12 months is enough to get most hard things done. If it could not be done in 12 months, chances are it never would be.

It had to be a personal rather than a work challenge - If we fail in the challenges that we set ourselves in our personal lives the consequences often have little or no bearing on our professional lives. It was essential there was no fall out from people either not starting or not completing their challenges. Most people work to live and not the other way round. My hope was by making it something that was of personal interest, they may be more motivated to start and complete.

How we set this up.

Steve and I put a couple of presentations together explaining why we thought this was a good idea. Steve told a number of stories of ordinary people who partly through chance, experimentation and in some cases spur of the moment decisions ended up achieving incredible things.

After the presentations, we asked everyone to spend a few minutes thinking of a challenge that met the four rules. We asked them to write it down and explain why achieving this goal would be important to them. Finally, we asked them to write down what the first step would be.

Finally, we tried to group as many similar challenges together to create self supporting teams. The team members would support each other and help each other overcome any hurdles they came up against.

What did we get?

Steve and I were amazed by some of the things people wanted to do. The variety was incredible. People’s aspirations varied from physical endurance challenges like running a marathon, to setting up their own businesses and even one person committing to write a comedy. The table below shows some of the variety:

Why this Challenge is Awesome?

Once the novelty of the conference wore off, inevitably, people get back into the normal groove of their lives. Stuff comes up and the idea of starting a big challenge becomes less appealing. As a boss, it’s also really hard to keep asking people how they are getting on without giving the impression these challenges are a three-line whip.

Motivating people to do things is always hard. Trying to persuade people to do something that has nothing to do with work when they have all the other stuff to do in their lives is going to be really hard!

But that is what makes it a challenge. Can I do it? I have no idea. Do I know how I’m going to do it? Nope! Does is worry me that I am setting myself up for a potentially public fail? Not at all.

To be honest, if it was going to be easy, it would not capture my imagination and it certainly would not be worthwhile.

Going forward, this blog will be where my team share their experiences of completing their challenges. I will also share how I get on in trying to persuade at least half of them to do them. Wish us all luck and check up on us every now and then. Why not share your stories with us!