Month: August 2014

Are you good in routine – in structuring your day, your week, your project?

There are two kinds of people, the structured ones and the rest. Actually, there are more kinds, but I’ll leave this for another post. I am from the other other kind, the one that loves going into the unknown, being spontaneous, responding to the moment and creating new things.

Sometimes we create so much that it gets on top of us.

The Alice Springs trip is knocking at the door with a lot to prepare this time. The organiser of the Ocean and Family Constellation workshop in Alice Springs recently had a beautiful baby daughter. Congratulations beautiful woman!

Her time is taken up nursing, which does not leave any for organising a workshop.

A friend jumped in. Thank you!

However, her work suddenly takes her 4 hours further North to Tenant Creek, then not, and then she is in Newcastle for a week.

I need to step in more.

A presentation at the AFN conference, this year in Alice Springs, is a few days after the workshop.

The night before flying to Alice Springs another presentation to make – this time for the Melbourne Chapter of IAF.

A mentoring program with a commitment to write a post every day for three months will hopefully become a routine soon. Thank you for your support mentor!

Phase 4 of the GROWTH coaching accreditation program gives another technique to round off my skill set when helping people get unstuck. Learning to project manage. Thank you for keeping me on track coach!

GROWTH is great. It gives structure to the new programs on resilience, leadership and belonging, that currently simmer in the back of my mind. Stay posted while it all gets integrated in my work!

So, what are the tricks for sticking to routine and managing that stuff doesn’t get on top of you? Do you have any?

I would love to hear from you.

I’ll share a collection of tips in a future post.

If you are in Alice Springs, you could come to the Ocean and Family Constellation workshop. It’s great stuff and some find it life changing.

On the 5th of September I will once again go to Alice Springs. I am in the fortunate position to be able to run workshops, twice yearly, in the Red Centre of Australia.

I love it out there. The desert, the red earth, the rocks, the big sky. The rawness of a country that is so very old. When I walk, cycle or drive through it, or sit at a camp fire or somewhere on a rock, a deep silence comes over me. I sink into the land, meditation and silence.

The land is not just old from a geological point of view, it’s also been settled for many, many thousands of years. The original inhabitants, the aborigines of Australia, have over the millennia developed a remarkable resilience in living and surviving on this harsh country. They also have developed a philosophy, a wisdom, a spiritual tradition that is very connected to the earth, as well as an incredible and highly sophisticated social system. There are still remnants of this past out there and you can feel it in spite of the tragedy a lot of these people are living in these days. The impact of European settlement, combined with the accompanied welfare system, has left many of them institutionalised, disempowered, and some stuck in alcoholism.

So, when you go to Alice Springs, this is what’s right in your face when you walk through the town. It is a first impression many people cannot handle. However, when you lift your head and look beyond the rooftops, you get a view of the spectacular MacDonnell ranges. Also, when you dive into the community a little bit more you’ll discover a group of beautiful and interesting people.

The land is not all romantic. The silence can be challenged by flies crawling over your face, dingos barking in the night, extreme heat and dust storms to name but a few.

Out there you meet the contrast of life. The highs and the lows.

Now, you might wonder what is so special about me running workshops in Alice Springs. Can’t a local do this?

The work I do, which I lovingly call Ocean*, has its roots in a model called Family Constellation. It is a combination of traditional wisdom and rituals, modern family therapy and systemic thinking. The originator, Bert Hellinger, developed it after living with the Zulus in South Africa for 12 years. I have taken his original form further, and included Organisational Constellation, a Solution-Focused approach, presence and my experience of 30 odd years in personal growth and meditation.

It is not just that my work is unique. The workshops I run out there gain power through the depth of the land. In addition, the sincerity of the people, who have come to these workshops over the years and grown together, makes them even more special.

This is why on the weekend of the 6th and 7th September 2014 I am running another of these workshops in Alice Springs. For more information download the flyer.
* Ocean stands for ‘Organisational constellation – effective analysis of networks’.