Blog | YourCoach Gent

Some of the more interesting recent additions to the English language:

Testiculating - Waving your arms around and talking bollocks.

Blamestorming - Sitting round in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed and who was responsible.

Seagull manager – A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything and then flies out.

Salmon Day - The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die.

Cube Farm – An office filled with cubicles.

Prairie Dogging – When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on. (This also applies to applause for a promotion because there may be cake.)

Salad dodger – An excellent phrase for an overweight person.

Swamp donkey – A deeply unattractive person..

Aeroplane blonde – One who has bleached/dyed her hair but still has a ‘black box’.

Percussive Maintenance – The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

Oh-No Second – That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG mistake. (e.g. You’ve hit ‘reply all’).

Greyhound – A very short skirt, only an inch from the hare.

Millennium Domes – The contents of a Wonderbra, I.e. Extremely impressive when viewed from the outside but there’s actually naught in there worth seeing.

Monkey Bath – A bath so hot, that when lowering yourself in, you go: ‘Oo! Oo! Oo! Aa! Aa! Aa!’.

Mystery Bus – The bus that arrives at the pub on Friday night while you’re in the toilet after your 10th pint and whisks away all the unattractive people so the pub is suddenly packed with stunners when you come back in.

A bit too long maybe

Tramp Stamp – Tattoo on a female’s back.

Picasso Bum – A woman whose knickers are too small for her, so she looks like she’s got 4 buttocks.

Tart fuel – Bottled premixed spirits, regularly consumed by young women.

A visual ode to those that constantly push back the limits of the impossible:

We regularly get the feedback that our business model is rather diverse, and somewhat confusing. What exactly is it that we do? Is it websites, or coaching, or both? And how do we combine those within one company?

We’re actually a hybrid company. We love variable activities, going from technical to personal. With our diverse interests we have grown expertise in various fields that we use in all of our work. Sometimes they’re separate (not every coaching client goes home with a website ), and sometimes we use everything we know in one project.

Like with Personal Branding, where we create a brand from someone’s unique traits and starting from their own values and vision. We start with coaching, where we elicit someone’s internal values and align them to create a compelling story. Then we use all of our technical and creative skills to give this a concrete form. That consists of a logo, house style, website (with SEO), copywriting etcetera. This process ensures success: our clients tell us exactly what they want, and we hear them. Just take a look at our references!

It’s our belief that companies will become increasingly hybrid like us in future. The holistic, human approach is more and more prevalent in corporate life. People working from home. Companies like Google that have people spend one fifth of their working time on projects that have nothing to do with their daily task. The shift in team buildings from learning specific skills to getting to the person below the professional, and developing him or her.

Our orientation is intuitive and based on our many interests. And because we’re passionate in all we do, success is guaranteed! We can help our clients on different levels, which means they can consult us for both personal and professional questions – and get them aligned.

What do you think about our business model and/or the way we present it? What can we improve? Let us know!

I’m not an expert in meditation, but I do know that there are different kinds. I notice that people that start meditating (like me) don’t have a clear view on the differences of every approach, which may lead to disappointment or objectives not being reached.

One way of meditating is concentration meditation (I’m inventing these names). This is where you keep your attention focused on one object. It strengthens your peace of mind and concentration skills, but won’t necessarily lead to any deeper insights. It’s like doing any other activity that absorbs all your attention, like extreme sports or fine arts.

concentration meditation

Another way is passive attention meditation. This is the most well-known one, where you sit still and watch your breathing. You become aware of the thoughts that distract you and take your attention away. When you realise this, you accept the distraction and silently celebrate your return to attentive breathing and awareness. This is a very soothing form of meditation and leads to surprising insights. By overlooking the thoughts that spontaneously pop up in your head, often connections spring into existence between previously unconnected parts of your mind.

passive attention meditation

Then there’s active attention meditation, where you give a ‘flavour’ to your meditation. You set an intention, like feeling love for yourself and/or others; or setting an intention to let all thoughts and feelings concerning a certain subject come to the surface; radiating goodwill to the world; visualising a certain goal or situation; repeating affirmations; etcetera.

active attention meditation

You can immediately see the difference between these forms of meditation. Their effect is also different, so it’s important to know where you’re hoping to go.

Did I forget something? Any interesting links about this subject? Let me know!

I recently realised, again, what a difference there is between knowing and doing – and between what I think I am and what I actually transmit to the world. Knowledge can give one the alluring illusion that we actually can and do what we know and believe. But we can’t. Of course we do things right and live according to our principles, at times. We then tend to retain these experiences as confirmation, and filter out what contradicts our beliefs.

I don’t mean to imply that knowledge is the devil. It can make you learn to do things faster, and it can even be satisfying unto itself. But we shouldn’t that having static knowledge is the same as dynamically doing. Knowledge gives you time and unlimited abstract resources to act and react perfectly, while doing is in the moment and very concrete. It’s balancing strategy and instinctive action, improvisation and experience.

This is particularly valid for self-development. I know plenty of people that know a lot about living life, and do poorly at it. Including me, a lot of the time  Have you ever read a book about self-development and not done the exercises? Then you probably don’t really get that book. It’s the experience, living through it that transmits the message to your body and deeper being. My rule these days is that I read one book at a time, and that I do the exercises – even when I think I can already do what’s being asked.

I have cycles – phases of doing, and phases of overview, analysis, gaining new knowledge and building a strategy for the future. It can happen in a flash, or over a few months. Every phase has its merits, yet I tend to believe that the majority of our life should be spent doing, in the moment.

Another thing about learning and knowledge: I think only what you need at that time sticks. Everyone has some areas of interest at a certain moment in time; the next step in their evolution waiting for them to take it. I really believe that only what’s relevant to that next step, sticks. The rest may be stored for later, but even then the step will have to be taken, not known.

So here’s a call for simplifying the knowing: look up what you need, feed yourself with what attracts you. And don’t forget to get back into the doing!

We all want things form life. Love, a great career, adventure, good friends… Our deepest, general wishes take the shape of specific desires and expectations that we carry around with us daily. When our desires are not fulfilled, we can feel resistance and frustration. We could start thinking life is incomplete, that we are incomplete or incompetent, and that we will never be happy. After all, there’s so much to want, and so little time and means to get it all!

I want all kinds of stuff. I want a compelling job, lots of love, and time to do anything that tickles my fancy. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by all the things I want, and the fear that I’ll never be able to do it all. When I really let myself be drawn into this feeling, I become stressed, impatient and even unhappy. I’ve had times I raged through life like a race car, going from one thing to another. I hardly took the time to eat properly; when I came home from work I rushed onto the sports club, to see friends or some other project that I was busy with.

There’s nothing wrong with being busy, unless you’re doing it to get something out of it.

Life became a haze and I couldn’t get no satisfaction. I looked for ways to get more into my day. You know where this story is going… I never found release in more activity. It just got worse. I remember telling my then girlfriend about this. She looked helpless and said: ‘But I don’t know anyone that’s as busy with things as you?’ By wanting so much I made myself unhappy, and I even soured up our relationship with it. In doing one thing, I had to neglect another and as such, nothing worked as it should.

I realised there had to be another way. When I look at the goal behind my activities, I can bring them back to a few fundamental wishes. Health. Love. Interesting, diverse activities and feeling like I’m getting better at things. And some recognition for my efforts. That’s about it!

Off to the convent!

At first I though I just had to let go of my wishes. That I would be saved when I gave up on my desires, a bit like a priest denounces the worldly for the spiritual. No career, love or time- and money-consuming hobbies. When my desires would be gone, I would be free.

Needless to say I never made it there, nor has anyone else that I can think of. When I felt my desires being put behind a wall, life lost its lustre. All the things I desire are what makes life worthwhile for me! I realised I was alternately doing on of two things: either letting myself be governed by my desires and becoming their overworked slave, or taking distance from them and losing my lust for life.

Anthony Robbins calls this kind of perpetual cycle a Crazy Eight. You go from one extreme to another, constantly reacting to the negatives of the other extreme. I was trapped in an eternal pendulum, going from giving into my desires and taking distance from them again. At some point I thought: there must be another way!

The third way

As is to be expected from a synthesis between to seeming opposites, the third way comprises a bit of both previous approaches. Going for the fulfillment of your wishes, and at the same time letting go of the struggle to have your desires fulfilled. In short: stopping the search, and finding.

Let’s make that concrete shall we. For example: how can you find love without looking for a partner? A question I have extended experience with. On the one hand you want to be together with the right kind of person, but in the meantime loneliness eats its way through your peace of mind and you just want someone that you feel cherished by – if not just for a moment. These two movements create another Crazy Eight: it could go from a forced independence to head-over-heels dependence. What’s the third way? How can you still your hunger without eating?

Let go. Your desires are not who you are. Hunger passes. It can feel like you’ll die when your desires aren’t fulfilled, but you know you can survive without. That’s the beginning of letting go: accepting your desires are there, not pushing them away. You become aware of them, and in becoming aware you realise there is more than that desire. With that insight comes peace, and you can focus again on creating the conditions under which getting what you want gives you true fulfillment.

The difference between desire and pleasure

There is a difference between desire and the actual pleasure you get from a certain situation. Desires are a kind of mental/emotional construction, a projection of what we think we’ll get from a certain situation. Needless to say they hardly ever correspond to reality. That doesn’t make desire bad, but it does make them unfit as the only criterium to base our decisions upon. The best criterium is the actual pleasure you get from a situation, the reality of your fulfillment.

Like one of those nights you initially didn’t feel like going out but that turned into the wildest party ever! Or New Year’s Eve, the typical example of a night so overloaded with expectation that is doomed to be unsatisfying.

Desire is there, and it is important. It’s an indication of what inspires and motivates you. It drives you on. Then comes the true fulfillment. You can desire a promotion at work intensely and get, only to realise that it involves more work and stress without offering a satisfactory pay rise. Or you finally find someone and then notice that it’s not all that, and that you have to compromise to a situation that only suboptimally fulfills you.

The balance between desire and pleasure

Making the fulfillment of your desires the main goal of your life, means that you will never be satisfied. Put your desires back where they belong: in front of the cart. When you are taken over by your desires they are in the cart, and you’re pulling. Desires have no rest, no end destination. Once one thing is reached they move onto the next. That’s why you need to become the driver of your life.

That implies having a satisfied sense of self, being satisfied now. As your desires will never fulfill you for more than a few seconds, they are only signposts along our way.

Like in a game: don’t focus on the end result, as you don’t directly control that. What you do control is every separate step you take. The desire to win may be in the back of your mind, driving you on. But it’s focus and fulfillment in the moment that wins every point. Life may not be a game, it is a path full of challenges. When you can let go of the fear of not having your desires met, most obstacles disappear by themselves.