Last Friday after a really intense January I decided to treat myself to a ticket to the Spark Seminar by Norah Casey. January is a hectic month for my industry and I usually am in demand with clients who want assistance on membership sales and marketing campaigns. While I absolutely adore coaching people and particularly so in the area of sales management and success I do find it can be quite challenging when you are perhaps turning upside down company policies and approaches and changing an organisations work culture. This being the case, achieving success with clients can leave me quite drained!! So I found, having the fantastic complaint of being a little low on energy come 1st Feb, that this Spark Seminar was just what I needed to help reboot my motivation…. and boy did it work!
I really admire Norah Casey and last summer I attended her Irish Tatler Business Academy and found it to be a massively positive and uplifting day so when I saw this half day seminar I thought why not. The purpose of the half day workshop was to “..learn how to fix your focus, build your energy and stay in the zone… and connect these with your spark within.” Just what I needed. So along I toddled to the fabulous Gibson Hotel in excited anticipation of the morning ahead. First Norah herself introduced the session and asked us to think about what superpower we would like and who we would choose to be stranded on a desert island with for 6 months (and it couldn’t be a family member, friend or partner). She approached me with the mic so I told the room I would choose invisibility as my power and Freddie Mercury as my companion!
Then she invited up onto stage “The Risk Takers” Sean Gallagher and Colin Meagle. Sean spoke candidly about his unsuccessful presidential campaign and about failure and how we as a society tend to view it as a bad thing. He said the greatest failure is the failure to try which really resonated with me as while I constantly push myself out there as an entreprenuer I have a massive underlying fear of failing. Both Sean and Colin made failure seem like a much more positive experience which I quite liked! Sean also spoke about our internal self talk and how we need to stop judging ourselves negatively, which seems to be the default mode for so many of us. He really got me thinking and while as part of my New Year’s Resolution I comitted to end each day with a thank-you he flipped that resolution on its head by discussing how he starts each day with a “Gratitude Routine”. Colin is definitely an inspiration for me and I was intrigued to hear about a story of how his confidence was shattered after freezing instead of fighting back or running away after a traumatic incident when he was younger. He spoke about how he thought about this again and again until he finally approached a Martial Arts Coach to ask how could he “switch on”. he now is a martial arts coach himself. My big take away from him was rather than “Fake it until you make it” (Which I just cannot do) he said he believes in “project it until you make it” which sits much easier with me. I jsut love Colin’s perspective on life and success and his comment that at 35 years of age you are simply only 360 pay checks away from retirement made me confident in my decision to turn down countless job offers in my dream to build my own business and my own version of success.
Then we had “The Transformers” Julie O’Neill and Teena Gates both of whom are engaging and entertaining speakers. Julie spoke about the “R Word” (retirement) and how she just simply wasn’t finished after her career as a civil servant. Since then she has learned chinese, holds several directorships and even blogs about Connecting Ireland, China & Australia through food! I particularly liked her viewpoint that “things are never as bad as they seem and are never as good as they seem”.Teena is a lady I have met and spoken with several times before and is such an inspiration. Hearing her speak once more about her transformation from obesity to activity. How it all started after a brief stay in hospital and a subsequest trip and some sole searching in France. Both Julie and Teena are true transformers who each decided to embark on a new path which ended up being life changing for each of them.
The morning was truly awesome and thought provoking. It most definitly re-ignited my Spark and the signed book from Norah was the perfect take home.
