Good morning. Have you ever wanted to improve the self-confidence and well-being of yourself and your team? Well, here are three tips to help you do that.

First is the gratitude diary. As a leadership team, we meet on a Friday with my business partner to go over all of the things that have happened in the last week. We want to cover all of the great things that have happened, what's gone right, what the messages are. We want to look at who's helped us at JBS and thank them. So, has it been a client, a supplier, or a team member? We want to look at who are we going to thank and what have we learned. Have we done any training? Have we done any networking? Have we spoken to someone and got a great tip over the last week? We look at whether we have been kind to ourselves. Have we taken a simple walk at lunch time? Have we had a laugh or a joke in the office? And, in Monday's team meeting, who are we going to thank? Who are we actually going to give praise to? Did we pick up a new client? Are we going to thank a team member? By doing these things, it really helps in terms of giving some positivity on a weekly basis.

We also look at doing this in a personal gratitude diary. This one's best kept on a daily basis. With the personal gratitude diary, we do it for all the same reasons. There are five reasons why you would keep a gratitude diary. It helps your self-esteem. It helps you sleep better. It makes you happier. It reduces stress. It makes you go back and look at the positive stuff that have actually been happening.

What I often do if I'm feeling a little bit down, or if my team is, we say, "What have we achieved at JBS over the last few weeks and months?" And we look at all the positive things that have happened if something goes wrong. When you start adding that up, it's amazing how you can really feel so much better.

The second tip I have for you is the wheel of life. This starts by asking: Are you a cause? Are you a cause for making some great things happen? Are you being really focused and really achieving your goals or are you an effect by letting the environment and the world around you really affect what's going on within you? Are you listening to the of people outside? By really concentrating on what you're doing, it can help change your mindset from “I can't cope” to a more positive mindset.

So that starts our wheel of life. What we do is, as a team and individually, on a monthly basis, is we look at these 10 things and we start with the cause and effect. We look at things like our work relationships, our health, our client service and relationships. Are we actually making clients feel a lot more positive about working with JBS, or are we getting complaints? We're looking at our finances and our health. We're looking at our work relationships and our clients service. Are we getting a lot of positive reviews and good client feedbacks when we survey them? Are we in control or out of control? Have we taken time out for a laugh or a smile? And, what's the team energy like? Is the team really uplifted or do we need to sit down and do a little bit of training with them?

By doing this again, you can often see those speed bumps that happen along the time and you can pick up and sometimes it might be you that needs just a little bit more coaching and a little bit more help to get you over those speed bumps.

For the third tip for you today is flexible working conditions. Now I live 65 kilometers as the crow flies from my office, 75 by road. On a good day and leaving at 5am, it will take about an hour for me to get in. On a bad day, it could take two hours for me to get home. I listen to a lot of audio books and podcasts. I listen to these on a speed of 1.5 times. There are two reasons for that. One, I get through a lot more and, two, my mind doesn't wander. If you're listening to them on a slow speed, because a lot of people do speak a lot slower than us Australians, then you can find yourself with your mind wandering onto other things and not listening to the speaker. I like to speed it up so I can actually concentrate better.

Because I live so far from the office, we've implemented flexible working conditions with all of the team. Half of the team works from home on a Wednesday or a Friday. This means that on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday our diaries are jam-packed with meetings, both clients and team. It means that our technology and our communications need to be 100 percent. We use Office 365 and especially the teams app within that. That means that all the conversations regarding clients are there for everyone to see. I'm sitting over here and I know what's going on with my office back there with my clients. It takes all those emails that often go between 10 members out of their emails and into a very easy to find conversation, should we have to search. We also use Zoom for client meetings and also team meetings and we make sure that our communication is absolutely spot on. It needs to be awesome.

The flexible working conditions has resulted in a lot more trust in the team. It's given them a lot more positivity and it allows the team members to pick up their kids from school, to go to the swimming lessons or simply take their dog for a walk at lunchtime. It's amazing the extra productivity and positivity that you get by giving team members just that little bit of their own self-worth.

Hopefully, by giving you the three tools of the gratitude diary, the wheel of life, and flexible working conditions, you too can help implement a little bit of positivity in your team's life.