As Nicola Cairncross prepares to go to the UK to speak at the International Coach Federation Annual Conference, UKICF, she reflects on the lessons learned from improvising a mosquito net bed covering for visiting ‘singing sister’ Heather Cairncross.
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Mentioned in the Vzine
- Heather Cairncross
- Local Stoupa volunteer Gaia Firefighters
- Nicola’s free app for your mobile device – Clicks & Leads
On the blogs
Vzine 066 | Catch Up, Will You?
Vzine 065 | When Everything Goes Wrong
Own It! 179 | Mental Models
Own It! 178 | Mary Daniels: Normal People, Noble Causes
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Hey, Nicola here. We’ve had quite an exciting week this week. First of all, Heather and Richard came to stay. Heather’s my singing sister, and Richard’s her partner. And I was very excited about that, ’cause they’ve never been to Stoupa before, and I was really looking forward to showing them all my favourite places. And then, about three, they came on Tuesday.
Then we had Tuesday night, Wednesday night, was last night Wednesday night? Yes, it was. And last night, we were awakened by lots of hooting, lots of banging, lots of shouting, and actually, what had happened was that somehow, a fire had started up at the olive grove.
The Fire engine turned up, and lots of local volunteers. And everyone was spraying their front gardens, and the thing is, it was really, really windy last night. So, the sparks were going everywhere. So we were all just ready to put out any fires that happened in our local vicinity.
Finally got to bed about, oh, 4:00, 4:30, something like that, and slept like a log until about 9:30, and then we struggled to wake up, even at that point. But we went off for a lovely day out, and we went to Limeni Village, which is one my favourite places, and went to Takis fish restaurant there. And I’ll put a, I’ll use a picture of Takis to illustrate this week’s V-zine, and you can see how gorgeous it is there.
So that’s my week and I’m coming back to England on Saturday, it’s my daughter Phoebe’s birthday today, so happy 23rd birthday Phoebe, and I’ll be back to give you a big ol’ hug and your birthday present on Saturday, okay? Love you, see you soon.
So today I want to talk to you about being resourceful when you don’t have the right resources or you don’t have any resources at all. I want to tell you about our mosquito net adventure.
I really wanted to get a mosquito net up for my sister, Heather, who is as neurotic as I used to be about mosquitoes, and I bought a very big double bed mosquito net, square, so it doesn’t hang down like that, it hangs like that. But it’s supposed to come with eight sucker pads that go on the ceiling, and of course, I didn’t even check the box, I didn’t even make sure it had everything in it it should.
So on the first day I unveiled this square luxury mosquito net, and then we realized that of course there was nothing to hang it to the ceiling with. So we’ve been pondering it for the last couple of days, and I took them upstairs to Katerina’s Supermarket and the upstairs emporium bit sells all sorts of things. We were looking for sucker pads, we were looking for stretchy washing lines, we were looking for anything we could use to string this mosquito net off.
And on our second perambulation around the top part of Katerina’s, Richard found extendable poles, and we thought okay, we might be able to do something with that. Because the best itself is a wrought iron bed and it’s got, you know, poles on the end, and someone had the bright idea that we could extend the poles up as far as we needed them and then, what are those things called? I’ve completely forgotten what they’re called. Little plastic ties, plastic ties they’re called. And we could plastic tie the poles to the bed, you know at each end and in the middle of the end of the bed.
And sure enough, we got back and it worked like a dream. And the other obstacle we had to face was the revolving ceiling fan, because I didn’t want to lose that because that’s about the only thing that means you get any sleep in the summer. So we wanted to get the mosquito net low enough so that the fan could go around over the top of it.
Yeah, and it worked brilliantly, so they’re gonna have their first night tonight without Heather worrying about a mosquito going zip next to her ear. It’s not even the bites, it’s the noise they make. And they wake you right up in the middle of the night, I tell you. And so yeah, they’re gonna try that out.
And it made me really think that when you’re in business and when you’re in marketing and when you’re in life, and faced with situations you weren’t expecting, you have to become resourceful, especially if you don’t have the right resources or perhaps you can’t afford the right resources to do your marketing.
You need to think, well how could I do this if I could find the resources and become more resourceful?
And so that’s what we did with the mosquito net, that’s what I did with my Facebook ads account being closed down, and that’s what I’ve had to do every time another obstacle comes at you.
Every time another setback happens, you have to just determine that you are gonna go and find a way around it, under it, over, through it, and if the very worst, you just try to blow it up somehow.
Okay, I think that’s all I need to say about mosquito nets and resourcefulness so I hope you have a great week and I’ll let you know what happens in my journey home to England next week.
On the blog last week, we had Own It! Episode 178, Mary Daniels, Normal People, Noble Causes. And it was all about people working in the social sector and how passionate people could get and how they can help other people and get great meaning in their lives from doing that. And Mary was a fantastic interviewee, she was really good fun and she gave us a lot of really interesting insights into the world of noble causes, in fact.
And on Vzine 66, which was last week, I was talking about catching up, please, with you. And I was saying about how some companies are only just getting to grips with marketing via website, via social media, via email marketing, and how already it’s moving on very quickly from that. And you’ve really got to get to grips with mobile marketing, which is a subtle difference because when 85% of people are on these mobile devices and iPads and tablets and things like that, it’s a whole different ball game than if they’re actually sitting at a desktop or a laptop. So, that was all about how you need to catch up even if you’re only just getting started.
And yeah, the week before, week 65, was all about what to do when everything goes wrong, and I’ve had some really good feedback from that, and last night was a case in point.
Everybody here, you know, all the local volunteers came out, everybody came out of their houses, everybody was shepherding people who were not able to get themselves away from the fire, and our local guy, Elias Hontzeas, was driving people around who needed to be driven around and his daughter was up here organizing all the volunteers. It was a real family effort, and it was really fantastic to watch.
So, yeah. So, when everything goes wrong, just get your wartime spirit out and see what you can do practically speaking. And I’ll speak to you next week.
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Creative Direction & Video Editing
Phoebe Soremekun
Intro Music
Pool Cosby
Incidental Music
[No Copyright Music] Summer’s Tides – Oshóva
Joakim Karud – Good Old Days (Vlog No Copyright Music)
Drone footage of The Mani
Georgios Ser-Aouas
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