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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Clicks And Leads is a "tongue in cheek" digital marketing Vzine by entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, Nicola Cairncross.

Mentioned in the Vzine

Heather Cairncross

Local Stoupa volunteer Gaia Firefighters

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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,