Help With Flood Relief Efforts

I have watched with  a sense of detachment and disbelief as the waters rose steadily over the last week  in Cork and Galway.  During that time I’ve felt many emotions from anger and sadness to distress and helplessness.  I had a feeling of “what can I do, I live too far away

Many businesses flooded

to be much help“.  But today Ruairí Browne from Kro.ie came up with a brilliant idea for businesses to help in whatever manner they can.  http://www.kro.ie/blog/2009/11/can-your-business-help-with-flood.html

I know that many, many people will be asking themselves “how do we get through this?”, how can we cope?” “when can we move back home?” and many, many more questions.   And many will have other financial considerations to consider before they even consider their emotional well-being.  So….as a coach I have decided to offer 40 hours of my time (through Skype) to help those who would like to deal with the

Homes destroyed by floods

emotional and practical issues that arise, and feel overwhelmed with it all.  I am delighted to be able to help and I sincerely hope I can be of use to some of the people.

For anyone who can donate time or services, I urge you to do so.  Not for any cynical business gain, but because these people have been stripped of everything and are plodding through as best they can.  Bearing in mind that those on Social Welfare or in paid employment will get welfare assistance through this but the self-employed are not entitled to any help and the many business owners in the flooded areas are seriously struggling.  We willingly offer help to foreign disasters, now we have a disaster on our own door-step and it is time to help our own people.

N – Nobble your Negativity

N

Nobble your Negativity

Is your glass half full or half empty?  Are you enjoying your life or are you just getting by?  Do you focus on all the problems in your life or do you look at all the possibilities you have open to you?  Do you look forward to the day or do you dread getting out of bed.  When presented with a new situation do you look at all the possible problems that might arise or do you embrace all the new adventures awaiting you?

As I’ve said in a previous post (The Law of Attraction & NLP) our unconscious mind does not know how to process a negative.  So if you are in a negative frame of mind and focusing totally on that, then that is exactly the type of life you will have.  For example, I don’t want to have a difficult life.  The very first thing our unconscious mind will do is delete the don’t and go get the rest.  Also what

Which way is your thumb pointing?

we focus our attention on, is what we end up with, so if we are constantly looking for problems in a situation, that is exactly what we will find.  I was raised with the idea that you prepare for the best but expect the worst and that is usually what I got – the worst. My mother’s attitude was that that was “being realistic”, and unfortunately for me realistic was something I didn’t like.  And I couldn’t understand why all these horrible things were happening to me.  I wasn’t a bad person, so why me?  It was only when I was studying NLP and discovered Cause & Effect that I began to understand it all.  Even for a while after I’d qualified as a practitioner I held back  at being totally at cause in my life and it was only when I fully embraced that and took complete responsibility (note – responsibility not blame) for my life that it started to move in a direction that I wanted it to.  And with taking responsibility came the responsibility of nobbling my negativity.

Do you ever cross the road to avoid someone who is likely to be constantly moaning when you “bump” into them? No matter what you say when you do meet them, they will have a negative reply and after a while you either find an excuse to leave or find your

Do you turn away from negative people?

humour dissipating with each sentence.  Being a very frank person, when I “bump” into one of these people and they start moaning, I’ll ask if there is anything good happening in their life at the moment and if there isn’t, I’ll say goodbye and move on. Do this often enough and they start to avoid you!  For me, life is too short, I only get one shot at it and I want to fill it with as much positivity as I can.  I spent enough time being negative, now it’s time to balance the scales.  One of my cousins renamed me “Moany Mammy” to my two eldest children when they were small when I, with best of  intentions of keeping them safe, wouldn’t let them do some minor things when we went out, like climb trees – they could fall and hurt themselves, like eat in MacDonald’s – there were healthier and cheaper places to eat,  like splash in puddles – might be deeper than they thought and their feet would get wet!   She’d start a chant and get them to join in and I would get annoyed and we’d end up going home, all of us in bad humour.  I couldn’t see the fun they would have just jumping in a puddle, all I saw was two sick children that would mean they couldn’t go to the crèche, I’d have to find alternative childcare or miss a day’s work and lose a day’s pay and I was already on a low-income and couldn’t afford it.  See how the problems just stacked up on top of each other?  Yet when I was a child, I loved jumping in puddles and because I was young and healthy I rarely got a cold.  My six-year-old can jump in all the puddles she wants, she’s young and she’s healthy, just like the other two were, but I was so busy being negative that I didn’t see it.

Jumping in puddles is fun

So how on earth do you nobble your negativity?  Well, just being aware of the fact that your thoughts are negative is a start.  Each time you become aware of thinking negatively ask yourself:  how else can I think about this?  What other ways are there to look at this?  For example, with my two older children and going to MacDonald’s and my automatic “NO” when they asked, could have been: What alternatives are there to MacDonald’s that will seem like a treat to them?  Will it be so bad to let them go just this once?  Once you start to look at other possibilities and get into the habit of doing that you will start to use the same method of positive thinking in all aspects of your life and life will start to look brighter.  If you like me prefer nighttime to daytime I can’t guarantee that you’ll jump out of bed every morning, but you will at least be joyful about a new day and the endless possibilities it will throw your way.

Steep Learning Curves

Things are starting to seriously move for me.  Both my businesses have started to take off, at almost the same time and I’m loving it.  I have moved so far out of my comfort zone that I don’t think I’d recognise my old one anymore if I landed back into it.  It would be a

busy in every direction

bit like trying to go back to a time that you weren’t satisfied in, but weren’t dis-satisfied in either and trying to settle back down to that.  Pretty difficult to do.  I am finding however that my time is precious to me. I am so busy with both businesses and my home life, I’m doing a fine balancing act at the moment.  I get informed of some up-coming events a day or so in advance and have to organise childcare and juggle other things I had ear-marked for that time.  I’m also finding that with both businesses some important events are scheduled for the same time and am having to choose between the two, and the benefit of attending each is enormous, so serious decisions are having to be made, while considering the consequences of them in advance.  It is certainly a hectic time in my life right now.

The more I am heading towards my goals, the more obstacles that are being put in front of me.  Overcoming them is now more of a fun challenge I’ve set myself than an arduous task to be done, and it is nice to look back at the one’s I have overcome and take note of how I did it in case I need to use that learning again in the future.  Some of them are self-inflicted, like not managing my time properly or not doing enough groundwork on some things beforehand and I am learning a lot from that.  I am also having to question a lot of my attitudes and beliefs around some of the things I had accepted without question, and that is throwing some interesting things

It's been a steep learning curve

back at me.  But I am a firm believer that if something makes us uncomfortable there is a lesson in the discomfort to be learnt if we are prepared to pay attention to it.  So I am learning loads, not all of it as straight forward as I’d like it to be, but learning none the less.  And all of this helps me grow, as a person and as a service provider to her clients.

I am in the position of learning overload at the moment and often have to take some time out just to absorb all that has come at me from the different angles throughout the week.  There are times in the day when I find myself saying to myself  “Enough! I want to get my head around what I’ve learnt and put some of it into practice before I take anymore on board“.  Pacing myself, so that what I do learn is not lost in education and sensory overload.   But I must admit I feel so much more alive in the last few weeks than I had for the previous month.  I have developed a childlike eagerness and excitement about learning and it has helped to motivate me to take more action and do the things I wanted to, but felt hesitant to do.

What has surprised me most through all of this is that I’ve had a few set-backs during the week and I’ve just slotted them into the

Pushing through my limits to new learnings

place they’ve needed to be and got on with what I was already doing, making the adjustments required to overcome them.  I already knew that I like to be busy, I find it invigourating, but I have discovered that I don’t like to be overly pressured.  And while I have had to learn lots, it has been in areas that help me to improve in business and in my personal life, so areas that are of interest to me and my development.  Would I like this to continue at this pace?  No!  Definitely not, but short bursts of it would be nice every couple of months followed by a slower learning pace and action taking at the same time.

M – Manifest your Magnificence

M

Manifest your Magnificence

Are you self-deprecating?  When someone gives you a compliment do you smile and say “thank you” or do you negate it all, with off- the-cuff negative comments like: “it’s nothing”, or “that old thing, I have it ages”.  Do you realise that you are putting yourself down and insulting the person who took the time to notice and compliment you on something that struck a chord with them?  No matter what you feel, an acknowledgement of their appreciation of you is called for and the best way to do that is to simply say “Thank You”, with a smile.   I remember when I was about eighteen and was starting to go to discos (night clubs to you younger readers) and talking to my mother one

Disco dancing at the weekends

day about it.  I was complaining about being asked up to dance by someone who I didn’t like and she asked what I did, so I told her I’d refused him and told him I didn’t dance.  Well, to say she took a few strips off me is putting it politely.  According to her  this poor guy had to pluck up the courage to cross the room to ask me to dance, then had to brave the stares of my friends, some derisive and others curious, then actually ask me and then suffer the embarrassment of a refusal and walk back to his pals some of whom also laughed at him.   At the time I didn’t see a young man who thought I was attractive enough to take a chance on,who manifested a magnificence within himself to overcome his trepidation and take that chance, I saw someone who reflected all I hated about myself at that time: self-consciousness, awkwardness, trepidation and fear and I didn’t want to be associated with it.  But my mother’s view-point on the whole event changed my outlook, she told me to imagine someone doing that to me and from then I stopped refusing dances when asked.  It takes a lot of courage for someone to do it, and they are putting themselves out there, they are finding something within themselves and offering to share it with you, be it a compliment, holding a door open for you, smiling at you or asking you to dance with them.

 

Do you put your best effort into everything that you do?

So how do you manifest your magnificence?  What are you good at, really, really good at? Become really good at something, anything and transfer the method of being really brilliant at that one thing into everything that you do.  Do you put your best effort into  everything that you do?  Or do you like a lot of people start off with the best of intentions and then lose steam as you go along, and cut corners?  Do you greet the day with joy (go back two posts and read Jumpstart your Joy)?  Think back to when you woke up this morning, what did you say to yourself  just before you got out of bed?  Was it positive or negative, did you use possibility words like can, may, will or necessity words like: must, should, have to?   Do you believe in yourself, and do you acknowledge and reward all your achievements?  Do you look at others with envy and resentment and be-little their achievements, even in your mind?  Or do you wonder at how they do it and consider asking them for advice so you can achieve a similar success.  Are you trying to do it alone?  Do you feel you can’t ask for help?  If so, why-ever not?  You don’t go to school and teach yourself, you don’t start a new job that you’ve never done before a hit the ground running, you have to ask lots of questions to find out how to do it properly, so why not ask for help now?  Take

Do you smile at people just to make them feel better?

that inner doubt or fear and cast it aside, find the brave part of yourself that overcomes those fears and doubts and ask for help.  Other people are simply waiting for a chance to manifest their own magnificence by helping. all they need is someone to ask them.  So kill two birds with one stone, dig deep inside yourself to do something you wouldn’t usually do and also by asking for help let someone else shine with you.

Anything that is negatively based is taking from your magnificence.  The brilliant you that you are dulling with negative thoughts, actions or words.  When you put off doing things because of procrastination instead of just doing it also takes from your magnificence.  We all have choices, we can choose to be mediocre in our world or we can choose to be magnificent.  Which will you choose?

L – Lose your Limitations

L

Lose your Limitations

How limited are you?  Are you living the very best life that you can?  Or are you making do?  How do the people around you treat you?  Is that any different to the way you wanted your life to be, because if it is, you are limiting yourself from being the very best you can be.  And if you are limiting yourself, what can you do to stop that?

When we are children we don’t limit ourselves.  When we told a story we embellished it with every fascinating detail we could, our voices told each part as if we were living it to the full, because we were.  We got right into it, totally

When I grow up I'm gonna be....

unlimited by anyone and thoroughly enjoyed the tale.  Ask any child from four to seven years what they want to be when they grow up and they will tell you all the amazing careers they see for themselves.   How many of your childhood friends have actually achieved the career they wanted?  And are they happy with it?  I know at sixteen years old one of my teachers asked our class (all girls) where we saw ourselves in ten years time and many of my class mates saw themselves as married women and stay at home mothers, a few saw a career for themselves but very few combined the two, because when we were in school it was normal for women once they became mothers, to stay at home and mind their children, unless they had certain types of careers that exempted that.  I know my own mother would have liked to go back to work, but once she had my older brother she had no job to return to, and that was the just way it was.  When she voiced the wish to work outside the home she was often treated with disdain, and she learnt very quickly not to say anything.  My mother, like a lot of women of her time, limited herself to the view of society.  There was no actual law preventing her from working and one of my aunts worked all of her adult life until her retirement in her late fifties or early sixties, and she had three children.  Nowadays, many women feel they have to work despite having children, simply to help meet the bills and maintain the standards they want.  But

Are you driving the bus?

is it a vicious circle, maintaining standards.  So often, we are limited by what society says we must do, have and be and the pressure of it all leads to the type of life we don’t want.

And how do you stop living within the limits  you impose on yourself, or let society impose on you, whether knowingly or not?  The first step is to “see” the ideal you.   When you close your eyes and see yourself as the “ideal you” what is different?  What way do you stand?  How do you sound, what do you feel?  What are you doing in your ideal life that you are not doing now?  What are you not doing in your ideal life that you are doing now.  How can you make the change from now to that?  Do you have any idea what is different?   What is stopping you making the changes?  What will you lose if you get your ideal life?  What will you gain if you get your ideal life?  How differently will those around you treat you, and how differently will you treat those around you?

Nelson Mandella, in his his Inauguration Speech, in 1994 used a quote from the poem: A Return To Love: Reflections On The Principles Of A Course In Miracles, by Marianne Williamson:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves,

Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine, as children do.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

And it is so very true, that often in life we are afraid of being our very, very best because we fear the possibilities that life has to offer and we don’t want to be on the receiving end of the ridicule that comes with being more than average.  So we settle for less and are dis-contented with our lives and we moan and complain or as we do in Ireland when someone asks us how we are, we reply: “Ah sure, grand.  No point complaining, sure no-one would listen“  And why won’t anyone listen?  Because they are in the same boat and are too busy living their limited life to hear about

Is this your life?

someone else’s!  I spent years being limited.  And I hated it!  I was living a life other people wanted for me, and I was so afraid of offending or upsetting them in case they rejected me, so little wonder I wasn’t happy.  I’ve always thought differently to most of my peers and it has caused many, many unsettling times for me.  I never saw the benefits of marriage and didn’t marry.  At one stage I couldn’t see how anyone would want to have children, never mind rear them – that has since changed and I am a single mother to three children.  I became a single mother at a time when they were still vilified for being single.  I’ve raised my children to question everything and that has caused many an eyebrow to raise.  I am very tolerant of many of the things society is not and I am outspoken about what I disagree with and I am intelligent.  I have been told by many of my peers that I don’t belong, that I am strange, weird, and to fit in I should: dumb myself down – my intelligence is threatening, mostly to men who might want to date me, should stop being so out-spoken, it’s just not done, should make my children conform, or they will never be accepted and won’t be employable.  These are just a few ways that others have tried to “limit” me.  For a while as I said, I went along with it, but the one thing everyone else was not doing was living my life.  So I stopped limiting myself.  I live my life, my way, without limits.  I don’t apologise for it, there is no need to.  I love my life. It’s exciting, different and the possibilities are endless!!!  When will you lose your limitations?

K – Kickstart your Knowledge

K

Kickstart your Knowledge

Are you where you want to be on your journey in life?  If not, how do you get onto the path you want to be on?  Do you even know where you want to be?  Or do you just drift along like seaweed with the tide, ebbing and flowing, ebbing and flowing, taking each day as it comes, hoping that nothing major will rise up and knock the stuffing out of you, leaving you winded and slightly confused?

 

Life is a journey!  From the minute we are born it starts.  Some people argue it starts from the time we are

Up to 7 years we are like sponges absorbing everything.

conceived.  I’ll go with the journey starting the second we take our first independent breath.  Now at that time in our lives we are totally dependant on our parents, but mostly our mothers and it is up to her to map out the early years of our life’s journey and we just coast along, oblivious of the fact that it is our journey.  We grow, learn and absorb so much in the “imprint” years (from birth to seven years) copying behaviours and attitudes of those around us, like sponges absorbing it all, totally unaware of what we are doing.  And for the most part we want to learn and copy those around us and we are encouraged so much to do so. We start school and are taught the basics: reading, writing, maths, and social interaction.  Then we hit the “modelling” years (seven to fourteen) where we develop “heroes”, people we look up to and want to copy, to be just like them, sometimes we idolise cartoon heroes like Superman or Wonderwoman.    We hang onto everything they teach/tell us and accept it pretty much as gospel.  It’s at this stage that if we discover a really good role model that we can model (copy), that we will develop really good skills to bring us forward to adulthood, get a bad one and we can end up modelling the wrong skills. It is at this stage also that our logical brain starts to develop as well.  The “socialisation” years (fourteen to twenty-one) are where we become aware of the opposite sex and also the changes in our own bodies and where we develop and hone our values and beliefs around relationships.  It is also the stage

We grow up, and we get a job, or become self-employed

when most of us start to make decisions about our future.  The “business persona” period (twenty-one to thirty-five) is the time we usually get our first proper job and develop our careers.

 

All of these stages we go through, mostly unaware of the fact that we are passing through a stage.  But at each of them we continually learn, firstly to sit, stand, walk talk, then the next stage to read, write, use logic, pick and choose role models, the third stage, we learn how to behave towards someone we care for who is not family, but evokes strong feeling in us, and we learn to make decisions and plans about our future.  The fourth we make adult decisions, be it to get a job or start a business, most of us settle down, marry (or live with partners) and start a family during this stage and we learn how to cope with dealing with all of those issues and be responsible for the decisions we make.  And we plod along, usually content in our own little world, doing what we can within the confines of that world.  How often do you expand your knowledge in that nice little bubble?  Do you do attend further education courses, hobby courses,  personal development courses?  Do you use the internet to expand your knowledge or are you happy to just plod along?  If something were to happen would you have the skills and knowledge to be able to firstly

Do you kick-start your knowledge with further education?

cope, then brush yourself off and get back into the swing of living instead of coping, again?  When I left school I did a secretarial course, I hadn’t a clue as what I wanted to do with my life and this was something to give me some more skills to be able to get office work if I wanted to.  I had worked part-time from fourteen years old in a local shop through secondary school and when I started the secretarial course I changed to working part-time in a local pub and persuaded the manager to teach me the “behind the bar” work which at the time was “not for girls”.  Down through the years I’ve changed jobs many, many, times, flitting from office work, to bar work to sales and any time I’ve had a prospective employer query my career choices and changes I’ve always been able to honestly say “There will come a time when the pensionable job will disappear and the “job for life” will no longer exist, when that time comes over 90% of the population will not be able to cope, I don’t intend to be among them.  Even in these recessionary times (mid 1980s) I am not out of work for more than two weeks, because I have many different skills and am employable in many fields, and this shows, that I am 1) forward thinking, 2)adaptable, 3)prepared 4)pro-active.  I change careers to stay up-to-date in each of the areas I work in” On most occasions I got offered the job.

 

I have friends who think further education of any kind is for “seriously sad” people who don’t “have a life“.  The way they see it, they work Monday through to Friday, and relax and unwind and spend time socialising with their families and friends at the weekend.   There is no time to further their education, to expand their knowledge.  Even in

Is this how you "have a life?"

the evenings their attitude is that they’ve worked hard all day and they are simply unwinding in front of the television before going to bed to repeat the process the next day.  These people complain when they’ve been passed over for promotion, or are told they will be in the list that will be made redundant in the near future.   I have other friends who see further education as something you do to grow as a person, for whatever reason: to increase career choices, to become a better person, to unwind after a hard day’s work with like-minded individuals.  The second group of people are the group that see that they have the choice to take control of their lives.  They are not just passengers on bus driving along life’s highway, they are driving the bus!

 

I recently blogged about an E-learning membership site I joined called I Learning Global.  One of the things that is discussed in one of the introductory videos is your EVE ratio.  That  is your Entertainment Versus Education ratio. (If you want to see the video I’ll leave a link at the bottom of this post).

Do you know your EVE ratio?

The ‘average‘ person spends €100 on entertainment for every €1 they spend on education after they leave school, college or university. Do you know yours?   These are the same people who cry “foul” when life throws them a curve ball that they weren’t expecting and they find themselves unemployable after a spate of redundancies because they have not up-skilled or increased their knowledge as they went through life, or their spouse/partner has left them because they refused to go to counselling to sort out their relationship issues, or their friends stop contacting them because they moan about how bad things are all the time.  So do yourself a favour, kickstart your knowledge, not because you have to, but because you can see the possibilities and doors it opens for you.  Not because some said you should, because you want to.

 

To see the video on EVE ratio copy and paste the following link into your browser and click on the EVE ration button.

http://www.ilearningglobal.biz/encouragingexcellence

J – Jumpstart your Joy

J

Jumpstart your Joy

Are you happy?  Truly happy? Honestly?  Most people when asked will say, “Yes, I am, but….” and they will tell you about the “but”.  And right there they leave their happiness behind and walk into some form of discontent.  It is rare to find a person that is truly happy with their lot, as it is.  There is always something…more. Something to take the

I could sit in joyous wonder at the perfection of my sleeping child

shine off the joy of that  moment.   And that is human nature.  To strive, to improve, to perfect, to be just a little or a lot more.  Sometimes though it is nice to just…stop….and enjoy the moment, to be still in that moment of joy.  And joy can come in many ways.

 

When each of my children were born I would sit holding them and just enjoy watching them sleep, in total awe at the miracle of life and the perfection of a tiny human being’s ability to evoke such a strong sense of pure love.  Their perfect little features and the gentle way they’d breathe.  And the joy too, that I was part of that human being’s creation.  When each of them started playschool, the joy of watching my child move up a stage with confidence that they were a “big boy” or “big girl” and were joining the other “big boys and girls”.   I’m lucky in that I didn’t see this as a sad or bad occasion, it was a milestone and it was monumental for them and the more positive the experience,  the better.   Or even the joy at parts of my own childhood.  The time we all (five of us) had bad colds during a snowy patch in winter and couldn’t go outside to play, as small children and my father and his assistant took the time to make a snowman out the back garden and the five of us leant noses up against the window watching and steaming up the window.  The joy of anticipation of the snowman and the wonder at how our breaths blocked off our view.  Or another occasion when it was a really hot summer’s day and we were excused our dancing class, my sister and I, and

Children find ways to be joyful

our parents took us all to the beach for the afternoon and the joy of running down the beach to the water’s edge and dodging the waves as they fell against the sand.  The pure bliss of finding crabs in the rock-pools and catching one in a net to transfer into the bucket we’d taken with us.

 

When we look back, it is easy to remember all the joyous moments, the freedoms of the carefree days of childhood when worries and plans and finances and careers were something that didn’t even enter our heads.  And then we hit teenage-hood and suddenly life was a confusing mass of hormones and sometimes self-consciousness.   Adults then told us we had to “grow up” plan for our future, but still didn’t allow us the freedoms that we thought we deserved with this new stage in life.   Our joy at life got caught up in the swirl of growing up, becoming  adults.  Within a few years we are full of worries and exams, then adulthood, college, careers, marriage, parenthood.   And it’s not that we don’t experience joy, it’s that we temper it with all the other things that come into our daily lives so that we often forget to notice the pure joy of a given moment and cherish it for what it is…..nature in whatever form….at it’s best.

 

So how do we jumpstart our joy in these times, when many people have huge financial or career worries, that add stress to relationships already overloaded with stress?  It always comes down to the four simple questions that probe so deeply:  How will I cope if I stay positive, how will I cope if I don’t stay positive, I won’t I cope if I stay positive, how won’t I cope  if I don’t stay positive?  By staying positive and looking for the joy in life’s simple childish type pleasures even in tough times we are jump-starting the small joy inside us.  It can build up to a feeling of gratitude for many things.  Even though it can be hard to appreciate the joys in life when job-security is no longer there or financial burdens are heavy, by appreciating the simple things we acknowledge that life is not only about

Nature, the pure joy we can get from it

the burdens we carry, but the other things, like our child’s laughter, or their joy on their faces when they see us after school.  Or that special look your partner gives you that says: “I love you, I think you’re wonderful”  The pat on the back a pal gives you, or your parents give you after a visit.  They are simple, but they all add up.  Each day, before we get out of bed, if we stop and remember what it was like as a carefree child, just for three minutes and see the things we saw with child-like eyes, and hear our child-like voice and those of our siblings and friends, and smell those smells of childhood, feel the clothes we wore against our skin and drown ourselves in the joy of that time, and let that feeling of joy wash it’s way right through our body, until every cell is bathed in it.  Then get up with a smile and face the day.

 

I – Involve your Intuition

I

Involve your Intuition

Intuition, just what is it?  Is it that sixth sense some people talk about?  Or is it some sort of spiritual guidance?  Or maybe it’s just a “gut” feeling.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary it is: “the ability to understand or know something immediately, without conscious reasoning”

		Are you left or right brained?

So it is something that we “just know”.  Now in our modern logical, conscious, scientific “left brain” world the idea of “just knowing” without the scientific backing can be hard to accept.  We are taught from an early age to look at things logically and to seek out the scientific proof of ideas and concepts.  It is almost like there is an intellectual superiority in logic.  That to consider anything less than logic is nonsense and left to the realms of the uneducated masses who just don’t have that intellectual ability or understanding of the above average, very logical, left-brain thinking people.  That in itself rules out half of our brain’s abilities.  So in effect we are taught from an early age to ignore half of our mental capacity, in the search for logic.

 

Do you listen to your intuition?

Intuition, by it’s very nature is a right brain activity.  It is something we have at an “unconscious” level.  It’s that feeling we get that we often can’t explain.  Some people believe that their intuition is what guides their day-to-day lives, directing them along.  It is the un-explainable “feeling” that warns them that something, they’re not sure what, is not quite right.  It is to some people, what keeps them from danger, or from making a decision that is not right for them. Now we do actually use both sides of our brain while growing up, and if encouraged, we continue to use both sides.  But often on the journey to adulthood we are taught to ignore what doesn’t fit into what “society” currently states as useful. In today’s world there is a huge demand for answers to many issues.  And often the logical answers just don’t answer the questions being asked, because logic is not what is required, right brain thinking or emotional or intuitive answers are required.

So when you have a lifestyle question that needs answering, do you listen to your intuition, or do you just suppress the answers that keep bubbling to the surface because you don’t like the answers you are faced with.  I had this pointed out to  me this week.  I asked for help from someone who I thought could and would help me.  I got an email from them along with some of the information that I was looking for.  The email evoked a negative reaction initially, but a feeling inside told me I needed to read the email and re-read it until I could read it without reacting to it.  So that’s what I did, and I realised that there are some changes that I want to make to my life that I’d been skirting around for a while and now it the time to implement them.  Now I could just as easily have ignored the email, or ignored my own intuition, but I have found down through the years that when I listen to my intuition, my gut feeling, I call it, I am right.  It’s when I ignore it, or only take a logical perspective on things that I find myself in trouble.  So how do you know when to trust your own intuition, especially if you think you never have before.  Well, you will have!  There will be times in your life where you’ve not done what everyone else has done because you’ve not felt it was right for you.  Our intuition kicks in very fast when we feel threatened or in danger.  That feeling of the hairs standing up on the back of your neck telling you to DO SOMETHING!, they’re our intuition and it’s time to listen.

That inner voice

Do you get uncomfortable when someone asks you about the balance in your life?  Do you get defensive when you know you are about to do something that will hurt someone else and you can see it in their face or hear it in their voice?  But you do it anyway, despite that niggly little voice telling you otherwise.  Well you’ve just ignored your intuition.  So how do we listen?  Stop ignoring that inner voice, that gut feeling you get.  Stop and ask yourself what listening to your inner voice or feelings will get for you that you don’t have now.  It’s speaking to you for a reason, so listen.  It might be that you don’t have balance in your life, or that your relationship needs more of your time, or your children need your attention, or maybe you need to take care of your health, or deal with a personal issue you’ve been putting off because it is not a pleasant issue.  Until you deal with it, it will keep re-surfacing to be listened to, so rather than running away and it constantly chasing you, why not stop now, listen and deal with it.  Like anything once we deal with it the first time, it gets easier.

H – Heal your Hurts

H

Heal your Hurts

Do you bear grudges?  Do you remember every slight, or insult, or rude deed that has been thrown at you and save

Do you keep looking for hurt?

them in your memory bank?  Do you plan your revenge on all those who have ever done you a mis-service?  Can you go into minute detail as you plot your revenge and see the fall from grace of the person or persons who have caused your misery?  Do you act out your revenge?  If you do, do you really get a sense of satisfaction from it or does it leave a hollow feeling or a feeling that it didn’t quite do what you’d hoped it would.

We all get hurt!  Life is all about getting hurt, brushing ourselves off, getting back up and learning from it.  Some people seem to instinctively look for the lesson in the hurt, and then use that to move forward and help others.  Other people, just as the hurt scabs over, pick at it and open the wound again, reliving the pain, almost wallowing in the misery, looking for someone to feel sorry for them and adding any lack of sympathy to the list of slights.  And they keep in doing it, over and over until the scab eventually disappears, but the hurt and misery remains like a mental scar.  These are the people who take great joy in telling you how they or are going to “make them pay” for, or “got back at” whoever caused their misery.  Most of us know one or two people like that and when we see them coming, we look for escape routes to avoid talking to them.

Carrying these type of grudges and hurts around becomes tiring.  Getting on with life then becomes difficult as all our energy is focused on the pain we are feeling.  But sometimes major hurts can be difficult to get over and we sometime sink into the mire of our own misery.  Relationships end, friends fall out, we lose jobs, imagined insults.  All of these cause hurt and pain.  In fact anything that we haven’t had closure on will cause us some form of pain.  We can suppress it, but it will keep popping up looking for resolution and until we acknowledge and deal with it, it will keep doing so.  And if we get caught up in the blame game we can end up escalating it into a huge blow-out where people stop communicating altogether and the friends and family stuck in the middle are left walking on egg-shells.

So, acknowledging our hurts is the first step in overcoming them.  Once we acknowledge that we’ve allowed ourself to be hurt in the first place, we can then start to deal with it.

The exception of course is when someone dies.  Of course it hurts when someone dies, but to refuse to move forward with your life is not reasonable.  When you die – and we all will at some point – do you want your nearest and dearest to sit down and wallow in their misery or do you want them to grieve and then move on, bringing all their happy memories with them?  I recently went to the funeral of a much-loved uncle.  There was a huge attendance at his funeral

Standing still gets us nowhere

and I yet hardly saw anyone cry.  Now it’s not that we weren’t sad that he died, it was that we all remembered how nice a man he was and all the nice or funny or smart things he would say or do.  On the other side of the coin when my last relationship broke up I felt dejected and abandoned and completely resentful.  I’d given years to this relationship and couldn’t understand how he could walk away from it.  I allowed that resentment get a hold on my life and it held me back for a few years, until one day I realised the only one suffering was me.  He had moved on with his life and I was standing still, looking backwards, yearning for what once was.  I looked at where I was in life, how much more I could do for myself and where I actually wanted to be and I realised I didn’t want to be lugging the baggage of something that belonged in my past around with me into my future.  And that brought the closure I needed to heal and then move on.  It is amazing how once we realise how much holding onto a hurt and carrying it around with us, holds us back from doing what we want, we are impatient to just let go and move forward.  I found making goals and looking forward helped me to actually move forward.  But the biggest thing of all was realising that the only person hurting was me!

What Is Meant For You Won’t Pass You By….

Heading to London for a seminar

I was supposed to be in London last weekend, at a seminar.  I’d been to an open night about this seminar three weeks previously and had decided then that I didn’t have the funds spare to attend it, much and all as I’d have liked to.  However two weeks ago I got a call from one of the sales reps from the company inquiring as to why I hadn’t signed up to attend when I’d stated an interest.  You see, on the night they had a “special”, a hard to refuse offer – for that night only! and it had to be paid in full on the night. I don’t go to any open night with more than the price of a cup of coffee in the venue and the parking ticket costs, and deliberately don’t so I won’t get  tempted by these “specials”.  I go home and think it over and weigh up the benefits against the costs and my thirst for the knowledge with what else I could do with that time and so on and so on.  And in this climate a lot of seminars are just not filling up to capacity, especially ones that cost as much as this one did, so I got on with life until the call I’d been waiting for came and I laid out my terms – basically that I was not prepared to pay more than the “special” on the open night, and it was accepted (having been told on the night it would not be accepted at a later date). So I decided I would attend this seminar.  I’d checked my savings scheme to see if the finances were there to cover the cost of it and they were….just.  That left flights and accommodation to be sorted.

An early flight was not what I had anticipated

Now, if you leave flights to nearly the last minute they can be quite expensive and my budget was going to be maxed out on this weekend, so I was looking for the best deals I could get and they were pretty thin on the ground.  Flights were eventually booked and paid for, after the third attempt and the “system” locking me out yet again, but amazingly remembering my details each time I re-entered the site to update.  Needless to say, in my frustration I got sloppy and didn’t check my return flight time – 06.50 – and I’m not a “morning person”!!  The flight had defaulted to the earliest flight of the day, luckily also the cheapest flight of the day, but it meant I’d be spending the night in Heathrow airport so as not to miss  the flight.  I also didn’t account for the fact that it is mid-term both, here and in England and London is a popular holiday spot all year round, but especially when kids are on holiday, so hotels were out of my budget and most of the B & B’s were already booked up.  I got stung by a booking site that took a booking from me and then didn’t forward it to the B & B, who took a booking directly from another customer, leaving my booking the “double booking”.  I found out on Wednesday about this and was supposed to fly out Thursday.  So panic posts to Facebook looking for recommendations (thanks to all who responded) and found a new booking that had to be paid for in full, due to the short notice.

I’d sent a letter to my savings scheme looking to withdraw my money (standard practice with this crowd) and was expecting my cheque to be ready as usual, five working days later.  But I hadn’t counted the bank holiday (last Monday in October)….”and they can take up to seven days to be issued, Madam!”, the nice guy in Customer Services said to me when I enquired.  So another obstacle to overcome, and with some delicate negotiations with my son and his pay packet and guarantees of full refunds, this was almost sorted, just €250 to find, so… I get dropped off at my mother’s house early on the morning of my flight and await the bank opening to withdraw a payment I was expecting.  The trip to the bank revealed that the payment had not been made.   I was yet to discover that a payment due to me had been delayed this week,  “just a processing error, not to worry, you’ll get it doubled up next week, sorry about that” said a cheery clerk behind the counter when I queried that one in person on Friday morning.  Needless to say I didn’t get to London!!!

My alarm bells started ringing together

For some, the warning bells start to go off when the first thing goes wrong, and yet I was so focused on getting there, that I didn’t hear a single bell until I was walking out of the bank.  Then they all rang at once and I heard every one of them, loud and clear.  I went back to my parent’s house and was in foul humour and ranted for about twenty minutes and then….just stopped….and let it all go.  I had a lie-down and napped for about an hour, got back up and was in good form, and still am.  Why?  Because I wasn’t meant to be in London that weekend, I was meant to be here, meant to attend the meeting I normally attend on a Friday afternoon and learn some really valuable lessons at that meeting, lessons that I might, or might not learn in London, but definitely did here.  Financially, it has stung quite a bit, but it’s only money!  With the lessons I’ve learnt on Friday, I can make that up thousands of times over and I will.  For me the biggest lesson was listening to my older daughter query my good mood on Thursday evening as we walked to the shops:  “Mam, why are you in such good form when you haven’t been able to get to where you wanted to go, you’ve lost money you can’t afford to lose and yet you’re so up-beat?”.  My reply: “I’m right where I’m supposed to be, what’s meant for you doesn’t pass you by” I knew, that there was a reason I wasn’t supposed to be in London, I just hadn’t found it out yet!

The conference is run twice a year, if I want I can go next April.