Archive for July, 2009
Slow Down – You Move Too Fast
Posted by: | CommentsI awoke this morning feeling energised but in a calmer way than that at the beginning of the week.
The last couple of days I have been in a panic – do I really want to take up coaching again, do I really want to help thousands of people (because that was what the email that sent me in a tail spin suggested), WHAT DO I REALLY WANT TO DO?
The panic culminated in my asking my coach for help yesterday evening and just the process of asking seems to have moved me forward.
“Why the hurry”?
“Why the mad dash to know everything I want now”?
Maybe slowing down to what I want now, today, in this moment is enough.
I can have some ideas of what I might want in the future but that is all they will ever be as long as they are in the future – ideas. When they are being created in the moment they will be what I want but for now the are just ideas.
So, I’m going to have a peaceful kind of day today and slow it right down. In the immortal words of Simon and Garfunkel – I’m “looking for love and feeling groovy”.
Care to join me for a groovy kinda day? 
A Spiral Kind of Life
Posted by: | CommentsMy energy levels are neutral this morning – a rise from yesterday first thing. And as the dust has settled I find myself asking again “What is it I truly want”?
I started this blog as an experiment to try and discover what to do next with my life. Through a variety of twists and turns I came back to coaching. And now, I’m not sure again.
It looks a bit like being back at the beginning but, of course, it isn’t. Life is not a straight line. Or even a circle. It’s a spiral. So maybe I have circled back to the left side, which is where I began, but I am still at a higher level.
So . . . on with the enquiry . . . ”What is it I truly want”?
When Being A Grown Up’s Not All It’s Cracked Up To Be
Posted by: | CommentsYesterday morning I woke up excited and raring to go and thought, hoorah, I’ve reached one of my goals (to wake up excited and raring to go).
This morning I woke up feeling low and spent most of the morning tempted to go back to bed.
“How did that happen?” I hear you ask.
Well . . . I received an email late yesterday afternoon. After reading it I felt like my wrists had been well and truly slapped. Tears came to my eyes and I just wanted to go and hide in a corner. I’d been doing so well . . .
This morning I tried to process why I had such a strong reaction to those particular words. I watched Byron Katie videos. I read inspiring works. I wrote “in my head”. I was transported back to a memory of an incident when I was about 5 or 6, whose theme I seemed to have replayed over and over in my life. And I sobbed. I mean really sobbed.
But, so what? Sobbing didn’t change anything. (Felt good though). And it wasn’t a new insight so I didn’t reach a new level of understanding.
So I hung out in the misery until I thought “sod this for a game of soldiers”. **** it! Who want’s to be a grown up anyway? Whereupon I reached for the Pringles, turned on a DVD and showed a finger to the world.
And now I feel great. I’ve got my cappuccino, my son will be home from school shortly, tonight is a family night that I’m really looking forward to. The angst will just bloody well have have to wait.
I’m playing.
Michael Neill’s Ultimate Time Management System
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been thoroughly enjoying Michael Neill’s ‘Creating the Impossible in 30 Days‘ although I haven’t had much time to do many of the exercises as I’ve been busy with “work” from the Coaching School. So, appropriately, I’m going to spend the day experimenting with his Ultimate Time Management System.
The idea behind it is that time is not something you have or don’t have. You are the source of it. You make as much of it as you want.
And the system works like this:
1. Take 2 pieces of paper
2. On the first page write “The only thing I have to do today is . . .”
3. On the second page make a comprehensive list of everything you want to get done in the next week or so. Include, all you regular “to dos”, everything you’ve got to do for work and at home, as well as the things you think you’d like to do if you had more time.
4. When it’s time to do the things on your list just choose ONE item. Choose the one that appeals to you most and write it on the first page. Do it as though it’s the only thing you have to do today.
5. When you complete it cross it off both lists.
6. Choose the next thing that appeals from the second list and transfer it to the first page.
And keep repeating.
When I first heard this my mind went straight to the place of “this won’t work because I’ll never do the things that I don’t want to do but have to be done”. But the other possibility of course, is that when it really needs to be done it will the one that most appeals because I will want to relieve the stress of the consequences I would face if I didn’t do it.
We’ll see. I’m off to play now.
Leave a comment and let us know how this system works out for you . . .
You’re Not Confused – You’re Scared
Posted by: | CommentsPhew. What a day. And it’s not over yet!
Yesterday evening I sent in my “homework” for the coaching school which seems to have triggered another couple of breakthroughs. By the time I woke up this morning I needed to add an addendum because I’d already moved on from where I was last night and then, during the course of a conversation with a client, I had another breakthrough and realised that something I’d been puzzling over wasn’t an “either or” but an “and and”.
I felt a split between creating my coaching pratice “my way” and doing the usual marketing things like asking for referrals etc. But I was a bit suspicious about my confusion since feeling confused is always a cover up for being scared. So I asked myself “if creating my coaching practice the traditional way was the right thing to do, what would I do next”? And I realised that the thing I would do next, in this case putting up a web page describing the services I was offering, felt pretty terrifying to me. Now I knew I was on to something. So I decided then and there that, by the end of today, I would have just such a webpage up on my new site.
I’d brought a fear into consciousness and I wanted to see if I could blast through it. To help me I tapped into my spirit of adventure and came from a place of curiosity and not knowing rather than from a place of thinking this is the right thing to do. I allowed myself space to see what happens next (an approach that inspires me) and to sit in the not-knowing.
After much resistance which took the form of wandering around shops, returning library books and feeling way too tired to start writing anything I finally sat myself down, in a cafe and just put pen to paper. Once I’d written 4 paragraphs, that I wasn’t at all happy with, the words began to flow. And now I have a page written and ready to go live on the web.
It’s rough and unlikely to stay in it’s present form but it’s a start. The goal was to take action and thereby neutralise a fear, which is what I’ve done. And now I’m really curious to see what happens next.
If you’re confused about something can you get to the fear that is underneath? Can you choose to neutralise that fear by applying curiosity and creativity?
Please leave a comment and let me know how it goes.
