Oh my Wordle!

Wordle is my new favourite online toy.  Here is some ‘art’ it created from the text on my website homepage about life coaching. Have a play and let me know how you get on!

My other body is a temple

Out for a run yesterday morning, I spotted the slogan ‘my other body is a temple’ scrawled on a passer-by’s t-shirt.

Now I’m sure there must be a coachy link here, but for now I just wanted to share it with you because it tickled me.

(Anyone who does think of a fantastic coachy link gets a prize and I’ll stick it up on here…!)

Lenten leanings

A good few years ago, I had the pleasure of teaching English to a really motivated and positive Chinese student. This young man was a lover of new words and their nuances as well as the customs and general quirks of his new surroundings.

It was Shrove Tuesday and he came in, full of wonder and questions about pancakes. The discussion led on to Lent and its religious meaning and tradition of giving something up for the 40 day period and how it was commonplace to do this, even in the most secular circles.

Now, this student was almost surgically attached to his electronic Chinese-English dictionary, which he insisted on consulting, even when having apparently understood the explanation of new words. It had become a joke between us that he was addicted to his dictionary, so I was surprised and delighted when he announced that he would give up using it in lessons for Lent. He promptly placed the dictionary in his bag and we got on with the rest of our lesson.

A couple of days later, I met up with a good friend for lunch. He happens to be an eminent clergyman who sits on the Bishops Council (as well as a very good conversationalist with an unrivalled stock of rude jokes). We chatted away as we ate lunch, which culminated in two large slices of a decadent chocolate cake. As we were finishing the last mouthfuls of the cake, I laughingly confessed that I’d given up chocolate for Lent, to which he replied that he had too and we had a conspiratorial giggle.

After lunch, I had another lesson with my Chinese student. At one point, I was struggling to come up with an understandable explanation of a tricky word he’d come across, so I suggested he look it up in his dictionary. He looked at me, rather puzzled, and simply said ‘but I’ve given up using the dictionary for Lent’. The taste of the chocolate cake was still in my mouth.

It really struck me that day that the person with the least obvious  ’investment’ in the Lenten tradition was the one who was the most committed. This isn’t meant to be a post about austerity or religious values - it’s about commitment to a decision and making it yours. My reasons for giving something up for Lent were vaguely churchy, but mostly because people had asked me what I was going to give up for Lent this year so I picked one of the usuals. My friend had more religious reasons, but still the ‘giving up’ is more a tradition than an obligation within the Church. Both of us had decided to give something up in an ‘I suppose I should’ sort of a way. In short, we were obviously not committed!

My student had decided to give up using his dictionary, despite being non-Christian and not having been brought up in a Christian-ised secular society which observes the pancakes-and-giving-something-up tradition. There was no ’should’ with him – he made his decision out of a desire to embrace the culture in his host country. He wanted to do it.

Sometimes, the very fact you have done something before, maybe time and again, seems like a reason to do it again. Look at your decision to do something – be it giving something up for Lent, embarking on a new exercise regime or going for a promotion - and take a fresh angle on it. Are there any ’shoulds’ in play here? Where do they come from? What would make you genuinely want to take this action? Find your motivation – whatever it may be – and really feel it before committing. Watch your results change!

Having trouble committing to something? Call me!

dance more!

At this time of year, there’s always a slew of magazine articles, telly programmes and the like, telling people how to change their lives in big or small ways – giving up smoking, losing weight, getting more exercise or whatever. All very admirable, but the ‘joke’ is that many of these good intentions have flown out of the window by about January 3rd, leaving the resolver frustrated and disappointed in themselves.

Some of the better articles or programmes of the ‘Happy New You’ ilk will include advice on how to make these resolutions stick, and often quote life coaches (indeed, I have contributed to this sort of article for the Brighton Argus and the TES in the past), giving tips on how to make your goals SMART, and how to make sure they’re in line with your values etc. As a coach, I can and I do help people with their goals in this way, and if you do want help and support with changing your life, please contact me.

I was having a conversation with my six-year-old daughter yesterday about New Year’s resolutions and what they were, and I asked her what she would resolve for 2009. We had a piece of paper we were doodling on, and she immediately wrote on it ‘dance more’.

She has recently started a dance class after school and is very enthusiastic about it, so that’s what she had in mind, but it struck me that it would be a wonderful metaphor for how I’d like to live my life in 2009. There’s nothing specific, measurable or time-bound about it, and as a goal it’s about as nebulous as you can get, but ‘dance more’ has really stuck with me in the last 24 hours as a wonderfully freeing philosophy for life, and it’s made it to the front of my diary for the New Year – to remind me I’m going to take 2009 by the hand and lead it in my own dance.

Where could you dance more with your life? What would that be like? Will your dance be a sexy salsa, a brooding tango or will you hop balletically towards the spring? Email me – I’d love to know!

love the brown leaf days too

it made me smile that, whilst waiting for this picture to upload, the accompanying message said 'crunching...'!

 

This is the picture my girls made with their dad after an afternoon’s leaf collecting. What fascinated me was that each of the leaves we picked up really stood out from the others around them at the time they were chosen – they were something special amongst the duller, browner leaves surrounding them. Yet, when they were all put together in this picture, some acted as the duller background themselves. It made me think about how we live in a world of relativity – how can we truly know happiness if we’ve never felt sad? How can we measure beauty without some implied aesthetic scale? If we lived in a world of infinite resources, fairly shared, would it mean anything to be described as ‘wealthy’?

 

So life is lived in a series of ups and downs, of days that stand out from the others like a glorious sunshine yellow leaf, and of the dull brown leaf days that serve to make that yellow leaf day so radiant. Wouldn’t it be great to always be aware of how our ‘ordinary’ brown-leaf days are part of a huge autumnal picture, our life as a whole, seen from a step backwards? And don’t they just make those other days shine?

 

What colour and texture leaf would your day be today? When was your latest yellow leaf day? Remember it in detail and make yourself smile!

Battery or free-range thinking?

ex-batts have bald necks from reaching over bars to their food troughs

Eggatha tries her wings out for the first time

Trinity, bonding with the chickens

There’s great excitement in the Bradford household at the moment, as we’ve recently taken on four new members of the family by the names of Cluck, Eggatha, Bobob and Staggerpole (some rather adventurous names there – that’s what you get when there’s a six-year-old input!) and they’re ex-battery chickens.

 

In the normal run of things, battery chickens are kept in small cages where they each have a space around the size of a piece of A4 paper. They don’t see daylight and are unable to carry out natural behaviours such as dustbathing, nesting or roosting.  It’s a pretty miserable existence and it ends after a year, when they are unceremoniously slaughtered as they are not considered such effective egg-laying machines.

 

That is, unless they are lucky enough to have been rescued by the Battery Hen Welfare Trust (www.bhwt.org.uk), who agree with some battery farmers to liberate some from each cull having found suitable ‘adopters’ for them.  And so it was that one damp Saturday morning we were waiting, along with many others, with great anticipation to be called round to the greenhouse to collect our liberated chucks.

 

Well the sight of 250 bewildered battery chickens who had seen the light of day and been able to move around for the first time that morning was incredible.  Four were selected for us and loaded into our car and we drove home like first-time parents bringing the baby home from the hospital.  Emika and Trinity were fascinated by the beaks that kept appearing through the hole in the box and the little confused noises the chickens were making.  They were even more confused when we introduced them to their coop, where they have more space than they’d ever seen before in their short lives!  They huddled together for the first 24 hours, hardly moving at all.  We had to pick them up and put them in the henhouse at night because they’d never used their legs and wings before and they were too weak to get up the ladder.  They were featherbare, particularly around their wings, tails and necks, and generally looked in a very sorry state.

 

Two weeks on and the change is enormous.  They have all started growing their feathers back and they’ve learned to dustbathe, sunbathe (on the rare occasions there’s been any to bathe in!), explore the garden, dig for and eat worms and other insects, flap their wings and ‘fly’ up to the henhouse (and away from us when we’re trying to round them back up!).  Two of them have learned to use the nest box to lay in and they’ve laid an average of three eggs a day between them.  They have distinctly different personalities – Cluck and Bobob rule the roost and are the brains of the outfit, while Eggatha storms the door and tries to escape into the garden whenever we go into the coop.  Staggerpole tends to keep herself to herself and is less adventurous, although rather affectionate with us.

 

That’s the change in two weeks.  In a month or so, we’re reliably informed, they will have grown back all their feathers and will look and behave like ’proper’ chickens, doing the instinctive things that they should have been able to do all of their lives.  They already have a thirst for more freedom – getting visibly frustrated at us when we don’t let them out into the garden – when two weeks ago they didn’t know what to do with all the space. 

 

It’s led me to wonder about the potential for change in all of us.  When put into a new situation, our capacity for adaptation is phenomenal.  You just have to watch programmes such as ‘I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!’ to see how the initial discomfort at being in a new circumstance quickly disappears and that contestants talk later about how liberating the change was.  Having completed that abseil I thought I’d never do (see previous post), there’s a change in my thinking – a subtle shift in my perception of what I ‘can’ and ‘can’t’ do, which also has been liberating.

 

Liberty then, and liberation.  Not only from the physical confines of battery cages (or ‘gilded cages’ made from the trappings of luxury and fame), but the limiting beliefs, fears and messages of those around us and those we’ve created in our own minds.  Our chickens lives have changed enormously in just two weeks since their liberation from the battery cage to the (relative!) freedom of our back garden.  How much can our lives change when we liberate ourselves from battery thinking?  What beliefs or fears have you made your cage out of?  What needs to change for you to go free-range thinking?

 

Want help liberating yourself from battery thinking?  Email me (info@straightforwardcoaching.com) and we’ll arrange an exploratory chat.

 

Want help liberating a chicken? Go to www.bhwt.org.uk. Good luck!

Which way are you heading today?

which way are you heading today?

 I love this picture!  It was taken when we were staying at the fantastically-named Sandy Balls holiday resort, by the New Forest.  

I have it as the wallpaper on my laptop to remind me to make the decision every day as to which way I’m choosing to go – are actions such as procrastination, avoidance, or not looking after myself taking me to Stuckton, or am I ‘in flow’, creative, productive and heading for Blissford?

Which way are you pointing right now?

Onwards and upwards? I went backwards and down!!

Picture the scene – it’s Christmas day in the Highlands of Scotland and we’re staying in a stone cottage with a roaring fire, kids playing happily with the toys Santa brought them.  My husband hands me a present – it’s an upmarket-looking embossed silver envelope.  Surely this has to contain a voucher for some luxury or other – a spa day perhaps, or a ticket to somewhere exotic?  He watches me, smiling, as I open it and read…

…it was a voucher for an abseiling experience. AN ABSEILING EXPERIENCE!!!! Had the man gone utterly mad?! Perhaps he had me mixed up with some other wife he’s been keeping secret?  Had there been some terrible admin mistake somewhere?  All goodwill and warm fuzzy Christmassy feelings went from the room in an instant.  I went completely white and momentarily feigned completely unconvincing delight (whilst tears of fear pooled in my eyes) before fleeing.

The ferocity of my rising panic and anger amazed me.  It’s true that I had lots of gremlins that lurk around such pursuits (due to being frogmarched to outdoor activity centres all too often when I was an overweight and underconfident teen – shudder), but I’m not afraid of heights and I knew the likelihood of everyone else pointing and laughing at me was extremely low (and now I’d have things to say and ways to deal with it if they had done!) – so why this paralysing dread?

When I calmed down enough to trust that I wouldn’t shout, swear or do harm to him, I talked to Richard and asked him (very politely!) what had been his thought processes around this particular present. He said that he’d known it was not the sort of thing I’d usually do (admitting he hadn’t anticipated how strongly against it I’d felt!) and he’d thought it would be a fun challenge, in a widening-your-comfort-zone sort of a way.  He also added that I could change it or not go if I wanted.

Oddly enough, it was this comment that made me decide to do it.  It reminded me that, as adults, we always have choice, even if it doesn’t appear obvious.  The fact I could actively choose to abseil down a 10m tower, rather than react to an event (ie being given it as a present) and therefore give away my choice by making it ‘Richard’s fault’,  immediately quelled some of the panic.  I also decided that I’d phone up and book myself in soon, rather than ‘oops’ letting the deadline come and go without any action (inaction being a passive choice in itself).  Besides, I wanted to show my girls (and myself, for that matter) that mummy can face her fears.

So finally, last weekend, the day came, after almost 9 months’ of nailbiting since that Christmas drama.  Although I felt strong and proud that I’d made the decision to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’, the fact was that I still couldn’t even think about leaning back over that precipice without wanting to be sick.  My family rather sensibly kept a low profile all morning and then the time came.

The more I felt unwell at the very thought of abseiling, the more I became determined to go for it.  However, when the instructor was showing us how to put on our harnesses, there was an almost primal urge to bolt – I had to physically restrain myself from running a mile in the opposite direction.  At the same time as feeling this overwhelming fear (the likes of which I don’t recall ever having had before), I was really interested in the feeling.  I’ve been practising mindfulness lately and it was comforting, in the middle of such an intense experience, not to be trying to block the feelings out but to observe them, almost subjectively, in a loving way. It didn’t stop me sobbing as I watched the first of our group balance on his tiptoes 10m up before lowering himself down though!

When it came to my turn, I focused on the choice I’d made to be there. I climbed up three flights of stairs inside the tower, willing myself on with every step.  At the top Simon, the instructor, explained what I needed to do whilst I clung on to the handrail for dear life. All the time, I had a still small voice telling me what amazing learning this all was.  But I still had to lower myself over…

Well, I did that.  The part that had worried me most was done and I was horizontal, many metres over the ground.  Then Simon said I needed to loosen my grip on the rope if I wanted to go anywhere.

I don’t know whether you’ve ever hung, clinging on to a rope, high off the ground. However, I can tell you that all your instincts scream at you to keep clinging on to that rope, whatever you do, don’t let go.  And here was Simon telling me I had to loosen my grip!  Well, that did it – all mindfulness was forgotten and sheer unadulterated terror took over.  I screamed that I wanted to get back up and was back up in a second, crying on poor Simon’s shoulder.  He was the perfect mixture of encouraging and listening, told me that I’d done the bit most people bottle out at, and asked me what I wanted to do.

I had choice again. I projected forward and tried out telling my daughters both scenarios, and telling them I hadn’t done it was awful, as was the idea of descending those stairs.  My decision was to do it. I composed myself, answered ‘yes’ when Simon asked if I was happy, and I leaned back and eased off on the rope.

It took a long time to descend those few metres as my grip was still pretty tight, but eventually I got to the bottom, to applause from the rest of the group. I had wondered whether I’d feel euphoric having done it, but I didn’t. What I did feel was that the worst part of the experience had just been the fear, but that I now knew I could get through that – even the abject terror. Franklin Roosevelt said “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”, and that seems a particularly apt quotation for my experience.  I saw fear in that moment for just what it was – a feeling, and nothing else.

Having beaten the fear once, I wanted to test myself and eventually went down the tower a further three times. I’d told Richard and the girls to stay away at the beginning (mostly as I didn’t want my daughters learning the swear words which have a habit of coming out when I’m under pressure), but called them after my second descent so they could come and see.  My six-year-old was typically unimpressed (”jump, mummy!”, “mummy, you’re not going very fast!” etc) but I was happy to have been a positive role model for them and I hope that they will remember the experience one day when faced with a massive personal challenge themselves.

As for me now, I will probably never do abseiling again, but I know that I could do if the situation arose. I also know that I have the ability to overcome that sort of fear and so could do something that provoked similar feelings if necessary (although I’ve told Richard that this does not mean a potholing experience would be appreciated this Christmas!).  I also know now – thanks to Simon – that to get anywhere in abseiling or in life, I need to loosen my grip on the rope a little.

Are you holding on too tight anywhere in your life? Do you have a dread of something that’s coming up? Give me a call!

Loosening my grip

Back down to earth!

Back to Straightforward Coaching website

www.straightforwardcoaching.com

The Abseiling Experience was provided by Hatt Adventures
www.thehatt.co.uk

Half term tips for harried teachers!

Let me tell you about my most recent brush with the media – in this week’s Times Educational Supplement magazine, dated 25th April.  I was approached by Susan Young, a journalist for the TES, to contribute my thoughts towards a piece encouraging teachers to have a proper break and get away in the May half term.  Here’s what I wrote to her, much of which is reproduced in the magazine (p8, if you’re interested…):

“It’s half term and you can just make out the light of the summer at the end of a dark, 8-week tunnel. There are reports to be written, essays to be marked, schemes of work to plan and it’s easy to fill this meagre week with more work than you’d do if you were at school. But what about YOU? It isn’t for nothing that we are reminded on flights to attend to our own oxygen masks before helping others with theirs – it’s important to keep ourselves strong in order to be able to keep going and to do some active good. This is particularly true of teaching, a job which makes many demands from many different areas. Yet so many teachers, already tired from the first half of the summer term, continue to keep their noses against the grind stone during the holidays so that they are near to dropping point by the end of term, and often end up having to take time off sick.

Half term is a convenient time to catch up with work, yet it is important to make sure that it is balanced with replenishing energy levels and looking after yourself. An ideal way to do this would be to get away for some or all of the break. But how can you do this if you’re drowning in work? The secret is in managing the time that you do have available to you, in order to maximise work and play!

Take a good look at the list of work you need to do. It’s likely that all of it needs to be done, but does it absolutely, positively have to be done during half term? More to the point, how much of it will you realistically do? Rather than kicking yourself at the end of the week that you haven’t completed your list, decide positively now that you won’t do all of it and cut it right down. Prioritise tasks, assign each one an estimated time it will take you and aim to reduce your list by at least a third of the total time. Next, plan exactly when you’re going to do it (it’s safe to assume that the mood will not suddenly come upon you…) – would it work better for you to do two or three solid days, for example, or would you work better knowing that your mornings are for work and your afternoons for you? Make
these work/play boundaries sacred and you won’t have the sense of your work ‘looming’ over you whilst you’re trying to relax.

So now you know what time you have available, what would you like to do with it? If you have two or three days clear, how about booking a B&B somewhere you’ve always wanted to go, setting off early the first morning and returning late the following day? Visiting a friend you haven’t seen in ages? Or planning an extravagant shopping trip and take in a show in a nearby city? You could even whizz over to Paris for a whistle-stop tour by Eurostar. If you have a day or a half-day available, how about packing a picnic and going for a long walk by the sea/in some hills/along a river? Or visiting a tourist attraction in your own town that you’ve never been to? Maybe you could consider doing something you’ve never done before, like abseiling, falconry, watercolour painting etc (try www.activitysuperstore.com)? Or you could even book yourself in for a pampering facial or massage.

Remember that relaxing, having fun and being good to yourself is not some guilty pleasure to be hidden whilst colleagues wear their weatherbeaten, worked-all-holiday expressions like a badge of honour! In fact, a little input for YOU during half term will make you clearer-headed, energised, motivated and creative – in short, an altogether much more efficient and happier teacher!”

This will be the third time I’ve appeared in the TES, another (abridged) feature I helped with features on their website here: http://www.tes.co.uk/search/story/?story_id=2560964

Fair trade foodie

We’re at the end of Fair Trade Fortnight and you could be forgiven for thinking that it never happened. The shops are stuffed to the ceilings with over-priced, over-packaged Easter eggs made with cocoa that the food giants have paid a pittance to the growers for in order to fatten our waistlines and their profit margins.

In Worthing, we’re fortunate to have two supermarkets nearby who actively promote fair trade (Co-op and Waitrose) so that we have a real ethical choice available to us. I’m now happy that the enormous Co-op Fair Trade egg I’ve bought for Emika will produce the inevitable sugar high and chocolatey handprints throughout the house but won’t have the bitter taste of injustice.

Spare a thought for those West African farmers, squeezed into poverty by the food giants. Fairly traded tea, coffee and chocolate are widely available now, as well as sugar, wine, bananas and a growing range of fruit. If you have a Co-op nearby, take advantage of the Fair Trade choice available to you. If you don’t, lobby your local supermarket into action. You can make a difference!