Season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and exceedingly fat spiders

The kids are back to school and therefore it’s a return to the 6.30am alarm that I’d been free from for six blissful weeks. Two weeks in, and we’re starting to notice that, whilst not dark, it’s not exactly light out there at that time now either. This is always a blow to the Bradford family. Between us all, we’ve had 85 years’ experience of it getting darker in the winter yet it somehow takes us by surprise every autumn.

We are prone to getting a bit glum as the light leaves, so we’ve worked on a ‘lovely list’ on the theme of the colder months. Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

• that lovely misty light in the morning that picks out enormously fat-bodied spiders sitting on their vast webs (although not so good when you walk through the aforesaid webs on your way to feed the chickens in the morning…)
• it being cold enough at night to snuggle under the duvet without wanting to kick it off five minutes later
• open fires
• coming in from the cold and warming up with a good cuppa (or, even better, a hot chocolate)
• tights and boots (this was obviously just the female members of the family…)
• satsumas and clementines
• frost – we love to examine all the pretty patterns on the windscreens of the cars parked on the route to school
• red wine really comes into its own when the weather gets colder
• the leaves turning – achingly beautiful
• bonfire night
• hallowe’en
• Christmas
• soup
• being inside and warm with nowhere we have to go to when it’s dark/cold/raining outside
• seeing the sunrise when you’re making your morning cuppa
• kicking up leaves
• conkers
• snuggly jumpers
• porridge for breakfast
• board games and books
• snow (a very rare treat round these parts!)

Any more? Please add your thoughts!

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!

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?

Making space for spring

It’s Easter, and whether you are Christian or not, it’s a time of new life and awakening. Trees are laden with blossom, there are lambs in the fields, grass verges are resplendent in purple and yellow, our daughter is delighting in the caterpillars that have appeared and there’s a new mildness in the air.

This year, spring seems to have arrived very quickly. Only last month, the snow had taken us southerners by surprise. And yet, last weekend, we were treated to temperatures of 20 degrees plus. Inspired by the warm weather, my husband took to the garden. A few hours later, having created bags and bags full of garden waste (his forte), he drove to the council dump only to find that the world and his wife had obviously had the same idea – there was a queue 20 cars long!

Funny how spring triggers an instinctive urge to clear out. Old things, no longer serving any use, have to make way, clearing a space for potential to manifest itself. This is true on many levels, from detoxing our diets to clearing out the loft. Once we have freed ourselves from the anchors of surplus possessions, commitments, weight, weeds(!), or whatever it is, we allow the potential in.

The space we create is magic. Some people are frightened of it and immediately plug the gap with more possessions, or busy-up their time. The real art is to sit in the space and be open to what happens.

My challenge to you this month is to clear some space in your life in as many or as few areas as you feel comfortable. This could be from taking a bag of old clothes to the charity shop, to a complete overhaul of every aspect of your life. Sit with it. Be comfortable in it. See what happens. Let me know how you get on.

Eco-friendly coaching

Ecology has always been a subject close to my heart. Last month, I touched upon our global responsibility for the future of our planet. As I understand it, this means making sure that our individual actions, indeed our very existence, impact as little as is practically possible on the environment. Simple things, such as using eco- friendly washing products, not taking the car on short trips, recycling and composting our waste and picking up litter are all ways we can help to reduce our carbon footprint (use the CAT calculator to calculate yours).

Last week, on my NLP Practitioner’s training, I learned a new slant on the definition for the word ecology. In NLP, ecology is the study of consequences – the results of any change that occurs. Just as we (hopefully!) are concerned about the effects of our actions on the natural environment, we should also look at the effects of our actions and decisions on our social environment and within ourselves.

Making decisions based on personal or social ecology can sometimes be obvious: a sporty two-seater won’t work as a family car, however sexy it looks in the showroom. Not every decision is so clear-cut though. I often hear clients struggling with a goal they have set themselves which may look good on paper but, after a bit of digging, turns out to be incongruent with their values or beliefs. In short, their goal is not ecological for them.

If you find yourself struggling to manifest a goal you have set yourself, try this exercise* to discover the hidden fears, beliefs and values that might be holding you back: write down all the reasons why you DON’T want that goal in your life. Let your darkest thoughts surrounding your goal reveal themselves on paper and keep writing until you can’t come up with any more. These are some of the fears, beliefs and consequences surrounding your goal or decision and they might include the one(s) that are holding you back. Once they are all out in the open, you may find some issues you need to work through before you are ready to achieve your target. Reframing or redefining your goal to address the conflicting value or belief could also work to integrate the goal with your personal ecology. Of course, working with me as your coach and NLP practitioner would help you enormously here, but you knew that already, didn’t you?

*with thanks to Lisa Wynn and associates

Some thoughts about the tsunami

Before the Christmas break, I had been planning to fill this post with lots of tips about resolutions and how to set goals for the New Year.
Then the tsunami hit. Suddenly, my own personal goals for the year, whilst still relevant, were dwarfed by the enormity of the situation in South East Asia. That enormous wave hit without warning, suddenly snuffing out 220000 lives, without stopping to ask whether its victims had goals or not.

Of course, I’m not saying that goals, resolutions and plans aren’t important (I am a coach, after all!) – just that the fragility and power of life and the planet are so enormous that they often get overlooked. Individuals, corporations and nations often are so busy looking at their own plans for the future that they forget they are part of a much bigger story. Resources, sometimes millions of years in the making, are plundered for short-term ends, and the great tapestry of life is starting to run short of thread.

I heard a lot of people, on exchanging Happy New Year greetings, saying things like ‘well, perhaps it’s not appropriate to say that now in the light of the disaster’. Personally, I think that the opposite is true: we have all the more reason to celebrate our lives on this planet. Mother Nature (less the delicately wilting flower she is often portrayed as and more the fierce and unpredictable wounded tiger) has given us a wake-up call: a sort of collective near- death experience. We have been frightened, and given a lesson in how miniscule we are in the grand scheme of things – but we have been spared, and what more reason do we need to be thankful for the New Year?

Being thankful for life, respectful of our environment and living with a real spirit of carpe diem (seize the day) are not things we should add to our to-do list, rather they should be the paper the to-do list is written on – the very fabric of our lives. Remembering how small we are in terms of the life of our planet does not mean that we are insignificant or unimportant: by living our lives fully we are contributing towards history. After all, you can bet that if those tsunami victims could be raised from the dead, they would make sure they would never again waste a single moment.

Some food for your relocation thoughts

During a session the other day, one of my clients was talking about her nagging temptation not to follow a relocation dream because of the fear of everything familiar changing.

This reminded me of a passage I’d recently re-read in Mark Forster’s excellent book Get Everything Done and Still have Time to Play, which talks about change being inevitable. In it, he talks about inaction being just as much a catalyst to change as action, and he gives the example of dirty dishes: if we do the washing up soon after eating, by our action we transform the dishes into clean, usable items for the next meal; however, if we choose not to do the washing up, our inaction also changes the state of the dishes and they become encrusted and increasingly difficult to get clean.

What is your inaction potentially costing you?

Which changes do you dread and which do you welcome?

If you choose to stay where you are, is there a way of turning that decision into a positive action rather than a fearful inaction? What needs to change?