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!

Relocation : what’s important to you?

The exercise in the previous post (eco-friendly coaching) is perfect for people considering moving. However, if you are at the stage of just considering whether relocation is for you, you might find the following exercise a little more manageable. The idea is to take notice of what is important to you in your daily life (some things get into such a routine that we can take them for granted until they are no longer available to us) so that you have clear criteria for what you need in your new location. Every day for a week, note down what you did, what you thought about it and what, if anything, you would like to change about it. Here are some examples:

Sunday: To church. I love being part of a real community. I wish there were more opportunities to mix with such a wide variety of people in other contexts.

Wednesday: At the gym. A fab step aerobics class! Think I’d go mad if I didn’t have this facility so close.

Thursday: Took the dog for a walk. Trudging round the block. It would be great if there were somewhere close I could take him off the lead and let him run.

Write down all your thoughts as they occur to you – don’t edit them. Highlight anything that comes up that you consider to be key to your identity.

Your next task is this: using your notes you have already made and adding anything else that occurs to you, make a list of what is really important to you (as an individual, couple or family group) about where you live now. When you have done that, highlight, underline or asterisk those things on the list that are absolutely necessary for you to keep your identity. Here is an example:

• garden or private outdoor space
• opportunities for work
• broadband internet access
• gym
• place of worship
• good schools
• open spaces, etc., etc.

If you know where you want to relocate to, check what’s important to you against what is there and consider what you will do in the event of any gaps. If you are still contemplating a move, keep this checklist to hand whenever you are considering a potential location.

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

It’s a date!

Very recently I started coaching a new client who had been thinking of moving to France for a number of years but had never done much about it because the processes involved had seemed so complicated that she didn’t know where to start. So she didn’t.

This is a situation that I come across with a lot of clients who are considering relocation. Once we have made a start on chunking the enormous task down into manageable steps, one of the first things that I normally ask people in this position to do is to set themselves a moving date (that’s date, not year, season or month!) and write it in their diary or on their calendar.

I should stress that this date is not intended to be a millstone round the neck or something to get hugely stressed about, but fixing a realistic date really helps to focus on what needs to be done between now and then. If necessary, it can be changed, but it needs to be taken seriously enough to spur you into action. Once you know your moving date, you can start to schedule other things into your diary relating to your move: the date you will hand your notice in, the date you will start your language lessons, the date you will put your property on the market, etc.

Having the deadline of a moving date drastically reduces procrastination on all the minutiae of moving details that otherwise can be dragged out for months or years – or even not started at all. In the spirit of my piece above, setting a moving date encourages you to seize the day so you don’t regret not relocating years down the line whilst sitting in your rocking chair. Give it a try!

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.