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!

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.