How to ‘win’ Christmas and still be smiling mid-January

Love it or hate it, there’s no way you can ignore Christmas. From mid October, we are subject to a constant slew of advertising messages, telling us how perfect our lives will be if we would only buy X, and how happy and fulfilled our kids would be if they received Y under the tree this year. Even the most grounded amongst us will admit to an occasional wobble if they don’t have a roaring log fire in an oak-panelled room with an 8 foot tree, a table groaning with homemade mince pies and mulled wine, children fit for the John Lewis ad, the perfect present bought and wrapped for everyone, snow billowing against the windows and an organic, corn fed monster of a turkey roasting in the oven…

…and… breathe!

Here are some tips to surviving – and enjoying – Christmas and for starting the New Year as you mean to go on:

November – December

• Take the pressure off yourself. Chances are, it won’t be like it is in the adverts. But that’s someone else’s idea anyway. What’s your version of the ideal Christmas? Take time to think about your own favourite Christmas memories. They’re probably mostly not gift related. Write them down and think about what made them so special. How can that be recreated? It might be about time spent with people, not money spent on them, for example.
• Delegate! There isn’t a big medal for doing everything yourself, so why not share out gift buying, card writing, present wrapping, house preparing and cooking tasks with your partner, children or even guests? That gives YOU the chance to enjoy yourself too, and (most!)people generally like to feel helpful. It’s no fun being a Christmas martyr, and no fun being around one either.
• Use the internet. Yes, the idea of carefully selecting personal gifts whilst wrapped up in your snuggliest woollies in a snow-dusted Christmas market is a beautiful one. But often the reality is trudging along a drizzly, grey, overcrowded high street, grabbing whatever 3 for 2s haven’t sold out yet. So make yourself a list, pour yourself a drink and investigate what’s out there in cyberspace. You don’t have to stick to the old favourites such as amazon – try folksy.com for handmade, unusual items, or get experience vouchers from redletterdays.co.uk. You can even club together online with friends or family to buy a special, bigger gift at shareagift.com.
• If you’re looking for an innovative and inspiring gift, how about giving a voucher for my Rock Your Resolutions mini course? 😉
• Keep costs down but creativity up. Challenge your friends and/or family to spend just £5 on each person’s present. You can trawl your local charity shops, put together little hampers of sweets, or knit them a scarf but it has to be under that fiver! Fun and frugal.
• Look after yourself. There’s so much rich food and alcohol going around at this time of year, and that’s great, but don’t overstock your house with it so that you end up eating it constantly. Buy in some treats, for sure, but remember that dates and satsumas are as Christmassy as chocolates. And brisk walks in the fresh air will boost your mood. You’ll feel so much more energetic, as well as giving your body a better chance of fighting off any bugs going round. And you’ll be very glad of it in the harsh light of New Year’s Day morning…
• Make space. Christmas inevitably involves a large influx of ‘stuff’, be it presents or visiting in-laws(!), so now is the perfect time to have a clear out in preparation. And if you do it early enough, you can make some money from your clear out on eBay to go towards the present
  fund! Why not join in a Throw Out Thursday on the Straightforward Coaching facebook page to get some support?

January

• Pass on unwanted Christmas gifts with love and gratitude; don’t hang on to them with guilt. Exchange them, sell them or give them away, but don’t let them take up space in your house or your head.
• A new year dawning can bring on the post-feast guilt like nothing else. But, however much of a good idea it may seem, don’t start a full-on detox on New Year’s Day. By all means cut back on the treats and up the fruit and veg count, but too big a change too quickly is almost  always doomed to failure. Make your good intentions sustainable.
• Dark and chilly evenings or rainy January weekends don’t have to be a dead loss. Times like these are perfect for batch cooking warming soups and stews or baking bread. Bung them in the freezer and they’ll be ready for you whenever you want a healthy, homecooked dinner but you just don’t have the time or the inclination to cook from scratch.
• New Year is famously a time for resolutions and new beginnings. That’s great, but remember it can also be very dark and gloomy too so don’t be too hard on yourself with the turning over of new leaves! Be realistic and give yourself some time – see the whole year as a work in progress and don’t expect to be totally sorted by January 2^nd. Join in on my Rock Your Resolutions mini course and set realistic, exciting and achievable aims for 2012.
• Get out whenever you can. Fresh air, however chilly, will make you feel better as it blows away the cobwebs. Walk or cycle instead of taking the car for short journeys – you’ll feel better, look better and save money too. Result!

Keep it real and be kind to yourself throughout the run-up, the event itself and its aftermath. Have fun, and remember it’s just another day to be lived from your heart, not stage managed to an anonymous ad-man’s fickle prescription!

Cheers!

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.