How profound…

Are you actually having a profound conversation or are you talking shit?

I've just spent the better part of an evening discussing the fact that no two people take away the same meaning from any conversation. We've both been learning about the origin of communication and how we can use it more effectively and yet we've spent the last few hours confusing each other with thoughts and descriptions of feelings that, if overheard by the untrained ear, could sound… well nuts. 

That's not to say that the other member of the conversation understood where I was coming from or my intention of the sentences that seemed to escape my lips like an unexpected but not unpleasant verbal fart. She nodded and responded in all the right places so one can only assume that one was understood. 

Anyway my point is, does anyone actually pay attention to the receivers feedback (facial expressions, body language, etc) when talking/having discussions, are we all just partaking in monologues with such similar themes that it gives the impression that we are ‘conversating’ or am I just looking for meaning were there is none to be found? 

Are You Confident?

Confidence is an essential component to create a healthy relationship with yourself and in turn that inspires and motivates others to do the same.

Confident people:

• Focus on their positive characteristics.
• Tell themselves they are perfectly imperfect.
• Cherish and honour their principles.
• Respect their own needs and wants.
• Advertise their strengths, not their weaknesses.

Be kind to yourself

Become aware that if you are unkind to yourself, you will subconsciously attract others to be unkind to you. Let go of the compulsive need for approval.

Confident people know self-belief is the main pillar of success. They have indestructible self-belief; they let go of self-defeating beliefs about what might happen in the future and know they have to change their perceptions to change their lives.

It’s all well and good me writing this but the RESULTS are in the practice. I own about 3-4 books that say the same or similar things, it’s one of the main learnings of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).

I’m a great reader. I have underlined these books to the max! I agree and believe in each point.

However, I’m not so great when it comes to ACTION.

Action seems like a dirty word to me. I know I have to do something but I just never seem to 'get round to it'.

Now you could say that it can’t be that important to me, it is I promise you, but I give into the limiting beliefs that tell me I’m not good enough or I can’t do it.

I couldn’t tell you where these feelings stem from, maybe it was feedback I received whilst growing up - my school teachers, my parents, friends, boyfriends, who knows - but they exist.

The catch 22? If I practice, I could reduce the strength of these limiting beliefs… sods law.

Am I confident?

I can be, but naturally no. It takes a strong worded pep talk for me to don the confident armour and that's usuallu accompanied by a couple of glasses of wine.

New Years Resolution #1 - work on confidence. It could be the key to getting to where I should be!

How Do You Choose

When I get on the bus to travel to work there are always seats, my stop is 3 from the terminal. The closer we get to Camden, the more people get on and it always intrigues me how people choose who they sit next to.

Personally if there's an empty row, I'll choose that over sitting next to someone, unless I'm getting off soon. If there isn't then I go for the seat nearest the stairs (I always sit on the upper deck).

I guess I question this decision process because I wonder if people go for who they deem approachable, in which case I don't match because I'm mostly left last. Sad, I know.

I've actually got someone sitting next to me as I type, she's just got on, but if I take a look around there are only 3 seats left... at the back.

Note to self: smile more whilst travelling

Open Your Ears

Spotify has often been my saviour.

When a mood hits me, music has often been the one thing that can determine whether it’s a good or bad day.

Coming back to work after a nasty stint of the flu, having to force yourself to concentrate on a brightly lit screen for 8 hours of your day, enclosed by white brick and glass, I turned to Spotify for entertainment and, I’m happy to say, I was not disappointed.

I’m a big fan of Ben Howard. I love his heartfelt words and recent dark, gripping guitar rifts. So I put my trust in Spotify’s Discover and ’opened my ears’ to Nick Mulvey. I was half way through his 2014 album ‘First Mind’ and I was already recommending him to friends I thought would appreciate him.

His song ‘April’ reminds me of my favourite Howard song on the latest album, ‘In Dreams’, because of it’s haunting effect. I’m a sucker for music that makes me feel, and I really like this album.

It’s also the kind of thing I think my ex would like, so if by chance he reads this - Get on it! I think you’ll particularly like Juramidam.  

"Music has healing power. It has the ability to take people out of themselves for a few hours". 

Elton John  

Dealing with Depression

Often I forget that I’m prone to really bad days until I’m in one. Then they loom over you like a dark cloud, threatening to drown you.

I frequently speak of feeling lost in my posts and really, that’s the only way I can describe it.

It’s like I suddenly forget where I was going, or what I am meant to be doing with myself. I feel very heavy in my body, tired, emotional and withdrawn from my own life. The temptation to just escape becomes quite prominent, and nothing else matters. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to cease existing I just want to press pause on the world for a little while.

Christmas is in 23 days, but besides looking forward to the morning lie-ins and sitting around in my jogging bottoms all day, I’m not that bothered. I just don’t want to be here!

The thing about depression is that you just don’t know why you feel the way you do, you can’t explain in detail to those who love you exactly what you’re feeling and you definitely have no idea what would make you feel ‘better’. You’re just in a black hole.

I feel like this now, although I don’t think I’m quite at the bottom of this hole perhaps just slipping down the side, struggling to find something to hold on to.

I need some help, and I’ll get it because I know that I shouldn’t suffer in silence. I’m not alone feeling like this, others feel it too, although when you’re in the dark you do feel like you’re the only one there.

If I could offer advice to anyone who relates to this:

• TALK to someone. You don’t have to use the term depressed, just have a conversation with someone you trust about where your thoughts take you and how they make you feel.
• Don’t ignore it. We are amazingly robust creatures but sometimes our emotions can overwhelm us and acknowledging that you sometimes can handle them on your own doesn’t make you weak.
• Take time out. Spend time with people who make you happy but also do something for yourself and if that’s a day in bed watching Disney movies NOT wallowing, fully enjoying the moment, then that’s a step closer to the surface. 

A Year On: Believe In Your-F**king-Self

Confidence.

It's so complex.

I was having a conversation the other week with a male friend of mine and at one point it got amusingly heated because though he said he felt he was winning in the end we just ran out of steam. I kept fighting back his argument. I wasn't wholly destroying it because I partly agreed with him, but what I was trying to say was:

Men and women will never be equal because we play from different rule books and speak a different language.

True, no?

Now when I said this to one of my closest female friends she almost slapped me, but hear me out...

I'm not claiming that women are the weaker sex; women lift weights, run ma-hou-sive organisations & countries - we are NOT weak, it's just that most of us merely approach things from a different perspective to men and THAT's what I'm getting at.

It's also driven by the perception of how a woman should act.

Most of the time if a woman says she doesn't want to have children, people bulk. If she has children but leaves them most of the day because of her passion for her work, she's seen as neglectful. If she acts in a way that appears detached, she's viewed as cold-hearted and called a bitch. Men, not so much. They'd be praised and more often than not, promoted.

The conversation all stemmed from a simple question:

Do you think you're confident? 

I can be, in situations. On the whole, I wouldn't say I was. As an Aries, confidence is supposed to be ingrained but I have deep insecurities I try to keep hidden, that I cannot explain. One characteristic I do have of a typical Arian is that I hate failure but the fear is so large I just don't try.

When I look in the mirror I'm aware of the things that can be improved, which is bizarre when others around you are saying otherwise.

How easy is it to REALLY change that behaviour and turn limiting beliefs into positive ones?

Do you have presence or are you a shrinking violet?

This was something raised in my annual appraisal and it's a question I have been asking myself ever since.

Do you have presence? Are you visible, heard?

Because there's a difference between being seen and someone seeing you, or being heard and someone actually hearing what you have to say.

I was in a meeting on Monday morning with a real L&D trainer, an aspiring trainer, their boss and a salesman. I came prepared, notes at the ready, desired outcome and participant action points in mind. Though the trainer was asking questions, I felt confident in my knowledge, what I wanted out of the meeting and held the attention of each attendee as I spoke.

I had presence in that meeting. Why? Because I viewed all of them my equal. But as soon as I walked out of the room and back to my desk, which happens to be in the corner of an office full of designers - none of whom I liaise with for work - I knew that presence had dissipated. I am left alone, to my own devices.

I feel my contribution falls on deaf ears and so I question my use, my capabilities, my worth. And so it all boils down to this... if invisible is how I feel, what am I going to do about it? Have I done all I can to make my presence felt? And more importantly, do I want to be noticed?

Great expectations

On Friday night I went to meet a friend for a drink in Putney. It was a gorgeous evening and although I was feeling anxious about my first weekend alone, I enjoyed the sun setting and how beautiful my surroundings were. Do you ever get a high from nature? God, I love walking through parks, beside water or just being outside in the country!

Here's a pic I took of Putney Bridge.

Anyway, my friend had been in Putney with a male companion all afternoon, eating, drinking and enjoying deep conversations. I arrived to join them at a time when they were discussing 'presence' and the reason we do react to things in certain ways.

Chris is the founder of Take a Challenge. He is dedicated to helping others achieve their goals through his physical and emotional experience's of life's challenges, and trust me he's had some challenges. I digress, we discussed our understanding of our core being, our feelings/gut not emotions and how many of us lose that connection after the age of 8. Chris was basically saying that we as human's need to rekindle that connection in order to be true to ourselves and get to most out of living happy. Sounds similar to what was discussed in that webinar I wrote about 'awakening your inner coach', doesn't it?

"We should be like dogs" he said "You can leave a dog alone for a whole day, forget to feed them, tell them off or shout at them, and they will still love you. They are not expecting anything of their day, from you (other than to feed them), they just love."

I found what he was saying fascinating but I was plagued with the doubt that we could truly live like that. It was an idealistic view of life. He said we should live in the moment, be 100% present, not thinking or worrying about what has passed or what is to come, that we should live to give, with NO expectations.

No dinner and half a bottle of prosecco later, we were leaving and I felt enlightened, i.e. PISSED. I wittered on to my friend about this theory in relation to the ex-boyf. I've constantly said that since the day he told me he didn't want to be in a relationship with me, that my love for him was not finished, it hadn't reached the end. In my opinion he was calling it too soon.

After this conversation of giving without expectation I started to wonder whether I could continue to love him without any expectation. Could I be there to share private but not intimate moments with him, enjoy his company with NO expectation that he would miss what we had, miss me and want me back?

Expectation is the root of all heartache - William Shakespeare

On Saturday I had to be back at the old flat to wait for a courier to collect some items I had arranged to sell. I saw him briefly in the morning before he went off to work and I was still there when he returned six hours later. I felt guilty that I was in his 'space' and wished that the courier had been already so that I wasn't left loitering around like some abandoned puppy. 

Turns out we had a lovely couple of hours. We chatted, a little about us but mostly about him, which he never did; we had tea, had a giggle and shared a nice peace-offering hug. When I left him that evening I felt like "Yes, yes I can love him with no expectation". However, a day later and I'm feeling down, missing him intensely and constantly checking my phone in case he's sent me a message, because if he's sent me a message it would mean he was thinking of me… there's never a message. 

*sigh* Maybe I'm just trying too hard to feel okay, after all I did get a tattoo to remind me to take things one step at a time... but I'm impatient, I'm emotionally exhausted and I want him back! 

(leaves post for an hour)

I just got a text from the ex-boyf about meeting up at the weekend for an event…