More Life in your Life

There are certain times in life when we ask ourselves couldn’t we be doing something else?  Weren’t we destined to be better, happier or healthier than we are?  What happened to the hopes, dreams and ambitions we had in our youth?

The reality is that we all have full and busy lives.  Going to work, taking care of our family and balancing the needs of other people against what we want.  It fills our day and leaves very little time to reflect on what we really want our lives to be.

And anyway, how would you start to get the life that you really want?  Wouldn’t that mean being selfish and neglecting the needs of your children/partner/job?

But consider this.  When you’re on an airplane during the in-flight safety demonstration, you are told that if the oxygen mask drops, put yours on first before helping anyone else.  There is a very good reason for this.  If you’re struggling to help someone else, you run out of oxygen and pass out.  Then the person you’re trying to help has no-one to help them and they pass out.

But, if you put your mask on first, you’re safe and well enough to help someone else.

Think of your life in that way.  You need to look after yourself so that you have the health and strength to take care of all the people and things in your life.  And not just physically well, but emotionally and spiritually as well.

When you look around, you’ll begin to see that it is the people who are really at ease with themselves who make other people feel comfortable around them.  I love the phrase from Nelson Mandela’s inaugural speech when he said:

“And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”

And it can be the simplest things that we can do that can release us from feeling weighed down by life.  Firstly, start believing in your own worth.  It’s incredible how many people do amazing things every day and don’t realise their own value.  Write down at least three things that you’ve done today that made you feel good – someone saying “thank you,”  a complement you received, doing something for the first time, feeling pleased about finishing a job….

Really, just think of things that make you feel better about yourself.  It’s a fact that once we have an idea in our mind we will, even at a subconscious level seek out evidence to support what we are thinking and block out anything that disproves it.  So, if you think something bad about yourself – such as you’re no good at meeting new people – you will ignore all the times that you asked for assistance in a shop, when you’ve given directions to a passing motorist, picked up the phone at work to speak to a customer.  They were all strangers and you dealt with them without thinking “I don’t like meeting new people.”  Your mind has also blocked out things like how you coped when you started school and started a new job and had to meet new people – strangers who are now friends.  See, you are not no good at meeting new people!

Mark Twain said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, in either case you are right.”  In other words it’s about believing in you.  It’s about challenging that little voice in your head that tells you what you can and can’t do.  It’s been there so long, you think it’s part of you.  Well, if it is part of you, take control of it.  Tell it what to think and that what it thinks should be supporting you.  Just think about it – the things that we say to ourselves via this voice in our head – would we accept someone else saying those things to us?  We can very cruel to ourselves in a way that we would normally tolerate from other people.  Stop it.  If you can’t support yourself, who else will?

As a personal coach, I’ve worked with many people who are so talented and capable.  However, it is almost without exception that for each person there is one thing that is stopping them living their ideal life – and that’s the voice inside their head that’s afraid of success