Personal growth

You are Someone Special too…

By Diana Gardner Robinson Leave a Comment

If you have someone special in your life with whom you know you want to spend the rest of your life, how do you treat them? Do you make sure that they know they can count on your? Do you spend quality time with them? Would they consider that to be quality time? Do you even put special times on your calendar so that more mundane events won’t get in the way? Make their well-being a high priority, encourage them to look after themselves, worry if they do not?

If you don’t, I suggest that you start.

AND, by the way, while all that does indeed hold good for anyone in your life who you truly care about, remember, too, that there is only one person with whom you KNOW you will spend the rest of your life, and that person is YOU. For any other individual, sadly, the unexpected may happen. Illness, accidents, changes of heart, all these can intrude on the most sincerely made togetherness plans. We hope not, but you are the only one that you know with total certainty that you are stuck with. Better make the best and the most of it.

How many things that you really enjoy doing, and have wanted to do, have you postponed in the last few months or more because you were too busy, or too tired, or decided to put the money elsewhere? If you are a person who always puts others first, Is there ever going to be a time when you put YOU first? Do you deserve to be always last on your list? The center of YOUR life needs to be you if you are to stay in balance. (Remember the oxygen mask analogy – if you don’t put yours on first, you may not be in a fit state to help anyone else with theirs.) Before you can give to others, you need to be healthy, happy, and to have your own needs met. What do you do to achieve and maintain this?

You ARE worth an appointment on your own calendar, not just to do routine maintenance like getting your hair cut, but for whatever lifts your spirits and brings a smile to your face. Perhaps a night at a concert, or a massage, a walk in the park or beside the river… whatever it is that you think of with a smile, or that you have always yearned to do. Do it! Do it for you! You ARE worth it.

Challenge – how about selecting at least two things every month that YOU want to do, that will help you to feel nurtured, or joyous and that, from now on, you will do, to make yourself feel well cared for? Try it! It does not need to be the same two things every month, but pick two, put them on the calendar and carry them out. And let me know…

Stay fabulous, stay balanced!

Diana

I hope you find this blog interesting, useful, or amusing, depending on its topic. One way to keep track of my posts is to subscribe to my newsletter (see form on the right), which will always contain a link to recent blogs. Or, of course, you could bookmark this page and keep checking back. Either way, I hope that my work makes your life easier and more balanced. To explore my offer of the gift of a 30-40 minute coaching session on whatever issue is a stumbling block for you, please contact me via my Contact page.

Does your next step up have a downside?

By Diana Gardner Robinson Leave a Comment

It is much easier for most of us to keep our balance on a flat surface than on a slope but we don’t get to climb that way. Today I am not writing about fear of falling physically but about the need to be aware of the slippery slopes that we may encounter when we are trying to make positive changes via small steps along upward slopes.

I know that many of my readers are entrepreneurs, for whom slopes, both up and down, are almost the norm. However, unless we are on a plateau, which is rarely desirable for any length of time, most of us, entrepreneurs or not, are on slopes one way or another, particularly those of us who are developing – or changing – some aspect of our lives.

A major problem can arise when we decide to do “more of” in one area of life because, given that we all have the same 24 hours in a day, doing more usually involves doing less of something else. That in itself involves a balancing act. The more shallow the slope – and so the smaller the change – the less likely it is that we will even consider the effect of the “less” as we glory in the positive aspects of the “more.” However, small positive changes often become incremental – both the “more of” and the “less of.”

(This is the beginning of my most recent newsletter, “Work in Progress (Because we all are!),” If you would like to receive this issue in its entirety, please subscribe at the “envelope and pencil” form to the right of this page.)

Diana

What about Gratitude over a whole Thanksgiving year?

By Diana Gardner Robinson Leave a Comment

Yesterday was, in my country of adoption, a day for Thanksgiving for all that we have in our lives. Today is, apparently for many, a day for buying more stuff because, it seems, we do not have enough. There’s an irony there that I am not the first to see.

What if, for most of us, we do already have enough?

What if we don’t need more than we have? I am talking about those of us who are “first world” people. I am thinking about what most of the people who can read this have, as opposed to refugees who have given up everything – yes, everything that they cannot carry in their own two arms, walking on their own two feet, to get to some place of respite. I am not talking about homeless folk who carry what they own in plastic bags, or push it in “borrowed” grocery carts. (Although actually, there are some of these who are content with what they have and choose that rather than accommodating themselves to rules and regulations that many of us consider to be “normal behavior.”)

To each his/her own.

My point is that most of us have. We have to overflowing. And yet we want more.

In my coaching, I find that much unhappiness focuses on what one does not have, or what one has that one does not want. My first assignment to some new clients is often so simple as to be ridiculous, yet so life changing that some people will not take it on. It is simply to start a gratitude journal – naming, at the end of the day, five things for which one has been grateful at some point during that day. The trick is that it cannot be the same thing repeated. That is why it needs to be a journal, recorded, so that the writer can look back, and avoid repeating anything that was written in the previous seven days.

I remember a client from some years back who, one week after I had asked her to take on this assignment, positively bubbled at the start of our next phone call.

“When I leave for work, even as I’m driving, I remember to look for things to put in my journal. I see so much more that is lovely, or fun. I am thinking about finding good things all day – I did not know there was so much to enjoy in my life.”

I think of another client who had lost a dearly loved relative. Concerned that she might spiral into depression, I made an exception to my usual three-time-a-month coaching call, and asked her to keep a gratitude journal and send it to me daily. It made such a difference in her life (and needing to send it stopped her from dropping it from her routine) that she has continued with her journal long after her grief, while not disappearing, has certainly weakened its hold on her.

Have you tried writing a gratitude journal? Try it. Let it become a habit. Buy yourself a nice looking bound blank-page book, or use an old spiral-bound writing pad. It does not matter what it looks like so long as it is what you choose. Through the course of your day, focus on finding those five things that you find good, beautiful, or that make you happy so that you can write them down as you look back over your day. Then, when the bad days come – and they almost certainly will – you have it to look back on, to remind you that, indeed, life can be good, and if yours was good before, it can most certainly be good again.

Bonus: You will probably find that the majority of the things that you write down do NOT come into the category of “stuff.”

Try it – five things each day – from now until the end of next year – however you count your days and your years. It just may change your life.

I hope you find this blog interesting, useful, or amusing, depending on its topic. One way to keep track of my posts is to subscribe to my newsletter (see form on the right), which will always contain a note of recent blogs. Or, of course, you could bookmark this page and keep checking back. Either way, I hope that my work makes your life easier and more balanced.

To explore my offer of the gift of a 30 minute coaching session on whatever issue is a stumbling block for you, please see my Contact page.

Journal writing – a down side but more benefits

By Diana Gardner Robinson Leave a Comment

Some of my readers know that I consider regular journal writing to be one of the big three as far as personal growth and well-being are concerned. (The other two are meditation and exercise.) However, one perceptive person commented the other day that she used to journal long ago, but stopped when she found that there is a down side to journaling. This can come when one reads through previous entries. (Although reading the entry from a year ago after you have made your today’s entry can be very educational, some people find it depressing to realize that the problems about which they were writing, and their insights on them, show little change today. They had thought they were making progress, and yet a comparison of the old and the new entries suggests that they are actually going in circles, still thinking the same thoughts and facing the same problems.

I agree that this can be depressing. However, it is also beneficial in that it does let us know what is going on. If you are lost in a forest and are going in circles, it is at least useful to recognize that you have once again looped back into familiar territory. So alerted, you can change your tactics and thus have a hope of making better progress in the direction you choose. In life it is the same way. Unless you don’t WANT to know when you are circling rather than making progress, the information culled from old journals can be very useful. Perhaps, rather than be depressed when making this discovery, we can greet it as a pointer to future progress.

Obviously, in order to have old journals, you need to be a journal writer. Journal writing contributes to self-examination. (Was that an “ouch” I just heard? Yet remember that Plato – or Socrates, the scholars dispute this – wrote” The unexamined life is not worth living.” It certainly cannot be learned from.) Keeping a journal encourages us to examine what is going on, what part we are playing in our own successes and our own disappointments. Essayist James Boswell, back in the 18th century, wrote “a man (sic) adjusts his character by looking at his journal.” If we write our true thoughts and feelings, and then read them later, we can indeed take the part of observer and notice where we are in error. Which means, does it not, that we will then be able to make a correction?

It also encourages us to express the thoughts and feelings that may be bottled up, even barely in awareness, within us. Such expression is healthy. It makes us more aware of things that are simmering below the surface. It brings us insights that we might not have reached had we not forced ourselves to put our vague thoughts and glimmerings into words. Expressing a thought or an idea in words forces us to clarify it, to hold it up in front of ourselves and examine it to see whether the words we have used are a true expression of it, or if they need to be tweaked until we get it right. In doing that, we may also examine and tweak the thought itself.

Where to start with a journal? With pen, or pencil, and paper. Or keyboard and new “blank document.” With a few moments of time safe from interruptions. With an open heart and mind, and total honesty, for if you cannot be honest with yourself… then, friend, you are in deep, deep trouble. Your journal is not for publication, not for posterity, it is for you and you alone, so this is a place where there is no excuse for dishonesty. In fact, if you find yourself censoring as you write, this is itself a “red flag,” a warning to check what is going on, and from whom you wish to hide the thoughts that you just chose to censor. Journal about that, too, in your quest for self-discovery.

There are many systems for keeping a journal and there is no one “right one.” Choose what seems to you to be the one you are most likely to follow. I know that many people relish the work they do with The Artist’s Way. Some people use a bound book with blank pages designed expressly for the purpose. Others use a writing pad and gather their pages into a 3-ring binder. Some systems are simple, some complex. Use what works for you. I have participated in journal workshops where I received journal systems so complex that even after a weekend of instruction I could not figure which “type” of writing to enter into which section of the binder. Yet I know that such systems work well for many – particularly those who have more time for their journals than I. I have found great satisfaction in simplicity, but, if you plan to journal, use whatever materials will encourage you to continue.

It is well worth the time.