Coaches’ Corner

Who Are You?

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Let’s talk about who you are, like really, in your core.

 

Might seem like a simple answer, I am a mother; a father; a friend; a partner; a teacher; a lawyer; a coach etc.etc. And yes, you are all of those things and probably a lot more too.

 

What else though? What’s underneath all of this, at the very core of you? When you strip back all the labels and social expectations and the roles, who is the you that’s really there?

 

And why does that matter? 

 

Your beliefs about yourself feed into this sense of your core identity – who you REALLY are – and dictate your behaviours, emotions, how wide or narrow your window of tolerance is. Basically what you feel able to do and not do on any given day, which dictates how you grow (or not) and evolve through your life.

As an example, If I believe at my core that I’m not a very resilient person because I’ve never been in the past, then when adversity comes my way, I “know” I won’t cope, and so I don’t… I lose sleep and have a meltdown, and then this confirms my own belief that I’m not very resilient. So the next time something comes up, I expect the same to happen again, and so it does, that then confirms my belief and so on and so on…

 

If I believe I’m a hard mother, then…..

If I believe I’m under qualified for my job, then….

If I believe I’ve never been good at XYZ, then…

 

It just goes on and on and on…It’s a vicious and downward cycle.

 

What we really want, then, is a few virtuous upward spirals!

 

Personally for me, my core identity around motherhood has been an interesting development. I’ve not hidden the fact that it was not an easy transition. I can’t detail in a blogpost exactly how much focus and work I’ve put into this over the last 9 years, needless to say it’s the most important thing for me and I’ve been prepared to really develop my identity as a mum. It’s been the difference between enjoying it, embracing it, and hating it! I can’t think of a more worthwhile piece of self-development!

 

When we are really in touch and in tune with our core-identity, who we TRULY are, and it’s positive, useful and conscious, here’s what’s possible:

 

  • Know yourself well, your own values and able to live them (in tune with your life)
  • Make decisions easily based on above
  • Like, love and approve of yourself
  • Healthy self care behaviours and boundaries – putting SELF in the equation
  • Better sleep and energy
  • Healthy striving and goal setting (rather than proving self; perfectionism; burnout)
  • The courage to be yourself and to say no!
  • The courage to get out of your comfort zone and stretch your tolerance window and therefore your core identity
  • Allow yourself to experience pleasant emotions
  • Less f*cks given
  • Spiritual identity solid 

 

It’s NOT EASY to change your core beliefs develop a useful and functional core-identity. It takes focus and work, and a lot of healing and practice. And, you can make a start on the journey at least!

 

What if you could change ONE aspect of who you believe yourself to be? Which area would you choose? What could  happen next?

 

In the Use Your Body To Solve A Problem Workshop, we begin to touch into the body-brains and not just the head-brain, including the GUT – enteric – brain. Did you know that one of the competencies of your gut-brain is core-identity and mobilsation (taking action)? When you’re too disconnected from this part of you, this stays STUCK, and being stuck is not a good feeling for us humans.

Want to go deeper? Fill out an application for therapeutic life coaching here.

What’s Your Emotional Life Actually Like?

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Here’s a question for you –  what’s your emotional landscape like?

 

Do your emotions come, have their say, and go away again, naturally, like the natural life-cycle of a flower? Blossoming and then receding? 

 

Do listen to each emotion and let them teach you exactly which action you need to take? For example, knowing that anger is there to right an injustice? And anxiety tells you something is not quite right and you might need to look into it? 

 

Do you experience the whole rich tapestry of all 80+ emotions, and can name them all when they arise? 

 

Do you experience both the joy AND the sadness?

 

Do you cultivate and enjoy pleasant emotions regularly? And teach this to your kids, too?

 

Are you feeling enough? Could you be a little on the numb side?! What are you missing out on?

 

Are you at the whim of your own reactions, getting triggered by others and outside things and then those feelings dictate the rest of your day/week?

 

Are you out of control with your anxiety or stress, or anger? Like literally feel like you have no control?

 

Do you dumb down your emotional experiences because you’re scared that feelings might overwhelm you? And then you’d never recover?

 

Are you frequently engaged in numbing behaviours to avoid your emotions? Scrolling for hours, drinking too much, over-eating, over-socialising, online shopping, etc. etc. etc.?

 

Without judging yourself, where are you actually at on the old emotional metre? What’s this part of your life like? What could be different?

 

When I had been a parent for about 2 years, I’d been working one-day a week in town with 1:1 clients. I got the opportunity to train in mBraining – or mBit (see previous blog for definition). I was having an issue. Due to my rough start with post-natal anxiety and depression, I was having difficulty FEELING those loving feelings towards my first child. Although I’d recovered and for all intents and purposes I was well, every time I held my child I’d experience a “loving feeling” coming up which I immediately pushed down again (not consciously). I was getting concerned! Needless to say my own personal development while doing this intense training was on the comfort of experiencing loving feelings, allowing them and enjoying them. It was a very worthwhile outcome!

 

It’s likely that you’d fall into one of the categories other than the first five, too. The first five are mostly what I’m coaching people towards and are not usually people’s default experience of the emotional landscape, for various reasons, upbringing, trauma, etc..

 

When you’re numbing or dumbing down and not allowing yourself to feel, remember you can’t selectively numb: numbing sadness or fear will numb joy and happiness. 

 

If you’re at the whim of, or mostly experiencing stressful emotions, then life is going to feel pretty tough. Perhaps you have tears that you can’t control, and this causes some secondary issues for you, like embarrassment.

 

Is it time for a change?

What if you could change just ONE aspect of your emotional life? What would you change? What would that be like?

In the Use Your Body To Solve A Problem workshop, we begin to connect into the body-brains in the heart and gut. One of the competencies of the heart-brain specifically is emoting. If we’re cut off from our hearts and are mostly head-brain dominant (see previous blog) we are not experiencing – or, importantly, regulating – the rich tapestry of our emotions. We aren’t living and experiencing fully.

We are aiming for both emotional literacy AND emotional regulation. This will take focus and work, and won’t be achieved in one workshop of course, but it is a start on the journey at least!  Would you like to start?

 

Want to go deeper and more personal? Fill in an application for therapeutic life coaching here.

 

How Much Anxiety is NORMAL?!

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A lot of my lovely current clients are dealing with anxiety at the moment, as so many people are, and wishing to turn the dial down, turn off huge anxious or panic responses, and get back to a sense of normality, in certain situations at least! Once they’ve experienced the amazing healing that both NLP and Havening Techniques can offer them, where they’ve settled dramatically and turned “off” the main panic response, they are noticing that they still might get “triggered” and are now pondering, what’s normal? How much can you realistically “turn off” and how much do you want to, actually? What’s normal and what’s not?!

These are very interesting ponderings, and of course, I have a professional opinion on this. So let me answer that for you:

There’s a big difference between an organic surge of adrenaline, in response to a trigger in your environment that’s out of the ordinary, and the layering on of thoughts – known in Buddhist psychology as the second arrow – which creates anxiety and/or panic for you, and/or makes that normal organic response worse and escalates things. We also need to consider: how debilitating is this issue right now?

  1. The Organic Surge of Adrenaline: Here’s the scenario: your nervous system has a good baseline, you’re fine. You’re walking around, living, and feeling OK or good. Something “not normal” happens, a trigger.  A car cuts in front of you on the motorway causing you to swerve. Your amygdala, the fear-detecting and safety-making part of your brain takes this information in very quickly through your senses, and sends a message to your adrenal glands to create extra energy, because your life’s been threatened, and you don’t want to be asleep for that….. you want to be able to spring into action now. Once the perceived “threat” is over, you recover and go back to your baseline OKness/goodness.
  2. Layering or the Second Arrow:  In the midst of a scenario like the above, your Nervous System is unable to just let the adrenaline surge and peak simply come and go. There’s past trauma in the mix, a reason to try and control things to the max. So now we have: OMG, it’s happening again! Why does this always happen? I was just anxious then! It might happen again tomorrow!  I should be better about this by now... and so on, and so on. Sometimes we can perform this layering process in the ABSENCE of an organic response, just by THINKING about the possibility of an organic response, or even one that you’ve had in the past. You get anxious right then and there, or exacerbate the anxiety that was organically and USEFULLY triggered.

Look – you actually can’t programme yourself to be a robot, no matter how hard you try. We’ve inherited this brain through evolution and there needs to be a level of respect for this ancestral heritage. Your brain is designed to keep you safe, respond to alerts and threats by surging your adrenaline so you can do what needs to be done in the moment with energy. You want to turn off this response completely? Good luck in an actual emergency. Well, you won’t need luck, cause you can’t turn it off completely, your brain won’t have it. You CAN teach it what’s appropriate to respond to and not, and turn the dial down when it’s NOT a functional response, absolutely yes! I feel like this is the essence of what I do in one context or another.

Do you have agency over #2, then? Absolutely yes! The layering over of thoughts that trigger or exacerbate the anxious response is absolutely within our control, and often I seek to heal this FIRST and re-train those thought pathways, so we can then get to the core issue, and the rest is organic from there, and you can enjoy your amygdala doing its job in an organic and functional way.

See if you can start to tell the difference between the two?

Much love, Charlotte.

Re-enter Your Life on Purpose, With Courage

Posted on  //  Posted in Coaches' Corner, Life Coaching, Parenting

[Illustration by the amazing Sue Kerr]

In New Zealand it has just been announced that from this Thursday, we start transitioning out of lockdown and in to a lower alert level. This will mean the re-opening of most businesses, schools, travel within the country and socialising with groups no greater than 10 people. This is a huge transition from where we have been. Before we go rushing back into ‘life’ again, let’s take a moment to pause, reflect, take stock, and start out lives again on purpose, and with the courage to learn from our experience, let go, and re-shape our lives going forward.

If you’re anything like me, you have mixed feelings about re-entering ‘normal’ life, or as close to what your past normal life used to be like (the ‘new normal’). On the one hand you are excited about the return of some freedoms you’ve missed and of schools starting up again. And on the other hand you are feeling anxious about being thrown back into a full life again. Whatever your situation, things have changed.

If I’m really honest I lean more towards the anxious side. Not that I am anxious about the virus per se – I’m not – I just don’t want to go leaping back into what life was like before this experience of staying home with my family for six weeks. I know from talking to people that I’m not alone: a lot of us have enjoyed this enforced time at home (albeit despite its challenges!) and aren’t looking forward to our bubbles completely popping after all.

Why are we feeling like this? Surely we should be chomping at the bit for our old life? And what does this say about the way we’ve been living our lives? 

I don’t know you all personally but I can take a stab at what this fear we are feeling is. It’s not that we don’t want things like schools to start, do a bit of socialising and the occasional meal out. It’s that we don’t want to go back to the things that we (perhaps only newly realised) do not like about living a full life. We don’t want to just ‘go back to things’ mindlessly, without consideration and intention. There are things we just haven’t missed, and we are not in a hurry to return to them.

But we are afraid. Afraid of saying no, afraid of choosing more wisely. Afraid of letting people down, afraid what others may think of our new choices. Perhaps we are afraid of losing people, money, status. 

Personally, what I’ve realised about myself during my lockdown is the exceptionally high value I’ve placed on socialising. I know where this comes from: as a child I was shy and insecure. I had attachment issues. I didn’t make a group of friends that I felt totally comfortable with until I was 16, and from there, fortunately, my friendships went from strength to strength. I had developed the belief that as long as I’m doing something with a group of other people, then it’s worthwhile doing. It’s like I was not living properly unless we were all doing it together. In other words, I got my self-esteem from surrounding myself with people at all times.

To some degree of course this is a truth: people need people. However, there’s degrees of it that I want to take into account. I’ve prioritised saying ‘yes’ to social invitations at the expense of my own wellbeing and sometimes the wellbeing of my family, and fairly recently, too.

I’ve always thought of myself as an extrovert who just had to socialise at every opportunity. Now I’m looking forward to saying ‘no’ more often and channeling my inner introvert, and that of the family, too. It won’t be easy, it will take will and courage and different decision making.

I’m also not that keen on returning to rushing around getting to places on time, my endless to-do lists and multitasking to fit it all in. I like how empty my calendar is! My mission will be to keep it empty, only putting in the things that spark joy, and not at the expense of my other values. For another thing I’ve definitely learned about myself: I can be very happy with less, much, much less. 

As I’ve said repeatedly, this has been a gift given to us and is the perfect time to make changes. So, how do you re-enter life and its activities mindfully, purposely, with intention and courage?

I’m a firm believer that we all have our own inner-wisdom. Sometimes it is just heavily obscured by a load of other crap, like social pressure and expectations, insecurity, perfectionism and people-pleasing. What this means is that we have a sorting exercise to do!

No matter how busy life is, we can all find 30 minutes in a day. Take that time to get rid of distractions, either be alone or talk to your significant other if you have one. Get quiet:

  1. Make one list of all the things you’ve missed, and on the same list what you’ve enjoyed about being at home. This is what you value, what really matters to you.
  2. Make a second list of all the things you haven’t missed, that you’re not in a hurry to get back to. These are the things that no longer fit with your values. If your job is on that list, then you have some work to do in identifying how you can work differently. Perhaps it’s working remotely more often, perhaps it’s working less and spending much more time with the kids.
  3. For the list of things you haven’t missed, write down what you want to drop completely, and what you want to change. Be brutally honest with yourself! No one has to know, for now anyway. For example you may want to ditch the gym membership and just continue biking with your family. You may not want to completely ditch a group of friends, but you want to change the way you catch up, and what you do together.
  4. Lastly, ask yourself: what action do I need to make these changes? And how can I cultivate the courage required to do that? As I said, most blocks to change will be driven by social expectations and fear based: the word ‘should’ will feature highly here. Here’s where channeling some Brene Brown and her work on vulnerability and courage can be a game changer. If you don’t know her look up her Ted talks. Oh, and her new Podcast – Unlocking Us – is just great, too.

Leave a Facebook comment or PM me with your insights, I’ll help where I can.

Love, Charlotte.

Are You Suffering From Zoomzaustion?

Posted on  //  Posted in Coaches' Corner, Life Coaching, Parenting

[Illustration by the amazing Sue Kerr].

We could say we are lucky to be living through a global pandemic in this current age of technology. Staying connected to our colleagues, friends, family, our children’s teachers, school friends and friends is easily integrated into our home lives. We can continue most of our ‘normal’ activities: exercise classes; buying music, movies and books; online shopping; stalking our favourite celebrities on social, and so on.

One the one hand, I marvel at it! Last night for example, I was able to attend my live-stream yoga class in my living room in front of the fire. I had my teacher’s lovely voice directly in my ears with my bluetooth headphones, which are designed to sit just outside the ear, enabling me to still hear sounds around me. I had the yoga playlist playing simultaneously though Spotify on my Google Home Speaker. All generated from one device – my phone. Pretty cool!

On the other hand, are we getting overloaded by the amount of technology in our home? In distance working and learning, are we putting proper boundaries in place to separate our work life from our home life? Are we succumbing to social pressure and saying ‘yes’ to more Zoom meetings that we actually need to? Are we feeling too personally responsible for keeping those email chains or Facebook nominations going when we’ve been tagged in them?! You know the ones, recipes, albums, tag ten people to keep the chain going etc., etc. It can all mount up to the latest phenomena of ‘Zoomzaustion’ – technology burn out during this time.

I was privy to a conversation a few days ago where working from home was being discussed. Every single person (bar one) said they were doing way more (too much) work than they would normally do: they missed the ‘water-cooler’ conversations with their colleagues; they checked their emails as soon as they work up at 7am and kept checking them way into the evening; they were on ‘way too many Zoom meetings’. They were way more available for longer during the day then they normally would be, and not enjoying it! Let’s face it why would they? Doesn’t sound like much fun.

It’s so interesting that our boundaries between work and home tend to blur more when we are working virtually, at a time where we don’t physically leave the office and travel to our homes. We aren’t getting the benefit of that change of scene, of literally ‘leaving the office behind’, of entering into a completely different environment with cooking smells and kids, or whatever your home situation is. And yet it is during this time we need to be much more protective of our time and draw those clearer lines in the sand between work and home. Not doing this will just spell stress and burn out over time.

And why, why are we on more Zoom calls than we actually want or need to be?! What’s going on there?

Because we are ‘just at home’ we feel like we can’t say no, after all, we have no where to be, so no excuses. I want to challenge this: again, this is the time to be even more protective of our time, not less. Not doing so spells stress and burn out. If we feel we have no reason to say no, because after all we are ‘just at home’ then we end up saying yes to way more things than we need to. Does your child really need three Zoom calls a day with their classmates and playdates? Do they really actually enjoy those meetings? Do you really need to be keeping in touch with your family or colleagues that often? What would happen if you didn’t?

In my last few blogs, I hope I’ve driven the message home that yes, this is a crisis. And within that crisis we have been gifted an amazing opportunity. When else in our lives have we been forced to strip everything back, apart from the very basics? This gives us an insightful benefit of contrast. We get to say, OK, I miss that, I want more of it in my life, or I don’t miss that at all, so I want to let it go. We are more in-tune with what we value and want in our lives right now. And because we are in this unique position of sorting the wheat from the chaff, we get to choose what we say yes and no to.

So, what can you do?

  • Channel a bit of Marie Kondo: Does that Zoom catch up spark joy (for you or your child)? If it is not 100% required of you because of the expectations of your role, then ask yourself that and see what the answer actually is. If not, say no! If you have the ‘should’ word reverberating around your head it’s a sign that it doesn’t spark joy and is only an obligation.
  • Just say no, occasionally: I’ve written extensively before about why we find it hard to say no. Ultimately we don’t want to let people down, offend them, or have them think less of us. Understandable as we are tribal creatures. Historically without our ‘tribe’ we would die. Things are different now. Consider setting some boundaries and saying no occasionally, and just see what happens. Be brave! Instead of thinking less of you the person or people may think more of you, and it may even give them permission to do the same themselves. We can become so personally responsible for other people’s feelings, and in most cases there is no need.
  • Get some boundaries between work and home, now: Treat your work at home much like you would work in the office. Start it at a particular time, finish it at a particular time. Take your lunch break. Stop feeling guilty, or as if you ‘should be doing more…’ or ‘be seen to be super available so they know I’m actually working…’. Most Importantly – do something to mark the end of the working day. Turn off emails on whatever device you use, go and exercise, shower, change your clothes, whatever you need to do to mimic that physical feeling of leaving the office behind. You will be more productive for it, trust me.

We know from research conducted in palliative care that the biggest regret of the dying is that they lived their lives according to what other people expected them to do, rather than what they desired themselves. It’s a lesson for all of us with breath left in our lungs. Let’s not waste that breath.

Our next post will be exploring how we re-enter ‘normal’ life after so long in our bubbles. We want to do so purposefully, and intentionally, in a way that respects the insights we’ve had during our lockdown period.

As usual, I’d love to hear what better boundaries you feel you could have in place right now, and what action you will take. Leave me a FB comment or feel free to PM me, anytime.

Love, Charlotte.