I remember standing next to the diving block, staring down at the strong smelly pool water, and being scared out of my mind.
There was no way I was going to jump in.
I could see some of my school friends taking the leap next to me, but they were so much taller that me. (I’m only 5 feet tall now, imagine how small I was when I was 7 years old.) They were more experienced, had stronger arms…and besides I couldn’t stand getting water up my nose either.
I remember stepping up onto the block and the teacher cajoling me from the side of the pool. “Jump!” he cried out.
And then a thought occurred to me.
Ok, I’ll jump. But I’ll jump as close to the edge as I can, so I can hold on to the side of the pool. That way there’s no way that I’ll drown.
I closed my eyes and threw my tiny body off the diving block, aiming for the edge…
Next thing I knew I was being pulled from the water, a mouth filled with blood, while one of my precious little teeth floated away to the bottom of the pool.
That day I learnt some valuable lessons about leaping into the unknown.
- Lesson #1 : Expecting something dreadful to happen, usually makes it pretty damn certain that something dreadful is going to happen.
- Lesson #2: Forget your excuses – you don’t need to know how to swim to be free to jump. Just get the hang of floating first.
- Lesson #3: Ironically it’s safer to jump where the water is deepest.
- Lesson #3: Don’t half leap into something, thinking you have a back up plan when things go wrong. If you’re going to jump, just bloody well do it.
- Lesson #4: Have faith – because even if you have nothing to put under your pillow, the Tooth Fairy still rocks up. Awesome.
So tell me, what’s stopping you from jumping in at the deep end?
‘Happiness is a journey, not a destination’.
The beginning of any year can be a turbulent but invigorating place.
It is the time when we pick over the year that was, piercing out the ruts and cracks that have tripped us up and held us back and tied us down; bad habits, unresourceful mindsets, unconciously poor attention to our lifestyles, our bodies, our families and our networks.
But we also have an opportunity to plan anew – to start building something of value instead of focusing on the tearing down of stuff that hasn’t served us.
There is always so much potential nestling in a New Year. We can dream big and wide. We can bust the cubicle apart. We can even plan to dominate the world.
But I want you to think for a moment about those times in your life where something that you have planned to do did not turn out the way you intended. continue reading…
Well, all I can say is finalmente.
It’s been almost three weeks since the birth of my little boy. Almost 21 days of soothing and rocking and holding and snuggling and swaddling, clutching at spare minutes of sleep and crisis-managing the occasional nappy FAIL.
But I am very pleased to confirm that he is truly scrumptious.
There is nothing more delicious than a newborn baby. There is a certain freshly-baked scent that barely lasts a day or two, but in those first hypnotic days it fills the room like a siren song. I’m sure it’s all part of the charm offensive…
I’m hooked. But I can now, with cast iron certainty, declare…never again.
Three kids?? Why, oh why did I start my blog three months before giving birth to baby three? What was I thinking? Why didn’t someone shake the hell out of me, slap my cheek in a kind of 30s movie style kinda way and say “For God’s sake woman, get a hold of yourself!”
Surely I was trying to do too much?
The truth is, you see, I have never been one to take it easy. If I start spinning a plate, I tend to say “What the hell, let’s spin twelve.” My imagination has always struggled to slow down and wait patiently for my circumstances to catch up, red-faced and puffing and apologising for the mess.
But despite the exhaustion and the guilt and the spinning spinning spinning, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Because there is only NOW. continue reading…
If you have ever tried learning a new skill, then you will know how it feels to be a clumsy and embarrassed beginner.
You totter and stumble, like a baby learning to walk for the first time. But thankfully, in those early days when you tried to take your first steps, no-one ever said to you, “You know, maybe you should just give up on the whole walking thing. I mean, you keep falling over, and you’ve been trying for months now and you still can’t put one foot in front of the other. Why don’t you just stick to crawling, you’re great at that!” Instead you were given abundant permission to fail because there is a knowing that everyone gets there, eventually.
But as adults, we are much more likely to withhold this permission to fail from ourselves. It’s too easy to give up if we don’t immediately get it “right”. The gap between how we are performing and how we think or assume it ought to be done can seem a gap too wide and humiliating to conquer. We have our pride. We have bizarre ideas of what we are capable of and what we are just “no good at”. Our time is precious, and we expect so much of ourselves that sometimes it’s easier to just stay “specialized” and stick to what we know we can do, rather than waste our days on something new that only makes us feel like a failure.
But we often give up right when the prize is literally inches away from our grasp. continue reading…
Have you ever stopped to notice how often you complain about something?
Think back over the past 24 hours and try to remember the conversations you had, not just with other people, but with yourself.
What did you spend your time focusing on? The good stuff? Or the stuff that really made you mad, annoyed, sick, upset, depressed or pissed off?
We tend to get a lot of mileage out of being miserable. Why is this? Is it somehow more beautifully tragic? More attainable? A tasty way to get more attention? Or do we place so little trust in our own ability to deal with our negative experiences that we have to seek out the solutions (and sympathy) from other people?
Or maybe it’s just that we’ve learned, over time, that no-one wants to hear how great we’re doing. That would be bragging. Cocky. Just weird.
We can get the same effect by storing up all the crappy stuff in our head instead, like a proud and wounded ninja unwilling to burden those around us with our noble inner turmoil. But the effect is still the same, whether you share it with the world or keep it to an internal monologue.
It’s called focusing on the stuff we hate. And it only breeds more of said stuff to hate. Which makes you talk about it more, think about it, broadcast it to others, label it in neon lights as “true”…before you know it, there goes another funky little failure mantra over and over in your head like a bad song on a loop. continue reading…
Have you ever had one of those conversations with someone when you knew they were not really listening to a word you were saying? I bet you could almost hear them planning what to say next while you were speaking – their eyes taking on a dull glaze as they wait for a pause.
It’s really boring after a while, when you know you’re being heard…just not being listened to.
In the real world, we tend to do what we can to avoid hanging out with these kinds of people. They tend to suck away our energy. Make us feel unimportant. Undervalued and unappreciated.
But – when someone really listens! continue reading…
I know you do it.
When you’re home on your own. When you’re certain you won’t be overheard or interrupted by someone walking in on you.
When you strip off all your clothes, draw the curtain (or close the glass door) and stand wet and naked in the steam…
It doesn’t take long before the urge strikes. And I should know, I’m guilty of indulging myself all the time. continue reading…
Have you ever watched “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” (If you haven’t seen it for a while, check out this episode featuring Robin Williams.) It’s a show that combines stand-up comedy with improvisation (and I do love it, yes I do.)
As a performer, I was trained to practice improvisation as the ultimate way of being creatively in the moment. When an improviser is on form and “in the flow”, the result is dynamic, adventurous, rebellious and unpredictable – but this entertaining craziness all hangs very carefully on a stable craft that makes us – as the audience – feel completely safe, despite the chaos on the surface. This is why “making it up as you go along” is actually a misleading description, because it’s not about marching in blind and simply winging it…
It’s about knowing the rules that work and then playing spontaneously within them.
Taking risks is so much easier when you know there is a safety net beneath you. It gives you the permission to have more fun being “in the moment”, and the courage to dance madly on the tightrope.
So if you want to be more playful and free, really engaged and wildly creative, why not try using the “psychology of improvisation” to help you? Here are 10 improv principles that will help to get you started: continue reading…
Compromises. You make them all the time – humble little decisions to acquiesce that keep the wheels of life oiled and generous.
You may make a simple compromise over where to go for a meal, or what kind of car you buy or who gets to do the dishes. You may argue a compromise with yourself, but more often than not it involves a certain amount of “haggle” with another person.
I like to think of it as sitting on a see-saw, and you’re just taking it in turns to go up and down. It’s probably more fun being up than down, but you can’t have one without the other. (And it’s no fun sitting on a see-saw all by yourself, is it?)
Whenever you choose to compromise, you generally make a choice to give something up in order to get something of consolation back – usually something you perceive to be roughly of equal value. You’re happy to take the highs with the lows because you know that the ride will probably even out in the end.
But at what point does a compromise become a sacrifice?
If a “compromise” is an evenly matched ride on a see-saw between two people of roughly equal weight, then a “sacrifice” is more like a game of tug o’ war, where one side is doing all the pulling, and the other side – you – gets dragged across the floor, through the mud, over the line with nothing to show for it but rope burn and a face full of dirt.
Whether you get up, spit out the mud and walk away red-handed but joyful depends on what you are making a sacrifice for. continue reading…
Have you ever thought about why it really bugs you when your partner leaves the lid off the toothpaste? Or why you are obsessed with being on time while your best friend thinks nothing of always turning up late?
Why does one person live perfectly at ease surrounded by piles of clutter while another would consider it an irritating mess? I remember visiting the flat of an ex-boyfriend for the first time and discovering he basically never washed a dish. Ever. His kitchen sink was like a horror movie. And I just couldn’t understand why that didn’t freak him out.
It was clear that we each had a different set of rules.
Our rules are hugely important in helping us to quickly and easily navigate our way through life. They allow us to shape our reactions to the things we experience and to judge whether we are moving towards things that work or moving away from things we want to avoid.
But we don’t usually choose these rules knowingly – most of them we soak up from our parents, our culture or our education. They may be obvious and mundane – like manners, the highway code or the etiquette of queuing. (Seriously, in the UK it’s an art.) Others are more ethical and moral, such as vegetarianism, or our laws against killing and stealing.
Whether we’re aware of them or not, all of these rules share something in common. continue reading…
