Posts Tagged ‘change your life’
Written on February 20th, 2010 by Susan Kersleyno shouts
Often the first step to reducing your stress is realising that you have some control over your stressors. You might find that it’s useful to have the support of a life coach for a few sessions to enable you to reduce the effects of stress in the ways suggested.
A life coach is similar but different from a counsellor or therapist. You will be encouraged to look forward and discover ways to set and achieve the goals you want for your life. Many life coaches work with their clients on the telephone rather than face to face and charge fees for their services.
The sort of things you could work on with a life coach to reduce the effects of stress:
- Get your life more balanced: don’t spend most of your days working, life outside is as important. Start to say ‘no’ when asked to do extra work especially if it is outside your normal working hours
- Be more organised: tidy your work space; tidy your cupboards at home and notice how much less stressed you feel when you know where to find things.
- Clear clutter: don’t hoard stuff just in case you might need it someday. Throw stuff away if you haven’t needed it for several years or if it’s broken or out of date.
- Get help: when you feel you have too much to do ask someone or pay for help lighten your load.
- Delegate: some things could be done regularly by someone else as a favour or for payment. Explain clearly what you want and how you want it done and leave them to get on with it and you to get on with something else.
- Stop doing what doesn’t have to be done: Step back and ask yourself why you are doing some things. Maybe there is no longer any reason they have just become habits and need to be stopped.
- Look after your body: when you eat healthy fresh food without additives or sugar and keep to low fat then you will feel much less stressed. Not only food but stop abusing your body with tobacco or alcohol and keep it flexible with regular exercise.
- Look after your mind by keeping up to date, reading as a way to relax and learning new things and doing puzzles to keep your brain active. You will notice how this reduces your stress too.
- Look after your spirit by being in nature each day; watching the sunrise or the stars; or connecting with your spirituality with formal or informal religion.
- Keep in touch with friends and family: love them or hate them, they say blood is thicker than water and keeping in touch in some way can be helpful to lower your stress. You have to find the amount of contact right for you because for some families this has the opposite effect. You may prefer to keep in touch with good friends instead!
If you want to find out if coaching could help you to do some or all of the above then CONTACT ME
Written on January 17th, 2010 by Susan Kersleyno shouts
If you have been thinking that you really must do something about your life because it isn’t going along the way you’d like it to be and yet until now you’ve felt you have to conform to the way you’ve always behaved. It can feel frightening when you think about doing what you dream of and yet it can happen if you take the appropriate steps.
You see the most important thing to do if you want to change your life is to do something different. It doesn’t seem to matter what you do, just doing something different seems to change your energy and then you will find making the changes you need to take become so much easier to do.
What could you start with? Strange though it may seem even eating something different for breakfast, or having breakfast if you don’t usually eat any can start the process. It doesn’t take a huge change in your behaviour to result in a massive change in your ability to achieve great things.
So can having your hair cut in a different style or wearing a different colour or style of clothes from your normal style.
Try it and notice what happens. You see when you do something different not only does your perception of life change but so too does how you appear to other people. So then they take more notice of you and are more likely to respond to other things you may do or talk about.
You could change the way you greet people or the route you take to work or the shops you go to. Anything that is out of your normal routine will have the effect of shifting something about you and your influence on other people. All of a sudden you will appear to be more confident and more self assured and they will sit up and take more notice of you then they did before. Then it will be up to you to state clearly what it is you want or what you are no longer prepared to put up with and what you want to happen instead of the current situation.
So don’t keep on living a life you no longer want. Instead make up your mind to take action and change your life for the better. If you do you may well find you can make huge changes which you have previously dismissed as being too difficult for you to achieve.
Written on January 2nd, 2010 by Susan Kersley2 shouts
Get a balance between all parts of your life by remembering the wheel of life and applying what you learn from yours to improve the balance in your life.
The wheel of life is a pie-chart: a circle divided into eight segments each of which represents a different component of your life. In order to have a balanced and fulfilled life it is widely suggested that you address each of these segments and define how fulfilled each of them is for you. You give each a score out of ten and then especially for the low scoring segments ask yourself how you could bring the score up.
How are the segments defined? This can vary from person to person. However commonly the segments would be labeled: friends and family, career, money, self care, community, spirituality, relationship, fun and recreation.
Decide how you score for each of these where a score of ten means fulfilled and is marked on the circumference of the pie to zero when you are not fulfilled at all in that area of your life in the centre of the pie chart.
When you see your scores ask yourself what has to happen for your score for those less than ten to increase by one point. While you have some parts of your life in which you feel unfulfilled there results a wheel which will give you a bumpy ride through life. Ideally you would have a balanced and fulfilled life when you feel fulfilled in each of these areas of life.
Consider on of the areas of your life which feels unfulfilled and for which you have a low score. Now decide 8 segments in relation to that part of your life. This means you can draw another pie chart just based on that area and in doing this you will be able to find out easily how to increase the score for that part of your life..
For example if you thought your family segment was very low you might think of the following example as part of the friends and family part of your life: communication, visiting, shared history, common interests, disagreements, reciprocity, financial issues, dependency. Thinking of each of these in relation to your friends and family and marking their score in relation to how fulfilled you feel in that part of your friends and family may indicate how to improve your connection with friends and family.
Coaching helps to get your wheel of life run more smoothly. Contact me about coaching.
Written on December 29th, 2009 by Susan Kersleyno shouts
Have you ever felt stuck and wanted to talk over your challenges with someone?
The obvious choice is to turn to partner, friends or family. But they are too often involved in their own life issues and tend either to pull yourself together and do what they think is best for you, or shrug their shoulders and dismiss your concerns because they don’t really sympathise with you.
So what could you so instead?
You could push your concerns away and carry on as before. This might be find in the short term but the feeling of wanting something different will return from time to time until you finally make the decision to do something about your life.
You could follow the suggestions of your friend and end up doing something which you don’t really feel comfortable doing at all. This won’t solve your problem because you will be doing something which is not congruent with your own needs and may also be against your morals too.
You could do something drastic without really considering the consequences. This could be good for you because sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and trust that when you do so you’ll be able to find your feet again. However it’s usually a good idea to think through the pros and cons of the action you decide to take.
You could bury your frustration in alcohol or junk food. This may give you the false illusion of being helpful but it won’t solve anything, just make you numb for a short while, won’t make the problem go away and lead to other health and life problems for you too
You could seek help from a therapist. If you want to explore your past and find the reasons about why and how you got into the situation you find yourself in now , then this can be useful. But understanding your past may not enable you to move forward into a brighter future
You could seek help from a life coach. If you want to accept where you are today and now want to move towards a better and different life then a coach will enable you to do this while he or she sits beside you for part of your journey and helps you to face challenges and do what you truly want to do.
Book a free ABC session and find out how coaching can help you.
Written on December 13th, 2009 by Susan Kersleyno shouts
If you want to make this the year you really will achieve your New Year Resolutions then here are the steps you must take:
1.Be absolutely clear what you want to achieve during the coming year.
2. Break down your main goal into smaller steps which will be the way you can check your progress towards your goal.
3..Make a plan. This is the map which will guide you towards achieving what you want. The plan will list the steps and the dates by when you want to have completed them.
4. Do something, however small towards your goal each day. Small steps build into progress when you do something regularly.
5. As you complete each step, tick it off on your plan. Be creative: you could stick a star on your calendar as you move forward and achieve.
6. Keep focused on the goal and follow your routine of a small step each day so that it becomes an automatic habit.
7. Find other people to support and encourage you. It’s easier to make progress towards your goal if you have some non-judgmental support a supportive member of your family, from a coach or mentor, or a friend. Tell them what will help you so they can let you have the support you need.
8. Be creative and explore different ways to achieve what you want rather than give up. Sometimes you can find new ways to reach your goal.
9. Don’t neglect yourself eat healthy foods, take regular exercise and have enough sleep.
10. Celebrate 2010 as your best year yet as you reach your goals.
If you want some support from coaching to achieve in 2010 contact me and find out what coaching can offer you
Written on November 30th, 2009 by Susan Kersleyno shouts
Goal planning involves several things but one of the most important is to set a date to achieve your goal. You may not be achieving your goal because you haven’t yet done this so you haven’t been able to fully focus on what you are moving towards achieving.
The reasons this is so important is:
• People who write their goals are more likely to achieve. Not only will you imprint what you’ve written into your subconscious mind but also you create a reference point for yourself to define where you are at the start of the process of change and where you hope to be when you’ve traveled along the road of change.
• Deciding on the date by when you want to have succeeded gives you the motivation to take action and do things differently
• You can plan how and when you will do the steps towards achieving your goal. Most goals will have small steps you have to take to get to your final destination. Make sure you define the small chunks and decide when and where you will be able to do those steps and move yourself forward.
• It will keep you focused on your objectives. It can be easy and commonplace to be distracted along the way by others who try to influence you and distract you from your chosen path.
So prepare your timetable for change with dates and times when you will take each action you have to take to reach your goal. Leave time if possible for some celebration as you succeed along the path because you will achieve more this way and it’s fun to acknowledge your achievements.
Written on September 21st, 2009 by Susan Kersleyno shouts
Have you noticed how sometimes you don’t even admit that you need to change something in your life? Your friends and family may have been telling you for years to lose weight or to stop drinking so much or to exercise more and yet all the time you say: ‘It’s not my problem- I can deal with living the way I live: stop telling me there’s something wrong.’ And yet there may well be if you hear those messages lots of time. Perhaps you need to take a step back and ask yourself it they, just might be telling you the truth you on’t want to hear!
The first step for change is actually acknowledging that something needs to be different in your life! So listen to what your nearest and dearest are saying to you, find out more and accept that what they say may be something you can begin to deal with.
