I was reminded last night of a quote I love:
“No matter how dark things are, you can always turn the light on.”
Sounds simple enough. But how do we do it?
What Are You Thinking?
What are you thinking?
Just stop for a moment to find out. A few seconds of quiet is all it takes to work out what’s going on in your head.
If you could put those thoughts into words, what would they say?
Are they positive, encouraging and happy or (much more likely, alas!) a critical commentary of what’s around you?
I vividly remember an exercise we did at school on “Stream of Consciousness”. It’s amazing I can remember something so clearly from so long ago as my remaining post-children brain cells often struggle to cope with what day of the week it is nowadays, so it must have made an impact on me. The teacher got us to write down everything we were thinking, for 5 minutes, completely unedited.
Then, having bared our souls on paper, she did make some of us read it out, which I remember with horror. But anyway… The point of the exercise is that your hand can’t move fast enough. Almost all of us started with “I don’t know what to write…” but we soon tapped in to what was going on inside our heads and it was illuminating. [Read more…] about What Are You Thinking?
Let It Go…
How much of our time do we spend feeling annoyed by something someone else has said or done?
Maybe it was a passing comment or a snide remark? Or maybe they did something really unacceptable and we just keep going over and over the event in our head.
Without realising, whatever they said or did has taken over our mood and we can’t seem to shift it. We’re just spiralling deeper and deeper into whatever our personal favourite yucky emotional state is.
Letting it go is easy to say, particularly when we feel stuck. Yet it can make a profound difference to our state of mind – and our day in general.
If you need help to let it go, this visualisation works well. [Read more…] about Let It Go…
Where Do I Start?
Isn’t it weird how it can be so hard to start writing on a blank page (or computer screen!), yet once the first few words are down, it seems to flow much more easily.
It’s as though the blankness makes the task seem somehow more enormous, more overwhelming than it might otherwise be. And those few friendly words that start the first sentence are like taking the first, gentle step towards your goal.
And changing your life is like that.
While you’re sat there, thinking about everything that’s going wrong, worrying about why it’s not working and feeling fed up about how hard you’ve tried, yet you’re still going round on the same hampster wheel, it’s unlikely you’ll feel motivated to get up and get started, sorting things out.
Yet there’s something simple that can really help.