Overwelming Lessons from the Garden

My garden was once my pride and joy, but somewhere over the last 7 or 8 years it lost its place on my 'interest' list - so much so when I attempted to venture down the path last week I could have cried.  I couldn't get to the bottom - the 'lawn' was at least 3 foot tall, the hedges double their width and brambles criss-crossing the paths.    At that moment I felt completely overwelmed and ashamed.  How on earth was I ever going to tackle this jungle?   I had a strong desire to just go back indoors, lock the back door and deny that I have a back garden but I knew sticking my head in the sand for another year would only compound the situation.

As I hacked away at the brambles, took the hedge trimmer to the hedges and 'lawn' to re-create a path I knew I had to get a plan together, just randomly tackling the job was not going to transform this jungle to an acceptably wild but tamed rambling garden, much less a beautifully manicured one (but thankfully that's not my style!).

Some coaching questions came to mind and whilst I was hacking away I began to answer those questions and formulate a plan.   It gave me a sense of relief to realise that taming my garden is possible, and also perversely how it took my wild jungle of a garden to remind me to apply some key questions and themes of coaching to my own life!

How important is this to me?
At this particular point this is important to me - as I'm beginning to question the purpose of all the running I am doing and what value and enjoyment I am getting from that, I remember that I find peace and solitude, a time to think and just be, the enjoyment of being outside immersed in nature when working in my garden - ironically similar to what I get from my running when I'm not on some crazy schedule of races. 

How will I know when I get there
I'll wander down my garden with a sense of satisfaction and pride - I know what that feels like - I've had it before!   I'll be on first name terms with the tip employees I'll have visited that often!


If something isn't working do something different 
Clearly my strategy of do nothing wasn't working to manage my garden the way I wanted it so it was time to do something different - TAKE ACTION!

How do you eat an elephant?  In bite size pieces
In its entirety the whole project is completely overwelming but I broke it down into small chunks - daily chunks in fact.   I figured that if I fill two manageable size garden bags with clippings and weeds each day and take it to the tip (just a 2 mile detour from my daily commute to clinic) that I will start to see results very quickly - and it takes less than an hour to fill those bags!

See the opportunities
Being August, being the Olympics I am presented with a great opportunity - clinic is quiet so I have more time, the evenings are still long, my daughter is home and available to help, and the weather is good (haha - that one may prove yet to be a challenge!)

Don't sweat the small stuff - do what creates the biggest impact
Starting to clear the paths and cutting back the hedges made a huge difference - the garden now looking like it is under some control!   Once the biggest shrubs, areas of bramble are cleared I'll start working on the flower beds, though I did weed the one nearest the patio, the one that is on view!

Identify the biggest challenge or sticking point in achieving this goal
The removal of the garden rubbish is my sticking point - I purchased two manageable size heavy duty garden tidy bags which when full I can still lift and move through the house to the car, and found out the opening times of the local tip!   Once I'm onto the 'finer' weeding and the bags take longer to fill I can start on the huge pile of garden waste left over from last year's short lived attempt to tame the garden - some of it has composted down but much of my garden rubbish is twiggy and woody.

Identify the added benefits
I'm also going through a huge de-cluttering inside the house so the daily trips to the tip means I can also dispose of the house rubbish and not have that hanging around in the 'tip' pile!   Some much needed bonding time with my daughter.  The headspace and prompt to come back to my equally neglected blog!   I always knew 2012 was going to a year of change, it has been and is continuing but this has made me realise I've just allowed the change to happen rather than proactively steering it to my best purpose.




If some of this sounds familiar, not just your garden, but any areas of your life where you are feeling overwelmed with the enormity of the goal, then try applying some of these questions and see how much better you'll already begin to feel now that you have the beginnings of a manageable, realistic and achievable plan in place. Any change, whether wanted or not, can be overwelming but applying some questions, giving it some thought and attention, identifying and find solutions to the  sticking points can transform that negative overwelming feeling to one of an exciting challenge or adventure

Operation Back Garden is now on day 2, and I'm looking forward to my stint in the garden! It has rained overnight and there is a lovely fresh earthy smell in the air and an early morning coolness - wonderful!

I've already got what I need!

'I've already got what I need! '   A powerful lightbulb moment for my practice client and a strong reinforcement of my learnings for me!    

It's weekend 3 of my Smart School Diploma in NLP and Hypnotherapy and the penny has dropped - this combination of NLP and Hypnotherapy is a powerful tool - each incredibly effective in their own right as therapies but put together and 'BAM' as the wonderful Peggy Guglielmino, our tutor, likes to say!

NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming and  quite simply it is a set of tools that analyzes and changes how your brain processes information and turns it into emotions and behaviours.   Now there is only a limited amount of thoughts, memories, behaviours and feelings that we consciously experience at any one time, everything that is not in our conscious mind is stored and organised in our unconscious mind - a huge library of thoughts, emotions and memories collated over all of our life.  What Hypnotherapy does is allow you to access that unconscious mind, by directing your attention internally towards your thoughts, sensations and feelings.  Combined together NLP and Hypnotherapy enables you to access your unconscious mind and make positive and beneficial changes to the way you think and communicate with yourself and others.  

NLP is based on a number of principles, not rules, but more a way of looking at things.  One of those principles is that we have all the resources we need to achieve our desired outcome - its not talking about physical, tangible resources like time, skills, money - but internal resources such as emotional states, for example confidence, calmness, inner strength, resilience or courage.  This principle was demonstrated beautifully with a practice client....

My practice client was lacking self confidence in going back on the dating scene again, yet through explorative discussion we discovered that she has ooodles of confidence in specific areas of her work life.  A simple but effective technique allowed her first to access those feelings of confidence she experiences in her work life and then to transfer that confidence into the dating context.   I'm wondering just how quickly she will begin to enjoy her dating experiences! 

What was so powerful for me was that she was concerned I would use hypnotherapy to try and control her thoughts, to put 'stuff' in there that wasn't there before - and she was delighted to discover that in fact she already has the confidence she needs.  Just that that confidence had been 'filed' in her unconscious mind under work and not under 'dating' so of course when it came to dating - a situation she found a little scary - she couldn't find the confidence!  So all we did was duplicate and expand that confidence file and filed it under dating too!  And as an extra bonus she also now has a way of accessing that confidence file anytime she needs it - by a simple discrete physical action that no-one else would notice - whether it be for jumping out an aeroplane, speaking at a conference or any other situation when she needs an extra boost!   Wow!

What emotional states would you love to be able to access at any given time in any situation?  

p.s my unconscious mind needs lots of repetition to instill and embed all these new skills - if you would like to be part of my learning and at the same time make powerful positive changes yourself - all for free - then contact me today!

The shame of it all...

What I love about coaching is that each session with a client brings up something new, a new perspective, some learning for the client; but after the session the learning for me continues also.  A recent session about root cause belief got me thinking about why it has taken me 11 years to work out that I want to help other widows along their journey to finding life, love and happiness again.  It struck me that at times I have felt uncomfortable with other widows, and in fact in the first couple of years I avoided other widows.   Why was this so?   I thought on the surface that it was because seeing their grief, their pain was too much, I didn’t want to be taken back to that place.  But after a discussion with a friend on this very matter, and some quiet reflection on the dark drive home it struck me that actually the reason I avoided being with other widows was the shameful feeling of being a fraud, that I wasn’t like the rest of them.    A fraud?  How come?  Because the overwhelming feeling I had when my husband died was that of utter relief.  That it was over for him, and it was over for me.   There was of course sadness and numbness but most of all it was relief and I felt ashamed of that relief.  My husband had fought cancer for 9 years, 5 of them with a terminal diagnosis.  It changed him.  It changed me. The man I married was not the man who died 9 years later, and I know the girl he married was not the girl he left behind.    Occasionally towards the end I would see glimpses of the man I married, but in the main he had long gone.   My grieving actually started a long time before his physical death, amidst the fear and anxiety of impending widowhood, though the doctors never gave an indication of how much time he had.  I think, as widows, we tend to put our marriages on a pedestal, or at least publicly we do, as we may think that is expected of us.   Several widows I have worked with tell me their marriages were wonderful, and indeed they may have been.   Each and every relationship is different, and so each and every widow’s journey is different.    If my husband had died suddenly after 9 years of a 'normal' marriage without illness then I have no doubt that my grieving would have been very different.   Our marriage was what it was.  At times tough, actually towards the end mostly tough…...but we were committed to seeing it through together, even if the journey changed us and our relationship beyond recognition.  

I hope also gives reassurance to other widows out there who find themselves in a similar position, locking away the truth of how they really felt.   Let us not feel ashamed or guilty about our relief, it doesn’t take away the love and commitment we had to our husbands, but shows us to be human in our desire to see the suffering for all involved to come to an end.  

Until next time...

Take the Pressure Off

Today's Thought of the Day from www.innerspace.org.uk popped in my mail box this morning and it resonated with me.

It said 'Often, it's not really the people or having too much to do that creates pressure in life.  It's your working and living habits that need tweaking. No one and nothing can make you feel pressured without your permission!'

When you stop to think about the pressure you are under, ask yourself who's putting the pressure on here?  What is the real source of the pressure?  Is it time?  Is it another person's needs?  Or is it from yourself?   Many a time it is likely to come from you yourself.   Pressure you place on yourself to keep up appearances, to conform to society's rules about how you should be behaving as a certain type of person such as being a mum, acting in your professional capacity, a partner, a widow or whatever your labels are.   Invariably any action that has a "I should do, ought to, must do" in the front of it will create unwanted pressure.  Who says you should, ought, must?

In the grand scheme of things do these 'things' that we feel pressured to do really matter?  Are there daily rituals and habits you can tweak or simply stop that will have little negative impact, if any, and may in fact cut out the pressure all together.   Are there things that you can let slide? 

It may be that the daily rituals and habits are so deeply ingrained in your patterns of behaviour that simply stopping is not as easy as just 'simply stopping' as they intertwine tightly with your core values and beliefs, and past experiences.  If, when you begin to explore the real root cause of the pressure and you find that it is linked to a fundamental core belief or value that you hold, then you may wish to enlist the help of a coach who can guide you through breaking that link and taking the pressure off.


Next time you're feeling under pressure ask yourself what is this really about?  Can I let it go?

Until next time..

Thought Provoking Dentistry - one year on....

A year has passed since I sat in the dentist waiting room scared about my new dentist, scared that he would not be so kind or gentle or patient as my old one who I had been seeing for 10 years or more...

Well in that year the locum dentist has come and gone as they do, and I now have a lovely lady dentist who is even better than the original dentist - even kinder, even more gentle if that were possible.  

So as we lose the comfort and familiarity of what we have known before it is easy to assume or believe that we will never find anything better, different maybe, but not better.   But we don't know what's round the corner, what opportunities are out there for us.  With an open mind and open heart we can find new things in our lives which are not just different but better

A time for thanks...

Part of re-emerging is about taking stock of where you are right now.  Taking stock means becoming aware of where you are at, perhaps aspects of your life you want to change, but also just as importantly the aspects of your life that you are thankful for.  It's not always easy when you've experienced loss to find things to be thankful for, but I bet if you spent just five minutes with a notebook you'd soon fill up a page!

I’ve started a daily thank you on facebook  http://www.facebook.com/Re.emergingwidows and twitter http://twitter.com/#!/Re_Emerging.

The beauty of it is they don’t have to be big things, in fact often it’s the smaller things we take for granted that get overlooked in the thought of gratitude – the friends and loved ones who are always there for us, a sunny blue sky day, our health, the food on our plates, our freedom....

Today I am grateful for the beautiful blue sky, the sunshine, the lovely breeze, and for having the good health to be able to go for a run and really enjoy this beautiful autumn weather.   I also give thanks to the very special man in my life who bought me the thoughtful gift of an ipod shuffle which motivated me to go out for a run in the first place to try it out!  

What and who have you got to give thanks for?