Tel: 07815 591279  Email: karen@greenspacecoaching.com  Skype: karen.liebenguth  

What makes you tick?

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Discover your personality type ….

Whatever the circumstances of your life, the understanding of (personality) type can make your perceptions clearer, your judgements sounder, and your life closer to your heart’s desire. Isabel Myers – Founder of MBTI

I’ve just been on a truly fascinating self development journey – training to be a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) practitioner – discovering what makes me and other personality types tick in different life situations and learning how we can use this knowledge to understand ourselves and others better. In so doing, we can works towards bringing about the changes we want to see in our lives – which goes to the very heart of life coaching.

I first came across the MBTI three years ago and was struck  by the depth and breadth of possibilities it offered for discovering personal strengths and blind spots – or our non preferred way of doing things. Having just completed my training I’m delighted to now offer MBTI sessions alongside my life coaching and personal development work.  Click here to book a free 30 minute taster session.

In a nutshell MBTI can help us discover:

How we prefer to be energised – through things and people or through our inner world of reflection. For example how do you prefer to recharge at the end of a day? Do you like to talk to someone about your day or would you prefer to have some downtime before you engage again?

How we prefer to gather information – do you prefer to pay attention to detail, facts, the here and now, or do you prefer to focus on possibilities, connections, the bigger picture? For example what information do you need when planning a holiday or booking on a course? Do you want details and facts about costs, logistics, timings, or do you prefer to take a broad view and imagine how the holiday or course will work out for you and what it might bring you?

How we prefer to make decisions based on the information we have gathered. Do you prefer to be guided by objective logic or do you prefer to be guided by your personal values? For example how do you deal with differences in viewpoint at home with your partner or kids or at work with your colleagues? Do you prefer to seek objective truth or do you prefer to seek harmony and look for common ground and where there is agreement?

How we prefer to deal with the world around us – our lifestyle. Do you prefer to schedule and organise your life, do you enjoy decision making and planning? Or do you prefer to keep your options open, to be spontaneous and flexible? For example how do you plan your weekend? Do you prefer to have a clear plan and know what you are doing or do you prefer to go with the flow?

Using MBTI we can explore our preferred way of thinking and behaving in different life situations – the way we do things that feels or comes most naturally to us. These preferences are underlined by our interests, values, needs and motivation.

And this in turn helps us to discover our strengths and the areas we can improve on (our non-preferences or blind spots). We can also use our non-preferred way of doing things and we often do. It’s like our right and left hand. One is our preferred hand with which we do most things in an effortless way. But we also use our non-preferred hand which may take more effort but with practice we could become better at using it – if we wanted to.

By knowing our type we can see how our preferences influence how we think and behave in different life situations and use this knowledge to help us deal with other people better, reduce stress, enjoy your work more and ultimately get more out of life.

Of course the MBTI is only one of many ways to help us develop personally. I have personally found it an invaluable tool in my own personal development and I’m delighted to be able to offer it to clients. Click here to find out more about MBTI sessions offered and rates.

The history of MBTI

MBTI foundersAbout 100 years ago the Swiss Psychologist Carl Jung studied differences in people and wrote the book Psychological Types. His theory of psychological types proposes that people are innately different, both in terms of the way they see the world and take in information, and how they make decisions.

Then, during the Second World War, two women, Americans, mother and daughter, Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers, picked up on Jung’s personality theories -they thought that his ideas were so useful that they wanted to make them accessible to a wider audience.

They were driven by a desire to help people understand themselves and each other better in a post-war climate and over a 20 year period, they set about devising a questionnaire that would identify which psychological type a person was.

Research and work into the MBTI continues to this day, making it one of the most popular personality type tools in the world. To find out more about MBTI click here.

Warm wishes

Karen

MBTI, understanding your personality type, what makes a person tick

Get more from your green space moment

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Green Park, Central London

We all have our favourite green spaces around where we live and perhaps work – spaces which resonant strongly with us, help us to relax, to unwind, to think more clearly.

I live and work in London and over the years, I have explored many of the Capital’s green spaces. Victoria Park, Regent’s Park, Green Park and Gordon Square – are four very different spaces, all different in energy, appearance and size but with this in common: they are all fabulous green spaces and like all green spaces, are wonderfully good for our well-being.

Those of us who live in an urban environment will benefit greatly from taking time out in green space – and indeed this is why I decided to offer life coaching while walking in London’s parks.

In this blog I share why these particular parks resonant so strongly with me, but first, here’s a beautiful exercise you can try the next time you visit your favourite green space – it’s called the 4-3-2-1 exercise – it will help you make the most of  your green space moment.

- Take a walk on your own ideally in a green space
- Slow down your pace
- Take a few deep breaths
- Start by naming 4 things you can see, 4 things you can hear and 4 things you can feel (physical sensations); then go on to name 3 of each, then 2 of each and then 1.

Here’s an example to illustrate how the exercise might unfold:

Four: “I see the clouds in the blue sky. I see tall trees. I see a big patch of purple crocuses in the grass. I see people on benches having their lunch.I hear birds chirping. I hear people chatting. I hear distant traffic noise. I hear my in and out breath.I feel the air on my skin. I feel the soles of my feet on the ground. I feel the warmth of the sun on my face. I feel my heart beating.

Three: I see the sun coming through from behind the clouds. I see two squirrels searching for food. I see daffodils here and there. I hear children playing, I hear people eating their lunch, I hear a bumblebee. I feel the wind in my hair. I feel my trousers touching my legs. I feel my shoulders relaxing.

Two: I see the pretty bark of the planes. I see the light green of the grass. I hear a dog barking. I hear myself swallow. I feel the muscles in my face relaxing. I feel the air touching my nose when I inhale and exhale.

One: I see the snowdrops around the trees. I hear the call of a crow. I feel a relaxed heaviness throughout my whole body.

Try to identify different things for each of the 4 stages. This will heighten your experience in nature and help to ground you in the present moment.

I recently did this exercise during my lunch break in Bunhill Field cemetery near Liverpool Street, East London – another beautiful green space. After the exercise I felt light yet grounded, alert and energetic with a heightened sense of perspective.

My favourite green spaces in London:

Gordon Square near Russell Square WC1.

This park always reminds me of the German saying: ‘klein, aber fein’, meaning ‘small, but exquisite’. It’s as though you enter the park and it says ‘welcome, stay a while’ – maybe it’s the impact of the old Hornbeam tree which stands tall in the middle overlooking the small paths, flower beds and other trees. I always feel very peaceful when I’m there. It’s a very special green space in the heart of London.

Regent’s Park NW1

Regent's Park WC1The sheer variety of trees in this park, combined with the wide open paths, fields and some wild and un-manicured patches of woodland ensures an interesting and refreshing variety of scenery. I get a great sense of freedom here. It’s a great place to slow down and escape from city life for just an hour or so. It’s truly wonderful.

Green Park W1

My favourite feature in Green Park is the large circle of old and tall plane trees. When you stand inside and look up – from late spring to early autumn – it feels as though you were in a huge tree tent. Being inside feels like being in magical place, protective and a little mysterious. Although relatively small Green Park offers a surprising number of paths, quiet and intimate spots with benches and lush grass.

Victoria Park East London

Victoria Park east LondonVictoria Park is my ‘home park’.  As I write I can see the giant plane trees from my window. Victoria Park has great big fields for roaming across and long avenues of old trees. The park has greatly benefited from the Olympics and now also offers an Old English Garden with quiet benches and beautiful flower beds. Sometimes I walk or cycle all around it or I find myself a quiet spot on a Saturday afternoon to read, to reflect, to take some time out.

I offer a free taster life coaching while walking session in Victoria park. Please get in touch to make a booking.

Please share your favourite green spaces with me on the Green Space Life Coaching Facebook page. I’d love to hear what makes your green space special to you.

I’d also love to know how you get on with the 4, 3, 2, 1 exercise. Any questions just drop me a line: karen@greenspacecoaching.com

Warm wishes

Karen

benefits of life coaching outdoors, life coaching tips, meditation, relaxation exercises

A good walk puts things right

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The Benefits of Walking

Just why is walking and being outdoors so good for us?

Clare Balding’s new series of Ramblings on BBC Radio 4 Walking for Self Improvement explores how walking can make us better – calmer, fitter, cleverer, more positive – more in tune with our emotions.

The episode “Walking for Spiritual Renewal” (14/2/13) particularly caught my attention. It chimed so much with my passion for the outdoors, with my own experience – I always feel different when I have spent time outdoors in the countryside or in one of London’s many parks and green spaces. I feel more grounded, alert, and more spacious inside. I gain new perspective and new ideas.

I just love the way Clare Balding connects with nature, how she describes with such warm-hearted enthusiasm what she sees around her – the different shades of green, the big sky, the dramatic and fast moving cloud formations, how all of a sudden she feels this urge to move towards an isolated tree on a hill top to see what the world looks like from up there. Listening to her is just delightful and very inspirational. And the best thing – to listen is as though you are walking alongside her.

In Walking for Spiritual Renewal Clare experiences how walking, and walking in silence can take us beyond our constant frenetic thinking – how walking can drop us beneath our thoughts and more into our body, giving our minds a break so that we can just enjoy feeling grounded with our two feet on the earth, and ourselves anchored in our body. When that happens (which is also my own experience too), calm comes, the mind opens up and feels more spacious because it doesn’t have to think so much – and that’s when changes in our perspective happen, when new ideas and insights can emerge.

As my dear friend Jane says “A good walk puts things right” – and so it is.

And as Clare Balding adds, the soothing quality of walking can also be very beneficial when we have difficult or important conversations with loved ones, friends and family members. I would add colleagues to this list also. For as we engage with the body and mind – as we walk next to each other, rather than sitting opposite each other, calm, spaciousness and a natural rhythm comes into your conversation.

Spring’s approaching – try getting out for a walk more often

Today we spend most of our time sitting at our desk, looking at the computer screen. Few jobs involve moving around any more, let alone being in or moving around in natural green spaces. Going for a walk, cycle ride, having a lunch in the park or just lying on the grass in a local park or countryside can be deeply grounding and have a soothing effect on our well-being.

Why? When we enter into nature we reconnect to our roots, our source of origin: nature. Our ancestors did not go into nature for a weekend of relaxation: they were in nature, and nature was in them. Modern research shows that this deep history is probably hard-wired into us.

Being under the open sky surrounded by natural light and colours and breathing fresh air gives us a sense of inner and outer space and a heightened sense of perspective. Often when we allow ourselves to open up to these natural surroundings, new insights emerge. All of a sudden we are able to look at important things in our life from a different perspective, perhaps gain a better understanding of some things or find a new way forward.

I often say spending time in green space has not only become part of my working life but also an integral part of my life, without days and whole weeks in nature, my life would not be the same. I highly recommend it.

I wonder whether Clare Balding would be up for trying ‘coaching while walking’ with me one day. Perhaps I’ll ask…

I’m going to share some of my favourite green spaces in and around London on Facebook. Curious to try coaching while walking?. Give me a call 07815 591279 or drop me an email: karen@greenspacecoaching.com to book a free 30-minute life coaching taster session in east London’s Victoria Park or by phone or Skype.

benefits of walking in nature, stress busting tips

Moving on from failed New Year’s resolutions?

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It can be tough changing engrained habits

January – the month that fills us with great hope that we will do all the things we really want to do.

Why then is it, come mid-January, that our New Year’s resolutions – all the things we’ve wanted to change so wholeheartedly, start dropping off our agenda so quickly leaving us with a sense of disappointment and failure?

Why is it that we often find it so difficult to follow through on our New Year’s resolutions, to do what we really want to do, to make the changes we’ve long wanted to make?

The main reason is that often our New Year resolutions involve changing some of our most engrained habits such as eating too much biscuits, chocolate, cake, drinking too much alcohol, spending money on cloths, smoking, not doing any exercise, watching TV every day, surfing the internet, Facebook or Twitter…

Changing our most engrained habits requires more than just deciding in our head that we are going to eat less biscuits or stop smoking, drink less alcohol or start doing exercise.

The thing about habits is that we do them without having to think about them. Habits allow us to function and to lead busy lives. They help us get ready in the morning, drive the car or ride the bicycle while planning our day ahead, they allow us to multi task at work or home etc.

Habits are positive as long as they help us and feel positive. When they become unhelpful, out of date, when they make us unhappy – eating too much, spending too much money, watching too much television – that’s when habits become tricky and sticky – that’s when we start to feel that something in our life needs to change.

In other words, habits are run by our unconscious. New Year resolutions often fail because we only make them at the conscious level, in our head. But it is crucial that we also get in touch with the part inside of us that runs the habit we want to change, e.g. eating less. To put it more simply, the head and heart need to work together.

We need to work with both our conscious and unconscious to undo old habits and to form new ones, i.e. to make New Year’s resolutions work, to bring about long-lasting change.

Here is how it can work in practice:

1. Take some quiet time and identify something you want to change in your life, for example eating less.

2. Make contact with the part of you that likes to eat. You can do this by acknowledging that part of you, i.e. it’s okay that a part of me likes to eat, it ‘s okay that this is present.

3. We always do things for a good reason, otherwise we wouldn’t do them. Ask the part of you that likes to eat what it is trying to do for you positively. This could be about making you feel comfortable, to nourish you, to give you pleasure. When you have identified its positive intention it is important to appreciate that too.

4. Then see whether you can come up with three other things that fulfill the same needs, in this example: comfort, nourishment and pleasure. This could be connecting with trusted friends, spending more time with them, having a hot bath once a week or a massage once in a while.

Once a day eat without doing anything else, just eating  your meal, enjoying the food and noticing how it feels in the body.

5. Check whether these new things resonate with you. This is also important because if they don’t then it means that the part of you that likes eating will continue to eat too much. So check that the new things you want to do feel right inside and also whether you can see yourself doing them.

Always remember, if we can form habits we can un-do them. Change is possible albeit slow sometimes. It takes some effort but the pay-off can be huge.

Change is at the heart of life-coaching. Get in touch if you’d like to find out more about my work. I offer a 30-minute taster session in Victoria Park, East London, over the phone or Skype.

 

changing habits, life coaching tips, New year resolutions, stopping over eating, stopping smoking

White Space Life Coaching

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white space life coaching2

Embrace the seasons…

The snow arrived but it didn’t deter.

Last Friday I meet three clients in Green Park.

It was icy cold but I felt inspired and motived to get out there because that’s how I want to work, in nature, in green space with my clients – in the freshness and crispiness of winter.

It’s all part of it my coaching approach.

 

There is so much to gain from getting outdoors in natural space, whatever the weather.

It’s wonderful for our mental, physical and emotional well-being.

Below is a photo from a beautiful long walk I went on with a dear friend in Surrey.

All day we were walking in the snow immersed in utterly stunning winter wonderland. The snow silence was delicious and the noise under our feet exquisite.

It felt like being in a completely different world and when we came back we felt so very content and at peace with ourselves and the world.

So my advice to you, wrap up warm, get out and enjoy! As always, keep in touch. Please email me if you’d like to book a free 30 minute taster session!

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Planning some New Year Resolutions? …

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Try setting some meaningful intentions for the year ahead

Why is it that our New Year resolutions are so short lived, that all the things we want to do so wholeheartedly drop off our agenda so quickly?

We put so many expectations on the month of January – the month of starting anew, the month that fills us with hope that we will do all the things we really want to do, that we have been postponing until the New Year.

We set our New Year resolutions with gusto and often they seem to work for the first two weeks – that’s when we see pretty full yoga classes, more people in parks exercising, early success with quitting smoking or dieting .. and then we fall back into our old patterns. For many the whole process ends in disappointment and a sense of failure.

It is true though that January, the beginning of the New Year, has an inspiring and fresh energy about it – a sense of opening up a new chapter, a clean sheet of paper, new beginnings. And there is certainly nothing wrong with tapping into that.

Try setting your intentions for the year ahead

What has worked well for me and the clients I work with is to set intentions for the year ahead, rather than New Year’s resolutions. What’s more, we can set intentions at any time of the year – not only New Year!

Here’s 5 tips to get you started.

Tip 1: Instead of New Year resolutions, be clear about your intentions for the next year.

An intention comes from a deeper place of value and inner knowing.

Before you set your intentions spend a moment reflecting on what is important to you in your life. Family? Friends? Relationship? Health? Career? Personal development? Spiritual life? Leisure time?

We often don’t know what really matters to us in our lives and as a result struggle to set meaningful intentions for the New Year.

Life coaching can help. It can help people to see things differently. It can boost your enthusiasm, confidence and self belief and help you find new ways of doing things so that you overcome obstacles and spend more time, more often, doing what really matters to you. The Wheel of Life exercise (see my blog ‘Is your life in balance‘) is also helpful for gaining clarity on what really matters most to you in your life.

Being clear about your intentions for the year ahead will help you follow through on what you set out to do. Setting intentions will also feel more manageable. You’ll have something to check progress against and come back to without feeling you have failed – there is no one off action to break, just an intention to improve upon.

So whether your intentions are to do yoga for 20 minutes 3 mornings a week, to keep in regular contact with your closest and most important friends or family members or setting aside more time for your career development… we need not feel we have failed if we revisit an intention we made at the beginning of the year and see how on track we are.

Tip 2: Start now!

You can state your intentions at any time of the year. You needn’t wait for 1st January, nor is it too late if you set your intentions for the year in March!

Create some space to think about what changes you want in your life and become familiar with these.

Tip 3: Reflect upon your intentions

Go for a walk in your local park or create some comfortable and enjoyable time for yourself at home and reflect on what your intentions might be for the year.

Tip 4: Keep your intentions realistic and write them down

Make sure your intentions connect to what really matters to you and are also something you can achieve over a period of time. Avoid stating one off actions that will be harder to come back to.

For example:

- I want to do yoga at least 3 times a week in the morning for 20 minutes.

- I want to develop my career and book at least 2 training courses in 2013

- I want to stay in touch with my most important friends on a regularly basis through emails, phone calls and doing enjoyable things together.

- I want to go on a long country walk at least once a month.

- I want to call my god-daughter every fortnight.

- I want to try out a new recipe at least once a month.

- I want to save £x every month towards a holiday

Make a note of your intentions in a note book or journal. Instead of a list, you might want to make a mind map of your intentions. i.e.. put My Intentions 2013 in the middle of an A4 or A3 sheet of paper and dot your intentions around it – use a different colour pen for each intention and any bullet points to help you keep on track.

Tip 5: Don’t forget what you set out to do – keep your intentions top of mind

Have your mind map of your 2013 intentions somewhere visible to remind you of them, i.e.. on your desk, on your fridge, in your diary/smart phone etc., or even a few different places. You can keep your intentions personal or share them with a trusted friend. Sharing can be very powerful as by doing so you make someone witness to your intentions and it can help reinforce your commitment.

I’d love to hear how you get on. Drop me an email.

With warm wishes for a fulfilling 2013.

Karen

All is calm… all is bright?

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snoopy charlie brown christmas tree

Feeling drained, stretched and stressed in the run-up to Christmas?

I contributed to this month’s issue of Woman & Health – full of practical tips for how not to let the festive season overwhelm and get to you.

And yet it does get to so many of us! Well, it doesn’t need to be like that.

Here’s just a few tips for keeping calm, grounded and resourceful this month. And most importantly, how to enjoy your Christmas break.

1. Are you enjoying preparations for Christmas?

In the remaining two weeks running up to Christmas, ask yourself if you are enjoying what you’re doing. If the answer is ‘no’, you’re probably doing too much or aiming too high. Ask yourself: What are the three to five most important things that I need and want to do?

2. Is planning for Christmas taking up all your time?

Don’t let all your time get eaten up with planning Christmas. Stay in touch with normal life by doing what keeps you sane, be it going for a walk or swim, having a nap, or seeing a friend for a tea or coffee…

3. Is tension building inside you?

Mind buzzing, jaw tense, trying to do six things at once? If so, stop what you’re doing, take a break or go for a walk around the block and ask yourself, ‘What is the most important thing that needs doing right now?’ Now try to focus only on that.

4. Reach out

Ask for help if you start to feel overwhelmed and remember you’re not the only one who can do things – delegate! Ask
your spouse, partner, children, parents for help.

5. Saying ‘yes’ to everything?

Before saying ‘yes’ to anything – a request for help or an invitation – ask yourself whether you have the energy to take more on. Everyone is preoccupied with their own Christmas business that they can sympathise and empathise if you say ’no’. Trust that it is okay to say ‘no’. It’s a good life skill to have!

Read the full Woman and Home article, here it is.

Let me know what you think. Email me.

Warm wishes,

Karen

 

 

stressed at Christmas, tips for festive season

Resilience – why do we need it?

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Resilience

We all get our fare share of crises, challenges and difficult situations, some big, others small. But why is it that some people are better at recovering from these difficult times and situations than others?

Resilience – our ability to overcome adversity, illness, challenges, continues to be a subject of wide study since the early 1970s. The word resilience comes from the latin word resilire meaning to leap back, recoil.

“Resilience is an individual’s ability to generate biological, psychological and social factors to resist, adapt and strengthen itself, when faced with an environment of risk, generating individual, social and moral success.” Oscar Chapital C.

Recently when I was on a long walk on the South Coast I took this picture of the windswept tree. Looking at the tree, I felt I suddenly had a profound understanding of what it is to be resilient – its feeling and facing the elements and staying rooted.

Resilience

So how can we stay rooted, firmly grounded when life gets difficult, when life seems to throw so much at us that we can hardly think anymore, when things blur into one big muddle?

People who are more resilient than others think and do things differently:

1. They believe that there is no such thing as failure only mistakes. They believe that they can learn from mistakes.

When something happens in their life, they review the situation afterwards, they step back and ask themselves: what can I learn from this? When things get difficult they are able to stop and pause. This creates a gap. In this gap they create a conscious choice to respond to what’s happening rather than reacting to the situation.

2. People who are more resilient than others have a well balanced outlook on life.

They believe that yes, some things in life are difficult and challenging, and that some things in life are also rich, interesting, enjoyable and beautiful. They can experience all of these things.

Resilient people also belief that life is an exploration, that life is to be experienced and that if something doesn’t work, they try something else until they’ve found something that does work.

“All of us get knocked down, but it’s resilience that really matters. All of us do well when things are going well, but the thing that distinguishes athletes is the ability to do well in times of great stress, urgency and pressure.”  Roger Staubach

I work closely with a number of clients to help them develop more resilience tools in their very own ‘life tool kit’. Of course, having these tools doesn’t mean you won’t experience any more challenging times in your life. But it does mean that you can now use your resilience tools to ensure that you no longer have to feel the victim, no matter how tough life get.

By learning resilience, you will find it easier to stay grounded, to bounce back more readily and sometimes quicker from any difficult situation or draw-back. The process will connect you to your inner strength and power.

This year life has thrown quite a few challenges my way and I have had much experience of practicing using my tools of resilience. As a result I have become a stronger person, ready to experience whole heartedly the next challenge that is headed my way.  If you’d like to know more about developing resilience tools and how to practice using these tools, please contact me karen@greenspacecoaching.com

I also offer a free 30 minute life coaching taster session to all prospective new clients.

life coaching tools, managing stress, personal development tools, resilience tools, self development tools

Stuck in your comfort zone?

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change

Is it time to embrace and enjoy the journey of change? The payoff can be huge. Try my 3 tips for helping you to make those changes for the better easier.

Do you prefer to stay in your comfort zone, the zone you know so well? We are all guilty of it!

Just why is it that we often find it so difficult to take up new challenges or do something completely new, to put ourselves out there into the world and explore life more fully?

I work with Claire, she is a communicator and writer and helps me with the marketing side of my Green Space Life Coaching work. Her greatest challenge with me is getting me to do new things. It is a challenge for her because I’m often resistant and would come up with good reasons why not to do it or just not do it (full stop).

Why is change so hard sometimes? So slow?

We all have a tendency to resist significant change, even if it’s for the better. Our body, brain, and behaviour seek to keep within rather narrow limits and to snap back when pushed beyond these limits.

Imagine if our body temperature or blood sugar level moved up or down by 10 per cent – we’d be in big trouble! And so it is with many other functions of the body. This condition of equilibrium, this resistance to change, is called homeostasis. It characterises all self-regulating systems, from a bacterium to a frog, from a human being to a family, from an organisation to a whole culture. And homeostasis applies to our psychological states, to our behaviour and to our body.

So the problem is that homeostasis works to keep things as they are even if things could do with some improvement! It resists all change.

For example, if you haven’t done any exercise for many years, your body regards a life without exercise as normal while the beginning of a change for the better is felt by your body as a threat. Or when Claire asks me to do something different, to change the way I’ve done things for a while, I start to feel anxious and alarmed, and think that I can’t do it and as a result won’t do it. I prefer to stay in my comfort zone, the zone I know so well. The resistance is generally proportionate to the size and speed of the change, not to whether the change is for the better or worse.

The good news is that change does happen – in ourselves, in our relationships, in our families, at work – albeit slowly at times. Homeostats are reset in our body, though the process might cause us some level of anxiety, pain and upset.

The question is: how do we deal with homeostasis? How can we make change for the better easier? How do we make change last?

Try my 3 tips for helping you to make those changes for the better easier:

Be aware of the way homeostasis works

This is possibly the most important and first thing to understand.

Expect resistance and backlash when you want to change things in your life or do something new. Notice the alarm bells in your mind and body in the form of negative and limiting thoughts and of feelings of anxiety in your body. You might take these signals as positive signs that your life is definitely changing.

Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change

When you feel resistance in your body, don’t back off or force your way through. Hold the change you want to make like a hummingbird – not too loose and not too tight. Listen to your needs in times of change and stretch yourself in a way that feels manageable to you. We can take small steps to explore new territory outside our comfort zone.

Develop a support system

You can go through change on your own but it helps to have other people with whom you can share the ups and downs of change. Choose people who you know well, who listen to you, who have gone through change themselves, people who support you when you backslide and remind you that change is slow but possible.

Let me know how you get on and most importantly: enjoy the journey of change – the pay off can be huge.

Karen

karen@greenspacecoaching.com

Try a free life coaching taster session – get in touch!

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A life based on contingency?

Posted by admin in Benefits of Life Coaching | healing | life coaching outdoors - (0 Comments)
if not now, when ?

“I really, really want to start doing what I want to do, I’ve had enough. I want to stop doing what others expect of me or what I think others expect me to do.”

The great temptation of human existence is to base our life on contingency.

We often believe that when I have the right job, the right boss, the right home, when the kids have finished school, when I have created the right climate of my existence, when all conditions are right, then I can start paying attention to what I really want to do in my life… But of course, deep inside, we know that life doesn’t work like this and yet we often find ourselves in this very thought pattern.

Why? Because this way of thinking feels easy, familiar and comfortable. It feels non-threatening and non-challenging.

Last week a woman took up a taster session with me and said with desperation in her voice and tears in her eyes: “I really, really want to start doing what I want to do, I’ve had enough. I want to stop doing what others expect of me or what I think others expect me to do.”

Many clients take up life coaching with me for very similar reasons.

I feel great empathy with people in this position – having once been in a similar place in my life ten years ago – when I felt I had truly lost my way. I was caught up in a corporate job and disconnected from what really mattered to me, from my passions: my passion for what makes people tick, my passion for seeing what drives change in people’s lives and my passion for nature – being outdoors and the benefits this has on our well being.

When I started paying attention to what was really important to me, I set the seed for what is now my Green Space Life Coaching business.  Of course at the time I had no idea what would come out of that seed.

What we need to do is have the courage to start cultivating a relationship with the unknown, with the things in ourselves that have not yet fully come into being.

We need to have the courage to pay attention to our own true life. We need to stop, look and listen inside and seek to connect to our deepest longing, to our passion, to what makes us feel alive.

You can do that by reflecting on the following questions:

What is my unique gift to the world?

This sounds grand but your gift can be small or big, e.g. caring or helping others, being a good listener, teaching, being a team leader, a coach or mentor, an environmental activist,  a gardener, doing voluntary work once a week, a grandmother, etc. You can add to the list.

Into which areas does my attention and life energy flow?

How does it feel? Alive, interesting, meaningful or dull?

Do I pay attention to what matters most to me?

Caution: this is not about being selfish. The more you do what you really want to do in life, the happier you are, the more energised you feel, the more you can connect to and serve others.

What do I want to look back on when I’m on my deathbed?

This is possibly the scariest question but perhaps the most powerful as it reminds us that all things are impermanent, that we only have this one life.

Do I make the most of all my skills?

Scan through your life and list all the skills you have to offer, the things you’ve learned throughout your life and check which of these you enjoy most, which of these you haven’t used and want to use more often, which skills have you neglected and want to bring back to life and build on?

Paying attention to our own true life lies at the heart of our happiness.

Wishing you courage to take the first step…

and if you need any help, perhaps you are interested in taking up a free 30 min life coaching taster session, just drop me a line karen@greenspacecoaching.com

Karen

happiness, life coaching outdoors, life coaching tips, making choices, personal development