More Fun to Life

Do you ever wake up in the morning and think “There must be more to life than this”? Back in the 90’s, I woke up almost every day with that thought. I wondered if this was ‘it’, if this was how life was going to work out – a seemingly endless slog of get up, go to work, come home, go to bed, at the weekend dance all night and sleep all day, seeing daylight only briefly and through bleary eyes. The hamster wheel had me and I was slowly drowning in a life that felt increasingly ‘too tight’. I desperately wanted life to be different, but I didn’t ‘do’ anything differently, I just carried on doing the same and complaining about it.

Until eventually I did something very different and went off travelling around Australia with a backpack and no plan. That was the start of ‘the change’. Since then my life has changed and I have changed in ways that make me almost unrecognisable from that unhappy lass 10+ years ago. But still, sometimes I wonder if there is more to life. Usually when I am busy focusing on the fact that I am not Mistress of the Universe (still working on it!), I am not living in a million pound mansion overlooking the ocean (yet) and I am not with the man of my dreams (haven’t met him yet).

When we’re busy focusing on what is NOT in our life, our attention is taken away from the wonderful things that are here now. Not material possessions or even people, but our own internal brilliance. Our ability to be fascinated by life, to find joy in the smallest of things, to dream of better and to TAKE ACTION towards that ‘better’. When we’re too busy focusing on how much life sucks, we’re wasting time that could be spent improving said life. I’d been in quite a funk for a few days, but one conversation with a friend which was filled with laughter and suddenly I saw the light!

It’s not about having everything in your life arranged perfectly, being Mistress of the Universe with the perfect house and perfect man. When that’s what you’re focusing on, there IS MUCH more to life! Because those things are fun, and nice, but they’re really quite irrelevant! What is important? Your energy, your connection to life, your joy, your love, your peace, your laughter. That inner well of magnificence and brilliance that no amount of shit in your life can completely bury. Your spirit, your soul, your light.

Because we can’t buy them or count them, we relegate their importance below a flat screen tv. And that’s the mistake. Because they are the ‘more to life’ you’re looking for. It’s only when we’re not enjoying life that we think ‘there must be more’ (let me know if you ever thought there was more to life while you were having a great time!) And most of the time, that desire for more takes us on a search for ’something else’ – a new job/relationship/pair of shoes/holiday/challenge. There’s nothing wrong with this as such. It’s just that there’s an easier, quicker, funner* way. Start enjoying your life right now – warts and all. Your light, laughter and love will draw you towards changes that no amount of negativity will ever reveal. And even if no changes come, there’ll be more FUN to your life!

Something to Play With

If you’re wondering if there’s more to life than ‘this’, find a way to get enjoying your life – do things you love, spend time with people who make you laugh, listen to your soul sing and dance to the tune. Leave me a comment and let me know what you’re going to be doing to bring more fun to your life.

Love, life and laughter

Donna.x
*Dear dictionary, funner is a word. Honest.
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Conscious Joyfulness

Well, the office revamp is still going on – today we put together a new wardrobe, which was going to finish off the revamp, give me some storage in there, and turn my office into a little dance studio too cos the doors are mirrored (I’m not a prima ballerina, I just always wanted a dance studio!). Anyway, the mirrored doors are the reason the office revamp is still in progress – 2 of them are broken. Sigh. Still, one was fine and Ikea were lovely and immediately agreed to replace them. So, next week I should have my new office completed! I hope. Meanwhile, I was talking to a client today and we were talking about Joy and being Joyful, which reminded me of this article: enJOY!

- Conscious Joyfulness -

The dictionary definition of joy is ‘a deep feeling or condition of happiness or contentment’. Sounds wonderful – I’ll have some of that! So, how often do you feel joyous? All day every day? Once a day? Once a week? Every now and again? I have a vague suspicion (I could be wrong) that it isn’t that often.

After all, we’re not programmed for joy are we? We’re programmed to be stressed, exhausted, busy and tense. So, we walk round scowling rather than smiling, we worry rather than getting excited, we are more serious than frivolous. Hmm. Which state would be more fun? Which state would be easier? Which state do we work on?

Interesting eh?! We’d enjoy life so much more if we worked on the state of joy, but most of us instead work on the state of stress! You may be frowning at me right now – why would you work on being stressed?! Make no mistake about it…every time you spend time on worry, anger, criticism, negative thoughts and actions you are working on your stress.

Perhaps not consciously, because if you were conscious of ‘working on your stress’, you would stop it. Here’s what we do: something upsets us or stresses us out. Then we worry at it like a dog with a bone. Then we talk about it with our friends, and every time we repeat the story (depending on the level of stress/worry/pain, anywhere between 5 times and 200 times) we relive the pain/stress/worry and charge it with a tremendous amount of energy and exercising our stress muscles so they get big and strong.

When I started thinking about this article, I realised that I too do not feel joyous 24/7, and I started looking for specific examples of things that brought me joy in the last week. A smiley moon, sunshine and starlight, catching up with friends, hearing about achievements and good stuff happening for people, connecting to a higher power, music, dancing, laughter, a good book, a new idea, a hot bubbly bath and a magazine, random acts of kindness, love, spending time with my family…the list goes on and on.

And do you know what I found very curious? I had barely noticed these fabulous things – I was far too busy worrying about something else altogether! Now, I’m going to spend more time working on joy, rather than stress. What about you?

- Something to Play With -

Spend 3-5 minutes brainstorming the things that make you joyful. Then decide to live a joyous life and consciously bring more joy into your life. For example, plan one joyous activity a day for the next week, and see what a difference it makes to your outlook. Want to share your thoughts on this article? Leave me a comment below.

Love

Donna.x

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Emptying Every Spare Minute

Dear reader, I hope your week is going exactly to plan. Mine is not. I had a lovely day out to visit my friend, came home intending to check my e-mail, write a blog, relax and instead discovered that the carpet in my office needed to come up. Some new flooring is going in on Saturday, and the concrete underneath the old carpet is wet. I thought it was just a little corner, it was actually three quarters of the room! So my lovely plan to relax and chill out turned into a mad few hours moving furniture around to get the carpet up and moving boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff out to the garage to leave as much of the floor exposed as possible so it will dry.

Big, deep sigh. It also means that my plans for tomorrow (in a relaxed way catch up with admin, marketing and writing tasks) have been replaced by ‘box everything else to get it out of there’. In the meantime, my office is a building site. So in true ‘beach’ style, I will be trimming other tasks to make way for this to happen, not frantically trying to pack everything in and collapsing exhausted at the end. Which reminded me of this mini article that I thought you might enjoy.

- Emptying Every Spare Minute -

I was thinking last week about what stresses me out, and noticed that about 99% of the problem was my insistence on filling every spare moment with ’something to do’. Got 15 minutes before a client? I’ll just go and write my blog. 10 minutes to spare? A quick tidy up. 5 minutes to spare? Check my e-mails. 1 minute to spare? Read half a sentence of this book…

No wonder I get stressed! And no wonder I often run late and work late. I have no time to myself to just chill, to reset, to plan. I cannot proceed from task to task in a nice relaxed manner because I have ‘mustbedoingsomething-itis’. Is this busy-holia making me more productive? More efficient? More at ease? Nope. Instead I am wild-eyed and fraught.

I have a client call in 15 minutes – if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to use that 15 minutes to do nothing.

- Something to Play With -

My articles are usually longer, so take the time you would have taken and just do nothing for a couple more minutes. You can pretend to be reading if it makes you feel better. And all this week, notice if you are ‘filling time’ and experiment with emptying it instead. Want to share your thoughts on this article? Leave me a comment below.

Love

Donna.x

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The Best For You

This week’s OnTheBeach Article – to receive it every Wednesday, sign up here.

Something I come across often in clients is that we expect the best from ourselves, but rarely give ourselves the best. There is some kind of paradox that says we should be superwoman …yet we don’t deserve to be given the very best – by others or by ourselves.

I’d say that we treat our cars better than we treat ourselves. We will service and MOT our cars regularly, but how often do we do the same for ourselves? We make sure the car has enough fuel for the journey, but often do we run on empty? Ok, we ‘have to’ with the car or it’ll break down…but don’t you think the same might happen to you?

I am all for people wanting the best from themselves. What I don’t understand is why these same people don’t want the best for themselves. Ask yourself right now – do you deserve the very best? And if the answer is not a resounding yes, why not?

Let me just be clear here, I am not talking about decking yourself out with Prada, Cartier and Versace. I am talking about giving yourself the best care and attention you can give. Good food, good rest, kindness, support, mental, emotional and physical fitness, having the best team around you.

Being the best you can be requires you to have 100% self worth – believing that you deserve to have the very best too. Picture it – you have someone with enormous potential (You), and you give that person the best fuel, rest and encouragement you can. Wow. Imagine how far that person (You) can go!

Alternatively, you can use the current model of motivation favoured by many in society by pushing this person hard, giving them no rest, poor quality food and poison for fuel, whipping them and demanding the best from them without giving anything in return. Sheesh, sounds like the workhouse to me.

If you really want the best from yourself, determine right now to get the best for yourself, and see how much difference it makes to feel supported by, valued by, and special to yourself.

- Something to Play With -

If you deserved the very best, what might be different in your life right now? What can you do this week to give yourself the best for you? Want to share your thoughts on this article? Leave me a comment below.

Love

Donna.x

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Wearing Your Stress as a Badge of Honour

I was speaking with a client this week about her work ethic and how this affected her stress levels. She told me that she wears her stress ‘like a badge of honour’. She is proud of how much stress she can take. She is rewarded for taking on more projects than one person can reasonably handle, and her friends admire her for being able to handle her stress.

Sounds great, right? There is only one minor problem – she hates the pressure and it is making her ill. Ah. Suddenly it’s not so great being superwoman – the expectations people have of her (including her own) are too high, and too demanding. Fortunately she is coming to realise that this is not the way it has to be. I know she’s not alone in this. I did something similar in a previous life – taking on too much and feeling important because I had so much ‘on’.

Do you ever feel the same? It’s a sad situation when people are rewarded for how quickly they can grind themselves into the ground, how busy they are, and how little they are enjoying their life. In these days of being able to ‘have it all’ it seems that we prefer the fiction that an overfull life is great over the fact that an overfull life makes you ill.

In case you’re unsure, let me make my position on this perfectly clear – stress is not something to be proud of. I do not admire stressed people. I admire happy, balanced, successful people. Success is not (to me) working an 80 hour week, and being available by mobile phone at 4am on your holiday. Success is not running from social engagement to social engagement being unable to enjoy any of them because you are too tired and too busy thinking about everything you have to do.

I would much rather say ‘I am loving life’ this year than ‘I had a nervous breakdown’. Wearing your stress like a badge of honour is dangerous to your health. Because of the harmful effects of stress, companies are required by law to provide reasonable stress management measures for their staff. Personally, I think individuals need to provide reasonable de-stressing measures for themselves. And the first one to adopt is to treat stress appropriately.

Think about your relationship with stress – is it healthy? Do you use your stress to get you out of the way of a speeding bullet or as a signal that something needs to change. Or do you wear your stress like a badge of honour? How about a different badge of honour – be proud of how relaxed you are! Or is that too radical for the noughties?

- Something to Play With -

Treat stress as a warning sign that your life needs to change. Ask yourself (if you’re stressed) how you can simplify, what you can do to take extremely good care of yourself (make sure you have my free ebook for self care ideas), what you can do to relax and ENJOY your life to the full rather than fill your life to the brim and miss out on any fun! Want to share your thoughts on this article? Please leave a comment.

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Beach Speed

On my weekly newsletter this week: I am…mellow. Surprisingly mellow. Annoyingly mellow! I have 1001 things to see, people to go, places to do. And there I am, sitting in the sun lounger for half the week watching starlings fly across a picture perfect blue sky. Mellowed out. Not ‘getting on with stuff’. I’ve come to understand (partly because of my health) that trying to flow when the energy is ebbing is a waste of time and totally counter productive. Still, sitting still doesn’t come that easy and I fought it for a while before realising that I quite enjoy sitting still and just enjoying the moment.

So instead of trying to rush about to write something new, I decided to recycle an article from 2006 about the pace of life…which seems appropriate for me. And perhaps for you? Let me know – leave a comment on my Facebook page or simply reply to this mail.

- Beach Speed -

Because it’s been a busy week, I’ve been rushing hither and thither at a frantic pace, leaving a trail of unfinished tasks in my wake. By Thursday, my office looked like a bombsite and I couldn’t find a thing! So, I decided to just slow down, finish what I could finish, tidy up, breathe, and stop pretending to be ‘Mr Rush’.

You may have heard of the ’slow movement’ – a movement which reacts against the fast food, fast living, now now NOW culture we live in. They have a point. Some things can only be enjoyed if you do them slowly. Long, leisurely lunch anyone? It’s one of the reasons we relax so much on holiday – there’s no time pressure.

You can get up when you like, eat when you like, do what you like. On the other hand, take a typical day in the ‘normal’ life for you. Everything is done at high speed because you need to be somewhere, have deadlines to meet, have a million and one things to do. And even social events are crammed in to a busy day.

My best friend and I went for ‘food and a film’ a few weeks ago. She was working til 6, then doing chores until she came to get me. I was working til 8, then frantically showering and changing to be ready in time. The first hour of our evening was spent discussing how tired we were and what a chaotic day it had been.

By the time we had both relaxed and started to enjoy ourselves, it was time to rush off to see the film, no time for digesting our food! Ridiculous. Had we just had the meal and then sat chatting, it would have been a lovely evening. As it was, we both sat through the film day-dreaming of sleep! And this is not an isolated incident – it happens to all of us, all the time.

Ironically, when you do slow down, you are actually able to accomplish more. From Thursday onwards, I decided to leave myself enough time to do what I had to, and leave anything that could wait. (and tidy up as I went along!) As a result, my stress levels shot down, I enjoyed what I was doing, and I got more done than I expected to.

I have deliberately used these two examples to show that ‘going slow’ works for business and pleasure. Try it…slow down the pace of your life just a little. Or go for the full experience and go down to beach speed! Now, about that long, leisurely lunch?

- Something to Play With -

Your mission this week is to play with this idea of ‘living slow’. Take a long, leisurely lunch. Sit and watch the world go by. Ditch half your ‘to do’ list in favour of playing with your friends, family or self! Change down to beach speed, and let me know how you get on! Leave me a comment.

And if you’d like to sign up to get the weekly newsletter, click here.

Love

Donna.x

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Drop The Pressure

Do you ever find yourself getting incredibly grouchy? Irritable? Impatient? Even evil? A short fuse is a key indicator of stress, but we often blame the weather, tiredness, PMT, and sometimes miss the fact that actually, we are under a lot of pressure. All too often, this pressure is entirely self-inflicted – the only person expecting the moon on a stick from you, is you!

For example, my friend has been to the doctors to ask for help for her PMT before she kills someone. The doctor prescribed…relieving some pressure. My friend is putting an incredible amount of pressure on herself to be perfect…and the pressure is telling. Imagine an old steam kettle – once the steam builds up, the kettle starts shrieking! She’s not alone in not realising that she is putting herself under a lot of strain.

Only a few weeks ago I was getting myself into a terrible tizz – I have a lot on my to do list for my business – there are all sorts of plates spinning, projects in progress and directions in which to go. And of course, if I were Captain Perfect, I’d be progressing every project daily. No one else is asking me to do so. It’s all me. I thought that I was superhuman. I was wrong. Sigh. No special powers or anything. Dammit.

Once I realised that actually, I am making progress, I could relax and continue on without the lead weight I had put on myself. What about you? Where are you putting yourself under pressure? It could be with your appearance, your career, your finances, your relationships, your health. Check in with your life. Where are you feeling the pressure to be thinner, richer, more successful, more popular, healthier, busier, more perfect?

Whose expectations are you trying to live up to? Are you adding pressure to yourself? Imagine if you cut yourself a break…how much easier would that be? And there is a possibility that when you relax your iron grip on the situation, achieving what you want will become easier…

Love

Donna.x

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Scan And Release

Sounds like an IT process doesn’t it? But this is not about technology, it’s about your body. I sat down this morning to watch a bit of the tennis and realised that my shoulders were quite tense (and I wasn’t that bothered about the outcome of the game!). Scanning my body, I realised that I was also holding tension in my feet (wierdly!) and in my jaw!

What about you? Scan your body now – where is the tension? Now release it. Aaaaah, that’s better. Repeat often – we hold a lot of tension out of stress, habit, pain and fear…but then when the stress, pain or fear have gone we keep tension out of habit. So make a new habit and let it go!

Love

Donna.x

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Staying Out of The Drama

There are hundreds of little things that happen every day that can pull us into a drama, from thoughtless drivers to stolen purses, from being rained on to disputes with your service providers. We are so used to participating in the little dramas of our lives that we don’t even question that we’ve spent 10 hours moaning to friends about this company or that person. In many cases, most people would agree that we have cause to be livid.

But here’s the interesting thing: getting pulled into the drama is never helpful. And it often makes a situation 10 times worse before it gets better. This morning I had a situation that for an hour, pulled me into the drama. I stressed, I told a friend the whole convoluted story, I worried and I was ‘in the drama’. Then I realised that I was busy ruining my day over something that is an irritation, but nothing more.

I set my intention around this (that it will be sorted out to the satisfaction of all involved), felt gratitude that it is sorted, and let it go. I don’t know how it will be sorted, but I know it will be sorted. And in the meantime, I’m not going to worry. In fact, to distract myself from feeling bad, I went on Youtube and found some more Top Gear clips (including a really random one on caravan conkers that I never saw before!)

There is absolutely no benefit in being pulled into the drama of life. No benefit at all. Not only does it not help to change a situation for the better (of course, more drama can make it worse!), but it also ruins your day. Try this the next time you notice you are ‘in the drama’: state how you want this situation to work out (always being open to a better solution!), be grateful that it’s sorted (even if you can’t see how), let it go and go enjoy your life DESPITE whatever is going ‘wrong’.

None of these petty annoyances that you won’t care about in a years’ time are worth even a moment of stress, sadness, or anger on your part.

Love

Donna.x

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Playing the Game

The Game of Life.

How are you playing? Are you fighting over ever throw of the dice, taking it all personally, giving up after a few throws, deciding that you will never win so why play, getting pissed off with other players for getting the wins that you wanted, sulking, taking it very seriously or being enormously competitive?

In other words, are you forgetting that it’s a game? Life (in my humble opinion) is FUN! We get to do some really cool stuff on this planet – dancing, laughing, horizontal exercise , bouncing, loving, being with friends, watching crap tv, seeing the sunrise and set, watching the seasons turn and the kids grow.

When you remember that its a game to be played and enjoyed, you can change your experience of it. Instead of it being hard and stressful, it becomes easy and fun…and you get to learn to play better rather than making the same mistakes over again. And the best thing about this game? There are no losers. You can only win the game of life.

Love

Donna.x

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