Tools, tips and education to help you live the life you choose

I spent some time today with a friend in Adelaide.  She owns a couple of what I would call a flash boutique shops.  Now I should explain that for me clothes shopping is not a favourite activity and most of my clothes do not cost in the triple figures, that is over $100.  Looking round my friends shop while she served customers I didn’t see anything in my price range, it was all triple figure stuff and some lovely items.

I looked at the clothes to see what made them worth so much more and as I say there were some clothes that you certainly wouldn’t see in K Mart or Target.  They were well made out of some gorgeous materials.  As I spent time there listening and watching I realised that this was only part of the story of where the value lies.

Relationships and the little things are what makes the difference.  Go to K Mart or Target and it is all self service and neither of these things.  Go to some of the other boutique chains and you will start to get some assistance, depending on the shop.  You may get help in choosing the clothes and advice on what goes with what etc.

Now in my friends shop she has taken it one step further.  Most of the customers that come in are repeat business.  She often knows their size and preference in clothes.  She rings them when certain clothes come in to let them know.  She knows her stock and knows what is coming in so she can advise them to come back in a few weeks if they are looking for something particular.  She understands which customers need the time to browse, which ones need constant attention and so on.  Being a customer in her shop is a whole experience, you are looked after and valued.  It is no wonder that so many of them have been shopping there for years and keep coming back.

I think every one of us can learn from this.  We all provide service in some way at some time, whether it is part of our work or part of our family life.  You can cook a quick meal and slap it down on the table in front of the rest of the family or you could put some effort into the meal, remembering who likes what etc.  You could then serve it with a smile.  It is only a little thing, again it is building your relationships. 

In business this is essential to try and build up your repeat customers.  It is Napolean Hill’s ninth Law of Success – The Habit Of Doing More Than Paid For.  So think about your life and whether you are doing the little things to build the relationships that are important to you.

Have you heard of BSO’s?  I am willing to bet that you have been distracted by them at some point in the past.  For me, being on the mailing lists of several Internet Marketers, not to mention the spam, there are dozens of potential ones each week.

OK, I’ll explain to those who don’t know what it stands for – Bright Shiny Objects.  Our attraction to them probably starts as a baby.  How easy is it to distract a baby or toddler from something they are doing if you have something that is literally bright and shiny?  They will immediately stop what they are doing and investigate the object you have.

As we get older we have the same habit, only the objects do not need to be literally bright and shiny.  Going back to the Internet Marketers or the spam emails I get stacks promising some bit of software or method that will make me money.  This is out of an email I received this morning:

Now I am not saying that the products that these words were advertising were not good products, the big questions is whether you really need them to get to where you want to go or are they a distraction.

 How many of you have downloaded an eBook and then never got round to reading it?  I am not sure of the statistics, I just know that is you answered yes to that question then you are not alone.  We were tidying out one of the kitchen gadget drawers tonight and I was reminded of BSO’s as we found several items that we had purchased at Shows.  You know the type of thing where they have someone demonstrating some wonderful gadget that you just can’t live without.  When you get it home you find that either it just never seems to work as well as it did for the demonstrator or that you do not actually really use it all that much.

 So my task for you this week is that if you know what your goals are or what you want out of life then check out how many BSO’s attract you this week and if you get as far as spending money or time on them.  The worst offenders of Bright Shiny Object Syndrome will never get anywhere as they are constantly going from one BSO to the next.

It was off to the snow for a day at the weekend.  I try to take the kids up once a year.  We generally find some snow and a slope near the road and spend a few hours having fun.  This year we had bought some snow sliders as they are called, basically a board with handles that they could sit on.  This is one step up from previous years when I have taken the boogey boards.  It is getting to the stage now where I am not guaranteed a go as for the first time this year Daughter took to going down by herself for part of the time.

On the way home I asked them what their favourite part of the trip was.  Daughter announced that it was eating snow!  We had been explaining on the way up that snow was like frozen water and you could eat it - so she did!  For Son it was throwing snowballs at Mum.  He was quite good at it too, there is nothing like getting a few bits of snow down your neck to remind you that you are alive.

We were discussing snowball fights yesterdays and how it is one of the few times in life that you can throw things at people without hurting them.  It is great fun and a great release of all sorts of energy as you run around throwing snow and getting hit.

In some ways it reminded me of anger work, except that this involved the release of different emotions.  Here we were having fun and releasing our stresses from the week.  In anger work you are releasing your anger.

In our society we are often taught to suppress anger or are unable to express it at the time or in the way we want to.  It is like having a bottle and each time you suppress your anger it goes into the bottle and you keep adding to it if it is not expressed.  Gradually it fills up to the top at which point you explode.  Have you ever noticed that you may seem to have a handle on things and be relatively calm and then suddenly something really small will set you off.  Or you may have found this with someone else, you make a small mistake and they go right off.  Basically their bottle has got to the top.

If you find this is familiar to you then doing anger work in some form will work for you.  This involves giving yourself some outlet for the anger before it gets to busting point.  For some a punching a bag works, for others it can be hitting cushions.  One of my favourites is what one of my fellow coaches does, she screams out loud while she is going along in the car.  For more guidance with this I would suggest working with a coach or someone who has experience in it.

His Mum continued her remarkable recovery going from strength to strength and was back in her own home by Tuesday, less than a week after being in hospital and intubated.

Now, when we visited her and at times in hospital when He was able to talk to her she agreed that it would be a good idea to seek accommodation in the local aged care facility.  When we were there visiting she talked about it and some of the advantages it would offer her, meals provided, her room cleaned and so on.  He insisted that once she was home she followed up with them to see what was available.

He got a phone call on Saturday to let him know that they had a one bedroom unit near the facility where she could live.  They could provide her meals and some assistance there although she wasn’t actually living in the facility and she could keep her dog.

Sounded ideal, however the conversation did not go along those lines.  She was not too excited by the idea and grumbled about various things.  In the end I think she will go.

Have you ever done the same sort of thing?  You talk about doing something, even organise it and then get cold feet.  It can be easy to distance yourself from things and not get involved emotionally until you suddenly realise that you are about to jump.  In His Mum’s case she can see the logic and the fact that she needs more care.  I reckon she has suddenly realised what it means to her to move from the house she has lived in for years and the emotions that brings up.  She is an animal lover and has had many pets over the years most of whom are buried in the garden.  Plus she may be feeling something about the fact that she will be more dependent.

As I say it is the same for many of us, you can sit down and plan out a logical path for some change in your life.  It could be something simple like going to the gym so you need to organise appropriate clothing, decide which gym and organise membership.  You might find it easy to organise the clothing and then find some resistance to picking up the phone to talk to different gyms.  Or you could have no problem doing these things it’s just when it comes to actually going to the gym that you find all sorts of excuses that stop you.

What is happening here?  As I said with His Mum it is going from head to heart.  The head can see the logic and it is all good until you get to a certain point, your jump point.  At this point the emotions, your heart, gets involved and logic can go out the window.

So what can you do?  That depends on how bad it is, sometimes you can get the head to rule again for long enough to get you to pick up the phone or do whatever it is to get you over that last hurdle.  You need to acknowledge your emotions and sit with them for a moment without judging them.  This may be enough to help you deal with them and move forward.  If you still find resistance that is stopping you then try things like breaking the task down, giving yourself a reward for doing it, talking to someone about it and enlisting their support.  There are also many blockage busting techniques that can help you with these sort of barriers that a good coach could help you with.  Whatever you find that works for you, understanding what is happening as you approach and finish line and that last hurdle will help.

Why would you get upset with someone you love who has survived after spending some days teetering between life and death?  Sounds hard to believe that you could feel like that, what is interesting is it has happened to both my Mum and Him and I reckon they were perfectly justified in feeling that way.

As mentioned in the last post we went on a big trip to visit His mother, Nana, as she is not in the greatest of health.  A few days after we returned we got the message that Nana was in hospital.  The next day we got the message she had declined, was intubated and air lifted out to Adelaide with a very poor prognosis.  He rushed over to Adelaide to be with her.

The next eight days were a roller coaster of emotions as there seemed to be signs of hope which were often dashed.  The doctors did not seem optimistic.  He was also suffering with a bit of the flu, not sleeping well and generally feeling the strain of it all.  In the end it got to the live or die bit where they were to pull her breathing tube out and it wasn’t going to be replaced. 

She lived, in fact, she thrived.  Within 24 hours she was sitting up and talking.  So why would he feel upset with her.  It was at this point that she noticed he was a bit sick and showed a total lack of understanding or empathy for the worry and what he had been through over the last ten days.

The story is the same for my Mum and what she went through with my Aunt, her sister.  She spent several days by her bed in Intensive Care and then my Aunt made a similar recovery and seemed to be revelling in all the attention and completely oblivious to the stress that Mum had been through.

In defence of Nana and Aunt they were out to it for most of the period prior to their recoveries so they hadn’t spent time worrying about whether they were going to live.  They may have been surprised that Mum and Him did not seem so completely overjoyed.  This comes down to having a bit of empathy, putting yourself in the shoes of the other person. 

Similarly in life you can find that someone you are dealing with does not react as you would expect.  Stop for a moment and think about what is going on for them, ask them about what they are feeling.  We can often get caught up in our view of the world and events and not realise that other people may be feeling differently for a variety of reasons as it was with my Aunt and Nana and Mum and Him.

I’ve recently come back from a 2500km trip to South Australia.  This included two days where we travelled 800km in the day.  I must congratulate Son and Daughter who were surprisingly good during those travel times.  Son, in particular, is not renowned for enjoying long trips in the car so it was lovely to survive those days with few fights.

One of the places we visited was Peterborough in South Australia.  His Mum lives there and is not in the best of health and can’t travel so we took the kids to her.  Peterborough has a population of around 2000 and in years gone by was a flourishing railway town.  Nowadays it is somewhat quieter and they are trying to build up the tourists coming to town with Steamtown (big train museum) as the centrepiece.

When we arrived at the caravan park we were staying at we were given a map and on the reverse it had ‘30 things to see and do in Peterborough’.  The idea of finding so many things to see and do in town sounded amazing, expecially to Him who had spent some years living there earlier in his life.  The list made great reading, they had actually put a little description next to stuff so instead of just listing the Motorcycle Museum they put ‘Be awestruck by the Motorbike Museum and the amazing antique collection’.  Using this type of approach they have included many things that you might not think of when compiling a list like this such as a pub crawl, having a BBQ or having a coffee.

What I am getting to here is the resourcefulness of the tourist information people at Peterborough.  It could be seen as a bit of a dead town with as many pubs as churches (or that was the way it seemed to me) filled with a large proportion of welfare recipients.  By taking another perspective of the town the tourist information people have managed to compile an impressive list of activities that you can do in town and present it in a way that appeals.

This is where the title of the post comes in, it is not a case of what resources you have, it is how resourceful you are.  Peterborough doesn’t have a huge number of spectacular attractions however it has been resourceful in pulling together a list of activities that you can undertake to appreciate their town.

Similarly in life we often decide that we can’t move ahead with something because we need to have x and y to do the job properly or get the best outcome.  Sometimes just changing your thinking and becoming resourceful to see what you can do to access those resources or get round your requirement for them can get you moving ahead again.  Have a think about it, are you waiting for best resources or are you being resourceful?

In my experience it seems that most kids seem to go through a phase of asking the ‘why’ questions when they are a few years old.  Every second time they open their mouth it is ‘why is this ….’.  Son is one of those kids where this hasn’t been a phase for him, it seems to be more a way of life, there is hardly a day goes by when at least one ‘why’ question isn’t asked.

What always gets me is the way their train of thought can flit from one subject to another.  At the weekend, at the end of dinner, I was cleaning up (He had cooked so it was my turn to clean up) while He, Son and Daughter were at the table talking.  All of a sudden Daughter pops the question ‘how do you make babies?’  He pauses for a moment then quickly handballs it to me – what a cop out!  I mumble something about a bit from a Mummy and a bit from a Daddy and that seems to satisfy a five year old’s curiousity.  Luckily Son doesn’t seem interested in the subject and wants to ask a question about something else so we get away with a simple answer.

As you grow up and go through life you can often stop asking questions and accept things as they are.  If you have lived in your home for a while take a look round, is everything in the most logical or effective place, does everything work well.  Chances are if you think about it you can find something that was put somewhere because it seemed like a good idea at the time, if you really stop and question it then you may find that it would work better moved to somewhere else.

Similarly in your thoughts and what you are doing in life, when was the last time you stopped and thought why am I doing the work I am doing, do I want to keep doing it for the rest of my working life or other similar questions?  We can easily get into patterns in our life and forget to take the time every now and again to question where we are in life and where we want to go.  So my challenge for you is to sit down and ask yourself some questions, it could be big life changing type questions or it could be little ones like why do I eat a certain thing for lunch?  Have fun and see what you come up with.  Don’t forget to keep doing it as you go through life.

This may seem like a strange question to some, however it is inspired by a couple of conversations with coaching clients this week.  Much is written about how to set your goals, I wrote a post some time ago about that subject, click here to check it out.

The question I was asked this week was how do I know what my goals are, how do I find my goals?  Another client was talking about feeling stuck and when we talked more it became clear that her goals or what she wanted weren’t clear.

It is a good point and got me thinking.  When you think about setting your goals you can get the impression that everyone knows what they want and then just has  to write it down.  For many people they haven’t actually got to that point, they haven’t go a clear picture of what they want.

I was contemplating this earlier this morning as I was walking Dog.  It was a cool, very foggy morning and pre-dawn so a little on the dark side.  As we meandered through the bush it gradually became lighter and easier to see the ghostly shapes of the trees and bird song pierced the pre dawn silence.  I realised that the morning heard some similarity to sorting out your goals.  It all starts with a thought, a single idea that you then latch on to.  As you focus on the thought you gradually start to see your path to achieve that thought, the fog clears.

So getting down to straight talk, instead of foggy mornings, you need to let your mind wander and think what you want in life, you could focus on different areas of your life – health, finances or spiritual.  Alternatively think about what your ideal life or day would be, what time would you get up, where would you be living, would you go out to work, do something from home and so on.

As you let your mind go over these sort of things you can start to come up with ideas, it could be to live in the country, grow fresh vegetables, start a new career.  Try not to immediately dismiss them as too hard or expensive or whatever other excuses may come to mind.  Work out what you can connect to as something you want to work towards.  When I say connect to I mean something that feels right to you, not just something that makes sense logically.

Think back to some of the changes in your life like moving house, having kids, changing jobs or careers.  These could have meant a major change in your life.  How did you start on the change?  Something triggered a thought in your mind, it could have been seeing a baby, hearing about a job being offered, it suddenly made you think that was something you wanted and off you went to achieve that, whether you realised it or not it became a goal for you.

So if you are having difficulty sorting out what your goals are, check your thoughts.

I came home late the other night and went in to say goodnight to Son and Daughter.  They were fast asleep so I was just going to tell them I loved them and give them a gentle kiss.  This worked fine with Son, he didn’t move.  Unfortunately with daughter she suddenly sat bolt upright and I was kicking myself thinking that I’d done it now, I’d be spending the next half hour getting her back to sleep.  I was wrong, she gave me a quick cuddle and lay down again.  As she put her head down on the pillow she asked this question “Is it true that when you grow up, you get old?”  I muttered some reply and left the room.

As I wandered back through the house I thought about this question and how profound it was.  On the surface there is the physical side that as you grow up your body gets older.  Then I began to think of the mental side and all the sayings like young at heart, spring chicken and so on.  When you think about it these tend to infer that keeping a youthful mental attitude keeps you young.

Building on this the next day I did a half day course called The Art Of Fun.  This involved being in groups and doing various fun activities, some competitively and others just for fun.  It was really interesting to feel the energy as everyone enjoyed some different activities and laughter.  It brought home the difference it can make if you are doing something you enjoy and are taking time out to have a laugh.

I thought back to daughters question and how often growing up is not only associated with the physical side of thing but also with the mental.  It is a case of growing up and taking responsibility, being serious, having a career, a partner and a family.  There is pressure to conform and have or do many of these things and they can lead to stress, health issues and so on.  When adults act with frivolity or seem to be coasting through life without real purpose they are often told to grow up and sort their life out.

It is interesting when we look at people who are older in years and see them displaying youthful qualities or a sense of fun that we pass comments such as young at heart.  It is often such people who can be in good health and live a long and happy life.

I think Daughter could be onto something with her question, when we do grow up in our attitude to life we can grow old.  Without balance we can lose that youthful joy in the simple pleasures in life and become stressed by everyday pressures.  Take a moment to stop and think about how old you are and how old you feel – old beyond your years or do you still have that youthful glint about you?  Take time this week to do some fun stuff, something that isn’t ‘grown up’ .

It was off to more training this past weekend, a 3 day boot camp.  One of the things we were looking at in this boot camp was the effect of your birth on the person you become.  Now I have to admit I was a little skeptical at the start, after all we are all born, does it really effect us whether we had a natural birth or someone assisted us with forceps or if it was a total trauma?  I was open to seeing what others felt.

After the weekend I am now convinced that there is something to the concept, that your birth experience can indeed influence some of your habits and psyche.  Before you start worrying because you may have had a bad birthing experience the effects don’t have to scar you for life.

One of the exercises we did was to get into groups according to births, so we had those whose parents wanted a child of the opposite sex, Caesar births, long labours, forcep births and so on.  Each group looked at a list of characteristics for people with their type of birth.  It was really interesting that for most people in those groups they could relate to several things on the list and felt that the list for their type of birth was more accurate than any of the others.  Not exactly definitive research, but certainly indicated some basis to the idea.

Obviously as you go through life you are exposed to a whole lot of other experiences which for you may build on your birth experience or turn some of the beliefs you got from it on their head.  Part of the process is realising your patterns and understanding where they come from.  You can be more aware of what you are doing and why and can make a more conscious choice of whether you want to continue that pattern.

For example you might have a pattern of not speaking up in public.  Think back about the pattern where it came from, why you do it.  Maybe you spoke up and were ridiculed at some point or your answer was wrong so you might have a fear of being wrong or failure.  It could be that you feel you are not good enough and are not worthy of contributing to the discussion.  When you think about your patterns you will know what feels right for you as to the why.  As I say in general you can’t just stop the pattern like flicking a switch, however being aware of it and why you are doing it can help you make a choice next time you become aware of what you are doing.

So spend some time sitting and thinking about your patterns and why you keep them.  If you are interested in the effect of births on your life, Google it and check out the research or contact me and I’ll send you some links and stuff.