There was a great headline in the Evening Standard a couple of weeks ago “101 things to do before we die, just one to go and we’re not even 30”.  It caught my eye – in the newspaper of the person sitting next to me on the tube and I was very happy that as she left, she left behind the newspaper so I could get a good read!    These two friends had made a list of challenges they promised to achieve over a lifetime.  And in the doing of them they got so inspired that they have done them all except one.  This list included joining football team, skydiving, going in a wind tunnel, training as a life guard, working on an organic bee farm, working on a conservation project, the list goes on and on.  One of the most intriguing ones was saying yes to everything for a month – I wonder how that worked out!   As of one of the girls said “there is nothing worse than regret, Sam and I swore we would make the most out of every minute of our lives.  Once we...

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I wrote on Facebook recently that when one door closes and another opens.  One of the comments was that not only was this true but many times the door that opens is, more often than not, a better door. This was certainly true for me a few weeks ago.  I live in Spain although the majority of my business is in the UK.   I run workshops, conduct Passion Test for Business Programs with individuals and companies and do quite a lot of networking in London.  To do this we have been hugely supported by a great friend who, for the past few years, has very generously opened the doors of his house to us whenever we needed to be in the UK.  Last week we heard that this was no longer possible and so it was time for us to say a huge thank you to our friend, and find a new London “home”.  My mind went into overdrive and I totally forgot that when one door closes another (often bigger and better) one opens.  I started to fret about how we were going to be able...

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For the last 20 years I have read many times that it is very important to have a vision for whatever you want in your life.  Perhaps you’ve heard the same – without vision there is no way you can work out your pathway to your destination.   Over the years I have worked with my clients on creating a personal vision – what they would like to have their life look and feel like when they have brought everything into balance.  It is always much easier to work out the steps you need to take, when you know where you are going.   There are many ways you can do this – at the end of the personal Passion Test we ask all our participants to create a vision board – pictures and sentences that represent their top five passions.  I have created a vision book, a similar idea as the vision board but something more portable.   Only last week when I was chatting to a friend about a new focus for my work she said  “take the morning off and do a new vision board for...

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I was coaching a Big Stretch recently up in the mountains of Spain.  This is a powerful week-long holiday/course in which we ask the participants to identify an area of their life where they want to stretch and take big steps forward.    As we all know stretching out of your comfort zone is scary.  And it should be!  Any goal that is only exciting is too small and we will grow out it far too quickly.  Any goal that is only scary is too big and we simply won’t go there.  So the right kind of goal is the one that is both scary and exciting!   So much for the theory, but what about the practise?  When you are sitting in front of a big stretchy goal often one of the challenges is “Can I trust myself to be able to handle this?  Will I be able to handle the challenges inherent in this, and succeed?”  We had just this question arise on the course.    Of course there are no guarantees that any decision we take will work ...

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I don’t now about you but life has become very busy since the beginning of this year.  It has felt like time has speeded up, rather whirlwind-like.  Many people I have spoken with recently have felt the same, some kind of shift happening, rather like the brakes being taken off. And that is all great!  However I also began to see in myself that I was wanting to short cut things to make up time and ‘get things done”.  Yep, that old potato, the “get things done”.  Now it is all well and good to get things done, but not if it is to the expense of other things like being really present in my work and not getting impatient. I also noticed that I was getting frustrated with the amount of time I needed to take on certain tasks on the computer.  Important tasks that will pay dividends in the future.  I caught myself resenting the time it took away from my “work”.  Whoa!  And that’s the catch.  What do you consider work and what is just ‘stuff ...

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Keep on Going. Ok, so we’ve all heard the phrase “when the going gets tough, the tough get going!” or maybe “when life gives you lemons make lemonade!”  Or even “don’t worry when the rug gets pulled from under your feet – learn to dance on a shifting carpet!”    What a collection of clichés! All of these sayings are kind of saying the same thing – keep on moving forward and let the challenges be the fuel for that movement.  Where are you in your life right now?  Are things moving as you want or maybe you getting disheartened, feeling everything is slowing down so much that maybe it feels like you are not moving at all?  I recently had a huge disappointment.  Something that I thought was going to be a large part of my work for at least the next ten years didn’t work out.  For a variety of reasons it wasn’t the ‘fit’ I thought I was.  For a few days I had a good old wallow in poor me until I realised that this was one of ‘those’ lem...

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“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.  Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.  Avoiding danger is not safer in the long run than exposure.” Helen Keller. I have always loved this quote, well to be honest I have always loved the first bit.  I have never seen the whole of it and when you do it makes it even more powerful.  It came to me at the end of my meditation and somehow resonated deeply.  What also resonated was it is my choice.  Am I going to continue to choose the daring adventure?  Are you? The past year has been a roller coaster year for many people and many have found it full of challenges. Maybe it is the same for you.  At those moments it is tempting to climb under the covers and feel a little ‘poor me’.  However not only is it the time to keep on going but it also a time to step back into the middle of the river rather than hang onto the sides.  To choose the daring...

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Don’t Believe All Your Thoughts! I have come to see over the years of supporting people create the life they want that one of the biggest obstacles to changing your life can be your thoughts. As soon as you decide on a change up surge all the limiting thoughts beliefs and decisions you have made about yourself, the world, the employment market, anything to do with your career, your relationships, what you can and can’t do, any limitation you can come up with.   A while ago one client I had said the most powerful thing she had learnt through coaching was not to believe her thoughts! I recently went on a nine-day retreat called The School of The Work with Byron Katie and it was all about questioning any thought that gave you stress.  It is a simple process and you can find out about it on her website. (www.thework.com)  It is basically four questions that ask you to question the validity of the thought, what believing the thought does to you and how it governs how ...

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Passion, The Signpost to a Fulfilled Life Passion is such a buzzword right now, so many times I have people come and say to me, if I only knew what my passion was I could change my life and be happy.  It is like they are some big secret, something that is hidden from them that if they could only see everything would be great. Having specifically worked with passions for a while now I have to reveal a secret – your passions are not something that are hidden away from you, something to be discovered that you haven’t previously allowed yourself to see.  One person I was talking with said that when she wrote down her passions nothing new came to mind.  How could it?  We can only be passionate about what we know, or we think we know, we want.  You can’t be passionate about something you don’t know.  But you can, and many people are, not be focused on your passions or even dismiss them because they are so obvious. When I work with clients who want to make cha...

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Passion is such a buzzword right now, so many times I have people come and say to me, if I only knew what my passion was I could change my life and be happy.  It is like they are some big secret, something that is hidden from them that if they could only see everything would be great. Having specifically worked with passions for a while now I have to reveal a secret – your passions are not something that are hidden away from you, something to be discovered that you haven’t previously allowed yourself to see.  One person I was talking with said that when she wrote down her passions nothing new came to mind.  How could it?  We can only be passionate about what we know, or we think we know, we want.  You can’t be passionate about something you don’t know.  But you can, and many people are, not be focused on your passions or even dismiss them because they are so obvious. When I work with clients who want to make changes in their life one of the first things ...

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