Some days I just plunge in and get going but other times I am a bit more reflective. On the days I am feeling reflective this is what I do:

First, I’ll cast my thoughts back over the previous week (see this post) and really give time to thinking about what worked for me. You may find yourself dwelling on what didn’t work but try very hard NOT to go there. It isn’t particularly helpful and will dampen your mood.

Three Things

Then I’ll make a quick list of three things I want to happen in the forthcoming week. I don’t necessarily mean tangible things like a ‘to do list’, although sometimes they feature. Often it’s to do with how I want to feel. And I remind myself that how I feel, how I manage my feelings about what happens is in my gift. Our thoughts are hugely powerful and choosing how we think about things can make us feel very powerful too.

And writing it down helps reinforce the intention to achieve those things. Just a few minutes of your time but it could have a powerful impact on the rest of your week and cure those Monday Morning blues!

How do you start your working week?

PS If Mondays really are a bad day for you then you are getting a powerful message about how you’re spending a lot of your life! Even in a recession it is possible to make changes, with care! It’s a common issue when coaching, women don’t like what they do but feel ‘frightened’ to change, or often don’t know what they want to do instead. If that sounds like you I wrote my book with you in mind! It’s a work book designed to help you get ‘unstuck’ and begin to make positive change in your life. You can read more about it here, and don’t forget the free audio download link on the same page! You can download it immediately and get started straight away!

Photo credit: Rose Ann

And one thing I particularly like is the way it has fused old and new. It’s had a brand new modern extension (tastefully not affecting the front elevation – from the front it looks as it ever was) which has enhanced it greatly. Of course, lots of people were anti the change but it’s been well done; it adds to the grandeur of the building, bringing it alive in the 21st century and of relevance to today. And of course, it’s useful! That’s a result in my book. Beauty and usefulness.

What’s Beautiful and Useful in Your Life?

Holding onto the past is not all bad. In fact, it can be positively life enhancing. If we hold onto the good and beautiful. Sometimes though we can get a bit stuck into holding onto all that is not so great about our pasts and allow it to define us.  For example, if you had a difficult schooling you may well allow that to influence all your attitudes towards learning and reject new ideas; new ideas which might add to the beauty and usefulness of your life.

Or a relationship which didn’t work may colour all future relationships you have because of  suspicion and cynicism. Or past mistakes in your current relationships may be an ever present malign influence if you can’t let them go.

Review Your Past

Take time out to think about the aspects of your past which enhance you, which ‘feel‘ right. That’s what you want to keep.  It makes you beautiful. However, some aspects may need to go into cold storage, and some will need to be jettisoned to make room for something new, to allow you to add something modern and beautiful and useful to you!

Here’s a quick personal development exercise to try! It’ll help you shape a beautiful and useful future!

Do you ever get in your car, drive, and arrive at your destination (usually somewhere you go regularly like work) and not remember much about how you got there?

You’ve arrived and it’s taken you the same amount of time that it usually does but you were unaware of the journey. It passed in a haze. Maybe you were thinking about the day ahead, or the day just gone. Maybe you were fantasising about a dream life post huge lottery win!

We all do it and it can be a bit scary. What have we missed on the way?

Change Your Life

The reason we drive to work and have no memory of it is that our brains have developed that pathway; it’s a groove we easily slide into. So much so that if our holiday route begins with our work route we may find ourselves halfway to work before we realise. We’ve gone into auto pilot. We need that facility or we’d go mad (imagine having to remind yourself how to do every single thing you know. You’d go bonkers!) but if we live too much in the groove we miss out on so much of the possibilities of our lives.

The good news is it doesn’t have to be like that. Whatever age you are it’s never too late to start to live consciously, to make the most of your life. It’s only too late if you never start!

Change and Grow

So how to change your life? Well, for one thing you could investigate new routes to work and vary it now and again. You’ll notice so much more and quite possibly drive better too! And open up a new pathway in your brain!

And you can investigate new routes in your life too. The more you give yourself new challenges, stray from automatic pilot, the more life opens up its possibilities to you and the more rich your experience of life can be. Sometimes that means having a destination or a goal, sometimes that means maybe taking a risk and following your instincts.  The point is that whatever you are doing you are fully experiencing your life and not cruising through your precious life on auto pilot.

So, what could you change today to make your life great?

P.S Ten Tips for a Brain Work Out will help kick start your thinking!

Photo Credit- Niels Jansen

But in 2009 researchers at Ohio Sate University discovered that our posture, as well as sending a message about our confidence levels to other people, can send one to us! 

University Study

The study included 71 students at Ohio State.  Participants were told they would be taking part in two separate studies at the same time, one organized by the business school and one by the arts school.

They were told the arts study was examining factors contributing to people’s acting abilities, in this case, the ability to maintain a specific posture while engaging in other activities.  They were seated at a P.C. and instructed to either sit up straight and push out their chest or sit slouched forward with their face looking at their knees.

Then the students participated in the business study, which supposedly investigated factors contributing to job satisfaction and professional performance.

Positive Traits

While holding their posture, students listed either three positive or three negative personal traits relating to future professional performance on the job. Once they’d done this, the students took a survey in which they rated themselves on how well they would do as a future professional employee. 

The results were amazing. The posture of the students had a very significant effect on the answers they gave. 

Stay Upright and Be Positive!

Students who held the upright, confident posture were much more likely to rate themselves in line with the positive or negative traits they wrote down. In other words, if they wrote positive traits about themselves, they rated themselves more highly, and if they wrote negative traits about themselves, they rated themselves lower.

Slouch Down and Be Negative!

However, students who assumed the slumped over, less confident posture, didn’t seem convinced by their own thoughts – their ratings didn’t differ much regardless of whether they wrote positive or negative things about themselves.  

Act ‘As If’

The message seems clear (at least if it is if research with students translates to the rest of us). Acting ‘as if’, i.e. sitting tall and confidently, actually can increase your positivity and along with that your confidence in your own abilities!

What’s your favourite confidence booster?

Three coaching questions for you:-

• How do you feel at this point in time? Are any feelings of concern or anxiety based on the actual facts of your life, or what you think might happen?

• Is it within your power to do anything about the situation at the moment, at this point in time? If so, start planning to do it. If not, why are you advance worrying?

• What is the worst thing that you think might happen? And the best…?

In the previous post I described how we edit our own lives. Sometimes, without us being conscious of it we have given negative events a much bigger role in our past than they deserve; we have allowed them to become powerful influencers of our current lives.

Try This

This is an exercise I have used when coaching with all age groups, initially with young children who had been part of the care system, but I have found it’s just as helpful for adults.

Take a large sheet of paper and some pens. Start with your earliest memory and draw a box for every significant event in your life. Write the event in the box.

Your Memories

For example, I have a very vivid memory of my brother being born at home (well, it was January and a neighbour sent me to play in the garden – I was cold!) It was a significant life event because I stopped being an only child at age 4 and a half.

Other examples of significant events in my life include leaving home to go to University, my first plane trip to the US, my first experience of loss. The older you are the longer your list will be!

At this stage don’t worry about whether events are good or bad, just collect them. You may have several on the page and need more paper. Keep them in date order but wind about the page at will. It will take you some time.

Some years you may have several boxes of significance, and some will be relatively incident free.

After you’ve done this part of the exercise leave it for a while, hours or days; go off and do something else. When you return to it, look at it again with fresh eyes and check you’ve not left anything out.

Pause a While

Now you have your life in front of you, or specifically your memory of your life. These are some of the building blocks of your life (some you won’t have remembered.)

Using the data you have collected try writing down a few paragraphs about yourself for use in the following circumstances. In all cases you must focus only on the positives.

Three Scenarios

1) You are at a networking event and meet someone who you think could become a really good friend. They are bright and bubbly, and in the course of conversation they ask you to tell them about yourself, your life. You say…..

2) You have been for an interview for a senior post and are at the ‘trial by sherry’ stage. A senior member of the board says you seem to be really strong personality (which is what they are looking for). She asks you where your resolve to succeed came from. You say….

3) You meet an old friend you haven’t seen for over ten years. They ask you what you’ve been up to for last ten years. Remembering you are focussing only on positives, you say….

This exercise is not about  putting on a false face, a mask, but being conscious of the image you choose to present to the world. We all edit our past- just make sure your good bits haven’t ended up on the cutting room floor!

You can tell your story in so many different ways. How you choose to tell it affects how you live your life.

Past Lives

All of us have had sad and difficult times in our lives. All of us have done things we wish we hadn’t. If we fill up our story with these episodes we feel hopeless, buffeted by life’s events, at the mercy of others. And that’s the face we show to the world.

Believing that bad things happen to us tends to become a self fulfilling prophesy. We fail to spot the good things in our lives and take the opportunities that arise.

Happy Endings

However, if you focus on the good that has happened in your life, the story looks very different, and can have a very different ending! It’s not simply a question of adding up the number on each side, because the value of each event is different. And unique to you.

In my next post I’ll give you an exercise to help you look at your story in a positive light. Meanwhile reflect on how you describe the story of your life so far! A sad soap or a feel good film!

I recently read of a study showing how having a positive outlook doesn’t just give you a short term boost but that it can also affect your future happiness. The research was undertaken by the University of California, where psychologists studied photos of 112 women taken for their year books in 1958. Using a process which noted the degree of muscle contractions in their faces they were able to gauge the levels of positive emotion displayed (i.e. how happy they seemed).

They then followed them up more than three decades later. They found that those who had photos showing genuine, happy smiles had become more organised, were higher achievers, and had the most positive attitudes towards marriage and personal well being and generally felt happier about their lives. That will make me think next time I’m posing for a photo…