Tag Archives: Dreams

Love what you do

love what you doWhen you love what you do and are engaged in the activity, hormones such as Dopamine, Serotonin and Oxytocin (happy hormones) are released and stress is reduced.

As stress is reduced, wellbeing is increased. When you love what you do, you may discover or rediscover something that  you yearned to do as a child but put aside due to societal or cultural expectations.

What dreams did you put aside?

Pursuing what you love to do will bring you  a great sense of satisfaction and completion. The joy in creating has immense benefits. It could be cooking, woodwork, pottery or another craft.  Not only crafts but writing or art can bring great joy to both creator and observer.  Have you noticed that when someone is engaged in their passion, their inner energy is apparent and they radiate that out to those around them?

If you need help in rediscovering your dreams let’s have a chat.

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Dream Stealers

“All our dreams can come true,

if we have the courage to pursue them.”

Walt Disney

There are 3 things that will take up your time and steal from your dreams. One is unavoidable and the other two will creep in and take up time that you could be taking action to move from a dream to reality.

They are:

  • Sleep
  • TV
  • Procrastination

It’s worthwhile to have an honest audit about the time you spend on each of these.

Sleep is necessary for our well being and studies show that poor sleep habits or interrupted sleep has a significant impact on our effectiveness. Too little sleep can be as unhelpful as too much.

TV or other electronic diversions such as social media can consume valuable time and time is the most valuable resource we can access. I grew up with a side plate that my grandmother gave me that had the words “Time and tide wait for no man”. It meant little to me as a child, but as the years have flown by, the meaning has become more relevant. Whilst we are unable to make more time regardless of our means and we can never get time back, we can manipulate it through self hypnosis. Reading other people’s posts on social media can be seen as wasting this valuable resource, so it makes sense to schedule limited time to access the various platforms or watching TV alongside scheduling time to work on your dream.

Procrastination or the art of shuffling papers or doing “busy stuff” is perhaps the most insidious time/dream stealer.

Ask yourself the following questions:

How much actual work am I doing to achieve my dream?

What changes do you need to make to create goals to achieve your dreams?

What steps do you need to take?

How will life be different for you after making these changes?

What will this allow you to do?

Thankyou for taking some of your valuable time to read this reflection!

 

Thinking Differently

Not everyone is traveling the same path… that would be quite boring, not to mention crowded. Quite some time ago I decided to take a different path to what was expected of me and I’m still traveling.

Let’s celebrate those who embrace thinking differently. Recently I came across an interesting topic on the Law of Diffusion of Innovation.

It was exciting to discover that just 2% of the population are likely to be innovators. These people are more likely to be risk takers and have a mindset that sees failure as a setback. 13% of the population are inclined to be early adopters of the innovations, and then we start to see the bell curve form with 34% on each side of the peak as an early majority/cynical majority with the remaining 16% suspicious about the innovations and the inventors.

Martin Luther King told us about what he believed and gave us the famous quote “I have a dream”….it wasn’t a plan worked out to the nth degree, but more of a vision.  Over 250,000 people turned up to listen to him on that day and those words still inspire many thousands more some 54 years later. Another example of a dream is the Wright brothers who were driven by their belief that they could fly way back in 1903.

I hold the belief that the therapies that I offer and teach are part of a much greater picture. Not everyone will share that same belief, and that I accept that. The mind body balance is something that is starting to be explored in more detail by the scientific community and I’m grateful for that.  Recently I revisited an old vision book from 2009 and was pleasantly surprised to read that my vision is still pretty much the same.

At the top of one page I had written  “Vision – Life of no regret….Not a dress rehearsal…. Make it the best it can be” and underneath was  “To create a retreat centre for therapists and teachers to recover from nervous/mental exhaustion.”
Certainly there are a few more steps to take in fulfilling that vision and the big one will be building a suitable place for people to stay, but I feel sure that with continued belief the universe will provide the means for this to happen.

Work Experience

Planting seedsSetting up in a Hypnotherapy or Coaching practice takes time. Do the study, then some more and then a steep learning curve on how to market yourself and perhaps find a niche.

“Find a niche an inch wide and a mile deep” was a comment made in one lecture I attended.

All well and good, but a couple of years after graduating, I was still looking for that niche like the proverbial needle in a haystack. Around me were fellow students who seemed to have easily and effortlessly slipped into their niches …Past Life Regressions, Lives between Lives, Style Coaching, Relationship Coaching, Business Coaching, Weight Loss, Stop Smoking… and the list goes on.

The bookshelves are groaning with the weight of recommended reading. The printer spits out marketing letters on a regular basis. I have sat down and written about my ideal client so many times I feel like we are conjoined twins…..

Yes, the clients are coming, but for a variety of reasons.

Mostly for weight with an underlying theme of stress.

Now that’s something I understand!

Perhaps I have stumbled upon my niche, except it doesn’t look an inch wide… more like a mile wide and a bottomless chasm deep.

The interest in stress started when I was still teaching. I noticed that if I kept an appearance of calm, then the students seemed to respond better. Combining a teaching job and parenting 2 young children meant that my meditation practice was made up of incidental moments rather than a half hour session at any one time. Breathing at the traffic lights, mindfulness when on yard duty – appreciating the moments of nature… a leaf…. an interesting cloud….

Leaving teaching for a couple of years, I went to a job where I was able to observe how people with learning difficulties reacted to stress. An interest in how the mind adapts to stress grew from here and CBT based Adolescent Counseling beckoned. Back to teaching and full-time for three years. This time the universe threw me a curved ball. Being back in the classroom with a different perspective on student learning was fabulous, but the staffroom was toxic and not entirely from the black mould growing around the school.

But that’s a whole different story to be told later…

I left.

I took time out.

I studied some more and graduated with a Diploma in Clinical Hypnotherapy and a Cert 4 in Training. I didn’t complete the Medical Intuitive course I thought was my next journey.

I went and sat in the Simpson Desert.

Then I went back to teaching part-time and a small client list part-time. Coaching studies to augment the Hypnotherapy and I was just muddling along. I didn’t have anything specifically wrong with my health, but just didn’t have the energy that I used to. Palpitations were becoming more frequent, but I dismissed them as a result of the coffee I was drinking. I didn’t notice that I wasn’t meditating any more. I was asked to speak about women and stress for a local council’s Women’s Network.  Scroll back through some of the older posts and you’ll find that speech somewhere and the events that transpired a few months later!

So now it seems that my niche found me, rather than the other way around.

How curious is that?

I’m presenting a workshop next month with the topic “From Stress to Strength – Building Resilience for the Small Business Owner”  and I’m preparing for that with a bit of work experience…

Yep!! I’m STRESSED!!

Just getting in a bit of practice….. some good stress involved this time with the imminent arrival of a grandson…some bad stress with a blind, diabetic aging dog that has to be let out to pee 2 -3 times a night.

Sleep deprivation is not good for stress management!

PastThe body mind connection is letting me know I need to manage the stress a bit better, so the emWave is getting a good workout several times a day.

Last night was a case in point. I dream. Colour. Action… always vivid. Sometimes so full of action I am tired when I wake up. Sometimes, not very often now, the events are too vivid & I have been known to wake with a blood curdling yell. That didn’t happen last night, but I woke as I threw off the covers and went to confront some intruders that weren’t there and who came through a doorway that wasn’t there….. it took quite some time to convince my conscious mind that they and the doorway didn’t exist.  This time the dog waking and going for a wander down the street at 2am was just what I needed as the activity in going looking for him helped to dissipate the stress hormones and I was able to get back to sleep relatively quickly.

A couple of emWave sessions before starting writing showed that I was entering into “Coherence” fairly easily. More sessions scheduled this morning before the afternoon clients.

It’s all about putting yourself first, to better serve clients.

It could be called Work Experience!