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Tag: relationships

Goals Are For Life, Not Just For New Year

We tend to spend the first part of a New Year considering aspects of our lives that we don’t usually think about, often analysing our relationships, careers, hobbies or where we live. Some people make resolutions or set goals they wish to achieve in the year ahead and if they create a plan and stick to it, will get great results. Even if we only commit to making goals at this time of year, it is better than nothing. If we understand that setting goals helps us move forward quicker, then setting goals on a weekly or monthly basis seems sensible.

I also want to acknowledge that at this time of year, people also decide to make life changing alterations to their life, as they realise that they are unhappy with certain aspects and these can obviously have huge impacts on people in their lives. Whether this is starting or ending a relationship, changing career or starting a new one, any change needs careful consideration. This is where having someone else to talk to who is unbiased and non-judgemental can really help. Whatever changes you wish to make need planning and a date when you wish to achieve them by. Without planning and consideration, some decisions made in the New Year can be regretted or not achieved at all.

So my advice is to make resolutions and set goals and if it’s a larger or life-changing project, get help from a non-biased, non-judgemental friend or employ a Life Coach to help you, if you are really serious about achieving it and want to be kept on track. Good Luck!

Ruth O’Neil

How Do Fears Change With Age?

Here’s an interesting question that I came across quite by accident the other day. How do fears change with age? My initial reaction was that they don’t, although I feel that was just the quickest answer I could come up with at the time. I’ve been wrangling with this one since then and it will be really interesting to get some feedback and answers to this question from others.

The coach and self-improvement junkie in me really wants to say that fears increase or decrease only through our thoughts and feelings about them. People have considerably different approaches to their fears and although there are not many people who you’ll find who can genuinely say they do not fear anything, there are a good many who are able to overcome their fears. I guess the question of age relates to our fears changing as we approach the mid to late stages of our life. Is it possible then that this can be linked to our aging body and perhaps a perceived frailty that that brings?

An answer to this question “how do fears change with age” is not truly complete without looking at the whole of the life-cycle. When we are born, our fears and concerns are around milk, warmth, close contact with people etc. As we grow, our fears evolve as we are subjected to the fears of our parents, carers, teachers and other people who have responsibility for our welfare. These childhood fears are further enhanced by the media around us and our relative lack of ability to understand the world around us (compared to the adult mind).

Next, for most of us, our fears surround work, money, relationships, children, family etc. Then they swiftly move onto growing old and this issue of frailty and being cared for in our twilight years. I suppose for most of us, there is a fear of death throughout our lives, which may increase as we get older and it becomes more imminent.

I genuinely believe that the majority of our fears can be understood and overcome and although I am not yet old enough to know, my hope is that my own experience of fear will continue to lessen as I get older and understand myself better. To me, fear becomes a major issue when it is not understood, or it is not faced or challenged in anyway. I really am looking forward to your thoughts on this, please feel free to comment.

Personal Customer Service

I’ve been having some interesting challenges with my home phone line. To cut a long story short, one particular company took over my phone line and I’ve been trying to return to BT. The last contact I had with BT, the lady on the phone asked me, “Are you happy with the way in which I’ve handled your enquiry?” I was really surprised by this question and it’s got me thinking about situations in life where such a question could be profoundly useful.

Part of my Coaching training has been around designing the alliance – a way of interacting with a client to maximise the use of the time, create direction and purpose for the coaching sessions and establish a successful working partnership. I’ve employed the same principle in some of my personal interactions, with friends and family to great success.

This question though, “are you happy with…” has, for me, some wonderful implications. What a beautiful way of checking how a personal relationship is going! Imagine asking your wife, husband, partner, child, friend, boss, co-worker, etc.,  “are you happy with the way I’m handling our relationship?” To ask such a thing and truly intend to have a positive, co-creative conversation that will enhance an existing relationship is an extraordinary thing to do.

It seems a shame that most people get to the stage where things are really bad in communication with each other before they step in and try and patch things up. Most of the time, of course, this takes the form of blame: “you did this”, “I’m not happy with you”, “you’re always like this” etc. In order that we can create wonderful, positive and enriching relationships, I suggest that we consider what Collette from BT took the courage to ask me… “How am I doing here? Is this working for you? How can we improve this thing we have?”

I hope that you are blessed with wonderful relationships and these ideas may serve you to see how far you can go with them!

Why Do People Fear Change?

This is a very complex and interesting question for me and I’m really looking forward to finding out my thoughts on this by writing this article. Firstly, it is important to acknowledge that most people fear change. They fear losing their jobs, lack of money, war, ill-health, in fact a whole heap of things that in themselves imply a change of state – from happiness (or in most cases comfort) to unhappiness.

Indeed is this all it is? People fear change because they associate it with a change from good to bad or from bad to worse? Lets examine some situations:

Fearing change at work: Why? Because they think that their job is already hard and change has previously meant more workload or new systems to learn.

Fearing change in relationships: Why? Because people are frightened to be on their own, or lose a partner or family member or friend.

There seems to be a pattern emerging here… Are people simply focusing on the bad stuff and not any of the good that may come from change? If this is the case, why?

One guess, and it is a guess, would be that we are constantly bombarded from an early age with negative messages about change. We are encouraged to focus on all the bad things that may happen and certainly from our news and media, how things are not as good as they used to be. In fact if we looked at the evidence, there is more money, better lifestyle, more opportunity and better health and health care than there ever has been. So really what is there to fear?

I’m remembering the book, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, by Susan Jeffers, in which she states that the real fear is the fear of not being able to handle it. This ties in very nicely with change – if change happens, we are automatically or instinctively frightened that we will not be able to handle it.

So people fear change, because they focus on the possible negative impacts on their happiness and lives and they do not know if they will be able to handle it. I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on this, click below on the comments link and leave a message.

Time Out

Taking some time for yourself is one of the most important things in this busy world that we live in. There always seems to be something to do and to just switch off creates major challenges for so many of us. Most people are aware of the consequences of not taking time out and yet so few people do so with any regularity.

Better than simply taking time out is taking time out with no distraction or other tasks to do. In fact, making the time out the task is many people’s solution. If the only important thing you have to do is to spend time on your own doing your own choice of thing, then the quality and effectiveness of the time out is hugely increased.

Really it is impossible to take time out when you are thinking about things that you have to do, or places you have to be, or worrying about aspects of your life. In fact that kind of time out is likely to create more stress and worry that you are not doing all those other things.

Time out is a discipline – just like time management (which of course enables time out to be included in our schedule) or organisation skills. It takes hard work and commitment, but the benefits are extremely powerful and enhance our ability to focus and be effective in our work, our relationships, our hobbies and all other aspects of our lives.

So, think of the things you would do if you had no tasks left to do and no other commitments for your time. Then schedule these things into your schedule on a regular basis and go and do them.

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