The Rooted Reinvention

My entire journey as a lifelong learner and soul searcher has been fuelled by feeling ‘broken.’

Reading Untamed by Glennon Doyle last year really hit me, and an article by Terri Cole a couple of months ago have been adding together in my brain as I deal with some personal transition.

This episode is a reminder to myself as well as you that we are not broken because they tell us we should be/feel/do differently.

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I’ve been really diving into ACT theories this month, and one aspect that really got me reflecting on my work as a life coach and wellbeing practitioner is that of being willing to go through the sucky parts of life to reach the more aligned sections. Today, that’s what we dive into.

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This week marks the deadline of a writing challenge I have entered. And with this deadline, I’ve been thinking a lot about constraints and limits – and how they can be HELPFUL for our creative projects. 

It’s also my birthday this week, so hai, newfound wisdom.

Last night Ember didn’t come home, and I found myself going down the unwanted paths of ‘what if something bad has happened’ in my mind. 
This became a ‘part 2’ of sorts to episode 47 (and a free handout): https://rootedreinvention.com/47-on-edge/  

Being human means always responding to our changing environment: both the outside world and in our own thoughts and feelings. But that doesn’t make those hard days any less hard to manage, so let’s talk through 3 ways to get into the ‘flow’ of life’s river again. 

The ‘silent’ to-do list items are often unconscious and thus hard to manage, or notice the true influence of. Here’s my take on it, with a few tips to consider. 

I’ve been in the self-help space for over 2 decades, and the most common theme I see is people have a ‘stable’ life: perhaps a steady job, somewhere to live, good friends and a family. But you don’t feel good. You set the same goals without feeling you are improving yourself. And here you are: going through the motions again. 

Since we’re not taught to define success or our ‘end game’, we never know if we’re actually making progress. And we tend to feel frustrated and lost.

Life Balance is one of those highly-valued aspects some people claim doesn’t even exist. After all, how is it even possible to ‘balance’ everything? Food, work, sleep, play, health, family, friends, creative pursuits and that pull of that potential best self… It’s overwhelming. 

The word ‘balance’ itself doesn’t just refer to things which are ‘equal’ but can refer to being in the correct ‘proportions.’ Eight hours of sleep may be an aim while eight hours of eating would be too much. Well, for me anyway.

If you struggle with knowing how much is “too much” to expect of the human brain, check on out the 7 Things Rule. If you’re ready to explore bringing about more balance in your life, let’s dive in.

There are some things that we can control, and when we’re feeling super on edge, here are four tips to help manage the physical sensations.

June has been a hard month, and today I am asking ‘when is enough?’ and exploring why we can do the FODMAP diet to look for food intolerances but when it comes to our behaviour, we’re expected to only change things if everything is broken or at rock bottom.

“You can get a new pair of jeans and this doesn’t mean you’re mad at your old pair of jeans – that they may not fit how they used to, or you want a different feeling today… Change is scary when things aren’t broken.”– Tiffany Han

“The secret to strength is the ability to hold yourself up when gravity is pulling you down. And it doesn’t matter if you modified, or made it easier, or you took a break. You showed up and you held yourself up even as gravity pulled you down.”  – Sarah Beth

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This month has been a difficult one in my life, and thus today I’ve got a short episode about the importance of caring for our seeds as they grow roots under the surface, and a reminder that things feeling uncomfortable are a sign you’re growing as a human being. 

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Today I’m interviewing the amazing, wondrous Leonie Dawson, complete with swearing. You have been warned!

You may have heard of Pavlov’s Dog Experiment, and this tells us about how the brain works. I discovered Neurolinguistic Programming as a child and apparently I’ve been accidentally using this technique for decades. Today I share how you can use this superpower of the mind-body connection.

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I had so many plans for this weekend, getting my todo list done. I did all the “correct things” and yet, I didn’t even begin a lot of them. We’re officially now in June – 5 months into 2021, and it’s okay if you’re not where you expected yourself to be by now. 

Today I talk about my foray back into rock-climbing after 4 years, and how I had to adjust my own expectations. 
 

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I’ve had 3 separate conversations about how I manage my ‘life-projects’ and having all the different interests I do. Today, I share one of the foundations to my success: the rule of “7.”

If you want to know more about Miller’s Law, my Finish What You Start (For Once) ecourse, or how you can reinvent yourself from the roots of who you already are, check out the show-notes.
 

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Questions to Ask about Integrity When you’re Struggling | #40

I’m not 100% well this week, and I’m angry about the political landscape in the UK right now. So today, let’s explore how to handle an emotional whirlwind in the moment, and my 3 main strategies for looking after myself and processing strong emotions. 

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 Happy May.

April was a month of experimenting around my productivity and perfectionism, and I must say I was surprised with my results, and let’s just say, I have no idea what I’ll be doing in May. 

If you’ve ever wondered what reflecting on an experiment is like “in real life” this is at least a glimpse into the process I use.

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A month ago, my old best friend from my teens contacted me, and it’s been a grand month of reconnecting, learning who we both are now, over 15 years later, and reflecting on who we were and the paths we’ve taken.

Since we were both teenagers back then, and have an interest in human psychology, we’ve had a lot of discussions about emotions and how our understanding of managing them has shifted over the past two decades. So today, I figured why not talk a little bit about those observations.  

Our experiences are neutral; it’s the stories we tell about them which causes us to feel positively or negatively toward them. I share a few tips from a book I recently read, and talk about despite being an ‘expert’ in some aspects ( according to some people), I’m still human, and knowing the right thing to do isn’t always (or actually, most of the time) enough to guide our behaviour. 

As the 35th Episode of this podcast, I rant about how millennials don’t have the luxury of a stable sense of identity. Ember’s bell can be heard throughout the beginning half and I decided to just share the rant as it is – high speed cat chases and all. 

We are driven by our core beliefs because nothing else made sense. We didn't have anything else to be out compass. We can only trust ourselves yet were never taught how to trust ourselves when we're still being told to trust the world around us.

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Here in the UK, lockdown is beginning to ease, and it’s raising some thoughts about comfort, courage, and anxieties. Beyond that, about how it is to be human, and to have mixed emotions about our life.

I spoke with someone this weekend about the pull of “I’m not ready yet” and how we block ourselves off from progress by saying to ourselves “I’ll be ready when X happens.” I explore this pull and where it comes from, and also how it doesn’t serve us… as well as what I’m now finally doing to move through the obstacle. 

Life is not easy, and it’s not meant to be. And sometimes the best person to help is someone climbing their own mountain. 

We all have a narrator inside our heads, we all get stuck in inertia, and we all have hard feelings. You don’t need to like it, to change it, or to pressure yourself to feel differently.

I view energy like a battery being charged and drained. One of the first steps in my free roadmap is actually to consider how your energy levels change throughout the day. 

I had the idea of starting a community forum space a decade ago, and it’s taken a bit of to and fro before I prioritised making it happen. Which has been a reminder of that core motivational energy and the importance of managing your time.

   I mentioned last week that I’ve been exploring my wild delight, that natural sense of joy… and that one of the things I explored was SkilllShare. 

   I took an art class on there and found myself joining the dots for using those lessons for things outside of just art: including learning how to colour in and about thumbnail sketches. 

The most common evidence-based treatment for low mood and low motivation focuses on refocusing on achievements. As a somewhat-perfectionist who grew up in an environment where academic and ‘on-paper’ achievements were highly valued, this treatment was not the right one for me, long-term. 

In the last few months I’ve been exploring ‘delight’, 'play’, and ‘joy’ or ‘fun’ and trying to explore what this means WITHOUT achievement. Apparently, watching other people doodle meets that need for me, without doing any art myself. 

We’re 6 weeks into 2021, and it’s important not to ignore the impact of the past 12 months on how we experience things (and how this may affect our perceptions moving forward too).

I also share my own systems and current routines for managing the ‘new normal’ of lockdown, including journaling, physical touch with my pets, regular movement and the tracking of habits.

Welcome to the myth of either/or.
There is a third way. It’s not that other things need 100% of our time and energy or we shut them out – it may be a 45-second hug, offering 5 minutes to see what your children want to show you, and then they move on and you move on to your thing.   

I also quote a study about distractions in this podcast as "18 minutes" but having found the reference (see below) it's an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds for us to get back to our task after an interruption.

Inspired by the experience of a friend setting herself up to make a lot of different changes all at one time, I talk today about transitions and pacing yourself, including New Year’s Resolutions, and how to avoid Burnout when setting new goals for ourselves.

It’s okay to not be creative right now. And it’s okay to be upset about your lost creativity.
Today, I’m discussing the frustration of not having our natural creativity, due to the high levels of stress we are under in this pandemic, even for those of us who have not personally been affected by the direct loss of someone through the Coronavirus.
And I share my experience of using vanilla milkshake on cereal. As you do.

Today we look at “what if?” anxiety thoughts, focusing on those “is this what I want?” and “what if I fail?” questions.

We ask more questions but also look at how to consider failures as being part of the road to success.

This episode was recorded before last week’s events in the USA, and I want to acknowledge that this is not the first fortnight of 2021 most of us hoped for. 

It's the final episode of 2020. And I'm focusing on what things feel hard, when the path feels 'wrong' and when we don't know if this is the 'right' decision.

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As we reach toward the end of the year, I talk about the importance of (and touch on some of the science around) crafting a life vision and designing how you’d like your life to be to boost your sense of clear direction and motivation.

We plan and prepare and review and check on everything… except our lives.

THE TWO STEP PROCESS:
-Keep a note / write it down/visualise where you are and where you want to be.
-Then ask yourself “are these daily habits taking me toward that goal?”

I’m sharing a technique around ‘Narrative Crafting’ as reinvention is often internal, and in hindsight, this is us choosing where we focus our attention, and the impact of doing this on our lives. I also talk about my “yellow moment” exercise and how I had to reinvent my own perspective to use it. 

Tiffany’s Quote: “The more content, fun, and level I am, the better it is for everyone in this household.” 

Happy December. 

With one month left of 2020, and I find myself pondering creativity, resistance, national novel writing month, and my pressure to ‘complete’ achievements. Sorry if you don’t care about creative writing, I talk about it a lot today! Nanowrimo has taught me about resistance every single year. 

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It's the end of November, and that means the end of this year's challenge to write 50,000 words of new fiction in the 30 days of November. And in trying to 'get it all done' I've been thinking about the pressure we put on ourselves, following on from last week's episode on 'success'.

#RambleAlert I’ve gotten good at showing up, playing the part, getting the ‘win’ but it’s hollow and during a recent conversation, my life coach called me out on it. So I shared the cognitive load, the pressure I put on myself, and the practicality of being dictated by the culture I grew up within.

Today’s Quote: “I'm not a shark, I won't die if I stop thrashing around for a minute.” #smashthepatriarchy #takeadamnrest #tadalist

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I said I wouldn’t do this to myself again. And yet, I’m doing the 50,000 word challenge for the 11th year. *sigh* Today I’m talking about my love of the fiction-writing community, having multiple projects, and a little bit about how my writing process is part of my identity; and how I need that more than ever this year. 

Visit the full show notes at https://www.rootedreinvention.com/podcast for show links and further information. 

I hate washing up. But the mental procrastination is actually taking more of my time and energy than the task itself would take. Today I talk about cleaning the kitchen and washing up and how I’m learning to just get those tasks done (particularly when they take up more time to worry about then it would to just do them.) 

Visit the full show notes at https://www.rootedreinvention.com/podcast for show links and further information. 

Today, I'm sharing a tool to help manage overwhelm inspired by Leonie Dawson, who shared this question on her own podcast. She words it like this: “If ____ was out of the picture, how would you be feeling in your life right now?” I take this a step further and share how I've been using the question in traffic jams and after feeling overwhelmed by... what feels like everything... but actually turns out to just be a few key items.

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I had planned for this podcast episode to focus on 'doing something okay-ish' is still a way to make progress, and what began as trying to debunk myths about the "right" way to change your habits or improve your life, ended up as a summary of how to half-arse your progress instead of getting caught up in perfectionism. 

After having a lapse of my mood and progress in September, I share the ‘spiral’ concept, and talk about how as evolving-beings, we are never back at square-one, especially when it feels that way. I also explain my understanding of a ‘lapse’, and a simple exercise to stay in the present moment when we feel like we’ve just backtracked.