Inspirational Speaking… and All That Jazz!

So yesterday I joined 6 other entrepreneurs who were all speaking at City College Norwich to a group of 100+ students, as part of the ‘Positive Image‘ campaign, created by Sarah Harding to help empower young people.

We each had a 30 minute slot to speak and in total over 550 students attended talks during the day and gave fantastic feedback afterwards.

So what did I speak about?

Well I shared with my journey from teendom through to where I am today, including lots of the good and bad times that got me here. I then went on to speak about values and how important it is to live your life in line with your values, those instinctive ideas that tell you what is good, bad, right or wrong in your life and the essence of who we are. These are pretty much hard-wired into us and if you’re not working in line with them you’re going to end up pretty miserable!

Then I went on to speak about beliefs and how we create so many beliefs all the time that we think are true. That we believe are part of who we are. That in reality are nothing but generalisations about experiences that we’ve had, that we’ve chosen to make into a belief (consciously or unconsciously).

I gave an example of being bitten by a dog as a small child and how that child might then create a belief that all dogs are bad and carry this belief through their whole life. This belief then may morph into a strong phobia of dogs that has a huge impact on their life, until death.

Now, most of us know, rationally, that the majority of dogs are lovely and it’s just a few you need to be careful of. Yet fear and phobias don’t work on a rational level and if we create a negative belief and we then build on that it can have far reaching consequences.

Then we flipped it and looked at positive beliefs and how we are in control of what we believe, whether we believe it or not! That we have the power to pick up or let go of beliefs as and when we choose. We just need to make that choice and take action towards achieving it (i.e. see an NLP/life coach/hypnotherapist etc or make small stepping stone changes daily yourself).

So how great would it be to choose positive beliefs instead of negative ones?

How great would it feel if you truly loved yourself and whenever you were faced with a decision, you chose the positive belief over the negative?

Just imagine how such positive choices could affect your life and not only your own life, but the lives of the people around you too.

So what can you choose to believe today that is positive?

After beliefs I spoke about Law of Attraction (LOA) and that by giving off positivity we attract it back to us.

Now I was pretty amazed when I asked the room who had heard of LOA and not one hand went up. So this was potentially the first time the these 100+ students had heard about this powerful mindset.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I am a great believer in LOA and have seen it in action time and time again. So I was in my element explaining how it can be used to benefit life.

I gave a few hints and tips about choosing to be nice to people. To compliment instead of insult. To remember that you do not have any idea what is going on in someone else’s’ life or mind and that your words might have a massive impact on their day, week, month, year, or even life! It is that important. Your snide remark may stay with that person for their whole life (see beliefs above!). You just don’t know. The world has enough problems and we need to be empowering others, not dragging them down. So choose your words carefully and empower rather than degrade whenever you can.

Remember:

Is it true?
Is it helpful?
Is it inspiring?
Is it necessary?
Is it kind?

If it is none of the above then why say it? Think what your agenda is by saying something that could hurt. What is happening inside you that makes you want to make others feel pain?

They say that perception is projection, in other words, what we see in others is what we dislike/want to change about ourselves. Perhaps next time you feel the urge to say something less than positive, take the time to ask yourself what it is in you that makes you feel that way about the person you are speaking to. It can be very enlightening, if a little uncomfortable at times!

And it didn’t end there (yes they were still engaged with me, for which I am hugely thankful).

I then moved on to goals and goal setting. One of the teachers said they had ‘tasks’ they were used to setting but not SMART goals.

I wanted them to think outside of the school box and look at long term goals that were in line with their values – and of course a little Law of Attraction doesn’t go amiss in this potent mix either!

So we looked at powerful goal setting:

S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = As if now
R = Realistic / Relevant / Responsible
T = Timed

and how they could use this for when they’re job hunting, planning grades etc.

Of course I had to mention that it’s all very well using these techniques and thinking, for example, I’ve set a goal to get a great job, and then doing nothing and thinking it will manifest. With the best will in the world that just ain’t gonna work! Or at least the likelihood of it is greatly reduced.

If you set a goal you then have to take MASSIVE action towards achieving it. You want that great job? Set your goal and then get out there. Network, send off applications, get on LinkedIn, JobHop and other online agencies. Take action and you will active your goal. I’ve seen it happen many times and it is always an amazing feeling when you get it!

So we had to wrap it up at this point and I kept thinking on the way home how many things I could’ve, should’ve said but there just wasn’t time – I spoke for 35 minutes in the end and it’s amazing how short a time that really is.

It was so lovely to have some of the students come up to me afterwards and say that they found it inspiring (what is a better compliment than that from a 16-18 year old!). We even had a lull between me and the next speaker and a few said I could continue as they were enjoying it – it’s so nice to be wanted! 😉

There is something quite magical about working to empower other people, especially the next generation. If we can empower them when they’re still young, just think what they could achieve!

Life is too short to be riddled with negative beliefs and surrounding yourself with negative people.

Get out there and LIVE!

Be around people who support and empower you and you you can in return support and empower them too.

Enjoy life – it’s there to be lived and enjoyed.

Climb out of the box and inject some serious positivity into your life – you just never know where it may lead you!

I could get used to this inspirational speaker malarkey!

You can find out more about the Positive Image campaign here: http://www.timetolookbeyondthemirror.co.uk/

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Author: Sophie Jewry
http://www.theholisticdirectory.co.uk

Changing History

We went to Oxborough Hall today, a beautiful place, steeped in history, in the depths of the Norfolk countryside. As I walked through the beautifully decorated rooms it got me thinking about the people that have lived and visited this place, and before it was built, the people that walked along the ancient pathways and roamed the land around it. Years and years of births, deaths, happiness, sadness, battles, romances and so many other things. Much of which has been catalogued in the history books and gone down through the generations in stories of the past, remembered and passed on.

A well documented history is great for many reasons; to compare past to present, to be aware of our roots and where we came from, even to be reminded of the bad things and so hope to prevent them in the future.

What’s interesting is that our minds work in a similar way to our keepers-of-history, carefully logging past events in the enormous filing cabinet that we call our brain, and recalling them at appropriate times to benefit us… or sometimes not.

Sometimes recalling past events is incredibly important, for example if we burn our hand on a hot pan on the stove we learn very quickly not to do it again. This is one of a great number of very valuable lessons that are important to remember.

Where this skillful storing and recalling of information becomes unhelpful is when it’s something that has no benefit to our emotional or physical wellbeing, and we have a tendency to be pretty good at remembering bad events or emotions and recalling them over and over to no benefit to ourselves at all. That mixed with our fantastic ability to distort, delete and generalise all information that comes at us can be a recipe for disaster.

At every moment of the day we are being bombarded with billions of bits of information and our brains cannot possibly process it all so it has developed a handy trick to deal with this: distort, delete and generalise*. Our unconscious mind filters out what it perceives to be the most important information and stores that as our reality. So really what we think we see is not actually what is happening, just our version of it. Which is why if you walk 10 people down a street and then ask them to describe what they saw, they will most likely all give totally different answers because they are all deleting, distorting and generalising via their five senses to suit their own beliefs and values.

When an event happens you have the actual event, then you have what you saw/felt/heard/smelt etc, then you have what you remember you saw/felt/heard/smelt etc which is likely to be even more distorted over time so what you remember to be true when you think of the event is quite often poles apart from what really happened. This is the same for all events that happen in our lives.

Peter Berger put it nicely when he said “The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.”

So have you got any past personal events that have affected, or even still do affect your life in a negative way? Perhaps you had an big argument with a close friend, or maybe you had a bad relationship and have stored away all the negative feelings that you gathered up during that time? Instead of feeling the emotions and letting them go, you’ve stored up the anger, resentment, sadness, frustration..(insert emotion here) and I’m sure you already know that this has no benefit to you yet there’s something stopping you from letting it go.

How does it make you feel when you consider that what you remember is not actually what happened?

If you could change how you feel about that event now, would you do it?

Would it be great if, when you thought of the event now, you had no emotional reaction?

This of course is completely in your power to do so and there are a number of techniques that can help you including counseling, life coaching and (my own personal favourite) an NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) session.

So why would you even bother working at letting go of this past event? Why not just bury it and leave it in the deep, dark recesses of the unconscious mind? A number of reasons really…

1) Letting go of emotional baggage can feel like a huge weight being lifted from your shoulders. Quite often we don’t realise quite how much of an effect an old, negative emotion can have on your life. Sometimes from this one problem stems other issues, emotional blocks and even phobias and when you work through it you may find that it has more of a far-reaching effect that you would have anticipated.

1) Canker spreads. Simple as that. If you knew you had mould in your fridge you wouldn’t leave it to spread through and cover all the food. You’d clean it out immediately to ensure it didn’t ruin anything else nearby. It works the same for your emotions – negativity breeds negativity so if you hold on to your negative emotion it will, without you even realising it, slowly work through into other parts of your life.

3) Why would you want to hold on to something when you can let it go? Imagine the freedom of feeling an emotion and letting it flow through. This is the path to truly living ‘in the now’. Let go of the negative. Remember the positive. Enjoy the present.

Of course this is always a work in progress and having worked through lots of my own emotional baggage I know how far I have come and what a difference it has made to my life. We invest time and money in keeping our cars, computers etc running smoothly and we should also ensure we do the same for ourselves.

So why not take action now. Book some ‘me time’ and invest some time in yourself. You don’t have to spend a fortune, you don’t have to see a professional every week, but if you do make the effort you may just change your life for the better.

Enjoy the journey 🙂

“Live each day as if your life had just begun.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Love and blessings

Sophie

*Find out more about this here: http://www.nlpcoaching.com/nlp-commmunication.html

Gratitude

I woke up this morning feeling a little down in the dumps – no particular reason why (although it could be good old fashioned hormones – who knows!?) so I decided to ask a question on my Facebook: “What are you really happy/excited about in your life right now?” and within just a couple of hours I had over 15 lovely replies with answers from “Fresh starts!” to “The arrival of Spring!” and “My horse” to “The morning with my son :-)” plus many others of course about work, life, spiritual development and more.

Not only did this barrage of happy thoughts do wonders for my mood but it also had me thinking about gratitude and how important it is in one’s life. On January 1st 2012 I started a ‘gratitude diary’ and ever single evening since then, without fail, I have written in there at least one thing that I am grateful for from that day. I have to say it’s more than a little satisfying to be now in my fourth month and able to see so many different things I written. Pages and pages of lines and lines of specific things that I am grateful for.

So what benefit does that actually give I hear you ask? Well for me it has helped to be much more positive in general. Instead of looking for the bad I am looking for the good and this can be quite transformational in every day life. Yes s**t happens but it’s how you deal with that situation that makes you who you are. Not forgetting of course that we are in control of our own thoughts and feelings so in any given situation you can choose to be angry, depressed, sad, frustrated or you can choose to look for something good and so move forward rather than get stuck.

You may at this point be thinking “I don’t choose to be angry/frustrated/sad, events happen and I feel that way, I would not choose to feel bad!” and I would quote Mahatma Gandhi “You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.” It’s so easy to forget the true power of the mind and in particular the unconscious mind. Whether you choose to agree, or not, it has been proven that we have the ability to control our thoughts and therefore our feelings just by utilising our powerful minds.

I appreciate that when you’re feeling bad it’s very easy, and sometimes almost enjoyable (in a weird way), to wallow in that feeling when what we ought to be doing is realising that it is just a feeling and that feelings are fluid things and that we have the ability to choose to feel the emotion and then let it go. By holding on to these feelings we are not doing anyone any good and just like anything in life practice makes perfect.

So how is this linked to gratitude? Well if you are aware that you can choose how you feel then you can practice feeling good more often. Baby steps, done often will naturally become big strides and soon you’ll be amazed to see how positive you feel every day.

When you find yourself in a situation where you would normally feel a negative emotion, stop for a moment and remind yourself that you have the power to choose how you feel. Then step back and look at the situation and find something positive from it and then focus on that.

Now this might seem tricky to do at first but the more you use this technique the easier you will find it.

So lets give you a few examples:

You loose your job
Positive thought = You are being given an opportunity to find a new path. When one door closes another opens and though the path may not be clear at first it is a time for you to find your passion and go after it. Take advantage of this change to do something wonderful.

You have a friendship/relationship that falls apart
Positive thought = What have you learned from this experience and how can you use that learning to take you forward in a more empowered way? There are many connections that you will make in your life and each gives you something different to enrich it. As they say – You meet people for a reason, a season or a lifetime. There is always a lesson to be learned from each person and there will always be something positive that you will take forward with you.

You’ve put on weight
Positive thought = you have enjoyed the food you have indulged in to gain the weight and it has given you an opportunity to see what weight you wish to be and so you can create a goal weight and then work towards achieving that goal in the knowledge that you will feel empowered and proud of yourself for the effort you will have gone to to achieve your goal and loose the weight. Focus on the weight you want to be, not the weight you are.

This leads me very neatly into the power of positive thought and the law of attraction. Said simply, whatever you focus on you will create. So focus on good things and good things will happen. Find the good in every situation and you will always be able to find good in every situation.

Have you noticed how positive people are that way, even when they’re stressed, or having a tough time? This is because they are looking for the best in every situation rather than focusing on the bad. By looking for the good you are also focusing on the path that will lead to your goal.

If you are in the dark, look for the light and then take action and walk towards it. If you sit still in the darkness you will never reach the light, despite how much you moan about it not coming to you. In order to reach your goal you need to decide what it is, focus on it and then take action towards achieving it.

For this year my purpose is to write every day something that I am grateful for and already this is helping me to feel more happy and grateful every day, as I am consciously looking for and appreciating so much more than I was.

If you look for the good you will find the good and when you create a habit of looking for the good in things then you will create great things.

Why not start your own gratitude diary and see how wonderful it is to be grateful every day.

Ending with a perfect quote:

“Gratitude, like faith, is a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it grows, and the more power you have to use it on your behalf. If you do not practice gratefulness, its benefaction will go unnoticed, and your capacity to draw on its gifts will be diminished. To be grateful is to find blessings in everything. This is the most powerful attitude to adopt, for there are blessings in everything.”
Alan Cohen

Love and blessings

Sophie