Autumn is my favourite season, and I feel like the crisp air and crunchy leaves almost challenge me to get honest and reflective so that I can shed what no longer serves. This Autumn, I’m asking myself if I can shed my need to be right. You know those moments where you say something to someone important to you and afterwards wish you’d just kept your mouth shut? I started off today having a yucky experience with one of my daughters, the details of which I’m not going to share

Do you ever feel like you’d do something if only you felt braver about it? Things like… I’d speak up in a work meeting if I knew that no one would think I was stupid/annoying. I’d say no to my child if I didn’t think it would cause a tantrum. I’d set a boundary with a family member or colleague if I didn’t feel so scared of displeasing them. These are all real-life examples for me! And my most recent one: I’d start sharing consistently on my mailing list and via social

A mentor of mine once said that there are no paradoxes in reality, and that they exist only in the human mind. I filed it away, thinking “nice idea but, really?”. It struck me recently while watching video footage from my daughter’s school trip to a village in Malawi. Local men and women were performing a traditional dance for the visitors. Men wore trousers, shirts and ties and they wore a traditional garment over these clothes to perform the dance. Women wore western style

I once thought that I was failing in life because I was too emotional and not resilient enough. There’s lot of talk about how to “build resilience” around. And then there are people who appear to be unphased by the ups and downs of life. They seem to deal with setbacks with ease, grace and even a sense of humour. Almost as though resilience is a personality trait and they lucked out in the personality department. It so doesn’t look like this to me these days, which is why I s

Do you ever find yourself wondering why… “Why am I like this?” “Why can’t I handle life as well as other people can?” “Why do I need more rest, sleep or downtime than other people?” “Why am I so affected by other people’s moods?” It looks to me like when we are wondering these sorts of things (as I definitely have), there are a few places it can be really helpful to look. 1. Our experience is thought-created You’ve probably heard that we don’t see the world as it is, we s

I have a question for you: If you knew that it would improve all your relationships and make life more beautiful, would you want to get better at listening to others? If we’re really honest (this is for all of us, me too), what is often called listening may be better described as waiting for our turn to speak. Would you like to hear a few examples of things I've found myself doing while supposedly listening to someone else? 1. Scanning my memory bank for something that relate

My article last week about being a mediocre mum seemed to land with people on my mailing list. Here I take a look at the kind of things that can hold a “good mum” (or “good dad”) pattern in place and have us struggling as parents. It's also relevant to just about any relationship you can think of. From a very young age, we are given messages about what it means to be “good”. These messages come from home, from school, from media, from all around. It also seems that as young c

A few years ago, in a fun exercise, a friend of mine identified one of my qualities as “fizz”. Intuitively I knew what he meant, but it was hard to put into words and felt a little uncomfortable. Fizz was something positive and yet it was somehow anxiety’s cousin, which my mind had some negative judgements about. Around the same time, I came across a quote shared by Jeff Foster on his Facebook page. I cannot find the exact quote now, but I can share the meaning I heard in it,