Oh My!

I think many of us associate something like The Power Of Now with ‘living for the moment‘ and not mithering about the past or fretting about the future.

But it recently dawned on me that much of my disorganisation is actually caused by me not following the Power Of Now – or doing stuff as it comes up.

Let me explain how this has been working, or not working, for me. I realised there are so many things which I don’t do when they should be done, which means I have to go back later and pick up from where I left off and sort it out. Or, the other thing that happens is I end up repeating a task simply because I didn’t do the admin at the time.

Here are a few examples:

Creating a new online account but not recording the new username, password, email address used, paypal account or any other associated admin stuff. Why doesn’t it get recorded?

The goal is wrong…If the end result, or goal is to get the account set up then there is a tendency to whiz on to get the thing set up and going, without including all the organisation as part of the job. If the end goal or task included not only the set up but the recording and administration to create a system to use the new tool efficiently, then we’re in with a chance of getting the job finished.

It could be because there is no designated place to record it. Or, where there is a special place like a notebook, it isn’t immediately to hand so the recording gets left until later. But what happens? Well I usually forget to record the details and then when I come to log on again I’ve forgotten the passwords and usernames I was convinced I would remember and on we go.  If you have something to record or file away and you don’t immediately know where it goes – then it doesn’t have a home and you will never be able to recover the information easily.  So create a home.

The Shove It In There And Sort It Out Later…How about all of those receipts and invoices which come into our handbags, pockets and inbox? Well often they stay where they landed or they get shoved into a box to be sorted out later – by which time it’s become a major job.  But how about if at the end of the week we collected all of the receipts together and just popped them into an envelope labelled up for that month.  It doesn’t take any longer than mashing them all down into a shoe box, but how much time has been saved not having to sort them out at the end of the year?  I reckon about 4 hours at least.  And don’t all those 4 hours mount up!!

I’ve put this post in the ‘How To Be Happy’ category because finally I realised how frustrating this disorganisation was becoming, and how it was affecting not only my productivity but my sense of well being.

How frustrating is it to waste 15 minutes trying to find a forgotten password?

Not as frustrating as doing it all again the next day!

What could be done if we reclaimed that 15 minutes back each day?  Well for starters this blog post took me about 15 minutes to write and publish. What else could be done in those rogue 15 minute time slots we throw away on doing stuff twice.

• Make a call to a potential business partner
• Listen or read a chapter of a personal development book
• Have a sit down with a cup of tea and a biscuit and listen to a chapter of the afternoon play
• Chase an unpaid invoice.

And I’m sure you can think of some more enticing activities!

So what does this mean.  In the slivers of time I spend hunting for passwords in places where they haven’t been written down and racking my sore brains for inspiration on what I could have used THIS TIME  for – I could have grown my business, got some cash, improved my mind or just chilled out.

So the next time I create a new account, I’m going to get up and get the damn book where I record them all!  Instead of shoving this weeks receipts into a box with all the little bits of paper I’ve collected over the year, I”m going to put them into the folder for December receipts.  If you’re going to shoving something somewhere to fester until you need it then it might as well be easy to retrieve.

Driving to work this morning and listening to the Radio, I started to switch off as the presenter rattled on about the various people who surprised the audience by their performance on Strictly Come Dancing.

Sadly, I am compelled to point out voraciously that I have never actually seen the programme as such, I have gathered up bits of information by osmosis through the news and so on.

As the presenter was going on about the surprising agility of Russel Grant, I almost totally switched off – but not quite. Then it dawned on me – there is a point to Strictly Come Dancing after all. And here it is…

• It’s about people doing things they’ve never done before
• You see people getting over themselves and daring to look a bit silly in front of the camera
• It’s about a shift of beliefs and identity
• It’s about making a change and expanding the boundaries of your experience and possibilities.

Does this mean that I’m going to start watching it?  Probably not.  But I may be aware of who’s taking part and imagining what changes in values and limiting beliefs they’ve brought into their life to make it possible for them.

The Power Of Now

As long as nothing truly ghastly is happening to you as you read this, then you really don’t have anything to worry about do you?  Before you lash out, what I mean is that if you are fed, watered, warm and pain free, then you really DON’T have anything to worry about right now.

But that’s not how it works for most of us – but if our basic needs are taken care of, then what is it we are fretting about?  Well if it’s not what’s happening RIGHT NOW then it must be something which happened in the past and which is still hanging around like Banquo’s ghost, OR, it is something you are anticipating happening in the future from the loss of a loved one to losing your job, your income or your health.  Even worse, it could be both.

But how much of what you worry about actually comes true?

Sadly, these feelings of harking back to the past and fearing the future is true for so many of us.  Just the sheer weight of quotes by famous people shows us this is a widespread and longstanding problem amongst the general population of humans who don’t have to struggle every single day of their lives just to survive until tomorrow.

Here are just a few of my favourite quotes:

“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened”. ~Michel de Montaigne

“How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened”.  ~Thomas Jefferson

“I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow.  It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us”.  ~Dorothy Day

And my personal best where the author is unknown (so maybe I can claim it) is, “For peace of mind, resign as general manager of the universe”.

But to just cease worrying is easier said than done because worry is a rather comforting habit and like all habits it needs to be broken.  A rather good book is The Power Of Now, A Guide To Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle and he comes up with a rather good technique which I will touch on here.  It all rather harks back to that old stuff I remember hearing about when I first took up Yoga about focusing on what is happening in the pose, so you lose yourself, albeit it temporarily.  Obviously I ignored all that and set up a little competition with myself about how far I could stretch, but focusing on how each muscle is working to keep you in the right posture really is the key.

It works because you can only think of one thing at a time.  Try this out for yourself – think of a tree and think of a horse.  You can’t do it! You can think of a tree and then think of a horse but you can’t think of the both things together unless you think of a horse jumping a tree.

If you are focused upon how something feels, smells or sounds then you really can’t think about anything else and your brain sort of switches off and has a bit of down time.  Peace.  Yes it’s only a temporary reprieve but as you carry on doing this, then the worry habit starts to subside.

Remember also that this is a technique for breaking the habit because it’s easier to move into concentrating about something neutral such as how the floor feels under the ball of your foot, than something positive which could manifest in the future.  Eventually  you are going to be able move your thinking from neutral to positive and powerful area for you.

Amazingly, there is a free copy of The Power Of Now published on www.holybooks.com so you can check it out before you buy.

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Think and Grow Rich

There is so so sooo much stuff written about goal setting.  Some may think there’s too much.  But it’s all just peripheral stuff because the key to getting western union india barpeta the life you want (and isn’t that what goals should be about) is plain old WYSIWYG. What You See Is What You Get!

There are loads of new programmes and techniques around now to help you set goals, and perhaps you’ve tried a few, but sometimes the best thing to do is to explore the ancient roots of a principle.  Goal setting, or getting what you want, is there in the bible and that’s probably far enough back in time for us.  And this isn’t about religion, so whatever buy cheap amoxil your religious faith, or lack of it, just remove the religious context and consider this is just about a proven technique.

In the bible we have a few choice phrases such as ‘Seek and yea shall find’, and isn’t that just telling us that we find (or get) what we are looking for?

Moving forward in time to the wealth gurus such as Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich) and their texts boil down to visioning what you want and conjuring up the feelings you would be experiencing if you really had a million pounds.  The excitement of ‘as is’.

When I chat this through with people so many of them say that this won’t work for them because they can’t visualise – and if that’s you then try this.  Imagine I’m sat with you right now and you’re describing your front door to me.  Ok – done that.  Now in order to describe it, the colour, where the handle is, the step and the frame – you had to get a picture of it in your minds eye.  It may not have been like a photograph (for some it is) but regardless of the sharpness of the image this is still visualisation.  And that’s all there is to it.

So what do you want to create?  What sort of house? How big an income? How will your relationship be?  Whatever you’ve got now has grown out of the pictures and movies you’ve been running to date and if it’s not what you want then perhaps you need to change the movie.

But remember it takes 21 days to break a habit and if you’ve been running a crap movie or picture then you won’t just be able to banish it and replace it with Shangri-la (which is also the name of a Bed and Breakfast in Whistable) in 5 minutes.  So stick with it.

Other Peoples Navel

I was shuffling up and down through the TV channels waiting for Mark to come in with the tea and biscuits before we carried on with our Saturday night film, when I found myself on a programme where the topic of interest was celebrity belly buttons.  Basically these poor muckers had been sat on a beach, letting it all hang out when someone had snapped a shot of them and their oddly shaped innie and outie buttons. Finally Mark came back and sat down ready for the rest of the film, but before we knew it we were hooked and on our third navel.

Now we are fairly discerning about our TV viewing and tend to limit it to films and stuff we’ve recorded, so we don’t waste time watching crappy adverts, and yet here we both sat, sucked in as it were, into unusual shaped belly buttons. It was so smooth we hardly noticed the slide down, and like a drug addicts purging themselves of their addiction we had to pull the plug on the source and go cold turkey back to our film.

But what does it matter you may say.  Well perhaps in our little lives, it doesn’t, but in the grand scheme of the world then yes it does.  That same morning Radio 4 ran a trailer promoting a programme about UN workers in the former Yugoslavia, one of whom had witnessed a starving family trying to survive by consuming a cold horses hoof, and here we were consuming our third navel, so to speak.

It’s not that there must never be down time, a time when you’re just doing nothing, frivolity, it was how slickly we fell, succumbed to the twaddle and were suddenly lost.  If we want to be truly happy and at peace with our place in the world then perhaps it’s about that twaddle time being consciously spent, and consciously ended.

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According to Mike, who works behind the butchery at Waitrose, this is the week in the year where everyone is most miserable, hence the empty Food Hall. The credit card bills are in, the end of the month paycheck hasn’t arrived, and the resolutions which were tripped easily off the tongue whilst the stomach was still queasy from too much turkey and pudding, are dropping by the wayside now that the nausea has subsided.  All of this means that people just arn’t feeling grand right now.

For the last, oh I don’t know, loads of years, I’ve made New Year resolutions and set various goals and made promises about not eating cake.  I’m sure you know the sort of thing.

Until now I mistakenly thought the only difference that breaking that resolution would make is to the size of my bum.  It’s big, (my bum) but it’s not yet HUGE and so the Battenburg western union india baripada usually wins out.   Until now.

I was reading The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by (Robin Sharma) when the concept of self-discipline sort of leapt off the page at me.  I guess that’s what people mean by “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear“,  because I’ve been dipping into this book for a while and not noticed this before.

Here’s the idea – if you can’t stick to what you promise yourself you will do, then how will you have the confidence to tackle anything more challenging? If eating cake makes you so sluggish and podgy and miserable that you resolve to restrict yourself to a small piece as a treat once a week, and then not 30 minutes later there you are tucking into a cream donut because your friend enticed you into the coffee shop – how good will you feel about your ability to achieve anything?

So sticking to your New Year Resolutions reinforces your confidence in your own abilities to do whatever else you might want to achieve.

If there’s something, say in your career, or your business, where you’ve been holding back, not achieving what you hoped and where you are lacking confidence, then perhaps you should look further afield than at more professional personal development or training. Perhaps you should look at what else you set out to achieve and consider if there is another area of your life where you should be getting a grip.

I can’t promise that taking that taking brisk walk before breakfast every morning, or cutting out the chocolate will directly land you a promotion, or make the leap to start up your own business, but sticking to your guns on these small matters can be a great way of getting the balls you need to aim for whatever else you want to achieve.

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If you decide to buy The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari – it would be great if you could use this link – it won’t cost you any more and SianScribbles get a little smidgen. Thanks so much. UK readers – when you get to the Amazon site, go to the top right hand side and pick the UK and you’ll head straight off there.

Bobby Farrel of Bony M died today (in the same City as Rasputin spookily enough). Check out these fantastic costumes which provide a great backdrop to this peaceful song.

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This is about another surprising turn in my life since I started sorting out my quality of life after breast cancer.  That’s also the name of a programme I’ve just launched.  Shameless plug.

What’s that got to do with tea cosies? Well it’s all about being ready to take a different path, do something different and in my case something creative.

I’ve always been a corporate girl, writing out my reports on time and speaking the gobbledygook of corporate land.  I know what a KPI is (and they’re not fun).  I’ve always earned my living (apart from a brief spell as a Saturday muggins in a hairdressers when I was 12) using my brain, its always been about my brain organising services and spewing it all out the other side in the local government format.

After the main part of my treatment ended and it was just me and the Tamoxifen, I tried to hop back into my same old mould. But it wasn’t working.  It took me weeks which started creeping into months, to work out that maybe I needed to try a different approach by doing something practical and, yes, crafty. Creative if you will.

Perhaps I would have arrived there eventually but I do wonder if hitting the doldrums after breast cancer was a godsend because it forced me to re-evaluate what I was up to.  A boot up the arse to kick me into a completely new direction.

I didn’t actually end up making tea cosies (but that could be next if I find the right market) but I did start making rugs, which is possibly feeding my annoying hoarding habbit.  Instead of throwing out old clothes and fabrics I can now recycle them into wall hangings, cushion covers and, yes, tea cosies.

Along the way I dispelled the myth that I’m no good with my hands because it turns out I am.  I also discovered my talent for matching colours.  So that’s two good things which have come out of my life after breast cancer.

Forgive me if this article makes it sound as though I was sat in the chair feeling a bit glum and 2 seconds later decided that something creative would spur me into action and found a set of rugging tools lost down the back of the settee and off I went. Sadly it took a lot longer than that.  But what have I learned?

• That when you’re looking for something different in your life, the tendency is to kid yourself that you’re taking a totally new direction, when you’re really just trying out the same old weed in a different pond.

• That when you take a new path in life you learn new things about yourself.

• That bringing something to life using colour is a joy and that 30 minutes sitting in silence whilst your handy-work gets one step closer to completion is the best stress buster ever.

And the tea cosy.  Well that’s thanks to my sister-in-law Karen, who came up with that idea for my cottage industry.

And I do like a good cup of tea.

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Uplifting Songs For Women

This is one of my favourite uplifing songs.  It’s featured in the film Practical Magic and it’s so understated. I don’t listen to it often but bump into it every now and then, and get hooked all over again.

For some reason it always reminds me how truly powerful we women are when we tap into our inner strength.

Please check out the other inspirational songs posted on this site and if you have any suggestions for your inspirational songs then I’d love to hear about them and maybe get them shared with others.

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Can you sit down through Boogie Wonderland by Earth Wind And Fire.

You might also check out the Boogie Wonderland Version from Happy Feet on youtube. Sorry you’ll have to head over and get this for yourself because they’ve stopped anyone from embedding it. Spoilsports. Anyone would think they only put it up there to profit from the views. Surely not.