Hilbre's Life Coaching Blog

Sometimes it is good to wallow and if you are a hippo then your perspective on wallowing is sheer heaven.  I have been asked a lot recently why I haven’t written any blogs over the last few weeks and to be honest the reason is that I have been feeling very down with all this rain.

As a life coach I always feel I need to project an image of positivity and always looking for the best perspective on things. After weeks of relentless rain I was struggling with both my positivity and my perspective – although I have to admit my lawn is sporting a fantastic shade of bright green, but even that hasn’t been enough to lift my spirits.

While talking to a friend this last week, she said I should write a blog about how I am feeling. I thought it might be seen as negative and then I realised that there is a lot to be said for sharing how one feels and that it is ok, even for a life coach, to feel down about life.

One of the powerful aspects of life coaching is that it allows you to acknowledge where you are in your life without any judgement, and to give yourself permission to be with your emotions and not fight them. We wouldn’t be human if we were always happy and laughing. We need to experience the dark times and the tears to get a balance.

Once I allowed myself to acknowledge the fact that I wasn’t feeling great, I was able to be honest when someone asked me how I was and I told them I was miserable. They almost seemed relieved because they were also feeling down about the weather, so we both reminisced about sunshine and how we need to book a holiday.

After I had given myself permission to be miserable I felt like I had taken the pressure off, and the ironic thing was that it wasn’t long before I started to feel good again – and the most bizarre part was that the sun came out.

I hope this blog will help you to give yourself permission to allow yourself to sometimes just be with an emotion. If that is considered a negative one, then just acknowledge it and for that period be in the perspective of a hippo. Draw comfort from the fact we all have the inner resources we need to pick ourselves up and when we do the sun will shine again….

Here’s hoping for a good summer.

I was in Dorset last week spending time with my new little god daughter and I was just so in awe of watching my friend doing such a fabulous job of juggling a new born and a toddler (of which I am sure many of you reading this will know only too well how hard this is). Not being a mother I find it interesting – and to be honest often quite sad – that when women become mothers their position in society seems to go straight to the bottom of the pile. Even the dog gets preference. Whilst I love animals I do find it hard when I see women not making any time for themselves, even in the smallest of ways. They seem to just struggle to cope with the many demands of the day to day.

So many of my clients come to coaching just so they can give themselves the small gift of their coaching time to re-connect with who they were before they became mothers. Time to really talk and time to be really listened to. Time to have the focus just on them and time to make a list of the things they want to do for themselves. Why is it that women are still in so many ways the inferior sex? While I don’t consider myself a feminist, I do believe that women should know their self worth and be true to themselves in terms of their own needs. I understand that being a parent requires a certain amount of sacrifice but surely that shouldn’t be to the detriment of losing one’s sense of self.

To all the mothers out there – always remember you were a woman in your own right before you became a mother and your children will leave home one day and you will need to re-connect with who you once were. Don’t leave it too long that you end up not knowing yourself.

Make time for yourself – no matter how small that time may be.

Have you ever counted how many different log ins and passwords/numbers you have for websites and credit/debit cards, passports etc etc?

A friend told me about this application called 1 Password and I can strongly recommend it as you never have to remember anything again. Your whole life is in this one application which can be shared by anyone you set it up with.

In line with trying to simplify ones’s life which was mentioned in yesterday’s blog – Playing with the moon – I thought this would be useful to everyone.

Follow the link below.

http://agilewebsolutions.com/onepassword