friends – Happy Parent UK

Know your motivation

When faced with a decision between one course of action and another, the motivation can make as much difference as the actual choice you make.

Leaving a job, confronting a loved one, telling someone how their actions have affected you – these are not always easy, and can sometimes lead to pain.

But each of these can be done out of spite or out of love.

Leaving a job can mean thumbing your nose at your employer and saying good riddance to the aspects of the job that led to finding another role elsewhere.

Or it can mean acknowledging your needs, how these aren’t being met in your current role, and being grateful for everything your current role has taught you, as well as leaving the place better than you found it.

Staying in a job where you’re unhappy could create discontent, building tension and dissatisfaction for you and your colleagues, or a nasty competitive environment where you spend most of your energy proving why others are wrong, rather than .

Or it could mean appreciating what is good about where you are, seeking to bridge differences and make the workplace better for colleagues and customers alike.

The decision – should I stay or should I go? should I try to talk to them about it or pull away? – isn’t always the most important factor. The motivation behind a decision is both the ‘why’ you do something, and dictates the ‘how’.

And that makes all the difference.

Personal story and reflections

A social media experiment

As many of you may know, I’ve drastically limited my time on social media.

Then recently, whilst at home sick with a high fever and flu-like symptoms, I ended up posting on facebook for the first time in nearly a year, which led to me checking back regularly to see if I had any comments. I then would peruse my newsfeed as, being bed bound, I had lots of time on my hands and nowhere to go and no energy to do much more than scroll.

But after a few days, I started to feel down. I can chalk this up in part to being isolated and feeling poorly, which always tends to leave me feeling out of sorts and a little blue.

Yet alongside the familiar sickness-blues was another familiar sensation that I experience from time to time and have come to associate with social media: a sense of being left out, or not belonging, or needing to do more.

Basically, by the end of my illness (and therefore, the end of my social media usage), I found a number of drawbacks to having used it.

Now, I don’t want to suggest that social media is “bad” or that I’m somehow a better person for not using it (hardly). As with a lot of things, there is no inherent value or drawback in the thing itself; it depends on how you use it.

But I did find it interesting, so here is what I’ve learnt following this unintended experiment in the pros and cons of social media. Continue reading “A social media experiment” →

Personal story and reflections, Self-help and coaching

Holding onto your self in the sea of life

I recently met up with a friend who is going through a divorce. When I saw her, the first thing I noticed was how amazing she looked.

As we sat down with our drinks and I started to take in the details – hair recently dyed to cover stray grays, eyebrows thick and neatly waxed, a cool outfit – she said, “That’s something that’s changed now he’s left – I will not sacrifice my self-care.”

Continue reading “Holding onto your self in the sea of life” →

Practical tips, Self-help and coaching

Weekly planning guide

I have somehow developed a Weekly planning guide that really works for me. It’s simple, quick, and yet holistic. In short, it’s much more than a list of tasks to do, and has been a boon and a comfort to me in difficult times recently.

It evolved from a need to get a lot done, but also from a need to make sure what I was doing mattered.

Because being busy isn’t the point of life. I’m not 100% sure there is any point in life beyond the meaning we give it, and I certainly didn’t want my life’s meaning to amount to a bunch of balled up to do lists, or my kids to remember me after I’m gone as merely an efficient taskmaster.

And there’s also how I wanted to feel whilst living my life. I’m the one who has to live it, so I better make sure it feels good to me. And what feels good can vary from week to week: sometimes I crave silence, stillness, peace, and other times I want fun and joy and excitement. Continue reading “Weekly planning guide” →

Personal story and reflections

An experiment in attention

In this blog, I want to try something a little different. I have been struggling with an issue that has been impacting my happiness. It’s very much a current issue, not something I’ve solved for myself. But I had an idea.

Yesterday as I sat in the silence of my Quaker meeting, I had the idea of “turning towards the light” – not to ignore negative feelings per se but equally not to ruminate on them.

As founding Quaker George Fox said:

“The first step of peace is to stand still in the light.”

Or, if I’m able to adapt an excerpt from Advice and Queries to make it more comfortable for agnostics and atheists,

“Take heed to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts. Trust them as the leadings of good, whose light shows us our darkness and brings us to new life.”

So I want to try applying this in my day to day life this week and share how it goes and anything I might learn. Continue reading “An experiment in attention” →