Unicorn 

When someone told me I was delusional, I almost fell off my Unicorn.

That quote always makes me smile. I love the idea and fantasy of living out my dreams that others would say are unrealistic. Well, where would we be today if it wasn’t for many others before us having ‘unrealistic’ dreams like equal rights for all, people flying in machines, communicating instantaneously across the world, and so much more.

Dreams are what we are made for. To find our passions and create a reality in the future for us to follow our purpose and have our dreams come true. To keep pushing at our comfort zones to have the life experience we came here for.

When people talk of goals these days it’s always about them having to be ‘achievable and realistic’. I really don’t like that SMART acronym at all. When we think about our dreams they have to be somewhat unrealistic in our minds at the time else they are not dreams. When we water them down to be ‘achievable’ goals they lose their magic and the motivation to go after ‘less than truly desirable’ dreams does not inspire us. This quickly dampens our quest and we quit before we start.

We need to be dreaming big, setting inspirational goals that get us emotional (e-motion is movement) so that we dare to live at the edge of our comfort zone and face our challenges to get what we want.

There is a balance between wanting to achieve our goals and dreams, and also being ok with how things are today, right now in the present time. When some talk about goals it often comes with the pre-supposition that things have to change as the current situation is not ok. However, things are ok right now (even if they are not ok, it’s ok) and our dreams are simply our sat nav on our continuing journey highlighting the paths to take.

Dreaming big can also be met with some fear of what if we don’t get there. As Les Brown once said “Aim for the moon, because even if you miss you will land among the stars”.

If you could dream big or dream small, what would you choose?

I know where my dreams are taking me, and I have my trusty Unicorn to carry me.

With love and gratitude

Nadine.

Values

What Value to you put on yourself, your feelings, your loved ones, your things?

Our values are the things that are most important to us. The things that we will always give priority to in our lives over other things, and while we may not consciously know what our values are, we can find out by becoming aware of what things, people, experiences etc we put first in our lives.

All we really want as human beings is to feel good, and have more good feelings than bad ones, and the way we behave in what we say, what we do and how we are with others is our way of meeting that need to feel great and feel good about ourselves. In N for Needs we discussed how although we all have the same human needs, we can go about meeting them in positive or negative ways and what determines that are our values.

What comes to mind for you when I ask what do you value most? What’s most important for you?

There are no right or wrong answers here, we are all different. Often when I ask that question I get replies such as ‘my children’, ‘my partner’, ‘my job’, and sometimes ‘my house / car’ and on fewer occasions I hear ‘myself’ or ‘my health’. Other answers are on the lines of ‘being honest’, ‘caring for others’, ‘knowing I have done my best’. The list of possible replies to the question is endless.

As I said there is no right or wrong, but the reason it can be enlightening to know our values is so that when we are living wide awake we can make those conscious choices, as opposed to relying on our reactive ones, and so find more of those good feelings more of the time.

It is interesting however that ‘myself’ and ‘my health’ are often not at the top of people’s value list, and in Y for Yourself First I will explore that further.

So if we wanted to make a list of our top values, how could we do it?

One way is to ask ourselves what feelings we are looking to experience more of the time. For example, are we after feelings of close connection to others, feeling needed, loved or valued? Perhaps we want to feel successful, feel that we have really achieved something, met a goal perhaps, won an award or just felt busy and productive. Are the feelings we seek more around security in our home or financial position. Maybe it’s more about feeling we are continually growing and developing our minds and souls, being authentic with ourselves and have integrity in all we do.

There are many positive feelings that we are always seeking to ‘move toward’ and whether we consciously know them or not, they will be the driver for our decisions and judgements.

There are also some less positive feelings that we seek to ‘move away from’ which can be an even greater driver in our daily choices. These can be feelings such as fear, conflict, overwhelm, anger, confrontation, loneliness and again this list is endless. These feelings that we do anything to avoid often have more of an influence in our lives than the positive ones we seek. It is useful to know our top few so that we can be more conscious about our decisions when we are more awake to the feelings we are trying to avoid.

This brings me onto the rules we have sub-consciously taken on-board that tell us when we can have those feelings we seek and when we get to have the ones we want to avoid too. Let’s take a look at the rules we have around our positive values, and what has to happen for us to feel those feelings we seek.
Take your top 3 values, and the positive feeling you are seeking by having them as the most important things in your life. For each just ask yourself the question “what has to happen for me to feel this?” For example, let’s take the feeling of being loved by a partner. It maybe that’s an easy one as you only have to think about that person to get that feeling. On the other hand you may have created some more difficult rules such as ‘I need to be told I love you’, ‘have to have a text / call / gift each day’, or even ‘they have to put me first in everything they do. The more rules we have we can see that the more difficult we are setting it up for us to have that feeling we seek the most.

Now let’s look at the feelings we want to avoid the most. Take your top 3 and ask the same question “what has to happen for me to feel this?” As an example, the feeling of confrontation may have some rules associated with it such as ‘when someone says No to me’, ‘if someone comes into my personal space’ or simply ‘when someone disagrees with my point of view’. The more rules we have makes it so much easier to have that feeling.

The point of this exercise is to see if you have made it easy or hard to feel the values / feelings you seek, and if you have made it easy or hard to feel the feelings you avoid. When I do this with my clients the outcome is nearly always that the rules are set up to almost make it impossible to feel what they want to feel, as easy as pie to feel the ones they don’t. That’s when we get creative and turn them around so that they get good feelings more often than the bad.

What are the most important things in your life and do they have your priority?

With love and gratitude

Nadine.

Worthy

We are worthy of a life of abundance in all areas. We deserve everything we could wish for.

So many of us really don’t feel we are worthy of anything. Give us praise and we shun it. Give us a compliment and we are embarrassed by it. Where does this feeling of unworthiness come from? We certainly weren’t born with it and even as a child we relished in the praise, attention, applaud and never thought for one minute we weren’t worthy of it all. As with everything else we wouldn’t choose, feeling unworthy or undeserving comes from our Script.

As a child my journey with not feeling good about myself started early. I was always looking for praise and confirmation that I was good. Often it seemed it just wasn’t good enough and whatever I did to please with good intention ended up being something I did wrong. Our young experiences are the foundation of our worthiness and what we in later life come to believe we deserve.

We do deserve it all. We are each worthy of sharing in all that the Universe has to offer, yet our beliefs often stop us short of claiming it.

Every person is deserving of love. However if we can’t find it in us to love ourselves, then we find it hard to accept the love from others unconditionally. We question the reasons why others love us, like us, praise us, compliment us, and we question their motives, all because they see something in us that we can’t. We don’t see our true selves, the beauty we each hold and the love that comes from our soul. Instead we believe we are at some level worthless and fundamentally flawed.

Know that this isn’t the real you. In S for Script we learn that this is just what others in our lives have led us to believe, either consciously or not, and when we go back and remember who we really are we can connect again to that child who felt deserving of it all

In V for Values we spoke about the feelings we are after and the rules around those feelings we seek. What has to happen for you to value yourself as you are right now, to see yourself as deserving of everything you wish for, and to allow yourself to feel that right now with no conditions.
If you hear yourself saying things like “I will feel worthy of my dreams when… “ then become aware that your conditional acceptance of yourself is the very thing that’s between you and a life full of everything you could wish for.

You are worthy.

With love and gratitude

Nadine.

Xtraordinary

Why fit in when you were born to stand out.

No one is ordinary. We are all beyond what is normal. So where did this desire to fit in, be accepted by others by being like them come from?

In N for Needs we see that Love & Connection is a big need that we all need to have met. Yet it also balances with our need for significance, and difference too. I remember in my teenage years I wanted to be different, so I became a punk to fit in with the others. The irony was lost on me at the time, yet I can see how these two key human needs were being met in one go.

Now as a mother of a special needs child I am campaigning for awareness and acceptance of children and adults with autism. Like any minority group there is an education that needs to take place with society as a whole so that their differences can be understood and they can be accepted as a valued part of our communities. This is not the first time, and won’t be the last, that a minority group have been treated unjustly, and for the most part it is a lack of awareness of autism and also the ability for everyone else to be ok with who they are, just as they are. Just like you and me they are perfect in all their imperfections. Xtraordinary.

Mahatma Gandhi said “Be the change you want to see in the world” which to me says that acceptance of difference starts with me, and if that’s the change you want to see too, then it starts with you also.

In history there have been some amazing people who have done great things to bring equality to blacks, gays, women and so many other groups of people who are Xtraordinary in their own way. In fact, in some way we are all part of a minority group, whether it be our gender, faith, colour, sexual orientation, health issue, disability, body size and shape, hair colour, language we speak, music we like and so on. At the present time some of these groups are considered more accepting in society than others, and one day all our Xtraordinary differences will be celebrated without the need for fitting in.

Being ordinary and fitting in is hardly something to aspire to, yet we all have that need for love, connection and acceptance which is why ‘being normal’ is such a big pull in our society today.

Let’s just be Xtraordinary and redefine normality.

With love and gratitude

Nadine.

Yourself First

Put your oxygen mask on first before trying to help anyone else with theirs

During the safety demonstration before any flight this is what you are told in the event of an emergency and the oxygen masks are needed. Why do you think we need to get ours on first before helping our loved ones, our children especially?

Simply because we are no good to anyone if we are struggling without oxygen ourselves. When we have oxygen and can breathe we can be calm and able to help and support others so much better.

This analogy is so true in our lives too. To help others we must first be in a place where we are in a position to give, yet what many of us do, mothers particularly, is keep on giving of ourselves so much, putting everyone else before ourselves to the point that we are on the verge of collapse due to self-neglect. Our Script tells us that we are not worthy to be a priority in our lives and that to feel worthy we must put others first. The Script is wrong.

Many of us value being of service to others. In V for values we learn that our values are the top things that we seek to feel the most and by being of service to others we get to feel worthy, loved, appreciated and other such feelings of respect. Yet being of service to others could be done so much better when we are in a good place ourselves. By filling ourselves up first we would have so much more to give.

As a mother I can relate so much to the times when I thought I had to just give and give and give and never receive. My child became my first focus and by putting him above myself on my priority list it became inevitable that by the time he had taken all he needed, there was nothing left for me. Yet by making an adjustment and putting myself first, I could satisfy my own needs quite quickly and by doing so have more to give him. By filling myself up first I was not running on empty serving him.

Does this sound selfish to you? My view is that it is more selfish to give others less than who you really are, and what you are really capable of. What do we teach our children by putting others before ourselves and what will they grow up to believe they must do themselves?

Fill yourself up first before you give. Then teach others to do the same.

With love and gratitude

Nadine.

Zest

Enthusiasm, Energy, Liveliness, Gusto provides the Zest for Life.

Doesn’t that make you come alive. Just those words give me a boost of happiness and make me want to do a little jig. I love the word Zest as it feels so fresh, full of juiciness, life, vibrancy, colour just as our lives should be and can be when we live fully awake and conscious.

The A to Z of Conscious Living is the guide to raising our consciousness so that we experience every single moment to its fullest capacity. And the best bit is still to come.

Raising our consciousness and living at a higher level of wide awake is just the beginning. As our consciousness rises up each day we see the same old things in a new way, a new perspective, with new glasses so to speak. This in turn helps us to raise our consciousness even more.

As our consciousness raises we see, feel, taste, hear and smell things with a new level of enjoyment that we didn’t have before. Every meal we eat tastes better than before. Every new sunset we see is more beautiful. The music we hear, the love we feel and the flowers we smell are all more incredible than the day before simply because our consciousness has raised that little bit more.

Every day our experiences of things we’ve done a million times before take on a new perspective as if we are seeing with even stronger glasses on each time. We see more, our experience deepens and our life enriches with every passing day.

Now that’s living life with Zest.

With love and gratitude

Nadine.