Making the journey as important as the destination

Sally with Peakakariki in the background. I'll be staying here with her in New Zealand.

In a few days time I’m due to make the long journey to New Zealand. 24 hours in a plane plus untold hours of waiting in airports, hotels and queues. It has felt pretty daunting at times and I’ve wondered why on earth I decided to do it. The truth is that I’m doing it to renew the bonds of friendship, and to be on a great adventure for 3 weeks. All my core values of connection, joy, beauty, growth, authenticity and peace will be there. Big values, life affirming and joyous.

Which brings me to the journey. I realised that I’ve been looking at it from the perspective of ENDURANCE. Something to be got through at both ends of the trip. Which made me think that there must be some different perspectives. The one I have chosen is VALUES. To live that 36 hours as much as possible in those 6 core values. It may be a stretch!

Here’s what I’m setting out to do

Growth – easy peasy. The whole journey is new, a challenge, stretching and enriching. That value will be fully lived with ease.

Connection – I really like people and find it easy to connect. So I’ll be connecting with all the amazing people whose service will be assisting me on my journey. Seeing who they are and acknowledging their contribution. Yet I’m not good at talking to strangers on trains and planes. My mind tells me that I’ll end up having to talk to them all the way, that they’ll be intrusive or boring. The danger is that I could end up sitting in a plane without speaking for 24 hours. I want to speak. So I’ll have to pull on~

Authenticity – and my capacity to be honest and claim what I need in the moment. To say out loud that I want to listen to my mp3, to sleep or simply to sit in silence for a while and be mindful. I want to find a way to do this gracefully, without hiding behind headphones and other technology. To create~

My transport on this adventure

Peace – on a plane and in an airport. An interesting challenge! I’m taking some mindfulness tapes and recordings of my sessions with my own coach. They’ll help me to find a more spacious place in my head and my heart, even amongst the noise and disturbance of a Boeing 777. Which brings me to~

Beauty – Trains, functional hotels, planes and airports. Not much beauty there. So I’m opening my mind up to what beauty there is and to make ugly beautiful. There will be beauty in the human faces and hands, elegance of engineering that combines form and function, the book in my hands, in the clouds, stars and sky.

And JOY – maybe the biggest stretch of all. How to be joyful when I’m tired, stiff, bored, sore eyed and cranky. I’ll need to remember that this is a choice. I can choose in any moment to be in the miracle of human creativity and ingenuity that has put me in a seat above the clouds. To think of the thousands and thousands of minds and hands that have built the plane, grown the food, woven the cloth, refined the fuel, cleared the rubbish, hauled the luggage and guided the plane. I reckon I can find joy.

 

David Beckham started it

Last week I was asked to speak about friendship on my local radio station Radio Leeds. I went on the radio prepared to talk about values and their importance in our lives – with friendship being a central one for many people. In the end the conversation turned out to be “best friends” and I talked merrily about my own experience of this. My friendships have changed in the last few years as I have sought out more people who share my values. It was good to be able to talk about what characterised my friendships and name my closest friends on air. However, all the stuff I wanted to say about the value of friendship went unsaid – until now.

The radio topic was chosen on the back of David Beckham’s recent interview in Men’s Health magazine. In it he spoke about the fact that he has three close friends.

On the radio and social media there was general amazement that David Beckham had ONLY THREE FRIENDS. Here was this talented, successful man, known around the globe. Why didn’t he have more friends?

I think they missed the point, which is that friendship is clearly an important value to him. By value I mean both the benefits he gains from friendship and the underpinning belief that it’s important to him. Three close friends give him what he needs. Here I think it’s useful to point out that he also spoke about the importance of family in his life, both his family of origin and the one he has created with his wife. Another underpinning value.

Friendship is a value that many of my clients hold. For some it’s a core value, one of the 6 or 7 that are absolutely crucial to them living a fulfilled life. These core values are like our DNA – remove them or scramble the code and we’re no longer ourselves. I ask them on a scale of 1-10 how much are you honouring that value in your life? It can come as a shock to some of them to realise that they are scoring 4/10. And it’s a wakeup call to begin to create the life that they truly want.

Friendship

If friendship is a value that you want more of here are some suggestions for small actions you can take.
·         Don’t wait for friends to contact you, reach out. Pick up the phone  and dial that number. If it isn’t a good time for them to talk you can always arrange another, or a coffee.
·         Tell your friends what they mean to you. Open your mouth and speak.
·         Talk about your friendship, what’s working in it and what’s not. Redesign it so it’s an even better fit.
·         If you meet someone you think might be a future friend ask them if they’d like to meet for a coffee. Not a date, just a cup of coffee and the chance to find out if you want to nurture this budding friendship.

You may have noticed your mind telling you all sorts of gremlin thoughts as you read those ideas. It’ll be embarrassing, I might get turned down, maybe next month, it’s too scary . . . . just thank your lovely mind for trying to look after you . . . . and give one of them a go. Because this is about values. And living a life according to your values is not always comfortable. Whatever the value you are wanting more of, not just friendship, you may have to take risks, make a stand for an unpopular idea, say NO or YES out loud, leave your job – or your friendship. Sometimes friendships no longer serve us, they are past their use by date. If that’s the case you may have to let go, as David Beckham has with some of his.

And right now I want to salute the three different clients of mine who have made the big decision to leave their jobs in the last few weeks. All three of them made values based decisions: living a working life of passion and purpose; making family the centre of life; LIFE itself – claiming back the right to live with enjoyment, balance and friendship. All three face difficult conversations with family, friends, colleagues and maybe bank managers.

Which brings me back to David Beckham. He clearly stands in the world supported by the twin values of friendship and family. He’s willing to make these public and face possible ridicule. He knows who he is.

And finally back to you. What are your 6 or 7 core values? What do they mean to you? How do you express the in your life? What score would you give them right now? What’s one thing you commit to do THIS WEEK to live one of them more fully?

Using Core Values as a Compass – Just £35

If you’re interested in values I’m running a half day workshop in Leeds on 28th April, 9.30-13.30 in Chapel Allerton. Here’s a quick outline of what we’ll be working on:

- Explore your values and what they mean to you – you might end up with a really rich list of things that are important.
- Identify your own unique set of core values to create a values compass – working out the small number that are crucial for you.
- Locate the compass points where you don’t venture or get lost – where have you lost sight of what’s important, let other people’s needs drive your decisions or simply sold yourself short?
- Create your own map to take you forward and live your values more fully – work out what you want more of and some first steps to get you moving to creating a juicier relationship with your values.

 Contact me to reserve a place.

 

 

Creating A Life That Matters

I’m spending time this month helping my clients to look at their values and live them more fully.

What do I mean by values? I’m not talking just about the moral values that society may require of us, like honesty or neighbourliness. These may well be part of the core values you choose to live your life by. Yet what about the ones that may also make your heart sing – like truly being you, freedom of expression, beauty, fearlessness or creativity? These are the types of values I want to explore here.

Our values are like our DNA, a unique expression of who we are and how we show up in the world. If I took three people who all said they had the value of creativity I could be pretty certain that they’d be living their lives quite differently. One might be using that value to write poetry, another to build new ways in which a community group runs and the third to design new systems for effective communication at work. Yet if I gave those three people a list of values to select from maybe only the poet would select creativity.

So what you do, and how you live your life, is an outward display of your values. Even when you are not conscious of them. Values work is one of the powerful ways in which life coaches help people to make the unconscious conscious. Only when we are conscious of the patterns that run our lives, our values and our habits can we choose to change them and create the life that we want.

If exploring your own values sounds like a great thing to occupy you over some dismal February days here are some ways you might begin.

Must-Haves - Beyond the physical requirements of food, shelter, and community, what must you have in your life in order to be fulfilled? What are the values you absolutely must honour-or part of you feels like it’s suffocating or in pain?

A Peak Moment in Time - Identify special, peak moments when life was especially rewarding or poignant. What was happening, who was there, what were you feeling? What were the values that were being fulfilled? It’s important that the time frame be quite limited – a “moment” – or there will be too much in the experience to allow you to pinpoint specific values.

Suppressed Values - Identify times when you were angry, frustrated, or upset. What was it that was being compromised?

The old railway path north of Filey

And my own? I have six core values that I am choosing to live my life by. They are beauty, joy, growth, authenticity, connection and peace. Sometimes I do really well at honouring them and feel great, other times I wander away from them and have to bring myself back. The important thing is that my values create a path for me to find again, I just can’t get lost forever whilst I know that they are there.

I’m looking at running a half day workshop in April to help people explore their values. If you’re interested in coming along let me know and I’ll keep you posted.
Have fun creating your own values path.

Warmly
Tilla

 

New Year’s Resolutions Gone West?

It’s well into January as I write this. The weather today is dull, cold and drizzly. This is the kind of winter day when it’s easy to lose your sense of purpose. One where the resolutions and goals of the emerging year can drift away from you. It seems as though there are weeks of winter left ahead of us.

That’s when the gremlins bite.  They may be showing up as procrastination – the I’ll do it tomorrow feeling. They might be creating guilt and whispering into your ear I told you, you’ll never be fit, what’s the point in trying. Or yours could be telling you that it’s no point starting whatever you need to do because you won’t be able to get it perfect.

Gremlin thoughts show up in lots of disguises and they’re skilled at finding ways to give you a hard time. Especially so in the dark winter months.

Learning to manage your gremlins better means

• noticing when it’s a gremlin voice speaking. Sometimes it’s hard to work that out, because you’ve been listening to it for so long it sounds like the truth.
• understanding a bit about what it’s trying to help you to do. Mainly they want to keep you safe, stop you taking  risks, looking foolish or failing in some way.
• experimenting with different ways of thinking and behaving to change what’s happening. In his book S.U.M.O. (Shut Up and Move On) Paul McGee uses the beautiful little equation E + R = O. This stands for Event + Response = Outcome. We’re often not in control of the events that happen to us in our lives. Yet we can be in control of our response, and so change the outcome that we get. Learning to manage your gremlins is one way of changing the response – it gives you CHOICE.

If you want to get to know yours a bit better and learn some tricks and tools to keep you in the driving seat of your life have a look at the details of my Gremlin workshop on Saturday 28th January in Leeds.

If you can’t get to that check out the series of short videos I created last year – you can access the first one here.

Whatever your gremlins are saying to you – it’s unlikely to be true! Stay curious about them and be compassionate towards yourself. Both these things will help you to stay out of judgement and guilt.

And enjoy the early signs of spring creeping towards us.

Tilla