Happy Mondays
Leading life and happiness coach
HAVE you listened to yourself lately? Truly listened. Not just noticing that weird reedy note your voice takes on when telling your teens to pick up towels off the floor for the umpteenth time or the “oomph” you’ve started to make whenever you sit down. But listening and tuning in to your deeper self.
I take a daily vacation and it’s one that does not involve fighting over sun loungers at dawn or eating as many cephalopods as you can in one day. It is simply staring at a wall or out of the window and listening to my mind.
Daydreaming to me is an essential daily exercise that allows the silt to settle and my mind to re-calibrate. I am remembering to pick up dry cleaning or I am fantasising of reclining in my grand Provençal chateau with the sweet smell of pine needles and oleanders.
I am sometimes hosting my own coaching based personal development global TV show and Oprah is on the line talking partnerships.
Or I am wishing I could turn the clock back and reliving a difficult time with a different outcome.
In her book The Joy Diet top coach Martha Beck insists you cannot read further chapters until you practise the first chapter, which is to do nothing at all for 15 minutes a day.
When you feel overwhelmed or nothing makes sense, she urges you to find a quiet place with no phone and no one around and just notice your thoughts.
Finding this mental place of peace is essential. It is why I love train journeys with no books nor newspapers, just a window and the unwinding of the mind. And therein magical adventures occur. It gives one time to make sense, to forward think, plan and imagine and create out of the ether.
Most of the top business people I have coached understand the importance of time out and day dreaming whether on the golf course, fishing or simply closing the door, putting feet on the desk and staring out of the window. Here you can step away from the monkey chatter of the mind and reconnect with peace and a deep sense of love in even the most turbulent times of suffering.
Taking time out from the madness that is the cult of busyness so worshipped by society doesn’t mean you tip into pointless laziness. The point is there is no point. And that is powerful.
Doing repetitive, simple tasks allows the brain to drift into an alpha state and therein is the canvas on which creative thought can project new ideas and solutions.
Contrary to popular thought, doing less and going to this place of peace makes one more productive than frenziedly over-working to the point of laboured progress.
In that silence is freedom and restoration. As the poet Antonio Machado wrote:
My soul is not asleep! My soul is not asleep!
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches, its clear eyes open, far off things, and listens, and listens at the shores of the great silence.
It listens at the shores of the great silence.
No need for a passport: book your vacation today and every day.