You can find the new site at www.dawnwaldron.com or by clicking the box on the right.

Looking forward to seeing and hearing from you in the new space.

Thanks to WordPress.com for providing a free home for the last couple of years. They’re a great team.

But I was impressed – deeply impressed – with the immense effort the celebs are making to reach their goals. It’s so easy to think, ‘It’s alright for them, they’ve got where they want to be’. But programmes like Strictly reveal a fundamental human truth: whoever you are, whatever you do, you always have a yearning to be that little bit better.

I like that about the human race. It’s the redeeming feature that underlies what sometimes seems to be a relentless and selfish scrabble for more, more, more. No matter who you are, no matter how successful you seem, I bet there’s something you feel you can’t or won’t do that you’d secretly love to crack.

With that in mind – and with the kids finally back to school – I’d like to ask you what your plans are for the next 3 months? What project is nudging away at your mind that you’d like to achieve but haven’t quite got round to? And I’d like to help you achieve it.

BACK TO SCHOOL OFFER…

Whatever your goal, here’s my September offer…

3 coaching sessions for £100 to if you book before the end of September 2011. That’s £33 per 60 minute session – more than enough to get started on your novel, your new product or business,  your health and fitness programme, your CV and job hunting, or simply to boost your health, immune and energy levels to see you through the winter. A good investment by any standards.

With a mix of life coaching and nutritional therapy I believe almost anything* is possible. Go on, take the leap, give it a go and make this your Strictly Self Development season and reach your goal before the Grand Final of Strictly Come Dancing in December!

Email: dawnwaldron@mac.com
Phone: 01892 512842
to get started.

*Disclaimer: If your secret goal is to learn to Foxtrot like Anton du Beke then I’m not your woman

Subconsciously many of the thoughts we have are comparisons. Today is colder, rainier and more wintry than yesterday. This morning I’m a bit grumpier than yesterday. I slept better last night than the night before…

The human brain is wired to make constant comparisons in order to assess the environment.

Trouble starts when that involuntary reflex is combined with a value judgment: Colder/Warmer becomes More Comfy/Less Comfy; Bigger/Smaller becomes More Beautiful/Less Beautiful; More Money/Less Money becomes Happy/Unhappy.

Our constant comparative processing has a profound effect on our sense of wellbeing – for better or for worse. And for some reason my brain tends to prefer to make comparisons which make me the loser: shorter, fatter, older, madder, busier are some of the ones that crop up quite frequently these days

You will never stop your brain doing this thing – but here’s the trick to harness it in your favour: stop comparing yourself, your life, your finances, your kids, your partner, your car, your underwear, your kneecaps with ‘perfect’. Turn your thoughts around. Think of all those knobbly knees you saw on the beach this year, think of the starving, the illiterate, the bereaved, the lonely…

I’m not encouraging you to be miserable, simply to start making comparisons that serve you well. That way lies peace, gratitude, contentment and acceptance. HINT: You may need to steer clear of some of the mainstream media to achieve your new-found inner harmony.

What comparisons are you making right now?

Who do you compare your kids with?

What standards do you judge your partner by?

Whose house is nicer than your house?

How does your body compare with Keira Knightley’s?

How does last year’s winter wardrobe stack up to this year’s fashion?

How does feeling discontented with who you are help you get where you want to be?

—

Time to change the soundtrack.

I can understand the good sense behind the advice. I know that it’s safer and wiser to look after your own needs first. It’s just that it doesn’t come naturally.

I’m not alone. I would venture to say that I wouldn’t have a coaching practice if everyone was OK with putting their masks on first. People who can are unlikely ever to want or need any help to get their priorities sorted out.

But the world is well populated with little compassion wagons who don’t feel complete unless they are helping others to get by and neglecting their own, often vital, problems.

If you are that sort of person I guarantee you have people around you who refuse to do anything at all about their oxygen masks. They just sit around waiting for you to do the whole shebang – and then look a bit confused when you pass out half way through due to lack of oxygen.

And then you probably feel bad about upsetting the apple cart (if that isn’t a metaphor too many). You probably feel you should manage better and not get upset and not be stressy and not harbour resentment and always smile.

But you can’t. Because your oxygen mask is still in the overhead locker.

Do yourself a favour…

Get it out.

Put it on.

And breathe.

The programme is designed to provide marketing and management support for caring businesses. In theory that could be any business you care to mention: in practice it’s likely that only small businesses with sole or small management teams will find it appealing. If I suggested to Rupert Murdoch that he might benefit from some business coaching with me he would laugh. (Might be worth a try as I don’t imagine he’s finding much to laugh about just lately.)

Why is it that the ‘big’ business community is so proud that its role models are characteristically mean, tough, cynical and unfeeling?

The Apprentice provides another worrying window on this world: those interviews! Alan Sugar parades a bevy of bullies in order to undermine and destroy the confidence of his candidates in order to what? Any manager worth his bonus knows that you will never discover the best about a person like that. Great telly… but God help us if Lord Sugar’s intimidating management style is the philosophy behind our precious and precarious UK enterprise culture.

So it was a triumph for the good guys that Tom ‘Too-nice’ Pellereau completed his apprenticeship on Sunday to be crowned the new Sugar babe.  I was so pleased to see Richard Reed, co-founder of Innocent Drinks, on the panel sharing his view that this was a breakthrough for British business; that the nice guy really could win. That’s at least two nice guys in British business now

So what is it about being ‘too nice’ that makes us believe that it’s no way to succeed in business? Precisely what is the problem of buying something from someone who you can trust to look after your needs at the same time as his own and keep the whole transaction above board? What’s wrong with trying to do the right thing and tell the truth and show your emotions and follow your dreams protect the environment and do it all with a smile on your face? Why can’t we see that our greatest chance of success lies in reaching our potential, finding our highest purpose and being our best selves?

To the cynics who say that Rupert Murdoch and his clingons would never survive without their particularly twisted model of businessmongering, I would simply say this: imagine what a man like that could have achieved if he’d chosen to do it all with integrity, compassion, authenticity and truth as his values.

Now that would have been a ‘big’ business.

———

Hmmm. Just sorting through these emails from new clients signing up for Vocation Location… R. Brookes, A Coulson, P Stephenson… could be interesting!

You can’t have everything.

And before you switch off, thinking you don’t want to hear that negative message, let me explain what I mean.

In coaching I always try to establish a goal: an overall goal which describes what you are looking to change in your life, and a goal for each session.

It’s normal practice to encourage big, bold goals: no limiting thoughts allowed. The whole coaching philosophy is that you can achieve whatever you want. And that you are uniquely creative and talented to bring your dreams to reality in a way that no one else can match.

It’s also quite fashionable to think in terms of getting noticed: published, discovered, televised, filmed, scouted, quoted, snuggled up on the couch with this year’s celebrity interviewer.

And why not?

Simply this. Everything we achieve comes at the expense of something else. And sometimes we discover that we’re not prepared to give that ‘something else’ up. Our happiness may be more closely aligned to the smaller goals than the large ones.

At best, this can be the reason you are quite happy plodding along in your quiet and peaceful world, rarely giving a thought to fame and fortune and letting any ideas of greatness slip through your fingers, safe in the knowledge that most Oscar-winning actresses haven’t had a square meal for about 4 years.

At worst this legitimate incapacity to leave your comfort zone can set you up for a lifetime of  ”coulda, shoulda, woulda”, where you constantly dream of having more, being more and achieving more but never quite make any of it happen. It can lead to feelings of disappointment and envy that make you believe that the life you have chosen (did you hear that bit about chosen?) is somehow less than the life you deserve.

This idea of the anonymous but fulfilled life came to my attention in many ways last week but never so powerfully as when, over an all-too-rare dinner with a great friend, we were discussing Philip Larkin’s poems and she showed me the one he wrote for Kingsley Amis’s new-born daughter.

He wished that she be ‘ordinary’.

‘In fact,’ he said, ‘may you be dull –
If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled
Catching of happiness is called.’

Most of us have set up our lives intelligently and thoughtfully to optimise the resources available to us. We may not have achieved nirvana but we have created a very skillful collage out of the luck, opportunities and talents that have crossed our path.

There is great value in learning to live with what we have.

Perhaps more than there is in leaving it behind.

Maybe the secret is to change your mind, rather than change your life?

It’s shocking. Strangely unnatural. Viscerally troubling.

Aside from thinking that it looks like an abandoned sci-fi lunar landscape, my mind was also asking why. Why do we need to cultivate in such intensive quantity?

We broke our journey briefly at a truck stop in the middle of one of the more crowded poly-cities and glimpsed another world. Lorries and vans and labourers and dirt and poverty and not a plant in sight. All under wraps. Even in June nature is not allowed to take its course.

I was just getting over the impact of that experience when I learned, courtesy of Andrew Marr’s Megacities, that London consumes the entire food production capacity of the UK.

Let’s put that another way. The amount of food consumed in the 600 square miles that is Greater London needs a geographical food production area equivalent to 120,000 square miles.

(I’m just going to stop typing for a moment so you can read that again.)

.

.

.

(And I’m not going to write about all the waste that pours out of that equation: the food packaging, the plastic water bottles, the cardboard coffee cups, the sandwich bags, the polystyrene burger containers and the food waste that is probably enough to feed Brighton.)

When I was a kid, if I didn’t finish everything on my plate my mum would say I had eyes bigger than my belly.

Now, I think we have eyes bigger than our planet.

The world is creaking at the seams (along with our trousers).

Our insistence on having it all, eating it fresh, all year round, deliciously enticing, cooked for us, wrapped for convenient eating or transporting, whenever we feel even slightly hungry, all day and all night, is an economic and ecological disaster. Our demand for the latest superfoods to counteract our crazy over-stuffed lifestyles is also part of the picture.

We’re like teenagers who keep on partying and don’t understand the consequences.

So what has all this got to do with being happy, I hear you ask?

Only in the sense that everything is linked. My happiness is your happiness. My greed is your lack. My insistence in living beyond my ecological means is impacting our children’s ability to live in a beautiful world. What goes around comes around.

Happiness lies in having enough and knowing what constitutes enough.  If we all have eyes bigger than our bellies then there won’t be enough of anything to go round – including happiness.

For a large part of my life the heroine was a poor little girl who was locked up in a nasty boarding school. Nobody loved her. She was destined for a life of misunderstanding and hardship. Because she wasn’t very nice.

I’m still pretty good at going to that place.

In the kitchen, in the shower, in the car, telling myself that no one understands me, I have no choice, no one cares, there’s no escape, they just don’t get it.

It’s a great story.
Nothing much happens.
No one feels better.

Except that it’s an easy place to be. A place where I feel at home. It feels natural.
A sort of comfortable discomfort.

I’m learning. I’m learning to stop. But it’s very very difficult.
It’s a bit like stopping breathing.
It’s involuntary…
subconscious…

It’s such an ingrained part of me that I find it difficult to catch myself doing it.

But lately, after nearly 48 years, I’ve coached my other inner voices to challenge the whinger.

They haven’t got any answers for her.
No balm, no sympathy, no resolution.
They simply and emphatically say.

“Think about something else.”

And when I catch myself,
when I recognise that it’s voluntary,
when I bring it into my consciousness
I can do it.

I can change my perspective,
choose a different mindset,
tell myself a different story.

About a woman who has everything she needs, surrounded by love and life and friendship and more choices than she ever thought possible and a great job and a great family and a great future.

All that joy…
just by choosing a different thought.

Amazing!

If we are being asked to do something we usually want to know why.

Looked at from another perspective, the ‘why’ question can get us into all sorts of trouble.

We can get stuck in why. Why did this happen? Why me? Why did they do that? Why can’t I <blank>?

Asking why can land us in ever-decreasing circles. Answers aren’t always available.

In coaching we are taught to keep asking questions.

Why? Because coaches believe that everyone has the answers to the problems in their own life. And those answers are uniquely appropriate and creative in a way that advice can never be.

But we also know that when you get stuck in a why question, it’s better to start asking something else.

Like How? When? What?

How can you move on?

When do you want to feel better?

What could you do to make a difference to the way you feel now?

Questions like this don’t always get to the root cause of your situation but they do provide ways to move forward, to get beyond the feeling of being stuck and powerless.

Perhaps if Lord Cardigan had asked How instead of Why history would have unfolded a little differently.

Who knows?