TSHP342: Looking back on your decade

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What’s Coming This Episode?

Well the decade is drawing to a close. How’s it been for you? This week, Sean and Ed have a chat about whether it’s healthy to look back on life…

Enjoy the show and take care, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

Show Notes and Links

Resource of the Week

  • Sean invited listeners to think about what they have learned this past 10 years
  • Ed reminds you that YOU ARE A RESOURCE

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TSHP341: How to have a happy Christmas

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What’s Coming This Episode?

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, right? Things dingle-ing-ing, etc.? Well, for some it ain’t such a happy time. Stress to keep up appearances, spend time with people you’d rather not see and the financial hit can make it an unhappy time for many. Let’s have a chat and see if we can work through it…

Enjoy the show and take care, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

Show Notes and Links

Resource of the Week

  • Sean recommends writing your letters of gratitude this Christmas
  • Ed demands that you watch It’s a Wonderful Life

Stay in Touch

We’re all over the web, so feel free to stay in touch:

Leave us an Honest Review on iTunes

We’d be amazingly grateful if you could leave us a review on iTunes. It will really help us to build our audience. So, if your like what you hear (and would like to hear more great free content) then visit our iTunes page and leave us an honest review (all feedback gratefully received!).

Happy Christmas?

And, here we are again! The season of goodwill is upon us. Why do we need to wait for Christmas to offer our fellow human beings goodwill? What is the matter with 364 other days of the year? It gives a lot of meaning to the song “I wish it could be Christmas everyday”.

A friend of mine will hold his mother’s funeral on the 23rd. The idea of saying have a happy Christmas seems completely wrong. For so many people Christmas is not a good time. It is a time when people revisit losses and bereavements. Some will be completely alone with not even a Christmas dinner to enjoy and there will be many in the cold on the street with nowhere to be.

Giving

Over all Christmas should, for me, be a time of giving. I see the over consumerism that we have developed leading to demands and critical disappointments. We cease to see the love behind the gift and only the gift itself.

But, how is it for you?

Happy time

Is it that Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus? Or is it that you recognise the winter solstice and acknowledge the end of the darkness and the change to shorter nights and longer day as the light increases. Is it that you simply see this as time of sharing, perhaps with family and friends. A time of warmth and social connection. Is it that you see this as a time when you get wonderful presents and maybe that you also give wonderful presents, a time of giving and receiving.

Not so good a time

Perhaps this is not such a good time. It might be the first Christmas without someone. Maybe it reminds you of bad times in the past or negative childhood memories. Some people just want to be on their own at Christmas and get accused of being miserable if the are.

A really bad time

Someone who is homeless is unlikely to be reading this and maybe having the worst time of their lives. There are children in war zones, old people living alone, the poor, deprived and the needy. People who are terminal or coming to the end of their life Christmas might no be a very good time at all. Children in hospitals. Families with none or very little money.

For many people this is not the most wonderful time of the year

Getting the best

Whatever Christmas means for you and whatever your stating point what is the very best that you can get from it?

All the evidence would point to the physiological and psychological benefits that come from the act of giving. Giving may be to those that are immediately around you. It may be that you are able to contribute in some way to those around you that have so much less. Who in your street or vicinity is living alone and may really appreciate a Christmas dinner, a visit or a little present. It may be too much for you to invite people into your home but you can contribute to the homeless and those that have nothing with food, money, presents or time. If people are coming to you or you have a family to cater for creating a loving and welcome ambiance is a real act of love at this time.

If you have nothing material to give you always have love. The most precious gift of all.

What about you?

It is important when you look at the ideas of giving and loving this Christmas to look after yourself as well. What are you going to give yourself this Christmas? What are you doing for you this Christmas? The phrase ‘Charity begins at home’ starts with you. None of us can look after other people, whoever they are, if we do not look after ourselves first.

Time to consider what you want and what you need this Christmas as well as what everyone else wants and what everybody else needs.

Be happy and enjoy it

Take care

Sean

TSHP340: Head or Hearts? An Election Special…

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What’s Coming This Episode?

It’s election day in the UK and it’s a big moment. 3 years of argy-bargy comes down to this. Don’t get scared now. Sean and Ed needed to get some things off their chests and we hope some of you find this mildly therapeutic! Get and vote, folks…

Enjoy the show and take care, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

Show Notes and Links

Resource of the Week

  • Sean says VOTE
  • Ed says VOTE

Stay in Touch

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Leave us an Honest Review on iTunes

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Election Blog

Today, when we recorded the podcast Ed and I were talking about the conflict between head and heart and how this could be effecting the current general election. We even had ex prime minister John Major clearly stating that he was really a conservative and would normally vote with his head but in the election he was voting with his heart and doing the best for the country and not voting conservative. He even encouraged other Tories to turn their back on Boris Johnson for this election in the hope that we would remain in the EU. I am not a Tory but I am with John Major on this one.

Throughout life we are faced with decisions. Often these will involve conflicts of head and heart. Many people, both men and women, have told how they knew in their heart, on the way to their wedding, that they should not go through with it. At the same time their head told them that all the people would be there, everything had been booked and they could not back down at this stage. Later, often years later, they have face up to what their heart was telling them and they end up in the divorce court.

People in the workplace are often forced to do things that they disagree with. This can happen a lot in the health service. We know that we should or should not do something but managers are telling us that we must act in ways that they are demanding. Those people that are prepared to stand up against the management often ‘have their card marked’ and end up paying for it later.

Most behaviour is driven by self interest. Whether we are voting to stay in the EU or to leave, is all about how we see how it will effect us. In reality the people that will have to deal with the consequences of this election are not the adults it is the children that will inherit what we do. This is at every level from the economy, to society, industrial production, international relations, climate change, plastic pollution and so on.

There has never been a more important time to think clearly about what we are doing than at this very moment. The vote today is the vote of a life time the vote of a generation. the worst thing that any of us can do is not vote.

Many people have suffered and died so that we could have the vote, have a say in what happens to us and to our country. I am hearing too many people say that they will not bother this time, they say what is the point? Well if we do not participate we cannot complain when things happen in the future.

I think that we should have a legal responsibility to vote, there should be no choice. That would at least ensure that we were informed as active participants. It is important that we vote even if our action is to spoil our ballot paper. They say that it is common in India for people to write on their ballot paper ‘none of the above’ and leave it at that. They took the time to express their opinion and share their point of view.

So, whatever you believe and whatever you think or desire to happen today – please vote-don’t waste it.

Take care and good luck

Sean x

TSHP339: How to get better with age

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What’s Coming This Episode?

Age is just a number right? Well, yep – the trouble is that it keeps creeping up. Year after year, moment after moment. Our mortality and the sense that we are running out of time can be a huge psychological barrier, but does it have to be? How can we get better with age?

Enjoy the show and take care, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

Show Notes and Links

Resource of the Week

Stay in Touch

We’re all over the web, so feel free to stay in touch:

Leave us an Honest Review on iTunes

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How to deal with ageing

When I was young, older people seemed really old. At the age of ten a thirty year old person seemed old and anyone over fifty was ancient, after that they were the walking dead. How the process of ageing changes that perspective. At the age of thirty, ten years olds are children, at forty twenty years olds don’t know what they are talking about. By the time you get to ninety they must all seem so young, even those sixty year olds.

The weird thing is that, in the main, from the inside, whatever age you are, you do not feel any older. I am reminded of my adopted Grannie Edna who at the age of 96 told me how she was eighteen inside. She would say, ‘I am really eighteen it is just that this body doesn’t work properly’.

Ed, approaching forty, needed to do this podcast. He is feeling a bit different to the way he did ten years ago. I think that it is the turn of each decade that effects people. It is the years with noughts on 20, 30, 40, and so on that have the effect. Being 29 seems very different to being 30 just as 59 seems very different to being 60 and I guess 99 seems very different to being 100.

I don’t think that age has ever really been the problem that it seems to be today. Previous generations grew old and wrinkly and accepted that age was a natural process. In some cultures old people were, and sometimes still are, highly respected and revered. The current drive to maintain, at least the appearance of youth has devalued and denigrating ageing. Ageing these days seems to viewed more as an illness that needs to be treated rather than a process that needs to be understood and enjoyed.

The reality is that the ageing process begins at the moment of our birth and we can’t stop. It doesn’t matter how much we lift, tuck or Botox we are only ever changing what the outside looks like. The changes of ageing that are taking place below the skin are the ones that mark the passing of time and our age.

Some of us will be genetically programmed to age slower and/or live longer. For some both the quality and the length of life will be determined by life style choices. Others will suffer illness or trauma. If we look at this mindfully we come back to the same place…

…it is never what happens that counts but how we respond to it that is important.

At any age you can have a young mind or an old mind. Our attitudes to ageing and our bodies, our experience and our happiness are not about our bodies it is to do with our choice to live happily or unhappily. Unhappy people can feel older and less able and allow themselves to become progressively less well and mobile and so on.

My advice to staying young is to remain engaged, remain interested, embrace life long learning and keep going. Get a hobby, start a business, do some charity work, learn a new skill, write a book, travel…whatever you do don’t stop learning.

If you continue to learn you will continue to create new brain cells. If you have new brain cells you will have a bigger and a younger brain. If you have a younger brain you will have younger ideas. If you have younger ideas you will live a younger life. If you live a young life you feel younger and stay younger, it doesn’t matter how old you become in years.

With the people that I see there are forty year ‘old’ people and eighty year ‘young’ people. The more I see the more I realise that age is a state of mind not a state of time or of body. As they say you are as young as you feel.

Take care and be forever young

Sean x