TSHP395: Happy New Year it’s 2021

What’s Coming This Episode?

Ok, so it is New Year!

Standing at the beginning of 2021 you, and I, will be making choices about how and what this year will be. 2020 will certainly be a year to remember and for many perhaps a year to forget. What’s on your list for 2021?

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Happy New Year it’s 2021

Ok, so it is New Year!  

Standing at the beginning of 2021 you, and I, will be making choices about how and what this year will be. 2020 will certainly be a year to remember and for many perhaps a year to forget. People tell me that is is as though it never happened. Or that we should simply cancel it and call this new year 2020 and do it properly this time without the virus.

As we ride into 2021 we have the joint joys of Covid and Brexit and we do not know what will be the outcome of either. Perhaps the vaccines will kick the virus in the backside and hopefully be a sovereign state again will be good for us. Looking forward into 2021 will create feelings of hope, love, fear, anxiety, joy…whatever it is for you. The point is that what you see ahead, and how…

  you create what happens for you … 

… is all a matter of your choices. it may not feel like it but your world is full of choice. In your present moment in your ‘Now’ you are actively creating the world of your experience through the choices that you make…  

…thoughts becomes things…

all of us, individually and collectively, are choosing what will happen for us in 2021 and how we will respond to it and feel ab out it. We are all doing it though we may not realise it.

Focus for a moment on the choices before you in this coming year. Do you have any? What are they? Most importantly what is the basis of your choices? When deciding to do, or not to do, something It is important to own that deciding not to make a decision is actually a decision. The action of stillness is equally as powerful as the action of motion. However, when you choose to do nothing you are likely to be vulnerable to the choices that everyone else makes around you. In having your own clarity of purpose you are in the flow of your life and, as I said, stillness is a decision as much as an action.

Choice and fear

For many of us the choice for action this year will be limited by fear. Fear of disease, debt, pain, failure, fear itself, the fear of looking stupid, ridiculed, of loss, rejection, abandonment and so on. Fear is the biggest limiting factor for any of us. Fear and anxiety are the destroyers of our happiness and to create fulfilment – those who dare win – We all need to step beyond our fears, as Susan Jeffers put it – feel the fear and do it anyway – ( a book worth reading).

If you can get hold of that idea that your thoughts become your experience, you are becoming the author of your own life. It is then you will realise that fear is actually a choice. Once you understand that you will realise that the experience of joy is the same thing. Personal joy and duty are often at odds. Do you do what you want to do or what you think you should or ought to do?

Choice and duty

Generally in psychotherapy the words “ought, should, must and can’t” are banned. Each of these words are the limiters of self expression. The call of duty may be laid upon us by our culture, religion, beliefs, as parents, children, employees, employers and so on. The trick is that if in 2021 there are things that you feel you ‘must’ do then, – act with a smile on your face –  this is known as Bhakti or, to give service without expecting anything in return. We all need a bit of Bhakti in our lives but it is always damaging when we allow a sense of duty to stunt our own self development after all – we all deserve happiness –  well we do in my script. Yet many of us chose to create negative life scripts.

There are many reason that we can find to maintain and justify our own lack of development or fulfilment our feelings of victimisation or misery, unhappiness and moaning about our life and other people that we meet, though there are alternatives. The classic is that we blame other people for how we feel. Common targets are our parents, family, friends, and most commonly partners and so on.

There are alternatives…

Choice and joy

In making your decisions for 2021 you might chose to avoid the ought, should, must and can’t and, think about the lightness of joy in life – focus on what makes you feel happy – and do more of it. Doing things that make you feel good is never a difficulty and never feels like work. When you do things that make you feel good, in the end it is you that feels happiness. How many of the things that you do in your life lead to you feeling flat, bored or unhappy. If you do more of what makes you feel good in your life you will feel happier and get better and better – happiness is a learned response – sometime we have to practise being happy.

Choice and responsibility

The word responsibility comes from the word to respond “respond-ability”. By being responsible or “respond-able” for what you experience makes you the master of our own destiny. It does not matter from where you begin your journey, whatever your age or state of health. By being responsible for your life and taking ownership of yourself – responsibility is the key-. If I decide to be responsible for me no one else can ever be responsible for what I think or feel and, ultimately, what I do. There are many examples of people who, against the odds chose to respond to things positively.

This year some of you will be facing very difficult and tough stuff, emotionally, mentally, financially, physically, socially and so on. These may be things that you cannot avoid and you have no choice other than to face them and deal with them. However, you do have a choice as to how you respond to them…

 none of us are effected by events, 

we are effected by our response to those events…

living in the present and being positive about your future allows you to create a year in 2021 that you will look back on positively and perhaps with joy.

Decide to create your own experience this year. Treat your problems as challenges so whatever 2021 presents you with, smile be positive and enjoy it.

Take care

Sean x

 

TSHP394: Christmas Fun and Games

What’s Coming This Episode?

Christmas is here which means… well, something a bit different this year. Sean and Ed reminisce about some of their favourite traditional family games they play at Christmas, and help with a few tips for online play this year. Happy Holidays everyone!

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Christmas fun and games

I had one of those “what did you do when you were a child…?”, conversations. I was talking with a newly recruited nurse. She was from Spanish Tenerife and we were talking about Christmas. She was explaining that as children they were not given their Christmas presents until January the 6th, said to be the day that the three wise men arrived bearing their gifts to the birth place of Jesus in Bethlehem. This giving of present of known as ‘Fiesta de Los tres Reyes Mages’. 

I was interested in what they did in the time between Christmas Eve and January the sixth. “We played games” she said. A tale unfolded of the various games the family would play together. She explained the importance of family and family values in their tradition and how people would travel for miles to bring gifts and make visits. She talked with starry eyes about the gatherings of the extended family. Then she told me about how much she missed it all. That got me thinking about our families and how this year, with restricted access, just how much fun there will be and how we will be able to play games. How many family get togethers this year will be online. Can you play family Christmas games online?

There were three types of games those that are played with the adults, those that are  exclusively for children and those that span the ages. The thing that struck me looking back was how much we did actually play and interact with each other at Christmas. Now we often have the virtual game that means we are interacting with a screen and not a person. So maybe for many younger people a lockdown Christmas will be fine as long as there are games consoles and people online to play with.

Anyway, all this got me thinking about the games that we played and how simple they were but also how we rolled around laughing our heads off. All of these games might seem ridiculous to children today but, maybe some game time at Christmas could be good for us all. It is a way of letting off steam and family bonding and maybe some of these would be played over Zoom, FaceTime etc. Here are some of the mad things that we would play as kids… 

The Laughing Game

Aim: Try not to laugh

1. All players sit in a circle

2. Each player takes it in turns to say “Ha”, “Ho” or “Hee”.

3. The first player to start laughing loses and is out of the game.

4. Continue until everyone is out of the game.

5. The person who manages not to laugh for the longest is the winner.

I have attended laughter workshops since and they do work just as this game does. The reality for was that we never got to the end because we would all end up laughing until the tears rolled down our faces.

There were two games when we were blindfolded, which was something I found a bit scary. I am not sure that these could be played online?

Blind Man’s Buff

A blindfold player tries to catch others while being pushed about by them.

Squeak Piggy Squeak

Everyone sits as quietly as possible. The blindfolded person sits on someone’s lap and says “squeak piggy squeak” where upon they squeak and the blindfolded person tries to guess who they are.

Card Games

There were loads of card games from Snap to Rummy and Chase the Ace. I think I will get a pack of cards for Christmas and see if we can get some games going. These can all be played online.

Board Games

Board games like Snakes and Ladders, Ludo, Cluedo, and for the more serious Drafts and Chess can all be played online. 

Kim’s Game

Ed likes this one and it can definitely be played online. In his version an adult brings in a tray with various objects on it. These have to be memorised by the players. The adult leaves the room and removes on object from the tray and brings the tray back into the room. The players have to guess what is missing.

Acting out games

Things like Charades, when people have to guess what you are acting out, were always very funny and sometimes mind boggling. This is a definite online game. There are variations on this theme now when people do things like you have a label stuck on your forehead that you can’t see while everyone else has to act out whatever is in the label until you guess what it is. This could be done online if everyone can see the label except for the person who is doing the guessing.

Talking

Again a good online game. When we got older we played some talking games such as Limericks. The first person would start the Limerick “There once was a lady from …..” the next person would provide the next line, and so on, until we got to the end. These were usually very funny and often very rude.

Running about games will probably not be allowed this year unless we can get outside with good social distancing. This year perhaps even going for a walk together will be fun. 

At this time of year it makes me think about how we do not do as much together as we once did and the importance of building family and maintaining family relationships and friendships through simple interaction. Covid has robbed so many people of the simple daily interaction that gave life purpose and meaning. Playing games gives us a good chance, and opportunity to just have fun and be silly and be together.

Whether you are celebrating Christmas, the winter solstice, or just creating some light in the dark depth of winter make it fun, play and enjoy it even if it is online.

Be happy

Sean x

 

TSHP393: Why do we listen to the prophets of doom?

What’s Coming This Episode?

For Sean a prophet of doom is someone who is habitually expressing the negative or pessimistic views of whatever is going on despite a general feeling that things were going well or at least getting better. So… why do we listen to them so much??

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Why do we listen to the prophets of doom?

For me a prophet of doom is someone who is habitually expressing the negative or pessimistic views of whatever is going on despite a general feeling that things were going well or at least getting better.

‘Hey, we have a vaccine’

‘It will probably poison us all’

Or even better..

‘We have a vaccine’

‘It is the dark powers just trying to control us’

You must know these, you might even be one, doom sayers are everywhere. Is the sun is shinning it is too hot, if not is is too cold, too wet, too dry, whatever it is, it is never right and it never will be. The role of the doom sayer is to tell you how bad it all is and to reinforce this negative message at every opportunity.

Human consciousness is such a powerful tool that it can solve problems, 

except those that it believes that it cannot.

Listen to those around you

Try this one, go to three different places, maybe after C-19 restrictions, cafes, waiting rooms, bus stops, or whatever, and listen to the conversation being carried on by those around you, what do you hear? Are the people around you sharing positive or negative things? Are they counting their blessing or bemoaning their woes? Are they sharing how good their live’s are or reciting the badness in their everyday?

Bad news is good news. It is bad news that sells papers and promote news channels. We seem unable to avoid tuning into it. Current research suggests that for most people the average negative dominance of their thoughts and conversation is about 70%. That means that for most of us we spend about 70% of our time thinking, feeling or talking about negative things. 

What are we doing this for? 

If we could track back in evolutionary time we could probably find a point where it became good for our development to be negative. Perhaps it was an obsession with danger that kept us safe. Or maybe the fear of starvation made us critical of their that wasted precious resources. However it began and however it developed it is with us today and maybe is developing. It is certainly true that every person who develops and maintains the habit of negative dominance becomes a drop in the ocean of negative consciousness that affects us all everywhere in the world.

Hoarders abound

As the waves of Covid flow around us and the Brexit deadline gets ever closer the bad news that we are presented with is that the shelves in the supermarkets will be empty. The negative fear drives us to hoard food and resources, ‘just in case’. From an evolutionary perspective this is a good strategy that will ensure survival. From a modern point of view all it means is that we increase our anxiety and stress and damage our mental health and well being.

Does it have to this way?

We know that we are habit machines. We are each the sum total of all that we have learned since our birth. We are all of the habits that we have developed throughout our life. We learned our habits through observation. Our children are doing the same in their observation of us. Are we demonstrating positive or negative behaviours to our children?

We can pass the habit of negative dominance down to the next generations so that it will become accepted to them as their normal behaviour. Remember, a habit is something that requires no effort and no will power to enact, we simply just do it. It becomes who we are, how we see ourselves and how we see the world, it becomes ‘normal behaviour’.

Be informed not inundated

Having listened to others talking try the news broadcasts. List the positive stories and the negative stories. What is the dominance, negative or positive? Just think about it. If this is the diet of information that we are receiving every day then it is little wonder that we have negative thoughts and feelings. We need to be aware of the news, we need to be informed but we do not need to be inundated by a sea of negativity. We begin to realise that with all this negative recitation and rumination how can we ever have a positive dominance in our thoughts and feelings. 

Time to change

To change you need to do two main things, 1: Stop listening to the sources of negativity and 2: start listening to the sources of positivity. This means stop listening to ever repeated news broadcasts and move away from people that you know who keep reciting negative messages.

The prophet of doom in your head

Do you really know yourself? Spend sometime listening to your self. Listen to what comes out of your mouth but also to your inner thoughts and feelings. As you become aware of what is happening inside you begin to observe how your system responds to negative messages. These may be news items or come from what other people are saying. What do you do with them? Do you grab them and play with them, reject them, get angry, sad? Just observe what you are doing and how you are handling it. Be aware of how your body responds. You might react to negative news/information with a in take of breath, with a flutter in your tummy, with a surge of anger or sadness. Whatever it is become aware of it.

As you observe watch what you do. Do you let negativity go? Do you challenge it? How does it make you feel? The point is that like all things being positive or negativity is a choice. Only you can decide how you respond and react to all the things that happen around you.

To back to the question at the beginning, the reason that we listen to the prophets of doom is because that is the habit that we have developed. In listening to negative messages we we feed them and encourage ongoing negativity. It is another case of what we feed grows and what we starve dies. If we stop giving it attention it, eventually, goes away.

Take care be happy and practise being a prophet of hope rather than a prophet of doom.

Sean x

TSHP392: 12 Days of Kindness

What’s Coming This Episode?

We could really do with a bit of happiness as we come to the end of year one of C-19. It has been great putting up the decks and the lights and a joy seeing all the homes around doing the sam thing. I was going through olds files and found a copy of The Happy Newspaper.

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

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Twelve Days of Reflection and Change

We could really do with a bit of happiness as we come to the end of year one of C-19. It has been great putting up the decks and the lights and a joy seeing all the homes around doing the sam thing. I was going through olds files and found a copy of The Happy Newspaper.

In 2016 The Happy Newspaper ran with the idea of “12 days of happiness” not just twelve days of Christmas. I love this play on ideas. In the Christian Cannon the twelve days started with the feast of Stephen on December 27th. If you remember… 

…”Good Kind Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen”… 

…and went to January 6th, the day when the three wise men turned up in Bethlehem to visit Jesus bearing their gifts. So Ed and I thought these twelve days should extend to 365 days, a whole year, of kindness and happiness. So maybe this Christmas we could start with the twelve days and see if we could carry it on?

The song or hymn “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was designed to teach the Christian faith to younger people. The interpretation of the exact meaning of each day, the numbers and the gifts vary but in general were used as a mnemonics to aid both memory and learning. So, “on the first day Christmas my true love sent to me”, is assumes to be True love = God, the Me = you the receiver of the gifts and the gifts are the message of Christianity in symbolic form.

Well, if the Christmas is about living a positive giving and happy life and the message of renewal and new beginnings perhaps we could each create our own message if twelve days or twelve steps. It would seem probable that the original pre-Christian festival was the solstice on December 21st which is the longest night and the shortest day of the year, after which the world gets brighter or the day gets longer. Whatever your beliefs structure or basis my suggestion for twelve day of Mindfulness would be to use the following as topics to meditate, think about and act on. Some things you cannot act upon but you can clear the negativity out of yourself and allow some light into your darkness.

The idea for these meditations come from the Live In The Present book and the ten steps course. Some of these meditations may lead to action and you may need to keep a pen and paper by you so that you can list any actions that might need to take. You might simply want to record what you are feeling after each meditation. Ideally each meditation would last for thirty minutes or more.

1: Forgiveness

Use this day to meditate on forgiving all those that have done you wrong. A time to let go of everyone and everything that you are holding any negative energy about. in your meditation allow the people or events to come before you and actively and consciously let them go. This is like a spiritual detox getting ready for a New year.

2: Self forgiveness 

Use this day to meditate on being honest with yourself about anything or anyone that you have wronged and might need to apologise to. As with day one bring those people or events before you and actively and consciously apologies and let them go.

3: Gratitude

Use today’s meditation to review all the positive things, events and people who have influenced your life and bring them before you. Actively thank them for what they have done, for who they are and openly feel the positive emotions of gratitude and thankfulness.

3: Live in the present

In today’s meditation review your life as it is right now, all the people, all the situation, that make up your life as it is right now. As you observe your life pay attention to how it feels. Do you need to change it? Is yes, then what do you need to do? This might be a time to make a list.

4: Who are you? 

Today in your meditation take a look at how do you see yourself? What is your level of self esteem? Do you love yourself? It is important to remember that the way that you see yourself is a learned habit and if you don’t like the way that you see yourself then you do have the ability to change and create a version of you that would serve you well.

5: Creating change

In today’s meditation consider that if you were to create the ‘you’ that you would like to be, what would you need to change? This might mean jobs, locations, attitudes, relationships. What would you change and how would you change it/them?

6: Creating an intention

Today meditate on if you do make the changes that you considered yesterday where is your life  going? What do you intend to do with your gift of life? If you were at a birthday party, ten or twenty years hence, and someone is giving speech about what it is that you have done and achieved what would you like to be hearing? What would they be saying? Having completed this meditation you might like to write the speech yourself right now.

7: Making a plan

Today meditate on how you will put your ideas from yesterday into effect. To put anything into effect requires a plan. A plan does not need to be fixed but it sets you off in the right direction. A plan is a map that can be varied and changed according to need. For most of us it is the lack of a plan that keeps us trapped and immobile. It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Many of us fail to progress because we do not plan we simply have an intention as a fanciful idea that we will, maybe, do one day. The plan that never happens.

8: Resource your plan

Today meditate on what you will need to bring your plan into action. What resources do you need? These may be practical things like equipment or supplies. It might be that you need knowledge, advice, or information. It may that you need the help and support from others, perhaps as a mentor. You may need forms of energy like money. Most importantly become aware of other people who may have done something similar to what you want to do. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, don’t waste your time doing what other people have done before. Try to learn from other people’s mistakes.

9: Check it out

Today meditate on how you might try out your idea/project. This is research. Traditionally this would be a focus group or a test group. Your idea might require other ways to test it. How can you try out your plan? Once you try it out see how it works and decide how you can adjust it or fine tune it?

10: Time for live action

Today meditate on how you will present your idea/project. This is the step prior to the actual enactment of your idea/project. It might mean organising a launch or a presentation. Who will you announce it to? Who will come to your event, what do you want them to get from it? What will happen next? 

11: Feedback

Today meditate on the reaction to your launch. What have you learned? How can you increase the effectiveness of your project/idea.

12: Reality

Today is the reality test. If during the last twelve days you have used contemplation and visualisation to consider who you are, where you are, have considered what it will take to get you from where you are to where your need to be and have taken your self through a plan of how to get there, you will now be ready to begin the process of change.

Realistic change takes at least ninety days and it may be that each of these mediations need to be done for one week or even for one month. Overall the only thing that will ensure that you achieve what you want is to be persistent and consistent and to never, never, never, give up.

Let me now how you get on.

Take care, have a fabulous 2021, have a fabulous life.

Sean x  

TSHP391: Did I hear that right? Miscommunication in Relationships

What’s Coming This Episode?

Twice, in the last month. I have had to deal with couples who have got to the point of being about to part company because one person misheard what the other person said and the following miscommunications tumbled into a battle. The impression that I get is that in the lockdown/furlough process many of us are switching off emotionally and not paying proper attention to what is going on around us.

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

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Did I hear that right?

…or should that be ‘correctly’?

Twice, in the last month. I have had to deal with couples who have got to the point of being about to part company because one person misheard what the other person said and the following miscommunications tumbled into a battle. The impression that I get is that in the lockdown/furlough process many of us are switching off emotionally and not paying proper attention to what is going on around us. The potential for miscommunication just grows. This shutting down is an understandable coping mechanism to deal with the potential boredom and monotony but not helpful in maintaining a relationship. When ‘that hitch’ is heard as ‘fat bitch’ we have a problem.

Recently I cooked a birthday meal and printed a menu for the diners. In doing it I remembered that, back in the London of my childhood, people would accidentally, or deliberately, get words wrong. So, Aperitif became ‘a pair of teeth’ and Hors d’ oeuvres became, ‘horse’s doovers’. Then today Chris Abouzeid made me laugh when he tweeted…

…‘So evidently our 13 year old thought ‘prima Donna’ meant anyone born before Madonna (i.e. pre-Madonna). Please send oxygen. We cannot stop laughing.’

It made me laugh as well. It was the tweets that followed that made me think of how we so easily miscommunicate. The child, who’s mother was a potter, went into panic at the news the baby sitter had been ‘Fired’. Laura who had thought that euthanasia was a young people’s place in Japan. I recall my younger sister, in her teenage, stunning us all when said ‘what is the point of oral sex? Why would you just to want to talk about it?’ Mind you, these days in the various forms of Covid lockdown many people have little else to do than talk about it.

Madam de Gaulle stunned a post war BBC interviewer when her answer to his question ‘what would you like with your retirement’ sounded like ‘I just want a penis’. She was actually saying ‘I just want happiness’ but with a strong French accent.

In the vagaries of Cockney rhyming slang the word used would be the one that didn’t rhyme. So ‘apples and pears’ meant stairs but you would only ever use the word ‘apples’. ‘Could you go up the apples and get my titver?’ = Can you go upstairs and get my hat? (Tit for tat = hat)

I think about the problems that we have communicating the simplest of everyday things in our relationships and then I look at the immense mis communication taking place over Covid-19 and Brexit. When I look at the government floundering around making u-turns and rewriting the rules day on day it would be fair to say that they are making a right orchestra of it all.
(Orchestra stalls = Balls).

In everyday conversations we often only hear want we want or expect to.

Said: ‘Wow, I think you are really good at that’.
Heard: ‘Oh, so you now want me to do it all the time do you’.

Said: ‘You look really curvy it that’.
Heard: ‘So you think I am fat.’

Oronyms are when we completely mishear a sentence. It is assumed that this is something going on in the brain though I suspect that lack of attention might be the real culprit. (audicus.com Diana Michel )

Said: ‘I got a new Toyota’
Heard: ‘I got a new toy Yoda’

Said: ‘What is the biggest hurdle you have overcome?’
Heard: ‘What is the biggest turtle you have overcome?’

Chinese whispers are when the words of a message get changed as it is passed from one person to the next. The classic is the First World War example of a commander sending a message back to HQ, ‘send reinforcement we are going to advance’. By the time the message was passed from one to person another down the line the message that HQ got was ‘send three and four pence we are going to a dance’.

Even worse that verbal communication is the text or email that we know can communicate as little as 7% of what the sender intended. The chance to mishear digital communications is huge.

There would seem to be three elements when we attempt to communicate. The first is what I said, the second is what you heard and the third is what you thought I meant. They may all be different.

There is only one way to be clear about the words used and meaning behind them and that is to ask. So, my resource for this week is try this on the people around you…

‘When you said that I heard ………………………. Is that what you meant?’

You will be amazed at how many times you get the wrong end of the stick. Either way you might be elated or totally disgruntled by what you thought you heard and in. both cases be completely wrong.

So, this week take a breath, stop and check what is going on around you, you may have it wrong.

Take care and be happy

Sean x