We’ve all been there. You’ve hit a crossroads in life and are faced with a number of different choices. Some may feel risky, scary even, while others feel safe and comfortable. Knowing which way to go can be difficult, especially when we start to torture ourselves with ‘what ifs’.
Whether it’s figuring out if you should quit your job or knowing if moving abroad is the right choice for you, decision making can bring out our inner critic, telling us we “can’t do it” or that we’ll “fail”....
You are going to make a mistake; things are going to go wrong; it's not going to go the way you wanted. Sorry! - but you can deal with it well. According to Buddhist philosophy, any time we suffer misfortune, two arrows fly our way. The first arrow is the actual bad event, which can cause pain or just dissatisfaction. The second arrow is the suffering. That's actually optional. The second arrow represents our reaction to the bad event. It's the manner in which we choose to respond...
When it comes to the workplace, it can be hard to articulate your thoughts with a constructive attitude - particularly if you find having confidence in your opinions difficult, or you’re aware there are sensitive members of your team.
But giving constructive criticism is a healthy activity in the workplace and enables important projects to move forward, better working relationships to flourish, as well as more open and honest discussions. It encourages creative thinking, confidence...
When I was in my young twenties I would often find myself in a hopeless loop of negative thoughts and as a result, it led to anxiety about many things from worrying about being judged to obsessing about perfectly fitting each person’s criteria of me. Due to my low self-esteem, I created an endless pattern of worry and anxiety trying to live up to my own imagined expectations and as a result, I would sabotage my future before I had even got there! I became so used to thinking in this way...
When asked the question: “What is it that you most want for your child?”, most parents I have spoken to have said something along the lines of “I just want them to feel happy within themselves.” Naturally, parents want their child to feel good about who they are, but for adolescents, this can seem like an extremely hard task. The internet and social media age hasn’t made this any easier. Snapshots of “the perfect life” are on show everywhere and...
Most of us have experienced, or at least witnessed performance anxiety, be it in sports, exams or work presentations. Take sport, I've learned much from athletes and their focus. However, even the very top ones, have been known to 'choke', which is, in essence, 'losing it under pressure' or 'unable to act/react at the appropriate level'. Team sports fans know that playing 'home' usually is an advantage. However, it is not always easier having your fans around you. Studies done on biathlon...
As mums and dads, we worry about our children and teenagers, don’t we? In fact, I should own up and admit that like many of my same age friends, I still worry about my children even though they are now in their 20s! The question is, how do we broach the subject of feelings without them closing down? The standard response from most children when asked about how they feel, is to say they don’t know. This is usually true. They don’t know. They feel...
“Welcome back, now that you are rested, we can get down to some hard work.” Has your spirit ever sagged at that statement? You have had two weeks leave, but feel rested? Ha! Returning to work exhausted after a break can be caused by several reasons:
You are in a season of life, where being on holiday means you just look after your kids or someone you care for in a different location. This is more stressful and expensive than being at home because you have to...
As a recent ‘quitter’ with no job to go to, the hardest thing was dealing with the shame I felt as a degree-educated 27-year-old, living at home with my parents, jobless.
As a millenial, it’s drilled into us that we go to university to get a good degree, to get a great job and to earn a great salary. But in some cases, life doesn’t always pan out how we had carefully mapped it. My worries when considering moving on, weren’t ‘what would my friends say?’ rather, ‘what would my parents’...
When I present to organisations and companies about confidence, I often question the attendees as to how confident they are in their abilities at work. I ask them to score their expertise from zero to 10 - with zero being "I'm totally incapable of doing my job", and 10 meaning "I'm extremely capable". When I average the scores of men and women, I can guarantee that the men’s average score will be higher than the women’s average. This is backed up by research in which they...
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