Be My Guest – Health & Wellbeing

February 17, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Hi there.  One of the things I do when I first start working with clients is to focus in on self-care.  It’s so important to be in good health when you’re working with your clients and if you’re burning yourself out then you’re not going to be giving the best of yourself to others.  Healthy eating is just one aspect of self-care.

For today’s Be My Guest – Health & Wellbeing post I’d like to introduce you to Susan Davies of Thrive Magazine.

BMG Susan Davies

A self-confessed foodie with a background in design and marketing. After becoming ill with stomach condition Sue turned to her diet and healed herself through food. She’s now retrained in Holistic Nutrition and runs a Design & publishing company called Thrive Publishing. Thrive helps to promote natural, ethical and healthy brands and products. Read her story here…

She also publishes her own Health & Nutrition magazine called Thrive. A quarterly magazine that shares the latest news and features about all things healthy and natural…www.thrivepublishing.co.uk

Describe yourself in 3 short, fab and fun sentences

A self-confessed foodie and health guru out to help people find more natural food and products. I love local. I love community and want every wonderful human on this planet to ‘Thrive’.

Sue DaviesWhat made you decide to become an entrepreneur?

I gathered so much knowledge and experience in healthy food and healthy natural products that I just had to start sharing it with everyone. I’m on a mission to get the world healthy. So, I started Thrive Magazine.  I also trained in Holistic Nutrition.

Thrive Magazine - Winter2015Who has been your biggest inspiration in business?

James Duigan from Bodyism. I listened to an interview with him 6 years ago on London Real and was absolutely amazed how humble he was with the knowledge he has about Health & fitness.

What’s the best business advice you’ve ever been given?

Follow your gut on everything.  Align yourself with people who have the knowledge you crave.

What three tips would you give when working on your health?
  • Always listen to what your body is telling you – it really does know more that your mind
  • Look to make small adjustments to start – start using natural ingredients
  • You can have those days where you’re not so good, it’s about getting your own balance
What are the three biggest mistakes that people make when trying to lose weight?
  1. They go on a diet scheme (there’s a few that I can’t stand, but let’s not mention names, you can guess)
  2. One little treat and they think they have failed – it’s about balance
  3. They start eating low-fat options, low calorie drinks etc – these are some of the worst products that you could put inside your body
What if I have no idea where to start with using natural products, what do you suggest?

Small changes are best, so switch to an organic, chemical free shampoo, for instance. I also offer Cleanside reports which help you to eliminate all the nasties in your daily routines, so I identify all of the possible chemicals you may be ingesting through not just your food, but also the hygiene products that you use and then work with you to eliminate these and make healthy, more natural choices.

How much time do I really need to spend on cooking a healthy meal?

Wow, this could be anything from 10 minutes to rustle up a lovely super salad full of nuts, seeds and greens to a few hours to create that perfect dinner. There are so many simple recipes available now. Check out some of our fabulous recipes by our Thrive Magazine writers.

If I wanted to connect and/or work with you where would I find you?

www.thrivepublishing.co.uk and also soon to be www.thrive-magazine.co.uk

Thanks Susan for some great hints and tips. You may have noticed I’ve been featuring a few posts now around health and wellbeing.  As coaches, it’s so important to look after your health.  Self-care is vital when running your own business.  How well do you look after your health?

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Filed Under: Health & Wellbeing, Self Care, Wellbeing Tagged With: , ,

Are You An Addict?

October 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Are you an addict?

Well yes you are if you’re a workaholic. It’s not great to hear really, is it? ‘But I like working’, I hear you say. ‘Is that such a bad thing?’ Well, yes it can be when it starts to impact on you and areas of your life.

I’m just too busy, just too busy..

Yes, we can be really too busy and there are two things to note here. One is that you can be busy being busy. Is it that you are procrastinating and delaying things you know you should be doing? Are you being distracted by sparkly things that take you away from the really important things you want/need to do?  Two.. If you’re really too busy then you are at risk of burnout. Yes, work is important but so are you! Where do you need to set some boundaries?

Clients often say to me, ‘Well yes, but my company expect x, y, z’ and they will continue to do so if you don’t set boundaries, but it’s not always about a company. Sometimes as Entrepreneurs you can push and push and push until collapse and it doesn’t matter then who you work for, yourself or a company, nobody will get much from you when you get to that point.  

Setting boundaries at work can be  deciding to finish work at your designated time (start with leaving ten minutes earlier than you would normally and then build on that) Setting boundaries at home can be structuring set times in the day when you will work, building a good routine. It may be that, like me, you need a nudge to stop working! My hubby and daughter are great nudgers. Who could your nudger be?

Five tips for easing off on work

  1. Set clear boundaries – structure your work time, if you’re working more hours than you should be check what could be dropped, delegated or not done at all. Is it really all a priority?
  2. Work out where your time goes – could you be more productive by switching a few things around in your day?
  3. Drop the perfectionism – 80% good enough is perfectly acceptable
  4. Make time for you – It’s important to make time. You need to connect with people and have fun. Looking after you is key. Whether it’s eating better or making sure you get enough sleep, make some time for you
  5. Make time to play – being a workaholic can damage relationships, listen when people are telling you that you’re working too hard and take some time out to play. Find a new hobby that can take you out of your work zone. Your brain will be grateful for the rest 🙂 

Remember it’s taken a while to build yourself up to this so don’t be too hard on yourself if it doesn’t happen overnight.  Take small baby steps.  It can be easy to try and do it all at once, but choose one thing and work on that before moving onto the next.

How different will your life be when it’s not all about work? You may find people want to spend more time with you. If you do it right then you should definitely have more fun!

Have you seen my new eBook? It’s all about Pricing with Confidence, you can find more about it and sign up here.

 

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Filed Under: Coaching, Uncategorized, Work-Life Balance Tagged With: , ,

Affirmations

May 24, 2013 by 2 Comments

This week over on Facebook I asked the question about whether people love or hate affirmations.  In Coaching it’s quite often suggested as a really powerful tool to help clients.

Affirmations are positive self-statements that are said to have originated from a Psychologist and Pharmacist, Émile Coué (1857-1926).  He used the following quote as a method for healing his patients.  As a result their recovery was shown to be five times faster than that of patients being treated in other institutes.

Émile Coué

 

It is thought that when a positive statement enters your subconscious mind it is thought to be true.  Other examples might be;

  • I am confident in my abilities to do my work effectively
  • I am calm and relaxed in every situation

I’ve read a lot of debate around affirmations and I am still trying to figure them out because there is so much difference of opinion.  What I do believe though is that by turning around our self-talk we can achieve a lot more.

For them to be effective try these four P’s..

  • In the positive
  • In the present
  • Personal to you
  • Powerful

We all know the power of negative language.  Just one simple comment/conversation can have a really profound effect on us.  For example, you bump into someone you haven’t seen for a while and they say how great you look, they think you’re looking really well, vibrant and healthy, you’ve lost weight. What reaction do you have to their comments?  It can start a positive spiral of self-talk, such as ‘I’m feeling great, I’ve been eating better, doing more exercise.  My hard work must be paying off’.  Take the opposite where someone says you look like you’ve put on weight, or you’re looking tired.  You can start to feel quite dispirited and down-hearted. This can then start a negative spiral of self-talk, ‘I look awful, I knew I’d put on weight, I’m rubbish at x, y, z’.

I think the idea of affirmations are great, they can help you change your thought patterns. I just personally find maintaining them quite tricky.  The idea is that you repeat the affirmation many times throughout the day to yourself.  Some of my clients love them and dedicate time to repeating them over and over again (which does make them more effective).  Other clients just use them as a reminder to prompt more positive language.  As you’ve probably gathered though I’m all about keeping it real so there’s no point in telling yourself you’re going to be a fantastic ballerina if you’ve never put on a pair of ballet shoes in your life!

That time when you’re telling yourself you’re overwhelmed and don’t have enough hours in the day switch to saying, ‘There is more than enough time to do all I need to do’.  If you genuinely have an enormous to do list that appears unmanageable and realistically you cannot possibly get all that work done in a day then that affirmation isn’t going to be right here.  A more realistic thing would be to decide what your most important tasks are that need to be done and aim to achieve them.  Telling yourself you have more than enough time when you actually don’t isn’t going to get you anywhere and may only reinforce those overwhelmed feelings.

So whether you think they work or not, if you’re having a bad day with self-talk try one out, you never know it might actually make you feel a bit more positive.  Don’t forget if you are going to say them to yourself in the mirror remember to give it a clean afterwards, mirrors covered in toothpaste don’t look so great!

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I’d love to know your thoughts on affirmations and if you’ve used them how well they work for you.

If you missed the Be My Guest interview with Career Coach, Kathryn Entwistle, click here.

 

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Filed Under: Health & Wellbeing, Mindset, Positive Language Tagged With: , , ,

Work-Life Balance

May 17, 2013 by 1 Comment

How is your work-life balance?  Are you so chilled out you’re horizontal or are you running around like a headless chicken wishing there were more hours in your day?!

Image: Pinterest, Source: Unknown

It is easy to forget how fragile life is and burn ourselves out trying to prove something either to ourselves or to others, so  how do we get off that hamster wheel?  Firstly it’s about being aware that it’s happening in the first place.

You may know that I am happily married with a teenage daughter.  My husband and daughter are incredibly supportive of me and I absolutely enjoy spending every moment with them, but when I’m in work mode they have no chance of accessing me.  Physically I might be in the room with them but mentally I am working out solutions in my business or the next project.  I am a Coach, I know the importance of creating balance, yet I frequently find it impossible to switch off.  This image really got me thinking. I know I’m a workaholic, are you?

I’d like to ask you the following questions, dig deep to find the answers..

  1. What are you doing in your life that you really don’t enjoy?
  2. What 5 small things could you bring into your life each day, just for you?
  3. What impact is overworking having on other aspects of your life?
  4. What needs to happen for you to look after yourself?
  5. Do you actually want to achieve a better balance or are you happy with things as they are?
  6. What boundaries do you need to set yourself so that your work and life doesn’t blur into one?
  7. How could you manage your time more effectively?
  8. What does it take for you to switch off, I mean really switch off?
  9. What activity do you lose yourself in, where the time seems to fly by?
  10. What would be the worst that would happen if you delegated and not try to be all things to all people?
This area for me is a work in progress.  I have to be aware that I am not switching out of work mode and consciously decide to do so.  I LOVE what I do so find it hard to switch out of Coaching or learning mode.  I want to learn more and more about how to help people and while that’s great it also means I can become quite boring and burnt out!!  I recently decided I would start to read some other books aside from personal development and found myself in a bookshop with my husband having a conversation with the bookseller about what I could read instead of self-help books! Can it really get to that point?  Yes, in my case!  What has worked for me so far is the following;
 

  • Setting a specific time that I switch off all technology (I still fall back into iPaddict mode but I am getting a little better)
  • Choosing to focus on the moment, reminding myself that work can most often wait.  Family and friends are important and to be cherished
  • Setting time each day to focus on myself (want to check out your self care levels? Pop on over here to complete a self-care quiz)
  • I try not to take on other people’s problems.  I’m a fixer so can feel responsible for helping people too much.  By doing Coaching I now realise that actually I’m not helping them with this approach at all.  It’s so much more empowering to help people find their own answers to their problems

So f you don’t have the right work-life balance choose to work to live, not live to work.  I would absolutely love to hear any of your work-life balance strategies.  It’s an area I’m always looking to improve.

If you missed last week’s post it was all about facing your fears, find out more here.

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Filed Under: Self Care, Simplicity, Uncategorized, Work-Life Balance, Work/Life Balance Tagged With: , ,

Health & Wellbeing

March 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Health & Wellbeing – What does that mean to you?  It can mean so many things to so many people.  Last night I was shutting down my computer and I realised I hadn’t done my blog post.  My normal thing to do would be to fire it up again and get on with the job before I go to bed.  This time though I stopped for a moment and asked myself how this is helping me in terms of health and wellbeing.  Rest and relaxation is vital for our health.  I guess if I hadn’t been writing this topic I wouldn’t have given it a second thought and I’d have been up until 2am writing this out, but I made the decision to go to bed and said to myself it can wait until the morning.  Nothing bad will happen if I don’t write out my blog post!

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Physical, Mental & Emotional well being... It’s all important.  Well–Being – we all want to be ‘Well Beings’, don’t we?  So why do we put off looking after ourselves?  I guess it depends on the priority we place on it.   When we’re younger we never think health will be an issue.  As we get older we start to consider our bodies more and make better choices.  It’s not just about physical health though, being well can help us to manage stress and the pressures of daily life.  We’re nicer people to be around if we’ve learnt to manage our emotions.

If you signed up to my newsletter you would have received a copy of my ‘Wheel of Life’ last month.  It’s a tool coaches use where you group your life into various categories (generally 8) and then rate them from 0-10 according to how happy you are.  You can then identify an area to work on in your life.  If we were using it for this topic there are so many areas we could pick;

Sleep, Nutrition, Exercise, Rest & Relaxation, Worry & Anxiety, Emotions; anger, sadness.  That’s just the start of it.

What’s incredible is once you start to look after your health and wellbeing you start to realise how many other areas of your life it impacts.  Feeling tired impacts your emotions which can then impact your relationships.  Eating unhealthily can make you unwell creating worry and anxiety.  By making some simple changes you can start to feel more energised and ready to take on life and all it has to offer.

The first step to making change in this area is to identify how you take your body for granted.  Are you a sleep deprived caffeine junkie?  Do you shout at everyone that dares to cut you up on the road?  What do these things tell you about your health?

What needs to happen for you to put your health and wellbeing first?  We often put it at the bottom of the list, but actually it needs to be at the top.

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Your homework for this week is to have a really good belly laugh, whether it’s watching a movie that always sets you off, a quick video on YouTube or going to see a comedy.  Do one thing this week that really makes you laugh and then start to take yourself more seriously when it comes to looking after your health and wellbeing.

Liked this article?  Try out my Self-Care Quiz.  If you like this blog post then please feel free to share using the buttons below.  If you want to improve your health and wellbeing and don’t know where to start then get some Coaching with me.

ps – If you haven’t seen my first ‘Be My Guest’blog post with my lovely Social Media expert guest, Rebekah Harriman make sure to check it out for some fun social media tips.  There’s a giveaway there for you.  There’s also a free funky goal planner on my ‘freebies’page.  Next week we have another great guest interview, watch this space!

Filed Under: Coaching, Health & Wellbeing, Life Coaching, Self Care Tagged With: , , , ,
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