Sometimes I say to clients that Life is a bit like a table with 5 legs holding it up and if one or all of them are missing you can see how Life can get wobbly or collapse completely. What are the 5 legs?
For me they’re exercise (stay with me I am not going to start banging on about sit ups), sleep, diet (also, stay with me), meaningful work and relationships. Why the photo of this boy? Well you may be caught in a “habit web” which you feel as entangling, trapping and constraining rather than, like that rope web the boy is using, supporting, enabling and helping you to get where you want to go.
When someone comes to me, whatever they’re wanting to work on, I’m also (subtly) curious about :
What is your sleep like?
What is your diet (by which I mean “food and drink regularly provided or consumed” not being “on a diet”).
How are you doing with exercise? By “exercise” I mean joyful movement during a physical activity done for the pure enjoyment of it rather than through gritted teeth and “if you can’t taste a bit of puke in your mouth you are not working hard enough” as one gym class instructor once actually said to us all in a class. Also, are you getting out into fresh air and Nature to do it or are you caught in the notion exercise is only to be found in a gym or an online workout?
Do you have work that feels meaningful to you (paid or unpaid, hobby or career)?
What relationships do you have around you and in what shape are those relationships, what are your circles of support like? And the most important relationship of all, the one with yourself, how is that?
Now, I can work with you on getting into healthier mental habits by working on the self-talk and chatter which may have started up when you read those highlighted words above and acts like one of those powerful drag parachutes on activity and stops you getting those legs back under your Life again.
We’ll take a careful deep dive together into the lagoon of psychological factors that knocked those legs out in the first place. Whirling thoughts that keep you awake at night, an “I’m not good enough” or “there is no point” soundtrack to Life, “I’ll be happy / start, WHEN…..” and “all or nothing” thinking, these sort of things.
Are you are caught in a “habit web” in that there are things holding other things in place and making it very hard to make change in your life (sorry to get a bit technical there with “things holding other things in place”). Bound in chains of “well, to do that I need to do this and I can’t do this because of that other thing” and it all daisy-chains and can feel very dispiriting, daunting and overwhelming at times. I get it. Untangle Your Life is a non-judgement, objective curiosity zone where we ask “hmmm, what is this about? How did this get into place?” Like the little boy in the photo, we want to use the habit web to enable, help and support us as we live our Lives not something that has grown up around us and tangles and traps us.
So how about changing one thing today?
Contact someone whose company you enjoy, interact with a pet, watch or listen to photos or other stuff that makes you smile, start an audiobook as you do chores, go out and listen to birdsong or watch joyful movement at a recreation ground, skate ramp or in a park and……if you long to untangle your mind from its habitual way of thinking and cast off the lead boots this has you wearing in life, please contact me here, thank you.
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Untangle Your Life - offering you the opportunity to be heard and to make sense of your life. 