Knowledge is king but understanding is what empowers us!

Before I became a Health and Liftstyle coach I very rarely read what we term as ‘self help books’. I had heard the term Personal Development as one of my customers ran PD courses, however most of these were centred on leadership and management or being part of a team.

I’d read the usual ‘The Secret’ ‘Who moved my cheese’ and ‘The 7 habits of highly successful people’ and that was the extent of my knowledge. Then I came across a Jim Rohn quote ‘work harder on yourself than you do on your job’ back then it didn’t really make sense but I’m really now starting to understand what he meant by that.

Personal development is not really encouraged at school or at home when you are growing up. I spent most of my life concentrating on my corporate success, accountancy qualifications, being the best at project management or business analysis, keeping totally up to date with the latest Windows or Dynamics releases. The only time I spent on ME was when I actually got some free time to run. It was those times I was able to clear my head, think about my goals and solve mine and my customer’s problems. But when you live that mad corporate lifestyle the ‘ME TIME’ is very limited, even more so when your home and family are hundreds of miles away and your weekly commute is a day’s work itself.

We all have a tipping point – an alarm that something needs to change. For some unfortunately it’s often their health, for most it’s a life changing event but for me it was the reality that for the past 20 years my family had been my only ‘WHY’. My family were the reason I had lived away from home 5 days a week, my family were the reason I often stayed onsite until 8pm evenings to get a job done and my family were the reason my own needs were way down my list of priorities.

Then one day my family grew up!!  They all became beautiful independent young woman with a life and ambition and success of their own. I had taught them that whatever they dream about they can make possible, that they can choose their future and shape their lives to whatever they wanted. I had taught them the importance of writing down their goals and visualising what they wanted from their life.

I then realised I was instilling those same values on my team and those around me, but I wasn’t living them myself, I didn’t know what my life’s purpose was, I had dreams and visions and goals but I had never written any of them down, outwardly I was positive but inwardly I was constantly complaining to myself that my life wasn’t going the way I wanted it to. I boasted about the importance of meditation to bring about creativity, but I could never sit still long enough to do it myself.

So I made it my mission to start working on ME, treating myself like a project – my daily milestones would be my 10 minutes of meditation, starting the day with exercise instead of hitting the snooze button, listening to motivational speakers instead of my usual music playlists, cutting the plug off the TV and spending that time reading instead, cutting down on the wine and coffee and making sure my diet was the healthiest it could be and drinking my 3 litres of water a day.

I worked in terms of 7 day milestones – sticking to all of these would be a lot easier if I did it in blocks of 7 days as it meant I had to stick to just 3 blocks and I had formed new habits that would mould my new life.

I’m now coming to the end of Phase 1 of ‘Project Me’ and I’m really seeing changes. My life is healthier and happier and my purpose is becoming clearer my motivation is stronger and I have for the first time self-awareness.

I’m now ready for Phase 2 which will be about how I can take those improvement’s and start changing other areas of my life.

We’ve all heard it said ‘its all about the journey’ and sometimes we have to just jump off life’s mad merry go round and step back to see what’s really important, find out what really drives us, how can we discover our true potential and fulfil our dreams and aspirations?.

My reading library now consists of really life changing material which I’d be happy to share with you – drop me a message or email at [email protected] and I’ll send you my recommendations and you too can take that step too becoming the best version of you that you can…. You deserve it !