Blog Posts and Resources

Here are a few tips and resources you might find helpful!

How to Stop Being a People Pleaser and Take Your Power Back.

Do you need the approval of others, to make you feel worthy? Do you avoid conflict at all costs and compromise your own values and beliefs to keep other people happy? Do you modify your own behaviour to fit in with the crowd? Then chances are you’re a people pleaser.

On the surface, people pleasing may seem like a good thing. You want to be kind, right? It’s good to help people out and put others first sometimes, isn’t it? Of course, but when you sacrifice your own wellbeing in the process is when people pleasing can become a problem.

It’s natural to want to be kind and unconditional love is the cornerstone of many spiritual practices, but people pleasing is often more about how we feel about ourselves deep down. When we rely on the approval of others to make us feel valuable or worthy, what we’re really saying is ‘I’m not good enough.’

If you think you might be a people pleaser, below are some reasons that might make you want to stop.

1. It makes you compromise your values. Our values are the most important things to us, they are what help motivate and inspire us in our lives. They help keep us focused and aligned with our true purpose. When we live for the approval of others, we sometimes have to compromise our own values to fit in with theirs. This can make us feel very uncomfortable and if left unchecked, can lead us to become resentful further down the line.
2. It gives your power to someone else. When we rely on the approval of someone else to feel good about ourselves, we are giving them a huge amount of power to another person. This can leave us open to emotional manipulation if they threaten to take their approval away.
3. It can affect your mental and physical health. When we are not able to freely express our opinion or beliefs because we are afraid of the reaction of others, we are suppressing our emotions. This leads to emotional stress which has a knock-on effect on our physical health.
4. You waste a lot of time. Whether it’s constantly doing favours for others, spending time listening to peoples’ problems or just worrying about what others think of you, people pleasing takes up a lot of time. Chances are you’ll never get around to achieving your own goals and dreams if you’re constantly sacrificing your time searching for approval.
5. You lose your identity. Identity plays a huge part in our wellbeing. How we view ourselves, can have a huge impact on how we think, feel and behave. Having a strong sense of identity, helps us make better decisions and enables us to live in alignment with higher emotions such as love, rather than fear.

So, if you want to stop people pleasing and take your power back, where do you start and what can you do? Below are 5 steps to help you stop being a people pleaser, take your power back, cultivate some self-love and improve your health and wellbeing:

1. Stay true to your values. Our values are the most important things to us, they are what help motivate and inspire us in our lives. They help keep us focused and aligned with our true purpose. When we live for the approval of others, we sometimes have to compromise our own values to fit in with theirs. This can make us feel very uncomfortable and if left unchecked, can lead us to become resentful further down the line. Staying true to our values helps keep us inspired and living with purpose.
2. Set great boundaries. When we rely on the approval of someone else to feel good about ourselves, we are giving them a huge amount of power to another person. This can leave us open to emotional manipulation if they threaten to take their approval away. If you know that there are people who demand too much from you, get better at saying no. They won’t like it at first, but they’ll get used to it and there will be better balance in the relationship. In some situations you may decide to let a particular relationship go altogether, if that’s the case, let it go with love.
3. Speak your truth mindfully. When we are not able to freely express our opinion or beliefs because we are afraid of the reaction of others, we are suppressing our emotions. This leads to emotional stress which has a knock-on effect on our physical health. In certain circumstances you may need to learn to get comfortable with constructive conflict and standing up for what you believe in. This doesn’t have to be done in a nasty way, it just means that you get to speak your truth mindfully and with love.
4. Take time for you. Whether it’s constantly doing favours for others, spending time listening to peoples’ problems or just worrying about what others think of you, people pleasing takes up a lot of time. Chances are you’ll never get around to achieving your own goals and dreams if you’re constantly sacrificing your time searching for approval. Cultivate self-love. People pleasing comes from a lack of self-love and acceptance. The more we focus on ourselves, the less we need to seek the approval of others. Meditation practice and working on belief systems is great to help with this.
5. Be yourself. Identity plays a huge part in our wellbeing. How we view ourselves, can have a huge impact on how we think, feel and behave. Having a strong sense of identity, helps us make better decisions and enables us to live in alignment with higher emotions such as love, rather than fear.

5 Steps for writing a kick-ass affirmation!

From Louise Hay’s affirmations for healing your life to Abraham Hicks’ affirmations for use in Law of Attraction, affirmations are widely used in the self-help community and with good reason, as they can be an incredibly powerful tool to help you overcome your blocks and re-programme your subconscious to make positive changes in your life, whether it’s for your health, personal life or career. But what are affirmations, how do they work and what steps can you take to write an affirmation that’s going to give you the outcome you want and help you make the changes you want to see in your life? Here we take a more in-depth look at affirmations and give you 5 steps to writing a kick-ass affirmation that’s going to help you become the creator of your own reality.

What is an affirmation?

An affirmation is simply a written statement or mantra designed to help you focus on what you want. The idea with all affirmations is to repeat them a number of times as you progress through the day, allowing them to slowly be accepted by your subconscious until you start believing them to be true. Affirmations are used for many purposes, from personal development to manifestation and as long as you follow some basic rules, they can be about anything you want. Your affirmation can be a general one that you use everyday or you can change it, depending on the outcome you want.

There are lots of ready-made affirmations you can use, but if you want to write your own, this is a quick guide on how to get started.

5 tips for writing an affirmation:

  1. Only write about what you want, not something you want to get rid of. E.g. writing about getting out of debt will have you focus on the debt not abundance.
  2. Use the present tense. Try to write the statement as if it has already happened, e.g. ‘I am abundant’ rather than the future ‘I will be abundant’ this makes the affirmation more effective as you start to believe it to be true.
  3. Avoid words like ‘but’ ‘try’ ‘must’ and ‘should’, that makes it seem like you feel obligated to do something. E.g. ‘I must try to work harder to become successful.’ Instead, try a more positive statement such as ‘I am successful and enjoy my work’.
  4. Stay in touch with your emotions, if the affirmation doesn’t resonate with you, it may not be the right one. Also, if you make it too unbelievable you won’t resonate with it. Keep it positive but realistic.
  5. Try and start with gratitude. Gratitude always helps to lift our emotions as it shows that we have something to be grateful for. So try adding ‘I am thankful for…..’ at the beginning of your affirmation and see how it makes you feel.

The most important thing to remember with any personal development work is to have fun with it, if it seems too much like hard work, then the chances are you won’t persevere, if you experiment and have fun then you can really start enjoying the process of becoming the conscious creator of your own reality. So, it’s important that you enjoy the process of writing and repeating your affirmations, otherwise you won’t be sending out the right energy and you won’t get the outcome you want to see.

3 Minute Core Breathing Exercise

Top 5 Mindful Tips to help your kids through their exams

As a coach who teaches mindfulness and resilience in schools, it’s usually pretty easy for me to give advice around stress management for exams, however, today my son is taking his first GCSE (the day before his 16th birthday) and it’s tough as a parent to watch your child have to go through this kind of pressure. So, I thought I’d share my top 5 tips based on the research I’ve done through my work, but also my experience as a parent going through this right now.

1. Manage your own stress.
This is about them not us, our role as parents is to offer emotional and practical support through this process, so no matter how worried or concerned we might be, letting them see this isn’t going to help. It’s really easy for us to forget that our children look to us to measure how bad a situation really is, if they see us panicking it will stress them out even more. So, whether it’s exercising, chatting to a friend, meditation, walking in nature, reading, listening to music, get yourself some good stress management practices in place so that you can fully be there to emotionally support your child when they need you.

2. Reward effort not outcome. 
I get that this might be a controversial thing to say, but all the evidence points to the fact that rewarding outcome (extrinsic motivation) actually has a negative impact on performance, because it puts more pressure on the student. If your child is suffering from stress or anxiety around exams it’s likely that they are stressed enough about passing, without having the extra pressure of knowing that they will only be rewarded by their parents if the results are good. The more that is at stake the more stress they will feel. By rewarding the effort put into revising you are encouraging them to work hard regardless of the outcome. After all, all we can ask of our kids is that they work to the best of their ability to prepare for these exams, that’s the only thing in their control, the results of those exams aren’t.

3. Use mindfulness techniques to help them manage their stress. 
It’s important to understand that stress is a normal response to a real or perceived threat, but when we get stressed we are not able to think clearly, that’s why our minds can sometimes go blank, not great in an exam situation!

Mindfulness promotes present moment non-judgemental awareness which helps manage stress. By becoming aware of being in the present moment we are no longer thinking about what has happened or what might happen and minimizes the risk of catastrophic thinking. A simple technique for this is getting your child to notice how it feels to be sitting where they are, bringing awareness to the breath, noticing how it feels to breathe and allowing thoughts to come and go without forming any attachment to them. When we learn to become the observer of our experience rather than the participator we can notice our thoughts without emotionally reacting to them. There are lots of great resources for 3-minute breathing spaces and other mindfulness practices out there (including apps) so it’s easier than ever to find something that will work for your child. Also yawning and stretching for 60 seconds has been shown to have a positive effect on the brain, it’s one of the quickest ways to calm down and can be done at any point in the exam itself.

4. Focus on positivity.
Negative words strain a child’s brain, but positive words lower anxiety. By bringing mindful awareness to language we can make better choices in the words we use. If we speak negatively about exams or revision, we are increasing our child’s stress without realising it. Teaching children to use more positive words helps them to have more emotional control & increased attention span. Like negativity, positivity is contagious, the more we focus on the things that are good and important to us (our values) the more motivated we feel. Help your child to focus on all the positive aspects of revision and exams. E.g. Revision will help me pass my exams, exams will help me get a job I love.

5. Keep perspective. 
My last piece of advice would be this, keep perspective. Even if the worst was to happen and your child doesn’t get the grades they need they can re-take and things will work out. Sometimes, the most amazing experiences we have in life come along when things haven’t gone the way we wanted and when we look back we realise those were the best things that could have happened to us. Yes, it’s tough to watch our kids grow and have to go through these kind of stressful situations, but it’s one more step for us to take with them on this incredible journey of being a parent and that is a gift in itself.

I asked my 15 year old son what the biggest parenting mistake I’ve made is and this is what he said…..

Parenting is hard, I mean really hard, sometimes it’s great but often it’s hard. Most of us have no clue what we’re doing, no-one gave us a manual, we’re handed this precious bundle and pretty much left to get on with it, using our intuition and our own experiences of being parented as guidance.
Yes, we can read parenting books, we can set up reward systems, we can look to ‘experts’ to help us and of course this can all help, but it can add pressure too. When we place overly high expectations on ourselves we often fall short, we compare ourselves to all of those we think are doing a much better job and we berate ourselves endlessly at every perceived failure.
As a Mindfulness & Resilience Coach I work with both adults and children and I often hear myself promoting a ‘growth mindset’, preaching about not fearing failure and learning from our mistakes, but the truth is, none of us really want to feel like we’ve failed as a parent, do we.
Another thing we don’t get is feedback. As a stay at home parent, I don’t get a yearly review and a pat on the back for all the things I’ve got right (I’m lucky to get a Mother’s Day card quite frankly) and I don’t get constructive feedback on the things I could have done better (I’m not sure accusations of child cruelty from enforced restrictions on gaming and sugar consumption count).
This is when I decided to bite the bullet and actually ask for some. Not from another adult or an expert, but from one of the very people at the coal face of my parenting, namely my teenage son. So, I asked him what he thought the biggest mistake I’ve made as a parent has been and I waited for a diatribe cataloguing all the mistakes I’ve made and arguments we’ve had over the years to be thrown back at me. But his response really shocked me, because he told me that on the whole he thought I did a really good job and that the only thing he would criticise me for is not restricting his brother’s laptop use more (I will confess, he has got a valid point with this).
Now this may make me sound like an awesome parent, I can guarantee this is not the case, I’m as flawed as the next Mum out there and I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way, but the truth is that from my son’s perspective he’s not as bothered about this as I am. We may have our ups and downs but on the whole, he thinks I’m doing OK and that’s good enough for me.
So, I guess what my son has taught me is that I need to have more of a ‘growth mindset’ myself around parenting, that I need to remember mistakes are OK and that’s how we learn to ‘parent’ better, not from a book.