Having goals is always going to be an ideal way of achieving what you want in life. Goals set you on the course that you need to be going on, they give you direction and act as an incentive to achieve what you want and what you need. Without goals you can be like a boat without a rudder, drifting off in one direction without the means to bring you back on course.

Having a focus can help in all areas of your life, from finding the ideal job, home, partner or lifestyle. Knowing what you want and then setting a plan to get it is highly satisfying and productive. Having a fixed goal in mind means that you always know what direction you are meant to be going in and having a 5-year plan means that you can visualise and set goals that will really change your life.

There are many amazing tips for spring cleaning your mind, body and soul that can totally transform your life.

In the same way that you clean your home and prepare for the warmer months ahead after winter has passed, you can cleanse your mental and emotional state by cleaning your whole self.

This is the time of new beginnings, everything is starting to reappear after the dormant winter months, flowers are blooming, temperatures are rising and emotionally and mentally, you probably feel brighter and more positive.

What better time then is there than now to give your mind, body and soul a good clean?

You live in your head all of the time and so you need to know how to talk to yourself in your head in a way that is going to be beneficial to you.

That internal constant chatter can either raise you up or bring you down depending on what you say to yourself.

Self-talk is that inner chatter that is influenced by your subconscious mind that highlights your thoughts, feelings, questions and beliefs. The way that you speak to yourself will determine how you feel about yourself and how you treat yourself. It will also determine how other people view you and treat you.

People who are confident in themselves and their abilities will have a good inner dialogue but people who look negatively towards themselves, and have little or no self-confidence will talk negatively to themselves.

Many people approaching retirement will be filled with joy at the thought of never working again but there are many others who will find the transition very difficult and will be looking for ways how to stop feeling lost after retirement.

woman sitting crossed leg with cup of tea

Retirement is often seen as being a time in life when you can start to kick back, slow down and take your golden years easy. If you have worked full-time until your retirement, the thought of being able to do what you like when you like can be liberating, to say the least.

Why then do many people struggle when they retire and find it a difficult transition?

Retirement can come with many new adjustments to life, and this is where some can find themselves feeling lost as they start to negotiate this new chapter.

Neuro Linguistic Programming has been used to change the way people think and act since 1975 when it appeared in Robert Bandler and John Grinder’s book The Structure of Magic I.

Neuro linguistic programme is very beneficial for many people. This is a very gentle modality that looks to solve issues by examining the use of language and senses in different situations.

NLP enables you to have better relationships and a better understanding of others which is particularly helpful in work situations and in home life.

Unlike various therapies that can go on for a number of years, NLP usually only takes a small time frame in order for the effects to be felt.

As a coach. I always advocate using a vision board for my clients who are looking for ways to bring their desired outcomes into their lives, and I give them clear instructions as to how to make a vision board that works for them in a few simple steps.

A Vision board is a collage of images, photographs, affirmations and cutouts of any dreams or desires that you have and would love to bring into your life.

Whether you have a physical vision board or an app, the principles are the same, you gather together in one place all of the visual representations of what you would like and arrange them together so that you can look at them every day and visualise having them in your life.

If you suffer from food obsession, you could find that it is starting to rule your life. You might constantly question how to stop obsessively thinking about food, or be constantly on the lookout for the best diets or ways in which to change your life so you are no longer ruled by food.

An unhealthy preoccupation with food can start to have consequences in all areas of your life, from your job, and health to your relationships. You can find yourself thinking about meals that you are going to be eating instead of concentrating on work, spending too much time planning meals instead of being with family and you can discover that it takes up too much space in your mind, leaving you with little room to think about anything else.

There is, of course, the major issue of health. An unhealthy obsession with food can leave you either overweight with health issues or underweight with health issues, which in both instances can be mental problems as well as physical problems.

Shame is a very coming emotion for humans but can cause great suffering and pain. We often feel it as an unpleasant, disturbing sensation in the pit of our stomach. It is often related to a sense of failure or the thought that we have done something immoral or embarrassing.

It is a complex emotion that will feel different to each person but is an emotion that everyone will have experienced in their lives. Many people can carry shame around with them for many years. Situations from when they were children can still cause them to feel shame many years later.

black and white image woman

We will all react to shame in our own way, and we can all experience it for different reasons. The one thing that many people will have in common is their desire to know how to change their thinking about shame.

January 1st….must start the new year off with a whole list of resolutions that I am going to achieve this year. January 8th…..well seem to be back to my old ways and have broken all of my resolutions already! Have you heard this before? Are you guilty of this? If so you aren’t alone, in fact, research has shown that only 9% of people see their resolutions through until the end of the year.

stationary goals journal

Why is it that we pick possibly the most depressing time of the year to set new goals and resolutions for ourselves, in the northern hemisphere anyway? Why do we find it so difficult? Shouldn’t we be given a manual on how to set goals and accomplish them?

I bet you have had many conversations along the lines of “ know let’s it here I prefer it,” or “no if you got his way it will save so much more time than the way you are suggesting.” These simple sentences may seem innocuous enough but if you hear them enough, they may highlight a more insidious problem, that you have a controlling person in your life.

Once you realise this is the case, you may start asking how you live with controlling people. It could be that the p controlling person is someone that you can’t just drop from your life, so you are going to have to learn some empowering ways to deal with them.

There are many people who can be controlling, a partner, friends, work colleagues, your boss, parents, family members and neighbours.

Seasonal adjustment disorder or seasonal affective disorder is a type of depression that comes and goes during the seasons. Most people who suffer from SAD do so during the winter months, though there are people who can feel fine during the winter months and who suffer during the summertime. SAD can often be known as winter depression because it is more prevalent during the winter months.

Coping with life can seem overwhelming at times. No matter how old or what our circumstances are, we can all find moments when we feel out of control in our lives.

Although we live in an age where we have many time-saving devices and technology to hand, more money and free time and better living conditions than in any period in history, we can still feel that we have too much to do, are burdened down and are unable to control many situations in our lives.

When situations are out of your control or can lead to a build-up of stress and anxiety, it can affect everything from your relationships with yourself family and friends to your jobs and social lives.

You can also feel overwhelmed by the pressures of the world and find that life can at times be daunting.

It is surprisingly easy to fall into the trap of catastrophizing no matter how level-headed we are. Jumping straight away to the worst-case scenario and imagining all sorts of terrible things until you are in a state of anxiety and stress.

We can all be prone to thinking the worst at times, it is a part of what it is to be human. The odd irrational thoughts we have that life is always going to be awful, and that the situation that we find ourselves in is never going to change.

Most of us will snap out of this way of thinking after we have examined the irrational thoughts that we are having and have replaced them with new, positive ones.

Other people though will tend to catastrophize about a situation and will begin to see it as being far worse than it is or will imagine that there will never be a change in their circumstances. These are people who are prone to catastrophize thinking.

You walk into a room and forget why. You can’t remember the name of someone you have just been introduced to and feel mortified or, you are fed up with constantly looking for things you have just had and can’t remember where you put them.

These everyday occurrences seem innocuous enough but you can’t get rid of the nagging feeling that something is wrong with you and you are starting to lose your memory at a young age

Are you one of the many people feeling lost in your 50s? Unsure of what has happened in your life thus far and not knowing where you are going or what you want to be doing as you get older? Do you feel that the spark has gone from your life, you’re not sure when it went out or how to get it back.

What you think about becomes your reality. This is a certain fact that we can’t escape. You need to be thinking about how to make your thoughts become the reality that you want to be living and release thoughts that don’t serve you.

There can be no doubt about it the last few years have been an incredibly stressful time for many and with so much looming on the horizon, you may be wondering about how to increase your resilience to stress and anxiety for 2023.

Globally, there has been a pandemic, war, talks of recession, rising energy, fuel and food bills and a general sense of uncertainty, so it is no wonder that many people are starting to feel stress and have anxiety levels rising as we start to approach 2023.

Imagine if we treated everybody in our world the same as we treat ourselves at times. Have you ever noticed that voice inside your head telling yourself all of the things that you do wrong and thinking “How do I stop being so hard on myself?” This constant habit we have of knocking ourselves down, criticizing ourselves and causing pain is something that needs to stop but how do you go about it?

Is it possible to trick your brain? If so how can you trick your brain into positive thinking? The brain is a complex organ in the body that controls our thoughts and our behaviours. This amazingly intricate organ gives us the power to speak, think, imagine, create and solve problems. As well as all of the cognitive power that we have, it also controls the temperature of our body, our heart function and our breathing. It controls all of our movement, every action that our bodies perform. Simply put, without our brains working properly we would not be able to function on a cognitive or physical level.

You start the day with so many plans and ideas of things you want to achieve and then suddenly realise that it’s almost 5 pm and you haven’t achieved anything as you have spent most of the day procrastinating. How did this happen? and more importantly, how can you stop it from happening again?