There's a part of you, of me, of everyone, who knows what to do.

Maybe you forgot how to hear it - I know for me it's a process of remembering and re-remembering. Sometimes weeks or months go by when I just don't hear. It's an easy thing to do, forgetting how to listen to the part of you who knows. The world is full of voices telling you to listen to them, instead. Buy this, follow my ten step process, take these pills, read this giant pile of self help books. The external voices are loud.

The internal voice, the one that knows, can be quiet. And sometimes it tells us things that don't make sense in the context of capitalism.

There's a device used in fiction to create tension and conflict between characters (which keeps readers turning pages). You give each of your characters a different script, and then make them think they're reading from the same one.

You might have a school principal calling a parent to tell them about their child's imminent expulsion.

The principal's script says: this child is a menace.

The parent's script says: this child is the highly gifted apple of my eye.

Imagine how the conversation might go?

When you're feeling out of sorts, anxious or irritated by everything, up to and including someone standing on your shadow - it's easy to get stuck in a loop of 'why?' trying to figure out the underlying cause.

"Why?" can feel like a good question. You're being self reflective. You're taking responsibility for how you're feeling, trying to figure it out, understand it. And sometimes this is useful… until it isn't, when you keep spinning in the feeling.

When that happens, "what" can be a better question.

A complaint is a fight against something. Fighting against things can get really tiring. Endlessly pushing away the things we don’t want, the things that aren’t right, the things that don’t feel good.

So what to do? One thing we can do is look inside the complaint for the desire it holds. If we don’t want strawberry ice cream, what DO we want? If this feels wrong, what feels right?

Sometimes, the answer is obvious (chocolate ice cream, of course).

But sometimes it’s harder to figure out…

It’s an easy trap to fall into, given the culture we live in, to believe that parts of ourselves aren’t right. To find ourselves thinking that it’s not okay to be needy, to think that we need to kill off our people pleasers, exorcise our anxiety, stop being a victim and claim our empowerment. To beat ourselves up for finding it hard to take off the suit of armour and be more open, more soft, more vulnerable.

It’s like we’re trying to chop ourselves into pieces and only keep the good bits.

But that’s not how healing works. That’s not how growth works. That’s not how we get what we want.

How much mental real estate is taken up by things you feel you should do, but haven’t? The endless to do list that gets bumped from day to day and week to week (and in some cases, month to month or year to year…).

What if that weight wasn’t there any more?

There’s a saying that drifts around the place about humans and time that says something like: we overestimate how much we can get done in a day, and we underestimate how much we get done in a year.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it was built.

To make this quirk of human minds work for you, read on for a suggestion..

This is a slightly different take on the ‘what do you want to do with your life?’ question.

What do you want to have done?

And then, what could you do today, in order to make that your reality later in life?

There’s something delightful about stepping outside of routine and doing things differently. Interrupting our regular patterns with something interesting or beautiful or curious or nurturing.

It’s also sometimes quite hard to do, given that it’s easy to get into ruts and routines, and the point of a rut or a routine is that you don’t have to think about it. And if you’re not thinking about what you’re doing, it’s hard to make a choice to do things a different way.

Which is why it can be nice to enlist support to interrupt our patterns.

There is a way for change to be a bit easier without us having to ‘effort harder’.

What if instead of trying to change our identity and our behaviour at the same time, we changed our external world so it’s easier to do the thing than it is to not do the thing?

Kind of like we’re the river – we’re going to run down the path of least resistance.

How do you change the river? Shift the banks that guide it.

What’s it like to work with me?

This is a question I get a bit, given all the different things I offer, so here’s an idea of the different things we might focus on together if you were a client of mine.

Don’t be silly, it’s just your imagination.

For many people, imagination is downplayed and discouraged as we grow. We’re expected and encouraged to grow out of flights of fancy, to be realistic, to put our feet on the ground and pull our heads out of the clouds.

But here’s a thing - imagination is one of the most powerful tools we have, for healing, for growth, for joy and delight, for getting what we want, for creating a life we love to live.

Read on for a couple of reasons why.

Worry is a hungry beast. It’s always looking for its next meal.

Sometimes, worry comes from things that aren’t how we think they should be. When I figure it out, whatever it is, I’ll feel okay.

And maybe these things will make a difference. But maybe they won’t - so what to do? We have this hungry beast roaming loose around our mind causing havoc.

Well, maybe we could tame the beast.

This is your invitation, into delight - allow yourself to be delighted.

Make yourself available for small moments of unexpected beauty, calling you into presence. Let yourself feel the lightness that comes from these tiny moments of connection with something magic.

Follow these ten steps and you’ll get results in just seven days. Take my three month program and you’ll be the you you wish you were. And when we reach step ten and we’re not where we were promised, we think there’s something wrong with us and we look for the next solution.

There’s nothing wrong with us.

In my experience, on my journey through life, literally nothing has worked like that.

Everything I have that brings me joy and satisfaction has taken time.

In a nutshell - when we jump into personal development from a place of ‘not enough’, looking for ‘the thing’ that will fix us, we don’t find it.

When we come to it from a place of absolutely enough, coming from curiosity, magic happens. We find there’s nothing to fix, and we’ve been solving a problem that doesn’t exist this whole time… 

...and we smile at ourselves because we know there’s still nothing to fix - we’ve just been following a harder path than we need to, and now we can follow a different one.

Creativity is freedom.

When you write or draw or make things or sing - you can do anything you want.

Put red here. Blue there. Burn it and begin again.

Write some words, fit them into sentences, read them back and reorder them so they sound like poetry.

Creative freedom is absolute within whatever limits exist.

It’s a nice puzzle. You’re not free, because there are limits, but within these limits, you are completely free. 

In past years I’ve have goals. This year I have curiosities.

Golden threads, asking me to follow them, posing the question - “what if…”

“Someday” is not a real day. Tomorrow is also not a real day. Not until it turns into today.

Today is a real day. Today is the ONLY real day.

Because the only real time is now.

Yesterday is a memory, tomorrow is a dream… today is what we have.

You are worthy of receiving support. Piles of it. As much as you need - it doesn’t make you weak, it doesn’t mean you’re not enough on your own, and it doesn’t mean you’ve failed.

Going to say that again - receiving support is not proof that you’re not good enough.