Sorting My Life Out

I've just spent the weekend on a Life Coaching workshop at Evolution in Brighton. It was a very interesting weekend that allowed me to take a closer look at myself and to re-evaluate my life and the direction it seems to be moving in. There were only 4 of us in the group (although there are usually 6-8 participants) who happened to be all female, so there was a very open, supportive atmosphere over the weekend - not that men aren't open or supportive, you understand, but I expect the energy would have been quite different if any had attended.

The workshop was a mixture of writing exercises, visual exercises, role play and meditation via individual, partner and group work so it was very varied and interesting. We also read some Angel Cards and Medicine Cards based on Native American wisdom - just for a bit of fun really, but I like stuff like that. At one point we had to think of a persona that embodies who we want to be or a type of personality that we can emanate to help us get through things in a different way. We had to walk like that person, then teach our partner how to walk like them too. I chose beautiful singer/songwriter Carrie Tree so I was floating around the room, very calmly and rhythmically, with confidence and grace, softly smiling with my head held high - aah!

Although much of the content and many of the exercises were very similar to what I'd been dealing with all through The Artist's Way, it was good to re-visit those issues and reaffirm where I'm at now. We also looked at some confidence boosting techniques and our coach, Christine Brown, recommended a book called Confidence Booster Workout by Martin Perry, which I intend to buy as it's full of interesting exercises and has lots of brightly coloured pages (that's the real reason)!

Chris also runs weekly courses, 1-to-1 sessions and a Saturday morning group in Life Coaching. See her website at Inner Balance or the Evolution website for more info.

Starting at the Beginning

Welcome to my first blog post and what a journey it's been getting here. 7 months ago I decided to leave my 7-and-a-half-year office admin job in order to do some soul searching and to try and answer that question that's been haunting me (or should I say that I've been avoiding?) all my life: what do I really want to do? What am I passionate about? What vocation would I find truly fulfilling?

I felt pressured into answering these questions and needed to have some sort of response prepared so that when people asked me if I'd made any progress sorting out my life I could avoid those pathetic and wishy washy "I don't really knows". So I decided I would become a writer. Ah yes, simple. Just like that. Or not. You see, if there's one thing I've learnt from studying The Artist's Way it's that the mind doesn't work like that. Or at least mine doesn't. As soon as the idea was formed, my mind turned into this jeering, sniggering evil little being, poking fun at the rest of me and saying "Yeah right, you're going to be a writer are you? Snigger. Snort. Well, we'll just see about that won't we?"

The Artist's Way is a fantastically inspiring book by Julia Cameron designed to help you discover or recover your creativity in whatever form that may be. It's written as a 12-week course with exercises and tasks to follow. And follow them I did. I read every single word in the book, undertook every task and digested every piece of advice. So I was very confused, not to mention disappointed, when I got to the end of the course and felt no different to when I'd begun. I thought I would see massive changes in myself, I thought my creativity would blossom and, most of all, I thought I would instantly become a writer. But you see it just doesn't work like that.

2 months after finishing the course I'm now beginning to see the benefits of it and experience the subtle changes within myself and my thought processes which the book has instilled in me. It's all very well reading other people's advice, but until you actually experience it for yourself it's pretty much meaningless. I'm now halfway through another book, Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg, which a dear friend gave me for my birthday. I'm only halfway through it because that was all I needed to give me the inspiration and the urge to start writing.

So here I am, 7 months after convincing everyone, including myself, of my exciting new career, actually starting to do some of the things I first intended. You just can't rush these things you know! And one of those things was starting my own blog. And here it is, my first blog post. My first victory. Thanks for reading it. All I had to do was take a leap and the net would appear. I must remember that in future...