Resolutions are one thing – execution quite another.

Take inspiration from the research showing that cigarette smokers increase their odds of quitting with every (even failed) attempt.

Instead of “resolving” – review. What did you resolve in 2014? 2010? 1999? My guess is something pretty close to what you’re planning to change in the future.

This year, skip the plan.

Want to be less disorganized, thinner, richer, healthier? In a new relationship, out of an old one? In a new job? A new house?

None of these things change unless you do. And it’s not just a behavioural change. It’s a fundamental one.

Alcoholics who get sober frequently become food or exercise addicts. Food addicts on a diet often overspend. Any real recovery requires uncovering the root of your problem.

Generally, it’s a need to self-medicate pain or dodge discomfort.

So why aren’t you comfortable in your own skin?

Resolve only to learn this:

How do I become “comfortable in my own skin”?

Try three questions:

How can I know what I don’t know?

Who holds the pain of my self-doubt?

How has failing to change served me or those around me?

Then make a plan to assemble a winning team; a coach and fellow players who will inspire & guide you while training by your side every step of the way.

There are some excellent self-help books to help you begin the process of unearthing your obstacles to change.

“Living Your Best Life” (Fortgang) is a great way to dive in. You’ll have no difficulty reading it over the holidays – and if you take the exercises seriously you will be well on your way.

Next step – choose a team!

Fellow travellers are critical. We need safe people in our lives, however, “familiar” is not necessarily “safe”.

Think about it. If you have surrounded yourself with the same people for years and you haven’t been able to make significant changes in your life – perhaps it is because in any system – we all return to the status quo.

There are networks, meetings and classes everywhere. Plan to take in at least one new event a month. Make a few of them classes.

Already going to yoga? Try a different class at a different time. You might meet a new best friend there. Like your gym? Take a session at another – you don’t know whom you might meet.

Ever hear of “laughter yoga” – no exercise involved – but be prepared to leave happily inspired.

Business network comfortably familiar? Other networks welcome visitors – don’t commit – just take a chance on a meeting.

Change is hard. Small steps matter!

Adopt a mantra for 2015: “I love and accept myself the way that I am today, I am enough”.

The miracle of acceptance is that as you come to believe this, by 2016 your life will have changed. For the better!

United Technologies placed this ad in the Wall Street Journal, 1979

Playing “catch up” in Ireland.

Imagine the surprise at 53 years old discovering I was, yet again, a girl.

Imagine the surprise in finding my accomplished, professional peers were also girls.

Imagine my sadness on realising they didn’t have a problem with it.

Please let us consider the underlying misogyny and join in rejecting the appellation.

When I moved here in 2008, the feminist in me never expected to be back at square one.

This tattered copy has hung in one office or another since 1980. The Christmas gift tag added in 1985 was a reminder that my bemused staff didn’t think it was important either. They got it eventually.

One hopes the New Yorker cartoon illustrates the absurdity of accepting something we can change…

…or else we conspire in our own oppression.

“At the end of the day you can only pay what you can pay…”

With these words Irish psychologist Shane Martin talks about the reality of the money stress that affects so many of us. I point out “Irish” because in his practice, Moodwatchers, he is often challenged by the fallout of the economic crisis. Too many ordinary people are suffering the consequences.

Google “money stress” and there are hundreds of articles – like these:

Interestingly, in 2009, five “coping” suggestions seemed adequate; by 2013, seven are necessary to grab our attention.

Rethinking “enough” is a good place to begin. We’re in good company, few are unaffected by the economic crush – most of us are living on less.

Where to begin?

Accepting that we can “only pay what we can pay” is simple. Though it is not easy.

Adopting a two pronged approach can help. Believing we have enough, feeling prosperous no matter the bank balance – this takes consciously minding our fiscal and spiritual bottom lines.

So much of our mythology around money centers on the illusion that if we had “more,” we would be more comfortable and more able to access our creativity. But creativity and prosperity are spiritual matters, not fiscal ones. The tools of The Prosperous Heart help people to embrace the life that they actually have, where they often find that they already have “enough.” Cameron

Let me highly recommend that you consider and adopt the practical steps outlined in the articles above. Then ask yourself: What are the real obstacles to your feeling prosperous?

If you’d like to explore them, the exercises and discipline of identifying your spending type, keeping a daily record of your spending, and abstaining from “debting” as outlined in The Prosperous Heart will help.

Author Julia Cameron takes the tried and true steps of The Artist’s Way and expands the methodology. The Prosperous Heart is a firm but gentle guide to making peace with money.

After determining your “spending type”, you will take pen and hand and construct an autobiography, analyzing your relationship to money when you were a child, an adolescent, young adult – through to the present. You learn what your patterns are and what they are about.

Like acceptance, the process is simple, but not necessarily easy. You are not in this alone. The secret to success is taking the first step – just do “the next best thing”!

If you find the process daunting – don’t do it alone! To learn more about how to set up your own group or to join a facilitated group – get in touch and register your interest here.

Sustaining change in life and work is hard. Groups of like minded people keep you focused and on track as you go through The Artist’s Way.

Explore a disciplined approach to effecting a real life change,  rediscover and engage your most creative self.

Join us for a free introductory session, twelve week groups will then commence in late September/October 2013.

The Artist’s Way

Dublin  @ The Howth Yacht Club
Tuesday evenings 

Tuesday morning location tbd

Belfast, @ The Source Wellbeing Centre

Thursday evenings 

Thursday morning location tbd

The Prosperous Heart

Newry @ The Bath House

Monday, evenings

Carlingford, @ Saddle View
Sundays, 11:00am

For more information or to
register interest, contact us.

There it was in my #MorningPages, something so clearly observed while emerging into consciousness.

I am grateful for my unanswered prayers.

At this writing, I am now fully awake with intellect engaged. It is different. It feels like some parent just sent me off on an unpleasant assignment.

That would be the loving, all-knowing parent who knows that the wisdom – retrieved from my unconscious needs to be processed.

This “morning pages” discipline often includes a list of things for which I am grateful. After all, there is a gift in counting the things that have gone well- before I rise and start measuring the bad.

Face it, we all complain about the rain as though our very existence didn’t depend on it.  Yet if I acknowledge the beauty in the blooms or the view of the mountain, I have taken back the power of the rain to bring me down.

Grateful for unanswered prayers, but why?

I have learned to honor why they went unanswered.

Self-will was obviously problematic through the ages.

“Thy will be done” is over two centuries old. It was a powerful and empowering closing to The Lord’s Prayer for the same people who were simultaneously reminding the divine to send daily bread and forgive their trespasses.

Thy will, not mine.

Humbly, I’ll remember that…

“I am rarely granted what I ask for but always given what I need.”

Keeping Score

I’d written a litany of unanswered prayers, and a few were noteworthy.

Indeed, I’d asked for relief and healing in my marriage, a sense of my own financial security when my children were small, and life for children unborn.

What might answered prayers have looked like?

Well, because the Divine has a sense of humor – I have had to face this head-on.

• My children’s father has remarried. He is well-loved, and they’ve been embraced by a new extended family, with the added benefit of step-siblings. He and I no longer know love qualified by our disappointment. We found each other very young and thought what we saw in each other was what we wanted (largely to be different people from our parents).It was not what we could deliver after our children were born. The imprints of our original families were overwhelming.  Imposing my will to “make it work” would not have allowed any of us to move happily forward.
• “Enough money” – well, we do come to learn there is never enough (10% more would surely make life easier). Whatever I thought enough was, I wouldn’t have learned the assortment of skills gained while working myriad part-time jobs. Moving into this life stage, I find I am grateful. Not a single one of the skills I learned or contacts I made goes untapped. I needed every one of those lessons and experiences.
• Life for children unborn; I have the gift of three grown children for whom my attentions are frightfully inadequate (back to enough, I know). They all want something more or different from me – and had there been four or five of them, would the stories of these three be as they were meant to be?

Above all, I know now that the reality of the “what if” would have been disastrous.

Oh, I’d have gotten my way and…

None of the happiness I now know could have come to be.

Even with this proof, I rise every morning struggling to get out of the way of my willful, judging self.

I rise wanting other people to treat me better (really, their world is about me?)

I want specific opportunities to become apparent (really, isn’t it arrogant to think I have envisioned the best of all possibilities?)

And I want sunny days! (really, next winter’s sweater will come from a thirsty sheep?).

Lastly, I now know to begin with – “Deliver me from the evil that is my willfulness into the redemption that is simply letting go“.

For more on #MorningPages see – Personal Change Management, The Tools or Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman’s article: This column will change your life: Morning Pages.

Who do we talk to, and are we careful in selecting them? Yesterday, I mentioned Julia Cameron’s acknowledgement page in Finding Water (2009) and the power of the gifts she outlines.

She has chosen these friends and family members and cultivates those relationships. So with whom do we chose to share our journey and what do we do to cultivate the healthy relationships? How should we accept and manage the ones that are less so.

I am often reminded of the lyrics of Caledonia. Dougie MacLean wrote: “Now I have moved and I’ve kept on moving, proved the points that I needed proving, lost the friends that I needed losing, found others on the way”.

Do we need to lose friends? What about family members? Perhaps not lose all of them, but certainly renegotiate the relationships.

• What are the messages we get from them?
• Are they reinforcing negative messages we give ourselves?
• Are they relating to us now or the person we were 5, 10 or 15 years ago?
• If we met this person tomorrow would we chose to have them in our life?

I have a friend who is proposing April 1^st as ‘National De-friend all those People you Shouldn’t Have Friended on Facebook Day”.

It is easy to make light of this, but it does beg the question – do I need to go on a negativity diet?

Every interaction, every conversation impacts us. Are we guarded? Available? Invested? Are we telling the truth? Asking for feedback or reflection? Most importantly are we listening? And when we listen, what do we hear?

A colleague reminds me: “How do you treat sick fish? You treat the water, their environment.”

So what might we do to change our environment to be happier, healthier?

Surround ourselves with happier, healthier people. Those aren’t necessarily the cheerful ones, or even the optimistic ones. They are the people honouring their own struggle and ours to be themselves.

We spend a lot of energy keeping our true selves to ourselves. Our “persona” is the face we show the outside world and if it is not genuinely us, we are spending a lot of energy displaying it. Underneath is a voice reminding us that the “real me” isn’t good enough to bring to the outside world.  Well why not?

Let’s shed the voice, the inner critic and look to the people we admire. We can adopt their voices, accept what it is they like about us. And affirm ourselves.

We’ll get there- and until we do let’s simply

“Fake it til we Make it”

I love and accept myself the way that I am today, I am enough!

You don’t have to go it alone – get in touch if you think we can help!