Have you caught up with life over on the podcast yet?


Already half way through this series of my new podcast, Sunday Night Motivation!

Thank you so much for the positive feedback and comments and I’m glad that some of the hints and tips I’ve been sharing over the past few weeks have been helpful.  They are some things that I have tried out myself, especially the getting into a healthy routine one, hence I wanted to share on the pod.

Just in case you haven’t caught it, I’ve also shared some tips and ideas for goal setting and this week’s episode started looking at some of the roadblocks that can stand in the way of us achieving success.  

You can catch the podcast on all good host sites now, including Apple, Spotify and Google Podcasts!

Photo credit:  CD-X via Unsplash.com

I’ve launched a podcast!

Exciting news friends!!  So, seeing as we’re going back into lockdown here in England and I’m going to have a bit more time on my hands, I’ve decided to bring my podcast launch forward and it’s is going live this weekend!!!

It’s called Sunday Night Motivation (as you can see!) and is going to be a series of short episodes with some little hints and tips that will help you to get set up for the coming week.

I started writing blog posts called Sunday Night Motivation during the last lockdown as a way of getting my own weekly planning in order.  Sunday nights have always been a downer for me, ever since I was at school, so the first episode will be looking at the old Sunday night dread….it is indeed a thing, and I’ll be looking into why it happens and what we can do about it.

You will be able to catch the show wherever you listen to your podcasts.  If you like it, please do leave a review on Apple podcasts, and subscribe to catch the latest episodes.

 

What is in your joy bucket?

 

What do you have in your bucket of joy resources?  Things that you enjoy, that make you smile or laugh, or that get you fired up.  It might look like a complete mish-mash of things to an outsider or seem like a bit of a weird collection, but to you, these things mean everything.

The things that I love and that make me happy are indeed a strange mix of quiet, thoughtful pursuits (like baking, cross-stitch and doodling), right through to the loud and exhilarating (like loud grunge music and motorsport).   People who know me because of one thing, might be surprised or confused at the other activities I enjoy – to them it might seem like polar opposites with no clear link.  But they don’t necessarily need to be linked.

And it is these things which make us unique.  All the things we love, all the things that bring us joy, and things that make complete sense to us.  Often we have attachments to things because they remind us of happy times when we were doing that activity with people that are important to us.  Baking reminds me of spending time in the kitchen with my mum when I was little.  Loud music reminds me of going to gigs with friends.  I became a huge fan of motorbike racing because my first love used to do it.

In difficult or unsettling times, it is even more important to remember all of these things that make us happy.  So, when we do feel stressed or lonely, we have something familiar that we can go to, and that we know will make us feel a bit better.

In some of my most difficult times, I often lost interest in doing a lot of these ‘unimportant’ things, or put them aside because they weren’t of interest to people I was with at the time.  But our identity is built around these things – they are the resources which become even more important when we are losing our way, or losing our sense of self.

Whatever these things are for you, try and find some time in your week to invest in making yourself happy.  It doesn’t need to be done for anyone else, or to serve any particular purpose or outcome.  Just do it to bring a little bit of light into your days – this in itself can help to lift your mood and improve your outlook.   Try planning something that you would enjoy doing after life returns to a little bit of ‘normality’ – maybe there is something that you have always wanted to learn, or a long-forgotten hobby or interest that you put aside to focus on other things.

And please don’t think this will make you look selfish to the people around you – in fact, if you usually put off doing fun or frivolous things out of concern of what other people will think, or if you feel as though you should be doing something more important, then it is probably even more important to make time for it!!

 

Photo credit:  @timmossholder via Unsplash.com