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3/7/2020 0 Comments Trying Too Hard Have you ever felt that no matter how hard you try you never quite seem to get where it is that you want to go? It might be in work, it might be in one of your relationships, it might be with your health, or your fitness or something like that. I decided to focus on this today because this has been one of my greatest challenges in life. I have always been somebody who likes to do something and do it really, really well. One of the first memories I have of this was on my first pony club camp. I won all the rosettes, and they weren’t all for doing anything amazing.They were for simple things like making sure that your pony is groomed well. I would get there before everybody else and I would spend hours grooming my pony to make sure that it was spotless. I didn’t do it to be better than other people it was because I just loved doing it.
It is just in who I am to give my all. Sometimes it has served me and other times not so much. At the pony club camp for instance I didn't actually get first place on the last day because, as the organisers told me, that they felt so embarrassed for giving me first place throughout the weekend that they felt like they needed to give someone else a chance. My excelling was uncomfortable to them. I also took part in a sponsored walk around my school when I was about 6. I really loved it, talking to all the other people and marching along, (I have always been a bit of a natter box). I don’t remember being aware of where I was compared to other people in the number of laps I had done but apparently I was in the lead for my age. My mother was a teacher at the school and through embarrassment of having me be win the sponsored walk for my age group she actually told another kid to go around a couple of times so that he would beat me. I have also experienced this when I was setting up my business here in the UK. I knew I had a time line to get everything up and going and I felt this pressure so I tried really hard. When nothing seemed to work as fast as I wanted it to I just tried even harder. As you can imagine this led to quite a bit of stress. It was only when I took a step back and started to act from a different place that I started to move forwards. I share these stories because trying hard meets with resistance even if my trying hard was not motivated by trying to get a certain result. It is also an energetic resistance. For example in a very basic form - if you push someone they tend to push back and resist. Life is the same. As I got older and wiser (hopefully) I realised that quite often putting that kind of effort in was actually quite exhausting especially when there was push back from life to the direction I was trying to go in. As life got more full with children, a career, social life and close relationships putting lots of effort into all these areas became impossible. When I was a young child or even when I was a teenager or in my early 20s there's only me to look after and focus on and then trying hard was not too self defeating. As my life filled up it became a behaviour that set me back more than it took me forwards and at times I became overwhelmed, exhausted, irritable and so on. The more I felt my self lag and falter the more I would make myself wrong and the more I would try even harder until I just couldn’t. I have often seen this in my friends and clients as well where trying harder and harder causes immense amounts of stress and exhaustion. Life was not meant to be like this and if we are not carful this continued stress can harm us physically. I have experienced this recently just through the circumstances of moving to a new country. Since we moved to the UK we have moved 4 times in as many years there has also been the stress of ensuring my children are as unaffected by these moves as possible so that their schooling wouldn’t suffer and a number of other circumstances. As I said I have a tendency to try too hard. So when my fitness wasn’t what it was normally (as I had not had time to go running) I pushed myself to get back on track. I had certain expectations of what I thought I should be able to do and I thought I could just force myself to meet them. Unfortunately I learnt the hard way that force is not the answer - and I gave myself exercise induced asthma. I later learnt that this is brought on when someone is stressed and then on top of the external stress they push their body really hard and cause it even more stress. It is the body’s way of saying STOP! What I am going to share with you today is that whilst my propensity is to come from a place of trying really, really hard I have learnt that a balance of both allowing and doing achieves the best results for me and for everything and everyone around me. Especially if my actions come from a place of inspiration (and I’ll go into inspiration next week). For this to happen you will need to make space for inspiration to come and then take action from this inspiration. When you are able to do this then there is very little effort and trying and the results are not bound by normal linear constraints. For instance in my coaching business when I was moving to the UK I didn’t know how I was going to make contacts and create a net work. Instead of trying really hard and becoming pushy I just shared what I was doing with people I knew. It was through this sharing in a non expectant way that a colleague of mine in Hong Kong introduced me to someone he knew who had just moved back to Bath. This person just happened to be a director of Bath Bridge who run a talent program for young leaders. I have now been working with them for more than 3 years. I could never have made this happen through effort it was only by following inspiration and acting out of curiosity that this came about. Looking at trying too hard energetically - to make an effort you have to have reserves of energy to do the thing that you want to do. If you are constantly exerting effort and you’re not replenishing yourself then you will have no reserves to be able to make the effort with. When you are running on empty is when you are susceptible to stress and this can lead to breakdowns both mentally physically. This is why I think it's so incredibly important to have balance between doing and allowing. One of my trainers once explained it to me in this way - it is like trying to catch a bar of soap in the shower. If you go and grab at it constantly it is very tricky. The more you grab at it and attack it the more it slips out of your hands and shoots away. However of you reaching for it and scooping it up by allowing it to fall into your hand then it is easy, (and for those of you who nowadays only use shower gel, get a bar of soap and try and chase it around a bathtub when it's wet). Life is very much like this. We do need to take action but as I have said the action needs to come from inspiration we need to be inspired to take the action that we take. And for that we need to be able to allow space and allow peace and quiet and allow ourselves to connect with Source. I would like to put it to you that there's two ways to achieve anything
Because our life is so much about doing we still have to find things to do when we are being quiet things that numb us to the expectation of doing. Just observe when you next watch too much TV, reading too many novels or eating too much and ask yourself why am I doing this? Is it to numb life? I would like to suggest that part of the reason that we do these things is because we're uncomfortable just sitting and being, daydreaming, pondering and being in that kind of open present space. That this has been made wrong in the world and we're not comfortable just sitting with ourselves because it has been so engrained in us that we have to be doing. And yet when I think of the most amazingly creative people that have had huge breakthroughs people like Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci they were known to have these moments of reflection. Albert Einstein used thought experiments and he also used to play the violin. I deeply believe that it is in this space that he learnt to disassociate and just be present with himself . And I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't get his greatest insights in those moments of complete presence. I don't believe that hard work and effort ever really got you what you truly want. I think we normally resort to hard work and effort because we think that's what we should be doing not because it is what we really want to be doing. And that if we actually create space in our lives space to be to be truly present with ourselves that we'll learn to listen to ourselves and receive inspiration and then our actions and the guidance that we get in life will be so much more profound. That the space between what we want achieve and achieving it will reduce so phenomenally that we wont be able to believe how easy life could really truly be. I don't profess to say that I've mastered this but I've seen it so often in my life that I know that it is true. As I said my wiring is to try too hard so this is something that I am very familiar with and it is something that I am constantly learning. I have been listening to a lot of Abraham Hicks recently and one of the things that I really love that they say is that - your soul your Source knows everything that you are wanting to achieve and if only you would relax and enjoy life it would unfold so much easier. The thing that I am focusing on the moment is relief because if I could let go of all the things that I think I need to do and should do and have to do have. I would have such a huge sense of relief. In focusing on relief I feel that my vibration rises and once I am focused on relief then I can focus on gratitude and then I can focus on joy and bliss. And bliss is the most natural state for us all to be in. If we let go of all the should’s, shouldn’t’s, must’s, mustn’t's and all of the noise in our heads what we are left with is bliss. It is funny I had created a YouTube video and a podcast on this topic but it was only when I was writing this blog that I noticed a very subtle difference in the examples I gave at the beginning. When I was a child I had not expected or wanted to come first I put the effort in because I loved what I was doing. There was no stress in the effort I was putting in. I picked up on the adults discomfort and I assumed it was mine but in writing this I see it never was. I wasn’t grooming my pony to get rosettes and I wasn’t walking so far to come first. I thought because the adults were uncomfortable I had done something wrong but I now see this was not the case. The real problem in trying too hard is not in the amount of effort you put in but in WHY you are doing it. If you are dong it for an out come and because you think you should or must then there is resistance. If you are doing it because of the love of it then there is no resistance! And this is where inspiration comes in because inspiration comes from a place of alignment with yourself and the things you love. I hope in my very roundabout way you've enjoyed today's blog. Your comments and interaction is very valued by me. I also have lots of other resources and if you’re interested you can find them on my website www.britttanya.com. And if you would like to step more fully into living a conscious self aware life I also offer coaching. You can send me a message through the contact tab on my website and we can set up a free chemistry call. So much love from me to you
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 Allowing myself to be truly seen is something that I have personally struggled with most of my life, well for as long as I can remember, although most people would most likely say that I am very open. And yet I know that by trying to be what is either expected of me by society or my friends and family makes me feel less expansive and more contracted. I have realised that for me to find freedom I need to allow myself to be truly seen.
In this world where we have so much social media and we're presenting ourselves in a certain way, (a perfect life where everything is beautiful and you're having the most amazing experience and you’re so unique and knowledgeable and so much better than everybody), is almost like an unwritten rule. Allowing yourself to be truly seen seems to be completely counter to what everyone else is trying to do. However allowing yourself to be seen is where true freedom lies, because trying to maintain a perfect looking life to everybody else is incredibly exhausting and it is out of alignment with your truth. Not only is it exhausting but it actually creates a lot of distance between you and other people as not many people can really relate to perfect. If you think about people (and the name Brené Brown comes to mind) who have shared really personal insights into their own lives with the world there is something real about them and relatable. It is as if you get them but not only do you get them but there is a feeling that they might get you too. When someone is willing to be themselves there is authenticity and with authenticity comes trust and when you can trust someone it is so much easier to open up and connect with them. It is funny because the things we feel ashamed of the parts of us that we try to hide are actually the parts of us that make us human and relatable. The upsides of allowing yourself to be truly seen are deep connections with other people a freedom to really be who you are and to own every aspect of who you are. When you own everything and you learn to let go of the shame of some things that you think are unacceptable you can start to accept other people as well and there is greater and deeper understanding. You are able to see that all humans are just human we are all flawed we all have things we like and dislike about ourselves but that that does not make you a good or a bad person it just makes you human. Allowing yourself to be truly seen also creates confidence, deep, deep confidence because when you have accepted every part of yourself whether somebody else accepts it or not is completely irrelevant. When you are trying to hide parts of yourself there is always a lingering fear inside you that somebody might see something you don't want them to see there will always be something you feel like you are hiding. This hiding of a part of yourself takes a lot of effort and thought and manipulation and whilst you think that other people don’t see this we all pick up on everything that everyone is being on some level whether we are aware of it or not. I feel that there is a massive reason why learning to allow yourself to be seen is so incredibly important, because it helps you to live a much more full and happy and confident life. So how do you go about it that's the next question how do you overcome the fear of letting people see all the things you think are unacceptable? For me one of my first steps into this was bizarrely enough sitting in front of a camera and a microphone when I did my training. We had to do these little videos and on one of the days I realised that I could get up and stand in front of people and talk and feel quite comfortable but as soon as I was in front of the camera I became really self conscious and self aware and not in a good way. I didn't feel like who I became as it didn’t feel like me and it bugged me. I knew a process that had helped me in the past uncover something that I wasn’t immediately aware of so decided to do it. I got a piece of paper and I sat down very innocently I started bullet pointing all the things that came up for me when I imagined myself sitting in front of a camera. The very last thing that I put down was the feeling of being alone. As I wrote it down I could feel this deep feeling of aloneness and the fear around that was that people wouldn’t accept me. That I would be rejected if people saw every part of me and the fear was that I would be alone. For some reason being in front of the camera really triggered this for me and the realisation was quite emotional. However once I had allowed myself to fully feel this aloneness that lived inside of me that I hadn’t even really been aware of and allowed myself to retrace my steps in my life to the times when I had felt really alone and allowed myself to cry and release the pain of all of this I felt a peace and a calm so deep and so clear. I asked myself was what I believed really the truth? Was it really true that I would be rejected by every single person I knew if they knew who I was? And was I ever really truly alone? I saw that no one is ever alone there is always Source / Life / God / Allah where ever we are and what ever we are doing. The truth was also that no one had ever rejected me because of who I was it was normally because of who they were. People were normally more open when they knew you more deeply there was more understanding and acceptance. The way to start stepping into this is
If you have enjoyed this blog or feel I have missed something out I would love to hear from you. I also have many other resources such as free courses, lots of videos and a podcast which you can find on my website www.britttanya.com So much love from me to you. 19/6/2020 0 Comments Building Self Belief
I think self belief is one of the most important qualities anyone can have and building self belief is one of the most important things you can do for your self. This is because whatever you believe you make real. If you believe in yourself then life is something that you can engage with because you know that you will find the answer or find a way past challenges as they come up. If you don't believe in yourself then life becomes a much more scary place because you won’t feel like you have the tools or the ability to handle what comes up in life. I spoke about this in the last blog on resilience but it is not just in this area where having a strong belief in yourself is important. It is important in every area of your life. In fact when my kids started school my one desire for them was that when they finished school that they would believe in themselves then they would be able to face anything in life and know deep down that they would be able to thrive and life would be an exciting journey of exploration.
If you have low self belief this is not the end of the world as self belief is something that you can develop and grow and I will give you a technique later in this blog that will help you do just that. Firstly I want to dive a little bit deeper into self belief and into beliefs in general so that you can really understand how what you believe you make real. When you believe something to be true your subconscious creates thoughts and actions that align with that belief. If for example I believe that I’m not particularly clever then I will have resistance to taking part in things that challenge my mental capacity and because I believe that I'm not good in that area I will avoid doing things that require me to use this faculty. I might even get fearful when I am put into a situation where it requires me to be clever. And this is the catch, when you are scared and you feel fearful your brain responds by putting you into fight, flight and freeze mode. When this happens the focus of your brain moves to survival and to the reptilian brain which takes focus away from your higher thinking. This means if I believe that I am not particularly clever and I am put into a situation that challenges my cleverness my brain in the panic will shut down and prove to me that I really am NOT very clever. The subconscious is so powerful at convincing us of our beliefs that we truly believe that they are the truth. Another example might be if I believe that I am not loveable and I start a relationship my partner might pass a comment that to other people does not mean anything but because I have pain around this I might over react by getting angry or by withdrawing. Either of these responses will cause distance between me and my partner and over time with many more incidences like this my partner will most likely leave proving to me that indeed I am unlovable. There are all sorts of beliefs that you have created both positive and negative which generate thoughts and actions that perpetuate the belief. There are people in the world who have very little other than self belief and they have achieved phenomenal things. People like Hellen Keller who was blind and deaf but has written books and is widely quoted for the wisdom she has shared and Nick Vujicic who was born without limbs and is now an internationally famous inspirational speaker and has also written at least one best selling book. When I look at people who have bounced back from all sorts of incredibly challenging situations only to succeed in the most amazing ways the one thing they all had in common was self belief. Now that I have hopefully impressed upon you how important it is I am sure you want to know how to develop it.
For instance if I decided I was going to go and run 10 miles ( I am really, really unfit at the moment and there is no way I could run 10 miles) I would start dreading it immediately. These thoughts of dread would be my subconscious already manipulating me to start doubting myself. I would be quite fearful because I would know that I wasn't up to the challenge. I would also physically find it impossible to do a 10 mile run and all of these things are the feedback that I'm talking about from the subconscious and life that would make it incredibly hard for me to streatch myself this far from where I am. This sort of resistance also happens when you start something completely new as your subconscious has no data that you are able to do what you set out to do even if logically you should be able to do it. For example (I am gonna stick with the exercising because it's in my head) if I haven't exercised for a really, really long time and I decided I'm going to start exercising. Just that initial step into exercising will cause my subconscious to produce lots of resistant thoughts. Thoughts such as I don’t need to do it today I could do it tomorrow, uncertainty, or making something else a priority. All of these thoughts are your subconscious creating doubt because the streatch is too great. This is important for you to know so that should you decide to do something new (even though logically you think it's not a big thing) make sure that you make the steps small so that the resistance from your subconscious is something you can manage without giving up.
Finally I found when I started becoming aware of all of this that I was quite good at keeping my word with other people but I was not as good at keeping it to myself. Watch what you say you are going to do internally as well as externally.
To summarise - if you want to increase your self belief you need to be setting yourself challenges that stretch you at least 20%. You need to be achieving those challenges and completing them at least 80% or more of the time to be able to increase your self belief. On top of that you also need to be very aware of what you commit to and what you promise because these are also like mini challenges. The more that you are your word and the more that you keep your word the more that your subconscious will believe that you’re somebody who can and does and that’s really all there is to it! It sounds really simple but I know it's not always as simple as it sounds. Don't be too hard on yourself in the initial stages you might fall down and you might slip up but if you keep trying then you will find this an incredibly powerful tool that can transform your whole entire life. Not only that but there is magic in playing in this space and when you can consistently acheive your challenges 80% of the time or more it is as if life starts playing with you as well. You will notice that there are more synchronicity’s and coincidences than ever before and who doesn’t want some of that in life! If you want access to more of my resources you can find the on my website www.britttanya.com So much love from me to you 
I’ve decided to build on what I was talking about last week in regard to resilience and dive a little deeper into building resilience. Although it is interesting to know how resilience and endurance fit together I am sure you would also like to know how you can build resilience in your own life. I have a tool I share with my clients which I will give you later in this blog.
The practice of building resilience is a bit like the difference of dieting and eating healthily. Eating healthily is a life choice and dieting is a momentary solution of a perceived problem. Eating healthily will mean you are healthier throughout your life but fad diets very rarely work in the long term and can actually cause your body harm. The same is true of resilience. If you streatch yourself in one area and have not been consistently working on it you will find that it causes you harm. However if you build resilience in all areas of your life when you are asked to streatch you will be far more able to do so without too much stress to yourself. It is also important that you not only build in resilience but that you also build in ways for recuperation in each area. As athletes know building in rest and recuperation activities is as important as their exercise regime. It is essential to a healthy body that it is allowed to recover from the demands placed on it and so it is in all areas of your life. In case you have not read last weeks blog let me remind you of the six areas of resilience.
What I am going to share with you, you can use on all the different areas;
Finally I am going to give you a few ideas for how to grow each area and build in rest and recuperation although this is by no means exhaustive so please add in your own where you feel moved to. * Financial Resilience - I am sure this is an area we are all aware of and the ways I am going to share with you will be no surprise. You can build resilience by
* Spiritual Resilience - This is about understanding what it is to be human and understanding your spiritual evolution. I focus on this in my coaching and training by helping people to shift from being in the ego/automation state into a more self aware and conscious way of living.
* Emotional Resilience - This is important because our emotions trigger our actions and these create our lives. Our emotions can also effect our wellbeing and becoming more emotionally intelligent will help quite a few areas of your life.
* Social Resilience - as I am sure you can guess this is to do with your social life. Before I go into how you can grow it is important for you to know if you are introverted or extraverted and to honour this in your self. You will need to adjust your social life accordingly depending on where you are on the introverted - extroverted spectrum as different amounts and types of socialising will either energise you or drain you and only you will know.
* Physical Resilience - I would imagine most of us know what might be required of this area but I hope I add a few things that might streatch your expectations. When looking for ways to streatch yourself in this area it is for anything that will enable your body to be more healthy and energised.
* Mental Resilience - this is anything to do with your mind and will often be finding ways to get out of the thoughts in your head as they are the cause of a lot of stress in peoples lives. My grandfather used to religiously do sudoku puzzles because he believed that this would ensure that he kept his mind agile and he was mentally agile right up till he died at 95.
I hope that you can see the benefits of building resilience into your whole life and that you have found value in this blog. I have a lot of resources on my website should you want to explore them - www.britttanya.com and I also offer a free chemistry call to anyone who thinks they might benefit from coaching with me. You can contact me through my website to set that up. So much love from me to you.
29/5/2020 0 Comments Changing Lives With Kindness
It was mental health awareness week a few weeks ago and the focus was on kindness and it's into this that I going to speak. There are different kinds of kindness and I am going to share a few of these with you. 1 - Kindness to self, I am starting with this one because kindness to self is where it all starts. You need to fill yourself up with kindness so that it can overflow onto others. It is possible for you to be kind to others without being kind to yourself but this will leave you feelings depleted and can in some instances leave you feeling resentful. I have a very good friend who is incredibly kind and thoughtful. She always goes out of her way for others. However because she is not kind to herself she often feels as if her kindness is not appreciated. The most wonderful way to be kind is to be able to give kindness away without any expectation of it being returned and the only way to do this and remain whole is to be kind to yourself first. The challenge is that critical thought in your head. The thoughts telling you that you’re not good enough, that you haven't achieved enough, that you just aren't enough. The judgment that constant berating, picking and bullying of yourself that you can’t get away from. I know I've got one of those in my head too but I have learnt to live with it and to realise that it is not the truth. It is just a programming of my subconscious mind from my parents, society and my educators. You can't stop these thoughts especially initially but what you can do is refocus them. When you catch yourself thinking that you aren't good enough, that your body isn't the way you want it, that you haven't achieved enough, or that there's something you're not doing that you think you should be doing - instead of getting cross with yourself for thinking the thoughts which is compounding the problem, you can try and refocus and look at the things that you like about yourself. Decide to look for what you're proud of, what you're happy about and what you like about yourself. The way our thoughts work the more you choose to focus on the positives in your life in time you will find you will naturally start to do this without having to remember to do so. The more you are kind to yourself the more you come from a beautiful space, a kind space and the more kindness and love you have to give others. 2 - The next focus I'd like to look at is kindness to those that we care about. Those that we love, our friends and our family. Quite often in our relationships with others we can look at what we want to get from those relationships. Such as wanting to be accepted, to belong, to be admired, esteemed, to be made happy, or joyful, help us have fun, to love us, or to care about us. It takes a different mindset to start asking what can we give to them. So when we focus on being kind maybe we can focus on how we can be kind to those that we love and that we care about and the nearest and dearest to us. It might just be a message or a phone call you don’t even have to say very much. You might just say i’m thinking of you, you're in my thoughts or share a memory and just say this popped into my head didn't we have a lovely time together. If you want to really show someone you care the greatest gift you can give somebody is understanding. When you’re coming from a space of what you can get from somebody else you are focused on yourself and your own internal dialogue and needs. When you start shifting that and looking at what you can give someone else you start to connect with people and start to really deeply listen to them and enter into a dialogue with them from curiosity. Where the curiosity is to understand the person that you are with and interacting with and that is a huge gift. It costs nothing but your focus and your time. Very few of us have ever been truly seen and deeply understood and it's an incredibly beautiful gift to be able to give somebody. 3 - The next focus that I want to look at is focusing on others. Focusing kindness on people that you don't know. When I lived in Botswana I decided to do this little experiment - for a week while I was out driving I decided to let everyone that I could in, in front of me. At every T-junction, cross roads or if I was on a dual carriage way and someone wanted to pull in I would let them in. I did this with no with no resentment, just an open hearted feeling of being kind to those people around me. What happened was quite unexpected because in Botswana (and I don't mean this in a critical way) people don't generally tend to be that courteous when you're driving. It can be every man for himself quite often, but what I noticed over the week of me letting people in was that more people seemed to let me in. The more kind I was the more kindness I saw in others. There is no way that the people I’d let in knew and remembered me to be able to let me in when they saw me again. It was more than that that, it was bigger than that. In my excitement over my discovery I shared what had happened with a friend. She then went out and did exactly the same and excitedly came back to me and shared that she had experienced the same thing. There are so many ways to be kind you don’t just have to let people in when you are driving. I sometimes buy an extra coffee, tea or hot chocolate if I am out and ask the teller to give it away to the next person who asks for one. The more you look for ways to be kind the more you will find. Something else that I want to share with you as we explore kindness (and I am certainly not perfect and I don't always remember to think this way) is to try to approach people with the belief that everybody is coming from a good place. That everyone is doing the best that they possibly can in the situation that they're in, with the knowledge and the experiences that they have. When I am able to come from this space I find that I am able to be so much more kind to people. Even if they're angry, upset, hurt or cross. If I choose (and it's a choice it's not something that you necessarily are born with) to see people as all doing the best that they can then when they show up as angry or upset I am able to see past this and to see that the real truth of what the person is going through. Who we all are is just the conditioning and the behaviours that we've learned to deal with things that cause us pain. If we are able to look at people and see beyond these constructs these programs and beliefs (beliefs and constructs that we have all created in our lives) and choose to see the truth of people. Then our ability to be kind to people whoever they are in whatever circumstances they are in is so much greater. I am a Consciousness Coach and I help people navigate the shift from automated survival to self awareness both as individuals and as businesses. If you would like to explore working with me send me an email and we can arrange a free chemistry call. I also have lots of other resources on my website www.britttanya.com So much love from me to you xx |
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