You’ve spoken before about the different forms of stress and the role each one plays in our lives. Can you elaborate further?

Stress has two forms – eustress and distress. Eustress tends to be wellness-promoting and occurs when you’re doing something that you love – something that is inspiring yet challenging, and something that supports your values. Eustress essentially means “true stress” and is often a confirmation that you’re on track with what is most deeply meaningful and inspiring to you.

Distress, on the other hand, can be illness-promoting and often occurs when you are living a one-sided life. Distress essentially means “divided stress” in that you might be looking for a positive without a negative, pleasure without pain or ease without difficulty. You might also be injecting other people’s values into your life and doing what you feel you “should” do instead of what is deeply meaningful to you. In that...

Talk about these 2 things with your Spouse. 

Sometimes for couples in business, there is a perception of lack of success. Despite achievement in other areas, couples experience fear, uncertainty, doubt. Perhaps it's because the business isn’t getting the desired financial results. Maybe its clients who giving negative feedback. Or, perhaps couples cant get away for some much needed down time.

For many spouses in business, this lack of confidence often begins to show up in negative ways in our relationship with our spouse. We may start to shut down and not communicate how we are feeling. Perhaps we keep talking about our fears when our spouse just wants a break from business talk. Or, we become angry or even critical of each other.   

Sadly, we treat our most important person in the world to us in ways that we are not proud of.

I know exactly what that’s like, because I’ve done it.

Case in point,  January 2016,  when we had a staffing...

Today, June 7th 2020 is Cancer Survivor’s Day. Strangely it is also a year to the day that I found the lump in my left breast whilst working abroad and so the journey began. No one wants to be told they have the big “C.” It’s scary. July 9th 2020 I heard those words. For me, my diagnosis came in the form of breast cancer, in the middle of bringing up my children and enjoying life: it was an unwelcome guest whose appearance disrupted everything.

Luckily, I found it early, went through rounds of treatment and am fortunate to have a very positive outlook. But the experience has changed me in ways I could never have imagined and I have learned a lot on my journey. Lessons I want to share with you.

I want to offer hope. Hope which will come in the form of re-establishing my 15 year old coaching business to focus totally on resilience coaching

We all have a different relationship with cancer, some of us have lost people close to us and some of us have had no...

We are living in tumultuous times. Many of us are sitting reading this not quite sure what is around the corner particularly with our work. Our jobs pay the bills, occupy many of our waking hours and can even give our lives meaning. At the moment we are grappling with home working which can weirdly be more exhausting than going out to work. Our days feel slightly 'ground hog' stretching out in front of us with no clear boundaries to enable us to switch off. And don't get me started on the anxiety and brain numbness countless zoom meetings can have on our sanity! 

Ambiguity about the future and new working conditions to grapple with can be anxiety-provoking. Mindfulness can help. There are simple ways to reduce the impact all this stress can have on your mind and body.

 Mindfulness — paying attention to the present moment in an accepting, non-judgmental way. Put simply it is a way to train your brain. Most of the time the part of the brain that is in charge of...

For many of us, it’s easy to find gratitude for the good things in our life: we’re happy for the blessed, but not so much for the messes. Of course, this is a very human thing – after all, our brain is designed to go after the dopamine and what we think will bring us pleasure.

But, what about the other stuff? What about the struggles, the challenges, and even the sadness and anger-filled moments? Just because our brain says “Give me more of what makes me feel good!”, does that mean there isn’t wisdom in finding gratitude in what we perceive to challenge us?

It is such an interesting idea to consider, especially since cultural messaging reinforces what our biology is designed to do- move towards the good and away from the bad.  The catch, however, is that this urge in the brain and body comes from the most primitive part of us, not the most advanced part of our evolution – as humans we have the ability to transcend our sensory experience...

In a world where we can be anything, the best thing to be is ourselves. It seems simple; after all, being us is suppose to come naturally. But this isn’t typically the case. In fact, obtaining authenticity isn’t always easy – there are many things that get in our way.

As play therapists, we must be aware of this as authenticity is extraordinarily important – it helps your sense of self and acts as the foundation of the relationship between therapist and child. And the reason for this is because, when it comes to inauthenticity, kids are onto it.

They know when you’re pretending, when you’re telling them what they want to hear, and when you’re being less than trustworthy. Children can feel incongruence. They sense it.  Their “incongruence” radars go off telling them that something doesn’t quite add up and sometimes the thing that doesn’t quite add up is the therapist.

Yet, despite knowing that it’s...

“When I sink into the tornado and allow myself to just spin and swirl, somehow I find the eye and soon the sun comes out.”

Have you ever felt like life was spinning so fast that you were caught up in a tornado? I have had many periods in my life where I felt caught up in a giant whirlwind, sometimes losing a sense of where I was going and feeling that only destruction was part of my path. I have felt so lost, confused and overwhelmed that I tried to grab onto something to help me feel the ground under my feet, only to find that there was nothing there, except myself. For someone who finds herself battling the illusion that having control is the best way to go, these periods have been very disorienting. Who am I? Where am I going? What am I destroying? What am I creating? What is meaningful? What can I depend on? These are the types of questions that tend to emerge in my psyche during these chaotic times.

I forget to let go. I forget that a tornado has two sides. ...

I can’t remember who first introduced me to the phrase ‘be careful what you wish for’ (except, eerily, as I type this sentence I’ve just remembered – but you won’t know him so let’s leave it there).  Anyway, it popped into my head this week when, after a prolonged bout of whingeing to no one in particular about how I’d had enough travelling and why does nobody ever give me any design and development work so I can stay in my office, three different clients did just that.

You’d think I’d be happy about this, but I confess to responding to these engagements with a feeling of deep foreboding.  You see, having all this open-ended design work to do presents me with a problem: I have to organise my own time. 

Ironically, one of the reasons I left [insert name of global consulting firm here] was the agonies we would all go through every Friday afternoon trying to fill in timesheets which had no Project Code for...