How to see the glass as half full – Tools for becoming more positive

I personally battled a 2 year long bout of depression that did more than just drain me mentally. It affected my relationships, lost me many a job and even had physical ramifications that are only now finally clearing up (some 8 years later). My confidence was non existent and I had no friends. I had dug myself into a hole. I could find a negative to any positive people wanted to throw at me. I could find something wrong with everything. I actually started finding a wicked sense of pride and achievement in being negative. I don’t know if my depression was a chemical imbalance, or whether my circumstances at the time became too much for me and I just let go and let the darkness take me over. If you have never experienced true depression, the best way I can describe it is that you wake up in the morning and start crying right away because you are literally unable to face the day. Every task, conversation, meal, shopping trip, shower is too much effort and you simply can’t get out of bed. A total sense of helplessness and an overwhelming negative feeling about every single aspect of your life.

I’m in a different space all together now, it is blissful, sometimes still emotional and I do have bouts of rage that I am gradually whittling down. I feel so alive though and I have an overwhelming desire to help others now instead of wallowing in self pity. I hope what I share here may help you if you are feeling down, struggling financially, having relationship problems, or indeed suffering depression or anxiety. I’ve built up a series of steps and cues for myself which I feel I should share, in case they can even help just one of my readers.

I can’t go on any further without referring to some of the amazing people who I’ve learnt from in my journey so far. I went from living in a caravan park, and living off food vouchers in a destructive relationship, to being happily married, with a son, living in paradise, financially stable and living in a energetic, motivated space. My first wake up call came from one of Tony Robbins’ CD sets. I remember buying them out of desperation. I figured my next stop was a shrink and seeing as I couldn’t afford one, I went to the local book shop and ordered a 6 CD pack of his motivational talks.

Constant and Never Ending Improvement

The main thing I took away from what he teaches is that you must always ask yourself an empowering question to find some direction. For me, it is always “What can I do right now, this INSTANT to improve my situation? “ I used this in a very literal sense. Sometimes it meant logging on and looking for a job. Other times it might be to swallow my pride, and apologise to someone, or even go through and sell some items on ebay so I could pay a bill. Creating a habit of stopping myself in the peak moment of rage or anxiety and asking that question was one of the most powerful tools I used to change my state from helplessness to productive. Tony also talks a lot about the C.A.N.I principle – Constant And Never Ending Improvement. I’ve successfully applied this to all areas of my life and I feel just reminding myself of it keeps me very motivated. I try to think of it as 1% a day = 100% in 100 days! You can apply it to everything – for me it is very important with my training and developing my nutritional habits as I want to attain as much information as possible and use what I know to help others. I am much more relaxed about both areas now because I don’t see a particular “end point”. I’m ok with never being perfect. I still have goals but there is always an open end them. I enjoy every day seeking out a way to improve my fitness, strength, endurance, cooking skills and relationships. I don’t set out to improve on every aspect of my life every day, but I do make a mental note of something I want to achieve, no matter how small. I love the driving force thinking like this provides me, it is really empowering and gives me so much energy. Disappointment has been banished from my life, I just keep looking forward to what I can work on next. It isn’t tiring at all, you live in a sense of achievement and motivation all the time!

“Chunking it down” was a great way to cope with anxiety attacks. I’d often have an overwhelming sense of urgency about me when trying to get through normal daily tasks at home or work. I would often stress myself out so much over it, I’d throw my hands up in the air, claim “it can’t be done, there is no way I can finish this in time” then promptly burst into tears or tear shreds off the nearest person who dared to try and calm me down. If you take a moment to truly prioritise what is in front of you, you can often get a little list going and break things down into smaller tasks and then be strong and push yourself to only focus on one at a time. Looking back I’m actually embarrassed about my behavior, but to me at the time, in the moment, it felt so rational!

Perspective and Gratitude

A strong influence for me over the last decade has been someone I have never had the chance to thank in person, her name is Belita, the child I sponsor in Africa. Receiving her letters would give me a huge reality check. To hear her describe how excited she was to sit in her new classroom at school now, (because my money had helped them build one) was sobering. She told me it was much better than being under the tree because at least when it rained now they would be able to keep on with the class. After reading her letter, not being able to afford to go the movies, or having to get up and work at 4:30am, or my boyfriend leaving his clothes on the floor seemed so very trivial. No matter how poor my financial situation became, I prioritised my monthly payment to her over everything else. Someone so far away has affected my life so much and one day I hope I can meet her to tell her that in person. Writing back to her, telling her about what is going on my life made me realise I was somewhat materialistic and had no reason to be so negative. She has always been so happy about everything in her life, and so thankful for what she does have, it made me sick to the stomach as I became more aware of my attitude and general outlook. I needed to find ways to appreciate all the greatness in my life. To have a sense of gratitude for all the wonderful people and experiences that came my way.

The Law of Attraction

A good friend of mine who I met through my husbands design work, is Helen Hall. She is an amazing Health Coach who taught me a lot about real health and real nutrition, which was a far cry from what they taught me in my Personal Training course! Having meals with her and her partner at the time, Stephanie Burns, led to many enlightening conversations about how we could eat and live better. They introduced us to Udo’s oil and eating LSA (a ground up meal of linseeds, sunflower seeds and almonds), got us drinking more water and snapped us out of our slack habit of eating whatever we could get on the way to training. We learnt to respect our bodies with better fuel.

I’ve learnt that the right people tend to come into your life at the right time. Helen taught me a lot about health, however the main reason I wanted to mention her is because she introduced me to a movie called “The Secret”. If you haven’t seen it, it is about the Law of Attraction. Steve Pavlina has a good article on this and there is a lot of writing about it out there so I won’t rehash what has been done before. A brief explanation is:

Your can attract into your life what you think about. If you think about negative things, that is what the universe delivers. If you think about money, or a job, it delivers that too. For example, if you are struggling financially, and you tend to think about bills and debts, that is what you will get more of. If you constantly think about how fat you are, you are ordering more fat from the universe! If you change your tune and think about money and higher income, or a healthy body, you will have opportunities come your way, and even cheques in the mail that you didn’t expect.

1. Know exactly what you want.
2. Ask the universe for it.
3. Feel, behave and know as if the object of your desire is already yours (visualise)
4. Be open to receive it and let go of (the attachment to) the outcome.

For all of the above to work, it is imperative that you think about what you are grateful for all the time. I have started a gratitude journal and try to write 5 things in it every night. I’d recommend everyone to start one whether you believe in the law of attraction or not. I write things like:

Thankyou for my health
Thankyou for my wonderful relationships with my family,
I’m grateful for the money that is helping us pay our home off
I’m grateful for how much sleep I have been getting

Doing this every day helps you to appreciate everything good in your life and makes it easier to disregard the negatives. The more thought you give to all the great things, the more you start to pay attention to opportunities and coincidences that can lead you to what you want. You know when you want to buy a certain model of car, then for a few weeks, you start seeing that model everywhere you go? Same principle – it sets you up to notice and pay attention to ways to bring the things you want into your life.

I do personally believe in the law of attraction (LOA). It has helped me with finding a career path I am passionate about, and being able to work from home. It’s helped my husband get remote work through his employer too. It has helped us start up our own businesses. We’ve gone from broke to a much better financial situation. We aren’t renting anymore. There were sums of money I asked the universe for and we got them within 12 months. I believe the way I think because I put the LOA into action helped me with getting pregnant and having a healthy baby. I believe it helped me get out of my depression and find plenty of motivation every day, with enough left over to help other people. If nothing else, it is a great tool for your emotional management as it can assist you to stay positive and maintain a sense of direction in your life.

Above all, respect and nourish your body. It is the vehicle for experiencing life and you can live on an amazing permanent high by fuelling yourself with good nutrition! Feeling physically well through exercise and food will go a long way to improving your mental experience.

I hope you can apply these tools for motivation, success and a positivity to your life. Be happy with constant and never ending improvement, celebrate all your achievements and keep looking for new ways to improve your life, 1% at a time.

If there are any areas of my posts that you would like me to expand upon, please let me know, I’m happy to oblige!

Change Happens

I used to be one of those people who shook their head saying “people never change”. I have started this blog because I (gladly) discovered I was wrong. My purpose for writing will be to assist you, my readers with your individual challenges, goals and dreams.

I’m not going to offer purely exercise or nutrition advice here. While it is my background, it will form only part of the bigger picture. My primary theme and goal on this blog is to show you how you should, why you can and WHAT you can change.

Change can mean a new start, motivation, health, happiness, success, direction or something as basic as losing weight or improving relationships. The aim is self improvement, breaking free from old habits, attitudes and beliefs. If I can help one person beat depression, save one person from the miserable effects of obesity, or perhaps prevent a suicide, it will be worth it. Most of the topics will be in the realm of health, fitness, self improvement/development and motivation, however from time to time I will write about other areas of interest.

The last 10 years of my life have been consumed by a burning desire to help others -clients, family and friends, and ultimately a soulful journey within myself as well. I’ve worked with approximately 300 individuals primarily for weight loss, recovery from injury and motivation. Others needed to improve general fitness for entry testing into police or military, or to improve performance in a sport. Many at the end of the day didn’t need a trainer, they already knew how to exercise and eat, they just simply needed to redefine their priorities and get some better organisation and management strategies for their work/life/exercise/family balance.

I’ve gathered information from a vast array of people, topics, talks, books, blogs and experiences – the common theme is that a change was needed somewhere. This might be stating the obvious, however many of these people I have worked with easily became so fixated on their goal/result that they lost sight of what they had to do and change about their behavior or thinking on a daily basis to achieve it. I hate to be the one to break it to you, you can want it more than anything or anyone else, and it still won’t fall on your lap. There is real, sometimes hard, often challenging work required to get there. It often means you have to really change your priorities and get them in the right order, and this can be confronting for many people as their ego gets in the way of making the change.

The one thing I want anyone who reads this to take away, is that there is a method, tool, technique or exercise for everyone who wants to or needs to change. There is no one size fits all option but it isn’t that hard to find the one that fits either. I want to teach you how to initiate real, tangible, mind blowing change that will excite you and help give you direction and success in many or all areas of your life. I don’t care what background you came from, what country you live in, how much money you have or what illness or injury slows you down, there is a solution for you and I am dedicating this blog to educating as many people as I can.

My motivation to start this blog came about when recently I was reading one of the articles on stevepavlina.com. He gives you an exercise to help you discover your true purpose in life – this is what I came up with:

” To be a catalyst for change in the life of as many people as possible.”

That statement will be the basis for my blog. Without realising it, is has been a mission of mine for quite some time and I had been somewhat subconsciously integrating it into my coaching methods with clients.

Spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle says “Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.”

It is something that I personally took my whole life up until recently to realise. Your focus, no matter what you want to achieve, needs to be on the present moment. It is the only thing you can utilise! You must change, stop, start, begin, finish, win or lose NOW.

This doesn’t mean to say you shouldn’t have a goal, just that you need to spend a small amount of time to decide what it is, then put all your energy into the “doing”. If you procrastinate for days on end about cleaning out your car, or put that workout off “till tomorrow”, or say you will stop smoking “after christmas” you are setting yourself up for failure. You are creating habits and attitudes to life that require a lot more effort to reverse, than if you could just nip them in the bud early. If you fail to educate others those closest how to support you, and get away from those people who drain you, you are again setting yourself up for failure.

If you have made it this far, there is something that I want you to do. I want you to throw away the life path you think you are supposed to have, or the one your parents set you up for, or the one your friends think you should follow. Forget about the typical pattern of school, university, job, retirement. It doesn’t even touch the sides of what you can and should experience in life. So much of what you are conditioned to think is “normal” or the way things are, has come about from centuries of corruption, greed, control and blind acceptance through lack of knowledge and education. How different things would be if individualism, creativeness, freedom, resource based societies and sharing of information and technology was commonplace rather than the institutions we are currently governed by!

I will be writing fairly constantly over the coming weeks to get this off the ground, and am open to requests on topics mentioned in this post that you would like more detailed advice on. Thankyou for taking the time to read my introductory post, I look forward to interacting with you, teaching you and learning from you.