A More Exciting Life

I love reading self help books. I have many and I read them over and over again. I hardly ever buy novels although I'm reading them constantly, I get them from the library and I'm very happy to return them there after I've read them. But self development books - every now and then I buy a new one, usually on Amazon, and look forward to them being delivered more than I look forward to Christmas. Ho ho ho! I also have a habit of dipping into my books whenever I feel I need specific words of wisdom or encouragement so I have this stack of books on my bedside table that just keeps growing because after a while I remember I liked some bit in another book and how good would it be to read that again and so I look it up in yet another book that I place on top of the pile... One of my favourite books at the moment is Hero by Rhonda Byrne (linked to Amazon UK). Rhonda Byrne is also the author of such books as The Secret , The Power and  The Magic . I love The Secret, I must h...

My list of things to do by September is coming along nicely (read the story behind that here) . Soon after starting it I remembered something about setting goals: they need to be SMART. That's Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound. (Can you tell I'm a trained life coach? Not a practising one though, except on myself). 'A walk on the south coast of England' looked very nice on my list but admittedly also a bit vague. I mean the south coast of England is quite a long stretch of land and what I had in mind was a day trip to coastal Sussex or thereabouts. Cornwall, yes, want to go there too but too far to get there and back in a day. So I did some research, found the part of the coast I particularly want to see and wrote down 'A walk is coastal Sussex in late July/early August (pick a date according to weather reports)'. Looks much better, doesn't it? It's a much more detailed and clearer instruction to myself. How likely am I to ba...

Today I caught myself thinking that.  What?!?! Am I not working on that? Yes but apparently not hard enough. It's been a tiring week and this time my bored inner self was clearly thinking about something quite big, massive even, not just some little every day things that I've been trying to make myself believe would make much of a difference. Well they can do but this time I was thinking about a big exciting change in my life. How many times have you caught yourself thinking that? 'I wish something exciting happened in my life!'. I've lost count how many. But this time I was a bit cleverer and asked myself back: well what could this something exciting be? Here's what I answered myself: I was offered a new, exciting job. Like, truly exciting, dream job sort of affair and a better salary would be a nice bonus if not quite necessary. Somehow I got to live in a big posh house. By myself or with a partner. I met a wonderful man and we fell madly in love, li...

It’s been a while – again – but I could say as an excuse that I’ve recently been busy leading an exciting life. Hooray!  I went on a hiking holiday in early June, hiking in several national parks in the US Southwest, places such as Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands National Park, Arches National Park, Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon. It was hot, it was beautiful, it was thrilling and most of all it was an amazing experience that most certainly was exciting. And how I pondered about booking it at the time, thinking it was going to be too expensive (read about that here) . Well yes it was expensive but it was worth every penny I paid for it and I don’t think about the money at all anymore. It was an experience that will stay with me for the rest of my life.    Bryce Canyon in Utah, US. Doesn't it look amazing? I loved the colours.  Soon after coming back home I went to watch some grand slam tennis at Wimbledon. Now that was really coo...