Tag: mental health

Personal

Having a Life Coach

by hannah maisieLeave a Comment on Having a Life Coach

I like to think I’m a pretty open minded person who is up for trying new things; so when my friend Zoe told me her colleague was training to be a life coach and needed people to work on and if I’d be interested, I didn’t really bat an eyelid about saying yes.

I have gone through therapy a few times and thought it would be similar but they are respectively different. Coaching is more about having a goal and finding techniques to stay motivated and work on those achieving those goals. This I think works better for me because instead of just exploring a situation/emotion and talking about it; with coaching you also look to see how you can break down that behaviour and move away from it.

My sessions are done through Skype and from the beginning I have felt so comfortable and able to be as open as possible. When the course started, we discussed exactly what my goal/s are and every week we talk about new techniques to help get me there. It’s great because we recap on the previous 7 days to see what worked and what still needs a bit of improvement.

I love how we have a main goal but little goals come up along the way and they are always something that is very achievable so I feel good when I’ve succeeded. I honestly look forward to the sessions every week and we do them on a monday so I have a focus for the next few days.

Of course I am only one person and my experiences could be completely different from someone else’s but I’d strongly recommend giving it a go. I have learnt so much about myself and can’t wait to see what the rest of my journey is going to teach me.

-Hannah X

Personal

Staying Positive

by hannah maisie5 Comments on Staying Positive

I promise I had thought about the perfect opening line to this post for at least half an hour as I didn’t want to start on such a negative so here goes…1 always try to keep optimistic and upbeat but recently, there has been a lot of stress in various aspects of my life and I’m finding it difficult to evoke any form of positive emotion and that in itself is so tiring.

I realise that the moods that I get myself into and the way I behave has an impact of the people around me and this is something I have been trying to change. I have such supportive people around me but I often worry that when I moan to them, it brings them down too; especially when it is as regular as I do. My poor boyfriend has the patience of a saint I swear. It’s so common for people to feel down and I know that the best thing to do is to pick yourself back up and carry on but sometimes that is hard to do.

Usually what I like to do when I’m feeling deflated is stick to things that make me happy the most; like blogging. Blogging is something that can easily take a back seat due to lack of time and motivation and it shouldn’t. I love blogging as it allows me to be fully creative and really takes my focus away from anything else that is going on so even if it is a post that sits in my drafts and never sees the light of day, it is good to write something down and escape.

Photography has alway been my number one love but yet again I have really let this slip and honestly, apart from taking a few blog photos, I can’t tell you the last time I picked up my camera. Last weekend, me and Jack went out for a walk in a local country park and I told me camera with me. It was so lovely to take some time out and get shooting again, especially all the beautiful nature. I definitely need to do it more, it’s something I have such a strong love for. Here are a few pictures I took!

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Work has been so stressful and I often find myself getting easily deflated if I’m having a bad day but I’ve started making sure that I take my full hour break (I was the worst at this and often used my ‘break’ to squeeze in extra work) and if I can feel myself getting worked up, I just remove myself for a few minutes to make a cup of tea to defuse my mood.

I’m just counting down the days until I am on holiday (8 by the time this goes up) so I can spend a week with some of my favourite people without a care in the world. Hopefully that gets me feeling myself again.

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– Hannah X

Personal

Finding The Right Balance

by hannah maisieLeave a Comment on Finding The Right Balance

I’ve been wanting to write a post like this for such a long time but never really knew the right way to word it, or whether I should even bother; but I feel like writing it down in a blog post will be a way to document how I feel now and compare it to how I feel maybe a month or 2 down the line.

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For as long as I can remember, I have had this over powering desire to impress; I guess we all do to a certain extent. Obviously the urge to impress can be a great thing as it pushes us to be the best versions of ourselves but the thought of someone thinking badly of me or me not being ‘good enough’ literally keeps me up at night. Everything I do, I always think about the worst possible consequence and often find myself taking on too much to please other people instead of doing things that make me happy; like blogging.

This is something that, especially over the last month or so, I have been trying to change; I need to find the right balance of doing well and impressing but also focusing on myself and what makes me happy. Life is so short and it’s important to put yourself first sometimes, it doesn’t make you rude or selfish; it’s all about prioritising.

The best time for me to focus on myself, I find, is the evenings because I can literally shut myself off from everyone and do what I want. My favourite thing to do is run myself a nice Lush bath with a few candles; it helps me relax so much and clear my mind after a busy or stressful day (sometimes I sit in the bath for so long I start to doze off) Usually once I’ve dragged myself out of the bath, I make myself a hot chocolate and sit in bed and binge watch Gossip Girl for the 100th time. This is usually the time of night when I turn my work phone off and completely unwind.

During the weekends, I am trying to make more of an conscious effort to ‘book an appointment with myself’. This includes sitting down to write blogs posts and go out with my camera, both of which make me so incredibly happy.

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Sometimes it’s easy to fall back in to old ways but I am determined to finally start putting myself first and finding the right balance between that and helping others.

-Hannah X