Switch off the news. It will still be there when you come back to it.

Have a listen to our Find Your Balance Podcast to get some tips on managing stress and letting go of the things you can’t control.

Have a sort out of your ‘books to be read’ pile. Take a moment to read the covers and put them in order of which you’d like to read first. If you can, find a quiet corner and make it your own!

Consider a different genre than the type you’d usually read. If you want to read a trashy novel, go for it. There’s no pressure, just read what feels natural and easy and will get you back into the swing of reading again.

Here are a few of our personally recommended books guaranteed to enrich your mind, calm your brain and nourish your soul.

The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Anchor
Most people want to be successful in life. And of course, everyone wants to be happy, don’t they? When it comes to the pursuit of success and happiness though, most people assume the same formula: if you work hard, you become successful, and once you become successful, then you’ll be happy. The only problem is that a decade of cutting-edge research in the field of positive psychology has proven that this formula is completely backwards. Success does not beget happiness.
Click here to order

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
How amazing does this latest book by Matt Haig sound?! (It’s not quite out at the time of writing this blog so we’ve added it to our wishlist).
Between life and death there is a library. When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change. Click here to order

The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse by Charlie Mackesy
Enter the world of Charlie’s four unlikely friends, discover their story and their most important life lessons. The conversations of the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse have been shared thousands of times online, recreated in school art classes, hung on hospital walls and turned into tattoos. In Charlie’s first book, you will find his most-loved illustrations and some new ones too. Click here to order

Who Am I by Liz Bell
5-star reviews on Amazon with testimonials from the likes of Jeremy Vine, Claire Balding and Cathy Newman, this little book may be small but it packs a mighty punch. This is the perfect book for anyone who needs guidance to:

• Grow in the face of adversity
• Find yourself in your marriage
• Make changes in your community
• Figure out who you really are
• Figure out why you are here
• Be happy with the person you really are

Click here to order

Sane New World by Ruby Wax
The mental health and mindfulness bestseller from author Ruby Wax, who shows us with her usual humour why and how our minds can send us mad and how we can rewire our thinking to calm ourselves in a frenetic world. Click here to order

The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly by Sun-mi Hwang
This is the story of a hen named Sprout. No longer content to just lay eggs only to have them taken from her and sold at market, she glimpses her future every morning through the open barn doors, where the other animals roam free, and she comes up with a plan to escape into the wild.
Click here to order

Who Moved My Cheese: An Amazing way to deal with change in your work and in your life by Dr Spencer Johnson
It is the enlightening story of four characters who live in a maze and look for cheese to nourish them and make them happy. Cheese is a metaphor for what we want to have in life, for example, a good job, a loving relationship, money or possessions, health or spiritual peace of mind. The maze is where you look for what you want, perhaps the organisation you work in, or the family or community you live in. The problem is that the cheese keeps moving. In the story, the characters are faced with an unexpected change in their search for the cheese. One of them eventually deals with change successfully and writes what he has learned on the maze walls for you to discover. You’ll learn how to anticipate, adapt to and enjoy change and be ready to change quickly whenever you need to. Click here to order

The post Self-improvement during self-isolation appeared first on Equa Coaching.

You can listen to our Find Your Balance podcast here or read the transcript below — but just to warn you, Jo frequently does impressions which you will be missing out on if you only read it!

Liz: Hello and welcome to the EqUa Approach Find Your Balance podcast. This is podcast one and I am Liz.

Jo: And I’m Jo.

Liz: We’re both from EqUa Coaching. We have taken all of our techniques and all the things we’ve learned over the years, be it hypnotherapy, NLP, timeline therapy, mindfulness, we’ve taken them all together and created our own approach, which we would like to explain now. The first podcast is going to be just about us explaining our approach and then as the podcast moves forward, we’ll actually be giving you different techniques, different ideas, different scenarios to deal with to find balance in your life.

Jo: The keyword really here is balance and the EqUa Approach, the EqUa stands for equanimity, and the definition of equanimity is a steadiness of mind under stress. The Dalai Lama has a quote…

Liz: Sorry, our good friend the Dalai Lama!

Jo: Okay, yes, this is high interaction with the Dalai Lama. With equanimity, you can deal with situations with calm and reason while keeping your inner happiness, and I think that’s something we all like to strive for. Certainly, when we’re working with clients, whether it’s one to ones or workshops, that’s something that we try to install and use as part of our approach. So, the EqUa approach is a way to help you get yourself into balance – balance of mind, balance of body, balance of life.

Liz: Absolutely, and these are the things that we will hopefully be teaching you over the next few months as we move forward.

Jo: Yeah, because many of us live our lives in what I like to call — a bit tilted. Sometimes you might look and when you become aware of how you’re living your life at any point in time and say well I’m working too much or I’m partying too much or I’m not spending enough time with family, or I’m not looking after myself well enough. So, we’re unbalanced, we’re tilted in one area of our lives, maybe too much or too little and that then affects everything else within our lives. So, it’s about being centred, it’s about being aware and being able to give equal measures to all the areas of our life. When we do that, we get a lot more back and we feel much more centred.

Liz: Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of the times these things are happening to all of us all of the time. I know Jo and I have two different methods in how we do this, Jo has the EqUa chart which she will be posting in a video on our website which helps you find where your balance is out of kilter. I like to use my -, well I just use a level really, if I raise my hand high, so high, medium, and low and generally, we want to live our lives in the medium section which is where we’re okay.

If you are having a high experience, which is something that’s normally great but there are obviously bad versions of high, or we have a low experience where we’re at a lower ebb. Those things always happen to us, we are in and out of those things all the time, but the most important thing is coming back to the middle zone where you’re feeling in balance so you can cope with most things that go on with your life. Even if they’re stressful, you’re able to cope with them easily and without causing your body or mental state a strain.

Jo: Yeah. It’s very much about-, you can’t live your life flatlining, you can’t flatline, you have to have highs, you have to have lows, it’s how you deal with them.

Liz: It would be a bit boring if you did.

Jo: Yeah, and you’d be dead as well if you flatline.

Liz: That’s quite extreme, isn’t it?!

Jo: It’s about acknowledging that and understanding that that is part of life but when you are in one of those zones that you have the control and the awareness to be able to bring yourself back to that sort of middle ground, that centred ground, that okay ground where you are back in control again and you’re feeling more balanced. When you’re out of kilter and you’re out of balance and you’re tilted, sometimes when you come down from a high experience you come right down and equally when you’re trying to lift yourself out of a very low experience, it’s very, very difficult to do. So, with certain techniques and awareness raised, you can bring yourself back to centre, put yourself back in balance much, much quicker, and that’s what it’s about. It’s not trying to get rid of the highs and the lows, it’s being able to acknowledge them and bring yourself back to centre much quicker than you would have.

If any of you have come to some of our Stress Workshops that we’ve held in the past, balance is quite key with whether you react to something or whether you respond to something. When you react to something you’re generally reacting because you’re out of balance, because you’re tilted. When you respond to something it’s much more measured, it’s much more thought-out and that tends to mean that you are more centred and more balanced. So, we’re looking for people to respond more than they react because reacting is a much more emotional answer to things, whereas responding is a much more thought-out, calm and measured.

Liz: Ooh we said the same thing at the same time!

Jo: So, it’s January, January is traditionally quite a difficult month for many people.

Liz: It’s cold, it’s miserable and you have normally overindulged over Christmas a little bit and you’ve had the highs of Christmas and it feels grotty, you’re waiting to get paid, so it’s a difficult month, it can be a difficult month for many people.

Jo: Yeah. I have my birthday in January, and I know how difficult it is, “Hi, would you like to come out and celebrate my birthday?” No, it’s too cold. No, I’ve got no money. No, I’m doing dry January. No, I’m trying to lose weight. No, basically.

Liz: So, Jo celebrates every year alone.

Jo: But it’s also one of those things where many of us have resolutions that by now could well be broken or we’re struggling with.

Liz: Yeah, we’re not big on resolutions at Equacoaching, we prefer new year’s suggestions, new year’s experiences, it’s actually much nicer to come up with some ideas of things you might like to do this year, things you might like to try out for the first time. Give a go, rather than a resolution that’s always something you’re trying to resolve or trying to solve something with this one thing, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Jo: Yeah, that’s another example of also putting yourself out of balance, if you fail a new year’s resolution or you don’t achieve what you wanted to, it can sometimes tilt you too far one way. After the excesses of Christmas and new year where quite often we’ve overindulged whether that be in eating, drinking, sleeping, partying, not spending enough time with certain people, spending too much time with certain people, whatever it might be, we can often feel it’s quite a key time where we feel tilted and very out of balance.

Liz: Often we then want something very extreme which we think is going to tilt us back the other way but generally most of the things that help tilt us back to balance are quite gentle and they bring us to the middle. What we do is we go for the high rather than finding that middle balanced ground, so I want to start training every day and lose all the weight and I want to be…

Jo: I’m going to start running, I’ve never run in my life but I’m going to run!

Liz: You’re going to run every day!

Jo: Yeah!

Liz: I’m not going to run like maybe come up with a plan where I can join a running club, or I can do it gently and take my time. I’m going to run every day straight away because I want to be Usain Bolt, by Wednesday.

Jo: Also, that’s another example of a reaction rather than a response, I’ve overindulged so I’m going to react to this by doing another extreme but the opposite end, by suddenly going out and running when I’ve never really run in my life. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s about doing it from a more responsive viewpoint and doing it much more measured because that way it lasts much longer, and the effects are much better.

Liz: Absolutely. It’s a panic to respond because we’re panicking because we’ve tilted the other way and we want to do something extreme to get us back into the scenario that we think is the perfect scenario.

Jo: Yeah. So, we use the word balance a lot as you’re probably aware of by now and we like to have used it as an acronym a sort of helpful acronym so that each letter of that word relates to something that people can use to help them find balance. To help centre themselves, to help them move forward in their lives but from a much better point, from a much better place where they feel more in control and less tilted. So, for example, the B of balance stands for belief and we are big on self-belief here at Equacoaching. For you as a person, it’s about understanding that you can do anything that you want to do. We as human beings naturally are very, very good at telling ourselves negative things, that we can’t do this, that this isn’t possible, that this will never happen as opposed to telling ourselves that anything is possible, that we can do this, why wouldn’t this happen – that becomes much more difficult for us.

So, self-belief is a really powerful tool once you start to really believe that anything is possible and that for you, you can do anything that you want to do. The world really does become your oyster and just by a few very simple techniques that you practice over and over and over again. A bit like if you were going out and start running, you’d have to gradually build up and the more you did it, the more it becomes a habit. It’s the same with your self-belief, the more that you practice certain techniques that we’ll be showing you and talking to you about, the easier it becomes to start believing in yourself more and then things around you become much easier, so B stands for belief.

Liz: Yes, about retraining your brain which we’ll go into more later on down the line in the podcast. A is for awareness, that is awareness of yourself, awareness of everything around, awareness of where you are, where you are in time, what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, how you’re thinking it. The more awareness you have the more capability you have to make changes.

Jo: Yeah, and again it goes back to as we spoke about earlier about responding and reacting, the more awareness you have of the decisions that you’re making, the thought processes, the things that are going on in your head, how you’re reacting or responding to situations or people. When you become more aware of that you can make changes much quicker which then create bigger changes throughout the rest of your life, it has that ripple effect.

Liz: Yeah, for example, I quite often ask clients to not complain for a week which is a brilliant tool for awareness.

Jo: Yeah and they are quite shocked.

Liz: You can find out you’re really whinging a lot.

Jo: Yeah, how many times you end up complaining without even noticing, it becomes almost like a default, so A stands for awareness. L stands for love, love for yourself, love for your surroundings, love for the people in your life, love for the choices that you make, love for the things that you do, love for the person that you are. If you can’t have love for yourself then you can’t really have love for anybody else really.

Liz: At the end of the day, love is important. We’re not talking about the wishy-washy, lovey-dovey, we’re just talking about self-love which is very important.

Jo: So, L stands for love.

Liz: A stands for alive, that we are.

Jo: You are alive, you’re not flatlining, you are alive. It comes on to the end that we’re going to talk about in a second but it’s about seizing the moment.

Liz: It’s about life is short really and at the end of the day, most of us want to live good quality lives. We want to live it and the whole point of the alive part of this is that a lot of us can coast through life without really living it properly.

Jo: Yeah. You want to be going to bed at the end of your day and saying, I’ve lived the best day that I can. That doesn’t mean that you’ve got to be out windsurfing or parachuting, it doesn’t mean that. It can be the simple things of just sitting down and having a nice cup of tea and really enjoying it or having a nice bath or spending time with people or whatever it might be. At the end of the day when you go to sleep, before you close your eyes you can say today was a good day because I lived it to the fullest.

Liz: Absolutely, and I think that there is a problem these days that people think living to the fullest means is high-octane living and actually we don’t need a lot in life to be happy, we don’t need a lot to feel alive. We’re looking sometimes in the wrong areas to try and find happiness and that feeling of a fulfilled life.

Jo: So, A stands for alive. N stands for now. There is no more important time than now, you can’t do anything about yesterday, you can’t really do anything about tomorrow or next week, you can’t do anything about last year. All you can do something about is right now and most people don’t really live in the ‘now’, they spend a lot of their time and energy worrying or thinking about what has happened or what might happen and you have no control over either of those things. The only control you ever have is of right now, right at this very moment and the choices that you make, the choices to whether you’re going to live the fullest day that you can live.

Liz: It goes back to what we were saying before about being alive, but now it’s very much about living in the moment. It’s what a lot of mindfulness is rooted in and it’s about enjoying everything that you’re doing even if it’s not necessarily what you consider to be the best thing at that moment. It’s about enjoying whatever it is you’re doing at that moment.

Jo: Yeah, even the washing up can be fun.

Liz: Let’s not go too far, Jo.

Jo: Well, if you really take time to wash a dish it, can give you a whole new lease on life!

Liz: Mindfulness washing up. Do you think it will catch on?!

Jo: Oh yeah. There is something there, definitely, without a shadow of a doubt, yeah.

Liz: Or maybe mindfulness golf.

Jo: No, I don’t like that.

Liz: No.

Jo: No, I’m not a golfer.

Liz: I’m sure there are all sorts of mindfulness things we can do, probably more fun than washing up I have to say.

Jo: But now is the time, right now, not yeah, I’ll do it tomorrow, not oh, I should have done it yesterday, so because I didn’t do it yesterday there’s no point. ‘Now’, you have the control and the choice to make a change right now, so N stands for now.

Liz: Leading you very quickly and seamlessly into C, which is change. Obviously, if you’re not happy, if you’re feeling that your life is out of tilt then you have to change something. Most of us are absolutely terrified of change, we don’t want to change anything, but it’s guaranteed that it’s the only thing that definitely will happen in your life, everything changes as, Take That said!

Jo: They did, and nothing changed.

Liz: But you, sorry, but you.

Jo: Yes, that’s correct, if you’re going to say it correctly but nothing changes if you don’t make a change. So, you can sit around waiting for something to happen but ultimately, unless you get up and do it, it isn’t going to happen.

Liz: The change doesn’t have to be massive, does it?

Jo: No, it doesn’t, and people are afraid of it because they always think change will involve a huge, massive thing that happens in their life.

Liz: It’s quite a common thing actually, that we make it a big thing, we make that change a big thing in our heads, so almost to self-sabotage and prevent ourselves from doing it.

Jo: Yeah, one of the earliest things I often do with a lot of my clients or get people to do in workshops is to make very, very small changes. Like if you sit in a particular seat when you watch television to shift and move into a different seat or if you drink out of a particular cup when you have your tea, use a different cup. If you travel to work on a train or a bus and you sit in a particular carriage, move, sit somewhere else. It gives you a different perspective, it’s a tiny thing but it changes and shakes your world and just gives those subtle little ripples of change which wake you up and give you awareness and so they all link on, so change is a big thing but it’s very powerful.

Liz: Yeah, and it doesn’t have to be difficult as you say, if you can make it, you’re in control of how much you change and what you change but as you said earlier, if you don’t make a change, nothing changes.

Jo: So, C stands for change and E finally stands for equanimity, which means balance, steadiness, calmness.

Liz: EqUa in itself has many different versions, we’ve got equilibrium, equanimity, equality, many, many, except I can only think of three right at the moment

Jo: All of the things that we’ve spoken about, if we are aware of them, if we love ourselves, if we believe in ourselves, if we’re prepared to make changes right now, we can improve our balance, we can bring ourselves back to balance much, much quicker than we might be doing at the moment. That’s what it’s about, it’s not being able to get to a point where we live a life where everything is serene and wonderful for 24 hours of the day 365 days of the year, that’s just not how life is. It’s being able to be in control of it so that when it does fall out of tilt, when you are feeling unbalanced, you have the tools and the awareness and the understanding to bring yourself back to centre much, much quicker.

Liz: Yeah, absolutely and you know what, it is entirely possible to live your life in a pretty balanced way most of the time and that in itself means living a happy life.

Jo: Yeah.

Liz: So, we are coming to the end of our podcast, the next podcast I think will be about letting go. So, we’re beginning these podcasts with the same route that we would probably go down in one of our workshops and so stage-by-stage taking through some of the techniques and stories and examples that we would use in our stress or the five ways to kick-start change workshops. Which leads me nicely onto if you are interested in any of our workshops or one-to-one sessions, then please go to our website which is www.equacoaching.com. There are some exciting things coming soon like the books coming out and the new website has been launched and also our online coaching programs are coming soon. So, keep an eye out for them and if you would be interested at all then sign up to the newsletter.

Jo: Bye for now.

Liz: See you later.

PS we have a new book out! It’s available now on Amazon, Waterstones and all good independent book stores!

Over on our Facebook and Twitter pages we love showcasing the very best the internet has to offer in the form of curated articles and videos from all these sites and more, covering well thought out opinions on stress, anxiety and depression, forwarding inspiring quotes, videos on the human psyche, news in art, culture, therapy and music. If we find it useful, interesting or inspirational we will share it. We also write articles on our blog (new and updated website coming soon) and if you’d like to be notified when we write a new one, or of forthcoming workshops then please sign up for our next newsletter.

If you are experiencing stress, anxiety, addiction, panic attacks, feeling overwhelmed or just simply want to talk, please get in touch to book a one-to-one session with either Jo or Liz. Sessions are either in person or via Skype and are completely confidential.

The post Find Your Balance #Episode 1 appeared first on Equa Coaching.

Letting go.

You can listen to our Find Your Balance podcast here or read the transcript below — hopefully, the rubbish bin image will make sense once you do!

Liz: Hello and welcome to episode 2 of the Find Your Balance podcasts, I’m Liz.

Jo: And I’m Jo, welcome.

Liz: That’s very perky.

Jo: Well, you know, it’s Spring.

Liz: It is Spring, it’s beautiful outside today actually, the sun is shining, and the daffodils are out. It’s actually been really hideous all week, Jo. Jo has actually been in Glasgow this week, in Scotland doing some work, what was it like up there?

Jo: It was very grim.

Liz: It was pretty grim down here too. So, today is a bit of an anomaly, but I like it, this is how I would like it to be.

Jo: Soon enough the bunnies will be out hopping about.

Liz: I think our podcast it’s going to be like a piece of Spring.

Jo: Yeah. “Boing”!

Liz: Anyway, the first thing I want to talk about is just a little recap from the last podcast.

Jo: Yes, so we talked about how the themes of these podcasts are going to be about finding your balance and some techniques and ideas that we’re going to give you to help do that. One of the ones that we talked about on the last podcast was about not complaining.

Liz: Yes, this is always a tough one because it’s difficult because obviously, we complain all the time, in our heads, lots of negative thoughts and really the technique is about awareness, awareness of how much we can complain. It’s not entirely possible to do.

Jo: It’s actually very, very difficult to do. In fact, if you can do it you are probably a superhero, you’ve probably got a cape somewhere.

Liz: Somebody really good.

Jo: Yeah, you’ve got a superpower.

Liz: No negative thoughts.

Jo: Yeah.

Liz: I can’t think of anybody… Betty White?

Jo: Betty White?

Liz: Yeah.

Jo: Wasn’t she a Golden Girl?

Liz: She seemed like she was really nice, like she doesn’t think badly of anybody.

Jo: If she is superhuman, I don’t know, we’ve really gone off pissed here, anyway piste even.

Liz: What did you say, pissed?

Jo: Quite possibly. Anyway, the whole thing about it is it’s not something that is actually achievable but it’s not about being able to tick something off and say I’ve achieved that, what’s next?

Liz: Yeah, that’s right.

Jo: It’s about raising your awareness and understanding, your thought process and how much you end up, spending time complaining and being negative about things.

Liz: Yeah, it’s actually about changing your brain awareness. There’s a really good technique, actually, I saw, I can’t remember what it was on, it’s to do with positive psychology. You can go online, I’ll have to find it and I’ll post it somewhere, post it on our Facebook page because it’s actually quite good. (here it is! )

Basically, you have a page of faces, of miserable, grumpy faces and there’s a smiling face, one smiling face and you have to click on the smiling face. So, it forces you to look for the smiling face and the point of the exercise is you’re training your brain to look for the happy person and it actually changes your brain wiring. It’s quite clever, a lot of the time we tend to look for the negative.

Jo: It’s our default as human beings, that’s what we do, it’s much easier to look for the negative. If you ask someone to write a list of 10 things that they like about themselves, they would go, “Oh, I can only think of five.” If you ask somebody to write ten things that they don’t like about themselves, they will go, “Well, actually I could give you 20.”

Liz: It’s probably a struggle with five to be fair.

Jo: Well, yeah, but it’s actually human nature as a default that we think negatively, it’s far easier for us to do. So, something like not complaining is a sort of thing to just do quite easily to get you going in terms of raising your awareness and noticing how often you do complain and trying to reduce that over and over again.

Liz: Yeah, so that’s last week. Hopefully, that answers any questions anybody might have.

Jo: Or last month even.

Liz: Oh, sorry, last month, time, it goes so quickly. So, let’s start with this month’s topic, which is “Letting Go” and the reason we picked this is because it really is a beginning stage of anything when you want to change, you have to let go of your current belief system. You have to let go of your current negative thoughts and you have to let go of what’s stopping you from moving forward.

Jo: Yeah, and actually there’s a very simple physical thing that you can do right now just to help clarify what it is that we’re talking about. This is something that we learnt from super coach Michael Neill, if any of you haven’t heard of him, you should read his books, he’s a really good transformative life coach. It’s about balance and it’s about helping you balance and it’s about letting go. Even though we’re not in vision here, I’m going to get Liz to do it as I talk through it, so Liz is going to stand up and for you at home listening or wherever you are listening…

Liz: They won’t know whether I’m doing it or not but I’m going to do it.

Jo: It’s just something to help with your awareness of letting go, so what I want you to do is just stand up and Liz is now standing up. I want you to stand on what you consider to be your weaker leg, okay, just stand on one leg, your weaker leg. Try and lift that leg up, the leg that you’re not standing on so that the bottom half of your calf is tucked at a right angle, that’s it. Just notice how difficult it is to remain balanced and how much your body fights that physically.

Liz: Yes, it’s fighting.

Jo: Yes, it’s fighting, Liz is wobbling all over the place. So, now if you really concentrate and it’s sort of a backward way of saying but actually let go and stop fighting to remain balanced.

Liz: You relax.

Jo: You relax yourself, it actually becomes easier. So, Liz now is, I’m looking at her body which has lost a lot of the tension. She’s not got her arms out to her sides to help her to balance and she is perfectly balanced on her one weaker leg without too much of a struggle. So, that is a sort of physical way of being able to explain that if you hold on too tightly and you try too hard, you hold on and you can’t let go of things. Whereas actually, when you relax and go a bit more with the flow of things it becomes a lot easier. So, that is an example of actually letting go, your body has its own inner gimbal inside of it. It doesn’t need you to fight to remain upright, it already has that gimbal inside and when you relax and allow that gimbal to take control you can hold your balance and you’re not fighting it and you’re relaxed and you’re in flow.

Liz: Disclaimer, if you fall over it’s not our fault!!

Jo: Don’t fall over or do it near something where you’re going to bash your head.

Liz: Yeah. So, that is good exercise actually, we’ve learned quite a lot from Michael Neill over the years. He’s a very good teacher and it’s one of the regular things that he does actually just to show us how hard sometimes we try to control things and to hang on and cling on to that control. But actually, when you let go, life has a funny way of just evening out.

Jo: Yeah, and actually I’ve used that technique or something very similar in a lot of mindfulness classes as well.

Liz: We use it in our workshops as well which is quite funny watching everyone stand on one leg.

Jo: Yeah, I think letting go is very much about, as human beings we have habits, we have habits that we follow day in day out and a lot of those habits can be quite negative, and you don’t even realise that you’re doing them a lot of the time. Similarly, those habits can be very big or very small, but the more you tell yourself that those things are the way things are, the more they become the way things are. So, it becomes a learned helplessness thing where the more you tell yourself, “Well, that can’t happen” or the more you say, “Well, this situation went wrong because of me, because of something I did” the more that becomes a reality and the more you believe it.

So, next time around when you have a situation like that, you haven’t let go of that previous situation and it comes along with you and you carry it with you. So, it’s about understanding that you don’t have to carry things with you. I often use with clients, I talk about a rucksack of rocks and everybody has a rucksack of rocks that they carry around on their back. You don’t have to have a heavy load of rocks in your rucksack, the rocks symbolise all the issues and the problems that you carry around with you. When you start to raise your awareness and understand that you don’t have to carry those things around with you anymore, you can take them out of the rucksack and leave them behind and you feel lighter and you’re able to move forward quicker.

Naturally, we tend to load ourselves up with a lot of rocks and we carry them around and we get so used to carrying that weight that we almost forget how heavy it is. It contorts our body and we carry it in our minds and it’s much harder to move forward. When you realise that some of the things that you worry and think about you don’t have to, it doesn’t mean anything and you let go of them, you can actually use all that energy and that time thinking about positive things and things that you really want to do.

Liz: Yeah. Obviously, we’re not being flippant expecting everyone to suddenly not worry about everything that’s going on in their lives. What we are trying to say is beginning the process of letting go can help you see how change can be made. So, it’s just beginning the process more than anything, that’s the most important thing. Also, I think it’s important to say that when you let go, you have to really let go to change your perspective on anything. While you’re still clinging, that’s how I always think of letting go, I always think I’ve got this-, you know that Where’s Wally, where he’s hanging on to the edge.

Jo: Yeah, you get those cartoons where they’re on the cliff edge hanging by their fingertips and they’re trying to grab on.

Liz: That’s how I think of it and I have always imagined letting go and just going ahhhhhh, okay. Meanwhile, in your version you are falling off a cliff but never mind, in my mind, you just slip down. So, it’s really a case of the fact that you can’t change your perspective until you let go of old beliefs, old thought processes. I often remember a guy who was obsessed with Diet Coke, this guy said to me, “No, no Diet Coke, it’s good, there’s nothing wrong with it.” I’m a bit of a reformed Diet Coke drinker, so there’s nothing good about Diet Coke but for balance, of course, there’s nothing wrong with having a Diet Coke once in a while but this guy just drinks gallons and gallons of it.

Anyway, he wouldn’t listen to a word I said about it and I said to him to find something on the internet. He said, I’ve seen loads of things that have said that Diet Coke is good for you and I was thinking I have no idea what he’s talking about, but he went away, and he found an article that said that Diet Coke wasn’t as bad. It didn’t say it was good, it said it wasn’t as bad as other articles will tell you, but what he’s choosing to do is ignore the million articles that tell you that it’s not good for you because he’s found that one. It made me think about this, I thought you can always find something on the internet to support whatever thing you’ve decided. That’s true of our brains, whatever we’ve decided we will find something to support it.

Jo: Yeah, I can relate to that and sometimes the things that we need to let go of are big, things that we’ve carried around that have happened during our lives, others are tiny little things. I can remember a time when I fell over.

Liz: What a shock (!)

Jo: I was walking down just past Kings Cross in London and it was lunchtime and I fell over on a pavement slab that was sticking up and I tripped up and fell over. It was quite a busy street, it was a busy time of day, there were people coming and going and what have you. One person stopped to say are you okay, nobody else did but whilst I was lying there on the floor the actual pain that I’d hurt my ankle became secondary to my brain and my thoughts in my head going “everybody is laughing at you”, “everybody thinks you’re an idiot”. But actually, when I took notice of people around me really rather than listening to the thoughts in my head, I noticed that actually, nobody was really laughing at me.

Liz: Or indeed helping you up! Ah, London, how we love it so!

Jo: Or helping me, exactly, yeah. No one was laughing at me, no one was helping me, everyone was just getting on with their own lives. They’re off thinking I’ll go and get a sandwich for my lunch, I’ve got to get back to work or wonder if I should go and buy those pair of shoes and they hadn’t even noticed that I’d fallen over.

Liz: Or I must remember to not trip over that piece of concrete that’s sticking out.

Jo: Yes, like that silly woman. Even if they do stop and notice and they might giggle or laugh or think, “Oh, what a stupid idiot she was for falling over”, it’s momentary, because then they go back to their own lives and their own angst and their own things that they’ve got going on. So, once I got hold of that and realised that, I could let go of it a hell of a lot easier than if I continued to tell myself that it was so embarrassing because everybody was laughing at me when actually nobody was at all. So, I was able to move on and forget about it and almost laugh at myself for almost going down that road of creating a much bigger something out of me just falling over in the street and not really hurting myself.

Liz: Making a big deal. No, you’re right, it’s thought. Actually, we’re going to go into thoughts in another podcast but you’re right, letting go of negative thoughts is a huge one, a lot of people ask me questions about that. So, we’d like you this month to become aware of letting go, just sit back, breathe out and just stop, see how it feels not to be clinging on so tight, not to be trying to control everything and just relax a bit.

Jo: Yeah, just go with the flow a little bit more, letting go can be many things, as Liz is saying, letting go in terms of stopping holding on too tight, trying to control things, just letting go and go with the flow. But also, if you’re carrying around negative thoughts and habits, becoming aware of what they are and deciding whether or not you really need them in your life and how you can let go of them, because you can leave them behind. They’re not offering you anything, they’re not helping you with anything and you often just carry them around with you because it’s a habit.

Liz: Yeah, Jo is going to be very happy if you lump one of your rocks out of your rucksack this month.

Jo: Yeah, lighten that load!

Liz: So, personally, I would just like you to breathe out, breathe out some of that control.

Jo: They need to breathe in first of all.

Liz: Obviously, one goes with the other, breathe out some of that angst and that necessity to hold onto things and control things so tightly and just relax.

Jo: Yeah, and also, as we’re often going to talk about in these podcasts is you can use whatever visualisation you want to help you with that. So, Liz has already talked about the Where’s Wally thing, and how they hold onto things. Whatever makes sense to you in terms of helping you to just relax and go with the flow a little bit more, just do it, whatever works for you, there’s no right or wrong way.

Liz: Yeah. I just think become aware of breathing out and just sitting back when you come up against the situation where you feel like, oh my God, I’m losing control, I need to control it. Just decide okay, do I?

Jo: And as I refer to the previous podcast where we talked about reacting and responding. Again, when you are more in flow, and not holding on so tight, you tend to give more of a response. Whereas when you’re holding on very tight and trying to control things you are much more reactive which comes from a much more negative viewpoint.

Liz: Yeah. A good example of that is when we’re trying desperately to think of a word which you can’t think of until you stop trying to think of it.

Jo: Yeah…What was that word?

Liz: I dunno!

Letting go in general this month is something I’d like you to get a hold of.

Jo: You’re not going to be able to let go of everything, we’re not saying and expecting that, it’s not a test, none of this is a test, it’s just advice for you to try. So, if there are certain things that you know that you worry about, just become aware of what they are and whether or not you really need them. You really need to be thinking about them, you really need them to be angry about and if you don’t, just let them go because they don’t mean anything, you don’t need them in your life. Once you can let them go you can move forward a lot quicker.

Liz: Obviously, there are techniques you can do to help with these things. So, I’m actually going to give you a technique for the end of the day, which is a great technique called ‘Garbage Dump’ which we teach in our workshops as well. So, if at the end of the day you’re lying down to go to bed and that’s generally when I think this is the best time to do it, you can do it whenever you like. You’ve got negative thoughts in your mind, I want you to imagine, it is called Garbage Dump, which is actually an American technique, but let’s call it Rubbish Dump and let’s go for an English version. Close your eyes and imagine a rubbish bin and you imagine all of the negative things that you feel have happened that day and include feelings into this, your thoughts, your feelings.

I want you to imagine letting them float out of the top of your head into the rubbish bin. Just do that for about five minutes or however long, a minute, however long it takes but you actually imagine them floating out the top of your head and including the feelings. Imagine the feelings floating out the top of your head into a rubbish bin and then you can imagine putting the lid on, then imagine taking it down to the bin outside and then you can imagine the rubbish truck coming and taking the bin and crushing it and then driving away and you imagine it getting smaller and smaller and smaller into the distance. This technique actually is a really good one for letting go of what’s been bothering you that day because you’re effectively saying to your brain, I don’t need that at the moment.

Now, there’s another technique you can do if you’re worried about forgetting about things, some people use a filing cabinet. So, it’s like, I know I’ve got to deal with this, but I’m going to deal with it tomorrow or later. So, I’m going to imagine that going into a filing cabinet and shutting it for later and these techniques are there to help you sleep obviously and to help you let go for the night.

Jo: The angst of that day.

Liz: Yeah, exactly. It’s a really good technique for your day’s events, giving yourself the ability to relax.

Jo: Yeah, and there’s no right or wrong way of doing this, so, your bin will look different to my bin whatever you decide as the thoughts flow out of your head, whether you decide to see them as paper and you screw them up in a ball and then you go and put them in the bin, it doesn’t matter. There’s no right or wrong way, it’s just about the visualisation of seeing those thoughts leave you.

Liz: And feelings.

Jo: Yeah, and the feelings that you’ve had, the negative feelings, if you’re feeling particularly angry or grumpy or upset or sad, try collecting them and allowing them to leave you and putting them in that bin. Again, there is no right or wrong way, everybody finds their own way to make it work for them.

Liz: Absolutely, and also some people will think well, that’s just silly, that’s silly, I’m not going to think of a bin, give it a go.

Jo: Yeah, it’s really powerful.

Liz: It’s a really clever technique and just give it a go. At the end of the day, what have you got to lose? Nobody else knows you’re doing it, so give that a go and see how you get on and please by all means ask questions on Facebook and let me know how you get on. Now, Jo is going to leave you with an ask yourself question.

Jo: Yeah, we decided that at the end of each podcast on a monthly basis, we would leave everybody with a question to mull over and think about until we all meet again in a month’s time. So, the question for this podcast is, ask yourself what is it that you’re holding onto that you don’t need anymore? There you are. So, again, there’s no right or wrong answer but what are you holding on to that you don’t need anymore? That can be as big or as little as you want.

Liz: I’m mulling it over Jo…a business partner?!

Jo: It can be anything, it could be something as trivial as, well, I’ve got a whole load of clothes that I need to get rid of. It could be…

Liz: A toxic friend.

Jo: A friend that’s not really a friend anymore, it could be a situation that’s weighing you down, that you need to walk away from, any type of thing. It can be as little or as big as it needs to be but just have a little think about that and ask yourself that question and see what you come up with. Quite often, these questions are questions that you never really ask yourself or don’t get asked by other people and sometimes you can surprise yourself with the answers that you end up finding out about.

Liz: Yeah, I agree with that, that’s true. Great, okay, so that’s the end of podcast two, we’ll be back, we’ve decided to do our podcast on the first Friday of each month. So, at least you’ve got some idea when the next podcast is coming out, it’ll be the first Friday of each month. So, thanks for listening and if you’re interested in any of our workshops or one-to-one sessions or any more information, then please go to our website which is www.equacoaching.com. If you’d like to join our Facebook group, that is EqUaCoaching and our Twitter feed is EqUaCoaching (there’s a theme here!) and we just launched our Instagram page, which is also EqUaCoaching.

Jo: Where we could take pictures!

Liz: Yeah, be afraid but come along and join us and obviously, we will add things on there that go along with the podcast. I might put a link to that happy face, which is quite good fun anyway and don’t forget to rate and subscribe. We’d love to get five stars if you like what we do. Thanks very much, see you soon.

Jo: Bye for now.

PS we have a new book out! It’s available now on Amazon, Waterstones and all good independent book stores!

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If you are experiencing stress, anxiety, addiction, panic attacks, feeling overwhelmed or just simply want to talk, please get in touch to book a one-to-one session with either Jo or Liz. Sessions are either in person or via Skype and are completely confidential.

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