Discover how to strengthen your resilience
It's to do with letting go of expectations.
I fully appreciate this may seem like a strange idea.
We all have expectations. Expectations of how we want others to be. Expectations of who we think we should be. Expectations of what we want to achieve. Expectations of what we want for our children, family, friends. We expect things about our bodies, our jobs, our lives...
Before I started meditating years ago, I had no idea I could disentangle myself from my busy mind. Our constant thinking and wandering mind, often leaves us feeling completely exhausted, stressed, and relieved to get to the end of each day. You know that feeling? When your inner voice says: "Thank god it's almost the weekend, so I can forget about my challenging week for a while." The trouble is, it's our constant thinking which pulls our attention in a thousand different directions, in very subtle ways, that we're very rarely aware of. This is what we call continuous stress.
I've been asked some provoking questions recently that have made me stop and consider more deeply what Wake Up Kate is all about.
After carefully processing each question, I realized they all came down to one single question:
Why Wake Up Kate?
Wake Up Kate originally started as a call to action to myself to WAKE UP in my life and take greater care of ME.
I soon discovered that staying awake in my life and practising self care wasn't just another 'to do'... it was a habit that became a way of life.
That's one of the secrets you need to know about how to maintain any kind of REAL change in your work and life........
I didn't know what I was doing there, in that room full of strangers.
Not just strangers, but people who had experienced some of life's greatest challenges. I felt like an outsider, as if I was somehow misplaced among these suffering people. What on earth was I doing there with all of them?
What I was doing with them, was attending a 12-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Interpersonal Neurobiology course.
The truth is, I've led and participated in dozens of executive workshops, but never one in which...
Don't just do something. Sit there.
It sounds completely counterintuitive and jarring.
Yet it says a lot in just a few words.
We spend much of our time "doing" things in our day as opposed to "being" in our day.
Being in our day requires some silence and stillness, observing, listening, letting things be. Getting out of our own way. Holding our thoughts, emotions, fears and sensations in our awareness, as opposed to acting on them.
Let's be clear, I'm not suggesting that we abandon 'doing things'...
Breathe.
In our breath, lies a completely overlooked source of power that can transform life. Yet we take it for granted much of the time. There are a couple of reasons why.
It's automatic. Like the sun rising and setting every day. It just happens. We don't have to consciously make ourselves breathe. Our body does it for us.
It's instinctive. From the moment we are born to the moment we die, we breathe. We didn't have to take classes to teach us how to breathe. It's just part of...
Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote, "Make sure you weave your parachute every day, rather than leave it to the time you have to jump out of the plane."
Excellent advice for skydivers and pilots. Is it also good advice for those of us who remain earthbound?
I was sitting in a room with 12 strangers, taking part in a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course, when I first heard about...
It was an ordinary day. I was at work. My phone rang.
When I looked at the screen it said it was my doctor. I answered it and she asked, "Where are you?" I said I was at work. "Can you find somewhere private to go... right now?" I found a small room and shut the door. "I don't know how to tell you this... but you have a rare, aggressive and advanced cancer."
In so few words, everything changed...
I struggled to find work-life balance, both as a single person and a married mum with young kids. I worked hard, didn't look after myself particularly well, got too few hours sleep, didn't spend enough time with my family and spent a lot of money on things I didn't need. Oh and I also happened to eat 3-4 tubs of Haagen-Dazs every week.
I became vaguely aware over the years, of a slight nagging...
