It feels like I have been pushing myself out of that comfort zone a lot lately, and when a brilliant friend of mine suggested I write a poem along the theme of ‘ Come to the edge….’ I had no difficulty putting pen to paper….

I will not subject you to my rather amateur attempt at poetry, but I would like to explore the same theme of being brave!

After facing my fears and dancing in Coventry does Strictly, quite frankly I felt like I should be able to do anything!

However, I experienced an inevitable tumble of butterflies last week cooking for Lisa Valentines blissful yoga retreat. It is many years since I last cooked at Lisa’s retreat, and even that was for the first time! However, I had a box of tools to support me this time, and perhaps most significantly, I had a distinctly upgraded mindset. I also have the wise voices of many different people in my head these days. However, as I say to all my clients….. ‘It really doesn’t matter what other people say to you; it is that voice in your own head that has the biggest impact.’

So, I am doing my best to step back and challenge the negative voice in my head these days. I always remember a comic on the telly saying ‘I shouted at the voice in my head for years.’

I found it equally inspiring and unreachable at the time. However, I think with a little more wisdom these days I appreciate that practice makes progress, and I have started to make daily affirmations a regular practice!=.

The two resounding affirmations that I played on repeat last week were

‘ I am perfectly imperfect’ and

‘I always do my best, and my best is always enough’.

I was also propelled forward by something I heard on a mindfulness course I attended last year, which was ‘The best way out of anxiety is action.’

Add in a dose of self-compassion, and everything turned out very much OK! Not only did I survive, I prepared and served up all the meals on time, met a lovely group of people, and enjoyed a wonderful yoga class from the brilliant Lisa Valentine. You see if we are willing to be brave and say yes to things that scare us a little, life certainly does become richer…

It always surprises me how we are sometimes unable to access the simplest most obvious things… we all know that starting a new job is stressful. After all… we are new… we are still learning…. Why is then that so many of us set ourselves up with impossibly high expectations and  feel like we need to be brilliant before we’ve even finished our first day? Nerves are NORMAL…. They show that we care,… and as my brilliant friend Donna says, they are inevitable consequence of doing things that  make us ‘Feel ALIVE!’

So what’s the learning in all of this? Well, it is to ‘come to the edge’, to say ‘Yes’ to life… because this is how we grow! Step out of that comfort zone,  ask yourself ‘what is it you really want in life?  and ‘what is one small thing you can do to take a step closer to that? With a little conscious awareness, we can start to make conscious choices in alignment with what we want, and we begin to see that anything really is possible!