Mindset Focus: Where to turn on the not-so-great days

We all have days where we need a boost, or a reality check. On day eight of my December Mind-set podcast, I'm sharing where I turn when I need to help re-balance.

I’m Dinah Liversidge and I’m a Coach and Trainer, a Celebrant and co-host of The Charcoal Hut, a woodland cabin in Myddfai, Carmarthenshire. I’m also a no-box-thinker. I believe when we stop trying to ‘think outside the box’ we take away labels and limitations that were always an illusion. There never was a box.

I love being a Coach, a Celebrant and a Host. All these aspects of my life help me achieve that illusive ‘work-life balance’ so many seem to be striving for. Join me in Myddfai in our woodland garden for a #MyddfaiMinute and listen to one minute of birdsong. I hope it brings you some peace.

If you’d like to explore Coaching, take a look at my Mindset Coaching here. 

I hope you’re enjoying my Podcasts. I’d love you to share them with someone you think would get something positive from them. 

Dinah  

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hi there, I'm Diner Live , and thank you for joining me on my podcast this December. I'm creating a short series of 10 Mindset Focus podcasts, and I'm looking at how we can influence our mindset and take more ownership of it after what feels like a year where, if anything, we've had very little control over what's going on around us, and that can impact our mindset massively. So I hope these tips are proving useful. By all means, if today is the first day you are listening, go back and listen to the other days. You'll find me on no box thinking.buzzsprout.com. So it's day eight, and today I wanted to share with you some of the things that I have made, a positive mindset, habit, things that I do or that I turn to when perhaps I'm having a day where my mindset doesn't feel great. And that's the first thing, is to acknowledge that not every day is a great day, and that's okay. Not every day is going to feel like you've got yourself in order that you know this stuff and you are working it. I have a very, very dear friend, Amanda Rose, the most incredible illustrator and artist, but she's also the most remarkable listener and seer of people. And she says the most wonderful things, one of which recently was that after having a particularly challenging day, she said, I took myself outside and had a word with myself. And I envisage her doing that, standing outside her beautiful home in the , in the hills here in the Brecken Beacons, and having a word with herself. And you see what she's doing is she's saying, I take ownership of my mindset. I take ownership for the fact I'm having a day where I'm just not listening to my own advice. <laugh> , we've all done it. And so I'm gonna share some of the things I do on those days where frankly, I should have a bit of a word with myself. And the first thing that I do is like Amanda, I go outside. I know I'm incredibly lucky to live where I live. I live , uh, in the hills and valleys of West Wales, about 200 meters , uh, from the edge of the Brecken Beacons National Park. And every window in my home looks out

Speaker 2: 2:58

Either onto a view of a mountain or hill or at trees. So I know that I'm incredibly lucky to have those views. And I also know that they are a great way of helping my mindset. So if I'm struggling, and particularly if I'm feeling tense about something, I will go outside and I will look at the smallest thing that I can see in my woodland. And the reason I pick the smallest thing is that at the moment, it, it helps me. And I think it helps a lot of us, instead of thinking big, which we're always trying to do in businesses, it's time to think small. You cannot influence what's going on in the big wide world, but you can influence the small things. And so by going out and looking at nature and the tiniest things I can find, it reminds me to think about the tiny things in my world that I can influence and that I can control and that lift my mindset. Another thing I love to do is to listen to Ted Talks and podcasts. Uh, I often mention Caroline Casey, who I think has given one of the most powerful Ted Talks I've ever seen. And of course, many of you will by now have discovered the remarkable Brene Brown. If you type the word vulnerability into Google, her ted talk comes up. I would also highly recommend her Ted talk on shame, although of course, you'll be far too embarrassed to tell anybody you're listening to it, <laugh>, you'll get that once you've listened to it, I promise. Um, and then the other big thing I love is listening to and singing along to music. So I have created several playlists , um, some of them on things like Spotify. Uh, some of them are actually on YouTube because they're from a , a time in my life where the visuals that go with the music often trigger a positive memory. So I might put on a positive playlist and look at a video and remember, reconnect with a time when my mindset was in a great place. I also have a playlist for those not so great days. It's rather dramatically called when only a good cry will do. And it's full of ballads from the 1980s that I used to sing in the shower. Um , so I sing them now when I wanna allow myself to have one of those days .

Speaker 3: 5:58

And the other thing that happens when I sing is I'm instantly transported to the most remarkable thing that happened this year during lockdown. Um, the , the incredible Lucy Brazier, who , um, apart from lots of other things, has an incredible organization , uh, which includes a magazine called Executive Secretary and a , a training, gosh, I mean to call it a training arm, is to totally understate the remarkable group of trainers that Lucy has managed to, to put together over the years. Um, but it's a wonderful, wonderful resource and community. And many of us have stayed connected during the summer , um, during times when perhaps we should have been together for conferences being organized by Lucy. And one of the great things that she's done at several, and please forgive me, I don't know the number , um, maybe someone can leave a comment on that, but on , on several of the , uh, live meetups, there have been choirs and they're all run by the same person. Uh, I can't help it. I always smile when I think of Helen. Um, they've been run by Helen Reese, and Helen is just one of those people whose enthusiasm and joy and determination for what she does are hugely infectious. And so she persuaded quite a few of us this year that we were going to get together on a regular weekly basis and sing. Now, admittedly, it was all Facebook Live, so you only saw Helen singing and yourself. Uh , but what was wonderful was she got all of us to send in recordings of ourselves singing, and her very gifted son put them together. And we now have a recording of all of us singing. And I never felt like I wasn't singing with all of them throughout the whole of the time that we did choir. I used to look forward to choir in a way that was it . It made me feel like a kid again. I, I refused to go to important business meetings because, no , sorry, that's the time I have choir with Helen. Um, it was an enormous part of me coping with the first few months of the lockdown. And if you ever, ever get a chance to sing with Helen Reese or anybody, do it. Do it. Don't talk yourself out of it. Just do it. Because the mindset impact is enormous. The all of the songs that we sang together, I cannot hear without instantly thinking

Speaker 4: 8:54

Of, of everybody in that group. And the connection I felt at a time when so many people felt isolated. And I'm gonna share one more thing with you that I have found during lockdown only quite recently, but that's had a massive impact on my mindset, mindset . Um, through my BNI group, I met a member of another BNI group, a terrific trainer called David Husband. And David is , uh, one of those people that I just thoroughly enjoy his company. He's a wonderful listener. He knows an enormous amount about field he works in, and yet he never comes across as arrogant or cocky. And I find him hugely refreshing to be around. And the two of us had talked in a one-to-one about how isolating it can feel working on your own. And we decided we would work together over Zoom a couple of times a month. So the idea is you have a scheduled time, you're going to turn on the Zoom camera, and you can hear and see each other, but you're not there for a conversation. You are there for work. But there will be a moment where one of you's gonna make a coffee, and you'll look up and say, I'm gonna make a coffee. Do you wanna make a coffee? And we'll have two minutes, and then you'll sit and chat for a couple of minutes, or one of you'll be working on something and you'll say, when you've got five minutes, I'd love to run this past you. And they'll say, yeah, sure. And suddenly, you are not in isolation. Now, of course, if you have to have confidential phone calls or somebody disturbs you and you don't want the other person to hear you just mute things. But for that few hours, you are sharing an office space. And it certainly had a massive impact on my mindset. So, David, thank you. I'm so grateful that you made that time, that you took that risk, that we tried it, and that we're gonna do it again and keep doing it. I'd love to hear from some of you, what are the things that you turn to on the days where you could do with a, a boost to your mindset? It would be great if you'd share them with me on Twitter at diner liversidge . And please do join me tomorrow for the ninth in the series where I'm going to be talking a little bit about that person who's quite often along for the ride in your head, the voice of your imposter. Oh, and before I go, just one little reminder for you. Stop tr just stop trying so hard to think outside the box. It was all a big con. The box was never there in the first place .