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This month’s is full of top tips about how to change your self-talk. To change how we talk to ourselves we need to have better relationships with others. Our minds are so crowded with things and our to-do list continues to distract us from being present. Preparing to go away last week, I found I was trying to fit in as much as possible before I went away: this was so everything would be ready to fly off my desk when I got back! I found I almost forgot to celebrate my birthday with friends.
Being present to ourselves and our vision for our lives requires constant work, involving a full review of our behaviour, attitude and mindset. It was Aristotle who first identified that all our potentialities in life arise from our bodily existence. He observed the inherent potential that exists in all forms of life including our own: the transformation that can occur starts with an inner change sometimes at a microscopic level. In the philosophy of eudaimonia and the Middle Way, he saw that we could actualise our potential in the real world.
Virtual reality
But how are we to do this when we seem to be so caught up in virtual reality and social media? When our relationship with our email inbox, our phone and our tablet so often takes priority over in-person connections? At NLC, we understand that the hidden transformation we are all capable of comes from holding better conversations with ourselves, with those close to us and with the wider world.
How do you ‘do’ talk?
So much of our life in virtual reality seems to be about control. I was having dinner with a friend recently and he was showing me how he could control the lighting in his property through his watch. As we were eating dinner, lights were going on and off as he glided his fingers over his watch face. Incredible, but also incredibly distracting. Think about email interactions; how much frustration and difficulty is caused by long-chain emails? I experienced some neighbour difficulties during the pandemic. Over the course of two years, I exchanged hundreds of emails about this with the neighbour’s landlord. But the issue was finally solved in a few phone calls lasting a total of about 15-30 minutes. I think this is because so much ego is involved in written communications. The dynamic tends towards us vs them with very little knowledge or understanding of who ‘they’ are. Where in your schedule can you book time to speak to someone? When you do get to speak, how are you going to go about it?
Good living – embracing uncertainty
This month’s newsletter is all about enhancing our mindset through holding better conversations with ourselves. One of the points I make in the newsletter is that without having regular conversations out loud, we can start to live in our heads. This leads us to think we don’t need to be vulnerable and that we can control reality. It was the Greek philosopher Aristotle who, when promoting his philosophy of good living – ‘eudaimonia’ – enlightened us to the fact that, in order to really become fully realised individuals, we need to be able to acknowledge our vulnerabilities as well as our strengths. However, as Susan Jeffers PhD writes:
‘As long as you think you can beat the very nature of life itself, you avoid looking for a way of being in this world that actually embraces the nature of life itself, which is uncertainty. You continue to live with the delusion that there has to be a way to control everything. If, however, you’re totally clear that there is no way to create certainty in your life, you can then move on to something more life-affirming. That is, you can learn to embrace uncertainty instead of trying to erase it.’
To get to know more about what NLC can offer and find out if it is a good fit for you, why not subscribe to my newsletter here?
You could also sign up for my upcoming masterclass which I will be running on Wednesday 28th February and Friday, March 1st at 1 pm.
The 45-minute masterclass will cover
- An introduction to myself and my methods (10 mins)
- Vision setting (10 minutes)
- Goal setting (10 minutes)
- Reflection and revision (5 mins)
- Q and A (10 mins)
Just click the link here to join the mailing list for the masterclass and I will send you all the details!
