Category: Blog

As I am about to embark on an adventure and a test of my own mental and physical resilience, I am feeling a mixture of great excitement and a little reluctance – a bit like pre wedding jitters – knowing its going to be an amazing event mixed in with a fear of the unknown.

In preparation for the Camino it was suggested that you engage in training on 3 levels – train the body to prepare for the physical endurance, prepare mentally –to let go of the busyness of everyday life and prepare spiritually to allow the mind to be quiet and accepting as we will have at least 6 hours each day walking and contemplating.

In this training I am learning the importance of “slowing down”. Coming from a busy and hurried world how do you just stop and start to live at a slower pace?

Well this is about to be my opportunity in a few days and I yet don’t know how I will respond to this opportunity. Will I drive myself crazy as I walk every day – 800km of being with my own thoughts? There will be no “to do lists”, “have to’s” no domestic chores (except for washing clothes each night!). Ahhh what will I think about?

What is this self-imposed pressure to keep moving faster, to hurry and push ourselves to overachieve and feel guilty if we take time out for ourselves to rest or stop to smell the roses.
Staying busy allows us to disguise our physical and emotional pain that can be felt when we slow down and have stillness.

I’ve realised that as I have been preparing for this exciting experience it is the perfect way to prepare for a more relaxed, peaceful and successful life.

I thought I would share with you my training schedule that each one of us would get positive results if we were to apply it to our weekly routine:

• Physically – exercising every day, alternating between walking and cardio and weights at the gym to build strength(except Sunday – that’s my day off to relax, chill out, family time.)
• Mentally – challenging my expectations, learning to become less attached to outcomes or what I think should or shouldn’t happen.
  -Being more adaptable by breaking the patterns and habits in everyday life and choosing to do things differently.
• Spiritually – increasing my daily meditation to 20 minutes.
  – Letting go of judgements
  – Live in the now and let go of the past and future and focus on what is happening in the present moment.
  – Enjoy regular solitude and quiet time .

This focus has been so beneficial to both my personal and business life and has resulted in feeling more relaxed, less reactive to situations and people and less attached to outcomes. And I have noticed that being “busy” is a choice, so I am choosing to do things differently so I am not feeling or thinking ”busy”!

I will be back at the beginning of June and look forward to sharing personal insights and wisdoms as I walk this path with many others from diverse cultures and life’s experiences.
If you would like to follow my journey I will be capturing photos of the beautiful Spanish scenery along with my insights.

The link to follow me on Instagram is :
https://instagram.com/juliewarburton

One evening an old Cherokee Indian told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.

He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.”

With a look of wisdom in his eyes the grandfather said; “I feel like wolves are fighting in my heart. One is full of anger and hatred, jealousy and resentment and the other is full of love, forgiveness, joy,  humility and peace.”

The boy looked intently into his grandfather’s eyes and asked, “which one will win?”

The grandfather smiled and quietly said,  “The one I feed.”

This simple story highlights the powerful point that, in life, you become what you think about.

Our mind is a powerful creator and it is up to us to direct our thoughts to focus on what it is we want to create in our life, not what we don’t want.

Quite simply, if you want to change your outcomes, you must master your thinking.

Change your thoughts and your reaction to your thoughts and your world changes too.

The more I studied in the area of positive psychology and neuroscience the more I became intrigued with this concept. What was truly amazing was when I started to put it into practise – I noticed when I stopped myself thinking thoughts of what I did not want and replaced them with more positive and empowering thoughts that I got more positive things showing up in my life.

If you want to make a positive change in any area of your life this is the key. Have you ever noticed the more you focus and think about something you don’t want, the more it seems to show up??

Remember, the most important thing to understand is that our inner turmoil is what causes the outer chaos (not the other way around).

Psychologists estimate that, on average, we have as many as 60,000 thoughts in a typical day. If we sleep 6 to 8 hours a day, then we are having about one thought each second.

When I started noticing my thoughts, I found my head filled with constant chatter. And the interesting thing is that I wasn’t having 60,000 new and useful thoughts. Instead, I was repeating a series of unproductive thoughts—worries about work, imagining challenging conversations with difficult people and difficult situations,  judgments of myself and others, and analysing everyone and everything (and not necessarily in a positive way).

So how do we create our success and happiness?

In his book Psycho-Cybernetics, renowned doctor and professor, Maxwell Maltz gives the answer to this very question.

Discoveries in the science of Cybernetics points to the conclusion that your physical brain and nervous system make up a servo-mechanism which you use, and which operates very much like an electronic computer and a mechanical goal-setting device.

Maltz explains how your built-in servo mechanism functions both as  “guidance system” to automatically steer you in the right direction to achieve certain goals, or make correct responses to the environment and also as an “electronic brain” which can function automatically to solve problems, give you needed answers and provide new ideas or inspiration.

Maltz became interested in why setting goals works. He learned that the power of self-affirmation and mental visualisation techniques used the connection between the mind and the body. This is also directly linked to your self-image. Your self-image fundamentally provides your brain with direction. So this is why we need to have a positive and healthy self-image to ensure we steer our servo-mechanism to get the results that are important to us.

Happiness and success are habits so it is up to each one of us to change the way we think and create new habits of thinking to enjoy more happiness and success.

This is my favourite time of year as we step into a brand new year and have the opportunity to ask ourselves:

• This year who do I want to be?
• What do I want to do and
• What do I want to create?

With each New Year we can recreate ourselves, learn from our past mistakes and challenges and plan to do things differently and create a vision and goals that satisfies and excites us.

Having said that, as I was reading the newspapers and articles over the Christmas and New Year period I was surprised to find myself becoming disillusioned and frustrated with the same old messages we see at this time of the year. ….set clear goals, make your goal SMART goals, what are your dreams for the future, who do you want to be in 2014.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am the first to start the year with clarifying my goals and creating a vision for what I want to achieve and who I want to be. And I am very passionate about this process.

Because I create meaningful goals regularly I have some pretty exciting stuff happening this year – the most exhilarating one is, on April 11th I am jumping on a plane with a friend to go hiking 800km on the Camino de Santiago trail in Spain.
This has been on my bucket list for a few years and at the beginning of 2013 I decided to make it a goal for 2014. This is something very special to me on my life journey and I am so excited that is coming to fruition.

So what this disillusionment allowed me to realise is how important it is to understand what comes before the vision and goals and dreams.
To know what is true and meaningful in your life. Know what will bring peace, joy and satisfaction to you; not any body else – just YOU, and then plan your goals around that.

When we have meaningful goals and we know what will create more excitement and passion in our life then we are on track for a great year.

Here are a few questions to get you thinking about how you can live more authentically with more enjoyment and peace:

• What is the fire in your belly? What gets you inspired?
• What would you love to do that you have been putting off or saying you are “too busy”?
• What would you love to stop doing?
• What brings you peace? …..and do more of that!

Make a commitment to yourself to discover what will make this year a meaningful and joyful one.
☺
Julie