I don’t know if it was obvious from the video above but I didn’t know when I was filming it if I was going to get my sea swim or if I was deluding myself.
There were so many rocks and so much seaweed in between me and the sea.
Was I being foolhardy figuring I’d come this far and I’d try?
My mindfulness practice has helped me remember that discernment is the positive side of judging and rather than my usual daily efforts to be LESS judgmental, I needed all of that discernment to help me make a good decision.
I kept looking for the most straightforward, safest looking route into the Atlantic Ocean (I so adore living on the Wild Atlantic Way).
What are you working towards right now?
What’s your sea swim equivalent? (Your goal may be far bigger than that)
How do you feel when you look ahead to that spectacular looking sea (or your equivalent)?
What feelings do you associate most strongly with making your goal a reality?
And when you pause for the reality check that the seaweed and rocks forced me to take today, what obstacles do you notice?
Are they things you can mitigate against?
If I had sea shoes (I have no idea what word I’m looking for here. I’m meaning shoes in which I could sea swim), it would have been a breeze.
Figuring this out means that future sea swims will be easier even when it’s low tide.
Similarly, I can learn to read tide timetables. I actually checked it this today before heading out but after eventually getting the right Westport, I didn’t believe I was understanding it and I wouldn’t have been able to go later when the tide was higher and everything much easier.
So I learned that I *can* swim at low tide but, where possible (I’m so fortunate to have a work schedule that allows sea swims at any tide – am not complaining), make life easier for myself.
How can you overcome the obstacles between where you are and where you want to be?
I love supporting people in making their dreams a reality. You can find out about my life coaching services HERE.
And, of course, the focus of all my work is self care and you don’t need me or anyone else if you want to simply pause and reflect and be your own self care coach.
There are lots of free resources as well as blog posts on my site.
My book, 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing (White Owl, 2017) also has lots of self care tools to support you in setting and reaching goals in your life.
You might want to start by journalling around the questions above or simply ask yourself:
Where DO you want to be?
Where are you NOW?
What are the biggest obstacles you face?
What’s your next step?
This can become a lovely guided visualisations I sometimes do with psychosynthesis counselling clients. We use crayons and imagery and the results are often surprisingly powerful.
And, again, you can experiment with it yourself.
Asking ourselves what we want and noticing the ways in which we need to adapt our approach in order to get there is a basic element of NLP
At the risk of sounding like Mick Jagger, we can’t always get what we want but by being honest with ourselves about what that is rather than habitually denying ourselves, we’re far more likely to create what we want that what we don’t want.
I got my sea swim.
By taking very slow, very careful steps, keeping my sandals on until the last possible moment, I made it into the glorious sea and had a fantabulous (if very cold – at some points, my head hurt from the cold water and my hands turned purple) sea swim.
The memory of this will encourage me forward the next time something (sea swim or completely unrelated – I want other things from life, too) feels challenging just as remembering how scared I was last Wednesday and how worth it it was helped me today.
Big love,
