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January 2005

Welcome to January's issue of Onwards and Upwards.

What a lot has happened since the last issue! The most significant event being, of course, the tsunami. In response to this disaster, fellow coach Lisa Wynn has set up a website, Rebuilding Lives, to raise money for Medicins sans Frontieres, a huge force in the relief effort. Many coaches (myself included) have volunteered coaching hours which can be bought for a donation to the appeal. If you have been thinking about trying coaching, why not use this opportunity to give it a go whilst helping out a very good cause? See below the next story for the link.

If you enjoy this newsletter and you are not already on my mailing list, please subscribe by sending me an email with the word 'subscribe' in the subject line. Do also feel free to forward Onwards and Upwards on to anyone you think may enjoy it. As ever, feedback and comments about this newsletter are most welcome - let me know the sorts of things that you want to read!

Have a great month!

Claire Bradford

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Some thoughts about the tsunami

Before the Christmas break, I had been planning to fill this issue with lots of tips about resolutions and how to set goals for the New Year.

Then the tsunami hit. Suddenly, my own personal goals for the year, whilst still relevant, were dwarfed by the enormity of the situation in South East Asia. That enormous wave hit without warning, suddenly snuffing out 220000 lives, without stopping to ask whether its victims had goals or not.

Of course, I'm not saying that goals, resolutions and plans aren't important (I am a coach, after all!) - just that the fragility and power of life and the planet are so enormous that they often get overlooked. Individuals, corporations and nations often are so busy looking at their own plans for the future that they forget they are part of a much bigger story. Resources, sometimes millions of years in the making, are plundered for short-term ends, and the great tapestry of life is starting to run short of thread.

I heard a lot of people, on exchanging Happy New Year greetings, saying things like 'well, perhaps it's not appropriate to say that now in the light of the disaster'. Personally, I think that the opposite is true: we have all the more reason to celebrate our lives on this planet. Mother Nature (less the delicately wilting flower she is often portrayed as and more the fierce and unpredictable wounded tiger) has given us a wake-up call: a sort of collective near- death experience. We have been frightened, and given a lesson in how miniscule we are in the grand scheme of things - but we have been spared, and what more reason do we need to be thankful for the New Year?

Being thankful for life, respectful of our environment and living with a real spirit of carpe diem (seize the day) are not things we should add to our to-do list, rather they should be the paper the to-do list is written on - the very fabric of our lives. Remembering how small we are in terms of the life of our planet does not mean that we are insignificant or unimportant: by living our lives fully we are contributing towards history. After all, you can bet that if those tsunami victims could be raised from the dead, they would make sure they would never again waste a single moment.

Rebuilding Lives website

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It's a date!

Very recently I started coaching a new client who had been thinking of moving to France for a number of years but had never done much about it because the processes involved had seemed so complicated that she didn't know where to start. So she didn't.

This is a situation that I come across with a lot of clients who are considering relocation. Once we have made a start on chunking the enormous task down into manageable steps, one of the first things that I normally ask people in this position to do is to set themselves a moving date (that's date, not year, season or month!) and write it in their diary or on their calendar.

I should stress that this date is not intended to be a millstone round the neck or something to get hugely stressed about, but fixing a realistic date really helps to focus on what needs to be done between now and then. If necessary, it can be changed, but it needs to be taken seriously enough to spur you into action. Once you know your moving date, you can start to schedule other things into your diary relating to your move: the date you will hand your notice in, the date you will start your language lessons, the date you will put your property on the market, etc.

Having the deadline of a moving date drastically reduces procrastination on all the minutiae of moving details that otherwise can be dragged out for months or years - or even not started at all. In the spirit of my piece above, setting a moving date encourages you to seize the day so you don't regret not relocating years down the line whilst sitting in your rocking chair. Give it a try!

More about relocation coaching...

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January's weight loss support conference calls

I hold a f'ree teleconference call every month for those who are seeking to lose or maintain their weight. It is informal and fun and designed to be a supportive resource which will complement other weight loss regimes/diets etc.

In this month's call, we looked at reframing our goals or resolutions so that they were powerful and acted as a positive motivation. Some ideas that came up were:

stating the goal positively ('I will be slim and healthy', not 'I want to lose weight')
if you have been resolving the same thing every New Year for ages now, the goal is not working for you - how can you change it so that it will be a positive motivation for you?
think about what you could add to your life/diet, instead of what you could take away - more water, perhaps? Fruit and veg?
keep active - one caller decided to take regular walks in the country which gave her some much-needed 'me' time.

Two callers this month found that they had so much in common that they arranged to call each other for mutual support every week!

Do please join us on the next call on Tuesday 8th February at 10am or 8pm.

More details about the teleconference call...

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About Straightforward Coaching

Claire Bradford, of Straightforward Coaching, is a life coach who specialises in relocation and weight loss. For a complimentary consultation session, giving you the opportunity to experience coaching and decide whether it is right for you, please contact me.


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