Pick a fun challenge to beat boredom and feel good

When life feels like too much of routine, choose a new pastime and turn it into a short term challenge. If you can find a few hours a week then why not fill them with something you have always fancied trying,  it shouldn’t be something that could cause you any pressure, so best to avoid something linked to work or  day to day household activities,  this is about pure fun with no strings. Let yourself go and choose whatever you want to try as long as you can realistically commit to learning and doing it regularly.

The challenge of learning something where you have no pressure will allow you to just enjoy the experience and grow. For example if you decided to take up the guitar from scratch, you could commit to learning and practicing until you can play your favourite three songs to a small audience of friends and family. No need to set a time limit as the idea here is to reduce stress and pressure but to make the challenge exciting enough to carry you through times when your time priorities are competing.

Brainstorm all the things that you will need to do to get you to your goal and then put them into a list and get going. Search online for the best types of equipment to start with, read reviews, look up local classes or buy a tutor programme for your PC. Once you have worked out how you will learn and develop, make your purchases immediately and get started that week.  If this challenge turns out to be more than your budget can stretch to then find something new straight away that fits.

The start of anything new will seem strange and if you have never done anything like it before then you may feel low on confidence and tempted to just stop trying.  The trick here is to keep trying until you feel yourself progress. If you stick with it you will, without any doubt, improve and feel more confident. Over time you will sense your excitement and eagerness to get back to your new challenge and as you talk about it with your friends and colleagues you will feel a sense of energy.

The saying, “a  change is as good as  rest” is never more true here, if you shake things up and change the outlook of your week by doing something you find fun and which allows you to grow then you will reduce your stress just by engaging your mind to find ways to improve and conquer a challenge that you maybe missing in your work or home life.

3 steps to improving your life balance

The frustrations of life often come about because we lack information or sufficient control over how we choose to use our time. In order to make adjustments to the way we use your valuable minutes its important to really know how we are choosing to use them now. Here’s a technique to start straight away which may give you some surprising information about your life.

1 Start a 7 day life log

This might seem like a big job but you need to keep it simple, a list and maybe a couple of words for each activity. This will paint a good picture of how you are using your minutes and highlight areas where you could save time by combining activities and also illustrate just how balanced your days are between the stuff you ought to do and the stuff you want to do. Just like a food diary, if you can see it all laid before you then you can start to see opportunities for more fun activities, improving the way you complete tasks and the things that waste your time. Achieving balance is all about putting everything on the scales and adjusting as you go.

2 Use three highlighter pens on your log to identify:

• Necessary tasks – such as work, paying bills and caring responsibilities.

• Time wasters – such as looking at junk emails throughout the day and channel surfing when not actually watching a programme of interest, there are lots more you can think of!

• Fun things – reading, catching up with friends, time with the kids

You need to be totally ruthless with this exercise, remember the aim is to get to know your life so that you can gain some control over your minutes.

3 Seek and change

List the time wasters you highlighted and pick one off the list to replace with a fun activity or a necessary one such as doing the shopping earlier in the week to allow more time for something else after. If you feel able maybe do this with up to three time wasters. It’s a gradual process and you can reduce channel surfing by half if that feels more manageable.

You can also list the necessary and fun things and identify where you can improve how you carry out a task to save time or increase the amount of time you spend on something you enjoy.

The key to this exercise is to feel completely familiar and present with how you spend your life rather than blindly frittering away your minutes and feeling more frustrated or stressed.

Good luck and do Let me know how you get on.

Try it on for size!

Sometimes we think that breaking out of a rut means a huge effort and we end up putting off doing something new. We think of the big things when it’s more powerful to just do something small and quiet.

How many times have we thought about whether we should go to that after work meal or the gathering and felt that it would be more effort than it was worth? We go along and often it can change the feel of the whole week, we come back with a nice memory or maybe we met someone new who made us think differently

Trying something new or different doesn’t mean you need to buy, it would be an expensive trip to the shops if that were the case!  It’s OK to try something that we might not feel is ‘me’.

Go to a museum, visit a park or watch a film you wouldn’t normally dream of watching. The thing with trying something on for size is that it shakes you up a bit, causes you to think differently, and that can lead to new ideas and new ways of doing things. It could lead you out of boredom and into something that inspires you.

It might all seem simplistic, but actually, life is pretty simple,  we have to sleep, we have to wake, and eventually we will die. So in between all of those traffic lights we have to do something, so it might as well be stuff that feels good.

This is all change, and change can be scary or annoying or exciting. However you feel about it the posts here will try and give you ideas, cause discussion and hopefully get the changing rooms full ! This will be a place to come and share ways we have made change happen, reacted to change, tried something new or how we keep life feeling fresh.

My aim is to help people to feel better about change and if we feel better about change then life can open up to new people and experiences.  I invite everyone to try something new for size.