Think back to the last time you had a rip roaring belly laugh.

Remember how the tears rolled down your eyes, how your sides ached? How, the more you wanted to stop, the more you laughed? How those around you could not contain themselves any longer and joined in the rollicking? Remember how exhilarated you felt?  How everybody and everything seemed lighter?

Laughter is a powerful way to tap into positive emotions. Laughter is a form of internal jogging. It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectations.*

Laughter is an instant vacation.**

The French writer Nicolas Chamfort maintained ‘The most wasted of all days is that in which we have not laughed.’

Woody Allen asserts ‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.’

There is a Yiddish Proverb that says ‘What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul’ and an Irish Proverb that says ‘A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor’s book.’

You don’t even need a reason to laugh! Just do it for fun. Google ‘laughter yoga youtube’ and pick a video to see what it is all about.

Here is a 4-step exercise to get you smiling and laughing. You’ll need about 15 minutes to do all of it. However, every step is independent of the others so you can do any of it at anytime.

Step 1: Warm up. Tap into some inspiration with the young Jessica motivating herself in the mirror.

Step 2: Get creative. We can all find unusual uses for all kinds of devices. Be careful though, your ideas may not be to the amusement of everyone, as you’ll see in this video.

Step 3: Share it. There’s that old saying about sharing pain halves it; sharing joy doubles it. Get creative about sharing. Here’s a safe way to share your iPAD with a cat.

Step 4: Shake it up. Follow along with this LAUGHTER YOGA – Laugh Along Practice which covers
* Laughter Yoga Breathing
* Light Laughter Stretching
* Energizing Laughter Yoga Exercises
* Laughter Yoga Meditation
* Stress Relieving Relaxation.

Have fun. Enjoy. Remember to laugh. It feeds the soul.

Quotes by:  * Norman Cousins and ** Milton Berle.

Baby step, baby step, show up. Baby step, baby step, show up.

This is my mantra for this year and a combination of two lessons I learnt from Nick Williams.

I first came across Nick when I broke a £20 note to get small change. I needed £1 to pay the toll fee for the Dartford Crossing. Mindful of spending money simply to get change from a £20 note, I looked around WHSmith at Thurrock Services, a motorways service station, to find something worthwhile. That’s when I came across the book ‘The Work You Were Born to Do’ by Nick Williams.

How small decisions change your life!

I read through the book, skimmed through the exercises and was very taken with the book and its author. Then Nick started showing up in my life. I would come across another one of his books; I would go to a conference and he’d be there giving a talk; at another event, he’d be a participant, just like me. Eventually I signed up for his mailing list, attend some of his events and every now and again, I would meet someone else who is also a Nick Williams fan.

Nick is a very down to earth person. He talks about his own struggles and he shares ways in which he battles the beast within, overcoming resistance, fear and procrastination. When he speaks, though there may be hundreds of people, he speaks to me – I relate to every word. He talks about how scary it was when he first ditched his job and started out on his own. How he just kept taking baby steps one after another. He just kept doing the next thing and then the next, small, tiny action that imperceptibly moved him forward and helped him overcome the myriad times he wanted to give up. Baby step, by baby step, often facing an overwhelming desire to throw in the towel, he just kept going, one baby step at time.

So this is the first lesson I learnt from Nick: Baby Steps. Keep on keeping on. Baby step after baby step, that’s all you have to do.

The second lesson is Show Up.

Nick tells the story of how he was scheduled to speak at a show, an open air affair. The weather was appalling, more rain was forecast and it was expected that not many people would turn up. So Nick hummed and ha’ed with himself, shall I, shan’t I. Eventually he decided he had made a commitment, he would go, even though it was a long drive to get there and there was a good chance nobody would show up for his talk.

When the time came to give the talk, there was a man, a woman and a dog. He gave the talk anyway and afterwards exchanged a few words with the people.

A few months later Nick was invited to speak at an event in the United States. Turns out those people listening to him on that cold, wet day, enjoyed his talk and asked him to speak at one of their events. Off he went. He became friends with this couple, was introduced to their circle of friends and followers and over time more opportunities opened up for him.

As he says, none of this would have happened if he did not show up for his talk on that cold, rainy day when only two people and a dog turned up to hear him. It taught him the value of showing up. You never know who will be there, what you will learn, who you will meet, what might happen to propel you forward.

Today, Nick is a sought after international speaker, author and broadcaster. How did he do it? By following this very same strategy: baby step, baby step, show up.

So that’s what I am doing. Baby step, baby step, show up; along the lines of Aim for Improvement, Not Perfection. Baby step, baby step, show up.

I have just come back from Solihull, near Birmingham, in the heart of the Midlands in England, where I attended A Course in Miracles conference. More than one hundred and twenty like minded people from all over England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, a sprinkling from Europe and even one or two from South Africa and Canada; inspirational speakers including Marianne Williamson and food, glorious food, especially the chocolate cake that had to be had for desert.

How does it get better than this!?

Uplifting, energising and deep connection – that is what makes events like this so special.

The theme of the conference was ‘At the Heart of A Course in Miracles.’ It was a weekend full of miracles.

The course says ‘Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love’.

I had three of my very own:

The Miracle of the Sat-nav: At the end of the first day, I agreed to drop a fellow delegate at Solihull railway station as it was pouring with rain. As I was a bit concerned about getting lost, the talk naturally drifted to Sat-Nav’s and their usefulness. Recently I have been pondering just that and concluded that it would be a good idea to get one. I had even done a little bit of research and decided I’d get a Garmin when I get round to it. Well, what do you know, my passenger said he had a spare one just sitting at home, brand new and used once.
Me: ‘What are you planning to do with it?’
Him: ‘Sell it, I suppose.’
Me: ‘How much would you want for it?’
He told me, I agreed and the next day he brought it in, showed me the basics and viola! Job done – I have a sat-nav!
Err…. did I mention it is a Garmin?

The Miracle of the Lady from Spain: During the morning coffee break on the first day, I joined two women who were talking about Spain. One relocated there from England several years ago and the other one have dreams of living there and can’t see it happening. So there she was surrounded by two women who had relocated to another country, proving she can make it happen. It transpired the lady from Spain and I had another common interest. I know an aspiring social worker and had been wondering how I can help and support him. Who should I meet? Someone who spent her working life as a social worker and was happy to share her wisdom and insights, the kind you don’t find in text books and lecture halls. What treasure!

The Miracle of the Travel Companion: What a luxury! I had driven up on my own – two and a half hours or so including a short break – and whilst good company, it gets a bit monotonous after a while! The radio is broken and driving music is not on my radar, hence no CD’s or mp3 player.

My travel companion and I had a wonderful conversation getting to know each other and having the kind of conversations we rarely allow ourselves to have with another human being, sharing our deeper toughts, showing our vulnerability. Turns out she would like to have that kind of communication with someone close to her, if only it was not so scary. We touched on how she might do that. Eventually the talk got round to what we do for a living and I replied I help people have the kind of conversation we had been talking about and struggle to have.

Well… Wow! Long, silent, pregnant pause while the enormity of that dawned on both of us. Just think of all the things that had to fall into place for the two of us to be together at that moment, she with her specific need – to be able to have deep, meaningful, real conversations with her family and me with my question – what specifically would women want from a workshop where they can learn how to do that?

Wow! Was that a miracle or what?

No matter what you call it, miracles, manifestation, the answer to your prayers, synchronicity, it is amazing how things just fall into place sometimes and the way forward becomes clear, effortlessly. It makes your heart sing with joy and gratitude. That, by the way, is another characteristic of miracles – it inspires gratitude.

Of all the things the course says about miracles, here’s the one I want to leave you with: ‘you are a miracle.’
Yes, YOU.     YOU are a MIRACLE. You ARE a miracle.

Test that one out:
Say out loud ‘I AM a miracle’. Repeat it, putting the emphasis on a different word each time. That’s four times, so just for fun, repeat it once more, twice as loud.

Ready to start spotting and totting up your own miracles? You are a miracle spotter, aren’t you?

Image by Ma Atmadayaki

One of the habits I am cultivating is to write every day. The idea is to write three pages of A4 every day and just write whatever comes to your mind. The purpose is to get the creative juices flowing and let things bubble up from the sub-conscious – thoughts, insights, wisdom, worries you did not even know was there.

So if you don’t know what to write, and I am often in this space, just write that. ‘I don’t have a clue what to write about today and so I am just sitting here writing whatever word comes into my mind.’

Sometimes I use some coaching techniques to get the juices flowing. ‘So if you asked yourself what it is you want to write today, what would that be?’ I even write that down, that question. Everything that comes up, I write down. And I notice when ideas come up, where they well up from: from somewhere in my head or from somewhere in my gut.

Right now I am noticing that I use the word ‘I’ a lot. That reminds me of a friend of mine who recently changed her name. She went to an ashram in honour of her master and came back with a spiritual name, Atmadayaki, which means ‘soulful and bestowing’. That name describes her inherent nature. She IS soulful and bestowing. And every time she uses and hears the name, she is reminded of her nature. This means that whenever she is NOT soulful and bestowing, using the name is a wakeup call to return to being soulful and bestowing.

She also speaks in the third person, meaning she never refers to herself as ‘I’. Instead of saying, ‘I am calling you to discuss….’ she says ‘Ma Atmadayaki is calling you to discuss…’

At first it was a bit strange, until she explained. Speaking in the third person allows you to take a step back and see yourself objectively; so you speak as if about someone else. It helps you to disassociate from the ‘I’ identity of the ego. It helps you take yourself, your situation and your interpretation of your world less seriously. It means you don’t become so attached to your expectations of how things should be and your version of the truth. It allows a little room for a different interpretation and it becomes easier to cut the other person some slack. It becomes easier to cut yourself some slack. This is especially good for those of us who are very hard on ourselves.

Those are all my reasons why talking about yourself in the third person might be a good idea. I am sure Ma Atmadayaki has more reasons and can offer additional perspective.

The ‘Ma’ in ‘Ma Atmadayaki’ is a way of showing respect. Having grown up in South Africa, I am familiar with this word as a term of respect. In Botswana, the terms ‘Rra’and ‘Mma’ are used in a similar way. A man is typically addressed as ‘Rra’ as in ‘How are you today, Rra?’ and a woman is addressed as ‘Mma’ as in ‘Mma Ramotswe is the very clever lady detective and the owner of The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency’.

It can be quite disorientating when someone talks to you about themselves in the third person. My initial reaction was ‘who have I missed, who else is here?’ Some people ‘get’ it very quickly, others just cannot adjust. Talking to officialdom is particularly difficult and then Ma Atmadayaki reverts to using ‘I’ when referring to herself.

Interesting! Interesting that Riana should notice she uses ‘I’ a lot. Interesting experiment to talk about yourself in the third person to see what comes up for you. Just notice, you don’t need to analyse, critique, evaluate – just notice. ‘Play with it’, as Ma Atmadayaki would say and let Riana know what came up for you. Just here below … add your comment.

There is a saying that goes ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.’

I beg to differ. I know the phrase is a saying to let others know that bad things they say or write about you does not hurt you. My experience has been different.

When you are in the middle of an argument or a difficult conversation, caught up in strong emotions and can’t get the other person to see our point of view, it is easy to revert to inflammatory language.

Him:   ‘For God’s sake! Will you LISTEN!!’

You:   ‘I’ve been here LISTENING all the time. You’re the one who has been ranting and raving, not letting me get a word in edge ways, Dickhead!!’

Language like this is like a red rag to a bull and what author Alec Grimsley calls Landmine Language. Even if you have gone to the trouble to prepare for a difficult conversation, landmine language will undermine your hard work.

Here are some examples of landmine language that can trip you up royally.

Blaming:      ‘It’s your fault.’ ‘You were supposed to make sure everything checked out.’ ‘You made a right mess of this.’

Labeling, name calling:      ‘You’re a liar.’ ‘You’re lazy!’

Threatening , intimidating:      ‘Go on! Do that one more time – see what happens!’

Sarcasm:      ‘Which part of ‘I want it tomorrow’ don’t you understand?’

Dredging up the past:      ‘This is just like the time when you…’

Exaggeration:      ‘Now everything is ruined!’ ‘For the hundredth time, will you…!’

Generalisations:      ‘You never listen to me.’ ‘You always drag your mother into this.’

Infantalising, belittling:      ‘That’s a dumb idea.’ ‘You can’t ask HER to do it – what does she know!’

Ascribing false motives:      ‘What you really mean is you don’t trust me!’

Opinion paraded as fact:      ‘The fact of the matter is, you’re dead wrong.’

Body Language:       Words it may not be, yet when what you think or feel is written all over your face, it speaks as eloquently and loudly as the most carefully chosen landmine language.

Deliberately ignoring:      The message here is ‘I don’t care’; ‘you don’t matter.’

Every time you say or do something with a little ‘dig’ to get at the other person, you deliver a message with a load, a little dagger to hurt the other person. Problem is it undermines your efforts at dialogue, a productive discussion and the outcome you’re after. Even that ‘got him or her!’ feel-good feeling evaporates pretty quickly and leaves you with what… a bad taste in the mouth? a broken relationship? Is this what you want?

1. Change, like any creation, starts with a thought. For example, first you think what a great idea it would be to get married, you envision a wedding ceremony complete with wedding dress, cake, champagne, a minister, rings, a bridegroom and guests, then you start planning it and making it happen. And on the day, your plan comes together:  you have a wonderful service, reception and a new spouse, just like you planned it.
2. Change is messy. It can be uncomfortable while we struggle with uncomfortable thoughts, emotions and uncertainty, not to mention people pulling us in different directions. In many ways, change is like tidying a cupboard or workspace. First you pull all the stuff out, then you sort through the clutter, throwing out what you no longer need, organising the remainder and repacking the cleared and cleaned space.
3. Whether you instigated the change or it was something imposed on you, there is an adjustment period where you experience elements of the grief  or change cycle: excitement, anger, denial, despair. It can catch you unawares, especially if it was a change you wanted.
4. Change gives you an opportunity to view the world differently. You can go down the ‘poor little me’ road of victimhood, the ‘what do you expect from a people like that’ road of villainy, the ‘there’s nothing I can do’ helpless road or any number of variations. The choice is yours and will dictate how you will experience the change and it’s long term effect. As the author and musician Tuli Kupferberg so eloquently, said: “When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.”
   
5. Change is now so endemic, it has become a cliché to say the only constant is change. Change is indeed the only thing we can be sure of in our five-sense world. Whatever we hang our security on, the economy, government, education, our job, partner, spouse, parents, children, it is likely to change. Hanging your security on these things is like building your house on sand, something is sure to shift sooner or later. It is becoming more and more imperative to find the constant factor within; the changeless within you. Hanging your security on that is building your house on rock.

Derbyshire Dales

Well, even though it is only two weeks, it seems an age ago I posted a blog.

I have been away helping a friend at the Business 2012 show which was held at the O2 in Greenwich, London. I have not been there since it was known as the Millenium Dome and had politicians fretting amongst themselves about it. Now it is a grand parade of restaurants and entertainment venues, built in such a way that should the dome structure be taken down, the interior can remain standing, no alteration required. I still think the dome is a fantastic engineering feat. My friend, Caroline Ainslee, owner and director of Bubblz Maths, had a field day taking photos of all the angles, structures, lines, shapes, in fact EVERYTHING that shows maths in real life.

Business 2012 had its own challenges and many learning points. There have been enough hot air exchanged over that; no need to contribute here.

The following weekend it was off to Bolton, via Coventry and the Peak District. The route we chose took us straight through Ashbourne where my friend and erstwhile colleague T lives. So we phoned T en route to see what she was doing that day and proposed to take her out for lunch. This was a spur-of-the-moment impulse. And what a delight! It was a perfect day for lunch in the sunshine at the Izaak Walton hotel in Dovedale, cradled amongst the greenest of hills in a peaceful embrace of nature.

T and I come a long way. Many, many years ago, T, another friend J and I worked together at a radiological practice in Turffontein, one of the southern suburbs in Johannesburg, South Africa. T and J were both from England, had been travelling the world and ended up in South Africa. They would often talk about their lives and families and friends back in England, using expressions and referring to characters, stories, icons, events and ‘stuff’ that were a closed book to me. It was a struggled to understand what the conversation was about, let alone follow it. I could hardly fathom their accents, especially T’s. She has a way with words that I am only now appreciating. Back then, I could not make out a word she was saying.

Back in those days I wanted out of radiography. T would keep on telling me ‘Stop moaning, Riana. Do something about it. There’s enough misery without you adding to it.’

Eventually I had myself a job as a computer programmer in a bank. Ha! You should have heard her then! ‘Well, now Riana. See how well you are doing! If it was not for me you’d still be stuck in Turf complaining.’

To cut a long story short, I came over to England in March 1999. A few years later T retired and came back to England, settling in Ashbourne. Shortly after, J came back to England. We all met up in Ashbourne to reminisce about ‘Turf and the old days’.

‘Who would have thought we’d all end up in England,’ we chirped in amazement and awe as we clinked our glasses and tucked into a delightful pasta dish, a T special, at T’s delectable dining room table.

And the next morning at breakfast: ‘Well now, Riana. You have me to thank. If it was not for me, you’d still be pressing buttons and taking X-rays at Turf. Look how far you’ve come! You should be very grateful I pushed you!’

These days, with T in the north, J in the south west, me in the south east, you mostly find us together on holiday. The first and to me the most memorable, was the time we went to Tuscany, Italy and stayed in a delightful villa, Villa Il Melograno, near San Gimignano. Since then there has been a stint in Corsica and another in Venice.

It was the Tuscany trip that did it for me. From From Turf to Tuscany just rolled off the tongue and has been waiting to be told. Yes, you have it here. It is the story of how three radiographers working together at Turf-(fontein) in Johannesburg end up in Tuscany, a turn of events that perfectly captures that quote from the movie Forrest Gump ‘Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.’

Ah yes! You might have guessed it. I am talking about ‘listening’. In fact, I’ll go further than saying listening is the forgotten skill and say it is a skill that most of us lack. We are never taught how to listen properly.

Hearing vs Listening: Hearing is a mechanical process. Sound reaches your eardrums as vibrations, travel through the middle and inner ear where it is converted to nerve impulses, then carried via the auditory nerve to the temporal lobes, the area in your brain where hearing takes place.  If you are not hearing-impaired, hearing simply happens. Listening, however, is something you consciously choose to do. Listening requires concentration so that your brain processes meaning from words and sentences. Most people tend to be “hard of listening” rather than “hard of hearing.”

How NOT to listen: This is how ‘hard of listening’ show up.  While ‘listening’ to the other person we are busy

• evaluating what they are saying,
• judging,
• jumping to conclusions,
• preparing our own responses,
• indulge in letting our mind wander,
• multitask,
• interrupt and sometimes we even
• talk over them,
• so anxious to say our piece, the minute they pause to breath and formulate their next thought, we’re in there with our opinions, thoughts, ideas, hijacking the discussion, showing how clever we are, making sure we get heard.

How to listen:  What to do instead?

• Be present, prepared to be nowhere else
• Give attention
• Listen with an open mind
• Tune in to feelings as well as to what is being said
• Keep quiet until the other person has said everything they want to say
• Watch for non-verbal clues
• Pay attention to how you talk to each other, as well as what you are talking about
• Ask the right questions at the right time. How will you know? When you have truly listened, you will know. Don’t take my word for it. Go test it.
• Skip the ‘why’ question. When you ask ‘why’ as in ‘why did you do that’, it begs justification. It is much better to ask ‘what made you do that’ or ‘what were you thinking?’ As a general guideline ‘Why’ gets you stories, ‘what’ gets you facts.  In my experience the question ‘What did you do that for’ gets you stories too, so be careful with that one.

Why? Yes, why should you listen?  Let me do that annoying thing and answer this with a series of questions.

• Would you rather be listened to in the way it is described under how NOT to listen or would you prefer someone paid attention and listened to you with their whole being?
• How do you experience it when you are not being listened to?
• How do you experience it when someone truly listens to you?   

If you have never had the experience of being truly listened to, go find someone who will do that for you, who will not judge you, cut you off, tell you off, ignore you or do any of the other annoying things that indicate they are not paying attention to you and only you.

Make sure you do the same for someone else.

Here’s your Challenge and it comes with a warning. Next time you have a conversation, practice listening, truely listening. When uncomfortable feelings come up, keep listening, let the words flow over you. Whatever it might mean, you could be wrong. Remember, best to ask the right question at the right time.

Warning. Truly listening creates an environment that makes the other person feel supported and safe. This means  they are likely to say things they would not normally divulge. Honour this trust. Take responsibility to keep it safe for you and the other person. If they say something that is hard to hear, you do not agree with or are finding difficult in any way,  breath to calm yourself. It is critical that you hold the space you have created. It’s OK to admit ‘this is hard for me to hear’. It’s OK to keep quiet.  As Susan Scott says ‘Let silence do the heavy lifting.’

Good luck and good listening!

‘Maybe stories are just data with a soul’.

I love stories, so this quote by Brené Brown speaks deeply to me. Brené studies human connection – our ability to empathize, belong, love. In this poignant and funny TED talk she shares a deep insight from her research, one that sent her on a personal quest to know herself as well as to understand humanity.

Click here to watch the 20 minute video. Enjoy!

There are plenty of quotes about fear. And a few acronyms too: FEAR standing for  False Expectations Appearing Real. Another version of this is False Evidence Appearing Real. More recently I heard a new one: Future-imagined Emotion Appearing Real.

Human beings are born with just two basic fears. One is the fear of loud noises. The other is the fear of falling. All other fears must be learned.

As I write this, I can feel the familiar telltale signs of fear in my body: My arms and legs feel heavy, my stomach feels tight, my throat constricted. All that, just because I am thinking and writing about fear!

Over the past week, the topic of fear has showed up in books and blogs I’ve read, in talks I have attended, in sessions with clients and in my own thoughts. Clearly the universe wants me to pay attention to where fear is showing up in my life. I have work to do.

This is how I will go about it.  Find a quiet spot, become still and ask myself some questions:

What is this wall you are hitting?
What are you fearful about?
What is fearful about that?
What is stopping you?
What is making you fearful?
When did you first feel this fear?
What is this fear stopping you from doing?
What will happen if you just do it?
What won’t happen if you do it?
What will happen if you don’t do it?
What will not happen if you don’t do it?

Well, that is quite a list of questions, it is likely to produce quite a list of fears and the process could keep me busy for a long time! So I’ll see if I can identify if there is one fear that underpins all the others and work on that one.

Now it’s your turn. Where is fear showing up in your life? Better still, work on the one that just popped into your head. Yes, THAT one!

Susan Jeffers wrote a book called ‘Feel the fear and do it Anyway’. It has been recommended to me a thousand times. I think it’s time I get my hands on a copy and I recommend you do to.

In the words of Dr Karl Menninger, ‘Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out.’ Better get going with that wish and the work – the world has need of courageous men and women.