In a plate full of goodness, you need a little treat.
Wherever you are in the lockdown, be kind to yourself.
I love chocolate…
If you relate to this article and need some more help and guidance in your life – get in touch with Alison. Here are her contact details.
Click to contact me Here
Tel: +44 7966 137568 Email: alison.wem@yoursoulfamily.com
Available face-to-face or via a video call depending on location.
Our children are often the dearest people in our hearts. We put a lot of time and effort into raising them. We want to know that they can have a good life ahead of them. No matter the age of your children, you never stop being a parent and wanting the best for them.
What can a parent do to help safe-guard their children?
By the nature of living in a changing world, the greatest gift for your child to not only survive within it but to thrive, is being flexible. Careers and jobs are no longer for life. Everyone expects to change them in a life time with a possible geographic move thrown in as well. Technology is moving fast and impacting our lives. Those who do not adopt it and take the best from it, are in danger of being left behind.
Are you being a good role model on flexibility?
While children are growing up, they tend to love routines and structure. These may well be useful and practical for maintaining a family schedule for times to eat and go to bed. But it is also useful to teach your children that changing the schedule is good if it leads to a better place or their environment necessitates it.
This is sometimes easier said than done. My son as a child loved his familiar routine. If we went on holiday, he would not change either the time to eat or sleep. It was a nightmare when we might want to stay out later to enjoy an evening walk or a meal. However, I do feel I brought this on myself. When it was just him and me at home, our lives ran better when we followed a schedule. When his baby sister arrived, we did not have this luxury. I still had to take and collect my son from school. The baby had to learn to wait for a feed or to sleep in her push chair if our family schedule necessitated it. My observation is my daughter grew up coping with being flexible more than my son.
As parents you want to warn your children of the inherent dangers in life. You may encourage them not to talk to strangers when they are little. When they grow older you warn them not to drink too much, to study and work hard, to manage their money carefully.
In all of this there is a danger you make your children fearful. It is important that they remain as curious about the world around them as they were as a baby and toddler.
There is a fine line between following your curiosity and safety
Curiosity keeps you engaged in the world and therefore informed on what may be upcoming in the future. With an understanding of upcoming changes, your children get the chance to consider what it will mean to them and to seek the benefits but mitigate the negatives. This gives them time to prepare and adapt to the changes.
An example of this today maybe Artificial Intelligence (AI). There is much fear around this topic from the risk of it being abused by powerful people and institutions. If this should happen, many people could be impacted negatively. However, used appropriately AI can bring many advantages to every day people like you and me.
If all fails, being resilient will help your children to get through any change that faces them. They may have a life plan of what they want to do, but they should be open to changing it. This can be rapid and significant if it is needed. No-one knows what these changes will be. But being able to ride the change is key to surviving and thriving in a new environment.
The conversations about being flexible, remaining curious and being resilient begin in childhood. However, it is my belief that the most important conversations happen in young adulthood and going forwards. As I said earlier, you never stop being a parent.
Of course, to be qualified to help your children as adults, you need to be all of these things yourself. It will not assist them if you use the rhetoric;
in my day……
You came into this life to learn and to enjoy the gift of life. Someone being unkind to you can feel like it disrupts this. We learn through challenges but sometimes an unkindness, particularly if it’s from someone close to you or that you love, seems to double how hard it feels.
The experience of unkindness is not the lesson.
No one wants you to experience pain.
The learning comes from how you choose to respond to the unkindness.
Your response can reflect in how you behave with others, but equally important is how do you behave to yourself. Do you allow the unkindness to strike at your heart and to unduly affect your energy and well-being?
Of course, you should consider what the other person did or said to you. Try to be clear on;
Whichever basis the unkindness came from, with this knowledge you can act more wisely with yourself. In both scenarios you will need to comfort and nurture yourself. But the learning will be different depending on the scenario.
If there was an element of truth in the unkindness, you may choose to adjust something in your life. But it is your choice, no one else’s. You should feel in control of what you do with your life. The change will only be affective if you accept the situation you need to change.
If it was an unkindness, you can choose not to allow it to impact you. This can be easier said than done, but the lesson may be about being strong such as having confidence in yourself and how you behave or make decisions, or holding your boundaries. Only you will know this.
If you are in this situation, you may want to make some changes in your life not to allow this person to do this again to you.
You are the most important person in your life
To be truly happy in your life, I feel it is about taking responsibility for it. Your choices today give you the life you experience tomorrow.
When you choose consciously and wisely, happiness will follow.
All of us experience grief at some point in our lives. When we experience it for the first time, it can come as quite a shock. It is often not talked about so it is hard to know how to deal with it.
When someone you love dies it can leave a big hole in your life. It can feel like life is no longer worth living. If there has been an illness and anticipation of death, you may have had the opportunity to say the important things you wanted to say such as how much you love each other or maybe forgiveness for a perceived wrong.
If, like me, the death was sudden and unexpected, you do not get the opportunity to say those important words. I believe that is why people say you should live every day as if it is your last and not to go to bed on an argument.
I believe grieving is the process of saying goodbye. Through this process you experience many emotions.
Listen to Alison Wem’s personal experience of widowhood and how to navigate the grieving process.
If you relate to this article and need some more help and guidance in your life Get in touch with Alison. Here are her contact details.
Click to contact me Here
Tel: +44 7966 137568 Email: alison.wem@yoursoulfamily.com
Available face-to-face or via Zoom/WhatsApp/phone.