How to Make Life Happen - By Gladeana McMahon - A Sheldon Press Book

Do you ever feel that you are on a treadmill and life is passing you by? Have you tried to slow down but found yourself thinking about yesterday and tomorrow at the expense of today? Do you try to do things differently but end up doing what you've always done? Do you think in a negative and self-defeating style but don't know how to change to something more positive and productive?

If you answered 'yes' to any or all of the above questions, and want to get more out of your life, then this book is for you.

How to Make Life Happen shows you how to:

• Llive in the moment - yesterday happened and tomorrow will come
• Create the life you have always wanted
• Change your negative thinking style to a more positive one
• Be successful and happy

The life-coaching skills in this book are all based on the sound psychological theory of cognitive-behavioural and positive psychology, and have helped many people take control of their lives. The message of this book is a simple one: today is all there is, and if you are prepared to do the work, you will see great changes. Get the most out of life, and really make it 'happen'.

How to Make Life Happen

Contents

Introduction

1 Life's purpose:

• My purpose - what is it, am I happy with it and can I change it?
• My messages - who says so?
• My rules - why I want what I do

2 Life's blocks

• Too much mind - I think, therefore I suffer
• Too scared to take a risk - what if I am wrong?
• Too angry to see clearly - I must get what I want
• Too dutiful to matter - sacrifice is always good
• Too hurt to move on - bad things happen

3 Life's strategies

• Personal qualities - compassion rules
• Live in the now - yesterday happened, tomorrow will come
• Use your mind to help - think clearly, it's more economic
• Change your negative emotions - realistic rules ok
• Learn to love - yourself included
• Managing life's pressures - minimize your stress

Useful addresses

Index

How to Make Life Happen

Introduction:

When life gets in the way of living: Paz, the telesales man, 2000

Have you ever felt that life is what happens when you are busy making other plans? It seems that, ironically, the more you set about planning to succeed, the more likely you are to set yourself up to fail. The full-on, 24/7 lifestyle has installed itself into every aspect of daily life. Terms such as 'success' and 'achievement' have been turned into buzzwords bandied around with alarming reverence. You may be so busy running to jump your next life hurdle that you end up missing your own journey. Success is seen as the ultimate goal as you strive to be a successful parent, lover, worker and even human being. You may feel that if you are not successful it must be because you are faulty goods. Hard work and determination equals success, and anything less than success is often experienced as a sense of personal failure.

Gurus of the day tell you to make the most of every minute - that life is not a dress rehearsal and that if you want to you can achieve anything. All it takes is the will to succeed. Yet the more successful you are, perhaps the less at peace you may find yourself feeling.

The explosion of twenty-first-century technology means being exposed to more information, more quickly than ever before - yet are you any happier, contented or at peace with yourself or those around you? Does technology help you connect with others or does it simply provide a way of busying yourself while you become even more isolated from what really matters? The Internet means you can keep in touch with family and friends anywhere, any time. New friendships can be made and interests shared. It also means being bombarded with adverts for goods you do not want, having to worry about child controls to ensure you keep your children safe and facing the possibility that you may lose your partner to someone met in one of the numerous cyberspace chat rooms. For an increasing number of people it means an extra drain on time with up to 300 emails a day requiring some form of action. As one person told me, 'I deleted 700 emails last month but even that took time and I was still left with 500 that needed actioning in some way.' Complete the picture with mobile phones and pagers and we really are able to claim our status as another 24/7 commodity.

How many people can honestly say they are immune from the expectations of others? We are bombarded from the day we are born with external messages of what is right, wrong, acceptable or undesirable. Friends, family, employers and society at large have shaped our attitudes, thoughts and behaviours. It is possible to live a life by rules we are not even aware of. Advertising is full of images that tell us how we should look, what is attractive, what possessions or attributes make us part of the elite or, perhaps, how the lack of these things means we are relegated to the bottom division – outsiders in a world of insiders, have-nots in a world of haves.

Life can feel like a treadmill. You recognize the feeling but don't know how to get off. Many people experience increasing levels of unhappiness so that stress, depression, illness and destructive behaviours increase annually. According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists prescriptions for antidepressants have more than doubled in England, from 9 million in 1991, to 22 million in 2000. The State of the Nation Survey carried out by Alcohol Concern reported that one person in 13 is dependent on alcohol in the UK. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) estimates that over 360 million working days a year are lost due to stress-related illnesses. NetDoctor, an Internet-based service, undertook a survey that suggested one in three people felt life to be less than worthwhile, while one in ten thought they would be better off dead. It costs the NHS 3,000,0000 a year for psychiatric treatment of stress-related illnesses, and sleep difficulties are one of the most commonly reported symptoms of stress. Seventy per cent of the 4,000 annual suicides in the UK are people suffering from depression and 15 per cent of those experiencing depression go on to commit suicide. One person in ten suffers from panic attacks.

Perhaps you long to experience the elusive 'quality of life' that you hear so much about, to share a sense of belonging, of being loved and feeling connected to others and at one with the world around you.

You may have put life off as you wait for the day when you have reached the temple of success. Once there, you believe, you can begin to live - you will have earned the right to stop. You will no longer have to strive and can start your family and those painting classes you have always longed to take up. You can then watch others struggle as you bask in the glory of arrival. Your twenties and thirties speed by while you tick off your personal life tasks, each eagerly jumped upon to reach your goal. Only, somehow, it's all rather like a bad dream. It does not matter how fast you run - your goal is always just out of reach.

Is it any wonder that more and more people feel cheated, as if someone has played a huge cosmic joke that leaves a sense of feeling empty, resentful, depressed and scared? Empty from the reality of having missed living in the present, as our sights have been so firmly set on tomorrow. Resentful because there is no magic pay-off, only the cold recognition of self-delusion. Depressed because we cannot reclaim the years wasted, however much we yearn to go back and do it all again. Fear becomes claustrophobically oppressive as we realize we know no other way of being in the world.

This book sets about helping you, the reader, to think about your life and your values. It is based on my 30 years of working as a therapist with a range of clients from all walks of life, experiencing a variety of personal challenges, issues and problems. It is a celebration of the human spirit and our unique ability to find creative answers.

This book is also based on my own personal life experiences. Therapists are not immune from change or from struggling with the complexity and uncertainty of life. We make mistakes and take detours like everyone else, but if we use our training well we try to learn from these and to use them to help our clients and also to enrich our own personal lives. Some would say this is 'walking the talk'. I have made mistakes - sometimes glaringly obvious ones. With the benefit of hindsight, I wonder how I could not have seen the implications: sometimes these were not so obvious and only became apparent as life unfolded, and sometimes things have happened that I have had no control over but I have not handled as well as I could have. For me all of this is about being a fallible human being, with the emphasis on 'human'.

There are activities and exercises in this book to help you focus on living in the moment. As you discover how you hold yourself back, You will also learn how to find greater fulfilment on a daily basis. There are stories about real people who have turned their lives around.

If you want to put meaning back into everyday life, it's time to stop and experience living in the present. It's time to put the soul back in your life. Forget success and ask yourself: what's your soul purpose? This book is about finding your own understanding of concepts such as 'feeling connected', 'living in the now', and 'simply being'. Discover how it is possible to shape your future while ensuring you experience life on a daily basis.

When I first heard the song 'Perfect Moment', the title seemed to say it all. A perfect moment is about feeling peaceful and at one — it's about wanting that joyful experience to stay for as long as possible, and it's about being open and able to recognize and cherish such moments when they occur.

People automatically assume that, as a therapist, I have all the answers. I don't - I too have struggled with recognizing that yesterday has happened and tomorrow will come. I have had to learn that the best past and most fruitful future come from making the most of being in each day. I have the kind of personal history that many of my clients have experienced and I have had to face many of the issues that you, the reader, may face. I have turned adversity into success. So, why is it that some people turn misery into joy while others seem trapped for ever in the worst kind of living hell? Many of you may think it is all down to luck. My professional and personal experience tells me it is down to hard work and facing the fear of change.

• I want this book to help you shape your life

About the author: Gladeana McMahon was listed by the Independent on Sunday and the Observer as one of the UK's top ten coaches and is also a respected cognitive-behavioural psychotherapist. Each year Gladeana attempts to train in one new subject area which makes her perhaps one of the most well-trained and rounded practitioners when it comes to understanding the many ways of helping people change. She combines academic rigour with down-to-earth communication skills, and coaches politicians, senior business people and those in the media and performing arts.

Her books include No More Anxiety - Learn to be Your Own Anxiety Coach, Confidence Works - Learn How to be Your Own Life Coach and Coping with Life's Traumas. Gladeana is a Fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, Association for Coaching, Institute of Management Studies and Royal Society of Arts.

Gladeana is also Co-Director of the Centre for Stress Management and Centre for Coaching and is an Honorary Visiting Lecturer in the Psychology Department of the University of East London, where she taught for many years on the Diploma and Masters programmes.

Her media work includes being co-presenter for ITV's Dial a Mum, a holistic emotional make-over show; smart coach for BBC1's Get Smarter in a Week; Life Coach for the GMTV website and stress coach for the Channel 4 website. She has been involved in Channel 4's Big Brother and was the originator of the UK's Ethical Guidelines for Reality TV produced by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. She provided the psychological assessments for many well-known programmes such as Britain's Next Top Model, Evacuation, Brat Camp, Bad Lads Army, The Club and That'll Teach Them Too.