Happy New Year to you! Welcome to 2015
So much has happened since I last wrote to you that the festive season of Christmas and New Year seems very far away.
Just before Christmas, Keith and I had planned and plotted for a deal that we’d send out on Boxing day that would last 48 hours or so with a view to raising some money for
charity.
Keith set it all up, but before he sent it out, he had a stroke and was very poorly indeed.
Keith is out of hospital and has been at home resting and trying his hardest to get back into his work. I wrote this article on my blog on New Year’s eve if you’d like to read more about my thoughts on Keith, his stroke and his
reaction to it:
Anyway, Keith’s son Tom filled in for him and we ended up being incredibly busy at a time when we are often quiet. Lots has happened and we’ve been a hive of activity.
Getting Running
First up, my marathon training has
begun in earnest. At the beginning of each year, I join a project that is free for anyone to join that helps motivate, inspire and support. It is called Jantastic and you can sign up for free here if you are interested: jantastic.me
If you run, cycle
or swim, you can log your workouts and hold yourself accountable to goals you set for yourself. You can also set up and join teams. A few fellow hypnosis geeks and I have a team that you are very welcome to come and join. We are called the ‘Hypno Runners’ and we’d love to have you on board our team. Track us down and join in the fun.
I joked on my personal Facebook page this week about my seeming addiction to running technology,
this is what I wrote:
“Soooo...
- My Garmin 910 records the pace, distance and speed of my run and records the information from my heart rate monitor and the foot pod measuring my cadence.
- All this information is combined with the number of steps taken
each day and my sleep patterns, measured by my Garmin vivosmart.
- Then it is all uploaded at Garmin connect to study and examine. Garmin connect also imports all my dietary information logged with the Myfitnesspal app.
- All this then
automatically gets uploaded to Strava to share and where other people can gawp at your stats, mileage, routes run etc. plus Strava uploads to Jantastic to prove to everyone (especially those in my team) that I did the runs I said I did when I logged them.
I blimmin' love running technology.
Love it!”
For me, being able to log runs, examine my stats, share information with friends online and so on all helps to motivate, support and adds to the enjoyment.
I love technology,
I love gadgets,
I love running.
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The Hypnosis for running
blog of mine snapped into action as I ran into the new year too then. I shall be logging all my miles and progress on that blog in coming months as I train towards the London and Edinburgh marathons I am running. At the start of the week, I wrote this article showing this week’s training runs I had completed, my goals for the year ahead in relation to my running and some thoughts on what I have planned for the running blog:
One of the major things that I have in store for 2015 on the running front, is that I am going to be making a transition from marathon running to ultra marathon running. One thing I’ll be be doing later this year is running all four races, one after the other, at the Bournemouth marathon festival. I’ll be running the 5km race, then the 10km race,
then the half marathon before getting transported back to the start line for the full marathon. By Sunday afternoon I’ll have four shiny new medals. When I tell anyone about this, most people ask; why are you doing this Adam? So I thought I’d write about and list my reasons for doing so in this article that I wrote this week:
This Christmas was wonderful for me. My son has started to properly understand what it is all about and my daughter loves the fact that everyone else understands, I think. They are both so full of energy and have such a zest for life at this very early age that I am in awe of them both, and also ready for my bed by 7pm most nights. They had a ball. We ate drank, were merry, spent time with our closest friends and family and just
celebrated.
On Christmas Eve, we went on the Santa Express train journey in Swanage here in Dorset, got visited by Father Christmas on the train, then went to a local children’s carol service for a sing along before I cooked a traditional Norwegian dinner for my family (my Mother was born in Norway and
we like to keep this tradition alive).
We then put the plate out for Father Christmas before bed, that involved placing a bowl of special food out for the reindeers that my son had made at pre-school (it looked like a combination of porridge oats and tinsel, but he
told me it was magic), we also left a drink and mince pie for Father Christmas. Again, my son insisted that Father Christmas would prefer to drink a glass of fizzy orange than the port I was suggesting, so Father Christmas got Santa Fanta from us this year - he still drank it all.
We had a family and
fun-filled number of days that followed and visited homes of friends and had a great time, with the children being spoiled rotten. Then came the new year. My wife and I decided to have a quiet new year and while everyone else in the world (it seemed to us) was partying and out late, we had an early dinner at a restaurant with our children then got them to bed and we did not stay up much later. In years to come, we’ll get to go out late and party again, but this year, while we have a 1 year old
and a 3 year old, we were quite happy with the way things were. I went out on a run early in the morning of a frosty new year’s day, running past numerous people just finishing off their parties on the sea front, and 2015 was upon us.
One of the things I noticed when I logged into Facebook and twitter
over the New Year period was the amount of whining that went on. The sheer volume of people that were writing about how awful 2014 had been was incredible to me. I was staggered at how many people were citing all the things that they disliked about 2014 and how it had been an awful year and gave an air of being powerless to it all. Like the year happened TO them. Like they were passive recipients to the year that happened. I am not one to just ignore anything bad that happened, but in every year we can find something that is laudable and that can be celebrated. We can be honest about our year of course, and there is no need to try to disillusion ourselves that things
were great if they were not, but the whining about it is something that may actually kick off the new year in a very bad way for your mental health and emotional well-being. Let me explain…
We can all complain, but learn to complain in an effective way. In a solution focused way at least. Recognise that there is a great difference from complaining effectively and just whining in a way that could be detrimental to our health and
make us rather unpleasant to be around.
Effective complaining requires us to voice fair and legitimate dissatisfactions while actively seeking and aiming for a resolution of some kind. By voicing legitimate dissatisfactions without that desired outcome of a healthy resolution, we are merely venting. Effective complaining looks for a resolution, whining is just incessant venting. Often with whining, there's no reason or purpose to it.
The distinction is significant because complaining, venting, and whining, have very different effects on our psychological and emotional well-being
We all complain many times a day to our families, friends, colleagues, taxi drivers, Facebook connections and even strangers at the shopping checkout. Many of us seem to be unaware that the way we voice our complaints can effect our mental health and emotional
well-being.
Despite many people’s seeming reluctance to complain, (especially here in England where polite, ‘stiff upper lippedness’ is how we are characterised) the truth is that people complain today more than ever.
Does complaining help us get what we want or what will make us happier though? Often, complainers tend to find
themselves repeating the same complaints, grievances and dissatisfactions to one person after the other as they attempt to vent and be free of the frustration. Usually though, by repeating the complaint, we are simply reliving the frustration and the grievance all over again and perhaps making us feel worse as a result.
For some reason, people tend to identify with the idea of venting a
lot more easily than they identify with the idea of effectively solving problems. Most people tend to complain as a means of ‘getting stuff off their chests’ rather than actually attempting to create beneficial change.
Research shows that when people are dissatisfied with a product, 95% of them fail to
complain to the company or retailer because of fear that doing so will be annoying and time consuming, and those people often believe they will not get the outcome they want by complaining. Likewise, people generally tend to avoid complaining directly to our loved ones. The fear is that voicing such complaints only leads to arguments and does not resolve anything. Instead, many reach for the phone to call friends and vent to them, or go out with friends and vent to them, or vent their thoughts
and feelings on Facebook and other social media outlets. Such is the brief means of communicating with social media that the complexity of issues are often missed, and others can misunderstand and misinterpret.
There are so many things people complain about each day; the weather, public services,
levels of traffic, our partner, our children, our friends, work colleagues, films you disliked, TV shows featuring annoying people, poor customer service, poor products, news items, government, politics, rival hypnotherapy schools doing a disservice to the field (I think that’s just me) and the list goes on and on. Here’s the thing…. When we feel powerless in the face of so much dissatisfaction and frustration, we are left feeling without support, without hope, like a victim; we feel bad about ourselves. A single, isolated incident won't effect our mental
health in a negative way, but with so much ongoing whining building up day upon day, it can lead to frustration and helplessness that impacts our mood, our self-esteem, and even our general mental health. Much of which also tends to lead to more whining!
Yet in the past when we have effectively resolved an issue, or healthily voiced a complaint to your partner that led to an advancement of your
relationship, that solution focused complaint with a healthy outcome led you to feeling good about yourself, didn’t it? It beneficially effected your life.
Just as whining may negatively effect our emotional well-being and mental health, complaining effectively and achieving effective resolutions can be incredibly empowering and it can affect our mood and self-esteem for the better. Further,
learning to complain effectively to our loved ones will do wonders for our relationships.
All it takes to turn pointless whining into complaints that solve problems and create change is to learn the tools and techniques to complain effectively. Many of the articles that I share here in Adam Up do that and there are many more on my blog or that are written by other authors out there in the
world.
Effective complaining can also be fun, even hilarious and tantalising at times! Effective complaining is the ability to share our raw truth, express deep sincere feelings, be vulnerable and share with those you love or who you value. It is about embracing those inner feelings and trying to figure them out, so you can create a beneficial and satisfactory
resolution.
It can sometimes require us to muster up a lot of courage. It requires us to understand our own reality. It requires us to talk openly and honestly. It requires us to want to make things right. It sometimes means going against the grain a little bit.
The next time you
decide to whine on Facebook, or are about to call a friend to vent about something that frustrated you, ask yourself if it is something you would like to change. If so, consider skipping the whining and taking positive, solution focused action to complain effectively with the aim of creating a solution and making your life, mental health and emotional well-being all the better for it.
I hope
you have a wonderful start to the new year, I am really looking forward to getting stuck into 2015.
Joke of the
week:
We have two this week, both are psychiatrist jokes:
1. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a
light bulb?
One, but it really has to want to change.
2. A man walked into the office of the eminent psychiatrist Dr.
Heidberg, and sat down to explain his problem. "Doctor, doctor! I've got this problem," the man said. "I keep hallucinating that I'm a dog. It's crazy. I don't know what to do!"
"A common canine complex," said the doctor soothingly. "Relax. Come here and lie down on the couch."
"Oh no, Doctor," the man said nervously, "I'm not allowed up on the furniture."
Thanks to everyone who sends in the jokes, I love
getting them! |
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