Articles By Diane
Diane's Top Ten Tips For Personal Development & Elevated Wellness
We all want to be better people. We all want to be able to provide better results for our family, our friends and our loved ones. In today's modern world we associate this with materialistic gain and providing more in terms of financial support and gain.
Diane has chosen her top ten tips for personal development and wellness - tips that we can all identify with and try to work on to make us better people, far more powerful than any other level of support.
1) Responsibility for results. You are responsible for your results, nobody else.
2) Cause and effect. All actions will create results. Choose your actions / causes carefully for results that benefit yourself and ultimately others (good ecology).
3) Ownership. Own what is yours before dishing it out to others. Simply ask yourself these 2 questions... 1) 'whose issue is it really?' 2) 'what is my need to tell this person this?'
4) Perception is projection. What you cast out into the world comes from you and only you. What you say about somebody else says far more about you and it is based on your interpretation of the world. In other words, be careful what you say about others, as it is likely that what you're saying is actually about yourself.
5) Be the change in yourself that you want to see in the world, don't just nag other people for it, 'model' the change. If those around you are ready to change they will.
6) Laughter is important. Try and make sure you get 10 minutes of good laughter each day, take time out of a hectic day to laugh, joke and make light of situations.
7) Ensure you are fully hydrated. Try and consume at least 1.5 litres of water each day. Every chemical and biological reaction and action that happens in the body happens in the presence of water.
8) There is no such thing as failure, only further learning or what we could call feedback. If you can remove the meaning of failure you will remove fear from your life.
9) Try and adopt a method known as 'Self Awareness'. This basically involves looking at yourself and working out exactly how you feel at any particular point in the day. It requires you to take charge of your emotions, instead of your emotions pushing you around.
10) ) Happiness... someone to love, something to do, something to hope for...!
The link between stress, injury risk and recovery.
Your body runs off a nervous system that is responsible for many functions like a big electro-chemical circuit board. One of its main functions is to signal changes around your body. Changes in external conditions registered through the senses, changes internally carried by chemical messengers called hormones and changes in movement programmes ie. athletes, dancers with habitualised movement patterns.
There is also present the sort of programming that takes place with the emotional landscape of your life. Your mind remembers many things consciously and unconsciously. This mass of electro-chemical-neurological computation leads us to being truly a remarkable piece of carbon engineering!
It is because of this link that the body-mind relationship has to be considered especially if you want to remain exercise buoyant and injury free. In the East they have known and exercised through traditional Chinese Medicine, with great attention given to the whole landscape of an individual's health and not just the symptom like in Western medicine. It is rather like looking at a painting in a gallery and just noticing one of the features on the canvas, whereas in the East the whole of the image and its collection, colour, proportion and composition are all considered.
It is because of our sensitive hormonal system that we can find ourselves out of sorts. Hormones can become easily imbalanced and de-natured. A good example of just how delicate this can be for some is the chronic over use of a sugary diet. This can de-nature the hormone insulin so the body fails to regulate itself so becoming dependent on it either being regulated through close attention to nutrition or worse still having to externally inject Insulin twice daily.
Now, let's look at the body as a system when we are under stress. The hormone adrenaline is triggered as a response to a stressor (an external factor that you have internally represented as an anxiety provoking object or situation). Another bi-product of this aspect of our nervous system's response to a stressor is the elevation of a hormone called cortisol.
Cortisol is a vital part of our hormonal system but too much for too long starts to have many knock on effects including that of carbohydrate craving and weight gain. This is known as the activation of the sympathetic nervous system. It is our fight-flight switch and gets us out of trouble when needed. The problem exists when this is switched on for long periods as it erodes at healthy balanced tissues and cells in the body, leaching vital nutrients much needed for cell growth and repair.
So, if you are already injured and endure many stressors you need to be aware that your systems are already down and that recovery may take longer. If you are not injured or poorly you put yourself at further risk of both by having your systems 'run down' and you will literally hear people say 'I'm feeling run down ...'
As a psychotherapist I spend my time with many clients aiding them to re-frame and represent the way in which their internal landscape interprets the world they experience around them. This allows the stress levels to be moulded and modified as they are then in a greater state of control. They then are doing just that... managing their emotional and mental state. I suppose it is a little like looking at a half empty or full glass.
I have found that where there is stress or irritation for an individual, two things are present: 1. There is an unresourceful state present that may have a secondary purpose, in other words a pay off like an excuse to avoid, deliberate or procrastinate, and 2. An opportunity to take a great learning on some level and move on all that much wiser and informed!
Mind - Body Connection
If I was to ask you where your mind is in your body, could you point to it? My guess is you may have pointed up to your head. Some people point towards their heart, some make wild pointing gesticulations all over themselves! This is because (not to be too gruesome) if you were to do an autopsy there would be no possibility of ever coming across an organ called 'the mind'. So no matter where you pointed you may not have been far wrong...
Let's start with the brain. I want you to picture the brain, it's the crinkly, walnut, spongy looking organ, inside our skull. It's technically known as the neo-cortex, and coupled with the long strip of nervous tissue that goes down the centre of our back (the spinal cord) makes up our Central Nervous System (CNS).
It is spongy, rubbery, oily to touch tissue that over millions of years of development has folded over and over and over on itself, hence the crinkly look, in order to accommodate and maximise the multi-function systems that constitute our being. If it weren’t crinkly and folding over, our heads would be enormous to accommodate all the neural pathways.
This brain, is also known as the mammalian brain - the youngest part of our brain, having only developed in the last 2 million years (this is actually quite young in the whole scheme of our evolution).
You see, as mammals, we have evolved complex motor, social, cognitive and emotional function, unlike our reptilian fellow species. All this is well and good - there is no doubt that this part of our brain is HQ, where we have all those light bulb moments. Moments of remembering, of a connection being made, of something breaking through, where our neural pathways make a link, and we literally, consciously remember something.
Although HQ, it is still not the mind. So, like our evolutionary fellow species, let's go back even further in time, when we too were reptilian in our stage of development. Deep within our mammalian brain, the neo-cortex, you have a smaller much older brain, called the amygdale, around the size of a marble. Although very small it sits at the top of our spinal chord and presides over some of our most powerful behaviours and functions that have resulted in our survival and development and species.
This reptilian brain pre-dates the mammalian brain as we were still breathing water and air, with limbs that resembled a walrus' flippers! This brain still exists in our modern brain, with a hard-wired set of programmes, 5 of them in total. They are known as the '5 f's of function'. The most basic functions that at times rule, no matter how intelligent or cognitive we have become. I guess we can call them our basic instincts. They are known as follows ; 1) Fight 2) Flight 3) Freeze 4) Food 5) Fornication.
Powerful stuff! These instincts can sometimes get the better of us before our cognitive, mammalian brain, which is a bit slower, can get chance to fire and reason.
Finally, let's get down to understanding at a very basic cellular level and let me introduce you to a very ancient system that still to this day constitutes our very ability to function, to grow, repair, learn, and thrive.
Before we even had our reptilian brain, we were bundles of cells, without limbs, without a brain, without a spinal chord. These cells had an intelligence and that intelligence was locked up in the membranes that communicated strongly with the heat of the sun and the DNA from the cell nucleus and formed what we know today as 'neuro-transmitters' - commonly known as to you and I, as guess what? Our hormones.
This my friends, is where our mind and body connection truly exists - through your blood stream with intelligent electro-chemical messengers that tell you when to sleep, when to wake, when to fuel your body, when to get juiced, when to relax, when to be happy and pretty much govern every decision we make.
This article is merely scratching the surface in terms of understanding our bodies and ourselves. This constitutes a form of self / personal development.
Diane has now produced an audio CD based on her award winning Personal Development - a nutritionally informative seminar which gives us a greater understanding in the world we live. Look out for it being released soon.
