Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

Welcome to Weird Words and Coaching Questions, which gives you something to think about and chew over during the week. Hopefully you’ll find answers that make life richer, easier and more fulfilling.

Instructions for use: you don’t have to answer any or all the questions – just skim them and dwell on anything that you feel in your body. If you feel a lightness, hope, or a sucker punch to the gut, stop and dig in there. However, if you have the complete-and-finish gene, then start at question 1 and carry on until done.

At a writing workshop with a couple of others a few months ago, we talked about our writing habits. I mentioned that I write (pretty much) every day and after the shocked faces had realigned themselves, someone asked how I fit it into the day.

After a little think, I realised that, to feel like I’ve earned my place on the sofa at the end of the day, with a glass of something, I need to have done something that feels worthwhile. So, working backwards, I need to write, because that’s my Worthwhile Thing. (I know in an ideal world, if I were truly at peace with myself, I wouldn’t have to ‘earn’ that place on the sofa, but we are where we are.)

This week I’m thinking about abendrot.

Abendrot (German) (say, “aaab’n-dote”). The colour of the Western sky at sunset. From “Abend”, meaning evening, and “rot”, meaning red.

Literally, it’s the colour of the sky, but metaphorically it’s all sorts of things, especially to do with motivation.

It’s the end of the day and staying motivated to feel satisfied that the day’s been good (that’s mine, and you can have it too).

It’s the end of our lives and looking back.

It’s who we share the sunset with, if anyone at all.

It’s thinking about tomorrow.

What about endings generally or specifically?

An afterglow – what’s good about an ending and

What do you need to let go of?

These are the themes we’re looking at with this week’s coaching questions - endings and motivation.

An ending can be beautiful.

1. Abendrot doesn’t describe the absence of day. It’s the name for something that happens because the day is ending.

What endings have you had that may not have been beautiful at the time but with hindsight, were lovely?

Was it time and perspective that made it lovely, or was it supplemental wisdom from someone else that helped you see things differently?

2. What if the end of something isn’t evidence that it failed?

Some things reach a natural conclusion. Are you telling yourself a ‘failure’ story when actually it was a natural death or demise – of a relationship, a job you loved, anything important?

3. What becomes visible because something is coming to an end?

A woman I once knew was a delight to be around – until she wasn’t, and when the friendship ended I could then see more of the things I didn’t like but hadn’t admitted to myself. My intuition had been whispering “Don’t tell her this” and “Don’t trust her with that,” and the ending meant I could see what it meant.

4. What might be beautiful about this chapter that you can only see now?

The wisdom you gained through difficulties? The new perspectives you hadn’t considered? Things and people you were introduced to?

5. Are you trying to make an ending meaningful?

We are meaning-making machines, as human beings, but sometimes endings are just endings and there’s nothing we need to read into them, but we do need to let them go.

Which leads us to…

The glow isn’t permanent.

Abendrot is transient. You don’t possess it; you just witness it like the recent eclipse.

6. What are you trying to hold onto that is just asking to be appreciated rather than preserved?

How can you wish it well and let it go?

I have a little ritual of washing my hands and letting the whatever-it-is wash down the plughole with the water. Or when I see those dandelion seed heads floating nearby, I try to catch it, whisper to it and blow it away (like we did with wishes when we were kids). Similarly, a cloud – imagine popping your thing to let go of on the cloud and waving it off.

7. What if the value of this moment is partly because it won’t last?

How do we sear it into our memories and hold it tight when we want to? Baby’s firsts, the dying loved one’s lasts.

There is a difference between closure and completion.

Sunset is only the end of daylight.

8. What exactly is ending?

What are you saying is “over” simply because one version of it is over? Babyhood becomes childhood (you’re still a parent), shitty partners can be better with someone else (you’ve still been loved and will be again), crappy friends can be left to their own devices (you were still a good friend and will be again), jobs/clients that were great teach us a thing or two.

What wants to be completed, and what wants to be carried forward?

What are you ready to leave behind, and what are you taking with you?

Abendrot is an afterglow.

The light you’re seeing isn’t simply “the sun going down.” It’s light interacting with the atmosphere. At low solar angles, the light travels through more atmosphere and the shorter blue wavelengths are scattered more strongly, leaving more red visible. (Every day’s a school day; I’d forgotten that before I looked it up).

So the metaphor is that sometimes, what we experience as an afterglow is created by the conditions surrounding an ending.

9. What remains after the thing itself has passed?

Chewy question:

10. What if you are in your abendrot and don’t yet realise it?

Not necessarily in a morbid sense. You could be at the end of a career chapter, a leadership identity, a relationship with a goal, a way of working, or simply an old version of yourself.

The question becomes not “How do I stop this ending?” but “What is this ending making visible?” What’s it showing me?

That’s it for this week, I hope these help shake something interesting loose.

Until next week,

All the best,

Elspeth.

Buy me a coffee? Why, thank you!

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

Welcome to Weird Words and Coaching Questions, which gives you something to think about and chew over during the week. Hopefully you’ll find answers that make life richer, easier and more fulfilling.

Instructions for use: you don’t have to answer any or all the questions – just skim them and dwell on anything that you feel in your body. If you feel a lightness, hope, or a sucker punch to the gut, stop and dig in there. However, if you have the complete-and-finish gene, then start at question 1 and carry on until done.

If I said you were insouciant, and you thought it meant careless, thoughtless, or heedless, you’d be a bit offended. But stay with me here.

For my fellow word-nerds: insouciant apparently entered English in 1828, from French insouciant, which did indeed mean careless, thoughtless, or heedless.

From in-, meaning “not” and souciant, meaning “to care”.

But souciant comes from the Latin sollicitare — to agitate, to disturb, to solicit.

So insouciant doesn’t literally mean “not caring” in the casual, contemporary sense. From its Latin root, it means not being troubled or disturbed: not allowing things to agitate you.

And that’s where we’re going with this week’s coaching questions:

1. Insouciance can be a positive state, like the childlike insouciance you feel when you’re watching cartoons instead of paying your bills.

So, as a fleeting feeling, when do you feel insouciance – where are you, what are you doing, who is with you, and when and how often do you get to feel it? Name this.

2. The easy breeziness of insouciance isn’t always considered beautiful, however. Merriam-Webster calls it “light-hearted unconcern” and describes it as “nonchalance”.

Are you able to fully engage with the childlike insouciance, or does something nag at the back of your mind and tap you on the shoulder to remind you to get back to adulthood?

3. Insouciance isn’t about not having troubles but about being able to set the troubles to one side and/or be able to balance them with some carefree living, if only for a short while to start with.

What story have you been telling yourself about being less burdened by worry and care? That you’ll do it when you’re on holiday? For when the kids are safe and stable? For when you’ve got the all-clear from your health concerns?

4. On a 1 to 10 scale, how heavy does the burden feel? And on a 1-to-10 scale, how much do you want to put it down and feel a little less heavy from it?

For the scores you gave above, if either was over 7,

(1) why did you give it that score? Put it into words.

(2) And (2) how can you dial it back a little – only by a point or 2, but just to ease the weight a bit?

(3) What’s the first step to doing that, and when will you do it?

5. Are you making insouciance a performance? Do you cultivate a look or a lifestyle that looks easy from the outside, but inside and under the water you’re flapping like mad, scared people will find out, and fighting the urge to curl up in a ball?

What’s that performance costing you?

6. Miles Davis (1926 –1991) was an American trumpeter, bandleader, composer, and painter. One of his signature ‘things’ was insouciance: he had no concern for or interest in what his listeners might prefer. He just did what he liked and was insouciant if people liked it or not.

This gives us the paradox of insouciance for women our age. Deliberate not-caring can be more magnetic and more powerful than effortful engagement and micro-management. For women who have spent decades trying hard to please, this is a really subversive idea.

A simple question then: what might happen if you just let go? List everything that you think might happen from “my kids would think I didn’t care anymore” to “Gladys down the street might think I’d lost it.”

And would any perceived consequences really matter? Use the 1 to 10 scale for how much each might matter, if it helps.

If letting go of something matters a lot, how do you mitigate that? How can you ease your grip but keep your sanity?

7. Sollicitare - to agitate, to disturb - is the same root as “solicitous“ (anxiously concerned) and “solicit“ (to approach someone with a request). Insouciant, at its etymological root, means refusing to be solicited by the world’s demands on your attention and energy.

Insouciance risks being read as passivity or privilege. The key is how do we/you:

a. Stop taking everything on board as your responsibility (if that’s your habit)

b. Learn to put down the burdens we carry more often, and put them down for longer periods each time

c. Discern which troubles deserve most concern and which simply don’t.

d. Take back control of things that feel like they control you?

The Polish (I think) have a saying, “Not my circus, not my monkeys”, which I love, and say in my head on an almost weekly basis. It helps me to stay away from things that don’t involve me and don’t need to involve me.

For the anxieties that feel like they’re gripping me round the throat, and that don’t respond to reason and a stiff talking to, I focus on breathing, do a bit of yoga or go for a walk in nature.

Over to you.

That’s it for this week. Have a good one, and until next Monday,

All the best,

Elspeth.

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Buy me a coffee? Why, thank you!

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

Welcome to Weird Words and Coaching Questions – your weekly guide to something weird that’s actually something every day.

This week’s word is ineffable.

Ineffable has two distinct meanings. The first and most common meaning is beyond expression, too great for words, inexpressible. This dates from the late 14th century.

The second arrived in the 1590s and is that which must not be uttered: the taboo dimension.

We’re going to look at both these meanings in this week’s coaching questions.

The intersection of both - the beautiful experiences or the ones too overwhelming to express in words, and the painful/shameful/taboo experiences – is what we Gen X-ers are rich in.

This week’s coaching questions.

The ineffable that’s too beautiful for words

1. Think of a time when you experienced something so beautiful or so moving that language genuinely failed you. Sometimes there just aren’t words in your particular language, and sometimes words diminish an experience. What was it? Have you let yourself return to it since, or have you filed it away under things that don’t count because they can’t be explained?

2. Frederick Douglass wrote of being filled with “ineffable sadness”. What is the ineffable sadness you carry? Sometimes it’s background noise and sometimes it screams. It’s the one that sits under the sadness and losses you can explain, probably some place where grief doesn’t have language. When did you last acknowledge it, even to yourself?

3. We live in a culture that insists everything be captioned, posted, described and explained. Ineffable experiences are the ones that resist words but are often the ones that matter most. Have you been trying to make your ineffable experiences expressible? What would it mean to just let some of them remain beyond words: felt but not shaped into something coherent?

The ineffable too taboo to speak

4. The second meaning of ineffable is that which must not be uttered: the unspeakable because it’s forbidden. What’s the thing in your life that falls into this second category? Something that’s too uncomfortable, complicated or threatening to other people’s narratives to say out loud? How long have you been keeping it ineffable, and what does keeping quiet cost or mean to you? You might be glad no one else knows, so even though it’s ineffable, that’s ok. It might not.

5. Every family has its ineffables. These are the things nobody names, the dynamics nobody describes, the history that’s kept hidden. What is the ineffable in your family of origin, and how much of your adult life has been shaped by a silence you inherited rather than chose?

6. Victorian society called trousers “ineffables” because they were considered too scandalous to name directly (it was a jokey euphemism, but god, the Victorians were a weird bunch). What are your everyday ineffables? Is there anything you don’t talk about for fear of other people’s discomfort? What would happen if you named it anyway?

Language for the unspeakable

7. There are things you’ve never said to another person, not because you lack the words but because the right listener has never been there to hear them. Who do you have in your life who could hold your ineffables without flinching? When did you last trust someone enough to try?

8. Writing practice allows us to approach the ineffable without domesticating it: the page can hold what conversation can’t. What would you write, privately if you allowed yourself to look at, reach toward or hold the thing that has been unspeakable? Not to fix it, but just to let it exist in language for the first time.

Silence and identity

9. I read something the other day that said: “Every word we write releases what silence kept.” Well, huh. We are partly defined by what we choose to keep ineffable. Does that definition still work for you, or has the weight of your unspeakables become something you carry because you’ve never got around to putting it down?

The chewy one

10. Ineffable comes from the Latin meaning not capable of being spoken out. What is the most important true thing about yourself that you have never spoken about? Not the thing you’re most ashamed of, but the one that’s most you. What would it cost you to say it, and what would happen if you kept it silent for another ten years?

That’s it for this week. Have a good one,

All the best,

Elspeth.

Buy me a coffee? Why, thank you!

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

This week’s word is probably not new to you, especially if you’ve worked in a corporate environment for more than 5 minutes. Don’t be put off though, I’m hoping we can bring it home and make it genuinely useful in a personal setting.

Kaizen was developed in post-war Japanese manufacturing. It’s the concept of continuous improvement, but what does that even mean to a woman who has probably spent decades improving herself for other people’s benefit? Be a better mother, a more attentive partner, 1% increments, a more efficient employee, kill the mornings, blah blah blah.

If you’re at a point where self-improvement for its own sake or anyone else’s is beneath your contempt, this is for you.

This week’s coaching questions:

Let’s reframe “improvement”

1. If kaizen means continuous improvement, what and why are we improving, exactly? And according to whose definition? Whose voice do you hear when you decide what needs improving? Is it yours? (Really, truly yours?)

2. At what point does continuous self-improvement become continuous self-erasure? How would you know the difference?

3. Kaizen in its original Japanese manufacturing context was a collective practice. Everyone in the factory contributed observations about what could work better. So, who in your life do you trust enough to tell you honestly where you’re stuck? When did you last ask them for help?

Big steps/little steps

4. The premise of kaizen is that tiny, consistent steps compound into transformation over time. In which areas of life are you focused on making big changes so you end up paralysed and making none at all? What is the smallest possible version of that change that you could make today?

5. Kaizen rejects the dramatic overhaul – things like the Monday diet, the January reset, the radical reinvention. Are you one for dramatic restarts, and how many have you attempted in the last five years? How could you replace the next one with something so small it barely feels like a decision?

6. There is a version of kaizen that becomes perfectionism in slow motion - the endless micro-optimisation of a life that is really perfectly fine as it is. Are you putting effort into improving something that needs improving? Or – chewy question alert - are you using the idea of growth to avoid being content with what you already are?

So, what actually needs improving?

7. If you had to identify the one area of your life where a 1% improvement every week for a year would make the most meaningful difference, what would it be? Not the most impressive difference, but the most meaningful one.

8. Kaizen looks to identify the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Most people find the gap uncomfortable and either deny it or catastrophise it. What happens when you just sit with your gap? Don’t try and fix it, or feel bad about it: just see it clearly?

Are there limits of improvement?

9. Kaizen has no off switch. In its purest form, it is continuous, ongoing, never complete. What would it mean if you decided that some things are not for improving and they’re simply for living? Which parts would you choose?

The chewiest question

10. Here is the question kaizen doesn’t ask but should: what if you are not the thing that needs improving? What if the systems, relationships, expectations and environments around you are the things that need changing? The system we live in wasn’t designed for women in the main – or for the roles/body shapes/life stages etc. women have and have been put in.

That’s it for this week.

Thanks for reading, happy thinking and see you next week,

All the best,

Elspeth.

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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

Welcome to Weird Words and Coaching Questions. This week we’re going to feel the wind in our whiskers.

Uitwaaien (say “oat-vi-en”) is Dutch, meaning to go out into the wind, often for a walk or bike ride, to clear your head and refresh your mind. It combines uit, meaning “out” and waaien, meaning “to blow.”

It’s a long-standing tradition of integrating nature with daily life for in order to find mental clarity and promote a feeling of wellbeing.

This week’s coaching questions:

Your current relationship with wind and weather (even in the middle of summer)

1. Have you ever been outside specifically because the weather was wild rather than despite it - and what happened when you did? If you can’t remember, might that mean you’ve been waiting for conditions to be comfortable before you allow yourself to feel alive?

2. A walk in the wind does not ned a destination. You don’t need to walk quickly or think about where to turn. So, where are you so focused on destination and direction that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to simply move without an agenda? What would ten minutes of purposeless movement feel like?

3. Uitwaaien works because wind is impossible to control, predict or manage (unless you’ve got a sail, perhaps). It simply happens. Where are you most resistant to being “happened to” and what is that costing you? How can you relax a little and go more with the flow?

Clearing our heads in practice

4. What are you currently giving a lot of mental real estate that’s been there so long you’ve stopped noticing it? If the wind could blow one thing out of your head this week - one circling thought, unresolved worry, conversation you keep rehearsing or re-hashing, what would you choose?

5. When the Dutch need to clear the mind and prepare for what comes next, they go uitwaaien. What are you trying to prepare for, and are you really preparing (I mean really really), or are you turning over the same stale indoor thoughts on repeat? What would happen if you took them outside instead?

6. We often clear our heads through reading, journalling or quiet indoor stillness – all of which are brilliant. Uitwaaien is about clearing our heads through physical exposure to something larger and wilder than ourselves. When did you last try that, and was it different from your usual methods?

Practical implementation

7. The Dutch practice uitwaaien as something very ordinary. It’s so central to Dutch life that students can’t understand the fuss among foreigners about the term, as if it is something special. “This is just life.” How could you build one ten-minute uitwaaien into your week? Not as a wellness practice or self-care, just as something you do because you need the air? When exactly would it happen, and where?

8. Where do you live that has wind? A coast, a hill, an open park, a field at the end of a road? Norfolk? Name the specific place you would go. The more concrete you make it now, the more likely you are to actually make it happen.

9. Uitwaaien is most effective in genuinely wild, windy weather. When did you last deliberately choose to go out in weather most people would stay inside to avoid? Did it work the way the Dutch say it does?

10. You already know what it feels like to come back inside after proper wind: slightly battered, unexpectedly calm, more yourself than you were an hour ago. The question isn’t whether uitwaaien works. It’s why you keep forgetting to do it when you most need it! Action is where the magic happens.

Until next week,

All the best,

Elspeth.

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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

Welcome to Weird Words and Coaching Questions: a short weekly email with chewy contents. Mind your teeth, and let’s get into it.

In 1877, George Eliot believed she had coined the word meliorist. She said, “I don’t know that I ever heard anybody use the word ‘meliorist’ except myself.”

She is credited with giving a name to a philosophical position that lies between optimism and pessimism, meliorism is the view that the world can be made better by human effort. Unlike optimism, which might assume everything will get better, meliorism emphasises active effort to improve things.

It’s the distinction between passive hope and active betterment, and it’s the focus of this week’s coaching questions.

The difference between hoping and doing

1. Optimism says things will probably get better. Meliorism says things will get better if we do something about them. Which of these are you practising at the moment? It might be at a micro (your own little cosmos) or at a more macro level – in your community/workplace etc. Does it depend how much energy you’ve got, or is that just me!?

2. Meliorism aims at improvement rather than perfection, so it’s a longer, more calibrated approach. Have you ever abandoned something improvable because it wasn’t perfect? And what would one tiny, concrete act of betterment look like this week?

3. George Eliot invented the word meliorist because neither optimist nor pessimist described her accurately. If you had to invent a word for your own attitude to the possibility of change, what would it be?

Where you direct your effort

4. Meliorism is a philosophy of appropriate action. If you could only improve one thing in your life this week or month (not fix it or perfect it), what would it be? Again, what’s the smallest possible action that would count as movement? Remember that action is where the magic happens.

5. In which areas of your life are you currently putting energy into things that can’t be improved: work situations, relationships or past versions of yourself that are finished? How do you know the difference between something that’s open to possible meliorism, and done?

6. If meliorism were a houseplant, what condition would yours be in right now: thriving, surviving, dramatically drooping, or quietly dead in a corner? And what would watering it look like in practice this week?

7. Meliorism sits between “everything will be fine” and “nothing can be changed.” Sometimes we need to take a beat and acknowledge the difficulty of a situation as well as our power to improve it, without collapsing into either false comfort or helplessness. Are there times you find yourself unable to hold both these things at once?

8. How could you to try?

That’s it for this week, happy chewing and happy meliorating,

All the best,

Elspeth.

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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

Welcome to Weird Words, with Coaching Questions to muse and amuse for the week.

Some of us are fortunate to have someone we’d describe as our soulmate, bestie, our 4-in-the-morning friend, the person we ring after six months of busyness in our own lives, and pick up where we left off. No explaining, no apologies or excuses; they’re the person who lets us be our favourite self or our worst self and doesn’t raise an eyebrow in judgement. A genuinely rooted, rock-solid friend.

Our anam cara.

Anam cara is Irish Gaelic, from the early Celtic church, meaning “soul friend.”

Read more about this in John O’Donohue’s book from 1997: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. He argues that anam cara is not limited to another person. You can have this soul-friendship with yourself, with a place, with your own creative work.

This week’s coaching questions.

Recognising an anam cara

1. Think of the people in your life, past and present. Who has seen you without your mask? Not the version of you that performs, manages, and explains…you know, the other one. Did you let them see that, or did they find their way to you, and stayed?

2. When did you last feel genuinely heard and understood? And when did you last offer that quality of seeing to someone else?

3. The Celtic tradition held that an anam cara could be a teacher, companion or spiritual guide: someone who accompanied you through the inner landscape of your life. Who is that for you, and have you ever told them what their presence in your life has meant?

The absence or loss of anam cara

4. Have you lost your anam cara? Maybe they’d died, or you’ve drifted apart or allowed the relationship to become more surface-level? What happened, and is any of it retrievable?

5. Introvert women are vulnerable to the loneliness that comes from the absence of people who truly know them. Layer some trauma on that and it’s a double-edge sword: they want someone to bear witness, but don’t want to be seen or noticed. Is that your loneliness? And have you named it to yourself before now?

6. If you don’t have an anam cara, what do you tell yourself about why: too busy, too private, too much has changed? How much of that story is true, and how much is protection?

Anam cara with yourself

7. O’Donohue believed you could be your own anam cara, and psychology often says that the quality of soul-friendship you offer yourself determines the quality of connection available to you with others. How would you describe your current relationship with your own soul? Is it one of companionship and honesty, or more critical?

8. What parts of yourself have you never introduced to anyone, not because they’re shameful, but because you’ve never found anyone you trusted enough to show them to? And what would it mean to begin that introduction with yourself first?

Building anam cara connections in midlife

9. Deep soul-friendship asks for a lot of courage and the willingness to be known at a level that makes us genuinely vulnerable. Where do you currently choose the safety of surface connections over the risk of being seen?

10. If you were to write a letter to your own soul, what would you need to say that you’ve been keeping quiet? And is there one person in your life to whom you could say even a fraction of that, if you chose to?

That’s it for this week. Wishing you an anam cara in your life,

All the best,

Elspeth.

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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

I’ve been thinking about another word about forks we meet on the road and how we make decisions when we’re there. It’s not something we face once in a while: we’re looking at them all the time.

This is quatervois. (say quarter-vwa)

First recorded around 1575 and last recorded in the early 1700s, it’s an archaic English word derived from French quatre (four) + voie (way), meaning a place where four roads meet, and by extension a critical decision or turning point in life.

This week’s coaching questions.

On recognising a quatervois

1. Think of a pivotal moment you’ve had. You might only recognise it in retrospect or perhaps you saw it at the time. What was the first signal your body sends you before your mind catches up?

2. Where do you feel the weight of a critical decision physically, and how reliably do you listen to it? Do you trust it?

On how you make decisions at critical moments

4. When you reach a quatervois, what is your default: do you decide quickly and live with the consequences, freeze and wait for the path to become obvious, consult others before you trust yourself, or something else? Maybe it depends on the situation and the quartervois, but is that default serving you, or is it a habit you’ve never thought about?

5. What quartervois have you met or been confronted with where you made the decision primarily to avoid disappointing someone else? What did you sacrifice, and is any of it still retrievable now?

6. What is the difference, for you personally, between a decision made from fear and one made from genuine choice? Can you tell them apart in the moment, or only with hindsight?

7. When you are facing a critical decision, what does your wisest self say? Not the anxious self or the people-pleaser. How often do you let her speak before the noise of everyone else’s expectations drowns her out?

8. Which quatervois in your life do you still return to because you feel you took the wrong road, or where you wonder about the road you didn’t take? Not with regret necessarily, but with curiosity: what do you imagine was down that other path, and how much of that imagined life are you still carrying?

9. Looking back at the most significant turning points in your life, how many of them did you consciously choose, and how many did you arrive at by drifting or by letting circumstances decide?

10. You are standing at a quatervois right now; everyone always is, even when it doesn’t feel dramatic enough to call it that. What is the decision you are circling, already half-aware of and rehearsing in quiet moments, that you haven’t yet dared to name out loud? What would it change if you named it now, in writing, to yourself?

That’s it for this week. Have a good one and happy thinking/journalling.

Until next week,

All the best,

Elspeth.

Buy me a coffee? Why, thank you!

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

Selcouth comes from Old English “seldcūth,” a combination of “seldan” meaning seldom and “cūth” meaning known or familiar, conveying something seldom known or rarely encountered. Merriam-Webster says its first known use was before the 12th century, but its last known use was around 1810, according to the OED.

Selcouth is typically used in literary or poetic contexts to describe something that is unfamiliar or strange as well as wondrous and intriguing.

This week’s coaching questions:

You, as selcouth

1. Imagine a stranger observed you for one day - not your achievements or your roles, but the way you move through the world, the things that catch your attention, and the thoughts you have that you never say out loud - what might strike them as unusual about you?

2. What is something about you that other people occasionally find strange, surprising or hard to explain? Is it something you’ve spent years either hiding or apologising for? What would it mean to consider that quality as being selcouth, rather than simply odd?

3. Selcouth means seldom known, but not never known, just rarely encountered. Who in your life has actually seen the rarest parts of you? And when did you last let someone new close enough to find them?

On what you’ve made ordinary that is actually extraordinary

4. Introverted women have often spent so long adapting to other people’s rhythms that they’ve forgotten which ones are their own. What do you do, think, or feel that you’ve normalised so completely, that you’ve stopped noticing it’s unusual? What would this look like if you took a closer look? Is it really so ‘odd’?

5. You carry a combination of experiences, knowledge, losses, recoveries and wisdoms that no one else on earth holds in the same configuration. When did you last treat that as remarkable?

6. What is the most selcouth thing you’ve ever done? The thing that surprised even you, and what did it tell you about who you are underneath everything you’ve been taught you ‘should’ be?

7. What parts of yourself have you kept selcouth because somewhere along the way you decided they were too much, too strange, or too difficult to explain?

8. Where in your life are you waiting to be seen by someone who hasn’t yet looked carefully enough? Is there a version of your life where you stop waiting and start showing?

Claim your own rarity

9. If you had to write one honest, specific, unsentimental sentence about what is genuinely rare about you, what would it be? Not what you hope is rare about you. What you know in the back of your mind to be true?

10. Selcouth things are wondrous precisely because they are seldom known. When will you decide that your particular strangeness and rarity isn’t a problem to be managed, but rather a quality to be lived?

That’s it for this week. Have a good one and happy pondering your selcouth.

All the best,

Elspeth.

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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

Every passerby, friend and acquaintance has a life as vivid as our own, just as amazing and complex. But, maybe because we’re introverts and observe the world from the edges, we’re perhaps more aware of this than other people. And if we’re fiction writers, we’re even more aware of it because we’re always wondering what’s going on with someone – it’s rich writing fodder, after all.

This is sonder.

It’s not an established word from any language or cultural tradition. It comes from John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - a creative writing project that invents words for feelings that don’t have names.

This week’s coaching questions are along the lines of sonder.

1. When did you last stop and register this sonder?

2. Is there someone in your daily life you’ve reduced to a role - the postman, the colleague, the neighbour - whose inner life you’ve never once considered? What would it change to consider it now?

3. Sonder might arrive out of nowhere as a sudden vague or vertiginous awareness of other people’s personhood. When does it visit you most often, and what does it feel like when it does? In the shower? At work? Watching characters on TV?

4. Introverted women might be accused of being in their heads too much. But sonder suggests that thinking about the interior lives around you might be one of the most empathetic things a person can do. How do you feel about that point of view?

5. Is there a person you’ve written off, dismissed, or failed to fully see? What might sonder ask you to do about that?

6. We live in an era of curated lives because social media shows us other people’s highlights, not their depths. How do you get to genuine sonder in a world designed to keep other people’s lives two-dimensional?

7. If someone passing you on the street experienced a moment of sonder about you - if they glimpsed, the full complexity of your interior life - what would they see that you rarely let anyone see?

8. Sonder can be humbling as a reminder that you are not the centre of the story. Does that feel like a relief, a loss, or something more complicated? If so, what?

9. Where in your life are you so absorbed in your own narrative that you’ve stopped noticing the fullness of the people around you? What has that cost you in terms of real connection, do you feel?

10. Now that you’ve thought about it, what does the concept of sonder ask of you in how you move through the world?

That’s it for this week.

Thanks to for the reminder about sonder.

Until next week,

All the best,

Elspeth.

Buy me a coffee? Why, thank you!

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

Steve Jobs talked about joining the dots backwards. James Fell’s book is called The Holy Sh*t Moment. Sometimes we need perspective to see how things change, and sometimes we know from the middle of a crisis that there will be a time before and a time after.

Metanoia (say meta-know-ee-ah) is an Ancient Greek word meaning “changing one’s mind.”

In psychology, it refers to a process of fundamental transformation, often precipitated by crisis, breakdown or existential conflict. It might be a shift in perception of ourselves, other people or even life itself; typically, an old identity seems to disintegrate and a more integrated version follows.

It sounds dramatic, but metanoia might not be limited to a single moment. It represents an ongoing process of evolution, enlightenment, and iteration. We come to explore our beliefs, values and perspectives, and sometimes they don’t fit anymore, like a piece of clothing we’ve grown out of, or that doesn’t suit us now.

This process can happen at any time, but midlife is as good a time as any, and it’s often completely uninvited.

This week’s coaching questions around metanoia:

1. While we grow and learn all through life, has there been a moment when the person you were no longer fits who you are becoming? What did that feel like when you first noticed it? Maybe you’re in the middle of it right now.

2. Looking in the rear-view mirror, what was the crisis or rupture that turned out to be the beginning of something better? And were you able to recognise it as that at the time?

3. What belief about yourself have you outgrown? Is there one you haven’t quite admitted to yet, because admitting it would need you to make a conscious change?

4. Your old self might not melt away without a bit of a kick and a scream. What part of her are you still holding onto? Is it out of genuine love for it, or out of fear of what comes next?

5. There is a version of your life that made complete sense five years ago and makes less sense now. What is it, and how do you feel about the change?

6. Metanoia is as much about sitting in the in-between as the change itself. It’s the place where the old self has cracked open, but the new self hasn’t fully arrived. Where are you in that process, and are you rushing it?

7. If your transformation were complete and you had become the person this season of your life is calling you to, what would be different? What would you have stopped pretending? What would you have stopped tolerating?

8. What do you know to be true about yourself now that you spent years denying, minimising, or keeping quiet about? This might relate to question 3.

9. Where is your inner, changed self, waiting for your outer life to catch up? Or is it the other way around?

10. If you take one action this week that reflects the person you are becoming, what would it be? And what is the thing that’s making you hesitate?

That’s it for this week,

Until next time,

All the best,

Elspeth.

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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

When I was 14, I went to boarding school, and I was homesick. At 18, my nurse training took me across the water from my home in Edinburgh, to Fife. And I was homesick. At 22, I moved to England, to be with my husband…yup, homesick. At 50, I was homesick for the lives I’ve lived, the woman I was, and the person I might have been, had my childhood been different. (All before the midlife realisation that the best is yet to come, of course.)

Hiraeth (say ‘hee-ryeth) is a living word from the living Welsh language and culture, with no precise English equivalent. It describes a particular kind of longing or homesickness for something. Maybe a place, a time, even a version of yourself, that may never have existed or can never be returned to.

Hiraeth isn’t straightforwardly comforting. It sits with grief and longing rather than resolving them. This week’s coaching questions will resist the urge to fix or reframe the feeling too quickly because we need to let the ache breathe before we find any kind of movement ahead. Feel the feels, if you will.

This week’s coaching questions:

1. When you let yourself go quiet enough to feel it, what are you homesick for? Not a place necessarily, but something. A version of yourself, a time, a feeling, a life you almost lived. Can you name it, or get a sense of it?

2. Is the thing you’re longing for something you’ve lost, something you never quite had, or something you’re not sure ever really existed, and does that distinction change how you hold it in yourself?

3. Where in your body do you feel hiraeth? And when did you last let yourself feel it fully, without immediately reaching for something to make it stop (like your phone or the TV remote)?

4. What have you told yourself about this longing? That it’s self-indulgent? That you should be grateful? That other people have it harder? What would it mean to set that story down for a moment and let the feeling be just be?

5. What brings the feeling up? Is there a season, a piece of music, a smell?

6. What are you afraid the longing is telling you about your life as it is now? How can you sit with the fear rather than quieting?

7. If hiraeth is a kind of love for something lost or out of reach, what does the intensity of that feeling tell you about what matters to you underneath all the noise of daily life?

8. Not every longing needs to be acted on, and not every ache needs to be healed. But some do. How do you know the difference, and which kind of hiraeth are you carrying right now?

Right, that’s it for this week. Until next week, have a good one,

All the best,

Elspeth.

Buy me a coffee? Why, thank you!

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

No coaching questions this week, just a little story and something to think about.

I am wintering. Not only is it the end of January and I’m in the Northern Hemisphere – it’s bone-cold and wet - but I want to rest and recuperate. Recuperate from what?

From life.

Wintering.

Some animals and birds ‘winter’ in order to survive cold weather and inclement months. They migrate to warmer places, build dens, and hibernate, reducing their activity to conserve energy and recharge.

Wintering is part of our chronobiology (chronos = time): the fairly new field of study looking at how different times of day, month and year affect how we feel and act.

You’ve heard of circadian rhythms which are the systems that regulate our physiological, biological and biochemical functions. An example is our sleep/wake cycle (for those who don’t work night shift patterns) and these rhythms help us, and other mammals, to adapt to daily and seasonal changes.

Chronobiology looks at the mechanisms that drive the circadian rhythms.

We forget, at our peril, we are animals too. Think back to the start of winter, the change of the light, colour in the trees, the length of the days and the drop in temperature. Did you notice a desire to withdraw a little? Was the thought of pulling on big sweaters and boots, wrapping your hands around hot chocolate and mulled wine a welcome one?

Or did you sigh and start looking for winter holidays in the warm?

Science is piecing together the observations we’ve slowly made over the centuries. How patterns in light and dark affect our energy levels. How our hormones influence our energy and how our external environment – daily and seasonal rhythms of light and dark, warm and cold – affect our hormones.

We are one with nature, no matter how hard we try to push back against it.

And when we do push back and try to inflict a 24-hour, seven-day, 365 constant ‘go’ on society, what happens? We get anxiety, stress, burnout, lowered immunity and a counterproductive loss of productivity, both individually and collectively.

But what about longer time frames? Is there a wintering season in a lifetime?

Time to switch off.

Like most of us, especially women, I’ve been ‘on’ for all of my adult life.

On for university. On for 35 years of nursing, business, and freelancing work. On for caring for my mum. On to help her carers care for her. On for the grief that followed when she died.

My list doesn’t include the ongoing on-ness of child care, no matter their age, and I acknowledge the privilege I have in being able to switch off.

I live in a house that’s not quite in the middle of nowhere. It’s set back from a country lane, tucked behind five other houses and next to stables and horses. Its large brown gates are ceremoniously closed when we’re at home, to keep the big bad world out and our little family (him, me, dog and cat) safe in its own little sphere.

The house found us at the right time and it’s the one from which we’ll be carried out in our boxes.

I work two or three days a week, picking my own hours and saying where I’ll go and what I’ll do. That’s the ‘free’ in freelancer.

But even so, I want to do less. Any thought of a new project or work opportunity beings on a physical shudder, a recoil that I can feel in the core of me. This tells me it’s not a change I need, but a rest – and in this case, I don’t think a change is as good as a rest.

It’s time to withdraw and focus on my inner world. Perhaps to journey a little more with my grief, perhaps to just be.

I shall write more and find more markets for my words. I’ll take a time with my exquisite and clever girlfriends. I’ll interview them and bring the light of their inspiration to a younger generation of women.

It seems to be a full-time job just to stay healthy as I get older – what with an exercise regimen and working out what’s best to eat, doing yoga and working on my demons.

I shall journal a little and read a lot. I’ll walk with my dog. I’ll sit in the garden swing and watch the world sway in front of me in summer sun.

And all to what end?

Periods of withdrawal and quiet are good for us.

When we’re mindful and intentional about these times, they can blossom us into personal growth, resilience and better mental wellbeing.

When we’re able to set aside time to recharge and recalibrate, we can help the brain’s self-maintenance program. This is pruning and laying down of memory (even more so than in normal sleep), processing of emotions, and restoring ourselves to ourselves and those who love us.

It’s a time we can think about thinking. Be creative and experiment. Fail and learn without consequences.

It’s a time to cultivate our inner smile, inner warmth and inner revitalisation.

Last thoughts.

I’m inspired and permissioned to do some wintering by a newsletter I love from Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

I’m permissioned to winter myself and turn my back on the active world.

I don’t know how long I’ll winter for. Maybe spring will come soon enough of its own accord: I’ll stretch out and turn my face to the sun, ready to flourish again.

Thank you, , for reminding me about the book , ‘Wintering’ by Katherine May, which inspired this little ditty, via Anne-Laure Le Cnuff.

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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve known with whom I feel ‘at home’. Not judged or given the side-eye, and where I’m not second-guessing their thoughts. I’m accepted as I am.

Perhaps you’re the same; these people, who see and honour the crazy in us just as we see and honour the crazy in them, are few in a lifetime.

This week we’re thinking about hòa.

Hòa (n) is a Vietnamese philosophy that emphasises personal inner peace as well as relational peace. That’s the harmony between people, between self and world, as well as within ourselves.

This relational bit is about someone who gives you peace and freedom to be yourself and vice versa. A bestie. Chosen family. Where we can have a conversation without words. One to ugly-cry with.

However, someone I’d have described as my bestie (as she did me) wasn’t my hoa. We were close, and I saw her at her worst, but she never saw me at mine. I realised after our friendship ended that it was always about her, and she’d have judged me in a heartbeat if I’d really been myself.

But I have a four-in-the-morning buddy (someone you’d call because you know they’d pick up and be there for you), and another friend who I don’t know well, but we have good chemistry. She may be a hoa in time.

So, this week’s questions are about distinguishing the tension between our peace and quiet, and our boundaries and walls (because sometimes people can be the most enormous disappointment).

1. Where in your life are you confusing solitude with avoidance (of people)?

Solitude is a relaxed feeling that lets you take or leave other people and the outside world; avoidance is just that: ‘Noooo, I don’t want to.’

2. And when you think about Q1, where do you feel the difference in your body?

3. Is the harmony you’ve built in your life a genuine agreement with yourself, or does it come from having made yourself smaller for other people?

4. Do you pursue peace, or do you pursue quiet? They feel similar from the inside but they lead to quite different lives.

5. What old relationships, situations, or versions of yourself are you still carrying? Now you’re in midlife, can you put some of them down? Where do you want to reinvent, or rekindle a former you?

That’s it for this week. There aren’t many questions there, but they need some unpicking and honest mirror-gazing. My crunch question, I’ve realised, is number 4, so I’m off to think about that.

Until next week,

All the best,

Elspeth.

Buy me a coffee? Why, thank you!

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

When I was clearing my mother’s home after she died – and you’ll know this if you’ve done it or anticipated it – the Big Thing was “What do I do with all the stuff?”

She lived in a two-bed bungalow and, while there was a lot, it wasn’t that bad; clearing was therapeutic for the grieving process in many ways. And as I sorted through the little things – photo albums, jewellery, knick-knacks – I worried about the furniture.

It’s inanimate, so what is there to worry about? Does it care about what I do with it? No. But I did. Me ‘n’ the furniture, we’re old pals.

By the time I was 14, we’d moved house about five times, which is not a lot by some standards, but unsettling enough when you don’t fit in anywhere anyway, and making friends is hard. But whenever the geography changed, the furniture was always there. Solid, dependable, constant.

So, when I realised I didn’t have to get rid of the furniture, that I could put it in my own house and keep it forever, it was like coming home.

However.

I love my stuff generally. As an extension of the furniture scenario, my stuff has always been my constant. Another seven house moves between age 15 and 55, and the people still keep changing, but the stuff comes with me.

But I wish I didn’t love stuff quite so much, which is the theme for this week:

Liberosis. (n)

The desire to care less about things; to figure out a way to relax your grip on your life and hold it loosely and playfully, keeping it in the air like a volleyball, with quick and fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play. (From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)

If you’re quite happy with your stuff-love, please tell me how to square the circle. But you’re still here, so read on anyway.

This week’s coaching questions, and a little drilling into your beliefs to begin with, so some repetition…

1. What is your belief around your love of stuff, or the stuff you love?

Mine is that “I’d be lonely if I didn’t have the things I love around me.”

In other words, why do you love your stuff? What’s the backstory?

2. Are there things you hold more tightly than others?

Why that/those things and not others? What’s their meaning or your belief?

Most of my wardrobe can come and go. I buy second-hand, and when it’s served its time, I thank it and let it go. I buy with the intention of passing it along.

3. If you find you don’t have a great affinity for many things or types of things, are there other areas of life where you find yourself holding on tightly?

Relationships? People? Jobs? Situations? Geographies? Hobbies, even?

4. Why? What’s your belief?

5. What would happen if you let go of that belief or changed it? What might be possible?

I hesitate to say this (partly because I might cry if I do), but if I believed “I don’t need my treasures,” I might find I could relax my mind enough to make more friends, even now.

6. What is the vision you hold for yourself?

Most of us would say we want to be happy, at ease, successful by our own measure etc.

So, where do your possessions, treasures, stuff, and your beliefs around them fit with that vision?

For me, I need to decide how much I want to make new friends, and how tightly I want to hold onto the success of those friendships. Simple as that.

So, I’ll go and ponder that thought. Let me know yours in the comments.

Until next week,

All the best,

Elspeth.

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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

Rise and shine. I don’t mean that in a get-out-of-bed-and-face-the day sort of way; I mean it as a call to illuminate your world.

This week’s word is coruscate, which means to reflect vibrantly; to sparkle; to flash with brilliant light. It’ll shine to illuminate your way forward, and it’ll let the world know you’re here for business.

Maybe because of our upbringing, or because we’re Boomer and Gen X women who were told not to be too loud, too bright, too obvious, or because we’re introverts by nature, we haven’t been too effervescent.

Well, don’t leave it any longer: midlife is our time to shine, and this is your mission for the week, should you choose to accept it.

To coruscate – shine brightly and sparkle where you are right now. I think this word is a far more honest description of how introverted women illuminate the world than anything the extrovert visibility culture has ever offered us. Feel the joy of your brio.

This week’s coaching questions:

1. Identify some areas where you already shine. At work? As a parent? As a partner?

2. Who or what makes you shine?

3. Why is it easier there than in other places?

4. Where else do you want to carry that torch and be more shiny?

5. Is there an invisible rule that stops you from shining? What would happen if you broke it?

6. If you’ve been forced/encouraged/conditioned to hide and stay in the shadows, what would happen if you shone? What’s the worst-case scenario, and what’s the best-case scenario?

7. If your nervous system needs convincing, find a mantra that will help.

As with all these letters, I write them for myself as much as for you.

My mantra is “You’re safe (always the nervous system’s primary concern). You’re strong. You’re capable (one day I’ll upgrade the beige ‘capable’, but it fits for now).”

With each statement I spend a few seconds mentally feeling for evidence that what I’m telling myself is true.

Safe? Yup, there’s peace, calm, wherever I am, no one’s here to get me.

Strong? Yes, look at all the kick-ass stuff you’ve done to get to where you are now.

Competent? Hell yeah. Ditto.

I imagine that each time I repeat my mantra and feel the feels that go with it, I’m giving myself permission to show up a little brighter and sparkle a little more.

8. What’s one thing you can do to show up and shine a bit more? Speak out? Step up? Take a leap and trust? Take a baby step and then another? What does the leap look like? What does the baby step look like? When are you going to do this?

That’s it for this week. Shine brightly wherever you are. You’ll light the way for other women coming behind you, and they will be grateful.

Until next week,

All the best,

Elspeth.

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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

The theme of this newsletter is to help women create, curate and cultivate a live they love, either with big strides or baby steps. To me, this week’s word is another that sums up the concept.

Kurashi (Japanese). “The way of living daily life with simplicity, beauty and mindfulness.” It’s about finding joy and harmony in the mundane moments, like making your coffee, cleaning the house, walking the dog, or putting on your makeup.

I’ve tried hard to get out of the habit of saying “When X [the Next Big Thing] happens, I’ll be ready/happy/able/good enough/insert adjective of choice,” and try to enjoy wherever I am right now. It’s a work in progress, but I hear myself say “when”, and it’s a trigger for my reminder: “when, is now.”

That Next Big Thing might be when I complete a course, when I hear back from an editor, or when I find the right notebook (I kid you not). But when we’re waiting for The Next Big Thing to happen, the liminal spaces between Big Things get forgotten – we think they’re not “important” enough to be enjoyed. Kurashi says otherwise.

This week’s coaching questions:

1. What are you waiting for? What’s your Next Big Thing? The next contract, subscriber milestone, to get started on your next career stage?

2. Why? What’s important about it? What will it bring that you don’t have now?

3. What’s going on right now in the space between the last Big Thing and the Next Big Thing? The humdrum and day-to-day, the tiny tasks that otherwise get lost. Find the mindfulness in them and learn to enjoy them, so the little things become the Big Things.

When I make the bed, I take a beat to look at it and admire the 30 seconds it took to do the task, and the peace a tidy bed and bedroom bring.

When I clean my teeth, I roll a tennis ball under each foot (1 minute on the left/brushing the upper teeth; 1 minute on the bottom teeth and right foot). It irons out the tension I’ve been holding in my feet, and they feel softer and flatter afterwards, and reminds me to feel the moment.

4. What are the small steps you can take while The Big Thing is pending? Follow-up emails? Small promotion? Join a like-minded group? Go smaller – train yourself to run your tongue over freshly-cleaned teeth and feel their smoothness; as you do your make-up, admire your work; as you make supper, use all your senses to be in the moment.

5. How can you train yourself to live more in the everyday and the spaces between? I have my “when, is now” reminder to stop my mind racing ahead. What’s yours?

And that’s it for this week. Slow down and enjoy the ride.

All the best,

Elspeth.

Buy me a coffee? Why, thank you!

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

Ailyak (say “ally-ak.” Bulgarian). Slow down and enjoy it. Whatever it is.

The Italians do it with food. The French and Spanish do it with family. Brits and Americans don’t seem to do it with anything.

I’ve put this word on a Post-It note above my desk, but it needs to be bigger. I should really make it into a phone screensaver, as a reminder to stop rushing through life, stop hurrying on to the next thing. To just stop and enjoy what I’m doing – ailyak.

When I write, I want more ailyak. I want my feet flat on the floor and my back relaxing on the chair rest. I want to breathe easily and let the words tumble out of my fingers, bypassing my thinking brain and onto the page.

This week, I had a lovely conversation with Rebecca Bonnington of Still, forest bathing in Scotland. She told me that, when she guides people in nature, going slowly, without their phone, fitness watch or any modern paraphernalia other than a decent pair of comfy shoes, she sees the tension disappear from their faces. They breathe properly, probably for the first time in a long while, and they’re where they should be.

This week’s coaching questions:

1. Where do you want more ailyak in your life?

Some areas of life are fine, and we’re in control. Some need a stiff talking-to to slow them down and bring them to heel.

2. Where are you rushing to get an outcome just so you can move onto the next thing?

a. How can you slow down and be curious about the process? Breathwork? Journal work? Why the need to rush?

b. Where has the impatience come from?

c. In which activities don’t you rush, and where do you feel you have to?

3. If you can’t get to Edinburgh to forest bathe with Rebecca, where can you go?

Even if it’s into your own garden with your shoes off, to feel the grass between your toes, it’s worth it.

Close your eyes and pick out what you can smell in the air – someone’s perfume? Next door’s BBQ? Fresh cut grass?

Open them and look for as many shades of green as you can.

What can you hear? Give your senses a chance.

4. Next time you feel yourself rushing, what will you do to put the brakes on? Have a go-to.

When I worked in the NHS and felt that hurry-up sensation overwhelming my small brain (which was pretty much all the time), I had two strategies.

One was to use a rollerball scent on my neck so it wafted calming aromatherapy smells to my nose. To best benefit from them, I had to breathe deeply, which activated the rest/digest part of my nervous system.

The other, if I was writing my patient records (yes, we had handwritten notes), I slowed my hand and tried to make my cursive script legible.

5. Take note of how you feel when you slow down.

When we get something right, get a win or a hit, we need to remind the nervous system so it’ll remember to make us do more of it. Otherwise, we’re just adrenaline junkies. Be a calm-junkie instead.

Buy me a coffee? Why, thank you!

That’s it for this week – where are you rushing, how can you slow down, how do you feel when you do.

Until next time,

All the best,

Elspeth.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

This week I had an ibrat. It was as shocking as it was obvious, and as welcome as it was empowering.

Ibrat (say eib-rah) is an Arabic word meaning “take warning.” Additionally, in Persian, “admonition, warning,” but also “to meditate upon,” which is wise if faced with a warning.

I like the “to meditate upon” version of meaning.

Scrolling my Substack feed, my eye snagged on something; I followed the writer’s ibrat, did the exercise, and wondered: “Who would I be if I were someone whose pitches were commissioned regularly and easily?” Last week’s lessons are still a work in progress for me.

There’s wisdom in looking at things from the perspective of your future-self, and from present-you ‘wearing’ a different mood or mindset. What would either of these women say, and what would they thank you for?

This week’s coaching questions are a small picnic of ways of looking at a problem:

1. If I said, “Think of a dilemma you’re facing,” what’s the first thing that pops into your head?

2. Take that one. Don’t filter or edit, take that first thought, because even if it’s not the one your conscious mind tells you is most pressing, your non-conscious chucked it at you for a reason. It’s an ibrat.

3. Byron Katie is famous for her questions in The Work, which she sees as a form of self-directed CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy). We ask the questions about a belief that’s causing pain or, in this case, an concerns about issue we’re wrestling:

· Is it true?

· Can you absolutely know that it’s true?

· How do you react when you believe that thought?

· Who would you be without the thought?

Then come up with a “turnaround,” a sentence that says the opposite of what one believes. So, for instance, “He doesn’t understand me,” could become, “I don’t understand him,” or, “I don’t understand myself.”

4. If your future-self had answers or a perspective, what would she say? We rarely think of our future self as a real person, but of course, she is.

What did she have to believe, what actions did she take, what resources did she pull on to change the situation you’re now in?

5. If you-in-a-bad-mood had something to say, what would it be? And what does you-right-now think about that?

6. If you-in-the-best-mood-ever-having-just-won-an-award had an opinion and/or some answers, what would it be?

7. And lastly, if you could helicopter over your life and those around you, what perspective would that give you on this issue?

That’s it for this week. Have a good one, and I hope to see you next Monday.

All the best,

Elspeth.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

This week I’ve been having a little crisis. There’s a woman I’m connected with on LinkedIn (and here, I think) who has the publishing success I crave.

When the stars are aligned, I’ve slept well, and my hormones are balanced, this is a non-issue. This week though, I think my hormones are out of whack – I’m exhausted, full of self-doubt and hopelessness, and it’s taking all the energy I have got to quell my irritation at, really, everything, and not to shout at Hubster and the poor dog.

I write, I pitch, I try to build relationships on LinkedIn, Bluesky and That Other Place, and at the end of the week, I’m no further ahead. Then this woman’s writing pops up in places I’d love to be published, and I descend into violent thoughts.

I need to remind myself of oubaitori.

Oubaitori (n) say: oh-buy-toe-ree. It’s a Japanese term referring to tree blossom, namely cherry, plum, peach and apricot. They all flower at different times and in different ways.

Rather like human beings.

We don’t need to compare our progress to others’, and success will come in its own sweet time.

This week’s coaching questions are as much for me as they are for you.

1. When you find yourself in downtown Comparison City, what behavioural rut do you see? What are you doing/thinking/feeling?

2. What does this behaviour or situation cost you?

3. What benefit does it bring (things are rarely all negative or all positive)?

4. Who could/would you be without this behaviour or situation?

5. What small thing can you do to break the pattern of thinking/doing/feeling when this situation arises again?

My behaviour and thoughts go along the “Well, fuck it then” line, while figuratively throwing everything in the air like I just don’t care, and turning my back on writing FOREVER.

In a more balanced moment, I know I need a rest, some more oestrogen, and a bit of perspective.

So…

Buy me a coffee? Why, thank you.

6. If you stepped into the shoes of the person you’re comparing yourself to, what would you experience?

7. What have you assumed about them?

8. Is there a voice that shows up when you make a comparison?

9. What do you believe about yourself, life and the world in general, that keeps taking you back to Comparison City?

10. Again, who would/could you be without this belief?

I’ve assumed the successful woman (and others) has something special that gets her noticed. I hear a whiny, “it’s not fair” voice – like my child self, and if I had a bit more oubaitori, I’d get over this a lot more quickly. Writing is one thing I really love. I wake up thinking about it, see ideas everywhere, and go to bed looking forward to doing more tippity-tappity the next day.

Do I really want to give that up just because I’m not (yet) as successful as someone else?

Until next week,

All the best,

Elspeth.