Precious time

Hi Lovelies,

I hope this year is treating you well so far.  Can you believe it is March already?  It feels like January flew and we just skipped February altogether don’t you think?  Where on earth did it go?

Noticing the pace of things has been a reminder to me to slow down as much as I can.  The only time we really have is right now and if we are too busy thinking about the past or the future (and not spending time being present) then life just passes you by.

I found myself not being present a lot.  I was spending way too much time scrolling through posts on social media that had absolutely nothing to do with me or left me responding with a negative vibration and it literally made me so upset I couldn’t stop crying a few weekends ago.  In essence, I wasn’t looking after myself properly. I’d lost balance and I’d lost my sense of how best to invest in my ‘now’.  So I decided to change that.

I haven’t deactivated altogether because I want to keep my blog and business pages active.  I get contacted for work a lot through social media as well.  But, what I have done is made myself conscious about what I choose to look at and how much time I allow it to take up, which is only a couple of minutes per day now. I will send birthday messages because lets’ face it, how good is Facebook for birthdays?  See what I did there?    I’ll also look at positive posts, inspirational posts and posts that make me laugh.  I’ll give credit where credit is due and show support to those that need it.  I think social media is great for that too.  But… the second I see something that reminds me I’m wasting time or is negative in any way, I’m out of there and logged out.  That way, in order to go back and have a look, I need to think, do I really want to log in?  Is this really how I want to spend my time?

Before I did this, I had several books that I hadn’t finished reading around the place.  So often in my down time, I intended to get to them but instead of doing so, found myself wasting time instead.  I was absorbing negativity and crap instead of the value these books have now added to my life.

In the 4 weeks since I made this decision, I have finished reading 3 amazing books that I feel will help make me a much better person than scrolling through so much of other people’s ‘stuff’ ever will.

The first book is ‘Chapter One – You have the Power to Change Stuff’ by Daniel Flynn, Co Founder of The Thank You Group.  Do you guys know about this?  The Thank you group is an amazing  social enterprise of young people who started a not for profit business purely for the benefit of helping others.  First there was Thank You Water – of which all profits go to providing safe drinking water in countries that don’t have access to it.  Then they released Thank you Body – from which all profits go to provide sanitisation products in underprivileged countries; and now there is Thank you Baby – which gives all profits to help Mums in underprivileged countries with their baby care.  If you see their products on a shelf – buy them!!  They have provided a platform in which every single one of us can make a difference by purchasing their products.  You can even enter your barcode in to their website so you can see just how the product you have purchased is making a difference.  Amazing right?!  You can find out more about them here http://www.thankyou.co

Then I read ‘The Dalai Lama’s Cat’, by Perth man, David Michie.  Another great read written from the point of view of the cat and the wisdom she picked up by living with His Holiness.  Such an easy and great read.  I highly recommend this one, especially to cat lovers.

Finally, I finished ‘The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People’ by Stephen Covey.  Another absolutely brilliant read.  If we all thought and behaved in the ways this book suggests, the world would be a very different place.

The strongest message that comes from all of these books is about how much better life becomes when we make it all about how we can serve others.  We get so caught up in what we can get for ourselves that we often lose sight of this, which I think is a great cause of discontent and unhappiness.  Reading books that help you do this is a gift we give both to ourselves and others in our lives.

I wasn’t giving myself permission to slow down before.  I was caught up in the mindset of ‘I should be doing this’ or ‘I should be doing that’.  I guess what I absorbed from social media contributed to this in a way as it can lead you to compare your life to those of others.

Spending my time in this new, mindful way has been the best reminder that the only thing we should be doing is really thinking about how we invest in our precious time.

What are you going to do on this beautiful day?  Enjoy it.  And make it count.

Love & Light Always,

Yvette xxx