Doing Life Your Way Creates Calm

Doing Life Your Way Creates Calm. When you listen to your intuition. When you connect to your wisdom. When you trust your gut. You just have to learn not to listen to Niggly Nelly inside your head. Join me as I explore this topic from a new perspective.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Calmcast,

A time to feel calm and think clearly.

I'm Claire Downham,

The Queen of Calm,

A transformational life coach.

I was a burnt out headteacher who finally made the journey to calm after years of trying and I want to prevent you from having to do the same.

The Calmcast is a series of short explorations gently guiding you back to your natural state,

Which is calm and clarity.

Just listen like you would listen to music with an open mind and curiosity.

There's nothing else to do.

Now let's relax into today's episode.

So today I'm talking about our working day and well doing life in general,

How that,

Doing it our way creates calm.

And it came to me really as I was walking.

If you've been listening to me recently you'll have heard how I used to always do my walk,

I go for a walk most days,

With my headphones in,

In order to be,

I guess,

To be as productive as possible,

Even when I was going to do something leisurely,

Like go for a walk,

Although I do walk quite fast.

Maybe that's something else to look at.

I would always have my headphones in because I always felt I needed to be making use of the time more productively and then I really listened to my inner voice,

To my intuition,

I suppose,

To my gut instinct,

Which had for ages been saying,

Claire,

You really need to walk in silence because you're not giving yourself any head space and you're not,

You know,

Things aren't falling into place as you might like them to.

So I went,

I started to go for walks in silence and it's been lovely.

All sorts of things have come to mind,

Including this actual session came as an idea during that because I was saying,

I said kind of,

Well,

Thought to myself,

I'm still working,

I'm out for a walk in the countryside,

But this is part of my working day.

And then I kind of thought how,

You know,

As business owners,

As perhaps busy working people,

Whatever,

We've had this idea of how life is supposed to look thrust upon us.

Well,

Not thrust upon us.

It's just sort of dripped in to life,

Hasn't it,

Over centuries.

Well,

Maybe not that many centuries actually,

Because when you look at the history of work,

This kind of structured day that we have where we start at nine and finish at five and all that kind of thing,

That's only really come in very,

Very recently,

Kind of with the advent of the industrial revolution in this country.

And factory owners wanting people to kind of be at their position for the day and for a certain amount of time.

Because before that,

Work was much more seasonal because it was to do with the land and nature.

And so people worked very differently.

They rested,

They may have worked quite vigorously at some points,

But they were more resting other points.

So it had a more natural flow to it.

This whole thing that we're doing right now is a bit,

Well,

It's not a bit made up.

It's completely made up.

And that's what I'm pointing to when I say that doing life your way creates calm.

Because what we've created is,

As human beings,

We were these natural intuitive creatures who lived on the land,

Lived with nature,

Ate food that was available when it was available,

Farmed eventually.

But we come from the origins of nature.

And you may have noticed that nature does it all her own way.

She couldn't care less whether you want the daffodils to appear when they do.

She couldn't care less if you don't want the leaves to fall off the trees now.

And if you look at the way the trees are turning,

It's so beautiful to see that.

Even on the same tree,

All the leaves are a different stage of,

Excuse me,

All the leaves are at a different stage of change in color.

And when you see a line of trees together,

You can see all the different shades of orange and red and brown and yellow.

They're all different.

They're all changing at a different pace.

That's how we were this intuitive led,

Driven by the energy of nature,

The energy of life,

Finding our own way through life,

Trusting our gut and that kind of thing.

And then the industrial revolution came along,

Put us all into a box.

And I think,

Well,

I don't know if we've been fighting to get out of that box ever since.

I think a lot of us haven't.

We've just kind of gone,

Oh,

There's the box.

That's the box we're supposed to sit in,

Just in the box.

And that's how we'll live our lives.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

Like for a long time,

There was a little voice in my head saying,

Walk without your headphones.

And I just didn't listen to it.

I,

Oh,

That's not productive enough.

I need to be learning something while I'm walking.

And then it's productive and it's more useful and blah,

Blah,

Blah.

And as I was walking the other day,

As I started to contemplate this session,

I just thought,

What the heck?

That's utterly made up.

Like when you think about the voice saying,

You can't walk and call that work or call that part of your working day,

That voice is the voice of the 1800s factory manager that's been passed down.

It's the voice of society that says,

It looks like this.

It's the voice of some teacher or parent or boss who told you working life looks like this.

Now,

I understand that if you are in employment,

There are structures to your day.

But for example,

My fiance,

He starts his working day pretty early and does take a proper break for lunch.

And sometimes we catch up with each other during the day.

He's working really hard and he's working well and doing his job well,

But he isn't quite as structured.

It's possible to do that even with work.

But if you're self-employed,

What the heck is the point of being self-employed if you're not connecting to what drives you,

To what you want to do,

To what you want your business to look like?

I know it's tricky because when we feel that urge to do something,

There is a lot of noise going,

You can't do that.

Work doesn't look like that.

That's not productive enough.

That's not good enough.

It's not clever enough.

It's not well,

You know,

It's just it's just a lot of noise.

But as we start to see that it's noise and it's the noise of the past,

It's got nothing to do with you in 2022.

I've started to call that little voice,

Niggly Nelly,

You know.

She used to feel like a good friend to me.

She used to feel like,

Oh,

Yeah,

She's there looking after me.

And now I'm like,

Shut up,

Niggly Nelly.

Go sit in the corner on your own.

And she will,

Because she'll still want to sit in the corner running away.

That voice,

As you start to ignore it,

Will still keep going.

But you can't do that.

Why don't you do that for?

It will do that for a while.

But over time,

That will pass.

Niggly Nelly will get bored of sitting in the corner,

Ranting away,

And she'll go away.

She'll stop turning up.

She might still pop up again sometimes,

But you'll have got to the stage where you just you just ignore her.

And why does this make us more calm?

Well,

Because there's something that needs to come through you into life.

And if you're following the rules and doing it all your way,

I don't think you feel as calm and you don't feel as connected to that thing that needs to come through you.

I think it can be a stressor trying to it's like trying to put a round peg in a square hole or square peg in a round hole.

I don't know what the phrase is,

But,

You know,

Or,

You know,

When you watch a two year old with one of those sorting books and they're getting it wrong and they're banging at it.

And it's stressful because it's creating,

You know,

A bang and a pressure and everything else because we're trying to squeeze ourselves into something that's not us,

That's not connected to our wisdom,

To our intuition,

To our guidance,

Because we're listening to that voice in our head that's got nothing to do with any of that.

So when we do life our way,

We do create more calm because we're just not butting up against life.

We're not butting up against our wisdom.

There's more flow,

There's more connection.

And I think it's a little step by little step.

This is not about you suddenly just throwing everything,

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater and completely changing the way you do life to suddenly,

But,

You know,

What if you just listened to sometimes to that voice inside you?

It's got things to offer you.

And as you begin to do life more your way,

You do start to feel more calm.

Because you're not pushing yourself into a space that's not your size space.

There's there's so much more.

And as you do that,

You will put out into the world the magic that you're here to put into the world.

And there's a lot of that inside you that can't get out if you're squeezing yourself into somebody else's box from 1905 or something.

Yeah.

So yeah,

Just play with that.

Just get curious about it.

Just notice how many of the rules from the past are you carrying around with you and thinking that's the way to live life when there's a whole different life that's available to you.

Lots of love.

Thank you so much for listening.

There's nothing to do now,

But bring some awareness to how this is working out in your life.

Listen regularly to experience longer and longer periods of calm.

This has been the Calmcast with Clare Downer,

Queen of Calm.

Take care and keep listening.

Reviews

On point as always