Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott and you find me up on Dartmoor,
The moorlands above my home and I've come into a gully.
When it's really really wet this gully becomes a stream and from my vantage point I'm looking up at the sky and there is an extraordinary range of clouds,
Fluffy grey clouds,
White clouds,
Blue sky,
Cirrus clouds,
What we call mackerel sky.
It's like there's a whole cloud show going on in the sky,
It looks glorious and I'm actually in this gully because there's a very blustery southwesterly wind and it's quite hard to record up on the moorland itself so I'm sheltering for a little while and I'm so looking forward to today's conversation with you.
My husband this morning was reading an email,
It was one of these emails from a man called Michael Neal.
Michael Neal is an author and a trainer,
He helped train my husband to become a coach and the question in this email that was sent out this morning was the following,
If you could create anything you wanted and knew that it would succeed,
What would you create?
If you could create anything you wanted and you knew it was going to succeed,
What would you create?
I might have misquoted that slightly but that was the essence of the email and I fell into a wonderful conversation with my husband.
It triggered things that I had been reflecting on in the community and I said oh I would love to create this amazing community space,
A beautiful vibe and feel to it,
Not one of these sort of old smelly church halls that are damp or these sort of back rooms where you put on community groups because it's cheap but a beautiful space that was filled with different things going on and people coming in and there was a cafe and I just started sort of reeling off what this space would look like and different activities going on at different parts of the day and people would just come in because the vibe and the feeling was so lovely and I just went off on one.
Now that was a very different feeling than if he had said to me what would it be like to create a community space in the community,
How about we do that and if that had been the question I probably would have gone oh but it'd be too hard and we'd have to get grants and we'd have to get people on board and we'd have to make money and we'd have to guarantee and by the time I'd sort of come to the end of my second sentence I probably would feel so deflated with energy that I'd like no I just don't think this is possible.
So can you see the question is is quite vibrant so if you could create anything you wanted to and it was going to be a success what would you create and we had some family around for lunch today and I was asking the question to them and the first person I asked he said oh that's really hard and he went straight into his job and said well if I was working in my job and I could succeed I might do this and he explained what he might do and we just sort of between myself and my husband we said yes but what if it wasn't to do with your job what if you could do anything so he pressed pause and he went okay let me rethink and we went on to the next person and she was really clear that she would have this off-grid house and would be self-sufficient and would be in a sustainable place and pretty much on her own with her animals because she loved her own company and she loved her animals and she wanted to be self-sustaining and she just went off on a soliloquy of this is what she wanted to do and then another family member talked about her love of crafts and just immersing herself in crafts and getting involved in engaging in crafts and arts and just being able to put them out in the world and that people enjoyed them and loved them and wanted them and we came back then to my other family member who had first of all said he he wanted to do something related to his work and he then went off on it no i'd get a bit of land and i want to build myself a place and live here and grow veg and have this space and all the answers all the answers we got were beautiful answers including mine where there was a sense of the creative flow just coming through so i want you to answer this question yourself you don't have to put anything into reality you don't have to think of the reality of it it's such a freeing question to ask yourself if you could create anything you wanted and it were a success what would you create and let me know will you if you could create anything you wanted to and you knew it was going to be a success what would you create let me know how you get on i'd just love to hear what you come up with
