From the time you were a child you learnt to do as you were told and follow instructions. How your parents, role models and other children interacted with you taught you whether you were doing the right thing or not. But as you grew up into the teenage years and then adulthood you began forming your idea about how you want to live your life, you started fighting for what you felt you had the right to do but you still cared about what others think. In some way you are always going to care about what others think of you, but you can stop focusing on these opinions.

Projection is when we feel comfortable to identify an issue with someone else all the while not recognising, we have identified an issue within ourselves as well.

‘You’re always late, you never consider my time’ says a friend who has turned up on time once to your 99 times and 1 late arrival.

‘You have got so many problems to fix, it’s high time you start working on yourself!’ Says the person who hasn’t seen a psychologist or coach, is often angry and lashes out at others.

Every person on the planet is afraid of rejection, eager to avoid it at all costs yet some people still choose to self-reject. Why is that and how can you fix this?

Self-rejection is a really easy thing to achieve if you do not accept yourself. It begins by not acknowledging your successes, the positive choices you make and the growth that you have personally and professionally. It then moves on to denying what you know you deserve and settling for less. From here it leads to the frustration that others are increasingly rejecting you but the problem didn’t start with anyone but yourself.

‘Can I really do that though? I mean who wants to hear from me?’

When you examine social interactions between people it is really easy to pick up who is communicating what people want to hear as opposed to who they are.

‘What would you like to know?’ you ask, when really it has nothing to do about what the other person wants to know but what you feel is important to convey to them at that time.

‘I’d love to run a business, but don’t I need to have everything sorted, have a big bank account and a lot of confidence before someone will buy? Won’t they just look at me and go nope?’

You are so hard on yourself. This is a phrase that you may have heard before. It’s usually followed up with ‘be kind to yourself; but how do you do that and ensure you achieve the success you desire? Doesn’t kindness take you off the hook?

Self-compassion is essential for building confidence. While it is understandable that high performers like yourself want you to push yourself, you cannot do it at the expense of your confidence. Confidence isn’t built out of self-loathing so you have to define what kindness is to you to actually be kind to yourself.

I have begun studying personal training myself. It has been a long time coming but now is definitely the right time. I enjoy studying and cannot believe it has been 18 years since I first started formal education beyond the schooling years. I still get just as excited as I did before I moved to Toowoomba for university in 2004. I’m very excited for what lies ahead and I love that my previous experience as a health and HPE teacher plus the ‘boss’ of several personal trainers has given me a fabulous platform to know how to deliver personal training to you well.

Before I became a coach, I was a teacher working crazy hours, doing the role of administration support, psychologist, teacher, parent to children who lacked role models. As a teacher you work nights, weekends and often sleep with the welfare of children in mind and a mass of creative ideas running around in your head. Teachers were required to report information 3 times in 3 different ways to appease the powers at be, and stress was wildly accepted as part of the job, especially where little to no health and wellbeing practices actually take place. I often wondered why I constantly felt stress until I read How to Eliminate Stress, a book by ____.

Your brain is a magnificent piece of software designed to protect you, it wants to see risk, it wants to warn you of failures it’s go to is not ‘look at the possibilities’ this is why you need to choose to do this for yourself.

Life is full of possibilities but what if you see the possibility to fail instead of the possibility to succeed? It is going to make success a harder journey for you isn’t it? This is where the human mind is fascinating, it wants to protect us from risk, it wants to warn us that we mightn’t be accepted for the changes we make, it essentially wants us to play small. Here’s the thing: the mind isn’t a fortune teller so it actually doesn’t know what the real possibilities are.

You spend most of your time indoors either behind your office desk, in airconditioned buildings or your car. It is easy to get through an entire day failing to step outside for a moment and actually take a minute. These artificial environments can unintentionally get you in a funk. Here’s 15 ways you can connect back to nature daily, ground yourself and feel so much better every single day.

As a personal development junkie you’ve heard of the inner child by now. How can you uncover how she feels and how to have a great relationship with her?

The concept of your inner child refers to the little girl (or boy) inside of you that represents your childhood, what you learnt about being a great human, the beliefs and behaviours you have learnt, the way you process and express your emotions and how you learnt to turn up in the world. Everyone has an inner child. It is the playful, bold, unabashed version of ourselves that we find the more confidence we build. As adults we can become disconnected with who we are at our core, developing a relationship with your inner child, understanding how she felt, was seen and empowered helps you to understand the fundmentals of what makes you, you today.