You from ten years ago
Ten years ago me in my stationery business studio
Welcome to The Haven…
…a place where you can take a breath, find comfort and understanding, inspiration and ideas to overcome your overwhelm and move forward with more calm and joy.
My book, The 1% Wellness Experiment, is available to pre-order now.
Last week I turned 48 years old, it was the anniversary of moving to Wales and our wedding anniversary too. So it got me thinking.
A decade ago, when I was 38, we were living in Surrey and I was running my stationery business. In the following ten years I grew the business to a rented studio and part-time staff before taking it back to being just me when we moved to Wales.
I discovered positive psychology, finding so much to help my own overthinking, overdoing ways that I started a second business focused on wellbeing, eventually selling the stationery biz to train as a life and positive psychology coach and concentrate fully on supporting women to swap overwhelm for calm and joy.
In those ten years I’ve created several online courses, run workshops with organisations, spoken at events, launched a podcast and guested on others, started a Masters in Applied Positive Psychology, been working part-time with my local branch of Mind, written features for a variety of magazines and a book to be published later this year.
Me from ten years ago would be pretty amazed at what’s happened in the past decade. She’d be proud of my determination and tenacity, my willingness to embrace change.
She’d be proud that I don’t let self-doubt and the fear of disconnection or of rocking the boat stop me from speaking up for what I want and need, what I think, feel and believe.
She’d be proud that I’ve found new ways of seeing how I could live and work, I’ve found different ways to find fulfilment and joy.
She’d be proud that I recognise the worries behind my perfectionism (which hides behind procrastination) and gently challenge them, continuing to take steps forward to doing what’s important to me. And that when I experience what feels like rejection – a post doesn’t get likes, my offering doesn’t sell, an organisation isn’t interested, a writing pitch isn’t accepted – I’m more practised at understanding it’s not a rejection, of me or my work, and that I’m enough, worthy and whole just as I am, whatever I do or don’t do.
She’d be proud that I now see how my natural kindness has previously led me into giving away my energy, time and peace of mind to people-pleasing, and that I’ve created boundaries to help me act kindly to myself too.
She’d be proud that my days include more calm, peace, lightness and joy than before.
She’d be proud that I understand there will always be steps back as well as forward, that wobbles and bad days come and go, that there will always be more layers to unpeel and more to learn.
And she’d be proud that the past ten years’ has helped me to understand more fully how to support women feeling overwhelmed by their overthinking, overdoing, people-pleasing, perfectionism, procrastination, self-doubt and lack of boundaries because of my firsthand experience.
So it makes me wonder, what would the you from ten years ago think about who you are and what you’re doing now? I’d love to hear about it if you’d like to share in the comments or in an email to me.
Your calm, your joy
If you would like support to lower your stress and overwhelm, create more space for rest and your own needs (instead of putting everyone else first all the time), feel calm, in control of your life and feel more joy on a daily basis, check out the coaching support I provide by clicking here, and book a complementary call to talk it over.
“When we started coaching I was exhausted, overwhelmed, work dominated everything, and you helped me feel safe. I’ve rediscovered joy, my sense of adventure and what I need to sparkle and thrive. I feel more in tune with myself, I’m speaking up for what I want and I have practical tools to continue navigating through life. Thank you for being my cheerleader.” – Julie
More for you:
Get your free guides for more calm and joy
Listen to the Pressing Pause podcast
Subscribe to my Substack
How you can work with me:
One-to-one coaching on Zoom
Coach in Your Pocket by messaging app
Take an online course
And you can pre-order my book, The 1% Wellness Experiment, from a range of online stores here.
Today’s me has less self-doubt than 33 year old me and much less than 23 year old me and amazingly less than 13 year old me although probably more than 3 year old me.
Looking back at where I was in the past and where I am now is always a great exercise for me because I often make those younger girls proud.
Sometimes I mortify them (the early twenty something cynical poetry cafe girl with no television is astonished by my binge watching while getting Amazon deliveries, for example.) But mostly I make them proud and the things that mortify them are things that I wish I could back and tell them aren’t quite so big of a deal.
I think the me from 10 years ago would be surprised and yes ecstatic at what I do now. 10 years ago I was still in a corp marketing job in an industry I didn’t love but was flexible and the team were lovely. Now I have my own multi-passionate creative business, have created ways of working that were purely my own ideas and just going for it, and she would have never believed a cancer diagnosis coming with Hodgkins Lymphoma and that leading to training to be a coach through Life After Cancer and that being added to what I do now! The icing on the cake recently, just last week, was getting DYCP funding from the arts council to get my book written and out there by the end of my 50th year, which is next year!! Quite mad when you reflect back isn’t it, definitely my most eventful decade yet! 🙂❤️