I was prompted to write this piece during a writing workshop. I believe the starter title was ‘A Better Me’ or some such.  I know we had to keep writing for twenty minutes, because as you’ll see, I start to get pretty fed up of the ‘better me’ concept.  Read on for a crash course in letting harsh reality invade your rose tinted dreams…

“I’d like to write every day.  For twenty minutes. In my ideal life I get up at 7am and sit at my beautiful desk in my beautiful room and write for twenty minutes. My other half gets me a cup of tea whilst I do this and then I stretch and yawn and do my yoga postures and some transformational breathing.  I make a mental note of three things I am grateful for upon waking and jot them down in my beautiful note book.  

On the days when I don’t write straight away, I run. I wake at 7am and get my running gear on, slip quietly out of the house and run for a good twenty to thirty minutes. I get home and shower then feel invigorated for the rest of the day. Do my yoga postures and breathing while I get dressed and have a cup of tea. Make a mental note of three things I am grateful for – perhaps I thought of them while running? – and jot them down in my beautiful note book when I get to work, if not before.

Running has also inspired me to write a blog post and as soon as I get in I make some quick notes. The joy of the idea is with me all day and I write and re-write and edit as I go about my business. All this goes on inside my head because I’m not awfully good at actually writing ideas down, just yet.  But I’m getting better, what with the 7am writing and all.

I run at least twice a week and do a minimum of an hour’s yoga too. Ideally I’d like to do two classes, perhaps a 7am one and another lunchtime one, but I often forget and the cost adds up.  One day I’d like to do the hot yoga after work at 5.30pm but I see little enough of the children, well the family I suppose, that I normally rush home when I can.

I meditate every day for ten minutes.  Sometimes when I wake at 7am I will meditate, but not if I’m going to write or run, which I do most days.  Perhaps on a weekend I wake and meditate.  But mostly I do it at work during my lunch-half-hour.  It’s tricky, because I like to get outside at least once a working day, away from the stuffy office and my stuffy desk and the stuffy screen that’s like a magnet, I can barely get away from it.  But if I go out during my lunch-half-hour I don’t have time for anything else. I could potentially take a ten minute break in the afternoon and slip up to the boardroom and have myself a little meditate. I think this is a good idea but for some reason I don’t do it, ever.  Hmm.

I’m halfway through my twenty minutes and the flow is leaving me. 

Is twenty minutes too much? Not for a writer, one would think? 

I get self conscious about my noisy keyboard.  My hand begins to ache and I’m reminded of my sore wrist and tennis elbow.  I should do my physio exercises too but in  my ideal world these are incorporated with my yoga postures and I have a good stretch and walk around every twenty minutes or so (yeah, right!). If I had a window I would stare out of it all the time and that would be good for my eyes; too much screen time is damaging. I am drawn to the window like a magnet, I could stare all day. It’s freedom out there.

I wish I drink more tea and coffee, so I could make myself a cup every now and then. But after my wake up cup of tea and my mid-morning coffee, I don’t want any more. It’s all I can do to drink water these days.  But it would be nice to have an excuse to get up and do something different. Here I sit in this chair and atrophy.  Both mentally and physically. 

I can’t face going home to my house. I want to see the children but I don’t want to see the house and the mess and the godforsaken neverending relentless housework drudgery that life has become.  I don’t want to have another boring conversation about bathrooms and extensions and the godforsaken neverending drudgery that is DIY and home improvements. 

I want to come home to a home that is light and bright and clean and smells heavenly.  Where I can sit down with a cup of tea and laugh with my children. Where I can invite people round and not wince when someone comes to the door, praying they don’t need to come in and see the floor thick with debris that has builds daily despite the regular vacuuming.  You can’t keep a concrete floor clean it seems and I often wonder idly what bacterial heaven we will be creating once we put the floorboards on top of it.

It seems far easier not to do any of it; the writing, the running, the yoga, the meditating.  Far easier to empty the dishwasher, shout at the kids and open yet another bottle of wine.  Go to bed too late and sleep badly, feel wretched and plan to do it all again tomorrow.  But one day, perhaps this week even, I will be living like the better me I want to be.”

Does this remind you of anything? Or of someone? Is it you? Because we all have dreams of our ‘better selves’, the one that does the yoga and the meditating. (I expect she never has to empty the dishwasher or deal with DIY either.)   Heavenly thinking! Then we crash back to reality and suddenly the distance between who we want to be and who we are seems unending.

But.

Have you ever tapped into your future self? Have you ever connected with your Inner Mentor in a direct and meaningful way? Not in a wishful thinking kind of way but really reaching within and finding your most wisest self (there’s tonnes of wisdom and experience in there, we all know it, we’re just so used to ignoring it).

Because that’s one of the core techniques I use in my coaching and forms a lesson within the Playing Big module of the Magnetic Mastermind. Once you have connected with your Inner Mentor you can start to lessen the gap between her and your current self. In fact you are already more like her than you realise. She is your most powerful ally and antidote to your pesky inner critic.

Want to know more? To find out how I do this and how you can do it too, DM me the word MENTOR and we’ll go from there.

Because it’s time to make the gap between your reality and your dreams a little bit easier and a whole lot smaller!