I was chasing a “dream” job that I wasn’t invested in. I was exhausted from trying to eat 1200 calories a day and then exasperated at weight gain when I couldn’t stick to such ridiculous calories.

I was bored of all of my part time jobs to pay the rent. I was dissatisfied with the mindless telly I would watch and the fear that would stop me from moving on with a life I wanted.

I knew my mindset needed a shift and that unless that was going to change I was going to be stuck here in another five years.

But along with this knowing that I needed to change things up, came a lot of mistakes. Things I learnt from that I want to ultimately stop you from making, so perhaps you can be more happy and satisfied with your life.

Here we go!

1)I did not realise mindset changes were a daily. I assumed I could just change my perspective and be done with it. But it turns out the thoughts that we have built up over years and years, are in bedded quite deep. It took me thirty years to learn all the fear and self sabotage behaviours. It was going to take me years to unlearn it. So I am still here, practising my mindset changes daily.

2)I expected change to happen right away. I truly thought that because I was making better choices for myself, that progress in my life would come quickly. To be honest I was looking for big massive changes. In reality there were changes everyday. I just wasn’t being grateful for them. The change was the process. The outcome would come later. Until I stopped to smell the coffee though, all my hard mindset work went unnoticed. Stop. Breathe. Look at the small wins throughout the day. Those are the changes you want to celebrate.

3)I thought that I needed to be amazing at meditating and that affirmations needed to be deep. Firstly, get out of your head if you have some attachment to the word “meditate” and what it means to you. I found it truly intimidating. I couldn’t understand how people didn’t have thoughts floating around their heads. I actually got so frustrated with the “idea” of how meditation should go that I could’t do it. I believed there was some perfect way and some perfectly deep seated words I needed to say to make a difference.

I learnt that I could just sit there and breathe. Watch my thoughts come in and watch them go. I can sit there for 5 mins a day and just breathe, imperfectly meditating. Because there is no perfect way. It is a practise. The thoughts come less over time, but resisting them creates mind chaos. Let them be.

And as for affirmations. They can be as simple as “Today is going to be a good day” and gratitude could be as easy as “I am grateful for the dinner I cooked tonight”Don’t let those beliefs that “mindfulness” or “mindset” practise is for deep, spiritual, woo woo hippes that has to be done perfectly. Keep it simple. Practise it. And see how the world changes, or how you perceive the world anyways. (And deep down, we are all deep woo woo’y people :)

4)I thought I would never have negative thoughts again.

Rewind… just to make this clear. This is a fantasy. You will. I still do. The idea is not that you will never moan about your life again or never be disappointed again. We are human. But perhaps the idea is to catch our thoughts. See them, be aware of them and not always identify with them or attach to them. Our thoughts do not make us who we are. “I think therefore I am” is a myth.

I am… without the thoughts I have created. We can re-frame our negative thoughts when we have them. “I hate my body” can be re-framed to “I am so happy that I am able to walk and move” But be careful with re-framing (see point 5)

5)I assumed I should not be sad. That life would now go perfectly and I would re-frame sadness instead of sitting in it. I assumed I should just be grateful. When my mum got sick I spent a good few months full of all the gratitudes. Grateful we had this time, grateful she found out she had cancer, grateful that we loved each other so much. I was so stuck in my “re-framing” of all my negative thoughts, that I didn’t allow myself time to feel my emotions. Doing the mindset work is not… never feeling sad. It IS feeling sad and knowing that there will be better days. It’s sitting with the anger and not judging yourself for feeling that anger. It’s grieving and knowing that that is part of life.

No mindset challenge or therapy or coaching is going to make your life unicorn farts and rainbow clouds everyday. But it takes us from victim mode to gratitude and the ability to breathe, be and accept ourselves, which calls for a far more content easy life than pushing away and feeling hard done by all the time.