Hello!
I’ve been listening to some Tony Robbins CDS and have been working on re-framing negative questions into empowering ones. Instead of asking, for example, ‘Bleh! Why does this keep happening to me?!’ I substitute something that gives me the power to change it and recast me as the adult in control and not the victim of circumstance, for example, ‘What changes do I need to make to ensure that I always get the best results I can?’. It’s an extremely powerful exercise.
Now, how does this fit in with a set of papers with birdboxes on? Tenuously, I grant you, on a superficial level, but I can tell you that channelling energy into creating something is, for me, therapeutic. I love to make things! I love colour in my life! It gives me juice! Instead of moping around feeling listless, bored and heading off to the kitchen for something rubbishy to eat to fill five minutes here and there, it engages me. It lifts my spirits to make something pretty that I can use and share with others. I have created a resource for channelling my attention and energy away from negative, self-esteem robbing crappy activities like eating mindlessly and enabled a better, postive behaviour that I enjoy. I live in the moment, use time purposefully and make something that satisfies me. I know my weight is not my worth but it’s a difficult concept to internalise when we live in a world that seems obsessed with diminishing the size of normal women into waifs – but I’m working on it!
Now, instead of eating crap, I find things to do. And when things don’t go quite right, I don’t beat myself up or stuff the frustration down my throat with biscuits and crisps thinking ‘Hmmm , I haven’t got it right, I’m rubbish at this’ I think ‘What’s not great yet?’. It’s a great way of seeing the potential and the lessons learned instead of the negative blinkers of ‘failure’ - a tremendously disempowering word, don’t you think?
I was tempted to use a question mark with an exclamation mark there – wouldn’t it be useful if there was a punctuation mark that combined the two?! Well, there is! The interrobang:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang
The interrobang, interabang[1] (play /ɪnˈtɛrəbæŋ/), ‽ (often represented by ?! or !?), is a nonstandard punctuation mark used in various written languages and intended to combine the functions of the question mark (also called the “interrogative point”) and the exclamation mark or exclamation point (known in printers’ jargon as the “bang”)[2]. The glyph is a superimposition of these two marks. It is present in Unicode as U+203D ‽ interrobang.
I think I will have to deploy this useful little chappie cos I think he’s just cute! What a pity it’s a non-standard punctuation mark so not available with normal font families!
Talking of cute, I recently used a photograph, courtesy of Russell Orr Wildlife Photography (http://www.russorr.co.uk/) in a romantic card for Mr Tree. Aren’t they gorgeous?
Aww!
Anyway, back to the pretty birdbox papers… same deal as before. If you would like a set of the papers above, FREE, drop me a comment. I’ll keep them available for a few weeks.
Have fun and be good to yourselves.
Hel x
