What do you want?

A coaching exercise to help you work it out and move towards it.

You know those days when you wake up and feel as if you’re being hit by a barrage of bad things?

Perhaps a shit email has arrived in your inbox overnight, you still haven’t been paid for your latest commission and then someone in the coffee shop decides to take their anger out on you.

Well, you might tell yourself a little story about having clearly gotten out on the wrong side of bed, and that today is simply going to be one of those days.

Except, that would be wrong. Because there’s no ‘getting out on the wrong side of bed’ and actually, you get a say in how your day will unravel.

Of course, there are hard days. Unbearable days. Sometimes, it’s enough to just get up and going.

To add to that…

We tend to have a negativity bias: absorbing the bad/annoying/difficult situations or information more easily and holding this inside.

Some of this can be helpful, for instance we might sharply observe a dangerous situation and see how to avoid something similar ourselves.

But to counter this negativity bias, when we get up and say a positive statement about the day ahead, our brains will then look out for reasons it is, in fact, a good day.

You’ll pick up on stranger’s smiles, pretty flowers in the cracks of pavements – the beautiful, mundane things that we can walk straight past and ignore or spend a moment focusing on.

The things that can lift our spirits higher, if we let them.

This is part of my daily practice - choosing to set a positive intention for my day (today is going to be exciting/calm etc) - but there’s also a one-off exercise I like to do called What I want.