Tag: health
This is Purpose: An Aristocrat’s Inspiring Quest to Change the World
“A society is measured by the treatment of its prisoners”
Winston Churchill
The article below exemplifies the impact economy + philanthropy at its very best – Lady Edwina Grosvenor, English aristocrat, criminologist + prominent prison reformer helping amongst the most vulnerable in society.
Despite a childhood of immense privilege, she is the founding investor + ambassador for The Clink Restaurant chain, which trains prisoners in catering. She is also the founder of the charity One Small Thing + Hope Street, a residential community designed to keep women + their children together, reducing the number of women in prison + addressing the root causes of trauma.
And while some prisoners may be written off as ‘evil’, the reality is:
– Incarcerated populations exhibit disproportionately high levels of childhood trauma, including abuse, neglect + household dysfunction (ACEs), which are heavily linked to adult criminality, mental health struggles + violence
– Studies show over 60% of young offenders report prior trauma, with high exposure to witnessing domestic violence (41%) or being in care (24%)
– 50% to 75% of inmates are functionally illiterate or have reading skills below 4th-grade level
The impact of the above is significant including:
Emotional Regulation: Trauma hinders the ability to manage emotions + cope with stress, leading to poor decision-making
Violent Tendencies: High scores in childhood trauma (physical/emotional abuse, neglect) are directly linked to increased, violent tendencies
Substance Abuse: Childhood abuse is strongly associated with substance abuse, which often leads to incarceration
Re-traumatization: Childhood trauma predicts higher rates of anxiety, depression + suicide attempts among prisoners, with standard prison environments often triggering past traumatic experiences, leading to hopelessness or anger
It’s easy to judge + polarise people as good or bad which is why her work is so important.
Like it or not, for many, criminal behavior acts as an often, sole, maladaptive response to internal chaos + past trauma.
As the outstanding Gabor Maté, Canadican physician, author + trauma expert says:
“If you study prison populations as I have, you see a common preponderance of childhood trauma and mental illness. The two go together. So a lot of the people are being punished for being mentally ill + they are mentally ill because they were traumatized as kids. So what we have in prisons are the most traumatized people in our society.”
Which is why, I suppose, in his superb documentary: “The Wisdom of Trauma”, he stresses the importance of asking prisoners:
“What happened to you?”
v
“What did you do?”
Why does this kind of attitude matter?
Because most decent people care about peace +, cheesy as it sounds, leaving the world a better place.
In the words of Barack Obama:
“Learning to stand in somebody else’s shoes, to see through their eyes, that’s how peace begins. And it’s up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.”
Read the article in The Independent: “It’s a complete scandal’: The aristocrat fighting to help prison children escape the stigma of crime” here
If It Could Happen to James, It Could Happen to Any Man: What We Can Learn From The Worst Kind of Tragedy
“I wish that people could understand that the brain is the most important organ in your body. Just because you can’t see it like you could a broken bone doesn’t mean it’s not as detrimental + devastating to a family or an individual”
Demi Lovato
Episode 5 of The School of Success Podcast Series is one of the most powerful and moving conversations I’ve ever had. This inspiring interview with Clare Milford-Haven, aristocrat, ex-Tatler journalist, polo player + co-founder of @jamesplaceuk, gives deeply personal insight into the tragic loss of her beautiful son, James, to suicide.
In this episode, Clare explains:
– what triggers depression + suicidal crisis;
– what type of person feels suicidal;
– why men are particularly vulnerable;
– signs + symptoms of mental illness;
– how James’ Place helps support suicidal men +
– why those most at risk may be the last people you expect
This is for you if you have an interest in what it is to be human – happiness, sadness, chance, adversity + everything in between. It’s also for you if you have men in your life you care deeply for whether father, brother, son, friend, boyfriend, husband or otherwise.
This powerful tale of the Harrow educated, polo playing, life + soul of the party, James, bears poignant testimony to the complexity of happiness + the fragility of mental health, no matter how fortunate you are.
If it could happen to James, it could happen to anyone.
Click on this link to listen. You might just save a life 💙
A Powerful 3 Step Communication Hack to Optimise Relationships
“Good communication is the bridge between confusion and clarity”
Nat Turner 💡
I’ve never been one for sharing personal relationship stories on here – but this one is too good not to share.
I’m still friends with an ex-boyfriend below, probably cos he was a good friend to me and a very genuine guy.
And though our love story wasn’t meant to go beyond what it did, like all relationships, I learnt some valuable pearls o wisdom.
The main one being the value of calm communication. Note – the calm gentle tone was more vital than the words as per studies which show tone and body language account for 65% of communication’s impact, with words being only 35%.
Food for thought, hey?
That was definitely one of his superpowers – a bit like my dad, it was as if in that moment when others might have been angry or agressive (like when I snapped some skis he leant me 🫢), he did what Mr P advises:
“If someone is upset or doesn’t listen, repeat yourself slowly and calmly until they do”.
I’ve never, btw, heard my dad raise his voice once. Ever. No wonder I don’t do well with moody people 🫢
The What Why How handy communication tool below gives structure to the complex business o communication, boosting clarity, closeness and relationship success when you’re struggling to express something. It can also be applied at work 💼
Here’s how the 3 step formula goes:
🔦 What’s important to you
🔦 Why it’s important
🔦 How much of it you need (if relevant)
Continued below ⬇️
You can also ask it in questions if you’re getting to know someone professionally or personally:
For example:
🏈 What are two things that make you feel loved?
🏈 Why is that important to you?
🏈 How often need that?
How would you feel if someone asked you that?
How would it benefit you both?
Another example might be:
🍊 Being open about your worries is important to me
🍊Cos it builds my sense of trust n closeness
🍊 So I’d love it you could try to be open about stuff that’s worrying you when it’s weighing on your mind
What do you think?
What comes up for you if you apply it to pain-points in your life or work?
Simple tools like these can give a how to things that might otherwise block us and transform the complex into the simple.
In fact, often it’s not that we’re not good at communication – it’s a totally learnable skill – we just need the tools and willingness to be slightly vulnerable.
And what do we know about vulnerability?
It’s strength in disguise and it’ll always draw you closer to the right people and organisations 🏹
Try it n see 🪀
☘️ To upgrade your life or career, book a free discovery call: www.melanie-pritchard.com
There is Purpose in Pain: How to Find the Magic in Adversity
There is purpose in pain.
If you’ve had a rough ride, it ain’t the end of your tale. Feel the pain, let it out and then dig deep, look for the learnings and good things will come.
Life is like a Super Mario game. You gotta decipher the learning on whatever level you’re on, no matter how hard, to progress to the next level. If you keep doing the same thing again n again you’ll stay stuck where you are.
Give in to low vibe energy and sit in a bog of victimhood (of course this is normal at times) and be prepared to stay stuck there.
If you’re really stuck in toxic emotions like anger, shame and envy, who can you talk to to break that impasse so you can bust upwards to survive and then thrive?
Even when you get through that, it can be hard to keep the faith at times that good things are coming your way so be your own cheerleader daily and champion yourself with positive language as you move through stress.
I regularly tell myself what I’d tell a best friend at those moments: ‘You’re doing really well, Mella, keep going’ or ‘It’s ok you’re feeling burnt-out, you’ve had a lot of change of late’.
Cos y’know what?
Language matters.
What you feed your brain matters.
Even if you don’t believe it, your subconscious mind believes anything you tell it if you feed it that regularly enough.
So repeat after me:
‘Amazing things are coming’ 💥
And wait for the tide to turn in your favour 🌊
————————————–
Want to learn more? Book in a free life / career coaching or corporate training discovery call to benefit from my 10% January discount and to optimise success before February is upon us! 🥂 www.melanie-pritchard.com.
Why my Brother’s Death at 23 Taught me that Courage is the Most High-Performance Habit of All
“Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous” – Robert A Heinlein
I have a confession.
While many of us have felt it, I sometimes struggle with people who doggedly refuse to move from victim mindset + are unwilling to do anything differently. Obviously, mental illness can keep us there, which is truly hard.
I recognise I may be a bit intolerant having seen my 22 year old brother choose courage at the worst of times – untimely death.
Nobody Googles ‘Glioblastoma’ + comes away feeling hopeful. Ironic the ‘my brother died of a brain tumour’ line is a conversation stopper because his defiance in the face of adversity made it hard for us to view him as anything but inspiring, radically altering the course of my life for the better.
Courage is a powerful thing – especially when the stats tell you you’re f*cked + hope, for all intents + purposes, is lost.
But that’s the magical thing about courage.
It’s truly metaphysical, uniting improbable points of likeness like strength in suffering, bravery in hopelessness + humour in adversity, in the most breathtaking ways.
It finds hope in the hopeless, inspiring life’s Greats to do their highest work on Earth – the most inspiring of whom usually have real reason to be victims – the Nelson Mandela’s of Apartheid, The Viktor Frankel’s of the Holocaust + the Martin Luther King’s.
A few days’ before my brother’s death, he wrote my sister + I a letter oozing a courage that blew my mind: ‘Obviously I’m a bit narked because I thought we could win, so now we have to reassess winning + how we define that’.
w o w
That’s the thing about courage – it takes your breath away – because it’s grit + defiance that flies in the face of fear –
+ you never really know it’s there until the sh*t hits the fan.
In truth, Matthew had always been a bit special, with an understated charm + charisma that lit up rooms – but none of us were prepared for how he made suffering his crowning glory.
Even in his darkest hour, he found the courage to reframe the hopelessness of tragedy: ‘Cancer need not be the epilogue, in many ways it can be the introduction to a richer life of wisdom’.
Towards the end of his letter to his little sisters, my twin + I, he wrote: ‘So we need to have a lot of fun (underlined) over the next few months or so’ (before signing off with an Austin Powers quote).
I’m privileged to see courage daily in my career + life coaching clients – who are, by definition, deeply courageous, seeking the magic hidden in stress. They inspire me daily.
So when life feels impossible, remember, courage isn’t the absence of fear, it’s defiance over fear. As Maslow says: ‘One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again + again; fear must be overcome again + again’.
So when you wobble, remember, there is purpose in pain. As Freud said:
‘Pain has nothing to teach those who don’t find the courage + strength to listen to it’.
Surprisingly Simple Stress Trick: How to Get Out of Your Head Fast!
‘Faith is an oasis in the heart that will never be reached by the caravan of thinking’
Khalil Gibran
How often do you find yourself overthinking when you’re stressed?
Totally stuck in your head or going round in circles with no end?
It makes sense to think we can think our way around things but sometimes, getting out of our heads and into our bodies is the best thing we can do. Y’see, without learnt tools to master our minds, our brains are designed to keep us stuck focusing on the negative and continuing to do what we’ve always done. Not very evolved, hey?!
Case in point – a career coaching client who was so stressed she was really quite depressed and unable to move forward had a 360 about-turn when she took her focus off thinking about careers and instead reconnected with doing the things that brought her fun and joy in life.
All the things that took her out of her head whether cooking, drawing, running or seeing her friends.
And boom! Then the clarity came – from being more and thinking less. Like a counter-intuitive detour around stress. The renewed energy and clarity came from moving her body rather than just sitting in the stasis of thought. Ironic, isn’t it, that when we stop thinking so much, sometimes we unlock feelings that guide the way.
As the legendary Dr Wayne Dyer says: ‘Think less, feel more’.
What do you do that brings you joy and gets you out of your head? When did you last have this experience? And what were the results?
For me it might be things like travelling, local adventures, meeting new people, working in new cafés, or doing a new activity like paragliding in the wilds of Italy above. Connecting with free spirits in sublime nature is always a sure fire way for me to change my state and get clarity on confusion. Note – most of these things involve movement – as Tony Robbins says: ‘Motion equals emotion’.
What one change can you make today to get out of your head and into your body?
How would that feel?
And what’s the best possible outcome?
Podcast Episode 13: How Changes in Your Diet and Lifestyle Will Transform Your Life!
Episode 13 of The School of Success Podcast Series is now live! An inspiring and eye-opening deep-dive into how shifts in your diet and lifestyle can transform your life and support females in their 40’s suffering with hormonal imbalance regain vitality, restoration and balance.
This interview with the accomplished Melanie Flood, Nutritionist, Health Coach and Female Hormone Expert, teaches you:
– top tips for losing weight fast, the healthy way;
– the surprising link between nutrition and mental and physical health and the shocking consequences of a bad diet;
– the truth about supplements and the six pillars of wellbeing;
– how gut, hormonal and genetic testing can optimise your wellbeing and happiness;
– the surprising signs of the peri-menopause; and
– why you shouldn’t believe everything a doctor tells you
This is also for you if you have an interest in how optimisation of sleep, movement and even the products you use in your lives can have a huge bearing on your wellbeing and happiness. Or maybe, like many of us, you’re not sure what a Nutritionist and Health Coach is and the main benefits of investing in one!
In this super informative interview, Mel shares her expert wisdom from her own journey struggling with low energy and anxiety and top tips for turning your life around using diet and lifestyle. A successful registered Nutritionist and leading expert in women’s hormonal health, Mel works with a range of clients but has a specialist focus on the perimenopause.
You can find Mel at www.instagram.com/melaniefloodnutrition/ on Instagram and at www.melaniefloodnutrition.com/
Listen to the full episode here!
Podcast Episode 12: Why Becoming a Mother is the Perfect Time to Start A Business
Episode 12 of The School of Success Podcast Series is now live! An inspiring and eye-opening deep-dive into why becoming a mother is the perfect time to start a business!
This interview with the accomplished Leadership Coach, Author and Workplace Wellbeing Creator, Sabine Matharu, teaches you:
– top tips for overcoming the limiting beliefs that stop people from launching their own businesses;
– what’s really going on in new mums’ inner monologues when they go back to work;
– myth-busting around the risks of launching your own business;
– how to use adversity to laser-focus new career goals and expedite health, wealth and happiness; and
– how organisations can better support working parents
This is also for you if you have an interest in how to optimise career clarity before making a change and how to find the killer weapons required to start and scale a business fast. This is also for you if you’re not sure what a Leadership Coach is and the main benefits of investing in one!
In this super informative interview, Sabine shares her expert wisdom from years as a management consultant turned successful author and entrepreneur working with women across a whole host of industries whether new mums, aspiring entrepreneurs or leaders in their field.
You can find Sabine at www.instagram.com/sabine.matharu/ on Instagram and at www.theempowermentportal.com. Her recent book, “Shift – A New Era Begins” can be found here: www.learnmoreabout.info/shift.
Full podcast episode here!
From New York Journalist to Farmer’s Wife: What The Dirty Life Teaches Us About Happiness
What are you?
A professional or an entrepreneur, a country bumpkin or a city slicker, a conformist or a free spirit? Or are you a hybrid – a suited and booted banker or lawyer with the ‘perfect job’ but a niggling desire to explore less well-trodden paths? Or maybe you’re just plain confused about where you fit and what really drives you.
Whatever category you fall into, most of us from Generation Y were bred by folks with far less opportunity than us professionally. With more conventional views of what constitutes a ‘proper’ job, our parents may have inadvertently left us stuck between a rock and a hard place – between what we should do and what we want to do. But ‘should’ is where it all goes wrong.
Expectations versus reality
Nobody knows this better than Kristen Kimball, author of ‘The Dirty Life’ and former freelance journalist and Harvard graduate from New York. After a chance interview with a hunky farmer, she upped sticks to set up farm with her green-fingered interviewee, leaving the city lights and life as she knew it in her wake. You heard right – East Village in favour of mud and veg in the middle of nowhere. This is a story of two love affairs that interrupted the trajectory of an intellectual glamour-puss’ life – one with farming and the other with a man who milks cows for a living. A striking tale about love, happiness and the power of instinct, ‘The Dirty Life’ is a must-read for anyone feeling a little disillusioned with the daily grind or what life’s all about.
The product of a neat, middle-class world, Kimball’s novel charts the mental and physical challenges she faced leaving the glitzy world of ‘convention’ in favour of rural slog. ‘Writ[ing] with precision, authority and gratitude about what is evidently, despite its rigours, an idyllic life’ (New York Times Book Review), Kimball challenges our views about wealth, success and love, giving food for thought as compelling as the gastronomical delights she chronicles.
Kimball’s union with Mark, a rugged hulk of a man with a passion for food and farming, is a world away from the corporate sphere she might have settled into. But as with the different kind of ‘wealth’ she finds farm-side, Kimball takes us on a journey full of surprises, a journey which exposes some stark ironies about our perceptions of ‘success’ and ‘happiness’ of City life.
Does success equal happiness?
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/01-get-hens-lay-eggs-nest-boxes-3016774-e78066e70ffa440ebbeb8f9f70e61a94.jpg "From New York Journalist to Farmer's Wife: What The Dirty Life Teaches Us About Happiness 21")
‘The Dirty Life’ makes us question our ‘values’ as we know them. In Kimball we find a cosmopolitan New Yorker who, like many of us, supposedly ‘has it all’. A woman with all the trappings of refinement, yet one who is, by her own admission, blinded by ignorance. Openly admitting her surprise that a ‘salt-of-the-earth-type’ person such as Mark could talk with dexterity and intelligence and that ‘the physical world – the trades’ was not in fact ‘the place you ended up if you weren’t bright or ambitious enough to handle a white-collar job’, Kimball shows us the danger of defining people by what they do. In Kimball we find a highly educated woman who has travelled the world with her job, yet whose eyes are opened by an entirely different world, stunned by the happiness she finds ‘pulling warm eggs out of a nest box’.
Shake things up…
So, what is the moral of the tale? Keep meeting new people, keep an open-mind and be true to yourself. Work out what is important to you and don’t be afraid to question reality as you know it. Have the courage to live a life true to yourself, not the life others expect of you and remember, the most successful life is one which unearths what makes you truly happy. Fulfilment goes far deeper than an impressive job title and it will bring you fruits that money can’t buy.
Watch an interview with Kristin Kimball here.
“Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it”
Mark Manson 🎯
There is great purpose to be found in pain 🔥
It’s one of life’s greatest paradoxes – how can something that hurts us be the seat of all power and growth?
It’s easy to miss the magic hidden in suffering when you consider the definition o paradox:
“A seemingly absurd or contradictory statement or proposition which when investigated may prove to be well founded or true” 🎯
So don’t be too quick to buy into pain being ‘bad’ or the end.
Instead, start with the counter-intuitive beginning..
Instead of running from emotion, get curious about it.
Understand it.
Learn how to leverage it.
Master it.
And you’ll thrive in relationships, life and career 🎯
And if you think pain makes you unattractive or weak?
Au contraire..
Vulnerability is strength – whether having the courage to explore your feelings or express ‘em out loud.
Unappealing?
Not really, cos you can only meet others as deeply as you’ve met yourself, which is why guys like the above n many o life’s greatest leaders, teachers and healers are able to inspire and transform other lives.
Cos they’ve faced themselves, they’ve often hit the deck in some way and turned their greatest challenges into their greatest strengths.
And those strengths become killer transferable skills and life hacks that bolster them against the great enemy – limiting beliefs, that might otherwise keep them small – and that energy is magnetic – it’s superpower bottled because from there, anything is possible.
So I say again, there is purpose in pain.
Feel to heal, let it out – and then get curious – if this was sent to teach me something, what might that be?
If there was a gift hidden in this horror, what could that be?
It may take some time and that’s ok..
If it came rushing in you’d miss the magic to be found in the journey and the strength to be found in the struggle.
Master that and you’re rich for life 🎁
☘️ To upgrade your life or career, book a free one hour discovery call here