Exploring Possibilities for Woman

As a woman I'm very aware of the complexity of our lives in the 21st century, the multiple demands on our time and energy can make it difficult to retain a sense of self. Depending on the number of roles we are trying to juggle it can be a struggle to carve out time for our selves just to relax. Exploring Possibilities for living, learning and leading offers a unique way of thinking about your self that facilitates self development across the lifespan while enabling you to experience value congruence across your roles, a sense of purpose and time to enjoy the journey.

As our lives progress and become more complex the clear beliefs and values we held as children are frequently insufficient for the multi-facetted demands of adult life. As children we may have had nine or ten roles to accommodate such as being daughters, grand-daughters, siblings, nieces, friends, Brownies and would be ballerinas but as adults the number of roles usually increases dramatically and if we maintain the same expectations for what we should offer in each relationship we can feel overwhelmed.

For example, in childhood it is possible to believe that it is good to care for other children and to do this to a ‘five star’ standard, as there are a limited number of people in our lives, and to experience positive feelings about our ‘caring’ selves. However, we could find ourselves overwhelmed as adults if we try to maintain this standard of care for everyone we encounter. This is where learning about self theories can be liberating. Once we realise that our lives have grown so large that we cannot offer ‘five star’ care to everyone we can increase the ‘range’ of our caring so that it ranges between ‘one to five stars’. This allows us to offer ‘one star’ care to most people we meet, ‘three star’ care to those who are closer to us and to reserve our ‘five star’ caring for the most special people in our lives and this provides an alternative way of living our values and being compassionate while differentiating the level of care so that we are not overwhelmed.

A crucial part of the Exploring Possibilities approach is to identify where we feel stressed and lacking in options and to investigate what is motivating our actions, that is, to identify our underlying beliefs and values. Frequently when we clearly articulate our established beliefs and values we can re-evaluate their relevance in the present time and make suitable changes so that we can continue to express our core values but in a way that is congruent with our complex adult lives.

Lifelong learning concerns developing areas of self to accommodate new events, relationships and tasks. The Exploring Possibilities programme translates innovative psychological theory into practice so that you can increase your understanding about self theories, identify your beliefs, feelings and values and clarify how these influence your actions, that is your motivation. It encourages you to evaluate the current relevance/usefulness of beliefs and values and to explore possibilities for alternatives that enable you to elaborate your self theories and so create ways to engage with the new situation, event, setback or relationship. The Exploring Possibilities programme provides you with the knowledge and skills to purposefully develop your life, in accordance with your unique values, to clarify your vision for your life and helps you to plan how to achieve your goals.

Coaching sessions can be held by video conferencing if this is more convenient (using Skype).