Hi all
Ok so I know its been a while and I kind of thought I had finished with this blog, but during a chat with my friend Bronnie last night, (the one and only, who is visiting from Australia), she mentioned how sad she was that I never got to finish my blog properly…..and I have to admit I felt the same.
Following that, I was all of a sudden overwhelmed with this urge to write and I decided that this particular journey is definitely nowhere near from finished and that my dad would have wanted me to finish it on a high!

Needless to say, it been a pretty eventful year moving back home to South Africa.
A couple of months ago I got asked to speak at Extreme Models Annual Mother and Daughter high tea.

The topic: Empowering women in their daily lives

My first official engagement as a life coach…..Yehaaaaa!!!
Of course, it seemed to arrive at the absolute worst possible time when I was struggling more than ever with myself, and my newly made life in South Africa. I had spent the first couple of months home, in a frenzied-empowered high.
My goal: “I must get work, I must make money-Nothing else matters”. But as is so often the case: When we work so hard towards achieving our goals, with the simple belief that achieving them will bring us peace and happiness, we are often let down. After more than achieving what I had originally set out to earn by the end of July I was suddenly no longer worrying about being financially stable and my focus suddenly shifted to my severe lack of a social life and friends. I was missing all my old friends incredibly, as the void between my UK life and SA life seemed to be expanding rapidly, on a daily basis. (Let it be known please, that even Midget fell completely off the radar during this time, some lame excuse about holidaying in Thailand? I mean really Midget….you should be absolutely ashamed of yourself. Is it any wonder I nearly fell apart? ;-)

So I was struggling unbelievably to make new friends, and I felt overwhelmingly claustrophobic as a result of having absolutely no one to just go out with. On top of that I was 36 and STILL single. STILL single!!! The Absolute Horror!! can you imagine!!;-) I was pretty sure that, somewhere out there in PE, there did infact exist some more single people (maybe even some my age?) ….but I was at a loss as to how I was EVER going to meet any of them if I had NO one to go out with!! So needless to say it was at this point that I felt totally and utterly ‘un-inspired’ and wholly ‘dis-empowered’ (if there is such a word?)
My initial reaction on reading the email requesting me to speak was to actually laugh out loud: “You have got to be kidding God? Now of all times? You couldn’t have sent this two months ago when I was at my best? This is a joke right?”

I think its incredible how certain things come to you at just the right time. A couple of days after I had arrived home, in December, I randomly picked up an article about facing your fears and simply getting into the habit of doing things: no matter how terrified you might feel. I have read countless such articles through the years… but for some reason, this one just stuck with me and has turned out to be my ultimate maxim this year: “If it scares the hell out of you Gayle….just do it!” It was what gave me the courage to set up my own tutoring business and the guts to finally start selling myself, it even gave me the strength to get through an incredible 10 day Vispassna Course in June…. (10 days of no speaking or communicating and 11 hours a day of desperately trying to sit on my arse and meditate – possible the hardest thing I have ever had to do but undoubtedly one of the greatest and most empowering experiences I have ever had.)
Needless to say, my maxim has served me well.

So faced with another mind numbing fear I said yes and started writing. Low and behold it seemed to be the perfect cure for pulling me out of my self-induced pity-party slump.

Instead of focusing on what I didn’t have, friends to go out with, I began focusing on the new friends I had made since being home. I began to appreciate their love and support and just found myself grateful for time that I was able to spend with them and their families. I began to realize how amazing it was to finally have one of my oldest and dearest friends, Kelly, back in my life – in full force, even if it was only on the phone. I was thankful to finally be able to spend time with my mother, who absolutely loves and adores me and for the chance to reconnect with my other family members. I was overwhelmed with gratitude to be home, at last, and found myself armed with a new measure of faith and awareness that everything I need comes to me and that some things, like building a new life and making new friends you just can’t rush…..

(For those of you that are interested I have included a copy of my speech….Midget, you, on the other hand, might just want to skip this and go to the next blog….were I do believe you will have a minor supporting role!;-)

Conquering our fears.
First of all, I would like to start by saying a very big thank you to all of you for having me here to speak to day. I am very honoured to be here.

This is actually my first public talk as a life coach so please forgive me if I seem really nervous.
Before I start I’d like to just tell you briefly about myself. I am a PE girl born and bred but I have been living and teaching in London for the last 12 years. During that time while I was desperately unfulfilled as a teacher I happened to stumble across life coaching. I have to admit that at a time when I was very unhappy with the direction my life had taken…..life coaching seemed incredibly attractive. I couldn’t help but think If I learn’t how to help other people to live more balanced, happy, fulfilling lives then just maybe I could start teaching myself?

Over the next three years I was challenged to really start thinking honestly about who I was and what it was I wanted from my life. It was also during this time that I noticed a total shift in my teaching. I was hit by the powerful realization of how I had spent so much of my life comparing and judging myself against other people, especially against other teachers. I had been my own worst critic and it had been utterly exhausting. For the first time I began to appreciate and embrace my own unique gifts as a teacher, and I actually started to enjoy teaching. Ironically what I thought was going to be my ultimate escape from the teaching world was anything but. After qualifying as a life coach practitioner I eventually moved back to PE in December last year and ended up starting my own tutoring business…with a little life coaching on the side…which I’m now absolutely loving.

When Veruska emailed me and asked me to come and speak to you my initial feelings were: Absolute Sheer Panic and overwhelming self-doubt! The good thing about me now, compared to a couple of years ago is that I now realize that these emotions are not unique to me and that almost everyone feels them at some point in their lives. How we handle these emotions is what makes the difference between us simply living our lives and us truly enjoying our lives.

So I hope you don’t mind but after spending a good couple of days trying to figure out what exactly it was that I was going to speak to you about I eventually decided to focus on the one thing that has been incredibly significant to me in my life, and that prevents so many of us from being the incredible women that we truly are. Conquering our fears.

There isn’t a single person in this world that isn’t faced with one fear or another every single day… the fear of failure, the fear of rejection, the fear of being alone, the fear of change…the fear of not being good enough…the list is endless. As completely normal as it is for us as humans to feel fear, fear can, if we allow it, become our greatest enemy.

Fear causes anxiety, stress and worries about what might happen in our future…and yet that being said about 90% of what we do worry about never actually happens. That means most of our fears and negative worries only have about a 10% chance of being correct or coming true! I think one of the best acronyms I have heard that sums up what the true meaning of fear is False, Evidence, Appearing, Real.

Dr Joseph Murphey author of a wonderful book called the power of your subconscious mind explains this beautifully with this example:

“A small child can be paralyzed with fear when a playmate says that there is a monster underneath his bed who will grab him in the middle of the night. But when the child’s parent turns on the light and shows the child that there is no monster he is freed from his fear. The fear in the mind of the child was every bit as real as if there was a monster there. But the thing he feared did not exist, in the same way, that most of our fears have no reality. Fear is simply a negative thought in our mind that we give our power away to.”

I honestly feel like this year has been my year for facing my fears. If you had of asked me this time last year what my 3 worst fears where they would have been
1. Loosing my dad
2. Moving back to South Africa
3. And public speaking.

Number one and two on my list where all consuming and played against each other beautifully……My dad has not been well for a good couple of years now and the fear of loosing him could at times be absolutely overwhelming. I usually came home for Christmas and saying goodbye at that airport was always heart breaking…I continually worried whether that would be the last time I saw my father. In fact I more than worried, being a real daddies girl, I adored my father and I obsessed about how miserable I would be without him in my life. But as much as I allowed that fear to keep me busy, my fear of actually moving back to South Africa seemed more than able at keeping me rooted in London. As much as I hated the weather there I was more petrified of the crime here. As frustrated as I was teaching in the school that I was at, I was more daunted by the thought of having to live off a teachers salary in South Africa. I was petrified of having to start my life over here and remake a whole new circle of friend…when I was more than happy with the ones I already had. As with most fears, I had excuses for everything but I wasn’t happy. I knew I wanted to come home but I just couldn’t make that decision and I felt completely debilitated.

Finally after seeing how much my dad’s health had deteriorated when I came home for Christmas 2009 Fear no 1, finally defeated fear number 2 and I made plans to come home. I can’t even begin to describe the feeling I felt to have finally just made the decision. While I don’t regret any of my time that I spent in England I do regret the worrying and anxiety that I allowed my indecision and fear to cause me.

So after 6 months of travelling I was finally on my way home when all of a sudden I found myself facing fear no one. Head on. While I was in Australia one week before I was due to come home my father passed away. But after years of worry, I was prepared for the worst and I knew exactly how I would react. I would quite clearly fall apart. My world would stop. And my life as I knew it would be forever changed for the worse.

What I wasn’t really prepared for was non of that actually happening. Yes I was heart broken, yes I was sad beyond words that my happy family reunion had turned into a funeral..but I was amazed to discover I was still functioning…and more than anything I felt strong. All of a sudden the only thing that consumed me was speaking at his funeral…the dreaded public speaking fear no 3 wasn’t even allowed to surface. With even the thought of my dad’s death reducing me to tears in the past I was amazed to find that I could stand up in front of 200 people without crying and talk about my wonderful father.

I have come to realize that my fear wasn’t actually that my dad would die…it was simply that my life would not be the same without him, it was the fear of how utterly lost I “thought” I would feel without having him standing next to my mum cheering me on. More than anything I have come to appreciate this year how all 3 of my fears where simple False Evidence Appearing Real.

This year has in so many ways been one of the best years of my life and I honestly believe it’s been a result of finally having to face and confront my fears. For starters, I absolutely love being back in South Africa and having family around me again. I could never have believed a couple of years ago how much losing my father would fill me with such determination to make him proud. I couldn’t have imagined how relieved I would feel not to have to watch him suffer anymore. I would never have dreamed of having the courage to actually start my own business or stand up here and bare my soul to a room full of strangers.

In so many ways I feel blessed because I was literally forced to face my biggest fears…but in life, we aren’t always that lucky and more often than not we have to face and overcome them ourselves.
So I suppose the big question is how do we overcome our fears, how ever big or small they may be in our everyday life?

For me there are 3 simple steps that I try to follow:

1. Is to simply start becoming aware of our fears. You can’t defeat your enemy if you don’t know who they are. Don’t judge your fears, don’t try sort them out and don’t allow them to take control of your thoughts. The more energy you put into trying to resolve your fears and the more you beat yourself up for having them in the first place the more overwhelming they will become. Get into the habit of simply asking yourself: what’s really stopping me from moving forward here?

2. Don’t be afraid to get things wrong
Ultimately I believe one of the greatest limitations for most people is the fear of failure. I must admit as petrified as I was to stand up here and talk, I think the only thing that would scare me more would be to step onto a runway surrounded by beautiful girls only to be rated for my performance and looks afterwards. So to all of you young models out there, you do have my utmost respect. But I can imagine that at times some of you might feel completely over whelmed by the fear of not doing well in a competition. I’m sure it can feel soul destroying to feel like you weren’t good enough when someone else is chosen above you. I can only imagine how easy it would be to start comparing yourself to others trying to figure out what it was about them that made them winners, and what was it about you that made you the looser? Was it my height? My hair? My nose? Is she prettier than me? Does she have a better figure than me? It’s only to easy when we fail to start finding fault with ourselves even when such a failure has absolutely nothing to do with us at all. In any competition there are different judges who are looking for different things. It could quite simply be that in that particular competition you just simply didn’t have what they where looking for. Had it been another set of judges or a different competition you might have had exactly what they were looking for.

I’m not a mother but I can only imagine how frightening being a parent can be. You carry this tiny little thing inside you for 9 months, and all of a sudden you are handed the most precious gift in the world. A tiny human being that is totally dependent on you. A little person that you are then responsible for sculpting into a healthy, happy child. As well as dealing with your own fears, you now have all these new fears, for your child as well. Will they be happy? Will they make friends easily? Will they be safe? How can I stop them from making the same mistakes that I made?

During the last couple of weeks, I have spoken to loads of my friends who are parents and one of the biggest fears so many of them have is: “Which one of my mistakes are my children going to remember the most.” Mums so desperately want to do everything right by their children, especially their daughters. Daughters more than their sons identify with their mothers and will ideally look to them as role models on how to be confident young women. Of course the only example any mum really wants to set for their daughters is that of a wonderful, loving, patience parent who never says the wrong thing and quite simply never makes a mess of things. But the truth of the matter is motherhood does not come with a manual. What it does come with is hundreds and thousands of books all telling you what to do and what not to do. Of course what most mothers will have discovered is that more often than not what works with one child just simply doesn’t work with another. Every mother is different as is every child so learning how to be a parent means you are going to make mistakes over and over again.

The beauty I think of babies and children is their determination to never give up. Imagine if a 5-month-old baby tried to walk for the first time, fell down and then simply refused to ever try again. Or a 6-year-old fell off her bike and her parents simply said ok that’s it: You are never going to be able to ride that thing…lets put it away. It’s such a simple analogy but so true. No loving parent would ever say that to their child….in fact, what any loving parent would do is continue to encourage their child to keep on trying until they eventually learn to ride perfectly. How wonderful would it be if we could learn to treat ourselves with that much patience and that much love?

For me, true empowerment comes from accepting that as women, and as human beings, we will inevitably be unsuccessful at many things in our lives, We are going to make mistakes. We are going to fail. What we do with that failure and our thoughts afterwards is the main question? Empowerment comes from accepting that we are not failures just because we don’t achieve the desired results this time. It comes from understanding that just because we didn’t win the competition, or got passed over for a promotion, or weren’t able to save our marriage doesn’t mean we will never be successful at any of those things in the future. It comes from stepping onto that ramp and believing in yourself no matter what the outcome of the competition. Empowerment simply comes from picking yourself up, dusting yourself off and merely asking: What could I do better next time?

3. Embrace the struggle.
Rather naively when I started out studying to be a life coach I had great dreams of my life getting magical easier, of fewer problems, of fewer worries and with fewer ups and downs. I think without a doubt the greatest lesson that I have learnt these last couple of years is that true happiness does not come from mastering a magic formula for creating a problem-free life.
True happiness comes from simply accepting that in life you will always have problems and struggles. It comes from learning to be kind to yourself, accepting that you are doing your best and not allowing your bad days to overrun your good days.

You probably already know the now fairy-tale like story of the writer J. K. Rowling author of Harry Potter.
Seven years after graduating from university, Rowling saw herself as quote: “the biggest failure I knew.” Her marriage had failed, she was jobless and on welfare, extremely depressed and raising her daughter by herself. After 12 rejections from different publishing houses, Harry Potter was finally accepted by a small publishing house in London, called Bloomsbury. Although Bloomsbury agreed to publish the book, the editor Cunningham advised Rowling to get a day job, since she had little chance of ever making any money in children’s books.
And yet with all this Rowling describes her failure as liberating:
She says:
“Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fears had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable.”

Rowling, through her hard work and determination, turned Harry Potter into a global brand worth an estimated 7 billion pounds making her one of the richest authors in the world.

I’m going to end with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson the great 19-century philosopher and poet

” Do the thing you are afraid to do, and the death of fear is certain.”

I don’t believe that we will ever be able to completely banish fear from our lives, nor should we want to. But we can stop it from dictating who we are and what we want to do, We can face it head on shaking in our boots and know that next time it will be a little bit easier. Next time we will do it a little better and one day we will do it right.