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Browse published articles attributed to Liz Copeland, with full-archive search.
Some years ago we were traveling through Boston Airport. On the wall, and it was a huge wall, there was a colossal American flag. Whiling away the time before our flight, this obviously caught the imagination of one of the children. ‘What’ they said in a loud voice that seemed to fill one of those silences you occasionally get in public places, ‘do the stars and stripes mean?’
Do you ever get the feeling that you are taking one step forward and two steps backwards? You lose a little weight then it all gets a bit scary and you stop dieting? And then all the weight mysteriously comes back. Or you stick to the diet all day but then in the evening you crave and long ...
Everybody has a Time Dictator inside them. This is the person who when you want to goof off and be totally unproductive, wags their finger at you and says ‘This must be done... NOW!’
My recent teleclass on procrastination dealt with the whys and hows, including the 3 steps to getting out of procrastination and the one essential ingredient to really get yourself moving forward. But on the call I didn’t have time to explore in detail some of the most wonderful procrastination activities, so I thought I’d cover that here. Yes, it’s not totally serious, but I think it will make the point that we are all endlessly creative in putting things off! So, what are the major reasons excuses for procrastinating: 1. I have to sort my office out. Ever popular, this one.
My recent teleclass on procrastination dealt with the whys and hows, including the 3 steps to getting out of procrastination and the one essential ingredient to really get yourself moving forward. But on the call I didn’t have time to explore in detail some of the most wonderful procrastination activities, so I thought I’d cover that here. Yes, it’s not totally serious, but I think it will make the point that we are all endlessly creative in putting things off! So, what are the major reasons excuses for procrastinating: 1. I have to sort my office out. Ever popular, this one.
Recently we went to see the Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy. I knew about his colourful paintings of French landscapes but hadn’t seen his earlier work or his pen and ink drawings. The exhibition showed how his painting style developed and how it reflected his life. And perhaps this is what you want for your working life – you want it to develop and you want it to reflect your life. The really sad thing, though, about Van Gogh’s work is that he was so unrecognised and unrewarded in his own lifetime. And this is NOT what I want for you!
Goal setting is something we all do in our lives. It can be personal like giving up smoking or losing weight. Or it could be a professional goal such as reaching a particular sales target, achieving a particular grade in your company or, if you are running a business, breaking into a new market for getting a certain number clients. Usually at the beginning of this process there is some long-term vision in mind. People don't dream goals out of thin air, they come from an inner desire that is driving you forward.
This time of year there are plenty of runners around London, locals limbering up for the marathon. They are out every day, running along the pavements (in spite of the fact that concrete is just about the worst surface to run on) and pounding the miles to the big day. And their success will be due to all the training work they have done, not in this last month but in the months leading up to now.
Isn’t that what some people say to you when you want to try something new? Especially if it rocks their boat. Especially if it changes their universe. “It won’t work.” “You can’t do it.” “It’s never been done before.” “You’re thinking of doing what?” Or, (laughing and pointing their finger at you) “Who, YOU?” Or perhaps your friends/relatives and well wishers are politer than this. They are conce ed for your welfare and safety. They don’t want you to get hurt.
Getting rid of your gremlins around food is not easy. Of course you have lots of help – diet books, slimming clubs, gym instructors (some of whom definitely have never been overweight), not to mention family members who give helpful advice while disdainfully looking at your hips. And have you noticed how the skinny ones (family members or gym instructors, it doesn’t matter which) exude an air of moral superiority.
So today is the day that William and Catherine (or Wills and Kate, as the newspapers will have it) get hitched. And deciding to get married is a big step in anyone’s life. But particularly for this couple who have the eyes of the world upon them. William is used to that and has been brought up to know he is in the public eye, but for Catherine it must have been a shock to realise how much of her life will be exposed to public gaze.
Whatever changes you want to make in your life you will find some aspects of change easy and some aspects of change difficult. The easy bit is working out that you need to change. That increasing sense of frustration, that growing sense of unease or just a general awareness of unhappiness, all of these things will make you realise that you need to change something. The difficult bit is actually taking the decision to change, making a choice that you are prepared to take action to get rid of that frustration, unease or unhappiness.
You may have set our New Year’s resolutions and are determined that this year it will be different. But take yourself forward to December 2010 - will you be looking back on this year the way you looked back on the last one? Will your dreams and goals be recognised? Will you be looking back on 2010 and saying – * Wow, that was my best year ever! * What a fantastic year! * And I’m looking forward to a fabulous future! Wouldn’t that be great? And setting and reaching your goals is easy if you have a system for getting you where you want to go.
There are several ways of getting rid of fear. Some people advocate facing it head on. That kind of person will lead you to the edge of the diving board and then give you a push. No doubt they do the same if you are in front of them with a parachute strapped to your back and hesitating before you jump. This gung-ho approach works for some things but it’s difficult to do it by yourself, in the same way that it’s difficult to inflict pain on yourself. So if you have to be self–motivating you’re probably not going to take that route. Another approach is to avoid fear completely.
We were all designed to be fat. Annoying but true; our ancestors never knew whether it was going to be feast or famine. So in the feast times they ate and put on weight. When the famine came along all that stored fat came in useful. Of course it helped that they had very active lifestyles. In ...
I was faced with an interesting question from my younger son the other day. He meandered into the kitchen and said was it all right if he used my The New Raw Food Detox Diet book as a plate for his chocolate cake. There were so many things wrong with this questio I didn't know where to begin. Not that Natalia Rose, the author of the eponymous book, is against chocolate, but I don’t think huge teenage-sized slices of chocolate cake qualify for good nutrition.
What does success mean to you? If you are reading this, I assume you want to be successful in some way, shape or form. But maybe you feel constrained by all the things you’d have to do, all the plans you’d have to stick to, all the goals that are worthy but, let’s face it, a bit dull.
Soon we’ll be getting all those television programmes that review the year just gone. There’ll be events we thought we’d never forget about, that we now can barely remember. There’ll be other apparently trivial events that stick in our memory. And unde eath it all, perhaps a nagging sensation... another year where things were much the same... same old goals set... same old nothing achieved. If this is you, STOP! I want you, right now, to stop this negative talk.
It was supposed to be the year you lost the weight/trained to be a rocket scientist/ditched the husband/married the hot chick from accounts/went global. Or at least made some money. You know, the big stuff. But somehow it’s fizzled out or been swamped by the old routine or engulfed in the busywork of daily living. And you sigh, and plough on and hope for the best. You still have the big stuff on your to-do list but you’re not quite getting there. So stop and ask yourself the following questions: 1.
Do you plan to be successful or do you just plan? There is a big difference between the two. Any kind of plan is probably better than no plan at all. But do you know the reason so many plans fail or succeed only as a faded, watered-down version of what they're supposed to be? It could be inadequate information gathering, or a lacklustre vision or poor implementation or non-existent management. All of these things will come into play, whether your intention is to make your business more profitable, advance in your career or re-organise your life.
Watching a nature programme the other day, I was informed that a single walrus can eat 4000 clams in a ten minute dive (Nature’s Great Events, broadcast by BBC, Feb. 11 2009) which seems a tad greedy to me, but then look at the size of a walrus. Are they that big because they eat a lot of clams ...
I always ask the same question when my son comes home from school. After the hello and how are you the next question is ‘what homework have you got?’ And a couple of weeks ago I got an answer I didn’t expect – ‘We weren’t given any homework because we spent the day remembering my dead friend.’ One of my younger son’s classmates had collapsed and died over the weekend. This was totally unexpected. He was a lovely boy, on the school rugby team and a member of the school orchestra, a great contributor to the world. And only seventeen.
Big decisions, by their nature, are scary. Decision making is in inexact science and the biggest decisions are usually made with incomplete information. There’s always the potential to know more but you can’t predict what’s around the corner and you want to avoid that ‘if only I had known’ feeling in the future.
How do you feel about 2011 so far? Has it met with your expectations? Is it working out the way you had hoped? Are you feeling safe and secure about the future or does it feel like a rocky road? Maybe you are dealing with a lot of unknowns and you feel you just aren’t in a secure place. Or maybe you know exactly what you are dealing with...and you don’t like it.
Now before you get carried away, I don’t mean go wild eating. Well you can do that with the right kind of foods but I don’t know what your current food inventory is, so I’m not going to advise raiding the fridge without limitation... What I mean by going wild is...
Just recently I’ve been thinking about Nantucket. I don’t know why, except my life is in the in-between dream state where one phase is ending and the next phase hasn’t yet begun. So in a way, anything is possible, and I set myself the task of day-dreaming about what I might like. Which, when you are stuck in no-man’s land and you don’t know what you’d like, is very difficult. But I allowed myself to relax and asked myself what do you really want? And the answer popped out. Nantucket. Now I have to say I don’t even know where Nantucket is...
What is eating about? Beautiful tastes and textures, wonderful aromas, a pleasing plate of food? Something to fill you up when you are hungry? A great gift that you can share with others, while you also enjoy their company? A list of calories, fat grams or carbohydrate grams? A stack of guilty pleasures or healthy (less enjoyable) alte atives? Food shouldn’t be any one thing to us. We use food to give calories and nutrients to our bodies, for sure, but it is also a source of pleasure for the sheer joy of eating.
Many people who overeat do so to fill in the empty time when they are bored, or they are using food to fill their emotional hunger. The pain of loneliness, the itch of frustration or the adrenaline-burst of anger can be suppressed by filling up with food. And it’s better to do that, we reason, ...
So what are YOU eating tonight? You know how it is. Full of good intentions, you plan your day/week/monthly menus, fill the house with good food and have the best of intentions for healthy eating. That’s Monday. And you chop, slice, sauté, cook and produce a great meal. Tuesday too. Wednesday you have an evening meeting, various offspring need to be picked up or dropped off for soccer/tuba lessons/knitting marathons and you are, frankly, exhausted.
Do you have a to-do list that gets ever longer? You think that once you are back to your routine after the disarrangement of summer holidays and packing/travelling/unpacking, you might actually GET THINGS DONE! For a while it works, but pretty soon that old to–do list is getting longer again. And the things that really take the time are often quite small tasks.
Almost everyone overeats and under exercises at Christmas. Yes, thin people do it too. So don't feel you are a failure if you have put on a few pounds. And if you want to change your shape, starting off a new regime in midwinter is not easy. If you are in Australia, no excuses, I know it is ...
One of my children (it would be unfair to give a name) has tried every trick in the book to get out of handing in homework. Actually, they've all gone through a phase of doing that, so much for my brilliant parenting. Don't kids realise that teachers have heard every excuse and no longer believe ...
In Star Trek Next Generation Jean-Luc Picard (French but inexplicably with a perfect English accent) was admirably played by Patrick Stewart. I was once lucky enough to see Patrick at a conference; he was one of the speakers giving an inspirational talk. He held the stage as befits a Royal ...
If you want to eat it’s possible to be very creative and find all sorts of reasons for overeating. These reasons are, of course, excuses. But sometimes we find ourselves in situations where it is very difficult to eat as healthily as we’d like. Here are some practical tips for dealing with ...
In this Hitchcock movie, the amiable but earnest Jimmy Stewart is confined to his New York apartment by a broken leg and thinks he has witnessed a murder. Sitting at his window he sees nearly all the activities in the apartments opposite. The gorgeous Grace Kelly is sceptical but gamely ...
I spend a lot of time coaching people through emotional eating. It’s a bit like taking apart an onion (ever noticed how many food metaphors I use?). Take off one layer, you think you’ve cracked it then there’s another issue to deal with. And all of us are susceptible to our old ...
When I was younger I read The Thirty-Nine Steps but much preferred the movie version. Calamity follows adventure and a sequence of unlikely escapes maintains the tension, along with the mystery of the 39 steps. It’s a good introduction to Hitchcock’s suspense-building ...
Anyone who had done weight loss knows that to lose weight you need to set a goal. Or two. Or several if you have a lot of weight to lose. And anyone who has read anything about success knows that good goal setting is essential. If you don’t know where you are going you will not know how to get ...
Our Christmas began early when my daughter and I went to Nuremberg to visit the Christkindlesmarkt or Christmas market. I went there to buy, among other things, angel chimes, only to find that the chimes I wanted actually come from Sweden - and can, therefore, probably be bought at IKEA! But ...
I’ve always been biased against Cinderella. Mainly because I have large feet and would never have fitted into that glass slipper. But also because I feel that if she were treated that badly by her sisters she should have left home and set up a cleaning business (which we know she was skilled at) ...
I recently wrote that Younger Son was on the Ark Royal. Well he survived it - and more importantly the Ark Royal survived him! He was a bit peeved that as they left the ship at Liverpool the crew were putting tables and chairs out for a party. Younger Son felt he was missing out on a feast and ...
So how emotional are you over food? Some people regard food just as a source of fuel. They skip meals because they literally forget to eat and it will only be that gnawing hunger in their stomach that drives them to food. Lucky them, you might think. Actually, that’s not that case. People who ...
News is a strange thing. Until a couple of weeks ago I had never heard the term "hockey mom" (and if I hear it again I’ll throw a brick at the TV!). A week ago I had not heard of a Large Hadron Collider, but it can, apparently, reveal the secrets of the universe. When driving to school the other ...
When were in Spain we decided to visit the Alhambra. This sounds as if it ought to be a bingo hall in Whitley Bay (US readers – for Whitley Bay think Atlantic City only smaller and colder). The Alhambra is, of course, an ancient palace originally built by the Arabs in Spain and then occupied by ...
Emotional eating can sabotage any diet or cause people to pile the pounds back on when they've reached their target weight. Does that donut have your name written on it? Is that last chocolate in the box the one that tastes the best? (And you'd know that because you've eaten all the others). Are ...
Since we last met I’ve been to Battle – no, not a state of warfare (though I am capable of that!) but the site of the Battle of Hastings in 1066. It is just a field, though a very historic one, but well worth a visit if you are in the neighbourhood, along with Battle Abbey. Standing on the site ...
So you’ve done the cabbage soup diet, the high fibre diet, the low fibre diet, the ice cream and beer diet (just kidding) and now you are ready to start a proper eating plan. But you also want to continue it. Already you know how diet failure goes. Full of hope, you clear out the ...
Holidaying in Southern Spain this year we enjoyed the Mediterranean food. A typical meal was salmon fillet with home-made pesto sauce (basil, pine nuts and olive oil) and stir-fried Mediterranean vegetables. Our Mediterranean veg medley consisted of aubergines (eggplants) and courgettes ...