Hello, I’m Jessica Hylands Life Coach, talking about feeling good in the face of adversity.

And boy are we facing adversity at the moment!

I hope you’re all keeping well and my deepest best wishes to anyone suffering from the virus and for those around them.

My heart goes out to those of you in the medical and care industries. I’m aware of what you’re going through both in terms of the worry of the risks you’re taking every day, but also of the massively hard work you’re putting in and the toll that’s taking on you.

Along with every else in the country, I admire and thank you so much for what you’re doing.

It’s those people who enable the rest of us to have comparatively smaller worries.

It’s a difficult situation that we’re in.

It’s difficult on lots of different levels.

Being confined to our homes is difficult.

Being told what to do is difficult. You mustn’t do this, and you must do that. We’re lucky enough to live in a time and country where usually we have so much freedom to do what we want when we want. To think what we want, to say what we want.

We don’t know we’re born.

And now we’re being constrained by so many rules. And some confusion around those rules.

Are we allowed to do this? Is it OK if I do that?

So, having all these new rules foisted upon us is difficult.

Losing money is difficult.

If you’re employed and getting 80% of your wages then hopefully that’s enabling you to keep things afloat.   

There is a lot of other help out there for people and businesses but for a lot of us, there isn’t any help. So yes, it’s hard.

Am I miserable about things?

No. And why aren’t I? I know as much as you do about it all, so why aren’t I miserable?

I confess to having a constant silver lining around all of my clouds but that doesn’t happen by chance.

It’s by design.

The way I manage to do this is by limiting the amount of negativity that I allow in.

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How about you? How are you feeling?

Are you losing sleep over things?

Are you constantly worrying about it all?

Worrying about what the future might look like.

If this is you, how much is that helping. In constantly worrying about everything, is that making you feel more secure?

Yes, we need to be prepared.

Yes, we need to take action that’s appropriate for our individual situations to ensure that we get the best outcome possible, but do we need to have a recorded message on loop going through our minds about how bad everything is.

About the doom and gloom that may follow.

We don’t know what’s going to happen when this is all over.

Will we all be living in tents this time next year or will we rise from the ashes to a prosperous and fantastic future?

We don’t know. I’m banking on the latter but, we don’t know.

For sure we know it’s going to be hard.

There will always be immense effort involved in righting a ship that has leaned over to the point of almost capsizing. But that doesn’t equate to doom and gloom forever.

If you imagine the two scenarios:

Firstly; 🙁 Doom and gloom. It’s going to be awful. It’s going to take so long to get back to normal. Oh no.  

And then scenario two. Wow we have a lot of catching up to do here. Let’s get to it! We’ll come out better and stronger!

Those are two different takes on the same situation.

If you find yourself doing the first one, ask yourself how that’s serving you.

Is it helping the situation? Is it making it better? Is it making you feel better?

Probably not.

And if you have the second version in your mind, how do you imagine that is going to make you feel? More optimistic? More ready to hit the ground running when we can? Make you feel happier on a day to day basis?

Hopefully you feel that option two looks like the best and most reasonable way to think.

Thinking positively doesn’t mean you aren’t taking any action to safeguard your future. You’ll be doing the same things, just with a different attitude.

If you find yourself stuck in the doom and gloom feeling, how can you get yourself out of it?

I’m going through the same situation as you of course, but generally, I’m feeling happy and optimistic.

I do that by not letting negative stuff in.

I don’t immerse myself in all the bad news on telly or on-line.

Yes, I discuss the situation with friends and what life might look like after this passes but we don’t focus and dwell on the negatives.

What’s the point? We don’t know how this will play out. We don’t know that it’s going to be awful afterwards.

Yes of course there will be a lot of casualties in business and work.

But ask yourself whether dwelling on that and feeling bad about it is doing any good, whether it’s directly affecting you or not.

We’re so lucky to live in a country where we’ll be looked after. We‘ll have a roof over our heads, we’ll have heat and light, and food on the table.

For those is us who may need to rely on that help, it may not be a five-star lifestyle but it’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be a safety net so that we can be assured of having our basic needs met.

That’s no small thing and I, for one, am very grateful knowing that safety net is there. It makes an immense difference to my feeling of well being. Knowing that my worst case scenario is better than a dream life for some people in other countries.

So, whatever your situation, however bad things are for you at the moment or how bad you anticipate them being in the future, focus on the good.

You know that focusing on the bad will not only make you feel rotten now but will hamper your ability to get out there (when we can) and do your best.

It’s difficult to come up with good and positive plans of how to work around something when all we can see is darkness.

I do know it’s not easy.

I’m not saying that it’s a walk in the park for me to stay positive.

I was part of a video meeting this morning and the conversation was all doom and gloom. We managed to move the conversation around, but had it continued, I’d have left the meeting.

I know that to listen over and over to all the economical statistics and forecasts for the country would start to drag me down.

Start to make me worry.

It did start to make me see things through the big dark clouds that some of the others in the meeting were looking through. I had to consciously pull myself back out of it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blind to it.

I know what’s going on, but the point I’m making is that once you know, you know.  Take the necessary action to protect yourself as well as you can, and then put it to one side.

What’s the value in doing otherwise? Where’s the value in doom mongering with every other conversation that we have?

Yes, we have to look forward and make sure we’re doing all we can to mitigate bad situations.

Yes, we have to be prepared. But do you need to keep nurturing the negativity like a little pet that you’re desperate to keep alive?

Keep ramming the bad news down your own throat all the time and of course you’re going to feel bad.

It’s like if you have two stone to lose in weight. When you decide to lose it, do you spend all day everyday down in the dumps because of the weight? No, you put your positivity hat on, you exercise, and you regulate your diet. You celebrate losing half a pound. Yeah!

If you spent all your time focusing on how bad you felt about the extra weight, you’d be more likely to sit in bed crying and eating a mars bar to console yourself.

This is the same. Don’t stay in bed with a mars bar. Find some positives. If things are hard now or you think they will be hard down the line, work out a plan. That might involve having to cut back on spending, and working hard to budget. Or might involve studying for a new career.

We’re all in different situations in a lot of different areas of life but the things that we have in common are that, we are where we are. We can’t ‘decide’ it’s not happening and move away. It’s here. This is how it is.

My wish for you is to be happy, calm, and I suppose accepting of things. It is what it is. Let’s do the best we can with it.

And while we’re trying to do that, keep smiling.

Don’t immerse yourself in all the bad news. Just check out the headlines once a day.

If you find yourself talking with people who are gushing with negativity, change the subject, or leave the conversation.

There’s only one person who can make you feel happy and contented regardless of what you’re going through, and that’s you.

I do wish you all the best with that. And I do understand that it’s not easy to do. But it is worth the effort.

If you need any help, then please do get in touch for a free fully confidential chat and I’ll let you know how I can help you with it.

Thanks for listening,

Bye for now.