Simple Self Improvement

                                                                                                   Adapted from Pixabay One Saturday before Christmas I discovered an acronym I hadn't encountered previously, NETTEL. I was having a cuppa in a cafe in the main street and looking through the newspaper. I came across a topical article, the tendency of many time poor parents to buy extravagant Christmas presents to compensate for spending little time with their children. These parents are examples of NE...

                                                                                                    Adapted from Pixabay Some people talk about the value of visualisation when faced with a task that invokes feelings of nervousness or downright fear. You may be preparing to attend an interview, give a talk to an audience or do something else which is taking you a long way out of your personal comfort zone. Many people suggest you picture yourself completing the task faultlessly instead of letting yourself think of the mistakes you could make. You are going to give the best speech the audience has ever heard. I recently read an alternative approac...

King William Street Adelaide                                   Image:Marie Vonow Marcel Proust, the famous French novelist, critic and essayist born in the nineteenth century said, ‘ The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. ’ There are many things in one’s local area or places one visits frequently which one probably hasn’t ever noticed. 

                                                                                                  Image:Marie Vonow What does the word ordinary mean? According to my old Heinemann Australian Dictionary (yes the old one held together with sticky tape), ordinary means normal, usual or average. That doesn’t sound very exciting. It sounds like enjoying the ordinary means accepting things that are pretty boring and dull. Actually, it is the opposite. It means discovering the exciting aspects in everyday th...

Nature gives me great pleasure                                            Image:Marie Vonow Everyone gets pleasure from different things and different experiences. Therefore I can't make a list of things guaranteed to bring you pleasure. Even for myself, I have changed over the years so if I had made a list of simple pleasures about 35 years ago some of the items would be different from now. But I do know the items on the top of that list would have been an uninterrupted night's sleep, an afternoon nap and a hot cup of coffee drunk without an interruption. Yes, I had a baby back then.

A person's mind can be just as cluttered as a physical space             Image:Adapted from Pixabay The topic of clutter is frequently discussed in magazine articles and on the internet. When we hear the word ‘clutter’ we usually think of physical surplus items that have accumulated over the years. Emotional bits and pieces are another form of clutter which can weigh us down.    This emotional clutter can be in the form of decisions you haven’t made or tasks you keep putting off. This type of clutter holds you back as much as physical clutter and can drain your energy making you feel tired and overwhelmed. There are times when you know you aren’t in the right frame of mind to make certain important decisions and it is wise to leave them for a while. After a time you may find yourself able to deal with them. Sometimes these decisions are left for a long time because you continue to find you can’t face sorting them out. ...

Enjoy a savouring walk                                                              Image:Pixabay We have had some beautiful weather lately, great time to enjoy a walk in a natural environment. Autumn has been late arriving this year but now the heat is definitely gone. Yes, sometimes it is cold, but there are times when it is 'Goldilocks weather', not too hot and not too cold but just right. For a moment there I thought I had made up an expression but when I googled it I found this expression has been used by others. Oh well. Recently I came across the term 'Savouring Walk' on the internet. The idea of a savouring walk is to spend twenty minutes taking a walk during which you make a point of using your senses to notice everything around you. Really look at t...