achieving our potential

This week has been Canadian Mental Health Association’s Mental Health Week. I’ve seen a lot of excitement about it online – there has never been a time in history where so much emphasis has been put on our health.  That said, a Google search of “health” provides an overwhelming amount of information on nutrition, disease, fitness, weight loss, and anti- aging.  What doesn’t come up is mental health. Mental health is so critical to living a good, healthy life – and it needs to take its important place in conversations around health. 

As we race breathlessly through January, energized by our resolutions, we may find ourselves sliding rather rapidly into February. Where did the month go? More importantly where are we in relation to all those resolutions? You know, the fitness programme, the commitment to eat no sugar, the giant wall of sticky notes promising more productivity. 

I want to be kind, I really do. Kindness matters, I know this, I coach this, I speak about the power of kindness, and yet -- yes, and yet.

In my primary relationship (you know, that relationship with my husband), being kind seems to be in a wrestling match with being right. Being right just feels so good. It is a lustful emotion, an instinctual one, a need that can be sort of addiction.

“Imagination is a magical power.”  I said this in front of twenty five thousand young people as part of We Day this year.  We Day is a global movement encouraging activism, engagement and volunteerism in young people.  Every young person in the Saddle Dome in Calgary, the Rogers Centre in Toronto, had earned their way to the event by volunteering locally and globally.

Transitions are a big theme in my life right now.  My son is going off to University, I finished a book a year ago and am pondering next steps in my life, and every client I am coaching seems to be going through some sort of significant life change.  Transitions are comprised of endings, beginnings and the space in between.  I was struck by something I read last week, “in order for something to begin, something else needs to end.”  Seems pretty obvious and yet it caught me off guard.  A beginning is also an ending, hmmm...