Guidelines to make your Christmas shopping a whole lot easier

With Christmas coming up, I’ve started thinking about presents.  Sometimes I can let myself get pretty overwhelmed with it all, feeling like I’ve bought it all before, they’ve got everything they need anyway, and it’s going to cost a bomb.  And so I’ve been reminding myself of a couple of things I know both from research and my own experience, that promise to make Christmas shopping this year a whole lot more fun.

Good things sometimes come from unexpected places

I biked into Hagley Park today.  It was beautiful.  Lovely spring weather, flowers blooming everywhere, ducklings swimming in the ponds… what a lovely way to pass the time.

Then, when it was time for the return journey, we discovered something rather significant – one of our tyres had punctured and was steadily hissing air.  A slight problem given we didn’t have any equipment with us to repair it.

How do you know you're doing a good job?

A couple of months ago I wrote about playing soccer again.  I’d just joined a new team after 10 years away from the game, and had initially found it pretty challenging being in a new team, with a number of new players, and playing against teams that were very experienced and realistically should not have been in the same grade as us.  That had lead to some pretty convincing defeats, and I’d had to find ways to stay positive in that kind of environment, something that was a challenge I’m proud to say I rose up to.

Where are your questions going?

We are constantly guiding our children, teaching them, nurturing them, supporting them and empowering them.  The more tools we have to do this well, the better.  Great questions are one such tool. 

All questions lead somewhere.  The real question is where.   Some questions lead to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, which means they lead to short conversations or they lead to doubt.  For quick information they are very useful, for example, “Have you brushed your teeth?”  Other times they are less useful, and may just cause uncertainty, for example, “Have you done enough to pass?”

How can you reframe challenging situations in your life?

You are capable of so much more than you think

It’s amazing how much you can achieve in a short time when you really put your mind to it.  This applies to all manner of things, whether it’s spring cleaning your house, landscaping your garden or improving your fitness.  Sometimes, before we start something it can seem a big task, perhaps even near impossible, but the reality it, that once we get started, things can happen quite quickly and with good momentum, we can make huge strides in a short time.