Blog – With Integrity

You CAN’T be too busy for this today

February 2, 2012

OK. THIS is important.

You mustn’t be too busy for this. Not today.

You put off thinking about this, reading this, because you’re too busy today. And tomorrow is the same.

And because every day after that is also too busy, all of a sudden, the ‘too busy’ days are done.

And so is the chance to live your life differently.

Take five minutes today and check how things are, against the 5 regrets of the dying.

Here is the benefit of hindsight, given to you right now

You are hereby advised to take that gift now

Now is your chance to decide you’d like things to be different

We can do it together if you like. Here, I’ll go first

Here are the 5 things.

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

Hmmm…ok, this is a good start, I’m good with this one

I’m a bit of a radical

You?

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

Ah. Not so good. Lots of work. Work at work, and work at home. Always work to do

My wee man shouting for me to come and play, me saying, “in a minute, I just need to finish……….”

There was always something else on the list

He’s 20 now and gone to University. I can work as much as I like

OK. I can still make amends, if he’ll let me

I need to forgive myself for this one. I’m a single parent, I’ve been doing the best I can

For a lot of years I didn’t know that it could be done differently (how not to be with the work all the time) and certainly never reached the point of exploring how it could be different

I now know that it can always be done differently, and that I am infinitely creative and know how to find ways for it to be different

How are you with this one?

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

I’m not too bad at this

Now that I know what my feelings are

Now that they’re not numbed out or buried so deep that I need a digger or quarry explosives to unearth them

A long time ago, a lovely man asked what made my heart sing and it was the saddest thing that I didn’t know

I’ve spent a lot of time since then allowing myself to notice (and been blogging about what makes life a pleasure for over two years now)

I’ve also learned a lot about expressing my whole range of emotions, not just the flowery easy ones, what Brene Brown refers to as being wholehearted

Which means sometimes there is pain. I feel it all now.

Marshall Rosenberg gets a lot of credit for this, and Bridget Belgrave and Gina Lawrie.

And me….I get credit for the unearthing and the feeling of the feelings and the expressing of them (that was a work of many, many years…still a work in progress)

You? You feeling creature you, how’s this one?

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

Not bad, but not great either

I’m such an introvert and so time with people is a finely balanced thing. Too much and I’m not. fun. to. be. with. at. all.

And if I’m working amongst people for many, many more hours than I can handle, I’m already all used up and just need to be quiet. It’s more the amount of work that I need to take care of so that I’m balanced and have space for friends too

I am blessed with friends who do more than their fair share of the keeping up. I am grateful.

And who accommodate and forgive my need to be quiet, sometimes for long periods, and don’t take it as a snub. I’m grateful for this too

How’s this one for you?

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

It’s the ‘letting yourself’ part that I didn’t get so much before

It was all work work, worry worry

There was never a break in the proceedings for it to dawn on me that I could be happy while I was doing what I was doing

I don’t know what I was waiting for….along the lines of what makes your heart sing….I didn’t know that ‘heart singing’ was on the agenda for me

I never gave any conscious thought to what would make me happy….too busy…work work, worry worry

And even that would have been to miss this point…this is suggesting that we can choose to be happy

I’ve been making a point of paying attention to what makes me happy (is a pleasure) for some time now (and blogging about it in The Pleasure Reports) and so I’m fairly fluent now

It hasn’t been so much ‘let myself be happier’ but let myself notice what makes me happy.

How about happier…do you let yourself be happier?

I’m now so passionate about everyone living lives of pleasure I’ve gone so far as to write The Pleasure Assessor to help everyone who wants to, look for where the pleasure is in their lives, and where it’s not

It’s like a more comprehensive version of the five things here, and you get to decide what the things are, that make you happy and that which would make you happier still if you were to make some adjustments.

People who’ve used it say things like

” This was a lovely way for me to step back and look at life from a different perspective.

I’m inspired by the pictures of how life could be that I’ve created and they’re nudging me gently into letting go of some things and building more self belief”

and

“I was exhuasted and focussing on the negatives. The Pleasure assessor helped open my eyes to what’s important in my life and what pleasure means to me. I have remembered that I love what I do, I can switch off from stress now and am finding life pleasurable again”

and

” The Pleasure Assessor is warm, it’s funny, it’s provocative, it’s clear, and most importantly it’s eminently useable. What a graceful tool, full of heart, that gets you directly to the core of awareness. Coaching doesn’t get better than this. And integral to the whole process, is that is a pleasure too. Perfect.”

Wow!

Now I’m not one for blowing my own trumpet but…wow!

I’m so happy that it’s working that well for people

So…

you know….

if you’ve decided it’s time….and you’d like to go a bit further than the 5 things above, then you could do a lot worse than to have The Pleasure Assessor take you gently, by the hand, through a look at how things are.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear how’s it looking for you on the 5 things?

Come and tell me in the comments

Love P x

The Pleasure Report. Year 3 Week 4. The radical edition with gold nuggets

January 31, 2012

The Pleasure

Eighty four points

And a 28:1 pleasure to pain ratio

A selection of the pleasure

Oil on canvas – radical idea

I paint. With oils. For fun.

I stand there and intuitively put oil paint onto canvas, usually very thickly, with a palette knife

For me it’s less about what they look like, though that seems ridiculous, given that looking at them is pretty much all you can do and people do say things like ‘Wow, I love that!” when they see them

And people do see things in them; the sea, a hill, the horizon, a landscape, though that’s not what I tried to paint

But I think it’s more about what people feel when they look at them, they seem to feel the energy the pictures give off

Painting in this way is one of my greatest pleasures

When I love what’s happening on the canvas I can get really excited, making such moans of pleasure, that anyone outside of the room hearing me, might think twice about coming in

I know *blushes*

I only ever paint like this for myself

But other people like the pictures as well. And I’ve been commissioned to do one.

And it’s been suggested that I sell them*

(Calm colour for that, staying calm)

I would never have thought to sell them

I had an initial hot flush of terror with accompanying thoughts of ‘these are naive and embarrassing, you can not do that, you’ll make a complete laughing stock of yourself”

But the people who said they loved them (before they knew I painted them) were convincing

Convincing enough for me to go ahead and offer them for sale.

If some people love them then that’s enough for me

And I suppose there would eventually have come a day when I had no wall space left.

And I have really enjoyed just giving them away when people said ‘wow, I love that’

And now they are up for sale

I’ve taken my first steps

Using just my point and shoot camera I photographed them and put them onto a webpage so they can be seen

That, my friends, is possibly one of the more radical things I’ve done.

There’s still some matters to take care of ;

- I will get better photographs as there’s glare and blur and other problems

- What to call them eludes me

They’re kind of fresh and raw, and I don’t think of them as art. I haven’t found a word that does seem right though

And haven’t come up with a title for any of them either

Ha! I now have the highly imaginative, ‘intuitive abstract number 1′

- I’m also still at a loss as to how to put a price on them, any suggestions on how to do that would be very welcome

In the meantime I’m inviting offers, but I know that’s off-putting. If I don’t know how to price them, doesn’t seem fair to ask you to do it

- Postage pricing to work out

BUT they are visible

One of the most pleasurable parts about this, is if they do sell, and I receive an income from them, then I will be funding my time to do the pleasure research in a way that is a complete pleasure for me

It would be the complete perfect ‘Life as a Pleasure’ way of working

Wish me luck. Or make me an offer

* weird how it came about, ask if you’d like to know

Cat claws

My puss cat’s claws needed cut

I’ve been trying to do it myself or with assistance for at least 6 months, I haven’t been successful, even glancing over at the clippers sent her shooting out of the cat flap, and I was beginning to think I’d need to make a trip to the vet

She doesn’t much care for the cat basket and the car journey stresses her out badly so I’ve been hoping to avoid it

This week she’s been demanding quite a bit of time on my lap while I’ve been trying to work and she has quite a long padding, and clothes snagging, settling down process she goes through.

So I told her she could sit on my lap while I worked if she let me clip her claws. And then she let me!

Wey hey!

Gold nuggets

A client this week suggested that I was over complicating my marketing materials

He suggested I just write

Pauline Esson Gold Nuggets

Because when we work together, you uncover the gold nugget of insight, seeing what stands between you and life as you want it to be

And he also said he doesn’t know anyone that doesn’t like gold so everyone would go for it

I love that

Look out for website changes (maybe)

The Pain

I’m calling silent retreat on the pain this week

Thank you Havi for the bliss of silent retreat

For the first time in over 2 years I don’t think it will help to talk about the pain

Not this particular pain

It’s already been aired, here at the blog, and I’ve let the light get at it and it’s just going to take a fair bit longer to heal

So, I’d prefer not to talk about it today

Thank you. I knew you’d understand

How about you?

How’s your week been?

Come and share your pleasure and pain in the comments

Love from the inside out – an alternative Valentine’s evening

January 21, 2012

I always intended to run a Valentine’s day event

One for single women, who weren’t desperate but didn’t want to be single forever either

An event where The Pleasure Assessor questionaire could do what it has been doing so well, and help people find good things in their lives (and no there’s nothing Ann Summers about the pleasure assessor, not that kind of pleasure)

Help them find good things they’d maybe stopped noticing, since they’d been concentrating on the lack of a partner, and help them focus on the one or two things that would make a real difference if they were to transform

So their lives would be pretty damn good, with or without a partner

There’s a lot of push in the world of single women

Got to ‘put yourself out there’ and let people see you

I don’t know many single women who feel full of relish at the prospect of ‘putting themselves out there’

And when you feel that your life isn’t pretty damn good, then you look a bit less than pretty damn good when you do put yourself out there

Catch 22

And so getting on with life becomes the strategy. But with an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with being single

And there’s the lack of other options to ‘getting out there’ and we’re back full circle to putting a brave face on and forcing yourself to do something you really don’t want to and you’re maybe not really ready for anyway

My Valentine’s day event was going to suggest an alternative

A version of getting on with life, but one where the making of a life that’s pretty damn good is an active thing

So that there will come a day when you really do feel pretty damn good and actually you do feel like getting out there

And when you do, it will be obvious to everyone how pretty damn good things are for you

And…well….catch 22 gone

And no forcing necessary and no going out there before you’re ready, pressure’s off

And to do all that supported by a group of like-minded women who encourage and cheer you on, listen and commiserate with your failures, listen and get happy with you for your successes

So this was all going to be lovely. I thought I was going to lead the event and I still will, I just didn’t know that I would also be single at the time of the event

I’m still moving from shock to denial with brief spells of acceptance about my own break up and am benefiting enormously from the circling round of groups of women friends and am all the more sure that I want to offer this event, and to provide a place where our aims are to make things pretty damn good and where you’re not on your own doing it

And so it will be.

An in person event in Hitchin, Hertfordshire on Valentine’s evening

If you know a single woman who you think might like this approach to singledom and who would benefit from the support of doing it together with a group of other women do please point them in this direction

If there are more people interested than the 10 maximum for the evening, I’ll run another one. Just not on Valentine’s evening

Not local but want to do this?

If you’re interested but not local, get in touch and let me know.

I could design a teleclass version that you can telephone or skype in for, with an online group for the post event circling round and supporting.

Happiness

January 18, 2012

“The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”

– Joseph Addison

What do you make of that?

I’ve been making quite a bit of that. I’m really interested to hear what you think and find to be the case for you, when you read it.

Come and tell me what that prompts for you and I’ll come back and say what it prompts for me.

The Pleasure (at work) Report. Year 3, Week 2

January 12, 2012

Week 2 in this, the 3rd year of pleasure

The Pleasure (at work)

Overall, forty nine points of which 12 were at work

And a 12:1 pleasure to pain ratio

A selection of the pleasure at work

Gorgeous example of pleasure at work and the effect on sales

As part of my pleasure research this week I watched a tv programme about a group of young jobseekers

They were given the opportunity, amongst other things, to run small retail stores with a little guidance from the existing managers

They were really inspiring to watch as they rose to the challenge of managing staff and putting on events to boost sales

When they found the balance between giving clear direction and having a lot of fun in the events that they put on they were most successful

The programme isn’t setting out to make this point but on the days when they were fearful they struggled to make their sales targets and on the day when they made it a pleasure and everyone had fun putting on the event one woman nearly made double the sales target

They’re a great example of what it could look like to really enjoy a day at work

I found that so encouraging and inspiring to watch

It’s a series of 3, The Career Crashers on Monday at 7pm on BBC3 with last week’s one available to watch again if you’re quick

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b019gc0f/The_Career_Crashers_Basic_Entry_to_Shop_Managers/

Someone getting recognition

I met up with a client I worked with last year and she is doing really well

And getting recognition for her achievements

So heart warming

One of her dreams has already happened

And there are more in the pipeline

My heart could not be warmer

Best thing!

Early morning preparation for the day – red sky and garden

I usually take some time in the morning to prepare myself for the day and give specific thought to clients that I have sessions with during that day.

The time of year affects where this happens. This time of year it normally happens under the duvet with tea and a pashmina.

One day this week the early morning sky was extraordinarily red and the temperature extraordinarily mild so I took my tea outside and sat there and it was absolutely gorgeous. I wish I’d taken a photograph.

It was red with slashes of deep dark slate grey slicing through along with that pale, pale but brilliantly lit blue.

I have a photograph from a year ago that’s similar.

The pain (at work)

Late for a client session

I have never been late for a client session

That might be hard to believe (given how old I am and how long I’ve been seeing clients) but it’s true

I view being on time as a mark of respect for all involved in any given meeting

I’ve been known to run over at the end of a session (ahem….apologies, I’m working on respect for the time at the end as well as at the beginning of our meetings) but, getting back to my pain in this instance, I have never been late

This week I allowed an hour, for a half hour journey, to meet a new client

I pictured me drinking coffee and having a very relaxed contemplative time before my client arrived

There was a traffic jam from Welwyn all the way back to Codicote and the half hour journey took me one and a half hours and I was a full half hour late

That I didn’t just melt from the horror of it is the biggest miracle of all

I’m not sure I properly recovered from it for the whole session after I did arrive

I hope I’ll have the chance to recover things in 2 weeks when we meet again

When we’ll have found a new meeting place that avoids the roadworks which appeared to be the only thing causing the delay

Eech

The Pleasure Posse

This week, using the #itsapleasure hash tag on twitter are a selection of people who I ……um…..I don’t think have necessarily ..um

Let’s say there’s a tipping over into the night hours which I don’t judge but is probably outside the scope….ah yes, that’s the way to put it, is outside the scope of this blog

So, I’ll refrain from featuring their posts

How about you?

How’s your week been?

Come and tell all in the comments, I’d love to hear about your pleasure and your pain this week

With Integrity

You CAN’T be too busy for this today

You mustn’t be too busy for this. Not today.

Now is your chance to decide you’d like things to be different

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

The Pleasure Report. Year 3 Week 4. The radical edition with gold nuggets

The Pleasure

A selection of the pleasure

Oil on canvas – radical idea

That, my friends, is possibly one of the more radical things I’ve done.

* weird how it came about, ask if you’d like to know

Cat claws

Gold nuggets

The Pain

How about you?

Love from the inside out – an alternative Valentine’s evening

An in person event in Hitchin, Hertfordshire on Valentine’s evening

Not local but want to do this?

Happiness

The Pleasure (at work) Report. Year 3, Week 2

The Pleasure (at work)

Gorgeous example of pleasure at work and the effect on sales

Someone getting recognition

Early morning preparation for the day – red sky and garden

The pain (at work)

Late for a client session

The Pleasure Posse

How about you?

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