Inspiring Tales of Pleasure At Work

May 9, 2012

Do you know someone who can still find work a pleasure even in the current climate, who, when they talk about it, make your stress levels drop a bit and begin to remember there’s good bits?

I’m gathering examples of pleasure at work.

I’d like to post them here at the blog to provide inspiration, for the times when we

don’t know how to get pleasure into our lives

or

have got into a rut of just surviving and forgotten that pleasure could be any part of our world right now.

 

I would like to invite you to share…

 

What do you, or your colleagues, do that makes work a pleasure?

 

Despite the stresses of recession, high volume workload, and all the pressures that you’re facing right now?

 

If you’d like to contribute, to spread the word, send me a short video to show here at the blog.

Tell us what your circumstances are, what are the challenges, what you do to make it a pleasure even in the midst of that, and what the results are.

 

You can:

  • record it yourself  (if you have that capacity, not much more than 2 mins is good) , post it to YouTube or Vimeo and  send me the link in an email

  • contact me and arrange for me to come and record your tale of pleasure in person (if you’re UK home counties)

  • contact me to arrange a Skype call to record your tale of pleasure

I’ll wait in excited anticipation!

 

Jane has kindly got the party started with two videos.

Go Jane!

How much would you’d like someone with Jane’s spirit around the office!

Leave a comment to share what you do that makes work a pleasure

or

Leave a comment for Jane

Gather in close to listen…the volume isn’t as loud as we’d like, we’re getting that sorted, in the meantime

Over to you Jane…..

 

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By Pauline | Posted in 'Make it a pleasure' doing business with you, Pleasure, when work's far from a pleasure | Tagged , , |

The Pleasure Report. Year 3 Week 7 The casserole edition

February 17, 2012

Fifty nine pleasure points

12:1 pleasure to pain ratio

 

The Pleasure

 

Fifty nine. That’s on the low side

But there were a few of the pleasures this week that were so wonderful, I’d have been happy with them alone

 

A selection of the pleasure

 

A Welcome

 

I visited a new bunch of people this week

And the Welcome I got was so welcoming that I’m giving it a capital W

The quality of attention and the sense of complete unconditional acceptance…no …it was more than acceptance

It was a welcome

And they were completely present, not half of their attention off elsewhere attending to something else

That is so very rare in my world these days

Oh my

That was gorgeous

 

A Casserole

 

I visited my wee man, he’s away at University

And I took a casserole

Ha!

I turned into traditional Mama

Ha!

This is a new persona that has shown up unexpectedly

The day before the visit I suddenly found myself thinking…yes, chicken and veg…that’s what I’ll put in the casserole

Whilst the other parts of me were turning to each other in surprise asking ‘the casserole……what casserole?’

And there was the (new and unrecognisable) trad Mama, in the car going to the supermarket for the ingredients and spending the evening cooking

Whilst the other parts looked curiously on

 

I quite enjoyed it

We’ve decided to make it a regular thing

Once a month, I’ll bring a casserole, he’ll supply the wine

Nice…I like it

 

Bentlily poetry

 

Oh beautiful is she

The art of noticing life

In a poem a day

Completely perfect for a life of pleasure

To notice the moments of life and gaze on them, till you feel them even more

 

This from the Valentine’s day poem, The cinnamon drink

‘promise me you’ll tell them

it was the rumble of daily life

that made me flush

with love for you’

 

see the whole poem at bentlily

 

 

The Pain

 

Sleep is fitful

It’s not surprising, with all the change and mourning, and letting go

But it leaves me with less energy for the practicalities, the organising of changes and letting go

This too will pass

 

 

How about you?

How’s your week been?

I’d love to hear

Come and share all in the comments

 

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By Pauline | Posted in Uncategorized |

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

Ow

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

 

.

 

 

 

 

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By Pauline | Posted in Pleasure | Tagged , , , , |

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

xx

 

How about you?

How’s your week been?

Come and share your pleasure and pain in the comments

.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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By Pauline | Posted in Pleasure |

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.

 

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By Pauline | Posted in Pleasure | Tagged , , , |