All Articles Posted By Sally Lever
How Downshifting Heals
Downshifting in a nut shell is about choosing to trade some of our income for simplicity and time. When we engage with those things, simplicity and time, in a wholesome, life-serving way, they have the potential to heal us in body, mind and spirit and also to maintain us in that healthy state. This article explains how.
By Sally Lever
De-stress Your Thinking - Part Two
In part one of this article, we considered the symptoms of stressful thinking and how that affects us. Using two examples of stressful thinking – “I don’t have enough time” and “I’m not motivated,” I introduced you to a simple strategy for de-stressing such limiting thoughts. In part two, we’ll look at two more examples of stressful thoughts and how to turn them around to ways of thinking that are much more helpful for a sustainable life.
By Sally Lever
Destress Your Thinking - Part One
There is no doubt that pain and suffering in our lives is something that we all experience from time to time and that it causes us stress. That same pain and suffering can also be the stimulus that triggers a response in us leading to a more peaceful existence. That response might well be physical – deciding to opt for an easier commute to work or to work from home. According to many of my coaching clients, the response also needs to be a mental shift, some way of de-stressing our thinking, if we are to achieve lasting tranquillity (or at least large periods of it!) in our lives. Think of it as a form of mental downshifting.
By Sally Lever
Time Management for Downshifters
Have you downshifted and yet still spend your days racing against the clock? One of the bug bears of many of my clients is this: they manage to leave the rat race, to reduce their working hours, to balance their working lives with their personal lives, to find work doing something they truly love BUT they still feel stressed and pressurised because of their attitude to time. Why is this? How do we downshift our approach to managing our time and still get things done?
By Sally Lever
Downshifting: 3 Steps to get you started right now
Downshifting is a different experience for each and every one of us. So what is it that successful downshifters have in common? And how does someone who is still in the rat race get started.?
By Sally Lever
How Downshifting Benefits Your Health and Wellbeing
About 17 years ago, I consulted a Complementary Therapist for the first time. I had decided to take a different route and try out what was for me an unknown and unexplored alternative to the conventional medicine I had always relied on in the past. Why? Because I was pregnant for the first time, suffering chronic morning sickness (of the “all day” variety) and unwilling to risk harming my baby by taking conventional drugs. This experience was to be a revelation for me and my introduction to a totally new way of viewing my own health and wellbeing, as well as that of my child.
By Sally Lever
How is Home Education Sustainable?
Home education is where parents elect to take total responsibility for educating their own children rather than delegating a sizeable proportion of it to a school. It is a legal and equally viable alternative to conventional schooling in the UK and indeed in many other countries around the world. But what on earth has it got to do with sustainable living?
By Sally Lever
How to Stop and Do Nothing (and Why it's Important for Our Health and Wellbeing)
One of the prerequisites for downshifting and leading a more sustainable life is for us to slow down. According to Jonathan Porritt, “Speed is the enemy of sustainable living”. When we opt for speed, then we tend to prioritise convenience over and above sustainability and this inevitably results in our consuming more and caring less about our personal wellbeing and that of the planet. What I’m going to suggest in this article is that we also need to stop altogether from time to time. Even if you have not yet decided to step off the treadmill, both slowing down and doing nothing are habits we can cultivate right away and from which we can very quickly start to derive benefit.
By Sally Lever
Intuition and Sustainability
Intuition can greatly enhance our ability to think for ourselves and to make decisions. In fact, some would say that merely relying on our conscious minds for this actually reduces our capabilities.By using our intuition, we open the way to a more abundant, inwardly rich and sustainable way of living by using our heart’s desires in decision making. This article explains how.
By Sally Lever
Open-hearted Relationships: A Sustainable Approach
If you are single and dating or thinking of doing so, what’s the best way to approach it if you’re looking for a long-term, committed, fulfilling, relationship?
If you are currently in a relationship, how do you review your situation and inject a new lease of life into your connection with your beloved?
By Sally Lever
Slowing Down the Pace of Life
Have you ever wondered what it is that makes it so challenging to live with less of the consumer lifestyle and more of the sustainable lifestyle?
By Sally Lever
From Earning a Living to Living Your Dream
Do you find yourself trapped in a job you don’t enjoy but which you continue with in order to pay the bills? My experience from coaching individual clients and from running teleclasses on downshifting is that this is a very sticky issue with many people.
By Sally Lever
How Will I Cope?: The Financial Side of Downshifting.
How much money do I need in order to downshift? Can anyone downshift? What if I'm in debt? How does anyone manage to live on less? Your questions answered.
By Sally Lever
Making Changes
There are times when we would dearly love to make changes in our lives, but find it difficult to do that from here, from the situation that we are presented with at that moment. Then we find ourselves thinking “If only things were different, then I would willingly downshift/ take the children out of school/ change my job/ move house/ find a life partner.” But things aren’t different and the first thing we need to do before we can make any changes is accept where we are now. Whatever our situation is, that is where we’re starting from and that’s what we’re working with.
By Sally Lever
The Sustainable Small Business
If you’ve made the decision to live more sustainably and have left the Rat Race in order to set up in self-employment, it makes sense to incorporate sustainability into the new business plan. That way your business is run in alignment with your interests and values and working in it ultimately leads to a higher level of enjoyment, fulfilment and meaning.
By Sally Lever
Food: Sustenance or Sacrifice? (Part One)
Are you feeding yourself in a way that is sustainable for the sake of your personal health and wellbeing or are you sacrificing a nutritious diet, and thus your health, in order to survive in the Rat Race?
By Sally Lever
Food: Sustenance or Sacrifice? (Part Two)
Are you feeding yourself in a way that is sustainable for the sake of your personal health and wellbeing or are you sacrificing a nutritious diet, and thus your health, in order to survive in the Rat Race?
By Sally Lever
Commit To Be Free
What are you committed to? How does that make you feel - trapped or free?
If you yearn for a simple life when you’re actually living in the Rat Race, you’re living by someone else’s values and it’s your commitment to that that forms your prison.
Isn’t it amazing that just that little “c” word – commitment – can put the fear of God into some people and endows others with a warm, cosy feeling of comfort and security. How does that happen? What can we do about it?
By Sally Lever
Does Your Child Need To Downshift?
As a parent, how do you spot the signs of stress in your child? When is it time to intervene and to help your child simplify their life?
By Sally Lever
Motivation for Downshifters in 4 easy stages
Are you committed to downshifting or de-stressing your life but can’t find the motivation you need to take the first step? Are there some external factors in your life, such as hefty mortgage repayments or an unsupportive partner that you feel are preventing you from realising your dream? Some conventional methods for moving ourselves forward in situations such as these often fall short on staying power and realism, so I’ve come up with an alternative approach.
By Sally Lever
Do You Perform or Connect in Relationships?
Despite what the TV soap operas would have us believe, our relationships with others do not have to consist of one drama after another. When we give up performing and focus on connecting instead, both our business and personal relationships flourish.The benefits of “connection” rather than “performance” in business and personal relationships is the authenticity and trust that connection feeds. Find out how in this article.
By Sally Lever
Job Juggling for Home Educators
As lifestyle challenges go, combining earning a living whilst at the same time home educating your children, has to be one of the toughest. For most families these days, school provides a large chunk of free child-care and this is what many parents exploit in order for them to be able to earn a living whilst raising children. So, what do you do when you do not have access to hours of child-free work time each day? What can you do if you are a single parent and/or home educating very young or disabled children? Tough challenges indeed, but certainly not impossible judging by the number of families I’ve come across who are, apparently successfully and happily, doing just that. How do they manage it?
By Sally Lever
Sustainable Planning: Keys to a simpler future.
It can be said that there are only two certainties in our lives – that we will die and that there will be change. The beginning of a new year is traditionally a time for planning but sometimes planning at any time can seem futile when life can be so unpredictable. How do we come up with a plan for our business or our personal life that is sustainable? How do we ensure that our plans are flexible enough to be worth spending any time on?
By Sally Lever
Jumping Through Other People's Hoops
How much of your life is controlled by others and how much by you?
One of the problems we face in the rat race is that we can find ourselves spending a large part of our waking hours jumping through other people’s hoops. Perhaps our life looks like it was designed for someone else. In this type of situation we can end up feeling very much like a victim of circumstance. Well, what can we do about that?
By Sally Lever
End of Suburbia - Film Review
Made in 2004, this documentary examines the American suburban way of life in the light of Peak Oil.If some, who may have viewed this documentary a few years ago, thought it alarmist then, then revisiting it now might reframe their beliefs in the light of the predicted consequences of Peak Oil which now seem to be actually taking place.
By Sally Lever
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