antonia@projectself.co.uk
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Project Self Life Coaching

How To Be Resilient

How we meet the world can be cultivated from a place of adaptability and tolerance, where we don’t have to get caught up or lose ourselves by losing connection to self-trust, despite external influence. We can regain balance, return to a place of ‘home’, resource and self-regulation and exercise boundaries so that we can both protect and connect in relationship.

We build our capacity for resilience through being able to acknowledge and greet strong emotions such as fear and anxiety without being overwhelmed. When we meet ourselves with self-compassion and recognise emotional drain and nourish ourselves. When we can exercise discernment around our thinking, and question the inner critic’s truth.

On Boundaries (Protection and Connection) - Project Self Life Coaching

On Boundaries (Protection and Connection)

Project Self
Boundaries are a fascinating area to explore in terms of how we show up in the world, how we make our presence felt and how we relate to others whilst relating to ourselves. Boundaries mark the interplay between us and the other, the meeting of the internal and the external. Most of us need to make some adjustment in terms of how we conceive of our boundaries and in implementing them. It astounded me when I first learnt to fly to learn that the sky is divided up into different zones or areas on a flight map, much as the…
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ON BEING KIND TO YOURSELF - Project Self Life Coaching

On Being Kind to Yourself

Project Self
Our innate human quality is compassion and kindness. In our natural, relaxed state we are warm and caring. Our self is inclusive and allowing. Such qualities expand us towards consideration, generosity and understanding, trust and forgiveness. We have sympathy for suffering.  We like. We are kind. We are love. When we are unhappy or upset we can become tight and sometimes ‘mean’ spirited. Our capacity towards generosity and openness diminishes. We shrink in as our heart suffers; we may close off, down and up. We contract our care as we take on negative or challenging thoughts and feelings. We may…
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On Feeling Into Fear - Project Self Life Coaching

On Feeling Into Fear

Project Self
Fear, I believe, is our most predominant emotion as it’s driven from our survival instinct. We are navigated through life by our threat detection mechanism; our nervous system, our primeval brain, our mammalian nature; checking experience (or future experience) out as either physically and emotionally safe, not safe or potentially not safe. Our need for safety drives our personality and behaviour towards being self-protective; dominating our natural capacity to respond from an open place of calm and compassion towards others (and self). Fear is a fundamental disallowing of ourselves to be available for connection or totally open to the present moment. Fear is live…
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ON SADNESS, PAIN AND LOVE - Project Self Life Coaching

On Sadness, Pain and Love

Project Self
It’s very rare that a client does not express a pain or sadness that they carry within them. Change Coaching for me is a balance between compassion and challenge. We all need to be met compassionately in our pain by another. The challenge is allowing ourselves and our pain to be seen and expressed. To not be fearful of experiencing our own sadness. To be compassionate towards that we cannot change. Life is not about being happy. Life is about feeling, being alive to and accepting all our emotions; the great spectrum and tide of the human experience; not editing…
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On Managing ‘Creeping Death’ - Waiting your turn to introduce yourself - Project Self Life Coaching

On Managing ‘Creeping Death’ – Waiting your turn to introduce yourself

Project Self
Do you experience social anxiety? What happens to you when you have to introduce yourself in a group? “Oh God I’m going to have to speak. In front of all these people. I knew it. I don’t want to go first. Why do they make us do this? Oh no, I don’t want to go last. Say something about myself. Introduce myself. I don’t know what to say. I’ve got nothing interesting to say. I hate this bit. Listen to her she sounded great, looks good too. You can tell this a breeze for her. Everyone else is so confident.…
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On Self Compassion - Project Self Life Coaching

On Self Compassion

Project Self
What’s the most significant relationship in your life? It’s the relationship you have with yourself. We have a continuous and inescapable relationship with our self. And it’s the most fundamental relationship in our adult life. But our relationship with our self can flux and suffer. It needs appreciation, attention and investment like any other. The self is our personal experience of our aliveness in the world. Our relationship with how we experience our living of life, our beingness. Our ‘simple self’ is our essential capacity to enjoy being our self as is. This is our inherent value and worth, contribution…
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ON RESILIENCE AND EMOTIONAL DRAIN - Project Self Life Coaching

On Resilience and Emotional Drain

Project Self
What does it mean to be resilient? Resilience is commonly described as being able to withstand and bounce back from negative experiences. Resilience is not the capacity to not feel, like a teflon skinned human; unaffected. It’s not the capacity to carry on regardless in the face of adversity. It’s not endurance. It’s the capacity to experience; sometimes extreme emotional difficulties, and recover; with the emphasis on recover. To bow but not break. To stay calm even in the bow. To adapt and not hit out, or in. For me, resilience is that our value and attitude towards our self…
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On Silence - Project Self Life Coaching

On Silence

Project Self
To live, is to be within surroundings. To be surrounded is often to be within sound. Often, noise. Being in noise; both external and internal, can threaten one’s internal equilibrium; yet sometimes it can be as difficult to tolerate silence as it is noise. We can find it uncomfortable and search to fill it with words, with background noise, with action that can dispitate the moment of space and stillness. As if silence is an absence of things that need to be found and a space once opened up, that needs to be refilled. Silence is active. It is not the…
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ON KNOWING YOUR MOTIVES - Project Self Life Coaching

On Knowing Your Motives

Project Self
It’s interesting that to question someone as to their motives seems to have a negative connotation. As if there is a sense of something underneath, undeclared and invisible that is driving the person’s behaviour towards their own ends. As if to have a motive, an end in mind, is a negative state which creates deception. When we question someone’s motives, is it because it is not clear from their actions what their intentions are, so we are concerned that things are not as they seem? Yet a motive is a creative, personal and powerful thing. It’s the source; it’s the…
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ON FINDING BALANCE - Project Self Life Coaching

On Finding Balance

Project Self
There’s a beautiful concept held in the mathematically designed Gomboc. It’s an object that self-rights itself whichever way it is pushed over. It has one point of stability and one of instability and will always return to the stable point. The shape was modelled on a tortoise which uses it’s shell to rock itself back onto its feet once it’s been turned over, and is dependent on doing so for survival. If the Gomboc was a conscious being, rather than an object, imagine what it would feel knowing that whatever forces conspired against it, it had the capacity to withstand…
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