If you want something done….

…give it to a busy person.

Did anyone ever say to Richard Branson, ‘do you think you’re taking rather a lot on?’ Or to my parents even. They run three businesses and have various other enterprises on the side. I expect that’s where I get this entrepreneurial tendency to do loads of things from. But it’s true, finding a balance is important and something that my parents are just now starting to concentrate on.

Tosser did actually raise some quite valid points in his/her second comment, and some that I did consider myself when I decided to do the coaching course. I have a full schedule, work wise and socially, but then I am not a person who is happy to stay in and watch Eastenders every night. Achieving things makes me happy, and it’s really not that hard to do with a bit of application, organisation, imagination and common sense. Life should be an adventure, whether it’s work, travel, or having fun.

So, re time for coaching – yes, I will be pushing it while I am doing my training, but that is for four months. After that, I hope to keep it ticking over with one or two clients on the go at any one time, which is only a couple of hours a week therefore realistic to commit to, until such time as my situation might change and I want to increase the hours. As for it meaning I don’t see The Man, the sessions are most likely to be phone sessions (these days most coaching is done over the phone, or even over Skype) which I can do during quiet time in the evening while he’s happily watching the footie.

Do I see The Man enough? It’s true we’re both busy people, but we’ve discussed this in the past and we quite like it. It means we look forward to the time we have together and make the most of it. We go out to dinner and Talk To Each Other rather than sitting in front of the TV every night not communicating. We are both of the opinion that having our own interests is good for the relationship – we retain our own freedoms and that’s important, it means we never feel stifled. It also means that we respect each other more for our accomplishments.

The engagement drama was just a wobble caused by a combination of hormones, wine and all the girls at work talking about their own weddings / engagements / ring hunting. Yes, I am a confident independent woman who, if she wants something, goes and gets it, but on the other hand I also have a lot of old fashioned values about things like manners, integrity, professionalism and love, and one of those is that the man should ask the woman. I suppose the main justification of that is that if the man asks, without prompting and/or thumbscrews, then he should be really sure that that’s what he wants to do, and he’s come to the decision of his own free will. That’s what I want when I get engaged, and for that I have to be patient. (Patience, unfortunately, is something I know I need to work on.) The Man is totally aware of how I feel and knows how important it is to me, but I am not pushing it, it’s up to him now when it happens. And actually, I’m happy to wait. For a bit. *;)

What would Chuck Norris do?

Well, it was more of a ‘what would Puss do?’ moment. In the middle of Saturday night, I woke up with a start to someone (clearly pissed and having a laugh with the flats' keypad, or having forgotten his mates' number so trying the lot) pressing our door buzzer. I never usually notice the thing in the day, but in the dead of night it’s quite loud. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz………..Buuuzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Being suddenly woken up like that gives me a huge adrenaline rush, but the continuing noise just made me cross. Fuming, in fact. The alarm clock said 1.29am, and I had to get up early again on Sunday and needed my sleep. I wished I could have made the door phone cord reach the window, and carried out this exchange with the door person:

‘Hello?’ (me)
‘Shello?’ (pissed door person to disembodied voice)
‘Darling, could you just step back a second and look up to the right?’
‘Erm, OK.’
[flash]
‘Nice mugshot. Now f*** off you c***ing twat or I’ll call the police.’

That would be what Puss would do.

Thank you for all the great comments on Navel Gazing. I don’t think I’ve had so many since the post on Men’s Pants! I’m exhausted today but feeling a lot more positive, thanks mainly to my first weekend of life coach training. It was so motivating I got home completely drained of energy, and I’m wondering whether I’m going to be able to keep up with everyone else’s frantic pace. I suppose when some of them aren’t working they have time to go to all the seminars and meetups and read all the notes as soon as we get them. Thank God that I’ve already read the first text book a year ago! So, I’m looking for some practise clients to accrue enough hours for accreditation, if you know anyone. No friends or family though, although I’m happy to refer F&Fs on to some of the other trainee coaches.

I think I need some coaching myself on time management. Full time job, a business I’m supposed to be running with my parents, and now setting up another business… It’s not unheard of, but I’m going to have hit the Red Bull!

So, things with The Man are back to normal (normal being good), and this week we celebrate being together for two years. Two years!! It seems so fast and yet our first date seems so long ago. Perhaps it’s because we’ve done so much together since then – his brother’s wedding and now his brother’s baby, my brother’s baby, trips to Wales, Egypt and the States, moved in together, had a health scare (me, all fine), changed jobs (both of us), helped his mum move house. He is the first boyfriend I’ve ever had who I am completely myself with, and it’s so amazing to be able to just be me! Sometimes when he’s there I have to just jump up and down (he thinks I’m barking) because I’m just so excited to be with him. And yes, you’re all perfectly right, I should appreciate having such a good thing and stop wishing my life away. Well, for once I am going to listen to some advice. Write it in your diaries people, it’s a red letter day!

Navel Gazing

Apologies, but this will be a rather introspective post. I've been feeling a bit dreary lately, and while I could put it down to hormones or post-holiday blues, it feels like more than that. I had a minor meltdown on Sunday night, sobbing on The Man who dealt with it valiantly. Frustration and impatience seems to be the main problem at the moment. There are lots of major life changes on the brink of happening, and I want them to happen, but they're just not getting there, and it's driving me nuts! I'm so used to being a can-do get-done person that I obviously find it hard to cope when I can't influence situations and make them happen. So, I just have to sit and wait for the small sparkly ring and the new house, listening to the girls at work planning weddings and putting a brave smile on for all the people who keep saying, 'Has he proposed yet? Tell him to get a move on! Have you found a house yet? Yadda yadda yadda?' while inside a small (and apparently growing) part of me is screaming. That's another thing I've discovered about myself recently, I cope with stress by ignoring it and blanking it and blithely carrying on until finally I snap and crumple. This is not good. I need to find a way of monitoring the scale a bit better and doing something about it.

The worst part about the minor meltdown was that The Man was trying (quite rightly) to find out what was wrong, and how could I say, 'it's because I want to be engaged dammit! And I want somewhere to live that has a garden! It's you and the housing market conspiring against me!' Garbled snotty explanations at 11pm must try anyone's temper, but he weedled it out of me anyway, assured me that it definitely all would happen, laughed at my fog-horn nose blowing, and somehow made it all OK. And then next day when I got home from work, hugged me again and checked I was still back in the land of the sane. He is a trooper that one.

Still, there are those people who have asked the $64,000 question - why wait? Apparently my brother was sure The Man would propose while we were away in the States, and mum said my brother was actually quite cross that he didn't. My brother proposed to his wife after six months, and fully subscribes to the 'if you know, you know, so why wait?' school. I think I'm sort of a 'wait a bit and check you can live with their weird habits' person, but if that's all good, yes, why wait? We might get run over by a bus tomorrow, or struck down with some dread disease.

So anyway the upshot of the meltdown is that I feel like I've put pressure on The Man when that was the last thing I wanted to do. Like he said, a proposal should be a surprise. I want to feel that he's done it 100% because he wants to, and I don't want even a tiny bit of the motivation to be because he knows it's doing my head in that he hasn't yet. So now I feel guilty about that too. The rational part of me says that of course The Man wouldn't do anything he didn't want to do, he's almost as stubborn as me and won't be pushed around, but hey, there you go.

Anyway, I must shake my shoulders, give myself a kick up the arse and cheer up, because it's really small fry in the great scheme of things, and life coaching training starts at the weekend. Who wants a gloomy melancholic life coach?