The Tribune

By VICTORIA SARNE

This year that is almost done has been filled with many changes for me, and although one or two were more than a little challenging at the time, they have now mostly turned out to have potentially positive outcomes as I look forward.

Usually I don’t review my year at the traditional New Year’s stage, but wait until my birthday in February to take stock of the negatives and positives before drawing a line under them and visualising what I would like to make happen in the coming months.

This year is ending in a totally different way than I originally anticipated but far from feeling it is an ending – I am imbued with an uplifting of the spirit as well as a deep sense of gratitude and positivity that I have arrived at the place I am supposed to be emotionally and intellectually. Quite a surprise to me, although as I take a moment to really think about it, there are several people who have contributed to this mental shake-up by causing me to think differently and re-assess some of my less productive thoughts and work habits.

We all need help of some sort from time to time, even helpers need help and I have been blessed with friends, old and relatively new, who supported me in various ways - sometimes before I even recognised that I needed their assistance and sometimes just by being there and being who they are. An invisible connection runs through and between all beings on this planet earth and we all need each other to thrive, friends and strangers alike. Sometimes that sense of connectedness to something larger runs very strongly in me but at other times gets covered with the overlay of day-to-day busyness and business and then it is time to stop, reflect and re-direct my thinking.

After several false starts at attempting to write a novel (which have invariably ended up being ditched in frustration after two or three chapters, as I had no clear idea of where I wanted the characters or the story to go next) out of the blue, the one I was always meant to write presented itself in my head and I am now happily two-thirds of the way through it and know exactly where it is going - a very satisfying feeling. Good or bad, read or unread when published, the sense of achievement will be knowing that I accomplished my creative goal.

The next step of getting it out in the public domain requires a different skill set and although PR and publicity is another part of my professional life, after some prompting from a friend, I somewhat skeptically enlisted the help of a life coach to help me focus on a specific outcome for the book and surprise, surprise, discovered I still had lessons to learn – a necessary, slightly humbling experience. That in itself was a message – that no matter how much we think we have mastered, there is always another layer to reveal and another perspective to help us find the answers that we seek.

So this is a thank you to David Holis, who is very generous with his time offering a 30-minute WhatsApp free consultation. (He is currently living in Greece). I liked his gentle manner as he quietly but probingly asked me all the right questions to direct my attention to what I really wanted to achieve and helped me define how I intended to get to that point. He then guided me through very specific steps to identify and concentrate my thoughts on the practical and logical efforts I needed to make to adjust my brain’s way of processing and where necessary abandoning old habits that no longer serve me well. Even for an independent self-starter like me, he showed me that we all need a push of some sort from time to time, otherwise we tend to get stuck in old habits and thought patterns. It was incredibly helpful and very refreshing to discover in myself new energy and enthusiasm not only for my work but my life in general. In my previous column I wrote about confidence and this kind of help for emotional, personal or professional reasons, with the right coach, is a valuable tool for changing lives, which I can personally recommend. Skeptical no more – after all, we hire trainers at the gym for our bodies, so it makes even more sense to get our minds in shape to give us our best possible lives.

• Victoria Sarne is an entrepreneur and writer. She headed a team to establish a shelter for abused women and children in Canada and was its first chairwoman. You can reach her at victoria.conversations@gmail.com, visit www.lifelineswritingservice.com, or call 467-1178.

Life coach David Holis can be reached via WhatsApp at + 33 6 73 07 80 66.