Make 2010 Your Year for Slowing Down!

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(Please excuse the brazen “plug” nature of this blog post)

In the spirit of New Years Resolutions, make 2010 your year for slowing down…

If you are serious about slowing down this year and want make certain your succeed, one of the easiest, and most powerful ways is a series of one-to-one coaching sessions.

I will work with you to develop an individual plan for you to start slowing down. A full assessment will be taken of your current situation and then we will work together to help you develop a plan for slowing down.

Throughout the process I will give you all the support and help you need to succeed in your wish to slow down.

To give you idea of the sort of thing that coaching can do, have a look at the process I did for Cosmopolitan Magazine in October 2009. To read the article, go to www.cosmpolitan.co.uk or CLICK HERE.

As a New Year offer, you can book 3 sessions for the price of 2!

Sessions can be carried out over the phone or via skype (which is totall free to install and use and much cheaper than a phone call!), or face to face if you are located in Birmingham or Cardiff, UK. I have worked with people all over the world and sessions can be booked at a time to suite you.

For more information, please go to my coaching page here, or click here to contact me to book a session.

(Here endeth the plug).

Matt

PS, I jumped the gun a bit last week announcing the “Welcome to the Slow Life” eCourse, I have had a few technical hiccups that has slowed(!) the process down, hopefully the first enrolment will start in the next few weeks. To register your interest and get a special “pre-registration” discounted price of $39.99 please click here to contact me putting “Welcome the Slow Life Pre-registration” in the comments box  and I will add you to the list and send you some free goodies!

Life is Journey, Not a Destination

“A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu.

The problem with our goal/success/achievement driven society is that we spend so much time fixating on the goal that we miss the process.

Whenever I have something I want to achieve (and Slow is not about NOT achieving things that you want), once I have defined my goal I always ask myself, “What is the most fun way?”.

It may not be the quickest way, but at least I enjoy getting there! And by picking the most fun way, you are much more likely to “succeed” as you are enjoying yourself so much on the way you keep going, rather than struggling, hating every minute of it and giving up!

SC

Celebrating Saint Monday

(this is a re-post from my previous blog at deckchairdiaries.wordpress.com, but since I have moved blogs a few times since then and a lot of you are new readers, and this is the first time I have mentioned it on this new slow blog, I thought it would be easier to repost it here than keep linking back to it – I hope Google isn’t too upset with the repeated content…)

Saint Monday is the tradition of absenteeism on a Monday (Saint Tuesday is the less common extension of this to a Tuesday)

The tradition of taking Monday (unofficially) off has been common among craft workers since at least the seventeenth century. The prime supporters of Saint Monday were often the higher skilled and therefore better paid. High piece-rates could provide good wages for skilled men, but they more often elected to take a moderate wage and extensive leisure.

Saint Monday is often ascribed to the regimentation of working class life which occurred with industrialisation (before then people could pick and choose their own working hours) around the end of the seventeenth century, it waned to nothing during by the mid nineteenth century. Payday was typically Saturday, and therefore workers often had spare money on Monday and didn’t need to work, choosing more leisure time over higher incomes. Business owners in some industries had become accustomed to workers not arriving on Monday, and were willing to tolerate it, even putting on provisions for entertainment including rail journeys, plays and games such as cricket.

I am very great believer (and have been for years, even before I got into all this slow stuff) that in these days of the modern technology we have, it could finally live up to the promise of it being “a labour saving devise” and free us from some of our work, meaning a 4 day working week is totally possible! OK, it only gives you one extra day a week, but 1 day is better than nothing.

So, go celebrate St Monday, skive, promote the 4-day work week!

SC

For more detail on Saint Monday read:

• Tom Hodgkinson, “In defence of skiving”, New Statesman, 30 August 2004 (also Tom’s books, including “How to be Idle” and “The Idlers Diary 2009”)
• Douglas A. Reid, “The Decline of Saint Monday”, in: Essays in Social History: Volume 2