Transformation and Change,
the significance of assessing where we are in our lives and where to next

Julie Hewson

Life can be an adventure, or a tragedy or a comedy or so banal anyone watching in the audience might want their money back.
The patterns we can observe in life are a mixture of fate and self determinism, an ancient dialogue familiar to the Greeks. We have no say over our genetic inheritance, or the emotional health or otherwise of our parents and care-takers. That we know as a fact. However within those parameters and historical, social, political and cultural contexts, we can and do make existential decisions which either enhance our life, or limit it. Those decisions are ours. Sometimes made when we were very young, using the best resources we had, many made later when we had a greater grasp of the complexities and subtleties in life. Some continue to live their lives based on decisions they made decades ago which have never been updated.

Today there are a plethora of professionals involved in facilitating change at a number of different levels. Sometime, reading the advertisements there is a sense of “drink me, and all ills will be redressed”. Reminiscent of some of the potions and pills handed out in Victorian times.

What we seem to do is yearn for authenticity in relationship with ourselves, each other, and the world. It means coming to terms with the past and looking at the present, with kind and compassionate eyes, with a view to living our very best life from now on into the future, and having a mind and responsibility to our environment. His holiness the Dalai Lama was asked if he had compassion for himself, and in his familiar throaty chuckle he said,” Oh yes, I have a hundred per cent compassion for myself that enables me to have eighty percent compassion for everyone else.”

Julie Hewson is A director of a successful Training Institute of 25years standing (The Iron Mill Institute) in the Exeter Area, in applied Psychology, Senior partner in Elliot-Griffiths, Consultants in Business, Executive and Personal Coaching. She is also an Organisational Consultant working with Government Ministers, the armed services and emergency services, business people, those in the medical and caring professions, artists, environmentalists in fact, people from all walks of life.