An interesting thing is happening to me at the moment: having felt physically exhausted for a good long while, and although my physical energy is low, my brain is packed full of things I want to say. This is classic bi-polar, of course, and the medical literature refers to this as the 'racing mind'. Or is it?

The Buddhists have a great saying: if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. This is not a gratuitous invitation to violence but a reminder that we owe it to ourselves to be intelligently skeptical and humbly self-reliant. I am right there with them.

I have already said that I considered 'energy management' - which I prefer to call Personal Ecology because I am not that fond of management speak - to be a crucial part of coaching. This is all very well but HOW can I actually DO it? 

I started by being slightly conflicted about it because I held two apparently opposed ideas:

There is a lot of talk these days about Work-Life Balance, and so there should be. I think this is a very important area of coaching.

I will never forget the day I looked at my goals sheet in my office and tore it to pieces. I had not achieved (nor was I ever likely to achieve) a single one of my short, medium and longer term goals. After three years of illness, I had simply run out of time. It took me weeks to 'process' the pain, the anger and the disappointment I felt as a result.

One of the most challenging aspects of my recovery has been, and continues to be, allowing myself to experience what I experience. My great fear has always been to give in because I used to equate it with giving up.

The way I started dealing with depression was by fighting against it with all my strength. As it got deeper, I fought more and more until I eventually ran out of steam. I am now aware that I exhausted myself as much as depression exhausted me.

Throughout my coaching career, I lost count of the number of times I said that we were Human Beings and not Human Doings. I was right of course but I was missing a big point.

My top Core Value is Spirituality so words like soul and soulful are part of my every day vocabulary. The most horrendous time in my illness was when I felt I had lost my connection to God (whatever that word may mean to you).