What’s been happening in the break

Pressing Pause ep 125 What’s been happening in the break

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Welcome to Pressing Pause, I’m your host, Gabrielle Treanor, a coach, writer, introvert and sensitive soul with an inclination to ponder over the stuff of life. Join me as I explore how we can create, find and feel more calm, ease and joy in our daily lives.

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Hi, and welcome to episode 125. It’s been a while! I’ve never officially had seasons of this podcast, I’m simply taken breaks when I’ve needed to which have been different lengths depending on what’s going on in my life and work. And this time the break has been pretty long! Which means this episode will be longer than usual too as I’ve got quite a lot to share.

So what has been going on during this time? Well, quite a lot! Let’s see, I completed my first year of the Masters degree in Applied Positive Psychology I started last autumn. That was fascinating and pretty demanding as it’s a long time since I was in the academic world and writing uni assignments is completely different to all the other writing I do. Getting the hang of researching and reading scientific papers has been quite challenging too although it’s also developed a skill which has become very handy, but I’ll come on to that later. So now, as this episode airs, I have just started the second year of the degree and I’ll be doing my dissertation at the same time so things are going to get pretty busy around here! I’ve mostly decided on what I’m going to focus on for my dissertation and I think it’s going to be really interesting, eye-opening and very relevant to my work.

Since the early summer I’ve been working with my local branch of Mind, the mental health charity. I’ve been full-time self-employed for over a decade so it’s been very lovely, and very different, to become part of a team and actually leave my home to go to work somewhere else! I’m really enjoying supporting people in my local community in addition to the work I do online with my coaching clients and courses.

I’ve continued to write features for the fabulous publications The Happy News and The Week Junior. The Happy News has been going for eight years and I’m honoured to have been a little part of it since the very beginning. It’s jam-packed with news of all the good that’s happening in the world and is a much-needed antidote to the grimness of news we get on tv, radio and other newspapers. And The Week Junior is the children’s version of The Week magazine for adults, it’s also full of news written for children to understand and be informed without being freaked out, plus there’s lots of other interesting features in there too and I write features for the wellbeing page about once a month.

I’ve joined Substack where I write posts which I also send out to my email list as newsletters. I’ll put a link in the show notes so you can check it out. There are all kinds of fascinating Substacks to read or listen to from an enormous variety of people. And there’s a feature called Notes which looks like a social media feed but without the infuriating algorithm or mean snippiness you get on other, recently renamed social media, for example. You’ll also find details on my Substack of regular online gatherings I’m hosting called The Gentle Pause where we meet online for half an hour of soothing and restorative calm.

But, what has been the biggest news this year, I actually signed the deal at the end of last year but couldn’t say anything about it for months, is that I have written a book! An actual book that is being published by a publisher and printed and bound into an actual book which you can hold in your hands and read! Throughout the entire writing and into the editing process I had to keep quiet which was so hard. It felt amazing, and quite scary, to finally announce it out loud because that made it real.

So, my book, I love saying that, is called The 1% Wellness Experiment: Micro-gains to change your life in ten minutes a day. For such a long time I have wanted to write a book but I didn’t have quite the right idea or I hadn’t found a publisher but this feels like the book I was supposed to write right now. The book is exactly what I imagined it to be, it has everything I wanted in it. The years of my coaching, course creating and teaching experience have been poured into it plus the decades of my own life experience, my own challenges, have shaped this book. too

It’s a really practical book with actions you can take straight away to make a real difference to the quality of your life. Each action takes only 10 minutes – that’s 1% of your waking day – so it’s really quick and effective. It’s not a book that makes you feel pressured because the whole premise of it combats perfectionism and procrastination as it’s not a rigid prescription but an experiment to explore. And this book puts the power back in your hands because you get to choose how everything I share in the book will work best for you in your unique life

I have lots more to share about the experience of writing the book (not least my tussles with perfectionism) and more about The 1% Wellness Experiment itself over the coming weeks before it’s published on 21 December. I know that’s super close to Christmas, the publishers chose the date, but the book is available to pre-order now so that it will arrive with you on the date of publication, and quite a few people have told me that they’ve ordered it as a little Christmas gift to themselves which I think is brilliant!

You might have heard other authors banging on about pre-ordering their book and wondered why bother when you can just wait until it’s published and then get it. Well, pre-orders are actually really important for how available a book is to readers after it’s published. Bookshops on the high street and online are tight on shelf space and so the more pre-orders a book has the more likely a bookshop is to stock it when it’s published because they see there are people interested in it.

Of course my ego would love to walk into bookshops and see my book on a shelf! But, aside from my own pride I also know The 1% Wellness Experiment will have a real, positive and meaningful impact on those who read it (plus the people around them because our own wellbeing ripples out to our loved ones, colleagues and communities) so I really want it to be available as widely as possible so that anyone who could benefit from the book can find it.

So, if you plan to buy The 1% Wellness Experiment I’d love you to consider pre-ordering rather than waiting until after publication day. You won’t be charged until it’s posted so hitting the pre-order button is an act of support and you can even change your mind if you want to. In the past I’ve pre-ordered a book months in advance, forgotten about it and had a wonderful surprise when it’s landed on my doormat on publication day so that’s an added benefit too!

There’s a list of online bookshops you can pre-order from in the UK and overseas on my website at thewellnessexperiment.co.uk and I’ll put that link in the show notes too. Or you can just go straight to your favourite online bookshop or go to your favourite bookshop on your high street and order it there.

And if you do pre-order please let me know so I can thank you and do a happy dance!

So that’s my big news and of course you don’t have to wait until The 1% Wellness Experiment is published to get support from me. My online courses are available for you to start on straight away so you can get help to feel calmer, be more present and content, create some peace and ease in your busy life and to feel more confident, in control and happier. And I’m working with a handful of coaching clients so if you’d like one to one support from me to lower your stress and overwhelm, stop people-pleasing and feel more calm, ease and joy every day, we can have a chat about coaching. You can find everything I offer at gabrielletreanor.com and the link is in the show notes.

I’m bound to have missed out some things but I think that’s caught you up with the big stuff that’s been going on this year.

So, for the rest of the next unofficial season of this podcast I’m going to continue, as I always have, sharing ideas, observations, realisations and my own exploration into living with less stress and overwhelm and with more calm, peace, ease and joy. Along with some behind the scene type insights into writing the book which I hope you’ll enjoy too. I have every intention of releasing a new episode each week and so if you’re subscribed to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify or whatever app you use you should automatically see a new episode appear in the feed every Friday.

And as always I love to hear from you. I love it when you message me to tell me how and where you listen to this podcast, what struck a chord with you, what you take away from it and what you’d like me to talk about – whatever you want to share I’m always happy to hear it. You can email me at [email protected]or find me on Instagram where I’m @gabrielletreanor. And if you enjoy the podcast and want to leave a review on iTunes that would be fantastic, thank you!

Okay, I think I’ve given you a lot of information so I will leave it there for now and I’ll be back next week. Thanks again for listening.

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