I am currently doing a Mental Health First Aid course (highly recommend it). One more session to go before I complete the training knowing that I am better equipped to spot some things and know the right way to approach and assist someone. On the other hand it makes me very aware that I know only a little bit of what people can be going through.

Something that happens a bit more then it should in our house is the smoke alarm going off, mainly because we had to remove all internal doors downstairs so I can have room to manoeuvre a wheelchair around should I need it. When it does start beeping loudly the first thing you do is get to the reason the alarm has gone off. Did the extractor fan not get put on? Did someone burn their egg when frying it, or forget something cooking in the oven? Or is it our family favourite -fried sea bass on the menu? The crispy skin that everyone loves really is a smoke detectors favourite reason to scream. There is no use in just standing under the alarm fanning franticly with a towel to get the dreadful piercing alarm to stop if the pizza is still burning in the oven, or the fish is still being fried. Any alarm going off is because there is something happening that is setting it off. Knowing yourself and be interested in others so you can spot when normal changes, and then be present and available to walk along someone whilst they find their burning pizza. I do see the flaw in this analogy because when you are being patient, listening and communicating non-judgementally which means not giving someone your side or your solutions, you probably in the real world of fire alarms going off would like to point out the burning pizza before the house catches fires.

My point I guess is, and my experience has showed me, that too often we are satisfied with helping someone get rid of the piercing alarm and talk about the very obvious things -kind of like pushing the button on your smoke detector that pauses it for 10 minutes. We hope by then whatever set it off will have sorted itself out. What we are forgetting sometimes is that it is often the unspoken small things that we need help to understand and work through. The power that there is in being listened to and talking things through, is incredible.

There are some great TV programs I have watched recently that I would highly recommend. One where Freddie Flintoff uses his platform to journey through with us and highlight issues surrounding Eating Disorder, and another one where Roman Kemp opens up about depression and highlights issues around Suicide, and the importance of talking.

These things together with the Mental Health First Aid training really has emphasised again the importance of listening in our communication. Winston Churchill said it well when he pointed out that it takes courage to stand up and speak, before he said ‘courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.’

I do love a good story, and I have a real soft spot for books and films that are based on a true stories. In my last post I wrote about resilience and told you that I have been asked to write a session on the topic. I do not like it when I don’t feel like I know my stuff and I might even sometimes be guilty of overpreparing, if there is such a thing. Because I do also enjoy learning, and so I have continued my research into all things resilience. Through recommendation I have been reading about a high ranking US military officer called James Stockdale, and something called the Stockdale paradox (talked about in Jim Collins Book From Good To Great).

For 8 years during the Vietnam war, Admiral James Stockdale was imprisoned and tortured. You can find a few books out there where he tells his story, books like In Love and War, Courage under fire and Thoughts of a philosophical fighter pilot. Better to hear his story first hand then to have it be retold by me.

But there is one thing I would like to share with you.

Talking about his experience and fellow prisoners, Admiral James was asked ‘who didn’t make it out’? His answer to this came quickly, ‘That’s easy -the optimist! They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

He goes on to say ‘You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.’

This is known as the Stockdale paradox. And I for one have been thinking about this a lot, so I thought I would share it with you!

I have been pondering all things resilience for the last week and a bit. You see I was asked to write a session on this subject for a wellbeing course a very talented friend of mine is putting together. The more I have been thinking about this and the more I have been reading others thoughts that are out there, punchy quotes that is related to it, as well as looking at it from my own experience, the more I am thinking that resilience is so much more then the ability to ‘bounce back’ and getting up when you fall. Because what if our normal is about to change, or life as we know it is about to shift to something else completely. I do like phrases such as ‘It’s not how many times you get knocked down that counts, it’s how many times you get back up‘, but I do think it lacks something. I am not sure how to rewrite it to including something along the lines of getting up to sitting is also getting up, it just maybe isn’t as punchy!

When life hits us hard, and we sometimes feel like we’re drowning, managing to just get our head above the waters so we can breathe is showing great strength, even if we are still in the same rough waters for now.

It has hit me that resilience starts way before any challenges comes our way. The ability to withstand, to find joy in other things and shift focus to the things we can achieve and do is something we should proactively work on not just once the storm is here, but also before it comes. Resilience starts with compassion for ourselves, and having a balanced life. When my health deteriorated, and I suddenly couldn’t do, and failed to find the energy for, all the socialising and active stuff I loved, those things still kept me going, even if ‘the how’ had to dramatically change because of circumstances. In the darkest hours and through the hardest challenges, my resilience and keeping my head above the waters was sometimes as little as a phone call with someone, other times it was actual time spent with a friend, but most of the time it was resting enough so that when the kids where around I had enough energy to read for them or snuggle up to watch a film with them. Finding the little things we can still do to keep us going as we navigate the rough terrain that’s were resilience lies. Did I want to be more involved -yes! Did I want to be the one to teach them to ride their bikes -yes! Did I want to sit inside next to the fire reading when everyone else went out on their skis -no! But if I couldn’t give 10 out of 10, what did 5 out of 10 look like, or even a 1 out of 10 is better then giving up completely.

So if you do get knocked down compassion towards yourselves says, even if I can only lift my head off the floor for a short moment that is a victory, let’s take it from there. I never bounced back to what my life was before, I learnt that somethings are lost forever. I also learnt to appreciate the simple things in life, and cherish the things you can do. And importantly I learnt to embrace the ‘new normal’ not as second best because resilience is about finding your way.

One last thing:

A big part of preparing for the unexpected is to make sure you have great people around you who can support you when you feel you have nothing to give anymore. I am so grateful for my family and my friends!

When I got married the first house we moved into was a rented house in a cul-de-sac in Coventry. There was one thing I really disliked in that house, and I do mean -really disliked! Imagine if you can, and I will be really impressed if you can, shiny pink silky curtains reminiscent of a puffy ballgown straight out of the 80s. That is what the owner had hung in the master bedroom, and my plan was to definitely get rid of them ASAP. Days turned into weeks, that turned into months, and as long as we lived in that house those curtains never changed. It wasn’t that I suddenly liked them more, and maybe it was lazy, but I never got round to doing anything about them.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the plumbing victory I had recently with the sticky flush, and this weekend I fixed another house thing that could have easily become another pink curtain thing in our lives.

The things that we do not so much like, even find irritating at times, and vow to do something about but get scarily used to them just being there. How many of those things do I keep on ignoring or work around. And in my most philosophical ponderings of the week, what are the pink curtains in my attitudes and personality traits that could do with a replacement or a little adjustment. Something for us all to ponder!

You’ll be happy to know that I do not have any picture evidence of the gloriously ugly curtains. I will leave you with a picture of a ballgown though that will spark your imagination as to why these curtains have made such a lasting impression on me.

Starting this week feeling a bit of withdrawal symptoms after the last 10 days of the world championship in what I think is one of the most fun sports to watch. Biathlon is such an impressive and tense sport. In this house we all love watching the impressive athletes; after they have skied for a few kilometres with a rifle on their back, they come into the shooting range and whilst their heart is racing and their pulse is high, they shoot at targets that are the size of a golfball 50 meters away. If you miss a target you will have to ski as many penalty loops as targets missed, or sometimes you have three reloads to do, and on a rare occasion it is a minute per miss added to your time. This all means that nothing is really decided to the very end, keeping us all on our toes and making us chew our fingernails until the very end.

Obviously being Norwegian over the last week has been especially fun as the Norwegian biathletes ended up on the top of the medal table with 7 golds, 3 silvers and 4 bronze.

Well done specially to Ingrid Tandrevold who has had a year with health challenges and maybe not the results she wanted and thought she was capable off leading up to the Championship. We cheered so much when she finally got her first individual medal. What a girl -she ended up with 3 medals at the end!

And then the junior who absolutely bossed it in his first Senior Championship. Cool as a cucumber!

I am always so impressed with any top sports people. Knowing how hard they work to be where they are. The determination, passion and staying power in these people are something to admire.

So if you have never watched a biathlon race I highly recommend it. (Top tip: start with a Mass start event, or a relay).

This week my musing have been about potential, and realising our abilities. We all know the classic iceberg picture of what you see on top as supposed to the largeness of what lurks underneath the water. In the context of our potential the latter is often used as a picture of our untapped, unexplored potential. Mostly what I have been chewing over this weeks is the fact that psychologists say that most of us seldom use more than 15% of our potential. I think that is Mind-blowing!

If I consider myself included in the phrase ‘most people’, even if I am a little bit above or even below the average, then the untapped potential I am sitting on is quite a lot. What would it look like if we just used another 10% of our potential? I have struggled to even wrap my head around what 100% could look like… as I said: mind-blowing!

In the powerful words from one of my favourite films Coach Carter (and yes I know the words are from a poem and that it is well known to have been used by Nelson Mandela)

‘Our deepest fear is NOT that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people the permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.’

PS. If you haven’t seen the film Coach Carter, I strongly recommend you do. Based on a true story, which always is a big win in my books.

High on the success of my plumbing the weekend before last, I decided another little niggling thing that needed fixing was the fridge-freezer in our outhouse/utility room. The way they open needed reversing, and quickly using my friend Youtube I realised there was a few videos there that could be used as a teacher. So I decided that fixing the doors was my next goal as Silje the ‘handyman’. Not all superheroes wear capes and all that….

Saturday full off enthusiasm I went outside and tidied away what was in my way (mainly bikes), emptied the content of the fridge-freezer into coolbags, and arranged a variety off tools that could be helpful aiding me in completing my goal. Quickly I realised that most video tutorials was only showing the reversal of ‘basic’ fridge doors, and not blowing my own trumpet or anything, if our spare fridge had only been such a model, this post will have been very different. Instead I realised that our American kind with lots of electrics was not such an easy task to take on. After lots of googling and trying to find the right kind of help for the same kind of model, electrics and door hinges, I was bombarded with warning messages. In short it was saying that if you try this yourself and it doesn’t work you won’t be covered for any parts etc that are damaged. More and more I was starting to think that this was impossible for a very basic diy’er like myself. The obstacle to achieve the goal suddenly seemed too big, it became an impossible task. I started capitulating to the fact that this would be a different Saturday feeling to last weeks high of achieving something great before lunchtime. Whilst I restocked the fridge and freezer I was thinking about the reason the door opening that way was such a little irritation to us all, and realised that maybe if I rearranged the utility room itself it wouldn’t be such a big deal. And so I decided that by clearing the space specially for the new bikes we have accumulated since Christmas, the squeeze to get a new milk out might not need to be such a big hassle. Though it took me a lot longer, and my husband has to find a space in the loft for his golfclubs, I still managed to achieve the ultimate; making the space we have useful and not an irritation.

Did I achieve my goal?! Well no, because the doors are still opening the same way, but actually YES I did because now it doesn’t matter anymore. Ask yourself why your goal is important to you, and what does success look like when you accomplish this? Don’t be afraid to stop and rethink a goal, and even sometimes along the way make a little (or large) tweak. And never give up if it matters to you no matter the obstacles! There might just be another way!

Silje -the successful tidy-up’erer of stuff to make space useful, less successful fridge door reverser’er.

Someone wise once said ‘Never stop learning because life never stops teaching’.

Over the last couple of months we have had a toilet flush that keeps on flushing until you press the button again. It is one of those things that is not a big problem so it has been left in the important but not urgent pile of our to-do lists. Also I know absolutely nothing about plumbing. But having left it for this long I made a weekend goal to research and find out if I could attempt to fix the problem myself. Saturday morning I read a bit and watched a very cheesy Youtube video made by a plumber and his wife, with scripted questions and very limited acting skills. But they were the teachers I never knew I needed. You really can find help for almost anything on Youtube these days. Gone is the days where the only way to learn something new was by buying a book that had the words ‘…for dummies’ in the title.

I turned off the water, pulled apart the cistern and I might have even put on my widest joggers in case a builders bum really is an important part of any building solutions -I haven’t read Plumbing for dummies, so didn’t want to jinx anything in case that is a chapter in the book.

By 10am on Saturday morning I had completed my goal, and fixed the flush. I felt SO good about my achievement, SO good that I just had to tell you all as my family had enough of my satisfied smirk and plumbing lessons by lunchtime Saturday.

So when life teaches you things make sure you are tuned into learning, for all other things there is YouTube.

Silje -a goal setter and sometimes a plumber

So it’s been a little while since I last put down my thoughts on paper (the webform of a notebook -a blog). Sometimes there is so much going on that it is hard to know where to start with putting words on what is happening.

We had a great Christmas, even though it was different to what most people were planning for after the UK prime minister Boris and his gang had another loft conversion added to their covid pyramid -tier 4. New years eve all over the world we celebrated the end to a difficult year, only for us here in the UK to be met by another national lockdown. This means in our house the children are all doing school from home, and we are still working for home. Basically we are spending a lot of time together in the same space. I keep on being reminded how incredibly lucky I am though as we get on so well as a family.

Whilst the whole world is still fighting a pandemic, part of our world is and has also been going through massive political chaos. The US changing the presidency after what can only be described as a child tantrum of epic proportion after the election in November from the now gone president. With Brexit and all that is going on in this country, I think I started to feel so tired and drained by it all. Leadership shouldn’t be about telling half truths or lying, or putting others down to get to the top yourself. How and who runs our countries are so important. Leadership and character is SO important.

With all this churning away in my mind, it can all feel so big and daunting. I did have some more thinking time because I had a new prosthetic leg made before Christmas that really didn’t work out well and made me have to have a lot of leg-off time. So I started listening again to one of my favourite books ‘Man’s search for meaning’, knowing that I needed to hear Viktor Frankl’s story again, and his powerful words about the last human freedom that can never be taken away from you: CHOOSING YOUR ATTITUDE IN ANY GIVEN SET OF CIRCUMSTANCES.

It is not worth using so much mental energy on the things you cannot control, instead look to the things you can do something about. Set some positive goals that excites and brings out the best in you. So I am back to writing and blogging, I am also back walking on my ‘old’ prosthetic, though revision surgery will be happening sometime this year. I have got a new bike and am enjoying having bike rides with my youngest son. Me and my 15 year old son is loving cooking (and the whole family loves eating) some epic curries with Al’s kitchen youtube channel.

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So with all that is going on that we cannot do anything about, let’s focus on what we can do. All the best to you all!

It’s December! First candle from our advent candlestick was lit on Sunday, and the kids are happily partaking in the traditional countdown to Christmas by having to eat a chocolate everyday.

Yesterday I was in a zoom meeting with some awesome work colleagues and friends. We were talking about our highlights from the previous month, progress and victories, and goals reached. One of the team member was telling us about a development programme he has found very useful, and he mentioned something that stuck with me and has made me think. The programme, as I understood it, asks you to take an aspect from your life (eg. family, mental health, social, physical health) and define what you believe about this. Once you have defined what is important to you about that, it then follows on by asking you ‘what are you doing about that today?’ As I sat pondering this and the Christmas carols where playing in the background, my eyes rested on our advent candlestick/wreath. Not sure how big a part of Christmas this is for people in England (apart from Churches), but advent and it’s meaning is the basis of many a song we Norwegians do, specially in schools. Just as for a lot of people in this country you get a real sense of Christmas when you hear children sing ‘Away in a manger’, for me and many fellow Norwegians it comes with the advent candles being lit, and the accompanying words that goes with that.

Each candle that gets lit in the countdown to Christmas represent one important part of the Christmas message, and life in general. Joy, love, hope and peace!

And as I sat there I thought: what do I believe about this and what about this is important to me. How do I define what I believe about joy? Is it adventures, laughter and fun, or is it a sense of inner satisfaction and a state of happiness. What do I believe about peace? Off course I want a world without war, but what about justice and fighting for equality, and how does ‘peace of mind’ fit into all of this? What am I hoping for, stretching towards, what do I really desire to come to past? What about love? Is it just about my affections or is it something bigger or deeper then that?

Once how this matters to me is defined, then the killer question kicks in. What am I doing today about this?

My advent challenge to you is to take these four words: Joy, Hope, Peace and Love, and define what they really mean to you.