Shelf Help Book Club: How to press pause before life does it for you

Shelf Help is a book club, dedicated to self-help and self-development, and each month, founder Toni Jones highlights a book that has changed her life for the better.

July’s Book of the Month is Pause: How to Press Pause Before Life Does It For You by Danielle Marchant.

Strive, drive, sleep, repeat, don't miss a beat. Does this sound like your life? Pushing forward with no pauses? If so, how are you feeling right now? Tired? Bored? Lonely? Angry? Stressed? Sad? Fed up? Wired? All of the above?

Pause is a beautiful book that is less about doing and more just ‘being’. Sounds simple, right? But slowing down is much tougher than we think. And it's crucial if we want to live a fulfilling and happy life, and understand more about ourselves and our place in the world, says author and executive coach Danielle Marchant.

Designed as a retreat in book form, Pause provides space, structure and guidance to help you slow down, get quiet, tune in and rebalance. Danielle says: “I have used my experience of burnout to provide hope, tools and inspiration for people who are finding life challenges overwhelming. I want to support people on their journey in life, and to recognise that even in the struggle (and perhaps especially then) that life is guiding us towards something bigger than we could ever imagine.”

Here are three pieces of easy-to-implement advice from the book…

1. Ask yourself: “What is working right now?”

Before we can make any lasting change to our lives it’s crucial to take a snapshot of what is happening now. And that includes the good stuff that we have going on, as well as the parts we’d like to transform.

“Nothing is broken,” says Danielle, “and at least part of the key to navigating big changes lies in what you have at your disposal now. While there will be parts of your life that don’t work, almost everyone has something that is going well for them, something that can be an anchor amid all the change.”

What will be your anchor?

2. Remember: “Fear is excitement without the breath”

Change requires doing something new, and that inevitably requires pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone, and often into fear. Even if that change is making a promise to do less.

“Sometimes we feel so scared of moving away from the safe and normal that we scupper our dreams,” says Danielle. So when you feel the fear, her advice is to think back to a time that you have confronted fear before. Your first day at school, or a new job, a driving test, exam, house move, travel, dating. Everything is new at some point and we have all felt the fear and survived it. We can (and must) do it again.

3. If you want to create more free time, book in “white space”

This is one of the ‘micro pause’ exercises that Danielle includes in the book, designed to take less than two minutes and prevent overwhelm.

She explains: “Block out ‘white space’ – time in your diary with nothing scheduled. This could be at weekends when you don’t make any social commitments, or at work where you leave yourself ‘white space’ at the beginning of your day, between meetings, at lunchtime or on Friday afternoons. When you have white space scheduled it’s entirely up to you how you use it – for creative thinking, planning your next week or prepping for an important meeting. The idea is that it is your time.”

For more info visit, lifebydanielle.com or buy the book here.

Shelf Help is a book club and community dedicated to self-help and self-development. Visit shelfhelp.club for more information on the Book of the Month as well as meet-ups and author events and find them on Facebook and Instagram