​So, another busy week on the 30 things for 30 challenge, although I have been a little slack at taking photos. I began the week (my challenge weeks start on Fridays) still at my mums house, helping her choose wedding outfits. This led us to have lunch in the John Lewis Bistro, where I had a simply outstanding stilton and pesto pasta dish – better than any Italian I’ve been too.

​We saw a couple of fantastic shows, including the Christmas Spectacular at Thursford – a thoroughly festive occasion with dancing snowmen, beautiful carols and high-kicking chorus lines. Mum invited her friend Nesta, who counts as my interesting person for this week. Nesta is a self-employed fitness instructor and used to teach my mum pilates. She also shared my love of colouring books, much to the bemusement of everyone else in the car who doesn’t seem to get what they are about. This is a good time to mention that I completed another colouring picture – this one was particularly detailed and time-consuming, but I love the end result.

​We also saw the Classic Spectacular at the Royal Albert Hall, an uplifting orchestra show made up of many famous pieces of classical music, with much flag waving and singing of Rule Britannia. The show culminated with the 1812 overture, complete with gunfire, cannons and indoor fireworks! Really quite exhilarating! During the show, I enjoyed a ‘blush cider’ – basically rose cider. After the show, we went for a thai meal at Thai Square One, where I took the opportunity to add another drink to my list – the Mekong Thai Iced Tea (Mekong is described as the Spirit of Thailand.) The best description I could come up with for this drink is that its ‘not unpleasant.’ While there’s nothing exactly wrong with it, it does have a rather peculiar flowery after taste. This brings my restaurant count to 7 and my alcoholic drink count to 8, so progressing well on both those challenge items. 

While at the Albert Hall, I did another random act of kindness. The queues for the toilets were huge, and a mother with a young girl (about 8 years old) was trying to coordinate getting her daughter through the toilets, while buying icecreams for the rest of the family. This resulted in her telling her daughter she would leave her in the queue for a bit while she went to find icecream, to which the daughter looked terrified at the thought of being left in a crowd alone. So, instead of catching up on the days important facebook news, I introduced myself to her, reassured the mum she would be safe with me, and we had a good 10 minute chat in the queue. Her name was Olivia, she has just started playing the piano, had never been to the Albert Hall before but was really enjoying it. I delivered her safely back to her mum, after warning her that there were loud cannons in the second half that might make her jump!

On the letter writing front, I send a card to my Grandma (Dad’s Mum) – it was actually her birthday (unlike my Gran who I sent a card to last week) and I wrote a letter inside to updated her on all the news.

On return to Edinburgh, I attended three networking meetings – the first was a one-to-one with Stan from Coachmatch, a company who’s coaching panel I am signed up to. I now Stan fairly well due to being the Coachmatch relationship manager while I was at Lloyds, and Stan also came on my first walking-coaching retreat back in May. It was great to catch up with him and also to hear about some of Coachmatch’s latest initiatives – some of which may hopefully lead to some work for me.

I also attended a CFM Consulting event based around Psychological Models and Types of Coaching. While the actual event was fairly high-brow and not quite the content that had been advertised, it was interesting to mix with a bunch of coaches and corporate people. It made me realise how rusty I have become at networking conversations since being self-employed and I had to make a real effort to talk to people and not hide in the toilets. Definitely a skill to practice, although it did make me consider where I was with the right crowd of people if we didn’t have much to say to each other.
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Following the session, I had another networking meeting with Nick Smith, who I was recently contacted by, as he is also an NLP coach who takes people into the outdoors. As well as discussing opportunities of how we might work together, this meeting also turned into a very useful peer-to-peer coaching session – we have agreed to meet regularly to continue supporting each other. He even sent me a facebook photo of a change he had made following our session. 

Towards the end of the week, things got a little more light-hearted as I again stayed overnight with my friend Lindsey and her two boys, Rory and Bram. In addition to an extremely productive working session, where we have finalised the main logistics of a join walking-coaching and yoga retreat, we also managed to fit in a session of disco dancing, including among others: Batman, Cotton-Eye Joe, and Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends and brief session of the Limbo. This counts as another type of exercise for me!

I also jumped at the chance to say yes to another opportunity, when Lindsey offered me the chance to sample her Indian Head Massage skills, ahead of her offering them to clients on our joint retreat. Very relaxing and far more extensive than I thought including the neck and back as well. Highly recommended!
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We ended the night with another 2 books, which I read to her son Rory, who is about to be in a nativity as a narrator. He therefore chose two Christmas themed books, the Mr Men Twelve Days of Christmas and A Very Noisy Stable. I’m very grateful to be getting the opportunity to read kids books, as in 4 weeks, I’m still only half way through my first ‘proper’ book, making the chances of me completing 30 in a year very unlikely!

Finally, I can add another exercise to my count, as I attended my swing dance lesson and instead of doing the normal Lindy hop, we learnt the Madison, which seems to be a 1950's version of the Cha-Cha slide, where the man on the record tells you what to do next, including the Double Cross, Cleaveland Box and the Rifleman (you may recognise it from the film/stage show Hairspray.)

So, that completes my week’s activities and here’s my top tips and learnings from the week:

1. Reading books is time-consuming and despite extensive training as a kid to read books every night-time before bed, this is a habit I much regret getting out of and I want to try to rectify this!
2. An Indian Head Massage is misleadingly named
3. Networking with groups of people you don’t know is scary (more scary than it used to be when I was employed) although its worth considering if it’s the right group of people to be networking with. 

So, I’m a bit behind with writing my update this week, as I went down south to visit my Mum and help her with wedding decisions, including the all-important dress (she’s getting married in April next year.)

It was again a busy week for the challenge, although I can feel some of the initial enthusiasm wearing off with some of the more difficult items.
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The last week started with Matt’s parent’s coming to visit for the weekend. Despite the fact that neither of them drink, this seems to coincide with a marked intake in my alcohol consumption! Either that, or I have a belief that I don’t really drink that much and I’m only realising since I’ve been tracking it on the 30 things for 30 spreadsheet. This week I’ve had: winter Pimms (blackberry and elderflower flavour with lemonade); some rosé wine (white zinfandel); prosecco with strawberry syrup (Zizzi’s version of a strawberry Bellini I think); Baileys (on ice); mulled wine (well, its rude not to at an outdoor light show at the Royal Botanic Gardens) and finally some summer Pimms (in an Indian restaurant and they didn’t have anything else I fancied.) Before you become worried that maybe I have a problem, may I just clarify that each of these was on a different day of the week, was only one (sometimes two….) glasses and is partly fuelled by my enthusiasm on this particular challenge item! This brings my total ‘different alcoholic drinks tried’ to 7 out of 30. The challenge will now get harder as I have already had my most commonly consumed alcoholic beverages, so will need to start getting more adventurous with a wider range!

I also visited a couple of restaurants as mentioned above; Zizzi’s with Matt’s parents, where I had a spectacular personal cheese fondue and also a delicious chocolate bread pudding dessert and also my Mum’s local Indian restaurant in Ely, near Cambridge called Basmati Rice. Here, we learnt 2 different ways of folding napkins after my Mum was caught staring intently at the waiter as he laid the table next to us, and also learnt about the history of relations between India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
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As well as going out for a meal, I also put my culinary skills to good use for Matt’s parents, making a new soup (Nigella’s Butternut Squash and Sweet Potato) and also a new recipe: Nigella’s mushroom and potato gratin. I also baked my first cake of the challenge, Nigella’s Gluten Free Brownie. Its only when you make cakes from scratch that you realise just quite how fattening they are as the only ingredients of this brownie were chocolate, butter, sugar, eggs and nuts! I had already bought the ingredients for all of these before I fell out with her Rapid Ragu recipe last week. The soup was ok, nothing special, the mushroom and potato gratin would have benefited from including cheese in the recipe, but I did enjoy the brownies, warm from the oven with a hot chocolate sauce. 

​The weekend with Matt’s parents was rather chilled, and we spent a lot of time sat around on the sofa, drinking tea and chatting. This also gave me the opportunity to complete 2 colouring pictures in my new ‘Adult Colouring Book’, (I had to double check inside for the nature of the pictures…..) I have come to discover that colouring these pictures is an incredibly time consuming business, although quite satisfying and extremely addictive (on both nights that his parents were here, I was last to bed by at least an hour after staying up ‘just to finish this section.’) It’s a far more worthwhile thing to do than simply vegging in front of the telly though. 

I also did my first random act of kindness. I have been finding it hard to do these, or at least work out what counts, as I find I’m a generally helpful person in terms of holding doors open and helping out ladies cross the street. So I’ve decided that qualifying acts will be conscious decisions to do an act, something I would normally walk on past or ignore, and something that not your normal, polite, well-meaning person would do as a matter of course. The first one was when I was walking home from town under a huge black cloud and saw a bike chained up to a lamppost with one of those tarpaulin bike covers flapping around in the wind. I clocked it, walked about 5 metres past it before deciding that actually the nice thing to do would be to reattach it properly to the bike to stop it getting soaked in the inevitably downpour that happened shortly afterwards. Hopefully the owner had a dry backside the next time they came to cycle somewhere! I was only on the receiving end of not one, but two, random acts of kindness on the train to my mums. Firstly, I really wanted a sausage sandwich and asked the lady in the restaurant if they had anything other than the advertised bacon. She initially said no, but then disappeared for a minute, and came back from first class with their left-over sausages from their breakfast service and cooked me one especially. Secondly, the man sat opposite me gave me a chocolate bar and a little Lindt bunny because ‘chocolate makes people smile.’ He was right.
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By way of update from last week, I received a letter back from my Gran saying how much she’d enjoyed receiving a non-birthday card and with 3 pages of updated from the happenings in Crickhowell.

Finally this week saw another new film: The Lady in the Van – basically an excuse to watch Maggie Smith being short with people now that Downtown Abbey has finished! And finally I said ‘yes’ to another opportunity when my Mum invited me to a Cribbage night at her local golf club. I learnt to play Cribbage with my Grandma when I was young but haven’t really played it since, and a cards evening with a bunch of retired strangers is not normally my idea of fun, but after a quick refresher lesson, I was speaking the lingo (“fifteen two, fifteen four and one for his knob”) and thoroughly enjoying myself!
That’s about it for this week. My tips from this week are:

1. Keep track of how much alcohol you drink, it’s probably more than you think! (although keeping track of it, in this instance, is probably making me drink more!)
2. Random acts of kindness come around. Don’t do them just for this reason but enjoy it as a nice consequence.
3. Playing cards with a bunch of seniors is more exciting than you think. 

Wow, what a busy week! I’ve made a good start on lots of my list (and notice I’ve been avoiding starting on other bits!)
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The week started with a relaxed evening in with a new film, Kingmans: The Secret Service. Although it was released last year, I never got around to see it at the cinemas and was excited to see it arrive via Love Film this week. There’s something quite surreal about seeing Colin Firth, normally known for being a stern romantic interest (Bridget Jones, Pride and Prejudice, Love Actually, Mama Mia!), suddenly becoming a very efficient assassin. Good fun, if not very realistic!

Saturday saw another film added to the list, seeing ‘Brooklyn’ at the cinema. The most surprising thing about it was that my partner Matt actually enjoyed it, despite it being a fairly soppy romance. He apparently liked that it didn’t end the way you thought it would. Plus it has Julie Walters in. We finished the evening off with an Indian meal in Jashan’s (thereby adding another restaurant off the list) and enjoying, for the first time, a Crabbie Alcoholic Ginger Beer (my first alcohol of the challenge). Not something I’d normally choose, and not something I think I’d choose again!

The week also brought my first book, a somewhat unexpected choice of ‘Hello Dudley!’ I was visiting my friend Lindsey and was asked by one of her (very adorable) sons if I would read it to them. I particularly enjoyed the fact that it has a hand-puppet mouth poking through the middle of the book that you can use to act out the story. Needless to say, the kids found it hilarious, as did Lindsey and I!
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Lindsey also taught me to do ‘rope plaits’ in my hair, so with a bit of practice the next morning, I was able to create my first new hairstyle from the list, using rope plaits to keep my hair off my face. Matt’s verdict: “An improvement on how you normally look, even if you do look like a 4-year old from the front.”

Tuesday evening saw my first ‘say yes to an opportunity’ as I joined Helen, a friend of mine from my NLP Practitioner course, on a walk along the Water of Leith near my house. Helen is currently undertaking a ‘Make a Change’ challenge, and part of her challenge is to get outside on these cold Autumn nights, and enjoy things that you wouldn’t normally do in the summer. This is not something I would normally have done, generally preferring to spend a dark night under a blanket on my sofa, but we had a great chat, felt energised by getting out in the fresh, crisp air, and finished the evening off nicely in the Blue Goose pub with a meal, thereby meeting 2 of the things on my list (opportunity and restaurant). I’m hoping to meet up with Helen again later in November for a night-time ascent of Arthur’s Seat to see all the Edinburgh Christmas lights.

Thursday saw my first free coaching session another NLP friend,  Nikki, combined with my 30 minutes walking for the week (although I had already fulfilled the 30 minutes walking the night before with Helen – the weather was good and we knew we’d both benefit from some exercise and a good view.) We walked up to Craiglockhart Hill from my house, and each spent some time coaching the other on a current issue.
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I also send my first letter. This was a birthday card to my Gran. Her birthday was in August, and I diligently bought a card about 2 weeks before, but forgot to send it! So, when I found it a few days after her birthday, I thought I’d surprise her at a random point in the year with a ‘non-birthday card.’ I’ve not heard from her yet, but I think it’ll appeal to her sense of humour and will mean much more to her that I’m thinking about her on some random day and making an effort to do something nice, than just getting lost in a pile of other cards with a cursory glance on her actual birthday. 

I finished the week off with another Swing Dance class. While this doesn’t count as a new exercise, as I did it last week, I did meet my first ‘interesting person.’ He was called Michael and normally did swing dance in Berkshire. However, he was in Edinburgh for work for a few days and thought he’d look up to see if there were any classes in Edinburgh. I didn’t get around to telling him about my 30 for 30 challenge, and therefore didn’t think to ask him for a photo either.  That might have come across as a bit random!
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Finally, tonight, I made another recipe and have to say I have fallen out with Nigella Lawson. Her recipe for ‘Rapid Ragu’ led to me spending the best part of 30 minutes searching everywhere in Asda for a jar of caramelised onions (NOT caramelised onion chutney) only to finally track down a lady that worked there who said she’d never heard of it. I then had to spend about 45 minutes making my own caramelised onions (which I have never done before, so needed another recipe) before I could make ‘Nigella’s Not-So-Rapid Ragu’. I’m tempted to claim 2 recipes for this effort, given I had to look up how to make the onions (turns out its just oil, onions and a bit of sugar) but its all gone into the same pot in the end, and smells pretty good…..

So, that what I’ve been up to this week. My tips for this week are:

1. Make an effort to get outside on these dark winter nights and do something you wouldn't normally do. It’s refreshing, energising and you get to see things looking different to the daytime, often in a quite magical way.
2. Never trust Nigella Lawson and her ‘quick and easy’ recipes
3. Birthday cards can be more fun and meaningful to send when it’s not someone’s birthday than when it is. 

So it’s the first week of my challenge, and Friday seems like a good day for writing blog posts, so I’ve decided to write one today. I wanted to log my achievements on my 30 things for 30 challenge as they are made, and also to reflect on what I’m learning from them.
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I’ve started strongly on the culinary front this week, making my first recipe and my first soup. It's worth clarifying here (for the more pedantic among you) what I’m counting as a recipe: It's any meal where I have to check the recipe for instructions, ingredients quantities etc and something I don’t routinely make (although it may be something I’ve made before – this seemed a good excuse to indulge in some of my favourite meals that I don’t normally have a reason to put the extra effort in.)

Given it was my birthday, I made one of my favourite recipes from my Cornish heritage, some good old Cornish Pasties. Then, having some leftover filling of chopped onion and potato, and not wanting to waste it, I made a ‘What’s in the Fridge?’ soup – a mix of potato, onion, some old-and-going-soft broccoli and some spinach, boiled up in some veg stock with thyme, rosemary, salt and pepper. While it looked like something Shrek would eat, it was actually pretty tasty!

​This week also saw me visit my first restaurant of the challenge: Henderson’s on Hanover Street, a vegetarian restaurant, where I met members of charity for which I am a Trustee and the Treasurer. Given our meetings are normally very business focused, with various people (normally me) needing to dash off to get back to work, we decided to do lunch just to get to know each other better.

​Some of the key things I learnt about my colleagues: two of the older, retired board members met doing open university courses and are currently undertaking a module studying blues and jazz music, which seems to consist entirely of watching YouTube clips. Next term will likely be philosophy. Another member is going home for Christmas next week to work in a pâté factory (despite being vegetarian) – the pâté has to fulfill a number of ethical standards as the factory is the main supplier of pate to M&S in Scotland. It's amazing what interesting things you can learn about people when you get curious! The meeting was a great success in getting to know people past the transactional level of business and start to build more human relationships and I’m confident it will help the running of the charity in the long run. 

​On the exercise front, I have started a course of swing dancing for 7 weeks as one of my types of exercise to try – I’m amazed at how quickly I have learnt to put a few simple moves together and already feel like I’m actually ‘dancing.’ I need to improve on my ability to 'follow' (the men take the lead in swing dancing) rather than guessing what the guy will do next, or worse, trying to subtly (or not so subtly) lead him.
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I have fulfilled my 30 minute walk for this week, cunningly combining it with an errand I had to run. While not a particularly inspiring walk, environment-wise, I did practice a new skill I have been learning to make the walk more interesting. I am currently doing an online Mindfulness course, which is all about focusing on the present moment, and not dwelling on past events or worrying about what will happen in the future. So, rather than letting my mind drift off to other things while I was bimbling along, I made a conscious effort to notice the world around me. Among other things, I saw a lady in a suit carrying a huge rake and a young man walking along wearing ski boots, with skis over his shoulder – the mind boggles as to where he was going to, in the most uncomfortably footwear known to mankind!

I also noticed this advert from Asda:

While I do love Christmas, it made me reflect on how much we live in the future sometimes. There’s still 7 weeks until Christmas, yet the media is already getting us to think about it nearly every day. By all means, look forward to Christmas, but don’t forget to enjoy today as well!
 
My tips for this week:

1. Make the most of what you have around you – sometimes it might surprise you! (What’s in the Fridge?’ soup is a good example!)
2. Make an effort to be more mindful and to live in the present moment – you never know what interesting things you’ll notice
3. Get curious about someone that you work with or normally only talk to on a transactional level – you may learn something interesting about them, or discover a hidden talent!

So, for my 30th birthday year, I've decided to try and do '30 things of 30' in a bid to stop myself feeling old and to get out and do new things! 

The list includes a mix of things that should be easy to achieve and some that are more time-consuming. All have the aim of making me healthier, happier and more productive, both in my home and work life. 

You can follow my progress with regular updates on facebook and on this page. 

Here's the list I have:
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Make 30 recipes
Make 30 soups
Climb 30 new munros
Read 30 new books
Visit 30 restaurants/cafes
Do 30 acts of kindness
Reconnect with 30 old friends
Create a playlist of 30 favourite songs
Drink 30 different alcoholic drinks
See 30 new films
Lose 30lbs
Try 30 different hairstyles/hairdos
Write 30 letters/postcards
Learn to say hello/thankyou in 30 languages
Say yes to 30 opportunities
Meet 30 new people
Bake 30 cakes
Give 30 coaching freebies
Do 30 different sports/exercise/classes
Ski 30 ski runs
Attend 30 networking events
Colour in 30 pictures
Write 30 blog posts
Get 30 new artists/band on my Ipod
Put £30 in a jar and treat myself
Play piano for 30 minutes a week
Go for a 30 minutes walk at least once a week
Earn 30k
Cycle 30 miles in a day
Walk 30 miles in a day