This is your conscience speaking...

Last month myself and a colleague began to compile a catalogue of womens thoughts on pregnancy and postnatal experiences. As I sat down and read through the responses I was quite simply amazed at how often a single emotion cropped up among the individuals questioned.

Guilt.

Now we're talking. Here's a feeling we can relate to. Here's a feeling that resonates with us all.

Eating too much; exercise (or lack thereof); not breastfeeding; being a 'bad' mother; working; not working; not having enough sex; wanting to 'have it all'; drinking wine before midday; going on holiday; going out with the girls; sleeping in; being lazy; preferring 'sex and the city' to a night with your fella.....shall I go on?

In training men and women over the years I have noticed this feeling come up more and more. Maybe I have just become more aware of it. Perhaps. Maybe I just attract feelings of guilt. Quite possibly. However it's also not such a stretch to realise that with more information being flung at us from the internet, newspapers, magazines, TV, movies, blogs...that we are subject to a greater level of potentially damaging 'expert opinion' telling us how to and how not to run our lives. Hey, I'm doing it right now.

What I find curious though is how very prevalent it is, even in those I would never have expected. Here's an example of how a typical hour of guilt might've gone for myself just a short while ago:

9am: Oh no, slept in, should've got up earlier; don't have time for a workout now; why did I have to sleep in; just didn't go to bed early enough last night; was reading when I should've been finishing off my work prep for today; bet the chocolate right before bed didn't help either; now I'm wasting time when I should be getting up, procrastinating again; really have to stop pressing the snooze button on my mobile; wanted to meditate before I went to work as well, no time for that either; what's wrong with me?; why can't I get it together?....

Okay, had to stop myself there with about 90 seconds worth. A full hour would've read like a Harry Potter novel without the magic (and the excitement...and Dumbledore). Think I made my point though and in the scheme of things, I would consider myself a reasonably optimistic and positive person.

So, what to do?

Well the first thing that helps is, to realise how truly immobilising guilt is. Intellectually I have known this for awhile but it was not until recently that I felt it. I was cycling to the gym on a Sunday and thinking about how little exercise I had done in the preceding week. My thoughts were literally beating down all my positive, little, happy cells on the way to an energising workout by focussing on things that I didn't do that I now couldn't do anything about. "What's the point? I didn't do anything all week so one session's hardly going to make a difference. Just imagine where I could be right now if I'd done what I'd planned to do. It's the same every single week, same excuses, same lines. May as well turn back for all the good it's going to do..."

And then WHAM! Going to break out the cliches and say that this was when the lightning bolt struck and I just stopped. All that chatter, stopped. I fully felt and understood how absolutely ridiculous and immobilising that chain of thought was and it was no more. I went to the gym and had a fantastic, energising and fun workout. I then went home and enjoyed my lunch knowing that I was going to do it all again tomorrow.

Okay so once the hard bit is done, the second step to getting rid of this whole guilt thing: awareness. Once you've realised how complete unnecessary and useless this emotion is, all you need to do is become aware each and every time it begins to surface. Do this enough and you'll stop it before it has a chance to become any part of your emotional range.

Finally, change it into something else. If we're going to get rid of an emotion why not replace it with something altogether more pleasant and tasty. Personally I like 'gratitude' but it really doesn't matter what you choose as long as the emotion serves you by moving your forward. Other possibilities might be Joy, happiness, pleasure, contentment. Whatever resonates with you the most to bring about the strongest positive associations.