Well not everyone – not me, for example, nor a lot of people I regularly hang out with. Yes, we are experiencing earth changes. Yes the weather around the world is extreme. We know that Australia is a land of “drought and flooding rain” as our poet Dorathea McKellar said over 100 years ago. And Aboriginal people have Dreamtime stories about the same thing. Just because our records only go back 100 or so years, doesn’t mean this isn’t a regular, long established, perfectly normal, pattern.

But anyway – that brings me to the topic of today’s post, the much-touted 2012 mystery/looming disaster/transformation/other interpretation.

I first came across the 2012 stuff about eight years ago when a lecturer made a passing reference to it. A few people in class nodded wisely and my interest was piqued. What is that about, I thought? So I googled for it and found almost nothing. That’s not the case now of course, there’s tens of thousands of 2012 information sites, and they all have their own take on this upcoming date, December 21, 2012. Many of them are about buying tinned food and heading for the hills; many about the disasters coming; and many more about the transformation we’re heading for.

For myself, I choose to explore, and if anyone is interested, I’ll share the results of my exploring here, just reply in the comments below and let me know. Otherwise I’ll not bother you all

To give you an example of how this would show up, I’m currently reading an amazing book by a very credentialed 2012 information researcher, Barbara Hand Clow, called Catastraphobia. She says that the societal impact of historical disasters have impacted into our racial memory, and it’s that impact that fuels the fear that grows around events like Y2K (remember that ‘disaster’?) or the GFC. It’s left us, she says, with a psychological syndrome she calls Catastrophobia – phobia of catastrophe.

Think about the average news bulletin – is Barbara correct?

She explores the human brain, how we access and create memory, and then a bunch of ancient mythical disasters – and sums it all up by telling us what she thinks is coming in 2012: a transformation, an evolutionary leap, a new way.

She’s not the only one saying this of course, and if you’re interested I’ll keep sharing this 2012 information from people who really know! Why? Because it really ticks me off that most of what is on TV is people whining about something or other; and most people get their thinking-material from the TV. I believe that the people who subscribe to this newsletter are also tired of the whining, and when we all put our thoughts into something that lifts our thinking, our spirits, and has the possiblity of transforming our belief, we contribute to the transformation of our cultural thought form. And that means something to me.

So I am happy to continue this 2012 exploration on my own, or to share it here . Let me know what you think, if I get ten comments below, I’ll continue…

In session, the client gets great results from tapping. The therapist gives the client a diagram and suggests a couple of areas where they could do more tapping between sessions, and the client goes away with the full intention to do that tapping and continue transforming!

But next session, nothing has moved, because the client hasn’t tapped at all.

Much has been written elsewhere about this resistance to tapping, and I think it’s all valid. However I have found that a short conversation with my clients about the mechanics of tapping, have improved between-session tapping quite significantly.

What is significant? I consider that if someone goes from never tapping between sessions to tapping once or twice, that is really significant. This hasn’t turned people into tapping maniacs, just set their minds at rest and allowed them choose tapping when appropriate.

The conversation I have with clients goes like this:

1. You can’t do it wrong – just do it
2. It doesn’t matter what order you tap in. We use the order in the diagram because it’s easy to remember and ensures you get all the meridians. But you can tap in any order you like; the body doesn’t know the difference between ordered and random, as long as you’re putting the energy into your meridian system, and focussing on the issue at hand.
3. Any tapping is better than no tapping, and all tapping is useful
4. If you’re not sure what words to use, or can’t put a label on the feeling in your chest, stomach, or big toe, just focus on the body sensation. The words are useful when we’re working with a therapist, but when we’re tapping alone, putting attention on the body can often be enough.
5. You can’t do it wrong. Yes, it bears repeating

Tapping your body can help you change your life. My 96 page eBook, The Personal Peace Journal, steps you through a tapping and questioning process, to find the roots of your beliefs and change them – all in the privacy and comfort of your own home.

Low-level, constant anxiety is so common right now – it’s a sick feeling in the stomach, a heavy feeling in the chest, often with heart-pounding, and fuzzy head that makes it impossible to concentrate on anything other than the powerful body feelings that the anxiety brings..

The fuzzy head is because stress hormones literally make us stupid. When we’re feeling anxious, stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol, plus oxytocin in women, flood our bodies, direct most of our body’s energy and oxygen to our instinctive hind-brain, our heart, lungs, arms and legs (so we can defend ourselves or leave fast!), and away from the front brain where our logical and rational thinking resides. With all that moving-around of resources, it’s no wonder the heart pounds, and we get sick in the stomach – blood and energy is literally being forced into the systems that ensure our physical survival

That your body responds exactly this way to stress is good news in a backwards kind of way, because it means our bodies are actually functioning in an appropriate way – it just feels really bad!

And for most people, most of the time, the cause of the anxiety is not life threatening, but our survival-focussed hind brain doesn’t know the difference.

Tapping, of course, is a really quick way to immediately lessen that anxious feeling. But it’s not always convenient to tap – depending on who’s around, your sudden tapping on your body could cause people around you to react in a way you’d rather they didn’t! But you can get some immediate relief at any time by rubbing or even holding just two points.

The first point is immediately under the eye, on the stomach meridian. Adding energy into this point with tapping, rubbing, or holding, the stomach point often settles the stomach flutters.

The second point is on the back of the hand – the ‘gamut point’, or Triple Warmer. This point connects straight to the amygdala, the part of the brain that stores all the emotions we experience until age three, associates body sensations with reward or punishment,  and is especially responsive to fear. Stimulating the gamut spot can sedate the amygdala, and reduce the body’s anxiety responses.

When I’m feeling anxious, I tap under my eye with the fingers of one hand, and with the fingers of the other, I tap on the gamut spot of the hand tapping under my eye. I know it sounds complicated but try it now – tap under your eye with two fingers of one hand, and while you’re doing that, tap on the back of that hand (under your pinkie finger)with the fingers of your other hand.

If you can’t tap because maybe there are people around and you don’t want to look demented, then try to decide which sensation is more uncomfortable – the stomach or the chest.

If it’s the stomach, rub under your eye. If it’s the chest, rub the gamut spot. When the feeling has settled a little, switch to rubbing the spot you haven’t worked with yet.

You will probably need to do some work with a therapist to get to the root of the anxiety, but in the moment, this technique is a sanity saver.

Tapping your body can help you change your life. My 96 page ebook, The Personal Peace Journal, steps you through a tapping and questioning process, to find the roots of your beliefs and change them – all in the privacy and comfort of your own home.

Food Cravings Can Make You Feel Like You’re Mad!

Nutritionists and Naturopaths can tell us exactly why we crave certain foods. Psychologists also think they know the answers. And they’re probably all right!

But right at the moment that the bar of chocolate or packet of hot crunchy chips is the total focus of your life, enticing you to abandon every commitment you’ve ever made to yourself for just one little bite, you don’t care what anyone else has to say!

I’m a holistic counsellor, specialising in working with women who have painful, profoundly negative views of their bodies, whatever their size. Food and their relationship to it is just one of the issues they work though. Food sustains us, gives us life, and when that relationship is distorted we have such pain!

And my clients have told me over and over again (and I think most of us have experienced it ourselves!) that the food craving moment is so powerful that you cannot simply think your way out of it, your body is not in any mood to listen to your brain in that moment! Women who’ve been on the diet roundabout for years pratically have a degree in what’s “good” and what’s “bad” for you, but even all those years of knowledge can’t stop the overwhelming desire to eat that irresistible piece of yumminess!

I have spent a lot of time studying the results of the Minnesota Starvation Study (which was conducted on males, remember – this applies to all humans who eat food ), which told us without a doubt that when we restrict our calories, every cell in our bodies focuses on survival – food becomes the most riveting, fascinating substance in creation! And even knowing that information, knowing that every single cell in your body just wants you to eat, is not enough to conquer the food craving!

But I know something that absolutely works, and not just in the moment, but for months! And best of all, when you use this method you:

• Won’t feel like every ounce of your energy needs to fuel your willpower to resist the craving

• Won’t feel like you’re missing out!

My clients who’ve gone through this process with me are amazed that they don’t even think about that food afterwards, they simply don’t want it anymore. Deprivation: gone along with the craving! Willpower and white knuckles are simply not required!

And the effect lasts for months, if not permanently. It’s not a psychological or mind-altering trick either – there’s no “imagine the chocolate is a plate of worms” or anything like that.

What it is, is a way to help you actually become aware of, tune into, what your body does and doesn’t want.

It will take less than an hour of your time for saying “no” to become truthfully effortless.

I still love chocolate, but I can have a bite or two and be really satisfied. I can even have just a few chips, and not want more. Most important though is that the word “choose” become very real for you – you can choose what you eat, without being driven by cravings that are just so hard to resist and control!

On Thursday December 10 2009 (Weds December 9 in the US and Europe), I am running a free teleseminar that you can listen in to, to clear your own cravings and get some peace around food issues. Why is it free? One, because I know just what it’s like to have those painful cravings, to think you’re going loopy because it’s so hard to resist, and I’m so grateful I found this answer. Two, because it gives me a huge warm fuzzy to pass this on to other people. I am a counsellor, I love to help people. Three, it’s a way for me to test to see how many people might be interested in a program built around this, and I may decided to package the call and sell it later. So all ways, I win. And because it usually costs $95 for an hour of my time, you win too, because this is free, no strings attached, no selling you other products, nothing but a chance to clear your food cravings. All you have to do is fill in the form below, and you’ll get an email with all the call details.

I am looking for a few volunteers to work live with me on the call, so after you’ve registered for the call, please contact me if you’re interested in working one-on-one with me, live.

The only thing you’ve got to lose, are your food cravings So fill in the form below and click the submit button. That’s all, see you on the call

New research from the University of Rochester in the US, published in the International Journal of Andrology, says that chemicals used in plastics are feminising boys. The chemicals, phthalates, mimic estrogen, the hormone that makes females female. Now, women also have a small level of testosterone, and men naturally have a small level of estrogen – so the pathways to process the opposite-gender hormone already exist in our bodies.

The plastics industry says phthalates are safe, but the European Union has banned many of them from being used in cosmetics, teething rings, and toys.

But – are they still in the plastics that wrap our food? Line the tins that we store food in? Plastic furniture? Plastic shoes? PVC Flooring? The chemicals are often used to soften plastic – so yes, they are present in all these items.

The research team, led by the head of obstetrics and gynaecology at the university, Dr Shanna Swann, tested urine samples from pregnant women in the 28th week or pregnancy, for traces of the chemicals. The group of mothers had 74 boys and 71 girls. When the children were aged 4 – 7 years old, the mothers were contacted again and asked about the childrens’ personalities, the toys they played with, and the activities they preferred to do.

The researchers think that the chemicals make significant changes in the babies’  brains at critical periods in their in-utero development. They are also concerned that this is one of the reasons that male fertility rates have been dropping consistently, and worryingly, since WW2.

The study also said that the girls were not affected by the chemicals.

Well perhaps their personalities and preferences were not affected – but I’d be really interested to know how many of the girls were affected by early puberty? How many of all the children had unhealthy weight patterns?

Because I’ve known about the estrogen effect of plastics on foods for a few years now, I changed all my family’s food storage to glass about five years ago. None of our food is stored, or ever cooked, in plastic. Well I say none, but as I’m thinking here, I have frozen peas in plastic, rice in a plastic bag, my herbs are in a plastic bottle, the keyboard I’m typing on is plastic, probably there’s plastic in the laminate on my desktop, and the arms of my chair, and possibly even in the fabric covering my chair, in the earbuds of my ipod, in the hairclip holding my hair up. I’m not a scientist so I don’t know if all these plastics contain phthalates, but it’s clear that plastic is everywhere.

There is a lot of research around a plastic called BPA, and its effects on health. BPA is used to make polycarbonate plastic, which is found in items like CDs and DVDs, cars, sports equipment, and – yes, food and drink containers; it’s also used in epoxy resins which make things like paints, glues, coatings, and protective liners in food cans. Industry sources say it’s inert, and poses no known risks to human health. Other research has looked at how BPA affects the way our genes express – that is, which genes are turned on and which are turned off. Research with agouti mice indicates that BPA has the effect of turning on the genes that cause excess adipose tissue – body fat.

And that brings me to the real point of my post, because if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I am interested in the distorted thinking and perceptions around women and our bodies and how we “should” be.

What I’ve been thinking recently is that perhaps the “obesity crisis” (for all its distorted statistics), particularly in children, could really be showing us is that the children who are obese may well be like the canary down the mine – the early warning system that something catastrophic is ahead of us, if we don’t take care. Yes, the quality of the food they eat has an impact, but surely also the unseen toxins in the forms of microscopic chemical residues are also having an impact?

Our reductionist, break-everything-into-small-pieces-so-we-can-understand-how-it-works culture, is in many ways, itself broken. Children now are being born with many digestive problems which will not only impact on their quality of life, but also shorten their lives. Why? Because their mothers and fathers have compromised health. How much is that health impacted by the plastics in our food and our environment?

The study by Dr Swann and her associates is hopefully going to help us all take a long hard look at the impact of these substances in our food supply. Public pressure supporting scientific findings managed to get the lead out of petrol, for the sake of our children. Can we do it again with this research?

Meanwhile, of course and as ever, tapping is a powerful tool in helping our bodies deal with toxin overload, as are flower essences like Pink Shamrock and Cassia.

Need help? email sandy@sandykumskov.com

Last week, a guy I’ve taken a few courses from sent me a link to a new bit of software he said was clearing all those issues up for him. I’m a bit sceptical about that to be honest, there’s so much hype online! But I liked his stuff and so I had a look. And if it only did half of what it claimed to do, I reckoned it was worth the $27!

And I’m ‘delighted with it! I’ve used my Outlook task manager for years, with reminders. I even used a couple of add-ons which were supposed to make the whole thing easier (sadly also very complicated!) But the long long list of tasks often added to my feeling of overwhelm.

This software, Action Enforcer, is different! You type in your tasks with the time you estimate it will take you to get each one done. Action Enforcer adds up how much time you’ll spend doing those tasks. When you begin a task, you click “start” on the timer. If you’re like me and often underestimate how long it takes to get things done (and that adds to the pressure feeling!), this software is a game-changer!

I’ve only been using it for just over a week, and in the run up to a workshop I was organising last Sunday, I loaded all the tasks into the timers and got done in half the time I thought it would take, with half the stress! Because the timer counts down, there’s that feeling of needing to focus to get the job done, and in the time it usually takes me to do just my newsletter each week, I’m also writing this little review, I’m that impressed with it

The really big thing for me is because now I can see all my tasks set out and a total time for the day’s work, the feeling of pressure I often feel (there’s not enough time!) is gone!

The downside is of course, you have to spend five minutes actually listing out all your tasks, and if necessary chunking them down into smaller bits. The developer, Dennis Becker, sends a few emails with some tips and tricks for managing time around his software. You know how they say, if you want something done ask a busy person? Well I reckon Dennis is a busy person, because this nifty little app certainly works like this busy person (me!), thinks!

Highly recommend this one! Dennis has got teaching videos for all the steps but to be honest I’ve not watched them, it’s really easy to use. Read more at Action Enforcer.

I know that the can-spam acts in various countries apparently make it necessary to double opt-in to lists. I found that enormously frustrating, because my one-on-one clients actually give me a piece of paper with their signature on it, that is, in my book, worth more than a mouse click. None of the most-used autoresponder companies would accept my hundreds of personally-signed papers as evidence the people whose email addresses I had actually wanted to hear from me.

So for the last four or so years I’ve hopped from one service to another to see if any of them were easier to use, offered useful features or whatever. And really, I think they’re all much of a muchness, copying one another’s features and presenting them in a different way.

And then I found the holy grail, the perfect service I’d been searching for, for years! Now I’m no woosy searcher, I can make Google give me the best results its got for any given subject, but this one had never popped up, someone told me about it. And I tried Sendpepper’s free 15 day trial. loved it, signed up, and still haven’t found the limits of it!

So I thought I’d write this little review that Google might index and you might find, if you’re on a similar quest as mine, and maybe it will solve problems for you, as it has for me. Just being able to add my clients in to my autoresponder easily and without a double optin has sparked my enthusiasm for my business marketing, a spark that was needed! Since converting to this service in late August 09 I’ve sent regular newsletters that my clients love – I get about a dozen or more comments and thank yous from them every week, which is unheard of in my previous attempts!

So what do I like about Send Pepper?

Obviously, double opt-in is optional – you just add a field to any form or newsletter where you want that very useful feature. When would you use double opt-in? When you’re giving away something that is really valuable to you, in exchange for the person’s email address. If you don’t use double opt-in you may get junk emails.  Is that all bad? If someone wants the freebie so badly they’ll give you a junk email address, they will probably never be a buyer of any of your products or services anyway. Just the same, there are several forms on my sites that require a double optin.

I was able to import all my lists and autoresponder sequences very easily, which was an absolute nightmare of losing hard-earned subscribers, and followups for weeks to get maximum conversion. Send Pepper offers a really reasonably priced do-it-for-you service to assist with this process if you’re not techie or are time challenged.Their video training series is excellent, very clear and helpful.

The manual part of my business is me adding clients one by one to my database. It is SO easy to do – as soon as you sign in to Send Pepper you see the contact list you were last working with. But at the left hand side you see a little form where you can immediately enter the person’s name and contact details, and hit the add button. As soon as you do that, the system takes you to another screen where you can optionally choose to add more information, including subscribing them to an email sequence, or to a mailing list for future contact.

And that’s the next bit of oh-so-easy coolness! It works like this – everyone goes into one big database. Of course the gurus say don’t do that, you must segment your list, and they’re correct – I probably don’t want to tell a male client who saw me for a quit smoking program about a new flower essence to help PMT. Well, probably not anyway

Send Pepper lets you add a tag to each client’s name, with just a couple of clicks. You can add as many tags as you like, of course, as many as make sense to you. And you then use that tag to filter all your contacts into groups. So I can create a group of people who’ve been through a stop smoking program or who have consulted me for phobias or who have had severe PMT. Heck, I could even segment right down to clients who had severe PMT, phobias, and wanted to stop smoking – and all with just a couple of clicks! You can save every group as well, so it’s just one click to send them an email.

So that means Send Pepper recognises that people do lots of different things, and have lots of different interests, and you can communicate directly and easily with them, any time you want to, with just a few clicks.

You can easily email a single person from within Send Pepper as well; their search feature is really accurate.

Of course, they have great click through tracking and open rate tracking and so on – you can see all that easily in graphic chart from from the dashboard.

One other feature I love is that for each person, the system tracks the contacts you’ve had with them. So for example if I look up Michelle Smith, I can see she’s had my weekly newsletter since a certain date, information about a Level 1 flower essence training, a special email about Bruce Lipton who was visiting our city and I thought she’d like to go see him, and a copy of my personal peace journal, which I gave as a thank you gift to all my clients when I released it. No other system I used allowed me to know all that without running queries! Plus, I can add a note, or as many notes as I like, to Michelle or anyone else’s data.

We’re using Send Pepper over at Spirit of Woman Essences as well, it is managing our workshop attendee lists. When someone signs up for a course through a form on the website, Send Pepper adds them to the list automatically, with the correct tag.

Because making forms is the other functionality you expect from your autoresponder. Now I learned to code HTML in 1996, so I don’t mind getting down and dirty with hexadecimal and radio buttons, but why bother when Send Pepper does all the work for you? Again it’s a few clicks to get the most-used fields into a form, and a few more if you want to customise the information you collect. When you save the form, Send Pepper gives you three form code options – a single line of code, a bit more code, or a whole swag of code that you can style to your heart’s content. After trying all three I go for the single line of code because then I can modify the form anyway I want to, within Send Pepper, and when I save it, it’s automatically updated on my site. Now that’s kewl!! Also, Send Pepper has a great range of graphical buttons etc that you can choose from, or you can upload your own. Don’t like the way a button looks on your site? Go back to your form in Send Pepper and choose a different one, save it, refresh your site – voila, whole new look! Love that!

What don’t I love? Well, all emails come from Sandy Kumskov (info@sendpepper.com). That was confusing for my clients at first. There is a way to solve it: register another domain name, similar, and point the name at Send Pepper. Let their techs know, and they’ll set up email addresses for you on their servers as well. I like to have complete control of my email accounts, so I haven’t done it for this domain, but I have for Spirit of Woman.

What else don’t I love? It took a lot of thought to come up with this one, but I wanted to be as honest as possible with my review. It logs you out quite quickly, and then it tries to reconnect all the time – that is just annoying when you’re multi-tasking and using up computer resources, like I do with ten applications open at any one time when I’m in full flight. So I just log out of the system instead of leaving it open for hours.

What else? Well, there isn’t anything else – I had a couple of issues early on, I contacted their help desk and the response came back super fast. Once they politely pointed me to a page in their online documentation that very clearly explained the solution, and the second time they gave me the answer in an email, in plain English! Great service I thought. The person who told me about it says their phone support is excellent too, I prefer the email method myself.

What haven’t I talked about? Oh yes, the autoresponder bit – what Send Pepper calls email sequences. Now, there are no fancy HTML templates here. As I said earlier I don’t mind getting into HTML, so when I want pretty colours and fancy graphics, like with Spirit of Woman’s ten day course, I set up the page in my HTML editor and then copy the code straight over into the HTML editor within Send Pepper. For some people this could be an “I don’t like this feature” but it isn’t for me, because I decided about a year or so back that I’m happy to send out plain text emails. Hard as it is to believe, some people still use email software that doesn’t read HTML. So for maximum readability you need to prepare two versions of your email, one for HTML and one for plain text. I honestly can’t be bothered, so I just send a plain text one. No one has complained! And some gurus say plain text is absolutely the way to go for maximum impact – if people are on slow connections or public computers, they don’t want to waste time downloading graphics in their emails. Fair point, I think. If you’re absolutely sure you want an HTML template, Send Pepper can help you with that for $199, then you have a template that you use anytime you want to. The autoresponder I was using until the end of August 09 wanted hundreds of dollars to provide a customised HTML template. I did my own, and then just started using plain text because their system was slow, and the html editor was a narrow little thing that meant I had to scroll sideways! No thanks… I switched to plain text and that’s what I’m still doing.

There’s a couple of other features about Send Pepper that are worth mentioning, I think. One is that they also offer a postcard service. Yes, they’ll print and send real postcards to your selected contacts. With whatever message on it you want. You access this by buying extra credits, it’s not part of your subscription, so you’re only paying for the service you want.

Another feature is the price – $29 a month for up to 2500 contacts on the Jalapeno plan. If you have up to 5000 contacts you switch to the Habanero version for $79 a month, and up to 10,000 go to the Pro version for $139. Habanero also allows you to build landing pages with just a few clicks, and has automated split testing, and loads more. Pro has all that plus task management,  integration with your shopping cart to manage upsells and so on. And if you want even MORE, you can go to the big brother, Office Autopilot, which has multi-user logins and permissions, fantastic task management, up to 25,000 contacts, more detailed tracking and so on. And then there’s the even bigger brother, Office Autopilot pro, more email addresses, more users, more tracking etc.

Most online marketers will cope very well with Send Pepper, and when your list is getting up into the bigger numbers you will need the extra management and automation that the higher levels give you. What I most like about it then, is that it is very easy to use, quick, and highly scalable with your business.

Well that’s the review, as honest as I can make it. Send Pepper has made a huge difference to my business communications, I love it. Try it free for 15 days, it just might solve some of the problems you’re not solving at other providers.

My family humoured me when I invited them along a few months ago, and my colleague Annie Meredith was as keen as I was to hear Dr Lipton speak.

Since I first booked the tickets, my youngest daughter has started studying a four year acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) degree, so the three of us had our heads together often during the event, unable to contain our excitement as we whisper-translated Lipton-speak into energy-psych and TCM speak. It was one of the most fun nights I’ve had in a while

Dr L packs so much into three hours that I can’t begin to summarise the essence of what he said, but it’s pretty much covered in his readable The Biology of Belief book, his great website, and various DVDs. Plus of course, on Youtube.

Now, anyone who knows her would be completely shocked to think that’s one trait of her personality, because she can talk to anyone about anything. As her dad says, even underwater with a mouth full of cement She is very much “outgoing”.

And yet, she gets worn out by it. And this is where it’s very helpful to understand what introvert and extravert really mean.

Developed by Carl Jung in his book Psychological Types, and taken into the world by Isabel Briggs-Myers and her mother Katherine Briggs through the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), introversion and extraversion are perhaps amongst the most misunderstood words in the English language. Since then a bunch of other typologies have used Jung’s work as their basis, so it’s well-used language.

It wasn’t until I was in college that I got the distinction though, and it’s worth discussing. When I got it, it was a major ah-hah for me, and brought me considerable peace! I studied the MBTI for the best part of a semester – though I in no way consider myself an expert in this – and it was only in the last stages of the course that I really got comfortable with my type, which is INTJ. I also can talk about anything to anyone (though am a little more reserved than Lesleigh is!). I am equally comfortable talking to hundreds of people from a stage as talking to one person. When my type consistently came up as an I (for introvert) I disputed it again and again. “Let’s keep going”, said the lecturer, “and see what that means.” So we kept going, week after week, testing ourselves and one another against the findings of yet another test. Because of course most personality tests will give a different result from one day to the next, as they are mostly subjective and very influenced by your mood. Doing any test several times over several weeks is probably the best way to go. Carol Tuttle’s Energy Types is probably the one exception I know of, because it’s less subjective.

Anyway – what I began to understand as the weeks went by is that the extraversion I’m so comfortable with is attached to my thinking processes – I have a minor e attached to my T. Funny That’s when I had my ah-hah and literally saw a whole bunch of incidents and times in my life in a completely new way!

Introversion is usually thought to mean reserved, perhaps shy, and often not very sociable. Extraversion is usually taken to mean assertive, outgoing, very sociable, and interested in seeking out excitement. If you see a line with introversion at one end and extraversion at the other, everyone’s behaviour is somewhere along that line.

What I came to understand though, was that the line itself is about where you get your energy from rather than how sociable you are. So in this context, introversion means you recharge your batteries by spending time on your own, and extraversion means you recharge by being with others.

For me, this translates as at the end of a day with clients, I am truly flat (which is one reason I love EFT, it seems to maintain my energy). I always enjoy a quiet evening and usually work on my own for at least part of the next day. My good friend Wendy, on the other hand, is a trainer who bounces off the walls after a day of training; that energy recharge sustains her in the days following when she is working alone on new tenders and new programs.

And Lesleigh knows that’s what she’s experiencing as well – after two days in a group she needs some alone-time to recharge.That’s all, just a battery recharge.

I wish I’d known that at 24, I’d have pushed myself much less hard, and criticised myself much less. Probably

As an aside, Lesleigh mentioned how the essences had helped her, and others, get through the weekend. One of her colleagues was speaking to the conference and was nervous beforehand – Lesleigh shared Crisis Calm with her, her nerves settled and she wowed the crowd! After her 90 minutes on stage she felt wiped out, Lesleigh shared Vital Energy with her and she felt her energy levels come up, and cruised through the day. She’s given us a video testimonial that will be on the site shortely. Lesleigh only remembered to add Vital Energy to her water as the conference progressed, but she shared it with others as well, and they all reported great results too!

I think I’ll suggest to Lesleigh that she add in some Ajuga next time, to just help her keep her own energy a bit closer to herself so she doesn’t get so tired. And I think I’ll do that as well, and will report the results!