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For Life on Purpose Episode #23, my guest is author, ghostwriter, “flourisher,” and free-range home-worker Cheryl Rickman. She joins me to discuss her latest book The Flourish Handbook: How To Achieve Happiness With Staying Power, Boost Your Well-Being, Enjoy Your Life More and Reach Your Potential, as well as some of the tools she uses to live a purposeful life.
About Cheryl Rickman:
Cheryl Rickman is a Hampshire-based author/ghostwriter, “flourisher” and free-range home-worker. Her practical books and products empower and enable people to enjoy and appreciate their lives more, boost their well-being, start-up in business, pursue their purpose and reach their potential.
Cheryl’s latest book, The Flourish Handbook, is a compelling and easy-to-digest practical guide on how to flourish; packed with worksheets, guidance, to-do lists and planners to help people find their forte, boost their positivity, and bolster their resilience, mindfulness and gratitude.
Drawing on extensive research and her own methods of coping with adversity and tragedy, achieving dreams, and harnessing the power of gratitude, The Flourish Handbook is about much more than merely achieving happiness. It’s based on the five pillars of well-being as set out by leading positive psychologists: positive emotion, engagement, supportive relationships, meaningful purpose, and achievement.
Meanwhile, The 7-Step Flourish Challenge has been designed to help busy people to flourish. It provides a comprehensive workbook along with daily e-mail reminders to maximise positivity, minimise negativity, bolster resilience, focus and action steps towards growth and achievement.
To learn more about Cheryl, visit: http://www.cherylrickman.co.uk.
More About The Flourish Handbook:
“We must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed toward attaining it,” Epicurus
Time flies. Fact! Time also (annoyingly) flies faster as we grow older. Often days, weeks, months, years blur into the next. As such, it is so incredibly important to get on with living a good, fulfilling life in which you flourish. It’s important to create stand-out memorable moments and take time to remember and be thankful for those moments. It is also important to avoid ambling aimlessly from one day to the next without any sense of direction, meaning or purpose.
Then we can squeeze every ounce of pleasure from this life. Indeed, making the most of THIS ONE SHORT LIFE with which we have been blessed is what flourishing is all about: boosting our well-being to such an extent that we can get more from life, cope better with adversity, get more done and feel more in control.
And that’s where this handbook comes in. The FLOURISH Handbook has been written to help you to flourish; to enable you to become the very best version of yourself and create the BEST LIFE that you can from this day forward. In doing so, you can become a better mum/ dad, friend, wife, sibling, student, employee, boss, entrepreneur…. i.e. YOU, BUT HAPPIER … A FLOURISHER; someone who has been enabled to flourish-ever-after.
Episode Summary:
In just the first 10 minutes of our in-depth conversation, Cheryl and I discussed:
- Her work “helping people to FLOURISH in their life, in business, and in childhood; to create new empowering habits.”
- The urgent call to action that serves as the tagline for both her book and her website: “This is your one and only life! Time to live it.”
- “I think we all are guilty of taking life for granted sometimes. We just sort of get into the flow and things are just going along whether we have direction or not. But sometimes things might happen in our life that remind us that we’re very blessed to be able to get up every day and be healthy and do what we want. And so it’s just really important to remind ourselves and make the most of this life. Because we only have one.”
- Her definition of flourishing: “For me, it’s kind of like happiness with staying power…. I think flourishing is more than simply feeling good. It’s pursuing and experiencing a good life really. It’s about building and optimizing well-being. Happiness is just one small segment of well-being. So flourishing is about thriving and making the most of life in general.”
- The process of building and optimizing well-being. “It does seem to be a kind of virtuous cycle once you step on towards practicing it and actually consciously trying to see how you can flourish in your daily life. Because what I’ve noticed is the more you live your life on purpose, and the more engaged you are and the more meaning you have in your life, the more you then feed the achievement pillar of well-being. And the more you achieve, that leads to positive emotions, which is another pillar of well-being. And then if you’re in a good mood and you’re feeling positive, that can help to build your positive relationships and you get more engaged in your work and so on and so forth. Which just kind of continues on this loop, so that each pillar of well-being feeds the next.”
- How does Cheryl define a Life on Purpose: “I think it’s ultimately just doing what you love and loving what you do. It’s not necessarily about finding a career that is absolutely tuned into your why, which obviously CAN be what it’s about. But for some people, meaning may just be being a parent. And that’s it. That gives your life meaning. You’ve got a purpose. And bringing up a child and guiding them through life, that can be enough.”
- Discovering the work of Dr. Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology and how reading his book Flourish led to her wanting to write The Flourish Handbook.
- “I wanted to create a book that is step-by-step. Not too much jargon. Really quite clear and easy to digest. That just goes month by month and puts the pillars of well-being into a practical guide… And moves through the stages so that by the end of the year, if you’ve followed the book, you’re flourishing and you’ve learned a lot along the way.”