About Me
My New Forest About Me lifestyle challenge dream come true.
About Me tells you how my New Forest dream came true, despite many lifestyle challenges and how I made it work for me. I'd always loved horses and ponies as a child, now I live my life surrounded by them and other wonderful wildlife, in the stunning New Forest UK National Park.
My name is Christina and I'd really like to welcome you to my About Me page and thank you for visiting my New Forest Life website. Let's share what life in the fantastic New Forest National Park is really like, and how my dream came true for me.
New Forest ponies outside my cottage - a dream come true!
Why Change My Lifestyle?
I've always believed life is not a dress rehearsal. We owe it to ourselves to try to live our dream and overcome lifestyle challenges, and this is what life, and About Me is all about!
On other websites built by friends and colleagues, the About Me page seems to be the hardest to write. I found that too. Incase you want to skip the potted history and get to learn more about building your own website on a subject you are passionate about then explore this Blog Information to find out the latest and most honest news from website building. If you wonder what a tortoise has to do with it you'll need to read the Blog!
Potted History of About Me Part One!
I had worked all my life in the travel industry. This meant we went on great holidays, stayed in lovely hotels, in glorious locations and had a great time.The lifestyle was good, our house was lovely but after years and years I knew I wanted to move on.
My heart has always been in nature.
During these times we also had really fabulous holidays in the New Forest.I had always loved passionately, horses, ponies, nature and wildlife. Every time we went away to the New Forest, (in our caravan) I found I felt really at home and didn't want to return to our old lifestyle. A natural response to a New Forest holiday really.
We would sit in a field, at New Forest dusk, drinking a glass of wine, perhaps with friends - enjoying a fantastic lifestyle. An owl might swoop and hoot overhead, or a New Forest pony would whinny in the distance or a cow moo softly to its wandering calf. (There's quite a lot of mooing going on as I'm writing this!)
We often checked house prices with friends when staying in the New
Forest but it really was just a dream, a lifestyle we didn't think we
could achieve. We would say
"If we won the lottery we'd buy that New Forest cottage". Just the way you do dream on holiday. Then a series of lifestyle challenge events happened.
My travel job was making me extremely stressed and I couldn't cope. I was becoming physically ill through stress. It took me a year of total stress to work out that if I left, my lifestyle would not grind to a halt - in fact, by now it was crucial that I did leave.
I looked for the least stressful job, at the bottom of the career pile, which offered no challenge, and when it was offered took it!
I've always wanted to learn what was going on in my head when a challenge arose, I decided to study stress and why it had had such a huge effect on me. This lead to me to doing Stress Presentations in companies and also building my own stress awareness website.
It was a truly cathartic time.
More About Me Lifestyle Challenges
My father became seriously ill and my husband was made redundant! We also had teenage issues going on, but who doesn't?
We decided that now was the time to make the lifestyle change and try to find a house in the New Forest. My husband had spent many happy years around Beaulieu and Buckler's Hard as a child and his family all came from Hampshire originally.
Unfortunately house prices were rising fast and close friends said I would have to give up my dream - after all West Sussex was really nice! It is, but Sussex wasn't my dream - my dream was the New Forest
Would we have to give up our dream? Would this be one lifestyle challenge too much? We tried to rationalise it: My husband had spent many happy childhood years in the New Forest. We had spent years and years visiting and loving it more and more each trip. We were desperately trying to make the move, live the dream and face the lifestyle challenge head on. But should we do it?
First Steps to our New Forest Life.
We rented a New Forest cottage which was thatched. It was a bit of a pile. You couldn't run a bath without risking falling through the partially rotting floor.
A rat had got in and died next to a hot water pipe, so we had to take up the floor in a storage part of the roof to find it's putrid little body - oh the joys of country living!
We vowed we would definitely NOT be buying a thatched cottage as part of our lifestyle dream - definitely not! Then we saw a Grade 11 Listed thatched cob cottage, in an area we didn't think we wanted to live, on the New Forest, and bought it!
My husband has just read this and said, "Are we mad?"
You do always survive, whatever life or lifestyle challenge is thrown at you. You lose loved ones on the way, feel you just want to scream with your stress levels at times, but I believe you have to keep moving forward. Believe in that dream, take a lifestyle challenge, whatever it is, and face it head on.Say to yourself, its About Me.
I've always been quite an impatient person (ask my husband), if it wasn't happening I would try to make it happen. With this particular lifestyle challenge I really had to learn patience. But more importantly, never give up the dream. Until we lived on the New Forest properly, I don't think we realised just how special it is to us.
Sometimes at night we are kept awake by the chewing of cows outside the gate. Other times the owls have a good old hoot in the oak trees in the wood opposite. New Forest ponies whinny and birds wake us - maybe this is sounding like a nightmare to the town dweller?
However, most nights we have total silence. The starry sky is spectacular. We walked the dog on winter nights and shared all the sounds of nature. We see deer in our torch light scurrying away or if we are lucky just stopping in their tracks and staring at us. Sometimes the biggest challenge is not to walk into a grazing cow or New Forest pony in the pitch dark!
It is the animals and wildlife together with the wonderful places to visit and explore that I want to share with you, and this is why my website is being built.
I am doing something I truly love, I am living my dream.
What next and what About Me?
We're now both retired from full time work for other people. Time to follow another dream I think! Face another lifestyle challenge
What is the worst thing about doing a day job? I've thought really seriously about this....
- Getting to work - traffic, bad weather, bus journey - do you feel like a little hampster on a wheel?
- Not enjoying your job - how many people go to work and love their job?
- Are you working for idiots? Not appeciated, overworked or bullied? It happens!
- Is your life draining away - fast! Each day I have a bad day I think at the end of my life I may want that wasted day back! - now we're really getting maudlin!
- Do you work to live or live to work?
Some or all of these points may apply to you, as it does to us.
We have sat together in bed at night, in the wonderful New Forest, and questioned What on earth are we doing? Was this lifestyle challenge worth all this hard work now?
Let's turn it around: we're in a terrible credit crunch, the economy is in a nose dive. People are losing their homes as they struggle to pay their mortgage. Lifestyle changes and challenges are happening to people during this awful time of recession.
The bottom line is - we're lucky! That doesn't mean we have to lie back and not try to make changes.
Live the full dream - be financially independent! I now work harder than at my day job. I LOVE and feel passionate about my website - it is totally mine - what a reward. And that alarm clock will never ring in the same way for me again.
I'm looking for personal growth, in an area where I can be self reliant, in which I hope to achieve financial liberation.
My web site is mine, my own business, and all of it, every last bit has come from my own thoughts and experiences, here in the New Forest. I've loved every minute of it and can share some success stories with you of others who are on a similar journey to me - see what you think.
How Can I Change My Lifestyle?
If you hate getting up to the alarm for someone else, why not try getting up for yourself!
Here are some suggestions I'd like to make to you based on my experience - grab a cup of tea and a cake??
- Perhaps like me you're a silver surfer?
- Or are you a Mum hoping to work from home?
- Are you looking for a Home Business? Something you can work at in your own time but in your own space too. Something which is uniquely yours? It feels wonderful to think I've created newforest-life from my own grey cells!
You may even be a Network Marketer? I'm working on an ebook which I'll produce and market through my website - how unique is that for a would be author?
What I really love is that I control my life and I'm enjoying every minute of it. When I feel like pulling my hair out if I don't grasp something I either go for a walk - short term solution or more sensibly ask a question from the fantastic help at hand via SBI Support.
Eventually, I expect New Forest Life.com to support my lifestyle and I'll tell you how I hope to make this happen, and what lifestyle challenges I overcame to get here............... About Me is about going forward.
About Me isn't going into massive detail about web site building. BUT I think it is a wonderful self help e business. New Forest Life site is put together step by easy step by Solo Build It or SBI. It was devised and is run by a man called Ken Evoy.
Ken is wonderful. When I did my stress website I think my husband got a little jealous
of "Ken" and the volume of helpful and informative emails I was receiving from SBI. Not now. This time round he is with me all
the way, shares my passion and has helped me to build my New Forest site. Update on my wonderful husband. He's now retired and has recently helped me by converting 140 pages on this website to the new BB2 format, sounds worrying, but a great step forward., so in a way its not About Me anymore its about us. He is a true hero! Find out more by you can take a video tour or if you're on dial up learn more.
Yes, it is self help, but it is also real, honest, Net education.
You can also do it as an e-course, from the New Forest, like me or anywhere in the world.
Find out more about the e course
Perhaps reading all this you now think - good heavens, I could never do that? There is a dedicated
e-learning questions
page, where you can ask whatever may be worrying you about creating your
site, like I have. Give it a go - you've nothing to lose. Soon you will be writing your own About Me page.
Maybe you can reset your own alarm clock too one day..?
What really amazes me is that I really have no time for computers and usually find them quite a challenge. At work they have always been a means to an end but over the last few months I have had a real buzz from building page after page and adding my own photos and all the New Forest lifestyle information I want to share with you.
You can have your money back if you want, and if you are not too sure about committing to the full year at SBI (although you do get a money back guarantee!) you can try it out by paying monthly.
What have you got to lose? If you're like me, you'll find your passion and there'll be no stopping you!
GOOD LUCK
Are you tempted to dip your feet in the water of your very own website? Here's your chance to
Ask a question or more
from knowledgeable and supportive people have already built a successful
website and have far more knowledge and answers than I'll ever have!
But all I want to do is have a great lifestyle in this beautiful New
Forest UK National Park. What have you got to lose?
About Me is how I'm trying to build a better life for us. I've met and conquered the first
lifestyle challenge - we're living, very happily, in the beautiful New Forest
I did that and now I'm going to share my passion and knowledge of this beautiful place, the New Forest National Park, on my New Forest Life website and be financially independent (and put my day job behind me!) I am living my dream and have achieved my lifestyle challenge - face on!
Perhaps you could too?
Would you like to try it for 90 Days - if you then decide it's not for you you can get your money back! You can see what you get for your money and choose the full year or monthly way of paying.
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What Other Visitors Have Said
Click below to see more New Forest Blog It contributions from other visitors to this page...
Raymond Pidgley 
I used to know a girl called Cynthia Fredericks who lived in Frogham with her mother, and I used to walk from Godshill to Frogham to play with her in the …
Mr & Mrs Lawrence Not rated yet
We would love to move to the New forest, it's been our 'go to' for many breaks away over the years. We are already in Sussex but the forest just feels …
Breamore Not rated yet
This website has been so useful! I live in Breamore House and I'm currently in the middle of a history project. Me and my friends decided that it would …
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