Costa Women Blogs

As a child growing up in the 60’s and 70’s in England, I remember simple family times, when we had a piano in the front room which my mum would play on special occasions like Christmas. Myself and my sister and brother were all squeezed into 1 bedroom, as my Grandmother occupied the other spare room, and I can almost feel, all these years later, the tangible excitement on Christmas Eve. We would be lying in our beds giggling and shushing each other as we were supposed to be asleep, under the dire warning that if we were awake when Santa arrived, he would not come in. We would all have written a simple Christmas wish list, and left it with a glass of Brandy and a biscuit for Rudolph.  Amazingly, none of us ever realised that the sound of rustling paper outside was my mum and Dad trying to make the delivery silently after a glass of brandy had been downed… Christmas dinner was always at home and my poor mum would be up at 6 to get the turkey in the oven.  The morning was a frenzy of opening presents in our pyjamas together, followed by a special breakfast, the Queens speech, and playing with our new toys. But after dinner, we would all be ready to play games as a family; charades was one I particularly remember. Old fashioned as it all seems now, I still want to bring back some of that old magic to my own family Christmas day, although I will not be getting up at 6 to stuff the turkey! I think that my childhood memories had a huge influence on how I have chosen to bring up my own daughter.  I wanted her to know the value of coming together as a family at meal times, to be able to talk to her parents about anything, and to have memories of a happy childhood that she will want to emulate in the distant future when she has children of her own. As an arty crafty person, I love sitting down and helping my daughter get creative.  Glitter is ingrained in our old pine table top from years of mum and daughter time together.  We have had many happy hours together, and it was this love of creating that brought an idea to myself and 3 other like-minded mums to build a craft business called MyGeckoBox. The concept was simple…spend quality time with your children, and help them learn key basic skills, whilst soaking up fun and interesting information that we provide to complete the whole learning experience. In an ideal world, as parents, we want to make time to help our kids get through the school years and build their confidence in their own ability. But sadly with kids having so much pressure to achieve good results in school, they can learn to hate or fear education quicker than to embrace it.  They fight with us over doing the homework, and then they seek refuge in mind numbing TV or computer games.  Hiding from the pressure, not talking about their fears, it can all build up to an explosion when they have had enough. As busy working modern day parents, life is not so simple as it was in the old days, where mum was at home and always there to help. But if we can just make a date with fun once a week, to enjoy a parent/child shared experience, is that going to be something they remember over and above the hour on an XBox? Will it give you time to talk about “stuff”? I think so. I adore my job, it is fun, but hard work, but most importantly it is inspirational and rewarding.  If I can give one parent the gift of feeling that they have just created a treasured childhood memory, then that makes me happy. I would like to set a challenge to anyone who is a parent (or a grandparent) of young kids. Try making one of these 3 Christmas crafts. See how much fun you have, how it gives you and the lucky child a sense of fulfilment and achievement. I bet you will want to do another!    3 Easy Christmas projects with bits and bobs you have around the house!   Make a santa stop sign to hang on the door handle There’s always a piece of card somewhere in the house, even if it’s from some old packaging… shirts always have a handy piece of card inside of their packaging.  Cut a whole big enough to fit over a door handle at the top and leave enough room below to sit a cheeky little elf with his special message.  Let them draw a little face, use could use pipecleaners for the arms and legs.  You could make 2 little holes and thread the arms through.  Then just add clothes and a hat, they can draw them on, or stick scrap material, napkins, tissue paper, whatever is knocking around the house to dress the little fella.  (We attached a little bell courtesy of the chocolate bunnies a certain chocolatier make). Easy peasy! Polystyrene or plastic balls, glue,  glitter, sequins and ribbon…let your kids imagination go wild. Buttons of different sizes stacked from largest to smallest and threaded to make a cute tree, with a little bell to top it off.. . go on, do you need to an excuse treat yourself to another one of those chocolate bunnies if it helps the cause!

  Life is never beige! So, I have never written a Costa Women blog before – but Andrea’s enthusiastic tips and Ali’s relentless drive and motivation went into my brain bucket.  Ever since we were handed the gauntlet of a blog challenge at our recent Business Breakfast meeting, ‘Blog’ has been rattling around… I am passionate about life.  And I am grateful to have come across Costa Women in my travels.  An amazing group of supportive women all at different stages of life.  An inspirational bunch.  An inspirational ‘tribe’.  The buzzwords of today keep mutating.  I’m old enough to have been affronted by the word ‘mouse’ when it was first introduced to a QWERTYUIOP keyboard! I have had a fantastic career across many industries: marketing, advertising, travel, music, hospitality, health, education, and interior design.  I had passion for them all as I embraced new learning and the challenges each role presented.  There were synergies between industries, but the valued common denominator was People.  And what a diverse mob we are!  Our ‘humanness’ connects us, and how we treat each other is one of life’s valuable lessons.  It costs nothing to be kind.  It costs nothing to be helpful, respectful, considerate or understanding. The abundance of knowledge we gain in return, strengthens our character. Life isn’t complete without the balance of hardship.  It’s not all a bowl of well-placed cherries!      Being true to yourself is something we all need to access on a regular basis.  Gut instinct is such a wondrous tool and we need to remind ourselves to tune in and listen to it.  In today’s techno-racing world we still have the best, miraculous, machine encasing our soul.  We can all harness our own unique power.  And our diversity is what makes each one of us truly special.  No matter what we face in life we all have the resources within to rise to the challenge. Coming together as Costa Women is such a positive experience.  It makes me happy to have met so many warm and wonderful friends travelling on their life’s journey.  At the moment my life path is freedom and self-nurturing.  It hasn’t always been that way – but I am relishing in the NOW! Business-wise I am embracing the discoveries of being a female entrepreneur and the exciting challenges that go with that.  I am currently looking at a new venture which will complement all I have learned over the years.  Grateful for wifi, I have been avidly reading and devouring copious webinars! In my life I have hatched a couple of amazing daughters (my personal favourite achievement!) and now I am hatching a new business plan.  I think it’s empowering to stretch outside your comfort zone.  I learned that at birth. When I came to the Costa del Sol (almost a year and a half ago) I was employed on a short-term contractual basis.  It was an interesting experience…  When my contract ended I started up my facebook business page: @lovethisspaceinteriors to reset my career compass.  I have always loved interior design – no doubt subliminal from a young age as mum made soft furnishings and dad had his own painting and decorating business.  https://www.facebook.com/lovethisspaceinteriors/ I think we all need our own special space just to ‘be’.  To be able to breathe at our own pace; to find solace from all the busyness outside our walls and restore balance in our lives.   Helping others achieve a space they will love has always made me happy.  And everyone has a different need. I enjoy helping people – coming up with design solutions; offering advice and transforming spaces.  I confess my love for interior design has often resulted in giving advice for free.  But I’m ok with that.  I think interior design should be an affordable service – but maybe I swing the pendulum too far!  So lately, I have been looking at a complementary business idea.  I am excited to develop my knowledge and give thanks to the Costa Women who have inspired me to keep thinking and growing.  Muchas gracias, mis amigas!  And here endeth my blog. xx  

As a young girl I was told I had healing hands, before I even knew what that meant. It seems it was my destiny to help others heal and as a mother with two young boys, I studied for a degree in Sports Therapy. Thriving on the results I would get from seeing my patients walk into my clinic in pain, and walk out again with far less pain or none at all, I grew as a therapist, gathering so much experience and knowledge along the way. When my husband became ill with cancer it devastated my boys and me. The only way I could cope was by putting all my energy into helping him recover as naturally as possible. I studied to become a nutritional therapist and wrote the book “Love and Wheatgrass – from helplessness to empowerment”, which is both our story and is also a compendium of natural supportive approaches for cancer. I’m very happy to say that my husband is not only a survivor, but is also far healthier than he ever was before his diagnosis. I soon realised that healing wasn’t just about correcting injuries and dysfunctions of the body, of understanding what nutrients the body needed to thrive, but it was also about the way we feel, think, move and live too. This is when I was drawn to studying not only the practice of yoga but the deeper cultural and holistic side of the discipline too. Adding this to my skill set meant I could help people to heal from the inside too. Luckily for me my best friend also has the ability to help others in a different way, filling the space in what I could offer, meaning that together we can offer even more. Our friendship is based on living life to the full, even though life has dealt each of us its fair share of blows, we laugh our way through them and draw on the experiences they have leant us, to help others. Elements 5 was grown from the very seeds of our experiences and watered by laughter and love. Elements 5 is an online shop and clinic and we also offer bespoke events and retreats. Our journeys drew us both towards yoga and its ability to heal and nourish mind, body and spirit. At Elements 5 we offer yoga to everyone through personal programmes and live web sessions, but its not just yoga!You can also book consultations with nutritional therapists or have online coaching, or book one of our workshops or retreats. And as if that’s not enough we also have an online shop where you can buy inspirational gifts or a piece of symbolic jewellery that represents a part of you. We really hope that you will stop by and see us at www.elements5.co.uk

  We all know the feeling, searching through our wardrobe for the right outfit to wear. Is it too formal, too loud, too casual? Finally, we make a choice, get dressed for the day and (with luck!) sally forth with confidence, knowing that our clothing choices reflect us and our tasks for that day.   So it is with the presentation for our businesses. The choice of styling and the usage of fonts on our website and in our written material say a lot about us and our personalities. Many of us pick a font as though we are searching for a piece of clothing. We assess the personality of each font and look for something unique and distinctive that expresses our particular taste or perspective. However, others have been there before us and there are already many tried and tested fonts that have become established workhorses. To continue the analogy, they are like your most comfortable jeans, ready to go with everything else in the wardrobe. These fonts seem to adapt to their surroundings and become more relaxed or more formal as the occasion calls for, and they just seem to come out of the wardrobe day after day. Usually, these are faces that have a number of weights (Light, Regular, Bold, etc) and/or cuts (Italic, Condensed, etc). My particular safety blankets are Calibri, Gotham, Trebuchet and Myriad The clothing analogy gives us a good idea of what kind of wardrobe we need to put together. The next challenge is to develop some kind of structure by which we can mentally categorize the different typefaces we run across. Typefaces can be divided and subdivided into dozens of categories. But mainly they fall into two categories. Serifs or San serifs – The serifs being the little feet or strokes at the ends of the letterforms.   Within the San Serifs we find the strict geometric forms. The individual letter forms of a Geometric Sans often have strokes that are all the same width and frequently evidence a kind of “less is more” minimalism in their design. At their best, Geometric Sans are clear, objective, modern, universal; at their worst, cold, impersonal and boring. Examples include Helvetica, Avant Garde and Franklin   Slightly softer looking sans styles are derived from handwriting and include Verdana and Gill Sans. The letter forms of these fonts generally have more detail, less consistency, and frequently involve thinner and thicker stoke weights. Serif Fonts mimic older style typefaces and are the result of the development of calligraphic forms. The caligraphic tails impart a traditional look to the piece of work. Old Style faces at their best are classic, traditional, readable and at their worst are… well, classic and traditional. Examples include Palatino, and Garamond     Some more modern fonts have blurred the lines between the two styles, their letterforms more geometric, sharp and virtuosic than the unassuming faces of the Old Style period. An example is Bodoni. They can be strong, stylish, dynamic but they may also be too classic too stodgy to be truly modern. Times New Roman being a case in point.   So, now that we know our families and some classic examples of each, we need to decide how to mix and match and — most importantly — whether to mix and match at all. Most of the time, one typeface will do, especially if it’s one of our workhorses with many different weights that work together. If we reach a point where we want to add a second face to the mix, it’s always good to observe this simple rule: keep it exactly the same, or change it a lot — avoid wimpy, incremental variations.   Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just picking fonts that are very, very different, but if we want some principle to guide our selection, it should be this: often, two typefaces work well together if they have one thing in common but are otherwise greatly different. This shared common aspect can be visual (similar x-height or stroke weight) or it can be chronological.   Time for another clothing analogy: My outfit works because my green belt acts as an accent and is offset by the down-to-earthiness of my jeans. But if I get carried away and cover myself in Telefonica green then it may not look so attractive. Use display faces with lots of personality in small doses. If we apply our cool display type to every bit of text in our design, the aesthetic appeal of the type is quickly spent and — worse yet — our design becomes very hard to read.     Take some time to experiment with fonts. It’s fun to play and there are no hard and fast rules – but always ensure legibility, use white space (that’s another whole blog in itself) play with the format (text heights widths, spacing and kerning and leading) and when you have a got a great looking piece of text PROOF IT. Nothing is worse than poor use of punctuation, poor spelling and poor grammar. It’s like going out looking absolutely fabulous, but with your skirt caught up in your knickers behind you.   Lynne Armitage is a designer and has a digital print workshop on the Costa del Sol. She is a member of Costa women. www.jigsawdesign.biz  

Elements 5 coaching “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass Its about learning to dance in the rain.”Vivian Greene   Hi my name is Harriet Alexander and I am a qualified coach and development consultant. I have been lucky enough to turn my passion for supporting individuals into my career, for over 20 years. The support I offer may be through physical improvements in health and fitness or through greater personal and professional effectiveness, career choice and mental wellbeing. As a coach I partner with individuals to help them find and bring the best of themselves to whatever they do. Essentially “live the life they love”This is one of the aspects I love about coaching, seeing people evolving, unlocking their true potential and knowing that they have made this change happen.  So what can coaching help you achieve? Does this sound familiar? Are you stuck in a rut at work or in your personal life? Feeling tired, burned out and lost your lust for life? Are you facing challenges at work or personally? … if you are stuck you are not broken. That’s where I come in through; Executive coaching (increases individuals effectiveness therefore organisation effectiveness) Career (supporting new and experienced professionals create a positive change in their career and to achieve their goals and aspirations) Personal impact coaching (Personal Impact coaching addresses specific personal challenges, transitions in your personal life, relationships or profession) Partnering with me as your coach I can help you focus on your desired goals to unlock your real potential. To challenge the assumptions about yourself and how you view the world.  To enable you to experiment and explore your potential. Broaden your thinking and translate the most viable options into a clear path of action. I bring energy, passion and integrity to all my work and use techniques and tools to enable learning, but keep my approach straightforward. My passion for coaching and developing people has lead me to another branch of Elements 5, which I have set up with my best friend Lorraine. We both enjoy life to the full although life has dealt each of us a fair share of blows, we have learnt to laugh our way through them and draw on the experiences they have lent us, to help others. Through our journey we have both been drawn towards yoga and its ability to heal and nourish mind, body and spirit. At Elements 5 we offer yoga to everyone, through personal programmes and live web session. But its not just yoga… Elements 5 is an online, shop, yoga, nutrition and coaching clinic and we offer bespoke events and retreats.  Whether its through the shopping, clinic or one of our bespoke events, you will feel restored, fulfilled and uplifted. You can also book consultations with nutritional therapists or have online coaching, or book one of our workshops or retreats. And as if thats not enough we also have an online shop where you can buy inspirational gifts or a piece of symbolic jewellery that represents a part of you. Thank you for reading my blog and have a wonderful day and wait no more…start living the life you love x Please visit our website for more information Elements 5 Or contact Harriet on Tel:07776121307 Mail: harriet@elements5coaching.co.uk  

Lets start with a fact: all businesses need words. The spoken ones tend to come naturally, but what about the written ones? The ones you need for your website, your blog, your social media posts, your newsletters, your free downloads…. Do they come as easily? Probably not but you’ve said before (and I can hear you saying it again now), you don’t need a professional copywriter. And here’s why. 1. You can write good copy yourself Because anyone can write, right? Just like anyone can draw, bake a celebration cake or get awesome reach on Facebook. So, of course you can write your own content. And write it well, originally and quickly. But what if you let a professional copywriter get on with your writing while you do the stuff you’re good at? (BTW: my maxim is do what you’re good at and pay someone else to do the rest.) 2. You know it’s too expensive Because professional copy is way out of your budget, right? Just like all our products and services are too expensive. So, of course you can save money by writing your own copy or go on one of those fiver sites and pay peanuts (but get monkeys). But what if you got a quote for some professional copy? You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the price. (BTW: think of any business cost as an investment. Just one new client will pay for those great words on your website.) 3. You have plenty of spare time Because everyone has sooo much time on their hands, right? Just like all those other entrepreneurs who sit twiddling their thumbs because they’ve finished everything including writing their own content. But what if you got a professional copywriter to do it for you so you free up some of your precious time to get on with the stuff that you do well? (BTW: how long has it taken you to write your blog post for the Costa Women Business Breakfast challenge? See what I mean?) 4. You know how much to write Because everyone just knows the ideal length for a blog post, LinkedIn Pulse article, landing page, brochure, Google Ad, right? Just like you know that Google loves (really, really loves) long reads. But what if you put your copy in the hands of a professional and let them write the amount that’s needed? (BTW: for a blog post to count for Google, it needs at least 400 words. Double that and Google sits up and maybe gets out of bed. Quadruple it and Google can’t wait for your next post.) 5. You can think of lots of great ideas for blog posts Because we can all draw endless ideas out of a hat, right? Just like we can always think of new business ideas, different ways of getting new clients, fun posts for Facebook… But what if you got a professional copywriter to dream up a month’s/half-year’s/year’s load of blog content? (BTW: I draw up content calendars for all my clients. You’d be surprised at the quantity and variety.) 6. You keep up with best practice on Google Because you’re always reading up on the latest Google trends, following Hubspot, listening in CoSchedule webinars, right? Just like you can keep track of Facebook algorithms, the latest type of yoga, the Costa Women event calendar… But what if you let a professional copywriter sweat the Google stuff for you? (BTW: the best copywriters make a point of knowing the latest trends for Google-friendly copy.) 7. You’re au fait with all things SEO Because you know about SEO too, right? Just like you know all about keywords, snippets and tagging. But what if you got a professional writer to take over the SEO? Then you wouldn’t even have to know what it means. (BTW: keeping up with best SEO practice isn’t easy, but some of us do it.) 8. You can create the perfect landing page and CTA Because you get landing pages right every time and your clients just can’t stop clicking on that button, right? But what if you put all this jargon in the hands of a professional and just welcomed the new business as your clients click that CTA button? (BTW: all content should tell the reader what’s in it for them.) 9. You know how to make easy-to-read content easier to read Because you know all about Flesch-Kincaid readability scores and all those WordPress tricks, right? Just like you know how to write good and varied blog posts that are Google-friendly, have the right SEO and are the perfect length. But what if you asked for a quote from a professional and got on with the things you’re really good at? (BTW: the main keys to easy reading are short paragraphs, bold text and lots of white space.) 10. You’re one of those amazing women who can do anything and everything Really? (BTW: I’m definitely no superwoman but I can write some mean words.) Let my words do the work for you.