Starting Up Your Own Self Detective Agency
Part 2 - Preparing Your Own SD Toolkit

This is about quality time: time away from distractions or any other mental demands (such as work, parenting, caring for others, house duties). Think about this point for a moment. If you are unable or unwilling to spend at least one hour a week devoted to your own personal development, is it really going to work?

Space away from distractions. Head-space. Space to keep your tools in. Space to keep your work in.

Working on yourself can be free. However, being realistic, from pens and paper to printing, books, workshops and courses, it can add up financially.

Not just for logical, rational thoughts, but for a whole raft of different ways of thinking that can aid, as well challenge, your current thought pathways.

Emotions are a useful tool for working out how you are feeling at any moment in time. Sometimes suppressed, historical feelings can intensify, distort and confuse our day to day feelings. However, if you take the time to understand your emotions, they can guide you throughout your life.

…such as tension in the shoulders, butterflies in the stomach, nausea in the chest and throat. These are clues as to what is going on with our thoughts, our feelings and our actions.

Not just smell, touch, taste, sight and sound, but also pain, balance, direction, time, motion, temperature, speed and intuition.

A radar helps detect things that are within our environment. A good internal radar lets us know what to trust, what to avoid, when to be careful and when it’s safe to relax.

Developing your own internal compass will help you gravitate towards things that are useful and important in your life and to distance yourself from unhelpful and undesirable things.

For support, for listening, for sharing. Wise owls can be particularly useful, as can groups of people meeting for a common goal of improving their well-being.

Insights, information and concepts from books, from the internet, from courses, from psychology and philosophy, from sciences, from the arts, from humanities and politics, and from anything else in between, can all aid your SD work.

All the things that make you the expert of you, including your memories and your life experience.

For example, a pen and paper, a typewriter, a computer, a tablet, a phone.

Anything that helps you to create, draw, paint, sculpt, model, etc. From pencils to paint to clay to crayons.

With which to express yourself.