Coaching

Living a cultivated life is a process and can never be done wrong. We are ever-evolving if we have set personal growth as an intention in our life, even when we can see no evidence of growth and transformaton. Like the growth of our physical body through childhood, or the opening of a subtle spring bloom, the shift in us is often imperceptable. It is gradual, but steady if we maintain our intention.

One practice that has helped me tremendously is to begin the day with a short meditation that supports my intentional path of cultivation. During this meditation, I calm my mind by breathing in deeply, all the way into my belly, three or four times and allow my mind to focus on the area around my heart and visualize a light there, first as a pinpoint of light, then growing larger and brighter until it fills my entire body. I concsiously relax each part of my body from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet. Then I bring thought in the form of a simple question. I ask “How do I want to feel at the end of today?” Do I want to feel satisfied, happy, content, kind, loved and loving,competent….The answer becomes my intention for the day  and I go through the day with this intention in mind, asking myself, will this bring me “kindness,”  for example, today before a think, speak or act.

This process helps support us on our path to a new way of living. If we begin each day with an intention, this serves as a roadmap for our day and how we will live it. It supports us to be present in our lives today, now, rather than living in the past or the future. When we begin the day knowing how we want to feel at the end of the day, we have an anchor and we feel grounded in ourself, we become inner referring rather than seeking external validation which we cannot control and in the end is meaningless. How we approach and live the days of our lives are a choice we have the power to make and lean on throughout our day.

The Seeker’s Guide, Elizabeth Lesser

Original Blessing, Matthew Fox

Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness, Marc Ian Barasch

Dark Side of the Light Chasers, Debbie Ford

Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge within, Byron Brown

You have taken step one and have assessed both your current levels of satisfaction and the amount of energy you devote to each area of life. Now you are ready to consider what your ideal life would look like. Take a look at each category separately and really think about what your ideal would be. The sky is the limit here. Really go for it as you begin to make a list of what your ideal might look like in, say, health & wellness. Make a list. So under health & wellness, I would list  healthy weight, cardiovascular health, healthy diet, regular exercise that is fun. After you make your list, go back over it and ask yourself what qualities you seek. In other words, what qualities would I gain if I obtained my ideal health & wellness. I would gain the qualities confidence, energy, enthusiasm and an over-all feeling of well-being.

Next, ask yourself these questions and journal about the answers:

1. How would you ideally want your time and energy distributed differently among these areas?

2. What would it take for you to feel like you were functioning at a 10 in each area?

3. What thought or belief would you have to give up in order to have a balanced life?

This step is not intended to be completed in one sitting. It takes some time to process the information you excavated from within and integrate that into action. Take one life area a day until you’ve completed the process. Don’t worry, you can’t do it wrong unluss you don’t do it at all. And even then, it’s not wrong, you aren’t wrong. It’s a choice you made for now. You can come back to it, but put in on your calendar so you won’t use “I forgot” as an excuse not to re-visit your work.

Take a deep breath and begin. The hardest step to take is always the first step.

We are well into the second month of 2010. By now, most of us can crank out “2010″ without a thought or a strike-through when we write the date, but how many of us have created some new habits that will support our dreams for 2010? Often, the larger question is, where do I begin? Without knowing where to begin, the chances are good that we never will and another year of mediocrity will be in the works as we remain on auto-pilot with our behaviors.

Fear not! Here’s a quick little exercise that will assist you in determining where to start. Think of it as a short diagnostic test.

1. Draw a large circle on a piece of 8.5 x 11 paper and divide it into 8  pie shaped pieces of equal size. Inside each wedge, label them as follows: Money & Finances, Health & Wellness, Primary Relationship, Family & Friends, Spiritual Development, Home & Surroundings, Fun & Leisure, and finally, Work & Career.

2. Rate each area of your life on a scale of 1-5, 5 being the highest, indicating your current level of satisfaction. Think of your experiences and achievements in each area as you rate it.

3. Look over them again and evaluate the percentage of your time that you spend developing each area  of the circle. Your total allotment for all eight areas should equal 100%.

4. Look over each area once more and evaluate the amount of energy, positive or negative, you devote to each area. For example, I may spend 80% of my energy worrying about my health or body, but only 5% on actually taking actions that will improve my level of satisfaction in that area.

Check back for what to do next, Step 2, in my next blog.

Good Luck!

We all go through troublesome times. That’s part of life if you are a human. And it’s not the times that are the trouble, but more what we make them mean about us, how we interpret times,  that create trouble in our lives.

For example, if we make a mistake, we can give ourselves a break, make a correction and move on. Conversely, we can confuse our actions with our identity and believe that WE are a mistake.

I’ve got a newsflash here that can change your life. Let yourself off the hook! Forgive yourself for being human. The only person in the world who expects you to be perfect is YOU. Stop it!

The biggest culprit in self-sabbotage is an unforgiving spirit toward ourselves. Once we start down the road of self-flagellation, it’s the beginning of a deep spiral until we are at the bottom of an abyss. When we are in such a deep hole, it’s difficult to know how to get out. Sometimes we stay stuck there for a long time, perhaps even years. The way out is forgiveness. Forgive, but don’t forget how desparate it feels to be alone in our own self-constructed prison.

One way to support yourself in this practice is to look yourself in the mirror and say, “I forgive you for……” Another powerful action step is to write a letter of forgiveness to yourself. Seriously. There is magical transformational power in the simple act of self-forgiveness.

Forgive yourself. Who are you NOT to forgive yourself? And never forget that you hold the key to your freedom.

I just had the experience of watching a family meet the newest member of their family a few moments ago. It was moving for me to witness the celebration of a new life. This particular hospital plays a lullaby over the intercom each time a baby is born. As I hear it now, I am grateful it is not for our baby,

I began this blog in late August, while stationed at the hospital where my daughter was trying to keep her remaining twin daughter in utero long enough to give her a fighting chance at life. We lost her identical twin sister at 19 weeks, after an intra-uteran surgical procedure in an attempt to save the girls, Harper and Reese.

The girls developed a rare disorder of the placenta that can only occur in identical twins, It is know as twin to twin transfusion syndrome, or TTTS. In very lay terms, that means that they share vascular connections in which one baby becomes the “donor” and the other baby becomes the “recipient. The donor baby does not receive enough blood to develop properly and the recipient baby has too much fluid, which causes congestive heart failure.

We lost the donor baby, Harper, in the early hours after the surgery and were told of the risks to Reese as she continued to develop. Through love and prayers and a blanket of positive energy, my daughter was able to postpone birth of both babies until 25 weeks. My surviving granddaughter weight 1 pound, 12 ounces when she was born on Septmember 10. Her due date was December 23.

It has been a long road for her mother and father, but they have shown nothing but courage and hope and faith. Courage to face so many obstacles during their first prenancy, hope that all woud be as it should be and faith that little Harper is exactly where she is supposed to be.

Reese got to come home right before Chrismas on her due date and has continued to thrive and grow. There is no feeling like watching her grow and improve daily and observing her journey has taught me that if she can make it through all of her obstables as a tiny micro-preemie baby, I have no excuses. I can do anything.

If you are curious about TTTS they have a foundation and a website:http://tttsfoundation.org

and if you have a friend or loved one who has recently been diagnosed with twins, make certain they know if there is one  placenta. This is a significat indicator of the syndrome, and if diagnosed early enough, there is hope to save both babies.

Our little angel, Harper, is my constant reminder to get the word out about TTTS.

I’ve got a great way to create an instant shift in the way we experience life. Take the week off! I don’t mean being absent from work, family, friends or other aspects of our daily life.

What would be possible if for just one week, we stopped listening to our negative internal dialog? What if we took the week off from making ourselves and others wrong? What would be possible if everything going on around us is merely “interesting?”

Beating ourselves up mentally and emotionally is a habit that is seriously self-limiting. Often, the current of our internal dialog is so powerful that we give up on ourselves, others, life in general and we just exist in a fog of monotonous lack of self-awareness. We live a life of nothing special.

Take this week off! Here’s an assignment. Take a few quiet minutes and write down all of the negative things you can think of about yourself, all the ways you make yourself wrong, all the ways you feel like a failure. Then, look over the list in a detatched way. Take the “Hmm, this is interesting,” approach.

Next do two things. One,  reframe the negative as a positive, for example “I’m lazy” might be reframed as “I know how to relax.” Step two is to imagine yourself saying these internal judgements to your child. Think about it. Would you ever tell your child or anyone else’s that they are fat and lazy or stupid and clumsy?

The fact is that many of us would treat a stranger on the street more kindly than we treat ourselves. We would have more compasion and understanding at the very least. Yet, we treat ourselves in some very heartless ways.

Do it…take the week off!

In life, we all find ourselves in situations that we’d probably choose to avoid if we could. We think things that are unthinkable. We resist our reality, deny that we have any choice over the life we find ourselves living and we totally deny the parts of ourselves that we reject, instead, projecting them onto others in the form of judgment and blame.  When ever we can look at someone and say, for example, “My mother is selfish, insensitive, arrogant and ignorant,” we are passing a judgment and projecting.

Following Jung’s theory of the Shadow, this indicates aspects of our own persality that we just can’t accept. We possess these qualities, but we make them wrong and deny them, using incredible amounts of energy to resist them and keep them hidden away from ourselves and others. The problem with resistance is that it virtually guarantees that we will create more of whatever it is that we resist. It’s like a universal law of some kind. It’s something we should all be taught in third grade, like multiplication. I didn’t coin the phrase, “What you resist, persists,” or “What you can’t be with won’t let you be,” but they sum it up in an annoyingly trite but true way.

I was crocheting some baby socks for my newest granddaughter a few days ago and working with very fine, delicate and twisted yarn. I’d pull and untangle a little at a time, enough to make the next few rows. Then, I’d get to the knots again, and push and pull here and there, trying to loosen the knot just enough to keep crocheting a few more rows. It was difficult to discern which fragile string I should pull to loosen the knot. Push, pull and wiggle this one, wiggle that one…maddening! The more I pulled on the knot, the tighter it became. The tighter it became, the more stuck I was in the process. I repeated this process over several days, even thinking about starting at the loose end of the yarn and winding into a ball, in other words dealing with it, but, of course I didn’t do that! That would be actually dealing with the dang thing.

Eventually, I had to admit that the more I pulled on or resisted the fact that there was a knot in my yarn the more it drove me crazy and kept me from moving forward with something I actually enjoy doing, creating something for someone I love. I finally accepted the fact that I was going to have to stop trying to push past this knot and deal with it. As long as I resisted it, it existed and really annoyed me. As long as I couldn’t be with it and deal with it, it wouldn’t let me be. And with all the power of my humanity, I managed to project onto the yarn! It was stupid, flimsy, stubborn, stuck, hard to work with….hmmmmm.

It was a process to loosen the knots and look at the problem through the eyes of acceptance, but there would be no forward motion until I did. As I worked through the tedium of the process, I realized that this knot was actually a gift. It gave me the inspiration for this blog and what I think is a great analogy.

We always have the choice to let go of our resistance and embrace the unembracable. Now, that’s a thought worth thinking.

A few weeks ago and then, again, a few days ago, something amazing happened. When I dug through my mail, doing my usual sorting, I found more than the junk and the inevitable bills, I stumbled across this new category of postal mail. I tore into these envelopes recklessly to get to something that is rare these days.I found real, live, personally hand-written notes from a friend and one of my daughters. As I read the words, I smiled and I was touched deeply.

We live in a fast paced, high tech world in which communication is almost instantanious and constant. This has come to be essential in the world of business, to be sure. The ease of instant messaging, texting or emailing is something even the most reluctant among us has adopted or at least warmed up to.

But, there is just something so personal about a hand written note in these days when electronic communication is the norm. It took extra time, thought and effort. It also took something I’m not rich in and that is patience. Yes, it does take a day or two for “snail mail” to deliver our thoughts to a real live mail box, rather than an electronic inbox. We have to wait for the delivery…but sometimes, waiting for it makes it more meaningful.

In coaching, we speak always to living a balanced life and reaching out to friends and family is part of that balance. We want to give our attention to the people in our lives, but sometimes we tend to make it hard, so we avoid it. But, hard is just a story, just an excuse to ignore our own need and the need of others to connect.

Why not grab some blank note cards the next time you’re at the store, get a great pen and some stamps (you can order these online!) and start a campaign, set an intention: I will reach out to one person I know and want to stay in touch with by personally written and mailed notes each week.

You can still use facebook to keep up, but for those of us with hundreds of facebook friends, that’s a great place to start for candidates. Among your friends, who would you like to add a special thought through a hand written note? There are only 52 weeks in the year! So many friends, so little time! Get goin’ and I promise you that you’ll enjoy the experience of writing the note just as much as the recipient will when the note is opened and read.

I write today from my bed, a place I have spent the last 10 days, more or less, trying to recover from a cold or the flu. The diagnosis doesn’t matter to me so much as the treatment, so we are treating the symptoms and I am recovering. I’m grateful that I am an otherwise healthy woman and have a strong biological defense system.

This sudden knock-out from my daily life, this transient health issue has reminded me of just how fragile life is, of how fine the line can be between fully functioning to flack on my back. In short, I’ve spent some of this time dwelling on all that I have to be grateful for.

It’s easy for us, as human beings, to lose sight of the miracles that surround us daily. We take so much of our lives for granted because we can. But what could our lives be if we practiced a little Gratitude?

I can tell you from personal experience that anything becomes possible from a place of gratitude. Choosing to see life in general or in any particular situation through the eyes of gratitude creates a profound internal shift. It’s a relief to know that there are forces at work on our behalf that are effortless.

Through my years of practicing Gratitude, I have come to understand that it is the small things, at least for me, for which I am most grateful. I am grateful for my breath, a simple autonomous and unconscious action on my part, that allows me to experience my human life. I don’t have to think about it, but without it, I would have no life.

This morning I felt gratitude at my first cup of coffee, which soothed my sore throat. I was also grateful that I enjoyed it in bed because my husband always brings it to me in bed

This grateful thought led me to how grateful I am to have my husband in my life, that he came to me in a time that I was broken down and broken hearted at the sudden loss of my now deceased spouse. I felt I could never love again, but I remember walking the dog down a familiar route and asking God to lift me up in Grace.

This brings me to connect with the deeper gratitude I have for Divine Grace, that invisible power that covers us all always and we cash in on in times of great need. We are always covered and we never have to pay a premium. Gratitude comes in all sizes and shapes, as unique as each one of us, and custom made for our unique life experiences. It’s hard to believe in this day and age, but its FREE. It’s ours for the taking if we just reach for it with a grateful heart. It is the salve that heals all wounds, all anger and all emotional upsets.

To say “thank you” is an act of surrender and that is where many of us, as humans, get caught up. We, in a manner of egoic insanity, want to labor under the story or illusion that we are in control of the contents of our lives. I assert that there is a difference between being responsible for our lives and the desire to be in control.

Practicing personal responsibility is about making choices, in advance, of ways we will think, speak and act in our lives. This could be considered a personal standard of operation and requires a certain degree of self-mastery and a regular practice of Gratitude.

The desire to control people and their thoughts, words or actions is usually generated from a regressed emotional age, an old wound in which we felt powerless and it is a chosen attitude. This belief that we can control others is an illusion and quite honestly, a manipulation because we can never really control another person’s thoughts, words or actions without their buy-in, their permission, of which they may have no conscious understanding. From an emotionally mature perspective, we understand that and have no desire or need to control others or be controlled by others.

A Grateful heart for all that we already have within us is the greatest antidote to control issues and self-pity that I know of. Begin your practice of creating a gratitude list daily. It only takes a few minutes, but they are mighty minutes.  Think of five things you can be grateful for right now and jot them down.