Today, we live in a 24 hour world. Yes, there has always been 24 hours in a day, but in the past, we did not have grocery stores and restaurants or other businesses that operated 24/7. We live in a world where shift workers who hold evening and graveyard positions are the majority. At no time is there an absence of those whom are watching TV, working, shopping, eating. The list is too exhaustive to mention here.

We have an attachment to constantly doing, doing doing. Even when we do take time out, our minds continue to work and often, guilt is present because we are not being productive. We are not doing anything. We have become a society of human “doings” rather than human “beings.” Contemplate that thought as you read on.

Why are we stressed?

Most of us were raised by the tenet that hard work pays. And, if cleanliness was next to godliness, hard work was even closer. Only a lazy person would do nothing and not feel guilty about it, and a lazy person is someone who is worthless, lacks ambition and worst of all, selfish.

Hard work, in and of itself, is not a bad thing, Clearly, this country and the world was built on the backs of hard work,that is true. It is equally true that in many cases that hard work was prodded and demanded by a cruel and hard taskmaster. Yes, doing has built the world in which we live today and as modern citizens, we value hard work, or at least the idea of it.

It is from this structured belief system that we have made a collective shift from being to doing. The result is that we have become a society in which we value doing more than being. For example, when we meet someone new, we want to know what they do as if this somehow defines them. We never ask, “Who are you, really?” We can’t ask that, for that would surely be considered a stupid question and the last thing any of us want to be is stupid. Consequently, we define ourselves and others by what we do. I am a banker, a factory worker, an attorney, a car salesman, a mother, a father…

This is problematic because when we aren’t “doing” we become irrelevant to ourselves and others. There is a constant pressure on us to perform, do, work, create. This causes  what we call stress.

What is stress?

Can you hold stress in your hands? Can you describe what it looks like? In other words, is stress a tangible object? No, stress is not a tangible object. But we all know it exists, right? We feel its oppressive weight in our shoulders or other places in our bodies.

In truth, stress is nothing more than an idea, a thought, a belief. Stress is not a thing, just a word that describes a feeling. We’ve all said, “I’m so stressed out!” But what are we really saying? Are we actually saying that we are trying desperately to meet some external expectation and fear we won’t measure up?

Stress Buster #1

Understand that you are in control of three things in your life and three things only. You have control over your thoughts, your words, and your actions. That’s it. So, if stress is merely  a thought, you have control over that. Stress really is all in your head.

When you feel yourself moving into the stress mode, be aware that you have a choice. You can practice awareness and ask yourself these questions:

1. Why am I feeling stressed?

2. Will allowing myself to feel stressed help me in this situation or hurt me?

3. Am I willing to give up feeling stress at this moment?

4. What would be possible if I just chose not to be stressed?

Stress Buster #2

Addictions come in all shapes and sizes and I have to assert that stress is an addiction. We become dependent upon stress to help us get the job done. Have you ever stated that you work best under pressure when you’ve put off a project until the eleventh hour? We use stress as an excuse to be emotionally unavailable to our family and friends. We use stress to justify unkind behaviors towards others and to become dependent if not addicted to substances such as drug and alcohol.

Take responsibility for the things you can control in your life. Some helpful techniques are to have some kind of an anchor that you can look to in times of need, to remind you that allowing yourself to fall into the stress trap is your choice. This anchor could be as simple as a rock in your pocket, a picture on the wall, an inspirational quote inside your desk drawer, a password or a digital sticky note on your computer. The point is to put something in place that will remind you that you always have a choice about your thoughts, words and actions. You always have a choice.

Take a few deep breaths. Believe it or not, we actually forget to breathe when we begin the stress cycle. Taking a few deep breaths brings us back to the present moment, supplies oxygen to our brain and has a calming effect on the mind and body. It also gives us a much needed time out.

Stress Buster #3

Ask yourself:

1. What is the cost to me personally if I fall into the stress trap now?

2. What will it cost me to de-stress myself?

3. Will my choice to feel stress harm others?

4. Will choosing to feel stress really change the outcome?

It takes practice to learn to pause before following Alice down the Rabbit Hole of stress, but be gentle with yourself. The first step is to practice awareness, be conscious of situations that might cause you to stress before you are actually there. Have a plan, and remember you only have control over three things-what you say, what you think and what you do. Practice this and you’ll be saying goodbye to stress in no time.

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.

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

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!

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.

My next series of blogs will be my reflections of the life I chose to live in 2009. Thank you for following my blog.

False Responsibility Part II

So, if we dabble in the alchemy of false responsibility, what we are sure to conjure up is a big pay-off. What do you get out of taking responsibility for people and circumstances in your life that are not yours?

Close your eyes and think about it for a moment. Here are the top five:

1. You get to be in control

What better way is there to gain control of people and life than to take on the responsibility for EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE. We are the general manager of the universe, at least that’s what we tell ourselves.

2. You get to feel significant

What kind of person is in control of everything and everyone in their lives? Smart? Probably. Reliable? Most definitely. Significant? You bet. If we are the hub of our world, all traffic goes through us. We usually describe ourselves as “hands-on.” That’s an understatement.

3. You get to be self-righteous

Through thick and thin, whether we realize it or not, one of the biggest pay-offs of false responsibility is that we get to be right. When things go well, we have the opportunity to feel the charge of power. When things don’t go so well, we can claim smug self-righteousness. We’re the first to say “I told you so,” even if it is only a silent comment to ourselves.

4. You get to be justified

When everything is our responsibility, the end always justifies our means. After all, we carry the burden of the our entire world, more or less. We have to do whatever it takes, however destructive to ourselves and others.

5. You get to be the victim

And our favorite…we get to be the victim of everyone else’s incompetence, low morality, greed, selfishness, lack of self-discipline. “If only they would do what we tell them to do, if only they could be like us…” But, they rarely do and are, so it is up to us to take care of everything. Poor us.

False responsibility is a cunning component of ultimately feeling stuck and trapped. Because we feel responsible for everything and everyone in our lives, we can’t possibly just quit. It would be against our self-righteous code of morality and principles.  

And this is the lie that we tell ourselves and others…you can’t do it without me…I can’t do without it. The truth is that we believe that we actually are responsible for everything and everyone. That is who we believe we are, deeply and truly. It is part of our identity. Because after all, who would we be without our pain?

Part III: The cost to ourselves and others of false responsibility

Since then, running has been a little hit and miss for me. I enjoy it immensely, but it is so easy to make excuses for not taking that first step out my door. It’s too cold, it’s too hot, I’m too tired, I don’t have enough time, I don’t feel well, I didn’t sleep well last night, I need to work. I’m reading a new book. I would be more committed if I were training for an actual event. I could see that I had fallen into a familiar old rut. While my mind churned out excuse after excuse, the authentic me knew they were nothing but B.S. There’s no other way to say it.

I had choices, as we all do from a place of awareness. I was allowing my excuses and justifications to run my life. I was not in charge, a stubborn 15 year old was wielding all the power and I was just trying not to beat myself up about it. I wasn’t doing too well at that. Truth be told, I felt like a loser that I had trained my body to run for five hours at a time only to slide down to the level where pulling out three miles was a real challenge. I remember when it took a good three or four miles for me to even warm up when I was logging 45 miles a week.

When I trained for the marathon, I never ran with ear buds. It was strictly my body, my mind and the road. One of my daughters who ran distance in high school and college warned me that some events won’t allow ear buds and even if they did, I shouldn’t train with them because I would be at a real psychological disadvantage if the battery went dead on my MP3 player mid event and I had never learned the mental fortitude to keep going. She was right and I really leaned on my internal resources April 29, 2007.

Then one weekend not so many weeks ago, I got into a really good book, you know the kind that you just can’t put down? So, I basically sat in a chair all weekend and read that book, cover to cover. On reflection, I thought about how much I enjoyed the story, but how unproductive I felt. Then it hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. I could download audible versions of books I want to read onto my MP3 player and listen to them while I run! I made the rule that I can only listen to the book while I am running. So, when I can’t bear to wait for the next page or chapter, I have to get my shoes on and hit the road. Brilliant!

I have faithfully logged an average of 12 miles a week since I began this “run and read” program and have even gotten my distance back to 8 miles and climbing. I have really improved how I feel, dropped a few pounds and read a few books I’ve been dying to read.

The real struggle for me here was to resist my temptation to go all the way down the “yellow brick road of beating myself up” because of my lack of motivation. In awareness, I was able to see the pattern and find another way to honor myself enough to take the hardest step in any fitness program, the first step out the door.

It’s a delicate balance, but not a difficult one. It takes presence. To achieve presence in the moment actually takes, well, presence! It requires us to stop and really notice what we are doing in the present moment, as in, I am working at my desk, I am driving my car, I am washing the dishes, the sky is blue, I feel the sun on my face, I feel happy.

The cost of not being present is that we live a life that is marked by the past and punctuated by fear, anxiety and conjecture about the future. All the while, we miss today. We miss out on our own life. I often hear people say, “where has the week gone?” Sometimes we experience momentary awareness and realize entire years, decades even have passed mostly unnoticed and unlived.

An anchor of some kind serves as a reminder to stop and notice what we are doing. Like the infamous string around the finger, we all need something that anchors us and supports us as we forge a new habit. Even if we only have one moment of presence and awareness a day, it would be a step forward for most of us.

I wear a little bracelet that serves as my anchor. When I look at it, I am reminded to stop and be conscious and deliberate about what I am doing, like really looking my 7 year old grand-daughter in the eyes and listening to her tell me about her day at school, really hearing her, noticing her brown eyes and shiny black hair and funny little gestures. In the past, I have set a chime on my computer to remind me to stop and really be in the moment.

The possibility presence creates for us is endless. In presence we have the ability to create anything we desire. Relationships become real, life becomes rich, joy becomes full.

Every moment is precious. The old saying is, “They don’t call it the present for nothing! Presence is a gift!”

Be present to that.

We have been taught from an early age that we should be nice and in order to be nice, we attempt to please as many people as possible an any given moment. And if you are saying to yourself at this moment, that you never try to please people, I am going to assert that you are , in fact, a people-pleaser and are unaware of it.

When we are caught in the people pleasing mode, we completely abandon ourselves and our own needs. This leads to a loss of personal power and ultimately to resentment and anger. When we say yes when we really mean no, we build up a residual resentment against the very people we are trying to please.

A typical example of this is the husband or wife who martyrs him or herself for the good of the other. This results in a set of unspoken expectations. When the other person fails to meet these expectations, resentment accumulates. Eventually, the resentment is so huge it can be difficult, if not impossible for an individual to see beyond.

When the wife of 40 years looks at her husband and sees only the ways he has disappointed her over the years, she is caught in the trap of people pleasing. She becomes blinded to the reality that this is the person with whom she has spent her life, her partner and friend. She has covered up his vulnerabilities as a fellow human being. Both her eyes and her heart have been covered over by the imagined wrongdoings of her husband.

What began, as people pleasing results in a separation from those we love the most. We have to be true to ourselves within our acts of kindness. We have to understand that saying yes when we mean no is not the road to happiness and well-being. It is the road to loneliness and isolation.

Standing in one’s own power means to be confident and courageous enough to be honest and say what we mean. We all want to be liked by others, but the truth is that regardless of what we do, half of the people will like us and the other half probably won’t.

What is really important is that we love our self enough to risk the opinions of others. As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “To thine own self be true,” for when we cannot be true even to ourselves, we cannot be true to another.