Tuesday 28 February 2012

FEAR

“We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of [the Universe]. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won't feel insecure around you.” 
Marianne Williamson 

Monday 27 February 2012

LACK

Your success doesn't mean someone else's failure because there is enough to go around. 

Success is not a finite quantity and you don't need anyone's permission to get it.  Living a small or meager life doesn't mean that you're leaving opportunities open for others, first because it's not your responsibility to do so, second, it's a copout rationalization, and third, the reality is that the more successful you are, when you're living the best and biggest life that you can, that's when you're also able to make a real impact on others.

Sunday 26 February 2012

Competition

Competition doesn’t make you stronger, it makes you insecure because you’re constantly looking over your shoulder.  You’re so busy measuring and comparing that you never feel good enough.  At bottom, hyper competitive people are terribly unhappy and insecure because even though they may be ranked best, it does nothing to actually make them feel that way.


Saturday 25 February 2012

Paradigm Shift

Un-normal your normal.  Nothing biological or immutable about your normal, it’s a construct and can therefore be destroyed or deconstructed and rebuilt coming from a completely different paradigm.  This is the way to actually see change -- remember, you can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.



Friday 24 February 2012

Sphere of influence, 3

Here’s the paradox.  While your sphere of influence doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it in no way means that you can make people act the way you want them to.  You cannot control, for example, how people will react, the decisions they will make or the directions they will go.  You only have the power to control the energy that comes from you.  It's a lot of power that you can use to either spread calm or produce anxiety. The choice is yours so long as you're aware that ultimately you are responsible for the energy that comes back to you.


I am editing this retroactively: I don't think we're necessarily responsible for the energy that comes back at us so much as not being surprised at what comes back at us, especially if you've put hostile energy out, don't be surprised if you get hostile energy back.

Thursday 23 February 2012

Sphere of influence, 2

It was the middle of the day yesterday when I ran into my local grocery store to pick up a couple of things.  Apparently a lot of people had a similar idea.  As I said it was the middle of the day on a week day, so I was surprised to see there were a lot of people in the store and lines forming at the checkout.  Things moved slowly as only a handful of cashiers were open.  
The store manager, a diligent man whom I had seen many times pacing the floor making sure all was running smoothly, had noticed and called for more cashiers to open.  This took a couple of minutes but already people were starting to look around, fidget and one individual started grumbling out loud about how he should go to their competitor.  The effect this one person’s grumbling had was to raise the level of tension all along the checkout lines.  As cashiers opened people rushed to them without the decorum of yielding to the person next in line.  This led to some more grumbling and a woman cornering the manager warning him that she would expect a refund if her cream was spoiled because of the wait.  Needless to say, this raised the collective tension level exponentially.   
Here’s the important thing about your sphere of influence, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  Your actions and reactions will inevitably be brought to bear on those around you, for good or bad.  In other words, the grumblers succeeded in raising the anxiety level around them.  Conversely, had they remained calm, made light of the wait and kept the situation in perspective, they could have had a calming influence over those around them.
Bottom line, you are responsible for your sphere of influence.  You are responsible for your actions and reactions and the consequences, good or bad that come your way.  So if you don’t like what’s been coming your way lately, perhaps you should check your sphere of influence.

Wednesday 22 February 2012

Tuesday 21 February 2012

Brick walls and whispers...

I don’t know about you but I find that I usually don’t learn a lesson that the Universe is trying to teach me until that proverbial brick wall falls on me.  I wish I could understand the lesson at a whisper, it certainly would save me a lot of time and effort, but stubborn is just who I am I guess.
Here’s the thing, perhaps it’s stubbornness, but I’ve been thinking that perhaps it’s lack of trust in myself because for some reason it seems to me that I don’t trust things that are too easy.  I trust things that I feel I have to struggle with and be anxious over, in other words, if there isn’t some bloodletting then how worthwhile can the message be?
As I get older though I am starting to trust myself more, I’m starting to trust my gut which  is my version of a whisper.  I usually get a tightness in my solar plexus that tells me something is off, but here’s the kicker, the kicker is not only becoming aware of the whisper but doing something about it -- as it turns out, usually pausing, doing nothing, not making a decision, nothing, just holding, is what the whisper is asking me to do.

Monday 20 February 2012

Time to ditch the mean girl

       Cruelty, to be effective, has to land on a welcoming spot.       Martha Beck
It is little wonder that our feelings get hurt by an insensitive remark when we believe so thoroughly the meanest, cruelest most insensitive remarks we hurl at ourselves.

Sunday 19 February 2012

Solutions

The level of the solution is never found at the level of the problem
Put another way
If you continue to do what you’ve been doing, you’ll continue to get what you’ve been getting
If you truly want to solve a problem so you never have to address it again you need to approach it in a way that you’ve never approached a problem before.  So all the old ways we’ve had of approaching a problem with things like fear, overwhelm, anxiety, etc., will never, never, never solve a problem.  Just ask yourself, are there things that keep appearing in my life over and over again?  If so, then you need a radically different solution.  The only way to arrive at a radically different solution is to change the way you think about the problem.
Go back and look at Chopra’s 3 questions, these will set you on the path to changing the way you think about a problem.

Saturday 18 February 2012

Managing Stories

Just as we’re humming along feeling as though we’re on track and making progress toward our goals, living with compassion and authenticity, we’re smacked upside the head with something unexpected, something that knocks us back on our heels.   
While we know that leaning in toward a challenge is a good way to push through and control the stories we’re telling ourselves, things like: Why does this always happen to me? I’m never going to achieve my goal?  What’s the use? etc., sometimes, we get so stuck in this negative groove we can’t remember how to lean in.
Deepak Chopra suggests asking yourself three questions to help you get unstuck.  The answers clear a path so you can see the challenge without destructive stories.  It’s a psychological bracing that allows you to stand sideways, thrust your chest up, roll the shoulders back and with a heave, lean in.
Questions:
  1. Is this a problem I should fix, put up with or walk away from?
  2. Who can I consult who has solved the same problem successfully?
  3. How can I reach deeper into myself for solutions?
Click the link below to view Chopra’s explanations to these questions.
http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Deepak-Chopra-Advice-Handling-Hard-Times

Friday 17 February 2012

Stories

The stories we tell ourselves are usually contradicted by reality, so why do we take those stories so seriously?  Why do we take those stories to be reality?

Thursday 16 February 2012

PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

This is the true test of self-love, the type of love that matters the most because the minute you begin to take responsibility for your life, you have in fact declared that you matter.

Wednesday 15 February 2012

Chocolate

Dana Small, assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern University Medical School, and colleagues found that different brain regions were activated selectively depending on whether subjects were eating chocolate when they were highly motivated to eat and rated the chocolate as "very pleasant" or whether they ate chocolate despite being satiated.
Small explained that studying the brain’s response to eating a highly rewarding food such as chocolate provides an effective "in-health" model of addiction. "The problem with studying addicts to understand addiction is that we don’t know what their brains were like before the addiction and we therefore can’t determine which brain functions have changed," Small said.
Small also noted that measuring brain responses in normal individuals who ate beyond satiety provided a measure against which the brain response to overeating in many people with eating disorders can be compared and thus serve as the basis for new research on eating disorders.
Small is a researcher in the Cognitive Brain Mapping Group at Northwestern University Medical School. Collaborating on this study were Robert J. Zatorre, Alain Dagher, Alan C. Evans and Marilyn Jones-Gotman, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

Tuesday 14 February 2012

LOVE

Much ink has been spilled on this topic so I’ll keep it brief.
VIOLENCE, WHETHER PHYSICAL OR PSYCHOLOGICAL, IS NEVER, NEVER, NEVER AN EXPRESSION OF LOVE.  EVER! UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE.  PLEASE STOP RATIONALIZING IT. 

And yes I'm yelling!

Monday 13 February 2012

Doing Nothing

Sometimes doing nothing is the most loving thing you can do for yourself.  We oftentimes forget that we have the choice of doing nothing, of pulling away to collect our thoughts, to touch base with what feels right for us before making a decision.  Or, you can defer making a decision until you can say with confidence which way it is you want to go.
If you are feeling pressured to make a decision, take that as a sign that you need to pull back and give it some space, give yourself some time to reflect, or get more information, or talk to a mentor.  If the person cares enough, they’ll wait.

Sunday 12 February 2012

Is honesty an aspect of love?

Sometimes we’re told an awful truth because the person doing the telling loves us and wants to be authentic and honest.  However, and here’s the BIG BUT:
“Honesty is an important part of authenticity. However, there's a distinct difference between being brutally honest and being truthful with others. 
In her 1994 book "The Dance of Deception," psychologist Dr. Harriet Lerner distinguishes between these concepts. She states that honesty can sometimes represent our uncensored thoughts and feelings, while truth requires tact, timing, kindness, and empathy with the other person.”
(Source: James Manktelow, MindTools.com, Authenticity Being True to Yourself)
I truly appreciate these two distinctions because sometimes people use brutal honesty as just another way of being passive aggressive, in other words, blurting out uncensored thoughts without tact, timing, kindness and empathy with the other person.

Saturday 11 February 2012

Authenticity

Authenticity is about pure love.  Being authentic means being true to your own personal values and spirit irrespective of outside pressure to be or feel differently.  So how can this not be about pure love?  How can giving the brightest, most shiniest YOU, to yourself and others, be anything but a gift of pure love?

Friday 10 February 2012

Fear and Loathing

A good friend of mine, an intelligent, kind, funny and beautiful woman had started hearing a ticking sound in her ear.  It was starting to worry her so she finally went to see a doctor and he told her, “Well honey, what do you expect, you’re not getting any younger.  The ticking of your biological clock is only going to get louder.  Better get a move on.”    
My friend then moved to crazy-town, into a nice cozy bungalow on Anxiety Lane, down the street from Hand-wringing Central and north of Twitchy-eye Heights.  She became a predator, engaging men just to apply inquisition like tactics to determine ‘husband and father’ potential -- she left a mutilated and bloody trail.
The last time I saw her she handed me a wedding invitation with one shaky hand while the other sank her nails into the arm of her fiancee.  Her vivid blue eyes, restlessly searched for something just over my shoulder.  Her deep red lips stretched across her face in an insincere smile, her body constantly in motion shadow boxing with a prevailing unease.
She was an intelligent, kind, funny and beautiful woman who bought the hype, who buckled under the pressure to conform, who became a stereotype, who thoroughly lost herself.  
So long as we continue to conform we will fear our ‘biological clock’ and loathe the creatures we become.
Let’s be clear: you are conforming when you feel you are betraying who you are and what you want just to please something (society/culture/traditions) or someone.

Thursday 9 February 2012

A soft place to fall

I have mixed feelings for Dr. Phil, his no-nonsense approach, and Texan twang are appealing, while his sometimes penchant for gossipy, sensationalistic topics are definitely not.  He does have an expression that I love however, it’s when he says you need ‘a soft place to fall.’  The very image of this evokes comfort, swaddling, safety and unconditional love.
We all need a place like that. Do you have one? Or is it perhaps a person? A trusted friend that no matter what will remain un-judgmentally and unflinchingly in your corner?
By embracing compassion and stilling that primal fear-fueled voice in our head we can also become that ‘soft place to fall’ for someone else, and most critically for ourselves.

Mirror

Women especially get so bombarded by messages that make them feel as though they are not enough they forget how perfect they actually are.  So even though sometimes we forget to see it in ourselves, I know we can see it as clear as day in the women we respect and love, so we, as their friends, must mirror to them, by telling them, how amazingly beautiful, smart and ENOUGH they truly are.

Wednesday 8 February 2012

Your focus

People oftentimes apply laser-like focus (obsessive focus, some would say) on a wedding but completely neglect to do the work to understand what it takes to make a marriage.  If people would spend as much money, focus and effort on preparing for a marriage as they do on planning a wedding, my guess is that there would be fewer divorces.

Tuesday 7 February 2012

Monday 6 February 2012

Consent

Only you can give it.  It doesn’t just apply to the external it also applies to the approval or agreement that you give your internal voice, that primal brain.  How much of it are you agreeing with?  Are you questioning what it’s telling you or do you give it automatic consent to dictate what you will think and how you will feel?
So with Valentines Day around the corner is your primal brain unearthing old hurts and insecurities because you don’t have a valentine, or is it stirring up dissatisfaction because you don’t have a more exciting valentine, more handsome valentine, more than one valentine?  
If that’s the case, you’ve given your primal brain consent to hurl you down that slippery slope at the bottom of which you helplessly beat your chest and gnash your teeth at the rotten life you’re leading.
It’s not true - it’s a matter of consent - refuse to give it.    

A wonderful gift idea...

Yup those sparkly wrapped kisses are taking over the shelves of every store (BTW do they have expiry dates?)

Feb 14 is approaching so it's time to make candy manufacturers and dentists rich.

How about we don't buy into that this year and do the vacuuming for our beloved instead, or wash the dishes, wash the car, or do the laundry or watch the kids? 

Isn't that better than gifting that tired old box of chocolate that you've been brow beaten into buying?

Friday 3 February 2012

It bears repeating...

So long as you continue to believe that the determining factor of how lovable you are exists outside of yourself, you will continue to feel that there’s something inherently wrong with you.

Denial is a personal choice.

Tell me where I'm wrong!

“Oh me” and other tales of martyrdom

Have I ever said, “Oh me” and felt sorry for myself?  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.  We have all leveraged our sense of self-esteem against how much suffering we can endure.  We have all misinterpreted our hurts as purely inflicted by others and seen ourselves as blameless.  At some point though, most of us snap out of it, take responsibility for our part and make better decisions next time.  
To have the pathology of a martyr though is to live, every day, in the morass of denial that precludes you from being able to see the part you play in the hurts or difficulties that manifest in your life.   To live the life of a martyr is to live in perpetual consternation at the state of your life. To live the life of a martyr is to get up every morning and strap on your blinders so that you cannot see the overwhelming amount of choices that surround you. To live the life of a martyr is to deny that alternatives exist and be convinced that you are helpless in the hands of fate.
In a relationship when someone is the martyr it is interpreted by both sides as an expression of love:
“You must really love him to put up with so much.”
“I know she loves me because she keeps coming back.”
“He really cares about me because he never complains.”
 It’s not love.  It’s sickness.

Relationships, an odd irony

There is a ‘reverse' stigma associated with being in a relationship - a stigma connotes a bad sign, so I propose that a reverse stigma is something that connotes a good sign. Following this logic, when a person is in a relationship it’s viewed as a a sign of health, a sign of getting along, it communicates to society that you are ‘normal.”  As an aside, when reviewing case studies of psychopaths, you hear profilers say ‘he appeared normal, he was married/had a girlfriend.‘   We of course know that being in a relationship is oftentimes far from being an indication of health or wellbeing*.  
Ironically the ‘real’ stigma (the bad sign) associated with being unattached tells us that it’s an indication that there is something wrong with a person, that they must be antisocial, they must have a disease, they are surely undesirable and certainly unlovable.  This is an irony whose very wrong but yet powerful message keeps us tethered to toxic people and embroiled in dysfunctional relationships by nothing but a big fat lie.
What’s even sadder is that many unattached individuals internalize this message of being less than if unattached and make themselves crazy trying to find a partner, at all costs: at the cost of their pride, their self-esteem, their spirit and sometimes their lives.  Start looking for the runway now.  Go.  Don’t buy this sham for another minute.
*(A 2005 study reported that 7% of partnered Canadian women experienced violence at the hands of a spouse between 1999 and 2004. Of these battered women, nearly one-quarter (23%) reported being beaten, choked, or threatened with a knife or gun. (Family Violence in Canada: A Statistical Profile, 2005))

Thursday 2 February 2012

Love: Borderliners and Narcissists

I couldn’t have said it better myself...
Real intimacy has to do with trust, understanding, and feeling understood. People who are intimate--and I'm not talking about sex--reveal vulnerabilities without fear that what we share will be used against them. Intimacy relies on safety, patience, mutuality, respect, constance, and no secrets. Without healthy self-disclosure at the right time, there can be no intimacy. And that takes honesty about who we are and how we feel. The more intimate you are, the safer you feel and the more worthwhile the relationship.”
Randi Kreger is the co-author of Stop Walking on Eggshells.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/stop-walking-eggshells/201202/problems-emotional-intimacy-typical-borderliners-and-narcissists