ADVICE

The good stuff...

"[...] is priceless. Not what you want to hear, but what you need to hear. Not imaginary, but practical. Not based on fear, but on possibility. Not designed to make you feel better, designed to make you better.

Seek it out and embrace the true friends that care enough to risk sharing it.

I'm not sure what takes more guts—giving it or getting it."

Seth Godin

UNCONDITIONAL

Loving unconditionally isn't just something you reserve for your kids. Imagine who you would be, how you would be present as a parent, if you felt, very deeply felt, unconditional love for yourself?

CHAIN

Women have been brainwashed into manufacturing the links in the chains that binds them.  This is how women collude in their own oppression.

CHARM

Talk rich.  Integrity poor.

ANATOMY OF CHANGE

“Change is one part nerve, two parts knowledge, and three parts tenacity.”

~ Sally Armstrong, ASCENT OF WOMEN

WHY NOT YOU?

A lot of time it’s not even about our fear of judgment or failure when we don’t pursue our goals.  It’s more about our sense of unworthiness that has us convinced that it can’t possibly be us to achieve something great.  My question is, why not?  Why not you?  

Is there someone you admire, someone that’s living the life you’d like to be living?  What do you think the difference between them and you would be?  The only difference between you and that person you admire is in the way they think about themselves.  The way they think YES! Why not me.

I know.  It would be easier if it were more complicated because then you could always use that as an excuse.  But until we see ourselves as worthy we will never be able to believe, why not me?

IGNORANCE

Ignorance can only be used as an excuse if we are morally bankrupt in the first place.   And if we are morally bankrupt in the first place then ignorance is the least of our worries.  

It is disturbing when heinous acts are justified but the total loss of morality as in the reframing of the context.  For example, “rules for research on humans were just being formulated and adopted by the scientific community."  Seriously?

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/07/16/aboriginal-nutritional-experiment_n_3605503.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular

NAME IT

A dysfunction is a feeling, sometimes a very vague one at that.  When we’re around certain people for example, we feel a gripping sensation around our chest.  Or, talking with our boss we feel a tightness in our solar plexus.  In competitive circumstances we feel a sense of exhilaration that we don’t feel at any other time.   Anger, shame, fear, feelings that when they surface out of context are a signal that they are surfacing from past pain, ancient suffering that has nothing to do with the situation at hand. 

In other words, the anxiety produced by our boss is a response to what our boss represents, which is authority.  If authority meant total control over our life growing up, then our boss comes to define someone who has control over our life, someone to fear, someone to obey.  

Our dysfunctional feelings are responses to representations, they are not a response to reality.  This is why we suffer.  So if we thrive in competitive circumstances it’s because winning means being better, being loved, being worthy.  We know that competition is not a healthy source of validation of our worthiness.  This is what it means to respond to representations and not reality.  

Digging down to the origin of the representation allows us to name that dysfunction.  Once we name it, we recognize it for what it is, we have the power to make much healthier connections.

FALLOUT

It’s uncanny how fear can whip us into a frenzy using our insecurities, foibles and distorted sense of low self worth.  It makes just the potential of any shunning and shaming feel so real that it freezes us in our tracks.  It’s extremely effective in keeping us locked up in our cave, terrified to venture out, try anything new, expand our horizons, develop our curiosity.

The reality is that if we went through life showing everyone exactly who we were, warts and all, our family would still love us and our friends would still cherish us, in truth, there would be precious little fallout.

Fact is, everyone is in the same boat.  We’re all worried about being lovable.  The irony is that if we were a little more courages and lived authentic lives, fear would loose its power.  Certainly, we would still feel it but it will have lost its power to imprison us.

VOID

Whenever we refuse to see reality for what it is and pretend it’s something else, we create a void that fear calls home.  

Whenever we tell ourselves that we’ll change when we’re “ready,” we create a void for fear to expand into.

Whenever we rather avoid a situation than face it with courage, we create a void, an opportunity, for fear to flourish.

In no time at all, our lives will revolve around and will be controlled by, nothing but fear.

PATHOLOGICAL

So why would someone choose to not be personally responsible? Why would someone expend so much energy denying what’s right in front of them and ignoring their instinct that’s going off like a three-alarm fire?

The truth is actually appallingly simple -- avoiding inconvenience, preserving the status quo.   The examples go from masochistic dysfunction, when it involves only an adult who makes the decision to stay because the relationship with their abuser provides them with some sort of status or financial security.  To heinous and pathological, as with Sandusky’s wife.

How hard did she have to work at looking the other way, ignoring her gut, so that she wouldn’t have to be inconvenienced with the upheaval to her life, if she did the right thing and turned her husband in?  A lot.  She would have to work really hard at denial -- so hard in fact for it to become a pathology, for it to become a disease.  An illness that alters a human’s natural reaction to reality.  This does not absolve her from taking responsibility however, because I believe that in some tiny part of her she was aware of what was going on, if she didn’t know the details, she knew it wasn’t good and she knew there were vulnerable children involved -- and she did NOTHING.

How many stories are out there where kids have enough courage to tell their mother (or father) that there is abuse and yet the parent doesn’t believe the child?  Many, too many.  Why does the parent not believe the child?  Inconvenience, the truth is simply too inconvenient.  It would mean that the adult in the situation would have to take personal responsibility, the adult would have to alter their status quo.

Never underestimate the lengths a person will go to avoid taking personal responsibility.  That’s why it’s so critical to be aware of this.  Nothing good comes from denial.  Never has.  Never will.

INCONVENIENCE

How many times have people made a conscious decision to live in denial just so that they wouldn’t be inconvenienced by the truth?  I think that’s the case more often than not when you’re not taking personal responsibility.

Yes, I believe that one makes a conscious decision to live in denial, it isn’t a contradiction in terms.  The problem I see with the suggestion that denial is subconscious is that one would have to deny, deny and deny again every second of every day the factual evidence that shows you how the violence happening in your home is affecting your children, for example.

In other words, you have to brush aside what’s right in front of you and pretend it isn’t there and that takes conscious effort.  Denial therefore is one of the biggest barriers to taking personal responsibility.

And yes, for the most part, especially at the beginning when you’re just starting to take back your power and practice personal responsibility, it is an inconvenience.

WHO

What your life looks like, feels like and proceeds like is up to you and based on every decision you’ve made up to this point.  Right down to how you’re choosing to perceive things that have happened that are beyond your control.   

It confounds me when I hear people complaining about how unhappy they are with their lives.  How they willingly engage in unproductive/destructive behavior and then look around for people/things/circumstances to blame.

I’m going to explore the issue of personal responsibility this month. It’s so critically important because when you begin to take responsibility for your life, your life changes.

SAFETY

Fear, not the irrational screeching that goes on in your head, but the other kind, the kind that feels like a cold chill down your spine, is the kind of fear that keeps you safe.  

While the lizard brain blows things out of proportion and compiles stories that make you feel anxious when you’re trying to do something that’s outside your comfort zone, this other fear, while also primal, sits in your body, often in your gut.

What’s interesting is that we, more often than not, listen closely and obey the fear in our heads even though it is telling us wildly improbable and unrealistic things.   On the other hand we ignore or rationalize the instinct in our body, the instinct that is telling us truth and showing us reality, the instinct that’s telling us that danger is ahead.  

Why do we do that?  

For women, we’re so socialized to be nice that we don’t want to offend, we don’t want to come off like a bitch that we acquiesce to uncomfortable, and/or dangerous situations, like getting on an elevator with a man we don’t know, while every nerve ending in our body is telling us not to do it.  Or, staying in a relationship and ignoring, denying or rationalizing the signs that tell us we're in jeopardy.  

The Gift of Fear, a book by Gavin de Becker explores this life-saving fear and why we so often ignore it.  The book is also a very practical guide to staying safe by listening to our intuition.  Like so many of us who rationalize and wait for proof of danger, the book points out that the feeling is the proof.

Check out this site for a review of the book: http://mortaine.hubpages.com/hub/The-Gift-of-Fear-Book-Review

This subject was inspired by Oprah’s Lifeclass on intuition.

RELATIONSHIPS VI

The relationship you have with yourself is the most critical.  It informs how all your other relationships work.   If your other relationships aren’t making you feel respected and cared for, chances are you’re not treating yourself with a great deal of care and respect.

QUESTION

Is the direction you’re going in really the direction you want to go?  

It is so critical to ask this question, whether asking it about our job, our friends, any aspect of our romantic life, this is a critical question that we so infrequently ask ourselves and even less frequently listen to and do something about.

Consider that in their book How Not to Marry the Wrong Guy, Anne Millford and Jennifer Gaussian report that 30% of women who get married regret doing so.   And even though some were asking the question, ‘What am I doing?’ They didn’t do anything about it.

Changing our minds is our prerogative not as women, but as human beings.  It’s okay to do it and even better to do it sooner rather than later.  

Vulnerability

The question is, I think, one of vulnerability.  We, I, feel vulnerable if I have to delve deep inside myself and ask myself what I want.  Why is that?  Perhaps it’s because we all start behind the 8-ball.  If for example, you start by asking the question, what do I want, what is important to me? but you’re coming from a place of low self-worth, whatever you come up with is already ripe with its own death, its own failure because let’s face it, if you’re not worth anything, if you are not enough, how will anything you may want, be enough?  Truly!  How could what you want possibly matter?

So this is where we start, this is where I start, feeling vulnerable, but feeling authentic in the asking, knowing that the answer matters to me, and that that, is enough.

The coalition of NO

It's easy to join.

There are a million reasons to say no, but few reasons to stand up and say yes.

No requires just one objection, one defensible reason to avoid change. No has many allies--anyone who fears the future or stands to benefit from the status quo. And no is easy to say, because you actually don't even need a reason.

No is an easy way to grab power, because with yes comes responsibility, but no is the easy way to block action, to exert the privilege of your position to slow things down.

No comes from fear and greed and, most of all, a shortage of openness and attention. You don't have to pay attention or do the math or role play the outcomes in order to join the coalition that would rather things stay as they are (because they've chosen not to do the hard work of imagining how they might be).

And yet the coalition of No keeps losing. We live in a world of yes, where possibility and innovation and the willingness to care often triumph over the masses that would rather it all just quieted down and went back to normal.

Yes is the new normal. And just in time.

Seth Godin

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/04/the-coalition-of-no.

Clarity

I find it’s easier to imagine, in the big picture, what you want your life to be.  I suspect because in the big picture you’re not thinking about the details, and that’s the problem.   While it’s nice to visualize the big picture, there is a great deal of frustration because there is usually a vast distance between what you want your life to be and what it is right now.  

Instead, if you work on the details, and the details manifest in the decisions you make every minute of every day, you’ll find the distance closing between what you want and what is until they become one and the same.

HMMMM...

Things that make you go hmmm, are things that you should listen to.  Usually an indication that something isn't right.  It's sometimes a tightness across the chest, in the solar plexus, across the shoulders or neck.  If you're feeling it in your body, it's a signal that something isn't right.  Listen to it.  Even if you don't know what it means exactly, listen to it by doing NOTHING, until you do know what it means.

Ignore the hmmm at your own peril.

Do you have a story of a time when you ignored the hmmm, what happened?