Coaching insight: What’s your baseline?

May 3, 2014 By

There is wonderful insight in this quote from happiness expert and author Doe Zantamata:

Measuring Growth“If your parents ever measured you as a child, they had you stand against a wall, and made a little pencil mark on the wall to show your growth. They did not measure you against your brother, or the neighbor’s kids, or kids on TV. When you measure your growth, make sure to only measure your today self by your past self. If you compare your relationships, your success, or your anything against anyone else, you are not being fair to you. Everyone has a different path, a different pace, and different challenges to face along the way.”

When we really take the truth of this in and understand it, we also begin to understand the power that lies in what is uniquely “us”.  Just as others have their own path, we too have our own and that means we also bring our own contribution to the world. So measure away.. just be certain that you’re measuring to the right baseline.  And remember, it is far better to create (grow) than to compete. Imagine that world!

 

Filed Under: Learning & Growth, Winds of Change Tagged With: , , , , ,

5 Tips to help adjust your view of change

April 28, 2014 By

Change and Choice and GrowthWhenever the subject of change comes up, there are mixed reactions.  Where we are in life, what we’ve experienced and our relationship with change will influence our response.  Even to the word!  But we didn’t start that way.  In fact, in our beginnings, change was the goal!

Travel back in time with me to when we were young.  Think about what got applause in your life:  First sounds, first words, first sentences!  First roll-over, first crawl, first steps! We progressed and that is change.  Change is about progress.  It is about growing.  All change.  Even the change that at first seems like it’s stopping you ultimately is just pausing you and for a purpose.

It can be tricky though to always embrace that idea and to go back to our earliest relationship with change.  And it definitely will not happen in an instant.  Like other “conditioned” responses in life, we have to do a bit of re-programming.  And that can take some effort.  But it can also be fun and the start of a life encompassing adventure.

Ready to get started?  It’s easier than you think.  Let’s go back to childhood and try a few oldies but goodies on for size. Here are my top five favorites to help turn your battle with change into your dance with change:

1)  Try a new food!  Remember this one?  How long has it been since you tried a new vegetable?  Even a new salad dressing? A new kind of fruit? Take a trip to a Farmer’s Market in your area and find something new and try it.  Ask the wait staff at your favorite restaurant to recommend something new for you to try. Try a new taste!

2)  Try some new music! This one is perhaps one of my favorites.  Are you a single genre kind of person? Or maybe you don’t have music in your life at all. Get some music in your life and mix it up.  Think you hate classical? Think again.  Try listening to some renditions from modern musicians like The Piano Guys.  You’ll hear things you never heard before.  What about some jazz? Not sure what’s out there? Ask your kids or grand-kids.  Or just spend some time on iTunes.  If you’re more visual, try YouTube videos in different genres.  The key is to give your brain a different beat to hear for a bit.  Soothing or salsa – it’s all great for the mind & soul.  And can be great for the body if it inspires you to move!

3)  Try some new words!  It would probably be a tie for me for this one with music because I do love language.  But think about your progression of knowledge as a young person.  Vocabulary was a big part of that.  We even had a minimum number of words a week to learn! Not sure where to start? Register for some of the word of the day messages.  My granddaughter and I had great fun with this one.  We both registered so we got the same word each day for a few months.  We so enjoyed coming up with ways to use those words.  It made us both better communicators.

4)  Try a different activity! When was the last time you broke your routine? Does one day run into the next because you basically do the same things every day? Why not introduce something different?  What is something you’ve been wanting to try? Or just begin again? Make a commitment to introduce a new activity into your schedule and then do it! It can be something as simple as walking every day.  Or beginning to journal.  The key is to do something that you already have the skills and resources to do.  Get creative. Maybe you always eat out.  Try cooking one night a week.  Or maybe for you it’s the reverse and you need to break the routine and get out more. Another idea is to switch up how you spend your time off, even lunch hours.  One of my clients began going to an art gallery or museum once a week.  It really had a domino effect and before she knew it, she had a whole new circle of friends and a vibrant social life that filled a void for her.

5)  Meet someone new! This one should be simple today given how much technology helps us reach out to people but we seem to still be pretty set within our circles.  Quite often, just changing our network can be the fundamental stimulus we can have for bringing significant growth into our lives.  Are you going back in time on this one? Remember the fear and hope as we started each new “year”? Who will still be there? Who were the “new” kids? Remember hearing about the influence of who you were “hanging out with”? Guess what – it’s still true! It is said that in any area of our life, we will not consistently achieve more than the average of the five people we spend the most time with or has the most influence over us. When we change our circle of influence, we change.  And as a result, so does our life.

Five very simple things you can begin right now.  It doesn’t take any more time.  Time is time.  It does mean you will use your time differently.  It doesn’t take any more money.  Not really.  But it could mean spending your money differently.  But isn’t that the point? We can’t expect our lives to change if we are not willing to grow and change.  Start with you.  And start where you don’t have to be afraid.  Start where change is about adventure and adding interest and color into your life.

Be sure and come back and share your experiences with us here.  You’ll be an inspiration for all of us!

Filed Under: Learning & Growth, Winds of Change Tagged With: , , , , ,

From hope to faith…part leap, part tight-rope

April 23, 2014 By

Tight Rope WalkIf you want someone to act, give them hope.  That is the cornerstone of every effective marketing plan in existence.  Regardless of seller or buyer or product or idea, for us to act, we need to have sufficient hope that there will be an outcome that we want.

By definition, hope is the belief that something “can” be true or “can” happen.  It is possible.  It may not be probable but it is possible.

And we want that assurance before we invest ourselves. Before we do the work. Because some work is pretty daunting.

So the greater the hope, the greater the chance will be that I will actually take the necessary steps and make the sacrifices.  There is a price for every promise after all.

But how is hope different from faith? It’s subtle but important. And it is what will make the real difference.

When I have hope, I believe it can happen.  But when I have faith I believe it will happen.  That’s true motivation.  And that is why faith is not just about the initial leap.  It is walking the tight-rope of life knowing you are going to make it through.

Hope can help us take the first step, but only with faith will we be able to keep walking.

I’m not as careful with hope as I am with faith.  Hope is easy.  Faith takes work.  But faith is where the promise comes true.

Where do you need to take the leap and get on the tight-rope of faith? Are you ready to go from “I can” to “I will”? Once you are, before you know it, you will say “I have.”

What I love about the process is that the more we do this, the easier it gets to really believe and have faith in what we can do – the difference we can make not just in our own lives but in the lives of others and ultimately in the world.

Ready to get started?

 

Filed Under: Possibilities & Perspective, Winds of Change Tagged With: , ,

The who, what, when, where, how & why of FAITH

April 20, 2014 By

Faith_Faithful_EasterMy personal focus word for this year is faithful. When I chose the word, it was within the context of being faithful to my promise and to my promises. That is key in my life right now because it is a very real struggle, one that by choosing the word I fully acknowledged. I want to be faithful. I yearn to be faithful. And I have found that it is not easy. Because there are many influences inside of me and in my environment that quite often encourage the opposite of faithful. And some of them are there for a good purpose.

Blind faith is not necessarily a good thing. I am learning that there is a middle ground between absolute faith in something and impervious skepticism. It is the place of the student. One of my brothers puts it this way: Trust, but verify. So what happens when you can’t verify? When faith and trust are in fact the ultimate intuitive judgment call? That is the ageless question that faces many of us particularly when it comes to faith within a spiritual context.

What do you accept as proof? How do you believe purely on the basis of faith at a deep enough level for it to challenge and change you? For me, it comes down to this: We must make a decision, a choice based on what we do know.  In too many cases, we drift into our spiritual belief system based on the experiences of our childhood. We either reject what we experienced because we saw hypocrisy or experienced some perceived personal harm or we embrace it as a part of a legacy we’re intended to continue. Neither of those are, in fact, a valid choosing, they are default responses. We must each make a definitive choice or it is not our belief.

For me, it became a matter of three questions:

  1. Do I know what I believe?
  2. Do I know what I don’t believe?
  3. How do I demonstrate my belief?

The core word in all three questions? I

I often refer to my early mentor, Jim Rohn and on this subject he was a critical catalyst.  Here are his thoughts paraphrased:  Whatever you believe, be certain that is the product of your own conclusion. It is at the core of your personal philosophy and will impact everything you do in life. Start there. Be clear that your belief system and philosophy is the product of your own conclusion.

Are there hard facts to back up my belief? Perhaps or perhaps not. But there was sufficient evidence for me throughout history and in my own life to persuade and answer my questions.

Am I clear about what I believe? Yes. There isn’t anything ambiguous about my belief.

Am I clear about what I do not believe? In general. But it is here that there is always room for study and questions. From that will come more answers. In only choosing to be absolute in what I believe, I have created a better place for continued growth and understanding.

How do I demonstrate my belief? Here is where it all comes together because in truth, I demonstrate it in everything. If it is a true belief it influences everything. I believe in God as my creator. I believe I am made in His image and that I too have the ability and need to create. I believe in God as my companion. I believe I was made for the purpose of having a relationship with God.  That means an active and ongoing conversation with Him where we both listen and speak. I believe in God as my father. This carries the willingness to follow His guidance and teachings. That means I must study those and continue to grow in my understanding of what He expects of me and from me. I believe in God as my savior. This allows me to experience forgiveness and freedom at a fundamental level. It also means that I accept responsibility for the decisions I make and accept their outcome with respect but without fear.

That is my belief. My belief also includes that I was not created to dictate your belief. Only my own. This is the ultimate expression of personal responsibility. To celebrate my own belief I must acknowledge your freedom to choose your own without judgment. Because in the end, my belief was born from ultimate and unconditional love.

  • We create in love.
  • We communicate in love.
  • We grow in love.
  • We live in love.

That is the essence of what I believe and is my faith. It is then the essence and basis of faithful. As I was writing about this today I was reminded that it is only by practicing my faith that I am able to be faithful. A life that is created, shares, grows and is ultimately expressed in love including for ourselves, can only produce a life that has that as its outcome. It is only when we deviate from that guidance system that we falter.

A quote I saw recently was this:  “Strive to be remembered for what you would die for.” Powerful. That is what this Easter is about for me. A reminder that we must always do that knowing by faith that ultimately, when we are remembered for what we would die for, it is because that is what we lived for.  A compelling view of purpose.

Live well.

Filed Under: Learning & Growth, Personal thoughts & insights, Winds of Change Tagged With: , , , , ,

What flavor is your fear? A guide to how fear can serve us

April 17, 2014 By

Smile at fearRecently I experienced a situation where fear was an unexpected partner in the dance. Not in an obvious way, but definitely present. In fact, I doubt that anyone involved (including me) recognized at the onset that fear was part of the situation. That troubles me because we will not change what we cannot see. And we won’t see what we are afraid to see.

There it is – FEAR. I have been reminded that to be successful personally and professionally, one of the core things we must develop is a healthy relationship with fear. Why? Because fear can be a positive energy, a partner for change.  But before that can happen, we need to engage fear as our ally.

The first step is to recognize that all of us experience fear. Every day. Let’s get some clarity about the many faces and flavors of fear. As I was researching this I found at least 45 synonyms for the word fear from one search.  45! That’s quite a few flavors. And when you move on to all of the additional terms and phrases, the list is literally endless. That tells us something. We get to choose some things about fear in any given situation. We get to put a specific name to our fear. Once we do that, it becomes easier to see it within a context that will allow us to counter and/or leverage it.

The second step is remembering that fear is a basic human response. We are born with fear as a primal response in recognition of danger and for self-preservation. Over time, we allow fear to become the danger itself and to be come self-limiting.  We need to remember that fear is not an absolute predictor, fear is just an alert mechanism that tells us we need to look at something before making our choice. Going back to our first point though, remember that in this context, fear does not have to remain a reflexive response. Fear can create choices in how we respond. As with any choice, once we recognize we are in a decision moment we know by default we have the power to make a different choice.

To help better demonstrate this, let’s look at 10 of the “flavors” of fear and an alternate choice for each of them:

Fear Power Response   Personal Power Response
anxiety   vs. calm 
aversion   vs. kindness
concern   vs. contentment 
doubt   vs. faith 
dread   vs. courage 
foreboding   vs.
assurance 
suspicion   vs. trust 
timidity   vs. confidence 
unease   vs. ease 
worry   vs. happiness 

Now on to our guide for making fear our ally.  Fear is an incredibly powerful emotion, even in these forms. It can distort our vision, perception and ability to act. In some cases, the fear is clearly invalid and we are able to just choose another response. But in most cases, we will need to engage with our fear and allow it to guide us back to our personal power. That is done using the right questions.

For example, if you are timid in certain situations it won’t be as simple as “I will choose confidence over being timid”.  Most likely, there is an underlying reason you are timid. The key will be to ask yourself what steps you need to take to develop confidence. Instead of focusing on the fear (being timid), focus on the alternative (confidence). First you will have to identify where you lack confidence. You will be able to look at what kinds of situations bring out that timidity and determine why. With that, fear becomes your ally. It allows you to see where you lack confidence, take the necessary steps to restore confidence and then thank your fear for its service and send it on its way!

Each one of the words listed above can leverage this process. Let’s look at unease. What is it about this situation creating unease for me? Are those things true? If so, are there steps I can take to be at ease? If so, what are they.  Take those steps, thank your fear (unease) for its service and send it on its way! If you cannot define steps that will help you feel at ease, recognize your unease as a “do not enter” warning”, thank your fear (unease) for its service and send it on its way! Over time, this becomes a more automatic reflex action for you.  Just remember that skill grows from use over time, not time alone. Put this into practice!

When we embrace fear for what it is meant to be – an alert to potential danger – we can leverage it to change outcomes and set ourselves up more effectively for success.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Learning & Growth, Possibilities & Perspective, Winds of Change Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Power of Words: What inspires you?

April 9, 2014 By

We all know that when someone tells us that they care about us it makes a difference. It can soothe us, create a sense of security and even contribute in some ways to our own sense of value.  There are, however, some sentiments that are even more powerful and can inspire people to take action and greater leaps of faith.  And that changes their life.  Four of the most powerful words we can offer someone to inspire them is to simply tell them:  I believe in you.   Hope and faith – two of the most powerful forces in the world.  And we have the power to inspire both so easily.

Let me start:  I believe in you.

Pass it on…

Believe in you

 

Filed Under: Possibilities & Perspective, Success & Significance, Winds of Change Tagged With: , , ,
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