The person I let down the most is…

… me

I am pretty good at following through on what I say I’m going to do. If I stuff up, if I forget, if something gets in the way I apologise. I beat away the guilt resolving to do better. For the most part I can be described as ‘reliable’. Actually, I am pretty sure I have primary school report cards tucked away in the garage (yes, I am that sentimental) that say exactly that ‘contentious, reliable and a pleasure to teach’. Yep, I was a teacher’s pet. Until high school. Then I got thrown out of religion class, like, a LOT. But that is a story for another day.

I find it painful, physically and emotionally, to let someone down. Except for me. I seem to be pretty damn good at letting myself down and not feeling a thing. Well, I don’t know that is exactly true. I do feel the faintest hint of betrayal, eroding self-trust and shame BUT I have been systematically numbing myself to those feelings. Obviously, because on some level I think its peachy to keep letting myself down.

Well no more numbing. It isn’t peachy. It sucks.

I tried thinking of the little promises I had made to myself, you know the ones; you say it mentally to yourself and you get a quietly gently excited. Looking forward to doing something for me. Then life gets busy, we get busy, we get distracted, priorities shift, fires need putting out and we just let it go. I don’t acknowledge it most of the time, I don’t apologise, re-schedule, resolve to do better. I just pretend the promise didn’t matter or that it wasn’t a promise at all. I don’t even treat my enemies that way.

So from now on, as much as humanly possible (I am pregnant and have a shocking case of baby brain), I will honour myself & my relationship with myself by honouring my promises to me the way I would honour a promise to you.

PS having said that the new layout and schedule is coming…

Crowdsourcing the universe

There is a critical difference, and quite a gulf, between identifying something and processing something. The former is utterly useless unless followed up by the latter.

Identification is something we all do, to varying degrees, in every single little aspect of our lives. One of the first things we learn to do as a child is to identify people, objects, places, actions. As we grow, our understanding deepens and we learn to identify the unseen; emotions, the intangible, types of objects, sequences of actions, relationships between people. Personal development takes it further; we learn to identify our ego, our shadow, our embodied archetypes, our chakras, our blockages, our issues, our personality types, our agreements. We immerse ourselves in information; ways to identify what is happening in us, around us.

Information on what to do with our vast knowledge of the plethora of information available? That is a little thin. Infuriatingly, what little information exists around processing our information and taking meaningful action is invariably vague. (Can you hear that little frustrated growl in the back of my throat?) My pet hate, my most detested state, is the overwhelm of finding myself in the middle of a veritable pile of information and lables with nothing to go on other than my heart, my instinct, or my gut. Don’t get me wrong – my intuition is invaluable – but ladies, please tell me you don’t live on intuition alone?

I need mentors, processes, experts, a nudge in the right direction, suggestions (even if I immediately disregard them). I don’t need the answer, because I will invariably buck the trend and go my own way anyhow. What I need to know is how others experience it, what they did (and do now) and how it went. I need to know what the research said, what the sages propose, what history shows. My intuition will tell me, which path is the best one for me. I just need to create her a map of sorts, to crowdsource the universal consciousness and give her some options. What a waste of human potential if we recreate the wheel every single time. My intuition is a pilot, she flies this damn thing, she isn’t the engineer that builds it.

So a call out to all the philosophers, practitioners, experts, researchers; we know the experience is different for everybody and we promise not to ‘hang you’ if your method doesn’t suit us. But please, please, please have the balls to publish the process as well as the label. The world will be a better place for it, if only because I will rant less.

Schedule your inspiration

It is your day off. You have been looking forward to this time for weeks. You have a list as long as your arm of relaxing things that you will spend these precious hours doing. You realise half way through the day that it is not possible to get everything done and your day will be anything but relaxing. You rush from errand to appointment and back again ending at home utterly exhausted, wishing that you had just picked up take away on your way home from work, because that (or getting a root canal) would have been less stressful. Does this ever happen to you?

This phenomena is born of two things:

1. We grossly underestimate how long it takes to ‘do’ something
2. We focus too much on the exhalation (the execution of a task) and forget the inspiration (the space between tasks)

I often plan to do something before I go to bed, like have a cup of tea and some chocolate or give myself a mini facial or read or write a blog or whatever. Two nights a week, if I am absolutely on fire, I will do one of those things before I go to bed. Instead I usually pack up the baby’s toys, pack the dishwasher and clean the kitchen benches, organise lunches for tomorrow, write my other half a lovely note for him to wake up to, put a load of washing on, balance the budget or any of the millions of mundane necessary things that I never include in my schedule.

This isn’t simply a Mum thing either. I know I used to plan meetings back to back when I worked in finance, giving myself 5 minutes to go to the bathroom and re-fill the water jug, only to find that the clients were early, my staff needed to run some issues past me, the printer was stuffed and the documents hadn’t printed and that I had a million emails to address.

Planning and scheduling is important. I think it is impossible minimise stress without knowing, for the most part, what needs to be done and allocating time for it. But so many of us don’t schedule to our priorities and only schedule a fraction of our tasks, but allocate them the majority of our time.

Lesson: To live with a sense of tranquility schedule the inspiration as well as the exhalation. And as any good yoga teacher will tell you; if you want to relax the inspiration should be as long as the exhalation.

Are you supportable? Ten steps to support in 2010.

I am fiercely independent and stubborn to a fault, but I have been supportable in the past. Currently though, I would say I am definitely difficult (near on impossible) to support.

I have willing and prepared family and friends, who would probably never say ‘No’ if I asked for help – so many of us do – but I rarely articulate what exactly they could do to help. When asked how I am doing my default response is ‘I’m fine’ which roughly translates to “I actually need support, but am too stubborn to ask for it”.

How to know if you are unsupportable like me:

• You lie about how you are doing i.e. “Yeah I’m ok. Everything is fine”
• You think that t is easier to just ‘stick it out’ than to ask for help
• You expect the help you get to be absolutely perfect and are disappointed when, lets say, the towels aren’t folded like you would fold them
• You keep telling yourself all you need is someone to talk to, not actual help
• You are hesitant to break the routine to try things a different, more supportive, way
• You keep telling yourself than in a few weeks when (insert dilemma here) is over, everything will be better

One of my goals for 2010 is to feel totally supported. So I will be changing a few things, from priorities to how I run my household and how I manage relationships to achieve that. (Friends and family that read this blog are broadly smiling or cringing in anticipation, depending on who they are as they read this, I am sure.)

Here is my game plan to a more supported life:

1. Recognise that the world would turn without me. So it is o.k for me to take time out for me – the sky won’t fall in.
2. Let go of the feelings of failure and guilt that arise when I ask for help. Needing help and time out is NORMAL.
3. Set up the family schedule so that time for me is already built-in. This will stop me apologising for doing what I need, like have an uninterrupted shower for example.
4. Take friends up on offers of babysitting etc.
5. Explain in advance what I need and how I am working to achieve it, so no-one accidentally works against me in attempt to help.
6. Preempt difficult times and take action to get support before I am desperate, rundown & exhausted.
7. Proritise yoga, meditation and writing just as high as getting the shopping done, catching up with friends and doing the chores.
8. Learn not to apologise for number 7 above.
9. Accept that things like having smooth legs and tidy nails, moisturised skin and getting hair cuts really do make me feel better, because they demonstrate I am worth taking care of, and make time for them regularly.
10. Cultivate a focused and relaxed mind that deals with what I am working on at the time and lets go of the millions of other things and thoughts that are going on simultaneously.

How are you focusing more on yourself in 2010?

5 steps to feeling great in your skin

What has been niggling at you for months? Is it an item on your ‘to-do’ list that gets transferred from list to list when everything else has been checked off? It it something you haven’t dared to even put on the list? Something that you haven’t even admitted that you want?

I want a new wardrobe. Not the structure to put clothes in, but the fashions to fill it with. I have clothes, tonnes of clothes in fact, but I don’t wear many of them. My wardrobe consists predominately of clothes I can breastfeed in or the crap that I haven’t sent to charity that I was wearing over 2 years ago, before I fell pregnant. So as you can imagine my wardrobe is full of stunning dresses, silks, delicate embroidery, tailored pants, flirty skirts and fitted jackets – NOT! My wardrobe has way more stretch cotton than should belong to one woman and is mostly a few basic colours that wash well and work with tan skirts or jeans.

To make my wardrobe woes worse, my body is alien. The pants I wore pre-pregnancy are too big now and the tops from the same era and way too small. (Pretty much everything else stretches, so it still fits). My hips and thighs need a L, my waist is a M and my bust is somewhere between an XL and an XXL, depending on the store and the cut. So most of the time I aim for ‘presentable’ or ‘good’ and try to avoid looking like Betty Boop.

I would really like a wardrobe that is classic, effortless, comfortable and flattering. Clothes I can wear to a café, to see a client and take the baby to the park all in a day. Why does this blog find a home in the category of personal development I hear you ask? Because I deserve clothes that make me feel good. So do you. There is nothing wrong with wanting your clothes, and indeed your style, to reflect your personality. There is no hard and fast rule, despite the glossies telling us otherwise, that says that you must be a size 0 or even a size 4 to look and feel good. Our bodies are wonderful pieces of kit – we will never own anything as versatile, useful and fun as our bodies so lets celebrate them.

As a coach I feel it is important to follow-up each epiphany with action steps. So here are my steps that I think would work for just about anybody:

1. Make a rough list of what I wear from my wardrobe (DONE)
2. Make a list of what is missing to mix and match with existing pieces to make desired wardrobe (DONE)
3. Go through existing clothes, sort out what the keep, what to throw out, what to pass to charity and what to gift to friends (like the stunning designer gown my bust no longer fits in)
4. Book an appointment (in the new year) with a stylist to do my colours and styles. (I am desperate to work with Coby from Stylewish and if you are a Sydney local you should check her out too.)
5. Go shopping! Gradually….

We might even save money by avoiding purchases that we won’t wear more than once, time in looking for clothes because we know what we are looking for and avoid horrifying fashion mistakes. That is my justification and I am sticking to it

*This blog was not a paid recommendation

Failure

One of the feelings that I hate is failure. I don’t think I am alone here. Nobody wants to feel as though they failed. My distaste for the feeling has another level to it though. My every failure is somehow turbo-charged. I feel like a failure for feeling the emotion failure.

You see I should know better. I know that there is no such thing as failure.

So not only do I feel crap for not succeeding, I feel even worse for feeling that way. Because, drum roll please, failure doesn’t exist, everything is simply feedback. Feedback to show you how prepared (or not) you were, how skilled (or not) you are, how on track (or not) you are, how well (or not so well) you handled the situation. Failure is asking you to honestly re-evaluate the situation, to debrief and to consciously learn the lesson.

Call me lazy, but sometimes I just don’t have the fortitude to do it. It is so hard to look the feeling of failure in the face and consider it logically. It is harder still to identify my misconceptions, re-arrange the plan that got me here and decide on a new course. But you know what? When I have the courage, and can dredge up enough emotional energy to do it, things get better – FAST. The added bonus is that lessons learned via an uncomfortable feeling, like say failure, tend to stick with us so we make the mistake fewer times before really getting it.

I have had a roll of ‘epic failures’ the past 6 months, possibly more than ever before. I have been getting feedback left right and centre telling me I was off course, I was ignoring my intuition and that I had my priorities way out of whack. But I hadn’t stopped to debrief until this weekend. I was too busy, too run down, too unsupported  too [insert excuse here] to look at what was going on, and so I kept ‘failing’.

The lesson I have been afraid of facing is that I am not paying enough attention to my intuition. I have been feeling dread and doing it anyway, I have put others needs before mine and my babies, I have taken what others say as gospel and ignored my own feelings, I have supported my partner without question. Each time the feedback was clear; dreaded feelings and crappy results flashing like the proverbial neon sign telling me to listen to my inner voice.

Lesson: Listen closely to your so-called failures. Heed what they are telling you. There is nothing worse than waking up and realising that you have lived a shitty groundhog day every day for 6 months.

5 reasons why the loving answer isn’t always yes.

Are you a ‘yes person’? Do you find it difficult to say ‘no’, to assert your needs, to negotiate for what you want or to stand up for yourself? Are your boundaries all wrong, so they allow other peoples needs to be prioritised over your own?

If you are saying yes to all of these, or even some of these, my guess is that you are also very compassionate, nurturing and have a high emotional IQ. You are so focused on doing what is best for everybody and supporting those you love that you have forgotten single most important rule in giving of yourself; The loving answer isn’t always yes.

Sometimes the loving answer is:

• No.
• Do you think it could wait a while?
• Could you do it yourself?
• What support do you need to enable you to do that?
• I’m sorry, but I can’t.
• No thank you.
• Are you kidding?
• I know someone who could help you with that, their name is …
• That won’t work for me could we do this instead?
• I’m sorry but I have changed my mind/circumstances have changed.

The above alternatives to ‘Yes’ can sound like cop-outs or overly polite responses, but they aren’t. It actually takes far more courage to say ‘No’ sometimes than it does to say ‘Yes’.

Here are 5 reasons why yes isn’t always the loving answer:

1. You disempower the other by doing something for them when they could do it themselves.
2. You disrespect yourself when you don’t enforce healthy boundaries.
3. If you always say ‘Yes’, you will eventually run out of the energy to say yes when you are really needed.
4. It is far better to teach another a new skill or support them in a transition than to encourage  co-dependency.
5. If you are saying ‘Yes’ out of habit and not genuine compassion, it undermines the act of giving itself.

Next time you are asked for help, carefully consider the question before you routinely respond with your usual ‘of course I can’. Remember the loving answer isn’t always yes. And sometimes the odd expletive is more than acceptable

5 reason to wisely choose your friends (the power of Osmosis)

Balance is the natural state of the universe. Things have a way of working themselves out in the end. Things flow from high to low until both are equal. If we try to work against the flow we might succeed… for a while. And then we fail.

The 5 people you spend the most time with are the most influential in your life. Their personality, habits and preferences bleed into yours. So you had best choose wisely who you spend your time with. These people flavour your world.

You don’t believe how influential these people are? Try these on for size:

1. Ask a smoker why they took up the habit and who gave them their first drag
2. Ask a star student who they study with
3. Watch the way the presence of a baby changes the speech of its family and friends
4. Ask an ex-junkie who they spend time with now that they are clean
5. Ask an outdoor type how many couch potatoes they hang out with

5 way to tell a goal from an ego trip

Goals are so very chic right now. It is normal to be working overtime, freelancing or consulting on top of your 9 to 5 gig. It is more and more common for people to own their own businesses or to be undertaking graduate study whilst working ‘full time’. These things are almost not considered a goal anymore. They are just what you do. Goals are what we do on top of these miraculous feats.

But more often than not goals are somewhat random end states that we consciously nominate, based on who we think we are at that time and who we think we want to be. Which in and of itself shouldn’t be a bad thing, right? Maybe. The catch is that most often we really don’t know what we want. We have a good idea of things that might make us happy. We know what would make our families proud. We know what would make our colleagues jealous. We know what we are interested in. So we make a guesstimate, at best, call it a goal and flog ourselves until we reach it. Not sounding quite so glamorous now is it?

I am not against goals. I am a coach. I spend a lot of time helping others to set goals.I also spend a lot of time looking into a person’s unconscious motivation, secondary gains, values, experiences, beliefs, fears and ego before I help them set a goal. Why? Why don’t I just write down the first goal that comes to their mind? Or the biggest goal they can think of? Or prescribe the most enviable, ostentatious goal applicable?

Because anybody can set a big goal and achieve it.

There is nothing special about big goals. Anybody can set the goal of working for themselves and achieve it. Anybody can set a goal of buying a luxury car. Anybody can travel around Europe. Anybody can plan a beautiful wedding. Anybody can get their body into shape. Very few can achieve a goal based solely in the ego and feel satisfied and happy at the end.

On the other hand very few people have the guts and humility to set a goal that has real and deep meaning for them and to work on that regardless of how it is perceived from the outside. Very few have the willingness to admit that really makes their heart flutter and to set about achieving it. So few are prepared to chase their dharma especially if it is something unglamorous like becoming a green keeper, raising children or nursing.

The easy ways to know your goal is not just serving your ego:

1. Are you drawn to it like a moth to a flame?
2. Are the steps towards your goal enjoyable?
3. Do you find your weaknesses become strengths in the face of this goal?
4. Do you find it hard to articulate why you want the goal, because it is just so elemental to your make up?
5. Do you feel as though the stars are aligned & that the road to your goal has been blessed?

We don’t know who we will be in 5 years. We don’t know what we will regret later in life. We don’t know what we will be proud of at 75. We don’t know if we will enjoy something until we do it. Our experience is so very limited and we don’t know what we don’t know. We can’t trust our ego on these matters. We can trust our heart.

Know the goal posts

Ask the question. Know the goal posts. It’s not just wise in business it’s essential for harmonious personal relationships to set boundaries, guidelines, to be clear on what is expected.

How do you know your relationship is healthy? How do you know your friend is living up to their role? How do you know you are delivering at work? How do you know what you can expect from family? Where does the obligation start and stop? How far are you ‘supposed’ to go? According to whom? Who drew these arbitrary lines?

Know what you need. Ask for what you want. Be clear on your deal breakers and enforce your boundaries. If you don’t know what the goal posts are, you will always be disappointed.

I’m wrong… a lot

My near and dear just died from shock at that title. If you ask those who know me well personally, they will tell you that one of my least favourite things is ‘being wrong’. In fact, few of them have ever witnessed me admit an error or mistake. But, despite my utter distaste for the experience, I am wrong… a lot. We all are.

• When I walk in a room I am sure everybody is noticing the flaws in my figure… I’m wrong
• When I think I can’t take it any more… I’m wrong
• When I think people care about when the last time I mopped the floor was… I’m wrong
• When I think I have nothing intelligent to say… I’m wrong
• When I think I simply must do everything… I’m wrong
• When I think the world will stop turning if I take a break, put my feet up and have a cup of tea… I’m wrong
• When I think feeding people will cure their ills… I’m wrong (but at least they are fed)
• When I think it matters if my son’s shirt matches his pants… I’m wrong
• When I think I have remembered everything… I’m wrong
• When I think I can be calm when we get lost en route to a new destination… I’m wrong
• When I think I can please everybody… I’m wrong
• When I think no one is listening… I’m wrong
• When I think I understand… I’m wrong
• When I think there are enough hours in a day (I am writing this at 12.01am)… I’m wrong
• When I am convinced I am not good enough… I’m wrong
• When I think raising my voice helps… I’m wrong
• When I think I suck at learning languages… I’m wrong
• When I think something is more important than responding to a call for “Mumee!”… I’m wrong
• When I think change is an external process… I’m wrong
• When I think I don’t have time to meditate… I’m wrong
• When I think I should feel guilty for eating chocolate… I’m wrong. Very wrong.

Care to share what you are wrong about?

Being ‘in the moment’; a magic wand or a carrot?

There is much to be said for, and indeed much said about, being in the moment. Being in the moment is so elusive that many assume that achieving such awareness will be the magic wand to their problems. Sadly not.

Being in the moment affords us the opportunity to:

• observe what is happening around us
• tune into our emotions
• be aware of our needs
• release our fears and hopes
• act without the influence of our neuroses

In essence being in the moment gives us clarity and freedom but it doesn’t change the moment. There will always be:

• competing priorities
• infinite options
• unfortunate situations
• unknown factors
• things we can’t control

Being in the moment just gives us a chance to see these things as they really are, free from our neuroses and the stories we tell ourselves about how it ‘should be’, what ‘they expect’ and what we ‘ought to do’ if only we were ‘good enough’. Being in the moment allows us to deal with what is in front of us as opposed to what is swimming around in our heads.

Finally being fully aware of the moment without the skills to mindfully act in the moment is like turning up to a gun fight with a carrot. Being in the moment is one aspect of a healthy psyche, but only one and  in the end all roads lead to Rome.