You Are Not In Charge

Waiting for the school bus, Charlie started barking at an innocent walker.  He saw him at a distance and started with the short snorts and growls and as the stranger got closer, he broke into a full barking spell.  He does that from time to time and my usual response is to tell him to calm down, or to shut up depending on my mood and how long the barking has been going on.  Today, for some reason I reminded him that he wasn’t in charge of the neighborhood.  I kept on telling him calmly, “you’re not in charge”.

I wonder how often we are disturbed by whatever is going on because of the misconception that we are in charge or responsible.  I wonder if I truly believed that I was not in charge or responsible for all the drivers out there, would I still be annoyed at whoever was driving too slow or too fast or, … Would I be more calm watching the news, if I didn’t believe I was in charge of the world and all its inhabitants and their actions, or opinions?

Truth is the only thing we should be responsible for is our own thoughts, emotions, and reactions.  Yet, we readily give that responsibility to everyone else: our spouses, ex-spouses, children, co-workers, bosses, etc.   It seems like everyone else is in charge of our reaction to life.  I’m sure if my dog was a human, he’d blame the stranger for his barking fit.  However, knowing Charlie, if he could talk, he’d probably say, “I’m a dog and he seemed like a nice guy, I was trying to find out if he wanted to play, I just wanted some attention”.
 
The next time I get upset about something, I’m going to ask myself: What’s really going on here?  Who is in charge?  Am I longing for some attention, someone to play with?  If nothing else, it sure will get my mind off of whatever was aggravating me and put me in a dog frame of mind. 

Questions To Ponder:
1)    What are some instances where you easily get aggravated?
2)    Do you find yourself in charge of the situation (e.g., the highway, the news, politics, etc.) or are you upset because you are not?
3)    What would you like to hear (e.g., you’ve been promoted, these are not your issues anymore, you need a vacation, etc.) from whomever is in charge that would make you feel relieved?



If you find yourself questioning your responsibilities and would like to explore what really matters to you, you may want to work with a spiritual life coach.  Spiritual life coaching is a process where you, the client is the driver and there are no right or wrong answers to any of your questions.  Contact me for a consultation to see if this type of facilitation is what you want.

Overcoming Fears

We are full of fears.  We move forward in hopes of not succumbing to our fears.  We are afraid of all kinds of things, real (as in it happened to us or someone we know) or imaginary (there is no real way it could happen, but we are still afraid).  Some of the most common fears I work with my clients on are: the fear of being lonely, failure, ending up poor and not being able to give the kids a better opportunity, and letting others (parents or family) down.
 
Within these fears are sub-fears.  And when you go even deeper than that, what remains is the fear of death or the fear of nothingness.  So, we keep on being busy, doing things, working hard, creating or participating in all kinds of drama, feeling guilty, running to or away from things, incessant worrying and an unhealthy sense of responsibility, etc. in order to avoid the so-called reality of our own mortality.  As we get older, it gets worse.  Once we see our parents getting old, or when our own health starts deteriorating, we become more obsessed with our addictions.

The more we can fit into a day, the less time for frivolous wanderings. The harder we work, the more we’ll deserve that one week vacation.  Only after we’ve slaved away can we justify taking a break.  And then, we are so exhausted, that the break is a necessary respite to prevent a physical or mental breakdown.  It is also a state of anesthetized rest, to get us prepared for the next week of full activity.  And we go on like this until something breaks down or we retire and die.

The ones we hope to be like are the ones who make it to retirement heaven and move away to someplace warm by the ocean and play golf with other people in heaven, praising their successful children who they worked so hard to provide for.  The failures are the ones who don’t make it to heaven.  They are the ones whose lives fall apart through a devastating loss: divorce, being laid off from work, death of someone close that they never quite get over, health crisis or even their own death.
 
This really is the biggest fear, the fear of not making it to the end in heaven (as defined by you).  No one wants to be like those other people who didn’t make it.  No one wants to be the shameful one whose husband left her for a younger woman or the one who couldn’t quite pull it together after his son committed suicide or worse yet, be the one with the diagnosis of terminal cancer.  In fact, we keep on telling ourselves, “at least my life is not as bad as XYZ” and that belief is what keeps us motivated to keep on doing what we’ve been doing.  It is like we read what we want into what we think we see.  Nothing bad has happened to me yet, so I must be doing it right.

Fears feed our addictions.  When you see someone who is obsessive about anything, they are afraid of something.  They often rationalize and resist the acknowledgment of their fear(s).  Most times, they are unaware of what’s really happening and keep on playing an internal game of hide and go seek with them self.  This keeps truth at bay.
  
If you are tired of running in circles, avoiding the truth, all of your fears, etc., it might be time to start working with a spiritual life coach.  The first step in changing self defeating patterns and overcoming any fear is always the hardest, because it involves a certain degree of recognition.  Usually, people don’t even know that they are afraid of something.  They just know that something isn’t right in their world.  Either way, start talking, start looking at your deepest, darkest corners with someone who won’t judge you or force you to make any decisions.  Spiritual life coaching is about partnering with someone in a safe space and examining and repurposing all the junk that you carry with you every day.  Only then can you decide by yourself if you are ready to let any of it go.  And when you do, everything will change.

Happy 2011, best wishes for overcoming those pesky, destructive and painful fears!

The Myth of Work-Life Balance

I absolutely love this short video on the myth of work-life balance .  What is so true and compelling is the fact that once we make the decision to have a certain degree of work-life balance, we have to be willing to change the definition of success.  It may not mean the salary, title, position, etc. as defined by mass consciousness and the 3-D world.  This is when courage and the willingness to be different and go against the grain come in handy. 

I hope that we have what it takes to change the world of course, by changing ourselves first!


Questions to Ponder:

1) Do you have work-life balance?  How?

2) When did you ever have work-life balance?  What were you doing and why is it different now?

3) What would a typical day be like if you had work-life balance?

If you are at a point in your life where work-life balance seems unachievable and you know that if you don't change, something terrible might happen, you might want to consider spiritual life coaching.  Spiritual coaching is a process where together we question the rules by which you live and you decide if you want to continue living according to them.  Contact me for a complimentary 30 minute consultation to decide if you'd like to be coached by me.

When Force Doesn't Work

I’ve been busy with my hands and my ears lately.  In fact, I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had the time to write on my blog.  Writing is a form of speaking and I guess I haven’t had much to say.  My self- expression has taken the form of preparing meals, wrapping presents, rearranging furniture, arranging flowers, etc.   When I have not been doing that, I have been listening to my clients sharing their frustrations and fears. 

Last weekend, I facilitated a workshop on the topic of the rewards and challenges of being a professional bi-cultural woman.  Most of the women had experienced either first hand or second hand (through their parents’ experiences) challenges prior to their education and success.  In fact, the driving force behind their accomplishments was the lack that their families had experienced.  Determined to not experience the hardship of their families, they were pushed to excel to create a better life for themselves and their children.

This type of determination is what most successes in the material and physical world are made of.  What feels wrong is when the drive or push becomes a meaningless compulsion out of habit.  And it always ends up that way, when we keep on pushing because we think it is the way.  Not only isn’t it fun to be pushy, but it stops producing or produces the wrong results.  Many times, our forceful ways are misinterpreted or we might get pushed back. 

When we are programmed to push and force things to happen, even after a defeat, we get right back up ready for the next battle.  This attitude may have been rewarded in athletics or at war, but at work or in life, it is not looked upon that way.  This is when the unraveling occurs.  What used to work, what you either learned from someone or taught yourself is no longer true.  So, how must you be?

Questions to Ponder:
1)    If you find yourself in a situation where nothing that used to work works anymore, what do you do?
2)    What are some things that you used to tell yourself when you were younger and now, you wonder if they are true?
3)    When have you pushed or forced something to happen?  And how did it turn out?

Spiritual life coaching is a process where you are allowed and encouraged to question all belief systems that no longer serve you.  Through this type of coaching, you will re-create your own reality where you live by your own inner values expressing them, and finding more meaning in the smallest of things.  If you are interested in learning more about spiritual life coaching with me, please contact me.

What Are You Feeding On?

This post is written with Professional Bi-cultural women in mind.  The “she” in the article is anyone and everyone I have coached.

I keep on ending up where I started with my coaching conversations.  It goes something like this: “so what do you really want?”  Rarely do I get a straight answer.  Most of the time she goes on explaining something that happened or is happening, hoping that I can infer what it is that she wants.  I’ll listen and go back to the same question.  She gets frustrated, she says she doesn’t know, or she comes up with another story.

We walk together to the same place, the place we started.  Sometimes I am the provocateur, sometimes a teacher, a companion, a friend, and most of the time she knows that I have walked in those exact same steps.  She trusts that I won’t belittle the pain, frustration or exhaustion she is feeling.  In fact, I won’t even pretend to take it away.  She knows that I honor her journey, her choices, and her experience.  I have nothing to gain or lose regardless of what she does or doesn’t do.
 
We sometimes gently and other times, not so gently investigate her food source.  What has she been feeding on I ask.  Sometimes it is an old memory, the way things used to be, a fantasy, or a dream.  Sometimes it is her work, she likes being busy, it numbs the feelings.  Sometimes it is her children or her family.  Sometimes it is an ex-husband who just won’t go away.  Sometimes it is worry about the future, what will happen to her or her children.  Sometimes it is the fear of the “what ifs”, her ending up in a situation she had worked so hard not to end up in.  Sometimes it is her addiction to control and to perfect.  Sometimes it is the drama in her life, her work, or on TV.  And sometimes it is food, when she isn’t even hungry.
 
Once we know what she is really hungry for, then we ask the question again: what do you really want?  From this place, abstaining from the junk she really doesn’t want to be feeding on anymore, she can go within and embrace who she truly is and then the real journey begins. 

This is why I love what I do.  I get to walk with amazing women who inspire me with their courage, honesty and a desire to change every day. 

Questions to Ponder:
1)    What have you been feeding on?
2)    What are you really hungry for?
3)    How will you know you’ve found what you’ve really wanted?

Spiritual life coaching is a process that helps clarify your real wants and desires in life.  Without the filters and feeding tubes, you can now make conscious choices about where you want to go and how you want to get there.  If you’d like to investigate if spiritual life coaching might help you on your journey, please contact me.

Inner and Outer Values

As a bi-cultural woman I shouldn’t be surprised that most of my clients are other professional bi-cultural women.  I have observed what I’d like to call a challenge of inner vs. outer values.  This is not limited to bi-cultural women, but they are the ones who have brought this to my attention.

I’d like to think of inner values as those we’ve had for what may seem forever.  For example, take Jane, when asked, “What are your top 3 values?”  She mentions: freedom, courage, and justice.  Based on my interactions with her, it was obvious that honesty was high up there.  So I asked her why she didn’t choose honesty, and she was puzzled herself.  She said, “I guess it’s just the way I am, so I don’t even think about it”.   Inner values are those you don’t have to think about, they are part of who you inherently are.  You would possess and express those values regardless of your circumstances.  You might not even notice it in someone else unless of course they weren’t.  But, that’s another discussion.

Jane is a bi-cultural woman who is a first generation American.  Her parents moved to the U.S. when she was only 10.  She had to quickly adapt to a new environment, language, etc.  She had to go through being the new kid in school, the new kid who dressed and spoke differently.  She had to adjust quickly and learn to be tough so she could survive the challenge of being the different one.  She developed the outer values of freedom, courage and justice during this time and she has applied it in her life and career since.
 
Outer values are developed through challenges and difficult situations that provide the right circumstances.  Whether these were always Jane’s values and had been sitting in a dormant state until she moved to another country, we’ll never know and is irrelevant to this discussion.
Outer values are the ones my clients use to navigate through life and challenges.  It’s what is at the top of their mind, and consciousness.  It’s what they rely on when things go wrong.  Ironically, it is also what they struggle with. 

For example, Jane’s outer value of freedom is something she talks about all the time.  She sees herself free from what other people think, not afraid to push the envelope, a daring to be different quality.  However, in her professional life, she is very careful with how she presents herself.  She appears to those she works with as a very professional and conservative person.  Freedom is a selected value that she uses when she wants to, it is not an inherent inner value.  She likes to please authority, and her bosses.  However, if something goes wrong at work, if her bosses expect her to lie for example, and her inner value is honesty, she will use freedom, her outer value to get out of that situation.  This of course comes across to her bosses as something unexpected.  They might even think of her as someone impulsive or erratic because they never saw it coming.  When we don’t express all of our values consistently, we can be misunderstood.

What if Jane felt truly free?  What if she showed up at work the same way she shows up with her friends or family?  What if she allowed her creativity and unconventionality to be expressed at work?  Would she still use freedom as a crutch to rely on when things got bad?  Or would freedom be something she’d be known for like her honesty? 

I’d like to think of our outer values as opportunities for development or conversion into inner values.  It takes practice, a mirror and a coach to help us strengthen and consistently use those values so that they become part of our inner or core self if we so choose.

Questions to Ponder:
1)    What are your top 3 inner values?
2)    What are your top 3 outer values?
3)    When do you use your outer values and with whom?

Spiritual life coaching is a client driven process where you can explore your values and determine how you express them in your life and/or work.  If you are interested in learning about how you could be consistently in congruence with your own values, please contact me for a complimentary 30 minute consultation.

Attention vs. Acceptance

This post is related to the previous post and regarding women waking up.  The women I work with are all high achieving professionals who are tired of playing the same games and achieving the same small results.  They are highly productive doers who refuse to do what others tell them to when it doesn’t make sense to do so.   In fact, they are here to change the way business is done.  They are intelligent women, engaged in whatever it is they do and understand how things work and are frustrated about how it just doesn’t make sense anymore.   Their engagement is a result of their attention.  They have attended to their accomplishments and broken with tradition either in their own family units, their ancestral lines, cultural norms, or society in general in order to get here. 

In the pauses that they take with me, we often speak of acceptance.  It is a new concept for them as it was and is for me.  Acceptance embodies a sense of non-doing which seems like the unnatural result of what one would expect if you are being highly attentive and engaged.  In other words, if I care, I must do something.  Caring and doing seem to go hand in hand.  Acceptance does not deny caring, in fact, it is the purest form of caring.  It is caring but not taking the responsibility for the object of your caring.

Acceptance is caring plus trust.

For example, if as a parent you are involved with your child’s education, you send them to the best schools you can afford, you help create an environment that is conducive to doing their school work, you encourage them and help them when they ask for it, you talk to their teachers, etc.  But ultimately, their success in school is up to them.  In fact, if you try to do more than provide the right environment and be interested, it can back fire.  Kids do not appreciate overly involved parents and need independence and to know that they are trusted.  This is an example of acceptance.   If the kid is not interested in doing well or is not pushing himself hard enough, you cannot beat it into him.  You accept.  Or do you?

An inauthentic form of acceptance is an act filled with empty words.  Our demeanor and attitude reflects our level of acceptance.

Sometimes we hide our egos in the guise of responsibility.  We claim that we are responsible for our children, our schools, our community and our country.  And really the motivating factor for our actions is always our ego.  It is about how we want to look or be perceived.  I want to be a good parent.  I want to be better than my parents.  I want to be there for my kids.  I want to offer my kids what I didn’t have growing up.  These enter our consciousness and all they are, are justifications for trying to control a situation that seems to be out of control. 

Acceptance is about allowing.  Can we allow our children to become who they want to be, even if that person is not someone we like or approve of?  Funny thing is , they don’t really know what they want.  So, can we allow them to be someone that they do not quite understand?  Can we live with that level of uncertainty when it comes to our most treasured assets, our children? 

Peace of mind is achieved with a healthy balance of “being” and “doing” that is sourced from “being”.  In other words, when you allow and accept, you pay attention and now can take action if needed.  When you show up being responsible for only you and to only yourself, you are a role model to others.  Your motivation for doing anything is not for control or for correction, but because it brings you joy.  And what better to model than that!

Questions to Ponder:
1)    When and what do you accept and allow?
2)    Who and what are you responsible for?
3)    What does the term acceptance mean to you?

If you are a highly accomplished professional and are finding yourself tired, hopeless, and disappointed in the quality of your life, your relationships, and the sacrifices you’ve had to make for your career, you might consider spiritual life coaching to connect with the bigger picture of your life in a safe, non-judgmental space.  If you would like to learn more about spiritual life coaching with me, please contact me for a complimentary consultation.