Room For Growth

Mom said to me yesterday, don’t get old – it’s hell.  I said, too late!  Even though I’m getting older (and aren’t we all?), I aspire to be like my friend, Gary Schmidt, who said to me today that he always wants to be learning and growing. 

The pairing of learning and growing results in evolving – stretching, making adjustments, and incorporating new ideas and new information.  However, if you’re toting around a heap of baggage accumulated over your life, you don’t have room for anything new.  Like an emotional hoarder, you’re trapped by things that aren’t serving a purpose in your life now, but are unwilling or unable to let go.  

A dear friend, Michele, was just diagnosed with breast cancer as well as a growth on her thyroid.  For many of us, these diagnoses would be frightening and paralyzing. She’s viewing it as a wake up call, a challenge, a call to arms.  Actually it’s the latest in a series of wake up calls she’s gotten lately starting with a car accident a few months ago, but now she’s finally listening.  Michele told me the emotional wall that she had built up to make her feel safe has just fallen away.  All of those thought patterns that she clung to like armor such as having to prove herself to people she doesn’t even care about have just disappeared.  She’s become more accepting of herself and feels more powerful than ever. Unfortunately it took a crisis for her to come to that realization, but she’s there now.  This is enabling her to be strong and brave facing the fight to regain her health.

What about you?  What are you hoarding?  Do you have relationships which are draining you but don’t serve you anymore?  Do you have long-held beliefs that are now habitual?  It’s one thing to have a belief because it honors one of your core values, and it’s another to live your life on auto-pilot, never evolving from your experiences. 

I don’t watch a lot of reality tv, but I confess that I enjoy Gene Simmons’ Family Jewels on A&E.  I’ve watched it for the past few years, but this season Gene’s family life has undergone a seismic shift.  After years of living his rock star lifestyle, he’s had to confront the consequences of his bad-boy behavior when his ‘girlfriend’ of 28 years and mother of his two children, Shannon Tweed, has come to the realization that she wants something different for her life after the kids left for college.  They’re each having their own mid-life crisis taking them in two different directions.  It’s been sad yet thought-provoking to watch Gene confront his long-held beliefs about family and about being married.  Faced with the crisis of losing Shannon, he’s found that those beliefs aren’t serving him anymore.  They aren’t delivering the deep-down results he truly wants for his life now.  This season’s episodes showed him traveling back to his birthplace in Israel to meet family he never knew he had and making peace with his estranged father at his graveside, as well as getting therapy back in LA which has brought to the surface how he really feels about his family and his role in it.  In the finale filmed months ago he proposed to Shannon, but recent articles say they’re still estranged.  He may have been too late.

Are you on auto-pilot?  Will it take a crisis to create your shift or can you identify and let go of aspects of your life which aren’t working for you anymore?  It could be a career path, vampires disguised as friends, old beliefs which served as armor to protect your wounds, or even the pursuit of old dreams which may have been what you wanted 20 years ago but aren’t anymore.

We often aren’t even aware of the baggage that’s not working for us. Like making assumptions, which I wrote about last week, they’re ingrained and unconscious. If you’re not getting the results you want, it may be time to start listening to your life in the Now.  Contact me for a 30 minute complimentary session, and let’s start clearing out your baggage.

Dangerous Assumptions

How often do you assume you know what someone else is thinking or what they mean?

Mistaken assumptions can be a huge emotional energy drain.  We whip ourselves up into a frenzy of hope or anger by projecting our own thoughts and opinions onto others. We assume everyone sees the world the same way we do and forget that people have different viewpoints and life experiences. ‘Forget’ is the nice way of putting it.  Sometimes we refuse to acknowledge a different perspective or we don’t allow someone to have a viewpoint that’s different from our own.  Assumptions can then pile on top of each other until the crash landing that comes when the assumption bubble bursts.

If this sounds like a familiar challenge for you, make an effort to validate your assumptions.  You could do that a couple of ways.  Start by asking questions to get clarification and make sure you understand, or ask for additional information that will help you see things from another’s point of view.  You won't look stupid, you will look interested - a very attractive quality.

Having a strong connection with your own intuition doesn’t let you off the hook here.  Yes, there are some highly intuitive people who can sense the mood of others or read a room, but you still need to validate your assumptions.

I love this quote from Stephen Hawking in a British Telcom commercial:  “Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking and its greatest failures by not talking.”

I had an interesting experience a couple of years ago when I worked at WaMu.  Each morning I’d stop at Starbucks to get coffee and then make a beeline for my desk.  My staff, who sat in the nearby cubes, knew that I like to be quiet in the morning until I’ve had my coffee, so they’d leave me alone.  But one day a gal who sat on the same side of the floor came up to me, shaking and very upset, demanding to know why I disliked her so much.  I was stunned!  Of course I recognized her as someone whose desk was a few rows over from mine, but I didn’t know her name.  Since she cornered me, I had to admit that fact and asked why she thought I didn’t like her.  She said it was because when I walked by in the morning I always gave her a dirty look. I explained about my pre-coffee state of mind and that if I’m not smiling my face often looks angry even when I’m not (which is unfortunately getting worse with age).  I apologized for being rude in not acknowledging her and promised to do better.

The impression that remained long after I calmed down from being cornered and accused of disliking someone I didn’t even know, was that this poor women had created a massive assumption about me and had been upset for weeks.  Yes...pre-coffee diva-ish behavior on my part, but honestly, why would she want to do that to herself?  It seemed and still seems like such a waste of energy.

I recently read an article about a group of teenagers visiting the U.S. from Qatar.  They said America is not like what they see on tv and the movies, and Arabs are not as they are portrayed either.  They felt the bottom line is the world will be better when we aren’t afraid to ask questions and give answers to each other. 

Think about that next time you catch yourself making assumptions. The trick, of course, is to catch yourself making assumptions in the first place.  I’ve found that the more comfortable you become with who you are – your character, your strengths, your values, your passions, and your purpose – and the more you appreciate your own uniqueness, the more interested you become in the unique aspects of others.

And that’s when your own world becomes a better place.

6 Step Program for Negative Attitude Addiction

Are you unhappy in your current job and planning to look for something else when the job market recovers? Poor business results, downsizing, offshoring and rampant fear are just some of the factors chipping away at job satisfaction. Every day I hear about people who are miserable but have made a conscious decision to stay put for now.

But don’t let the challenges of your current situation undermine your ability to find something better down the road. Before planning your next move, make sure your confidence is in tip top shape. Putting together a powerful resume and search strategy takes confidence and perspective. Choosing to network and sell yourself takes courage and persistence, even in a good economy.

So what can you do now to build your confidence? Well, how is your daily attitude, your state of mind, right now? Would you hire you? Or do you:

• Complain to coworkers, family & friends about your crummy job, in fact that’s all you seem to talk about?
• Find fault with everything - do you actively look for things to gripe about?
• Allow your worst self to come out because you just don’t care what other people think of you or how you impact them?

You don’t have to love your job, but a long term goal of wanting something better in the future needs to be more important. If you’re feeling hopeless you may be caught in a destructive cycle – addicted to your negativity. Addicts can’t help themselves. The short-term pleasure of release and the feeling of superiority from finding fault outweighs everything else.

Break this cycle and take charge of creating your brighter future. Here is my 6 step program for overcoming a negative attitude addiction:

Step 1: Admit you have a problem, and the problem isn’t your job or your stupid boss, or the economy. You may be unhappy with these things and feel justified, but that thinking won’t move you forward. The problem that needs to be solved is your attitude, and you’re in the drivers’ seat.

Step 2: Take a personal inventory. Be brutally honest and get specific. If this is difficult, ask for perspective from someone you trust or hire a coach to help. Be open to seeing things that aren’t pretty, but don’t judge or feel bad about yourself. Just recognize your behavior and the results. Name it and own it.

Step 3: Make amends. You’ve probably done some reputational damage with the very people you need for a reference. Business 101: don’t burn bridges. If you don’t want to openly acknowledge you’ve been an ogre, try a softer approach. Don’t worry about being ‘Suzy Sunshine’ – just make an honest effort.

Step 4: Try on a new code of behavior. Don’t cause whiplash by trying to suddenly become someone else. Identify those situations that bring out your worst, and develop strategies to keep your ogre from appearing. Tape your mouth shut if you have to. It’s not the magnitude of the changes – consistency and persistence are the keys here.

Step 5: Take it one day at a time, or as Dale Carnegie taught: live in day-tight compartments. Instead of looking for things to complain about, look for the good in each day, even if it’s only what you had for lunch.

Step 6: Be a positive influence. Why not take all those brains, all that skill, all of those great leadership qualities you’re going to highlight on your resume and turn them into a force for good right now? Nothing will build your confidence more than knowing that you can deliver value and be a constructive and positive contributor in any business climate, not just the good times. If you’re saying, “but no one will recognize and reward me for this,” then you’ve got your eye on the wrong target. Think bigger!

There will be times when you backslide, but just catch yourself and try again. If you make an honest effort, your confidence will begin to grow and you’ll be in a better frame of mind to begin the next phase of creating a brighter future for yourself.