Making a Bigger Difference 11/11/2011
 photo by Ellen Britt It's not what we say or what we do that makes a difference, but rather who we are. Every morning when we wake up and look out from our two eyes into the world something happens. We become aware that we have a body, we seem to step into that body like the crab scrambling for a shell, and then out of that body we gaze, blink, step forward, and spend our day. We don't give this routine much consideration, so it is very easy to just assume that we are limited, confined, fragile and our sphere of influence is reduced to those we meet or talk with in any given moment. I think we often start our day inside a feeling of smallness. We forget that our influence is not limited to our task list, our meeting calendar or today's projects. In truth, we are not aware of how wide we reach, how many people we touch, and most importantly, how we are transmitting beyond our shells. In part I'm simply talking about just lifting our eyes for a moment to take in a wider view of life. A greater awareness of the largeness of ourselves. When you do that, just briefly, right now, do you really think that you are this dinky body and nothing more? How can you be certain that people don't remember you, think of you, care for you and are impacted by you -- in ways that you have no idea of. In fact people right now who have never met you may have some kind of opinion of you. Each of us has a reach that is far greater than it might seem. Even people, like myself, who have decided that to reach out deliberately to touch others and to be a part of moving this world forward in a loving direction, may or may not be fully aware of this all the time. But everyone makes a difference to someone. Everyone matters. Everyone. You don't have to decide to change the world and help thousands of people to be making a difference in your world right now. In fact, you couldn't NOT make a difference if you tried. The question is, what difference are you making? You don't have to sign up for any cause if you don't want to. But would you like that to be conscious of how impact works? Anyone who is working for change certainly needs to. Without that awareness people try to influence in all the wrong ways, through bullying, guilt-making, pushing, forcing, and many other angry forms of activism. Every time you've been repulsed by someone's approach to donate to their cause, you were reacting to their impact on you. You were not reacting to the cause itself. So, difference-makers (in other words, all of us), who are you? Are you acting from the discomfort of your own badly-fitting shell? Your limited perspective? Your anger? Your frustration? Your blaming others for the state of the world? I don't think any of us humans will ever be perfect, so forget being squeaky clean. But do pay attention to who are you being. Who you are being is not an action, it is an attitude. Here are some ways we can see you as you transmit who you are: - are you opinionated or open? - are you a listener or are you only interested in confirming what you think? - are you hard with yourself, so you cannot allow yourself to forgive others? - are you rushing so much that you find it tough to give someone your full attention? - are you reflective in a conversation, or reactive? - are you often thinking how other people need to change their ways and habits? - are you blaming the person you love for not giving you what you need? Of course we all show up all these way sometimes. No one is immune from being human. Gage your true impact on others, not from your actions, but from the deeper ways in which you hold fixed opinions and views of other people. Notice the feeling in you when you talk to someone. What's your internal opinion? What do you think you are really transmitting to them? We are never transmitting words, we are transmitting US. The smaller and more limited you feel inside you, the greater your negative impact on others -- no matter how noble your cause may be. You cannot replace inner shrinkage with outer expansion. You must expand inwardly first before you can do anything effectively in the world, with your partner, children or your colleagues at work. May you see something bigger about yourself today. In other words, may you see something true. Because the truth is that your shell is nothing more than the collection of all the smallest ideas you have about yourself. Who you are could never fit into any shell. And knowing that makes a difference. Add Comment Life Jacket For Your Crisis 08/06/2010
If you are experiencing a serious crisis or loss, I highly recommend you read Daphne Rose Kingma's Ten Things To Do When Life Falls Apart. You will be inspired, comforted and for each of the Ten Things there are exercises for reflection, meditation and journaling that will assist you: 1. CRY YOUR HEART OUT 2. FACE YOUR DEFAULTS (four steps to face them) 3. DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT (No, it doesn’t feel like expansion…it feels like loss but you can change your relationship to the problem) 4. LET GO (hanging on is fear, letting go is hope) 5. REMEMBER WHO YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN 6. PERSIST (hope is born of persistence) 7. INTEGRATE YOUR LOSS (you Are big enough if you remember who you really are) 8. LIVE SIMPLY (a surprising chapter!) 9. GO WHERE THE LOVE IS 10. LIVE IN THE LIGHT OF THE SPIRIT And remember: There is more to you than what you ordinarily think of as yourself Musings on death 03/02/2010
Death is not a topic we have comfortably integrated. It is shrouded in superstition, and fear of it underpins so much of our thinking and it plays out in the way we speak about stopping aging, how we treat 'older' people and the things we tell ourselves about our own bodies. A large plastic surgery industry feeds off a simple fear, that others will not approve of us, although that is not entirely the fault of surgeons. They are only responding to the ways we ourselves are choosing to deal with becoming older. Would we really treat people the way we do, would we ignore our children, would we not go to dinner with Mom this week, again, if we had a healthy sense of our own mortality? Wouldn't knowing we do not have a guarantee of tomorrow in the least, shuffle our priorities so radically that we might be unrecognizable? If we really knew tomorrow we'd be lucky to wake up, would we be making any of our same choices today? Despite all our daily worries about the future, the future in fact does not exist. (Nor does the past, for that matter, but that's another topic). When we live in worry about what isn't real, we suffer, we lose all our joy and we try run around creating solutions for a problem that is does not exist. We waste so much energy and time and love. You don't have to look further than Chile and Haiti to know there is no tomorrow. Let's be something more than just occupied. Let's stop being busy and consider what's meaningful to us. There really is only one moment. The one you and I are living now. if you are interested in this topic, listen to the show with Stan Goldberg, Lessons For Living Without Regret  What You Say Is What You Get 01/27/2010
"If you think you can, or if you think you can't, either way, you're right." Henry Ford  We all experience the world, not as it is, but through the filter of our thoughts about it. No matter how you think of yourself, or how you have judged yourself - good news. Not everything you tell yourself is true. We can stop because we started it On the show today, It Is What You Say It is, (Jan 27) I talked about what builds the house you live in. Ever catch yourself saying "Oh, I'm not good at that"? Our opinions and beliefs build our limiting walls. I've had many clients tell me they can't manage this or that based on having never really tried it. We bust right through those to incredible new places. How? Because they are just lies. They are lies that we install not just as our walls but also as the windows in our house. Through these lies we view the world outside: a limited place of ever decreasing possibility. It doesn't have to be this way. No matter how long ago you started, or how well practiced you are, or how scary the lie. Luckily, you can't make a lie true, just by believing it for a long time Love is one of the big, big areas where we make a lot of decisions about how limited our lives - and our chances! - are: there are only so many single people, only so many healthy single people, only so many not-entirely-insane single people. Oh, we have so many fixed ideas! But love isn't limited at all. Love is who you are and it doesn't arrive when your life partner does, or when your child hugs you, or when you complete a successful project. It is always there for you to have and depends on nothing at all. (see the show Jan 29 All You Need Is Love when I talk to John Welshons, author of One Soul, One Love, One Heart ) Greg Baer illustrated this so well in his Master Class with SuperCoach Academy this week. This is roughly the story: So there you are sitting by the pool, enjoying the sun on your dream vacation. And someone from the pool is splashing you and splashing you, and you are getting wetter and wetter and angrier and angrier. Then you finally move enough to look into the pool and give this person a piece of your mind, when you realize they are drowning. What would have to "happen" for you to lose you anger and get in touch with caring about them? Nothing. Your anger is just gone in a poof, you become instantly overcome with a deep desire to help. Love is just there, in every moment. It's a decision. Love is just there in every moment. OK, I just said that. But... Does that sound possible? Does that sound true? Why would you even care? I'm reminded of an extraordinary day, a day when everyone in New York - and then around the world - suddenly became aware of the presence, the importance and the interconnectedness of us all. We were deeply moved by the preciousness of life. What I notice when I think about 9/11 is, that day people made a choice to love, to care, to feel connected. You didn't have to. You just did. That choice is available always. Why is it important to know this? So you can. Listen to the show here The Limits of Impossible 01/20/2010
Have you noticed lately that lots of things we never thought could possibly happen, have happened? Did you know bionic research is in the process of creating the 'Million Dollar Man'? (OK, actually she's a woman and she has a bionic arm she can attach where her physical arm used to be. See last months' National Geographic if you think I make this stuff up). More to the point, guess how you control a bionic arm? You use your mind. Not the conscious mind, the one that takes effort - the other one, the one that just simply 'moves the arm'. The mind truly amazing and too wonderful a thing to waste. I believe it is not confined to a brain, but just as we supposedly activate only a small portion of the brain, we waste the true power of our mind every day. What does this have to do with the limits of the impossible? Basically, our minds have a lot of say over what we believe is possible. Ever tried to outwit your own mind when it says - I can't? Now when I suggest we waste the capacity of the mind, I'm not talking about creative day-dreaming. I'm talking about going unconscious. For example, you might go to exercise after a hard day, let's say, taking a long run in nature but as the body oxygenates, you use your mind to replay the stress of something that happened earlier, over and over again. I'm talking about going for a massage and lying there thinking about all your faults and all the ways you hate your body. That kind of thing. How many times have you had a wonderful idea and then stomped it out with all the reasons why it is not possible? If dreams were socks, somewhere there are drawers and drawers full of all the lost socks waiting to be found again and paired up with their owners. Although we may be more accustomed to choking off our dreams, by labeling them 'Impossible' the good news is that we can use the same imagination either to argue for our limitations, or to find creative ways to dance our way to our target. What I'm saying is essentially, it's possible to change the film running in your head from today's matinee of fear and limitation to tomorrow's long running smash hit called your life. And while I don't think that's accomplished by "positive thinking" alone, I do think our creative resources are easier to access from a mindset of openness rather than shut-down-ness. Argue for your limitations and quite simply, you'll have them. Unless you have a great friend (or a great coach) who will risk being honest enough to challenge you, I don't think many people will bother to take the opposite view. In fact, most people are happy for you to keep your limitations and live happily ever after with your long list of These Are The Things That Are Quite Impossible For Me, Thank You Very Much. Because they are doing exactly the same. If this sounds horrid, it's because it is. Challenging your 'Impossibles' is one of the most liberating experiences you can ever have. I saw it in Michael Neill's "30 Days to Creating the Impossible" and I've talked about it plenty on the show. Most recently with 'Who Says The Impossible is Impossible" (aired January 20, 2010) To challenge your 'impossibles' I highly recommend keeping an eye out for Michael's next program. Until then, here are some things you can do/read: Gay Hendricks' book, The Big Leap Get past your Upper Limit Syndrome, by expanding your tolerance for things going well in your life Barbara Sher's books Wishcraft and I Could Do Anything, If Only I Knew What It Was (I highly recommend her Twitter IdeaParties on Thursdays for getting past dream blockages!) And you can:
The Qualities That Will Save Your Life 01/15/2010
When I got Lynne Klippel's book, Overcomers Inc., in the post, I have to say my initial reaction was I liked the book, hated the word. Overcomers. I don't want to be an overcomer. I want to sail effortlessly through life and have everything be easy. Overcoming is such a dull, pedestrian task. Maybe, "Go Climb That Mountain!" just make you tingle with inspiration, but it makes me want to climb back into bed. I read the book and the true life stories in it, and although I still don't like to think of myself as an overcomer, I have to admit that I am. We all are. If you got through asking someone on a first date, or wearing really high heels for the first time, you are one too. And that's not a dull thing at all. In fact, there are some pretty hefty qualities that we need to be able to call on when the going gets tough. Here's what I think those are: Taking responsibility Surrendering Trust Willingness In every real life experience in that book, as well as in my own life and the lives of people I coach, these are the core of creating a new life - whether you are creating on the rubble of an old life, or you are just ready to move to the next square on the board. Taking Responsibility OK, swallow hard now, this is the painful part. Yes. We all have to take on the fact that we live in our bodies, and that what we chose is what makes our life a heaven or a hell-hole. Until we do, even if it's just saying, "I'm really the only one who can get me out of this mess", no change can begin. As Debbie Ford used to say in our training, over and over again, "No one is coming to save you." Ouch. Surrender This is a bit sucky too. When you are very used to being the project manager of the universe, or at the very least queen in your own teacup, surrendering to the idea that you just don't know how to fix it is, well, let's just say, not fun. Surrendering doesn't mean giving up, it just means giving way. You have to get your own ideas out of the way in order for new ones to come in. In my life, this often mean surrendering some idea of who I am, in order to get a glimpse of a bigger me. Trust We place our trust in many things, including the universe, our pets, our friends, and our lovers. Maybe you trust that things will 'all work out for good' or some other spiritual principle. Whatever you chose to trust is up to you, the one thing I know you can trust, always? Your own inner guidance. When that channel is clear it is never leading you astray. It might take you in a direction you don't like, but that's another matter! Willingness Oh, you have to be willing to change, to move, to be different, to let go of what you thought would be. Willingness is the oil that greases all the wheels. Willingness to try the new, to step when you can't see forward very far, and willingness to fail - help you take it all less personally. And that's a good thing. For more on this topic listen to the radio show from January 15th with Lynne Klippel | Well Within
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