Have you ever played pool? Did you notice how you might be a ½ millimeter off when you tap the white ball, but by the end of the table the white ball is off course by inches? Such a little thing as a ½ a millimeter can radically change through time and space. The same thing applies to any change we want to encourage in our lives. We are actively living in time and space. Any small changes you adopt to improve yourself, will grow through time, if you keep at it.

Things that might empower you:

Power List! Write a list of all the things that you have accomplished. Make sure you add things like, I graduated from…, I taught my child…, I am a good friend to… Find accomplishments from your education, your personal life, your work/career, and volunteer jobs. Have you every gotten a compliment about being smart, or creative, or funny? Write it down. Keep the list somewhere that you can find it and add to it as you go. This list will help on the days you feel less than. It will help you challenge your thinking, when you may be more negative than is useful.
Leave yourself Love Notes! These aren’t love notes in the traditional format, but rather you telling yourself the things you need to hear. I am capable! I manage stress well! I am likeable! I care about people and they care about me! I am smart and getting smarter! Put these post it note messages up all around your bathroom mirror, you will have to see them at least twice a day and they will be good for you.
Try Power Posing! Stand like Superman or Wonder Woman. Raise your hands in the Victory V and smile to the sky. Sit with your legs up on the desk and your hands behind your head like a big shot. Find a power pose and then practice it in private, but over time, you will change the testosterone and cortisol levels in your body and will develop a more powerful sense of yourself.
Visualize! See yourself handling anything you need to do well. See yourself being successful in anything you might normally be scared of, such as talking in front of people, or in a job interview, going to a party where you don’t know people, walking into a classroom the first day, whatever might be scary. Then see yourself doing that thing with confidence.
Let Go! It can be hard to let go of regrets, resentments or worries, it seems you’re hardly human if you don’t have a few of these. All these things are either past focused or future focused, and they take attention away from ‘now.’ And, unfortunately, the more you focus on the negative aspects of the past or the future, the harder it is to feel good about yourself and/or your direction in the present. When we focus on things we have no control over, the past especially, it’s really difficult to move forward. Looking backwards is only helpful if you are learning from it or letting go of it. The future is open and unknown, we can work to influence it in positive ways, but worry and resentments rarely get you where you want to go.

Try these tools to help you keep your energy high as you move toward your goals. We also need to support ourselves through the journey. Just like in pool, these tiny tweaks will lead you to new outcomes. As you make these small adjustment, see how they are working, if you are feeling more empowered, then make another, and then another, and another.

Actions, Creative Mind, tools

tiny tweaks can lead to BIG SHIFTS

Creative Mind

Let your life lightly dance

The Quote for the Week.

Actions, Creative Mind, The Science of the Brain, tools

Tiger Tiger

Tiger! Tiger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night.
William Blake

If we roll back time about 12,000 years, what we would find in 10,000 BC is small bands of humans who had mastered using tools, they could use fire, they had art, and they had a developing culture. But, they were still outnumbered by all sorts of scary things that thought, “Humans taste like chicken.” The reason I am even mentioning this, is that humans have had to developed a very quick defensive response or arousal response in their brain. They needed to be able to react quickly to the tiger sneaking up on them, they needed fast reflexes that got them running faster than others, or up a tree in a second. This arousal response is something I talked about in the blog about the Navy Seal training program. It’s very connected to the Fight, Flight or Freeze response. People needed ways to survive in a dangerous world and the people who had quick arousal responses typically made it to parenthood and passed on their genes.

Fast forward 12,000 years. You and I live in a very different world. There are not as many tigers stalking us, but the world is still filled with situations and other people who can, at worst, be dangerous, and at best be annoying to the point that we get stressed out. Who among us has had a serious illness, or the loss of a loved one, or had to swerve as they’re driving to avoid another car, or had to grab a child who is about to have a calamity, or tripped as we were walking and texting. Speedy reflexive actions are life savers. But, not all situations are truly life or death. The husband or wife who is annoying us, might be really annoying, but probably isn’t deadly. Yet, we may have a reaction to this person that is bigger and more explosive than necessary. Especially depending on how long we have held our stress in check.

There are many tools to manage our brains on stress and fear.

1/ Meditation. Meditation isn’t just for monks, it also doesn’t have to take hours. Meditation can be as simple as focusing on your breathing for 2 minutes, focusing on your breathing until you feel your automatic nervous system relax. There is no need to chant, though there isn’t anything wrong with that either. But, really it’s an intentional shift of focus from what is outside of you and stressful (external) to your breathing and body relaxation (internal). The more you practice this tool, the easier it is to do. Also the easier it is to access when you’re feeling stressed. I often recommend to those new to meditating, try focusing on your breathing every time you sit down, for a minute or 2. You might end up meditating 10 times a day, for 1 or 2 minutes, but this is still going to have a positive effect on your stress and build your toolbox. The hardest thing for people to do is sit down and try and meditate for 30 minutes, you have to learn to work this muscle a minute at a time.

2/ Laugh. Readers Digest has said it for years, laughter is the best medicine… Both laughing and crying do a similar thing in your body, they pump the diaphragm and relax and tense muscles. On a physiological level this action moves chemicals around the body, like stress chemicals, which help to flush them from your system. But, laughter offers other benefits too. Laughter is linked to a healthy immune system. When we are stressed, we make more blood platelets, which cause obstructions in our arteries. Laughter increases our natural killer cells which combat illnesses, we increase our Gamma-interferon, T-cells, and B-cells all of which help us to stay healthy even under stress. Also, researchers estimate that laughing 100 times is equal to 10 minutes on a rowing machine… I know which I would choose. Check out Laughter Yoga, it’s an international movement that might just crack you up.

3/ Challenge it. Someone once said, “don’t believe everything you think.” Well, it’s true. When we are afraid, stressed or angry, our brains will tell us all sorts of amazing and false things… Be very careful what you latch on to, in these moments. Depending on our personalities, we may over react that we did something wrong, or conversely that everyone else is wrong. Either of these responses could be incorrect. The truth, whatever that grey area is, probably lies more in the middle, and either cursing yourself, or cursing someone else probably isn’t going to help much. Plus, you may just be reacting to misinformation. Dr. Amen talks about asking yourself 2 questions. 1. Do I know this belief to be 100% true? 2. What do I know that challenges the negative belief? These questions are great. You may find you are telling yourself the truth, but if your not, then you can head off making the situation worse.

4/ Just Wait. Steven Covey, in the 7 Habits, talks about being ProActive and giving yourself time to choose a different response. When our brains start freaking out, our cortisol and adrenaline increase, our reactivity goes up and our ability to think plummets. Have you ever had a reactive conversation with someone, said all sorts of crazy things that maybe didn’t even make sense, and an hour later thought to yourself… “I should have said…” or “I should never have said…”? That’s because your brain on stress is stupid. It’s not meant to think about deep philosophical insights, thoughtful arguments, it’s supposed to keep your happy ass from being eaten by the tiger! One of my best strategies, and mind you I am a Red headed, Irish, Leo… I know of what I speak, one of my personal best strategies is to… wait for it… keep my mouth closed, or conversely, don’t press the ‘send’ button. If at all possible, I wait to respond. I have given myself several weeks, depending on how angry I was. I know that my brain is not acting in my best interest in the heat of the moment, so I shut my mouth and wait for my brain to catch up. It’s saved relationships on several occasions.

5/Visualize. Creating a picture in your head of how you would like something to happen, how you would like to handle some situation, seeing yourself be better at some activity, or how you would like a job interview to go, or what you want your life to look like in a year. Visualizing the outcome you want is like setting a visual goal. The more clarity you have about what you want an experience or situation to look like, the more likely you will handle yourself in ways that take you where you want to go. Visualize yourself being successful in navigating tigers, managing them, and maybe even making them purr. Most of us have been successful at times in handling stressful situations. Think back to times where you handled your stress in a way that felt empowering, then visualize yourself in new situations, handling yourself the way you would like to. The mind doesn’t know the difference between visualizing doing something, and actually doing it. Brain scans show visualizing doing something (practicing a golf swing), lights up the brain similarly as actually doing something like swinging that club. Visualizing doing exercise actually improves muscle mass. So use your mind to help you.

6/ Breathe. When all else fails, or maybe before anything fails, breathe. Most bodies tense up and stop breathing when they get stressed. People either find themselves breathing in short shallow breathes, or big gulps. How you breathe affects your nervous system, and if you wonder why I am making a big deal about breathing, think about how long you can go without food? A month? Or water? A week? And, then think about how long you can go without oxygen. Most of us can maybe go without oxygen 5-7 minutes. That’s a ridiculously short amount of time. The most important connection here is that you can control your breathing, when you slow your breathing down, you affect your heart rate and you reduce the Cortisol and Adrenaline that fear of tigers produces. Conversely, you can hype yourself up by breathing faster.

7/ Distract yourself. Have you ever noticed when you’re in a hurry that all the people around you seem to S L O W down? You’re standing in the grocery line and the lady in front of you starts to pay in pennies, or everyone driving in front of you is on a Sunday drive? If you decide to change lanes, you may get block again, only to see the lane you were in speed up? This is one of the vortex’s of the universe, my made up name for the phenomenon is Hurry up and Wait Syndrome. But, I digress, one way to manage this situation is to distract yourself. Dream about what you would do if you won the lottery, most people can easily pass a few minutes to a few hours dreaming of being a big winner. Or, read a magazine in line, as soon as I pick up a People magazine, the line freakishly speeds up. I am flipping and searching for some article and before I know it, it’s time to pay and I have to decide if I care enough about the article to buy it. Listen to music or a book in your car, if that’s where you lose your mind, so you can distract yourself from focusing on all those lost tourists and Sunday drivers.

8/ Music soothes the savage beast. There is a recent study from the University of Missouri, by Yuna Ferguson, that showed that music can improve your mood. Music can also energize you, which is probably why people do aerobics to upbeat high energy music and not Classical Opera. In another study by Thomas Schäfer, Peter Sedlmeier, Christine Städtler, and David Huron, The psychological functions of music listening, found that people listen to music to regulate arousal and mood, to achieve self-awareness, and as an expression of social relatedness. With the regulating arousal and mood and achieving self awareness being more important than the social relatedness.

In another study, on the Effects of Music to the Human Stress Response, found that Relaxing music, reduced the physiological responses to stress. And, there is new research showing that music positively affected brain waves, muscle tone, blood pressure & heart rate, for the elderly, when they were listening to the music of their youth.

These tools are not really meant to be used in any particular order. Try them all and bolster your toolbox.

Authenticity. It’s about being real. It’s about knowing yourself. It’s about courageously confronting the parts of yourself that don’t fit with your vision of you. Authenticity can be a moral compass that directs your actions toward your own true north. It’s a feeling of being comfortable in our own skin. Yet as much as we understand this in theory, being authentic is one of the hardest things to do in practice. Think about how many people you know who are in your mind truly authentic. If you’re lucky, there are a handful of people who you can name. Now think about times when you have felt authentic. You may be one of the special few, who always feel confident in your ability to interact with the world from a solely authentic place, but most of us have to work at it regularly. There are areas where we shine our authentic selves like a bright light in a dark universe, and if we are being authentic, we also know that there are places that we still need work to grow the light. Most of us still have the dark closet or corner where our fear gets triggered.

Like any other trait, authenticity is an aspect of ourselves that we can develop. Part of that development comes from acknowledging who we are and that we want to become more authentic. When I was 18, I looked at myself and saw a person that I didn’t like. I saw a lot of negative qualities in myself and I focused on them. While I wasn’t a mean or bad person, I wasn’t very compassionate, or forgiving, I was often afraid, I was at times reactive and this didn’t fit with the type of person I really wanted to become. I pretty consciously decided that I needed to determine what sort of person I did want to grow into. I began to develop a picture of who I wanted to be. This included an inventory of my values and these values became the map I actually wanted travel by. These are not the values that we may say to other people because we think they are right or appropriate. These are the values that live in our truest hearts. I decided that I wanted to be an authentic person, honest about who I am and courageous enough to share that. The more I worked on authenticity, the more I needed to have compassion with myself, and the more I shifted my negative self talk. The more I could explore my strengths, the more clearly I saw myself honestly, and the easier it was to act or respond in ways that deepened my ability to be authentic. It was a positive growth circle.

I taught anger management for years and one of the hardest things I saw people struggle with was the willingness to be honest and vulnerable. We spend so much time worried about other people’s judgments of us, and fearing that we might be taken advantage of, that we stop ourselves from being fully present in relationships. The truth is that we often judge our insides by other people’s outsides, yet it’s our own opinions of ourselves that matter. Our view of ourselves is the guideline that every other person will use with us too.

There are steps that will put you on the path, as you journey, you grow.

Steps to developing your authentic self:

Knowing yourself

Understanding your deep values
Recognizing your triggers
Developing compassion for yourself and others
Focusing where you have influence

Willingness to be vulnerable

Ability to acknowledge your feelings
A willingness to not know everything
Giving yourself permission to let go of yesterday and its mistakes
Learn to clearly speak to your truth
Being willing to let go of the idea of perfection
Recognition that you are courageous

What developing your authentic self gives you:

A feeling of empowerment in you life and your choices
Breakthrough’s that allow you to push through resistances (fears)
Ability to trust yourself and then to trust others
Map to find your tribe of people

My favorite people to work with are the ones who want to forge themselves. Are you a person who is willing to be brave and face your life with authenticity?

Creative Mind, tools

Developing your Authentic Self

Actions, awareness, Creative Mind, tools

Making it Stick!

Get Explicit and Make those Juicy Goals

What does it mean to get Explicit? If this is the key to making a New Years Resolutions, or really any goals successful, then explicit is important.

ex·plic·it – ikˈsplisit/

adjective

adjective: explicit

1. stated clearly and in detail, leaving no room for confusion or doubt.

This will be our working definition.

So let’s get explicit.

When you think of your goal, begin by asking yourself, on a scale of 1-10, how important is this goal to me? If you are not at a 9 or a 10, then why do you think this is a goal worthy of your time and attention? What would it take to get the goal to a 10 for importance? This is really important because we will often say something is important and then not follow through on it. This is the behavioral equivalent to saying, “I don’t really care about this…” and I am not in the habit of working with people on their lukewarm goals. A lukewarm goal is basically a set up for failure. Not the sort of failure where you really try to change something and you don’t succeed, but the sort of failure that you get from not really trying. I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but those are two very different types of failures. I don’t enjoy spending a lot of time, money, energy and not meeting a big goal, but at least I know I gave it my all. In my mind, there is no failure with true effort. When I was younger, I was a swimmer. I would spend hours a week at practice, back and forth laps, working on my stroke, a lot of time and energy was invested. All this work didn’t mean that I won every race I entered, but without the time, commitment and effort, I wouldn’t have even started, let alone finished a race. The more I trained, the better I did.

Let’s look at the example like I want to “Get Healthy”:

Is this a real goal, or is it a goal you think you ‘should’ have? Do you think it’s a 10 value goal?
How do you know you’re at a 10?
What does “getting healthy” mean to you?
What are the most important aspects of this goal for you?
What would it look like if you were behaving in a “healthy” way?
- Remember, “healthy” may mean different things to different people. Be clear about what you mean.
How will you know you have reached your goal?
What will you have done during the year, when you look back on this goal on Dec 31, 2015?

Maybe my goal over the next year is that I want to eat healthy, or maybe I want to exercise every week. Do these goals sound interesting or juicy? If the goal doesn’t excite you, it will be harder to commit to. What would a juicy goal sound like?

You might start with: “I want to exercise every week” then keep writing what you want from the goal.

I want to move daily
I want to feel powerful in my body
I want to spend time outside breathing in the forest
I want to take my dogs on regular walks

If you sum up these wants, what might the goal sound like?

Daily tree time with my dogs, breathing in nature, makes me strong!

As you write what you want from the goal, you can begin to mold the goal into something that speaks to your soul. Which goal sounds juicier to you? I want to exercise every week or Daily tree time with my dogs, breathing in nature, makes me strong! I know which one I will be choosing.

What are the baby steps that I need to take to meet the goal “Daily tree time with my dogs, breathing in nature, makes me strong!”? Break it down:

Commit to X number of times a week.
Put it in your schedule.
Find a friend who might want to join you.
Join a dog club that walks.
Or start your own dog walking Meetup.
Find the dog leashes.
Pick some places close to your house that you can go walking outside that make you feel excited.

Figure out all the little things that you need to do to help you meet this goal. The baby steps help you map your plan for success. This is true for every goal you ever set for yourself.

Time to pick a goal. Next blog we will start looking at different goals and how to suss out whether they are 10’s for you.

Creative Mind

Hello 2015!

I’m going to do a little series, looking at a few common New Years resolutions, and think about what it might look like if we actually accomplished what we said we wanted to do. Novel idea born! I am going to ask you questions to help you think about what you really want. I have a theory that most New Years resolutions fail because we don’t really develop them in our minds before we start. We begin with a vague goa like “lose weight” without any real clarity about what our deeper goal is. Then we wobble off the track in a week or a month and the New Years resolutions gets stuck in our coat closet until the next year. I found an interesting statistic at The Statistic Brain, that only 8% of people are successful in achieving their resolutions. That’s not a lot of people being successful. It seems that people who explicitly make resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t clearly and explicitly make resolutions. So right here, in the last hours before 2014 ends, let’s plan to get explicit!

awareness, Creative Mind, The Brain that Thinks it's alive

Creating Meaningful Stories

Every day when we think about the past, the present or the future, we are creating stories. Researchers are discovering that we all remember experiences through the perspective of our own set of filters. These filters include our past experiences, attitudes and beliefs, values, hopes and dreams, and especially our fears.

These filters affect how we interpret or experience life, as well as the stories that we tell ourselves about what the experience means to us. Stories are the way we connect with other people. Our stories resonate with some people and draw them to us. This is how people who are passionate about a topic end up with a circle of friends who think or feel very much as they do. The stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, what is important, and what we are capable of doing lead to the life we create for ourselves. This means that the stories we focus on and build upon are epically important to how we view our lives.

My mother and I were recently having a conversation about our personal historical stories. When my mom was growing up, her parents, who immigrated to America between the two World Wars, later worked for thirty plus years for the Ambassador to Norway, at his estate in Palm Beach, Florida. They were servants in his household. My mom grew up with two stories: one that she “was just the ‘servant’s child’” and she lived this story out with a belief that maybe she wasn’t good enough. She told herself a complex story that she was in some way less than, less important, even disposable. The other story that she told herself, was that she was ‘just as good’ as any of the amazing people she was meeting, just as clever, smart, and capable. Her sense, as she looks back on her life today is that, depending on which story she tells herself, it impacts how she has feels about her self-worth.

My perspective on my mom’s life is from a more powerful perspective. My grandparents had gone from small war ravaged towns in Europe and found a way to give their child a much bigger future. I saw my mom as having a pretty magical experience. She lived with her parents on a beautiful Palm Beach estate, where she met the Kennedys, a Four Star General, ambassadors and royalty, as well as stars from the theatre community. She babysat Caroline and John-John, under the watchful eyes of Secret Service Agents, and she even went dancing with one of those agents. She had great times with her friends on that estate with the ocean at her back door. While her parents may have thought of themselves as simply servants, my mom really had an extraordinary childhood, in which she was able to study the behavior of remarkable people up close.

When I asked her which way of thinking about her past led to better outcomes in her present life, her response was that when she was making choices from the position of being worthy, she chose options that led to situations where she felt successful and was seen as successful. A view of the past from a place of “what did I learn?” being ‘just as good as’ has empowered her present life. The same is true for each of us.

How we tell ourselves our story, absolutely affects how we view our life and the choices we make. We are, in this moment, the sum total of all of our conscious and unconscious choices. The more aware we are of the story we are telling ourselves, the more conscious our choices will be. Our perception of our story impacts the conscious and unconscious motivators that propel us.

I too have had to evaluate my own story. My parents divorced when I was 9, and I was fairly ripped out of my comfortable life. When I was 11, I was dragged to San Francisco and was required to bus myself across the city to an inner city middle school where I was one of twelve white kids in a sea of diverse cultures. I am a redhead and so stood out like the proverbial sore thumb. It was a hard transition for me; I went from the relative safety of a small town to a very big city. I moved from a school where I had known everyone since 1^st grade, to an inner-city school where I was very clearly different. I experienced bullying, and I was scared; I had stomachaches all the time, sore throats, and basically was stressed out. But, there were also kids who took me under their wings. The story that I was telling myself at the time sounded like, “I’m gonna die,” and all my reactions and responses funneled through my fear.

But, I didn’t die, and I started to breathe, I began to look around me and shifted the story. As I got my sea legs, my story began to shift. I started to make friends; I discovered things I liked to do: I joined the band, I volunteered at the aquarium in Golden Gate Park, and I hung out at the horse stables in the park also. I was lucky to have some resilience, and I began changing the way I looked at my situation. In hindsight, when I think back to that time, while I can remember the fear, I also remember becoming more independent, learning to trust myself, learning to make friends in new situations. I started to embrace diversity and to like differences in people. I was learning how to move through fear. The shift from being a scared kid to feeling empowered didn’t happen overnight. It took years. The more I focused on seeing the empowering elements in my story, the more empowered I felt as a person.

How I viewed my experience created a circular feedback loop. The more I pushed through the fear, the more empowered I felt. The more empowered I felt, the more I knew I could do anything I really tried to do. The more I did, the more fun I was having, the less fear I felt, and the more empowered I felt. In a nutshell, this is how it works for anyone. Each time we meet our fear, it’s an opportunity to push through it. I am not saying that you shouldn’t listen to your fear, notice it, acknowledge it, and decide if it is a dangerous or life threatening situation. But, if it is just a negative inner story, or negative self-talk about not being capable or good enough, then push yourself to challenge it. This is not about making up a super happy story that doesn’t resonate (my life was perfect, only perfect things ever happened to me, and only perfect things will ever happen to me) – but real stories. It is not just noticing the negative, but looking for the balance, the places where we grew and developed in powerful ways.

In every situation, we are making choices in our lives. When we participate in our lives from an empowered story, then it helps us to make choices that may lead to more empowered outcomes. When see ourselves as worthy, we make choices from that perspective. When we change our stories, we allow for different possibilities. This happens on the macro level – how we respond to the world and how the world responds back to us. It also happens in on the micro level – how we feel about ourselves in the world. If I say to myself, “I’m not a writer” then I generate a block to being able to write. If I say, “I’m not good at relationships” I may find myself throwing up resistance to relationships. These are powerful stories. Saying instead, “I am a writer” doesn’t make me a brilliant writer. That takes practice, practice, practice, but it does open me up to writing and developing myself as a writer. The same is true for anything you want to do or be in the world.

The stories that we tell ourselves are important….choose wisely.

Creative Human Solutions

Author Archives: Lyssa

tiny tweaks can lead to BIG SHIFTS

Let your life lightly dance

Tiger Tiger

Developing your Authentic Self

Making it Stick!

Get Explicit and Make those Juicy Goals

Hello 2015!

Creating Meaningful Stories

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