Always and forever this moment is your life, Freaking pay attention and enjoy!
image by Lyssa
Category Archives: Creative Mind
Creativity: use it to have it
You can’t use up Creativity: the more you use it, the more you have. Maya Angelou
A Balanced Perspective
There is a movie called, The Lady in the Water, by M. Night Shamalon. It didn’t get rave reviews, but I enjoyed it. That’s not really the point though. In the movie, there was a character, who had worked out only one side of his body; half his body looked like a body builder and the other half was a normal guy size. He was physically out of balance. And, while most of us don’t wear our imbalance so obviously, we play out our imbalance in how we interact with the people around us and the world in general.
In the past few weeks I have been talking with people about their negative versus positive focus.
We humans are hardwired for survival. Noticing what is odd, dangerous, out of place, etc, is a survival strategy. As we scan the world with our senses, it’s nice when we notice the pretty flowers, but when we can notice the tiger in the tall grass, it helps us survive. Even though the skill is a crucial survival skill, the wiring can create its own set of issues. All the focus gets turned on what isn’t working, what we don’t like, how bad we feel, where the problems are, what’s wrong. Then the imbalance pitches toward the negative. This lopsided perspective isn’t realistic, any more than only seeing only the positive is realistic.
This week when I was walking out to my car, I tripped. Not a big splatter type of trip, but a drop all my stuff and end up on my knees type of trip. “I am so clumsy!” “I am the clumsiest person!” In that moment I wasn’t thinking, “I take about 5000-10,000 steps a day, over the average month I take 150,000+ steps, and I tripped once.” People rarely focus on the 150,000 good steps, but will instead create a laser focus on the one bad step. Does that really make sense? I am not saying go to some perfect Pollyanna extreme the other direction, what I am saying is that we need to work on using the muscles on both sides of the situation.
How much of our self-esteem and our internal conversations are colored with this same negative laser focus?
It is really hard to shift our focus to something neutral when we’re in the middle of something that’s maybe pissing us off painful. As we’re in the middle of whatever the situation is, we chew it around and around, gnawing at all the bad parts. If I’ve gotten into an argument with my husband, and he did something that bugged me or hurt my feelings, in that moment it’s very easy to focus on solely what is upsetting. The negative laser focus doesn’t help me think of all the times he’s been supportive, thoughtful, or caring. It doesn’t remind me of the times he’s rubbed my feet or listened to my feelings. In fact it doesn’t remind me of anything good at all. At that point, my negative focus isn’t the whole truth. At the point my focus is lasered on something negative, I’m missing out on the whole other side of the truth. So, in order to challenge the negative focus I have a couple of ideas to share with you.
Ideas:
First – Take time before responding; wait to see how you feel in about 2-24 hours. Take a walk, take a bath, read a book, talk to a friend. Not every situation is a crisis just because we feel the pressure to try and resolve it instantly. This first step is really about doing no harm until you can have clarity and work towards having a good conversation. It is the shift from being Reactive to being Proactive.
Second – While you’re waiting, giving yourself some breathing room from the issue, start remembering all the positive things about this person you’re upset with. Is this a person who has been good to you? Have they helped you in other areas? Have they supported you in the past? Do you care about them? Do you love them? Create a thorough list of all the things you like about that person. Maybe you don’t like them, but you need them because they’re your boss, or in-law, or a co-worker. You don’t need to make up anything; just really notice an honest reflection of who they are and try to find something that you can appreciate about them. It’s an interesting thing, but we treat people differently based on how we think of them, 
the label of friend or foe makes all the difference.
Third –
Pay attention to your feelings. Feelings offer you a place to discover the deeper issues that may be affecting the relationship or situation. If you regularly find yourself feeling a negative feeling with your partner or friend or anyone, you may need to pay attention to what that feeling is trying to tell you. There are often deeper issues at work. Do you feel like you are being rejected or that you are not good enough the way you are? (Acceptance) Are you feeling controlled or manipulated to do something or be different? (Power and Control) Maybe you are feeling taken for granted or feeling like your hard work isn’t appreciated? (Recognition) Is there a sense of being criticized or treated with contempt? (Respect) The deeper emotion may have to do with trust, not feeling like someone will follow through with agreements. Or, are you being challenged in your views of yourself? (Integrity) In intimate relationships we may struggle with “Do you love me?” (Love) and “Do you want to be here?” (Commitment) These deeper issues will never be resolved arguing about whose fault it is that the dishes didn’t get done, or any other superficial problem. It’s only when we understand what’s getting triggered that the important conversations can happen. The more important the relationship is, the more carefully we need to handle the conversation. Through years of relationship work, I have found that if you are feeling some of these deeper issues, so is your partner, be it an intimate relationship or a work relationship.
Fourth – Make sure to listen to hear and understand. Often times we listen for ammo. This is not real listening; this is a form of war. Unfortunately, winning a war of words with someone, means you lose something else, like their respect or help or love. There is always our side of the story, but there is also their side of the story. Listening is a two way street. If you have something to say, make sure you are also doing what you ask of them; listen. Listening and agreement are two very different things. You don’t have to agree with their side of the story, but try and put yourself in their shoes, if only for a moment. Look for what their intention was; if their intention was not to hurt your feelings, remember that.
Fifth – When you’re ready to actually talk to the person, try to come from a place of only talking about your feelings. Feelings are very difficult to argue with because they’re yours. I have seen “I” statements that are actually convoluted “You” statements. “I feel like your are a jerk.” These don’t work. If you focus on what you don’t like about someone else’s behavior, you run the risk of either shutting the other person down, or you will turn up the volume on their defensiveness. We are masters at triggering other peoples’ defenses, especially in long relationships and in hard conversations. Recognize that in every conversation there is intent and impact. The closer these are aligned, the better the conversation will go. Start important conversations softly to keep the dialog useful.
One of the super secrets in life is that emotions are not good or bad, but rather they are like road signs; they tell you something. When we learn to read our own emotions, it helps us know ourselves better and hopefully get to know other people better too. The goal is to shift the story from imbalanced to I’m Balanced!
images from BigStockPhoto: balancing balls Sashkin and Imbalance Bigandt_Photography
Apparently it is not as simple as “yes or no.” Kelly McGonigal talks about a Harvard study that shows that, how you think about stress matters. If you see stress as bad, causing illness, and hurting you, it will. Almost magically, the crucial difference between the stress that makes you sick and the stress that doesn’t hurt you at all, is how you think about it. The mind is truly a powerful tool. When you change the stress story, and you see stress as your body’s way of rising to a challenge, you fundamentally change your body’s reaction to the stress. Your body believes your thoughts and your stress response becomes healthier. It’s brilliant! This is a great scientific example of changing the your world with your thinking.
Is Stress Bad for You?
Danny MacAskill Rides Boldly
What would it feel like if you believed you could do anything? What would it feel like if you were willing to push yourself past comfort, saw failure as a teacher and you used experience to create more courage? How would you feel if you stepped outside the box of limits that you’ve placed yourself inside, or allowed others to put you in, and saw yourself stepping into that place where the magic happens?
Danny MacAskill demonstrates how brilliantly he has done this. He rides his bike with joy and quite a bit of humor. I am absolutely sure that he has learned by falling along the way, but he picked his bike and himself up and pressed on. It’s truly a wonder to watch him.
Danny MacAskill – “Way Back Home” from Dave Sowerby on Vimeo.
Notice how you feel when you watch the video, do you feel impressed, excited, inspired? Where are those feelings being held in your body? Feel them, notice them. Then work on remembering those feelings in your body each day for 5 minutes for the entire week. At the end of the week, tell me what you notice. Have fun with this exercise!
images from BigStockPhoto: bicycles xuanhuongho
Messy Love
“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.
The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits – islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”
Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I am not sure exactly why this quote has so captured me. Especially in the hindsight that Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s husband, Charles Lindbergh, had three other families (wives and kids) in Europe. It’s unclear if she knew this or not. I would find it a little hard to imagine such a smart woman being completely ignorant of who her husband was, and what he was capable of, even if she didn’t know the specifics. So, maybe she did know that he had affairs, and maybe she understood that love is complicated and messy. That often we are hurt, not by another’s actions, but rather by the idea that we have of who they are and how they should act, instead of loving them in spite of the fact that we feel failed by them, for not being what we want them to be.
There are boundaries that may be healthy for us, for me affairs cross a boundary in a marriage. Would I love my husband less if he had an affair? No, don’t think so, the love would remain. I’m not sure if I would stay in the relationship, certainly if I stayed it wouldn’t be in the same relationship that we had. I don’t know what the relationship would look like, but it would change as I changed my thoughts about myself, my husband and the new “now” of our marriage. Love can bind us to people and places, it can give us purpose to learn and to move through the fear of vulnerability, and if we let it, it teaches us to stay true to love that is just for love.
Change through time is true in all relationships, family, friends, and lovers, even without traumas and dramas. We are constantly shifting how we feel about other people. How we think about ourselves and how we think about them, changes how we feel about them. We do this all the time. Think about the myriad of ways that we get angry or annoyed with people, even people we love, for much less concerning issues; the kids leave lights on everywhere they go, you ask nicely, you ask sharply, you ask and ask and ask, and still, no matter where in the house you walk, the lights are on. You scream, you rant, you threaten, and in these moments you don’t love in a loving way. Because your love has stories and expectations woven into the core of it. If you loved me, you would turn off the lights because you know and care what that means to me… Or, you would turn off the lights because it’s the responsible thing to do, or it saves money, whatever. Unspoken stories, I love you when you… do what I want? The weft and weave as I sit in my justified nagging and yelling place, not showing love, because you didn’t meet my expectations. Is this conceivably true? Can I possibly be so self centered and demanding? Having unrealistic expectations of others and then wondering why the relationship feels distant or hurtful. This is the way of severing and ending relationships, this is not loving.
Just where is my responsibility for my needs, my feelings, and my expectations? Why don’t I turn off lights as I come to them instead of being unloving? Tell myself new stories that don’t connect my love for you, or your love for me, to my expectations? This simple shift is probably the hardest thing to do. The fine line between a healthy boundary and an unrealistic expectation. This shift takes courage, because like life, it’s fragile and filled with the longing of wanting to be loved in return, and we cannot control that. It takes the strength and flexibility of a dancer walking on a tightrope with no safety net and also dancing with a partner navigating the same dangerous ground.
Not many of us do this balance well. We may have areas where we sit in Buddha like calm over a topic while the world around us loses it’s collective mind. Yet, there are always chinks in our perceptions, places where we lose our own minds, often to issues or ideas that someone else has no problem with. It keeps us humble, we aren’t so perfect ourselves. We are all creatures of light, but also of shadow. When we recognize our imperfection, do we then withhold love from ourselves? Often the answer is “yes.” If this is true, how can you truly love another, with all their messy imperfections, if we can’t love our own self, with all of our messy imperfections? We hide and hate our shortcomings, we drown them and pretend they don’t exist, instead focusing on the shortcomings of others. Isn’t the idea “to love others as we love ourself” at the core of all world religions? I think “yes.” My very purpose in this life is to recognize the places in myself that need to be challenged, tweaked and tuned, to learn to love myself through the process, and learn to love others in spite of my (mis)perceptions and (mis)expectations of them. Allowing for the ebb and flow, the here and now. Being present to the tide as it dances by my shore.
This is a repost from my other blog, which I closed down.
Challenge the Limits
We all have expectations. We have them of ourselves and of others. I am not going to give a judgment on the rightness or wrongness of expectations, because clearly communicated expectations are useful. Yet, it is important to develop awareness around the limiting power that they can hold, depending on how we apply them. And, we have thousands of thoughts and ideas about how the world is supposed to work, how people are supposed to be, how they are supposed to act, what they are supposed to do, and even what they are capable of. It’s endless. Which is why it’s so important that we start to become aware of how we may be using expectations in limiting ways.
How to Become Batman – Invisibilia Podcast
I was recently listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Invisibilia, where hosts Alix and Lulu explore the limiting qualities of expectations. The discuss a study about rats where a person’s belief in the rats ability affects how well the rat does in a test. In the study, labels of “smart” rat and “stupid” rat were put on the rats. The rats were actually all very equal in intelligence and breeding. Interestingly enough, the “smart” rats did far better on the tests than the “stupid” rats, again, not because of any real difference between the rats, but because of how the person doing the testing felt about the rat as a result of believing in the label. Our belief in our labels affect how we interact, not just with animals but, with other people and with ourselves. Our belief in the label creates a tangible outcome. In an interesting film called, A Class Divided, we can see how labels effect kids.
The film explores how the kids see themselves, as better or worse, depending on the messages they get from others. In this case the teacher. Yet, you could insert, parent, friends, or society, into the situation and get something similar. The film also explores how when the larger culture is telling us something we like, we buy into it without much thought. Unfortunately, we also unconsciously buy into the cultural messages that limit us. To figure out what messages help or hurt, requires awareness.
Back to Invisibilia, in the show, How to Become Batman, we are introduced to Daniel Kish, a man who lost both of his eyes to cancer when he was a child. But, through his own form of echolocation, can now navigate the world and “see.” What is exceptional about his story is that Daniel was allowed to explore the world, like any sighted kid. His mother didn’t place limits on him, but instead held her breath and allowed him to explore, run into things & try things that most “blind children” wouldn’t be encouraged to do. And, as a result, he is a lovely example of someone who doesn’t fit into the traditional idea of what being blind means. He just assumed he could do anything and then he went out and did it.
And, the point of my sharing these examples?
1. That we begin to “see” that negative labels create limiting expectations of others. We are not experts on what other people are capable of, in fact, all we can have is an opinion. Our limiting expectations aren’t passive, they have impact, they effect how we have relationships with people, how we define them, interact with them, what we expect from and for them, and even how they end up being in relationship with us.
and,
2. That we recognize how we place similar negative labels on ourselves and these labels limit us just as equally. Limiting labels are like little confining boxes, boxes that don’t allow us to grow, fail, try again and develop trust in our abilities. When we limit ourselves, the danger is that we miss opportunities to be fully engaged in our life and learning to move through fear. Experiencing life, facing challenges and forging ahead, changes how our brain makes connections. Challenging experiences teach us what does and doesn’t work, it stretches our boundaries, helping us become smarter, braver and more connected to what we want for our life. And, that’s a good thing, right?
Creative Human Solutions 