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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.

Making it Stick!

Popular New Years Resolutions

• Get Healthy
  • Lose Weight
  • Eat Better
  • Drink Less
  • Quit Smoking
• Volunteer
• Education
  • Learn something new
  • Finish your education
• Get a Better Job
• Save Money
  • Manage Debt
• Manage Stress
• Take a Trip

Based on the statistic that 8% of people with a New Years Resolutions successfully complete them, we know that most of us make a resolution with high hopes, then something happens.  The goal is something we say is important to us, yet within a week 75% of us have already moved on, put the resolution in the junk draw and basically gone back to life as usual.  It’s like we love the idea, but we don’t have enthusiasm for the work that goes into changing a habit or working on a goal.  So, how do we continue to generate enthusiasm after the first flush of New Years has left us? Here are some ideas.

Be a Decider.  Don’t just go with the crowd when it comes to your New Years Resolutions or goals, get individual and decide what is really meaningful to you.  If everyone wants to do xyz, but your heart really isn’t in it, what is your heart open to?  Imagine looking back on 2015, what would be one or two things that would make you feel like you had honored yourself?  What would you like to say about yourself to others?  What would make you feel proud of yourself?  Write that down. Whatever goal speaks to your soul is going to be a much more interesting goal or resolution than just following the masses.

Create an Explicit Juicy Goal.  Without a clear vision that is based on your own ‘why’, most people just aren’t enthused about what they say they want.  Make your goal clear, meaningful, and fun.

Realistic Expectations.  This is one of the Super Secrets of life.  If you begin with an unrealistic expectation such as, “I’m going to lose 50 pounds in a month,” it’s going to be very hard to make this happen. It’s not impossible, but it isn’t healthy and it probaly requires a level of commitment that may be overwhelming.  If the goal is realistic, “I’m going to be dancing daily till I’m fit,” then you can develop that goal into something juicy.

Baby steps.  Every goal has many steps along the way that chunk it down and make it more easily “do”able.  Baby steps break down the ‘what to do’ or action aspects of a goal.  These baby steps will guide you along the way and help to make the goal more manageable.  Losing weight is a great goal, but you’ll need to break it down: Create a play list of music I like to dance to, Schedule it, eat more veggies, & cut the simple carbs.

Plan for Bumps along the Way.  This is really a part of realistic expectations, but it deserves its own bump.  Imagine you’re going on a trip.  You’re heading from Seattle to Boston.  You get on the plane and you’re off.  The plane has a clear destination, Boston.  The flight is not actually moving in a straight line, it’s a direction, and along the way the pilot is bringing the plane back on course with many little adjustments.  Expect that you might get off course on your own journey. Know that you can bring yourself back on course as many times as it takes to get to your destination.

Celebrate Successes.  Too often we set a goal and then we lose steam as we work and work and work.  Set mini goals. I called them baby steps above and celebrate them regularly.  I often make something I love to do into a prize at the end of the work.  If I have paperwork to do, which is my least favorite thing, I might say to myself, if I get this paperwork done today, I will go out to a movie.  I can create my own carrot.

It takes a Village.  At about the four to six week mark, people become excuse machines.  We throw up all sorts of rationalizations, reasons, justifications, smoke and mirrors to let  ourselves off the proverbial hook.  Having people who will support you through the rough spots is important and necessary to success.  It could be a person or an online support group.  When I quit smoking, it was much easier to hang out with nonsmoking friends. The more you surround yourself with people who support your goal the easier it will be for you to be successful.

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.

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     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.

Hello 2015!

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!

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Here are 10 truths that will change your life, your career, and help you meet your dreams?

There are so many mindsets that are important to create success, but these are the 10 Mindsets that I believe are among the most important.

1. Open Your Mind. Open any closed doors in your mind and allow that there are many different ways to be successful. Some people will focus on careers, some will focus on relationships, some will pursue a mountaintop, an idea, write a book, or work to have a positive impact on the world. But, any of these areas can be an aspect of your personal success. An open mindset doesn’t limit you to just one idea. In fact, you don’t have to limit yourself to one area of success, you’re allowed to be successful in all the areas that matter to you!
2. Keep Learning. The coolest thing in the world is to know you can learn, recognizing that you can develop tools to do anything. Our brains are capable of learning new things till the very day we die. You are walking in the footsteps of giants and most of them have either been written about and you can learn from them, or they have written a book about what you want are interested in. Learn all you can from the people who have gone before you. Find the people you admire and then consciously work to learn from them. But, for that matter, create a mindset of learning from every ‘mistake’ you feel you’ve made. Squeeze all the learning out of every experience, both positive and negative. Life is a big school and everyday is a school day if you’re doing it right!
3. Develop Self-Awareness. Notice when you’re on the right path, notice how it feels, learn to hear your gut. You will feel it in your body. It might show up as a bad feeling about something, or a buzz of excitement, or a settled calm that that moves through your heart. Listen to your guts; develop your trust of yourself. Start small, but start listening to what your truth is. The more you develop the mindset of insight, the more powerfully you will move in the right direction. The more you learn to trust yourself, the better able you will be to leap off tall buildings and fly.
4. Set goals. Begin with the end in mind. This doesn’t mean you have to know exactly where you are going. But having a clear goal significantly focuses the journey. Clarity means that you have an idea about where your want to go. Having short term, mid term and long term goals can help you stay on track. We lose energy and direction when we work for a long time towards an intangible idea. The mindset of having a goal means you bring your compass out into the open and then set a clear destination.
5. Visualize. See yourself being successful. Work to create as full an image of what that will look and feel like. What do you want your life to look like in 1 year, 2 years, or 3 years. What kind of job or career do you want to have? Visualize roadblocks and then visualize yourself working through those roadblocks. See yourself becoming what you want to be is an incredible tool and a brilliant mindset.
6. Work. I don’t know that you have to work hard, but you do have to work consistently. There is no movement without action. You must plug away at your goal relentlessly. Each day ask yourself, “Is what I am about to say, think, or do, going to take me closer to my goal or farther away?” Create a mindset that pushes you, prods you, and sometimes forces you to get off your ass and get moving. Those goals aren’t just going to come knocking on your door, unless your out there working on making them happen.
7. Persist. Success often comes to those who hold on, and don’t give up when it gets hard, or boring, or scary. Life will toss you and spin you and send you spiraling out into the universe. Your job is to find good places to hold tight and hang on. Recognize fear, learn to breath, keep a clear direction and then hold tight. It takes a mindset of making choices, allowing mistakes, practice, practice, practice, perseverance, and patience to muddle on.
8. Develop Confidence. Don’t worry about what other people think about you. There will always be people who don’t agree with you, or don’t think that your direction is a good idea. They are often loud and you will hear them. But, hearing and listening are different. Someone once said, “Your opinion of me, is none of my business.” It’s a hard thing to learn to do. But, develop the mindset that you are good enough and your dreams are worthy. Worry less about other people’s expectation of you, than you worry about your own expectations of yourself. Haters gonna hate, but who cares?
9. Don’t waste time. The only wasted time, is the time we spend wishing the past was different, or blaming some situation, some person, or some circumstance for why we haven’t been successful. The past is an interesting place; it’s the moment that this moment, now this moment, now this one, is done. I don’t have Mr. Peabody’s “Way Way Back machine”, neither do you. The mindset of letting go of the past means that you shift your focus on influencing the future. You will have a lot more success when you’re looking forward.
10. Breathe. Take time to clear your mind and breathe. Allow yourself to be uncertain and then breathe through the uncertainty. Take walks, meditate, pray, read, develop your tools to maintain your internal calm. Find people who will support your idea of your healthy self. Sit in moments when you’re feeling good, calm and happy, breathe in those moments, and then learn to carry the feelings over as you breathe into more difficult experiences. Breathe through every fear that marches by.

     

    There are thousands of steps that go into being successful and your mindsets are key to the steps working. Keep adding to your list.

This is a repost from my other blog, I’m moving posts over to Creative Human, as I move forward.

What the Navy Seals Know

I was watching a show on the history Channel called “The Brain.”  It was a fascinating program for several of the pieces that they documented.  The program really looked at how the brain operates under different circumstances. One of the segments of the show was a piece on training the Brain to manage stress, and specifically how the Navy is working to improve the passing average in the Navy seal program. What they found was about 25% of the troops in training the program were passing, but the Navy found that there were 5 to 10%  of each group of men that should have passed the Seal’s training, yet didn’t.  Some of these men quit in the last week, last days, or hours of the training.  So, the Navy set out to find out what key things these men needed in order to be able to pass the training.

What the Navy found was there were four areas that needed to be addressed and taught to the men, so that these 5%-10% of men might be successful in the Navy Seal training program.  The four areas that they discovered needed to be addressed were: Goal Setting; Visualization; Self Talk; and Arousal Control/Breathing.

Goal Setting: What the Navy found about goal setting was this, people needed to have very clear short-term, midterm, and long-range goals. What I mean by short-term goals is this, the person might need to be saying to themselves, “I can make it through this next minute,” “I can make it to lunch,” “I can make it one more step or I can make it one more mile.”  Midterm goals might look like, “I can make it to the end of this training day,” or “I could make it to the end of the week.” What long-term goals are, is the ability to remember what the greater purpose is, of any action. For instance, “I want to be a Navy Seal.”  And, for mere mortals, we might have a long term goal of being an Artist, or Writer, or own our own business.

Visualization or Mental Rehearsal: I’m using the terms, visualization or mental  rehearsal, interchangeably. But the Navy found was it was very important, for the person, to see themselves practicing training successfully in their mind. For instance, one of the images that stands out for me, was the underwater test. A Seal trainee, would be in a pool and their trainer would swim down and mess with their air supply. This would trigger a primal fear of drowning. The trainees, who visualized how to handle this situation successfully, tended to be far more successful in actual practice. Another example of this is something I saw most recently the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver Canada, while watching the downhill skiers, you might see them practicing turns or jumps in their heads moving their bodies around as they visualize themselves competing on the course or making a complex jump.

Self talk: They mentioned in the piece that the average person says between 300-7000 words per minute to themselves.  If the majority of that self talk is negative, it’s really no wonder that we can freak ourselves out of completing tasks.  Part of making self talk manageable is to first become aware that you are actually saying so much crap to yourself and then working on challenging the negative words and beliefs.

Dr. Amen of “Change your Brain – Change your Body” talked about asking 2 important questions when you were flooded with negative beliefs.  1. Do I know that this self talk or belief is 100% true?  and 2. What do I know that contradicts the negative self talk or belief?  So, for an example:  “I totally can’t finish anything I start!!!”  Question One: is this 100% true? I don’t know, maybe… maybe not.  Second question: what do I know that contradicts the thoughts? Well, I finished the laundry… I finished brushing my teeth… I fed the dog this morning… I finished this blog article…  Ok, it cannot be 100% true.

Breathing/Arousal Control: When we are having a stress reaction or Arousal Response to a situation (getting scared, anxious, nervous, angry, worried, etc – any strong negative emotion) our brain can have an amygdala trigger, flooding our body with the chemicals Cortisol and Adrenaline.  There are some other chemicals that the body also produces, but these two are very powerful.  We may notice that our hearts start to beat really hard, or our breathing gets quick and shallow.  Our bodies may start to shake or tense up, ready to Fight, Flee or Freeze.  Unfortunately, when we are in the middle of a intense arousal response, our ability to think through the situation is lost and we become very reactive.  What the focus on breathing does, is shift our attention away from the situation and as we work to normalize our breathing, we can calm our responses to situations.  This then will help us stabilize our brain back to a place where we can start thinking again.  Creating the wiring in our brain to calm ourselves in a stressful situation will help us make more effective choices, be less reactive and ultimately help us to survive the situation as best we can.

The Navy has the Seal’s train for stressful often combative situations over and over again.  These men learn skills and develop strategies to manage their reactions in the most intense and deadly situations.  As a quick aside, I am so humbled by how much they do in a days work.  And, I appreciate what they do for me each and every day.  But, the coolest thing we can learn from their training, is that we, mere mortals, can work on training our brain’s reactions and responses to be better!