In the Words of Buckaroo Bonzai…

no matter where you go… there you are.

It seems to be a theme this week; I’ve been talking with clients about the idea of them wanting their lives to be different by either running away or having things magically change.  The underlying idea being, maybe if the situation changes, it will be easier for them.  Let me start off by saying, there is nothing wrong with leaving a situation or changing it, if you recognize that you take your baggage with you.  Leaving the situation can give you a break from whatever rut you find yourself, but if you have a pattern or habit of behavior or thinking, most likely you will find yourself running around the same tree very soon.  In order to break a habit or change a situation, you need to start with yourself.  What do you need to be aware of in order to really change whatever situation you find yourself in that you don’t like?  That’s the big question.

One question to think about is: Is there a pattern here?

Awareness can make a huge difference in outcomes.  In fact, Awareness makes ALL the difference. With awareness, we can begin to understand our patterns and what motivates us to behave, speak, fight, and make choices, etc in certain ways.  With this insight, we can begin to choose with clarity.

Another question to think about is: Where do I want to be in 6 months or a year?

Awareness let’s us know what’s going on, but in order to know what to choose, we have to have an idea of where we want to go. In his book, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, Steven Covey says to begin with the end in mind, and that’s the truth, we definitely need to have a direction.

I was talking to a client the other day, she gets into patterns in relationships where she is in financial crisis and wants someone to ‘save’ her.   But, people don’t tend to want to financially rescue other people for free, so she ends up with the cost of what she has to do to keep the savior engaged in saving her.  She then begins to feel bad about what she has to do, or put up with, and ends up hating her savior.  She had to take a good hard look at the pattern, now that she knows it’s there, she has to start to develop the idea of what she want to move towards.  “I want to feel safe and like I don’t have to worry that creditors are knocking at my door.”  My thought to her was, “If you want to truly be ‘safe’ you’re going to have to deal with the financial drama you create.  Creating a different dynamic in that regard will allow you then to choose the people you actually want to spend time with, based on liking and respecting them, not because you have to put on a show to get them to do what you need… like save you.”

We do this in jobs too.  “I hate my job, but I can’t quit.”  Well, why not?  I realize that people have expenses, kids, homes, cars, insurance, etc.  But, if you really hate a job, why can’t you start to think about what you want to move toward?  Feeling stuck and choosing to stay that way is most likely a pattern too.  There are times, that with good reason, we need to stay in a job, even if we don’t love it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be planning a change down the road.  It may mean we need to take a look at what skills we need to develop, education, etc.  The pattern is just the easy place we can get stuck; it doesn’t mean we have to stay stuck forever.  Someone once said, the only difference between a rut and the grave is the depth… ruts are easier to jump out of, death is terminal.

If we have the courage to pay attention and stop running away from our stuff, life gets a lot less complicated. It’s sort of like that quintessential picture of the newlyweds driving away in the car looking over waving at the crowd with little cans hanging off the back, those little cans are actually baggage, the cans say things like: problem managing anger, commitment issues, fear, wants to be saved, and I’m not feeling so confident. The problem with the little cans is you’re dragging them along with you and until you can see them, you can’t toss them in the recycle bin.

One of the problems of life is that we can’t really hide from ourselves, no matter where we go… there we are.

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!