Don’t believe your own lies

Most of us have well-developed survival strategies for when life gets tough. We need them. They include telling ourselves that things are going to get better. And for the most part they will. Even though we haven’t a clue how that’s going to happen.

It’s fine to use that strategy to get through a rough patch at work, or an unsettling phase in a relationship. It becomes a problem when the bad feeling lasts for more than a few months and we’re still telling ourselves that things will be OK – but doing nothing about it.

Although unwelcome, our inner voices possess a wisdom we may not want to acknowledge. They prod us and prompt us to wake up – to try something new. They trigger fear. Fear that we have made mistakes or need to change track. They push us to explore beyond our slightly uncomfortable comfort zone.

I was going to call this blog post ‘Saying What’s Real’. But on reflection I realised it’s not always wise to speak uncomfortable thoughts out loud. It can create tension and shift that we’re not ready for. But in the safe confines of your own head, it makes sense to trace the origins of these disquiets – the thoughts that make Sunday night feel miserable, or the return from holiday depressing. When we trace them back to the bullying boss, the stretched bank account, the indifferent partner, the selfish friend… when we admit them to ourselves and recognise them for what they are, we empower ourselves to take action.

Once the thoughts are brought into the light we have choices. Fear recedes as we realise that leaving – quitting our job, leaving our relationship – is only one of the options. We can choose to look at things a different way, try a new approach, create a new focus, inject some new energy. We can look after ourselves and deal with what’s really happening – instead of ignoring it.

That is a powerful recipe for change. And it starts with telling yourself the truth.

 

Doing what comes naturally

For as long as I can remember I’ve struggled to know what to do with my life. From somewhere unwanted and unbidden has always come a sense that this is not a trivial question; that there is something that must be satisfied. More than a should, stronger than an ought: an imperative.

Do or die.

When I’ve hit challenges in my life, I’ve often felt it’s because I haven’t yet found the right track. The feeling was strongest when I was diagnosed with cancer and a quiet, rather pissed off, inner segment of me answered, ‘Well that’s because you haven’t done it yet.’

Done what?
I haven’t known.
I’ve never known.
At times it has felt like trying to identify a familiar object, blindfold, and through a thick woollen blanket.

Often I’ve had a frustrated sense of knowing what it is and yet not being able to articulate it. Always, the question is with me ‘What am I meant to be doing with my life?’ And I don’t even know who I’m asking.

In the last year, some glimmers.

There’s a sense of rejecting everything and working with what’s left. I’ve been up so many side roads looking for answers and it feels like they’ve all been dead ends.

From talking to other people about their life development I keep returning to the idea that we all, recognise it or not, have repeating loops in our lives: get up, get going, fall over, learn lesson and… repeat. My loops have been various: learning to listen to my intuition, learning not to work for anyone else; learning to love what and who is given me to love; learning not to worry too much about dying; learning to be kind to my body; learning to reach out to others: learning to drink enough water; learning not to hurry through life as though a pack of wolves were at my heels. At any given moment, should you bump into me, I’ll be struggling with one of these. Sometimes you’ll catch me on an up-loop. Often I’ll be picking myself up and dusting myself down, wondering what just happened. Again.

Recently, I’ve started to realise that the loops all point in one direction. They are all about allowing myself to be happy: happy now, happy as I am, happy with my lot. There is a strong sense running through them of being here, now and simply being me. Knowing that happiness lies in that direction. It is something I know with all my heart and yet, contrariwise, it’s the biggest lesson I still have to learn.

And out of this tangle of loops and thoughts and mistakes has come a thought.

Maybe the thing I’m supposed to ‘do’ is the thing I most need to learn. That wall I keep hitting my head against, the one thing in life that I can’t stop doing, is the thing I’m meant to do. For myself and for others.

And then I realise it is what I do, already. It’s what I’ve always done, in one form or another. But I’ve never articulated it properly. I help people make a habit of happiness.

It’s both my struggle and my vocation.

Ping. A breakthrough.

And then I wondered if that’s true for everyone.

Perhaps your greatest challenge is also your greatest gift?

Perhaps the thing you’re meant to be learning is also the thing you’re meant to be doing?

Have a think about it and let me know.

What do you really really want in 2011?

I was talking about New Year Resolutions with a very dear friend of mine and I was surprised to hear that she makes the same 3 resolutions every year, which can be summed up as:

1. to lose weight
2. be punctual and
3. watch the pennies.

It’s not that the resolutions are surprising, they’d probably work for most people at some level. The surprising thing was her tone of voice which was a bit bored and already a little bit defeated. This friend – let’s call her Mary – is one of the most intelligent, educated and accomplished women I know. She’s capable of achieving anything she sets her mind to. This year I predict she will achieve great things but I doubt they will relate to any of the above…. because her heart just isn’t behind them. They don’t set her on fire.

If I was coaching my friend I would work with her on 2 areas.

1. Setting Heartfelt Goals
I know Mary well enough to know that she always prioritised and delivers on what motivates her, I’ve seen it happen. So you have to assume that these 3 things are not what drive her. No matter how much she believes she wants them, they are either not really her own dream… they could, for example, be the things she believes will win maximum approval from her closest friends and family, (i.e. the things she thinks she should want).

Most of us have some obvious flaws: overweight, lateness and poor money management are great examples. Widely accepted as things that ‘we ought to do something about’, it’s easy to believe these are our dreams… to be slimmer, to get there on time, to spend less. But if you look more closely you’ll find that for some people they’re not dreams they’re just a guilty response to society’s ‘be respectable’ driver. They’re good things undoubtedly, and to conquer them may demonstrate admirable levels of discipline and self control, but dreams they are not. And if you’re a dreamer they won’t work as motivating goals for you. One easy way to tell a dream from a ‘should’ is when people use the words  ’I ought’, ‘I’ve got to’, ‘I must’, to describe their goals – instead of I want to, I love, I’m excited by…

If she wants to move mountains this year, and even if she wants to make some progress towards these 3 ‘shoulds’, Mary is going to have to find a way of identifying a goal that she really really wants. If she does, I guarantee she’ll get there. This would be a good time to engage a life coach like me!

2. Setting Achievable Goals
The other reason our voices can sound a bit dead when describing our resolutions or goals is that we feel, at some level, they’re impossible to achieve. It feels a lot easier to move 3 small hills than one enormous mountain.

I learned this first hand last year during my own lifelong quest to lose weight. I set myself a goal to lose 4 stone and petered out half way through the year for all sorts of reasons (some quite good excuses as it happens, but in the end I discovered that the motivation just wasn’t there to keep trying when the going got tough in other areas). I lost an exciting 18 lbs in the first quarter and, despite making no further progress, managed to keep a whole stone off. Now on one level that feels like failure but on another it sounds like a plan. Losing a stone a year by dieting for 14 weeks and maintaining it for 38 weeks is a sound and sensible diet regime. Not many people finished the year a stone lighter. Well done me!

So I’m planning to do the same thing this year. I’m going to lose a stone in time for Easter. It will sound too slow to those of you who are planning to lose 3 stone by Friday but the great thing is I know I can do it. I know it feels great to lose some weight and then take the pressure off, and I know that keeping it off is more difficult than losing it and I managed to do that.

That makes it an achievable goal. So when I talk about it I can feel fairly confident and that confidence will help to propel me towards the task. From time to time I’ll be blogging about the weight loss progress here so if you’ve got any questions feel free to email. Or if you’d like a nutritionally sound weight loss plan based on achievable goals for yourself come and see me.

Back to Mary. What do you think she’ll do? Will she finish the year slim and punctual with a large bank balance? My guess is that she’ll be so successful in the things that really motivate her that she won’t have time to overeat, she’ll love her work so much that she’ll be eager to get to meetings on time and she’ll be earning so much that her bank balance will improve anyway. She’ll achieve all these things once she trusts herself to really follow her dream.

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PS The significance of the picture is that, while everyone thinks that what any dog wants is a nice juicy bone, my dog, Jack, would rather have chocolate any day. Food for thought: what dream would you rather have than the dream you’ve got?