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In my last post, I wrote about utilizing the power of your feelings to be smarter. I want to build on that to encourage you to make another distinction with your thoughts and feelings. Seth Godin speaks in this interview with Merlin Mann of 43 Folders (the video is good too) about how our lizard (limbic) brain is hardwired to focus on survival needs. Godin gives us insight on how to “ship” in spite of the power of this old brain of ours. For Godin, shipping is producing.

Not all of us are oriented toward shipping the product as much as we are creating it. Both of the men refer to Steven Pressfield’s excellent book, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles as a great guide to breaking out of the procrastination that prevents shipping.

We can’t nor do we want to shut down our limbic brain’s survival response. Godin does a good job describing what many would call being mindful. I agree it is not about denying, it is about moving forward with that response still present. If you try to make it an either or – you are more likely to be taken out by your fear. Godin uses the example of how he got over his fear of public speaking from just doing it.

When you can, you procrastinate, rationalize or just avoid – you aren’t shipping. Wouldn’t you rather produce, so you are going to get off your ass and do it? It does sound simple and easy. Yet, if it is – why aren’t we all doing more shipping?

After a few hundred thousands of years, we’re not going to change our biology. However, we can change our behavior. Godin’s new book – Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? should be a good guide to not always being a lizard with feelings of survival ruling your behaviors.

How do you honor your fears while you ship?

Further Reading:

1. How to Be Smart – while Feeling

Being to doing

How do you make it easy? How do you find your flow? After you healed your need to survive – then what?

In the previous post, we learned about how therapy clears out your limiting past. It isn’t necessary to clear out the past and heal to work with being; it just makes it easier. I often work all three elements simultaneously; but then I’m greedy.

Let’s talk about being. You don’t need to be a Buddhist monk to get power from being present. You just need to be mindful or aware of what is happening. Our tendency here in the United States is to focus on doing, often several things at one time. Being is first focusing on your experience. As you are doing, you are aware of your experience. For example, when you are doing the dishes, you focus on what it feels like to do the dishes rather than worrying about what you need to do tomorrow. In becoming “one with your dishes,” you allow any body or emotional experience to occur. You may also feel the physical and emotional tension of your worry.

Yes, this being thing sounds simple – it doesn’t get simpler as a concept. So why would people spend a lifetime mastering it? Because the better they get, the more they get done, the more relaxed they are and the more joy they feel. I know it sounds contradictory to experience possible discomfort to feel more joy, but it works.

It’s a strange phenomenon, surrendering to discomfort eventually reduces it. It is as if you were grasping your right forearm with your left hand and squeezing hard. After a while, you begin to be numb to the pain. The tension is still there, possible damage is still occurring, yet there is no pain. If you were to bring your focus back to you right arm, you would feel the pain. Then with that awareness, you would say to yourself, “Why the hell am I hurting myself?”

Being present to what is occurring not only frees you from pain; it can free other resources to be more available. Most people don’t know how much effort they put into sustaining their “normal” existence. When those resources are free, they are more available for pleasure and for performance.

When I had a clinic in Scottsdale back in the ’90s, we ran Mindfulness Stress Reduction Programs for hospital systems, corporations and the public. I remember one of the many Type A executives we had in our program. She was a senior VP in the city. Her life sucked. She was stressed, in pain and getting less effective even though she was working more. Half way through the 8-week course, she came in to the class to report she removed her second phone, started taking lunches and worked only 40 hours the previous week. She was amazed that not only was her pain gone, she was more productive with less work.

She learned to just be present. She got there by focusing on her body through simple exercises we taught such as a body scan where she experienced her body and focusing on the breath. When you focus on what is happening in the present all your resources are present. The distractions of the past and future are not there. You are just there in your body in the present moment. This state is the same state a top athlete achieves when he is experiencing a “runner’s high.” When I worked with these athletes and they came back reporting more of these highs, I told them it was due to them being more relaxed and balanced.

Being present also is a set up for creativity. My artistic clients had the same experience as my athletes – relaxation lead to being more present, which lead to increased production – for artists this showed up as more creativity. Relaxing into being allows more to show up. Your essence starts to show up.

Further Reading:

1. Want a Powerful Life? Use Your Hidden Resources – Part 1
2. Want a Powerful Life? Use Your Hidden Resources – Part 3
3. How to Use Pain to Change

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Why can existing be so hard? Why does it feel like you are fighting the inertia of the entire universe to have the life you want?

I doubt you are using your innate capacity to fully live. In previous posts, I’ve written about the Whole Adventure or Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as being an unconscious movement to evolve.

If the Whole Adventure is your evolutional process and the river you travel to your new self – what is the power that will propel your down the river? Beyond the desire for this journey, you have the means to facilitate the needed change. If you are to take this journey, and you are – you need help traveling it. Help comes in three forms as you change and grow. Knowing how to use these instinctual processes will greatly improve your journey.

The Trinity – three ways to achieve graceful and powerful change:

• Therapy to healing
• Being to doing
• Magic to miracles

Over the years these three aspects of development consistently show up in those who have a rich life. I suspect these people instinctually tapped into their deep power. You can do it intentionally by understanding what these three assets are and how to utilize them.

Therapy to healing

These aspects are not necessarily stages, but if they were, this would be the first for some. Here, the limitations that prevent life and movement are removed. This is particularly true if  the stress or trauma occurred during childhood and we were unable to experience and release it so the event becomes lodged in our body/mind. Our world tells us that either what occurred didn’t occur or we can’t speak about it in an honest way – so we distort our worldview and ourselves to fit the world that exists. Over time, we grow to consciously and unconsciously accept this new worldview.

Therapy, as a change agent, becomes the catalyst for this change. Be it psychotherapy or body therapy, or even shamanic work when the stress is released and understood for what it was, you are free to begin to experience life fully. Life stops being about survival. You stop being at the effect of stress and trauma, for example you move beyond the Drama Triangle which I wrote about in previous posts.

Therapy is the part of the trinity that deals with fixing. It removes the limiting past, beliefs, pain,

tension and toxins. It gets the crap out of you and your life. Therapy sets up your body/mind to do what it wants to do – heal. Healing can’t occur in a state of survival. Stress, even if it is from the past, is a form of survival. To the extent you have stress in you; you are limiting your mind and body to heal.

Examples of therapies

Therapy can also include holistic therapies such as acupuncture, herbology or homeopathy. Standard allopathic medicine doesn’t foster healing, but it is great at dealing with emergencies. Support groups when focused not on a problem, but towards sponsoring change, can get you out of your past. So can trainings that not only teach a new way of being, but also activate your deeper instincts for change.

As Americans, we like to fix things including ourselves. This is great until it becomes a distraction or obsession. My warning here is don’t use these processes to develop a better coping mechanism. I see people learn a better way to be, but they still aren’t being themselves. They may overtly be functioning better. They could be getting in less trouble. They aren’t happier.

It’s not why

Believing you need to understand the why to heal is a misnomer. True understanding comes from the wisdom of experience, not from someone else telling you to be different. In other words, be less concerned about why and more focused on the how of change.

Agents of change

Your body and its cycles have its own agents of change. For women, puberty and menopause are two examples of how all parts of a woman are forced to change as she passes through her rites of passage into another stage of life.

All these agents of change will produce chaos. Releasing, completing and healing will shake up the past; it is their purpose. The fixing nature of therapy brings you back to a neutral place, a place more available for the second element being to doing which I will discuss in the next post.

What are your agents of change that you use to move your life forward?

Further Reading:

1. Want a Powerful Life? Use Your Hidden Resources – Part 2
2. Want a Powerful Life? Use Your Hidden Resources – Part 3
3. A Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

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I couldn’t agree more about what Andrew Cohen is call Creative Fiction in his recent post. So often I see people attempting to be politically correct, new age or just safe in their conversations. I love it when someone is willing to risk it and possibly mess it up to speak her truth. Speaking it is different that forcing it on someone.

Andrew writes about, in relationship there needs to be a space for the “fiction” to show up. It is there. If not expressed it comes out indirectly, i.e., passive aggressively or goes in to your body to produce tension and resistance.

For me practicing mindfulness is expressing, allowing for the unspoken tension to be spoken. What are your thoughts about this tension – Creative Fiction?

No related posts.

Are you lonely? If you are, you’re a part of a growing percentage of Americans according to a recent Pfizer Journal study. The fact that Zoloft®, one of the most prescribed antidepressants is manufactured by Pfizer, and Pfizer just settled a $2.3 billion case with with the Department of Justice does make one wonder about the creditability of this study. Drug company ethics aside, no matter how many others are lonely – it sucks when you are.

The distinction between being alone and loneliness

You can’t begin to heal the second until you allow the first. For years, I denied my loneliness. It was only after I settled into being alone, that I then was able to feel my loneliness and could then allow the despair of loneliness to lift.

When we run hide from an emotion, the emotion doesn’t go away, it just hibernates waiting to awaken hungry. Using your survival skills you developed as a child, you learn to do work around painful emotions. As a kid, you had few options to assert your feelings or needs. You learned to do what was needed to survive and be loved. Putting up with being lonely was one of them.

One of the more common compensations for being lonely is to be busy. You may have learned to always be doing something or to always be with others. Solitude is not an escape from the stress of life as much as opportunity for the loneliness to wake up. When you are doing things, hanging with others or you are being entertained – you are may be temporally escaping loneliness.

When was the last time you spent several days by yourself doing nothing? When I asked that, what did you feel? What images flashed by? Did it feel like an invitation to be tortured?

What causes your loneliness?

Loss is a huge set-up for loneliness. Losing a partner through the changes of life, divorce or death can put many into the depression of loneliness. It might be you moving out of your home and your community. Remember what it felt like when you moved away from home.

Whatever the cause, loneliness will affect you physically. Research continues to show that it impairs your cognition and motivation while affecting your immune system, blood pressure and DNA.

The art of being alone

How much do you enjoy being alone? Can you just hang with just yourself, or do you need to be with someone or doing something?

Solitude is a lost art in these days of 24/7 media, Internet and whatever else we want. Even if you aren’t looking for a distraction, it is there seeking your attention. The email or tweet that needs a reply or the clothes that need washing often comes before your need for undisrupted time and space.

Creating space for your own quite time takes a commitment. Years ago when we had a company that taught Mindfulness Stress Reduction, we would require the super type-A students to do 45 minutes of mindfulness homework per day. Everyone would say, they “didn’t have time for it.” We would then tell them they couldn’t do the course – they then created the time. The interesting thing was that four weeks into the eight-week course you couldn’t take the practice away from most of them.

We cannot only learn to be alone; we can learn to enjoy its benefits.

Transform loneliness by being alone

Here are some simple suggestions, starting with the don’ts:

• Don’t
  • Resort to drugs, they only repress the affect; they have never addressed the cause of loneliness. As an emergency intervention, yes – as a healing regime, no.
  • Deal with your need for time alone by:
    • Justifying how you always need to be with someone or doing something
    • Rationalizing that invalidates your feelings and needs
    • Suppressing your expression of your feelings
    • Shaming yourself into doing it the “right way” which is not right for you

• Watch your behaviors
  • You project on to others what you are not owning or experiencing
    • We often see in others what we don’t want to see in ourselves
  • Here are some common escapes to suppress and distract
    • Media
    • Friends, family and pets
    • Work
    • Addictions

• Practice mindfulness, the art of
  • Acceptance
  • Allowing what wasn’t okay to be experienced
  • Feeling ­– just feel physically and emotionally what is happening as it happens
  • Using your mind to witness, not judge what is occurring

• Express
  • Your feelings and wants
  • Withholds of your feelings and wants

• If you can’t get there ­– use others to help stir up feelings
  • media
    • country music – it is great for bringing up the victim in you
    • sad, angry, frightening or happy movies
    • books
  • Change groups from support groups, which are based on supporting a problem and move on to a group that is oriented towards supporting change and success

• Risk
  • Meet others
  • Take the long view
    • Use experiences of being alone to activate loneliness so you may release it
  • Stay in the moment and your body as you experience being alone or loneliness
  • Prime the pump
    • Volunteer
    • Find a passion and share it

• Take care of your body
  • Get the rest and nutrition you need

• Receive
  • Bodywork
  • The joy that comes from truly being with others as you are fully present
  • Support – let others support you
  • Community
    • Join
    • Create  one if you can’t find what you want
    • Start with an on-line community

• Breathe
  • This is the simplest, yet most powerful way to heal loneliness

• Be alone
  • Surrender to the state of being alone

• Just do it

Being alone will be your vehicle to move you out of loneliness. The seduction of life today will want to pull you into not being alone. Use the above tools to get the most out of shifting loneliness into the pleasures of solitude.

The ultimate test, which is asking yourself if you’re getting less or more energy at the end of the day from your behaviors, will determine if your investment was worth the effort. Share any ways you transform your loneliness.

No related posts.

What makes you powerful? I propose it isn’t your biceps; it’s your emotions. Your power derives from you expressing your emotions. I’m not talking about the rants we can go on, I am talking about those feelings that are difficult to express. In the expression of your vulnerability, you are powerful.

When you reveal your emotional liabilities, you risk judgment and rejection – but power lies in the risk. Telling your friend that you don’t want to help her, or your spouse how much he means to you, feels dangerous.

Think versus feel

Who taught you to communicate emotionally? If you’re like the rest of us, no one taught or modeled clear emotional communication. We were taught to be logical. Our religions and culture stands on Descartes’ proclamation, “I think, therefore I am.” Taught to lead with our minds, we come to believe the feelings will solve themselves if we figure the situation out.

You might be smart, but are you getting what you want? The passion that moves change comes from your belly. It comes from living a life of expression; I learned this the hard way. Growing up with dyslexia, I tried everything to be smart like others but it didn’t work. I had to resort to another strategy so I just started expressing what I felt.

In the course of leading more with my feelings and less with my thoughts, I stumbled. Yet, I also discovered I was happier and more powerful. I went from a timid, overly self-conscious kid to a man who has no problem opening his mouth.

One concept that helped came from neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), a way to understand communication and behavior. I learned that even though we might use our visual and auditory capacities to process information, it is our kinesthetic sense that tells us what is true for us. We gather the information, and then we run it by our feelings to know if it is good for us.

How many times have you made a decision based on logic only to later realize that while your deduction might have been correct, the decision wasn’t right for you? Our cultural training to make decisions based only on facts causes you to function as inefficient computers.

Train yourself to feel

Your feeling abilities are just underdeveloped skills. Like with any skills, you can significantly improve them with deliberate practice. There is no gym for feeling, so how do you get in shape? Here are some of the practices I give to clients and students:

• Mindfulness. The growth of the practice of mindfulness in the last ten years has exploded. Virtually every community has someone teaching Mindfulness Stress Reduction courses. I used to teach these eight-week courses and there is no quicker way to develop a level of mastery with being aware of what you are experiencing. The bonus is that your stress level goes way down as you increase your awareness of your body and emotions.

• Express. When in doubt – speak. This is just like any activity in which you’ve become out-of-shape; you’ll be a little rough at it in the beginning but let yourself screw up. Your self-judgments will be worse than what others might think. If the only thing you say in the beginning is that something doesn’t feel right or that you’re a confused, you’ve taken a large step.

Speak what is true for you in the moment. Another method to prime this emotional pump is to begin your speaking with a physical feeling. “My stomach feels tense,” can be the beginning of an honest conversation.

• Release the past. This doesn’t mean you need to enroll in ten years of therapy. It might mean taking a page from 12 step programs where you make amends for past actions. We all have done things we regret. I know when I called an old girlfriend to own how I betrayed her and listened to how my actions affected her, we both opened up and let go of held feelings.

So much of your charge about a current event often comes from similar previous events that often for valid reasons didn’t get expressed. So, when possible, feel and express even if it is small.

Every week in our men’s groups, we see how a small expression of past held actions or feelings set men free to be more alive and more powerful. After hundreds of these meetings, I have always left the meetings feeling more powerful because I made sure I spoke what I needed to speak. I still might be shy and screw up some of my communications, but I don’t hold back my feelings, the cost is too great.

Focus on your feelings; start speaking them, find venues that you can work out your feelings, play with emotional expression. Let us know how this works for you.

Further Reading:

1. The Two Questions That Will Transform Your Life
2. How to Transform Your Partner’s Relationship
3. MAKING IDEAS WHOLE – The Power of Language

It’s not you, men. For women, happiness comes from how they experience life. Marcus Buckingham and his team polled thousands of women to discover what made them happy. He found that women’s happiness comes from focusing on the moments rather than the goals, plans or dreams. Focusing on the moments means being present. And men, women know when a man is present. If you want to attract a woman, and help keep her happy while she’s with you, be present.

Buckingham states it well:

When you commit your life to being true to yourself, you are not committing to some far-flung destiny, some grand dream, or some disembodied list of values, no matter how worthy. Instead you are committing to the truth embodied in this strong moment, the truth that this specific moment, for no rational reason, energizes you.

This phenomenon holds true for men too, though. We all experience a deeper and richer life when we are present. Stress is often the effect of not being present. Our bodies know when we are being incongruent with what we want and what we are doing. To deal with the incongruity we learned to check out. The problem is, we often don’t check back into our bodies, or back into the moment.

Have you ever been out to dinner with you wife or girlfriend, and she’s talking away, and you’re thinking about work? She gets your attention by saying, “Hello! Where ARE you?” That’s a great way to drive a woman away—by never being present with her. Learn to enjoy the little moments with her, and it will create an unbreakable bond.

We read books that tell us how to get things done, how to live our dreams, or how to change our habits to be better people. We often succeed at our goals–but are we happier?

Ok, you might be thinking, “Being in the moment might work better than all the other techniques I’ve tried, but how do I do it?” Unfortunately, none of us in this culture were taught how to be present.

One way to be present is incredibly simple:  breathe. Years ago, my business partner and I ran a mindfulness stress reduction company in Phoenix. During the eight-week course, we taught people to relax by teaching them to feel their bodies through breathing. As they hoped, their stress was significantly reduced. What really amazed them, though, was that they were happier—not just less stressed, but truly happier in all aspects of their lives. Because they were finally present.

I don’t teach the classes any more. I do have a blog that assist readers in reducing their stress and teaching them to use the power the breath: www.stressedout.org.

If you want to be happier, be more present. If you want to be more present, experience your body – breathe. As simple as it sound, it works. If you want to attract the “right people” to you, be present. If you want fulfilling relationships, be present. Simple.

Further Reading:

1. How to Cheat Change – Use Your Body
2. Change Is an Extreme Event
3. How to Transform Your Partner’s Relationship

Amber Riviere wrote an excellent post on how to cut through what blocks you from achieving your goals and your vision. In reviewing, Wayne Dryer’s new book Excuses Begone! she mentions that Dryer says just ignore what is taking you out. I would agree don’t give it energy. Yet I would warn you not to deny the feelings associated with the inaction.

When any of us hold our breath, holding back our full experience my might get the task done, but we are still left with the emotion that was taking us out. By feeling the emotions as you move forward beyond the block not only do you get it done, you also reduce or release the limiting emotion.

There will be a next time. If some of the emotional charge is released, the resistance will be less – it might be gone. What a bonus to doing the act the first time.

Amber speak about the benefits of having a blank “unwillingness sheet” which is similar to what I wrote about in “Know Fear to Succeed”. Read Amber’s post to learn more simple suggestions to being successful. Let us know what you do to achieve your goals.

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Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Workweek fame discusses how to succeed by using your fears. His short video shares how listing your worst-case fears prepare you for what most likely won’t happen. What it does do, is bring out in the open the distractions that are rolling around in your head and taking you out. Getting honest can be hard in the beginning, but as you continue writing your list, you’ll feel your energy pick up.

His next suggestion is to practice your fears. Here, he suggests you create strategies for these possible situations, and then rehearse dealing with them. This further decreases the fear, and enhances your understanding of the situation. If one of the fears does come true, you’re also prepared to deal with it.

Tim’s two suggestions go against the current mindset of focusing on the positive. It causes you to go into your feelings, which will often take you out despite all of your positive affirmations.

The power of Tim’s approach is mirrored in what we ask men in our men’s group, “What is at risk?” What would happen, what would you lose and/or gain, if you pursue a particular avenue? When this is done in such a way where it takes the man out of his head and deeper into his feelings, the process can be very empowering. The man gets to see and feel what his little voices are doing to him. The price he has paid for keeping these voices, but not addressing them directly. Once owned and felt; he can release them.

Let me know your success with this approach—or any other for that matter—for dealing with your fears.

Further Reading:

1. How to Know and Use Fear

Change requires determination, sometimes like that of a competitive endurance athlete. An article in National Geographic Adventure on how to get through adversity, tells the story of how Rosie Stancer attempted to be the first woman to travel solo to the North Pole. She didn’t achieve her goal, but she did survive—minus two toes while vowing to reattempt.

The article quotes Andrew Lane, Ph.D., a sports psychologist, who suggests concentrating on each movement. He goes on to say, “Relaxing your shoulders can help stop a cycle of vicious thoughts.” Breathing and being in the moment no matter how difficult it might be will reduce your stress and increase your performance. A stressed body never performs as well over time. The survival response as the stress response will get us out of harm’s way, but we aren’t meant to sustain that level of sympathetic nervous system output. Over time, our performance decreases if only because we become exhausted.

Another sports psychologist, David Coppel, Ph.D., speaks about how some athletes disassociate from their bodies to get through the event. Disassociation is a backup to being present; when you can’t handle something you check out. The problem is that you often don’t check back in. It’s true, you feel less pain but you will also feel less pleasure. Not being present is a set-up to injuries and getting lost.

Stress, in a sporting event or life, can teach you to check out. The problem is you can get so good at it that you don’t even know you aren’t present. Then one day you may wake up wondering how you got to where you are. Twenty-five years ago, I had a pediatric neurologist see me for Rolfing. About halfway through the ten sessions, he told me, “I am not who I wanted to be. I am someone else’s image of a life.” He gave up medicine to discover who he was and what he wanted from life. That took an act of bravery to come back into his body and his life.

The process of change can be difficult. Often the most difficult aspect is getting present. Once you are in your body, and feeling what is occurring in the moment, change occurs. For many, the first three stages of the Whole Adventure are just about getting present. Re-associating and relaxing into whatever is happening can make your event more intense. It will keep you on your path ultimately increasing the chance of success.

Further Reading:

1. How to Use Pain to Change
2. What Makes Women Happy?
3. How to Cheat Change – Use Your Body