Most people don’t really want to heal: they just want less pain and suffering while staying the same.
 

What most people seem to be looking for today is another “magic pill”, instant-cure approach to alleviate the pain, discomfort and frustration in their lives. They say they to want to find healing—may even think they mean it intellectually or emotionally—but their preferred solution is still the quick fix: the ‘pill’—chemical or non-chemical (food, alcohol, TV, sex, surgery)—to alleviate their discomfort and take away their symptoms.

Pain brings a cry for change, but once the discomfort disappears, they want to get back back to “normality”, not continue towards true healing. That’s scary and threatening. It requires asking yourself how you are contributing to your own discomfort, and how far you are responsible for what is causing the problem. Which of your thoughts, beliefs, choices and actions are causing the imbalance and unhappiness you are now experiencing? Then it challenges you to to make the necessary changes to reduce or eliminate the dis-harmony.

These are profound and difficult questions to face, which is why people think about change far more than they take positive and sustaining action to make it happen. Thinking is easy and costs little. Action is often neither of those.

What stands in the way of willingness to change is ego.

Ego is necessary. It supports you, creates your personality and individuality, acts like the clothes you put on in the morning in helping you be ‘you’ when you go out into the world. Ego helps you appear to be who you say you are; to remember where you left your wallet and what time the team meeting is.

Unfortunately, your ego also feels that it’s its job to keep your image of yourself safe and protect the lenses through which you see the world. That’s why we all spend so much of our lives defending ourselves against others—sitting in judgment, acting critical, defensive or resentful; resisting change in an effort to avoid more pain and suffering.

Fear comes from the ego. How many of your thoughts are healing or loving thoughts, how many are ‘killing’ ones—fear-based, judgmental, scary, hurtful and negative? Your ego believes that your most limiting beliefs are necessary, even when they cause you pain. Why? Because it imagines that the pain you experience protects you (and it) from a much greater pain: the pain of death and dissolution.

Ego wants to feel safe. When it comes to changing your (actually your ego’s) beliefs and thoughts about life and living, your ego becomes scared. It tries to ensure that you continue to think, believe, and behave exactly as you have in the past. According to your ego, change is hurtful. It wants to keep you (and itself) safe by not changing in any significant way.

Ego prefers thoughts and more pain to actions that threaten its security. That’s why, when people start to realize change is needed, their ego diverts them into seeking out what’s ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ about them. You can spend a huge amount of time beating yourself up over that—all without doing anything to change. You have the illusion of working for change, but none of the substance of changing.

Quieting your ego

If you want true and real change, you must first allow your beliefs and thoughts freedom from instant censorship—just observing them without judging. This action quiets the ego, your ever-present Inner Judge and Critic. It wants you to feel small, scared, wrong and bad. It wants you to set aside the freedom to think new thoughts and take up new beliefs. It wants to block you from making different choices or walking down new paths.

You created most of your limiting and painful beliefs about yourself and the world around you, typically in childhood. You used whatever resources you had at that time, so you could feel safe and garner Mommy and Daddy’s love, attention, approval and recognition. Those beliefs maybe worked then. They don’t work so well now. They need to be updated.

We can all can change our thoughts and beliefs. Despite what our egos tell us, doing so won’t kill us or even cause us greater pain. We can realign our lives by creating new, supportive thoughts and by choosing to act on what they show us. If you really want to heal, that choice is yours to make. What better time than now?

Here are some questions for self-reflection:

• What stories do you tell yourself to keep you from making real change in your life? What beliefs or blockages prevent you from experiencing new ways of doing things?
• Do you constantly beat yourself up? Do you constantly label yourself as ‘bad’, ‘wrong’ or ‘not good enough’ in some way? Would you allow your friends and colleagues to speak to you in the way your ego—your Inner Judge and Critic—speaks to you?
• Do your current beliefs bring you happiness (be honest) or pain and suffering (be equally honest)? If the latter, why do you continue to hold them and allow them to run your life? What would it take to heal yourself?
• The average person has 16,000 thoughts a day. Would you characterize the majority of yours as ‘healing’ (love-based) or ‘killing’ (fear-based)?
• Did you ever just observe your thoughts without getting caught up in them, or in a ’story’? What is that like?
• What one or two debilitating or limiting beliefs would you like to update right now? Can you do it? Will you?
• What one or two baby steps can you take this week or next to make changes in your life by creating new thoughts and beliefs about yourself—and then taking action?

Technorati Tags: change, security, keeping your beliefs intact, sticking with the past, the illusion of the ego, believing your Inner Critic, stuck in painful beliefs, fear of change

Fear and obsession are linked in an endless cycle of hopeless attempts to change reality

 
In a time of fear, the temptation is to try somehow to ‘cure’ the problem that you’re afraid of by focusing on its opposite. This is a mistake. The more obsessed you become with safety, the more sources of risk you will find. The more you focus on achievement, the more opportunities you will create to fear failure. The reality is that there has never been a way to ‘cure’ the ups and downs of life. The only answer lies in accepting reality and working from there.

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Technorati Tags: fear, anxiety, seeking safety, coping with uncertainty, accepting ambiguity, facing reality

In what ways does your working life need ‘fixing’?
 

Is the pursuit of happiness the main cause of your problems and misery?

Our modern world is too attached to options, choices and preferences. Everything is ‘customized’ to your wishes—or can be, if you have the means to pay. People are obsessed with ‘having it all’—whatever ‘it’ is and however likely or unlikely it may be that they can ‘have’ it.

This goes well beyond material possessions. People demand to ‘have’ certain life experiences and emotional states. They want to ‘have’ a perfect life, perfect relationships, a perfect career—plus extensive wealth, mind-blowing sex on demand, perfect feelings of joy and happiness all the time and complete freedom from the ‘bad stuff’.

When this doesn’t come about—and how would it?—such people believe they and their lives are broken in some way. Now they want a cure—preferably one that is instant, low-cost, and requires little or no effort. Is it any wonder the world is full of snake-oil salespeople selling personal development and lifestyle ‘cures’ for lots of money? Read the full story

Maybe love of money is not so much the root of all evil
as the cause of most stupidity

Dionysus granting Midas’ wish
painting by Nicholas Poussin

King Midas was a dream CEO. Thanks to the gift he requested from the god Dionysus, everything he touched turned to gold. That’s why ‘having the Midas touch’ has become a shorthand for anyone with exceptional money-making ability.

Here’s this Phrygian king, Midas, and he’s even greedier than the top guys at Enron. The accumulation of wealth is all that matters in his life. That’s why he made his fatal mistake.

One day, he found the Satyr Silenus, drunk as usual, wandering around lost. Recognizing who he was, Midas treated him kindly and returned him to his master, the god Dionysus. In return, Dionysus said he’d grant Midas anything he asked for.

Despite being hugely rich, what Midas wanted most was infinite money-making ability, so he asked that everything he touched should turn to gold. Dionysus granted his wish and . . .

Whoa! Everything?

That’s right. The Ancient Greek gods were a tricky bunch. Dionysus gave Midas exactly what he asked for.

Food? Drink?

Yes. Midas quickly found he couldn’t eat or drink; couldn’t touch his beloved daughter or kiss his wife without producing an exquisitely detailed, solid gold statue. Everyone fled from him in terror and he quickly realized he would starve to death. So he prayed to Dionysus to take back his gift. The god told him to bathe in a certain river and the gift passed into the water, so that the sand in the bottom became streaked with gold. After that, King Midas, who had finally learned his lesson, hated gold or any other wealth, and so became a kind of ancient environmentalist, living a simple life in the fields. Read the full story

Have you noticed how coffee and chocolate is becoming as pompous and snobby as wine tasting used to be?

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; as most of us will have bad memories of huge catering tins of icky powdered instant coffee in our respective workplace tearooms and were glad to see even fast food joints like McDonald’s embrace fresh ground coffee and barista-trained staff.

Taking a coffee break means that it’s no longer a stroll past the cubicle farms and stationery cupboard into the kitchen. We now take orders from our workmates and leave the building to the decent café across the road that, like Cheers, now knows your name and exactly how you like your coffee. The place can also function as an impromptu meeting room for those times you want to discuss something away from the office, or as a little ‘treat’ to staff for a job well done. Read the full story

For many, change is unsettling, leading to feelings of insecurity, imbalance and instability.

“We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what in the morning was true will in evening become a lie.” — Carl Jung

We’ve all heard the expression “change is the one constant in life.” The truth is that every day we’re experiencing change in some way. Life evolves continually — at work, at home, at play and in relationships. Yet, if pain and suffering accompany change, they are less likely to come from the experience of change itself than from trying to hold on to the past and your familiar ways of thinking, being and doing. Underneath reactivity to change is fear of the unknown, fear of new ways of doing or thinking about things, fear about having to learn something new, and fear of letting go.

To tap the inherent growth and developmental opportunities within change requires you first to explore the question: “What am I afraid of?” This exploration allows you to understand what’s beneath your fear and what you can learn about it. Rather than talking a detour around it, suppressing it or trying to control it, you can come directly into contact with your fear and see what it wants to teach you about yourself.

You can only grow, personally and professionally, through change. You cannot change and grow while defending and holding on to the status quo — hanging on for dear life. Change is not a threat to growth but an integral part of it. Read the full story

Introducing a new ‘author’ for Slow leadership

Ever since we moved to Arizona, I have had a soft spot for coyotes. We see them fairly often around here, at all times of day. We hear their ‘concerts’ in the early evening, especially in Spring, when the high-pitched yips of the pups are added to the howling and yapping of their elders. Most look well fed and in good condition — though that doesn’t stop them from being a significant threat to people’s small pets.

Most of you will already know that Coyote is a major figure in much Native American folklore. He’s a trickster, a bit of a rogue, always trying new ways to avoid effort and often getting into problems as a result. But he’s also a significant part of the creation, often adding oddities and creating quirks and alterations in the Creator’s designs — more often than not to the benefit of mankind.

This ambivalence — part rogue and joker, part wise and creating spirit — was what drew me to the character of Coyote in the first place. It seemed particularly relevant to our world today, where few things are quite what they seem and even the best of intentions tend to run into the law of unexpected consequences. We certainly need wisdom, but not always of the all-too-serious, moralistic kind typically handed out by academic professionals and self-appointed gurus alike. We need something more earthy and practical — and hopefully more fun to hear about. Read the full story

Kath Lockett reflects on giving in to the shame of wearing the universal badge of a drone

Photo: LAGtheNoggin

Ever since I started work as a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed graduate trainee in 1989, every workplace has had some kind of security card access for entry into the building. This common sense approach to preventing robberies or lunatics entering the building (ones not on the payroll at least) is commendable and was not worthy of much introspection on my part.

What I always refused to do, however, was to encase the entry card in a plastic sleeve and then wear it around my neck on a lanyard.

For people with lives, a ‘lanyard’ is one of those ribbon string things that kids normally use to hang their tamagotchis from, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be seen wearing one for the greater part of my waking hours.

You see, they make the wearer look as though they are trying to be important: all they need is the white lab-coat to complete the picture of being able to gain top-secret access into the underground nuclear bunker that also houses Elvis, the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot and the Tasmanian Tiger. Read the full story

Success often hinges on avoiding unforced errors. Here’s how to do it.

Photo: indi.ca

What’s the cause of unforced errors in life and work? Not stopping to think. Going so fast that you don’t see the looming pothole until you hit it. When asked why they did something stupid, the commonest thing people say is: “It seemed like such a good idea at the time.” It did — because all they saw were their dreams of success, and they didn’t slow down enough to notice the risks that went along with them.

Today’s leadership role models tend to be aggressive by nature. They prefer the spectacular win over any series of small gains, even if it comes with far more risk. They want to be known as ‘winners’, not people who play safe. And, like all who have the power to recruit others, they tend to choose people in their own image: people whose strengths and weaknesses are very like their own. You can think of this like the emphasis on successful stock-picking that flew around before the dot-com bust. The supposed masters of this art were widely imitated, even though all the evidence is that even the most dedicated and professional of them cannot beat the market over the long term.

The truth is far more prosaic: in nearly every human activity, success depends more on avoiding unforced errors than flashes of brilliance. The one who doesn’t mess up, wins. The brilliant risk-taker produces occasional miracles, but they’re often out-weighed by all the mistakes that come along with that approach. Look back on your own career for a moment. Some of the bad times certainly won’t have been your fault; chance plays a huge part in events, personal and organizational. But how many times did you make some mistake that you know was perfectly avoidable — if only you’d seen it in time? How many unforced errors have caused you embarrassment, loss of credibility, or even more serious career set-backs? Read the full story

Believe it or not, she makes a great case study on how to deal with a crisis.

While we may be fascinated by Britney Spears and her professional and personal downfall for voyeuristic reasons, there are real-life lessons that we can benefit from. On a personal note, I enjoy reading the tabloids and reading about celebrities and their trials (sometimes literally their court trials) and tribulations. For me, however, it is not about watching a car wreck for the purpose of seeing a car wreck; rather, it is about learning how these folks, with all sorts of professionals to help them, deal with the situations they encounter. Selfishly, I like to learn from the mistakes of others so that perhaps I can avoid them all together — or at least know better how to handle them should they, or similar situations, occur in my life.

Consider for a moment:

• What management techniques can be employed to manage a crisis such as Britney’s?
• What communications strategy should be followed?
• How do you turn around a bad situation?

So, back to Britney. I think it’s fair to say that most of us, if not all of us, can agree that she has not done a bang up job with “crisis management.” I certainly think that with all of her resources, advisors, handlers, etc., that she could have done a better job managing the media during her personal and family problems. Now, in fairness, the media hound Britney like a swarm of bees do a honey-filled hive. which is clearly more than most people could bear. But, regardless, it is equally clear that her handling of the situation leaves a lot to be desired. Read the full story