Days Gone By

Its a quirky thing, blogging. I think about it as days go by and on the one hand I ask myself what inspirational thing can I share... I never really have considered myself inspirational but others have.  I think I've just looked at myself as wanting to experience everything that I can and have considered the moment as being the best time to start. "What's next" has pretty much been a mantra of mine... and "no time like the present."  It's been perfectly fine in my life when I've been 'on my own' and a bit stickier when I've been in relationship. Except for now, which is fabulous.

Days gone by.. I don't know what had me name this post and the days have gone by.  There are many wonderful times and many not so wonderful times. There have been highest highs and lowest lows. Each have contributed to who I have become. I'm content. I'm also restless. Which both are exactly okay for me. 

I've been told many times "you should write a book" because of the stories that come out of me that I have lived. Perhaps those experiences will eek out in my blogging and my bloggers can vote on whether or not there is something to write about. No time like the present, eh?    

Thoughts on dis-empowering conversations that we automatically speak to ourselves

Day by day we wake up into possibility. Today, at 6:30 AM I woke up into possibility, or said another way, choice.  In that exact moment I had the opportunity to wake up into... "I should... or "I have to... or "I need to... or "I'm going to try... or whatever form of waking up into the 'default' environment that we, as human beings, automatically set up for ourselves. 

Or I had the opportunity to choose to wake up into "I will...

Think about it. If I "should on" myself, I am automatically 'off the starting block' with a 10# weight tied around my neck. I call this way-of-being 'being hopeful that my day turns out.' There is no commitment in these default conversations that show up automatically and besides, they dis-empower me as the designer of my life. 

If I live from "I have to..." then I am already making myself wrong for 'not doing what I have declared I have to be doing.' There is a difference between "I have to" and "I will."  Today, I will get up... and make a choice in the NOW. The now is all I have. Now, I can choose to continue to write this blog or now, I can choose to stop. 

Yes, there are plans that I have for the day, including choosing to be responsible for my body and going to work out however, it is up to me whether or not "I should... or "I have to.. or "I need to... or "I'm going to try...

You see, I can go on not working out. It's not something "I have to" do. That is perfectle acceptable as a choice.  I can continue to  choose not work out ever as a way to live my life and to accept whatever happens because of that choice. If I look from being responsible in designing mine as a healthy life, I will work out. There is no Have to, Need to, Should, Trying.. there is only choosing that "I will", if I choose to live my life responsibly and healthily.

And now, I choose to stop writing this blog and go work out.

 

Powerful Communication with First, Your Body Dispositions

I heard something fabulous the other day on which I've been pondering where to pay attention to how our communication with each other may become more powerful.

Marty Raphael, one of my colleagues through Newfield Network, said the following in one of our shared ontological explorations:

"First, we have a body.

Then, we have emotions.

Finally, we have linguistics." 

Let's explore this as an inquiry and how it relates to communicating powerfully.

Sometimes we pay attention to what we say. More more accurately however, we pay attention to:

"self talk" or 

"the little voice in our head" or 

"I have to" or 

"I need to" or 

"I tried.." or 

"feelings" ...

... or just generally, how we "should on" ourselves via language.

In other words, we automatically fall into talking to ourselves or others from which we find... shall I say "collusion" ... to keep our automatic ways of speaking in place. But that is fodder for another conversation.  Let's get back to Marty sharing the obvious.

"First, we have a body.

Then, we have emotions. (I'll add "and moods")

Finally, we have linguistics."  (briefly defined as "what we say and what we listen")

Are you noticing that what you are saying resides inside of a mood or an emotion? In addition, have you noticed those two domains reside within how you are 'holding' your physical body? There is a congruence with these three domains that 'we' as human beings don't often put our attention on.

An obvious example of an automatic way of speaking that does not work for you is when you are "fighting" with someone.  

There are:

1. the spoken words that come out of your mouth <"you did this" and "you did that!">

2. from an emotion and I promise you, 

3. how you are holding your body

The congruence of these three domains lead to a lack of powerful communication in an automatic way-of-being called "how I fight with someone."  This way-of-being does nothing for you other than keep you "fighting."

You might ask, how do I "get out of" this dis-empowering way of communicating? 

Look at Marty's statement... 

"First we have a body."  

We learned FIRST how to communicate via our bodies. How might you shift the conversation or the mood or the emotion from 'anger' or 'frustration' to 'acceptance' or 'compassion' or 'humility'?

If you think of how you hold your body in 'anger' or 'frustration' you will begin to see a pattern. That body disposition is where you automatically reside whenever you are in anger or frustration. 

Now to first, go with the body, shift it. Consciously move it to another body disposition, someplace that is unfamiliar to you when you are in anger.  Notice what happens. Notice how the mood or the language is altered. Notice now you have the ability to "step out" of the anger or frustration and "observe" from another view. One from which you are now able to communicate powerfully.

Exercise:  when you recognize that the Way-of-Being that you are in is not working and you "want out of it," stop yourself and notice how you are holding your body.  Then shift it.. if your shoulders are forward, move them back. If your legs are crossed, open them up. If your eyes are squinting, open them wide. If your sitting, stand up.  Then notice what happens.  What new emotion shows up? What new words of possibility show up? How does your communication shift?  As with any new practice this takes practice, practice, practice and guess what? More practice. 

Let me know how it goes.

Happy Spring!

Patricia



Patricia Hirsch
ICF Master Certified Coach
Communication Expert
Design Your Life Coaching
www.designyourlifecoaching.com

Have you considered that this life, the one you are living right now, is perfect?

Yes, yes, I know there are assessments that people live in that life will be perfect when… when "this problem" and "that problem" and "so many problems" is/are handled such that often people spend their time, their precious living time, wanting to and having to "fix" so that they will get to "life will be perfect." However, I'm going to ask you to "try on," like you would try a new hat on in a store to see if it fits, that "life is perfect."


Right now this is the life you are living. So how, pray tell, can it be anything other than perfect? This is where you will start designing the rest of your life. You have the opportunity to say whatever you wish to say, be it something of power, or beauty, or sadness, or anger, or disgust, or just plain joy. You have the opportunity to make the choices you make regardless of what others think you "should" do or "have to" say about it or any other nonsense that might get in the way of designing your life from now forward that life is perfect. 


This is your perfect life. How will you choose to design it? How will you choose to shift who you are being such that life shows up as perfect? It's not up to Mom or Dad. It's not up to your boss, your teacher, your fellow employees, your friends. It's not up to your partner. Guess who gets to choose your life. Bravo! It's YOU!! You are the one that gets to come from life is perfect - right now - and you get to choose… "x" …or maybe choose "y." What's it going to be?


Okay, say you're 58 years old, and you've been laid off a job, and you have a bad cold, and your partner is mad at you, and all you want to do is scream to the world, "It's not fair!!" Is life perfect? Absolutely! 


Being 58 years old. Wow.  However, let's take a look. That is coming into the age of wisdom, where you are able to draw on your legacy and make choices based on what you have observed in your life up till now.


Having been laid off, you can now choose where next you wish to focus your intentions and how about on your passions? Oftentimes people default into a job or career, and it's not necessarily what they wanted to do when they were young and people asked them, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" Granted, you may have to adjust a few things and decrease spending to match what you can afford; however, think of what opportunities you can now design living from life is perfect.


You know you will get better if you care for your cold with responsibility. All it takes is lots of fluids, vitamins, cleanliness, and rest. 


Your partner is mad at you. Okay, this one I ask you to think from that new hat perspective that our assessments often choose for us and we let them. With a partner mad at you, what assessments are you living from that can get in the way of life is perfect with your partner? How about this one… my partner is mad at me and that's okay!


"But," you say, "how about me screaming at the world, it's not fair?" That too, is perfect. I say an emotion expressed allows the emotion to dissipate. Not the truth, just another way to look at emotions. Say the emotion fear comes up, or perhaps frustration, or how about the mood helplessness, or hopelessness, that has you want to shout "it's not fair!"? I say that's perfect. Well, what's perfect is to shout it if it is calling out to be shouted, and we are responsible about our shouting. In other words, I find the perfect place for me to shout out my frustrations or anger or upsets are while sitting inside my car, with the window down, driving down the freeway. What a perfect place in my perfect life to express those emotions that wouldn't necessarily be acceptable nor responsible inside my home (unless it's into a pillow), or my work place or a movie theater. In my perfect life, it works for me to express those emotions driving down the freeway. It's brilliant if I say so myself as I am then able to observe the fear, frustration, helplessness or hopelessness and choose to "be at cause" in my life. 


To me, life is perfect. This has been just a tiny view from my perspective. I wouldn't want it any other way. Living in life is perfect allows me to look at each of my fellow human beings as the perfect people with which to interact and since I absolutely love my fellow human beings, how perfect it is that they come into my life. 



Patricia Hirsch, MBA, Master Certified Coach 
Chief Empowerment Officer with Design Your Life Coaching

Are You Vacationing?

There is nothing like unplugging from a quest to reach dreams or goals or a desire to “get to” other than where we are and to just enjoy the moment, as so often can happen on a vacation.

Truly, to vacation and experience a world that is vastly rich with peoples and cultures and new ways to traverse this experience we call life allows for a richer and deeper appreciation for what we choose in our lives.  To vacation is not "the right thing to do” however, if you are one such a person who does not vacation, have you considered what you “might not know that you might not know” and could experience and learn from?

Perhaps for me the key factor in the importance of taking vacations is based on the fact that as a military kid moving from one state to the next every two to three years, and even to a foreign country, there was always a reason to vacation. Oftentimes we didn't spend a lot of money to vacation, however vacations were always important for our well being. 

Mom was an avid historian and would research our next vacation each time we would move to the next city.  She found numerous historical cities, along with the wonderful federal and state parks throughout our naturally rich with history and nature, United States. She drove us through the country visiting places like the huge sculptures of the four best Presidents representing the first 150 years American history.  We visited the massive dam of Niagara Falls, outside of Buffalo, New York, which holds back thousands of tons of water which pours over a 180 feet high cliff that is over a half of a mile wide, while at the same time feel the spray of mist that displays wonderful perpetual rainbows.  We walked across a plank laid across a tiny, muddy trickle of the assumed head of the 2350 mile long Mississippi River in Itasca State Park, Minnesota, and later were amazed by a visit to the Gulf of Mexico where the huge mouth of where the river culminates. 

Our idea of vacationing brings back fond memories of no television, no radios, not a MP3 player in sight nor thankfully needed. Instead we talked and we sang and we played games such as to how many different state license plates could we find along our travels. We spent valuable and now longed-for time together on our vacations. We traveled in big old wood paneled station wagons staying in inexpensive clean little motels or vacation rentals on military bases rented for a modest fee along the way. One summer we traveled in an old silver Airstream trailer camping along the way and sitting around campfires at night while listening and laughing to wonderful stories told by my parents or fellow campers visiting the same campground.  It was a pre-fast food environment and my very favorite place was Howard Johnson's where we would stop after a roadside picnic for dessert on special vacation occasions and I could order my favorite Peppermint Stick ice cream.
 

I knew that life was great. We were on vacation and I was with people I loved.

Dad was an avid fisherman and when we weren't moving from state to state or country to country, the "in-between" years we would be at some little fishing resort that would take a family of 4-8 kids, depending on the year, with fishing gear and aluminum skiffs, and a ski boat where he would drive madly around the lakes with kids in tow either solo or in tandem, depending upon the boat of the season and how large the motor was.  This was the basis of the years I have spent on sailing the oceans of the Pacific, Atlantic and Caribbean, I'm sure.   Dad would take off to fish in solitude while the rest of us would swim or fish our own way or sit around and read books with each other or get lost in a story alone. Often, we'd set up our meals on picnic tables outside with fellow resort vacationers and learn new things from new perspectives. 

Ah! The realization that life beyond our own imaginations was plentiful and rich and waiting to be discovered!

When we moved to Europe, Mother's itineraries spread from tiny little Moroccan cities in España to huge cathedrals in Italy and cities in France where she and my father might have visited previously during their assignments during WWII. Dad being the water person that he was would choose vacations along the Costa del Sol in beach cities such as Benidorm, Barcelona, and Sitges. 

Ah yes, vacations are important. To have accomplished what I have of which I am proud, my accomplishments have been based in my choice to continue my family tradition of vacationing. While I no longer stop at Howard Johnson's, I have had the pleasure of going camping just a few short miles from my own town deliciously isolated from the ‘city life’ lights and hustle and bustle while sitting next to a crackling fire under a star studded sky, while laughing with family and friends and fellow campers.  Or visiting the wonderful people of Fiji and SCUBA diving while taking movies and pictures of sharks being fed inches away from me; and visiting the Oktoberfest in Munich with friends from Germany and Austria; and sailing for 10 days in the British Virgin Islands, dropping anchor in deserted little anchorages and plunging into the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea; or traveling to Europe with an inexpensive Euroraíl pass, getting on and off the trains for visits to "Youth Hostels" where albeit the water wasn't always hot in the showers but the beds were welcome and the beds clean, while traveling the Bay of Biscay where Napoleon's wife, Josephine, had her estate, or a customized pizza was served to me in Brindisi, Italy, or ouzo was served to me in a Café Neon in Crete, Greece.

Because of vacations, I have been able to indulge in a favorite passion: to study people and cultures throughout the world; all along, getting to know the people of the world and learning to love the wonderful earth on which we live.  That what is available beyond my automatic ways-of-being in my life always opens my views wider and assist me in appreciating life for what I knew not.
 

Are you vacationing?

Have you considered that conversations are a bit like yawning?

Have you ever notice that some conversations seem to run rampant in communities?


Take for instance, the conversation being shared all over the U.S.A. that goes like this:  "I'm SOOOO busy!"  Doesn't it seem as if almost everyone you meet is living inside of that conversation?  Doesn't it seem as if that conversation alone is contagious? Almost like the analogy I referred to in the title of this post... as contagious as a yawn.


As a matter of fact, I'm yawning right now and I even had a great night of sleep last night. Just the word, "yawn" brings to the forefront that there is a yawn waiting to be expressed. Woops!  Another one.. and I'm suppressing a third... nope.. no such luck.  I yawned.  Yawns are contagious and I bet you've had to stifle one just reading this post. Plus, if you are in a public place ans someone saw you yawn, I'll bet they too have yawned in the few minutes since seeing you .. then someone saw them yawn and there it goes!  A yawn caught around the world! 

As with a conversation. 

If we use the same rationale for how conversations run rampant like a contagious yawn, think of the conversation "I'm SO busy" and how it's showing up in the unlikeliest of places. People have been doing the same things over and over again, and people are going to work and returning from work very much around the same times they always have, and there have always been 'action items' around what needs to be completed next.
 
How about farmers who have tons of things to do from waking up before dawn, making breakfast, eating it, cleaning up, getting out to the barn, hitching up the animals, taking them out to the field, plowing the field, and on and on (I'm just making up that I know what happens on a farm). Oh yes! Don't forget about gathering the eggs, feeding the chickens, and whatever else there is to do like milking the cow and butchering…well, we don't have to go there. In all the shows I've seen where there are farmers who are getting their long lists of chores done, up until about two or three years ago, I never once heard anyone say on one of those shows, "I'm SO busy!" and especially with the contagious emphasis on that word “SO”! 


Perhaps we are not as busy as we make out that we are and that someone actually invented the conversation of being busy and we “caught” it as when we catch a yawn. Based on my earlier theory, the rest of us have caught that contagious conversation unaware of how it is affecting us or our well being.  

Even though we move from one chosen undertaking to the next, the conversation that was made up, "busyness," for which many of us have gotten caught up in not dissimilar to a yawn in fact, is perhaps distracting us from realizing that the emotions that go along with being "SO busy" may not be ones that are supporting us in having a fulfilled life. 

Think about it, and I request that you be detached from possible assessments such as how you can prove to me that, "yes, but with me I really AM busy! Let me tell you about what I'm doing in MY life!" This contagious conversation may be a clue that we might not be acknowledging ourselves and our ability to see that we are actually the ones who are choosing the conversation, or even the state of being, busy. 

The choices that we make of living in a perpetual state of assessment of "busyness" and "so much to do" and "not enough time," etc., seem to me to be the antithesis of living a life full of passion and fulfillment, and seem to distract us from the accomplishments in our lives, much like with a yawn distorting our faces and maybe our ability to see or hear while in the yawn. 

So, the next time you hear or say "I'm SO busy," step back, observe and see if there may be another more powerful conversation from which to choose to live. And then let me know what you find out!

"Words do not label things already there. Words are like the knife of the carver: they free the idea, the thing, from the general formlessness of the outside. As a man speaks, not only is his language in a state of birth, but also the very thing about which he is talking."

Eskimo Quote