Welcome to 2013

Last night we showed 2012 to the door. Depending on the kind of year you had, you may have been sorry to see it leave. Personally, I shouted 'don't let the door hit you on arse on your way out' and went to bed. 2013 started without me. I started 2013 cuddled up.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been thinking about my New Year Resolutions. I've only been making them recently; I would rather not make a resolution and find at the end of the year that I've stuck to it! Result. When I started making New Year Resolutions, I would find that they didn't last past March if I was lucky. Nothing like creating a resolution, the failure of which hits you in the face for the rest of the year.

Last year, I resolved to stop smoking. 2012 became the year I stopped and started and stopped again. When I stopped in December (I didn't want to wait until January), I stopped because I really wanted to. I stopped not because I was guilted into it (by the many hours of anti-smoking lectures), or down to financial constraints, or because it was something I 'should' do. I stopped because I really wanted to.

My experience with resolutions is not unique to me. After all, in the beginning of January, gyms are full. By the middle of February, they're back to their normal clientele. So I've been looking for a way to set resolutions and keep them, rather than have them become yet another stick to beat myself with.

Yesterday, I found this video in my Facebook feed.

I like the idea of having resolutions every day of the year, not just January. Richard always makes me smile.

Today, I read Stephen's thoughts on resolutions. I like the way he's taking 'should' out of his coaching vocabulary. If you've set your resolutions, I urge you to visit Stephen's blog, have a look and apply what feels right to you and your circumstances.

Goals, Aims and Targets are the focus of mainstream coaching, because if you don't know where you're going, how can you complain when you get where you are?

Before I did my NLP training, I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do and set out to do it. The few times I did that, it worked out pretty well, but never in quite the way I envisaged it. I had fun along the way and few complaints about the way things turned out. I learnt a lot which is fine by me.

After my NLP training, I was encouraged to create a 5 Year Plan. Creating a 5 Year Plan on a timeline and working back towards present day is a powerful experience. You see yourself in 5 years time, having achieved your goals and then go through the steps backwards to your starting point in the present day. I saw it work incredibly well during my training. The only problem is, it makes me physically sick. I react very strongly against it as a concept that I should embrace. 

It boils down to my values. I value spontaneity. I like surprises. And let's face it, Life is a constant surprise, both good and bad. You can plan for everything down to the most minute details, and Life still manages to throw a spanner, a monkey and wrench in all your hard work. 

I like leaving a bit of space for the unexpected.

This year, I created one resolution. But I changed the way I wrote it. It is positive and overarching. I have sub-resolutions, which all align up with it. They are vague enough to give me room to dance around any unusual encounters along the way, but keep me working toward the outcome I am genuinely excited by.

In 2013, I will be following my Bliss to financial sustainability. All of my activities will be either focused on achieving this, or on the maintenance of the rest of my Life, so I can work towards achieving my goal.

Pain, Suffering and Laundry

It's a character flaw on my part; the minute someone says to me "...you should really..." my heels dig in and I generally do the opposite. I was like this as a child and as a grown woman, I've only got better at doing the opposite of what I "should" be doing. It doesn't matter if the advice is good, accurate, well meaning or rational...my initial reaction is intractability. I just don't do what I'm told.

Like all 'flaws', it's a useful response. It means that I sanity check advice first. I don't blindly follow any one or doctrine. I critique the advice I'm given...and then I do the opposite anyway. My stubbornness makes me difficult to bully, bowing into peer pressure doesn't happen. I've learnt to trust that immediate response.

Since I last posted on my thoughts on Positive Mental Attitude and whether I 'should' have one, I've continued to think about it. One of the things that struck me comes from a Buddhist saying: 

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional

Why is pain inevitable? It's a harsh and bitter to pill to swallow. No one wants to be in pain. I look to biology for this: what is pain? Pain is a sensation. At it's core, that's all it is. A sensation. It happens for a very good and logical reason, it's a feedback system between our  mind, body and environment that is meant to keep us safe and well. There is a medical condition called Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis (CIPA), it's a rare and a debilitating condition where the sufferers are not able to feel pain, heat or cold. Sufferers can't tell when they've been injured, so can walk around on broken limbs, develop infections they were completely unaware of; some can't even control their bladders or bowels. They experience no feedback from their bodies at all.

So physical pain, although it's uncomfortable, is a necessary survival mechanism.

Emotional pain, I believe is also a necessary survival mechanism. The ability to feel a whole range of emotions in reaction to a situation or circumstance is emotionally healthy. To feel grief, anger, disappointment, grumpy, low...all of these things point to the healthy functioning of our emotional feedback system. They are pointing out that something isn't working, your attention is required. It can be neither comfortable or pleasant to sit with these emotions. They are painful.

But you know what? That's okay. Here's the thing, it's supposed to hurt. It's supposed to hurt when you say goodbye to someone you love. It's okay to be angry because you've been let down or betrayed. It's okay to be disappointed because something didn't work out.

Feel the emotions for what they are. Emotions. 

Suffering comes from being stuck in those emotions. Suffering comes from the stories that are created out of the pain. The internal dialogues that continually undermine. In Buddhist terms, it's about attachment. I like that idea. 

I think of my emotions being something like a washing line, strung out in my garden on a warm sunny day. The stories I tell myself about a situation or what I'm feeling are the clothes I hang up to dry on the line. I can do a dark wash and hang negative thoughts, or a white wash - hanging the light things to reflect the sunshine; or I could just do the laundry, let the clothes dry without judging how they look, put them away and enjoy the garden.

What is the appropriate response when dealing with physical pain? Attending to the cause, removing it if possible and healing the injury. Why should the appropriate response be any different to emotional pain? 

*   *   *

Not a terribly seasonal post I know, but that's where my thinking was going and I wanted to write it down. 

The last quarter of 2012 has not been easy. Flow turned to stagnation, in both my work and emotional spheres. This has led to me re-thinking much of what I learnt doing NLP and living in it's aftermath. It's clear to me that I have more to learn. I will not abandon this blog, I will continue to think about Life, the Universe and Everything and post my musings here. I hope you continue to find it useful. 

My wish for you all over the festive season, if indeed you are celebrating it, is that you and yours are happy, safe and well. May 2013 bring you prosperity, good luck, opportunities, love and fun.

Roses
xxx

When 140 Characters Just isn't Enough

"You're just never satisfied" My exH.

That observation/criticism from my exH, probably typifies the failure of our marriage. His frustration with me and vice versa. But then, he was talking to a young woman who ran away from her home and country at the ripe-old age of 18, to rock up to work in her father's pub. No, I'm not good with 'good enough'; I'm worse with 'status quo'; and my personal favourite, 'that's the way it is, that's the way we always do it', makes me grind my teeth to undo all the good dental work I've had done recently.


I have a short attention span. My employment, generally speaking lasts for 18 months to 2 years and there are very few instances of me lasting 2 years. I'll leave out details of my private life, because well, it's really no better. I used to believe my family when they said it's because I'm flaky. I now believe my Mentor when he says it's because I am a learning animal and I need the stimulation of new situations, new learnings. 


When we were having that conversation, he put to me a scenario that many people used to experience here in Norwich: leave school, get a job at Norwich Union, work there for 40 years, retire in a bungalow, die. I find even writing that, a deeply uncomfortable experience. My skin crawls and my shoulders start creeping up around my ears. Does. Not. Compute. He says I'm the kind of person who at 80 will be invited to a dinner party to regale the other guests with my latest adventure. I was much more engaged with that vision of myself. That was one of the two conversations that turned my internal world upside down to settle in a far better place.


I've been having a conversation on twitter. There was concern that Life Coaching was like air-freshner and that it promoted the view that people can't cope without it. Haven't we got along fine without it so far?


Now, I'm not a Life Coach. I am an NLP Practitioner. But I use life coaching strategies in my work, just as life coaches use NLP in theirs. But more than that, I believe in personal development, I believe it the same way I believe the sun rises in the East every morning. So for me not to engage in that conversation is like saying 'stop breathing'. But the great thing about it, is it's given me a chance to really consider the discussion. I've sat with it for a couple of days and here's what I think.


I believe there's always a better way of doing things. Life Coaching, is an exploration, an adventure. It's about finding out the clients' values, aims and Life goals, it's about lining everything up and discarding the self-sabotage that gets in the way. Ultimately, it's about enabling the client to achieve what they want in a way that is compatible with their values. The value of this was questioned - haven't people been getting along just fine without Coaching and Mentoring.


Yes and no. Yes, people have been perfectly successful without it. But no one achieves anything without a helping hand. I'd argue coaching and mentoring has always been there. In the days of manufacturing, there was the concept of apprenticeships: a lad started out at the bottom and learnt his trade from the people already doing the work. If he was good enough, he became a Master and took on his own apprentices. If you want to learn something, you find an expert in it and learn from them. When I worked in Economic Development, I used to arrange for business consultants to go into Small to Medium Enterprises to help the business owners grow their business. The criticism then was 'if the consultants were so successful in their field, why do consulting?' Often it was the case that the consultants were retired and so committed to entrepreneurship, that they wanted to pass on their skills to the next generation. And of course, some were better than others. Just like everything else.


Life Coaching is a particular version of this. Instead of looking at how to do something better in a business to achieve a better bottom line, it looks at what behaviours a person can change to do better in the facets of their life which are important to them. Life Coaching looks at all facets of a client's life: relationships, friendships, working life, career etc. If one facet is off, it tends to bleed into the rest of their lives.


Abraham Maslow created the Self-Actualisation Pyramid, whereby an individual sorted out the food, shelter, work, relationships facets before moving on to be self-actualised. NLP doesn't agree with that approach. We're an impatient lot. Why wait for self-actualisation? It's possible to work on all of these things together and frankly, you might as well enjoy the journey, because you're longer there than in the self-actualisation part! By lining all of these things up and getting everything working towards the same goal, it makes things more coherent, efficient and is a more fun experience.


One of the foundations of NLP is modelling. The co-founders broke away from the medicalised approach to mental health and studied people who succeeded. They studied people who got over phobias and then applied the model to people who struggled with them and taught them to get over it too. Think it sounds far fetched?


I've been in a room with a woman who was so terrified at the thought of snakes, her terror would manifest at a picture of a snake in a magazine. After 20 minutes, Richard Bandler taught her to overcome her fear, so that she was holding and stroking a boa constrictor and smiling. Boy did not like spiders, there would be many big, girlie screams at the sight of a spider, even in the bath and unable to get to him. I've got pictures of him holding Rosie, a tarantula after his session.


My boss in financial services over the last two years, has been mentored. He led his company through a very rocky patch last summer, where we all thought every day would be our last working there. Not 8 months later, the company is growing, taking on new staff and opening new offices around the country. All down to mentoring? No, but the mentoring helped him focus his concentration and energy to achieve his goal. Ultimately, a person has to put the theory into action. 


Life requires courage, compassion, perseverance, humour, creativity to survive it without going mad. Life Coaching offers one way of negotiating the mine field. It might not suit everyone. And that's fine. Like I said, I'm an NLP Practitioner, not a Life Coach, but I would not rule out it's usefulness to people who are struggling.


So what are your thoughts on the subject? What do you think? Self-indulgent waste of time, or useful? Tell me, tell me all!