Escape from Cubicle Nation

Is life just one damn thing after another?

I am always a bit perplexed when people ask me how to come up with new material for a blog.  I say, let it come to you!

Like this conversation I described on my new post for Martha Beck's blog.  I was halfway through writing on another topic when I got this call on my cellphone.  I couldn't get it out of my head, so I wrote this post as a way to provide support to the caller, "Beatrice."  Real life is better than fiction!

My cellphone rang yesterday.

"I can't believe I'm calling you," a woman I will call "Beatrice" said. "I don't know where else to turn."

"I read Martha's North Star book a few years ago and, while pursuing a dream job on account of a man, actually made tremendous progress in my career. I have since received national awards for my work.  I never thought it would be possible to get paid for work I love, but I made it happen." "Now my romantic life is a disaster.  Today was a breaking point.  I was in the Disney store with my daughter and saw an ad for a cheesy movie about a robot who finds love on another planet.  I thought "Even a freaking robot finds love. Why can't I?" and I started sobbing.  My 25-year old daughter looked at me like I had lost my mind.   I have been divorced for years and have gotten to a point where I am devastatingly lonely.  I don't even know where to begin to fix it.  Can you help?"

This situation, while extremely painful for Beatrice, is a very common occurrence. How is it that you can be really together in one area of your life and a wreck in another?  Why can one area of your life skyrocket (career, love life, finances) and the other tank (health, relationship with kids, level of grunge in ring on bathtub)?  Is it just a big conspiracy to keep you from being happy?

I think it is actually a kind and gentle way that life lets you chip away at improving different parts of yourself at different times.   In the complex web of your brain, heart and spirit, all parts of your life are not always in similar states of health and harmony.  This is why you see cases of:

• The blockbuster actor going to prison for 3 years for tax evasion
• The successful governor cavorting with prostitutes
• The supportive husband and excellent father sticking with a dead-end, miserable job

We all become ready for change for different reasons.  For Beatrice, her "Disney meltdown" was a cry for help.  She realized that if she did not attend to this long-neglected part of her life, she was going to lose her mind.  I have witnessed or experienced the following catalysts for major life change:

• A father finally making a career change after learning that while he was working 200 miles away, his 3-year old son was crying for him in the middle of the night.  Realizing how much he missed growing up with his own father, who had died in the Korean War, he got chills realizing he was not present in the lives of his children.  So he quit his high-paying job the next day, and started a  career working from home.
• My own health crisis spurred by a toxic relationship.  It took me getting severe pneumonia to finally take action to leave a poisoned relationship.  Lying in bed, wheezing, with a strong fever and not even enough energy to reach the remote control that was one foot away, I realized it was time to change my life.  I picked up the phone and told my best friend for the first time how bad things really were.
• A successful young career woman radically changed her work and lifestyle after the untimely death of her mother. A now thriving entrepreneur who travels the world for a living told me that what finally moved her to quit her "secure" corporate job was the death of her mother.  Suddenly, it became clear how fleeting life was, and she realized she was in charge of her own destiny.

Whatever spurs you to change, once you are ready, what do you do?

Read the rest here.

Do you really HAVE to do anything?

Today's Martha Beck post is one of my favorite subjects ... "have to" vs. "choose to."  Just ask my husband what happens in my household when he utters "I have to do this."  Reason #25 to be very wary of marrying a life coach.  Enjoy!

If you have ever watched the Discovery Channel, you have seen the fury of a mother bear defending her cubs from the video lens of an over-eager nature lover. With fangs bared and claws ready to attack, she focuses all of her power and girth at taking down the potential threat.

Such intensity almost matches a creative father who adamantly defends his miserable career as a network administrator since he "has to" pay for his children's education.

Or a young college student who "has to" answer her overbearing mother's calls, even in the middle of a date.

Or a mother who "has to" feed her children only organic carrots fertilized with vegetable compost blessed by Tibetan monks.

Or an executive who "has to" work weekends and vacations in order to stay competitive.

The fact is, we don't have to do anything.  We choose to do things with specific consequences.  Different choices = different consequences.

This slight distinction has huge implications for your sense of personal power.

But releasing these ingrained "have tos," also called your "personal religion," is not easy.

To get you started, here are three short exercises:

1.  Body Compass:

• Close your eyes and deeply relax. Vividly recall an exceptionally painful or unhappy experience. Notice how this memory is making you feel, not emotionally, but physically. What bodily sensations or symptoms are connected to the negative event?
• Name this sensation with a word or phrase.
• Assign a score to this negative feeling from 1-10, with the worst possible score being a 10.
• Repeat this process, thinking this time about the very best time of your life. Notice your body symptoms, name the sensation, and assign a score.

Once you have this valuable information about your "body compass," you can use it to understand how you are really feeling about a situation. When you think a thought or ponder a decision, what do you feel in your body? Is it your "best" or "worst" feeling? What is the score?

2. Think of some things you have had to do lately that made you uncomfortable, sad or angry such as:

1. I had to lend my brother $250 (again) so he could pay his rent
2. I had to attend a boring all-day meeting
3. I had to enter my credit card items in Quickbooks to prepare for my tax filing
4. I had to attend a dinner party of a neighbor who I don't particularly like
5. I had to do my laundry
6. I had to fire an employee
7. I had to take my son's car away after he had an accident
8. I had to call a client and tell him we were behind on his project
9. I had to decline a weekend away with the girls since I didn't have enough money
10. I had to walk the dog in -20 degree weather

Using your body compass, assign a  number from -10 to +10 to each item, based on the way your body reacts to each item.

3.  Take the item with the worst score and examine the belief. Read the rest here.

Shout YES from the rooftops

The following is a new post on Martha Beck's blog ... which has finally moved to a permanent home on her new website.  Feel free to add the feed to your reader when you visit!

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When I was younger, I went crazy for Salsa.  I don't mean the kind involving chopped tomatoes and chili peppers, I mean the sexy, sweaty Latin dance variety.

Nothing, nothing, made me feel better than being whipped around the dance floor to the intoxicating rhythms of salsa music.  While dancing, I felt like a combination of a Hollywood temptress, prom queen and Jennifer Beales in the finale of Flashdance.

My passion for salsa dancing was a little problematic since as an Anglo wannabe Latina, I didn't have too many friends who shared my enthusiasm and were willing to go out dancing with me.  Showing up as a single blond was not always recommended, as it was akin to putting a "cheap floozy looking for quick fling" sign on my chest.  But my love for dancing overrode any fear of embarrassment.

Salsa dancing is one example of things in my life that make my essential self scream YES. When I do it, I lose track of time, feel absolutely present in my body and have an involuntary silly grin plastered on my face.

Finding the things that delight and enthrall you is a critical step towards finding a life that not only fits you but thrills you.  It helps you make complex decisions like whom to marry, where to go to college and whether or not to quit your job to start a business.  It also works for simple things like which restaurant to go for dinner on Saturday night or which color to paint your toenails.

In my last post, I led you through an exercise about identifying your inner NO from Martha's book Finding Your Own North Star that was sure to leave you drained and unenergized.  I made you imagine a scenario where you were being judged by people you didn't respect on things that you hated to do.  I swear, I was not trying to chase you into the arms of a therapist, I just really wanted you to experience what it felt like when your essential self screamed NO.

Today, thank god, we get to swing in the opposite direction, into the people, places and things that make your essential self shout YES from the rooftops.  Read the rest on Martha's blog!

Was Nancy Reagan right? How just saying NO can change your life

One of the questions that persists in my working life is "How can I help people find out what work they are meant to do?"

Career assessments, online personality profiles and analytical tools can help answer the question, but they often fall short.  This is because while addressing "What do I think I should do?", they fail to address "What do I feel I should do?"  Many people who have stewed in corporate jobs for a long time tell me that after so many years stuffing their emotions, they don't feel much of anything. 

Martha Beck and I discussed this awhile back in a podcast interview and today on her blog, I introduce the first of a two-part exercise pulled from her book Finding Your Own North Star that really gets to the meat of the question.  Here is the introduction to the article Was Nancy Reagan right?  How just saying NO can change your life:

I knew my soon-to-be three-year-old son Josh had achieved a new level of negotiation finesse when his vigorous "NO" was tempered into "No Thank You."  It is hard to get angry at a little man who is exceedingly polite about totally refusing to do anything I ask him. 

"Josh, stop throwing Legos at the wall and GET YOUR SHOES ON."
"No thank you Mom!"

"Get off that little boy and stop choking him Josh -- he doesn't like to play rough!"
"No thank you Mom!"

"Josh, you have to eat your veggies if you want to be big and strong like Spiderman!"
"No thank you Mom, pass the Cheetos!"

Do you see what I mean?

Josh's outright refusal to comply with my requests are the manifestation of a very clearly expressed essential self. Unencumbered by the need to please anyone but himself, he feels perfectly empowered to tell me and anyone else who will listen that he will NOT do anything that doesn't feel good.

The concept of essential and social self was described in Martha's book Finding Your Own North Star:

    "Your essential self formed before you were born, and it will remain until you've shuffled off your mortal coil.  It 's the personality you got from your genes:  your characteristic desires, preferences, emotional reactions and involuntary physiological responses, bound together by an overall sense of identity.  It would be the same whether you'd been raised in France, China, or Brazil, by beggars or millionaires.  It's the basic you, stripped of options and special features.  It is "essential" in two ways:  first, it is the essence of your personality, and second, you absolutely need it to find your North Star.

    The social self on the other hand, is the part of you that developed in response to pressures from the people around you, including everyone from your family to your first love to the pope. As the most socially dependent of mammals, human babies are born knowing that their very survival depends on the goodwill of the grown-ups around them.  Because of this, we're all literally designed to please others.  Your essential self was the part of you that cracked your first baby smile; you social self noticed how much Mommy loved that smile, and later reproduced it at exactly the right moment to convince her to lend you the down payment on a condo.  You still have both responses.  Sometimes you smile involuntarily, out of amusement or silliness or joy, but many of your smiles are based purely on social convention."

Since writing her newest book, Steering by Starlight, this definition has been updated:

"I used to think of the human psyche as having two sides:  the "essential" self, which determines our talents and preferences, and the "social" self, which predisposes us to respond to other people's influence.  Over the past few years I've also come to believe there is a third self, one that goes beyond the boundaries of both the genetic and social selves.  Buddhists call this "no-self," a confusing term meant  to focus our attention on something the intellect can't grasp. Other traditions call it the great Self, an identity that is shared by everything that exists.  I'm going to call it the Stargazer, because it never loses sight of your own North Star, your destiny."

Pressure on the essential self

If Josh's life progresses along the path that most of us take, as the years go by, his willful determination will be tested by nagging parents (me and Darryl), zealous teachers, managers, mentors and eventually a spouse.  His natural inclination to only do what feels good will be tempered by the need to please others.

I am going to hope that between his life coach Mom and medicine man Dad that he will still turn out a happy, confident and balanced young man (Meet you back here in 20 years to see how my predictions turn out, deal?).

But here is the interesting part:  Josh's inner NO won't go away, it will just go underground.

For some people, it gets buried so deep that they can't even hear it anymore.  Some don't believe it exists!  That is when Martha and I hear our clients say things like:

• I don't know what I am passionate about
• I don't even know what I feel
• I am not sure which decision to make - should I stay or should I go?

For these situations, identifying your inner NO is the first step in reconnecting your essential and social selves.

Ready to try?  Read the rest here.

Are your thoughts keeping you stuck? Time for some belief busting

Time for another tool on the Martha Beck blog ...

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The other day, I was talking with my client Laura (not her real name) about her big, audacious business idea.  She had shared lots of background information on the project over email, and it was clear to me she was wildly informed about the idea and extremely competent to implement it.  Then she said:

"I want to talk to some other people who are doing similar projects, but I am not prepared enough to talk to them yet."

As soon as she said this, I heard a big "SCREECH!" sound in my mind which is an indication that some belief busting is in order.

How do beliefs get in our way?

If you read magazines or watch news shows, you should have no problem knowing what to do to improve your life.  Articles and stories abound about things like:

• How to lose 10 pounds in 2 days while eating chips and salsa
• 3 steps to turn your potato chip-loving kids into tofu enthusiasts
• 7 ways to find the mate of your dreams
• 8 ways to reduce your debt and have financial freedom
• And my personal favorite that has been covered by Cosmopolitan Magazine at least 5,000 times in the last 40 years:  5 ways to make your man deliriously happy in bed!

The fact is, we know what to do and how to do it.  So why don't we?

Because of unhealthy and unhelpful beliefs.

Using my earlier example, my client wants to get her business off the ground.  She knows that in order to do it in the most efficient way possible, she needs to learn from others who have already walked that road.  But her belief "I am not prepared enough to talk to other business owners" is getting in her way.

To help shake loose this unhelpful thought, I used the four questions from Byron Katie's pioneering book called Loving What Is:  Four questions that can change your life

As Katie says in her book:

"The Work is simply four questions that, when applied to a specific problem, enable you to see what is troubling you in an entirely different light. It's not the problem that causes our suffering; it's our thinking about the problem. Contrary to popular belief, trying to let go of a painful thought never works; instead, once we have done The Work the thought lets go of us.  At that point, we can truly love what is, just as it is."

The Four Questions from "The Work."

1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it is true?
3. How do you react when you think that thought?
4. Who would you be without that thought?
   
   and

           Turn it around.

Read the rest about how I used The Work with Laura here.

(and, yes, I am tricking you to go to her blog with my cliffhanger ... a technique I have learned from people like Penelope Trunk and Bob Sutton who write for other blogs than their own.  :)

Why would you want to walk through the Ring of Fire?

I have had quite a few new visitors lately, so for those that aren't familiar with this standing feature, I do a guest post once every two weeks on Martha Beck's blog. She is my mentor, and the person who taught me the life coaching skills that I use every day on my clients, my family, friends and myself, or anyone else who will listen.  While a bit more purely "personal development" oriented, I feel the topics mix quite well on Escape from Cubicle Nation, because we all know that navigating fear and staying strong and confident are key components of surviving the ups and downs of entrepreneurship.

Here is an excerpt from today's post:  Why would you walk thorough the Ring of Fire?

It may seem a bit strange to brag about coming from a proud lineage of divorced relatives. But proud I am:  my parents and every single aunt and uncle in my family got divorced and remarried. 

"That explains it!  I always knew something was a little 'off' about that Pam Slim," you say.  "Coming from a broken family like that."

Fascinating interpretation.  And dead wrong.

What I gained by watching my parents and relatives go through painful, gut-wrenching, excruciating divorces was the realization that by walking through hell with an open mind and willing heart, you come out a freer, happier and more whole person.

Martha calls this hell the "Ring of Fire" in her forthcoming book Steering by Starlight.

What is the Ring of Fire?

The Ring of Fire is part of a bigger picture shown here:

Martha describes each component:

The Shallows (Material Reality):

"The exterior shell of our life is what I call the "Shallows."  You might also call it the world of form, of physical objects and the thoughts that cluster around them.

When your consciousness is fully attached to this realm, you are a material girl or boy.  You're mentally trapped in your concept of yourself as isolated, limited and separate from all other things.  Your socialized beliefs and your lizard-fears direct your actions, which consist of running from things you dread and grasping at things you desire.  Maddeningly, no matter what you do, danger is never fully averted and desire is never permanently fulfilled.  Life is a bitch, and then you die."

The Core of Peace (The Stargazer):

"At our very cores, unperturbed by the disturbances of the shallows, lies that Stargazer self.  No untruth can exist at this level of awareness: no apparent separation from the fabric of the universe, no pain, no fear, no death.  The real reason we feel so starved in the shallows is that we aren't made to be satisfied with material possessions, or with concepts of ourselves as famous, noble, smart, handsome, righteous, influential, blah blah blah.  What we really want is the peace of the Stargazer.  The irony is that this is already present in every single one of us, though it's obscured by the dense matter of our lives at the shallowest."

The Ring of Fire:

"The Ring of Fire is the emotional process we must go through to reach the Core of Peace.  There are only two ways to accomplish this.  We can disbelieve any false ideas that are causing unnecessary pain.  Any unavoidable pain -- loss of health or a loved one for example -- we must grieve."

My family's Ring of Fire ignited around our kitchen table in 1971.  I was five years old.  I can still vividly recall every detail of the moment: the red and white checkered table cloth, the feel of my Mom's lap and the look on the faces of my siblings as my Mom and Dad told us they were getting a divorce. Although they said a lot of things, only one phrase from that conversation stuck with me for decades afterward:  "We love each other, we just cannot live together," they said.

My stomach dropped and I felt a heaviness in my chest.  My safe, ideal, neat, organized world was blown apart.

Read the rest here.

Lessons learned from 4-day win experiment

I promised to report back today on the success of my 4-day win, which I shared earlier this week on Martha Beck's blog in Death to procrastination:  Use the 4-day win to get your goals moving. I encouraged readers to share their own goals and we got some specific examples from Mike, Andy, Latarsha, Rosalind, Billionaire Strategies, Glenda, Kizla, Jan Marie and Judy (see comments on the original post).

My 4-day win involved working on a book proposal, a task I have tried to accomplish in the past (without success, and with great consternation).  My specific goals and rewards are in this worksheet (click to enlarge):

I had fun using the tool and reported on my lessons learned here.

If you were doing the experiment yourself, please let me how it went by leaving a comment.

Turtle steps rule.

(Speaking of which, I heard a silly joke that made me laugh today, in the spirit of making slow progress: 

Question: What did the snail say when it hitched a ride on the back of a turtle?

Answer:  Weeeeeeeeee!)

Progress is relative, isn't it?

Death to procrastination: Use the 4-day win to get your goals moving

Are you feeling a bit overwhelmed with everything you want to get done in the new year?  If so, you may enjoy my latest post on Martha Beck's blog about a concept she calls the 4-day win.  It takes big, audacious goals and helps you to break them down into easy-to-accomplish bites.   

It is based on research from her book of the same name, The Four Day Win.

I know that I have some die-hard Getting Things Done (GTD) readers, so the methodology may feel either repetitive or too simplistic.  But I encourage you to try it anyway, and report on how it worked. 

I posted my own 4-day win on the blog and encourage you to do the same.  Five days from now (January 20) I will write about how it went, and you can do the same.

Check it out here:  Death to procrastination:  Use the 4-day win to get moving on your goals

As I mentioned last time, we are about to switch blogging platforms for the Martha Beck blog so we don't have an RSS feed yet.  We will soon, so thanks for your patience.  My next post will be on February 1.

New year, new blogging gig with Martha Beck

Happy New Year!

I am so excited about this year I can hardly stand it.  I am looking at a fresh, clean desk that I spent 3 hours working on yesterday.  I shredded 2 garbage bags worth of old documents, put up new pictures on my bulletin board and wrote the following on my white board:

• Great partners
• Time is precious
• Organize/Outsource
• Live it to give it
• No excuses

These are my mantras for 2008.  I will write about each as the month goes on, but I want to start with an exciting update for the first one:  Great partners.

If you have read this blog for very long, you know that I am a big fan of my coaching mentor, Martha Beck (picture above).  She has written a number of books including my favorite Finding Your Own North Star, and is a monthly columnist for O, Oprah's Magazine.  I am kind of picky about coaching gurus, but Martha is the real deal for me.  She is wickedly smart, funny, thoughtful and has a very effective and powerful coaching methodology. 

So I was beyond thrilled when she asked me to write for her blog twice a month, starting today.  You can read the "back story" in my first post, but basically I will be writing about things that have a bigger scope than just starting a business.  I see it as a great addition to my portfolio of activities, as well as a way to sharpen my coaching knowledge and reach a wider audience.

Knowing that all of you have more on your mind than just starting a business, I hope you enjoy it too.

Check out the first post here.  We will be migrating to a different website soon and will add the RSS info when that is complete.  For now, I will let you know on this blog when new posts are available.