In my room the world is beyond my understanding;

But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.

~Wallace Stevens

The most daunting part of the journey is, I think, the part I make up in my head when I am alone, when I withdraw, when I cut off from support, when I look at the immensity of the task. I sit in my room, and it is all beyond my understanding.

But if I venture out, if I take one step and then the next, if I do the first thing, and then do the second thing, and let the obvious third thing arise when it’s ready, then I see that it is all very simple really: three or four hills and a cloud.

(I found this poem quoted in Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, by Frederick S. Perls, a book full of Perls’ wit and insights into human growth and maturation. More posts inspired by Perls to come.)

I invite you to sit down for an hour or so with whatever tools best help you reflect: maybe your calendar, your journal, a notebook, art supplies, a friend.

Open up by asking yourself:

What do I remember from these past six months? What has happened in the world during the last six months? What has happened in my community, my group, my family, my team?

What has happened in my life during the last six months?

Who was I on January 1, 2010? What has changed? What is the same? What have been the highlights and the lowlights of my last six months? What have been my dreams and goals? What am I proud of? What do I wish had been different? What am I celebrating?

Take some time to sit with these questions and wait for the answers to come to you.

Journal about them. Sketch an image that comes to mind. Get curious about what’s coming up for you.

Note where are you right now.

If 2010 is a journey, and you are midway through it, what is the landscape in which you are standing right now? Imagine travelling up in a helicopter, and then looking down from far above at where you are on your path. What do you see around you? What do you see behind you? What do you see on the horizon?

What is the energy and the potential of where you are right now? What is there to love about where you are right now?

Imagine where you are heading.

What do you hope is true about you by the end of 2010? What do you want more of in your life? What do you want less of? What one change could you make that would make all the difference? What do you need to be reminded of over the next six months?

If you could write a billboard, a bumper sticker, a newspaper headline to capture the energy you want to bring to your next six months, what would it be?

Make it real.

Take your billboard, bumper sticker, newspaper headline, motto, and bring it to life. Write it in bold colours and post it on your wall. Draw what it would look like, photograph it, and set it as your computer desktop. Tell other people what it is. Ask yourself every morning how your intention will come alive today.

Open yourself to what might happen, and thank yourself for taking the time to reflect and dream.

Thank you to everyone who joined me for the in-person Two Hours of Perspective. I’m so excited to bring my newspaper headline to life:

Woman on Fire!

Sizzle.

On my 30th birthday, my house was full – FULL – of people I loved and who loved me, and I was hiding huddled in my room, feeling like a blight on the planet and like the loneliest person alive.

Breakup-illness-leaving a job-hating graduate school … the details aren’t important, but it did all happen within the space of a year, leaving me a confused, directionless mess who could barely eat or leave the house.

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to have one of those experiences which stopped me in my tracks and pointed out how different I am now, just two years later. I walked into a coaches training course, just about two years after I had taken my very first coach training, and I noticed how differently I showed up. Two years ago, I walked in terrified and uncertain. I was uncomfortable in groups. Everyone else seemed so much more professional and knowledgeable. I felt like the only person who was lost. I held back and barely spoke. I didn’t know what I would be doing the next week, or next month, or next year.

This time, I walked into the class feeling my confidence, and knowing I love my life. I have found work that I love and in which I flourish. I have built a business. My training in therapist skills has transformed my ability to connect to people individually and in groups, and how to show up with presence in a group. Two years ago I was desperately looking for something to be optimistic about, and this time around I walked in already loving what is.

So, all of this has made it into a blog post for two reasons:

1. It’s important for me to mark the differences, and to note what’s changed, for myself. To remember to celebrate.

2. To prompt you to experiment with thinking: How different might your life be in two years? What if it could be different beyond your wildest dreams? How would you love it to be? And – it’s just two years away.

On December 30, 2009, I gathered together people from all areas of my life for Two Hours of Perspective, looking back on the year and decade that was, and dreaming ahead to the 2010 we wanted to see for ourselves. It was cold, we had banana bread, and cookies, and rum and eggnog and shortbread, and candles, and good conversation. Lots and lots of good conversation.

Coming out of that evening, one person set out on a healthy living goal that has just gathered more and more speed ever since, like a snowball of healthy goodness. Another person took the vision of his Future Self and turned it into a tattoo to remind himself of the force he wanted to be. I wrote down the words I wanted to guide me for 2010, and regularly revisit them and tune back into my intentions for the year.

As I look out my window now, at an explosion of greenery, at flowers running rampant, at 30+ degrees of Toronto summer, the time is ripe for Two Hours of Perspective, Redux. Mid-year, let’s gather together to reconnect with our goals and dreams for 2010, share where we’ve been, and dream about what we want as we move to summer and then to fall. Whether you were at the December Two Hours of Perspective or not, you are invited to Two Hours of Perspective, Redux, on Saturday, June 26 from 2pm-4pm (probable location: Bloor-Bathurst area).

Send me an email at readyforchangecoaching@gmail.com to RSVP and for more details. Hope to see you there.

Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror

I’ve been asked to run a workshop this week on “Self-Awareness” to kick off the four-day-training for the 2010-2011 group of Engineers Without Borders chapter presidents. As I prepare for the session, I’m getting curious about what self-awareness is and what’s good about it. Don’t we spend a lot of time getting over our acute self-consciousness in our teens and twenties? Is it going backward to reintroduce self-awareness?

The difference, I believe, is that self-consciousness limits your choices, limits your actions, and leads to self-constraint. Self-awareness, on the other hand, increases the number of choices available to you in any given moment, increases the number of perspectives from which you can take action, and leads to self-expansion.

For example, if I am self-conscious that I am a poor conversationalist, then I constrain myself. I avoid situations where I have to have conversations. When I am in conversation, I’m self-censoring the whole time, and berating myself afterward. I look for evidence that supports my belief that I’m a poor conversationalist.

If, however, I am self-aware, I realize that I have a belief that I am a poor conversationalist. I realize that my belief may or may not be true. I recognize how I act when I carry around that belief, and I experiment with how holding different beliefs could change my actions. I look for both confirming and contradictory evidence. I am aware of many things in my life that I have changed, and accept that I can change how I am in conversation too. I see possibilities, and I see myself as dynamic. My choices expand.

Which do you choose? Where are you choosing self-consciousness? And where are you choosing self-awareness?

*
Post-script: if you attended the workshop and are looking for the link to more resources, try here.

A good development worker… or facilitator… or coach… always remains open to learning with and learning from.  Development workers who are open to learning write blog posts like this or this. A facilitator open to learning adjusts to what participants bring to the room, and brings a willingness to be surprised and a willingness to deviate from plan. A coach open to learning with and learning from is relentlessly curious about her/his coaching clients, and committed to a journey of co-discovery.

What have you already learned today from the people around you? What might they have learned from you? What learning are you thirsty for?

He started off with a group check-in. When I said, “I’m excited about the course this weekend,” he scoffed. “Your words say you’re excited,” he said, “but nothing else does. The words are Jingle Bells, but the tune is The Old Rugged Cross.”

It was true. My words said I was excited, but my body was slumped in my chair. My eyes were half-closed. I was speaking in a mumble and so quietly I was almost inaudible. There was a complete disconnect between my words and everything else I was conveying. I might have believed what I was telling myself – “I’m excited!” – but no one else did.

Such an obvious disconnect between what someone is saying and what someone is feeling is a rich place of exploration for coaches (and for therapists). When one of my coaching clients starts talking about a goal they “should” get around to, and starts making half-hearted plans, then it’s the perfect time for me to say, “I hear you saying you want to do this, but I don’t hear any desire, drive, or excitement in your voice. Is this a goal that truly resonates with you?”

I invite you to check in this week on the messages you’re conveying in your body language, your tone of voice, your facial expressions. Do those messages match up with your words? If not, what’s up?

How can I hold and appreciate my self-knowledge, and leave room for discovery and growth? Here’s a switch I’m playing with: rather than describing myself using “I am…” or “I always…”, I’m starting to use the words “tend” and “tendency”.

For example, instead of saying “I take on too much” (as if it is a fixed fact), I say, “I tend to take on too much.” Now that I’ve labelled it as a tendency, I also realize that it’s something I can choose not to do. It doesn’t have to be my identity to take on too much. It’s just something I tend to do, and I could decide to tend to do something else.

Another example: “I get overwhelmed.” If I change that to “I tend to get overwhelmed”, then I can now work with a spectrum – a spectrum of tending towards overwhelm or away from overwhelm. No longer is it “overwhelmed” or “not overwhelmed” – it’s a tendency I can lean towards or away from.

I invite you to pick something you *know* about yourself, and to restate it this week as a tendency. What changes for you?

wikimedia commons: Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions

Picking up on the previous Words Matter post here, I’m going to draw a few more lines around the words “think” and “feel”. I get called on this in my therapist training class; in turn, I tend to call my coaching clients on it.

“I feel that we’re going down the wrong road here.” “I feel that things are looking up.” Both of these examples are not feelings, but are thoughts. It’s a thought that we’re going down the wrong road. It’s a thought that things are looking up.

If I can catch myself starting a sentence with “I feel”, but then expressing a thought, then I am catching myself distancing myself from my feelings, confusing my thoughts with feelings, and generally being unclear about what my feelings are.

The impact of this is that I take actions to address my thoughts, rather than spending the time to identify and understand what might address my feelings.

If you feel like playing with this concept a little bit this week, here’s an assignment:

1) everytime you hear yourself say “I feel” this week, check to see if what comes next is a feeling or a thought.

2) if it’s a thought, then pause to ask yourself: “What is the feeling here?”

If, like mine, your emotional vocabulary could use a little expansion, you might want to browse around here to find some words to put to your feelings.

Instead, she asked questions about what drew me to the different areas, and what excited me as I considered each of them. She asked me questions about my purpose, and about what got me interested and intrigued. As I answered the questions, I started hearing my own answers. I didn’t need advice, and I didn’t need to make a pros and cons list, and I didn’t need a career assessment test— I needed to be asked genuine, curious questions. As I answered them, I realized for myself what I wanted and why. My coach was modeling co-active coaching skills: being curious, asking powerful questions, and self-managing (i.e. not assuming that because coaching was a good career fit for her that it would be a good career fit for me).

I left that coaching session with homework to explore: “What would thrill me?” My homework assignment surprised me. What did this question have to do with my career? I thought. Looking back, it strikes me that my coach recognized that this conversation wasn’t just about my career – she had my “Bigger Agenda” in mind. She had sensed in my conversation that I wasn’t living a fulfilling, thrilling life, and she was holding out to me the possibility that I could. My career might become one part of that, but first I would need to dream about and glimpse the totality of what my fulfilling and thrilling life could be.

That conversation was 16 months ago, and I remember it clearly because it’s been a powerful influence in how I’ve lived my life ever since. I’ve now worked with my coach for almost a year and half, and I regularly have conversations with her that are just as powerful. Our coaching sessions keep expanding my sense of what my life can be. As my sense expands, I become more willing, able, and eager to take action to bring that vision alive. I say confidently now that I am leading a far more fulfilling and thrilling life than I was two years ago.

That’s just a little bit of what coaching has done for me. If you’re interested in seeing what coaching might do for you, many coaches offer free sample sessions so that you can see if their style is a good fit for you. I’m offering a day of free sample coaching sessions this week, on Thursday, April 8. I’d love to hear from you if you would like to try out a coaching session with me.