Happy New (Fill In The Blank)!

OK, I live with teenagers. And teenagers are amazing, wonderful, vexing creatures. They are truly experimenters – trying on this idea, that sweater, this hairstyle, that belief system.

I love them.

Because they remind me to think outside the box and change things up, too.

Let me ask you this: Why is it, just because we started a new calendar year, that people do all sorts of planning, resolutions and intention-setting? (”Calendars are arbitrary and made up by some ancient Romans anyway, Mom,” says the Dude, true to teen form.)

Well, my coach brain says: “Doesn’t really matter. Today’s just as good as any other day.”

And I do love me a good plan. So, I jumped right on in, regardless of who made the calendar.  Just before the end of 2009, I released a Personal Planning Tool and about a thousand people have downloaded it.   You can, too, by clicking on the highlighted text.

What I tried to do with the tool is create a way to make a Plan That Works.

But let’s take a minute to talk about change. Because I can make all the plans I want, and if I don’t execute them… they ain’t nothing but paper.

And if I don’t execute them, it’s likely because I’m afraid of change.

Laurie would like to leave her job. She’s been there five years, there’s no room for growth, her co-workers are not “her people” and she doesn’t fit in.  It’s time to go.  But she can’t.  Oh, she routinely tries.  She puts together a resume, sends out one or two, has a coffee with a prospect and gets cold feet and stops looking.

Why?

Because she’s scared.  Because she tells herself that maybe  things aren’t really that bad where she is, that maybe she’s unhireable, maybe she needs that Master’s degree, maybe all jobs are disgusting, time-sucking, mind-numbing black holes – so in that case why not stay in the time-sucking, mind-numbing black hole that she knows?

Here’s the real thing holding Linda back – she sees no real, positive outcome to making a change.

Not one positive thing.

And until she can see one, she’s not going to execute her plan.

Same goes for Kristen, who wants to lose 40 pounds.  Ask her to envision an outcome to that kind of weight loss, and if she’s honest with you (and herself) she’d say: “People would expect more from me, because they would see that I can make things happen. Oh, wow, I might have to dress better. I might look like a hoochie-mama. I might find someone other than my husband attractive, I might get divorced, I might have to move. What about my kids? I dunno, losing weight would mean I have to change too much.”

Who would lose weight with that kind of dismal future in mind?

When you complete your Personal Planning Tool, there might be things you’ll need to change.  And you might feel some teensy (or humongous) resistance.  That’s the moment to say to yourself, “What will happen if I really do this?”  Listen to the negative outcomes and learn everything you can about your fears. But don’t let fear stop you, baby.  Immediately start focusing on one positive outcome.  Just one.

“If I find a new job, I can have more friends.”

“If I lose 40 pounds, I can start skiing again.”

Just one positive thing.  It’ll do the trick.

So, Happy New (Fill In The Blank)!  How are you going to fill your blank?

While Recovering…

Since I’m still recovering from my recent surgery, I thought I’d repeat a post from January 3, 2007 — called “Alive and Awake”:

I have a little shorthand I use to describe some people. I started with “deeply unconscious”. Then I shifted to: “lacking insight into themselves and how they function in the world.” Both of these phrases were my feeble attempts to get at a larger issue – how to describe people who have no interest in (and in fact run screaming from the very idea of) personal awareness, openness and growth.

(You know who you are.)

Recently, I was running errands and had Oprah & Friends playing on my XM radio. I have to admit it: I have an Oprah crush. Sure, she’s got Steadman, and I’m not gay. But still.

I love her.

And I love her Friends. So the other day, I was listening to Dr. Robin Smith, author of Lies at the Altar: The Truth About Great Marriages, when my girl Dr. Robin said something that caught my ear. She said, “It’s time for you to step up and be a grown-up. It’s time for you to be alive and awake.”

Ka-thunk. That was it! Alive and awake! I want my friends to be alive and awake. I want my family to be alive and awake. I want my clients to be alive and awake. I want to be alive and awake.

Why would anyone want to be anything other than alive and awake? What’s the opposite there – unaware and asleep? Hmmmn. Guess if you’re unaware or asleep, you’re kinda safe. You’re insulated from feeling anything or having the scary possibility of anything in your life changing. You sleepwalk through your life, numbed to all experience.

Is that the way to live?

I’ve always wondered what babies think when they fall asleep in their car seat and wake up in their crib. Do they think, “Whoa! Weren’t we just going to the grocery store? How’d I get here?”

Maybe that’s what happens for some people at mid-life. They begin to wake up and think, “Whoa! How’d I get here?” And if they’d been awake and experiencing their 20s and 30s, maybe they’d have a partial clue.

Being alive and awake is a lot of work. The major spiritual traditions suggest that coming awake is our soul’s lifework. It was the Buddha, wasn’t it, who experienced enlightenment and became The Awakened One?

I love the words of Jesus in Matthew 7:7-8: “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”

Leading me to believe that if you never seek, you will never find. If you aren’t alive enough to seek enlightenment – asking who you are and why you are here – you’ll never be awakened.

There is an element of pain and suffering to being alive and awake that you certainly don’t have to face when you’re unaware and asleep. When you’re alive and awake you consciously open yourself to good and bad, happiness and pain, light and dark. Would the easier way be to lead a life of only the former and none of the latter?

That ain’t gonna happen, is it?

As writer Jack Kornfeld has said, you can’t live full time in a blissful state. Even the most enlightened person has to do the laundry from time to time.

Alive and awake is about balance. Think about balance for a moment: bakers add a little salt into a dessert recipe to enhance the sweetness of the treat. Balloonists add a load to their lighter-than-air craft so they can control ascent and descent. Opposites attract.

Continuing the homey aphorisms, it’s said that into every life a little rain must fall. And where would we be in a world without a little rain? Well, we’d have drought. Which would bring on famine. Then death.

Perhaps being unaware and asleep is the way some people try to avoid death. Funny, isn’t it? You go through life insulating yourself from experiences because you’re afraid of death, and guess what? You die anyway.

Because we all do.

How much better, then, to fully live until you die? How much better to turn your face up to the rain and lick the drops as they fall into your life? How much better it would be to live sensing everything, feeling everything, knowing as much as you can. How much better it would be to be alive and awake.

What a great New Year’s Resolution, huh?

Looking Forward

So, did you make your list of 25 things you accomplished in 2008? I heard from many of you who did, and several of you who intend to make a list. Which is lovely. Still others told me that they ran over their accomplishments in their heads. So, progress was made on many fronts. I’m a very happy coach.

This week, let’s do something really cool. Let’s look forward.

Let’s pretend it’s December, 2009.

What would you like your list of 25 Accomplishments for 2009 to look like?

Ah, my spidey-sense suggests that you’re intrigued, and already thinking. Excellent.

Here are a couple of questions to aid your idea flow:

• What do you want more of in your life? That you already have? That you don’t have?
• What do you complain about most? How can you address it or solve it so you free up your time and energy?
• What do you do when you lose track of time? Do you do it enough?
• When are you at your best?
• What’s one positive change you know you can make?

Some ideas percolating in that noggin of yours? Hope so. Here’s what you do — take a piece of paper and write down all of your thoughts. Then ask yourself this whopper of a question:

• When I’m living my best life, what will I have? What will I be? What will I do?

Good one, huh? OK, from all of this cogitating, you should begin to see a pattern emerge. Now, I do love me a good to-do list. However, an endless to-do list can feel like a burden, so unless you are absolutely, 100% motivated to tick off a list: simplify, simplify, simplify.

You may see, based on your answers to the questions above, that your stuff breaks down in to categories. If you notice, for instance, that you have a lot of goals around losing weight, getting into shape, doing something about your hair, finally getting that operation… you may want to make a category called, “Personal Well-Being”, and make a goal of “Taking care of my body and my health.” See? How much easier to keep that top-of-mind rather than forty-five “to-dos”.

Plenty of people I work with have a real strong tug toward being connected with other people. It’s a biggie. So I often suggest this little exercise: “What would it FEEL like to be connected to people?” For any goal, when you let yourself experience what it will feel like in your body, it’s so much easier to recognize it when it actually happens.

And, you have to work at it. You may be like the woman I spoke with this week — longing for deep connection, yet work consumes her life. Here’s her schedule: Wake up. Go to work. Come home. Too exhausted to do anything but sleep. Sleep. Wake up. Start over (sounds suspiciously like a rut to yours truly).

To achieve her goal of having more connection in her life, she is going to have to make some changes. Something has got to give, and I’ll be the one to say it — it has to be her work. You can work smarter, not harder, as you may have heard. She will have to start making room for volunteer activities, friends, classes and, dare I say it? Fun. She’s going to have to risk a little bit — exchanging the comfort of the known rut for the uncertainty of possibility. If she can do it, she’ll get the connection she wants. And still do great things at work. I absolutely guarantee it.

When you take the time to consciously consider what’s really best for you — what inspires you and strengthens you and fires you up — then you can confidently create a plan to make sure you spend more time with those things, and less time with the things that keep you stuck in that nasty old rut.

And, when you do, just think: what a list of accomplishments you’ll have this time next year!

Looking Back

Can you believe it’s December? Before we know it, it’ll be January and we’ll have both feet firmly planted in 2009. Yikes.

This is a great time to look back at 2008, and take its measure. How was your year? Think back. Did you make any resolutions — and did you meet ‘em?

[uncomfortable silence.]

OK, I hear you. Let’s look back in a different way. Take out a piece of paper. I want you to write down 25 things you accomplished in 2008. I’ll do it, too. Here goes:

1. Took out the trash and recycling every week.

Hey, believe me, that is an accomplishment.

2. Paid off and closed two credit cards.
3. Got my mammogram.
4. Started writing an advice column at BettyConfidential.com.
5. Met, then exceeded, my goals for my coaching practice.
6. Never forgot my kids’ orthodontist appointments.
7. Got my roof fixed.
8. Did more public speaking.
9. Stuck to my budget.
10. Made time for my friends.
11. Volunteered to chair a committee.
12. Went to the dentist twice.
13. Taught more classes.
14. Co-chaired my high school reunion.
15. Re-connected with old friends.
16. Took my kids to a baseball game at the new Nationals Park.
17. Published my book.
18. Held a yard sale.
19. Chaperoned a 6th grade field trip.
20. Got a new stove, fridge, dishwasher and microwave. Fun week.
21. Paid my taxes.
22. Took good risks.
23. Read 47 books.
24. Got national press coverage.
25. Laughed often.

What’s your list like? What does it tell you about your unspoken goals — your real resolutions, if you want to call them that — for 2008? My list reveals that taking care of my own physical and financial health, and the well-being of my kids, was paramount. It appears I also served my goal of being connected — with people, with my community and with myself. How about you? What did you do?

2008 was an up-and-down year for so many of us. You had the money in March to plan for a vacation in December, but now wonder if you can really afford to take it. We had $4 gas in August, and $1.75 gas in November. We’ve had lay-offs, foreclosures and financial melt-downs. Plenty of us have lost loved ones or faced serious illness. It would be easy to say, “Ick! 2008 was horrible!” yet your list may tell a different story.

Even in a difficult year, you did stuff. You made progress. You accomplished. That’s where you need to focus — not on all the up-and-down-ness. Believe it or not, your best 2009 resolutions will spring from the list of what you’ve done this year.

So spend some time cataloguing and acknowledging your accomplishments, and next week we’ll take a look forward and spell out some achievable goals — so you can make 2009 your best year yet.

Ya Gotta Wanna

Considering making some changes here at the end of one year and the start of a brand spanking new one? Gonna lose weight? Stick to your budget? Change jobs? Travel to Bali? Find yourself that elusive soul mate?

Sure every year you make resolutions; but this year, by golly, you’re really gonna do it.

Well, all I’m gonna say is, “Ya gotta wanna.”

How many times have you found yourself in late December writing down the New Year’s Resolution to Get Into Better Shape, and by February you find yourself couch potato sluggish — not going to the gym you paid for, or even using those getting-dusty weights in the back of the closet?

My guess? You didn’t really wanna get into shape.

Because if you did really wanna, you woulda.

The sneaky sabotage comes into play when we say one thing yet do another. We say we want to pay off our credit card debt yet we continually splurge on something we “deserve”, or that makes us “feel better”. Result? We end the year with two additional credit cards, and everything maxed out.

And we feel like a failure.

Which is, of course, why we didn’t pay off the credit card in the first place.

When you feel like a failure, you create opportunities to remind yourself that you are, indeed, a failure. What does a failure do? Why, fail! So, you fail to pay your bills on time — and the nastygrams from your creditors reinforce your idea about yourself… that you’re a loser. You fail to eat healthy food and moderately exercise, and what happens? Why, you gain weight, lose muscle tone and feel… bleah. But isn’t that how a failure is supposed to feel?

To turn this around, there is only one thing you can do. And you gotta wanna. You gotta wanna move from failure to success. Really, really wanna. Ready?

Take out a piece of paper. Oh, and a pen. Or pencil. Or fat crayon. Something handy. OK. List the following categories and leave enough space between them to write four or five things under each. The categories are: Career; Money; Health; Physical Environment (your living conditions); Family/Friends; Significant Other/Romance; Personal Growth (continuing education, spiritual growth, etc.); and, Fun & Recreation.

Focus on what you did, rather than what you didn’t. That’s a switch, huh?

When you’re finished, look at your list of accomplishments for the year. Any patterns? Anything interesting? What’s that tell you about your year?

This was a tough year for a client of mine, Susan. A year ago, she lost her senior executive position due to an industry shake-up. Then both parents got ill, and she became their legal custodian. She arranged for their care, took responsibility for finances, coordinated with the extended family. A full-time job — while she was looking for a full-time job. In the last three months, her father died and her sister unexpectedly died — and her mother remains ill.

But.

In the last year, she rekindled friendships. She moved to her dream city. She put lovely things into her new home. She made smart financial decisions. She exercised. She traveled. She continued to expand her professional network. She sought support when she needed it. She took care of herself.

Although Susan might say, “2007 was a lost year”, her list would indicate that she actually made some important steps. Sure, she did what she had to. But the things she really, really wanted to do? She got those done, too.

When you shift your thoughts from “look at what a mess I am” to “look at what I’ve done”, you shift your perspective from perpetual loser to resilient achiever. Even if your achievements are small, they are still yours.

“Michele”, you say.”What’s the point? I only made accomplishments in areas that really don’t matter. I still don’t have (a partner, a great job, a million dollars).” I, in my most wise Yoda-like way will ask, “Why are you afraid of leaving Loserville and moving into Successville? What’s keeping you from claiming all of your power and accomplishments? What benefit do you get from believing that what you do doesn’t matter?”

Getting rid of your negative beliefs about yourself is the key to making progress on any New Year’s resolutions you may make. Shifting from a sense of limitation and lack to an awareness of opportunities and abundance completely changes your life. Things become more effortless, you become happier. Believe me, it can be done and you can get there.

But ya really gotta wanna.

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