Archive for Creating My Life
Waiting For Magic
Posted by: | CommentsTuesday felt like a good day. I made my commitment to my project and moved from one thing to the next and it all seemed to fall into place. Since then I’ve been spinning my wheels, waiting passively for something external to move me onto the next thing. Waiting for magic.
I’ve been thinking, it’s a bit ironic that I’m saying I’m committed to creating a workshop about what to do when you don’t know what you want, and here I am, not being able to identify, in the moment what it is I want to do, and getting very stuck in that. Perfect, of course.
One of the ideas I want to get across is that everything you need is in your life right now. So, if I apply that idea to my life what do I see? What opportunities have I been missing while I’ve been waiting for something else to jump up and bite me on the bum?
Remember, I’ve taken advantage of the cosmic hint to write an invitation letter (described in my post about little struggles), and then got hung up because I couldn’t seem to finish it. Then the waiting started. I’ve been making a note of the 30 day challenge “homework” but haven’t taken any action related to it, because I didn’t know what to do. And then it struck me, I didn’t know what to do next because I didn’t have a plan.
OMG The “P” word.
And then the s**t really hit the fan and I came face to face with the truth that is my fear of running this coaching programme. Having a plan suddenly makes it real.
I’d forgotten the difference between intention and commitment and how “You’re not really committed until you’ve proved it by putting in place a supporting structure. Until you do, anything you think you want remains an intention without the power of true commitment and, consequently, is unlikely to materialise.”
So, now I have a choice, do I want to stay stuck and pretend to be playing the game or will I take the next step and create a plan? I choose to re-engage in my project and create a plan. So, once again, I reset my commitment to enrol 10 people on my 6 month coaching programme called – ‘When You Don’t Know What You Want – Make It Up!’.
Two Struggles and a Project
Posted by: | CommentsI have about 8 weeks before I return to Phoenix for the wrap up of Steve Chandler’s Coaching School and, finally, I have found a project that excites me, to engage in between now and then. Here’s the story of the lead up to the project with more specific details to come later.
The Background
I went to Phoenix, back in June, and joined Steve Chandler’s Coaching School. I didn’t really know why I was going other than I was desperate to make some changes in my life, I thought I might want to go back to coaching and I’d been really inspired by the people I’d come across who’d previously attended Steve’s school.
My return was full of the usual euphoria that follows any great seminar, as I started to apply what I was learning to creating a coaching practice. Then the stuff that was underneath that was going on in my life started to surface. I tried to use my new learning to deal with it and gained a load of useful insights but I didn’t seem to be creating anything external, let alone a coaching practice, and my mood began to drop.
If you read my earlier posts you can follow this journey (it begins with What shall I do next?) and you will notice that there is a pronounced gap throughout September. This was the beginning of my descent into a mini depression during which time I felt there was nothing worth writing about and life generally sucked.
I was also dealing with a chest infection and my coach was suggesting I take a break from trying to make things happen, which I didn’t want to hear. My experience, to this point, had been that if I didn’t make things happen then nothing of worth, would happen. (See To Thine Own Self Be True and Will The Real Gillian Please Stand Up? for more on this). This culminated, on October 6th, in my low point of The Coaching School. I found myself considering cancelling my flights to Phoenix for the end of the programme, in December. I couldn’t see any point in carrying on with it. I was thinking “The School wasn’t working, Steve obviously wasn’t a good enough coach to sort me out (grin) and I was never going to change so why waste my money returning to Phoenix just to tell everyone I’d failed and achieved nothing”.
I didn’t cancel the flights, however, and through a series of conversations and doing The Work, I came to a deeper understanding of my need for achievement and with that I was now on the ascendant again. Whoopie!
Two Struggles
Over the months as I have struggled with purpose and passion and goal setting and action and not knowing what I want, Steve has coached me to:
“CHOOSE something anyway. Choose projects and complete them and be proud of your work. Then continue choosing new things after that, always rising up to action and service so that the end of the day always feels good”.
I tried that, I chose various projects which I thought I had made a commitment to, only to find I’d lost interest after a couple of days. Then I had the breakthrough about my need for achievement, identity and depression. See (Will The Real Gillian Please Stand Up?).
The second struggle was to do with creating my life and did I really have the power to do that? Steve says “yes”. Byron Katie seems to say “yes” one minute and then “no” another. My confusion over this greatly added to my low mood.
I was trying to understand it all/work it out in my head. Some would say I was trying to understand that which cannot be understood. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter what anyone else says because, unless I experience it for myself I won’t truly know one way or the other.
So this is my project for the next 8 weeks – to investigate whether or not I can create something concrete in my external world by setting an intention/making a commitment and then taking action as opportunities present themselves.
More specifics on this in my next post . . .
Stop Trying To Break Bad Habits
Posted by: | CommentsMost of us have had the experience of trying to break a “bad” habit but I wonder how many of us have had the experience of succeeding. We start with the best of intentions but soon find ourselves lapsing into old ways and, often, we end up feeling worse about the situation because now, not only do we have the “bad” habit but we’ve also failed at trying to change it. Trying to break a habit always has an element of force to it and, let’s face it, we don’t like to be forced to do anything so, sooner or later we are likely to rebel.
When I’ve wanted to change a habit I have found a much more successful way to approach it is to replace what I want to change with something better. “Bad” habits are formed because they serve us in some way. So, for example, I regularly fall into the habit of eating more refined sugar than is good for me. This takes the form of cakes or chocolate in the afternoon and then again after dinner. Partly, I think this is an energy thing and also a reward thing. I like cakes and chocolate.
When I label this habit as bad, and then try and give up the cakes and chocolate I’ve found that I end up feeling deprived and don’t succeed. But, in the times I’ve changed my focus from stopping eating cakes to eating 5 pieces of fruit a day before I eat cakes or chocolate, I’ve found that I’ve succeeded in cutting down and then eventually cutting out these foods. The fruit takes care of the energy side of things and allowing myself the option of eating cakes and chocolate should I so desire, albeit after the fruit, takes care of the reward side of things.
This video show’s a great example of how to change undesirable behaviour with something better by changing the focus to something fun that will replace it.
Will The Real Gillian Please Stand Up?
Posted by: | CommentsYesterday, I went to a healer. Not something I normally do. But a good friend of mine recommended her work as a short cut to lifting the grey mood and at that point I was willing to try anything. By the time I actually arrived for my appointment the mood was already lifting anyway. But what was interesting was we ended up working on my drive for achievement and she also mentioned the self-criticism. Last week, in a session with my coach he’d suggested that somewhere I’d taken on the need to achieve, as an expression of who I was.
This isn’t new. I’ve been aware of being a high achiever and a “star” since my 20′s but I what I hadn’t quite grasped was the strength of that drive and just how thoroughly that has defined who I am. I’ve been so busy doing what it takes to be a high achiever or feeling down about not achieving enough, that I hadn’t focussed much on the being aspect of it. And, in the latter part of my life, I feel like I haven’t really achieved much anyway. All the things on my list that I wanted to do I’d pretty much done by my 30′s and, since then, I have been in this sort of wilderness desperately trying to find what it is I truly want to do.
And, in that time, I have suffered and been treated for Clinical Depression and, when I got over that, these grey moods that seem to come from nowhere.
This morning I’ve had a bit of an epiphany and the trigger was the healer bringing up the self-criticism again. (See my post ‘To Thine Own Self Be True‘ for more on this). As I said, in that post, for the most part I don’t find self-criticism to be particularly hurtful. It seems to be something I just do. But what is important is the high achiever identity from which it springs. The criticism comes because I’m not doing well enough, not achieving enough, not living up to my impossible standards etc.
Now, that is also a way to explain the depression and grey moods. As I mentioned, by the end of my 20′s I’d pretty much crossed off all the big things on my Life’s To Do List. And, very importantly, I had learned that most of them didn’t deliver what I’d hoped for. As an example, getting a prestigious job didn’t make me feel more important or cleverer or happier, as I’d secretly hoped it would. So, not only had I reached a point where I no longer knew what I wanted, I’d also had the experience (albeit unconsciously) that nothing external would make the sort of difference in my life I was looking for. Now, combine that with a drive and self-identity built on achievement and no wonder I ended up depressed. I was a high achiever who unconsciously thought that achievement was pointless.
As I began to see this, over the last 24 hours, my first feelings were of sheer terror. If I’m not a high achiever then who the hell am I? How will I operate in this world if that is stripped away? What if I sit around all day doing nothing getting more and more bored, contributing nothing? But this morning the curiosity is beginning to creep in. And the questions are changing to, for example, whom will I discover when my old identity is stripped away? What will life be like without the drive to achieve and consequent disappointment when I don’t (or do)? What new identity will I chose, if, indeed I have a choice? Do I have a choice?
Suddenly the world is an exciting place again. A place of wonder and curiosity. Suddenly Gillian is an exciting place to be.
Finding Life Purpose – Day By Day
Posted by: | CommentsSince writing my blog post on finding your purpose, I’ve been rereading Gregg Levoy’s book – Callings. I went to a seminar of his 8 years ago and was surpirsed to see that the things I’d written in my notes then were pretty much what I’d write today, with the exception of wanting to live somewhere else. This maybe suggests that these were indeed “callings” that I was getting in touch with.
In my earlier post, I mentioned the idea that we may have a choice in respect of finding life purpose. Similarly Gregg Levoy notes: “Calls are in our minds, big, and we feel we have to respond in a big way, which, of course, can be paralyzing. It is therefore important to remember, first, that a call isn’t something that comes from on high as an order, a sort of divine subpoena, irrespective of our own free will and desire. We have a choice“.
Also, “few people actually receive big calls, in visions of flaming chariots and burning bushes. Most of the calls we receive and ignore are the proverbial still, small voices that the biblical prophets heard, the daily calls to pay attention to our intuitions, to be authentic, to live by our own codes of honor”.
“The great breakthroughs in our lives generally happen only as a result of the accumulation of innumerable small steps and minor achievements. We’re called to reach out to someone, to pick up an odd book on the library shelf, to sign up for a class even though we’re convinced we don’t have the time or money, to go to our desks each day, to turn left instead of right. These are the fire dirills for our bigger calls”.
I find relief in the idea of “innumerable small steps”. It is something I can do now and ties in with living my life on purpose even when I don’t know what it is I want to do. Having said that, I notice that 3 days have passed since I wrote the post about my 4 week experiment about getting on with life when you don’t know what you want. And, although I have taken some action on using the opportunites that are in my life now, to consciously enjoy the present and create the future, I have been consistently ignoring the small still voice that is calling me to have more coaching conversations.
Today I will step up and attend to that voice that I am pretending not to hear.
