A 3-Minute Transformation at Work

One morning last week, a colleague was feeling really off. 

We can tell when people are feeling down. It’s a lot of people a lot of the time.

They (we?) are carrying things around with us. We’re carrying sadness, despair, frustration, hopelessness, depression, loneliness. 

We feel for them. We feel with them. 

How are you?

“I’m doin’.” 

“I'm surviving.”

“Meh.”

This particular morning last week, I asked my colleague to share about it.

So she looked up, moved her fingers off her keyboard, and expressed what was present for her.

As she spoke, she said something BRILLIANT:

"I'm just trying to shove it down so I don't feel this way anymore."

☝️ ☝️ ☝️ ☝️ ☝️

Isn’t that what we do?! We try to shove it down.

With our friends and family who are struggling, we’ll try to help them get over it, move beyond it, or avoid it long enough to at least feel a little bit better.

I thanked her for sharing all of it with me, and then I acknowledged the power and insight behind that one statement.

I said to her about it, "It sounds like you're judging and hating that part of yourself."

Her mouth dropped, and she said: "That's it."

She excused herself to let the tears flow while the emotion released her.

When she came back, she was lighter, happier, and grounded.

Challenging emotions will release us when we are willing to release them.

They stick around because we shove them down.

They stick around because we judge them and ourselves for feeling them.

They become an enemy, something to fear, something to avoid, because we hate them to some extent and therefore hate this part of ourselves.

There's magic in the energy of ALL our emotions, and we miss it when we're busy shoving them down, running from them, or trying to numb them away.

It’s as if we have a scared, depressed, or angry child tugging on us from the inside. Resisting, avoiding, and reacting are not healthy ways to be with those kids.

Invite these parts of yourself up and let them go. You can handle them. They're a part of us in those moments whether we like them or not - and it's much more freeing and beautiful to meet them with love than to continue to meet them with judgment and hate.

Much Love. ❤️

P.S. There are two ways you can commit to leveling-up your emotional awareness and freedom by working with me:

- 1-on-1 coaching

- Mind Mastery training for groups

Self-Care or Self-Deception?

I think that one of the good things to come out of covid was the awareness that most of us can be doing a better job taking care of ourselves.

We see ads and get emails about the importance of self-care, our employers are reminding us of it, and we sign up for classes, get books, and start scheduling time for it. 

Long walks, meditation, yoga, sleep, our favorite show, our favorite vacation destination, whatever. It all helps.

For most of us, though, taking care of ourselves mostly means coping with the insecurities, fears, judgments, and triggers baked into our psyche over the decades. 

For most of us, self-care means figuring out ways to cope with a life that seems just too hostile and just “too much” at times.

Our limiting self-concepts, our judgments of ourselves and others and life, and our triggers filter EVERYTHING we see, and our self-care practices may not be healing them.

Our self-care routines may be treating the symptoms but not the underlying cause.

We think emotional freedom means the freedom to express our rage, disappointment, and fears AT the people in our lives.

That's not emotional freedom. That's emotional reaction.

We think self-care means phoning it in when we feel triggered or "up against it."

Settling the nerves at those times is self-care, but delaying, resisting, or avoiding dealing with the underlying sources of our triggers within ourselves is self-deception.

Next-level self-care is raising our emotional threshold. It’s showing up with integrity at our deepest levels. It’s clearing the gunk and cobwebs out of the joints of our spirit.

If we never explore and transform the ways we daily betray ourselves, we'll continue betraying ourselves no matter how many spa days we take.

If we never take responsibility for the countless ways we deceive ourselves, we'll continue to point fingers at the world and never fully step into our natural power, wholeness, and beauty.

🔥 The power of integrity, clarity, peace of mind, freedom, and love for life. 

🔥 Wholeness of Self, at all levels of our being - mind, heart, body, spirit, and relationships.

🔥 Experiencing the beauty and perfection of our pure, innocent, divinely-gifted, and unadulterated spirit.

See if you can add some freedom from self-deception to your self-care routine. THIS is self-care at ALL levels of our being. 

Much Love ❤️

P.S. There are two ways you can level-up your self-care routine by working with me:

• 1-on-1 coaching

• Mind Mastery trainings for your school or organization.

Putting It on Loudspeaker

A client of mine religiously listens to the recordings of our conversations in order to milk as much value out of them as he can. So during our calls he’ll often say “let me put my thinking on loudspeaker” so he can record his thoughts for the future. 

Putting our thoughts on loudspeaker in general is a powerful practice, at least when in the presence of a committed listener who’s got our back and is listening cleanly. 

Our fears and our insecurities, our mistakes and our problems, our regrets and our judgments. We often keep these silently to ourselves.

(This is also true of our goals, dreams, and visions.)

Meeting with a different client recently, he shared about his life and his challenges. He said that he faced a problem in his business earlier this year that was stressful. He then talked about other things.

We could’ve left his stressful work issue at that. Of course life and work is stressful at times!

Yet there was more within him that could be expressed about it.

“Stress doesn’t come from our circumstances,” I said, “it comes from within us. What was stressful about business at the time?”

In other words, I asked him to put on loudspeaker all his thinking about that stressful experience. 

Mostly we stop listening at the surface! For him, it was enough that he felt stressed. Even as a trained listener, I could’ve easily stepped over and bought into the simple comment about being stressed like it’s a normal, everyday thing, and pretend to both of us that I knew exactly what he was talking about.

But we don’t know what people are talking about unless we ask! We don’t even know about our own experience without inquiring beneath the surface.

The surface is just the surface. Getting on loudspeaker helps the underlying feelings, reasons, and turbulence get expressed.

The outcome for this client was transformational.

He got in touch with feelings of disappointment, defeat, and resignation that he didn’t even know were at play. Tears flowed unexpectedly. 

Our body is constantly speaking to us. So is our heart. So is Spirit. Mostly, we ignore them and prioritize what our conscious mind is thinking - that automatic, conditioned, incessant, and not-very-creative voice.

But even those conscious thoughts we don’t really hear. Instead, we follow them unquestioningly into a world of illusion that takes us farther from the truth about ourselves, others, and the world.

Putting ourselves on loudspeaker doesn’t mean we air our issues out there for everyone. It doesn’t mean we make our problems someone else’s problem too. It also doesn’t mean we react from challenging emotions.

Putting ourselves on loudspeaker is best done with someone committed to listening to us cleanly and without judgment. Being on loudspeaker is best done in a container where we’re loved unconditionally, and all parts of us have room to be.

Being on loudspeaker doesn’t mean we need someone to agree with us. In fact, the loudspeaker process goes much better if our listener doesn’t think they know anything about what we’re speaking. 

If we’re not in such a safe container, what comes out is going to be filtered, modified, manipulated, or modulated in some way either by us ourselves or in the mind of the listener. 

It’s hard to get complete and clear in a sloppy space of listening.

When we actually do have the profound space to get complete and clear, a new realm of possibility opens up for us. 

My client, by getting his experience on loudspeaker and being invited down a path of powerful clearing in conversation with me, was able to get complete with the challenging experience in his business and create a whole new space of inspiration, integrity, and action to move forward once more.

In a few weeks I’ll be offering an online workshop to get complete - with this year or with a particular area of life - and then create yourself newly in this area from inspiration and integrity. I hope to see you there.

Much Love. ❤️