Peace of Mind in the Heart of the Storm

“Have you ever figured anything out with this type of thinking before?”

My client was exhausted from a stressful week of work. Like many educators, he is able to get into the zone when working with students and colleagues, but outside those interactions, he sometimes falls into the trap of self-criticism, imposter-syndrome, and other fear-based thought patterns.

When I asked him that question - “Have you ever figured anything out with this type of thinking before?” - he laughed and said no. Yet we try and we try and we try and we try to figure it all out with that frenetic and stressed thinking!

This type of thinking isn’t comfortable. We hang out in it in hopes that it’ll give us clarity, but it never really helps! In fact, what we really want in those moments is peace of mind, and it’s these thought patterns themselves that keep us from experiencing that peace of mind.

In a post from July 5th, Trusting Our Inner Genius, I briefly described our two ways of thinking, focused and diffuse. Insight nearly always arises from the diffuse thinking that comes to us, not the focused thinking that we do.

In those times of high mental energy when we’re desperately searching for insight to help us with a challenge, the best thing for us to do is actually relax our bodies and minds and allow diffuse thinking to handle it; in other words, allow insight to arise.

Our inner wisdom has access to all that we know - the conscious thinking, the unconscious thinking, the conditioned thinking, and the creative thinking. Relaxing our mind allows that inner wisdom to do its job, and it does its job much much better than our focused thinking.

Here’s my favorite part of my conversation with that client this week. Despite his previous clear and valid perspective that he’d had a stressful week and that his state of mind was definitely at the effect of it all, once he saw the insight into the nature of his own thinking, he was able to relax and get his work done more enjoyably. Apparently his stressed state of mind wasn't about the week he'd had at all - it was about the quality of his thinking in the moment.

Now it’s on him and on each of us to discover ways of finding peace of mind in the midst of a thought-storm. Peace of mind is settling into a physical and mental state of well-being that allows that hyper-focused thinking to dissipate. I've got lots of options to offer, but we each have to find the ways that work best for us.

Recommended exercise: explore ways to access peace of mind regardless of the storm seemingly raging around and within us. Pro-tip: it’s nearly always the stories and narratives that we wrap ourselves up in and try to solve that lead to the stress, not the other way around.

The best way to weather the storm is with peace of mind.

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

Love Isn't Something We "Catch"

“Mick and Amy, your superpower is Acknowledgment.”

At our outgoing meeting as the lead couple on a board of directors, my wife and I were thanked for reliably bringing our “acknowledgment superpower” to our work with the organization.

Acknowledgment is a creative expression of gratitude for what another brings or has brought; not what they've brought as a thing, but what they've brought as a way of being. Acknowledgment is also a gift and an opportunity to both giver and the receiver.

This Thanksgiving holiday, however, I want to share the source of our acknowledgment superpower: Presence, Gratitude, and Love.

Love and Gratitude are two sides of the same hand - if you Love, you’re Grateful; if you’re Grateful, you Love. In all of the following statements, you can replace Love with Gratitude.

Though Love seems like a feeling we “catch” from our circumstances or external conditions, Love actually flares up from within.

Love doesn’t need a target; we can Love for the sake of the feeling itself.

Like learning to create music with an instrument, scenes with a brush, or language with a pen, we can learn to create Love with our body and create Love with our mind.

Fear is designed to protect something we Love; seeing the Love behind the fear helps dissolve the fear and connect us with Love. We can foster Gratitude for the gift of fear.

Our Love is a gift to others, and it’s also a gift to ourselves.

Love is our destination, our vehicle, and our road.

All we ever need to do is find something in this moment to Love. There’s always something present that’s worthy of our Love.

Love only ever exists in this present moment.

Thank you so much for joining me on this blog journey each week. I’m grateful to get to do something I love and to share it with interested people. Thank you. ❤️

A Case for Living From the Inside-Out

From learning new technology to additional work responsibilities and more, the pandemic has been challenging for most of us in multiple ways. What’s compounded our problems, however, is that most of us are very well conditioned to live at the effect of our circumstances. So when our circumstances began to go haywire in March 2020, so did our already-tenuous sense of clarity and well-being.

Living at the effect of our circumstances allows blame, burnout, dissatisfaction, and worry to so easily take over. When living at the effect of our circumstances, we await permission from leaders and colleagues to be well and enjoy ourselves again. When living at the effect of our circumstances, we are living life from the outside-in.

None of us have ever been through a pandemic like this before. Our students and their families haven’t, our colleagues haven’t, and our leaders haven’t. Despite understanding that the pandemic has universally challenging aspects, it remains so temptingly simple to blame someone else for our experience, as if this would all be going so much better if our leaders were more competent, caring, and compassionate.

Except it’s not school leaders who are making this a tough time to be in education. It’s not our fault either. We simply haven’t yet learned how to thrive in the midst of a storm, to either dig firm and grounded roots or to lift off and soar.

Most of us adults tend to lack the foundational insight, grounding, and resilience to thrive in life no matter the circumstances, so it’s not hard to see why the last 18 months have been so challenging for some of us.

Burn out, frustration, and unhappiness happens at work when we allow our job to dictate our quality of life and sense of well-being. What if instead we elevate our quality of life and sense of well-being and then have that dictate our experience of our job?

It’s not a complicated process to live this way, but the first step is often quite daunting: be willing to take radical responsibility for your well-being and quality of life. Doing this gives us reliable access to living life from the inside-out and thriving no matter the circumstances.

We work too hard and we care too much to let circumstances continue to distract us from what really matters: our families, our friends, our students, our colleagues, and our own well-being. The people in our life deserve so much more than that, and so do we.

We don’t need anyone’s permission to transform our experience of life in this moment. We only need to be willing to try on radical responsibility to live from the inside-out right now. Trust me, once you’ve tasted it, I don’t think you’ll ever want to go back to an outside-in way of life.

I’m so grateful for you, my audience. Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a great Thanksgiving week. ❤️