Do you have a particularly bad memory of communication gone wrong?  I do!  I was venting to a friend (I thought), a woman in the coaching space.  I was struggling with a mentor and needed to discuss his motives and his methods.  The confidential (I thought) conversation was a mixed bag of positive and questioning statements and the exchange left me sure I did not want to break off the relationship but

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confirmed I would proceed with caution (I thought).

My decision was made for me a few days later.  My mentor called me and confronted me with a slightly smudged version of the conversation I had with my coach friend.  He wouldn’t share his source, citing the loyalty of his friends as the reason for the broken confidence.  When the phone conversation ended, the mentoring relationship ended as well.

I didn’t confront her, the coach/friend/not really a friend, even though I run into her occasionally.  Every time I see her I am barraged by feelings of betrayal.  A memory of her pretending to  be my friend, nodding and smiling and getting me to gush, all the while plotting to use the information against me.

Any person who has experienced consistent human contact has experienced communication issues and betrayal.  I posed a Facebook question to our community:  What is your least favorite communication issue?  The results are below (starting with the conflict receiving the most votes).

1. Confronting someone who did you wrong.
2. Getting the Silent Treatment
3. Asking for what you need
4. Handling someone overly emotional
5. Someone talking behind your back.

And that’s the topic of the #lhjlifedare chat today!  Focusing on WHAT we are dealing with, WHY it’s so hard for us to speak the truth and HOW we are going to DARE to deal with our communication stresses in the future.

Join Ladies Home Journal (@lhjmagazine) and Life Dare TV (@liznead) tonight, Wednesday, March 21st at 9:00est, 8:00cst for a chat about our #communication issues and building DARES on the spot for you!

• Date:  Wednesday, March 21
• Time:  9:00est, 8:00cst
• Duration:  1 hour
• Location:  Twitter #lhjlifedare #communication

I hope you’ll be there!

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I have a secret, though.

I hate confronting people who have hurt me.

Yes, it may seem strange, strong women who avoid confrontation but the real FEAR is about negotiation.  Women’s apprehension over negotiation is 2.5 times more than men, according to Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever of Carnegie Mellon.  

Everyone has a negotiation weakness, a space they would prefer not to confront the truth.  A strength in one area does not necessarily translate to strength in all situations.  I put a list of my least favorite “communication issues,” and asked a few “strong” women to identify which they struggled with the most and why.

1. The Super Silent Strength Sapper.   You may have done something wrong, your first clue, the ominous cricket-y silence.  The silent treatment is a power move, a gauntlet thrown down to you:  figure out what is wrong with me or I will allow our chasm of silence to grow into a relational canyon.    Kristen, a funny, outspoken and successful realtor, feels the silent treatment is a game of manipulation.  If she can speak her mind, why can’t they trust her enough to lay it out there?
2. The Emotional Gladiator.  Some people FEEL DEEPLY and when you try to confront the truth, they become an Emotional Gladiator- building a wall of tears and anxiety until it seems impossible to get at a real discussion of the problem.  Kari is a fashionable and frank female entrepreneur, and dealing with the Emotional Gladiator is her least favorite communication issue.  She strives to create productive dialogues but it seems sort of unfair to remove her own emotional responses to get through the process.

1. Emotional Pirate.  A cousin of the silent treatment, the Emotional Pirate holds certain topics hostage.  As long as you don’t address the “hot spots,” you feel connected.  But, come close to a real problem and the relationship grows cold.  Bonita is a triple threat, handling a corporate position, a small business and a music career yet she struggles to handle the emotional pirate.  She maintains the relationship will eventually wither for her is she is not able to effectively address the issues.
2. Confrontation Constipation. Sometimes it’s not about the other person- you need to air your issues.  You don’t want to seem crazy, you don’t want to blow it out of proportion, but you are feeling bad and it’s someone else’s fault!  Joann is a charming newlywed and student who seems to get what she wants through charm.  When she needs to confront someone’s behavior as hurtful, she finds herself very anxious.
3. Need nothing syndrome.  Usually, you are the one with the answers.  People come to YOU for help.  Part you of thinks your friends and family should be able to see your needs but when it’s time to ask for what you need, the words stick in your throat.  Caron is a thoughtful and savvy employment specialist and recruiter but struggles with creating boundaries with certain people who treat her poorly.  If they don’t get it, Caron feels it’s a waste of time.

Even though the five situations are very different, they share some common assumptions.

• They should know.  If we all enjoyed a collective consciousness, everyone would automatically know what they are supposed to do.  Many things get in the way of “knowing,” most likely the ego who preserves our sense of safety in our “rightness.”
• They won’t accept my truth.  Even thought your truth may not be shared, most negotiation anxiety comes from the assumption the other person will not understand or accept your feelings.  The truth is you both may have to agree to disagree about your truth.
• They won’t be able to handle negotiation.  You might feel it’s an unfair fight and the person you need to talk to may agree.  If you use your skills in all their glory, you may win the argument and lose a relationship.  How much is the relationship worth if you can’t use the skills you use for buying a car with a relationship with a human?

Effective communication isn’t about getting acceptance or proving truth.  It is about building bridges of understanding with various perspectives.  Trusting your own instincts and the goodness in others.  Now, it’s time for some DARES!

•  I dare you to break the silence in love.  Tell the person who is giving you the Silent Treatment there is an open door when they are ready to talk.
• I dare you to civilly express your feelings to that person who is hurting you.  Take a deep breath, set up a time to talk and just say it, clearly and kindly.
• I dare you to ask for time from someone who isn’t making time for you.  I know they should know you need it, but imagine you are not the center of their universe and trust they love you.  Besides, they will probably love seeing your need for them!
• I dare you to ask your friends for help in an area of personal struggle. Don’t take it too seriously- it could be dating, clothing or decorating- just ask for help!
• I dare you to set up a time to dialogue with an Emotional Gladiator.   Bring a kit (tissues, chocolates, music) and let them get it out.

Give a dare a whirl and see what happens.  My guess is you will be surprised not only at the other person’s reaction but the light feeling you have in your soul.  Good luck!

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Guest Lisa is getting ready to try some SPICY on this episode of Life Dare

For the next four weeks @liznead and @lhjmagazine are teaming up at #lhjlifedare to chat about a topic that can Bring Life Back to Every Day Life and this week’s topic is:

#energydrain

I posed the question to our fans and followers and got back quite a list:

• Fighting children
• Negative or nutty people
  

  Stop the #energydrain and Bring Life Back to Your Life right now! Do you DARE?

• Not getting enough sleep
• Re-explaining or re-doing because someone didn’t get it the first time
• giving but not getting in return
• Not enough exercise
• Work stress
• Sick children
• Caring for elderly parents

Wow!  No wonder we are feeling tired and lethargic at times.  Our lives have a slow and steady leak and it’s time to plug the energy drain- IF we DARE to make some changes.  We are going to focus on the top three energy drains

• Negative people around you
• Handling work stress
• What to do with those grey days

and we’ll be building DARES on the spot you can try today!  

• Date:  Wednesday, March 14
• Time:  1:00est, 12:00cst
• Duration:  1 hour
• Location:  Twitter #lhjlifedare #energydrain

I hope to see you there!

Now it’s time to take a 30 Day Life Dare!  Click to start..

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Book Liz to speak at your next event!

“Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.”

The act of vision-ing is natural and healthy.  And whether you believe it or not it’s working right now.  Counselor Don Gilbert thinks vision is not only natural and healthy, but “necessary.  Being stuck in an open-ended rut can cause you harm.  Choosing something different is always a healthy option.”

How do you treat your visions?  Do you feel the power?  Your visions of the future establish powerful blueprints that influence your daily experience.

• The “stability” blueprint:  You picture never finding passionate
  

  Take your own 30 Day Dare- what do you want to tackle?

  love so you don’t go through the process of trying to find someone special.  You can see you will never be able to leave your job to pursue the career you really want, so you stay focused on your daily tasks and stop dreaming of your purpose.  What are you imagining?  Do you picture never finding love?  Never able to afford to have that career you really want?  That is part of your blueprint, reducing your risks to have stability.

• The “don’t buck the system” blueprint:  Yes, you have visions but maybe now is NOT the time to step out on the crazy-limb.  Everyone else seems happy with their lives, and it’s working for them.  Your parents, and your parents’ parents did just fine with this life, and it WORKS for them.  Who do you think you are to change the blueprint?
• The “let’s just be grateful” blueprint:  No one will call you a malcontent.  You are just so grateful for everything you have in your life.  So many would love to trade places with you.  If you vision something else, you might dream yourself right out of your comfortable existence.  Better to be very thankful for what you have so you don’t lose it
• The “I don’t deserve it” blueprint:  So you’ve made a few mistakes, have you?  And somehow the people with the better.
• Psychologist Don Gilbert with New Life Counseling states, “don’t ask yourself WHAT YOU WANT in five year (money, career), ask yourself WHO you want to be?”  Which brings me to the last and LIZ APPROVED blueprint.

• The “superstar/ Napoleon Hill” blueprint:  OR and yes, this is my favorite, you treat those dreams and vision as the “design plan” of your best life.  You imagine careers, relationships and situations that FIT your strengths, that FIT you!

Take a second today and admit to your blueprint.  It’s okay, and it’s normal.  THEN, start dreaming.  Remember our friend Napoleon Hill.  Visioning is necessary, normal and essential to experiencing a life full of purpose and meaning.

Now it’s time to take a 30 Day Life Dare!  Click to start..

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giving away a FREE coaching session from Life Coach Liz and a Life Dare kit with Inspired Vision CD and 3 months of 30 Day Dares!  Just review our retrospective of Life Dare episodes and comment with your dare ideas.  Click to check it out now!

Fatigue, overwhelm, just a general energy drain is a syndrome in our world.  The average person transmits the equivalent of SIX newspapers each day and receives 174 newspapers of data.  You are capturing your to-do’s and crossing them off after you have completed them and 66% of you are losing sleep to stress.

No wonder you have no energy.

Here’s How it Works:

Food on the Table is a fabulous  NATIONAL option to save you time, invest in your health and reduce your stress.  Simply go to the FREE application and begin.  With your e-mail, you can choose the grocery store nearest you, choose your eating preferences (steak vs. chicken or vegetarian), tailor your choices to your health restrictions (low sodium, gluten-free etc) and choose from at least 20 recipes!  The whole five minute process is topped off by a itemization of your ingredients cross-referenced by what is on sale.  Remove the ingredients you already have and choose how you want your grocery list-  e-mail the list, print it off or send it to your i-phone.

Food on the Table:  Healthy, streamlined and simple,  and another way to boost your 30 Days of You!  Do you Dare?

Look for more inspiration from Liz by watching Life Dare TV!  Don’t be afraid, try a challenge of your own with the 30 Days of You community.  Or, book Liz as a speaker for your organization with Nead Inspiration!

Sticking with your intentions takes some planning and mindfulness:

1. Keep your vision in front of you.  If you can, boil your REASON for completion down to one sentence and keep it in front of you.  When you are feeling tired, when you are feeling on top of the world, feed that message to your brain.  Your mind will take it from there.
2. Ask for help.  When you are struggling, it’s easy to want to hide your troubles from the world.  Concealing your challenges might make you feel psychologically safe but it also increases the chances you will stumble in your pursuit of a better life.  Instead, let your guard down and talk it out and accept the encouragement you deserve.
3. Take one more step.  That overwhelmed feeling comes from looking at the big picture.  You just know you don’t have the strength or the time to do it ALL.  The reality is you can’t do it all anyway.  All you can do is ONE THING at a time.  Focus on that one step.  When you have complete it, focus on the next step.
4. Avoid the grand decision.  When you are feeling down, you start to think you have to make the BIG DECISION.  Are you going to stick with this or not?  Do you really have what it takes?  Your brain just wants you to quit, to save you from present pain.  Take a break and come back to it later.  Get some rest, obtain the perspective you need and return to your challenge with renewed strength and energy!

Look for more inspiration from Liz by watching Life Dare TV!  Don’t be afraid, try a challenge of your own with the 30 Days of You community.  Or, book Liz as a speaker for your organization with Nead Inspiration!

Sometimes, if we wait too long, that frustrated energy can turn on us.  We lived with less than the ideal for so long and now we can’t stop looking at it.  Where you tolerated your job before, now you really HATE IT.  The relationship was barely a relationship but post-realization it feels like torture.  You knew your pants were too tight but now you look at your flabby body with loathing.

OKAY!  I get it!  You don’t like where you are.  But focusing on what you don’t have will only lead to more focusing on what you don’t have.  It won’t solve your issue.  You need to assess what you do have and start there.  Imagine you have $17.00 in the bank.  In today’s world, seventeen bucks barely covers a trip to McDonalds.  It would be easy to focus on the infinite space of what it isn’t, that eighteenth dollar and beyond to infinity.  You definitely don’t have A LOT!

But what can you do with what you don’t have.  How many plans can be built on the eighteenth, the nineteenth, the twentieth dollar you cannot access?  In the end, you only have $17.00 and with that, you might be able to do something.  You can save, you can invest, you can do SOMETHING with what you have.

Take a second and look at what you have in your life.  No matter how bad everything else seems, building a better life starts with acknowledging and using what you have.  Don’t create a challenge that focuses on what you are not.  Instead, build on what you got.

You might be able to get a FREE iPad from Life Dare TV!  Go to www.30daysofyou.com/ipad right now!  Look for more inspiration from Liz by watching Life Dare TV!  Don’t be afraid, try a challenge of your own with the 30 Days of You community.  Or, book Liz as a speaker for your organization with Nead Inspiration!

What’s the black box?  It’s the place you deposit certain memories along with a vow that you will not be placed in that situation again.  I wanted to be accepted and I also wanted to be free to pursue my destiny, my identity.

Sounds like good stuff, doesn’t it?  What could be wrong with freedom and acceptance?  Nothing is wrong with either, nothing but the location- the Black Box.  For years, I did not acknowledge those remnants from  my childhood.  I continued to grow and learn as a business woman, a wife, a mother and friend.

Yet, when I encountered a controlling boss, I became extremely unhappy and my creativity and passion shriveled.  Why?  Unbeknownst to him, he had trifled with the contents of my black box, that memory of being controlled and the desire to never be in that situation again.

A few years later I went on a trip to Chicago with a group of women and while I went to the bathroom, one of the catty ladies made fun of my overly-verbose personality.  When I found out about it later, I felt deeply hurt by a women I barely knew and to this day feel a resentment every time I run into her.  She had had a “let’s hurt Liz” party with the contents of my black box.

You have a black box, with thoughts and memories that can stimulate negative actions and mindsets.  You can’t get rid of it without a lobotomy.  So what should you do?

1. Acknowledge what is in there.  It’s affection your life anyway, so you might as well get real!
2. Recognize those voices.  They are there to protect you, but the protections they offer are childish, only offering options such as FIGHT or RETREAT!  See and embrace the other choices and responses.
3. Create new memories to counter your black box experiences.  Seek out people who aren’t controlling, are respectful, are willing to support your success.  After a while, those black box stimulants will not have so much power

YOUR ACTIVITY:  Grab a piece of paper and write down the phrase…”I never want to” at the top.  Then, write down the situations and feelings you never want to experience again.  You are expert in this situation, uniquely trained to avoid those painful circumstances because of a past experience.  What is that experience.  Take the next week to watch what happens when someone or something makes you feel uncomfortable.  Are they playing in your black box?  Realize where this negative energy is coming from.  

Look for more inspiration from Liz by watching Life Dare TV!  Don’t be afraid, try a challenge of your own with the 30 Days of You community.  Or, book Liz as a speaker for your organization with Nead Inspiration!

So, what’s the problem?

The reality of your life boils down to this:  your experiences are created by what you believe.  If you don’t believe you deserve wealth and value, then you will keep it out of your life.  If you are afraid to work out, your exercise experiences will be stressful.  If you don’t believe there is true love out there for you, don’t worry, you won’t find it anyway, even if it sitting across from you at your favorite restaurant.

You want something different tomorrow?  Admit where you stand today.

Look for more inspiration from Liz by watching Life Dare TV!  Don’t be afraid, try a challenge of your own with the 30 Days of You community.  Or, book Liz as a speaker for your organization with Nead Inspiration!