If you have faced challenges in your own personal development, you’re not alone. This podcast looks at some of those challenges, and why they might arise.

Related posts:

1. BWYA Podcast Episode 2: Who is Personal Development for?

It’s one of life’s most profound questions: what do we really want? 

Often, we get sucked into the flow, go along with what we’re told we should want, what it’s normal to want, and what it’s reasonable to want. When we start becoming more authentic and uncovering more of ourselves, getting rid of the “shoulds” and comparisons can leave a gaping hole.

This can be scary – uncertainty is a scary place – and it might feel like we’re floating, not able to grasp what it is we truly want in our lives. Expressing our wants feels wrong, like we might be too demanding of people. Going after our wants ourselves can be terrifying – what if we make a mistake?

Which leaves us asking: “I have a sense that there’s more I do want, but how do I access that? Where do I start?”

Everyone is different, so what works for one person might not work for another, and I don’t think there’s a solution that can cover everyone’s needs in this situation. I don’t have a definitive answer for this; I wish I did (it would make my life easier), however I do have a series of steps that have helped me work out what I actually want from a situation, and want to share in case you find them helpful too.

Knowing my instincts, trusting my instincts

Instincts are there for a reason – they’re important messages and should be heeded carefully. Sometimes, when we have a lot of beliefs, ‘shoulds’ and conflicting messages though, we might not feel much trust in our instincts. The key to this is knowing what kind of things push our buttons, and being able to honestly ask ourselves

- “Am I in a place where I can trust my instincts right now?” 

- “What stresses or difficulties might I be facing that could mean other things are possibly interfering with my instincts?”

- “What part of me is telling myself I want this? What do I know about that part?”

- Where do feelings around this want show up in my body? Can I think of any other time that feeling showed up? What happened then?

Being aware of urgency 

Related to instincts are urgency and/or desperation. When we feel that we desperately or urgently want – even need – to do something, there’s usually a story playing out underneath about what might happen, or what it might mean, if we don’t do, get or experience that thing.

- Do I feel desperate?

- What do I know about myself that could be influencing this decision? (For example, do respond to stress by comfort buying or comfort eating, or conversely by denying myself things that I might genuinely want?)

- What do I know about myself that could lead me to rush into/avoid a decision?

- What is the story behind this want?

Priorities and values

If you have a long-term goal to pay off your credit card, but those shiny $300 shoes are calling to you, you might feel like you want the shiny shoes right now, but will that be the case in the long-term?

You go to a job interview and discover you’re going to be selling old ladies life insurance that you know will cost them a fortune and provide them with zero realistic cover. You’re down to your last $10 and they’ve just offered you the job. You want a job, and you want to be able to eat later this week, but you’re not sure if this is the job you want. Unless your values are aligned with swindling old ladies, you might feel the urge to take it, but you won’t want to – because it doesn’t fit in with your values.

 - What are my priorities? 

- How does this fit in with my values?

- How does this fit in with my needs?

Visualising

Visualising can give us distance from the emotional weight of our current situation and helps us look at life from a different perspective. By looking at the situation we’re in from the outside,  we can get clarity that might otherwise be obscured by “shoulds”, apathy and internal conflict. Two types of visualisations can be useful: future self visualisations, and third-party visualisations.

- When I think of my best possible future self six months/one year ahead, how will I feel looking back on this?

- When I imagine someone who I consider a role model, what would they do in this situation? 

Stop Planning

When we find it hard to know what we want – whether in a particular situation or in general – this can be because we are too busy. A cluttered mind leaves little space for exploration, and, consequently, we experience a frustrating blankness. Planning unstructured time frees our mind from the daily grind, the endless to-do lists and those good old “shoulds” and leaves us with… ourselves.

- When I make time to sit with myself, not planning anything, not deliberately doing anything, how does that feel?

- When I make time to sit with myself, not planning anything, what comes up for me? What do I notice about what comes up?

Unstructured time is hard – I find it challenging to shut down my brain and tell my task list to take it easy for a couple of hours. Sometimes, we have to do this several times over – for example every weekend, or two evenings a week – before we start to notice a difference.

 How do you know what you really want? I’d love to hear your experiences.

Related posts:

1. 12 Steps to Becoming More Curious (and some stuff about cats)
2. Steps for rewriting self-destructive patterns
3. Daniel Mackler on Self-Therapy and Journalling

Picture Credit: annemariecross

As Becoming Who You Are grows into “The Guide to Authentic Living”, this episode takes a look at what authenticity is and why it’s so relevant to our lives.

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Picture credit: Photosbykas

This week’s podcast looks at a NY Times article about the self-improvement movement and discusses change vs. acceptance.

Related posts:

1. BWYA Podcast Episode 2: Who is Personal Development for?
2. Why Self-Improvement Sucks
3. The BWYA Advent Calendar

Picture credit: picturesofwinter

This is a special podcast. It contains a meditation that focuses on building up our inner warmth and strength during the winter months.

I am a huge fan of meditation for encouraging mindfulness and inner awareness. This is the first one I’ve recorded so I’d love to know what you think of it.

If you enjoy this and would like to spend time getting to know yourself better, try 12 Weeks to Self-Knowledge. It’s a pay what you want sentence completion course that helps you get to the core of your being using daily sentence stems and weekly support emails (and it’s really pay what you want – no strings attached).

Enjoy!

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What helps us make the most of personal development, and why it isn’t for everyone.

Today’s resource: 750 words.com

Related posts:

1. BWYA Episode 4: The Trouble with ‘Self-Improvement’
2. The Challenges of Personal Development
3. Introducing: the Becoming Who You Are Podcast!

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Only by letting go of the old forms can you make space for something new to be born. – Eric Klein

I’ve been thinking about the word “change” recently. It has mixed connotations for me: I think change can be positive, helpful, even necessary in some situations (ever been through a break-up?), but I think we can also put too much pressure on ourselves to change, to be something different, and ultimately sacrifice enjoying what we can about who we are right now.

This week, I updated the “About” page of the website. I’m still not 100% sure of BYWA’s focus – somehow, it feels too broad at the moment, and trying to get a handle on it is like trying to get a hold on a water bed matress.

So I left the old about page up, way after it was overdue, even when I couldn’t stand looking at it anymore.

I didn’t let go. I didn’t change it.

The old page was done. It felt safe, familiar, and complete, even though I wasn’t at all happy with it. Re-writing the page nagged at the back of my mind and every time I visited the site, I would avoid it. Slightly irrational, as the “About” page is one of the first places I look when I arrive at other people’s websites!

Finally letting go – sitting down and working on a new page – was difficult. But I feel a lot happier now. The nagging is gone. I don’t feel guilty for having abandoned one of the most crucial parts of the website anymore.

This led me to think about change. Every day, we hear so much about change: changing our attitudes, changing our style, changing our lives, changing the world. People get so caught up in change, sometimes it’s difficult to accept the way things are now, let alone appreciate them.

But what if we want change? Not in a wanting-to-be-gold-medal-winning-superstars kind of way: desiring that change will only lead to heartache.

I’m talking about real, tangible change. A change we can define, be specific about, measure, and reasonably achieve (if you’re saying you don’t know what you can reasonable achieve – you do, just ask yourself). A change that will improve our lives.

For example, instead of “I want to exercise more”, choose “I want to go running at least two times a week” or “I want to be able to run 5K by this summer”; instead of “I want to change career”, choose “I want to retrain as a carpenter and start my own bespoke carpentry business within 10 years of finishing”. Each of those changes might have its own set of sub-changes underneath, and these can all be defined, specific, measurable and achievable.

Why defined, specific, measurable and achievable? To stop the perils of vagueness.

The Perils of Vagueness

How many times have you heard someone say “I really want to lose weight” or “I really need to get fit” but not do anything about it? For some people, actually doing those things is too scary – as much as they want to do it, where they are is a familiar place, and leaving it would put them out of their comfort zone. Sometimes, looking towards a future when a certain thing is different can also be a way of avoiding acceptance of the way that thing is right now. So the desire for change stays broad and generalised, and nothing happens.

But if you’re ready to step outside your comfort zone, you define your goal (i.e. “I want to lose weight”, “I want to get fit”), then you make it specific (“I want to lose five pounds” or “I want to be able to run 5K”), it’s measurable (“How will I know when I have lost five pounds/hit my 5K goal?”) and it is reasonably achievable (“I want to do this over the next six months”, not “I want to do this over the next two weeks”).

When changes are specific, measurable and achievable, we know exactly what we’re aiming for, exactly how we’re going to know when we’ve got there, and we’re not going to defeat ourselves by setting unrealistic expectations. If we’ve had unrealistic expectations or desires for change in the past, it can be hard to let go of them. We might never win the lottery, make People’s 100 Most Beautiful list, or have perfect relationships.

And that’s fine, because those things don’t matter. We can’t control them. Real change comes from things we can control.

Those kinds of changes, if we really commit to them, can be empowering, uplifting, and incredible to achieve.

Fun

I recently listened to a webinar by Ishita Gupta, who runs fear.less magazine. She talked about fun over fear, and how we can make a conscious effort to introduce more fun into our lives.

 “How much fun can I have with this right now?”

This question really struck me. The context in which the question was posed was boring or dull tasks that we have to get through as part of life, but the phrase applies to hard changes as well.

So start the week with a bang: think about one change you want to make – maybe you’ve wanted to make it for a while. Define it in specific terms, decide how to measure it, and think about ways you can have fun while doing it.

Related posts:

1. Things don’t Change

Picture credit: lyricsdog

If you’re part of the BWYA Facebook community, you’ll have heard about the BWYA advent calendar, which ran for 25 days last year. It was a series of prompts that encouraged a retrospective look at 2011 and awareness of goals and desires for 2012.

One of the goals and desires for 2012 that came up for me during this time was to show more of myself in my writing – to have more of a voice (I’m pretty introverted so I can find this challenging with people I don’t know). That desire got me thinking about podcasting; I enjoy listening to podcasts and I think it’s a great way of opening up the material we talk about here to a wider audience.

I’d had thoughts about doing this before but, every time a thought came up, so would a lot of counter-thoughts telling me that I didn’t have enough time, I don’t have a ‘voice’ for podcasting (whatever that means) and I didn’t know where to start making one of these pod-ca-whatyamacallits.

That voice was – is – trying to protect me, to stop me doing something that could reveal more of myself and leave me vulnerable. But in the end, we can let the voices rule us, or we can listen to them, appreciate them and go forward, knowing they’re looking out for us. I did this a couple of weeks ago with 12 Weeks to Self-Knowledge. Knowing I have the above goal gave me the motivation to push myself a little here too.

Not everyone has the time to or enjoys reading blogs; or even reading – full stop. So this is a great opportunity to make the content more accessible by making it available in different formats and push myself by doing something that is slightly out of my comfort zone but that I’ve wanted to do for a while: double win!

The feed will available through iTunes in a couple of days so please subscribe if you’d like to hear more. Let me know what you think, and I hope you enjoy!

Mentioned in the podcast:

Meditation Oasis

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So now we have our ledgers. We know what’s important to us in relationships, and we’re aware of those things that will affect someone’s credit.

Using this information, we can gauge our current relationships. This helps us be more aware of our needs in individual relationships: which are being met, and which aren’t being met.

Observations

What you might notice about the credit/debit list you made before is that some figures on the debit list are higher than those on the credit list. For example, kindness might be +30, while unkindness might be −70. This is because there are certain things we expect as basics of a good relationship – such as kindness – and are therefore more noticeable when they’re not there than when they are.

You might also notice that some things appear on one list, but not on the other. For instance, spontaneity might be +10 on the credit list, because that kind of thing is fun, but equally if someone isn’t particularly spontaneous, it’s no biggie.

Evaluation and Reciprocity

Now it’s time to look at ourselves, at the level of reciprocity that exists in our relationships. You’ve probably heard the old adage that you really find out who your friends are during the tough times, and there’s truth in that. But, perhaps counterintuitively, being as generous as possible in your relationships is also a helpful way of measuring the level of reciprocity. When we know we’re being as generous as possible, we can use our feelings as a guide.

Let’s think about this in the context of a laptop: When I provide it with power, how long does the battery last? When I leave it plugged in and feed it electricity for a certain amount of time, how much portability does it give me in return? My old laptop lasted a good few years, but the battery died and I couldn’t used it without plugging it in first. Kind of defeats the point of having a laptop, no? That was a deal-breaker, and I purchased a new one.

The same principle applies to relationships. You might know the ones I’m talking about: those that leave you feeling drained, empty, exhausted, wondering what you yourself got out of that conversation. Those relationships are like my old laptop: you’re giving them a lot of power, and not getting much in return.

Then there are those relationships on the other end of the spectrum. They leave you feeling vitalised, renewed, light, rewarded. Those relationships are like the laptop I’m using now (cable-free and on the sofa: my favourite place). You give them some juice and it pays off.

That’s reciprocity.

Of course, reciprocity comes in many forms, it doesn’t mean that if you listen to someone’s problems for an hour, they should do the same for you. It might mean that if you take time out of your day three days in a row to listen to someone’s problems for an hour, then they buy you a coffee, or lend you a book, or whatever you feel an hour of listening to their problems is worth to you. If they’re in good credit, maybe it’s a freebie.

And this is why we make the ledger, so we have an idea of where we stand, what the dynamics are in each of our relationships.

We work out what is meaningful to us, and we go from there.

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I’ve felt so happy receiving people’s feedback on 12 Weeks to Self-Knowledge! It’s wonderful to know that people are making the most of the practice, and to hear what they’re getting out of it.

“At the end of the week, the dominant feeling is happiness and the dominant thought is a sense of accomplishment.” – Cheryl, NY.

If you’ve been thinking about joining, it’s not too late. Click here to start.

Related posts:

1. The Bank of You Part 2: Ledgers
2. The Bank of You
3. 5 Mindhacks for Overcoming Procrastination: Part 2

Picture credit: Accountingunleashed

In the last post, we introduced the idea of the personal bank account.

When we look at our actual bank accounts, we are either “in the black” or “in the red”. When we’re in the black, we have money in our account and don’t owe the bank anything. When we’re in the red, we have minus amounts of money and have to borrow from the bank.

I would also add a term – “in the grey” – which describes that tipping point between black and red. This is the point at which things are shaky: it’s a point of instability.

“In the black”, “in the red” and “in the grey” also apply to other aspects of our lives. If we buy a certain brand of soft drink that we find disgusting, we stop buying it and find an alternative drink. If we hate our job, we quit and find another one. If we don’t like someone’s behaviour over a period of time, the account will slide from black, to grey, then red, before we hang out with them less or stop seeing them altogether.

When we think of our relationships with things, places and people in terms of a bank account, we can more clearly define what we are looking for from a particular relationship: what is important, what is a deal-breaker and what is inconvenient but liveable. We can more accurately measure the quality of our relationships and gauge for ourselves what is and isn’t acceptable.

Let’s do a quick exercise (if you’re pushed for time, you can finish it later)

Take a pen and paper and make two lists: a credit list and a debit list. 

The credit list contains things that add to the amount of credit in the relationship (i.e. ‘Positive’ actions and behaviours), and the debit list contains things that might take away (i.e. ‘Negative’ actions and behaviours).

For example, reciprocity or honesty might be on the credit list, lack of reciprocity or dishonesty might be on the debit list. For now, try and fit five to ten items on each list.

Rank each item on a scale of 1 to 100, 100 being the highest value, and 1 being the lowest. 

Voila: this is the basis for your relationship account ledger.

I’m not suggesting you should literally make a relationship ledger (unless that’s your kind of thing), but it’s useful to be aware of what is important to us in our dealings with others: what we need, what we won’t accept and what’s so-so. Being conscious of our ledger, carrying it around with us in our heads, will help us make decisions in our relationships that are focused on our values and needs.

In the next post, we’ll look at patterns in the ledger, and how we can use these to gauge our own actions.

I’m interested, if you want to share: what’s on your ledger?

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For greater clarity about your relationship with yourself and others, check out the 12 Weeks to Self-Knowledge sentence completion course. This program provides a daily practice that will help you evaluate your relationships, self-acceptance and become who you are. Find out more here.

Related posts:

1. The Bank of You Part 3: Credit Check
2. The Bank of You
3. 5 Mindhacks for Overcoming Procrastination: Part 2