Just Try Harder

I love this quote by Victoria Castle:

If struggling were the way to get there, we’d all be there by now.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the way many of us approach work.  Often, suffering and struggling is so much a part of the everyday experience that it goes unnoticed and unchallenged.  We can automatically and unconsciously believe the lies that say if we just try harder, work longer, suffer enough,….then it HAS to pay off….doesn’t it?  We like to call it “work ethic”.  Seems more like “carrot and stick”.

[Years ago I had a coach who suggested I take a baseball cap, cut a hole in the bill, loop a string through it, tie a carrot to the end of the string, and wear it as I go about doing my work!  The suggestion alone was enough to get my attention and to have me look more closely at my underlying beliefs and cultural attitudes toward work and success.]

Naturally there is a place for hard work that challenges us to grow ourselves and our businesses in positive directions.  But hard work doesn’t have to include suffering and struggling.  Instead, it can be filled with joy, delight, and love.  Rather than draining and degrading, it can be satisfying, energizing and esteem-building.  Hard work can feel good.  Struggling has never felt good to me.

BTW, you’ve probably noticed that struggling isn’t reserved exclusively for work. We can bring it on vacation, to relationships, to parties, etc.  It can become a way of life.  Here’s the bottom line:  It’s a choice.

So here are some questions to consider:

• Are you willing to let go of struggling?
• If so, what will you do instead?
• How will that change your experience of work?

A Secret to Everyday Happiness

Each morning before looking at email, calendars, or to-do lists, give yourself some quiet time to consciously create your day.  Decide how you would like for your day to go.  Decide how you would like to feel throughout the day, and what qualities you intend to bring to your day (a sense of humor, an attitude of gratitude, compassion for yourself and others, etc.).  Imagine yourself moving through your day, cheerfully encountering people, resolving problems with ease, making a difference or rising to a challenge — whatever would be fun and meaningful to you.  Close your planning session with a phrase such as, “This or something better, with harm to no one.”  Then, go about your day.  This process takes as little as 10 minutes and will positively impact your life.

Choose a Theme

As one year closes and a new one opens, it’s a prime time to choose a point of focus for the coming year.  We encourage all of our coaching clients and GROWE members to select a theme and then visit it regularly throughout the year.   A theme is a big picture topic to explore, learn about, and master.  Here are some themes people have chosen in previous years:

The Year of……..

• loving myself
• full permission
• no bull!
• wild success
• luxury
• self-care
• accepting what is
• living my truth
• freedom

We recommend that you not use a tangible goal as a theme.  For example, please don’t limit yourself to something like “The Year of a 7-figure Income”.  Have that has a goal if you like, but not as a theme.  Choose something from your heart.  Something that will really serve your growth holistically.  Then work with a coach to keep it alive and real.  If you don’t have a coach…hire one!  And, if you don’t want to hire a coach, we recommend that you and a good friend each choose a theme and tell one another what your theme is.  That way, you can remind each other throughout the year.  When faced with a challenge, you can ask how the theme relates to or could help with the challenge.  The same can be true when making a decision or when celebrating a success.  (example,“This is your year of luxury, so how does that inform your decision?”)  If you’ve never chosen a theme before, you’ll be amazed at the power of this tool!

My theme for 2010 is: The Year of Conscious Choice.  What’s yours?

This is another profound and powerful exercise.  It starts with envisioning what you really want during the holidays.  Here are the steps:

• This holiday season, I want to feel _____ more consistently.
• I want my overall holiday experience to be _______.
• I will know this holiday season is successful when I ________.

Inner Peace Anytime

This is a simple and powerful exercise to do regularly (daily).  It only takes 5 minutes.

• Set an alarm to go off a few times each day when you will not be in meetings or otherwise engaged with people.

• When the alarm goes off, stop what you are doing.  Set everything down.

• Close your eyes and focus on your breathing.
  

• Consciously let go of tension in your body, the stress you have accumulated during the day so far, and any anxieties you have about the future.
  

• Just breathe and come into the present moment.
  

• Decide how you would like the remainder of your day to go — smoothly, peacefully, magically, joyfully — whatever would be most enjoyable to you.
  

• Gently open your eyes feeling refreshed and renewed.

6.  Dismiss the Idea Right Away Because You Think It Won’t Make Any Money.

How many times has an idea, still in its infancy, been abandoned because “the voice of REASON” asks: but how will this make money?  Some of the most inspired and successful businesses and/or products began just because the inventor had a passion.  I have a friend whose daughter studied art history and who is now a sought-after movie set designer.  I think about Steve Jobs creating a micro computer in his garage or the recent movie: Julie and Julia, where her Julie’s desire to cook every recipe in Julia’s book lead her to create a blog that lead to a book that lead to a movie.  My own husband is a math teacher and decided to write a textbook for his own use, since he wasn’t finding exactly what he wanted.  Fast forward 10 years, now has three published textbooks.  Had any of these people dwelled on the money question, their ideas would surely have been abandoned and we all would miss out on their contributions.

A spiritual teacher recommends: Work passionately, receive passionately.  Part of what this means to me includes following ideas that you are passionate about and trusting that the money will come however it comes.

Thanks Keri!  For more about Keri and her work, visit her site, Coaching Masters.

I was working with a client this morning when we started laughing about an unfortunate and humbling experience: Killing a Great Idea. Here are my top tips (from personal experience, unfortunately, and from my clients’):

1. Demand It Be Successful Immediately. Think of your idea as a newborn baby.  Sweet, precious, and needing nurturing.  It takes time to mature.  You wouldn’t expect your newborn to be able to run in a track meet next week!  Instead, give your idea the time and space it needs to develop strength and momentum.

2. Ignore your Intuition, the Whispers, & Signs from the Universe. This can range from living in la la land to being in denial to outright refusing to accept what is so.  The whispers, signs from the universe and our intuition are always offering helpful, loving guidance.  There’s that saying: “Listen to the whispers so you don’t have to hear the shouts!”

3. Ask for Feedback without Discernment. Sometimes we ask for feedback too soon or from people who are too critical or too indulgent.  The timing of feedback is one part of discernment; the source and quality of feedback is another.  Consider the metaphor of baking bread:  If you take it out of the oven too soon and hand someone a knife, they’ll cut into it and it will fall. Ruined.  OK, maybe that’s dramatic, but you get the point.

4. Attempt to Control Every Aspect of Development. I recently had a project that at first was a delightful idea.  Unfortunately, I went into my control mode.  It was as if I put my hands around its neck and strangled the life out of it.  Not pretty.  Not successful.  I didn’t allow for the mystery, for the unknown, and for the magic to happen.

5.  Starve It for Attention. We need to make sure we can give enough attention for the idea to take hold.  If we have too many other things going on (too many other projects or life activities), we simply won’t be able to give what is needed and the idea will wilt and die.

So, there are my top five sure-fire ways to kill a great idea.  Got any to add?

Sarkozy Wants Happiness Used as Economic Indicator

By EMMA VANDORE, AP Business Writer PARIS – France plans to include happiness and well-being in its measurements of economic progress, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday, beckoning other countries to join in a “revolution” in the way growth is tracked after the global economic crisis.

“The crisis doesn’t only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so.”

France will adapt its statistical toolbox as recommended by two Nobel economists whom Sarkozy commissioned 18 months ago to analyze new ways of measuring social progress, he said in a speech in Paris on the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

France, whose growth has lagged its peers in recent decades according to standard measures, will also try to convince other governments to change their economictracking, Sarkozy said “A great revolution is waiting for us,” he said. “For years, people said that finance was a formidable creator of wealth, only to discover one day that it accumulated so many risks that the world almost plunged into chaos.

“The crisis doesn’t only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so,” he said.

Measuring well-being would make France’s economy, famous for its short workweek and generous social benefits, look more rosy.

“If leisure has no accounting value because it’s essentially full of non-market activities like sport or culture, we put productivity below human fulfillment,” Sarkozy said.
Sarkozy asked U.S. economist Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel economics prize and a critic of free-market economists, and Armatya Sen of India, who won the 1998 Nobel prize for work on developing countries, to lead the analysis of growth tracking.  Sen helped create the U.N. Human Development Index, a yearly welfare indicator designed to gear international policy decisions to take account of health and living standards.

Their report, delivered to Sarkozy on Monday, recommends shifting the emphasis from gross domestic product, which measures economic production, to well-being and sustainability.

The report recommends looking at household income, consumption and wealth rather than production in the economy as a whole for a better reflection of material living standards. Non-market activities such as house cleaning should also be tracked, it says.
More prominence should be given to the distribution of income and wealth, as well as to access to education and health.

Attention should also be given to whether countries are over-consuming their economic wealth and damaging the environment, the report says.  In terms of GDP, the internationally recognized way of measuring an economy, French growth has lagged behind the U.S. throughout most of the past 30 years, although recent turmoil in financial markets has hit the U.S. economy harder.

France appears to be weathering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression better than most, recording a small level of growth — 0.3 percent — in the second quarter this year.

But economists warn that the good news won’t last.  “France seems to be resisting better on the downside but it is increasing less in the upside of the cycle which means it is collecting less wealth and it will be more difficult to rebound afterward,” said Laurence Boone, an economist with Barclays Capital in Paris.

I’ve been thinking about “permission” lately.  Many of us won’t grant ourselves permission to freely do, have, or be what we really want in life.  I’m talking about in big and small ways alike.  Big as in working in a career that is less than ideal or suffering in a relationship that isn’t loving or satisfying.  Small as in filling the calendar with duties and obligations that we convince ourselves absolutely MUST be done.  Or, having a to-do list that is not only impossibly long, but also just downright dreadful.

This is no way to live a fulfilling life.  This is no way to have a fun, successful business.

Now, I am happy that I have work that I love and a family life that is tremendously gratifying.  And yet there are certain circumstances in which I do not fully let myself have, do, be all that I desire.  So, I’m challenging myself to a bold experiment:  For the next 7 days, I am only doing what I really want to do — following my heart’s desire.  I trust my heart to guide me to what is most real, most satisfying, most loving.  (My ego likes to threaten me with images of my ultimate destruction: lazing on the couch for hours on end, remote control in one hand, junk food in the other.  Seriously, not my heart’s desire.)

Imagine….day after day of listening to your heart, to your inner guidance and then following its lead.  Well, I’m going for it!

And, no blackmailing myself with SHOULDs, HAVE TOs, or WHO DO YOU THINK YOU AREs! No justifying, asking for approval, or permission from anyone outside of myself.  No apologizing for doing what brings me joy.   I’m talking about giving myself the real freedom to choose moment to moment.  And, if/when I judge myself for being frivolous, indulgent, etc., I promise to lovingly bring myself back to center.

Anybody want to join me?

Listen to yourself.  Really listen.  Slow down.  Get quiet (it may take a while for the inner chatter to subside).  There is so much inner guidance and wisdom available to each of us.  We have access to it whenever we listen for it.

You might want to pose questions about your business, about its direction, about opportunities, or about any aspect of your life.  Then listen.

Consider taking this on as a daily practice and see what happens.  I’m going to!