TSHP164: The one character trait to rule them all

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What’s Coming This Episode?

Do this! Do that! Do the other! There are so many tips, tricks and hacks that we’re encouraged to undertake and study. But it there one that ranks above all others? There might just be!

Enjoy the show, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

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The one character trait that you need…

Conscientiousness

This week a listener wrote in asking about the importance of being conscientious and should we be developing this trait, does it serve us well.

To be ‘scient’ is to be knowing, aware, knowledgeable or awake. Con means ‘with’. So to be conscientious is to act with awareness or awakeness, in short to be mindful.

Conscientiousness is the state of being thorough, careful, or vigilant; it implies a desire to do a task well. Conscientiousness is also one trait of the five-factor model of personality, and is manifested in characteristic behaviours such as being efficient, organised, neat, and systematic. It includes such elements as self-discipline, carefulness, thoroughness, self-organisation, deliberation (the tendency to think carefully before acting), and need for achievement.”

Ramji, my teacher, once said to me that a good person is someone who is getting better at ‘it’. The ‘it’ could be anything or any aspect of your personal development. The key ingredient to getting better at whatever is conscientiousness.

For my resource of week I suggested Erkart Toille’s book ‘The Power Of Now‘. Living in the present, living in the now is the mindful manifestation of conscientiousness. To develop the ability to be mindful requires the application of conscientiousness. In doing this it creates a constant and persistent habit.

Remember that a habit is something that you do without the need for willpower or effort. It is something that you just do. To be conscientious, to be mindful, is the ultimate habit, it is the one trait that rules all that you do. When you have developed this habit whatever you do will always be the best it could possibly be, and by definition, every time that you revisit it you will get better and better at it.

If you are conscientious about being a good person in the end you will be pretty amazing.

Be mindful, be conscientious, be happy

Sean x

TSHP163: Dealing with long term unemployment

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What’s Coming This Episode?

A listener sent us a message asking us to have a chat about the issues surrounding long term unemployment. Being out of work can be very debilitating. It can lead to a loss of identity and start a slide into depression. On the flip side, it’s a chance to reinvent ourselves…

Enjoy the show, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

Show Notes and Links

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Dealing with long term unemployment

This idea was passed to us by Lee a long term listener. He told us that he had been forced into retirement for medical reasons at 42 and is left with the question “now what?” He now finds himself struggling with motivation trying to check job listings and get going again.

Ed and I see ourselves as long term unemployed, that is, we don’t work for people we work for ourselves. We do that on the basis that we have the freedom to do what we want when we want and are not tied to the whims of an employer. In reality I spend half my time as a consultant in the NHS and the rest of the time I am in companies or seeing people privately. I know that both Ed and I probably work many more hours, and many of them unsociable hours, than we would if we were employed. Yet, we both hold the concept of ‘chosen unemployment’ and perhaps, in many ways, that is the point, it is not what we do it is how we see what we do that counts.

In our hours of employment there are times when we both do what would be termed ‘work’ for little or no money. I see people, who need it and are unable to pay in the normal manner, for free and Ed is a committed charity worker with the blind.

How do we define work and not work?
Every species on the planet wakes up in the morning and gets on with it’s life. The activities of survival, food and water, building a home, creating a relationship and raising the young are common to all of us. We as human beings, have broken away from all other species with the invention of money and our developed acquisitive drive to own stuff.

Money has put us in the position where we no longer have to kill our own meat, make our own milk and cheese, weave our own cloth, cobble our own shoes. We have become the specialist in ‘non-productive’ work that we do in exchange for tokens that we then exchange for the things that we need, or for the stuff that fill our houses. Society has become not about who we are, the skills that we have to offer, or the contribution that we can make for the good of us all, it is now about how many tokens can we gather and keep for our self? People with lots of tokens are called ‘rich’ and those with only a few, or no, tokens are called ‘poor’.

Money, money, money
When in general people describe themselves as ‘unemployed’ they are not saying that there is nothing to be done they usually mean that they are not in a position to exchange their time for token, for money.

When this happens to us we have become poor and we have to rely on others to give us tokens as benefits or charity. These concepts sway who we are, how we see ourselves, how we are seen by others and how we act. Often we will give a rich bad person with money status and poor good person without money little or no status at all.

When we value people by their ability to get tokens we down grade some of the most important jobs in life. At the dinner party, when strangers meet, the first thing they ask each other is “and what do you do?” The answer to this question is given status usually related to the amount of tokens an individuals role in life is worth. The worst praise ever uttered at a dinner party is “I’m only a house wife”. Strange as this is probably one of the most important jobs on the planet yet it attracts no tokens at all.

We need to, ‘love people and use money’, not the other way around and we need to remember that ‘it is the love of money that is the root of all evil’.

In many ways unemployment is not a state of fact it is a state of mind. There are always things that need to be done, or that we enjoy, that employ our time but will not give us tokens or money for doing them. At the end of the day one has money and the other has not yet, that have both been employed for the same amount of time.

In that sense we are all employed. Cows, fish, apes, birds, humans we are all employing our time. Sometimes it will be for profit as food, shelter, money or stuff and sometimes it will be hobbies, pleasure and fun, and I guess I should include illness and recovery, it is all employment, it is all using our time.

In a money economy we are often driven to do things that we don’t really want to do to get the money. This can often be at the root of our lack of motivation to get going once we have been out of a money producing role due to illness, retirement, redundancy and so on. I have worked with many women who have been employed raising a family and running a home who, when the last child leaves home, feels the need to return to earning again, yet the roles and options open to them do not excite them and make them want to go out and do them.

I guess this is why Ed and I describe ourselves as ‘unemployed’ because we both do what we want to do and we both enjoy what we do, so for us we are just living not working. Some of our life is paid and some is given for free.

In this episode my resource was one of my favourite books by Joe Vitale called ‘The Attractor Factor’. This is a good work book that asks you questions that require that you look at what you are and what you are doing now and then gets you to hone down your ideas until your are really clear about what it is that you ‘really’ want to do.

When you know the answer to that question you are at that point when you join us in the ranks of the paid unemployed because you are now no longer working you are living. It is just that you get paid for it.

So often getting motivated is not about ‘pull yourself together’, or ‘get a crack on’, it is about actually wanting to do it. We just need to decide what the ‘it’ really is. Then life begins to make sense and you can work towards becoming the version of you that you really want to be.

So, ask yourself the question:
“What do you really, really, really want from your life?” Your happiness and fulfilment just might be in your answer.

Take care and be happy

Sean X

TSHP162: Dealing with Chronic Pain, with Belinda Claire

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What’s Coming This Episode?

Pain is a massively complex issue. We’ve dealt with it a little in the past but thought it was a topic worth revisiting, this time with an expert to help us out. Enter Belinda Claire of Pain Care Massage, a good friend of Ed and Sean’s…

Enjoy the show, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

Show Notes and Links

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Dealing with Chronic Pain

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Imagine that you are hammering in a nail when you slip and hit your thumb. You jump up and down, suck your finger, say a few blue words, you shake your hand and carry on hammering.

Now, imagine that someone is holding down you hand so that you can’t move it. Someone else comes towards you with a hammer and while looking you in the eyes hits your thumb half as hard.

Which one do you think would hurt the most?

Pain is a sensation. Just like heat or cold. Your nervous system registers that something is happening and it sends that message to your brain.

Strangely pain is not experienced in your nervous system it is experienced in your brain. However it does not really feel like that.

There is a scene in the Gormenghast Books by Mervyn Peake when the guru is sat with his students telling them that pain is all in the mind. One of his students is getting angry and feeling mischievous, he strikes a match and leans forward and sets light to the guru’s beard. The guru dies screaming in pain.

We know that it is possible to disassociate from pain. People walk on coals and lie on beds of nails. We also see that people have different thresholds of pain. Some can deal with huge levels of pain while others fall apart with the smallest injury.

I guess that pain is telling us that something is wrong, that we need to pay attention to it and do something about it.

Pain is not always physical. We might have emotional pain, mental pain, social pain, financial pain and so on.

This week Belinda joined us on the podcast. Belinda is a pain therapist using massage and touch to help people deal with and release their pain. The thing that she describes is how we hold emotional pain in our muscles and joints, This was of great interest to me as the relationship that she described between feeling and muscle tension matched the Ayurvedic work I had done in my training. This explained the psychological and emotional connections that are expressed in different parts of the body as chakras or bio energy centres. The body areas related to chakras are quite precise but in simplistic terms they are as follows:

1: Root Chakra
Sited in the perineum the sensations are in the buttocks anus and gonads.
The pain in these areas would be seen as being repressed physical or sexual energy.
May also effect the chin and jaw.

2: The Bioenergetic Chakra
Sited an inch below the navel covers the small of the back, kidneys, bladder and the sciatic nerve effecting the back of the legs down into the arch of the foot, kidneys, adrenal glands and bladder.
The pain in these areas would be seen as being fear and anxiety related to social interactions that may include fight and flight and social and sensual conflicts.
May also effect the teeth, gums and lips.

3: The Solar Plexus Chakra
Sited over the diaphragm, effects the upper part of the lower back, the pancreas and the front of the legs right down to the top of the foot to the toes.
The pain in this area would be seen intellectual tension, boredom, being fixed and stuck, overdosed on routine.
May also effect the upper maxillary bone.

4: The Heart Chakra
Sited in the middle of the sternum, covers the thymus, heart and lungs (cardio vascular system) respiration, blood pressure, liver and spleen, and the area from the middle of the back through the under arm to the palm of the hand.
The pain in the area would be seen as associated with self image, self esteem, levels of consciousness and emotion hurt or burden.
May also effect the nose and the breathing in general such as with asthma.

5: The Throat Chakra
Sited at the base of the neck, covers the thyroid and the neck, upper back and the area through the shoulder down the upper arm through the back of the hand to the fingers and nails.
The pain in this areas would be seen as associated with duty, responsibility, the need to be authoritative, organised and successful and is often related to statues and standing in chosen profession.
May also effect the eyes and the ears.

6: The Head Chakra
Sited in the centre of the forehead, covers the pituitary, the head generally, eyebrows, and the centre of the brain and the limbic system.
The pain in this area, that may include headache and epilepsy, is related to issues of deep sensitivity, spirituality and the meaning or life and meaninglessness of life.
May also effect the cranial nerves and the forehead below the hairline.

7: The Crown Chakra
Sited at the top of the head on the fontanelle, covers the pineal gland, the hair and the crown of the head.
Pain in this area would be seen as more existential, creativity, genius and madness, imagination, rumination, and sometime fantasy.

While these are my definitions rather than Belinda’s, the manipulation that she describes enables the release of trapped emotion in these different areas of the body, emotions and the mind. Together with some talking therapy body therapists have a tremendously positive effect on pain and also on other Illnesses and syndromes that are expressed in the body.

For us all our body is a guru that, if we listen to it, will teach us much, and when we listen to it and work with it we can release tension, reduce or eliminate pain, and find emotional release.

Take care be happy and let go of your tension and pain

Sean X

TSHP161: How to Regain Trust

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What’s Coming This Episode?

We’ve had a listener request to discuss the topic of trust. Basically, after a divorce our listener is struggling to trust his new partner. It’s something that can affect us all so let’s dive in to this topic…

Enjoy the show, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

Show Notes and Links

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Regaining Trust

On the podcast this week Ed and I were talking about trust and what happens once it has been broken. So much of what we are and what we do in society is based on trust.

On the trading floor of the Baltic Exchange the world’s only independent source of maritime market information for the trading and settlement of physical and derivative contracts commits it’s international community of over 600 members encompasses the majority of world shipping to a code of business conduct overseen by the Baltic that is “My Word Is My Bond”.
In the exchange every deal and transaction on the busy trading floor is done on the trust that what I say I will do. Millions of dollars are traded everyday on this “trust”.

Since 1744 Baltic Exchange members have undertaken to commit to this code of conduct. Those who breach the code are expelled.

We see codes of conduct, or trust, established for many business and professional areas. When we see the doctor we ‘trust’ them to act in our best interests as we do with the solicitor, teacher, financial adviser and so on. When people break the code, or the trust, they are turned out of the group. Priests are “defrocked”, service personnel “court-martialled”, doctors are “struck off” Baltic Exchange members are “expelled”. Even in our social groups we expel those that don’t adhere to the social code. We “send them to Coventry” and we no longer talk to them or acknowledge them.

Trust works, or is broken at all levels of human interaction. The most problematic and therefore the most common in the consulting room is unfaithfulness in relationships. When this contract is broken we call it separation or divorce.

In all forms of broken trust the issue is can we ever put it back together, can we learn to trust again and how will it effect the rest of our life?

This week we received the following email…

My ex wife had an affair that I discovered. Some 2 years after our divorce I’m now with someone else and I find it difficult when she goes out in the evening as I fear she might be unfaithful (even though I have no evidence she would be). I find it tough to deal with that / things are good when we’re together but it’s difficult when we’re apart as my mind imagines all the things that could happen.

In this case the person above, who has been let down, has carried the issue of hurt and loss with them into their next relationship. So often we are loaded with unfinished emotional business from our past that is effecting our present.

“I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

Trust is a strange thing. It assumes that we can rely on another person to do either what they agreed to do or what we expected them to do. My teacher told me that my need to have trust from others was misplaced and could never be. When I protested he told me that “trust is what happens to a chicken before you put it in the oven!” His point was that a chicken before it is cooked is trussed so that it will not move while being cooked. He said that when we put our trust in other people we truss them into an immoveable position. This is an impossible thing to do because people can never be trussed or fixed. They are moving living breathing, developing, learning beings who will always change and will never stay the same.

When it comes to relationships research shows us that up to 60% of people have affairs. Which means that we have less than a 50% chance of having a faithful relationship. The two questions this raises is why, and can we put it back together after the event?

Why?

When asked ‘why?’ most people say that they needed some attention. For the majority sex was never the issue. If was mainly the feeling that someone wanted them, appreciated them, desired them and most importantly listen to them and made them feel valued and important.

Now, there will be a percentage of people who are serial philanderers who will never truly commit to a relationship, there will be those that are addicted to the dopamine, the love drug, generated at the outset of a new relationship and there will be a percentage of people on the psychopathic spectrum who lack any real empathy.

As the majority of people are not psychopathic, philandering love addicts, we need to look to communication as a key to the maintaining a relationship. It is said that “those who eat together stay together”. In most cases couples who talk and do things together create the emotional bonding that is oxytocin in brain chemistry. Oxytocin is what binds a mother to a child and members of a relationship to each other. Couples who communicate stay together, those with active oxytocin stay together.

Can we put it back together?

The simple answer is normally “no”. However, it does not have to be that way.

In the workplace I get involved in myriad mediation cases that often come to nothing or are at best a papering over the cracks with an agreement for the workers to act professionally with each other in the future. Once the trust has gone the professionalism is a mask.

With couples in the consulting room I find that it is usually fairly clear. Most women seem prepared to give it another go after their man’s infidelity, though it may take them much work and time. There are few men prepared to give a woman another chance. For those that do choose to stay together and have a go at working it out there are some things that need to be done and said.

The new contract
You need a new contract that involves letting go of the past. This is what we deal with in the first step of the live in the present course. Until we let go of that past it will always drag us back and tip us moving forward. It is like a weight that will hold us back.

Forgiveness is hard. If you have never considered it have a look at step one.

Most importantly if you have problems letting go of your past email in and take some time to deal with your issues, don’t allow them to ruin your life.

Take care be happy and do not allow your unresolved past to wreck your present. Deal with it, seek therapy and enjoy your life.

Sean x