Archive for year: 2016

The podcast this week follows on from last week when we heard Alex describe herself as “only a hairdresser”. My point to her was that she was not giving herself the value that she deserved.

We had an email from Luke, as follows…

“…I am plagued with self doubt, low self esteem and pessimistic points of view, I want to be positive. I have a goal but just can’t get my head around the idea that I am even remotely good enough even to apply never mind get the placement. What can I do?”

Having a positive sense of ourself starts with the labels that we give ourselves. When people ask us ‘and who are you?’ what do we say? Well in most cases what we do is list the roles that we play and the things that we do. Because we live in a world that is driven by what we do we have to have roles to play that we can feel good about, those that serve us well. Or we will have nothing positive to answer the question with. It is then that we can feel the “I am only…”

Self-doubt can come at the point of change
When we develop self-doubt it is often based around our loss of the sense of meaningful roles. Sometimes we look at what we are doing and feel that our lives are, or have become pointless. This is not an uncommon feeling. Most people will feel this at some point. Often related to change we may feel it when a certain aspect of our live comes to a close. We leave school, the university course comes to an end, we leave a job, retire, are made redundant, we get divorced or separated, or someone close dies. The list is endless.

The solution here often comes from just simply acting, do something, join a club or a course. Get yourself going again. It is by doing that we create a new life, we create new meaning.

Self-doubt can come from needing to change direction
Sometimes we find that the decisions that we have made and the path that we have been following is not actually what we actually want or what we expected it to be. This involves being able to face up to the wrongness of our decision and do something to get it right. This can be accompanied with a sense of failure that might make us feel stupid. Such feelings sap our self-belief in getting something right in the future. If these thoughts lead to feelings of ‘what is the point?’ It can lead to depression and then it can be progressively harder to get enough energy to get going again.

The solution here comes from therapy, mentorship, sometime medication, or coaching.

Monkey in your head.
The situation that Luke describes suggests that he has let his monkey out of the cage. His monkey has run off and is throwing negative bananas at him. This is the process of rumination. Once we let monkey business take over we end up with…

What you feed grows and what you starve dies

If we continually recite negative mantras we just feed the negative concepts within us and they grow ever bigger. Choosing to ignore the negative monkey and to recite and repeat positive internal messages will, eventually, cause the negative monkey to grow ever quieter until we can pop it back in it’s cage.

The solution here is the use of positive affirmation. Try reading some Louise Hay and work with her positive affirmations. Learn to become internally inspirational. Read, listen, watch The Secret. Try Joe Vitale’s the Attractor Factor. However you do it, get some positive input.

Is there an external negative feed?
If you’re a regular listener or have read any of my books, you may be aware of the negative things my father said to me, to the point when I believed what he said. Are there people around you that are feeding you negative messages? Who are you hanging around with?

The solution here just might be deciding it is now time to change your relationships, friendship group, job and so on. Associate with people whose attitudes will enhance you and serve you well.

For my resource of the week I chose:
Mentoring – Buddying – Making a plan – Creating Mind Maps – Practice Mindful meditation.

What I am saying is “do something to make it different” and if you can’t find the energy within yourself see a therapist, get a mentor or a buddy.

We all deserve to be happy. Happiness begins with self love. Self love comes from doing things and being in situations and relationships that serve you well. It just might be time for a self audit?

Take care, be happy and love yourself

Sean X

In this weeks episode we had the pleasure of interviewing Alex. She and I worked together a couple of years ago as she made the magic changes of getting rid of the habits she had developed that did nor serve her well and replacing with new one’s that did. Like all of us, her habits were not really current, they were the ones that she been developing since the moment of her birth. We are all the habits that we create from what we learn. In the first instance these are from observation of what is going on around our emerging self and then after that they come from our experiences and more importantly from our responses to those experiences. In Psycho-speak we describe this collection of what we know and believe as our paradigm.

‘A paradigm is a standard, perspective, or set of ideas, a way of looking at something. It is a new way of looking or thinking about something. This word comes up a lot in the academic, scientific, and business worlds.

A new paradigm in business could mean a new way of reaching customers and making money. In education, relying on lectures is a paradigm: if you suddenly shifted to all group work, that would be a new paradigm. When you change paradigms, you’re changing how you think about something.’

Perhaps we should revisit the last sentence and perhaps embellish it a little.

When you change your paradigm, you are changing the way that you think, feel and behave about you and your wellbeing.

What Alex managed to do was take the journey that changed her paradigm. In so doing she changed her life, her relationships and her level of happiness and self-fulfillment.

You embark on ‘the journey’ when you make the decision to change your paradigm. When you do this you move from the unconscious programming of your childhood, where your unconscious paradigm controlled who you are and what you do, to a new you. This new you is in control of, and actively creating, and living what you desire. This is a new you who is living and getting what you really want from your life.

Different disciplines will describe this journey in many different ways, for me this is ‘waking up’ and is what our work at ‘Live In The Present’ is all about. The course and the book are designed to take you through the steps required to re-wire your paradigm. This is not prescriptive, we do not have an ideal paradigm that you should create or a set of dogmatic beliefs about how you should be. Your journey is you deciding what is the best version of you, that you would like to be, and then enabling you to take the steps to get there.

Strangely, when embarking on the journey, most people have no real idea of their destination. Many of those that do, at the outset, will often change their course mid-journey as their awareness of their real needs and desires emerges. It is a bit like me asking someone “what is it that you really want” and they say “I just want to be happy”. Well that sounds good but it doesn’t work. To complete your journey to your happiness you need to know what happiness looks like, what it feels like, what shape, colour, size it is and so on. To find happiness you need to have some idea of your journeys end. This is the work of the steps and this is what Alex under took with me on a one to one basis.

There is one thing that did come up when she came on the podcast that I needed to reflect to her, it was that she described herself as “I’m only a hairdresser”. Apart from the fact that hairdressers are probably equal to a therapist in the happiness and wellbeing that they provide for their clients they also are often real therapists as well, because people, in the secure safety of a trusted touch relationship will often unburden themselves to the practitioner. This is true in massage, reflexology, reiki, acupuncture, chiropody, podiatry, the list is endless. There are many professions that are ‘lay-therapists’ it is the nature of being a human in a human society. It fulfills my philosophy,

“If we all look after each other then, we will all be okay”

But, back to the ‘I am only a hairdresser’. One thing that you begin to realise when you are on the journey is that this is not a quick fix. Changing your paradigm, that you might have been reinforcing for many, many years, does not change quickly and can be tough. As Harv Ekker, author of the Millionaire Mind put it “change is difficult, it doesn’t happen fast, it happens at the speed of crap and crap moves real slow”. What we find is that we need to revisit our evolving paradigm not just once and not just through the period of the ten steps but every day in every way for the rest of life.

This is life long learning. It is the journey of the evolving self and I would say the only meaningful purpose of life. Human beings are learning machines. We are a centre of consciousness that is connected to the experiential world through a set of senses that teach us about our environment and our experience. When we wake up we realise that we are in control of our experiences.

I suggest that you have a listen to the podcast and hear Alex’s fascinating journey.

Take care, be happy and embrace life lone learning.

Sean x

A listener Judy messaged in…”Please can you help with ideas for how I can try teaching my 7-year old child about letting go? She is very sentimental about some items and memories, which become a focus for sadness. I would love to be able to help her resolve these feelings, instead of them piling up in her.”

This, in many ways takes us back to last weeks blog and our old friend ‘attachment’ which, positively, creates security, and safety but also negatively creates loss and bereavement.

It is often said that children having pets is a way of teaching them about care and nurture but also about loss, bereavement and death.

Do we need to let go?
Memory is the part of the mind that connects us to the past, to what was. This is a normal and good thing. Memory tells us who we are, where we live, who our family is. Memory is the basis of learning that is passed from one generation to the next. In many ways memory is evolution.

Attachment
Attachment is glue. It is emotional glue that connects us to the past. Some glued attachments we may see as positive. We visit our father’s grave and feel the positive wave of attached energy that allows us to celebrate him and our relationship. When we have negative emotional glue we cannot let go of what was. The problem is that we then tend to live the past in the present. This is the basis on emotional depression – the continual rumination of unresolved past events.

What do we teach our children?
Judy’s message is about her 7 year old child and her ability to let go.

Where do children learn behaviour?
The main way that we all learn about how the world works and our place in it is through observation. We observe our parents, siblings, friends, society culture and so on, and each give us a bit of information that we included in our sense of self and our sense of who we are.

Our responsibility as a parent
Have you ever had the experience when you hear yourself saying something that your parent said? When you hear yourself saying it you are taken back to what is was like to hear that when you were a child. I know that there have been times when I have heard my own parents coming out of my mouth and I have wanted to cut my tongue out. Such is the nature of the emotional programming that we get from our parents but also the emotional programming that we pass to our children.

So a child, your children, learn to let go from observing you, from observing your behaviour and how you deal with letting go. If you are relaxed and easy, so are they. If you are uptight and angry, so are they.

The quickest way to change the responses in other people is to change yourself
If you observe your child responding in ways that you do not feel are right or appropriate, the question that you should ask yourself is “where did they learn that?” If they learned it from you then you need to change your responses to what you would like to see reflected in your child’s behaviour.

If you see the source of their learning, the response that they have another person’s responses, you may feel able to address this with them. If not you need to consider how you can counteract or diminish the effect of this observed behaviour.

Most importantly, when we give our children the negative gift of not being able to let go, we are creating people who are open to being stunted in their growth, held back by the unresolved past, and ultimately subject to depression. When we teach our children that it is okay to let go we create children who can face the future positively, who do not allow the past to hold them back and who can move forward positively and face the challenges that life throws at them.

If you look at your children and see them having insecurities about letting go and you can see that they have developed this behaviour from observing you and the way that you respond, then, the best thing that you can do for them is to go into therapy yourself so that as you change and resolve your issues, then your children can learn to be different, to have different responses.

Life long learning is open to us all if we choose to take it!

Take care, be happy, and allow yourself and your children to grow through learning – never stop learning.

Sean X

A listener messaged in asking us to revisit the subject of disappointment. We had looked at the subject in episode 159 and tended to focus around the hot topic of the EU and the potential, whatever the outcome, for half the population to be disappointed.

The request here was to look at the effects of more personal disappointments. For example what happens when the job interview doesn’t go so well or we feel let down in other areas of life? This raises the issue of competition and the idea of winners and losers, often seen as the survival of the fittest. The reality is that in a competitive world disappointment is just a fact of life. You can’t have one without the other.

But there are alternatives – You can’t be disappointed without your permission.
To be disappointed you first have to buy into the concept of wining and losing, of gain and loss. These concepts involve the separation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ or ‘you’ and ‘me’. For ‘me’ to win or succeed ‘you’ have to lose or fail’. If ‘we’ win ‘they’ lose. These tribal separations are the seed of all conflict and war be it religious, sexual, ideological, sectarian, ethnic or whatever. It all involves ‘you’ and ‘me’, ‘us’ and ‘them’ concepts that lead to ‘have’ and ‘have not’, ‘success’ and ‘failure’.

In the personal sense for ‘me’ to succeed at the interview and get the job ‘you’ will be disappointed. On the other hand if ‘you’ get the job then ‘I’ will be disappointed. Unless we begin to see this process of winning and losing in a different way. Perhaps these things that I identify as disappointments are actually good things.

My own assumption is that the universe is not out to get me and that the things that I am presented with are for my own growth and development. I am not a fatalist I believe in free will but I do get the law of attraction and see that the things that happen to me do so because they are meaningful to me and my level of development. I see the same things as true for you also. In this way nothing is ever bad. It is my response to what happens that labels it good or bad.

What if I didn’t get the job because, in the greater scheme of things, it would have been damaging to me or the wrong direction for me, held me back and not allowed me to develop to even greater things? If this were the case the fact that I didn’t get the job should be a focus of celebration and thanks not of disappointment and loss.

To be disappointed assumes…

1: Expectation. This is craving, my demand for the outcome that my ego seeks. When we project forward in expectation of outcomes, be they good or bad, we are firing up our anxiety circuits. Learning to see the things that happen in life not as problems but as learning opportunities means anxiety dissolves. If you consider that the human race has survived because we each have this amazing problem solving ability that, should we need it, will come to our aid and solve whatever the issue is that we are faced with.

We don’t have problems we have learning opportunities.

2: Loss. This is attachment, my inability to let go of my feelings of possession for things, people, events or the belief of what I see as ‘mine’. It could be that I saw the job as ‘mine’ before I went to the interview. This attachment to the past creates depression. When we feel the loss or bereavement for what was, or for what might have been we often ruminate. When this happens the rumination keeps it alive, so that many years after an event it can still feel like it is live action as though it has just happened.

When we learn to let go we overcome depression and stop projecting into the future we can live in the present. In the present, in the now there can never be any disappointment because there is no attachment to the past and there is no carving for the future. The trick to living in the present is gratitude. The following is attributed to Buddha.

Let us rise up and be thankful,
for if we didn’t learn a lot today,
at least we learned a little,
and if we didn’t learn a little,
at least we didn’t get sick,
and if we got sick,
at least we didn’t die;
so, let us be thankful.

At the end of each line of the above the option is to be disappointed or grateful. It is not what happens it is the way that we see it. We are not effected by events but by our response to those events.

In a very real sense being disappointed is a choice. What do you choose?

Take care

Sean X