How we can talk ourselves out of our capabilities

22 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

One way that older people particularly feel the sense that they don’t have so much time left is seeing others doing what they once did, that others are taking over their role, that there isn’t a role for them in the workplace, and that those now doing it are much younger than them and often quite different. You could even say that people start to sense a potential redundancy quite young, even after let’s say 40.

I’m focusing here on the feeling, not so much on the actual situation, as it is often perception-dependent. For example it is perfectly possible to begin new careers, to position yourself and operate differently in the market place and, given the likelihood that many will now work for much longer than they used to, the contribution of the older person at work will over time change and be seen differently and more positively. For example, there is the contribution of knowledge, expertise and wisdom and many smarter ones are already selling this contribution. Such people evaluate the market and re-position their offering.

However, in self-awareness terms, it is worth looking at how the older person perceives their situation, and not just in work-related terms. It can be very easy to get locked into a self-perception that you are “over the hill”. This is all about self-confidence and self-belief. People who find themselves no longer in the first flush of youth can start to doubt themselves, at any stage. It can be very easy to talk ourselves out of our capabilities, and then what we believe manifests itself. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

To change the perception will vary from person to person, but it can include counting our blessings and identifying our assets, rather than limiting our sense of our potential by a comparison with others. So often in groups I’ve listened to people describe a very self-deprecating and self-limiting view of themselves, only to hear other much more positive perceptions of them by others. Such is the power of the mind. Where the mind goes, the energy flows. Talk ourselves down, and down things go.

So, for the older person, and I mean “older” simply as a comparison with “younger” and this could be at any age in fact, this is about looking at what we make ourselves and the world mean, and re-framing those that are not serving us. So a useful activity could be to write down all the self-deprecating words you use about yourself and the age-related comparisons you’re making with others, as a list on one side of a sheet of paper. Then on the other side, come up with positive re-descriptions of what you offer. It may take some work, and you may need to ask others, and re-visit the list. However, this is about finding ways to view ourselves differently. Then the point is the get into valuing yourself, rather than not, and then present yourself to the world from this new space.

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Suddenly waking up to the fact that you’re getting older

21 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

People come to significant change points at different times in their lives. For some it is when they past 30, others it’s 40 and that can feel like a major milestone. However you hear less perhaps of those passing 50 or 60, or later. Issues can arise around these age-related milestones that for one reason or another tilt one to re-evaluating one’s life and perhaps to tackling what is getting in the way for them.

What can often drive concern over what one is doing and what one is achieving is a hidden sense that time is running out. It’s the realisation, for true or false, that “there’s not so much time left” to do whatever it is that one is driven by. With age milestones, we are often brought closer to our own mortality. It’s not a subject most of us like to think about and given the fear of dying and death, it’s not surprising we avoid it. So, something that gets us to think about an aspect of it can be chilling.

This can also come up with the loss of a loved one, as well as the grief around their loss. Or the death of others not so close to us. We might ask ourselves what’s it all about, or what does life mean for us. And if the answer’s a bit negative, we’re likely to go looking for things that provide a stronger sense of purpose. Or we might look anew at our careers, or whatever else is important for us.

Accomplishment and success is a major driver for many people, the sense that you’ve achieved what you set out to do, but also for many it’s what you are doing is in line with your goals in life. Are you, in other words, “on purpose”?

As people get older, along with the sense of “time running out” is the concern over their capabilities and the willingness of society to accept their contribution. In an ageist environment like the UK, where there’s still age discrimination despite legislation, there’s obviously concern over employment. But behind that can also lie a question linked with self-belief. “How much longer can I do this?” The likelihood is that it’s a lot longer, but it’s the limiting belief that needs looking at. Then there’s the recession, which is hitting those over 50 and those under 25, with a sense of reduced opportunity. So, one may feel constrained or limited.

From a self awareness perspective, the point is to look at what is driving the sense of crisis or challenge that people so often experience with age-related milestones, one that can set in some time after the birthday champagne has been drunk.

These are classic reasons which bring people into self development and I often hear them voiced in my seminars.

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What’s in that lovely glass of wine that we really need to look at?

20 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

Tonight on BBC TV there is a program on Britain’s Hidden Alcoholics which sounds very topical in view of the increased awareness of the drink problem in the UK. It nicely targets the major problem of home drinking and people’s struggles to manage it.

Britain has a had a long and troubled relationship with drink, as seen in the gin drinking of the 18th portrayed in Hogarth’s engravings such as Gin Lane, or the campaigns to stop it such as the 19th Century Temperance Movement. Today a lot of drinking has been fuelled by its relative low cost and ready availability in supermarkets. As at present every so often there is discussion on limiting its availability. Yet while a supply-side approach has its advantages, it is also worth looking at demand and about personal responsibility and accountability and the struggles people have to manage their inclination to addiction of one kind or another.

Arguably the really insiduous and dangerous side to alcohol consumption is the slow, steady excess that can build up at home in the regular evening drink with a meal and confortably slumped in front of the TV and other seemingly harmless evening leisure pursuits. As a number of recent reports have been showing, the danger of long-term drinking is the gradual threat to our internal organs and the increased susceptibility to deadly diseases related to the colon, bladder and liver among others. Now there is suggestion to abstain for three days a week, to allow the liver to recover. For the regular consumer, that can be a challenge.

For those interested in self development and also the regular glass of wine, for  example, it is worth exploring your awareness around what might be called an attachment to the glass of wine and the issues raised by not having it. You could for example write down what comes up for you on each of these aspects.

What is involved in the pleasure? Is it your stimulated taste buds, or is it that lift you get followed by lets say a pleasant woozy feeling? Are you tired at the end of the day or exhausted or fed up and the thought of the wine or whatever is a nice way of taking you way from all that? Is it the social thing, of sharing it with another, who also likes doing it? Of course you might be a wine connoiseur and having a “good glass” does it for you – and your pocket.

On the other side, what comes up if you try not to have it. Do you get disgruntled, bored, not knowing what to do, for example? Has a hole just been knocked into how you spend your evening? Do you miss that diversion from whatever has been going on during the day. Have you just lost part of what defined your lifestyle? One can picture it, getting home, mixing that salad, the drizzle of balsamic vinegar, the chicken in wine sauce and some boiled new potatoes, all seemingly very healthy, and accompanied by a nice large glass of chilled white Burgundy and a good conversation (Oh, and you then just have to top up that glass, and then why leave that little bit at the bottom of the bottle?)

From a self development perspective, it’s worth looking at every part of that picture, and see what factors contribute to the regular drinking pattern.

Alcohol, like other addictions, is a powerful way that we disconnect from what’s really going on, and diverts us from dealing with them – at our own expense, literally and metaphorically.

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When other people don’t show up as you want

16 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

One might think that a child gets used to disappointments, that as he or she does not get what they wanted they learn some way of moderating their expectations and learn not to feel such angst when it doesn’t happen.Yet, perhaps many a young person will say that nothing compares to being disappointed in love. Have you been so utterly in love with someone and thought him or her a total angel only to have all those expectations of joy to be crushed when you got dumped or it didn’t turn out some other way what you had expected?

Some learn from these early experiences and don’t let their emotions get the better of them. In emotional intelligence terms we could say we learn a form of self-control, “keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check,” (Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence at Work). For others disappointment and disiilusionment is something we don’t get used to, and we keep repeating the pattern. One classic pattern is to go through a cycle of hope and expectation followed by crashing disappointment, only to repeat the cycle again. Others live in a state of pessimistic hope, where they hope for a good outcome but actually believe it won’t happen, a sort of set-up for it not happening. It can almost seem as if there’s a fatal flaw in the whole setup, whereby we know inside it won’t work out,and so it deosn’t. Some can have a perpetual sense of resignation in their energy and body or a look of disappointment, as if they’re constantly disappointed with life and other people. Very sad.

It might be partly about the whole question of expectation, having expectations about life and other people. Another emotional intelligence “behaviour” in the “Self-Management” cluster that Goleman refers to above is adaptability or flexibility in handling change.  Then too it is about recognising and accepting that others are different and can change too and have their own desires, which don’t necessarily chime with yours. We can learn a softness and acceptance about life, a recognition that nothing is permanent at the human level and the need to change ourselves and be self-responsible. After all, there may be another way forward that appears when we let go, one even better!

However, for those attached to expectation, it isn’t like that. Here, people might hang on to what they want and place an emotional investment in things being a certain way. They may for example have experienced such loss early on that they hang on emotionally to others and seek to get them to fit their own expectations for fear of having to face the uncertainty and risk of it being different from that.

It then can be hard to see that when we truly let go of all expectation, totally and unconditionally, it then works out as we had wanted. But we have to have let go of it. A paradox – like Life!

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Feeling separate from the one we seek

15 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

“Will I ever get there?” How many of us at different times wonder whether we’ll achieve what we set out to do in terms  of our core goals? They’re commonly used words, wanting, success, goals, achievement, accomplishment. It can seem like we’re forever seeking but never getting “there”. Perhaps if you get there, that can become another “here” and there’s another “there” to strive towards.

Without wishing to get too far into the realm of human accomplishment in practical terms, because surely there’s lot’s who have achieved a lot. I’m thinking more of the inner driver, the inner wish, that which senses also a lack of accomplishment and that something is missing.

Yogis and others would say this is because we get ensnared by desire, wanting, in the egoic sense, and we get attached to it and it eats away inside. Others might say it is inappropriate goals. Or that we have a limiting belief that we won’t make it. All of these and more could be explored.

However, I’m interested here in the very fact of seeking. In terms of non-dual philosophy, by seeking we’re setting ourselves up to be another subject in search of an object, that which we seek, and therefore immediately make ourselves separate from it. And this can be the knub of the problem, the sense of being separate.

A classic way the sense of separation is experienced is feeling very separate from one you are in relationship with. The anxiety of separation eats into the relationship and drives the other one away, especially if it is accompanied by intense neediness, seeking love from another.

More generally people can feel separate in all sorts of ways, such as in social situations, feeling lonely, feeling apart from others, or engagement with life and living in its broadest sense.

Feeling separate from that which we seek could be said to be a core human dilemma. From a non-dualist perspective we are all One. Yet our human ego experience is that we are separate, and hence get to feel unloved, alone, abandoned, isolated, or at least those of us that connect at this level. So we might say that the early experience of the infant at fearing being separated from her/his mother taps into this core human dilemma. Existential aloneness and problems with infant bondedness get mixed up with each other, one fuelling the other.

From a spiritual perspective, this is all an illusion and hence part of the work is to let go of such feelings and to focus awareness on the sense of connectedness within us, as in meditation but also in our engagement with others. For example one can work to increase the feeling of connection and to hold to that in contact with others.

This is the sort of learnings we provide in The Point of Awareness.

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What’s keeping us from the love we seek?

14 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

In case you’re feeling out of the love bonanza (in theory) on St Valentine’s Day, it can be worth remembering that as well as love between one person and another, there’s other ways that love is experienced. There’s platonic love, say between friends, there’s love for animals, nature, one’s children, one’s parents, love for our fellow humans, or in what we do. We can encounter love in many forms and situations. It is a matter of being open to it.

You might, for example, be in a cafe musing on the world in general or deep in something you are reading, when you hear a song that sparks a memory. Or you are sitting outside and you are watching some children playing, and you remember a scene from your own childhood. You see some people pass and watch them talking, and somehow you feel very at one with them in the dynamic – and you feel love inside you. You are at a meeting, and someone discloses something very human and touching about themselves, and yours and everybody’s hearts open, and you feel love.

Love can be around, anytime, anywhere, for when we experience it, yes even when we choose to. There’s something about opening ourselves to what’s inside us. It seems like it’s something outside of us, like there’s a trigger or a reminder or a connection. Yet the experience is inside us.

Meditators would say it’s there all the time. For them it might be a matter of taking their awareness within, letting go of whatever is going on, and steadily settling and focusing the mind, and then allowing the state of love to emerge. In fact you could stay there and let it grow and grow.

Yet, the ego part of the mind can kick back in and we go off somewhere. Or the mind doesn’t seemingly allow us to go there in the first place, or lets say our ego part.

This is where self-awareness work is so important. It’s that ego, all those patterns, in yogic terms samskaras from past lives, memory, habit, limited thinking, limiting decisions, who we think we are, repeat thoughts, fears, anxiety and worry, past resentments, stuff stored up in our system, that so many of us are in denial of, desensitising ourselves from our awareness or deflecting our awareness from what hurts, all this inside that keeps us from our love.

So the external manifestation of missing love, that today might be a reminder of, is but also a mirror of an inner pain.

Dealing with all this will open you to the real love that dwells within, the parting of the 60,000 veils of illusion.

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What’s missing that we don’t feel totally comfortable about love?

13 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

Probably it can seem as if a blog post on the theme of love is pretty hard to take on a damp and murky Monday morning in early February, and the mention of St Valentine’s Day (Pisst! It’s tomorrow, guys! I’ll see you in Sainsbury’s!….a card?!) can produce an order of groans, so long as your loved one isn’t in hearing or anyone who knows her/him.

And that reaction, if it’s at all true for you, is one reason why it’s important to write about love. If there’s a part of us that feels rather remote from love at some level at the moment, then we ought to be sitting up and asking ourselves why.

Here’s a few reasons: we might for example feel that producing a St Valentine’s Day card is a routine gesture for your partner (and they might too!), something to keep them sweet, or to “make up” for all the tiffs and arguments that perhaps typify the relationship. So what’s missing in the relationship that it’s like this? If there’s a reluctance to mark the day as an expression of how we truly feel about another, then perhaps we ought to be asking ourselves why. Otherwise we’re not being honest.

Watch the soaps (well, if you do…). Their plot lines are usually built around some form of deception to a loved one, a failure or reluctance to be open and honest. And we all watch hooked, because it is a mirror of some aspect of us, at some level, or has been and we’re not free of it yet.

Then we can take this theme more broadly too. If there’s a part of us that groans about St Valentine’s Day, or feel sceptical or cynical, for the self-awareness explorers that is if not the rest of us, it’s worth exploring what happens for us that we distance ourselves in some way in relation to love.

For example I’m often struck how people find it a bit difficult to just say the word. Many people don’t say it cleanly. It often sounds overlain with embarrassment. Like we’re not comfortable with some aspect of it. We might, for example, be feeling vulnerable around love, or that we’re some of us embarrassed or ashamed about its associations with sex, let’s say. Perhaps we’ve had trouble with love in the past, or are currently. Maybe we feel deep down inside a big hole about love. After all, so many of us feel or have felt unloved, or are constantly seeking love from another. We might therefore feel the pain, or seek to deflect our awareness away from it because we can’t bear the pain, or we’ve learned to desensitise our awareness so as to not feel it at all.

This can be much more the truth for so many of us, the pain we feel about love, in relation not just to a partner or ex-partner, but to our parents, perhaps to an early abandonment experience that we’d rather not remember. It could be that we were loved, deeply, by our parents but our very early experience was of being left with another in ways that caused us to feel abandoned and unloved. It’s a not uncommon experience.

And we split from love at some level when the subject comes up. That tells a story.

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Use awareness to catch yourself doing your number

11 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

A lot of the time we tend to live in an unaware state. This is not surprising since we generally need to focus on activities relevant to our day-to-day needs. The practicalities of life and interactions with others will tend to demand this. In so far as we might be self-aware, it might be according to how we are accustomed to doing things, for example to adjust our behaviour to suit our interactions with others, or perhaps because we’re being self-critical, or perhaps in order to look after ourselves and lets say take care of how we’re feeling. Such self-monitoring will be egoic in the sense of maintaining our belief about our identity as who we think we are.

Very often we get “caught up”, absorbed in a pattern that we’re not comfortable with but are unsure of how to fix. It can also seem as if we’re a prisoner of our own personality, even helpless in the face of what is “thrown at us” by life. However, it is possible to change this.

Self-awareness can be used differently, as a tool for change, as a means of becoming aware of how we are are in the moment thinking, feeling and behaving.

A key way that self awareness can be used as a tool for change is to learn to observe yourself in action and particularly to notice when you thinking, feeling or behaving in ways that don’t serve you.

This approach is described in the video below:

What is important is to be able to use self-awareness to reach the underlying beliefs, limiting decisions, or our sense of self that sustain such patterns and then use awareness to unhook and free ourselves up from these areas of our lives that don’t serve us, and wake up to who we really are.

Our program The Point of Awareness is designed to help people do this and deal with the underlying patterns that keep them stuck.

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Where the desire for more money might not serve us

9 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

How much money you have, whether you have enough money, whether you are secure, whether you have “financial freedom” are all questions that buzz around so many people’s minds. “It’s what money can get me,” people say. While many of us might think that money can’t buy happiness, there’s lots of others that think it comes as a result, backed up by a lot of surveys that show that the wealthier tend to be happier. An odd mix of contradictions!

To a yogi, the pursuit of more money is an aspect of desire, an ego characteristic where we are never satisfied with what we have. We are, according to this line of thinking, wanting and wanting and always wanting. It’s like an addictive cycle. We want, then we get and then we want again. The getting doesn’t satisfy, or not for long. It’s seen by yogis as a major trap on the spiritual path, for example where our minds in meditation get caught up in thinking in some way connected with desire. By contrast the sadhu cultivates non-attachment to desire, but instead equipoise, balance, evenness of mind, patience, allowing, and letting go. Desire introduces unevenness of mind, anxiety, fear, anger, frustration, jealousy, and off we go into some pit of unease. To the yogi this is how happiness is lost, in among other things addiction to desire.

Of course there’s more than one side to desire. We could also say that there’s a positive wanting, where you set yourself a goal that you intention to achieve, and here you have something you want to do. You might be positively motivated in this. Also you might want to earn money to put food on the table in the sense that it is a need, a fundamental to living. Maslow is well-known for his “hierarchy” of needs, all considered natural to the human being. We could debate these but at least it gives one perspective on the value of needs.

“Need” and “want” overlap, as you will see if you consult the dictionary definitions, and it depends on which meaning of each you are using. So at one end a need might imply a requirement or a necessity, while at the other end a want could be a wish. Take your pick!

Whichever word you are using, it can be useful to enquire into what you mean when you are pursuing a need, want or desire. Because the other side to desire is the wanting that suggests a deficit need, the sense that one is really driven by a lack or a fear of a lack, or by some compulsion or addiction to wanting, or some ego attachment in which the sense of identity is wrapped up with wanting. So the need or want for money might be ego-driven. For example, my sense of who I am is that I have worth if I have enough money, and I might see myself as worthless if I’m so badly off without it that I’m destitute. Interesting that we use “worth” to include both a financial value and also a human value! This is where the pursuit of more money becomes an unhealthy driver than harms us ourselves and/or others around us.

 

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Applying the utility test to your choices

8 February 2012 By

People often ask me whether something they are doing or thinking of doing in life is “right”. I often reply with another question, “Does it serve you?”, or “Is it useful to you?” Reference is made numerous times in this blog to the phrase “what serves you” in assessing whether something is suitable as a strategy in life. I call it the utility test, whether it is useful or not. It brings thinking round to the outcome desired and whether the action, thought, feeling or behaviour will produce the desired result. And is that result serving you, being of use? Is there actually a higher purpose behind all this, like what your heart or your soul really wants, or your higher Self. Will what I’m thinking of, for example, help me, be of use, in my life path? Will in all this will I finally get to feel whole, complete, At One, who I really am, what I fundamentally believe in, what I’m truly about, my integrity, my real values, etc., etc?

So thinking about what serves you invites you to reflect on your underlying purpose in making your choices, rather than the more superficial criteria we might apply. “Right” by contrast involves a value judgement according to some belief system often received from others or the social consensus. People use the word “right” as if there’s an absolute, when too often it’s a relative, based frequently on received perception. One example often given is how one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. Syria would be a good case in point at present. The West considers the “protesters” to be advocates of democracy, whereas others support the Assad regime as they fear “armed gangs” or oppose “regime change”. Who is “right”?

Another question that is often raised takes the form of “Should I (think, feel, say, do) this or that?” “Should” is a use of an internal or external belief system presented as a moral choice. It is similar in effect to the use of “right”. So too with “good”, “bad”, and so on.

In personal development it can be “useful” to mull on the choices and the thinking behind the choices. We might ask ourselves what’s really going on here? What’s this about? What’s the belief behind it?

Clarifying choices is an essential ingredient of much effective personal development, in seminars and in coaching.

We help people raise their awareness of their choices in The Point of Awareness.

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