iMindShift with Steve Chandler

You can't change anything

 

"You can't change anything by fighting or resisting it.
You change something by making it obsolete through superior methods.

~ Buckminster Fuller

 Making the bad thing go away is a double negative: bad thing and go away are both negative. And to change my life I want positive energy. 
   
   What the genius Buckminster Fuller is saying is an important part of why coaching works. My coach does not have me fight off bad habits. My coach has me execute superior methods of living that make the bad things a mere memory.

     Often I do this with my own coaching clients. I listen as they talk to me about their problems and I listen carefully for language that is permanent and pervasive. If I find permanent and pervasive phrases in my client's self-description I stop the conversation and explore.

     My client, Odessa, (and that is not her real name) would always talk about herself in permanent, pervasive ways. Such as, "I always…." "I never…." Or "I have a tendency to…." Notice that these phrases describe permanent, ongoing patterns. They hint at perpetual motion machinery in the woman that drives her behavior. She obviously believes in personal patterns that explain her actions. She even tells me often, "I have a pattern of always………."

      I want to break her of this mental mistake. So I tell her a story. I ask her to follow the story and see if it makes any sense to her.

     One night it snowed heavily as my wife and I were watching late night TV. My wife asked me if I would shovel the walk in the morning, and I said I would do that.

    The next day when she came home from work at lunch time to have a sandwich with me, she noticed that the walk was not shoveled. She almost slipped and fell on the packed snow and ice on the walk leading up to our door.

     "I thought you said you would shovel the walk," she said when she got inside.

     "I have a tendency not to shovel walks," I said.

     "But you said you'd do it, and if I had known you weren't serious I would have shoveled it myself this morning," she said.

     "My pattern has been not to shovel," I said. "Looking back on my life, I tend not to shovel walks. It's a bad habit, I know, but it kind of runs my life and leaves me in situations like this a lot."

     "I don't care about patterns or habits or tendencies," she says. "I just wanted the walk shoveled. You said you would do it."

      Was my wife being unreasonable to dismiss and discount my patterns and tendencies?

      Odessa said that I, myself was being ridiculous to even float them as excuses for not doing the walk.

      But that's what you are doing, Odessa, I told her. You are not doing things and then going back into your past to find the patterns and tendencies that explain it. You refuse to see that the past is over. It counts for nothing. Your word counts for everything. Your word you give yourself  on whether you are going to do something. The past is over. Your word is all powerful. It is not over.

*     *     *     *     *

To avoid the clichés 
Of the obituary writers, 
Die in obscurity. 
A fine bed in a light-filled room 
Someone who adores you is at your side 
And vowed to silence. 

~ Kenneth Koch, "Aesthetics of Obituary"

     Or … as Bonnie Raitt says:

Life
is
more
precious
when
there's
less
of
it
to
live

*     *     *     *     *     *     *

 
 

      "If you're a coach, read this book. If you're a mystery buff, read this book. If you're a romance fan, read this book. If you want a great story filled with wisdom, humor, and intrigue, read this book. Steve Chandler does it again: delights and dazzles us with his generous insight and creativity! Great stuff and highly recommended."

             ~  Robert Tallon, Co-author of Awareness to Action

Give my heart

 

Please play this version of IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER by the Gloucester Cathedral Choir:  

*     *    *     *     *     *

  Steven Pressfield has written a true masterpiece on the subject of creativity (a subject that concerns us all) called The War of Art. 

     He has a short chapter in the book called A PROFESSIONAL DOES NOT HESITATE TO ASK FOR HELP. He writes, "Tiger Woods is the consummate professional. It would never occur to him, as it would to an amateur, that he knows everything, or can figure out everything on his own. On the contrary, he seeks out the most knowledgeable teacher and listens with both ears. The student of the game knows that the levels of revelation that can unfold in golf, as in any art, are inexhaustible."

     I wrote a book once about motivation and the many places it comes from. In it, I was just beginning to explore coaching. I was just beginning to understand that one's life can be a work of art containing many levels of revelation. 

     In that book I talked about a time of discovery…long before I ever really understood the value of coaching, and the person who taught me that value: a young business consultant named Steve Hardison. Hardison taught me this: Tiger takes a lesson not because his coach is a better player who can give advice and tips, but because his coach can stand back from Tiger Woods and see him objectively.

     One time I was having a hard time enrolling people into seminars and doing my prospecting calls on the phone. Hardison grabbed the phone and started calling people and signing them up. Then he accidentally dialed a wrong number and reached some mechanic at a car repair garage. Most people would have apologized at that point and hung up and dialed again. But rather than waste the call, Steve introduced himself and then stayed on the phone---until the mechanic had signed up for the seminar.

     Hardison is a gifted and courageous public speaker, a resourceful and relentless salesperson, a talented athlete and a committed family man and church member. The kind of guy who used to make me sick!

     I could write an entire book about Steve Hardison's remarkable work in coaching and consulting, and someday I just might. Examples of ways that he coached me to higher levels of performance are plentiful. But I think the greatest thing he has taught me is the value of coaching itself. 

     Once you open yourself up to being coached, you begin to receive the same advantages enjoyed by great actors and athletes everywhere. When you open yourself up to coaching, you don't become weaker-you grow stronger. You become more responsible for changing yourself.

     In The Road Less Traveled , M. Scott Peck writes, "The problem of distinguishing what we are and what we are not responsible for in this life is one of the greatest problems of human existence...we must possess the willingness and the capacity to suffer continual self-examination."

     The best coaches show us how to examine ourselves. It takes cour-age to ask for coaching, but the rewards can be great. The best moments come when your coach helps you do something you have previously been afraid to do. When Hardison would recommend that I do something I was afraid to do I'd say, "I don't know if I could do that."

     "So don't be you," he would say. "If you can't do that, then be someone else. Be someone who could do it. Be DeNiro, be Bruce Lee, be anybody, I don't care, as long as you do it." 

     Coaching's contribution to my life is illustrated in these words by French philosopher Guillaume Apollinaire:

'Come to the edge,' he said.
They said, 'We are afraid.'
'Come to the edge,' he said.
They came.
He pushed them.
And they flew.

You can get coaching anytime. If coaching is appropriate for your golf or tennis game, it would be even more appropriate for the game of life. Ask someone to be honest with you and coach you for awhile. Let them check your "swing." Let them tell you what they see. It's a courageous thing to do, and it will always lead to more self-motivation and growth.

Genius is in the air

 

     After finishing writing her blog (www.girlsinwhitedresses.blogspot.com) about how I ruined Thanksgiving by putting some wet potatoes on her puff pastry my hard working wife Kathy sent me this quote from Henry David Thoreau about the miracle of snowflakes....ever look at them closely? 

     "How full of the creative genius is the air in which these are generated! I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity, so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand."

     Snowflakes, when you look at them closely, show you that creative genius is in the air. Just waiting for us to breathe in and breathe out, and by so doing, connect.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *

Art saves lives

 

    My friend Peleg Top is a coach, artist and mentor to people in the world of design. He puts on wonderful mastermind groups and seminars in California on creativity.

     Peleg is presenting a creative exploration workshop in Intuitive Painting with Dr. Pinki Feinstein, founder of the Psycho-Creative Institute in Tel Aviv, Israel. January 6-7, 2011 at the Holy Spirit Retreat Center, in Encino, California.

     Here's a COOL video for you to watch:

 

       And this is the link to VIEW the video: http://vimeo.com/17270303

       Peleg wrote to me recently, "Intuitive Painting is a place where we pay attention to our desires. 

     "Each and every one of us has the DESIRE to create. We want to express ourselves but often times we either don't think that we know how or we believe we are not good enough. So we don't even try. We walk around hoping, wishing we were more creative but do nothing about it. But the desire is there. It's in every one of us. The desire to create and love what we create is our right.  Our intuition is never wrong. We must tap into our intuitive side and bring out what's buried in there." 

    "Intuitive painting is one of the methods to help us connect to our intuition and practice applying it to other areas of our lives. If we bring our intuition into our work, our business, our relationships and truly listen to what's inside, we don't really need anyone else's opinion or criticism to show up in the world. We can love what we create and bring our true self into everything we do."

     "In intuitive painting we don't copy pictures and do not draw an inanimate object. We learn to express ourself in a spontaneous way. We believe that creation is an innate ability that was blocked in our first years of life. Intuitive painting enables authentic emotional expression that leads to unique personal creation.”

     "Intuitive painting enables us to play as a children, to be amused and to have fun. Intuitive painting is an amazing gift that a person can give himself. The gift of creativity and originality that belongs only to you."

      Peleg is also a business coach and mentor to creative entrepreneurs. He discovered Intuitive Painting during a family visit to Israel while accidentally taking an evening stroll down Disingof Street in Tel Aviv he came across The Center for Psycho-Creative Institute where Intuitive Painting is taught. He was drawn right in (no pun intended...) and his life has never been the same. He started studying the process with the founder of the method, Dr. Pinki Feinstein, and after a year of ongoing work and mentorship, he is bringing this work to America for the first time along with Dr. Pinki himself. 

    You can  register at http://www.intuitivepaintingla.com

 

 

*     *     *     *     *     *     * 

     One of my favorite blogsites is SPORTSGEEZER www.sportsgeezer.com it helps me (and other people over 40) with ideas for staying vital, fit and full of energy:

     Simple Walking Cuts Vascular Dementia Risk 73 Percent

     Putting aside, for the moment, the physical benefits of resistance training and endurance training, Geezer directs readers to research suggesting that light exercise, such as walking or gardening, does as much for our brains as far more strenuous routines. The Tufts Health & Nutrition Letter reports that researchers in Bologna, Italy analyzed data about the daily routines of 749 men and women, all over the age of 65. After four years of follow-up, the scientists found that those whose routines included moderate exercise had a much lower risk of dementia. Simply walking each day, for example was associated with a 73 percent reduction for vascular dementia.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

    Do You Suffer From Outdoor Deprivation Disorder?

    Call it ODD, although according to New York Times health writer Jane Brody, outdoor deprivation disorder is not odd; it's all too common. Brody reports that a general and widespread disconnect with the natural environment had been linked in a host of studies to obesity and obesity-related diseases in children and adults, including Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, asthma and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, as well as vitamin D deficiency, osteoporosis, stress, depression, attention deficit disorder and myopia. Yikes, it that all? No. It's also linked to lower cognitive function. The problem is apparently so acute that doctors have begun writing prescriptions for outdoor activity, providing patients with maps, guidelines and programs of gradually increased activity. The good news, Brody tells us, is that the treatment is widely available and usually free: all we have to do is get outside. What do you think? Do we need to get outside more often than we do? Click on "comments" below, and let us know.

Read more in the New York Times.  

Don't you know how to live?

 

   The great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said "Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can." Notice he said "chief want" and not "passing fancy" or side interest. It's what we want more than anything else. Is there any wonder, then, that coaching has bloomed and blossomed?

     A lot of people laugh at the very idea of my having a life coach. Why do you need a coach for your life? Don't you know how to live?

     Apparently not! Because without my coach, I was living differently than I live right now. I was underachieving but I didn't know why. I had talents I was unaware of. I had courage and willpower I had no idea about. I could go on for many pages about all the things I found in me through the coaching process.

     But is that really so mysterious? Is it a big puzzle that if something works for improving the way you play a game like golf it might also work for the game of life?

     I've known men who have hired golf coaches to improve their game. Their games improved, sometimes quite dramatically. They did this because golf had become important to them. They reached a point in their progress where they felt stuck. Yet they were passionately curious about how good they could be if they could somehow take their game to another level. That's why they hired their coach.

 

     What if they became as passionate about their lives as they were about their golf game? What if they felt stuck there, too and wondered what life might feel like if it were taken to a whole new level of effectiveness and self-expression? A truly creative life fully lived. Would they not get a coach for that too?

     Not if they had a lot of pride in their existing permanent egoic identity. Not if they were afraid to let go of their well-rehearsed self. They would laugh at the idea of a coach.

     What if you had never painted anything but were hired to paint a mural on the front wall of a new museum in your community. Would you take some art lessons? Most people would say an emphatic YES! So, if that is so, why is it so hard to see your life as a creative work of art?

     One of the greatest sports coaches of all time was John Wooden. He coached basketball for UCLA and won more national championships than any coach before or since. His motto was, "Make each day your masterpiece." And although Wooden was a basketball coach by profession, his former players all talk about the life lessons he taught. 

     Wooden was a life coach.  

      And the fact that his team won all those championships was related to that. Something happens when you coach the whole person. The whole life. Other more narrow, strictly-basketball coaches tended to lose games and eventually get fired.

     Corporations have hired me to come in and train their managers on how to coach their people.  They understand that coaching is different than managing.

     Managing is most often an attempt to control other people, while coaching's intention is to empower other people.

     Coaching empowers you. It finds and develops the power in you.  When you are finished with your coaching session you have more power than you had before.  Whereas, when you are finished being managed you have no more power, you've just been controlled.

     When managers learn to coach instead of control, they bring out the best in their people.  I wrote a book with Duane Black (The Hands-Off Manager) on how much more productive and innovative organizations are when the old management style of military bossing is replaced with coaching.

     Which brings up the question of whether coaching is soft.  Many people just assume "life coaching" is a soft, new-agey, California woo-woo fad that will fade from the scene.  It's not and it won't.  Because coaching is proven to immediately boost productivity, it won't go away, and neither is it soft.

     In fact, a good coach is going to move you quickly into higher levels of responsibility and accountability.  While a manager just kind of bosses you around.

 

Effort is good fortune

 
 

    His death wish backfires:

     Masatake Morita was a very bright, extremely sensitive but sickly youth prone to insomnia and gastro enteric disturbances.  He was studying psychiatry at the university and was accustomed to receiving a regular allowance for tuition, medical, and living expenses from his father.  At one point the regular checks stopped arriving.  His father had come upon financial difficulties and was forced to cut off his subsidy.  Morita was extremely upset and felt betrayed by his family.

     He decided to get back at his father for this treatment.  To show off his "miserable state" he would cut off all medication (since he now couldn't afford it) and overexert himself.  Or, as the story goes, he decided to "study himself to death."  This would surely teach his parents the error of their ways in abandoning him financially.

     But instead of dying the young Morita thrived.  In fact, his physical symptoms all but disappeared as he applied himself to study full time.  Not only did he appear to "get well" but his efforts produced spectacular academic marks!  His own effort had inadvertently led to the relief of his suffering and the discovery of what he would come to describe as "the healing power of work."  It laid the foundation for Morita's understanding of the relation of effort to mental health and became the basis of Morita Psychotherapy.

     (The three paragraphs above are from an essay called "Reality's Work" by Patricia Ryan-Madson featured in Mindfulness And Meaningful Work edited by Claude Whitmyer and available from Parallax Press, P.O. Box 7355, Berkeley, California, 94707)

*     *     *     *     *     *     *
 

     BUSY HANDS ARE HAPPY HANDS

   When my book 17 Lies got reissued into paperback format, I re-wrote the last chapter because I wanted to remember my own grandmother (Dannie Lee Chandler) and her influence on my life, and her favorite saying, "Busy hands are happy hands."

    I wrote that book after my first few years of coaching people and helping them discover the lies they were telling themselves about how powerless they were in the face of circumstance and other people. I found 17 of these lies that kept coming up....but the beauty of all that was that it was just flat out FUN to reveal the lies, and my clients and I would laugh so hard to find out that life's scariest stuff wasn't even true.

    So I'll say it again like I did at the end of the paperback because, really....what people in this world want to know, more than anything, is how to stop all this deception. 

      How do we stop all this lying? All this story about being helpless and confused? How do we live in truth and enjoy the beauty of being alive? The answer is simpler than it looks. You don't need a brain transplant, or a new injection of character or a change of DNA.  You might not even need five years of therapy.

     A clue to the answer is found inside the purpose of the lies. As we observe these lies, we can see that they are all (each one of them!) designed to keep us out of action. They are all "call in sick" cards on the great game board of life. They make it easy to fall victim to our feelings (especially the negative ones).  The lies give us cover for following those feelings (even though following a negative feeling usually leads to an even more negative one.)

     Therefore, if each of these lies leads to passivity, then the truth must be found in activity.  It is as simple as the saying your grandmother used to repeat to you whenever you helped her with a chore, "Busy hands are happy hands."

     Our bodies and minds were designed for movement. They were not designed for an agonized, depressing paralysis. Yet our current culture and society urges us further and further into the soft, lewd arms of comfort.  Dark and clammy passivity beckons, and the world becomes obese with self-nurturing. Listen long enough to the lies and we won't move at all. We will just become shimmering mounds of glistening gel, wobbling discreetly in reaction to the latest electronic thrill, the shift of the cushions on the couch or the blast of the super-sized drink we slurp to wash down another sweet and spicy artificial food. We will shimmer. And we will grow sad. And we will tell ourselves more lies.

      Your own way out of this cycle will show up for you once you base your life on constructive action.  What needs to be done? That's the question. Not, "How do I feel about doing this?" Every time you ask yourself, "How do I feel about doing this?" or, "Am I comfortable doing this?" or, "Do I have the self-confidence to do this?" or, "How do I remove my fear of doing this?" you are robbing your soul of its greatest gift, the human spirit. You are placing emotion above motion. A near-fatal misjudgment. Emotion is meant to be carried low, and motion high. Lift yourself up, please! The human spirit is expressed in uplifting motion. A bird must move before it can fly. And so must we. Take these broken wings and learn again.

       The late and great American philosopher William James said, "Effort is the measure of a man." And Japanese psychologist Shoma Morita said, "Effort is good fortune."

      Today there were many people who did not go out running. Why? Because they didn't feel like it. But even the most devout daily runners, the ones you saw out running this morning on your way to work, didn't feel like it. Not until they started running. Then, about 15 minutes into the run, they felt like it. In our society we have everything backwards. We are all sitting around passively waiting until we feel like doing what we know needs to be done. We have now elevated feelings to the highest possible level. We've put them above everything else, and in so doing, we have paralyzed our lives. We have frozen perfectly good lives that could have been constructive and full of joyful accomplishments.

         If we would learn to honor movement over passivity, we would have the answer.

     The truth is, we are powerful. But we can only know the truth of our power by using it. We can't just know it conceptually, because that does us no good. We can't really know anything by just sitting there trying to figure out what we feel like doing. (We knew we were powerful when we were children, because we spent the day running, skipping, jumping, painting, laughing, singing and soaring through space. Our young minds moved, too: Creating, inventing, improvising and making stuff up all day long.) 

      As adults we have talked ourselves into a conspiracy of frozen living.  The lies we tell justify the deep freeze we are in, the paralyzed existence. The lies justify and explain why we are always so stuck. 

      Busy hands. That's the answer, and always has been the answer. You'll find your truth, not by believing, but by experiencing that your grandmother was right. Busy hands are happy hands.