Spotting your Saboteur
It would be quite fair to say that most of us sabotage ourselves on a daily basis. But because sabotage takes place at both a conscious and unconscious level, we may not even know we’re doing it. Regardless of whether we’re aware of it or not, our saboteur plays an enormous role in all of our lives.
This thing called a saboteur is a part of us, not some sort of external negative force that plays havoc with our very existence. It may seem that its sole purpose is to destroy and destruct, but if we learn to understand our saboteur it can help us to confront the fears we have of maximising our potential and feeling empowered.
The saboteur in action
At first glance it may seem facetious to say we don’t want to maximise our potential. But whether it’s in our relationships, our work, our health, our finances or our hobbies, there are always implications to making changes and the saboteur challenges us every step of the way.
Consciously or not, when we imagine living at our highest potential we say to ourselves ‘I don’t want to be/do xxx because then I will have to be/do yyy…’. The saboteur pricks up its ears and jumps in to make darn sure we abort our repeated attempts to make changes.
An example
Jane decides over the weekend she wants to be healthier. She’s been feeling tired and sluggish and keeps snapping at her colleagues. She decides she’s going to go to bed earlier, eat breakfast every day, cut down to just one coffee in the morning, exercise three times a week and stop her excessive drinking at the weekends.
On Monday morning the blast of her alarm wakes her up, but she presses the snooze button and turns over. By the time she drags herself out of bed it’s too late for breakfast so she just runs out the door to get to work on time. Jane’s so tired after a late night on Sunday that she has a couple of coffees before mid-morning and because she was late leaving home she left her gym bag in the kitchen.
Already Jane has sabotaged almost every resolve she had to live a healthier life and it’s not even Monday lunchtime.
Why do we sabotage?
Why we sabotage is the million dollar question. That’s exactly the question we continually need to ask ourselves to understand the inherent fear we all have of maximising our potential. It’s not enough just to acknowledge a fear, though that in itself is hard enough. What’s more important is really getting to understand what drives our choice to remain less empowered than we all know we can be.
This takes time, effort, resolve and practice.
Listening out for the saboteur
We know we are sabotaging ourselves when we say things like ‘I would have…’, ‘I should have…’ and ‘I could have…’ . Words such as ‘but’, ‘if’ and ‘when’ are also favourites of the saboteur. When you hear yourself saying this – to yourself or to others – your saboteur radar should be working overtime.
Paying attention
The starting point to working with your saboteur is to pay attention to how your saboteur operates:
· What sort of language do you use?
· How often have you made excuses and broken your word to yourself?
· When have you resolved to do something only to break your promise to yourself the very next day, week or month?
· In what areas of your life does your saboteur have the strongest hold?
· How frequently do you let yourself off the hook?
Taking the first step
So often we make a strong resolve, such as Jane in the example, only to go into overwhelm because of the amount of change we want to make. This is shortly followed by sabotage behaviour, and the cycle continues.
Do you really want to make changes that will positively impact your life right from this moment?
Then take the first, small step by thinking of a decision you can make by the end of today that would immediately make you feel more empowered and improve your self-esteem.
This could be anything but it should be one small change. This one small change, and each small change thereafter, is symbolic of your decision to move yourself forward in some way. You are choosing to change your life, and each time your saboteur comes forth you are also choosing to look at why you are aborting your own attempt to get one step closer to your highest potential.
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Filed under life skills | Comment (1)PURPOSE
Although the search to ‘find purpose’ has troubled people at least as far back as two centuries ago, nevertheless it does seem to be a particularly pertinent 21st century phenomenon. It follows, of course, that as life becomes ‘easier’ from one decade to the next (at least in terms of basic survival) we have the luxury of time to analyse and ponder questions such as ‘why am I here?’ and ‘what’s my purpose?’
Whether we look at the question from a secular or a spiritual perspective, asking ourselves about our purpose demands more than a half hour in a coffee shop. But because we humans tend to like having answers to everything it’s also all too easy, once we embark on this road, to come up with an answer before we’ve asked ourselves enough questions.
Considering some of the different aspects of purpose may give some guidance.
What is lack of purpose?
Before looking at purpose, it’s useful to consider the opposite: a lack of purpose. To some extent or another, everyone has probably experienced a lack of purpose for at least a short period of time. Lack of purpose can be associated with boredom, apathy, depression, emptiness, discontent and anxiety. But what happens when this lack of purpose is all-pervading in our life? We can feel like we’re drifting, treading water, wasting time, having no direction. This can lead to us getting busier and doing more as it provides temporary relief, but if the things we’re doing to keep busy have no purpose for us we again start to ask the question, and the cycle continues.
Finding purpose
I mentioned before that we can look at purpose from either a secular or a spiritual perspective. Interestingly, there is much similarity in both approaches.
Who we are
From a spiritual perspective Deepak Chopra (in ‘The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success’) says that the first component of finding purpose is to discover our true self. From the secular perspective, Abraham Maslow (most known for his ‘hierachy of needs’) talks about becoming self-actualised. This first step is probably the step that is most often overlooked. But if we really want to embrace finding meaning and purpose in our live, first of all we must become comfortable in our own skin. We must find out ‘who we are’ in the world.
What we do
Chopra says that the next step is to ‘express our unique talents’. If you don’t know what your unique talents are, ask yourself these questions: what is it that you do that makes you lose track of time? What is it that you do that makes your heart sing? If you can’t answer either of those, it’s time to start finding and expressing your talents…
We can often make the mistake of thinking that what we have talent for must correlate with what we do for work. I don’t think this has to be the case. Not many of us are lucky enough to get paid for what we truly love to do the most, or even what we have most talent for. But what we can do is ensure our work gives us the opportunity and means to express our talents at different times and/or in different ways.
How we serve
The final component of finding purpose is, according to Chopra, finding how we can help and be of service to others. Victor Frankl (who studied ‘Man’s search for Meaning’ whilst in a concentration camp and then wrote about it afterwards) said there comes a time when we need to be self-actualised enough to think more about others than ourselves. For true purpose, we must reach outside of ourselves and service our wider community and humanity.
This final step is often where we start when looking for purpose. It’s not surprising that we think ‘If I can help others, then that will give me my purpose’. And it does, for a while. But without that first step – that step of ‘self-actualisation’ – then we can’t really be of full service as we have not given ourselves a solid platform from which to function.
Purpose and our lifecycle
Finding purpose is a fluid and evolving process. Our priorities and concerns will change as we go through different stages of life. What concerns us at 17 will probably not concern us at 30. Allowing our purpose to change and grow as we do will ensure we stay on the path to finding our purpose as we enter new phases of life.
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Filed under Uncategorized, existential | Comment (0)RESILIENCE
Last month, I wrote about the impact of fear in our lives, and how to manage FEAR more effectively.
Many people gave feedback on how relevant this was at the moment, having either lost their job recently or being fearful of doing so in the future.
So this month we turn to resilience: how do we deal with those real or potential events that are impacting our lives?
Resilience is, in a nutshell, our ability to bounce back from difficult experiences. A resilient person is someone who adapts really well to a stressful event, finding new ways to cope or being able to quickly return to their previous levels of functioning. Bear in mind, too, that a stressful event doesn’t have to actually happen; resilience protects us against the impact of the imagined as well as the real.
We often think of people as ‘resilient’ or ‘not resilient’. Although it seems that some people are naturally more resilient than others, resilience is something that can be developed and learned.
There are two components to resilience: how others contribute, and what we can do ourselves.
The contribution of others
An important factor in resilience is to feel supported, empowered and reassured by those around you.
You will feel more resilient to uncertainty and change if your partner, friends, family, colleagues, even the local barista, are batting for you. It could be anything from a few kind words of support to some helpful encouragement or practical suggestions; just knowing that you have a group of people who are right there with you will bolster your resilience.
Your own contribution
Sometimes our resilience ebbs and flows. When things get really stressful – because of one significant event or a number of events that build on each other - the resilience of anybody can start to fade.
There are a number of ways that we can build and maintain resistance, but I think there are two basic building blocks:
1. 
SLEEP AND REST – when your resilience is low, you need to build up your physical and emotional strength. To do so, it’s vital that you get regular sleep (min 7 hours) at regular hours (no later than 10.30pm sleep; no earlier than 6am rise) combined with regular rest periods.
2. 
EAT REGULAR MEALS – eating good quality wholefoods at breakfast, lunch and dinner (spaced throughout the day) will help you nurture and nourish yourself.
‘Sleeping’ and ‘eating’ may sound all very easy and straightforward and even rather dull. However, if you are not feeling very resilient right now it is highly likely that your sleeping and eating patterns are also completely haphazard. This plays havoc with your cognitive functioning, your emotional robustness and your physical energy, all of which directly relate to how resilient you are.
So, to build resilience, start with those basic but fundamental building blocks.
Other ways to build resilience:
3. 
MAINTAIN SOCIAL INTERACTIONS – I’ve already mentioned the importance of the role of others. When feeling less resilient, we can often withdraw from our social connections. Make sure you keep some level of interpersonal connection with the kind of people who are going to make you feel better, not worse. At times like these, allow other people to help you build up your resilience for now and the future.
4. 
BUILD OR MAINTAIN SELF-ESTEEM – how you feel about yourself is inextricably linked to your levels of resilience. If you usually have a reasonable level of self-esteem, find ways to maintain it (whatever works for you – positive affirmations? reviewing your strengths, successes? learning new skills?). If you don’t have a good level of self-esteem, now is the time to start building…without it, your resilience will be built on shallow foundations.
5. 
CLARIFY YOUR PURPOSE – when your resilience drops, your sense of purpose can soon follow down that path too. Taking the time to clarify your purpose and goals will help you become more motivated, persistent and hopeful. If you can’t think much into the future right now, even planning your daily goals and daily purpose will be helpful. Give yourself permission to live a day at a time and gradually, as your resilience grows, you will be able to see beyond the end of the day and take a longer term view of your purpose and future.
Resilience is a very important skill to develop to help us through the stresses and strains of daily living. It becomes even more important in uncertain times such as these.
Take some time to ensure your resilience is robust enough to cope with unexpected changes.
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Filed under health and wellbeing, life skills | Comment (0)FEAR
Fear is a theme in many people’s lives at the moment.
Some of you may have been directly affected by the share market downturn, mass redundancies at your organisation, rent increases and plummeting superannuation funds. You, or someone you know, may have lost a job and have had to make spending cuts, think up new income streams and generally survive in the financial crisis.
If you’ve been directly affected by this global turn of events, you are likely to be feeling anything from mild concern to full-blown panic.
Others, on the other hand, may be thinking about the likelihood of losing your job in the next company downsize, thinking about how you may have to curb your spending and thinking about what you’ll do if the financial crisis really hits you.
If you’ve been thinking about how this global turn of events could affect you, you are likely to be feeling anything from mild concern to full-blown panic.
Our thoughts can be extremely powerful. Just thinking about something ‘bad’, such as losing a job and having to survive in a global financial crisis, can make it seem very present and highly likely. A natural response to a very present and highly likely event is to feel anxious and fearful. The key point is that the event doesn’t have to have happened, and yet we respond to the thought of it with the same intensity as if it had.
In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, there’s an acronym for FEAR which demonstrates how fear can get in the way of making choices and taking action.
The first is F for FUSION
Cognitive fusion is just how I’ve described our reaction to the possibility that we’ll be affected by the economic downturn. Thoughts about what could happen bring about the exact same feelings as if it had actually happened. From a psychological perspective, the event may as well have taken place.
To de-fuse from our thoughts, we need to accept that a thought is a thought, and nothing more.
In cognitive fusion, thoughts are real, true and important. In cognitive defusion, thoughts are merely words, bits of a story; they may or may not be true and they may or may not be important.
A simple defusion technique is to make a simple language change:
eg “I am having the thought that I may lose my job” rather than “I may lose my job”.
The practical application of cognitive defusion is much more difficult than this brief description attests. However, just starting to notice your thoughts as separate from real events is a step towards cognitive defusion rather than cognitive fusion.
E stands for EVALUATION
Most of us are extremely good at a constant evaluation of our external environment and the internal workings of our thoughts and emotions. We discriminate against things that are ‘ugly’, ‘dirty’ and ‘different’. We distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ thoughts and emotions. Gladness is a good emotion, anxiety is a bad one. ‘I will keep my job’ is a good thought; ‘I may lose my job’ is a bad one.
This process of evaluating often leads us to struggle, as we try to free ourselves from the bad or disordered thoughts and emotions, to get to that place of idyllic happiness.
If we do not evaluate how we think and feel, we can stop the struggle.
For example, if I have the thought that I am going to lose my job, and I am feeling anxious about that, but I do not evaluate either the thought or the feeling, then the struggle and resistance I have to both the thought and the feeling decreases.
A stands for AVOIDANCE
Just as most of us are Evaluation Experts, so too are we very good at trying to feel better by ‘avoiding’ an unwanted thought or emotion.
Using the same example as before, we avoid the horrible thoughts of what could happen in this global downturn (as well as the uncomfortable anxiety that that creates) by just ignoring them, trying to overpower them with a new set of thoughts and emotions, reasoning with them or escaping from them with TV programs, alcohol, recreational drugs, and so on.
Avoidance is a great temporary strategy to help us feel better. But whatever we’re avoiding always rears its ugly head in time, probably returning even bigger and uglier than before.
In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, acceptance is practised rather than avoidance. Just as we aim not to evaluate our thoughts and feelings as good or bad, so too do we try to just accept that we are having this particular thought and feeling that particular way, aiming to stop avoiding thinking and feeling them.
R stands for REASON GIVING
We all tend to be experts in evaluation and avoidance. We also like to have solid explanations for our thoughts, feelings and behaviour – both for ourselves and for others.
If your friend said to you ‘I’m too anxious to look for a new job’, you would probably think that was reasonable and understandable, and you could well be sympathetic about your friend’s plight.
But if your friend said instead ‘I don’t know why I’m not looking for a new job’, you’d be less likely to respond so favourably. Your friend hasn’t given you a good enough reason, and we like to have reasons for everything.
Reason giving is the final part of the FEAR acronym. We are so used to giving reasons that we can even make them up, sometimes without even realising we’re doing so.
There is some clinical evidence to show the detrimental effect of excessive reason giving1. Depressed people who gave ‘good reasons’ for their depression tended to be more depressed and harder to treat than those people who did not have as many reasons for their depression.
To reduce the impact of reason giving, we aim to refrain from seeing ‘reasons’ as actual ‘causes’ of our thoughts, emotions and behaviour.
To sum up, the word fear can be seen as a combination of our cognitive FUSION, our constant EVALUATION, our attachment to AVOIDANCE and our excessive REASON GIVING.
To find out more about this approach to fear, talk about it in our next session or contact me on victoria@freedomfortherapy.com.au or 0422 240 966.
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Filed under health and wellbeing, life skills | Comment (1)Health 2009
Now that we’re halfway through January, many people will already be falling a little short of their new year’s resolutions. It’s not uncommon to hear people talk about starting the new year with great gusto for major transformations in their life. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to make our resolutions way too unrealistic and by halfway through the year (if we get that far) they have all fallen by the wayside.
We like to make our new year’s resolutions because they make us feel good temporarily, particularly over the traditional Christmas and New Year period of excess in its various forms.
There tends to be two types of ‘resolution-makers’: those who resolutions such as ‘this year I’m going to get fit and earn more money’ – a fine resolution but rather general and broad-sweeping. The other type of ‘resolution-maker’ will fill pages and pages with a mind-boggling list of resolutions, all of which are achievable but which are just too numerous to be ticked off by year-end.
Thinking about new year’s resolutions, I realized that most of the resolutions we make could be fit under the banner of ‘health’. As health is fast becoming a priority for everyone – whether to gain, improve or maintain health – this blog aims to give you a handy tool to come up with your realistic resolutions for 2009.
Below is your Health 2009 chart.
There are four quadrants: financial health, physical health, relationship health and mind and spirit health.
In each quadrant you can put some specific and realistic resolutions for yourself and stick it up on your wall, not in your bottom drawer.
For example, a financial health resolution may be: set up savings account and save $xx each month; a physical health resolution may be: go for 30 min walk three times a week; a relationship health one may be: go out for coffee with a new colleague at work; a mind and spirit health resolution may be: have a doona day once a month to recharge batteries.
Another purpose of your Health chart is to demonstrate that optimum health is more than just physical health or mental health.
As Henri Fredrick Amiel said, “In health there is freedom. Health is the first of all liberties”.
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Filed under health and wellbeing | Comment (0)Who can you trust?
Who’s the person you trust the most? Your partner, best friend, mum, dad, work colleague? Now think about why you trust them (we’ll be looking at this later)…
Trust is one of the most important building blocks of any relationship. When high levels of trust exist between you and another person, you will communicate better, negotiate better, even disagree better…
You may be someone who has a tendency to trust someone until they give you reason not to trust them anymore; conversely, you may be someone who needs someone to prove themselves before you can trust them. Either way, there are a number of ingredients that are fundamental to the building of trust.
Fundamental to building and maintaining trust is keeping your trust ‘emotional bank account’ in the black. What this means is, for you to keep trusting another person, they need to be making more deposits into the account than they’re making withdrawals.
Let’s say the person you trust the most in the world is your best friend, Matilda. Matilda would be making a deposit into your emotional bank account if she arrived on time to meet you for a drink, called you when she knows you’re fed up, tells you how great you look in your new outfit (if you do) and explains why she doesn’t agree with your point of view.
But Matilda would be withdrawing from your emotional bank account if she continually arrived late for a drink, forgot that you were fed up and didn’t call, didn’t notice you’d bought a new outfit but did point out that she doesn’t like your hairstyle.
These may seem like small deposits and small withdrawals, but they can create a healthy, flourishing emotional bank account or cause serious problems over time. Because they seem such small and everyday occurrences, many people can fail to realise or acknowledge the impact of them when they are having relationship problems – or even that such things are related to how much we trust someone.
As with any bank account, it tends to take a lot of deposits to build the emotional account but just one or two significant withdrawals to put it into the red. Sometimes a withdrawal can be so big that the bank account is irreparable, and bankruptcy is declared (ie the relationship breaks down).
Underlying trust, and its accompanying emotional bank account, are four key building blocks.
- Reliability
- Acceptance
- Congruence
- Openness
Reliability
Being reliable is doing what you’ll say you’ll do. Someone who is reliable keeps their word, fulfils their commitments, is someone you know you can count on.
Conversely, you’re not reliable if you often find yourself making excuses for not doing something you say you’ll do; say you’ll do it tomorrow when tomorrow never comes…
Reliability is a key component of trust.
Acceptance
Acceptance is when we accept someone for who they are; we suspend our judgments and don’t criticise them for not fitting into our own belief system.
We have all experienced not feeling valued or accepted at some point in our lives. Are you more or less likely to trust someone who doesn’t accept you for who you are, what you’re doing, what you’re wearing?
The reality is we’re all making judgments all of the time, but what’s important is we learn to put these judgments to one side as we relate to each other with more tolerance and respect.
Congruence
Another ingredient for building trust is congruence. Congruence means that what we think, say and do are in alignment. Being congruent means that what you are feeling on the inside can be translated into communicating that on the outside.
When you are congruent, you are being honest with yourself and with others. Congruence means you build trust in your relationships by being honest in your communications.
Openness
Unfortunately in our society, openness – particularly in regards to disclosing our feelings and admitting to our mistakes – is sometimes seen as a sign of weakness. However, without openness it’s impossible to have honest interactions with others and a vital trust building block is omitted.
Being open means you are open to telling the truth, to disclosing how you feel, to admitting when you make a mistake and to taking personal responsibility.
So, these are our four key ingredients: reliability, acceptance, congruence and openness. Each ingredient contributes to the emotional bank account, which help us build and maintain trust.
Take one ingredient away, and already we’ve lost a major contributor to the bank account.
You may be extremely reliable but never admit to your mistakes or share your feelings, and you’re missing out on being able to build really long-lasting, trusting relationships.
Now think back to the person who you trust the most. Chances are they will be reliable, accept you for who you are, be open in how they communicate and be congruent in what they say and do.
How trustworthy are you in your relationships?
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Filed under life skills | Comment (0)‘Specific Goals’ Suck
I think setting goals is overrated. Everywhere I turn nowadays I hear people talking about the necessity of setting goals – from life coaches to financial planners to car salesmen. What are our short term goals? What are our long term goals? And what about the goals in between?
I used to set work goals for both myself and for people in my team. They were perfectly defined SMART goals (specific –measurable – achievable – realistic – timed) and I had a real good-factor when I’d set, and worked on, goals for myself and my team. Being a compliant employee, I would always aim to achieve my goals and I certainly got satisfaction in that respect. But nowadays, when I have given myself the choice of how I work and what I want to focus on, I never set goals.
Why?
Setting goals is way too easy. But they often have little foundation behind them. Goals often come from a knee-jerk reaction to something we don’t like or don’t want in our life anymore – a goal to lose 5kgs, to go to the gym 3 times a week, to stop drinking for a month, to earn more money. These types of goals can be very temporary and are built on shaky ground.
Goals can be yet another ‘should’ in our lives. “I should go to the gym to achieve my goal even though I have a cold/am exhausted”; “I should go for that new job because it’s a pay-rise even though I’m not even in the career I want to be in.” Do we really need any more shoulds?
But most importantly, goals shut down our creativity. Having specific, measured, realistic and timed goals limit our potential to see all the opportunities that exist to achieve what we want to achieve.
Rather than goals, I think we should expand their scope into a vision that we want for our lives. I think our vision would be better associated to how we want to feel.
For example, rather than having a goal of going to the gym 3 times a week, I would instead have a vision of health, because I want to feel healthy and vital. This becomes a lifestyle choice that places less importance on just getting my 3 gym workouts done.
If I was still setting my SMART goals as I used to, I would have missed out on many opportunities to choose creative pathways towards my broad vision for myself.
What do you think about goals?
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Filed under life skills | Comments (2)Five Ways to an Instant Perfect Life
(Warning: this article is written with tongue firmly in cheek).
The other day I was thinking about the plethora of advice and information available out there to help improve our lives.
And I don’t mean just on the uncensored internet; published books, qualified practitioners and many organisations all offer us everything we need to make our lives better.
In fact, there are so many mentors who can help us nowadays that really there’s no reason that we can’t have everything we want …and even better, we can often get them INSTANTLY.
To get our instant perfect life, I’ve chosen the five things that tend to hit the top of the list when we think about what we want to improve on.
1. Happiness
2. Wealth
3. Relationships
4. Diet
5. Fitness
I have used a variety of sources for this article, with the deliberate aim of finding the most instant ways to achieve success in each of these five areas. However, I have de-identified all sources (this is, after all, a little bit of fun and I don’t want to get into trouble).
Happiness
A very well-established company offers special 2-hour ‘happiness’ coaching sessions. During the session you will quickly work out your happiness goals, and by the end of the two hours you’ll already be happier and well on the way to achieving happiness FAST.
My take
I believe that if we find meaning and purpose in our lives, happiness is a positive side-effect. Too often we can chase happiness via instant gratification routes and merely experience a short, sweet but unsubstantial happiness.
Wealth
There are so many ‘instant ways’ to make your fortune out there that it’s hard to choose just one. However, I did like the one that promises that you’re just 15 minutes from being a millionaire, all in just one simple step via a special secret that you won’t know until you purchase the offer.
My take
Making millions fast has become popular and more accessible due to a certain self-development video. And yet most of the western world is currently in serious economic down-turn – recession even – and I don’t remember hearing that there’s been a significant increase in self-made millionaires. So what happened?
Relationships
This is my favourite, only because I’m so incredulous. A Dating and Relationship Coach/Guru guarantees a set of proven techniques to find your boyfriend or girlfriend QUICKLY. The coach has such extraordinary abilities that in less than 60 seconds the person the coach approaches feels like he/she is falling in love with the coach. By buying the programme, we are all guaranteed this sort of 60-second success to finding a partner.
My take
I really hope nobody is sold on this one. Making and maintaining connections with people and building relationships is an ongoing, mutual process that is entirely belittled by this 60-second promise.
Diet
There are 100s of instant diets out there, all promising to help us lose excess pounds in a few painless days or weeks. Here are just a few:
Seven Day Diet – includes 5 bananas and 5 glasses of milk on one day, and 4 beef steaks on another day.
Cookie Diet – 6 special cookies a day with 8 glasses of liquid, and a dinner
Personality Type Diet – eat and exercise according to your personality (need to calculate this out via their programme)
My take
There is so much advice from so many quarters about diets and food that I wouldn’t be surprised if everybody was overwhelmed and confused about what and how to eat. Two simple facts are that diets RARELY WORK and there is no quick-fix to a healthier eating plan. If a diet isn’t sustainable in the long-term, it’s not going to work. Much better to accept a medium to long-term approach to your diet, making changes that are realistic and achievable.
Fitness
There’s a special CD set out there that promises you rock hard abs, a ripped back and huge pecs in just a few short weeks, working out 3 x 20 minute sessions a week. The guy on the front cover has obviously done the programme as he’s looking really buff.
My take
If you watched the Olympics you may have noticed that many world-class athletes don’t look as ‘buff’ as many people who work out at the gym regularly. Athletes aren’t that bothered about looking good, they’re far more interested in ensuring their bodies function optimally for their sport. I can pretty much guarantee that the above programme will not give you rock hard abs in just a few short weeks (there’s far more to it than that) and fitness isn’t just about having the perfect body.
Fitness is a continuous journey, not a destination.
An Instant Perfect Life?
If we were to take up all the advice in each of these five areas, I calculate that in little over a month we’ll be strutting our buffed up stuff with our new partner along our own private beach, grinning like Chesire cats.
What do you think?
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Filed under health and wellbeing, life skills | Comments (4)Anxiety and Fear
‘Anxiety’ is something I will write a lot about in my posts, but it will be from an existential perspective.
From an existential perspective, anxiety is our response to the givens of existence which, as I’ve mentioned before, (…) are death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness.
These four ‘ultimate concerns’ are part of our existence; concerns that we cannot get away from no matter how hard we try. And this causes existential anxiety.
Death is an obvious ultimate concern. We experience anxiety because we are aware of the certainty of death, yet we want to continue to live.
Freedom leads to being entirely responsible for our own life, which means that on one hand we are faced with the total absence of a well-structured world order (because from an existential perspective we create our own world order) and on the other hand the desire for some sort of order and structure. Our response to this is existential anxiety.
Isolation, in an existential sense, means a core, fundamental isolation. We are never able to completely connect with other living things and the world; there is always some sort of a gap between us and the other. This leads to a conflict, an existential anxiety, because we want to be in contact and connected, yet we know that we can never fully experience that.
Meaninglessness is often thought of as the main existential concern. What meaning does life have? How shall we live? Why do we live? If we are responsible for our own lives, then that assumes we must make our own meanings. But we are conflicted between creating our own meaning whilst also wanting there to be a bigger, all-encompassing meaning. This brings yet more existential anxiety.
This may all sound a bit philosophical and irrelevant to your own life. But the interesting thing about existential anxiety is that it ‘seeks to become fear’ (Rollo May). We can probably all list things that we are fearful of, far more so than trying to relate to these ultimate concerns in ‘naked form’.
We fear things that are tangible, that have a specific location in life. I’ve noticed myself that as I’ve got older I’ve become a lot more fearful of driving. In my 20s I didn’t think it was worth getting in the car unless I was trying to break the speed limit. Nowadays, I drive far more carefully, am cautious in wet conditions, I rarely go beyond the speed limit. And as for ‘adventure activities’- bungee jumping, abseiling etc - well you can forget those nowadays! I don’t immediately associate this increased fear with death anxiety, but I am separately far more aware of the impermanence of life now than I was in my 20s…so I can easily see that this is maybe why I’ve become more fearful.
Existential anxiety always aims to be transformed into something that is both more tangible and more manageable. I can handle my driving fears far more than I can my fear of death.
Can you see a link between your fears and anxiety of the ‘ultimate concerns’?
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Filed under existential, life skills | Comment (0)Freedom for Being
I went to hear Deepak Chopra speak this week at the State Theatre in Sydney. The theatre was full to the brim with people eager to hear from who Time magazine calls one of the top 100 ‘heroes and icons of the century’. (I tried not to think about what would happen if we all needed to evacuate as I’m pretty sure the minimal exit points go against all health and safety rules).
I must admit that a lot of what he said went over or around my head - particularly as my brain tends to have switched off by 10pm - but there were two little things he said in passing which particularly struck a chord.
The first one was that to get what we want in life we must think of it like breathing. To breathe, we let our breath go and it comes back to us. It’s impossible for it not to: let our breath out and it automatically comes back.
To get what we want in life, we must also let it go…and then it will come back to us.
That’s easier said than done, of course, as we get impatient and lose faith in this actually happening. But I have experienced this myself: once I just stop the struggle and ‘let it go’, things start to change in the way I wanted them to.
The second thing was really a reminder about how we humans operate.
We begin life as human BEINGS.
As we get older we become human THINKINGS.
Then by the time we’re adults we’ve become human DOINGS. By this stage we’ve usually forgotten how to BE.
Meditation, yoga and mindfulness are all ways to try to return to BEING again.
Even before this point, though, is learning how to REST. Most of us are in some sort of ‘doing’ frenzy and are unable to truly REST until we have to because of exhaustion or illness.
In Leunig’s ‘The Curly Pyjamas Letters’ Mr Curly tells Vasco all about REST. It is well worth a read. (click on it below to make it bigger on your screen).
How much resting are you doing this weekend?
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Filed under freedom, life skills, mindfulness | Comments (3)