Tools Are Not Enough

by Denise Green | Adapting to Change, Career Satisfaction, Coaching, Communication, Developing Others, Emotional Intelligence, Gratitude, Leadership, Management, Neuroleadership, Neuroscience, Optimal Results, Personal Development, Science of Leadership Comments | 2

Don't go it Alone

If knowledge and insight were all it took to change our habits, we could just read a great self-help book or take a course and voilà: excellence!

No Magic Wand

Sadly (for those of us who like instant gratification), it takes effort and practice to shift patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. You’ve developed your current state over years of accidental practice and attention: it’ll take some time and effort to develop new, stronger habits (aka, neural pathways). You’ll be tested a million times a day and have a million opportunities to return to your comfort zone.

Got Support to Thrive?

This is why even coaches have coaches. We all need someone who can listen without judgment and help us see things in a way that opens up better possibilities for action. Someone who can help us stay focused and support our efforts to change. Someone who can remind us why we’re putting ourselves through the discomfort and who can highlight the small positive changes that would otherwise fail to get noticed and appreciated.

“When you’re weary, find relief. When you’re strong, find delight.”

- Martha Beck, author, coach

Before You Get Support, Build Capacity

And sometimes, even that’s not enough. Knowing the tools exist, and being able to explain the tools intellectually isn’t enough. When we are in pain — depressed, sleep deprived, injured, etc. — we need triage support to build up our resources so we have the capacity to improve. Once we’ve alleviated the acute symptoms, we can pursue higher goals.

Don’t I know it.

After my daughter was born, I suffered many months of severe sleep-deprivation and anxiety before I finally sought medical advice. I was surviving, but certainly not thriving. My brain was in a negative loop. I recall thinking that I knew how to escape my negative thoughts, but I lacked the capacity to use the tools. It took two PTSD diagnoses for me to decide that I couldn’t self-coach myself out of my state. [Read more...]

Share

What Bruce Lee can Teach us About Living

by Denise Green | Adapting to Change, Emotional Intelligence, Favorite, Optimal Results, Uncategorized Comments | 3

You know the scene. Outnumbered and surrounded by bad guys, Bruce Lee composes himself, takes a stance, and then elegantly kicks ass until he’s the last one standing.

No, I’m not suggesting that we embrace violence to solve our problems. The message we can take from Lee and all great martial artists is this:

If you want to be more effective, do less.

The prevailing quality in the movement of gifted martial artists is efficiency.

And who couldn’t use some of that?

No Nun chucks Required.

You don’t have to enter a dojo to learn the lessons.

Be Your Own Sensei:

When you become an objective self-observer you’ll notice how you waste mental and physical energy on futile efforts like worry, resentment, and anger. Just sitting at your computer, you may notice a clenched jaw, shallow breathing, hunched back, and strained eyes.

Noticing the wasteful habits is challenging since they are so deeply ingrained in our bodies and thoughts. Unwinding the habits will take attention and practice.

Find a Sensei:

To shed the waste more efficiently, get a partner. Great teachers come in many forms including coaches, trainers, body workers, and cognitive therapists. A couple of years ago, I found the Feldenkrais method to help me relieve pain. Every week my practitioner Sonja Sutherland, also an Aikido black-belt, helps me re-educate my nervous system with what seem like simple, inconsequential, movement instructions. As I try to execute her instructions, the A-student inside me struggles to move as far as I can, putting lots of effort in. Her constant reminder is “do less.” The new movement only works if I do it without any struggle. When I insert struggle, I short-circuit the goal.

Do Less, Be More:

What if we went through our days without the wasted effort? If we moved between meetings, task, and errands without wasting energy on worry, resentment, tension, or comparison? What if we were more focused on the task or person in front of us, instead of lamenting about the past or worrying about the future? What could we achieve by bringing more being to our doing?

It seems a worthy quest.

Moshe Feldenkrais on his goal with the method

“To make the impossible possible, the possible easy, and the easy, elegant.”

“If struggling were the way to get there, we’d all be there by now.”

Victoria Castle The Trance of Scarcity

Share

Proper Paranoia

by Denise Green | Adapting to Change, Emotional Intelligence, Optimal Results, Uncategorized Comments | 0

The Annoying Side of Mindfulness

When we become self-aware, able to see ourselves as a neutral third party, we notice certain deeply ingrained ways of thinking and being aren’t working.  Recently, an incredibly insightful client described his underlying story as “danger is everywhere.”

And I thought, Welcome to the club.

I dub the “danger is everywhere” condition (that plagues us all to some extent) the Jason Bourne Syndrome. If assassins are hunting you because you are a rogue government experiment, it comes in handy. For the rest of us, it’s a bit much. Call it a hold-over from our reptile brains. Once effective at keeping us alive, our fear sensors are too tightly wound for life in peaceful, developed countries where we have access to food, clean water, and healthcare.

So we learn to fear our boss, our colleague in marketing, operations, or sales, our clients, our future, the dentist. Some of our fears are grounded. Many are not.

Escape

1. Identify your fears: brainstorm. Try to bring a sense of lightness and capture them all: big and small.

2. Identify the big ones. Circle the 2 or 3 that really have a hold on you.

3. Notice what behaviors you take as a result of these fears.

4. Validate or invalidate the fears. Some you will immediately invalidate (e.g. I am not being chased by secret operatives). Others may be less obvious. For example, How likely is it that you could lose your job? How serious is the symptom you’ve been feeling? You may need investigate, seek data and opinions.

5. Replace the invalid fears with new stories. My client decided to replace, “My boss will think I’m nuts” to “My boss wants to help and can handle someone else being human with her.” So far, he has not been eaten.

Get Help

Sometimes, we discover that the fear was illogical yet we continue to feel it. In some cases, the fear is so deeply entrenched that no amount of mindfulness seems to help.

After my daughter was born in 2007, I developed a deep, terrifying anxiety that she would perish. It didn’t make any sense yet it was there. And I did not seek help for a very long time. Eventually, my body rewired itself around the anxiety and learned to stay on alert. Subsequently, I did not sleep deeply for over a year.

Finally, I sought help and found two practitioners who partnered with me to heal my very unbalanced neurochemical and endocrine systems so that I feel more like my old self. And I now sleep — much better than Jason Bourne I suspect.

“Fear is the expectation of pain, so its opposite is the expectation of pleasure. The world is what you think it is.”

- Serge Kahili King, quoted by Victoria Castle

Book: The Trance of Scarcity Victoria Castle

Share

Why Change Efforts Fail (and How to Change That)

by Denise Green | Adapting to Change, Emotional Intelligence, Optimal Results, Science of Leadership, Uncategorized Comments | 0

Resolve No More

A few years ago, I gave up the practice of making New Year’s Resolutions, thus giving up the sense of failure and accompanying guilt that rolled around mid-March. Maybe you are one of those people that always keep your resolutions. If so, stop reading. If not, don’t despair: you are entirely normal (unlike those other freaks).

Blame it on the Brain

Here’s neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz’ explanation for why we so often fail to meet our goals:

“Change is pain.”

“Trying to change any hardwired habit requires a lot of effort in the form of attention…which leads to a feeling that many people find uncomfortable. So they do what they can to avoid change.”

So, it’s not entirely your fault. Your brain is set on protecting you from discomfort. The result: you further cement hard-wired habits.

The good news: you can become the boss of your brain.

First, you have to better understand your specific resistance to change. For this, we can look to the amazing work of two researchers, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. In their book, Immunity to Change, they describe how each of us has a sophisticated, often subconscious, system of practices, fears, and assumptions that keep us locked in place and thwart our attempts to change.

They write: “The most reliable route to ultimately disrupting the immune system begins by identifying the core assumptions that sustain it.” Examples of big assumptions include:

  • People are less capable than I (so I won’t delegate or will force people to do things my way only)
  • People are not to be trusted (so I withhold information)
  • If I speak my mind, I will be eaten (so I keep my mouth shut and my contributions locked in my head)
  • ______ is evil (so I lose all compassion and curiosity, diminishing any chance of having a rewarding relationship)

Once the assumptions are identified, you can begin to test their validity.

Dangerous Assumption

It Works

In 2010, I began using their simple Immune Identification process with private clients and workshop participants. In one team offsite, a VP stopped me at the break after about 45 minutes with the process and said “I’ve been to a lot of these meetings and I have never seen people learn so much about themselves and reveal so openly as I just witnessed.”

Whether you want to change yourself, an employee, or an organization, begin by discovering the change immune system, or risk wasting precious energy and resources for short-lived improvements.

A Gift

Given that I could not find a concise handout in their book or website, I developed a brief set of instructions (with sample) based on Kegan and Lahey’s work that I use with success with my clients. If you’d like a copy, send me an email to denise@brillianceinc.com with subject Change Immune Instructions and I’ll send it promptly. No strings attached, no need to trade anything. I welcome any success stories.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Share

Attention Please

by Denise Green | Adapting to Change, Communication, Optimal Results, Relationship & Trust, Uncategorized Comments | 0

Fragmented Attention

Perhaps you’ve heard: we are the most distracted humans to have walked the earth. And apparently, being distracted— fragmenting yourself so that no one thing or person gets your full attention—has damaging effects on your relationships, results, and stress levels.

I’m not sure what’s more annoying, being distracted or being told that I need to stop being so distracted when at this exact moment, my phone is ringing, my email just binged, my kid needs to be fed, the laundry is in a mountainous pile, my proposal is jammed in the printer, the dentist keeps sending me escalating reminders that I am past due for a teeth cleaning, and the dog is looking at me forlornly.

So what’s a person to do? I know that yoga and/or mediation help increase calm and focus. Which sounds great assuming the yoga teacher does laundry, fixes printers, walks the dog, and cleans teeth.

Focus 101

Until then, here’s a primer for attention challenged ones comme moi:

1. Decide that you want to give this moment (person, task) your full attention for ____ minutes.

2. Turn off and reduce distractions: close your laptop, turn off your phone, put a do-not-disturb note on the door, put the papers on your desk to one side, write a list of things you need to remember/do (writing it down frees up valuable brain space).

3. Breathe deeply.

4. Practice being in one place, doing one thing.

5. When your attention drifts, recall your commitment, breathe deeply, and return your curious attention to the person/task.

6. Reflect. What was gained from this exercise? What’s in it for you to increase your ability to feel settled and focused?

7. Repeat 342 times per day.

The Upside of Focus

Despite our best attempts to multitask, we really can only do one thing well at a time.

By learning to give more of your full attention to the important work and people around you, you’ll find that conversations and tasks are more efficient, with fewer mistakes and misunderstandings, potentially leaving you time for things like yoga, family, or cleaner teeth.

“Be here, prepared to be nowhere else.” (Susan Scott: principle of a Fierce Conversation).

Indulge in the Moment this Holiday

I hope this primer serves you this season, when we have an opportunity to escape from some of the sources that pull on our attention. Even so, it’s not easy to let go the impulse to check email, voice mail, and fragment your attention.  If you are a leader in an organization, know that when you become more focused (or fragmented), those around you do as well. May you reap many awards from indulging fully in the moment.

“I’d had enough so I threw the blackberry out the car window.” An inventive client who shall go nameless.

Share
« Older Posts