Time to Dream or Do?

Time to Dream or Do?

When you’re setting goals, there is a time for dreaming and a time for doing.

The art is in knowing the difference.

When it’s time for change and setting goals the call comes in different ways. Some calls ask first to be dreamt into existence. Dreaming is part of an active creation process. It’s a fun place because you live in the world of possibilities.

Something marvellous forms itself in your vision. You imagine new twists and turns — a new development in your story. You have a new excitement about life. Anything can happen if you’re open to it.

Wake Up and Get Ready

Other calls come with a to-do list already attached. You go from step one to step fifty and, voila, you’re there. You organize yourself, then learn the path, and refine the skills you need to succeed. Things like math or music or web development are like this.

When you’re young you learn many skills to become a ‘better’ adult. The cool thing about skills is that they can circle back to dreaming again — different skills let you express your vision in unique ways.

The two approaches call for very different mindsets and practices. Your brain will be wired to favour one over the other.

The wise ones learn to cultivate both.

Learn to Dream

One of the best guides I’ve found for creating the practices that will stimulate creativity is Todd Henry of the Accidental Creative. The short version of his ‘rules for a creative life’ are:

  • Keep your focus to three creative priorities. Let your ideas marinate.
  • Build relationships that spark your creativity and hold you accountable. Don’t think friends – think mentors, friendly competitors, inspiration.
  • Manage your energy wisely – leave buffers between events to absorb and be present to what’s happening. Keep burnouts to a minimum.
  • Be really choosy about the stimulus you take in from media and social media. Garbage in, garbage out.
  • Trust your instincts.

Practice Make Perfect

If it’s the skill of learning skills that you need then don’t look any further than Canada’s singing astronaut, Chris Hadfield.

His memoir, An Astronaut’s Guide To Life On Earth, is a hymn to the joy of preparedness, over-preparedness and obsessive attention to detail. Of course, riding what is basically a large bomb into space will do that. His rules for success are:

  • Sweat the small stuff.
  • Plan and test. Fix what went wrong. Plan and test that. Do it again and again.
  • Figure out what could have gone wrong but didn’t. Make a plan and test that.
  • Make a checklist for all the plans that worked, all the plans that didn’t work and all the plans that might not work.
  • Practice, practice, practice the all the skills on every checklist.
  • Don’t trust your instincts.

All Together Now

Now, for a moment, let’s think about how we could use these two complementary mindsets to the goal of losing weight.

The creative part of the process might look like this:

  • Scope out Pinterest to find new and innovative ways to cook spring vegetables.
  • Learn to make artisanal bone broth to stimulate your soup making.
  • Practice different ways of eating – vegan, paleo, Mediterranean – to see what gives you most energy.
  • Find forums of similar people and find out what they’re doing.
  • Explore different ways of eating, like mindful eating, to see how your habits affect your weight.

The skill-based part of the process might look like this:

  • Sit down on Sunday night and make your meal plans.
  • Use an online tracker with reminders as an interactive checklist.
  • Plan for the times during the week when your plans will not work.
  • Write a checklist for all your plans so you don’t have to make it up on the spot.
  • Make a lot of ‘if this happens, then I will do that’rules for your behaviour like ‘if I’m home late from work, then I’ll cook one of the frozen meals I made on the weekend’.

How could you apply these two approaches to something you want in life?

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The Expressive Soul of Tara Mohr

The Expressive Soul of Tara Mohr

Connecting with your expressive soul starts with stripping down to your deepest self

When I was just starting my business and was learning a new flavour of expressive soul – newbie entrepreneur – I was drawn to a course led by Tara Sophia Mohr called Playing Big.  A small voice of doubt called to me, “Was I not playing big enough already? Do I really need to think about playing bigger?”

But it was the perfect place for a “big visioner” to be hanging out. Tara is committed to helping women find their voice in the world and bring their talents to meaningful projects. Her work resonates closely with mine – we’re both about helping women find an authentic, true voice for their talents.

With Tara it comes from a place of deep gratitude and love. She’s run a successful learning community focused on female leadership for years. And now she’s woven all the threads of her teaching and experience into a book, Playing Big.

This interview is from a couple of years ago when Tara was launching the course. Our conversation about stripping off the layers of “shoulds and coulds” resonates perfectly with uncovering your true expression.

You can listen to the interview here.

Read it here:

D:  Today I’m talking with Tara Sophia Mohr, who’s an expert in women’s leadership and well-being, as well as the creator of “Ten Rules for Brilliant Women” and the creator of the Playing Big program.  She has an MBA from Stanford University. She’s been on the Today show a couple of times, including once last week. She writes for the Huffington Post, has a fantastic blog and she writes poetry.  And she’s so lovely that you can’t even be annoyed at how talented she is.

So I did the Playing Big course with Tara earlier this year and I found it really, really inspiring and I found it really, really packed with useful training skills about upping your game.  About creating more visibility in the world to help you step into the calling that belongs to you.

So Tara I’d like to thank you very much for talking with me today.

 

T:  Thank you.  Thank you for having me here.  It’s a pleasure.  I adore you too so it’s really nice to be able to chat with you.

 

Poetry Gives Us What We’re Looking For 

D:  Now before we get started, I think your poetry doesn’t get enough play in your Playing Big.

 

T:  I agree. I feel like I’m selling cookies at a bake sale everywhere I go They say: “Tell us about 10 Rules for Brilliant Women” and I’m saying “Would you like some poetry with that?”

 

D:  Yes, because your poetry is so beautiful and it speaks so much to the Playing Big journey without specifically referencing the Playing Big journey. I love it.

 

T:  I just blame it on the world.  I think we don’t have enough poetry lovers in the world and people aren’t looking for poetry or integrating it into their lives for the most part. It can give us what we’re looking for in all the wrong places.

 

D:  So very true. And because it’s not so mainstream we don’t have places to find poetry. The poetry we learned in high school were great poetry, but not really applicable to us where we are now.

 

T: And a lot of times I know that the poetry that I learned in school was very cerebral and the emphasis was on admiring the craft of the writer, or looking at the rhyme scheme. It wasn’t really what most people, if they’re going to turn to poetry in their adult lives, are going to turn to because it really touches our heart or lifts our spirit. And that’s what I love about poetry because we can do a lot of personal growth work on ourselves and we can try and be more peaceful and we can try to be more confident.  But poetry actually connects us to peace. And poetry can help us remember that we’re everything that we need to be and then we can feel that confidence. So I think poetry is a way to experience so much of what we tend to seek through our personal growth work or our spiritual work. It brings it right to us.  We don’t have to try to attain it.

 

We Are Part of the Whole

D: Yes, I know what you mean. So I’m going to read one passage that really resonated for me about the Playing Big journey and what was so meaningful to me about it.

So Tara writes:

In my own life, when I think of myself simply as “Tara” – the 5’0” married woman from San Francisco who writes and teaches classes, etcetcera – there is a narrow, self-critical tone to my life experience. I’m filled with thoughts of what I’d like to change about what is. I am more irritable with those I love. There is pressure to get it right, to live up to a picture of how I think my life should be.

For me that captured so much about where modern-day stress for women lies – in that gap between who we know ourselves to be and where we think that we should be.

 

T:  Yes.  I’m really glad that you picked out this passage because it is an important thing to me and I haven’t written about it a lot and it doesn’t get noticed a lot. But it’s really important. And what I was trying to write about and describe was the sense that when I’m really only in my surface level identity, in all of those things that I named there — that I’m Tara and I live in California and I write, I teach and I’m this tall and I weigh this much, I’m married, I’m an only child – all of those things that are really the identity of the personality – I’m never satisfied.  There’s something inherent about our ego self that is just never satisfied. And if we’re identified with that ego then we are going to be really critical and hard on ourselves. We’ll always be striving for the next thing, thinking it’s going to change how we feel.

And the alternative is actually really thinking of ourselves in very unconventional ways. So for example, thinking of myself not so much in terms of “being Tara” but thinking of myself as one cell in the larger human body. And so what is my cell like and what is that cell like over there? Or thinking of myself as an essence of life that has lived for thousands of years through many different manifestations and I’m just living through the Tara one right now. And when I find that I can remember those other ways of conceiving of myself – oh my gosh, I can really relax from the stress that you’re talking about.

 

D: Yes, and your book of poetry is called “Your Other Names” and what I took from it was that you connect to those other names by the experiences that have come before you and live through you.

 

T: Exactly. That’s exactly it. It’s remembering that we have other names besides our given name and besides our ego identity. There’s other ways to think of who and what we are like those that I was just mentioning and that actually I believe – and some other people might say that while thinking of yourself as someone who has lived for 2,000 years and that I’m an essence of life is crazy – I would say, well actually, if you’re not tapping into your other names and thinking of yourself in a way that’s not based in your ego than you’ll not have psychological health. I think that actually in order to have some kind of sanity, in order to have some kind of psychological health we have to regularly tap into those more expansive, and more sacred ways of seeing ourselves. We need to really identify with our other names as well as our given names.

 

Getting to the Gold

D: When you understood that – because you wrote the poetry before you started the Playing Big program . . .

 

T:  And a lot simultaneously.  Two parallel paths in a way.

 

D:  So when you had that profound understanding of who you really were in the whole of the world, how did that inform creating Playing Big?

 

T:  Well, I think that part of the connection between what we’re talking about around our other names and Playing Big is that idea that, in our culture people think that playing big comes from working hard or striving to be bigger. It comes from puffing up our chest and putting on a great performance. It comes from succeeding in a very worldly sense that takes a kind of effort or performance. And I think that in many ways the opposite is true.  That actually playing big, achieving great things, having remarkable success, having amazing, creative offerings that get produced through us and flow out into the world through us, leading with impact.  Anything that we might define as playing big – that that is actually what happens naturally when we undo some of the blocks and limitations that life has put in us, and when we simply tap into our authentic desires.

I’m just writing a workshop description for something else and I called it relaxing into your playing big because I think when we really can let go and can really understand where our inner critic is and we can quiet the voice of our inner critic and we understand how to work with our fears, when we stop being so dependent on praise, or avoiding criticism. When we do those things and we kind of flush out those obstacles and toxins and then just tap into what wants to come out of me and have the courage to do it in an uncensored way, we will be playing big because what’s inside of us is grand and remarkable and it’s gold.  It’s gold.

 

D:  That’s so beautiful.  It’s stripping off the layers, as you say, to get to the gold.

 

T: Yeah.  And I love that a lot of time women come into Playing Big and they say: “Well, it wasn’t what I expected but now I learned what playing big can really look like in a sustainable, soulful way for me.” And yet it’s really about unearthing the wisest part of us — we’re unearthing that gold and we’re, brick by brick, removing some of the obstacles that have stood in the way of us sharing our voices soulfully in the world.

 

The Play in Playing Big

D:  Because I must admit that when I first started doing Playing Big I knew I was drawn to it, but I was pretty nervous about what playing big would actually mean.  And at first glance it seems like it might be a recipe for actually adding stress to your life because you’re awakening your inner critic.  But there’s the whole not knowing how it’s going to look – what playing big is going to look like and so the stress comes from there.  But what I noticed, as you say in the course, is that the opposite was actually true – that there was a big component of play in Playing Big.

 

T:  Yeah, I’m so glad to hear that you felt that way because I think it really can be so playful and I think that when we think about what the real stress is – it’s the tug of war that we’re in with ourselves around: “Is it OK if I put myself out there or not?” and “Am I willing to take that risk or not?” or “I want to do this but I’m not good enough”, right? This constant impulse to create, share, risk, express ourselves and then all of the forces that come into interrupt that or dampen that.  That’s like having a tug of war inside all the time. So having a lot going on in terms of what we’re bringing into the world doesn’t have to feel stressful if there’s flow there. And there can be flow when we just remove the blocks.

 

D:  Right, right.  And I know from your style of playing big that there’s a big component of play for you in playing big.

 

T:  Well, that’s nice that you said that. I think that’s great. Because sometimes I might forget to see that in myself or my own life, but, yeah I think that I certainly try to have fun along the way and take a spirit of experimentation.  There’s some new research that show that children need to feel emotionally safe to learn – that we actually have to take emotional safety into consideration in our design of our educational environments.  You can’t learn math if you don’t feel emotionally safe.  For myself and for other women, we’re not going to feel safe and stretch into playing bigger if it doesn’t feel like a safe space – kind of like a trampoline. You know if you fall that you’re just going to bounce and that there’s a real bouncy surface to jump around on.  So I try to hold that tone, and of course sometimes I’m a stress case and sometimes I’m a fear case, and all of that.  But my intention is to have the balance.

 

D:  Do you have any suggestions for women on how to lead from a place of playfulness rather than from that place of stress or fear?

 

T:  Yeah.  So I think that humour is so important and having people in your life that you can laugh about what’s going on with and just laugh about a lot of things in life with.  I think that’s so huge and for me with a couple of friends, and then my husband, where there’s just so much humour in our relationship and I think that’s really huge.  And then for me, dance, especially in the past year or so, has become a really important practice.  It’s kind of hard to dance without a spirit of play. And I think that’s taught me a lot about being in the moment, being present to what’s happening, listening to my body, playing with other people – like exploring on the dance floor what happens and relationship when two different dancers come together – all that.  So that for me has been a great practice, too.

 

D:  Yes, and even when you say it being in the moment, dancing with others in the space – this also could be so applicable to time at work, time with your family.

 

T:  Yeah, to think of it as a dance.  To think of a meeting as a dance, think of a conversation as a dance. Absolutely.

What can Tara teach us about our expressive soul?

Playing big includes play.The world is expansive and sacred. When you doubt yourself think of the world flowing through you. Find people who you can laugh with — they’ll keep you healthy.

Posted by Deirdre Walsh

 

 

Stress Resilience – Served Four Ways

Stress Resilience – Served Four Ways

A very good friend who has known me through many an up and down was over for dinner last weekend with her husband. We’re at a new stage — our kids go out for dinner without us, leaving us to fend for ourselves. This is a very different scenario from the days we started connecting over hot dogs and plastic plates.  They brought over a bottle of Dom Perignon to celebrate our sort-of freedom. (I have to admit that it really made my week to be considered – to paraphrase Elaine from Seinfeld – Dom-worthy.)

 

She wanted to know what I’d been doing, health-wise, for the last while. She said she’s noticed a gradual, but consistent, improvement in my energy, weight, skin, and overall love of life. I couldn’t point to any one thing. It’s been doing hundreds of little things that have worked together.

 

I’ve learned an awful lot about what health really is since doing my training at Duke Integrative Medicine. I had a short bout with chronic fatigue a couple of years ago that made it all very personal. I’ve come to appreciate how much your body can really heal itself if you give it time and space. And it was really, really helpful to change how my body reacts to stress. 

 

When I look at the habits that have made the biggest difference it comes down to four pillars of resilience:

  • how I nourish my body
  • the type of exercise I choose
  • working with how I put myself to sleep
  • and, most effective of all, practicing different ways of mindfulness

 

Nourishment

 

One of the first things I did was look at how my patterns of eating were causing stress on my body. Was I doing a mini-starve during the day?  Our bodies love regular meals. I learned how to balance the macronutrients in each meal and snack so that I wouldn’t cause an insulin spike. When your insulin levels go off they pull all your other hormones off kilter with them, causing a host of annoying side-effects.

 

I put sugar on a strict budget. I don’t like cutting things out entirely because I need at least the illusion of freedom. But having a sugar budget made me start really savoring my sweet indulgences.

 

I experimented with the possibility of food sensitivities by going on an elimination diet for a few weeks. I found I wasn’t really allergic to anything, but that processed carbs do add a certain pudginess that can’t be explained only by calories.

 

Being mindful about what my body was asking for gave me a lot of insight into stress.  I know the stress hormones in my body are rising when I really feel like I deserve something sweet or a glass of wine. There’s a momentary belief that pops up that eating or drinking something will give me enough of a lift to make it through.

 

Things like sugar and alcohol make your body work overtime to heal from their effects.  When that little voice is coaxing me I consciously choose foods that help my body heal – fruits and veggies full of anti-oxidants, or protein rich foods.  I also worked with a couple of really great naturopaths who helped me find supplements that added to my energy and gave me a little more nutritional oomph.

 

I resisted mindful eating for a long time. But that changed when I realized it wasn’t about restricting how I ate. Instead I’ve added gratitude to my diet, with a pinch of breathing room, and finished with a soupcon of kindness. I put my fork and knife down after each bite and think about how I’m enjoying my food and my family.  I try to use the daily routine of feeding a family as a guidepost for creativity. Sometimes I’m Matisse with a knife and other days it’s like painting on velvet.

 

Intentional Exercise

 

My biggest aha came from reading Spark by John Ratey. I knew exercise was important, but didn’t understand that exercise is the most powerful medicine we can take. Food is medicine but exercise really, really is medicine.

 

The more I read, the more I realized that you can change your body’s physiology by the kind of exercise you choose. Aerobic exercise is excellent to rebuild our brains because it stimulates a host of chemicals that act like fertilizer to rebuild our neurons. Interval and strength training increase our muscle mass and make us younger by stimulating human growth hormone and testosterone. Yoga balances our neurotransmitters and has a wonderful effect on our moods and anxiety.

 

In the early stages of recovering from burnout it was critical to rest and restore my adrenal glands and rebuild the way my body used energy. But over time something shifted and I didn’t notice. My body went from being burned out to being deconditioned. The symptoms are very similar – the main one is energy crashing after exercise.  I found invaluable advice from Phil Maffetone in the Big Book of Health and Fitness and embarked on a six-month re-conditioning program. I admire my friends who do bootcamps, races and other amazing feats of strength and stamina. I hope to join them again when I’ve put in the slow, steady progress on the elliptical.

 

Restorative Sleep

 

During the worst of my burnout phase I would almost dread settling in for the night as I was almost guaranteed to be awake again a few hours later. The more I talk to women, the more I find this is a very common experience.  It’s a drag the next day when you’re dragging yourself through the day, but what you’re really missing out on is the time to rebalance your hormonal levels to set you up for the next day.

 

The key to getting restorative sleep is to mimic the natural patterns of nature as much as possible. I try to shut down my computer and start turning off the extra lights at about 9. I sleep in total darkness with as few clothes as possible. I go to bed at 10, if I can. I try to be as relaxed and mellow as I can when I cozy into bed. These are all things that we can’t possibly fit in, but it’s good for us if we try.

  

Mindfulness

 

Mindfulness is really what changed my life. Mindfulness is many things, but the biggest difference for me was learning not to fight what was going on and to accept things as they were. This seemed like defeat at the beginning, but I began to see how I could conserve energy by not fighting reality. Then things had a chance to change – and they did.

 

I was at an amazing conference where Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the early champions of mindfulness, said: “Everything that rises in your awareness is the curriculum.” I started to shift my reaction to the day’s events towards kindness, self-compassion, gratitude and right action. Some days better than others.  Some minutes are better than others.

 

But in the end it was better, and healthier, than treating those events with bitterness, anger, resentment and blame. Each time I practice I get a little better at it and it gets a little easier the next time.

 

,

Image: iStockphoto.


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How It Feels Under Stress

How It Feels Under Stress


When do we know when we’re under stress? I’m way too familiar with the signs from my body that I’m burning through my energy reserves. I start getting really sensitive to sound and interruptions. I need the kids to turn down the music in the car. All of a sudden I can’t remember things. My head, back and hip start aching. My eyes get really, really tired – all the way back to my brain. I lose my sense of humor – big time.

Getting more under stress

That’s when I turn to the thing that comforts or energizes me now – and makes me feel bad later. All the women I work with have some kind of go-to when they get those signals from their body. For some, it’s hitting the kitchen after the kids go to bed. For others, it’s the glass of wine at the end of the day that goes to two, or sometimes three on a bad day. Some of them are queens of the meltdown – not meaning to fly off the handle, but powerless to stop themselves. Others are awake at night, believing if they keep obsessing about the details that the day will go better. Me, I usually head for sugary treats – either chocolate or wine.

All these things provide soothing short-term comfort, but really are small, relentless steps towards feeling crappy and ashamed.

Why do we do these things?

Because our bodies are looking for something to stabilize the effects of the stress hormone, cortisol. That’s the bad boy that your pituitary gland pumps into your bloodstream after your hypothalamus – the stress thermostat in your brain – senses you are not safe. Cortisol is an amazing biochemical when it gets in, does its job and gets out. It’s a master at protecting you from danger, either by fight, flight or freeze. It’s a powerful ally.

But if you call on it too often – with worry, or running late all the time, or adrenaline rushes – it starts running the show and your body pays the price. I’ve written about how uncontrolled cortisol plays havoc with your system here

But the worst offense that uncontrolled cortisol commits against busy women is this:

Even though they love their life, they are tired and their body hurts.

Tired, tired tired

Tired in the morning instead of bouncing out of bed to greet the day. Tired in the afternoon, often looking for a pick me-up. Tired in the evening, often crashing in front of the tube for some House and Garden TV, or some trashy pleasure on a really tired night. Too tired to exercise, or eat right, or be present to the wonderfulness of their life.

I’ve written about the three-stage downward spiral of stress before:

  • busy multitasker – where you feel wired and tired at the same time. Life is busy, but you’re proud of what you can accomplish.
  • burned out – where you’re always behind and you wonder how you’re going to catch up. You doze off easily when you’re forced to sit down.
  • flat-lining – when you can’t keep up anymore and have to cut back on work and activities

These wonderful, gorgeous women drift further and further from the warm, kind, generous person they used to be. They muscle through the day on nerves and steel. And, really, they know they’re not much fun to be around anymore. This is not who they thought they’d be at this point in their life.

 

Does this sound familiar?

When I’ve drifted to away from being the me I want to be I’ve learned the hard way that all the chocolate and sugar in the world (or supplements or self-talk) will not help – well not for more than an hour or so. I’ve learned that I need to manage how the cortisol is affecting my body, and for me that means water, guided imagery, light exercise or meditation.

 

Tell me, how about you? What have you learned to keep yourself well?

 

Image: Death to Stock

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Client Insights – Being Enough

Client Insights – Being Enough

Client Insights is an occasional series of articles on breakthroughs that clients have experienced during coaching sessions. Client details changed to protect those released to fly.

 

Before we get to the rest of the post, I wanted to remind everyone that today is an official “blue moon”.  What it means is that August has two full moons this month – one on August 2nd and one on August 31st. It’s not really anything more a scheduling blip between the calendar and the moon. But it does remind us to go and do something we only do “once in a blue moon”.  I gently suggest that you make that something fun.

 

Penny and I were coming towards the end of our sessions and I was feeling like we had just started getting close to the heart of things. I was constantly amazed at the tales of accomplishment she would bring to our sessions, but concerned because she didn’t see them as accomplishments herself. She couldn’t bask in the glory of her talent and awesomeness.

I really enjoyed coaching Penny – she has a lovely, ironic sense of humor and always showed up to coaching raring to go. She’d been working at the same place for over a decade before making a change to a new company, right around a milestone birthday. She was worried about falling into the same patterns at work – of being the underappreciated office go-to who got left holding a lot of bags. She was starting to feel that her personal time was more important and she wanted to have more control to focus on life outside of work.

We circled through a number of calls as Penny was establishing who she was going to be at her new job. She was determined to make things be different this time, but was often unsure as to how to do that. She found herself falling into old patterns, even in the new environment. We talked about the things that gave meaning to her life – spending time with friends, having downtime at home and, most importantly, getting back to a writing career that she’d put aside to make it in the “real world”.

The place where core values and actions fail to meet is a juicy place to spend time in coaching.  I wanted Penny to get really clear for herself: “What is it about writing that is most meaningful for you?” She felt writing let her express herself in way that was never open to her before.  She had absorbed the lessons of early life to be hard-working and always do a good job at your paid job. The first big aha she had was when she made the important distinction between time spent and time invested. She realized that spending time writing was an investment in her and not a silly hobby spent to pass the time.

Her insights started coming fast and furious from there.

On the next call she mentioned speaking to a co-worker late on a Friday afternoon.  He was bemoaning the fact that the week had run late, and he had so much work for next week, and his weekend was booked with family events, and he had so much to look after at his house, and . . . . .  Penny laughed as she called him a “sad-sack”, moaning about the state of his life when he was steeped in abundance.  The abundance of a good job, of a healthy family, of a loving home.  She marvelled at how he couldn’t see the riches that were right in front of him.

And then she said something that made me cheer inside.  “You know, Deirdre, I saw too much of myself in him. Seeing life for the burden that it is and not for the gift.  And now I see how my previous co-workers saw me. No wonder they avoided me.”  She chuckled for a moment – good sign, I thought.  And then she said something that really made me cheer. “I want more for myself from now on.”

Her first act was to put aside the perfectionism she’d been controlling herself with for years. She decided that her best efforts were going to be enough for her job.  What is truly remarkable about this insight is that she broke through something that keeps so many of us stuck in life. 

She decided she was enough.

After that huge insight, many of the qualities of that Penny wanted in her life fell into place – a bit like dominos.  She felt a lot more efficient, and much less anxious, at work. She knew what she was capable of doing and decided to do her best to not worry about the rest. She decided to change up her exercise routine to suit her mood. She wanted to capture the great days to walk outside with her husband during the summer.  She felt that coaching had freed her up to take less responsibility for everyone else’s experience and more for her own.

And she started writing regularly. 

So I ask you . . .

Where do you downplay your achievements?

Are there core values in your life that you’re not taking daily or weekly action to express in your life?

What is one small action you can take to plant a seed of creative self-expression?

Image: iStockphoto

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Taking the Wisdom of Yoga Flow to Heart

Taking the Wisdom of Yoga Flow to Heart


One of my favorite local yoga teachers is a bit of a hike for me, but well worth the trip to the country.  She’s named her studio well as there’s a sense of peace just by pulling into the driveway.  She’s a treasure of information about the body and its physiology, but her real brilliance lies in her suggestions to approach your yoga flow practice.  As I hold the poses and listen to her encouragements, I often think how useful they are to life outside the studio. 


Two encouragements that have travelled with me with my flow beyond the studio are “relaxation through action” and “fill the pose, and hold it actively with strength”.

Yoga Flow: Relaxation through action

Is it possible that moving into action doesn’t require meticulous planning, effort and sweat?  I don’t have to marshal my forces, work on my list, and climb up that mountain of tasks?  Clearly, I don’t have a graceful, flowing ability to get things done.  So it’s a real shift in perspective for me to consider that taking action can be a way of getting relaxed. 

On the mat it’s so easy to see where the extra effort I use to push into a pose is wasted and painful. As is the pointlessness of the internal chatter about how hard it’s going to be and how others find it easier, blah, blah, blah.  In my daily life, it’s not always so clear.  Sure, the pain is acute when I’m procrastinating on something important that will take focus and vulnerability.   Finally getting into action is such a sweet relief.  But do I remember how relaxing it is to get into the flow?  Not often enough.

Yoga Flow: Fill the pose, and hold it actively

This thought gets me through many a wavering moment.  With this encouragement, Gina asks us to engage fully in a difficult moment with all the energy and strength we can muster.  As opposed to the half-hearted, floppy, droopy attempt that sometimes passes as my warrior pose.  To me, filling out the pose translates daily into fully stepping into the difficult tasks or conversations and holding firm while staying open.  It’s dealing with the discomfort in kind of a badass way.  Instead of contracting from the discomfort, it’s a way of standing tall and saying bring it on.

This week my coach, Tara Mohr, was in town and I had the chance to see her at two different events.  Brilliant woman herself, she’s written the 10 Rules for Brilliant Women – a guide to standing with strength and authenticity as you add your voice to the world.  I love her take on filling the pose, with the rule “Be an arrogant idiot.”  She’s not really counselling that we become that annoyingly confident self-promoter who’s so enamoured with their own unformed ideas that they convince the world of their (faux) brilliance.  But she’s suggesting that we adopt their unwavering belief in their abilities and take a few steps in that direction. 

Image: Yoga at Sunrise

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