Never Give Up

I remember standing at the start of the under 12 inter-house 200 meters. My heart pounding and my body filled with that nervous energy. I wanted to do well, maybe even win the race.

Take your marks, get set, boom, the gun explodes and I was quick out the blocks and into a fast stride, perhaps a little too fast. I remembered my dad’s advice clearly - “stride down the back straight and reserve something in the tank for the last 50 meters.”

This advice I didn’t heed, I was moving it down the first 100 at a rapid rate, leading the race. I hit the bend and I was thinking, I’ve got this all sewn up. I got lulled into a false sense of security, enabling my 2 closest rivals to catch up.

The final 100 was lined with spectators cheering, the extra something I needed to get over that line in 1st place. But something switched my focus and I turned my head to the right to see the other 2 competitors exactly in line with me sprinting neck and neck for the finish line.

This was a psychological blow for me. I had been leading up to this point, and if I was not leading, I was not going to win the race. I gave up, took my foot off the gas and came in 3rd place.

What if I had, instead of giving up, used the other competitors parity as extra motivation to push harder than ever before, to dig deep and find that extra something to keep going? Perhaps the outcome would have been different. But more importantly I wouldn’t have felt so bad knowing I had given it my all.

The lecture I received from my dad about how not to give up has stuck with me to this day. How often do we abandon something when we are so close to success, just to give up because it’s just too hard to maintain the momentum?

Learning: it's an ongoing process

Traditional learning goes something like this: you go to school, learn a bunch of subjects, and if you get the grades and so wish, go to university. Here you learn more subjects, some of them more specialized, and if you pass you get your degree, diploma, certificate.

You’re now “qualified” to get a job in the real world. Once you’ve got the job, you learn the work, and you do this work day in and day out, and the learning stagnates.

A more authentic, fluid way of learning evolves and develops over time. I think we all agree that things are constantly changing, moment to moment. If we stop learning then we stop growing. Our psychological development stays at the level where we stop learning and the world leaves us in her wake.

See, learning doesn’t stop at the intellectual level. Once we learn “about” something we have to put that into practice and in so doing, gain the relevant experience. Next, we need to embody the learning, actually become what we have learnt. This is mastery and it exists at every level of growth.

“In times of change, those who are prepared to learn will inherit the land, while those who think they already know will find themselves wonderfully equipped to face a world that no longer exists.” Eric Hoffer

Language & the Power of your Narrative

Language and our interpretation of events, and not the actual events themselves, frame the results we get as well as our future actions.

You’ve been striving for that promotion for months now, only to recently find out that it’s been given to someone else. What goes through your mind:

• My boss favours Julia more. I am more qualified, but he simply likes Julia more. I need to find another job where I’m more appreciated.
• I knew I wouldn’t get it! These things never go my way, I’ll never move up the company ladder!
• Maybe there are aspects of my performance that need improving. I wonder if Julia and my boss would be open to a conversation about how I could improve?
• Julia must have sabotaged my chances by either bad mouthing me, or schmoozing the boss, heck maybe she used her sex appeal..

Each explanation serves as a starting point for future actions, which lead to certain interactions and results.

What’s your explanation or internal narrative, are you even aware of it, and that you’ve been building them your whole life?

If you’re not aware of your explanations, the option of creating a more powerful story isn’t even an option!

Happiness: balancing Peacefulness & Productivity

Happiness is about creating the right balance between peacefulness and productivity. What do you think?

Peacefulness is the subjective, qualitative nature of your life experiences. This includes how you feel about your life: the degree to which you experience pain, suffering, happiness, satisfaction or dissatisfaction in an ongoing way.

Productivity is the quantitative, more objective side of things. It’s the getting-things-done side, the real-world, tangible, results side, the making a contribution side. It’s also the purpose-driven side, the part of your life that gives you inherent meaning.

Happiness includes both these aspects. It includes and is balanced proportionally between the 2.

Dissolving Toxic Barriers & Building Healthy Boundaries

How do we dissolve toxic barriers that keep us from growing and build healthy boundaries instead which aid our growth?

A barrier is a contraction and the defence of a position, idea or belief and a boundary an expansion, relaxation and willingness to look into the validity of 'limits'. A boundary is held in a space of inquiry.

How do you dissolve a barrier?

• Observe and relax into the barrier.
• Can you understand and be aware of your defensiveness?
• What’s your position in relation to the barrier and what words do you use in relation to your barrier?
• How do you feel when you get into defensive mode?

You will feel empowered when you hold a boundary, you will feel relaxed, expansive, open, alert, mature, confident and grounded. You know you held your boundary even though perhaps you upset someone in doing so.

Barriers come up as a means of protecting oneself when one is hurt, another barrier could just be unskillful means. Fear, anger and bad skills are all barriers.

Let’s say you value that your children(adult) don't take drugs at home. Here’s the healthy version:

• You’re clear on why you have that boundary and what the consequences are, if that boundary is transgressed.
• You’re open to reviewing that boundary as your values and circumstances evolve and change.
• You’re able to hold the boundary as you’re clear about why you have it to begin with.

Barriers are created unconsciously and because you don’t intentionally develop them, you feel a little out of alignment when you have to defend them. Since values are intrinsic to identity, if one's unconscious boundaries are trampled on you will feel trampled on, and that's going to cause pain, suffering and some sort of push-back.

Clear, healthy boundaries are important because they serve to manifest our values in the world.

Creating an Authentic Response

When communicating how do we create an authentic response, and what do we actually mean by this, and how would this serve us in our relationships?

Well, what is an authentic response? I believe that true authenticity in communication lies in knowing oneself. And what do I mean by this? I mean how aware are you of your own being? Learning to communicate authentically requires us to become aware of our body, our thoughts and our emotions.

Here are some relevant questions I would like to pose to you in relation to this: how connected are you to what’s real and authentic and do you know where that’s coming from? What are the causes of your thoughts and feelings? What keeps you from your authentic self in relation to others?

Say you meet someone and they pay you a compliment, but subconsciously you strip it of all its emotional richness, so the only way you connect with it is on an intellectual level. How much of this type of thinking influences your relationships? What barrier have you put up that prevents you from receiving the fullness of the compliment?

Your ability to communicate authentically with others is in direct relation to your capacity to have strong boundaries - you’re clear on what you want and what you don’t want. These boundaries are important because they enable you to connect with yourself at an emotional, body, and mind level. And until you can do this, you can’t connect with and communicate authentically with others.

The natural instinct would be to assume that clear boundaries inhibit communication and that to communicate authentically we would have to relax them. On the contrary, clear, healthy boundaries ground us in the totality of who we are, thereby making that connection with another person more fulfilling. There’s a difference between a mental barrier, which strips whole hearted connection and a healthy boundary which enhances it.

You can’t read into another without knowing yourself and you need contrast in order to know yourself. Close your eyes. What is there, nothing but blackness, no contrast whatsoever. It’s just black, no differentiation, you don’t know what’s yours and what isn’t yours. Similarly, if you want to learn how to communicate with your partner you need to know what’s yours and what’s not yours.

If we are to learn to communicate authentically we first need to be connected to our own energy - body, mind and spirit, and then learn to integrate all 3. Once you have created this connection you can more easily communicate with your partner, work at meeting each others needs, and grow your relationship.

A Question of Priorities

Getting what you want is influenced, to a large degree, by your priorities.

A couple divorces. After 2 years of being the sole support for their son, the mother is now angry and frustrated. She needs financial support for insurance and medical bills as well as for the father to be more actively involved with their son to allow her some time off.

She could resort to legal action that would be expensive and difficult, not to mention the years or lifetime of tension and anxiety that it would create.

First off she needs to become clear on what she wants and how much of a priority that is because in order to do this, it's going to take time and energy. If it's not a priority, one that we can give time and energy to then better just to drop it altogether or in this case, take a chance in court.

A more intelligent approach would be to visit a mediator before anything else because it’s unlikely that when emotions run high we're going to find the clarity to think and act purposefully. If she can learn through this mediation process to think, act and communicate more authentically then she might be able to get what she wants.

It’s all well and good knowing what you need in relation to the challenges you face, but authentic communication takes time and energy and we can only deal with so much at a time.

So how could she prioritize this according to her need for financial support among others? It’s critical to not only know what we need, but how important it is.

1. accept and work to change a situation
2. accept and move away from it (if possible) if it's unacceptable and we determine we either can’t change it or it's not a priority
3. accept and live with it if it's unacceptable but we can't change it or its not a priority and/or we can't move away from it.

The difficulty lies in the acceptance of a certain issue because we are so used to pushing back or resisting when things don’t go our way.

The traditional way of getting what we want is to push back or demand it and then we wonder why we end up frustrated when we don’t get what we want.