This Week is Last Week’s “Next Week.”

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I recently had a conversation with an individual about how her life is unfolding these days. Short answer: “It’s terrible.” I asked, “Going forward, if this week were typical of next week, and the next week, and the week after that, and the next six months, the next year and five years after that, would it be OK?” She instinctively reacted: “No!” – filled with resentment, frustration, and muted rage. When I asked what she’s doing about her life, she sort of responded with a “Well, you play with the hand you’re dealt” attitude — being the victim — intimating that she’s too flooded by victimization consciousness to take time to stand back and gain a larger perspective or do anything constructive about changing.

Julia (not her real name), a successful professional woman, spouse and mother is basically unhappy – stressed out by her work, by her relationship, by her children, by the uncertainty of the economy, by the state of her physical health and her social life. Nothing seems to be “working” as she phrased it. When asked, “Why not?,” she thought for a moment and said, “I don’t know; I just don’t have time to get my life together.” That’s when I asked the “Well if this week is typical?” question.

So, what about you? How are you showing up in your life – not just life at work but life at home, life in relationship, and life at play?

Presenteeism
“Presenteeism” is a term used most often to describe a form of “disengagement-with-life” type of fog with which folks show up in life. The reality is many folks are exhibiting presenteeism in one or more aspects of their life. They are physical, emotional and mental wrecks to some degree — often, a larger, not smaller, degree. Many folks are not doing justice to their work, their spouse, their children, their friends, or their own self because they’re suffering from presenteeism.

Being the victim
Because many folks are acting as the victim, reactively and begrudgingly living with the “hand they are dealt,” and choosing not to be proactive about changing their life or lifestyle, they are experiencing stress, overwhelm, confusion and quiet desperation – played out in their self-destructive life habits — lack of sleep, poor diet, workaholism, sickness, disease, lack of exercise, estrangement from family members (even while living in  the same house), being abusive, argumentative, resistant and resentful. Moreover, they have mostly concocted “stories” to justify why they can’t move off the dime. And thus their “insanity” continues, you know, doing the same thing the same way, over and over again and expecting different results each time.

Reflect
So, maybe this is a good time to explore your relationship with presenteeism, with your own “insane” way of dealing with your life, with change and with the stories you use to justify and rationalize why you are where you are. And in that vein here are some considerations that can support your journey forward so that the “next week” and the “next week etc. might not be carbon copies of this week or last week.

Work life:
How is your relationship with your work? Why do you do what you do? What attitudes do you bring with you to your workplace? Do these attitudes support your well-being? Do you find meaning in your work –  even in the mundane (hint: it’s possible)? Are you engaged at work, passionate, challenged, unhappy or overwhelmed? Would you do this work even if you weren’t paid? What do you like about your work (place)? How do you justify doing work you don’t like?

Family life:
What’s your relationship with your family like? Is the value of family “being the most important thing in my life” borne out by the “reality” of how you relate to your family? Is there a disconnect, a discomfort? Are you satisfied with your relationship to your spouse or partner, to your children? What about real connection and intimacy? Is something missing? What about your relationship with your parents, sisters or brothers? How’s that working? Is your relationship with your family “this week” exactly what you would like it to be in the weeks, months and years ahead? How do you rationalize and justify unhappy and unfulfilling relationships that you allow to continue? Do you allow your job to keep you from your family (that “most important thing in my life”)?

Your health:
How well do you take care of yourself? And what rationalizations, stories and justifications do you use for not taking care of yourself? How do you explain neglecting your health to your spouse/partner and children? If you became disabled tomorrow, how would that affect your family and others who care about you? Are you a good role model for others in the way you deal with your health? Do you urge your spouse/partner and children to follow your health patterns?

Social life:
Are you a friend to your friends? Or are they more the friend and you the recipient of their friendship? Do you take more than you give? Are friends important to you? How do they know? Do you subjugate friendship to a low priority, even though friendship is important? What rationalizations, stories and justifications do you use for doing so? If you have no friends, what is that about? Are your friendships consistently superficial or are they continually ripening and deepening? Do you have true and real friends at work? Are most of your friends “Internet friends?”

Your happiness:
Are you happy? Be honest, brutally honest. Do you experience joy in your life? And never mind the “it’s all relative” or “compared to whom/what” retort. You know if you are; you know if you aren’t. It’s about the truth. Are you settling? Are you resigned? Are you OK with your level of happiness? Do you know how to achieve true and real happiness? What justifications, stories and rationalizations do you use to explain your level of happiness? Is your level of happiness “this week” exactly what you would like it to be in the weeks, months and years ahead? Is happiness in the foreground or background for you? Why? What brings you joy?

Some questions for self-reflection:

• If last week or this week were typical of next week, the week after and the week after that, and every week for the next six months, every week for the next two years, would that be OK with you? If not, why not?
• What one or two baby steps can you take this week — this present moment, now — to move in the direction of having “next week” be truly better/different than “this week?”
• What has to happen, or not happen, for you to take a first step towards change?
• What conversation(s) do you need to have in order to move forward?
• Resistance to change is based on fear – always. What are you afraid of? Be honest and tell the truth. Who or what can help you move through your fear, your procrastination or your stuckness?
• How did you and your family deal with change when you were growing up?

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(c) 2017, Peter G. Vajda, Ph.D. and True North Partnering. All rights in all media reserved.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to share this reading with you and I hope you find it insightful and useful.
Perhaps you’ll share this with others, post it on a bulletin board, and use it to generate rich and rewarding discussion.

What is the one thing that is keeping you from feeling successful, happy, confident, in control or at peace as you live your life – at work, at home, at play or in relationship? Maybe you know what that “thing” is…maybe you don’t. You just have a feeling that something has to change, whether or not you embrace that change. And how would that change support you to show up as a “better you?”

I’m available to guide you to create relationships that reflect honesty, integrity, authenticity, trust, and respect whether at work or outside of work. I support you to focus on the interpersonal skills that enable you to relate to others with a high level of personal and professional satisfaction – unhampered by personal inconsistencies, beliefs, “stories,” and behaviors that create barriers to a harmonious, pleasant, conscious, compatible, healthy and productive relationship.

I coach by phone, Skype and in person. For more information, 770-804-9125, www.truenorthpartnering.com or pvajda(at)truenorthpartnering.com

You can also follow me on Twitter: @petergvajda.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TrueNorthPartnering

 

No Mud, No Lotus

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Over the years, I’ve become a devout believer in the notion of necessary suffering – that you cannot heal, grow or become “conscious,” and deeply self-aware, without suffering.

Thich Nhat Hahn, Buddhist monk and author, puts it this way:

“It’s like growing lotus flowers. You cannot grow lotus flowers on marble. You have to grow them on the mud. Without mud, you cannot have a lotus flower. Without suffering, you have no ways in order to learn how to be understanding and compassionate. That’s why my definition of the kingdom of God is not a place where suffering is not, where there is no suffering…”

For me, it’s not a question of whether you believe in God (Source, Spirit or whatever you call a higher power), nor is it about religion or theology. It is about how one transforms to a higher state of self-awareness and consciousness (one’s True, Authentic Self) so that one can walk the planet on a daily basis from a place of equilibrium, inner peace and equanimity.

The Buddha says:

“As a blue or white lotus is born in the water,
grows up and is unpolluted by the water,
so too has the perfected one grown up in the world,
has risen above the world
and stands unpolluted by it. – samyutta nikaya 22.94

The science of it all
The reason the Lotus flower is not polluted is due to its leaves. The leaves represent what is known as the “Lotus effect” – the leaves are so structured that water beads up and off the leaves, keeping the flower from being polluted. In fact, the leaves clean the lotus of real or potential pollution.

The science, according to Wikipedia, is:  “…due to their high surface tension water droplets tend to minimize their surface trying to achieve a spherical shape. On contact with a surface, adhesion forces result in wetting of the surface: either complete or incomplete wetting may occur depending on the structure of the surface and the fluid tension of the droplet.” The cause of self-cleaning properties is the hydrophobic water-repellent double structure of the surface.

The nature of pollution
So, consider your life – at work, at home, ay play and in relationship. Are you confronted by “suffering” in some way, shape or form daily? Better, how are you confronted by suffering on a daily basis? Most of us are. How is it that we can manage to NOT be immersed by the polluted waters – literally and figuratively – of the context of our past and immediate environments?

The fact is each one of us grows up immersed in the “mud” – an environment characterized by wounding – abuse, criticism, judgments, abandonment, rejection and the like – an environment in which every family operates, into which every human being is born. It’s the human experience. The degree of suffering may differ; but the muddy environment is there. The mud also represents painful childhood memories. Later on in life, the mud represents our immediate, real-world, real-time “suffering” – mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, and psychologically – that arises in the form of our life challenges – health, finances, social and living conditions, career, relationships, social life, finances, etc.

When we get in touch with our own suffering, head-on – recognizing it, being open to it, chewing on it, digesting it, understanding the purpose of it, metabolizing it, rather than denying and avoiding it, we grow, we become more conscious, self-aware. When this happens, suffering is still there, but the “charge” it used to have becomes less and less as we understand the reasons for the suffering, how it leads to our growth, our self-understanding and our healing. It’s the idea that you can have pain, but you don’t have to suffer.

The antidote to pollution
The growth of the Lotus, our individual Lotus, represents transformation – moving from suffering towards happiness, love, peace, and stillness in our life – at work, at home, at play and in relationship.

When we do the “work” to transform, we gain clarity, insights, AHA moments all of which point to the “purpose” of our suffering, our wounding, and our challenges. In the process of understanding, something shifts. Your attitudes, your responses, your perspective. Where your focus is more on your Lotus, less on the mud.

Understanding our own suffering, we can also begin to understand others – as well – the place from which love and compassion grow. Many of us resist getting in touch with our suffering. But, when we do get in touch, we actually suffer less. We become the Lotus.

That’s the nature of the Lotus. That’s the nature of the mud.

Some questions for self-reflection:

• Do you ever feel like a victim? If so, why? How does that show up in your life?
• Has your suffering taught you anything/lessons? How so? What have you seen/learned?
• What would it be like if you viewed your suffering as happening FOR you and not TO you?
• Do you feel you are in control of your life? If not, why not?
• Do you believe that change begins with you?
• Do you tend to move away from your discomfort? If so, what might it be like to embrace it? How do you feel when you consider this option?
• To what degree (1-10), on a daily basis, do you identify with the mud, with the Lotus?
• How did you experience suffering as a child? Do you still carry scars of that suffering with you now? How so?

P.S. If you’re someone with a tendency to want/need to fix, save or otherwise rescue others from their suffering, the story of the butterfly and the cocoon is worth reading. You can find one of many versions here.
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(c) 2017, Peter G. Vajda, Ph.D. and True North Partnering. All rights in all media reserved.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to share this reading with you and I hope you find it insightful and useful.
Perhaps you’ll share this with others, post it on a bulletin board, and use it to generate rich and rewarding discussion.

What is the one thing that is keeping you from feeling successful, happy, confident, in control or at peace as you live your life – at work, at home, at play or in relationship? Maybe you know what that “thing” is…maybe you don’t. You just have a feeling that something has to change, whether or not you embrace that change. And how would that change support you to show up as a “better you?”

I’m available to guide you to create relationships that reflect honesty, integrity, authenticity, trust, and respect whether at work or outside of work. I support you to focus on the interpersonal skills that enable you to relate to others with a high level of personal and professional satisfaction – unhampered by personal inconsistencies, beliefs, “stories,” and behaviors that create barriers to a harmonious, pleasant, conscious, compatible, healthy and productive relationship.

I coach by phone, Skype and in person. For more information, 770-804-9125, www.truenorthpartnering.com or pvajda(at)truenorthpartnering.com

You can also follow me on Twitter: @petergvajda.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TrueNorthPartnering

 

 

I Don’t Know

Speaker page,  Facebook Page, Becoming a Better You book page

So, can you remember a recent time you were in conversation with someone and said, openly and honestly, “I don’t know.”? And, felt completely at ease and at peace with “not knowing”?

Why we feel we need to know
In life — at work, at home, at play and in relationship — we’re expected to have certain capacities and competencies – i.e., “know-how.” Others often expect or depend on our ability to know how to have, be or do.

But, what happens inside us when facing a dilemma, a conundrum, a challenge or problem and we “just don’t know?”

In Western culture, it’s common to want (or need?) to “save face” and often when we feel challenged, we  conjure up the “appearance of knowing.” Why? In order to show we’re in control and be recognized for what we know. In our culture, we overemphasize how much we know. While we may feel that “not knowing” is unacceptable, the fact is we often just don’t know from time to time.  Isn’t that true?

Why “not knowing” puts us on the defensive
When we don’t know, we often move into an unconscious reactivity to “defend” ourselves in some way, shape or form — i.e., clinging to jargon, double-speak, techno-babble and the like to mask our unknowing, or we create a facade or fakeness about knowing — sometimes resorting to facts or figures to cloud an issue, or muddying already-murky waters — or we avoid, i.e., feigning “exclusion” or seeking allies to support our not knowing, or we blame someone else in order to deflect our discomfort, fear, insecurity or uncertainty. All of this to be in control and protect our fragile egos.

The benefit of not knowing
In Eastern, and other, cultures, “not knowing” is often seen as a self-supporting, personal-developmental practice that can actually bring one to be ever more effective in experiencing life. Welcoming a conflict or problem with a sense of “not knowing” can be an opportunity for creativity and insight, greater self-awareness. The darkness of the unknown supports us to access our inner strength, our inner wisdom and higher self. Asking positive — not-fear-based, reactive — questions from a place of curiosity can support us to overcome our fear, uncertainty, doubt or feelings of lack or deficiency.

Actually “not knowing” gives us an opportunity to consciously slow down, “take a deep breath,” delete our assumptions, misperceptions, misunderstandings, “stories” or expectations so we can be present in the moment, right here and right now, without the intensity, irritation and agitation to “get somewhere else,” to have an answer, to be right. “Not knowing” gives us an opportunity to relax into our body and mind, focus on the foreground and the background, to “see beyond our eyes,” to jettison “my knowledge” and be curious about what I don’t know. “Not knowing” is all about curiosity, the adventure of “finding out” from a place of “Hmmm, that’s interesting. I wonder what that’s all about.”

“Not knowing” is about “punctuation,” – i.e., more question marks and fewer periods. It’s about being inquisitive, not about ego, personality, blaming, judging or “being right.” When we “don’t know” we invite, we are open, we ask and observe, watch and listen. We slow down, settle and give up our need to be “the expert.” We allow life to unfold; we don’t “make” life unfold.

Rather than defending against “not knowing, we can relax into “not knowing” as a part of who we are, knowing that it’s a part of our everyday life and an opportunity to grow and learn something new about ourselves in the process.

So, Two sets of questions:

Questions that evolve from a place of “not knowing:

• If there is a deeper reason for me to be here, what is it?
• What’s important to me about this situation and why do I care?
• What’s my intention here? What’s my deeper purpose – the “big why” – that is worthy of my best effort?
• What stands in the way of my being fully present in this situation?
• What draws me to this interaction?
• How much does the first person who speaks set the tone for the ensuing conversation?
• Can I by-pass some of the trust issues that normally keep me from opening up and moving into deep conversations?
• Can I step into the unknown?
• To what degree might it be possible for me to see the world/issue/problem through another’s eyes?
• What am I hiding?
• Do I give myself permission to be fully myself?
• Does my “expertise” distract me from exploring the essence of the issue/question?
• How comfortable am I with not knowing?
• What would someone who had a very different set of beliefs than I do say about this situation?
• What is missing from the picture so far? What am I not seeing? Where do I need more clarity?
• What could happen that would enable me to feel fully engaged and energized in this situation?
• What’s possible here and who cares about it?
• How can I support others in taking the next steps? What unique contribution can I make?

and

Some Questions for Self-Reflection:

• Is it OK to “not know”?
• How do I feel when I “don’t know?”
• What behavior(s) do I engage in when I “don’t know?” Do I ever “pretend” I do know? How so?
• Do I ever see “beyond my eyes”? (observe what’s around you that you’ve never noticed before…e.g., a crack in the floor, color/shapes of plants in the office, another’s tone of voice, color of lights in the elevator, someone’s usual way of talking or their body-language, softness of the carpet in my living room, others’ email signatures, pictures in the taxi, store, etc..)?
• What in life are you curious about? Have you explored further? How so?
• Do you resist “not knowing?” If so, why?
• What is one upcoming opportunity where you can practice “not knowing?”
• What was always needing to “know” like for you and your family when you were growing up?
  —————————————————–
  (c) 2017, Peter G. Vajda, Ph.D. and True North Partnering. All rights in all media reserved.I’m grateful for the opportunity to share this reading with you and I hope you find it insightful and useful.  Perhaps you’ll share this with others, post it on a bulletin board, and use it to generate rich and rewarding discussion.

  What is the one thing that is keeping you from feeling successful, happy, confident, in control or at peace as you live your life – at work, at home, at play or in relationship? Maybe you know what that “thing” is…maybe you don’t. You just have a feeling that something has to change, whether or not you embrace that change. And how would that change support you to show up as a “better you?”

  I’m available to guide you to create relationships that reflect honesty, integrity, authenticity, trust, and respect whether at work or outside of work. I support you to focus on the interpersonal skills that enable you to relate to others with a high level of personal and professional satisfaction – unhampered by personal inconsistencies, beliefs, “stories,” and behaviors that create barriers to a harmonious, pleasant, conscious, compatible, healthy and productive relationship.

  I coach by phone, Skype and in person. For more information, 770-804-9125, www.truenorthpartnering.com or pvajda(at)truenorthpartnering.com

You can also follow me on Twitter: @petergvajda.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TrueNorthPartnering