The leadership blog for successful women

Hard to believe...we're only 8 weeks away from the end of the year! Probably a super busy time for you:

• Projects to complete.
• Budgets to spend.
• Plans to be made for next year...let alone organizing Christmas and family visits. 

I know that most people will push learning/changing etc out to the beginning of the next year. And put their head down now and sprint through their extensive to-do lists, making sure everything's done, hardly ever looking up, arriving at Christmas exhausted, overdue for a break.

I used to do that A LOT.

It might look like there is no time for anything else - let alone CHANGE. 

I disagree. 

NOW is EXACTLY the time to hit the brakes, reflect and make some time to consciously decide who to be and what to do.

But HOW - you might say. The real world demands something else from me. That's an idealistic view and not possible. 

Again - that's what I thought for a long time. 

The truth: THERE IS NEVER A GOOD TIME TO CHANGE.

Because most of...

Insight #2: Surrender (to what life presents you with)

Surrender – not a word anyone really likes, right? The connotation is rather negative. It smells and tastes like giving up. Losing. Not being in power and control anymore.

The thing is: life can be wonderful. And really shitty.

And throw things at us which we consider as horribly bad, heartbreaking, extremely difficult or challenging, tiring or exhausting or even unbearable.

And it rarely unfolds exactly as we want it to.

Very often these are situations we cannot change or don’t have any control over. Or life presents us with stuff we have not planned (if we consider it good or bad is a matter of perspective. A topic for another time)

We get fired from a job.

Our partner ends a relationship.

A person is treating us horrendously bad (we could change the situation, not the person though).

Our assets shrink to nothingness due to a downturn in the economy.

We get sued for something.

Our job is suddenly being moved to a...

Insight no 1:

Whatever someone does “to” me, has nothing to do with me and all to do with the other person.

 “He never said thank you – he’s ignoring me….I’m not really important”. We’ve all been there. Someone treats us horrible, outside of our set of values or understanding. We start interpreting, put a label on the behaviour, judge, and unfortunately, the judgement often has to do with beating ourselves up on some level.

It must be me, right? Why would this person say that otherwise (or ignore me, or be rude, offensive or whatever)?

WRONG.

We all go through some struggle. So does the person we might have issues with. Most of our thoughts circle around ourselves (this is why we take things so personally!). So do the thoughts of the other person.

Their rudeness, offensiveness, negligence or dismissiveness has nothing to do with us and all with him or her. How he sees the world, what kind of challenges the person deals...

Have you ever faced the situation where a crisis hit you out of the blue? Silly question, right? As I literally don’t know anybody who did not, at some point in their lives.  

This could be the loss of a job, your partner telling you that they want to leave, a diagnosis from your doctor which turns your world upside down.

That’s the kind of crises I’m talking about.

From Shock…..

Often the first reaction is pain, panic, shame, fear…..or we’re utterly and completely paralysed, our brains literally not functioning anymore. Maybe accompanied by crying, shouting or acting out.

We might feel victimized on top of all those difficult emotions. Why does that happen to me? Why do I have to suffer through this?

Typical (yet rather destructive) questions to ask ourselves – let me come back to that in a minute.

Maybe we’re even looking for someone to blame for the situation. 

…To DOING

When the first rage or pain settles...

Tell me something my friend – are you happy in this world – or do you need more, is there something you’re searching for? Something you're longing to change?

This is (almost) the line from a song I fell in love with while listening to it the other day (Shallow from the movie "A Star is Born").

And it resonated with me and triggered a number of thoughts. 

There might just be this little feeling creeping up from time to time that despite things are (kind of) good and still, something’s not quite right. There might be this deep seated longing to change something and we might not allow it to come up or we simply ignore it as it could make our life really difficult.

It’s so tempting to just go through the motions and to not look closely if there has been a void developing - in our job, in our relationship, in our life.

And also tempting to rather avoid it and fill it with lots of work, entertainment, excessive gaming, sport, sex  - you name it...