When you schedule a Clarity Call with me, I’ll ask you to answer three questions. Many of you tell me that those three questions alone provide you with powerful clarity before we ever begin working together.
Writing is thinking. Just writing down what’s going on, rather than letting it spin and spin in your mind, helps you see patterns and gives you insight into your own heart. Clearly articulating the issue helps us stop avoiding it and begin to give it our attention in a meaningful, healing way. We give ourselves regard and respect when we take the time to write down what’s hurting and where we’re struggling.
The second question comes from author Pam Grout, so long ago I can’t find the reference. These six words are powerful because the only way to have what you want is to know what you want. When you describe what you want in clear words, you’ve already begun to create it. You’ve begun to take your power back.
And question three gives you insight into what’s going on in your mind that’s keeping you stuck. I teach that thoughts create feelings, feelings lead to actions, and actions produce results. When you articulate your obstacles, you see them as either stuff you’ve made up in your mind that isn’t true, or as reality that must be accepted. Either way, you’ll know your next step.
These questions are why just 45 minutes together on a free, no-strings-attached Clarity Call can be life-changing. No kidding.
These next four questions, from psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor Dr. Edith Eger’s The Choice, are the focus of the last session in my three-month Coaching Intensive. They also underpin “Get Your Thing Done.”
1. What do you want?
2. Who wants it? (You, really, or someone else?)
3. What are you going to do about it?
4. When?
Coaching relationships begin and end with questions. Along the way, of course, there are many more questions. Good coaching is rich with good questions.
You might have noticed there’s not one “Why?” question among them. That’s because I find “Why?” questions generally unhelpful in coaching. “Why?” is more a therapist’s territory, which I am not. “Why?” can be a useful question to answer. “Why?” can also keep you stuck when you use it as an excuse not to take necessary action.
“What?” and “How?” are more my jam as a coach, which I most decidedly am. Throw in a little “When?” and we’re really rocking. “What?” and “How?” and the occasional “When?” will move you forward.
You don’t need me when you answer these questions, although saying something out loud (letting me or someone else “hear you into speech,” to paraphrase bell hooks) leads to greater awareness and greater accountability to our wild heart’s wisdom. There is power in using your voice to articulate your clarity.
Take some time to answer these questions. Answer them in the privacy of your journal, share them with a trusted friend, or talk them through with me. Revisit these questions regularly. Give yourself the gift of listening to yourself. Give yourself regard and respect. I think you’ll find yourself growing and healing as you see and hear yourself ever more clearly.
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“When you complain, you make yourself a victim. Leave the situation, change the situation, or accept it. All else is madness.” ~Eckhart Tolle
Does that quote piss you off just a little? It does me. There
are things I feel I ought to be able to complain about. Things that just aren’t
right, but that don’t seem to be within my power to correct. Things like White
nationalism, the persistence of misogynist patriarchy, and rampant capitalism,
for example. But what good does complaining about any of that do? Nothing.
Nada. Zilch. At least for me.
I believe Eckhart Tolle is correct. I make myself a victim when I complain. If a situation is truly intractable, the only sane course of action is to accept it. Because the above-mentioned forces are man-made (deliberate use of “man”), they are changeable. It’s just that changing them requires such hard work and an eye on the long game that they feel intractable.
I also see in myself a tendency to complain about situations I could leave or change, if I were willing to live with someone else’s anger or my own discomfort. I blame others for my choice to remain in situations that I don’t like. We complain when we don’t want to change, or when we feel powerless because the problem is so damn big. We choose not to change because we’re afraid of the hard work and the consequences.
I learned something in life coach training that blew my mind: Thoughts create feelings. I always thought it was the other way around. Nope. Here’s how it works:
Thoughts create feelings, which create actions, which create results, which lead to more thoughts, which create more feelings, which create more actions, which produce more results, which lead to more thoughts … on and on, around and around …
You can see how we can get ourselves pretty deep into a
gnarly clusterf*ck if we don’t understand how this works.
Your thoughts create your feelings which motivate your
actions which produce results. You then have thoughts about those results,
which create feelings, which motivate actions, which produce more results. All
of these results add up to your circumstances.
Of course, all of this is happening within the complex human ecosystem which is you. You exist within a matrix of material reality interwoven with Holy energy. And, as mentioned above, we live in a culture that privileges Whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, and wealth, which certainly affects your life.
If you’re an adult and you’re reading this, your present circumstances are largely a product of your actions. You did this. Every step of the way. The circumstances in which you find yourself are the result of actions you took in response to feelings produced by your thoughts.
Although we like to blame others for our adult
circumstances, unless you’re being held captive, that blame is probably not
accurate. I’m NOT saying you caused your cancer or depression or whatever. I AM
saying that if your cancer or depression or whatever is creating unnecessary
suffering, you can allevate that suffering by taking responsibility for it. It
may not be your fault, but it is your responsibility.
If you’re looking around at a life you didn’t intentionally create and you’re not thrilled about, it’s because you didn’t know about this cycle — how it works and how to create meaningful change for yourself.
How do you take responsibility for this cycle and the results it’s produced in your life? By understanding it and learning to intervene in it skillfully. To grow up is to understand this cycle and to use it to create the life you want.
Circumstances we don’t like and feelings we don’t like are where we usually notice distress, so it’s natural to think they are what we need to fix first.
We would be wrong.
Thoughts and actions are the only places we can break the cycle and put ourselves back in charge of our lives.
When we try to fix feelings without attending to the
thoughts that drive them, we deny our feelings or numb them with addictions and
compulsions. To alleviate uncomfortable feelings, we take impulsive actions, or
no action at all because we feel paralyzed. These careless actions are useless
at best, destructive at worst.
When we try to fix results of our clumsy actions without addressing the feelings and thoughts that drove those actions, we simply recreate the same circumstances over and over again. We all know people who’ve moved, changed jobs, coupled up or broken up, gone back to school, had a baby, or something else to alleviate the discomfort of their circumstances and feelings. Heck, I’ve done this myself a time or two. Wherever you go, there you are.
Unskillful interventions create more suffering in the long run, and they don’t produce lasting change and healing.
Skillful interventions, on the other hand, reduce suffering and result in long-term change and healing.
How do we intervene in this cycle skillfully and effectively?
A good place to start is to notice what you’re complaining about. If you complain about a circumstance in your life, you’re making yourself a victim. Stop it. Stop and look at what’s really going on. Follow the cycle backwards. Ask yourself these questions:
What actions have I taken that resulted in this
present circumstance?
What feelings was I having that drove those
actions?
What thoughts created those feelings?
(A coach or other careful listener can be really helpful
here, because we’re often blind to how the cycle has worked in our lives. If we
could see it clearly, we’d make different choices!)
Actions: If you’re choosing destructive actions to alleviate feelings you don’t want to have, stop it. Are you overeating? Overdrinking? Overspending? Yelling at your kids or your spouse or the driver in front of you? And recognize that simply ceasing an action without attending to the feelings and thoughts that drive that action is unsustainable in the long run. Will power isn’t infinite.
Feelings: Uncomfortable feelings won’t kill you when you feel them. Feel your feelings all the way, and they lose their power. You’ll discover that you can feel your feelings and survive. Learning to feel feelings without needing to act on them in ways that are destructive to your life and your integrity – that’s freedom. That’s maturity.
Thoughts: The most effective and sustainable place to intervene in this cycle is with our thoughts. This is the bulk of the coaching I do, because most of us need help hearing our thoughts and changing them to thoughts that serve us.
Here’s an example from my own life. I feel embarrassed to share it. I also believe many of you can relate, so here goes.
I often crave potato chips, even when I’m not hungry. The cycle goes like this: I see potato chips and I think, “I deserve those today, I won’t be able to stand not eating them now that I see them, and a few won’t hurt me.” So I want them, I eat too many of them, and I feel overfull and not proud of myself. I haven’t acted in my own best interests and according to my values. This is what I did just a couple of days ago.
I could have interrupted this cycle in two places. I
could have noticed the wanting, felt it all the way, and not eaten the potato
chips. This is what I usually manage to do. The most powerful place to
intervene, though, is with the thought, “I won’t be able to stand not eating
them.” Because I know if I can just let that craving be what it is, it will
eventually dissipate and I’ll be fine. The craving is just neurons firing in my
brain, after all. Although it feels lethal, it’s not. This is getting easier
and easier for me to do as I rewire my brain. I hardly ever eat when I’m not
hungry anymore.
Now, for most of us, potato chips aren’t the end of the world. But sometimes, because we don’t know how this process works, we make choices with destructive consequences that are life-altering.
Looking back on my life, I can see how I’ve gotten where I am, both the good and the bad. I can draw a line from the circumstances in which I’m living now, back to the actions I took to manage the feelings I was having, and then even further back to the thoughts that drove those feelings, and the circumstances that created the thoughts, and so on and on and on.
Here in my 60s, I can see how choices I made when I was in my teens and 20s have resulted in a life that doesn’t fit in important ways. I can stop doing the things that hurt me, but it’s working with my thoughts that has created and continues to create lasting change and healing.
Because of what went down in my childhood family, I believed I wasn’t worthy of living my own life on my terms. My choices flowed from that core belief. The only way I’ve been able to heal is to examine those tangled beliefs, and to begin to learn to think different thoughts. It’s not easy. Lasting change rarely is.
Now that I know better, I can do better. So can you. Start with where you’re complaining, and work backwards. Contact me if you want to talk.
Repeat after me: “It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.”
The behaviors you carry into your adult life are not your fault. They are simply how you learned to cope with the stresses and strains of being a child in your family and in your culture.
They are not your fault.
They are, however, your responsibility. Once you are aware that your automatic behaviors in stressful situations aren’t serving you, it’s your responsibility to learn new ones.
Here’s what happened. You came into this world with an incredibly malleable, adaptive brain. Events happened in your family that began to shape your brain even before you were born. Every event in your childhood was an opportunity for neurons to connect. Every repetition of an event and your response to that event strengthened that neural connection. Over time, these connections learned to function like superhighways in your brain. Stimulus leads to response without your conscious awareness, producing the same result.
It’s neurobiology, and it’s not your fault.
For example, let’s say one of the adults in your life got mad often, and you frequently got hurt when they got mad. You probably learned that angry adults are scary and your job was to either hide or placate. That was an adaptive, rational response when you were seven. If you’re still responding to angry adults by hiding or placating when you’re 57, that’s a problem. You’re not a child anymore, and you have power now.
Building new habits to replace the old habits that no longer serve us – that’s what coaching is.
We start by learning the cycle: an event produces thoughts, thoughts lead to feelings, feelings lead to actions, and actions produce results. You can interrupt that cycle in only two places. You can change your thoughts, and you can change your actions. Feelings are a result of your thoughts, and the only way to shift them is to shift your thinking.
To heal and to make different choices, you must cultivate awareness of exactly how this cycle is operating in your life. One powerful tool for developing awareness of the cycle is the Awareness Wheel. Grab one here, and read these two previous posts for more information.
Sometimes just shining a light on what’s going on with us will ease our suffering. To really heal ourselves, though, we need to heal our brains. One powerful way to heal our brains is through an inquiry method, such as Byron Katie’s model which she calls “The Work.” (There are other forms of Inquiry. I’ve included links to two of them at the end.)
After you’ve identified a thought that’s not serving you, The Work asks four questions:
Is it true? Yes or no.
Can you absolutely know it’s true? Yes or no.
What happens when you believe this thought?
Who would you be without this thought?
The deeper you go into Questions 3 and 4, the more healing occurs. Take your time here. Katie’s website is full of resources, and I’m always happy to talk you through this process.
The final step is to turn the original thought around, and to find evidence for why it might be as true or truer than the original thought.
The purpose of this process is to find the truth. Inquiry is not about denial. It’s about truth. The truth will set you free.
Here’s how The Work could look for a child growing up with a violent parent. One painful thought learned in this situation might be, “It’s my job to keep people happy.”
Is it true? It sure feels true, so YES.
Can I absolutely know it’s true? Not really, so NO.
What happens when I believe the thought “It’s my job to keep people happy”?
I’m always being nice and going out of my way to accommodate others. I don’t say what I think and I never disagree with anyone. I’m always paying attention to how others feel to the point that I don’t know how I feel anymore. I feel tense in my stomach and my breathing is shallow. My shoulders are a little hunched and my arms are tight.
Who would I be without the thought “It’s my job to keep people happy”?
I’d say what I think. I’d let their anger be their problem. I’d pay attention to what I’m feeling and give myself love. I’d feel so much more free.
Two possible turnarounds:
It’s not my job to keep people happy.
Of course this is true, because I’m not actually in charge of other people’s feelings.
It’s my job to keep me happy.
Who else’s job could it be?
Repeating this process over and over builds new neural pathways. This is how you heal your brain.
Unf*ck Your Brain (This podcast and blog is the work of Kara Loewentheil, a Harvard-trained lawyer turned life coach. I think it’s f*cking brilliant, if you don’t mind swearing. Kara’s method is more streamlined than The Work.)
As always, I offer a free consultation. Please email me or use the contact form to set up a convenient time.
Do you remember a moment when you made a major life decision or chose to acquiesce to a loved one’s wishes and then said, “Oh. Shit. This is what that means”? Maybe it was moving in together, or getting married, or having kids, or your husband saying he felt called to be an Episcopal priest. I had that moment recently (again) after Jed said, “I’d like to walk the Camino de Santiago, and I want you to come with me.” “I’d love to,” I replied.
As this adventure has become less theoretical and more real, I’ve been freaking out more and more. Then I think, “Come on. You’re a coach. Coach yourself.” So yesterday I did.
First a little background: The Camino de Santiago’s most-traveled route, the one popularized in The Way, is 500 miles of well-trodden path that begins in St. Jean Pied de Port in the far south of France, crosses the Pyrenees and most of the northern part of Spain, and ends in Santiago de Compostela. It’s not wilderness. The Camino passes through several cities including Pamplona, Burgos, and Leon. Along The Way there are many small towns full of shops and bars and cafes and hotels catering to the more than 150,000 people who make this trek annually, and have for a thousand years. The freaking out part, for me, is that we plan to take five weeks to walk these 500 miles, which works out to about 15 miles per day. We’ll take a few rest days, so the average goes up to around 17 miles per day. That’s fewer miles than some walk in a day, and more miles than others.
Yesterday, when I felt the freak-out, I got quiet and listened to what my mind was saying. Here’s what I heard:
I don’t want to do this.
It’s not safe to do this.
I shouldn’t have to do this.
I don’t know how to do this.
I don’t know what’s going to happen.
That’s when it clicked. I think my life needs to be predictable, that I need to feel in control, and that I must always look and feel competent. I know these things about myself.
The Camino will challenge these beliefs so much.
My husband included this video in his adult forum on the Camino yesterday. About half way in these four words appeared: “Let’s Just Walk Today.” And I got it. I understood then that The Way through this experience for me is Let’s Just Walk Today.
The Camino is already providing.
Let’s: I walk in community. I walk with the love of my life, with the prayers and support of family and friends and people I’ve never met, and with fellow pilgrims. Just Walk: Take the next step. Trust the Camino. Simplify. Lighten up. Let go. Today: Breathe in all this awesomeness with appreciation and gratitude.
Peregrinos say that the Camino changes their life, usually in ways they did not expect. I walk to grow in trust, flexibility, and acceptance. I am grateful for your prayers, support, and gifts. I invite you to accompany me. I’ll let you know what happens along The Way.
