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Radical New Year’s resolution: Be OK

January 2, 2014 Written by Curt Rosengren

It’s only January 2nd, and I’m already feeling overloaded with the manic frenzy of ways to transform ourselves from slovenly, unwashed peasants into shining princes and princesses.

I suspect that it’s a function of where I am on my own path, but all the achieve-your-goals-lose-weight-be-a-superstar-change-your-life focus is ringing a bit hollow for me. It all feels like changing the color of the frosting on the cake of life.

Here’s a radical idea for a new year’s resolution: Be OK.

I know, it’s not especially sexy, and it probably won’t sell many self-help books. But the more I think about it, the more it feels like a vital ingredient of the cake.

If I could make one single wish for any of us for 2014, it would be this: To find peace with who we are. To realize that all the stories of insufficiency and lack we tell about ourselves are the supreme fiction. To learn to love ourselves as is, without needing to spit-shine ourselves first.

In other words, to be OK.

That’s a big part of what my self-compassion project for 2014 is all about. I get glimpses of it here and there, more frequently now than I used to, but still not as much as I would like.

Here’s my belief, even if I can’t always feel the reality of it. I believe that each and every one of us, when you strip away all the stories and patterns and beliefs about ourselves, is inherently enough. We’re inherently OK, just as we are. More than just OK, we are each an embodiment of love, and we are each here to bring that love into the world via our own particular gifts, skills, and even personalities.

It’s like the meditation analogy of weather patterns on a mountain. In this case, the stories and patterns and beliefs are the weather, and the mountain is the core of who we really are. To the mountain, the raging storms of not-enoughness are surface level chatter, completely irrelevant at a deeper level.

“I’m not OK” is a story. It’s a work of fiction, one that feels insidiously real and solid. It prevents us from showing up from the heart, and it spills over into the effect we have on the world around us.

Here’s what I believe to be true. Try it on and see if it fits. If you don’t achieve a single thing or make a single change for the better in 2014 besides moving more deeply into an awareness that beneath all the surface chatter you are enoughness itself – if you learned to spend more time as the mountain – the year will have been a stunning success.

So this year, make one of the most radical and important resolutions you can make. Learn to be OK.

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Heart-based living, Overcoming obstacles, Personal development
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How to stop failing at New Year’s resolutions

January 1, 2014 Written by Curt Rosengren

For most people, ’tis the season for ill-fated resolutions, well-intentioned but doomed promises to themselves that they’re going to change for the better.

If you have read my posts here over the last couple New Year’s, you know I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions (at best they tend to be ineffective – at worst they reinforce people’s inner story that they can’t make positive change).

But if you’re determined to make them anyway, here is a way to approach them that increases their potential to have a meaningful impact on your life.

Commit to a year-long resolution project

Rather than looking for the immediate gratification of instant change, look at a resolution as a year-long project. Take action on it, but don’t assume that the New Year’s rush of optimism will be enough to carry it through into long-term integration into your life.

Look at your resolution as a starting point, and then commit to doing the work to integrate it over the next year.

As you do, don’t get caught up in needing it to be a perfect transformation. As the integration unfolds, you’ll likely experience backsliding as part of the process. Instead of beating yourself up for “failing” at keeping your resolution, think about it this way:

If every month you take two steps forward and one step back, by the end of the year you will still have taken twelve steps in the right direction!

Here are some tips to help you make the most of your year-long resolution adventure.

Set up monthly checkpoints

One of the biggest challenges with taking a longer term approach is that it tends to slide off our radar screen. To counter this, try setting up monthly checkpoints where you check in with yourself (or even better, with someone else!) to assess how it’s going. Ask questions like:

  • How well am I doing?
  • What do I need to do differently?
  • Where am I falling down? What can I do about that?
  • What is getting in the way of my progress? What can I do about that?
  • What support do I need? Where can I find it?
  • What knowledge do I need? Where can I find it?
  • How have I succeeded? (And then celebrate that!)

Look at your experience as research and development. You work on implementing your resolution for a month, and then bring it back into the lab to look at how it went.

The goal isn’t to assess whether or not you succeeded. It’s to learn from what you have done in the last month. Removing your resolution from the tyranny of a black-and-white definition of success gives it infinitely more potential to succeed.

As an added bonus, checking in once a month also gives you twelve built-in chances to get back on track when you wander.

Create accountability

One of the benefits my clients find in my coaching is accountability. Knowing that someone is going to be asking about what they have committed to do adds an additional incentive to actually do it.

The same is true any time we express our commitment to something to someone else. It’s much easier to let something slide when you’re the only one who is watching it lapse.

Is there anyone in your life you can use as an accountability partner? It could be as simple as checking in with them once a month to update them on your progress, what you’ve learned, and how you plan on moving forward.

Find a resolution partner

While we’re on the topic of the value of incorporating others into your efforts, you might want to find someone who can be your resolution partner. In this case, instead of just you creating accountability by reporting in to someone, you partner up with someone who is also working on their own year-long resolution project.

Acknowledge your progress

Finally, acknowledge your progress as you move forward. Spotlight your successes. Recognize the steps you have taken in a positive direction. Give yourself credit for those positive steps, without minimizing it with a yeah-but focused on how you haven’t been up to snuff.

Reward yourself. Praise yourself. Ask someone else to give you kudos. All too often the only feedback we get from ourselves is a kick in the ass when our efforts fall short. How motivating is that?

Trying setting up a reward system where you get a reward each month if you meet certain goals. For example, if you’re cutting down on sugar, treat yourself to something special each month you hit a target goal (like 25 days out of the month where you keep your sugar intake within a set range).

At the end of the day, real change takes time. Making your new year’s resolution a year-long project will make that time an inherent part of the process.

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Brought to you by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst TM

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Change, Personal development, Uncategorized
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4 steps to change self-limiting habits

May 22, 2013 Written by Curt Rosengren

Sometimes the biggest obstacle between us and our vision for what we want to create in the world lies smack dab between our ears. We all have self-limiting habits and perspectives.

For example, for me a big one is lapsing into the habitual harangue of my self-critic, Brutal Bart (and mistaking his spiel for reality). For someone else, it might be perfectionism, or chronic pessimism, or making negative assumptions about other people’s motivations, or a mistaken belief about how they “should” show up.

In my role for the last dozen years as a Passion Catalyst helping people create careers and lives that energize and inspire them, I have had a front row seat on the wide range of habitual ways people get in their own ways. I have also discovered a process that works consistently well in shifting those habits.

Step 1: Identify the habit

This seems like a no-brainer, I know, but it’s important. Get really clear on what you want to shift.

Step 2: Learn to notice the habit

If you don’t notice it playing out, you’re a puppet on a string being yanked around by the habit. For many people, those limiting habits are so ingrained that they notice them as much as a fish notices water. It’s just their natural state of affairs. So this step is about creating awareness.

Sometimes it’s enough to say, “I’m going to notice when I do that / think that.” Often though, it’s such a fluid part of our experience it’s like trying to remember to notice the oxygen in the air.

If that’s you, start by noticing after the fact. For a week, do an end-of-day review. Look back at your day and say, where did that habit come up? Think of it as training your brain to notice. Over time, you’ll start noticing it more naturally in real time.

Step 3: Practice shifting the habit

Ultimately your goal is not just to notice the habit in real time, but also to shift it. Often easier said than done. The solution? Again, it’s about training your brain.

Just like you trained your brain to notice, you can train your brain to shift by doing it after the fact. At the end of each day, look back and pick a time when the habit reared its head. Then start asking questions.

Let’s say your habit is self-criticism. You would identify a time when it popped up and ask things like, “Was the intensity of that criticism valid? If I were looking at someone else in the same situation, would I be as caustic and mean with my criticism? OK, so I flubbed that – what might some other ways to respond have been besides beating myself up? What would the kind response to this have been? What are some more productive ways I could have responded to that?”

The aim here isn’t to give your critic more fodder for criticism (you should have done it this way!). It’s to give your brain a chance to practice different alternatives when it’s not in the heat of the moment. Think of it as taking repeated training runs for more positive and constructive responses, giving your brain a chance to build “muscle memory.”

Step 4: Shift the habit in real time

At some point you’ll not only catch the self-limiting habit in real time, you’ll be able to start choosing different alternatives. Sometimes you’ll see the hole before you fall in. Other times you’ll fall in, but climb out again before you get too lodged in it.

Don’t expect to be perfect with it. It’s less of a light-switch approach to change and more of an evolutionary one.

Remember: It takes time

Keep in mind that this process doesn’t look at the shift as an immediate gratification kind of thing. It’s a way to create that shift over time. I will often take a week by week approach with my clients. “OK, this week, just notice. No need to fix anything. No need to do anything different. Just build that noticing muscle.”

Separating the steps out instead of trying to do it all at once both makes it more manageable and more likely to succeed.

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Brought to you by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst TM

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Overcoming obstacles, Personal development
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Train your brain to change: 30-Day Experiment

January 14, 2013 Written by Curt Rosengren

Do you have have any limiting habitual ways of doing or perceiving things? Maybe you’re overly self-critical. Maybe you get impatient with people. Maybe you habitually look for the problem and see it as proof that life doesn’t work.

Just resolving to change those things tends to be as effective as deciding to run a marathon after years as a committed couchpotato-ist. If you’re going to run that marathon, you have to go through the steps to prepare and enable yourself to do it. Making changes that stick is not different. You have to train your brain to change.

Your 30-Day Experiment: Train your brain to change.

However sincere your intent to change an ingrained way of showing up, it’s unlikely to happen with the flip of a switch. In my work with helping clients create careers and lives that light them up, here’s a process I have found to be much more effective than a flip-switching approach to change .

1. Train your brain to notice what you want to change.

In this step, you’re not worried about changing anything. When something is an ingrained habitual way of seeing or doing things, it can be so automatic that you don’t even notice it. And you can’t change what you don’t notice. So this step is aimed at shining the light of attention on it, training your brain to start noticing it. It is often one done in hindsight with, for example, an end-of-day review.

2. Train your brain to see better options.

Again, you’re not worried about making a change yet. You’re just taking your brain to the gym to help it start seeing different, more constructive options. This is done in hindsight as well, looking back and exploring, “What could I have done? What were some alternative ways of looking at that situation? What were some other things I might have said that would have been more constructive.”

3. Notice it as it happens.

Finally you’re noticing it on the fly, as it happens. But you’re still not getting caught up in insisting that you must make a change. Often the momentum is too strong to let a silly little thing like noticing get in the way. If you expect the change to implement here, it will probably feel like failure. So just give yourself time to notice it when it happens, without having to do anything about it. Let your brain get adept at noticing in real time.

4. Notice it as it happens. Stop, re-evaluate, and make a different choice.

Ahhhh…we’re getting closer. You noticed the train going down the track. You noticed the bridge was out. You saw it happening, but you couldn’t stop it from getting derailed. As soon as you can, back up and say, “OK, what would a better option be?” Again, you’re training your brain to get to the next step, which is…

5. Notice it before it happens and make a different choice.

You see that knee-jerk response coming up, notice it, and decide on a different option. Over time, as this becomes more natural, it leads you to the result you’ve been after all along…

6. Make a different choice.

Now you have a new habitual way of showing up.

Think of this one as a multi-step experiment. Let’s say you want to stop being so critical of yourself. Your experiment might look like this.

Week one: Notice what you want to change. Just notice. Don’t worry about changing anything. Do an end-of-day review. Every evening, scan back and ask, “Where was I critical of myself?” Maybe make a laundry list. this is a no-judgment zone. You’re just noticing, objectively observing like a scientist.

Week two: Keep doing the end-of-day review. Each evening, pick one (or more, if you feel inspired) thing from the list of times you have been overly self-critical and ask, “How could I look at this differently? Was it really as bad as my story would have me believe? Was there anything positive about what I did? What can I learn from this? How could this prepare me to do something different in the future?”

The point of the exploration is to train your brain to see different alternatives than your knee-jerk, habitual one. Doing it after the fact gives you time to sort through it and give it some thought, taking the pressure off.

At the same time, challenge yourself to catch your habitual way of being as it unfolds. Don’t worry about implementing the new alternative (if that happens, it happens, but if it doesn’t, that’s not your focus yet anyway).

Week three: As you notice what you’re aiming to change, encourage yourself to start incorporating the alternative. Start with an immediately after-the-fact approach. “Hey, there was that old pattern. What would a different way of seeing it/behaving have been? How could I have played that differently?” If possible, hit reset and do it over.

As you recognize the old pattern coming up, challenge yourself to catch it before it happens and replace it with the new approach.

Week four: Reinforce. Reinforce. Reinforce.

Now, realistically, do I think it will be a nice, tidy, linear process like this? No, probably not. But this lays out a way for you to approach it that takes you out of the tyranny of must! change! now! and lets you take an approach that is more likely to stick.

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Join the Ripple Revolution TM

Brought to you by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst TM

Time for a career change? Start with The Occupational Adventure Guide 

Change, Overcoming obstacles, Personal development
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Are you creating your life by choice?

February 16, 2012 Written by Curt Rosengren

Have you ever looked around at your life and asked yourself, “How the hell did I get here?”

If you have, consider this: You got there by choice. 

The choices that landed you there may not have been well thought out choices. They may not even have been proactiveCreate Your Life by Choice! choices (as that Rush song says, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”). But still, they were choices.

Sure, external events and circumstances happen over which we have no control, but even then we have a choice about what to do with it.

Mary Allen has a thought-provoking blog post looking at what she describes as the compounding effect of choice. Much like earning compounded interest on your money, the cumulative results of the choices you make pile on top of each other and create a compounded effect.

As she describes it, there are two main principles at work here:

Principle #1

“It is the simple disciplines (choices), that don’t seem to make any difference at all in the moment; HOWEVER repeated over time, the compounded affect makes all the difference in the world.”

Principle #2

“It is the simple errors in judgment, that don’t seem to make any difference at all in the moment; HOWEVER repeated over time, the compounded affect makes all the difference in the world.”

And lacking that perspective is exactly where people get in trouble. If you don’t have that compounded long-term view, the small choices seem fairly insignificant. But over the course of time they can have an enormous impact.

Mary shows a graph illustrating the effect of those choices, leading as she puts it to either Mastery or Mediocrity. That binary view yields an easy way to evaluate the choices we make. “If I made this choice repeatedly over time, would it lead me to mastery or mediocrity? Would it lead me to fulfillment or frustration?”

If you’re like most people, you’re making many of those choices on autopilot. And that’s good news, because the simple act of consciously asking that question consistently opens the door to a ready source of positive change.

TRY THIS: For the next week, notice the choices you’re making. They might be choices about how you interact with a loved one, how you eat, how much time you spend working, how you spend your free time, or any one of a bazillion other choices you make on an ongoing basis.

At the end of the day, scan back at the choices you made. Write them down as a list. Then go through them and ask that binary question. “Repeated over time, would this choice take me toward the life I want to create, or away from it?”

You don’t need to make any changes at this point. This is just an exercise in noticing. You might find that the changes come automatically. If they do, fine, but don’t make that the focus.

You create an energized life one choice at a time. And there’s no better time to start than right now.

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Change, Overcoming obstacles
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