Category: Professional

The Value of Not Over-Analyzing Yourself

Good day, team,

As I was reviewing some of my earlier coach’s challenges today, I saw one I wrote in July 2007 that seems relevant for this past week. Here it is.

This morning I happened upon an article about Dr. Albert Ellis, a noted psychotherapist who died last week at 93. Dr. Ellis focused much of his psychotherapeutic treatments on action; that is, rather than overanalyzing everything, he encouraged his patients to take action regarding their emotional and psychological states by accepting who they were and not delving too deeply into the reasons why they were that way. He wrote more than 75 books with titles like “How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything,” “How to Keep People from Pushing Your Buttons” and “How to Make Yourself Happy and Remarkably Less Disturbable.”

Dr. Ellis’s advice reminds me of the importance of staying sane in our daily lives by dealing with the internal dictator that tries to tell us all sorts of ridiculous things. For example, some of us walk around all day with internal thoughts such as “I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to do that. I should have said this to that person. I need to be more like that. I ought to be more organized. I should be more attractive, intelligent, witty, popular and personable. I ought to be more assertive. I need to be less aggressive. I’ve got to speak up more. I really need to keep my mouth shut.” Some of us “should” on ourselves all day long!

This mind chatter makes us crazy. And if that’s the state of mind we harbor most of the day, we tend to project that same state onto others. It often takes the form of judgment and blame: “He should do this. He should do that. They ought to know better. They should treat us more fairly. She should be more sensitive. She ought to be more personable,” etc., etc.

This week, try to give yourself a break from thoughts and attitudes that lead you to continually judge and blame yourself and others. Ellis wrote, “Not all emotional disturbance stems from arrogant thinking, but most of it does. And when you demand that you must not have failings, you can also demand that you must not be neurotic…and this only makes you nuttier! Neurosis still comes mainly from you… . And you can choose to stop your nonsense and to stubbornly refuse to make yourself crazy about anything.”

Often the simple practice of trying to think of how we can serve others, either at home or at work, will take us out of the subject of “I am the center of the universe” and expand our thinking.

Continually thinking about myself provokes my arrogance. When I spend more time thinking about the well-being of others rather than entertaining thoughts about myself, I am a lot happier, and life is much more rewarding and interesting.

Have a great week!

Kathleen

Kathleen Doyle-White
Pathfinders Coaching
(503) 296-9249

Note: I’ll be on vacation next week, so there won’t be a challenge for the week of 3/9/09.

© Copyright 2009 Pathfinders Coaching, Scout Search, Inc., all rights reserved.

Follow Your Bliss

Good day, team,

I’m reading a wonderful book, “The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship,” by David Whyte. Here’s a quote that best describes what the book is about.

“We have the remarkable ability as human beings to fall in love with a person, a work, or even, at times, an idea of ourselves.” He asserts that our current understanding of work-life balance is too simplistic. The ways in which we think about our work, relationships and inner selves seem to frustrate and exhaust us. Whyte argues that it’s impossible to sacrifice any one of these aspects of our lives without causing deep psychological damage and invites us to examine each marriage with a fierce but affectionate eye. He explores these three parts of our lives with profound observations and conclusions that I’m finding eye-opening and provocative.

The conclusion Whyte comes to in Chapter 6, “Opening a Tidal Gate: The Pursuit of Work Through Difficulty, Doubt and Distraction,” is at the heart of this week’s challenge. He writes, “In building a work life, people who follow rules, written or unwritten, too closely and in an unimaginative way are often suffocated by those same rules and die by them, quite often unnoticed and very often unmourned.”

This conclusion spoke loudly to me as a coach. Many clients have come to me for guidance in finding a life, as though they’ve lost the life they had; they tell me they can’t remember the last time they felt any joy in their lives or that they’re feeling a depression so deep they seem to be completely lifeless.

One man has asked me to share his story in hopes of helping others. When I began working with him, he was no longer able to get out of his recliner. That is, he had reached a point in his life where all he did was go to work and then come home and return to his recliner in front of the television. His wife served him his dinner there, and he slept in it all night. He was beginning to worry that he might wake up one morning and not be able to convince himself to go to work, that he might stay in his recliner 24 hours a day and one day not be able to get out of it at all.

When I asked him questions about his work, he would often say, “Well, I just fly under the radar. No one really notices me, and I just go about my business and always follow the rules. I don’t make waves, and people just leave me alone.” And when I asked him what made him happy, he couldn’t remember.

This experience is not as unusual as you might think. By living our lives without any real desire, the fire within us dims and, eventually, can go out. If we’re always following the rules and not allowing our imagination to challenge the status quo, we disengage and our lives become stale.

It took my client awhile to remember when he had last felt genuine joy and happiness. These memories had become locked up and hidden under layers of always being responsible and reliable, always doing the right thing. As we worked together, he began to remember the joy he experienced when he went fishing as a young boy. When he spoke about those days, tears formed in his eyes and a smile spread across his face. I could see his desire begin to reawaken his heart.

My client began to use his vacation days to go fishing. At first, he went by himself, but after awhile he began to invite friends and colleagues. After awhile, he brought pictures of the fish he caught to put in his cubicle at work. His wife started learning about fish preparation and wines that go best with certain fish dishes. He even made up a sign at work that read “Gone fishing” when he needed quiet, concentrated time in his cubicle and didn’t want to be disturbed. His colleagues laughed at his quirkiness, but they were happy to see him re-engaged and no longer depressed. My client began to connect his work, his relationship and his inner self around his love of fishing, and it reignited his joy in life.

Today, he is semi-retired. In the summer, he works at a children’s camp where he teaches the kids to fish. During the rest of the year, he writes articles for fishing magazines when he’s not out fishing himself.

Your challenge this week? Don’t be afraid to build a work life that includes those things that keep your inner fire alive. Maybe you haven’t spoken your mind lately and feel the need to disagree and have your views heard. Experiencing a moment of your own courage can light your fire in an instant. Perhaps you love flowers: Make sure you have them on your desk where you can see them each day. How about challenging yourself to use your creative imagination to improve a project you’re working on, or suggesting to your team members that you all try taking a different approach to solving a problem? How about allowing yourself to fail or to be wrong just for the sake of experimentation? If necessary, spend some contemplative time figuring out what used to make you really happy and try incorporating that into your daily schedule.

As a child, I used to spend many hours in the basement dancing to all kinds of music. I made up steps and tried them out. Sometimes I would just turn circles; other times I would pretend I had a handsome dance partner who whisked me across the floor. Now when I’m feeling depressed, I plug in my i-Pod headphones and dance a few steps to lighten my load. It always works, and even if people see me, they don’t seem to mind.

“Follow your bliss,” counseled Joseph Campbell. And I say, once you know what it is, find a way to live it.

Have a good week!

Kathleen

Kathleen Doyle-White
Pathfinders Coaching
(503) 296-9249

© Copyright 2009 Pathfinders Coaching, Scout Search, Inc., all rights reserved.

Living With Less and Being Grateful For It

Good day, team,

The title of this week’s challenge could be “Grateful for Less.” I’ll tell my story, and then you can decide.

Years ago I lived in Venice, Italy, for a year. I wanted to live in Europe for an extended period of time, in a place where the locals demanded that I speak their language, that had fine wine and excellent cuisine, great art, easy access to water, a place that would require me to live my day-to-day life differently. Venice was perfect.

Soon after I moved there, it became obvious to me that living in a place without automobiles was very different. You have to walk everywhere. Aside from the occasional water taxi, you are completely dependent on your body to get you from place to place. You also have to carry everything on your person. This not only keeps you in great shape, but it slows you down, limits the number of places you can get to within any given day and means that you try to purchase everything in small amounts. None of this going to the store and buying a jumbo box of anything. Because you have to carry it home, small is the perfect size.

I was also living without a washing machine or dryer (the Italians think that clothes dryers are unsanitary), so once a week I had to hand-wash all my clothes and hang them out the bathroom window where my clothesline hung. There is an art to hanging laundry in Venice, and if you live on the third floor of a 14th century building and you don’t get it right, your unmentionables end up in La Signora’s garden on the first floor. It’s a terrible way to get to know your neighbors, believe me.

Since there were no big supermarkets around and each store had its own specialty—the bread shop, the meat shop, the pasta shop, etc.—it took me awhile to figure out where I was going to get laundry detergent. After I had made many inquiries in broken Italian, my neighbor finally took pity on me and escorted me to the one store in my neighborhood that sold detergent. She warned me, “The detergent boat arrives on Wednesday late afternoon. First thing Thursday morning, you have to be here bright and early to get your box of detergent; otherwise, they’re sold out by noon and you have to wait another week.” Imagine how strange this was for me as an American. We can buy detergent 24 hours a day in any size box with a long list of choices—bleach, no bleach, liquid, powder—at the price point we want.

So early the next Thursday morning, I went down to the detergent shop. A line had already formed. I waited there thinking, “I can’t believe I’m doing this to buy soap,” and trying not to look impatient (most Italians think that all Americans are impatient). When I finally got into the shop, I saw the wall of detergent boxes. There was only one kind in one size, small by American standards, but good if you have to carry it home. I purchased my box of detergent and triumphantly headed for home. Accomplishing the simplest of things when you live in a foreign country is always a victory.

All year I repeated this ritual and actually began to appreciate the rhythm of the experience. It was like hearing a familiar piece of music, and each Thursday morning when I stood in that line, I felt like I belonged there.

One year later, I was back in Northern California after my year abroad. On my second day home, I was jet-lagged and shocked by how fast everything and everyone moved (especially the automobiles). I had no food and a suitcase full of dirty clothes, so I headed off to the grocery store.

I wandered into the nearest Safeway to make my purchases. Imagine how strange this was: The aisles in the store were wider than the streets I had walked in Venice. The store was the size of an entire Venetian neighborhood square, and the shelves were filled with huge amounts of everything. As I made it to the detergent section in a daze, I began to peruse the soap offerings on the shelves. There were so many kinds of detergent I could not possibly read all the specifics on each box, let alone make a choice. The entire experience began to make me anxious, and I started to cry. Finally, in the midst of all the boxes, I realized what a waste of time it was for me to read detergent boxes to compare ingredients and prices. How depressing and confusing! I quickly grabbed the box closest to me and made my way to the check-out.

As I fumbled in my pocket for a few dollars, the clerk asked me, “Did you find everything you needed?” I mumbled something obscene in Italian and quickly left the store.

What did I learn? That the experience of access does strange things to our psychology. We always tend to want more, but when we’re given too many choices, we get more and more confused and less satisfied with the results. There’s never enough, even when there’s so much that we can’t possibly use it all. The list of things we want to buy, improve, get a good deal on, etc., is never-ending, and so, as we acquire more and more, we become less and less satisfied.

Your challenge this week is to try living with less. Look at your stuff—in your garage, in your closet, in your office, in your refrigerator or kitchen cupboard. How much is there that you never use? And when you go to choose something, is it difficult to do because you have too many choices? Try limiting the amount of stuff you use this week and see what happens. Experiment by going to the store and buying the smallest amount of something and see how long it lasts. Two weeks ago I bought a jumbo bag of pretzels, because they were the best price. I’ve only eaten about a handful, and even though I’ve tried to keep the bag closed (by a special clip from Safeway designed to keep jumbo bags of stuff fresh), they’re now going stale.

The architect Mies van der Rohe pronounced that in buildings “Less is more.” I found out that maxim is also true for life in general. See what you think.

Have a good week!

Kathleen

Kathleen Doyle-White
Pathfinders Coaching
(503) 296-9249

© Copyright 2009 Pathfinders Coaching, Scout Search, Inc., all rights reserved.