You are here: Home / 2012 / Archives for February 2012

Top 10 Ways to Change Your Behavior Immediately #10: Actively Recover and Try Again

February 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Suppose you have tried everything above and you still can’t seem to bring yourself to work.  First, I want you to repeat step two and show yourself a little compassion.  Did you do that?  Good.  I’ll bet you’re feeling better already!

So given that you can’t seem to get yourself to work, what should you do instead?  When locked in internal conflict, we will often take some form of default action (a common one these days is to browse the internet).  This form of procrastination rarely feels very fulfilling or regenerative.  This is like a drowning man treading water – you’re not getting any closer to shore!  Instead, recognize that you are refusing to work in that moment, and engage in active recovery.  Make a list of your most fun activities, the things that will leave you feeling the most energized and happy, and commit yourself to enjoying them fully and without reservation for a period of time.  After that time is up, take your renewed energy and good mood and get right back on the horse!  You will undoubtedly have an easier time than you did from a place of unhappy resistance.

Note that sometimes we are legitimately tired – most people in the United States are getting less than 8 hours of sleep a night, and artificial lighting can wreak havoc on our body’s natural circadian rhythm.  When you have a low energy level, everything in life seems harder.  In that case, the best thing you can possibly do for your productivity is to rest!  Employers are starting to realize the importance of napping at work, so if you happen to work for one of those forward thinking companies or for yourself this is an easy solution.  Otherwise, I suggest setting a timer, closing your eyes, and allowing yourself to free associate: do not think of anything in particular or try to hold onto any thoughts (especially about work), let your mind wander undirected.  Afterwards you will feel refreshed and ready to go again.

This concludes my Top 10 Ways to Change Your Behavior Immediately series.  I am sure that you will find one or another of these tips to be helpful – leave a comment or drop me a line and tell me how they worked for you!  Please feel free to pass these along to friends, family, coworkers, or anyone else who you think could use this advice.  And be sure to leave us a note in the comments to tell us what techniques you have come up with, so everyone can share your success!

This is the tenth installment in a series of posts called Top 10 Ways to Change Your Behavior Immediately.

-William Ryan

Change can happen quickly.

Filed Under: Posts Tagged With:

What To Do Before You Die #5 – Let Yourself Be Happier

February 14, 2012 By 1 Comment

From Bronnie Ware’s regrets of the dying:

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again. 

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying. 

 

Being part of Positive Vector has really brought home for me how true this is.  I’ve been on a steady positive incline of increased happiness over the past few years, which has been shooting up more and more dramatically over the past couple of years.

 

There is a lot to happiness.  A lot of it is choice.  Choice about happiness is more complex than I used to think.  Something I’m seeing with my new company is how hard people can try.  I’d had a coaching business before this, and it did not fly.  This time, I’m working with partners, and they work like crazy!  With this energy, I’ve been working really hard too, and things are going extremely well.  I feel engaged and happy, and I have a great appreciation for my partners.  We keep each other’s enthusiasm up.  We share exciting finds, help each other through problems, and keep all of our bases covered.  The personal growth starts at home.  We’re constantly working to help each other grow, be happier and more fulfilled, and to go out and do interesting and exciting things in the world.

 

All of these points Bronnie makes come together for my happiness.  I’m living a life that is true to myself, I do work that I enjoy, my partners and I are extremely open with each other about our feelings, they are my close friends, and I am letting myself be happy.  It has been an interesting journey to get here, I’ve learned a lot.  I’ve overcome years of depression, and have proven to myself that you really can change, especially with help.

 

Becoming happier can be a simple mental technique, it can be Internal Family Systems counseling, it can be hard work, it can be smart work, it can be medicine.  Its important to keep trying.  Shed those layers of bad mental programming to make yourself happy.  Improve your diet to make yourself happy (that’s a big one).  Spend your time with people you find fun, inspirational, relaxing, and make you happy in whatever way works best for you.  You can fully feel with all of your senses the pleasure you have in your life.

 

Bronnie says it best:

 

Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.

 

This post is part of the series: What to Do Before You Die.

- Shannon Friedman

Find your passion.

Filed Under: Posts

Top 10 Ways to Change Your Behavior Immediately #9: Commit to One Minute

February 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The hardest part of any task is getting started – or maybe even before getting started, while you’re still busy worrying about doing the task instead of getting it done!  Luckily inertia works in both directions: once you’re already underway with a project you realize it isn’t nearly as bad as you originally thought.  So the trick here is to overcome that activation cost, to get yourself started working at all.

Fortunately there is a very easy solution to this problem: commit yourself to working for one minute.  How bad could 60 seconds of work possibly be?  The great thing about a one minute commitment is that it is a one minute commitment – if you legitimately find the work you are doing to be that torturous, you have kept your commitment to yourself and you can stop and figure out something else to deal with the problem.  I have rarely seen people object to this level of commitment, but if that feels like too much you can choose an even shorter time period to fit your needs.

Once you have begun working, you will find that the task is rarely as bad as you anticipated.  In fact, you might even find it easier to continue working than to stop abruptly and switch to something else!  I don’t know about you, but I don’t like leaving anything unfinished, so I will persist until the task I am working on is complete.  After you master the art of starting, you can switch to a system like the Pomodoro Technique and commit yourself to working for 25 minutes or more!

This is the ninth installment in a series of posts called Top 10 Ways to Change Your Behavior Immediately.

-William Ryan

Change can happen quickly.

Filed Under: Posts Tagged With:

How to Deal With Embarrassment #4 – Taking it as a Signal to Change

February 10, 2012 By 1 Comment

4.  How to take embarrassment as a signal and use it to not do the thing again. 

 

When you’re feeling embarrassment and shame, sometimes its because you’re doing something that has a negative consequence.  Sometimes its not the feeling that you need to change!  When you want to use an emotion to change things, its important to use it as a signal.

 

When you start feeling embarrassment about this particular thing, think to yourself “Wait!”  Pause.  Sharpen your senses.  Look around.  Come up with a game plan.  You are going to make changes, so you need to know what you are going to do!  Make your best guess – in an ideal world, how would I respond to this thing I am reacting to?   Try to do that.

 

Check in with yourself to see what your results are.  Does the new thing you’re trying make the situation better?  Will you see incremental progress instantly, or is it something you need to try a few times for it to start working?  Do you expect it to work instantly?   Build as good a model of it ahead of time as you can, and then test it.  Know that you are running an experiment, and that if it doesn’t work, you will take this as data, and you will try something else if it doesn’t work.  Don’t give up.  Don’t just react.  Take conscious control of your life, and your responses.  You have many options.  These are just a few:

 

  • Try your own ideas.
  • Read books for more ideas.
  • Ask friends.
  • Contact us at Positive Vector.

 

I used to feel embarrassed when someone walked into the room and I thought I should be doing work and was instead fooling around.  I didn’t want to be not feeling embarrassed, I wanted to be getting work done!  So now when that happens, I take a deep breath, and I refocus.  I use what I’ve learned from my meditation practice.  When I notice that my mind has drifted, I bring it back to what I want to do, without judgement, just like I would if I was meditating on my breath.  It works remarkably well, much better than shaming myself.   Sometimes embarrassment wakes me up from my drifting thoughts and reminds me that I’m not doing what I want to be doing.  When this happens, I use this wonderful stimulus of embarrassment to help me do what I want to be doing.  It doesn’t always work, I’m human, but it sure is a big improvement.  I am much more productive than I used to be.

 

Click here to return to How to Deal with Embarrassment.

- Shannon Friedman

Set your passion free.

Filed Under: Posts Tagged With:

What To Do Before You Die #4 – Stay in Touch With Friends

February 7, 2012 By 1 Comment

From Bronnie Ware’s regrets of the dying:

 

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying. 

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships. 

 

Friendships are so important to humans.  We’re social beings.  In the ancestral environment we were in tribes, where we’d see the same small group of people all the time.  Its the sort of thing that we have lost in modern society.  Work tends to be transitional, without people staying at a place with lasting bonds the way we would have in a tribe.  People tend to cocoon into serial monogamous relationships, where they have little interaction with their larger friend groups.

 

Luckily, there are a great many ways in which you can connect to your friends when you set your mind to it.  Our modern society has come up with the modern invention of Skype!  We can now have face time with friends anywhere in the world.  For free!

 

Something I recommend if it is feasible for you is to live in an intentional community, or at least with friends as neighbors.  I’m part of the intentional community of Tortuga.   I love it here.  There are always people around, and yet we have a lot of independence, with our set up of having two four-plex apartment buildings full of friends in their own units.  When I go through hard times, it helps me relax to know that these people are here for me.  We take pleasure in each other’s successes, and know that we can trust and count on each other.  If you are interested in intentional communities, I recommend checking out resources like the Intentional Communities website.  

 

More conventionally, you can simply make time to visit the friends you have, and create new and lasting friendships.  Its worth it to put in that extra effort to get that extra reward.  That human connection makes life so much better.  If you’d like help brainstorming personalized ideas for how to find friends in your situation, sign up for the free 30 minute consultation with Positive Vector and it will be our pleasure to help you out!

 

This post is part of the series: What to Do Before You Die.

-Shannon Friedman

Find your passion.

Filed Under: Posts Tagged With: , , ,

How IFS Changed My Life

February 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I became a practitioner of IFS myself, because IFS changed my life.  It has changed my life in many ways, I feel less anxiety and shame than I used to, I’m more productive, and much more.  This particular story is the most dramatic.  I’m still shocked that a counseling session has had that much impact on my life.  Thank you Divia!!!

 

-Shannon Friedman

Find your passion.

Filed Under: Posts Tagged With: , ,

IFS Practice Group this Sunday: Observe the Non-Unitary Mind in Action

February 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Where: 850 Williams Way, Apt 4. Mountain View, CA 94040
When: Sunday, Feb 5, 4:30-7:00pm

This Sunday, we’re hosting a practice group where you can not only experience Internal Family Systems therapy, but learn to facilitate your friends. Experiencing IFS has lead to my becoming better, happier, and more productive :-) . If you’re interested, read more here: or here.

But I’ve learned as much if not more from leading others through the IFS process as I have from experiencing it myself. It’s led to:

  • Much greater social awareness

You get really attuned to observing subtle changes in the other person’s state. Now I get tons more data from body language, word choice, vocal inflection, and microexpressions. And it’s not abstract or theoretical. You’ll get real-time feedback about what you’re observing corresponds to, since you’re interacting with what you see.

  • Increased empathy

When you actually talk to an angry, complaining, or distracted part of a person, see that it’s trying to protect them from pain, and experience the memory of that pain alongside the person as they describe it, you cannot help but get better at understanding where other people are coming from. Shannon, who has been practicing Nonviolent Communication for years cites learning to practice IFS as something that greatly increased her ability to empathize with others.

  • Greater confidence

Once you can see the defensive and at first threatening parts of a person’s psyche become vulnerable and explain their protective role, you’ll never see an angry or uncommunicative person in quite the same way again. Most of my fears in life are social in nature, so when someone lets you see first-hand that they’re as crazy as you are and that they only seem scary because they’re scared of pain, you’ll feel more comfortable interacting. And you should feel more at ease, because you’ll have a better model of human psychology.

There’s a lot to learn about practicing IFS, but the basics are pretty easy to grasp. We’ll have lists of questions for everyone to work off of, and four experienced facilitators to prompt you when you get stuck and to give helpful feedback.

To all of you who’ll be coming, I promise an interesting and growthful experience.

Click here to check out the event on facebook.

Hope to see lots of you there!

If you’re curious about IFS but can’t make it to this, click here to sign up online for our free consultation.

 

Filed Under: Posts Tagged With: ,

Embarrassment #3 – How to Not Be Embarrassed and/or Calm Down Quickly

February 3, 2012 By 1 Comment

3.  How to learn how to not be embarrassed and/or to calm down quickly when you are embarrassed.

 

Learning to not be embarrassed is a fabulous trick.  For me, this takes empathizing with the human condition.  We are all the same in so many ways.  I used to write a personal blog where I talked about experiences I found very personal and was worried that people would judge me for, because I know other people feel that way too, and I want them to know that they’re not alone.  It can help to read blogs, biographies, and other personal writings from people who talk about their personal stories, so that you can see that other people go through what you are going through.  If you share intimate stories with friends you can trust, they will usually tell you similar stories that they would find embarrassing.  When you share stories like that, you will find them less embarrassing, when they are received with understanding and compassion.

 

I used to feel so ashamed about not being as great a mother as I wanted to be.  My little secret was that I wasn’t as responsive to my son as I thought I should be.  I felt a dull pain in my chest whenever I thought about it.  I had a little voice in my head telling me that if anyone ever found out, that they’d think I was a terrible person and never want to talk to me again.  Then I started reading other mothers’ stories!  I learned that most mothers feel at some point or other that they aren’t as good at mothering as they think they should be.  Now when I feel that shame and embarrassment start to come up, I remind myself that this is a part of the human condition, and that I am not bad or wrong or even unusual in the places where I want to improve.  Knowing that there are people out there with the same feelings of shame that I have about the same sort of things helps me feel less embarrassed.  I just think of myself as human, and not only do I feel less embarrassed, I also have more energy to address the underlying issue that I had embarrassment and shame about!

 

Another way to reason with your embarrassment is to confront it head on.  Think about what you did that part of your mind is telling you that you should be embarrassed about.  Consider it as though someone else was telling you “you should be embarrassed about this.”  Think or write your responses to this person.  Continue defending yourself in the way you would defend your best friend, until you see the flaws in this embarrassment part’s arguments.  If you’re getting stuck working through this process yourself, we’re happy to help you at Positive Vector, or you can contact your local cognitive behavioral therapist.

 

Click here to return to How to Deal with Embarrassment.

- Shannon Friedman

Find your passion.

Filed Under: Posts Tagged With: ,