Well Being

As human beings we are masters at creating narratives.  We create colorful stories that have the capacity to stir up emotion.  And that can be very wonderful and inspiring.  I’ve often said that emotions are the elixir of life.  The problem with our innate gift for story telling is that we often tend to cling to the negative and painful narratives and replay them repeatedly in our minds.  If she just hadn’t said that.  If I just hadn’t done that.  Then the relationship wouldn’t have been ruined.  I wouldn’t be in such dire straits. We create headlines of negativity And off this rumination we create high level headlines, scripts that sound like:  I am always getting taken advantage of. I am estranged from this relative. I am always making bad choices. I am bad at leadership. I am horrible at relationships. I am not assertive enough. I am weak. I am not hardworking enough to pull that off. I am overweight. I am stupid. I am never going to get ahead in life. I am damaged. I am a victim. I am powerless to change anything. Just let it go, right? We’re often told by self help experts that we have to let go of these negative scripts.  Release the negative self talk, they exclaim!  But how?  Especially when they’re so ingrained.  Many of these stories have been kicking around in our brains for decades.  Maybe I’m crazy for saying this but “Let that sh%t go” sounds trite and condescending.  If it was that easy, I would have done it by now, is what I often think when I’m met with platitudes like that. I often speak about the power of language with folks I am coaching, and direct coaching clients to pay particular attention to anything that comes after the phrase “I am.” Why?  Because words are literally magic.  And they have the capacity to expand the possibilities in our lives or close them down for good.  Words, whether spoken out loud or spoken in our head, are incredibly powerful.  If you’ve ever read or heard of the book, The Four Agreements, Ruiz speaks to this when he addresses the first agreement – Be impeccable with your word, who says: “You can measure the impeccability of your word by your level of self-love.  How much you love yourself and how you feel about yourself are directly proportionate to the quality and integrity of your word.” Beware of the negativity bait and switch So what would impeccability of word look like as it pertains to releasing negative self-talk?  Would it be the converse?  Instead of I am not weak, perhaps the answer lies in the reverse – I am powerful.  That would be convenient, wouldn’t it?  Just a simple bait and switch should be enough to do the trick, right? In my experience it’s tough to go from one extreme to the other.  We as humans also have an animalistic ability to sniff out the falseness of a message.  If […]

Today’s blog is hitting on a topic near and dear to my heart.  It reminds me of the proverbial phrase, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”  If you grew up in the South like I did, you’ve probably heard a version of this in your formative years.  And if you didn’t – welcome to my world, filled with many such sayings like this one and “There are a million ways to skin a dead armadillo.”  (the latter of which we won’t be focusing on today just in case you were wondering…) Idle hands aren’t the problem But we do live in this way – idle hands are to be avoided at all costs.  I’ve often wondered why. Maybe, deep down, we’re afraid of calm.  Fearful of it even.  Silence can be terrifying if we’re not used to it.  When I first started practicing mindfulness and meditation, I heard horrible stories about adverse reactions folks were having upon trying a few minutes of meditation.  It scared me as a facilitator.  Panic attacks.  Participants reporting they felt their skin was crawling.  And when I’ve felt forced to sit for a long time at a meditation retreat, I’ve often experienced similar sensations.  Feelings like boredom can be unbearable, especially if we always have the constant companion of the smartphone and scrolling to keep us company.  That’s the annoying problem with mindfulness practices like meditation.  They’re difficult only because we must sit with ourselves.  We are finally alone with ourselves.  And when you’re alone and have nothing to distract you, you have no choice but to feel what you’re feeling.  Human beings are masters at avoiding feeling the difficult things.  We become workaholics, alcoholics, shopoholics, foodoholics instead.  I’ve even seen working out become an obsession. I have a friend who manages this dance better than anything I’ve ever seen.  She runs a successful business, she’s always on the go.  She stays in perpetual motion.  We have a party and she’s on her phone responding to a text, in-between bouncing around from guest to guest engaging them in banter, then running to the kitchen to straighten things, helping with the dishes (which I greatly appreciate by the way!).  I don’t think I’ve ever seen her sit still.  There’s a look in her eyes that I’ve picked up on, she’s scanning the room looking for the next thing she can do, straighten, clean, or put away.  I get this compulsion all too well because quite often I’ve been this person.  If you look hard enough in those moments, you’ll notice what’s sitting underneath the surface is a restlessness.  An emptiness. The restlessness is a clue – We’re really running on empty I’ve been feeling quite a bit of this myself lately, so I know.  The difference is I’ve finally learned it’s not a sign that I need to speed up.  That’s how I used to handle it.  I would find ways to occupy myself, anything I could do to keep that empty, restless, grasping, sticky feeling […]

Developing a healthy sense of confidence, whether it’s in your leadership, or whether it pertains to your career direction, is important.  We often report feeling like we lack it.  But how to build confidence?  It’s intangible and fuzzy – it’s nice to say we need it, but what do we do about it?  There are three elements critical to building confidence in my experience as a coach.  As I describe these, think about for yourself which of the three you would rate as high, and which you would rate as low. How to Build Confidence – The Three C’s of Confidence Clarity – Direction is important, and to the extent we lack it, we can feel rudderless in our lives and in our leadership.  Do you have a vision for your career?  Do you know who you want to be as a leader and how you want others to experience you?  I remember when I was making my career change from accounting to leadership development back in 2012, I knew what I wanted, I had a direction.  I might have had no idea how I was going to get there, but the passion I felt for the vision I was cultivating kept me going.  Clarity is inspiring.  Once we have it, we can take steps to materialize our vision. I often have clients think about their values as a method of making a way out of the fog.  It can sometimes feel like an arbitrary exercise, but it’s not.  Our values guide the choices we make, and we all have values, whether we are conscious of them or not.  One of mine is autonomy.  It came into play recently when I was faced with a difficult business decision.  Tuning into my values helped to navigate this situation, knowing that I was tuning into my own True North.  Competency – Building skills builds confidence.  Every job has competencies associated with it.  Some are technical, and some are what folks often refer to as the softer skills.  Things like communication, presentation skills, time management.  Leadership does as well.  Good leadership is about two main things – building relationships while getting tasks accomplished.  We often sacrifice one for the other.  Maybe I over-focus on delivery and ignore important opportunities to coach and mentor my team.  Or maybe I focus too much on relationships at the expense of deliverables.  Good leadership requires balance between these two elements. How do you stack up on the competencies for the role you’re currently in?  Do you even know what they are?  What are you strong on?  What needs some work?  When we’re feeling less confident, we often try to hide our inadequacies.  We’re ashamed of them.  We may shy away from things that will challenge us because we’re afraid to fail.  The more willing we are to cultivate a growth mindset by leaning into our strengths and working to improve our weaknesses we better we will feel.  Movement in this direction generates energy and motivation.  Compassion – […]

I look around and see everyone is pursuing these amazing careers and they have great lives.  They all seem to know what they’re doing, and they have a purpose.  I don’t understand why I can’t get in gear.  What’s wrong and missing in me that I can’t figure it out? I hear this a lot as a career coach.  And I also recognize it’s hard not to compare yourself to others.  When we are caught up in the cult of comparison, we are often caught up in the trance of the inner critic.  It’s our brain’s flawed way of trying to motivate ourselves to move into action by using comparison as the carrot to dangle in front of our faces or more aptly the switch to use on our backs.  It works up to a point where it stops working as a motivator. We prove and we prove and we prove and then we get tired. And wonder what it was all for.  And that is when we find ourselves on the messy path to growth.  To wholeness.  To uncovering our true value. When I first started out as a coach, my confidence was lower.  I was trying something new; I was worried about whether I would be a success and I spent a lot of time and energy ruminating about what I was doing in relation to other coaches.  I’d see their fancy LinkedIn posts of workshops they were running, filled with pictures of smiling participants, complete with slick materials bearing perfectly polished logos and I’d feel woefully inadequate.  I’d use it as fodder to beat myself up with.  I’d start to spring into action to post something, to plan something, in a desperate desire to compete, to put my own words out there too.  And then I’d be riddled with thoughts about how my idea wasn’t as good.  It would never work.  And I’d abandon the idea to the graveyard we each have in our heads.  Following your true north isn’t easy The inner critic comparison attack still happens from time to time for me, and chances it does for you too.  But it looks a little different now.  Recently I’ve turned down a few opportunities that have come my way, because I’ve sensed they weren’t the right path for me and didn’t resonate with my values.  Perhaps they would have been right for a different coach, or if I had a different idea or vision for my business.  And it was extremely hard to do because I knew deep down my inner critic wasn’t going to like it.  I was afraid of the fire that I knew saying no would brew.  Now Gertie (my inner critic) is telling me I was crazy to walk away from the revenue.  Telling me I am woefully inadequate compared to the coaches that took that path and look how successful they are.  And it’s getting in the way of progressing a couple of initiatives I want to kick off, which was […]

I’ve decided to write a multi-part blog on a topic that is so important, it warrants a little extra attention.  I was talking about how to set boundaries yesterday with a client, a freelancer who is working on growing her business, and struggles to optimize her time effectively.  I think many of us fall into this bucket.  I mean, who really does have perfect time management skills?  But all the fancy apps and time management tricks mean nothing if we don’t challenge the limited beliefs that are guiding the everyday choices we make. Our beliefs about availability drive our behaviors I’ll give you an example.  My IT guy, James (who is awesome by the way) has a way of working with clients, which he communicates clearly.  I know in an emergency I am to call him immediately.  A real emergency, not a fake Shelley kind of emergency like “could we change the color of the banner on my website – it looks too blue?”  James knows me all too well… So far, I’ve only had to do this once, when my site domain got hijacked and my website got pulled down – a real thing by the way, and now I’ve learned all about the importance of 2-factor authentication.  But I digress… Otherwise, if there is something non-emergency related I need I am to email him.  James checks his email twice a day, once in the morning and once in the late afternoon.  And aims to respond to client requests within 1-2 working days.  If something is going to take longer than that, he gets back to me with a time estimate of when he can most likely complete the task.  It’s a clearly communicated policy of how he deals with email and client requests. It’s so simple, it’s so brilliant, it’s so effective, and yet, most of us do the complete opposite.  Why?  Because deep down there’s often a dark, hidden, limited belief lurking in the shadows that says something like – “You have to be available all the time.”  Or “If you’re not available, people won’t be able to trust you and rely on you.” Or “You have to be available 100% of the time for your clients or your business will fail.”  Sound familiar? The people pleasing poison These beliefs are rooted in what I call one of the three poisons – or reactive tendencies that end up creating a lot of problems in our life and leadership.  This particular poison is the one of the people pleaser – My self-worth is related to how much people like me.  And we human beings are super inept at sitting with the discomfort of feeling like we are not liked.  Notice I say “feeling” because often this is our perception, and perception does not equate to reality.  Healthy people respect and honor appropriate and properly communicated boundaries.  And because we’re not conscious these fears are lurking in the background, then we do stupid things like have the email notification […]

There’s often a disconnect between what we want and where we find ourselves in this journey called life.  Maybe you come up with an idea of something to try or to learn, but you find yourself quickly dismissing it or finding reasons to rationalize why it would never work.  We often mistakenly perceive these things as a lack of motivation.  “I guess I just didn’t want it enough.  But when I find the right thing, I’ll know it because I’ll suddenly be motivated and filled with an intense passion!” Wrong.  Motivation doesn’t just fly out of the air when you find the right thing.  There is no right thing by the way.  Cultivating motivation and passion has a lot more to do with what voices you’re letting speak inside that crazy thing called your head, rather than the specific thing that you’re focused on. In my experience as a coach, folks typically are stuck for one of two reasons.  The answer lies in the source of the stuckness, and whether it has to do with an outer block or an inner block.  What is an outer block? An outer block is an external constraint or barrier that gets in the way of a person achieving their goal.  It’s something that needs to be planned for, managed, and actively worked.  Let’s say I’m thinking of making a career transition, and I want to move into finance.  Education will obviously be a barrier to me achieving this goal if I know nothing about numbers.  So identifying a course or a program to enroll in, using time management skills to plan for this course, budgeting for this course will be key.  Outer blocks are relatively straightforward and easy to coach.  The problem is that most of us suffer from inner blocks when there is a disconnect from where we currently are to where we want to be, when we feel stuck or are lacking motivation. The sinister world of the inner block and the inner critic In my time as a coach, I’ve never met a client (including myself) who didn’t suffer from inner blocks and the curse of the inner critic.  An inner block is a deep-seated belief that who we are and what we are just isn’t good enough and will never be enough.  We all have an inner critic.  Mine’s name is Gertie.  Here she is: Gertie loves to fly around my head at warp speed and bump into things.  She squeals with glee as she yells, “You don’t work hard enough Shelley!”  Deep down Gertie knows that I’m lazy and I’ll never do what it takes to finish that new initiative or project.  That online leadership academy I’ve been thinking about building and piloting – What a silly pipe dream!  And then I start thinking to myself, “Well, maybe it wasn’t that important after all.  Maybe I just didn’t want it that bad.” Or maybe I do, and I just allowed myself to get derailed because the inner critic […]