Sightline

Your Own Permanent Revolution

2012-01-29T09:46:00.003-05:00

Radical Revolution: Step Eleven

Make a pig a cow.

Turn water into stories and orchids.

Bring the children to the mountain

and make them sing.

Believe what cannot be built.

Forever is longer than you have.

Count your feelings to the moon.

Leave the last hummingbird in the thistle.

Deport the calendars of the empty rich.

All the moss will be your bed.

America will turn into snow

and you will not be able to see your street

from your window.

Eat something you have saved.

Save something you can eat.

Make sure the seeds are as protected

as the gold. Break the banks

with bread. Imagine all the lines and blueprints

disorganized and lost to their centers

and their expected order.

Tell someone you are lost too;

do it over and over until, like last night,

the shining crescent cups

a billion flights: you are here and you

are there. Believe you can believe

and kick the pirates out

until they have nothing but their hearts

on the plate of hunger and of love.

Make a forest a clean winnowing harvest

as it is, doing nothing to disturb

the minutes of its wind and the turn

of its breath to the moon. Ah

the moon again.

Take a minute, in the snow,

to locate that light. The revolution

has never been gone.

You are standing on it.

It turns in you, under a wheel of dreams

through the tumble in the rivers of vacuums,

galaxies and the first nebula

of the primary star.

Your mother is there

and your twin. Carry the signs

of revolution as if it never stops

because it never does.

From Life and Death Motivation to Joy: Changing Diet, Changing Life

2011-11-13T14:20:00.008-05:00

I recently recieved the following letter from a reader. I wanted to share her letter and my response because it relates to my own life as well as the reasons I've been unable to post on this blog for some time.

Hi Bob Vance,

I was reading your blog today and wonder you could give me an opinion on a diet/fitness app I'm making right now?

For me, I think the problem with being healthy is motivation. It's an abstract, overwhelming goal. I think the best way to counter this is to have concrete, winnable games and small victories.

So, this app will makes living healthy, and fitness into a RPG game, where users earn points, and "level up' as they achieve their goals. Every time they eat something healthy like vegetables, they earn points. Every time they complete a workout, they earn points. Each level will present different challenges.

The challenges will follow a certain structure. First will come changing your environment such as getting rid of junk food. Then, reducing stress, as stress leads to eating comfort food. Then concrete goals like keeping track of everything you eat, or taking the stairs for a week. Small, concrete goals rather than abstract ones like “be healthy” or “exercise more”.

The whole point is to create a holistic framework/game so people will rely less on willpower, and more on fun, achievement, and changing our environment

What's your opinion on this idea? Would you want to know when I'm done with it? If this sounds too silly, or absurd, just ignore what I just said, hehe =)

Best, Christine

***

Christine;

I appreciate your thinking of me for feedback on this project. It is interesting to be approached about this at this time in my life. In the past six months I have lost over 25 pounds. It has not seemed that difficult to do, even though I have worked on keeping my weight down for years, actually since I quit smoking over 27 years ago. Your query got me thinking about why it has seemed so much easier to change my relationship to food now than it has in the past.

I’ve never been horribly over weight and I have exercised regularly and vigorously for almost forty years. I carried my extra pounds quite well, but have known for many years that my family carries a kind of genetic cardiovascular predisposition for early illness and death. Both of my grandfathers died before they were 60. My mother died at 68. So I thought, rightly, that I had to try to get ahead of this issue while I had time. So far so good… until this past spring, when two days after my 57^th birthday, while I was swimming my 1.5 mile lap routine, I developed an unusual pain in my chest and back that later that day sent me to the hospital.

Without going into a time consuming and overly detailed account of my heart attack (the result of a clot in my “widow maker” artery that was held back from a deadly course by two peaks of arterial plaque, but still blocked blood flow while I was exercising), I think, for me, your idea that the main obstacle toward developing better health and diet patterns is motivation is right on. That I survived a potentially fatal heart attack (and did so, according to my cardiologists, because I exercised and worked on diet) is, it occurs to me, the only motivation I’ve needed to fine tune my diet, lose the extra weight and improve my overall cardiovascular health as I go into my older age. The motivation I feel is a matter of believing, viscerally, that I MUST improve my diet, that I have no real choices if I want to stay alive. This has worked, so far for me (and really, with no real 100% assurances) because it is everything I can do.

Duplicating this kind of motivation for others who are not confronted so concretely with their mortality seems to me to be the kind of question you are dealing with. You are working on a formula that maneuvers people into flicking the switch of a kind of motivation that takes advantage of their knowledge of the importance of their diet and exercise in very deep and essential ways.

Beyond haranguing people who really do not have a concrete perspective concerning the nature of their own mortality… and haranguing people about the benefits of diet and the negatives of overeating I think usually only creates more motivation to continue to over eat… how can you engage their intellectual understanding of the need for weight loss and over all good health habits in a way that it creates a deeper sensory based motivation toward better diet, weight loss and health?

I think your idea about creating a system of small steps and rewards is a good one. And I think focusing on making it fun, in one way or another, is a good inclination. That being said, I also think you should consider enlarging the scope of what that means to the wide variety of people to whom you want to offer your program.

If you have a good understanding of the nature of individuation, you must also understand that each of your clients will need to be involved in the invention of their own system of steps and rewards, as well as, and perhaps most importantly, in the uncovering of their own particular keys to the kind of motivation that is necessary to make the changes that they have to make. How uncover each client’s will to change? How to help each client understand that their urge to be healthier is indeed a life or death process?

So my next question would be: How can you help your clients uncover their, very serious, will to lose weight and be healthier all while integrating their individual program with the also very serious but more ‘fun’ reasons they want to stay alive? What do they love about life that makes this such a serious “mission”? Each person’s answers may be different, but without integrating that passion for living into the reasons for wanting to be healthier in whatever way shape or form it occurs in each individual life, I doubt that it will be possible to find and add the weight of the motivation needed to make the changes that they want to make. And they really must be ready to find those reasons, make that change and do the work themselves.

Also: For me food is a one of those joys of living. I don’t doubt that I am in rather good and crowded company. Eating is fun and gratifying. It is a social adhesive and a daily reward for the trials of each hour of living. It adds spice to love and succor to sadness. Without recognizing that and including it in a diet and health plan I doubt that I, personally, would get anywhere. How can we integrate someone’s love of food into his or her motivation for needing to have less of it? When does wanting food change from a simple daily joy into an addiction? Is there a concretely defined line between joy and addiction, and if so how do we help clients find it for themselves? If there are only shades of grey, how do we help our clients find their own place of comfort and health in that fog?

So yes: go on with your program of short term goals and rewards, but I would ask that your process include giving most of the responsibility for inventing those goals, steps, rewards and the nature of their motivation toward change to your client. Have a menu, so to speak, of choices plus give them plenty of space and facilitation to discover their own choices. Have your framework ready (it already sounds like you have a good start on that) and facilitate your clients’ exploration of it and help them fill in the details of the tasks that lie ahead.

I hope this helps. You might do some research and reading in the area of Motivational Interviewing, a technique for facilitating behavioral change pioneered by Professor William R Miller, Ph.D. and Professor Stephen Rollnick, Ph.D.. There’s a lot of information on the Internet, and training modules and courses available. It’s a non-intrusive, non-confrontational method of interviewing and counseling that gives responsibility for change to the client through exploring their roadblocks and stagnating ambivalences. You might find it a good companion to your work.

When the Norm becomes Sin

2011-06-12T11:24:00.003-04:00

I am perplexed by the cultural habit of making something a sizeable proportion of the population does into sin. What part of who we are as individuals and as a culture demands that we continually pillory the very same people we set up to be our heroes and models and those who speak for us? Why are we so obsessed with behaviors that are common, a product of a wide range of personal preferences and, if done between consenting adults, harmless? Why are we less upset, even entertained, by footage of the bombing of cities than we are of some guy’s home movies of his underwear?

The Internet is full of video clips and picture-sharing opportunities. That we would expect people NOT to share sexually related information, tastes and titillations, with each other at least as much as they share the latest popular song, the inane circumstances and happenings in family and social relations, political agreements, arguments and passions, pictures of hopelessly cute children and pets, and too many people singing badly to count, is befuddling. Beyond some confused and conflicted, self-hating, shame about our own desires.

Sexual chat and sexual variety, real and virtual (can they be reasonably expected to be distinguished from one another? at least in terms of how the internet is a reflection of our concerns and what we think about?) are a normal and generally motivating part of life. As long as it does not interfere drastically with one's day-to-day survival and the respect for others that is a given in civil society(and often sex enhances survival in whatever form it is expressed) sex SHOULD in fact be sought after. The pathology is with and in those who are constantly working to repress and disappear their own and others' urges for sexual connection... because it doesn't usually work very well, and, as we have ample evidence, it is generally dishonest.

The ugliest part of these overly examined celebrity sex-bashing news cycles is in the nature of the mob mentality with which they are pursued, regardless of how intellectual some of the stone throwers may hope to sound. They are still throwing stones, and if the statistics and Internet content represent any truer picture of what we think about, lust after, and wish to do if only in our fantasy life, the houses they throw from are glass.

The cultural predilection for demonizing normal behavior is self-defeating, but worse it also assures that the collective "we" will always be able to be led over any cliff of public attention or lack of it that is handy when other, more heinous, collective behaviors, deserve our attention and our action. Can we really care that much about a fella's wiener in his tighty-whiteys? I mean, I am more concerned about those who are pre-occupied with puritanical and unmaintainable standards of pathological morality than those who display their goods to someone who asked to see them.

And as far as the lies are concerned: if the thought of being forced to be tied to the burn pile of public attention isn't enough to force such untruths, then the internalized shame such a pathological cultural approach to expressions of sexuality would be entirely expected. More Stones. More glass houses.

In the end, who cares? In the end, the sex other people have or don’t have is as inane as wedding pictures, or the ten-year-old’s first tap dance, at least to those who did not attend and/or have no personal connection to them.

In the end, how can we expect to find people who can authentically represent us and our hopes and dreams for this nation if we constantly tar and feather them for the acts we ourselves have indulged, fantasized, and frightened ourselves with? What is the force behind the velocity and anger with which we aim the stones that we throw? Do we really wish to turn our representative bodies and the lives of our cultural heroes into sterile, passionless and abnormally sexually single-focused Stepford droids?

Just as vehement gay-haters are often most likely to struggle with their deeply felt and deeply unresolved tenderness toward those of the same sex, so must our angst and rage at those who would post pictures of their parts and talk about their titillations be invested with our own shame and denial about our desires and repressions.

The Complexity of Creative People

2011-02-06T10:40:00.005-05:00

The Complexity of the Creative PersonalityBy Douglas Eby

Creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi includes descriptions of the multiple characteristics of creative people.

In a post of hers, Juliet Bruce, Ph.D. notes that Csikszentmihalyi wrote, “If there is one word that makes creative people different from others, it is the word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude.”

“Like the color white that includes all colors, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves. Creativity allows for paradox, light, shadow, inconsistency, even chaos –and creative people experience both extremes with equal intensity.”

Here are a few qualities he lists, as Bruce summarizes:

1) A great deal of physical energy alternating with a great need for quiet and rest.
2) Highly sexual, yet often celibate, especially when working.

3) Smart and naïve at the same time. A mix of wisdom and childishness. Emotional immaturity along with the deepest insights.

4) Convergent (rational, left brain, sound judgment) and divergent (intuitive, right brain, visionary) thinking…

5) Both extroverted and introverted, needing people and solitude equally.

6) Humble and proud, both painfully self-doubting and wildly self-confident.

7) May defy gender stereotypes, and are likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other as well. A kind of psychic androgyny.

For more, see her post Understanding Creative People – and Csikszentmihalyi’s classic book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention.

Do you relate to any of these qualities?

One of these intriguing areas is androgyny.

Tilda Swinton won an oscar for her role in “Michael Clayton.” Part of her power as an actor and many of her characters is in their androgynous looks and energies. Swinton has said she is fascinated by the question, “How do we identify ourselves, and how do we settle into other people’s expectations for our identity?” She once commented she is “very often referred to as ‘Sir’ in elevators and such” and that it “has to do with being this tall and not wearing much lipstick. I think people just can’t imagine I’d be a woman if I look like this.”

But androgyny is more than appearance. Kathleen Noble, PhD, a professor and psychotherapist who works with many gifted clients, said in our interview, “Gifted women tend to be highly androgynous… they tend to combine qualities that we tend to ascribe to both genders.

“So for instance, you get women who are highly sensitive and highly empathic and compassionate (which are all components of psychic ability), combined with high energy and high drive, high independence and autonomy, which are qualities that the culture rewards in men but not in women.”

Ellen Winner comments in her book Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, “Perhaps because gifted children reject mainstream values, they reject gender-stereotyped traits as well. … Csikszentmihalyi’s talented females scored highly on achievement motivation and dominance, two traits associated with males, and rejected traditional feminine values such as neatness.
“The gifted boys in his study scored highly on measures of sensitivity and aesthetic values, two traits typically associated with females, and rejected the stereotypical male trait of bravado.” [Winner was referring to his book: Talented Teenagers : The Roots of Success and Failure.]

Perhaps consciously expanding boundaries such as gender stereotypes can help people be more creatively expressive.

Douglas Eby, MA/Psychology, is a writer and researcher on the psychology of creative expression and personal growth. He is author of the Talent Development Resources series of sites. Also see his Facebook and Twitter pages.

The Search for the Authentic Voice

2011-01-09T22:07:00.003-05:00

“Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live
I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.
It is not my own face I see there, but other faces,
even your face at another age.
Whatever’s lost there is needed by both of us—”

-- Adrienne Rich

In the arts the idea of voice and “style” as highly individuated and highly sought after aspects of the creative process, and the product of that process, is paramount. One is expected to seek out and grow into one’s “voice” through a variety of approaches that are numerous and almost as difficult to pin point as the nature and attributes of that voice itself. The emergence of that voice or style as a recognizable attribute of one’s creative work is the evidence of what is real and accessible as it becomes an artistic experience that moves and transforms. It is in the making of one’s voice accessible to others that one’s voice can be transformed into art, a poem, a style of acting and singing or writing. Even this is a difficult and hard-to-pin-down process of self discovery within rules and directions that are almost completely reliant on the artists’ vision and honesty about how that vision is rendered.

In the helping professions, in work that is defined by verbal communication as its major tool, finding the authentic voice involves a similar process. We learn a variety of approaches and theories with which we hope to use to approach certain tasks of eliciting and/or imparting information to our “audience”, our clients and patients. Often the information we deal in, the stuff of our interactions, is of an essential, highly intimate and at best only partially discovered nature. We are given the authority and the responsibility of creating spaces for change and development in partnership with those who come to us for help through how we listen and how we speak about what we hear.

Just as the search for and maintenance of the authentic voice or style of an artist involves constant self-evaluation and observation of a full spectrum of aspects of the creative process, the ability of the helping professional to engage in listening and dialogue toward change and discovery is also charged with the responsibility of coming from some center of the authentic. Regardless of one’s proficiency in any number of communication and therapeutic techniques, the inability to engage genuinely with clients and patients will sabotage progress. The ability to authentically and somewhat fearlessly enter intimate relationship is the thing. Everything else can only become productive after the basis for real caring and trust has been established and can be maintained.

This may appear to be somewhat elementary. Trust-building and rapport are universally accepted, and perhaps taken for granted, as the foundation in most therapeutic and professional helping relationships. But while they are expected to exist, their nature and the skill of the caregiver to imbue them with the ability to tap into an authentic, deep and productive caring, without crossing over and sabotaging the process by crashing through professional and personal boundaries, remains less explored.

It is the nature of the authentic voice of trust and connection we are most interested in… the rather less-that-definable nature of communicating true concern and empathy from the heart of where it lives in oneself. I propose that this is the real work for any helping professional, and that without it active listening, support and guidance through change are at best a sluggish possibility if not impossible.

We’ve all been subjected to office and professional personnel, in any number of professional capacities in which we are the consumer, whose chosen manner of communicating concern and care is parental, patron- or matronizing, sometimes to such an extreme degree that we are automatically offended or alienated. In care scenarios in which our personal, emotional and often intimate physical well-being is being explored, our responses to this “style” might range from weary tolerance to open disdain. In any case, the lack of ability in which the helping professional has been able to convey an authentic concern, coupled with a solid area-specific skill set and aptitude, immediately affects our ability to enter into an honest exchange of information that lubricates and is essential to the dialogue that must take place in order that we get the best care and attention possible.

Missteps in communication by helping professionals are not often as apparent as this example. It is possible that many of the mistakes made are even more damaging but less immediately apparent. Tone of voice, pacing, ability to read the nature and preferences of the client’s own styles of communication in relationship to how they are best served through conversation are all important aspects of how to establish an authentic voice as a professional in a helping role. Measuring and assessing the various balances of need in these areas, while one is in the middle of establishing and taking care of a genuine trusting relationship, are among the most difficult and creative aspects of the process of building a productive therapeutic helping relationship. Skill and getting the information necessary to make good judgments in these areas are often a matter of practice and simply asking for the information one needs from the client or patient in question. But perhaps more essential, and most complicated, is the ability of the professional to access and use his or her real self, the authentic voice, both symbolically and literally.

Simple enough: as long as the professional is familiar with and knows what that true voice sounds like. If we consider that finding one’s authentic voice is much, much more than hearing the music and meaning of what comes out our mouths and what does not, and exists more along the lines of a deeper search and maintenance of a familiarity with oneself, at a very primary level, then we begin to recognize the true complexity of how to convey our connection to those who come to us for assistance in our role as helper.

And this isn’t about self-disclosure, or at least it is not about disclosing the facts and minutiae of our lives to those to whom we are entrusted to assist in any number of ways. While a certain amount of self-disclosure is probably in order depending on individual circumstances and professional roles, too much information disclosed about oneself could be a mistaken attempt to provide authentic connection that can and should be established in some other way. This can damage or short circuit your client or patient’s will to engage productively.

Remember, in many cases, your authenticity will encourage them to see you in the way that they need to in order that you can help them. Too much specific information prevents that from happening and does nothing to further the therapeutic alliance that is so essential. So much of how we establish firmly genuine professional interactional relations has so little to do with what we say and more about how and what we can elicit from our clients and patients out of their conviction that we are worthy of their trust. We can only be successful in this task if we are perceived to be coming from a place of truth and genuine non-judgmental concern for their well-being.

So how do we show our true selves to those who come to us for expertise, guidance and support? What is this process of discovery and maintenance of our authentic voice? Where do we start, and more, what will it look like as we are able to build a certain amount of skill? Are we somewhere along the path already? How do we open that pocket of genuine empathy and dole it out naturally and care-fully, all in the service of those who come to us for our expertise and support and as a catharsis toward their own change?

Here are some questions that might be helpful in that process of self discovery and “authenticity maintenance”. There are no right or wrong answers. These questions are provided as a tool for self evaluation and a way to explore and meditate on the location and creative disclosure of authentic voice.

1) Think of a professional, someone who helped you whom you hold in very high regard. Name five of their non verbal attributes that you were fond of or that helped you decide to trust them.
2) How comfortable are you with non-sexual intimacy in your own life? How does that translate to your professional life?
3) How do you speak about your clients and patients with other professionals in your field? How is it different from how you speak to your clients and patients? How do you rationalize any differences?
4) When talking about presenting your authentic self to your clients and patients what parts of your real self, which emotions and feelings, feel most vulnerable? How do you respond to clients and patients who express those same emotions and feelings?
5) In your life what has been the best response to you when you have been in great pain, grief or confusion?
6) In what situations have you felt you have been able to speak in a way that represented most who you are as a person and what is most important to you? What was the outcome? What created that opportunity?
7) When conversing with others what cues do you notice that say you have a person’s attention and concern? What cues say you have lost their attention and concern?
8) What kind of range of expression, from sadness to laughter, anger to joy, do you employ in your relationships with your clients and patients? What kind of a range do you think represents the authentic voice as we are speaking of it?
9) What practice do you employ to exercise and strengthen your ability to have and maintain authenticity-based relationships with your patients and clients? If you do not have one, where will you begin to look to find one? How will you know it is working?
10) Name five ways you can practice increasing your skills in accessing and maintaining your authentic voice.

Finding, developing and taking care of the authentic voice is a deep and creative process of unending discovery and uncovering, not unlike the one a painter or poet goes through to locate, translate and present central themes of their selves in the world. Our wish, as helping professionals, is to similarly make our selves accessible and in-common to others who have come to us for support and guidance and even a kind of love.

As the poet Adrienne Rich says in one of her Twenty One Love Poems, from her book “Dream of a Common Language”, our authenticity is the one way we have at our disposal to ask our clients and patients the same question they ask us, “…show me what I can do for you, who have made the unnameable nameable for others, even for me.”

On Meetings: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly (but Mostly the Good): Ten Ways to Make Your Meetings Succeed

2010-11-20T11:45:00.008-05:00

Any of the following sound vaguely familiar?

The world has developed into a place populated by those who go to meetings and the others who serve coffee and donuts to those who go to meetings.

The world has evolved to the point that there are two kinds of working people, those who plan and go to meetings, and the rest of us who have been told by them that we must do our jobs and fit them around meetings they have planned so they can tell us how to do our jobs.

Meetings are for those who cannot make a decision about how to spend other people’s time and money badly without bringing them all together to talk for too long about how they are going to spend other people’s time and money badly.

Meetings are like paperwork, the more there is the less actual work gets done.

The world is divided into two kinds of meetings, ones that tell you what you already know and do it in the longest amount of time imaginable, and ones that teach you what you don’t know in a way that assures that you will have to relearn it after you’ve left the meeting.

Meetings are designed to give everyone a chance to participate in making decisions that have already been made.

The prime purpose of meetings is for people from far-flung departments to get together to see who’s hair and waistline is different and who will act as badly as they always do at meetings. That way everyone is sure to have something to contribute at the next meeting.

Meetings are alternately disparaged and tolerated, essential and a complete waste of time.

A good meeting may hard to find, but when you are a part of one you know it. You can take something back from a well-facilitated and efficiently thought-out meeting that is helpful and can be implemented with understanding and clarity.

A successful meeting reinforces the common goals and connections that bring people together for the meeting and to the workplace in general. People leave good meetings feeling they have been heard and their expertise has been honored and/or their concerns aptly addressed.

We leave good meetings with new information clearly expressed and clearly actionable.

We leave good meetings knowing who we would contact should we have questions about the information the meeting dealt with.

Bad meetings are the stuff of corporate, agency, or workgroup legend. We all have our war stories, funny, tragic and unbelievable. That is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about having good meetings.

If meetings are a necessary evil then let us make them tolerable and productive. Let us make them as short as possible without cutting necessary corners or being required to convene another meeting to cover the information or processes that were left out or unconsidered. Let us work to make them a place where people feel value and able; places where our connections to one another in the workplace, even if contentious, are valuable and affirmative.

Here is a list of a few things that make a meeting worth attending. It doesn’t pretend to be completely comprehensive and I invite additions. It is not meant to pertain to the kind of bad news meetings in which people, in large or small numbers, or their departments, are let go. It certainly does not concern meetings in which the purpose is to “hot seat” one or a few employees by ganging up on them to attempt to motivate change, whether the need for action along that vein is necessary or not. I would propose that while some of the items on this list might work for such a meeting, meetings for those purposes are counter-intuitive and fail in almost every aspect of the basis for having a successful meeting.

1) Do your homework. Not only in terms of the information and/or process that is the purpose of the meeting, but in terms of the process of the meeting itself.

2) Do your homework whether you will lead or attend. Is your role as attendee going to be interactive or passive? What information do you need to have with you? Who has the information about this if you do not know?

3) Ask these questions:
a. Is this largely a meeting to disseminate new information or to share information and problem solve a new or faltering process?
b. How much time needs to be dedicated to interaction between attendees?
c. How much teaching time is required?
d. What do you know about the learning and process styles of those in attendance?
e. As an attendee: what do you know about your own way of participating in group process and how can it be used constructively?

4) Do you need to lead or facilitate or both? Where are your strengths? If you are a good leader but fall short as a facilitator can you ask someone else with that strength to co-lead if the meeting requires an ample amount of facilitation?

5) Decide on the format and time line for the meeting and stick to it. Designate an official time-keeper if you will be too busy or are not good at tracking time. Inform and ask all participants to observe these time lines and thank them in advance for agreeing to do so. As a participant, be willing to actively participate in time management.

6) Are there high context people who will attend who require more interaction and background time to process and share? How can you help them participate without allowing the timelines and goals of the meeting to be subverted?

7) What about quick-thinking result-oriented people to whom meetings can be seen as a waste of time, but who have great information and innovative, effective styles? How can you engage them in the process without others feeling rushed, interrupted or minimized?

8) Practice or script how you plan to move the meeting along to its next item of business or away from one that has been finalized or thoroughly discussed. (Stick to the time frame!)

9) Design your time line to incorporate ample question and answer periods during the body of the meeting and one toward the end prior to the final recap (see following). Do not take more time than needed for questions and be ready to sort and defer questions to another time or to a one-to-one interaction at a later date (“Why don’t you and I talk about that another time” “We’d have more time to discuss that in full later, let’s move on.” “Why don’t you talk to me after the meeting and we can schedule a time to talk about that”)

10) Make sure to include ample time for as many recap and summary periods as are necessary during the course of the meeting and for a comprehensive one at the close of the meeting. Make sure people share and know what the meeting has accomplished and what the expectations are after the meeting. Do not shirk or short-change the recap. This is when the meeting’s goals and objectives will be re-stated and its specific actions and processes or changes reviewed. A good recap clarifies confusion, restates resolutions and implementations. Ask participants for feedback on the process of the meeting after the final recap. A brief, sincere and good-humored, “How do you think this meeting went?” can go a long way toward engaging your coworkers, associates and clients in follow up and the success of meetings to come.

And finally, be grateful to the participants. Especially be grateful to those whose work day is full of tasks that a meeting takes them away from. Acknowledge both the necessity and the imposition of the meeting. Participants of a successful meeting might also put some effort into gratitude. And be specific in your positive feedback. People are often problem-oriented. They remember what they did wrong. What they did right is forgotten in spite of it holding the potential solution for what they did wrong. They will remember if you acknowledge it.

So, good luck to you in your efforts to make your meetings a productive and engaging part of how you accomplish what your work requires of you.

Remember: a meeting’s effectiveness is not in the idea of the meeting itself, but how it is organized and run. Meetings are our chance, really, to bring people together to communicate about the goals toward which our work groups, companies or agencies are primarily engaged. Without them we are often ineffective, even if brilliant, Lone Rangers with an incomplete toolbox of ways to communicate with those who are engaged in parts of the same task that we are.

Meetings are a place to share expertise, vision and support. We can assume that, once the issues of money, basic needs and mutual respect are dealt with, everyone wants to do the best job they can. As human beings we look for opportunities to learn how to do that.

While meetings should not be the only way to facilitate this natural human urge to improve and excel, if done well they can be great avenues and opportunities toward that end. They can simultaneously assist us to engage in and get better at interacting with others and that can make our work group learn and excel too.

Good luck and go get ‘em!

RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

2010-11-04T07:47:00.001-04:00

Honoring Our Gifts: Letter to My Talents

2010-10-11T21:40:00.004-04:00

The following letter was written during a retreat weekend at The Fen. Not far from Three Rivers Michigan, on a tributary and wetland that is part of the St. Joseph River system, The Fen is a very special artists’ retreat center owned and shared with others by the great Canadian singer, songwriter and poet Ferron and her partner Mary.

Our retreat weekend was structured around keeping silence for a good portion of the day and “talking your walk” with the rest of an intimate number of participants at the end of the day.

One of the suggested assignments was to write a letter to an important some one, something, or some place, and/or to address your fear of expressing your talent: what keeps you from sharing your gifts? I chose to write a letter to my talents.

I found succor and connection in the exercise and in the product of the exercise, which I share here. I heartily recommend similar experiments to others as a way to get to one’s center of worth and worthiness, whether you identify as an artist or not. Besides, it’s fun!

Dear Talents;

First of all I’d like to thank you for a wonderful weekend. You went out of your way to make my place with you comfortable and exciting and included enough risk-taking that I felt somehow I could be new and renew.

Of course the customs in your country are somewhat strange and alien considering the restrictions in the place I find myself living. But, in spite of that, it didn’t take long for me to see that lifting that veil, that veneer of masks and meaningless prohibitions and letting them fall away, was all for the best. Your rules, if one can even call them that, to honor your heart, to speak the best parts of yourself, and to connect with the best parts of others – and then to make something lasting and worthy for the next generations – are strange at first, but soon come naturally; so naturally that I find myself humming those tunes even in the most adverse situations.

This must be how people, even in the most oppressive lands, those dim and dank mine shafts of the collective shadow, survive: they know their music, they remember and honor the songs of their loving predecessors, and they always discover what is new and can be depended upon. And they find ways and people with whom to share what they have discovered. That is what I’ve learned from you my friend.

I know you have been with me since I was a child but your name, or names, were hidden from me even as you were born in my own house like some secret sibling I could turn to in the dark night afraid and we could cling together – and laugh or hum our little new songs back and forth, back and forth, never to forget we belong together, we are in one another, even if the circumstances of kings and queens would have us doubt our worth.

I like your country and hope I will find time in my waking hours and even more often in my dreams to be near you there. Until then, fare thee well. Let us speak often and well as we have been able to and reconfirm the inseparable nature of our bonds.

I am sitting by a river now. It is Fall and the bright tree -- orange, yellow, and amber -- is mirrored in the moving water. Strange. I could be in your country even here. Yes, there are trains and the drone of far away trucks, even gun shots, sometimes fearsomely close, close enough to remember the wars others have to dream through to remember you and the possibilities of where you live. I cannot forget them, can I?

So I hope I can bring you to my living even here – these small places where we make enough quiet to hear you in the intermittent rain of Fall leaves, the owls and kingfishers, the crickets behind me, the little green frog with duckweed on its back.

Look at all the little leaf boats! They are coming around the bending water toward me. And then, even then, I must let them go on!

Thank you for your gifts to me,

Forever yours, inestimably mine, infinitesimally ours –

Sincerely,

Bob

Six Questions for Initial One-to-One Workplace Problem-Solving Sessions

2010-09-08T21:31:00.004-04:00

Please answer these questions or be prepared to discuss these questions when I meet with you for our initial one-to-one session. There are no right answers. What we talk about will be held in confidence, unless it has to do with any illegal or unethical behavior.

My approach to workplace conflict or desired change revealed through our talks will be to assist you to take charge of how to work to resolve it yourself, either through coaching you in ways to initiate and carry out direct conversations to that end, or to be present during conflict resolution sessions with those the conflict concerns. We will work on coping strategies when direct problem-solving is not the best choice or premature.

Although the word conflict has negative connotations and often creates anxiety, I believe it can be used as an opportunity for understanding and positive change.

1) What interpersonal or communication skill or attribute do you think is your most valuable asset to your work team?

2) Can you describe some interpersonal or communication skill you think you could be better at in the workplace?

3) What is the major difference between the way you communicate at home with family and friends and the way you communicate in the workplace?

4) Name one to three positive communication patterns already in place in the workplace that you think could be used more. How do you think this might be accomplished and what do you think you could commit to doing to make it more common?

5) Name one to three communication patterns that are absent from or have a negative effect in the workplace. How do you think this might be remedied? What do you think you would commit to doing to help create a remedy?

6) What is the most difficult aspect of workplace communication for you? Name one to three ways you think I could help you manage, cope or change that aspect.

We Are Wrong About Being Wrong

2010-08-13T07:05:00.004-04:00

from op/ed columnist Johann Hari:

If we want to face up to our mistakes, then we need to change the way we think about them. Error is an essential step in the process of finding the right answer

Friday, 13 August 2010, The UK’s Independent

Here's a series of questions that should be fairly straight- forward, but are actually excruciating. When were you last wrong? What has been your most recent serious screw-up at work? What has been your biggest mistake in your personal life? We all have a weird and paradoxical relationship with our mistakes. We can see that everyone around us makes errors all the time – yet we are always astonished when it turns out we are getting things wrong too. It's because, deep down, we see being wrong as shameful proof that we've been sloppy, or stupid. This belief pervades our culture: we applaud the public figures who "stay the course", even if it's wrong, and boo the ones who admit a mistake and "U-turn" or "flip-flop". But what if – apologies for the irony landslide here – we are wrong in the whole way we think about being wrong?

A brilliant new manifesto has just been published urging us to reassess our relationship with our own mistakes: Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by the American journalist Kathryn Schulz. Perhaps the best place to start her story is with an experiment first staged in the University of Berlin in 1902 by Professor Frank Von Liszt. In a classroom, two students began to have an angry argument, until one pulled out a gun. As the panicked students around them drew back, a professor tried to intervene – and a shot was fired. The professor collapsed to the ground. The witnesses, unaware that all three were actors following a script, were then taken outside and quizzed about what they had seen and heard. They were encouraged to give as much detail as possible.

Everyone got it wrong. They put long monologues into the mouths of spectators who had said nothing; they "heard" the row as being about a dozen different imagined subjects, from girlfriends to debts to exams; they saw blood everywhere, when there was none. Most people got a majority of their "facts" wrong, and even the very best witness offered a picture that was 25 per cent fiction. The more certain the witness, the more wrong they were. Every time the experiment is run, the results are the same.

The implications are pretty startling. Human beings can't even accurately describe an event of great importance that we have just witnessed with our own eyes. What does that suggest about our ability to be easily right about much more complex questions? In American Pastoral, Philip Roth calls life, "an astonishing farce of misperception". Our abilities to perceive and reason are painfully limited, while the world is unutterably complex. We are peering at an entire universe through a drinking straw.

So the meaningful question about any human being isn't: does he get things wrong? With these limitations, we will all make big mistakes. The real question is: does he take the time to understand his mistakes and learn from them? But you can only do this regularly if you know how to think about mistakes in a healthy way.

There are a few areas of human life where people have found a way to do this. Revealingly, they are the areas that make things work better than any other – the sciences. To pluck one example of millions, when Barry Marshall and Robin Warren proposed that stomach ulcers were caused by bacterial infections in the 1980s, almost all scientists disagreed. Now, after conclusive tests, everyone agrees. It's not that scientists have less ego than the rest of us, or feel less sting when they are proven wrong. It's that they have developed rigorous techniques for constantly checking their claims against the evidence, and ruthlessly hunting out their errors and figuring out what they mean.

This approach can be extended. After two planes collided at Tenerife airport in 1977, killing 600 people, the airline industry introduced radical new protocols. Crew and ground members are now actually rewarded for reporting their own errors and screw-ups. The result? Accidents fell dramatically, from 0.178 per million flight hours to 0.104.

Now compare that to the way we conduct public life. One of the most predictable applause lines for any politician is to boast that he won't back down, look back, or say sorry. Tony Blair wasn't unusual when he bragged: "I can only go one way, I've got no reverse gear." But a car without a reverse gear would be banned from the roads.

Yet we have structured our public life so this seems like a sensible statement, while anyone who ever admits a mistake is talking themselves out of a job. You can hear the carping interviewers now: "How can we ever trust you again, if you were wrong about this?" We make it easier to continue in error than to admit error and put it right.

If we want to face up to our mistakes more regularly, then we need to change the way we think about them. If we see them as proof of our own incompetence, we will continue to puff out our chests and pretend they aren't there. Is there a different way?

Error is an essential step in the process of finding the right answer. Every scientist leaves behind a trail of disproven hypotheses and papers shot to pieces by colleagues. He doesn't see them as shameful, but as part of a process that was bringing him closer to the truth through experimentation. Similarly, James Joyce, thinking about all the drafts he wrote that failed, said, "a man's errors are his portals of discovery".

But error may be even more fundamental than that. From the moment we are born, human beings are creating theories about the world, based on limited evidence. It's how we survived: if our ancestors hadn't generalised that all lions are dangerous, you wouldn't be reading this. Errors are often simply this necessary impulse reaching too far, or misfiring. So the impulse that makes us wrong is also the impulse that makes us human.

Since reading Schultz's book, I have been trying harder to train myself to think systematically about my own mistakes. Every week, I make a list of what I have got wrong, personally or professionally, and try to figure out how to get it right next time. I can't entirely drain the pain from it, but I do think there's a hunger out there for this approach: the most positive reaction I have ever had to a column was when I tried to publicly explore how I had got the Iraq war so horribly wrong. What I learned from that awful mistake – the true factors that drive US and UK foreign policy, rather than propaganda claims – have led me, I think, to positive insights since. If I had instead run from the error and insisted it wasn't there, I would be stuck in a bloody blind alley, devoid of insights.

Tim Harford of Radio 4's More or Less has suggested an annual prize for the politician who makes the most constructive admission of error. It'd be a good start – but we will best seek a healthier approach to error in public life when we achieve it in ourselves.

You will get something wrong today, and tomorrow, and every day of your life. So will I, and everybody you know. You don't have a choice about being wrong sometimes: mistakes will be your life-long companion. But you do have a choice about whether to approach your error in terror so you suppress, ignore and repeat it – or to make it your honest, open ally in trying to get to the truth.

The Function in Dysfunction: Families in Transformation

2010-07-10T13:19:00.007-04:00

I worked as a family counselor with a hospice organization for eleven years. During my first meetings with the person who had been admitted to our program, a program designed to deliver aggressive but not curative care to people with terminal illness, I came to expect and be prepared for the patient or a family member to take me aside and tell me that their family was “dysfunctional”. This admission was such a common feature of my early meetings with families that I learned, early on in my work, a kind of script for my response. My response was generally calibrated to fit the individual situation, but more often than not I found myself saying that I was not sure I believed the word “dysfunctional” was a very accurate way to describe how any family works or does not work.

I asked what the word “dysfunctional” meant to that person in relationship to their family. That in itself could turn into the basis of my ongoing work to help the patient and family integrate the anticipation of the devastating event of the expected death of one of its members. Generally speaking, and leaving out family systems that include repeated and multi-generationally enforced patterns of extreme and normalized torture and cruelty (and they happen often enough!), I was often able to help various members of a family reframe how they perceived the way their family worked as a system, even modifying the negative judgment in which they had initially compartmentalized their family’s functioning. In the end and often enough, if I was greeted with a quite common, healthy and functional will to comprehend how the love family members feel for one another is not often comfortably expressed, is full of normally complicated and difficult history and a wide range of feeling, many families could go about the business of caring for their dying loved one unfettered with the weight of feeling they are interminably wrong and flawed, a kind of a “double whammy” when one is attempting to carry out the extreme challenges of caring for a dying family member and all that it entails.

I think there is a common belief based in some ways on very real changes in how we think about families and the roles of men and women in families as well as attitudes about race and sexuality that have occurred over the past century that our families and how they work have become unfamiliar and undiscovered territory. We believe, perhaps rightly, that our families are made up of new combinations of expectations and untested norms and sometimes frightening and alien intentions and lack of intention… as if, in the past, there were clearer guidelines regarding what was expected from each family member and fewer deep and fracturing misunderstandings and communication gaffes than seem to be a huge part of how family estrangements and long term conflicts are born and sustained.

I cannot deny that there have been changes in how our society views the function of family as well as very real and obvious changes in what the family looks like in the United States and perhaps in the rest of the world. Deeply actualized alterations in how many people see race, and the overall move toward a willing or reticent integration of race, spirituality, sexuality and nationality groups have been seeded and taken root in the family. Mixed race families have become something of a norm and even accepted, with fervor or begrudgingly, even in individual families throughout the culture. Our own president is a good example of this shift.

The push for and the ultimate inevitability of non-heterosexual partnerships being given equal status in family and child-rearing has had a huge impact on our individual and collective ambivalence about what a family is, what it means, and what it does… how it functions as a basic foundation stone in the structure of humanity.

So yes, this change is real and, perhaps, a seminal and historically, bio-sociologically evolutionary event. We can choose to be excited and relieved by the change, or we can predict the doom and destruction of humanity based solely on the disintegration of the previous norms. Or both and everything in between.

Certainly the confusion and lack of confidence in families and in the culture in which the foundation is shifting could largely be attributed to the disintegration of previously held and maintained attitudes and norms.

That being said, there were always bi-racial people and couplings. But while we have suddenly awakened in a country in which we have, on one level, attained a long-awaited and, among the ethical and honest, hoped-for event… a non Caucasian president… we are also faced with the fact that in spite of that huge boundary being smashed, much has not changed. Much will not change.

The same can be said about non-heterosexual marriages and openly recognized long term same sex unions. They have always existed, and in some of the greatest and most long-lived human societies, they were an open and accepted feature. There was and is still war. There is still greed and human-to-human cruelty. And I would propose that there were and still will be family rifts and estrangements, heart-felt tearful apologies, and forgiveness as well as heartbreaking death-bed scenes due to the inability to come to understanding, and reasonable but painfully held differences that cannot be resolved.

Perhaps the most simultaneously celebrated and reviled change in families and societies is the role of women. Again, in spite of great strides being made, from family role-change in respect to gender, to the rise of women in all levels of occupation, vocation and influence (and in spite of the fact that there seems still to be a huge gap in gender equity in many places in the world and in subcultures, usually in theocratic societies large and small even in the U.S.) much has not changed; much conflict on all levels of society seems, more and more, to be integrated in the nature of humanity as opposed to the nature of how societies and families have organized themselves.

What does all this theorizing have to do with the confidence we have or do not have in how our families look, feel and function? How can knowing that these changes are at the same time real and illusory… even disappointing… help you plan for your interactions with your long estranged cousin’s clan as you all attempt to put on your best behavior at the funeral of a family patriarch or matriarch?

Good question.

It seems to me the question is not how to dysfunctionalize or even suppress these new forms of family dynamics and attributes. Some, out of the irrational fear that comes from superstition, lack of understanding of and apprehension about irrevocable change, would like to.

Besides, the dynamics and attributes of this change have always been present in one form or another. Perhaps the biggest challenge in our society and in our families is how to develop personal and interpersonal skills to facilitate and cope with how these attributes are no longer as suppressed, are coming out into the open, are being expressed in their rightful and transparent places in our lives.

What if our task is not learning how to cope with the dysfunction these new family attributes have released, but how to adjust and tune into the potential they hold for us? What if the goal is to finally be set free from the vagaries and deep and often disastrous pitfalls of the patriarchal, racially segregated, rigidly and unrealistically heterosexual family models of the past?

Perhaps this is a major shift for human society. Perhaps the adjustments, the suffering as well as the opportunities and potential this change holds for us is on a par with other shifts in collective consciousness and ways of surviving.

What if these new emerging family models carry with them as yet unrecognized skills and tools for successfully managing and thriving on a transforming earth and in a human culture that remains a place of the best of times and the worst of times? Where will we be, or not be, if we allow the regressive elements of our society to further repress what are basic and necessary, if sometimes chaotic and not fully understood, ways to express human social equality at the very foundation of that human collective, the family?

It is clear we need skills, invention and confidence that we can move forward, eyes wide open. We have to seek out ways we have functioned, and functioned well, during such changes in how our intimate worlds are constructed and how they work. Instead of adopting a model of dysfunction we might fully invest in the understanding that the only reason the family and society in general has gotten this far is because of how the innate forces and systems of our evolving nature are based in function, in how things work, not wallowing in how they don’t work. Systems do not survive not working. If they do not work, if they are truly dysfunctional, they fail. In the biochemical physical universe dysfunction means disappearance. It can also mean transformation. But in that case the change is rooted in a will to function, and so the dysfunction or what is called dysfunction, is actually an integral part of how a system returns to, never really leaves, functionality.

So go to the funeral. Be prepared for the drama and sadness. Be prepared to be stricken by the suffering with which such human endeavors and functions are suffused. But just as one relative approaches you to complain bitterly about another, or a sibling weeps deeply and inconsolably about the lost opportunity to make right what might never have been made right anyway, understand this in terms of how you and your family work, not how they do not work. Then see where that leads you.

A Guest Article: Where Is Love Going?

2010-06-23T21:56:00.005-04:00

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Where has all the love gone?

The burning flame of passionate mutuality is burning out as people obsessively chase ratings in the mating game

Monday, 21 June 2010, The Independent

A 25th wedding anniversary party thrown by some dear friends on Saturday was a fabulous celebration of enduring ardour and affection. The husband, a musician, got us singing old romantic songs as he played the piano. But as joy filled the marquee, I felt a whit of unease and then the cold touch of melancholia.

My brother-in-law, who died recently, was devoted to my mentally ill sister for three decades. How many marriages of the future would have such perseverance and longevity? Why did the songs sound like ghosts from an era long gone, never to return? Completely by coincidence my first wedding in 1972 was on the same date, the 19th of June. It didn't last, couldn't survive the self-gratifying Eighties which led inexorably to our age of narcissism and commodification of everything, including intimacy.

Even Martin Amis, both an embodiment and chronicler of the Thatcherite culture, is somewhat unnerved by modernity, in particular, by the way sex today is severed from feelings. About the long sex fest in his latest book, The Pregnant Widow, he says, disarmingly, "it's pornographic sex. It's easy to write because the emotion has been withdrawn. It's cynical and recreational".

Before long, says David Levy, people will be able to get a robot to satisfy their sex needs and programme in the required doses of affection too. Levy, a successful computer chess programmer, wrote a book on the metallic objects of desire that will end unhappiness because "everyone can have someone" in their empty lives. He isn't crazy. You can already buy the Japanese made Honeydoll, a pleaser which (who?) emits orgasmic sounds when stroked. Perhaps next, boy dolls proving their manhood upon being touched by keen hands.

In 2005, brain researchers from New York University at Stony Brook reported in the Journal of Neurophysiology that sex and love produce different body responses and that romantic love is a more powerful force than mere sex drive. It is what makes us human. That precious, fragile, universal bond between partners may not survive long in the West. Men and women can copulate more imaginatively and freely than ever before; they just can't talk as well with lovers, care for them, and make love.

The burning flame of passionate mutuality is burning out as people obsessively chase ratings in the mating game. Loveless sex, aided by Viagra and other chemicals, is an anesthetised experience, unmemorable and futile. The internet is full of sex advice, addicts, positions, tricks, fantasies, costumes and porn. There is hardly anything on the emotional truths and gifts of love.

In the east and south, love is endangered by other brute forces. These countries have their tragic fables of impossible love. Films, books, songs and poems lament unfortunate and impulsive paramours who can't resist each other. Once people understood that wasn't real life. Now, as individualism and the idea of personal choice spreads across the globalised world, sensual love is awakened in these societies, threatening the old order under which marriages reinforce social and familial ties, maintain patriarchal control and involve clever economic calculations.

That is why there is a sharp increase in forced marriages, more murders of young lovers (as happened in Delhi this month when a couple were tortured and killed by the girl's family), veiling, ruthless state interventions too. Loving sex is banned. Meanwhile the use of porn and prostitution rises fast.

We can imagine what will happen if we neglect the environment, overpopulate the planet, fail to tackle inequality. More perilous still would be a future throbbing with heartless, instant, blanked out sex and no abiding love. We may find a way of coping with dried rivers, but dried hearts?

That Stygian future is fast approaching. Those of us filled with foreboding fear it may already be too late.

(reprinted by direct permission of the author)

Looking For Doctors, Psychiatrists and other Highly Paid, Highly Educated Helping Professionals: Questions and Concerns

2010-06-11T20:07:00.007-04:00

I make a habit of interviewing highly paid medical people, just one or two questions, before I make a first appointment with them. If they will not answer these questions and insist that I make an appointment first, or answer in a way that makes me doubt their ability to treat me as a partner in my care as opposed to a subject of their care, then I go on shopping for someone else

The last time I switched doctors my first question was to the receptionist/intake person: Can Dr. Smith (not the real name) talk to me briefly on the phone prior to making an appointment so I can ask him/her a few questions to see if I think it would work out? If the receptionist said I had to make an appointment first, I went on to the next choice of “candidates”. If they said “yes” and the doctor actually called, then I asked my follow-up questions about my own particular circumstance: the thing/s that are most important to me related to the ways I prefer I be engaged in a relationship with a professional helper or health care provider.

One of my questions that time had to do with sharing confidential information.

I am in a thirty-year-old unmarried relationship with my life-partner and want to be assured that, when necessary, my written power-of-attorney (DPOA) wishes, that my partner be kept informed and an important part of decision making, be honored without fail and without question. This is more important to me because of a potentially catastrophic situation that arose with a doctor who was my partner’s and my primary physician. My well-documented and routinely reinforced power of attorney status was summarily revoked while my partner suffered a rather terrifying reaction to a medication the doctor prescribed. During a number of phone calls to their office during this crisis (Susan’s skin had turned bright scarlet, she was projectile vomiting and I found her semi-delirious after one dose of a powerful antibiotic), because I asked too many questions and expressed fear and was upset, I was told the office staff would no longer speak to me about the situation! Of course, when we went looking for a new doctor, questions about the integrity of how our DPOA status would be honored within the prospective office were paramount.

Each person will, of course, tailor their own questions to fit their own situations and concerns. This is a brief initial “employment” interview. Your prospective “helper” will be able to bill you or your insurance company for substantial amounts and make their living (often at a much greater rate of income than you or anyone else they serve) through the services they deliver to you. They are being hired by you. It is important to keep that in mind, in spite of the powerful position these people can occupy in our lives..

As an aside on this subject, and as a kind of unabashed advertising for Professional Coaching I want to say that one thing that attracted me to practicing as a Life, Family and Business Systems Coach is that the coaching process usually includes a free initial session to help determine if the “fit” will be good, from both the client's and the professional’s standpoint.

Other questions that might reflect your own concerns are as follows:

1. What is the average amount of time I will have to wait in your office before I am seen for an appointment?

2. How much time do you usually allot in your schedule for each appointment?

3. What is you experience treating people of my racial [gender, sex preference, cultural, occupation etc.] background.

4. Tell me your philosophy of your relationship to your patients.

5. Can I expect that you will routinely let me know what a procedure/medicine/assessment/service will cost, and if my insurance will cover it (or how much of it my insurance will cover) prior to ordering it?

6. What is your philosophy about non-traditional or non-western approaches to your area and scope of practice?

There could be many others.

There are good people out there, but also too many who think that book smarts and the number of letters after their name equals excellent clinical acumen.

I would be especially careful of any clinician if you get any inkling from them, through this interview process, that they have not been able to master the skills of non-judgment. Do they strike you as being so blind to their own value paradigms and prejudices that they will not be able to put them aside in the treatment of those they serve? Questions to get a quick picture of this dynamic might be important to you.

Knowledge, insight and applicable skill related to race, socio-economic, cultural and gender/sexuality related differences are especially common unlearned skill areas in highly paid, highly educated, people who generally have little-to-no intimate, equality based, experience with people outside their own cultural sub-categories. This is aided and abetted by the nature of segregation, especially in higher education in the US.
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To close, here is another bit of input especially about psychiatry:

Remember that psychiatry has changed a lot from its early days of being the founding profession of "The Talking Cure". Now the profession is largely about medication prescription and administration and any talking is to those ends, especially if you are dealing with publicly-funded psychiatric services.

Once more, psychiatrists may be excellent at what they do but are not very good at supportive and insight developing/non-medication related behavior change via talking/listening strategies and techniques. If you are looking for someone adept in those skills you might look elsewhere.

It is, however, often productive to have a counselor and psychiatrist working together with you... especially if there is some inevitability about medications being a part of what you will require in their care. If that is the case, make sure your helpers talk to each other and do not have too much inter-professional hubris about who is best at what part of the work that is being done. If you hear one blame the other for perceived misapplication of practice or judgment, it might be wise to go elsewhere… or at least to be quite direct about the inappropriate nature of sharing such professional dissonance with you perched in the middle.

It is also important to decide, when choosing a helper, whether you think confrontation will be a useful tool in helping you with your plan to move forward in your life.

Regardless of the proof that confrontation is at best a last resort technique and generally ineffective in producing change, it remains a technique used widely by ineffective clinicians who bring too many of their own unexamined value judgments into the therapeutic relationship, whether it concerns a medical issue or a “talking cure”.

Confrontation, over-used, is akin to emotional and verbal abuse, and though it may be a normal and even preferable direct communication device used between family members, it is out-of-place in professional relations and really only serves the needs and wants of the practitioner. Often a clinician resorts to such techniques when they have been unable to come to terms with the needs of their clients related to rates of change and autonomy of choice. They want something different, and in a different way, than their client wants.

Confrontation feels good to them, but rarely is productive to the goals of the professional relationship. It can actually be damaging and serve only to produce or repel dependency and transference. Take care if you find yourself feeling like a child or too much like a bad student in your relationship with those you hire to help you.

Here are some other questions for you as you go forward in developing your own pre-hiring interview.:

1. How much control can you exercise and how much do you want as your "treatment" goes forward?

2. How and when will you know when the professional you hire to partner with you in your care has stepped over any lines you do not want stepped over (i.e.: are they assuming too much control? Are they dictatorial as opposed to supportive?)

3. How much control do you want/need to give to your care professionals?

4. How will you communicate these kinds of needs in the relationship and when will that conversation start?

The Outlaw Catalog of Cagey Optimism

2010-05-26T21:51:00.004-04:00

Culled from Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter

May 26, 2010

THE OUTLAW CATALOG OF CAGEY OPTIMISM

(The complete text is here: http://bit.ly/CageyOptimism)

Psychiatry and psychotherapy obsess on what's wrong with people and give short shrift to what's right. The manual of these professions is a 943-page textbook called the *DSM-IV.* It identifies scores of pathological states but no healthy ones.

Some time back, I began to complain about this fact, and asked readers to help me compile material for a proposed antidote, the Anti-DSM -- a compendium of healthy, exalted, positive states of being. As their entries came in, we at the Beauty and Truth Laboratory were inspired to dream up some of our own. Below is part one of our initial attempt at creating an *Anti-DSM-IV,* or as we also like to call it, "The Outlaw Catalog of Cagey Optimism."*

ACUTE FLUENCY. Happily immersed in artistic creation or scientific exploration; lost in a trance-like state of inventiveness that's both blissful and taxing; surrendered to a state of grace in which you're fully engaged in a productive, compelling, and delightful activity. The joy of this demanding, rewarding state is intensified by a sense that time has been suspended, and is rounder and deeper than usual. (Suggested by H. H. Holiday, who reports that extensive studies in this state have been done by Mihaly Cziscenmihaliy in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.)

AESTHETIC BLISS. Vividly experiencing the colors, textures, tones, scents, and rhythms of the world around you, creating a symbiotic intimacy that dissolves the psychological barriers between you and what you observe. (Suggested by Jeanne Grossetti.)

AGGRESSIVE SENSITIVITY. Animated by a strong determination to be receptive and empathetic.

ALIGNMENT WITH THE INFINITY OF THE MOMENT. Reveling in the liberating realization that we are all exactly where we need to be at all times, even if some of us are temporarily in the midst of trial or tribulation, and that human evolution is proceeding exactly as it should, even if we can't see the big picture of the puzzle that would clarify how all the pieces fit together perfectly. (Suggested by Meredith Jones.)

AUTONOMOUS NURTURING. Not waiting for someone to give you what you can give yourself. (Suggested by Shannen Davis.)

BASKING IN ELDER WISDOM. A state of expansive ripeness achieved through listening to the stories of elders. (Suggested by Annabelle Aavard.)

BIBLIOBLISS. Transported into states of transcendent pleasure while immersed in reading a favorite book. (Suggested by Catherine Kaikowska.)

BLASPHEMOUS REVERENCE. Acting on the knowledge that the most efficacious form of devotion to the Divine Wow is tinctured with playful or mischievous behavior that prevents the buildup of fanaticism.

BOO-DUH NATURE. Dwelling in the blithe understanding of the fact that worry is useless because most of what we worry about never happens. (Suggested by Timothy S. Wallace.)

COMIC INTROSPECTION. Being fully aware of your own foibles while still loving yourself tenderly and maintaining confidence in your ability to give your specific genius to the world. To paraphrase Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral: following the Byzantine ploys of your ego with compassion and humor as it tries to make itself the center of everything, even of its own suffering and struggle.

COMPASSIONATE DISCRIMINATION. Having astute judgment without being scornfully judgmental; seeing difficult truths about a situation or person without closing your heart or feeling superior. In the words of Alan Jones: having the ability "to smell a rat without allowing your ability to discern deception sour your vision of the glory and joy that is everyone's birthright."

CRAZED KINDNESS. Having frequent, overpowering urges to bestow gifts, disseminate inspiration, and perpetrate random acts of benevolence.

ECSTATIC GRATITUDE. Feeling genuine thankfulness with such resplendent intensity that you generate a surge of endorphins in your body and slip into a full-scale outbreak of euphoria.

EMANCIPATED SURRENDER. Letting go of an attachment without harboring resentment toward the stimuli that led to the necessity of letting go. (Suggested by Timothy S. Wallace.)

FRIENDLY SHOCK. Welcoming a surprise that will ultimately have benevolent effects.

HIGHWAY EQUANIMITY. Feeling serene, polite, and benevolent while driving in heavy traffic. (Suggested by Shannen Davis.)

HOLY LISTENING. Hearing the words of another human being as if they were a direct communication from the Divine Wow to you.

IMAGINATIVE TRUTH-TELLING. Conveying the truth of any specific situation from multiple angles, thereby mitigating the distortions that result from assuming the truth can be told from a single viewpoint.

IMPULSIVE LOVE SPREADING. Characterized by a fierce determination to never withhold well-deserved praise, inspirational encouragement, positive feedback, or loving thoughts; often includes a tendency to write love letters on the spur of the moment and on any medium, including napkins, grocery bags, and skin. (Suggested by Laurie Burton.)

INADVERTENT NATURE WORSHIP. Experiencing the rapture that comes from being outside for extended periods of time. (Suggested by Sue Carol Robinson.)

INGENIOUS INTIMACY. Having an ability to consistently create deep connections with other human beings, and to use the lush, reverential excitement stimulated by such exchanges to further deepen the connections. A well-crafted talent for dissolving your sense of separateness and enjoying the innocent exultation that erupts in the wake of the dissolution. (Suggested by Sue Carol Robinson.)

JOYFUL POIGNANCE. Feeling buoyantly joyful about the beauty and mystery of life while remaining aware of the sadness, injustices, wounds, and future fears that form the challenges in an examined life. (Suggested by Alka Bhargava.)

LATE LATE-BLOOMING. Having a capacity for growth spurts well into old age, long past the time that conventional wisdom says they're possible.

LEARNING DELIGHT. Experiencing the brain-reeling pleasure that comes from learning something new. (Suggested by Sue Carol Robinson.)

LUCID DREAM PATRIOTISM. A love of country rooted in the fact that it provides the ideal conditions for learning lucid dreaming. (Suggested by Kenneth Kelzer, author of *The Sun and the Shadow: My Experiment With Lucid Dreaming.*)

LYRICAL CONSONANCE. Experiencing the visceral yet also cerebral excitement that comes from listening to live music played impeccably by skilled musicians. (Suggested by Susan E. Nace.)

TO SEE THE REST OF THE EXALTED, POSITIVE STATES, GO HERE:http://bit.ly/CageyOptimism

On the True Nature of Forgiving

2010-05-13T12:44:00.001-04:00

Forgiveness is a process not an event. An action not a pronouncement.

If you expect the words themselves to usher in a guilt free future for the perpetrator and a freedom from real and metaphoric nightmares for the victim, then you are expecting a four star meal at the MacDonald's window.

Letting go is something a victim can do without the cooperation of the perpetrator. While forgiveness is a cooperative venture and demands that the perpetrator asks for it.

Forgiveness for victims is icing on the cake of healing... but they can heal without it or, in some cases, they can learn to function in spite of the pain of what has been inflicted. Some wounds are permanent, physical, emotional and spiritual: to deny that is to offer too rosy a picture of what is possible in the real world.

For some victims letting go is a natural event that signals how the brain itself heals from trauma. Healing will happen without forgiveness, but may be sped along with it. To rely on it exclusively or to have greater expectations from it than it can deliver is the game of politicians and perpetrator denial.

Grief: A Normal and Natural Response to Loss

2010-05-04T18:13:00.002-04:00

Most people who suffer a loss experience one or more of the following:

* Feel tightness in the throat or heaviness in the chest
* Feel thumping, erratic beats in the heart and are very aware of
heart actions
* Have an empty feeling in their stomach and loss (or gain) of
appetite
* Have pain and/or nausea in stomach
* Feel restless and look for activity, but have difficulty
concentrating
* Feel in a trance, want to just sit and stare
* Feel as though the loss isn't real, that it didn't actually
happen; (this may include trying to find the loved one)
* Feel light headed and dizzy often
* Sense the loved one's presence ( this may include expecting the
person to walk in the door at the usual time, or hearing his/her
voice, or seeing his/her face)
* Have headaches frequently
* Wander aimlessly, forget and don't finish things they've started
to do around the house
* Have difficulty sleeping, and have dreams or visions of their
loved one frequently
* Assume mannerisms or traits of the loved one
* Feel guilty or angry over things that happened or didn't happen in
the relationship

These are all normal grief responses.

You may also experience:

* Disbelief:
You expect to wake up any minute from this nightmare. It can't be
true. You can't cry, because you don't believe it.
* Shock:
Nature softens the blow, temporarily. You are numb and dazed. Your
emotions are frozen. You go through the motions, like a robot.
* Crying:
Deep emotions suddenly well up, seeking release as loud sobbing
and crying. Give yourself time for tears. They can help.
* Physical Symptoms:
You may sleep or eat too little or too much. You may have physical
aches, pains, numbness, or weakness. Check with a doctor to rule
out other causes. Usually the symptoms fade gradually.
* Denial:
You know the fact of death but you forget. You expect your loved
one to telephone or walk in the door. You search for him/her.
* Why:
"Why did he/she have to die?" You dont expect an answer, but you
need to ask repeatedly. The question itself is a cry of pain.
* Repeating:
Over and over again, you tell the same story, think the same
thoughts. Repeating helps you to absorb the painful reality.
* Self-Control:
You control your emotions to fulfill your responsibilities or to
rest from the pain. Self-control can shape and give rhythm to your
grieving, but constant rigid self-control can block healing.
* Reality:
"It really happened." You feel you're getting worse. Actually,
reality has just hit, and support from friends and family may be
diminishing.
* Confusion:
You can't think. You forget in mid-sentence. You are disorganized
and impatient.
* Idealizing:
You remember only good traits, as if your loved one was perfect.
You find it hard to accept the not-so-perfect living. Your loved
one's idiosyncracies or imperfect traits become endearing
reminders of their realness, humanness.
* Identifying:
Wanting to stay close, you copy your loved one's style of dress,
hobbies, interests, or habits. You may carry a special object of
his or hers.
* Envy:
You envy others. Their pleasure in their loved ones makes you feel
keenly what you have lost. They don't deserve their good fortune.
* Frustration:
Your past fulfillment's are gone. You haven't found new ones yet.
You feel you're not coping with grief "right."
* Bitterness:
Temporary feelings of resentment and hatred, especially toward
those in some way responsible for your loss, are natural. But,
habitual bitterness can drain energy and block healing.
* Waiting:
The struggle is over, but your zest has not returned. You are in
limbo, exhausted, uncertain. Life seems flat.
* Hope:
You believe you will get better. The good days out balance the
bad. Sometimes you can work effectively, enjoy activities, and
really care for others.
* Missing:
You never stop missing your loved one. Particular days, places,
and activities can bring back the pain as intensely as ever.
* Commitment:
You know you have a choice. Life won't be the same, but you decide
to actively begin building a new life for yourself.
* Seeking:
You take initiative, renewing your involvement with former friends
and activities, and exploring new involvements.
* Hanging On:
Some days you hang on to the grief, which is familiar. Letting go
is more a final good-bye to your loved one. You let go gradually.
* Peace:
You can reminisce about your loved one with a sense of peace. You
feel able to accept the death and face your own future.
* Life Opens Up:
Life has value and meaning again. You can enjoy, appreciate, and
anticipate events. You are willing to let the rest of your life be
all it can be.

This list is a gift to you from Survivors from both Orange and San Diego
County. It has been compiled for you by Connie Saindon, MA, MFT,CTS

Connie Saindon, MA, MFC14266 Self-Help & Psychology Magazine,
Trauma Department Editor

Copyright (c) 1994-1997 by Pioneer Development Resources, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Alice Miller, Author of "Drama of the Gifted Child" 1923-2010

2010-04-27T09:42:00.003-04:00

I have recommended Miller's book "Drama of the Gifted Child" countless times in my work in grief and loss and other areas of my professional coaching, counseling and social work. I remember when I read it literally feeling a calm cool breeze come over me during some of the most deeply applicable sections. Many people have reported similarly moving and transformative emotions... some a bit difficult to traverse (a friend reports getting sick while he read it), but worthy of the voyage. The most moving and useful aspect lies in how she charges her readers to balance the righteous anger and rage they may feel toward those who hurt them as a child, with compassion and understanding: the adults who hurt you also had their own childhood traumas to bear and function in spite of.

April 26, 2010

Alice Miller, Psychoanalyst, Dies at 87; Laid Human Problems to Parental Acts

By WILLIAM GRIMES , The New York Times

Alice Miller, a psychoanalyst who repositioned the family as a locus of dysfunction with her theory that parental power and punishment lay at the root of nearly all human problems, died at her home in Provence on April 14. She was 87.

Her death was announced Friday by her German publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag.

Dr. Miller caused a sensation with the English publication in 1981 of her first book, “The Drama of the Gifted Child.” Originally titled “Prisoners of Childhood,” it set forth, in three essays, a simple but harrowing proposition. All children, she wrote, suffer trauma and permanent psychic scarring at the hands of parents, who enforce codes of conduct through psychological pressure or corporal punishment: slaps, spankings or, in extreme cases, sustained physical abuse and even torture.

Unable to admit the rage they feel toward their tormenters, Dr. Miller contended, these damaged children limp along through life, weighed down by depression and insecurity, and pass the abuse along to the next generation, in an unending cycle. Some, in a pathetic effort to please their parents and serve their needs, distinguish themselves in the arts or professions. The Stalins and the Hitlers, Dr. Miller later wrote, inflict their childhood traumas on millions.

“The Drama of the Gifted Child” struck a chord with mental health professionals. “Clinically, she is almost as influential as R.D. Laing,” the British psychologist Oliver James told The Observer of London in 2005. “Alice Miller changed the way people thought.”

The book also stirred the general public, selling more than a million copies. Its central argument was easy to grasp and, for many readers, offered a tempting explanation for their sorrows and failures.

Dr. Miller is often credited with turning the attention of therapists to child abuse, both physical and sexual, but also with encouraging millions of adults to regard themselves as victims.
Daphne Merkin, assessing Dr. Miller’s book “The Truth Shall Set You Free” in The New York Times Book Review in 2002, wrote that Dr. Miller “could be said to be the missing link between Freud and Oprah, bringing news of the inner life, and especially the subtle hazards of emotional development, out of the cloistered offices of therapists and into a wider, user-friendly context.”

Dr. Miller further developed her ideas in two books published immediately after “The Drama of the Gifted Child’: “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence” (1983) and “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child” (1984). She applied her theory of childhood development to explain the passivity of the German people in the face of Nazi tyranny and took aim at Freud, whose theories, she believed, cast parents as innocents and children as depraved.

Often she used prominent artists as her case studies. In “The Untouched Key” (1990), she held up Friedrich Nietzsche, Pablo Picasso, Kathe Kollwitz and Buster Keaton as illustrations of her theories. In “The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting” (2005), she put Dostoyevsky, Proust and Joyce under the microscope.

Alice Miller was famously reclusive, and deliberately kept details of her early life sketchy. She was born in Lwow, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), on Jan. 12, 1923. She studied philosophy and literature at the University of Warsaw, which operated underground during the war.

After the war, a Swiss charity arranged for her to continue her studies at the University of Basel, where she wrote her dissertation on the neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert and received a doctorate in 1953.

After undergoing Freudian psychiatric training in Zurich, she went into practice as an analyst. In the 1960s a wave of revisionism swept over the profession, as psychoanalysts adapted the ideas of Freud and Jung to social criticism.

Strongly influenced by the education writer Katharina Rutschky’s notion of “black pedagogy,” a term for the authoritarian style of German parenting, Dr. Miller came to view all forms of parental coercion, and even mild physical discipline or emotional coldness, as fatal to healthy psychic development. In her English books, the term is rendered as “poisonous pedagogy.”

“Humiliations, spankings and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away,” she writes in an explanatory essay on childhood mistreatment and abuse on her Web site, alice-miller.com. “Beaten children very early on assimilate the violence they endured, which they may glorify and apply later as parents, in believing that they deserved the punishment and were beaten out of love.”

By the time she wrote her first book, published in German in 1979, Dr. Miller had stopped practicing psychiatry. The relationship of analyst to patient, she came to believe, replicated the insidious power relationship of parent to child. Her initial critique of Freud led to a full-scale break described in “Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries” (1990), a semi-autobiographical work that revealed her own abuse as a child, which she discovered through paintings she created spontaneously.

“Not once did she apologize to me or express any kind of regret,” she later wrote of her mother in “The Body Never Lies.” “She was always ‘in the right.’ It was this attitude that made my childhood feel like a totalitarian regime.”

Having broken with Freud, Dr. Miller resigned from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1988 and embraced a number of alternative therapies. She became a disciple of J. Konrad Stettbacher, an advocate of regression therapy, and expressed enthusiasm for Arthur Janov’s primal-scream approach, but soon rejected both. Over the years she became increasingly reclusive.

She is survived by a son and a daughter.

Uncompromising and often strident, Dr. Miller preached her message with an often messianic fervor and a polemical style of argument that cost her support from early admirers. The underlying precepts remained unchanged in later works like “Breaking Down the Wall of Silence” (1991) and “Free From Lies: Discovering Your True Needs” (2009).

Business Coaching Services

2010-04-22T21:26:00.003-04:00

The following is a range of services I can offer your company. This list can be considered to be a menu of options. Options can be added as process continues and applications are determined. Prices are reached on a case by case basis determined by number of people involved in each session, service provided, and ability to invest. Flexibility and a creative approach to the combination of these services is a key to their successful implementation. Adding others is always an option.

* Visions and Goals: Initial planning session to determine direction of coaching, set goals and time tables for attaining those goals. For executives, managers and staff as determined and deemed necessary by managers. At least two hours. Can happen in several increments over the first month of coaching.

* Individual Executive and Manager Coaching: Individual session with executives or managers. Generally three-quarters to one hour long. Can be held at place of business, over the phone or in other community setting as requested by client.

* Individual staff coaching: Individual session with one staff per request by staff or in agreement with/request by manager. Can be held in place of business, over phone or in other community setting. Thirty minutes to an hour.

* Seminar: Didactic and/or skills training seminar for a work unit or large percentage of an entire staff. At least an hour; not usually more than three hours. In setting provided by company.

* Observation and Assessment: Information and process observation in the workplace. This is my opportunity to visit workplace during a normal day and observe. No less than one hour for observation. Includes report to managers and/ or staff as requested and needed at a later date; at least another hour.

* Facilitation and Mediation: Coaching for small sub groups of people involved in specific workplace problem-solving processes. Total number of hourly sessions to be determined on a case by case, issues by issue, as needed basis

Fear Shoves Us On; Hope Lights the Way

2010-03-28T14:13:00.002-04:00

There’s not much we can do about fear. Not really. It is uncomfortable; that is true. Too much of it is certainly not a good thing, but not enough of it in situations where it is warranted can be deadly and dangerous to our well-being.

In fear we have evolved a remarkable adaptive mechanism. It’s not been that long since we crouched in the damp or arid confines of wherever we found shelter, with our little sputtering fires and our nearly tamed pack of dogs not far out of the ring of shadows and light. We lived in a constant state of hyper vigilance; or at least, most of our forebears who were small and had to contend with much larger carnivores did. Our adrenalized danger signals and systems of retreat or attack were finely tuned to the dangers of our surroundings.

When we needed to, when the huge teeth and claws of the larger meat-eaters glinted too close to us in our little packs, our bodies were well-equipped for the split-second decision to escape or fight for our lives and for the lives of our children. Immediately our adrenal system dumped a kind of speed into our electrical and cardio systems and our pulses raced to prepare us for battle or to run, our breathing became shallow and our blood supply was altered: more to the huge muscle masses that would help us run or fight, less to the rest of us. Often this resulted in instant elimination, the lighter the better. Our higher brain functions took second place to muscle and more primitive memory parts of the brain. We could kill if we had to. We could save ourselves even when our pack-members were being eaten. Perhaps their shrieks spurred on our body’s powerfully self preserving mechanism. Sometimes in the end, we got away. Sometimes in the end, we had more food for the cold months.

It’s been a blink of an evolutionary eye since we lived in that world. Some of us still do, although now it is more often others of our own species that we fight or flee from, often it is the machines of war and massacre. The adrenalized mechanism of survival is put to good use even now. We hear the stories of mothers or fathers lifting cars off the crushed bodies of their children. We see films and reports of people who respond heroically in crises: the 12 year old girl I read about who lived on a small island about to be inundated by a tsunami who ran to ring the community bell to warn the community and in doing so saved the entire small population of her hometown.

Fear is a good thing. It isn’t often considered to be. But it has its drawbacks as well. The powerful system that it uses to let us know of its presence, of the presence of what has been interpreted as danger, is as well-developed and speedily put into action in an executive whose most dangerous act all day is to cross the street before and after he goes to work, as in a tribal family in Kashmir that has to contend with the sudden incursions and withdrawals of a number of armies that use them as fodder for their deadly acts of war.

Even in peaceful communities with low level conflict and social pressures instead of life and death events that happen on a regular basis, fear is ever present… in fact, how it makes itself known in those situations may even become more recognizable, for the nature of the fear is less tangible and easily minimized when compared with what we remember collectively and deeply.

In recent years we have seen the rise of the somewhat misleading term “anxiety attack” although the “attack” part of the term may, in fact, be a very accurate descriptor of how the event of a sudden panic or anxiety event feels to its victim. Someone walks through the aisle of a grocery store and suddenly feels a need to move more quickly and breaks into a sweat. The lips are numb. Balance feels off and fear of collapsing occurs along with a heart beat that feels like it might pound through the rib cage. Nausea sets in as well as blurred vision. The more that person becomes aware of the terror being felt, the feeling that something is WRONG, the worse it gets. The shopping cart gets left in the aisle, after an urgent trip to the rest room. When he or she then manages to get to the local emergency room, the doctor says everything is normal; “your vitals are heightened, but there is nothing wrong”... and then that question comes: “Have you been under any stress lately?”

While this may sound like an extreme example, it is not an unusual one. Many people live with the debilitating effects of these kinds of “attacks” for many years, and much of the literature about the treatment of such events is not very optimistic about treatment, at least from a pharmacological angle; in fact, medicating such events is often seen as a reinforcement to the “attacks” over the long term as opposed to a good way to ameliorate them.

And perhaps these are extreme examples of how fear can become a stumbling block in our lives as opposed to something we can keep in an appropriate perspective and use instead of being used by. In my work with grieving people and those who have terminal or life-threatening, life-changing illness the occurrence of anxiety and panic events was so common that I made discussions of it routine as opposed to waiting until it presented itself. For one thing, some people who had such events were reticent to report them.

In grief, especially, the mourners often experienced such things as a medical event entirely and were mystified when nothing besides an elevated blood pressure or pulse could be found. They might have been afraid they too were about to succumb to the terminal illness from which their loved one died. So I came prepared with education and normalization, as well as breathing exercises and a number of other informal, self-initiated, bio-feedback interventions to pull out of my bag of tricks… and they were invariably welcomed and used.

Still, when we talk about how fear motivates us, how we move because of it in our lives, we are generally not talking about dramatic examples. For those of us whose most dangerous act might be more in the realm of crossing a busy street, flying cross country in a jumbo jet, giving a presentation at our place of business, sitting down with a supervisor to review topics of conflict, or making and presenting a holiday dinner for a group of extended family fear does not seem to amount to what our forbears experienced in their little groups on the savannah.

But I would like to suggest that the level of fear in our lives may, in fact, be completely relative. It may, even in our comparatively safe world, occupy as much of our functioning, our complex systems of motivation and search for meaning and satisfaction, as it did in our more dangerous pasts. To minimize its role may be a potentially serious misjudgment. This is a frightening world. The things that threaten us may seem distant and less graspable than the way being confronted by a grizzly bear outside the door of our stone shelter did, but they can often symbolize life and death in as frightening a way. Financial and business troubles, the prospects and lives of our children as the economy continues to fail to grant them the kinds of opportunities we had, threats from various parts of a society that is full of inner, if not outer, unrest and lack of sureness about health and wellness and security in our housing can feel as threatening to us as that bear felt to our ancestors… if less obviously a direct and immediate threat to our body’s ability to go on.

We live in a world where fear is less an event-to-event possibility of extremes. It is stretched and smeared out over time as a collective constant that we keep informed about through news mediums and various community information systems. It is layered over the more personal fears we carry from experiences that inform our lives and are remnants of the wounds and traumas all of us carry. These are the wounds and traumas that exist as parts of the building blocks of our individuation and how we educate and transform and build the communication that occurs between our genetic codes and our nervous system. We can manage this more nebulous fear as a good teacher of what to avoid that delivered us into similarly threatening situations in our pasts. It can push us through patterns of social functioning and disappointment successfully by reminding us, consciously and not, what we did that delivered us from fear in the past and how we can avoid traveling the same “pathway” or “river”.

But fear is an uncomfortable teacher. And relied upon exclusively does not often instruct us in joy or even love but more in suspicion and dependence. Fear can be used by others who really do not have our best interests in mind to manipulate us; others who know the buttons that can be pushed to activate it. It is an automatic response and can be turned on purposely to gain control and move individuals and the collective. Much of advertising, propaganda and campaigning is adept at this use of fear buttons: the science of the concrete replications of the cues that demand a fear response in humans is largely ensconced in the public relations and political campaigning fields.

But people want something other than fear as a teacher. The discomfort of fear and its modern sibling anxiety may in fact be a major motivator, but it is resisted and in itself feared. In fear and anxiety we walk away from what makes us fearful and anxious. We “double-whammy” ourselves by feeling fearful and anxious about fear and anxiety. We want to shed it. It hurts. We want less of it. We want to be pulled forward by something that is attractive, by attraction itself, by what lies before us… rather than feeling we are always walking, or running, away from what we are afraid of, what we hope we are leaving behind.

How can we do this? If fear is such an integrated part of who we are as people, as one person, if it so informs our way through and into our futures, and what we avoid and try to escape from, how can we see, create and/or recognize the thing that is before us that might have the power to mitigate that discomfort… might even resolve and dissolve it or balance it out?

If fear must push us forward, can something else more attractive, something like authentic hope or invention, be there equally to pull us forward? To balance the yin and the yang of our process into being who we really are and want to be and become?

In a questionnaire I routinely give to my clients that asks questions about their fears and the role they have in their lives and the reasons they have sought out a coach, I ask them to imagine what their life would be like without their fears… how would their life and their strivings look if fear was not involved? Can they imagine their goals as a part of something other than a fear or anxiety about where they are? Can fear be transformed into more of a clear and transcendent reaching into the uninvented future? And if they can do this, how will their life look, what will they feel like as they move toward their goals?

Often enough, people reach an awareness, sometimes for the first time when they answer this question that their fears are instructive and constructive. They would not lose them entirely but modify how they are felt and the effects they have on their feelings about their goals. Even through this modest exercise, authentic inner-driven hope already demonstrates the power of its ability to balance the scale between fearing and embracing the future, the plan for the future.

Just as often, people also say without the discomfort of fear they would feel lighter. More light. I like that: the idea that without fear, or with fear accepted and held but not in itself feared, we can become lighter, more like the light. How fine is that? To be able to go forward on our journey with our new invented future but with less weight, more illumination.

I challenge you to do the same. In a truly frightening world in which the changes portend an even more disturbing future, what would it be like for you to see it without fear or without the fear of feeling fearful?

If you are successful at envisioning this, what do you imagine would be the primary benefit of seeing your future in this way? What fears do you imagine you will still need? How will they serve you and how will you balance the discomfort they cause so that they do not stop your forward motion or keep you looking backward as you move into your potential for a more illuminated future?

2010-03-14T15:24:00.003-04:00

A Family Systems Approach to Managing Workplace Dynamics

by Bob Vance BPh LBSW CPC

Business owners and employees in almost any size of company can be heard saying that their workplace is “like a family”. I’d like to take a closer look at what that means.

As a coach who has worked primarily in life, couples and family coaching I understand that being “like a family” can have any number of meanings and associations for any number of people. So when I hear someone say their workplace is like a family, I am unlikely to assume that it means that the company runs like a well-tuned conflict free clock in which every employee always acts as highly functioning, trusting and trusted gear in the machine of the company’s main purpose, productivity.

The fact is I have never met two families that are the same. Families, like people, are highly individuated. Each is its own organism. Each invents and generates its own culture. This is the family’s strength and also its weakness. The same can be said of work groups, whether those in a workplace recognize the workings of its inter relationships and communication dynamics as “like a family” or not.

The fact is that all people are informed, indoctrinated really, from the earliest ages, about how to function in a group by the position they took and the nature of their experience in their own family. These lessons are often unconsciously employed in every group setting the person finds themselves in. For good or ill.

Perhaps we can step outside of this premise for a bit for a look at how this plays out in your life. To do this, I would like to ask several questions to illustrate it.

1. When was the first time you understood your family was different from others’? Can you describe a situation in which that difference was made very clear to you?

2. How would you describe how your family is different from others you have observed?

3. Does that difference impact how you behave in groups? At work?

4. If you said yes, how specifically does it impact your behavior at work?

5. If you said no, how have you managed to keep your family out of the way you function in groups and at work?

6. Do you work hard to stay “professional” in spite of your feelings at work? Are you always successful? When you are less than successful what usually has occurred? Do you think your family has anything to do with this?

Whatever your answers to these questions are, I think I can fairly anticipate that most people, even with a modest amount of self reflection, can make the connections between how they function in their workplace and how they function in their family. And it doesn’t really matter if you define your family experience as “good” or “dysfunctional”.

For one thing I’d like to toss out the word “dysfunctional” when referring to families and even to work groups. The fact is, in most cases, individuals and family-sized groups are never so much dysfunctional as they are functioning according to the situations they face and the resources they have to succeed, or merely survive, in those situations.

Even seriously maladaptive individual or group behavior often is adopted in order to get through a difficult situation or one in which the only tools are the wrong tools. But those seriously maladaptive systems of behavior are rare, and in a work place are generally self-limiting. The nature of larger economics and productivity standards do not generally allow for serious dysfunction to persist for long, at least in modern companies that are progressive in how they see and relate to their employees as opposed to older business models that employed a more despotic system of oversight and remuneration.

Still, this family dynamic in workplace communication and relationships can be troubling, even for, or perhaps most especially for, progressive managers and small business owner/managers who wish to promote and sustain an overall positive workplace atmosphere where employees can be productive, feel meaningfully useful, and be as autonomous as possible. How can these family-of-origin issues be managed in the workplace when even people who come from the same family “culture” often have difficulties communicating effectively and putting aside assumptions and grudges based in a family history that has become ingrained and seemingly impossible to set aside.

As a well-meaning and empathic, effective, manager, how does one facilitate effective, open and positive problem-solving at a meeting where not only one family system is present, but the number of families present equals the number of people who are sitting around the table?

If, as a manager or owner of a small business you have ever felt like you’ve found yourself in charge of a United Nations meeting in which you’ve forgotten to hire translators, this is the reason why: each family DOES represent a different culture, even a different language of sorts.

So take deep breath. No one wants to make you a family coach or therapist in order to effectively manage the group dynamics in your company. No one is perfect, not even you or your company. You can’t expect to be able to solve and or mitigate all the communication-based ills in your work group or company. You lead, you don’t father or mother…. in spite of the fact that leading often borrows from fathering and mothering.

In fact, being the leader, and all that the role involves and how it is a part of the nature of the group your are leading, automatically takes you out of the running as the person most likely to succeed in facilitating a process of self-awareness and change in the way the systems of your workplace communication work and don’t work.

Just as a husband or wife, or a mother or father, would not likely be the best choice to observe, interpret, and facilitate a process of change in a family… would not ultimately be successful as a coach, counselor or therapist for their own family… it is unlikely that without some outside assistance changes in workplace communications and relationship dynamics are not likely to be successful with the boss in the role of facilitator, for reasons that I think are obvious.

Besides, if we take as truth the idea that being aware of the systemic nature of the problem is halfway to its solution, we must also place the lion’s share of the responsibility for any change that is needed on every cog and gear in the machine of the workplace. Every employee must become familiar with how bringing their family to the table effects their contribution before any change can be attempted. Ultimately this familiarity with the manner that one communicates and how it interfaces with the communications systems of others is the responsibility of each employee.

A leader, supervisor or owner can only require that those in his or her employ do that work and give each employee the resources to use to pursue that goal. So while you, as the leader, are embarking on the task of self-reflection and revising how you function in your role, so can your employees be involved in the same pursuit, facilitated by a hired coach or consultant you trust.

There is generally, and for good reasons, some trepidation about entering into this kind of process in a company that may have problematic communication and relationship dynamics but functions in the “good enough” category in these areas. Sure, excellent employees might inexplicably leave or have a “blow up” quite regularly, or potentially serious mistakes due to poor communication might routinely, and thankfully, be circumvented at the last minute, but your efforts up to now have not yielded much change, often seem to make small incremental motion forward only to fall back into old patterns, so you have settled into accepting what seems to be inevitable.

But is it?

Some might ask “Are we to be in the business of family therapy in the workplace?” and to them I might offer reassurance by saying that therapy is the last thing that should happen, and if it starts to look like that after a coach or consultant has been hired to help improve communication and relationship dynamics, it might be best to bow out as quickly as possible.

The idea we are pursuing here is to put each person in your, including you as the leader, in charge of their own self reflection and change, to share personal information only when it is relevant and helps the process and not outside of the parameters of appropriate personal revelation set early and restated often during the process. This is not about making everyone happy with their family, but about helping you and your employees identify and manage how their family dynamics prevent and/or help them travel toward excellence in the workplace. This is about making the road to excellence in quality and productivity as free of communication and professional relationship potholes and detours, or unexpected washouts and traffic jams, as possible.

Guest Contribution: How Much Giving Is Enough?

2010-03-02T20:13:00.004-05:00

The following is a contribution from Vision Powered Coaching at

http://irisarensonfuller.wordpress.com/

I think it beautifully addresses the feelings of being overwhelmed by feelings of not being able to do enough, and/or survivor's guilt, in the face of global tragedies. I thank Vision Powered Coaching's creator, Iris Arenson-Fuller

Should You Always Do More, Or Is Less Sometimes Enough?

I just read a good blog post by Alex Lickerman on the blog, Happiness In This World-Reflections of a Buddhist Physician . The title of the post is “You Can Always Do More”. I want to thank him for this article . I, too, thought about going to Haiti to help in some way and had significant feelings of guilt about not going. I am in contact with a few of my friends and colleagues in the world of adoption who have relationships with Haitian orphanages. They sent representatives there to check and to make sure that children who had already been referred to their clients and were in process of adoption were all right, as well as to determine what else they could do to assist. I have not worked in Haiti, personally, but have had some contact with Haitians over the years. At one point, years ago, a Haitian family, sponsored and brought here by a dear friend of mine, lived with me and my family for a period of time while in transition and looking for an apartment. I remember well the commonalities the mother of the family and I shared, in spite of being able to communicate only with some French and lots of sign language. We spoke the language of women and mothers and we developed a real bond. Of course, one would not have to have experienced such a connection to be overwhelmed and moved by the plight of Haitians now, as though life in Haiti were not already enough of a struggle for most.

When it came down to brass tacks, I realized that I do not have the stamina at this stage of my life to face the arduous and dangerous conditions in such a time of devastation in Haiti. It was hard for me to admit this, as I prefer to think of myself as still young, strong and energetic, but the reality is that I am in my sixties and though relatively healthy and thankful for it, I do have some health issues that might impede my stamina and ability to help.

Yes there is always something in this world that we can do help others and to have an impact on lives less fortunate than our own. I certainly related to the feelings of guilt mentioned in Dr. Lickerman’s blog, and to wanting to do all that we can in the face of human need. I love the perspective he gives that if we are helping in one place, we are, thererfore not helping somewhere else, with something else. I know that for many years I spread myself too thinly and often, as a result, could not always do my best job. There are a multitude of ways to help and it begins with one to one, compassionate contact and reaching out. Some of us are able to take that further and do magnificent, selfless things, but that doesn’t diminish the small meaningful interactions or the other ways in which we can make a positive impact on others.

While I have been involved over the years in a variety of charitable works in different countries and in the US, one encounter touched me enormously, though it was only a small intersection of lives and emotions that occurred once, a long time ago in India. I had participated in setting up a feeding program for needy children and a program to teach poor young women a trade, and had visited numerous orphanages too, distributing clothes and supplies. This was moving and rewarding, but nothing like what I felt one particular day when visiting a maternity home. I was escorted to the bedside of a young Muslim woman who had just had a stillborn baby a day before. The translator shared her story with me and told her who I was and why I was there. It was explained that I ran an adoption agency and helped homeless children find loving families, and that I had adopted children myself. I told her how much I loved my children and how I thought of the birth mothers of my children every day, and of what it must feel like to lose a child, no matter in what way. I said that as a mother, my heart was very heavy for her and for what she was having to endure. She began to cry and reached for my hand. I sat with her, mostly in silence, and held her hand for a long time.

Sometimes I sit in my comfortable office and wonder if my furture destiny will still include the privilege of traveling as I was able to do in the past and giving of myself to people who struggle for the basics of survival. I don’t know if this path will be one that presents itself to me, or if I will be physically and financially able to take it if it does. As my days of running an adoption agency draw to a close, and I continue to build my coaching practice, I have many examples of the ways in which I have already touched others and will continue to make a difference in people’s lives. Still the thoughts creep in sometimes that I am needed elsewhere and perhaps am not doing enough to better the world.

Dr. Alex Lickerman, physician and former Director of Primary Care at the University of Chicago and a practicing Buddhist, says:

“ But I am arguing that if we already focus on helping others as best we can (and obviously many of us don’t) then we need to realize our cups will never be entirely full—that we really always can do more—but that giving too much will at some point compromise our ability to give at all. I’m saying that as you challenge yourself to do more to help others, be gentle with and forgiving of yourself. The cup may never be full, but for those who take action to help others when they can, it’s always filled with something.”

I remind myself of what I am always telling coaching clients and others in my life. I don’t remember where I got this but I have liked it for a long time.

“If your own bucket has holes, then the sand will run out and you won’t have any left for anybody else.” Not all of us are in positions to be able to travel to Haiti or to put ourselves on the front lines where other humans are suffering and in dire need. We must indeed be as gentle and forgiving with ourselves as we are with others and must take care of ourselves and of others close to us first. As warm-hearted and altruistic as we may be, if we neglect ourselves and the significant people in our lives, then we are not living and loving to our greatest capacity. Each of us is presented with a multitude of opportunities to reach out and touch another human life.

Each of us has unique talents and ways of being able to do that. There are times when the universe presents itself to us and enables us to do really important and large things and other times when a small gesture that we make is appreciated and perhaps can even be life changing. Who is to say that what you do is “not enough”? Your objective is to keep on being a giving, loving person for as long as possible, or at least mine is.

Five Questions to Ask Before You Start Your Journal

2010-02-08T21:05:00.011-05:00

A client asked me about starting and keeping a journal to help manage and possibly come to terms with and/or control pain. The client wondered if I had an opinion about how a journal might work and if I thought it would be a worthwhile endeavor. In true coach form I answered that question with a set of my own. Aren't we coaches frustrating?

But really, my job as a coach is to facilitate, not lead... to help my clients lead themselves inside their own sets of norms and values. While I have some pretty strong and dependable values of my own, as well as opinions, it is completely outside of my job as a coach to allow those opinions to be overly influential in how I facilitate each clients' journey with me.

I like to see that facilitation as shining a light on processes that are often already in place, but may be hidden, may be tangled in the thorny briers of the stuff of life that can keep clarity of direction hidden; perhaps to help a client see what exactly needs to be built next, or that the travel along the path is already being undertaken. In clearing away the brambles it can be taken with more purpose and more direction.

That is: my questions are meant to pull that organic and even necessary curtain of diversions and defenses back a bit so the path, a path, can be more clearly detected or plotted.

What is most interesting about this process, to me, is that the task for me is to facilitate an uncovering of innate emotional and intellectual self knowledge that is already there.

So I depend completely on my clients' willingness and ability to allow me to see it, to trust me enough to open a spontaneous and even random exchange that will allow me to shine the light in. They open the doors and the windows to some of their hidden but reverberating rooms so that I can shine a light in. And, as I hold the light, of the two of us, they have the most freedom and vision to see what the light illuminates.

As far as journal writing is concerned: I am serious about the following questions and about the kinds of preparatory work that can and perhaps should be done prior to engaging any kind of self-initiated exploratory therapeutic activity. It would be foolish for me, or any coach, counselor or therapist, to believe that he or she owned the secret cure to the quandaries and life dilemmas a client brings to them. The "solution", remedy or resolution of complex and integrated life change lies primarily in the client themselves.

Apparently there is research that proves that this is true, and though I don't have the name of the particular study/s at my finger tips, it was revealed through the research that up to eighty percent of the success of a session depends upon what the client brings to the table. Even those, like myself, who have been proud to believe that the relationship between a provider and a client is the magic that provides the impetus toward a "cure" or recovery must admit that without the client's willingness to enter into the relationship there is no chance for moving forward, no change.

So, inevitably my advice is to be open to methods and activities proposed to you by your helper, your coach or counselor, but do not be afraid to scrutinize... or to say no... to methods and proposed exercises and plans that do not feel right to you. Feel free to give them a trial run and then reject them, revise them, or run with them if they work for you... or if they just feel good, are FUN, even if you are not sure what the benefit is right away.

One good thing I'll have to say about journaling is that it can be useful for no other purpose than to provide a record of one's progression of thoughts about and around a certain issue. In my work with grief and loss it has been particularly helpful for some people to look back in time through their journals and see that progress, though slow and inconsistent, was being made. They could say: "well... I feel really bad today, but I haven't felt that bad in a while and six months ago I felt that bad EVERY day."

While the following are questions to ask prior to starting a journal about pain, I think they can be easily converted to apply to any subject or quandary. In fact, one might consider these questions, and the writing one might do in response to them, as the way to start the journal!

1) What is it you are hoping a journal might accomplish on the way toward "breaking free"? Or.... what does "breaking free" mean to you and what would it be like if you were able to do that, journal or no journal?

2) How would you know if it were working? How long would it take for you to know?

3) How would you know if wasn't working? How long would it take for you to know?

4) What form of journal do you think would be most helpful in tackling this problem... that is, do you think having a specific format for your entries would be better or having a free form approach?

5) Would you benefit from keeping a journal whatever the outcome? Would giving it a trial period be a way to see if it works, and again, how long would you give it until you could tell if there was benefit?

If you have any further questions about starting a journal feel free to contact me through the comments section on this blog or scroll down to the bottom of the blog and use the contact information there. The same goes if you would like to start a blog but feel you could use a more formalized structure for it. I think I might be able to help.

J.D. Salinger and Adolescence, Censorship and Fame

2010-01-30T10:11:00.017-05:00

The following was originally a comment made to someone on an internet news site who disparaged the talents and influence of J.D. Salinger. This past week Mr. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye, died.

Beyond the point of defending a writer who was influential to my years of rebellion and transition to adulthood, it seems important to say that, in order to manage their trip through the potentially dangerous terrain of adolescence, children require vantage points of reflection that represent their experience in a way that is honest, nonjudgmental, and non-condescending. They need to see themselves in the world to enter it confidently and constructively.

The periodic collective ire that J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye produces among those who wish to narrow the range of what our children can see and recognize about themselves as they grow into adulthood has always dismayed me, even though I understand it as inevitable in a world of adults whose own adolescences have often been restricted and narrowed by well-meaning but ultimately counter-productive social forces that create even more dangerous trends and collective actions than they hoped to prevent through censorship.

Regardless of whether you think Salinger's work is the product of genius or not, its worth perhaps can be measured by the very resistance that it produced in those whose ideas about adolescence is stunted and unrealistic.

And one more thing: Salinger spent much of his life resisting the trappings and recognition of fame and celebrity. All kinds of assumptions are made about this without his input. That in itself makes me doubt the veracity of those assumptions and put them down to the worst kind of rumor mongering and envy.

In my work I have met and been privy to the secrets and pain, as well as the joys and great accomplishments, of people from a wide, wide range of socio-economic backgrounds, family systems and levels of community recognition and fame. Beyond some very basic creature comfort issues that poverty creates, I have yet to meet anyone whose wealth and/or fame has had any real impact on the nature or the feelings of satisfaction and meaningfulness of their lives. Often great wealth and fame becomes a hindrance to people looking for connection and meaning in the world.

Salinger's characters, particularly in his post Catcher in the Rye writing, wrestled openly and deeply with these very issues... and for the most part they came to a very personal and workable set of standards for themselves in relationship to recognition and privacy. It is interesting that many of us automatically assume that those who actively reject the trappings of fame and recognition are automatically relegated to the slag heap of the irredeemably neurotic and/or misanthropic. As if the culture that worships and reveres the rare and often jaded lives of those whose every move is spied upon and extrapolated into absurdity has been able to set healthy standards related to who, how and why and when people should be lifted into celebrity and that those who reject those standards, even after watching someone like Michael Jackson be turned into a side-show freak, are somehow unstable and lack a healthy sense of self.

I beg to differ, and differ strongly: the strength and resolve and sense of inner cohesion that it takes to reject the superficial and ultimately narcissistic, seductive, pull of celebrity must be immense and in some ways spiritually transcendent. That Salinger, if we are to listen to and believe his children, was in some ways still a victim of a routine range of human foibles and quirks (and believe me, it doesn't take the absence or presence of fame and wealth to make people chock full of foibles and quirks) only makes him more like us, more a part of the irascible and infinitely individuated miracle of what is human, and how we are connected to the collective mind of what is called the divine.

***

Developmentally it is the job of adolescents to rebel. Their ability to differentiate themselves from their parents and elders is hugely integrated into how they are able to integrate the necessary individuation into their concurrent socialization as they enter adulthood... a process that generally takes until they have an adult brain at about age 25. As adults it is our job to guide them through this. To think we can protect them by censoring the literature about rebellion, a natural and normal developmental stage or at least an indicator of that stage, is about as effective as an abstinence only program to help them figure out what to do with the new and undeniable sexual urges they are subject to and that their brain development dictates cannot be ignored. In fact, that new sexuality is an inseparable part of that development and the rebellion it entails.

Anyway, for me Catcher in the Rye is the least important writing he did.

You might consider that censorship to an adolescent brain, informal from a parental angle or formal, is like trying to help them lose weight by eating cheesecake in front of them and telling them they can't have any.

As parents we probably will make choices all along, as we should, about what we are willing to let into our children's sphere of influence, but we should be careful about being too rigid about going forward in our efforts to shape their exposures by understanding that our "nos" can automatically increase the status and allure of what we are saying no about. Instead we might focus on being with them compassionately as they navigate this part of their lives, cultivating a relationship of trust so that we can know what they are choosing to read and see; help them integrate it into a healthy rebellion as opposed to one made more dangerous because it has to be done in secrecy and deceit, attributes that come quite naturally to the adolescent brain if attempts are made to squelch instead of guide the rebellion they must do.

This may, in fact, be a theme in Catcher in the Rye... it certainly is in Franny and Zooey although from an opposite angle... Franny and her world being something of an opposite perspective from Holden Caulfield’s in the processes of rebellion and the outcomes. Franny internalizes rebellion more and Holden externalizes. Franny's parents and family facilitate it in their own endearing if in some eyes “neurotic” way, while Holden's become more punitive.

And if it's the historical, potentially dated, aspect of the writing that puts you off, in that it seems to you to encourage rebellion without the kinds of consequences that the modern world seems to levy, I would think that kids would be even more gratified and relieved to know that these issues are universal and timeless to adolescents. It would be like dissing Oliver Twist and refusing to allow poor children and orphans to read it or refusing to read it to them because it is out of date. Why do you think shows like "Grease" and "By Bye Birdie" still get a significant amount of air time in high school drama and music departments (if they even HAVE music departments left)?

Real Ways to Go Into an Unsure Future

2010-01-08T10:52:00.011-05:00

Let’s face it, there’s a lot to be worried about…

“I have these moments
All steady and strong
I’m feeling so holy and humble
The next thing I know
I’m all worried and weak
And I feel myself
Starting to crumble….”

-- Dan Fogelberg

Let’s face it, these days there’s a lot to be worried about.

In fact, though I don’t have any figures to prove it, I would wager that among the only growth industries left in the country a few have some connection to increasing levels of dread and anxiety and loss. To pretend or behave otherwise may be tempting, but ultimately not helpful.

Certainly, in times like these, we can be attracted to and overwhelmed by those almost delusional, and most definitely absurd, claims that riches are ours if only we maintain what is a bizarrely packaged and described “positive attitude”: consult our crystals and our new “positivity” gurus, and invite affluence in. No wonder ads and claims for such things are growing like weeds.

While maintaining a level of positive regard for what we are capable of is not to be sneered at, there is a level of the unrealistic that is seductive but ultimately disappointing and even addicting in these claims that flood the media waves and those opportunistic self help info-mercials during rough times. Still, with or without them, we must push forward… we must persevere.

Still, we must go into our futures with our sense of meaning and purpose intact, in spite of losses that, for many people, increase daily and are measured in sometimes extreme and heartbreaking ways. No amount of ungrounded positive thinking will change this.

Nor perhaps should we try to force a positive spin on happenings that range from loss of income and home to the tragedy of the event of chronic illness or the death of close loved ones. Even the constant barrage of negative news about our government servants that seems to place them in a range from inept to purposefully malfeasant adds to the ingredients in a recipe for a sour soup that we have little choice but to eat. It is fed to us daily and may often directly relate to our own very personal losses.

So how do we go forward? How do we keep our sense of self from faltering into unrelenting despair and clinical depression? How do we count our blessings when they are being smothered or stolen? What is the recipe for keeping our heads above water, appreciating the shrinking part of the happiness pie that is ours, and refraining from passing on an intolerable level of gloom to those who are close to us and who are passing through their own dark times? How do we create and maintain a small light in this tunnel of dark?

I’d like to propose a few ways that might help.

These are not the tricky self-spin invitations into the inane world of cheap public relations sloganeering that so often infects self-help discourse. These admit and hopefully guide one through the grief of bad times, while using that grief to start to build a new structure of meaning. Because, often, what we have lost will truly never be regained; because often we must work hard and traverse an empty cold field after a series of losses before we even start to recognize and appreciate the way life presents us with reasons to go on: a deeper meaning, even love, to rely upon… a realization that what helps us persevere is always with us and will not forsake us even in the worst of times.

In fact, I’d propose that if what we have placed great meaning and purpose in has abandoned us, it may serve us better to come to a more workable, deeper understanding about what it is made of; it may serve us better to recreate it rather than try to force it, leaks and all, across the deep rough water of the difficult periods in our lives.

1) When you are scared of the future due to things beyond your control do a quick life review.
a. What has helped in past difficult periods of time?
b. How does this rough time measure up to those past times?
c. What deeper, even spiritual, wisdom did you gain?
d. How much can you trust yourself based on your past?

2) Can you actively devise a method to help yourself refrain from judging your pain and just focus on feeling it without the multiplying effect of guilt or shame?

3) What have you enjoyed in the past day or week that has delivered you for a time outside your grief? Can you duplicate it? If not, can you look forward or cultivate openness to another time in which something similar might occur?

4) What jobs do you absolutely have to do today that relate directly to the source of the loss? Can you schedule a time for that work and stick to that schedule?

5) Assuming there are a number of ways to cry (some sob, some do not shed tears but feel it in their bodies, some need space to shout and be angry) do you think you’ve been able to do enough of it to help heal?

6) How much time do you need to make for people?
a. How much aloneness helps?
b. How much aloneness reinforces your feelings of isolation?
c. Who can be trusted and relied on?
d. Who has proven to be a fair-weather friend?
e. Who makes you laugh?

7) What activities are soothing without turning into damaging crutches or addictions? If you have a history of addictions, how can you get support for and maintain your current level of recovery?

8) What spiritual practices (and I interpret the term “spiritual practices” very very broadly) feel empty or lack connection to your current predicament? Are you willing to let them go at least for a time? Which spiritual practices, new or old, assist in the deep tasks of inner reconciliation and healing? Are there people or places that facilitate or encourage those spiritual practices? When and how often do you plan to share time with those people in those places doing those things?

9) Can you devise a simple, quick way to keep track of and measure your progress through your difficult time? Marking a calendar on a day to day basis with a simple three level measurement system (G=good, M=medium, B=Bad) or keeping a journal of short entries specifically about your progress can be a help as time goes on.

10) Assuming that you have always been able to traverse bad times in your life without the professional assistance of a coach, counselor or therapist, when would you know that you might benefit from such an intervention? And if you have benefitted from such professional help in the past, when do you think you would seek it out again?

Many of these ways are not pat activities or answers that claim to solve or fix a part of life that is difficult, sad and seems not to have easy solutions. I propose that is largely because, sometimes, life is not fixable or solvable in that way. To pretend otherwise is dishonest and can multiply the nature and difficulties inherent in these dark times. We are often simply unable to see far enough into our futures to know what will happen, nor are we blessed with any magic keys that unlock the problems inherent in a life that is inextricably attached to other lives, other circumstances and streams of events that we truly have no control over.

Sometimes the challenge is just to ride the terrible roller coaster as best as we can.

I am more than willing to arrange for exploratory coaching sessions to discuss these things further. We can start with a conversation that my list above has brought to the forefront and then decide if more sessions would be helpful. Look elsewhere on this blog for contact information or send me a message via the comments to get in touch.

Guest Contribution for the New Year: Franklin Abbott

2010-01-03T18:02:00.006-05:00

Franklin Abbott is a psychotherapist and poet who lives in Stone Mountain Georgia. We have been friends for over twenty years. We first met during a Men and Masculinity conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The conferences were a series of well attended gatherings for connection, education and transformation of men and interested women. They were sponsored by an organization of pro-feminist men who were working hard to come to new concepts and actualizations of what being a man could mean and be. The organization was good at everything but finding a name for itself and it changed it's name too many times for me to keep up. Franklin and I were both poets. It was an organization that, in those years, valued poetry and gave us substantial audience for our work. I think this is a beautiful way to welcome in the New Year without unrealistic hyperbole about resolution, but one that does not side-step hope and the power of self actualized personal growth. --- B. Vance

nanakorobiyaoki

That's the way life is --
Falling over seven times
Getting up eight
-- Japanese kotowaza/folk poem

It was a normal day in Fall. I was sweeping the walkway behind my house while my friend Martha Ham was getting her luggage ready for the ride to the airport. Maybe it was my new shoes, maybe the leaves had stayed too long on the plank I was sweeping but my feet went out from under me and I fell sideways on my left hip and landed with a dull thud. No one except the birds and the squirrels saw me. I picked myself up, dusted myself off and continued sweeping.

I know how to fall. I can't remember where I learned or who taught me. Maybe some forgotten P.E. teacher in a long ago gym class first explained it was better to fall without struggle. This has come in handy since I lack normal coordination and depth perception.

I tend to move slowly and deliberately to avoid hurting myself and so far, knock on wood, I haven't broken anything. Another Japanese proverb states: Even monkeys fall out of trees. When I was a little monkey, seven or so, I did fall out of a tree. I had a puncture wound in my left thigh that required stitches. I can still remember what it looked like to be sewn up though I can't remember the doctor. I remember after the fall my little brother pulled me home in a wagon. The only "ambulance" (knock on wood twice) that I've ever ridden in.

I remember reading The Fall by Albert Camus in college. I should probably re-read it given how unlikely it is that my 19 year old mind grasped much of what the French existentialist was talking about. I know it had something to do with the fall from grace, somehow connected to the Bible story of the Evil One tempting Eve to tempt Adam in the Garden of Eden. I remember a Sunday school argument over whether she used an apple or a fig. I knew from the mild form of Christianity I was brought up in that the fall resulted in original sin and that I was by dint of birth, a sinner. I was thinking of none of this when my hip hit the ground. I was soon driving Martha and myself to lunch and then her to the airport. I wasn't sore and when I checked later I wasn't bruised.

It took several days for what happened to manifest in odd ways. I was going to the Gay Spirit Visions Conference in the mountains of western North Carolina where I would be a featured speaker. I was going with friends Roger Bailey and Cal Gough and I asked Roger to drive as I was feeling shaky. The conference was celebrating its 20th anniversary and I had keynoted at the first conference so I was brought back as a piece of living history. I had prepped for the presentation with Bob Strain and we would mix music, poetry and reminiscence in our morning with the gay spirit brothers. Despite a wonderful massage, my hands were still shaking, my balance was off, my brain was a little foggy and I felt like a Coca Cola with no bubbles. I adjusted my presentation buoyed by Bob and the delicious energy of the hundred plus men who gathered with us. As the conference progressed so did my shakiness making feeding myself an awkward chore in the cafeteria. Back home I had a terrific Thai massage by a man I met at the conference and after an afternoon at the office gave a reading for my new book, Pink Zinnia, at Outwrite. I know I appeared nervous as my hands were shaking. Like at the conference I could hardly sign my name. The next day I was better and the day after that

I went to the kung fu chiropractor at my gym. Though petite, she is a take no prisoners manipulator and one chop to my left hip and I heard an amazing pop as my pelvis relocated. Within twenty four hours I was fine, balanced, coherent and I could write legibly!

The nanakorobiyaoki (fall down seven times, get up eight) proverb has been pinned to the wall by the door going down a flight of stairs into my garage for a number of years. It has taken on new meaning. I know there will be a time to fall and not get up. That happened to several of my friends who died this year, one a little younger, four not too much older. Part of the price of surviving is to pay tribute to the fallen. I learned this lesson young back in the bleak years of the AIDS epidemic when I couldn't count the number of friends and colleagues lost to the virus. 2010 will bring more losses. Mortality, mine and that of all living things, is inevitable. I don't have any sway over that variable. What surprises me is that at 59, I can still lose innocence.

Like everyone I know I was and am impacted by the loss of physical and financial security brought home by the events of the last decade. As cynical as I can be at times I am still mourning the loss of the American dream. As hopeful as I feel about the change of administrations and the election of our first African American president, I have lost something that I can't get back, a naive belief in inevitable progress. Things will not always get better and better. I did not believe that with my intellect but it was deep inside me.

My Venezuelan friend Alejandro invented a word: believance, a cross between belief and observance. I had a believance in the American dream that was as strong as my believance in original sin.

So, a new year is here and a new decade to boot. I have lots to be thankful for including, thanks to my fall, the ease with which my fingers are now moving over the keyboard.

I am loathe to make resolutions for the New Year. One of the gifts of getting older is making peace with who you are. I will not learn a foreign language, a musical instrument, run a marathon or organize my files in the year to come. My mentor and friend the poet James Broughton would often say that the two things we need more of are praise and gratitude.

Praise be it for All Creation or the waiter who brings my food is something I will endeavor to give more of. And gratitude, well that brings tears to my eyes, despite all that I have lost and we have lost, I am grateful for such good company on the journey as I have.

And I am grateful - nanakorobiyaoki - having fallen down seven times to have gotten up eight.

Franklin Abbott
3 January 2010
Stone Mountain

I am happy to supply references for the talented folks who helped me heal from my fall:
Tom Clephane, Bill Hufschmidt, and Dr.Marina Harris.
An interesting website on Japanese proverbs is www.stockkanji.com .
For more information on Gay Spirit Visions: www.gayspiritvisions.org .
For more information on Outwrite (and to order Pink Zinnia): www.outwritebooks.com

Surviving Solstice Period Holidays: A List That Refuses to Pretend

2009-12-21T22:03:00.004-05:00

I don’t pretend this is what anyone wants more of: yet another list in the exponentially growing blob of lists of pretend wisdom that promise to make your solstice period holiday easier, wealthier, cheaper, more fun, healthier, less stressful, less devoid of central religious figures and beliefs.

I do invite you to consider, however, whatever it is you really might want from this time of the year, no matter how invested you might or might not be in any of its more mundanely celebratory or religiously-based streams of events and customs. No matter how much you hate them or love them.

Let’s face it. We’re stuck with a plethora of feelings about the season whether we like it or not. Let’s stop pretending we can escape it or make it something it’s not or cannot be.

Let’s stop pretending we can get away from the constant dome of bad music in every public place we walk into, or that we can quit trying to find the one version of that one song we haven’t heard yet that makes us cry because mom or dad liked it and they are gone now.

This is a list about not pretending.

It is a list that does not pretend that buying or giving material gifts is wholly satisfying when what one wants, in a more and more fractured and anti-intimate world, are more opportunities to be intimate… to know more love.

Nor does this list imagine that somehow our list of gatherings of friends and family will be without dread, without pain, without too-small portions of unmitigated and unqualified joy and love the way it is portrayed by every blessed advertisement for everything from electric shavers to the hoards of plastic doodads and hoozits that come parading across our consciousness every time we open a magazine, a book, newspaper, email or internet site.

This list imagines that life goes on and that, during the holidays, there are opportunities to make it more livable, more understood and understanding, more truly connecting and more accepting of what cannot be connected, understood or livable.

So are you ready? No? Well, give it try anyway. Something might work… even a little. And if it does, I’d sure like to know!

1. Say no to events and people that drain you and have drained you every year for the past three years or more. Do this especially in regard to family gatherings you dread and have always dreaded. Can you afford to sacrifice yours and perhaps your significant others’ holiday by trying yet another time to make your Uncle-in-law into something other than a fat Nazi drunk? Say you have other plans, and then don’t waste time feeling guilty. Try the next thing on the list.

2. Schedule one-to-one face or phone time with someone who nourishes you. At the end of the initial time together, schedule the next time. Don’t leave it at “We’ll get together soon” Mark it on your calendar. A variation on this would be to make a face or phone time “date” with someone whom you’ve only ever communicated with via the internet. Try it, hetero, bi-, or homo, with a same sex friend, or, as a couple, try it with another couple.

3. Charmingly corner someone you think you might like at a holiday function. Ask them an open-ended question that demands more than a yes or no answer.

4. At a party tell the truth about a complicated way you feel about something to someone you inherently trust and do not know well but would like to know better; someone you haven’t connected with in a long time, or have had a long past misunderstanding that has never cleared. In the last case purposely avoid making a statement about that misunderstanding. Make an opportunity for meaningful conversation first.

5. Make an agreement with yourself to quickly end your part of any conversation that revolves around “dissing” someone who isn’t there. Change the conversation to one about the moon last night. If that doesn’t work, walk away complaining of urinary urgency.

6. Make a list of open-ended questions (see #3) that have the potential to start in-depth and rich conversations. Take the list with you to gatherings that you aren’t sure you will enjoy. Review the list in the bathroom in-between mingling. Practice them before you use them and don’t expect success every time. Remember, people are hungry for this kind of talk… and don’t worry about excluding politics or religion. You’ll find out soon enough what isn’t acceptable, or you might make a joyous connection with others who agree with you and each other more than disagree.

7. Make time for great, memorable sex with someone you love.

8. If you end up at some gathering of people and it is turning out as badly as it has every other year, try responding in a way you have never responded before. Be silly and loud. Laugh loudly and run from the room, taking someone with you and then look out a window and call everyone’s attention to the stars, or the snow. Stage a fake fight with someone you came with who is also having a bad time. Say: “I told you to use the rubber", loudly but not too loud… then "now look at the trouble we’re in” as you walk angrily from the room. Try anything… including going upstairs and visiting with the children who aren’t really asleep. They’ll love it.

9. Make your grief and sorrow over the deaths and/or absences of lovers, family members, beloved friends, spouses or parents a part of how you observe your holiday. It does no good to repress such things. And feeling badly about feeling badly becomes an exercise for sleeplessness, a bad drunk, or panic attacks. Find ways to give yourself and others time to remember. Feel good about tears even when it hurts… and it mostly does. It matters not how long ago the loss was. I always suggest a place in amongst the decorations with remembrance candles and/or pictures of loved ones lovingly and frequently tended to. Regularly start conversations with others who knew the person who is gone.

10. Don’t expect that bad family/friend relations can be mended or made better by doing the same things that have always been done. If you want to reconcile, you must invent new places and ways to attempt this. Start a conversation, not a solution. Be ready to forgive yourself and let go of the way you have been hurt so it does not continue to hurt you.

A Poem For Knowing Place and Gratitude

2009-11-28T11:10:00.002-05:00

Waking to Birdsong

Wild in the first light, catchments
of dreams, choruses
of the dawn star

cast out of the darkness
flails the new near shadows
where even the moon

has failed to crease the trees.
Cedars, river, beech,
old hemlock, stumps from beavers,

birdsong all
a chorus from the spinning
uterus of our stars. Galaxy,

whole mountains
of little winged things flying
that bring us day.

Awake
the paths between the tops
of trees. Awake

the calliope
in the near new sky. Awake
the grass by the golden rivers

where beavers
and the other nocturnal workers
hear those bells of slumber

and the rest of the blue-eyed
brown-eyed,
furless and furry world comes to. Waking

to birdsong all hallelujah
to the sun.
We arrive in another circle

another twist
in the molten membrane
of these beds of stars, oh

these little winged harbingers
of going on.
Even suicidals rise

and for just a few moments
are busted into
by joy.

The paymasters of the cheats
of the kings
close their eyes

on their ledgers of blood
and remember the children
they must have been,

once. The blasted kingpins
of the ugliest secrets and torture
cannot out sing these cherubs

of dawn. My dreams
as elevated as they have been
cannot compete

with this chorus.
I walk to the river.
They dip and rise and follow me

one after another over
the miracles of water. Darkness yes
will soon be shattered.

Gifted Child = Gifted Adult

2009-11-11T19:43:00.005-05:00

Gifted child pre-occupation = gifted adult occupation

by Christopher J. Coulson

(from the blog "The Gifted Way" http://www.thegiftedway.com/)

Who was I?

This is a recurring question for gifted adults because the intensity of our childhood experiencing has a direct bearing on our adult gifted success. It also offers valuable clues to understanding those things that don’t work so well for us.

In particular, the question: “What fascinated me when I was three years old?” seems of special significance. This is because the passionate preoccupations of three-year olds so often seem to form the foundation of success in a wide range of gifted adults.

The number of gifted and creative artists who recall their passion from their very early years is legion.

"I danced myself out of the womb.Is it strange to dance so soon?"Marc Bolan. "Cosmic Dancer".

At three or less, musicians pick up violins or start hammering on drums; dancers shake their booties; painters discover negative space without realizing there was ever anything else.

As an example, if you enter: “I started drawing when I was three.” as a single statement on Google you will get nearly 150,000 responses from illustrators, artists and so on. Substituting “playing piano” brings up 3,000. “Writing” only gives rise to 9, but includes one of my favorites: “I started writing when I was three years old, but it wasn’t until I was seven that I was first published.”

If you simply enter: “I started when I was three.” you’re greeted with nearly a million dancers, skiers, stamp-collectors, violinists, riders, soccer players etc. And these are only the people who feel compelled to commit their biographies to the Internet.
Pre-occupation to Occupation

Given that three is an age that has great significance for our future, how can we use the lessons to be learned from it?

Unconsciously building a gifted future.

Lucky the child whose obvious interests attracted parental support. S/he would all-unconsciously have started on the path to mastery and clarity.

But what about those of us whose creativity didn’t manifest through a musical instrument or box of crayons? We have to look harder to see where we come from.

The effort involved in this considered examination is highly worthwhile. Through it our uniqueness becomes apparent by revealing our own history and balance of preoccupations.

I hope you’ll take the time to uncover your own. As a process it can reinforce some affectionate self-recognition as well as open the doors to greater self-understanding.

As a guide to what I mean, here are some of my early qualities:

I was very clumsy at drawing.
I read a great deal.
I took every opportunity to go exploring on my own.
I built complex houses and towns from building blocks.
I focused a great deal of attention on my mother’s welfare, not least because we moved every six months or so, sometimes halfway round the globe.

How does that translate into today?

I still read a great deal. And, as reading is practice for writing, I write a great deal.
I’m very independent, an explorer in thought and in location.
I have always worked with complex systems demanding deconstruction, re-architecture and re-construction. This applies to my work in computing, in writing, and of course in the ongoing task of understanding and re-framing human nature.
My “taking care of mom” shows itself in dozens of ways, from a tendency to be over-solicitous in personal relationships to volunteering my time on committees. Many a professional or non-profit organization has reason to be grateful to my mother!
I’m still very clumsy at drawing.

Your mind is an iceberg

If your present life is more or less in accord with your three-year old preoccupations then you’re probably reasonably happy.

Out of sight but in the mind. What's concealed can slow you to a crawl.

However, if you’re finding it hard to follow through on your early enthusiasms, it could be due to your unconscious mind. Like the lower part of an iceberg, this is the hidden power that dominates your actions.

Brain research has made it clear that it is the unconscious, not the conscious, that rules our decision-making and thus our lives. (Check out Jonah Lehrer’s book: “How We Decide” for confirmation of this.)

Experts of all kinds have contributed their estimates as to when the development of our unconscious mind is ‘finished’. Such estimates typically fall in an age range between two and seven.

So where does that leave us?

Where does that leave us? Perhaps shockingly, it leaves us being managed by the assumptions and beliefs of – let’s average it – a five-year old. With our mind like an iceberg, our consciousness is the ten percent above water while the real weight and power lies massively beneath the surface.

This explains so much of what we find challenging. Our conscious mind says: “Let’s go to New York and look at some art,” but our unconscious wants to go surfing. With nine tenths of us pulling one way we are bound to end up in some compromise situation.

In this case, rather than New York it might be a trip to Malibu. There you can spend the days at

Surfrider Beach while taking side trips to the Getty Museum.

That kind of compromise might seem harmless enough but supposing your conscious mind is saying: “I need to save for a rainy day,” while your unconscious is saying: “There’s no point saving. Someone will just steal it from you.”?

The inevitable – yes, inevitable – consequence is that you will effect a compromise between these two positions. And it’s unlikely that it will meet all your conscious self’s need to save. So you will fret . . . and fret . . . and fret.

I want to correct any impression that I assume that the childhood unconscious tends to be irresponsible. It often isn’t. There are plenty of people who consciously think: “I ought to have more fun,” while their five-year old unconscious is nudging them to keep working “just in case.”

What to do about it

When our early preoccupations work for us, life is grand. But what happens when they don’t?

Gifted and creative individuals are highly sensitive. We feel conflict intensely and will take great steps to try to resolve it. The sense of going where we don’t want to – under the control of something hidden - is thus very painful and discouraging for us.

It’s never going to be easy, but the key to tolerating such apparent conflict and inability to achieve our objectives is first of all to make our five-year old selves real. Picture yourself back in that tiny body, mentally recreate a room in which you spent a lot of time, and allow these questions to pass across your mind:

Who were you then? How did you experience yourself?
Where were you? What events and family dynamics were determining your life?
Where did you go to be yourself and what would you do there?
What were the actions of your parents/caretakers showing you about their belief systems?
Did they all send the same message? Were you able to reconcile any conflicting messages and if so, how?

You can call for reinforcements when you know what you need to overcome.

The more clearly you are able to re-experience yourself at that time, the more understandable your current conflicts will become. And, much more importantly, the more you’ll be able to work with them rather against them.

This is because by revealing your most counter-productive beliefs to yourself you discover where your conscious will needs reinforcement.

You can use this information to help you find the appropriate assistance to tug you in your preferred direction. This assistance might come in the form of a person, a book, or some other form of external energy. You’ll recognize it when you need it.

And now . . .

I’d love to hear how your fascinations as a three-year old reveal themselves today. Just add your comments below and tell us your story.

Thanks.

Genius and Eccentricity

2009-11-01T22:29:00.001-05:00

Actually, I think the idea that genius automatically carries with it the price tag of eccentricity or a kind of insanity is over-stated and under-supported by what ever kinds of research could be done to prove it.

That we are more interested in the lives of geniuses may only mean that we tend to be attracted and entertained by the eccentricities of history’s most examined, scrutinized characters. We are less likely to be interested in more mundane lives of those others who are just as integral to the full spectrum of human inventiveness and genius.

We are also less likely to scrutinize in so personal a way individuals in the rest of the population that are not considered genius, and so really have no way of comparing which “sample” has a greater degree/proportion of insanity/eccentricity.

We are also attracted by the eccentric on one level because, I think, it reminds us of our selves, our community of friends and family, our relationships, our inner lives and our own potential participation and desire to participate in the genius of the species.

I work in the mental health field so I have some background in this. The fact that we tend to know more about the lives of those who are considered to possess genius may throw off any untested theory that there are a greater proportion of eccentrics and/or a greater degree of insanity among those who are considered genius than those who are not.

As my work involves a much, much larger proportion of people who are not considered genius than people who are (although I might petition that rather arbitrary application of the definition for a definition that recognizes that everyone has, at least, the potential for genius in their own lives and community and may apply it in their own way), and as I am privy to the deepest life quandaries and pathologies of these people, of which there are numerous and frequent examples, even among the many who look to be quite "normal" to those who are not privy to their inner, more private and secret, lives, I am skeptical about any claims that the proportion of eccentrics and/or level of insanity among those who possess genius are any higher or lower than among the general population.

Though I would be glad to change my own theory if someone could fashion and implement a far-reaching enough study, I am not sure how that could be done, if one considers the enormous barriers of subjectivity that all this naturally calls into play.

How would we measure genius? Certainly not by IQ alone. How would we measure eccentricity or insanity? Certainly the behaviors and intelligences of any one culture, historical time frame, or social milieu can only be defined along a continuum from harmfully insane or eccentric to mind-numbingly dull and normal if each is left to be defined within its own sets of relative norms and abnormalities.

What system could we devise to compare these various and potentially innumerable sets of norms? Would we say that Moses was crazy for hearing a burning bush speak in the voice of his god if we are willing, at the same time, to continue to put much weight into the commonly held idea that artists like VanGogh or Sylvia Plath were insane because they heard voices? What is our system of measurements and how do we determine a manner of implementation of a system of measure that is absent our own set of assumed norms?

It could be that it only appears that the "genius" segment of the human community has more than its share of eccentricity because we know more about them than even our own “normal” neighbors and, in addition, we are attracted to genius, love the stories of their struggles, loves, pathologies, failures and successes simply because they DO reflect our own lives, families and communities of loved ones so well. Their stories are ours.

Another reason we may like to focus on geniuses’ foibles has something to do with our own deep feelings that our lives lack the kind of meaning and import that the lives and accomplishments of geniuses have and we are, on some levels, envious. So we like to balance their accomplishments against our own by diminishing their lives against our own lives.

Oddly enough, if my own theory holds true, we would be better off seeing their lives as comparable to ours in that they have the same struggles, heartbreak and victories, on very personal levels, that any of the rest of us do. Then, perhaps, we would also be more able to recognize and catalyze our own potential for genius.

Anger Worksheet and Anger Log

2009-09-16T19:03:00.007-04:00

Anger is normal and a healthy response. It is the way we manage anger that becomes problematic.

Healthy shows and uses of anger are misunderstood, stigmatized and often vary by culture and family. Some displays and uses of anger are useful and lead to healing and motivation, others become repetitive patterns of avoidance or aggression, passive or otherwise.

Passion and variances in affect are often interpreted wrongly as anger, just as passive-aggressive or aggressive, harmful, anger displays are sometimes excused as normal or to-be-expected in certain groups and genders or are stereotyped as a part of some activities, sports or roles.

The following is a good anger worksheet and anger log that can help you understand your own anger and how to begin to modify how you use and display it. Thanks to Pine Rest Christian Hospital and The 10th Annual Michigan Substance Abuse Convention for some of this information.

Anger Worksheet

What things, persons or events, over which you have no control, do you keep trying to control?

What do you do to try and control this person/situation?

What is the consequence of your struggle to control the uncontrollable?

The one situation that frequently resulted in my becoming angry was:

List at least 3 factors or conditions that seem to influence your anger.

List 5 anger cues or signals. These are the warning signs that tell you, or others, that you are beginning to “lose it”.

What are the Physical Signs?
Clenched jaw, fists
Raising your voice
Sweating
Feeling hot
Rapid heartbeat
Rapid breathing
Pacing
Becoming quiet, withdrawing
Cravings

What Else?

Remember: Anger causes 178 chemical changes in the brain.
Adrenaline numbs the frontal lobe of the brain-the seat of our thinking capacities

***

Anger Log

Use to track individual anger display episodes.

What Happened?
Why did you get angry?
Rate anger on scale from 1 – 10
What body signals did you notice?
What thoughts did you have?
What were you feeling?
What were your actions?
What were your choices?
What, if anything, would you do different next time?

The Effectiveness of Phone Sessions: Testimonial From Client

2009-09-03T23:03:00.002-04:00

Not being able to meet with Bob in person, left us skeptical as to whether coaching would work for us. After our first phone session and a few awkward minutes, Bob was able to take control and put all our fears to rest. Bob has a unique ability to really listen. You don’t have to be sitting across from him to know that you have his complete attention. Equally important to us was his fairness and sincerity and respect. With Bob’s help, he dissolved a stressful and tense situation and shifted our focus back to each other. Bob never chose sides, he only led us to rediscover the things within ourselves to improve upon. We were so lucky to find such a compassionate and experienced professional. Anyone who has the pleasure of working with Bob will take his lessons and apply them throughout their lives. We thank you Bob for all that you have done for us.

Larry & Penny Everett

35 Inspirational Quotes

2009-08-18T22:29:00.002-04:00

“All the old bindings are broken. Cosmological centers now are any- and everywhere. The earth is a heavenly body, most beautiful of all, and all poetry now is archaic that fails to match the wonder of this view.”

Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By



“…it would be plain that this is what everybody wants, and everybody would regard it as the precise expression of the desire which he had long felt but had been unable to formulate, that he should melt into his beloved, and henceforth they would be one instead of two. The reason is that this was our primitive condition when we were wholes, and love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.”

Plato, The Symposium



“The smell of coffee had been like a spider web in the house. It had not been an easy smell. It had not lent itself to religious contemplation…”

Richard Brautigan, “Trout Fishing in America”



“But the reason Jefferson, throughout his long life, was carried away by such impracticabilities was that he knew, however dimly, that the Revolution, while it had given freedom to the people, had failed to provide a space where this freedom could be exercised. Only the representatives of the people, not the people themselves, had an opportunity to engage in those activities of “expressing, discussing and deciding” which in a positive sense are the activities of freedom.”

Hannah Arendt, On Revolution



“What of the future of rare native wildflowers?... …Birds are mobile; they can return easily to their niche. And some seeds have parachutes or are carried by birds. But what about the others? Can seeds remain viable in the soil for half a century or more, until succession renders their habitat suitable again? We know little about this.”

Roger Tory Peterson and Margaret McKenny, A Field Guide to Wildflowers



“But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of a wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers.”

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse



“Rather than speak of my certainties – I have so few and they are of so personal a nature – I prefer to tell you of my efforts to acquire them. I write to understand as much as to be understood. Reflected in all my characters and their mirror games, it is always the Jew in me trying to find himself.”

Elie Wiesel, One Generation After



“Time, within him, had become as small as a heartbeat, as large as death. He was no longer hungry or thirsty; he no longer desired children and a wife. His whole soul squeezed into his eyes. He saw – that was all: he saw.”

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ



“I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance”

e.e. cummings, Love and Its Mysteries



“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave”

Milan Kundera, The Incredible Lightness of Being



“Our mothers, unlike their white counterparts, had to try and make a home in the midst of a racist world that had already sealed our fate, an unequal world waiting to tell us we were inferior, not smart enough, unworthy of love. Against this backdrop where blackness was not loved, our mothers had the task of making a home.”

Bell Hooks, Salvation



“All creatures are involved in the life of all others, consequently every species… all nature is in a perpetual state of flux. Every animal is more or less a human being, every mineral more or less a plant, every plant more or less an animal… There is nothing clearly defined in nature. “

Denis Diderot, D’Alembert’s Nephew



“Probabilistically speaking, it is mind-bogglingly more likely that everything we now see in the universe arose from a rare but every-so-often expectable statistical aberration away from total disorder, rather than having slowly evolved from the even more unlikely, the incredibly more ordered, the astoundingly low-entropy starting point required by the big bang.

Yet, when we went with the odds and imagined that everything popped into existence by a statistical fluke, we found ourselves in a quagmire: that route called into question the laws of physics themselves. And so we are inclined to buck the bookies and go with a low-entropy big bang as the explanation of the arrow of time. The puzzle then is to explain how the universe began in such an unlikely, highly ordered configuration. That is the question to which the arrow of time points.”

Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos



“Needless to say, not one dime has been spent conducting research or medical follow up on any of the 458,290 Americans that the Department of Energy lists as having been present at one or more of the atmospheric bomb tests.”

Michel Uhl and Tod Ensign, GI Guinea Pigs



“Today I mourn him, as I can,
By leaving in their golden leaves
Some luscious apples overhead.
Now may my abstinence restore
Peace to the orchard and the dead.
We shall not nag them anymore.”

James Wright, An Offering for Mr. Bluehart



“From having all these and other feelings I noted that the interior prayer bears fruit in three ways: in the Spirit, in the feelings, and in revelations.”

The Way of a Pilgrim (translated by RM French)



“We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that it will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations.”

Emma Goldman, Patriotism



“Those that desire the life of this world with all its frippery shall be rewarded for their deeds in their own lifetime and nothing shall be denied them. These are the men who in the world to come shall be rewarded with hell-fire. Fruitless are their deeds, and vain are their works.””

The Koran



“I think it is imperative that feminists dismantle the institutions that foster the exploitation and abuse of women. The family, conventional sexuality, and gender are at the tops of my hit list. These institutions control the emotional, intimate lives of every one of us, and they have done incalculable damage to women.”

Pat Califia, Feminism and Sadomasochism



“Ah, demoniac madness! He rages most of all at the thought that eternity might get it into its head to take his misery away from him”

Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death



“This is like rejecting the notion that a Heaven lies someplace beyond the end of the path of life. Heaven, so to speak, lies waiting for us through life, ready to step into for a time and to enjoy before we have to come back to our ordinary life of striving. And once we have been in It, we can remember it forever, and feed ourselves on this memory and be sustained in time of stress.”

Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being



“Whatever such a mind sees is a flower, and whatever such a mind dreams of is the moon. It is only a barbarous mind that sees other than a flower, merely an animal mind that dreams of other than the moon. The first lesson for the artist is, therefore, to learn how to overcome such barbarism and animality, to follow nature, to be one with nature.”

Basho, The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel



“The otter is agile, fluid in its movements as the water that is its favorite element. Yet on land it is not as light on its feet as the weasel or marten and seems almost to plow through the snow. This is revealed by its tracks, which sometimes appear in a snowy trough. Characteristic too, is the long mark in the snow where the otter has slid. Coasting is enjoyed occasionally by the mink, but the sport is developed to the extreme by the otter.”

Olaus J. Murie, A Field Guide to Animal Tracks



“A genuine old-fashioned barbecue is as fascinating and as gay as a strawberry festival. The big ones seem to be getting more and more scarce, just as the strawberry social with Japanese lanterns and pink crepe paper seems to be giving way to more exciting refreshments and boogie woogie.”

James Beard, Cook it Outdoors



“There can never be a single story. There are only ways of seeing.”

Arundhati Roy, War Talk



“Many, again, having observed in others or experienced in themselves elevated feelings which they imagine incapable of emanating from any other source than religion, have an honest aversion to anything tending, as they think, to dry up the fountain of such feelings. They, therefore, either dislike and disparage all philosophy or addict themselves with intolerant zeal to those forms of it in which intuition usurps the place of evidence and internal feeling is made the test of objective truth”

John Stuart Mill, The Nature and Utility of Religion



“Blessed are you whose worthiness gives scope,
Being had, to triumph, being lack’d, to hope.”

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 52



“Look, I admit I find this man’s supposed bisexuality confusing and I don’t quite believe it. But what are my options? A two-minute roll in the hay with you, where you make no distinction between sexual intercourse and push-ups; and then a happy evening of admiring your underarm hair and your belt buckles?”

Christopher Durang; Prudence, from the play “Beyond Therapy”



“Dogmatism reveals itself not only by its inability to conceive the inward or implicit illimitability of the symbol, the universality that resolves all outward oppositions, but also by its inability to recognize, when faced with two apparently contradictory truths, the inward connection they implicitly affirm, a connection that makes them complimentary aspects of the same truth.”

Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions



“A Jewish Merchant, on a ship off the coast, observed the Crusader siege of Acre and described it to his mother in a letter: ‘I arrived in Palestine before Acre was conquered and therefore witnessed the vicissitudes of the siege. We constantly faced the danger of death, for we were near [the Crusaders] day and night, hearing their talk as they heard ours, and our bread was colored with blood’”

from Joel Kraemer’s “Maimonides; The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Great Minds”



“It grieved Whitman – as it did Lawrence – that there was no open, legitimate way to express love for a man, but it makes no difference to our understanding of him to know whether or not he went to bed with men. The secret shameful things that he feared in himself were incorporated in his store of sensual delights. Outwardly they seemed unexpressed. The blossom of his body’s shamefulness was a terrible beauty to him, part of his revolutionary inner life. “

Philip Callow, From Noon to Starry Night; a Life of Walt Whitman



“Through the thin red silk my cool flesh glistens
lustrous as snow fresh with fragrance.
With a smile I say to my beloved:
‘Tonight, inside the mesh curtains, the pillow and mat are cool.’”

Li Ch’ing-chao, Tune: Song of Picking Mulberry (Translated by Eugene Eoyang)



“The world was divided into two parties which were trying to destroy each other because they both wanted the same thing, the liberation of the oppressed, the abolition of violence, and the establishment of lasting peace. On both sides there was strong sentiment against any peace that might not last forever – if eternal peace was not to be had, both parties were committed to eternal war, and the insouciance with which the military balloons rained their blessings from prodigious heights on just and unjust alike reflected the inner spirit of this war to perfection. In other respects, however, it was being waged in the old way, with enormous but inadequate resources… …for in the meantime the intellectuals, visionaries, poets and dreamers had gradually lost interest in the war, and with only soldiers and technicians to count on, the military art made little progress.”

Hermann Hesse, If the War Goes On Another Two Years



“I have been thinking of the difference
between water
and the waves on it. Rising,
water’s still water, falling back,
it is water, will you give me a hint
how to tell them apart?”

Kabir, Forty-Four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir; Versions by Robert Bly



“I like my life and I am satisfied with it. I am not in need of any additional gilding of it. Life without privacy and without obscurity, life reflected in the splendor of a plate glass show case is inconceivable to me.”

Boris Pasternak; I Remember



A Family's Responds to "Exploring Feelings of Being Lovable"

2009-07-14T13:29:00.009-04:00

The following is a letter that one of my clients got from a family member after the family spent an evening discussing my last post, "Exploring Feelings of Being Lovable, 12 Questions and Exercises".

I can't think of a better use for these questions and exercises and I am gratified and honored that this family took the opportunity to use them to enhance their relationships to one another. I think it takes a lot of courage to disclose and discuss such private and deeply held feelings. I also think this letter says more than I can say about the positive results of using such a method to build more gratifying intimacy in one's family. And it sounds like it was fun too!

Dear Mom;

I was having trouble sleeping and I got to thinking about our 12 question conversation last night. It was very interesting to hear every one's views on themselves, each other and life in general. In particular, your thoughts about not feeling like you could be yourself throughout most of your life for fear of rejection or feeling like you just weren't good enough. That brought something to my mind as I sat here in my office thinking random thoughts. You spoke of certain times/events in your life that you needed to hear that you were loved and didn't receive it. I can not relate to that particular scenario but I am almost certain that I can tell you about something that you do not spend nearly enough time thinking about. How you have affected the people around you. I'll give you some examples. I'm aware this is going to sound really weird coming from me but hear it goes. Be patient, I'll get to my point.

You and I have had many conversations often involving self reflection but until the last 17 months I never really paid that close attention to my side of the story. I'm sure you have probably said a prayer or two about your own situations in life but have never realized how many peoples prayers you have unknowingly been god's answer to and often times at the sacrifice of your own happiness. This was just my one personal example. I bet if we could look back 3 years ago in a dirty old dilapidated house in northern Michigan we would find an old lady praying for someone to help her. Or 12 years ago in St.. Charles we'd find Larry (probably not praying but certainly hoping) to find someone to spend his life with.

Or several years ago your father wondering how he was going to get through life without your mother and then probably praying to find someone (I mean anyone) to takeover for you so you can try and get on with your life and stop worrying about him. Or your brothers, again probably not praying but certainly hoping, that someone is going to take care of dad after their mother died so it wouldn't be such a burden on them. You single-handedly compensated for your daughter's lack of a father and still managed to raise her to have a good heart which after hearing more about the town she grew up in seems almost like an impossibility.

I guess what I'm getting at is I can't help but think that a lot of the pain you have endured in your life was actually everyone else's pain. You would rather take it upon yourself than see someone you love hurting. We talked briefly during our 12 questions quiz about how people in you life have not always let you know how much you mean to them. I think there's a couple of reasons for that aside from the obvious emotional instability. One has tobe the fact that many of the people in your life don't even realize the huge sacrifices you have made for them. The second has to be that most people are not nearly as compassionate as you and therefore, once again, don't think about letting you know how much they appreciate you.

Well I love and appreciate you mom. Not just for the cookies. For the chicken salad too:)ha ha. You have unknowingly been the ongoing answer to my prayer and not only improved my life but my relationship with my wife, my family and my business. Thank you. Apparently Pam is right, my universe responds to my prayers. So my new prayer is that you will not only soon get the happiness but the relief and care that you have given to so many others. But you have to be willing to recognize it and accept it and for once not cure someone else's pain at the sacrifice of your own joy.

Sincerely,

(anonymous at the author's request)

Exploring Feelings of Being Lovable: 12 Questions and Exercises

2009-06-21T10:27:00.002-04:00

by Bob Vance

Remember, these questions and exercises are for creative exploration. There are no right or wrong answers. It is best to answer spontaneously, or to use them as a basis for meditative, even prayerful, contemplation. Take your time!

1) Who was the first person to tell you “I love you”? Describe how you felt. If you cannot, why do you think that is so?

2) Who was the last person to tell you “I love you”? Describe how you felt.

3) Is there an important person in your life who has never said the words “I love you” to you, but who you know loves you? What part of that is comforting? What part is uncomfortable?

4) What thoughts arise in you when someone says “You have to love yourself before you can feel love from others”?

5) What does loving yourself mean to you?

6) If you could love yourself better how would your life improve?

7) Do you think there are actions that you can take that might move you toward feeling more loved? If so, can you list three of them? If not, why not?

8) In 25 words or less write your personal theory about how important love is to your life. What experience from your life makes this theory true?

9) Write the names of five people you know love you. Indicate if they have ever said they love you. Regardless of that answer briefly describe how you know they love you.

Have you ever said ‘I love you’ to each of those five people? How do you show them you love them regardless of whether or not you have said it?

10) How do you think your feelings of being loved and/or unloved affect your overall satisfaction with your life?

11) Name three new things you think you can do that will help you feel more loveable when you are feeling unlovable. What do you think might go right or go wrong if you try these new things?

12) What fears do you have when you think about talking honestly to one person you trust about your feelings of being unlovable? How might talking to one trusted person about this help you feel more loveable? If you think it would help, how soon can you do this?

The Real Work

2009-06-06T07:25:00.007-04:00

by Wendell Berry

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

20 Ideas for Open-ended Questions and Statements

2009-05-17T11:59:00.004-04:00

-- to Develop Authentic Trust, Get Good Results from Assessment Interviewing, and Engage in Therapeutic Relationship Building

1. I’ve never had that experience. Can you tell me more about that?

2. That sounds difficult, what did you do that helped you get through that?

3. That sounds difficult, were there things you did that didn’t seem to help very much? What were they?

4. That’s interesting. A few years ago I had a similar circumstance in my family. At first we didn’t know what to do about it. What did you do?

5. That happened a long time ago. How does that still effect your way of seeing your self and your family (husband, father, sister etc…)

6. You really brighten up when you talk about that. How does that make you happy?

7. You seem confused and sad when you talk about that. What about that experience made it difficult?

8. When you think about that, how does that relate to what is happening now?

9. I am interested in how you see yourself in that kind of circumstance, can you tell me more?

10. It will help me understand you more if you can give me more detail about that experience, do you mind telling me how you got from there to where you are now?

11. We are about the same age, I can tell you that thinking about an experience like yours in my life makes me fearful(scared, worried etc), how did you cope with those feelings when it happened to you?

12. You are from a different generation than I am. I know my father/mother don’t talk much about that time in their lives. It would help me understand and help you more if you could describe those years a little more.

13. Wow. That was an exciting part of your life. What do you think was the best part of that experience for you?

14. You must miss him/her terribly. I lost my (mother/father/sister/best friend) a year ago and it surprised me how hard it was… what was the hardest part of that loss for you?

15. You know, yesterday I really got angry when something like that happened to me too. It sounds like you wish you would have done something different in that situation… what do you think would have worked better?

16. You really didn’t want to come in today, I know. Is there a way I can help you feel more comfortable and safe until you can leave (until we are done)?

17. How do you like people to talk with you when you are not feeling well?

18. How can talking about that help you?

19. Tell me the rest of that story, that’s really interesting and it will help me get to know you.

20. I am glad you are willing to tell me such personal things, I want to reassure you that this conversation is confidential. What else about that experience makes you feel so sad?

These questions are meant to be jumping off places and jump-starters for questions individually designed for the unique situations with clients in which coaches find themselves.

The basic idea is to be aware of and work to relate the authenticity of your own interest in your clients' individual processes and sets of concerns through a judicious use of self-disclosure and finding common ground; at the same time creating an awareness in your client that he/she is the expert in his or her life by shining a light on their role as teacher of their life to you, the student.

Developed by Bob Vance

Questions for Coaches: When a Client Quits

2009-04-25T10:47:00.006-04:00

At which session did you have an inkling that this was not going to work?

Are you satisfied with how you dealt with that inkling, both internally and with the client?

Did the client's lack of directness about the effect of the sessions continue even after you explored her intention in coaching and her will to change?

Do you feel that at some point you should have adjusted your expectation of what change means to this client? Her expectation of rate of change?

When do you think you would have ended coaching with her and how would you have done it?

What did you do well?

Nine Questions and an Exercise to Jump-Start Change in Your Life

2009-04-10T09:17:00.013-04:00

1) How long has the change been needed?

2) What is the situation's history?

3) What are the external forces that keep the change from happening?

4) What are the internal/personal forces that keep the change from happening?

5) What are the top three reasons the change needs to take place?

6) What are the top three excuses/rationales made for keeping things status quo?

7) Are there parts of the ultimate goal/dream that can be compromised in order to still make needed change occur? Is reaching part of the goal, implementing part of the change, acceptable? Why and why not?

8) How quickly and/or gradually can the change be implemented?

9) Who can be enlisted to support and help facilitate this change and who will challenge it?

10) Exercise: Make a Change Flow Chart

a) Take two pieces of paper and on each draw and label a box for your “Start Point”, or where you are now. Label one paper “Vision Flow” and the other “Real Time Flow”

b) Decide upon a number of outcomes, no more than five, and draw boxes representing those outcomes vertically down opposite side of the "Vision Flow" paper from the "start point" box. Label those outcomes if you can or leave them blank until you are able to label them as you proceed.

c) Determine what your first action steps can be (no more than five), make a box for each step on "Vision Flow” piece of paper nearest the "Starting Point"; label each with name and a time frame for action.

d) As you are able, continue visioning flow-boxes and connections, in however many steps necessary, and with as many choices as is reasonable and useful, between your “Start Point” and your “Outcomes”. You can do this as you complete each step and move forward in your vision of change through the flow, or design a complete plan for your vision of change right away. You can also do both.

e) Your “Real Time Flow” chart can be filled in with boxes for the actual steps taken as they occur. Label the boxes with time frames and compare vision and real time. Adjust expectations, time frames and nature of outcomes as you proceed and is necessary.

Note: The less rigid you can be in relationship to expectations of differences between your vision and real time the more creative and less self-judging this exercise will be. The ideal way to proceed might be to see the "Vision Flow” as a fluid and changeable process. Doing it in pencil, or at least using pencil for the names and time frames, might facilitate an optimally creative and productive approach. That being said, incorporating actual time limits and needs is recommended. The “Vision Flow” chart and the “Real Time Flow” chart should interact with each other in productive and positive ways and be a way to document and encourage needed change.

After completing one step your major question can always be: "What is/are the next step/s I can take toward my goals?"

Created by Bob Vance BPh LBSW CPC

Courage by Anne Sexton

2009-03-15T19:57:00.003-04:00

It is in the small things we see it.

The child's first step,

as awesome as an earthquake.

The first time you rode a bike,

wallowing up the sidewalk.

The first spanking when your heart

went on a journey all alone.

When they called you crybaby

or poor or fatty or crazy

and made you into an alien,

you drank their acid

and concealed it.

Later,

if you faced the death of bombs and bullets

you did not do it with a banner,

you did it with only a hat to

cover your heart.

You did not fondle the weakness inside you

though it was there.

Your courage was a small coal

that you kept swallowing.

If your buddy saved you

and died himself in so doing,

then his courage was not courage,

it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,

if you have endured a great despair,

then you did it alone,

getting a transfusion from the fire,

picking the scabs off your heart,

then wringing it out like a sock.

Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,

you gave it a back rub

and then you covered it with a blanket

and after it had slept a while

it woke to the wings of the roses

and was transformed.

Later,

when you face old age and its natural conclusion

your courage will still be shown in the little ways,

each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,

those you love will live in a fever of love,

and you'll bargain with the calendar

and at the last moment

when death opens the back door

you'll put on your carpet slippers

and stride out.

on forgiving and being forgiven

2009-03-05T22:16:00.005-05:00

forgiveness is a great concept, but cannot be taken lightly or as the easiest, shortest way toward conflict resolution

forgiveness, I believe, must be asked for to be given

forgiveness, as healing a process as it may seem to be, is first and foremost a process and not an event

dramatic forgiveness displays (like the one I read about involving the woman who was the girl in the napalm photos from the Vietnam War who publicly forgave the pilot who dropped the napalm) are great and powerful, but forgiveness generally does not happen in such dramatic and succinct, cathartic ways. Nor should it

forgiveness means hard and potentially frustrated work in the long-term process to right and alter the course of a chain of events spawned by the original wrongs and the perpetuation of those wrongs that by their nature grow ugly, strong and insinuated into the very fabric of the generations of actions and people that may pass between the time the seed of harm is sown and the forgiveness worked toward, spoken and finally safeguarded once it occurs

forgiveness cannot be considered to be an automatic phenomenon that comes about through the mere asking or giving

forgiveness, asking and giving, is action not words

effective granting of forgiveness means never allowing oneself to be hurt again in the same way that one was hurt by those who wish to be forgiven

asking for forgiveness requires an acceptance of the fact that it may not be enough, may not be deserved, and that even asking may not be acceptable as an adequate gesture in relationship to the dramatic and permanent changes set in motion by the manner in which those who were hurt were hurt

those who ask for forgiveness must do it in the spirit of understanding that asking for it does not mean they will be saved from the consequences of admitting their culpability... in fact it means that they bow to those consequences and accept them willingly and humbly

forgiveness is weak and shallow when it is used with the hope of forgetting the harm done. Forgiveness is only useful when it allows remembrance

most of all, forgiveness can not and should not been seen as an easier road toward resolution of harms committed than justice. Justice is separate but inseparable from forgiveness; they may overlap and may rely on one another for true and sustained resolution.

those who ask for forgiveness as a way to release themselves from facing their responsibility for the ongoing chain of events that their harmful actions seeded and set in motion do not ask for forgiveness but for deliverance and an un-earned freedom from the chain reaction of their guilt.

forgiveness un-asked for cannot be given, but letting go is always an option. Letting go works as a way for those who have been harmed to prevent how they have been harmed from continuing to harm them, or as a way to strategize and manage the nature of how the harm’s scars affect movement and feeling. Letting go implies building good and flexible, non self-harming, defenses against the perpetrators of harm and often implies and/or requires external or internal non-violent estrangement.

5 Random Thoughts On the Expression of Human Potential and Spirit

2009-02-21T14:44:00.002-05:00

On the Tensions and Bigotry Between Ways of Believing:

This is where the work begins and ends. To be able to continually make distinctions between what is sheer bigotry and cultural megalomania disguised as religious integrity and practice, and what is truly a part of effective human perceptual evolution... that part of each religious tradition that in fact does deserve respect and nurturing.

There is something of a winnowing out that has to take place with a constant vigilance or else we stand to lose some of the daring heights and depths of how the species has come to broaden and account for our own peculiar manner of perceiving ourselves on the planet, in the cosmos. Without it, god or no god, we deprive ourselves of the basis upon which we must go forward or die. Secularism, atheism, formalized agnosticism belong in this pool of what has been called religious/spiritual as well... because, on a transcendental level, there is not enough difference between the highest renderings of our way of seeing ourselves in the world to bother with.

Questions to ask during this winnowing search process: What has been useful but is no longer useful? What continues to serve evolution and survival of the whole species that has been in place but is threatened with extinction (and what can we do about it?)? What changes in our beliefs about "the other" do we need to invent and institute to survive? What about our collective belief patterns increase the friction between beliefs and what enhances our transcendental unity?

Here-in Lies the Difference

Here-in lies the difference between the expressions of the highest aspirations of humankind side to side with its lowest denominators of cruelty, mass murder, violent bigotry and hate. That both ends of the spectrum are contained in a single human attribute, its penchant for religious spirituality, is typical of almost every aspect of human life on this planet. It is why Tony Blair's recent foray into support for religion can never be taken as seriously as the bombs and murder he unleashed upon the unwitting and innocent who may have been praying the most genuine prayers available to the human heart. It is why the religious who go forward with no ability to poke fun at their own foibles, and who cannot see the damage from their most megalomaniac collective actions, are at the root of most of the collective sins that humans can muster; and it is why those whose belief in atheism is so religious that ultimately they commit the same errors of ethics, morality and cruelty of thought and deed they speak so vociferously against.

On The Error of Thinking Society Can Go Forward Without Coming to Terms and Facing the Consequence of the Past

A refusal to come to terms with the past and acknowledge the wrongs done... as well as ask for some kind of atonement or indictments for the worst of the guilty by first familiarizing oneself with the details of what must not happen again in order to truly move forward... is a tactic used by uncommitted alcoholics and other "stuck" personalities and systems that believe that they can move into the future without doing an exhaustive inventory of the past and how one got where one got.

Those who practice these kinds of refusals are more interested in bringing their enablers firmly over to their side than they are in instituting real change. They are terrified of being abandoned by the people who wittingly or unwittingly support them in their personal and/or systemic failure to change, in their addiction to patterns of behavior that are destroying them. And they are just as terrified of the change itself. The addictions (in this case to what? Oil? Big Money? perceived loss of control and power? Deep guilt by complicity? Cars? Mass murder and torture? Hiroshima ?) have a biochemical, electrical, systemic, hold on them. They are terrified of the vacuum of a monstrous unknown that they, perhaps errantly, perceive must follow a true commitment to change.

This refusal to look to the future while concurrently carrying and reading the completely open book from the past is a faulty and manipulative excuse to maintain, consciously or purposefully unknowingly, the unexamined tactics and habits of the past that are patterned into a system of avoidant and repetitive failures. It is exactly how and why the system or person ends up, time and time again, back where they started.

If you are not familiar with, and have not gathered extensive evidence and research about, what went wrong and why, from, in particular, the people and other systems your actions have damaged the most, then you are not really committed to moving into the future unencumbered by the same self-defeating patterns from which you claim to want to be loose.

Pay attention campers. Leaders who refuse to judiciously and, in a democratic system, publicly, examine and autopsy the systemic diseases that have felled us are not as much interested in developing a cure as a major characteristic of how they move forward as they are interested in putting a new mask upon the unrelieved symptoms. They are not much interested in moving forward at all.

What Pushes Us Forward Starves Us.

History shows that people/cultures who migrate, live and grow into desert areas, or into areas otherwise balanced in a precarious climate, soil and geological combination, often fail quite spectacularly... and often for the same reasons they had initial success. The laws of evolution hold fast here: cultures, like species, that cannot change as fast as the environment around them fail and die, or migrate out, supplanting, conflicting with, and/or integrating with the cultures they find in their new residence.

I was just talking to a friend about relatively minor climactic changes that were largely responsible for the French Revolution and the subsequent Reign of Terror. Two years of no growing season due to a mini ice age (only two years!) immediately prior to and concurrent with the rumblings of large scale social change pushed the masses into full scale revolt.

Let them eat cake? How shall we arrange it on the platter around your head?

It simply does not matter what kind of climate change we are talking about, or what we name it: it will take very little change, in relatively short durations, in climactic terms to change the face of human society beyond recognition. How do we charge this kind of change with evolution as opposed to devolution?

One Strength of the Species

One strength of the species is the manner in which it adapts to changing surroundings, threats, landscapes and climates. This has been key to the survival of the species. Part of this mechanism lies in refusing to adapt beyond any phenomena immediately felt and perceived to be 'at hand'. Humans are gifted, and cursed, by this evolutionary adaptation.

They are gifted in some ways at making quick "getaways" and flights or fights to stay alive, but they cannot manage, biologically and mentally, to change behavior and approaches to the landscapes that have not arrived yet, in the future, somewhere else, no matter how predictable.

Failures in almost all world political systems are something of a proof of that... ie: the collapse of capitalist systems due to the dismantling of safeguards put in place during the last global crisis in capitalized systems is indicative of a species that is unable to respond to crises that cannot be "felt" in the here and now, no matter how predictable. Can this phenomenon, perhaps encoded, be used to our benefit?

The True True Creation Myth

Oh come on now... we all know humans were birthed in a stream of the effluent of Kharpi, that most peculiar of the warlords of HarHar! Why else would we wear spikes on our sunday shoes? Why else would the fish in the nether spots resemble Katharine of Aragon?

It is high time these scientists and the hopelessly lost bible creationists realize that without the Yarmalooks of Treeza, our skyscrapers would be the size of your dog biscuits. Its time to reclaim the history of humankind, as we sprung from the adam's apple of the saints of pleebahahahaha.... everyone in my advanced reading group has come to that conclusion and the trees answered yes yes... "you are the children of the toilet brush and the descendents of the toe nails of Koookash! Rejoice!" The truth is now known here-abouts and also in the thundering water closets of your aunt Silvie.

So, with that in mind: Remember we shall all someday be taken up into the tundra of Blooobeefun... that day when we have reached our perfect toe nails and no longer need to stand in line for the Twittertwatter. Hallelujah! All the great mysteries are solved. No need to think or diet. Let's have some bangers!

Why Would You Choose Me to Be Your Coach?

2009-02-07T11:00:00.006-05:00

Over the twenty-five years I've worked in the human service, counseling and life coaching field I've discovered my innate understanding of the multi-faceted nature of human personality and human relationships. This seems to me to be more of a gift than a learned skill… or at least less learned in a purely academic manner.

That is not to say that the application of that gift is automatically useful to me or anyone else who has it… that is where developing and practicing skills comes in.

I can confidently say that the work I have done in recognizing and establishing professional boundaries between my needs and the needs of those I serve has resulted in a level of expertise that is flexible and compassionate, but also respectful of the maintenance of the kinds of boundaries that are the most useful in the effective, affecting, productive, goal-focused coaching relationship. As I have often stated: my goal is to help my clients become their own coaches.

What personal attributes and perspectives do I rely on to keep my coaching relationships healthy and moving forward?

Self awareness of the nature, extent and limits of the gifts that brought me into coaching in the first place.

An understanding that coaching cannot be seen as a way to exert control over others or bring others over “to my side”.

Good supportive family and friends that offer outlets for human relationship outside of client relationships.

Willingness to always be in a state of learning. Each client brings an inner textbook of norms, talents, gifts and processes.

A willingness to eschew what has worked in the past for what can and will work in the future.

An ability to disconnect my own process from expectations of others’ process.

What makes me a great choice as a coach?

I am empathic by nature, but have married empathy with various learned and practiced interaction and interviewing skills that make what I know on an empathic level more apparent and useful to progress forward in others.

An ability, due to experience and hands on learning in the helping professions, to make quick assessments related to the nature of the processes and essential coping strategies that people, couples and families/groups use… and then to employ them in the manner in which I work with people to help them see, understand and employ them toward positive change.

Good sense of humor used liberally and in appropriate doses

A good solid understanding of the difference between my needs and my clients’ needs

A refusal to be maneuvered into the role of the least favorite parent, or the voice of that parent, in my dealings with my clients. I routinely ask my clients to be a better parent to themselves than their parents may have been to them.

The insistence that my work with people be centered on strengths, kindness and gentle persistence, and that it is their responsibility to take a tough stance against any persistent lack of follow through, once identified, not mine.

A RITUAL TO READ TO EACH OTHER by William Stafford

2009-01-31T19:02:00.007-05:00

I think the following is a poem that explores and explodes ideas that to be accepted in a circle of friends, or any of the larger circles of social networks and society in general, one must stay a follower. It goes a long way, and beautifully, to reinforce the idea that to get anywhere together our circles of friends, family, country and associations are best served through having a circle that is made up of leaders. This poem is especially applicable to the current trend toward faceless internet social networks.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

—William Stafford

New Ways of Being

2009-01-31T13:24:00.011-05:00

I always found that new ways of being often unfold without a fully conscious input from us as we go forward; as if we recognize after the change has been in process for a while exactly what characterizes it. We just keep putting one foot in front of the other and suddenly the light goes on: "Oh yeah, that's who I have become!"

Four questions to ask yourself about recognizing and tracking inner change:

What little things are you doing that are revised or new?

Do they feel okay enough to keep around?

How do you distinquish between what is forward motion and what is regression?

Is regression sometimes a way forward?

Poem about Dreams and Family

2009-01-23T07:40:00.002-05:00

In My Dream

In my dream my mother who has been dead fifteen years
helps me take the fish hooks out of my shirt

after I retrieve boxes and boxes of music
from the garage where I left them years ago.

In the dream the boxes are piled where
my father kept his tools, under a ladder

to the attic that was never there when I was a child.
It is the house where I grew up and the hooks are not easy

to dislodge, my mother says nothing, but the music is in good repair.
I am excited to find some singers I have forgotten

I owned. The dream comes after a week of dreams
in the middle of months of grey snowy weather

and one day, yesterday, when the sun
made us feel like mole-people emerging from our caves

finally into the frigid air.

*

Yesterday I talked
to a young man who has manage to fence in his beasts

but has friends who have succumbed once again to theirs
and without admitting to it he talks about the fear

of his sick tigers coming out to tear him up again.
He says that lately he has had many dreams too

and we speak of tomorrow, and spring, and building
walls against the return of monsters

and living even if they do return. I say: in my dream
my mother is kind as she unhooks me and does not even

tear my shirt. What does this all mean?

*

I wake
in the dark again, not long before the alarm and wonder

about all the people I work with who must stay angry at something
just to keep themselves from being swallowed by the grief

of it all, the wars, the torture, the little losses
every day at work set into the cloth of our unconscious

and in puzzles of bare trees outside the empty houses.

*

In another dream
I only now remember, there are the flowers my mother grew.

Roses.
None of this is easy, I tell the young man

but you might be able to do it.
We have coffee and laugh.

--- Bob Vance

Eulogy For My Father

2009-01-18T08:01:00.012-05:00

Eulogy For My Father
Robert A. Vance 1923-2009

One of the things I learned in my years of work as a family counselor for a hospice organization is that each member of a family has an equally valid, and often very different, piece of the over-all story of the family member who has died. I learned that parts of the story that are difficult to tell and hear are as important as the parts that are full of the spirit of life that fills each and every one of us and is expressed in deeply spiritual and loving ways. We needn’t tell every part, but it is important to acknowledge the totality of all the pieces. Without all of the pieces we are left with a flat, paper doll, version of the person whom we have loved; not a living, breathing, complex and miraculous individual of whom there exists not a single duplicate in the entire universe.

Family legacies and stories are similarly complex and go back much further than any living memory. The birth of the good and the bad in our families precedes, by far, our very limited ability or willingness to recall.

I was born in the city where all of my sisters and I were raised because of the sudden death, one month before my birth, of my father’s father. At that time my Dad and Mom moved back to Mt. Clemens, Michigan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania due to my father’s overwhelming loyalty to his mother; loyalty that came from years of the kinds of family struggle that were typical during the Great Depression.

My grandfather was a jack-of-all-trades who built the home where I was raised and where he died. He was, in Alcoholics Anonymous parlance, one of the early “Friends of Bill”, and in spite of his constant battle with alcoholism, I believe his early death in his fifties from heart disease was a direct result of the nature of the disease of alcoholism. He had served in the trenches in France in WW1 and was apparently, as is common among men who suffer what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, very reluctant to speak about the horrors he had seen. He was not a very nice drunk.

My father and his mother, my grandmother, from what I can gather, were often forced to rely very heavily upon each other in order to survive even when Dad was very young. My father sold honey door-to-door from a wagon during the Depression to help the family get by. He was an only child. He went on to become the first person to attend college in a family that has roots in this country that go back to the Revolution and before. One of our earliest ancestors was among the Hessian German mercenary soldiers hired by the British to fight the Americans during the Revolutionary War. This ancestor was captured by George Washington’s troops during the battle that included Washington’s famous Delaware River crossing. He was subsequently made a prisoner-of-war in a camp where, I have learned, Thomas Jefferson probably visited. Jefferson was homesick for things European and found it among the Hessians there. Our ancestor, like many of those Hessians, switched sides to help the American cause because they were treated better as American prisoners-of-war than they had been by the Brits.

My mother likewise showed incredible strength and resourcefulness as a child growing up. She could pick up almost any string instrument and play it and made sure each one of us learned an instrument and/or sang in choirs. Sometimes I believe her near perfect pitch and love for music were among the big reasons she survived, rather spectacularly, her own father’s unsettled inner conflicts and his resulting cruelties. She survived as well due to the enduring strength and resourcefulness of her mother and her mother’s Iowa farmer father and mother, my great grandfather and grandmother. Among my earliest memories are the family visits to their farm south of Des Moines, and then again to the small house where my great grandparents lived after they left the farm and into which my sisters and I released a jar of captured fireflies that glowed off and on throughout the night. That same night my great grandparents were heard giggling in their bed.

That my father and mother found one another is one of those necessary and true miracles of two people who need exactly one another to become the best adults they could and who, by fortune and fate, heal each others’ childhood wounds by becoming each others’ greatest aspiration. They completed one another.

One of my parents’ goals in raising children was to be better at parenting than their parents had been. I believe they accomplished that goal. One of the goals that I believe I share with my sisters has been to be better at child-rearing than my mother and father were. I believe this has been a goal met as well. I challenge our succeeding generations with that same task: be better at raising your children than we have been. If you never have children then I challenge you to work in the world even better than your parents have. Don’t be satisfied with what was done before. I challenge you with this task in honor of my father’s and my mother’s legacy. It is what they wished for, for all of us. It is the way we can make the world better.

To finish I want to share something I sent out to my email list after my father died and a couple of the responses I received:

‘My father died yesterday. He had a stroke while opening holiday gifts at my sister's home in Pennsylvania. He was taken to an ICU unit at the local hospital where his condition deteriorated over the week. He died peacefully with people around him who loved him and who he loved, and with my sister Linda acting as midwife and shepherding him into whatever follows this life.

My father made an incredible life for himself after the early and unexpected death of his soul mate, my mother, in 1991. They met during WW2 when he was an Army Air Corps cadet expecting to be shipped overseas. They married a month after meeting. My grandmother, my mother's mother, routinely bragged about what a good looking couple they were. And boy, could they dance!

My father and mother went on to have four children and, in many ways, each of my parents served as healer for the other, deliverer, savior, good news, and best best friend.

In spite of a rough few years after her death that included serious, life threatening, health problems, as well as the death of his own mother in 1993, he went on in a way that could only be called inspirational... traveling the world, making friends every where he went through Elder Hostel, and cultivating an active respected role in his community and church. He lived on his own until the end and only recently began to tire of the harsh Northern Michigan winters.’

*

Grief is a necessarily solitary process I guess, since we all mourn a different loss when someone dies; one loses a friend, another loses and adversary; one loses a husband, the other a brother, the other a dad. Still, I think a man losing his father has some commonality of experience for all of us.

Kurt Colborn, Erie, Pennsylvania

*

My folks… …met right before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and went together only six months, married, and they had met at a dance club. And over the years they were really into dancing too: like the couple who dances together stays together. It worked for them!

Balyn (Linda Balent), Boston Massachusetts

*

On occasions like this I am always reminded of the Serenity Prayer. I am sure you are aware of it.

It is good to note that he had a full and satisfying life. While opening a gift in this life he gifted himself with the ones to follow!! I am sure he leaves behind a grateful and loving family that misses him and will carry his legacy forward.

Chandra Chandrasekhar, Chennai, India

*

I understand how it feels when a parent dies.

I give you all of my heart and humanity for this transition.

It sounds like yr dad was a great man.

But, this is what I know.

You are a man filled with righteousness, justice, & compassion.

You are a man who has taken on the idea that you can make beauty by simple letters and trust.

You believe in beauty.

You believe in truth.

A son does not get this on his own.

It takes a great man to make a son who has the eyes for this sort of madness.

I go out in my yard tonight and say a hello and goodbye for your dad.

It is dark, I am sincere, I wish you well.

You are now free.

And more lonely.

Rob Hutton, Seattle, Washington

***

This poem was written to be read out loud during a Jewish memorial service for parents/relatives who have died .Yartzeit (Yart-zite) is the anniversary of the day that a loved one has died which is remembered each year. A Yartzeit candle is the candle someone lights once a year on that anniversary. One could call it a memorial candle. Hopefully, this poem brings the mind back to the love and good deeds that the deceased loved person has done in his/her life that live beyond the temporariness of life and geography and that reach to the next generation. –Diane Baum

One loving person

passes love on

father to son

sister & brother

mother to daughter

Like a stone thrown

in still water

rings ripple out

more and more

in widening circles

till they wash against shore

One loving person

doing good

it starts in the heart

begins to connect

from one's own place

in the neighborhood

and on to affect

the city the country

then out into space

One loving person

reaches out like a seed

and plants whole forests

from one good deed

One loving person

is a call

it echoes all

around the town

like a ringing bell

the sound travels outward

from listener to listener

from parent to child

to more children still

Like a candle for yartzeit

small but bright

throws its light

against the wall

down the hall

out the window

and into the night....

Diane Baum, Grand Rapids, Michigan

A Few Client Testimonials

2009-01-05T20:47:00.000-05:00

The following are a few testimonials from some of the clients I have been proud to work with. I have been delighted by the progress they achieved and real genius they demonstrated in moving toward the goals they set with me.

In looking over these testimonials it occurs to me that initial goals and the eventual outcomes are often quite dissimilar, and some of the best work we have done involves little bits of grief and loss related to letting go of wants and desires when it becomes apparent that the true course one wishes to set has been hidden... but then, through coaching, these discoveries and their attendant losses yield and make way for the opportunities to set a truer course and pursue it as one might find and explore a new land... and one that feels more like home!

I am grateful to each one of these clients and my others for the opportunity to be trusted with some of their most precious treasure: the future and an innate hope in it.

*****

"When I started coaching with Bob, I was this shy little bird afraid to fly out of the nest on her own. Bob was able to hold a coaching space over the months in which I discovered that lacking self confidence was only a hideout for not doing certain things, and that I could stop it anytime I decided to. Bob’s patience, his clear, direct style of coaching, along with his natural empathy and enthusiasm allowed me to find the inspiration within me, to spread my wings and start flying.

Bob didn’t fix anything wrong with me, instead, he helped me discover what was lying within me , waiting to unfold. I feel whole and authentic, clearer than ever as to which directions I want to take in my life. "

- Claire Molinard

***

“Bob has always been a great support for me. He has a gentle style of coaching. He has helped shift my perspective many times always supporting me to keep moving forward. Even though I have wanted to quit he always knew how to re-motivate me. and clarify what I want”

-- Brandon Williams

***

“I liked Bob’s challenges and the thinking they often opened up for me. He was generous in spirit and with his time and I appreciated the extra support and interaction we had by e-mail. His compassion and humanity were very evident to me.”

-- Iris Arenson-Fuller

***

“Bob had the ability to keep me on track with a consistency in message and support. He brought a perspective outside the “forest” (“Can’t see the forest for the trees”). He gave me a place to detach from drama and observe process. Help with more objective analysis of my process. He is nonjudgmental.”

-- Mary Schimmel

***

“Bob brought a high level of personal concern and compassion while maintaining professional distance and critical thinking. He was insightful, thought provoking and supportive.”

-- Theo McCracken

To Our Children in a Season for Children

2008-12-21T22:44:00.000-05:00

I don't know much about Dr. Ray Hawkins, but I was sent this by someone close to me and I wanted to share it.

It seems to me that this time of year is about children, whether out of the pagan/Christian/Judaic Christmas Hannukah season with its Santa Claus magic, lights, and gift giving, or from the birth of the child of the New Year as we head into longer days and time seems reborn. I thought Dr. Hawkins' thoughts were excellent reminders as we bless and cherish our children in our lives.

From Dr. Ray Hawkins:

"I find it difficult listening to parents who berate, belittle and disregard their children and then demand respect from them.

As a parent, you certainly do deserve to be respected and your children need to learn to respect other adults as well. But you must give respect to get it.

Introduce them to your friends in public, ask their opinion on decisions the family is making and let their ideas be truly considered and sometimes followed. Talk to them as you would an equal, not a servant. This starts early in life.

Every 5 year old wants to feel valued by a parent. They want parents to talk to them with respect.

If they see it, they will do it. If they hear it, they will say it. If they get it, they will give it."

http://www.drrayonparenting.com/

A Poem About Growing and Passing Things On

2008-12-12T07:55:00.000-05:00

For Pearl in her Fourteenth Month

You have become very industrious
now that you have walking down
to a wobbly science and rooms are organized
according to your constant wanderings,
the mysterious jobs you devise
making bowls and blocks and shoes into toys or tools,
stacking and un-stacking between
giving us all little wet kisses.

Your month is the same as my four years,
so when your mother leaves the room
and you go to the kitchen gate
to whimper or howl in genuine loss I know
those minutes last forever while mine pass
so quickly if I cried it would be because I
can barely hold on like I wish to hold on to you
after you bubble away from me in laughter.

You are so busy!
Tell me stories in your babbling
language until I can learn to transcribe
the dreamt world of a life so new
that the blocks and found toys
you put in your boxes and take out over
and over again, or present to me
with such an earnest gaze

have no choice but to become treasures
so full of your untarnished heart
that they fly up into my throat a yellow bird,
a song, the thread of my mother’s
blue eyes out of your open sweet face.
How can that be? We are not blood
beyond the possibility of the convertible nature
of genes that might suck up and be changed

by love over generations until
they describe me, and me in you, in the music of your voice
without the convention of any official language,
and better than I can describe myself.

In Response to Iris' Comment on my Last Post

2008-11-19T23:43:00.000-05:00

In responding to your comment I feel I first have to make clear the difference between what a parent's job is and what a coach's job is. The parent by nature is given the huge responsibility of being an expert, a teacher, a diviner of innate gifts and talents, as well acting as a kind of life-long coach (as opposed to life coach?), psychologist and source of unqualified love and regard. While a parent may have much less control over the totality of a child’s make up and genetic predispositions, they are given the sacred task of guiding, teaching, limit-setting and loving.

While a coach certainly carries the responsibility of some of those same "jobs", the relationship dynamic between coach and client is mandated to take place on completely equal footing. Parents, it seems to me, have much more authority and responsibility in the relationship with their child (at least during the child's actual childhood) than a coach has in the coaching relationship.

If we take that equality to be the required norm in a coaching relationship, then we accept the fact that we, as coaches, must refrain from making judgments or proscriptions for where a client "should" be in any movement toward change... even if it is in the process of a change the client has stated he or she wishes to be engaged in. We are contracted through the nature of the relationship to stand along side of our clients and assist them in facilitating the rate and steps of their own change.

Resistance seems to me to be something the coach feels as a result of a certain dynamic in the relationship that may arise in the work toward change... denial too is a way a coach might define their own perception of the client's motivations and movement toward change, or lack of movement, as opposed to what or how a client would label it. How could a client label themselves such if they were truly “in denial”? As soon as they recognize their own “denial” they have, in fact, delivered themselves from it. Resistance or denial, then, are the products of a coach pushing in directions or for rates of change that are not in sync with the client; it is the way the coach defines feeling out of step with the client…. and when the coach places the onus of that uncomfortable dissonance on the client, instead of realigning themselves with where the client is.

It could always be that the change the client states they wish for is simply not to be had. The client may not be ready for it… or perhaps there are deeper issues at stake that are beyond the coach’s (and perhaps the client’s) power to uncover and resolve. In that case the work for the coach and client is to go where the client wishes to go, at the rate they wish to engage and explore coming to terms with how that change is not a possibility. This might also be the place in the relationship where we would bring into the coaching conversation other resources that might be useful, reset goals for the coaching relationship, or refer to other professionals.

Some Questions to ask a client when a coach is uncertain whether the client is satisfied with their rate of change and/or progress toward goals:

How well do you think you are doing in moving toward your stated goal?

We have talked about this pattern (or issue, difficulty, stumbling block) for several sessions. What do you think stands in the way of moving beyond it?

Are you moving toward your stated goals at a rate you are satisfied with?

Are you still committed to the goals we set when we started working together?

Why do you think it has been difficult for you to move beyond this issue?

What would it be like if you were able to move more quickly toward your goals?

It is hard to contain our own perceptions related to what is blocking a client’s rate of change or progress toward a goal… especially if it seems to be very clear to us. But as coaches it is important to remember that we are working to facilitate the client’s own voyage of discovery and change and we cannot really know the inner landscapes that they must circumvent and navigate to get to their destination. We must ask for those details and help them see them more clearly. We help them navigate by asking for clarification and the various viewpoints of what they see ahead and how they plan to steer around or toward it. The client is our only way of seeing what is ahead for them… and we must trust that they know, consciously or not, what lays ahead, what they can accomplish and how long it will take for them to accomplish it. We are mirrors and clarifiers, tools and navigational instruments.

And how much more satisfying for a client when they are allowed to chart, navigate, and discover their own way? The end result belongs completely to them… and it may be that it is more complete and more an innate part of their wisdom and genius if we insert as little of our own, perhaps premature, perception about their inner world as possible.

A Thought About Client Resistance to Change in Coaching

2008-11-14T13:22:00.000-05:00

Readiness to change is not automatically a trait that the client brings into the conversation or one that the client recognizes in its totality, but it can be brought about through interaction with a coach who is attentive to the signals and signs of motivation toward change and responds in a way that enhances them.

What is called “resistance” or “denial” is, in fact, the product of the practitioner’s assumption that the client is closer to change readiness than he or she actually is.

Resistance and denial are actually problems generated from the practitioner and not the client.

Satisfaction Saturday

2008-10-09T20:53:00.001-04:00

My friend and colleague Iris Arenson-Fuller has invited me to be a part of what she has named "Satisfaction Saturday"... a day to integrate appreciation of the present and its gifts. This is my acceptance to her fine invitation:

I am fortunate to be blessed with what I call the happy gene. This does not mean I have no struggles or deep and dark passages, but that my urge seems always to surmount these, or go through them, and to appreciate them. I honestly cannot think of a time in the past that I prefer to be in... I like the idea of the future and though I have the normal levels of reverie about my past, my memories and my experiences, I am intrigued and interested in the future and work to be present in what the present offers me. Not always easy, but ultimately do-able.

I think, if I learn anything from my rough passages, and I have been blessed/cursed with some horrific ones since earliest childhood, it is that survival itself is a given, that change is unavoidable, and that I will learn to cope, adjust and find meaning... real meaning with real spirit and light, real appreciation.

I anticipate, on an individual and collective level, that this dark night of the human soul we are inevitably recruited to pass through together, will offer me the same gifts. This does not mean I will not feel despair at times, or loneliness, grief and even hopelessness, but that those times too shall pass and give way to other times until I no longer inhabit this bag of tissues and great spirit that is my home. Perhaps I shall take these thoughts too into my "Satisfaction Saturday"!

Viktor Frankl as a Basis for Coaching Practice

2008-10-07T19:49:00.000-04:00

I am exploring resources for a paper I am writing as a final requirement in my work with International Coach Academy and I thought I'd like to share this one. The following is from the website of the Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy (link below). While I recognize there is a boundary between coaching and therapy, I think each can learn from the other. At any rate, I think many of Viktor Frankl's primary premises, or assumptions, are at the core of good coaching practice.

Assumptions of Logotherapy

The assumptions of Franklian Psychotherapy can neither be proved nor disproved with any certainty. This is also true with all psychotherapies. To see if these assumptions make sense in our lives we must assume that they are true. According to experiences of Logotherapist, these assumptions make sense. These assumptions include:

1. The human being is an entity consisting of body, mind, and spirit.

2. Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable.

3. People have a will to meaning.

4. People have freedom under all circumstances to activate the will to find meaning.

5. Life has a demand quality to which people must respond if decisions are to be meaningful.

6. The individual is unique.

The first assumption deals with the body (soma), mind (psyche), and spirit (noos). According to Frankl, the body and mind are what we have and the spirit is what we are.

Assumption two is “ultimate meaning”. This is difficult to grasp but it is something everyone experiences and it represents an order in a world with laws that go beyond human laws.

The third assumption is seen as our main motivation for living and acting. When we see meaning we are ready for any type of suffering. This is considered to be different than our will to achieve power and pleasure.

Assumption four is that we are free to activate our will to find meaning and this can be done under any circumstances. This deals with change of attitudes about unavoidable fate. Frankl was able to test the first four assumptions when he was confined in the concentration camps.

The fifth assumption, the meaning of the moment, is more practical in daily living than ultimate meaning. Unlike ultimate meaning this meaning can be found and fulfilled. This can be done by following the values of society or by following the voice of our conscience.

The sixth assumption deals with one’s sense of meaning. This is enhanced by the realization that we are irreplaceable. In essence, all humans are unique with an entity of body, mind and spirit. We all go through unique situations and are constantly looking to find meaning. We are free to do this at all times in response to certain demands.

http://www.logotherapyinstitute.org/

Poem About the Cycle of Life

2008-10-06T19:23:00.000-04:00

What the Ravens Want

What is it the ravens want squawking
this early as the sun struggles
to come through the iron clouds?

Some predictions of winter would have them
hover near the road waiting for another
accident involving porcupine or raccoon

or, for their whole clan, a doe.
It seems too early for such frozen dead delights
but still they remind us, when they flap up

away from our blind speed, as it gets colder
the more we kill with our fast passes or failed swerves,
the more they can clean away.

It is the sordid forgotten version of the story
of our emptying highways. Even now, as the cars
are sparser this far into the forests, the first flocks

of red orange leaves reflect in the glassy lakes.
Until a stiff arctic wind, that is. Up here
the waterfalls and last yellow wildflowers

down close to the floor of the woods
are accustomed to a final cover (big blueblack birds
out of a grip of white) of laconic early snows.

Love and Desire

2008-09-18T07:33:00.000-04:00

Desire: A dangerous flame

Jeanette Winterson

Thursday, 18 September 2008 , The UK's Independent

Why is the measure of love loss? In between those two words – love, loss, and standing on either side of them, is how all this happened in the first place. Another word: desire.

While I can't have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I'd take a taxi across town to see you for 10 minutes. I'd wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say "Will you..." my answer is "Yes", before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

Desire is always a kind of invention. By which I mean that the two of us are re-invented by this powerful emotion. Well, sometimes it is the two of us, sometimes it might just be me, and then I am your stalker, your psychopath, the one whose fantasy is out of control.

Desiring someone who has no desire for you is a clue to the nature of this all-consuming feeling; it has much more to do with me than it has to do with you. You are the object of my desire. I am the subject. I am the I.

When we are the object of each other's desire it is easy to see nothing negative in this glorious state. We become icons of romance, we fulfil all the slush-fantasies. This is how it is meant to be. You walked into the room... Our eyes met... From the first moment... and so on.

It is safe to say that overwhelming desire for another person involves a good deal of projection. I don't believe in love at first sight, but I do believe in desire at first sight. Sometimes it is as simple as sexual desire, and perhaps men are more straightforward there, but usually desire is complex; a constellation of wants and needs, hopes and dreams, a whole universe of uninhabited stars looking for life.

And nothing feels more like life than desire. Everyone knows it; the surge in the blood, cocaine-highs without the white powder. Desire is shamanistic, trance-like, ecstatic. When people say, as they often do, "I'd love to fall in love again – that first month, six months, year...", they are not talking about love at all – it's desire they mean.

And who can blame us? Desiring you allows me to feel intensely, makes my body alert as a fox. Desire for you allows me to live outside normal time, conjures me into a conversation with my soul when I never thought I had one, tricks me into behaving better than I ever did, like someone else, someone good.

Desire for you fills my mind and thus becomes a space-clearing exercise. In this jumbled, packed, bloated, noisy world, you become my point of meditation. I think of you and little else, and so I realise how absurd and wasteful are most of the things that I do. Body, mind, effort, are concentrated in your image. The fragmented state of ordinary life at last becomes coherent. No longer scattered through time and space, I am collected in one place, and that place is you.

Simple. Perfect.

Until it goes wrong.

The truth is that unless desire is transformed into love, desire fails us; it fails to do what it once did; the highs, the thrills. Our transports of delight disappear. We stop walking on air. We find ourselves back on the commuter train and on our own two feet. Language gives it away; we talk about coming back down to earth.

For many people, this is a huge disappointment. When desire is gone, so is love, and so is the relationship. I doubt, though, that love is so easy to shift. Loving shies away from leaving, and can cope with the slow understanding that the beloved is not Superman or Miss World.

We live in an "upgrade" culture. I think this has infected relationships. Why keep last year's model when the new one will be sleeker and more fun? People, like stuff, are throwaways in our society; we don't do job security and we don't offer security in relationships. We mouth platitudes about time to move on, as though we were doing something new-age and wise, when all we really want is to get rid of the girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/wife.

I don't want a return to the 1950s, when couples stayed together whatever the hell, but whoever said that relationships are easy?

Advertising always promises that the new model will be easier to use. And of course when you "upgrade" to the next relationship, it is also easier – for a while.

If you are pretty or personable, handsome or rich, serial relationships offer all the desire and none of the commitment. As sexual desire calms, and as the early fantasies dissolve, we begin to see the other person in real life, and not as our goddess or rescuer. We turn critical. We have doubts.

We begin to see ourselves, too, and as most of us spend our entire lives hiding from any confrontation with the self, this sudden sighting is unpleasant, and we blame the other person for our panicky wish to bolt. It is less painful to change your partner than it is to confront yourself, but one of the many strange things about love is that it asks that we do confront ourselves, while giving us the strength of character to make that difficult task possible. If desire is a magic potion, with instant effect (see Tristan and Isolde), then love is a miracle whose effects become apparent only in time. Love is the long-haul. Desire is now.

An upgrade culture, a now culture, and a celebrity culture, where the endless partner-swapping of the rich and famous is staple fare, doesn't give much heft to the long-haul. We are the new Don Giovannis, whose seductions need to be faster and more frequent, and we hide these crimes of the heart under the sexy headline of "desire".

Don Giovanni – with his celebrated 1,003 women, is of course dragged off to Hell for his sins.

Desire has never been a favourite of religion. Buddhism teaches non-attachment, Christianity sees desire as the road to the sins of the flesh and as a distraction from God. Islam has its women cover themselves in public lest any man should be inflamed, and jeopardise his soul. In Jewish tradition, desire ruins King David and Samson, just as surely as modern-day Delilah's are still shearing their men into submission. Yet it would be misleading to forget the love poem in the Bible that is the "Song of Solomon"; a poem as romantic as any written since, that gives desire a legitimate place in the palace of love.

And quite right too. Desire is wonderful. Magic potions are sometimes exactly what is needed.

You can love me and leave me if you like, and anybody under 30 should do quite a lot of loving and leaving. I don't mean that desire belongs to youth – certainly it does not – but there are good reasons to fall in love often when you are growing up, even if only to discover that it wasn't love at all.

The problems start when desire is no longer about discovery, but just a cheap way of avoiding love.

It is a mistake to see desire as an end in itself. Lust is an end in itself, and if that is all you want, then fine. Desire is trickier, because I suspect that its real role is towards love, not an excuse in the other direction.

There is a science-based argument that understands desire as a move towards love, but a love that is necessary for a stable society. Love is a way of making people stay together, desire is a way of making people love each other, goes the argument. This theory reads our highest emotional value as species protection. Unsurprisingly, I detest this reading, and much prefer what poets have to say. When Dante talks about the love that moves the sun and the lesser stars, I believe him. He didn't know as much as we do about the arrangement of the heavens, but he knew about the complexity of the heart.

My feeling is that love led by desire, desire deepening into love, is much more than selfish gene-led social stability and survival of the species. Loving someone is the closest we can get to knowing what it is like to be another person. Love blasts through our habitual sclerotic selfishness, the narrow "me first" that gradually closes us down, the dead-end of the loveless life.
There are different kinds of love, and not all of them are prefaced by desire, yet desire keeps its potent place in our affections. Its releasing force has no regard for conventions of any kind, and it crosses genders, age, social classes, religion, common sense and good manners with seemingly equal ease.

This is bracing and necessary. It is addictive. Like all powerful substances, desire needs careful handling, which by its nature is almost impossible to do.

Almost, but not quite. Jung, drawing on alchemy, talked about desire as the white bird, which should always be followed when it appears, but not always brought down to earth. Simply, we cannot always act on our desire, nor should we, but repressing it tells us nothing. Following the white bird is a courageous way of acknowledging that something explosive is happening. Perhaps that will blow up our entire world, or perhaps it will detonate a secret chamber in the heart. For certain, things will change.

I don't suppose that the white bird of desire is nearly as attractive to most of us as the white powder substitute with natural highs. Desire as a drug is racier than desire as a messenger. Yet most things in life have a prosaic meaning and a poetic meaning, and there are times when only poetry will answer.

For me, when I have trusted my desire, whether or not I have acted on it, life has become much more difficult, but strangely more illuminated. When I have not trusted my desire, out of cowardice or common sense, slowly I have gone into shadow. I cannot explain this, but I find it to be true.

Desire deserves respect. It is worth the chaos. But it is not love, and only love is worth everything.

The Poetry of the Integration of Grief and Loss

2008-09-14T15:32:00.000-04:00

The following is a poem by someone, Iris Arenson-Fuller, I have had the great pleasure of meeting through my work at the International Coach Academy. I reproduce it here because I believe it succinctly and movingly reflects on the ways our history of grief is necessarily interwoven into and an essential part of how we intuit, visualize and actualize our future... whether we see the future as out of our control and fated, or decide to take as much control of it as we can to make our dreams and hopes a reality.

Over the years in my work with grief and loss with those who have sustained a series of losses, traumas, or are facing the kinds of losses and great life transformation represented by the advent of a life-threatening disease, I have come to understand that the ability to go forward healthily into a life that is informed by such events or series of events must necessarily include the management of how those occurrences are present in our store of sense and emotional memory for the rest of our lives. That is, they are filters and batteries in the circuits of our generator of traumas, joys, learning and genetic predispositions that inform how we go forward and approach our remaining years. They cannot be escaped. They must not be avoided because they cannot be avoided. They are, for lack of better words, encoded, and can become part of how we are gifted as a species that is able to transform trauma into progress and enlightenment, for the purpose of survival, or they can, through avoidance or misplacement, become the source of continuing un-managed anguish and self-destruction... neurosis and even psychosis and collective evil.

Because I believe literature has been the greatest repository of the most complete understanding of how these dynamics come to the fore and are played out in the drama of our lives, I look to it and always have looked to it for guidance and understanding of the human psyche and the wisdom, love , grief and tragedy of our species.

Poetry especially is able to bring great truths, clarity, resolution and acceptance to our struggles as individuals and as a collective of souls. This poem is especially adept at bringing such truth to the surface of conscious understanding and I thank Iris for it!

11111

Bear Daydreams
-Iris Arenson-Fuller (http://irisarensonfuller.wordpress.com/)

Forty-five black bear sightings this year in town
help me imagine a large stuffed furball seated
on the pine glider, shaded by the tall
Dutch Elm awning and framed by beds of lilies,
strawberries and cream.
She smiles and turns pages of a storybook
about three little humans who visit her den
and sample her hospitality.
She is sure she belongs and never questions
in whose life she has come to live, or why,
or whose daydreams she has annexed.

I lean into the sun in the old lady’s field
behind the barn, hoping to coax my skin
into a warm new friendship instead
of claiming the redhead’s cancer birthright.
My grief sits on the grass in a Chinese takeout
carton where I packed it up for safe keeping
Sometimes I place it on the soft curve of my
belly and it rests, no longer heavy like cold stone
calling cards on graves, but now light, airy
nuggets of tears stir-fried carefully with smiles
and frozen-frame memories.

This grief is like some prosthetic limb
I wish I did not wear, and when I detach
it and hang it on the chair, I find it still
under the old worn quilt.
It steadies my core and carries me over
young meadows that wake early to stretch
and rub the dew from green eyes.
The limb is part of the body now,
incorporated into a company I did not know
I would ever inherit.
Daydreams crawl into my arms to nuzzle at
my breast as I study the sky, hoping
it is not a mirage.
Unlike my bear, I sometimes wonder in whose
life I have come to live, or if some creature
from a world I never dream has hijacked
my soul to weave into an intricate tale
and nested it in a florist’s box.
Then I spot the box, next to the bear
on the glider and I understand that
They have both been there, rocking,
waiting for me to find them today
under the Dutch Elm.