Pivotal Choices Coaching

“Not Another Day! I Can’t Take This, I Can’t Take This Anymore!”

The ad begins:  [Squawk, Squawk] “Not another day, not another day!  I can’t take this, I can’t take this anymore!”

We see the parrot, and then a man opens the door, agitatedly pulling at his clothing and saying, “Not another day! I can’t take this anymore.”

Point taken—he’s been saying this so frequently that his parrot knows the refrain well.

Do you identify with the words and the frequency of repetition?

Some people who can’t take their work are bored, wanting to do something different, while others are beyond boredom.  Anger and anxiety have set in.

Because we fear making a change or believe we have no choice, we stick with the job.

If you continue to work month after month, year after year, at a job where, day in day out, you approach the work with anger or anxiety, your body will show the strain. 

Headaches, vomiting, insomnia, all are ways your body is saying Enough!

Do you dismiss the signs from your body?  Your long-term health can be damaged by chronic anger and anxiety.

If you have taught for years or been an administrator or been an executive assistant and more and more you are saying, "I can’t take this any more," then it’s time to look around.

Don’t quit your day job quite yet.  But look around. 

What is one small step you could take?  Give yourself permission today just to entertain the idea that your life could be different.

Small Changes Can Add Up to A Big Life

A brilliant, creative client has been working toward a long-term goal.  It’s been challenging for her, but she has kept going.  She thinks of herself as a tortoise, slow and steady.

Being focused on a goal for a long period has had the effect of blinding her to the pleasures that await her.  She has started to forget the possibilities that can be ahead for her.

Recently, she made a change from one fairly staid locality to a lively area, and it has made all the difference.  She refers to her previous area as “mini-van city.” She is quick to say that people who move there and live there have made good choices—for them.  She, however, had forgotten her cosmopolitan side and all of the choices that are available to her because of her strengths and interests.

Interestingly, she had resisted this move, and finally gave in after much prodding from her partner.

This relatively small shift has reawakened her.  She’s still the tortoise, moving toward her goal, but she now sees the good life that’s ahead for her.

Making changes, making mistakes, making small choices can all add up to the life that she had meant to live. 

What Was Your #1 College Choice?

Many of my clients are working on choosing what comes next in their professional and personal lives.  When I ask them about key points or pivotal choices in their lives, they rarely speak of getting into a college.

They may talk about a particular professor who mentored them or their becoming interested in a particular field of study, but seldom do they even speak of how important it was that they get into a particular school.

My clients’ infrequent mention of their undergraduate school is in direct contrast to the importance attached in much of the US on a young person’s admittance into a particular school. 

This past week an acquaintance from the Midwest called while he was taking his 16-year-old child on the college tour.  This so-called college tour is a pseudo-pilgrimage to Ivy League and 7 Sister schools on the US East Coast. 

The pressure to gain entrance into one of these schools has brought about a systematized process, not unlike training for a marathon.  There are certain procedures that Ivy-hopeful high school students seem compelled to take—the prerequisite balance of IB/AP classes, the perfect types and number of volunteer activities, the requisite travel to countries that are off the beaten pathway, and then the application process, which may include the help of an editor, and a video included with the submitted application. 

The choice of a college is only one of the many important choices one will make.  There are many pivotal choices where learning takes place.  With so much emphasis on college entrance, I wonder if the opportunities for learning from the many other small pivotal points during the high school years may be missed.

Fall for me always brings up possibilities of change and learning.  The fall one goes to college is indeed a pivotal point, but the location of that college—which college it is—may not be nearly as important as we were led to believe.
 

Six Steps that Will Kick-Start a Tired, Stalled Project

The other day a caller asked if I had ever coached someone who had become stalled on a house renovation project.  My answer was no, but what came to mind was how similar all big projects are.   How difficult it can be to keep going.  How crushing the project can become. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Let’s say it was you who started the renovation project. You envisioned the changes you were going to make.  You put together a plan to accomplish those changes.

And you took on this project in part because of what you wanted to prove to yourself.

Following through on such a commitment takes courage and resilience.  I’ve seen someone with these qualities accomplish an amazing home renovation project.  The husband of one of my nieces almost single-handedly built a large room onto their house.  He’s an accomplished man, but he’s not a carpenter, nor is he an architect.  Nevertheless, over many months, the structure came together, and it’s a lovely addition to their home.

Completing such a project must be more than satisfying.  I would guess that the end feeling would be relief coupled with enormous joy in the accomplishment.

But if the renovation project is yours and if you’re stuck, re-starting takes courage and a willingness to look with new eyes at what this project will require from you.

Here are the Six Steps you have to take:

1.  You need a plan, the more detailed the better.  Without a plan, you probably won’t succeed.

2.  Make realistic, manageable goals each and every day or work session.

3.  When you accomplish the day’s goal, stop for the day—you don’t keep going.  Stopping when you’ve reached a realistic goal gives you the strength to come back another day.  If you go beyond the realistic goal, you make it much harder to return to the project.

4.  After you quit for the day, acknowledge yourself for the courage it took for you to take on this whole project, as well as for what you have accomplished that day.

5.  And give yourself permission to feel joy in meeting the challenge. 

6.  Draw on that feeling of renewed courage and the surge of joy to start your work another day.

Embarrassment, discouragement, and shame are likely to accompany getting stuck on a home renovation or building project.  Having one’s failure on public display can be brutal.  But the dread of being found out when a failure isn’t so visible is also hard to bear. 

Life’s too short to live in dread or shame.  You have a choice.  I say get started on that detailed plan . . . and then get to work!

Getting Out of My Own Way with One Small Step

A small step, one that you’ve overlooked or maybe just didn’t want to see, may be pivotal in making a change for the good.

Ever since we had some of our upstairs floors re-done, our basement has been overflowing with boxes of books, clothes, and odd accumulations that we had moved out of the way of the workers.

These boxes joined all of the other items from the past that had found their way to our basement.

I’ve wanted to rid the basement of much of this stuff and could imagine the area with only the essentials—the ping pong table, the couch, the bookshelves, the treadmill. 

But the reality has been that I’m hesitant to throw much of anything away , from my kids' elementary-school board games to their high school notebooks.

Today when I asked myself where could I take one easy first step, I knew what I hadn't wanted to see.  At issue were not my kids' things.  Nearly blocking the path into the basement are boxes filled with drafts from one of my long-ago writing projects, replete with Xeroxed copies of relevant and irrelevant articles.  What would it take to pull those boxes out to the street for the garbage collector?  Very little. 

So what has been stopping me from doing this before?  I suppose I have been thinking I would get to work on publishing something based on one of these drafts, but I don't need this physical reminder of unfinished business. It’s time to take this one small step to see where it leads me.

Meaningful Work, Pleasure, Loved Ones Make for the Happier Life

Some people put up with work that leaves little time for family or other meaningful pursuits outside of work.  When they think of leaving, the “Yeah, but” chatter starts up in their minds—“I should be happy that I have a job that pays well…Our family expenses are so great that I don’t have a choice.”

People who now call themselves “recovering lawyers” might have formerly been part of a group that Tal Ben-Shahar, author of Happier, labels the “rat racer.” 
 
He says that the "rat racer’s tension stems from the need to feel control over the future."
(“What if I don’t get a promotion?  What if I can’t afford the mortgage on my new house?”)

Many of the self-described recovering lawyers that I know are women. They had started to question their goals.

To find a balance in their lives and to enjoy the present, they made a choice.  They decided that they wanted a present that was more proportional.  For some of them, that meant a life that included their families as well as work.

Ben–Shahar says the happier life includes pleasure and meaning, spending time with our loved ones, and learning or being engaged in work.  Too often, he says, we sacrifice something that is essential to our happiness.

What is Happiness?  He says “when we experience something as personally significant and when we enjoy doing it is when we’re at our happiest.”

A Hopeful Choice: Happiness at Harvard through Goal-Setting

Serendipity struck last night.  As I was clicking on my TV remote, putting off the choice between writing or sleeping, I happened on "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central.  At that moment Jon Stewart was introducing Tal Ben-Shahar, author of the book Happier and instructor of the most popular class at Harvard—a class on Positive Psychology.

In his book Happier, Ben-Shahar emphasizes goal-setting and the effect goals have on changing one’s life. 

Jon Stewart, ever the cleverly entertaining cynic, poked fun at the concept of a Happiness course with its overtones of self-help. Stewart asked if the class is popular because it’s easy.

Ben-Shahar held his own, showing his witty side as well as that of the scholarly researcher.  He said that his class conveys the research and science behind the emerging field of positive psychology and also helps students improve the quality of their own lives.

Experience tells those of us who have taught college students that students need to find meaning in the academic process beyond the notion that one day it will all be over.  In the middle of exams, papers, and required readings, it’s easy to feel isolated and anchorless.

Ben-Shahar says that having goals demonstrates hope, or in his words, “the belief that we are capable of overcoming obstacles.”

To illustrate, Ben-Shahar compares life to a journey in which you’re walking along with a knapsack on your back until you come to a brick wall.  Do you turn back or “throw your knapsack over the wall, thus committing yourself to finding ways of getting through, around, or over the wall?”

The first difficult choice is setting the goal.  Throwing your knapsack over the wall takes faith in yourself, but even more importantly, the willingness to make a commitment.  This is what I will do.  I will find a way.   

The brick wall is a pivotal choice.  You can commit to scaling that wall or turn back.  Committing to a specific, stated goal makes it easier to keep going.  And surmounting that brick wall bodes well for overcoming additional brick walls in your future.

Makes sense, right? And so obvious! Or as Jon Stewart said to Ben-Shahar about positive psychology and also about Ben-Shahar's teaching positive psychology at Harvard, “It’s a fascinating subject and one I can’t believe you’re getting away with.”

To see the Tal Ben-Shahar video clip, go to
http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_daily_show/videos/most_recent/index.jhtml and click on the box for the Tal Ben-Shahar video.

I’d love to hear your reaction to Tal Ben-Shahar.

Surviving the Bridge Collapse: “I’ve got another chance.”

We’re told that it’s hard to predict what will make us happy in the future, but some of the people who were on the  Minneapolis bridge that collapsed are making predictions of how this event will shape them.

For those who lost someone, the disaster will be a tragic marker, dividing their lives into before and after the collapse of the bridge.

But for others, the tragedy may be a turning point—for people who were there, people who saw it, people who were spared.

As a nation, we Americans may say that we will fix structurally deficient bridges, and we surely want that to be true, but more than likely, we’ll forget the urgency of this moment. It will be too hard to maintain this current focus.  We’ll stop gritting our teeth as we cross a bridge and, yes, stop sighing in relief into the quiet of our car after we are safely across.

There will always be another disaster, another meta event, and we will move on to facing the next hard thing.

So is this a Turning Point for the country?  Maybe, maybe not.

What seems more likely, though, is that for people who were there, who were touched, this has the potential to be a defining moment. 

--For the shaken, but relieved young man, who described seeing the cars in front of him dropping, until suddenly,for him, the ground held.

--Or the young woman who found herself trapped in her car at the bottom of the river and who unrelentingly probed and pushed at the steel until something gave and she was free.  How does she see her life?  Miraculously, I would think.  As she emotionally said, “I shouldn’t be here.”

--Another survivor, a Fed-Ex driver, was shown in several television newscasts, wincing from pain as he was led from the collapsed bridge.  Today, from his hospital bed, he spoke not only of how he felt during the disaster, but also of the choice he has made about his life because of what he has gone through. He said, “I’m going to do the best I can with my life.  Because I’ve got another chance.”

Giant, Oversized XL Choices

In this Pivotal Choices Coaching blog, I will shine a light on choices that seem to mean so much and also on those choices that, at the time, seem to be fairly insignificant.

Pivotal Choices are fertile fields. 

Huge, oversized choices look like turning points even when we’re far afield.  Those are the big ones that are right in the middle of our path.  We struggle with those, worrying about the best way to proceed, and sometimes we get really stuck and mired down. 

When we’re sweaty and muddy from wrestling with the Big Turning Point,  we often overlook the small choices that are important for so many reasons.

Taking any kind of action can help us break out of that stuck place.  You never know what small action could set you loose.