Articles
Collapsed distinctions
After an amazingly powerful and invigorating final CTI coach training session over the weekend, I came home on Sunday night, collapsed on my couch with an exquisite glass of champagne proffered by my championing husband. We toasted the end of my in-class training and the new chapter of my life as a Life Coach. It was very very lovely to sink into it all. And then, the pain crept into my shoulder. Acute, severe and debilitating. I realize how dramatic that sounds, but it was so. Typing, writing, reading, walking, even talking all gave me, well, a pain in the neck. The pain started in my neck and radiated to my fingertips.
After two days of an ineffective treatment course of Jacuzzis, muscle relaxants, ice packs, more champagne, heating pads and complaining, I finally suspended my life-long disbelief and went to see a chiropractor highly recommended by a friend (Victoria Dixon…makeup artist to and the stars…and me). The diagnosis? Vertebral subluxation. In layman’s terms… a pinched nerve.
The skeletal model of the spinal cord that the chiropractor showed me reminded me of a concept that our course leaders Deborah and David introduced us to: collapsed distinctions. We all have them…and like two vertebrae bearing in on a nerve, they can restrict movement….and cause a great deal of pain.
The chiropractor adjusted me this morning (hence my ability to type this…alas, yoga is still a ways away yet) and relieved some of the pain. This will be a process of adjustment, absorption and repeat.
I can’t help but think that this is what happened to me on Sunday night: “training’s over now you’ve got to DO IT!!!!!!!”. Uh oh. Sounds to me like “new” and “scary” are two distinctions that I need to pull apart so I can move forward. Maybe LEAP forward might be a better description.
Here are some distinctions that may be familiar to you:
• Work = hard
• Sex = love
• Generous = wimpy
• Independent = alone
• Nice = insincere
• Tough = mean
• Easy = not valuable
• Leader = aggressive
• Kind = weak
• Collaborative = simpering
Consider what distinctions you yourself have collapsed. What movement would it give you to pull them apart and adjust accordingly?
Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.
Jumping the shark
It really didn’t take that long. Five short years in fact. Well, maybe more like two. When our daughter turned three, she started to get the notion of “cool”. And we were IT. Yesterday morning we (well, ok, my husband first) officially “jumped the shark”. In suggesting that our daughter put on a hat because it was “funky” (his words) our daughter rolled her eyes suggesting that he was way, way, WAY off the mark. In jest, I asked if Daddy was cool. She looked conflicted (not my intention) and then said truthfully: “no…not really”. OUCH.
We’d had a conversation a couple of nights ago whether we thought we were ever “hip” or not (we agreed that we never were), but to not be cool in the eyes of our five-year-old…harsh stuff! We figured we had at least until she was 10 to revel in some modicum of coolness.
So…onward. Now that we don’t need to worry about being “cool” anymore as we’ve been granted a certain liberation. We don’t need to worry about WHETHER we’re going to embarrass her or not…because it is now a qualified, bona fide certainty that we WILL. It is the legacy of parenthood that very few can evade. We can now focus on making sure our daughter’s tended to, well-fed, well-slept and not running with scissors.
I did a wholly (read: not at all) scientific survey of Facebook Friends. Seventy-three per cent thought that being cool was less important than the other “un-fun” aspects of parenting. Our dear friend Raahool wrote: “This is a recipe for disaster because at some point your kids will be forced to think that you are not [cool] and then you will be forced to over-extend your coolness, which in and of itself is not cool and will lead to scenarios like showing your kids’ friends how you can dance which will seal your uncoolness.”
This is additional relief for Greg and me..again, we’re not really cool (and we dance like no one’s watching…which they are). When it came to being cool, we were faking it (badly).
We’ll not be hiking our pants up to the armpits any time soon, but this does give us room to not bother worrying about sweating the cool stuff. Bottom line: be who you are. Be authentic. Because, let’s face it, trying too hard is simply too hard. And sweating just isn't cool. Just ask the Fonz...pre-shark jump, that is.
Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.
What do you want...?
The ellipses in the above question aren’t stylistic. They are intended to allow you to fill in the rest. What do you want…now? What do you want…to do? What do you want…to get over? What do you want…in life? Oooh…such fun!
Yesterday was Mother’s Day (which you would know if you were near any given city park…filled with men and their children while Moms everywhere slept in). I was feted royally and had a fabulous day. For the bottom-lined version of this posting, go straight to paragraph 7. For the minutiae of my lovely day, read on.
It was a quieter day than most of our weekend days, by design. We had few plans other than our annual tradition of visiting my mother’s commemorative tree down by the beach and planting cheerful and fragrant flowers for all to enjoy. We capped that off with a family brunch and parted ways with my Dad, his partner, and her son.
I was asked by my sister and husband what I “want to do” now. I demurred as I didn’t really know what I wanted to do (very unlike me). But the reason I wasn’t sure was simple. I knew I could do anything I wanted to…it was “MY” day. The possibilities were dizzyingly endless. Well, maybe not ENDLESS, but certainly plentiful. After some coaching from Greg and Christina on “what that could be” (based on what I always say I don’t get enough of), I decided on yoga and reading in the back garden. They concocted an elaborate plan to give me time to myself and I took full advantage of it…once I got over my self-imposed guilt and missing my lively household.
It was one of the nicest yoga practices I’d had in a while and I lost track of time in my new read: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
Two points here. The first: sometimes we don’t know what we want. We may have too many options in front of us; too few options; or stubbornness about doing something different (in my case, this can manifest as martyrdom). Sometimes we need people around us to remind us who we are, what we’re worth, and what we’ve SAID we want.
The second: people who love you want you to be happy and for you to do what you want. So much so they’ll help you figure it out…willfully, cheerfully and with best intentions. And you’d do the same for them. Period.
Those two points encapsulate the fundamental premise and power behind the Board of Your Life program. Sometimes we know we need a change…but don’t know what that might be. By asking ourselves some hard questions, and bringing in people from our own lives that see and know us and want the best for us, we’re opening ourselves up to a myriad of possibilities. All good.
You at your happiest is the best gift to everyone else around you…a slight variation on “When Mama’s happy, everyone’s happy.”
You SHOULD do what you want. The trick is to figure out what that is.
Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.
Clogs vs. flow
For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been having drainage problems. Not the kind caused by rogue tree roots under your basement floor (we’ve experienced that particular brand of annoyance), but rather the kind that makes your sinks drain really slowly. The kind you don’t really understand but hope it just sorts itself out. Throw a bottle of toxic drain cleaner in there and hold your breath. That didn’t work. The slow drain led to a non-draining laundry tub which overflowed with every load. When the next bottle of toxic drain cleaner yielded no results, a rubber hose was connected from the washing machine to the floor drain to reroute the rinse cycle. An effective stopgap solution, but hardly a permanent one.
Then the dishwasher started to leak. A lot.
I seem to be okay with a hose running along the basement floor but I draw the line at a lack of dishwasher. I have my limits.
The drain guy came in and did his thing with a scary looking electric snake. Turns out there’s been an accumulation of crud in our pipes from last year’s tile work in our basement. A year after the fact, our sloppy workmanship finally caught up with us. Washing the grouting tools in the laundry tub led to the build-up. Which blocked the tub. Which tied into the dishwasher and caused it to leak.
So now things are moving. But still slowly. One more step to go…though the drain is somewhat clear…we need to add another vent…something about neutral air pressure. All I understand is that this will help the flow. And flow is good.
So here’s the thing. I’m a sucker for metaphors and this here’s a doozy.
We all have emotional crud. Some of us have more, some of us have less. It might originate from our own incompetence (like washing tools in a laundry sink) or from factors beyond our control (like roots growing under our floor). But it’s still our crud to deal with. And if you don't deal with it, it WILL back up and cause leakages in other areas of your life (sound familiar?). And that's another big mess to deal with. So deal with the blockages. Here are some ways you can approach it:
a) leave it alone and watch everything back up b) dump toxic crap in and see what happens c) chip away at the crud; or, d) vent it out.
I highly recommend c) and d).
Talk to a friend, find a good coach, do the work and watch the crud drain away. Let it flow, let it flow.
Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.
When two positives make a negative...
I just spent a lovely weekend with my family in Montreal. We did a house swap with a friend who stayed at our humble abode in Toronto and it all worked out very well indeed. Before you dismiss this posting as a “here’s what I had for lunch” blog, hear me out. This here sign got us the honking of a lifetime.
You see…perhaps it’s a cultural thing…perhaps it’s an idiot thing. We thought the friendly green circle in the sign indicated that MTQ suggested that we would PREFER to go straight or right…we did not think that we really really really weren’t supposed to go left.
Hence the honking (complete with language-bridging gestures).
This sign kind of reminds me of the new shift towards putting a positive spin on everything. Case in point, have you noticed that you’re no longer asked to turn off your cell phone but are now “reminded to turn your phone back on after this session”?
There’s such thing as being too positive (yes, I, Tanya Geisler, the Pollyanna of Pollyannas have just declared that there may well be such thing as being too positive). Sincerity can be compromised, clarity can be lost and confusion can reign.
While this sign is far more welcoming than the no-left turn signs we’re accustomed to (it makes me curious about what’s possible ahead and to the right), its initial ambiguity wasn’t helpful. Clearly.
In considering the double positive of this sign (go right, go straight but don’t go left) I was reminded of a story told by a friend (turns out it’s Jack Rosenthal’s story in the New York Times, but clever nonetheless):
A colleague recently told Roger Gould, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, about a lecture, place uncertain, referring to double negatives. Every language, the lecturer observed, has a construction in which two negatives make a positive. But in English, he said, there's no construction in which two positives make a negative.
From the hall came the perfect, anonymous response: "Yeah, right."
Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.
The _______ Fairy
We’re out four bucks this week. Our daughter lost her two front bottom teeth and apparently a toonie per tooth is the going rate. I suppose baby teeth are a commodity. We’re conflicted about her passing another milestone. On the one hand, we’re sad to see the end of the baby toothed-era, but we (including our daughter) are excited that she’s moving into the big-toothed era. That and the fact that she has the unique situation of her adult teeth already moving in behind the recently departed baby teeth. Quite simply, that mouth wasn’t big enough for the both of them sets of chompers.
As if the excitement of a new phase of growth wasn’t enough, society had to heap on the expectation of financial reward in exchange for used (if tiny) body parts. Appropriately, our little recipient is thrilled to have shiny new additions to her piggy bank.
The tooth fairy comes and takes away that which we don’t need, making room for new growth and possibility. So what can we extract (pardon the pun) from this? There can be opportunity in loss, I think.
If you could have a fairy come and take something away from you to give you more room in your life for growth and possibility, what would you be rid of? (Don’t hold your breath for cash under the pillow on top of it though…that’s just plain greedy).
When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us. - Alexander Graham Bell
Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.