Taking Back Your Power

If you’re anything like me, or just about everyone else I’ve ever met, one of the things you struggle with, perhaps more than anything else, is your relationships with others. This could be a close family member, a co-worker, your boss or an employee. Would you like to resolve this issue for yourself and get to a place of peace with all of your relationships? No kidding? If yes, read on.

Here are the fundamental reasons why relationships are such a struggle. And if you understand this, peace is right around the corner.

1. You are never upset with people for the reasons you think. When people behave in ways that are upsetting to you, it always looks like the cause of your upset is them and/or the unacceptable behavior. Not true. The real reason for the upset is that they are not behaving the way you would like them to behave or the way you believe they “should” behave. In other words, they are not living up to your expectations and that is the cause of your upset.

2. You also do not understand that they are simply showing you some issue that you have that is unresolved for you. So, for example, a person is loud or overly aggressive and that’s upsetting to you because you think a person shouldn’t behave that way. But, for example, you had a loud or overly aggressive father who used to upset you with his behavior and, as a child, you didn’t have the tools to deal with him and you still haven’t either forgotten that he behaved that way or you haven’t forgiven him for doing so.

Now, if you understand both of those statements, you can hopefully begin to realize that there is nothing bad or wrong either with the other person or your relationship with him or her. This is all about you! I often say to people, although they don’t like hearing it, that you are the producer, the director and the star of the drama that your life is and everyone in your life is sent by central casting to help you play out that drama. If you can get that, you can understand why I say that peace is right around the corner.

So what is there to do? You have to be willing to change your attitude towards everyone in your life. We have all had childhood and even adulthood experiences that have hurt us in some way and the hurt we are carrying around is what’s being shown to us by the other. So where the work needs to get done is over there where you are, not over there where they are. As strange and even bizarre as this may sound, you need to learn to view all others as a blessing and a gift, someone who is showing you the work that you need to do for you.

Does this mean you get to be a doormat and let people walk all over you? Surely not, and that is usually the exception not the rule. But it does mean that you learn to stop judging others, that you literally forgive them for what they are doing or how they are being, forgive yourself for whatever reactions you might have, and get on with the work of trying to figure out what in you from the past they are triggering and getting that complete. What’s really so powerful about this approach is that you take back the power over your feelings you have given them and return it to the only place where you can make a difference: with you!

10 Tips to Ease the Fear of Public Speaking, part 3

This is the conclusion to our series The Fear of Public Speaking.  I hope you have found these tools useful and are noticing a difference in your stress level when it comes to speaking.  Here are the final tips..

5) Dress for Success.  Appearance matters.  Often times we underestimate the impact of how we look.  Feeling great about how you look gives you that extra edge to be able to speak to people with confidence.  So when you have to speak to someone, put on your favorite outfit, iron your clothes, shine your shoes, and hopefully it will be a good hair day!!!

6) Carry a special object or personal item.  For at least the first 8 years that I was a professional speaker, I always carried this little green stone in my pocket.  This stone symbolized all the hard work I had gone through, all the love I had for what I was speaking about, and all the support I had gotten from people in my life.  It gave me courage.  I never spoke in public without that stone.  I highly recommend that you find something that works for you.  Something you can hold on to, or just know that it’s there to keep you in your heart and calm.

7) Visualize what you want.  After 15 years of being a speaker I still use this tool.  I always visualize how I want a presentation to go.  Not only that, but I visualize how I want a conversation with my husband to go, or with my kids.  I visualize how I want a difficult phone call to go, or a meeting with a potential client to go.  This is a powerful tool that actually helps to generate the results you want.  It doesn’t even take very long.  5 minutes can help transform your focus and energy.

8) Give yourself a break. The most important thing to remember is that we are all in a learning process.   There are no rights or wrongs, no good or bad.  We are just who we are, perfect in our own way.  Giving yourself a break is the most important message I could leave you with.  If it doesn’t work out perfectly, then try again.  The word “mistake” is actually a term from archery and it means “missed the mark”.  Often times we make mistakes and we beat ourselves up.  If you can view your mistakes as simply “missing the mark”, and chose to re-aim and shoot again, you’ll find your life working better and easier.

9) Celebrate yourself.  One of the hardest things for us to do as human being is to celebrate our accomplishments.  It is vital that you learn how to do this for yourself, the big stuff and the little stuff.  This creates energy on the subconscious level and sends a message out to the Universe that says, “Send me more good stuff”.  So the next time you take a risk and public speak, whether it’s a big function or one on one, congratulate yourself.  Tell yourself “way to go me”.  Often times we look to others to give us this kind of attention.  But did you ever get a compliment and you brushed it off?  This is usually because we negated the statement in our minds.  Celebrating yourself opens us up to the opportunity to take in others compliments much easier, because we are already giving it to ourselves.

10) Cultivate an attitude of gratitude.  As with celebrating yourself, being grateful attracts more of it into your life.  Even if the situation doesn’t turn out exactly the way we would like it to, be thankful about the opportunity at hand to continue to grow and learn about you.

This concludes our series.  So go hunt down some opportunities to speak, whether in a group or to another person.  Exercise the muscles that you have developed in these articles.  Practice makes perfect, so go try it on and see how it fits for you. 

Executive Leadership: No One Is Perfect

Last week I discussed why you often find yourself wondering why team building is such a struggle and why you frequently find yourself frustrated in your desire to provide the leadership necessary to create an effective work team? The answer previously discussed is that the ego voice tells us: we’re not good enough, we’re not lovable, and we’re not worthy and, as a result, we tend to listen either that we’re being criticized, or we’re being lectured to, or we’re being made wrong, or we’re being judged, or all of the above. Under these circumstances, it’s almost impossible to have a friendly, helpful conversation with a team member and most conversations are either avoided or end up in an argument.

Here’s another reason: It’s impossible for us human beings to not have expectations of the other people in our lives. We have expectations of our employees, our co-workers, our boss, our spouse, our children, and even our friends, just to name a few. At work, in addition to our expectations about how other people will act and what it will be like to be in relationship with them, we also have intentions as to what results will be produced by them.

Given that nobody is perfect (please note that I said that), it’s completely unlikely that others will always live up to our expectations or that things will always turn out exactly the way we intend. When this happens, we become disappointed and being disappointed in a relationship, all relationships, is inevitable and predictable.

That’s not the problem, however. The problem occurs when we approach the other person to discuss our disappointment. We frequently forget that the reason for the communication really has nothing to do with the other person. Now I doubt you see it that way and that’s the problem. People are just people and they almost always do the very best they can given the tools they have available to them. The reason we have a problem is only because they are not living up to our expectations or not fulfilling our intentions. But we tend not to see it that way. We think there is something wrong with them. And often, that’s exactly how we communication.

Now, add that scenario on to what we discussed last week. Rather than taking responsibility for your expectations and your intentions and communicating appropriately, you, in fact, do criticize, lecture, judge or make the other wrong. No wonder they respond the way they do. And this happens all the time, resulting in upsets, arguments and hostility.

The solution: always communicate from a place of responsibility, in addition to following the suggestions from last week, and you’ll go a long way toward creating an effective work team. Unshackled Leadership, available in our store, contains specific instructions for communicating from a place of responsibility.