I Get to Be ME

I ran across a quote that struck a nerve in me. David Taylor, author of “The Naked Coach” wrote,

“…that when one is presenting, yes, the audience is thinking, ‘What’s in it for me?’ and ‘How can I apply what the presenter is saying in my life or to help others?’ but, more than these two, they are asking themselves, ‘Does this person really believe what they are saying?’

And when the answer is ‘yes’, then the speaker is not only being more persuasive and having greater impact, they are also simply being themselves.”

I found myself reaching out and tracing those lines and nodding and thinking “Yes, yes, this is exactly the person I want to be!”

Recently I was reading Robert Ringer’s book “Million Dollar Habits” and stopped at the section of the book to answer five questions the book had posed:

• What do I enjoy?
• What am I good at?
• What do I want out of life?
• What’s the price?
• Am I willing to pay the price?

Under the first question I had a long list, two of which were quite relevant to the person I am evolving into today—‘teaching others’ and ‘changing lives for the better’. Under the second question, ‘what am I good at’ I found they repeated themselves, ‘helping others’ and ‘teaching others’. Excellent, I was on the right track.

In each answer I had also listed ‘writing’, which as you have probably noticed I do a fair amount of. And then it hit me—I picked up “The Naked Coach” and read the last sentence again.

“And when the answer is ‘yes’, then the speaker is not only being more persuasive and having greater impact, they are also simply being themselves.”

And I had to smile.

I had to smile because I realized I have now exactly what I always wanted to accomplish—the ability to be me. I get to be me every day. I don’t have to pretend to be anyone else; I get to be me, me, ME!

To put into some kind of perspective how deep a change and relief this is for me, I will need to take you back to a time in my life when ‘being me’ simply didn’t seem acceptable.

In my mid-20’s I worked for a distribution center in the customer service department. I was known as a ‘big mouth’ and a ‘know it all’ because when a question was asked of the group of us in general, I was likely to answer. It wasn’t that I was showing off, or answering a question I didn’t actually know the answer to, I was (in my mind) simply trying to help. I knew the answer, why not share it?

On the nights when I didn’t have my daughter to care for I would go to the local bar to enjoy live music and engage in one of my favorite activities – playing pool. I was good at it, damn good for a girl, and I regularly whipped the guys in singles or playing in doubles. I was relatively well-liked there and always invited to play on doubles teams by those who knew me. The guys would ask me “how’s it going” and I would tell them all about my beloved daughter and the latest funny story about her.

One evening, one of the guys I saw regularly leaned over and said, “Christine, you’re a nice-looking girl, and I can see you are a good person. So I’m going to give you a piece of advice. You would get so many more guys willing to date you if you would just not talk so much.”

He couldn’t have hurt me worse if he had slapped me. It was a firm reminder that who I was, the indomitable me, was simply not accepted.

I spent my childhood and adolescence asking my parents and my teachers, “Why do I need to learn this?” I never got a straight answer other than, “Because I said so.” And because of it, I fought learning the curriculum, fought doing what they tried so hard to make me do. I fought them until the day I left home, a mere month before my seventeenth birthday.

In those first few months of freedom I realized one very important thing…I wanted to LEARN. I saw the other teens my age returning home from school and I was suddenly gripped with such a thirst. I wanted to learn and grow and know and be so much more than I was. I wanted to jump up on top of all of the obstacles and stand upon them victorious.

I wanted to help myself to be that person I dreamed of being, and I wanted to turn around and help others who were standing there dazed or clueless or lost. As much as it would be possible to, I wanted to infect others with a love of learning and growth and change.

It took me years and years to get here, to this place where I am today. Despite my thirst for knowledge and change, I still lost my way—sometimes for weeks or months or even years. And I’m far from done; I’ve truly only just begun.

But I was very pleased to realize that I get to be me now. I get to be me, and I find that it is accepted and it is acknowledged, and I am the lucky one for it. Because now I really can help others, now that I’m comfortably myself at all times.

So now it is your turn. Ask yourself the question, “Am I being myself?”

If you answer “yes”, than congratulations, you are well on your way to changing your life. And if not, then don’t you think that maybe it’s time you got started?

You Don't Know What It's Like

She looked at me with tears in her eyes and cried, “You don’t know what its like to be sixty. You don’t know what its like to be this age and have no education, no money, and no future.”

No, no I don’t know what its like to be sixty. I don’t know what it is like to be sixty and uneducated, with no money and no future.

And God willing and the creek don’t rise, I never will.

But I do know what its like to watch someone throw their life away—one day, week, month, and year at a time. And I’ve spent nearly forty years doing just that and wishing it could be different, wanting so much to stop it from happening, and eventually banging my head against the wall and walking away in despair.

If she were here in front of me I would say, “It isn’t my life or my decisions that count here, it’s yours. What good does it do to cry and moan about the situation you find yourself in or bewail the years when you didn’t get the education, didn’t stay with Mr. Right, or didn’t pay your taxes on time?”

It does no good. None at all.

Look, I know what it is like to make mistakes. I know how it feels to flash back in time and see myself behaving like a horse’s ass and making unbelievably stupid decisions with my life. There are moments when they hit me, a snapshot of memory that makes me wince with regret and embarrassment. My stomach flips, I close my eyes, and wish to hell I didn’t remember things like that.

It is far easier to remember the bad rather than the good. We are so good at etching those painful moments deep into the flesh of our memories, deep into the folds of gray matter. The funny, positive memories don’t seem to have the staying power, the deep hooks to burrow in and stay. They seem so much less retrievable.

But it is what we do next with our memories, our guilt and shame, that matters so much more. We cannot change the past, we can only move forward. We must learn from the past, this is essential. But when those awful memories surface, do you flagellate yourself again, reliving the past in agonizing detail? Or do as I do and close your eyes, let the memory come, and then say…

That was the past.

That was yesterday.

And I live in today.

Let me learn from my mistakes

Let me grow as a person, and

Let me move on and be someone better.

You cannot progress into the person you want to be if you insist on re-living your mistakes over and over. You cannot improve yourself by continually revisiting past transgressions. By wallowing in guilt and despair you hold yourself back from becoming the person you dream of being.

Stop…doing…that.

I mourn for her. I mourn for the person she could have been. For the person she will never be, and for the person she chooses not to be. I mourn for her—and wish things could be different. I am afraid that I understand far better than she does what it means to be where she is now. Because, for her future, for her personally, there will be no change. Because she cannot see anything but this life, and these choices, and this life she has chosen for herself.

You cannot change her.

I can’t change her.

But you can change yourself.

I can change myself.

You just have to believe, really believe—and then take the first step—and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next.

What are you waiting for?

Choice...What Are YOUR Choices?

I read multiple books on multiple subjects at any one time and I make no apologies for it.

This morning I woke at 6:30 a.m., my usual time, weekdays or weekends it doesn’t matter I’m awake before 7 a.m. After a shower I decided to paint my nails (a new development in my ‘pampering me’ stage of life). Of course I needed coffee and a book. So I decided it was high time I began reading Alfred Adler’s “What Life Could Mean To You”.

I’ve barely made it past the introduction and have discovered, to my surprise and delight, that he was a colleague and strong influence on Rudolf Dreikurs, who wrote my favorite parenting book of all time, “Children: The Challenge” in the 1960’s.

Here is a particular passage from the introduction that caught my interest:

“In Adler’s words, ‘No experience is in itself a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences – the so-called traumas – but instead make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences but are self-determined by the meaning we give to them…As soon as we find and understand the meaning a person ascribes to life, we have the key to the whole personality.’”

When I read something like the passage above, I find myself experiencing such relief—as if I am hearing the voice of a familiar friend.

Why is it that our culture in general seems to hang on to the notion that a trauma, once experienced, changes or damages a person forever beyond all recovery?

Wait a minute; I know the answer to this. We promote the victim persona because it is easier than taking responsibility and saying, “I survived this and guess what, I’m still here!” Instead we haul out that violin and play a dramatic, sad tune about how we were done wrong, or how we will never be the same.

This is not to say that what we experience does not affect us positively or negatively, it most certainly does. But it is what we do next, what we choose to do next that determines how our lives will play out.

Choice.

I get so sick and tired of hearing “That’s just the way I am, I can’t help myself.” My silent response is always the same, “Bullshit.” Perhaps that too is why I shy away from organized religion. The idea of putting your life in someone else’s hands, even if it is a deity, is just so alien to me.

I am in charge of my life.

I am in charge of my future.

I am responsible for my decisions.

Stop for a minute and think on those statements. Ask yourself, “How do I view my life?” If you are letting someone else call the shots in your life, maybe now is a good time to make some changes.

Alfred Adler believed that each person was a capable, self-determining individual. I believe that we choose our paths through our actions and beliefs and shape our lives accordingly. So if on reflection, you determine that your life is not where you want it to be, then it is time to decide to make it different. You are the only one who can.

Paradigm Shifts

I finally purchased, and began to read, Stephen Covey’s book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. I haven’t gotten too far, but already he is speaking of an area that I have been very interested in recently. Covey refers to it as a paradigm shift. I have often referred to it as ‘walking a mile in someone else’s shoes’ or said, “Life is not black and white, but merely shades of gray.”

Paradigm shift is far simpler to remember and well to the point.

As I type this, the thought strikes me, “If everyone were able to stop, and see another person’s point of view, we would have far less conflict and strife in the world.” Not a novel or unique thought, but there you have it.

Covey goes on to speak of Thomas Kuhn’s book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” in which Kuhn shows how almost every significant breakthrough in the field of scientific endeavor is first a break with tradition, the old ways of thinking, with old paradigms. This paradigm shift can also be called the “Aha!” experience.

In order to change your life, to build something new, or to turn your world on its ear, a paradigm shift is in order. An integral facet of life coaching is setting aside the old ways, the old view of how you saw your world and your life going and instead open up a new chapter and structure your life in a way that makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning and get started.

Paradigm shifts can be easy, quickly made but they can also be very difficult. I spent 17 years working in jobs that I hated before I experienced a paradigm shift and realized just how well suited I would be to entrepreneurship. Why did it take me so long to see it? My first and most deeply lasting model of entrepreneurship was my first husband, who seemed to spend more time trying to shoot himself in the foot than succeed at what he did. It was that image of entrepreneurship that haunted me through the years, prohibiting me from trying something similar until I came to the simple revolutionary realization that I wasn’t him, and that I had the power, common sense and tenacity to succeed.

Another personal paradigm shift was choosing to homeschool my daughter instead of continuing to send her to public high school. For years, my only two ‘choices’ had been public school or private school. Not really a choice since I had no way to afford private school for her. Then I moved to Missouri and discovered that there were people who actually homeschooled their children. What?! My first response was, “Is that legal?”

A few years later, after another miserable and disastrous year in the public school system I would finally remove my eldest daughter from her 9^th grade classes, seven months into the semester. We designed a curriculum for her, which included college-level algebra, women’s history studies, and political science—with plenty of the essays and writing assignments she loved so much. She went on to ‘graduate’ a couple of years later by taking her SAT’s and GED and entered junior college. At 19 going on 20, she is in college and doing well.

My paradigm shift from public school to homeschooling gave us both the opportunity to bond, to spend more time really learning subjects of interest, and lessened the enormous pressure of attending an overcrowded school filled with conflict and roadblocks instead of roads to education. I learned that school didn’t have to be a dirty word filled with fear and pain, and it helped me transition myself fully to ‘lifetime learner’ mode right alongside my teenager.

I could probably write a book about how it helped and what it did for the two of us. But in the end, when her baby sister was born in 2006, my husband and I were both committed to homeschooling this second child from birth. In a few short years I transitioned from feeling inadequate and unable to ‘teach’ my child, to feeling enabled and excited about teaching my little one how to read and write and all of the years beyond. Now that is a paradigm shift!

So now it is your turn.

I want you to first think about a time when you experienced a simple, small mini-paradigm shift. Think of an “a-ha” moment when you saw someone else’s point of view and stood for a moment in their shoes and experienced a piece of what they felt. Got it? Good.

Now for a bigger challenge—take a moment and examine your life. What is working? What isn’t? Be specific. It won’t help if you throw up your hands and say, “Nothing’s working!” And I doubt you would be here at this site if EVERYTHING was working out for you, so identify a facet of your life you need to change or improve.

Got it? Okay good.

I want you to spend the next week thinking about a part of your life that you feel needs improvement or change. Think about your strengths, your abilities, and ask yourself, “How can I look at this differently? How can I make a change that will enable me to be MORE or HAPPIER or SATISFIED?”

I would be interested in hearing about what you identified, what you thought of, or even, how I can help. I welcome your comments below.

Take time today to enable a paradigm shift in your life in whatever area of life you are wrestling with. Trust me, it’s worth your time.

Think BIG

There are times when everything seems to be crowding in and there are no easy answers. Times when you feel pulled in twenty different directions at once, with an ever-increasing list of problems and concerns vying for your undivided attention.

Yesterday was one of those days. At one point I just wanted to bash my head into the wall repeatedly. The phone kept ringing, my toddler was insisting that my lap was the only place she wanted to be, and I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out who was going where for next week’s cleaning schedule for my housecleaning company. And while it didn’t seem like the best use of my time at the moment, I left toddler and ringing phone in the hands of my capable husband and zoomed off to a client’s house for a quality assurance check.

In point of fact, it was the best use of my time that I could have made. Stressed out as I was, when I reached the client’s house and met with the client, reviewed areas of concern and told her I would just fix the missed areas while I was there—as I settled into the cleaning zone for those short few minutes I had time to think. It was time away from phones (I had even mistakenly left my cell phone behind), family distractions, and the siren lure of my Inbox and computer. No emails to check, no calls to take, no one asking me questions or pulling on my leg and whining for attention.

In the space of a few quiet moments—well maybe not that quiet, I did run the vacuum and was dripping from exertion by the time I was done—I realized I was being short-sighted in my business tactics.

Early on, when there was no money, or very little of it, I did it all. I worked all the cleanings by myself. I designed the website, despite no experience in web design. I trained my staff, in spite the fact that I’m no great shakes at training. I have handled purchases, financials, customer relations, sales, recruiting, management, and anything else you can think of.

Some of it I’m excellent at. I know business, what makes clients happy and what doesn’t, how to define my niche, how to provide a service for a reasonable price, and how to keep the books. When I do cleanings, my clients are deliriously happy. But I don’t do cleanings anymore (see references to toddler above) unless the situation demands it and I am lacking in management capability or time to get out there and train.

As I did a quick vacuum and mop at the client’s house today I had time to really think about what I wanted. Did I want a business that was cobbled together, barely efficient, and full of half-trained staff and clients who were running out of patience? Or did I want a business that was a powerhouse of cleaners, with an efficient manager who could do quality checks and training and ensure that the staff was cleaning homes in the manner that the clients both expected and deserved?

Despite having a record month for December I knew that the former option was simply no longer viable or acceptable. I needed to find a manager or fold up the business…it wasn’t fair to my clients or my staff to keep hobbling along. It also wasn’t fair to my spouse, my toddler or me to be so stressed out, so often. If you aren’t good at something, recognize it. If you know you aren’t going to get better, acknowledge it and then adapt.

So I adapted. I decided to cut my income in half and hire a manager. Someone who can train personnel, do quality checks on others, and eventually even help me expand to the Northland (north of Kansas City). My reasoning was that if I have happy clients and well-trained staff, the business can expand exponentially—rewarding my efforts many times over. As I told my mother, “I have to look at the long-term and make a decision NOW on how this business will continue into the future. If I continue to just try and patch things, and if I am continually am distracted by the little stuff, things will never improve and the company will stay small.”

I have learned so much in the past two plus years of running this business. The hardest lesson by far was the one I learned yesterday…think small and you stay small, think big and you will grow big. But along the way, you had better know your limits.

Information Addicts - Part II

It is two weeks into my new ‘low-information diet’ and it hasn’t been a pretty sight here in the Shuck household.

I think there is something calming about checking your email twenty times a day, or knowing what your exact bank balance is, and what bills have come in and what your exact debt/income ratio is…

Okay, so I’ve fallen off the wagon a few times and I doubt I’ve managed to restrain my hitting the Send/Receive button on the email to three times a day more than a handful of times. But I’m well below my usual 16-20 times per day!

I am also proud to announce that I haven’t visited any of my favorite news sites since the 9^th! Yes, that’s right, I have absolutely no idea what is going on in the world except for what my husband tells me. He gives me the juicy bits each evening when he returns home from work and a day spent surfing the web.

I have taken up fiction reading again, but thanks to the munchkin (14^th month old Princess Emily) not much of that happens. I’m lucky to get an hour in each day at present.

I rather like only processing my incoming mail once per week. My exceptions to this rule are packages (fun stuff to unwrap!) and checks (that goes straight into the bank). I will admit to actually feeling anxiety when I look over and see a huge stack of mail to process through. And folks, I get a LOT of mail.

But slowly, things are sliding into place, and I’m happy with the changes so far. I have managed to completely re-create my website through a trial version of Dreamweaver and have turned over all the files to a web designer who is also a client of mine through CCS. I’m finally outsourcing the management and updates to it and the new website should be online and active within the next week or so. A sleek new look, professional and thorough—it is ready to go!!!!

I’m hoping this will take my income with CCS to the next level, give me the flexibility I need to bring in more staff and perhaps hire a manager, and then I can devote myself to 25^th Hour (advertising and promotion only) and Creative Solutions more and more.

At some point in 2008 I will be offering free coaching sessions to a limited number of clients as I roll out Creative Solutions Life Coaching. I will be posting a request for participants in the near future. Stay tuned!

A 12 Step Program for Information Addicts

Here I am in front of my computer, realizing just how often I sit here and:

• Check my email
• Review my personal finances through MS Money and my online banking
• Check my email
• Go through my daily physical mail, processing each bill and comparing it to the previous statements
• Check my email
• Browse the news websites
• Check my email

Huh, [scratching head], I think I see a pattern here.

In Chapter 6 of Timothy Ferriss’ bestselling book “The 4-Hour Workweek” he recommends going on a “Low-Information Diet”. The first set of requirements? “Go on an immediate one-week media fast.”

He stipulates the following:

• No newspapers, magazines, audiobooks, or non-music radio. Music is permitted at all times.
• No news websites whatsoever (cnn.com, drudgereport.com, msn.com, etc.)
• No television at all, except for one hour of pleasure viewing each evening.
• No reading books, except for this one book and one hour of fiction pleasure reading prior to bed.
• No Web surfing at the desk unless it is necessary to complete a work task for that day. Necessary means necessary, not nice to have.

I stare at the list [gulp] and keep reading. I read on to Chapter 7, where he discusses ‘Time Wasters’. I nearly rebel as I read the following:

1. Turn off the audible alert if you have one on Outlook or a similar program and turn off automatic send/receive, which delivers e-mail to your inbox as soon as someone sends them.

2. Check e-mail twice per day, once at 12:00 noon or just prior to lunch, and again at 4:00 p.m. [These] are times that ensure you will have the most responses from previously sent e-mail. Never check e-mail first thing in the morning. Instead, complete your most important task before 11:00 a.m. to avoid using lunch or reading e-mail as a postponement excuse.

“No way,” I say as I read the instructions on e-mail, “No WAY! I need to be able to check first thing in the morning!” Instead I write in my notebook, reduce checking email to four times a day: 1^st thing in the morning, again at noon, again at 4:00 p.m., and finally at 7 p.m.

Then the daydream hits…

I’m new here and the moment I have been dreading finally comes. I walk up to the podium slowly, feeling each set of eyes upon me as I stop, turn, and face them. I take a deep breath and let it out in a rush and just say it, “Hi, my name is Christine and I am an information addict.”

The group chimes in return, “Hi Christine!”

The fantasy melts away.

Umm, yeah, so like Timothy was saying, less email is better. And if it will keep me from having to attend a newly formed IA (Information Addicts Anonymous) meeting in the near future than I’m ready to make the change!

Still unable to bring myself to such an extreme restriction I settle on checking email three times a day.

• Once 1^st thing in the morning (but after I have drafted a ‘to-do’ list for the day)
• Once at noon
• And then finally (that’s it Christine, NO more for today!!!!) at 4 p.m.

To summarize, on December 9^th, 2007, I committed to:

• Process all incoming postal mail once a week, on Thursday, instead of on a daily basis
• Process all financials (online payments, balancing checkbooks, paying staff members and any bills) on each Thursday instead of daily.
• Check my email a maximum of three times a day (I sent out an email to everyone informing them of this change).
• Reduce my television viewing to one hour per day maximum
• Re-introduce one hour of fiction reading each evening at bedtime
• Eliminate reading of any media websites, newspapers or magazines.
• Reduce all reading to either “The 4-Hour Workweek” or one of my Life Coaching study books (I need to continue my studies, so that is a reasonable tweak to Farriss’ suggestions)
• Eliminate all web/internet surfing unless needed for work that day. (Oh lord, this means no online shopping. I think I may die. Yes, yes it’s possible to die from lack of online shopping.)

Hi. My name is Christine and I am an information addict.

Check back in with me for updates as I wade into the sea of the unknown—adulthood faced with NO unnecessary computer use, NO unnecessary television use, and NO unnecessary reading. I strongly suspect that my days are going to be very, very different…