Wellbeing

March 30, 2015 by Christine

How To Create Daily Habits in a Way That Transforms Your Life

About two years ago I began something of a personal experiment.

It was just something I did to try and give myself a bit of momentum when I thought that’s what I needed. But it developed a life of its own, opening my eyes to things I hadn’t seen before. Changing my life in the process.

In the beginning…

The catalyst was pulling away from a business relationship that had absorbed me for a very long time. Suddenly, when I was no longer spending at least an hour a day on the phone with this person, meeting potential joint clients, delivering work with them and turning up for monthly meetings that involved a bigger group of people again, I noticed I had a lot of white space to play with.

At first that was somewhat scary. I had my personal OD and coaching clients of course, and so it wasn’t that getting business per se was an issue. But the whole split opened up what, in the beginning, felt like an open wound.

What was I going to do to fix it?

Habits as an alternative to goals

My knee jerk response was to think that I needed to logic out a new direction for myself, create a list of new goals, develop a project plan, and manage the shit out of it. I’ve been masterful at that. Something gets on one of my To Do lists and I have the appetite for it, it’ll get done alright.

But that whole approach didn’t feel right for some reason. Not any more. In fact it felt it was time to see things a new way.

By a series of magical coincidences, I came across Jamie Smart and the stuff I was writing about last week on The Three Principles. From reading his book and then doing his training, I had some massive insights about myself, two of which were:

That, even though in that moment I felt quite directionless and exposed, I was okay. Nothing about the circumstances of my life or work could change that.

Then, clarity can’t be forced. It’s something that comes in its own time.

I began to see that this gap was actually an incredibly creative space, and decided to play in to it.

Still, I’m not really one for sitting around doing nothing, and it occurred to me that, while I continued to work with my existing clients, I would also use some of the spare time I had to do some of the things that were important to me but that had till then perhaps been relegated to the fag ends of my busy work days. Things like exercise, creative writing, healthy eating…

Next it occurred to me that I was going to upturn the applecart of my life entirely and, instead of putting work first as I have done over the years, I was going to put wellbeing first. And dare to see what happened as a result.

But what might putting wellbeing first look like?

Habits emerging from wisdom

That’s when the idea of creating daily habits emerged. I could – and did at the time – put logical reasons round why it made sense to direct my energies into habits. But in truth I just went with a feeling.

So, in the beginning, I went with things that resonated with me. Not things that I had to discipline or somehow force myself to do, that were punishing in any way, or that would be very hard to instill. Things that were simple. Easy.

The first ones were immediately clear:

Daily writing (I wanted to be a writer, yet wasn’t till then allowing myself to write creatively on a regular basis)
Maximum two cups of coffee a day (I love coffee. But more than 2 cups a day knocks my whole energy off)
Maximum two glasses of wine a day (ditto)
Drink two litres of water a day (since I feel so much better when I’m well hydrated)
Bed before 10pm (I am a sleep monster, and even on days when I’m up at 6am, this gives me 8 hours sleep a night)

On the writing front, I struggled to begin with. What to write? Where? Another person I admire, Steve Chandler, has this ethos that if you don’t know where to start, “start anywhere”. I decided that it was less important whether I wrote here or elsewhere, or what I wrote, than that I wrote at all. And so I started a private journal. Wrote there daily, if I wrote nowhere else. Sheer top of the head stuff, which in turn prompted unexpected thoughts and ideas of their own to come forward.

Just keeping with these simple things over the course of those first few months was energizing in a way that I hadn’t expected. Keeping with them brought some truly unexpected shifts.

Unexpected insight

One thing I hadn’t anticipated was a huge insight around integrity. It simply came to me that, the more I kept my commitment to myself to honor my habits, the more I was in integrity with myself. The more my actions and my intentions were lined up, the truer to myself I felt myself becoming, and the better connected to myself I felt.

I began to feel like I was taking myself seriously in a way I never had before.

Not that I have become a slave to my habits. They’ve kind of become like my best wishes for myself. Love for myself in action.

It occurred to me early on that there was no room here for any judgment of success or failure. There’s just noticing. Some days I can tick the box on all my habits. Others I can’t. But every day is its own day.

As I’ve changed and learned, I’ve had new and fresh insights about what I needed to do:

Exercise three times a week (I feel better when I exercise and when my body starts to feel well and strong)
Eat protein at breakfast (I can maintain my energy so much better if I pay attention to what I eat for breakfast and make sure I get a big dose of protein: quinoa, yogurt, eggs…)
Meditate 20 minutes daily

Benefits

The benefits to me have been immense. First, I feel really well and my energy is good, my thinking feels much sharper. I dropped a lot of my need to strive for stuff; I came to really value simplicity.

On the health front, I upped the anti big time on nutrition and sorted some long-standing problems I’d been having with IBS and energy.

But I guess I couldn’t have anticipated where all of this would take my work. I’d had visions at one point of developing a huge social media presence off the back of which I’d develop a whole series of coaching type products. And I’d had a site which for a long time had good traffic and was quite high on the Alexa rankings. But it began to feel like a burden. The more I turned up for my existing clients, the more I really valued the work I already had and instead of trying to create something different around all of that, decided to hone in on what was most working there and articulate that as my offering. You can read more about that here.

Getting that clear allowed me the discernment to ditch the darling that had been my old website, and recreate this site. It’s audience? Primarily the people I currently work with, have worked with in the past, or may work with directly in the future. And, if you’re reading and you’re not yet one of these, then that’s cool – it’s good to have you and if you like this make sure you don’t miss out on future posts by giving us your details here.

Oh, and last summer I started putting some of my more creative writing stuff online too, over on my own name domain site. It was in the process of doing that that I had the discover that I want to do memoir writing.

Why?

Well, again, I could come up with a smart, logical answer. But the truth is it makes me feel good to write. I write it well. I enjoy writing from feeling.

That spills over into how I feel about life in general. How I turn up in relationship to Steve, my family and friends.

Which in turn spills over into how I turn up for my clients. I think the best coaching and consulting work is done, not through technique, but through a heart connection. It’s so easy, I believe, in the business world to forget about that.

Habits as a way of creating inside-out change

Who would have thought that all of this would have come from following some simple daily habits?

Certainly not me. But now, with the proviso that you allow the habits to choose you, my big sense is that they can be a powerful way to boost your wellbeing and indeed to change your life.

So, over to you. What resonates for you in all of this? What wellbeing habits have you tried to instill? With what results?

Photo attribution: Copyright: / 123RF Stock Photo

March 20, 2015 by Christine

The Three Principles: A Different Kind of Approach to Wellbeing

There’s a problem with much of the wellbeing advice.

It’s this: it’s based on a misunderstanding of how things work. It deals with the symptoms of being out of balance, rather than allowing you to see that emotional, physical and spiritual balance is your natural state.

The philosophy that wellness is our fundamental nature isn’t new. It’s intrinsic to ancient Chinese and other traditions. It’s the essence of homeopathic medicine. But it’s being refreshed as a concept right now by a group of people I’ll call Three Principles Practitioners.

3Ps has an unusual history. A Scottish welder by the name of Syd Banks who emigrated to Canada had a series of powerful insights that caused him to quit welding and start teaching.

The story goes that he himself had felt far from psychologically well. He’d gone in search – as I guess so many of us do – for solutions that would help him feel better. But something a colleague said to him served as a kind of awakening. What he began to see that he was looking in the wrong places for answers.

Inside-Out

One of the first things he understood was that he’d been holding a completely wrong understanding of how things work.

He’d been working on the basis – as I guess we all do – that the world happens outside-in. That things outside us affect how we feel and what we think. But he saw that, instead, we ourselves are the creators of our experience.Which is not to say that shit doesn’t happen in our lives, but it’s what we then make of it that affects our wellbeing.

Let’s look at some examples:

An important client gives notice on their contract with you. The markets crash. Your son has a tantrum. You might respond with panic, depression, or anger; in part because that’s how you’ve been programed to respond by the outside world.

Traditional wellbeing or stress management advice will tend to focus on the event that’s “causing” your stress. It might offer you a mantra like “success lives in the land of failure” to help you get through. It might advise you to meditate to try to alleviate your depression. It might teach you relationship tactics for dealing with teenagers.

There’s nothing in essence wrong with any of this. It may even have a temporary feel-good effect.

But 3Ps thinking looks in a somewhat different direction.

See, clients sometimes quit. The market can be volatile at times. Children can behave as they will.

But the stress is not in the situation unless you choose to see it there. I know that it looks and feels as if it’s outside you. But it’s not.

We’ve just all been spoofed by an illusion of how things are for centuries.

3 Principles

Beyond this, Banks began to see that, underneath all the outcome-oriented psychology, all the personality theories, all the philosophies and religions are three fundamental principles.

What’s a principle?

Before we go on, let’s look at what we mean by the word “principle” in this context.

For Banks, a principle is a rule that always applies. We’ve come, through the years, and via the genius of certain key people, to understand other principles about life.

For a long time, for example, it was believed that the world was flat; that it had a finite boundary; and that if anyone was to go near that boundary, they’d fall off. You can imagine, back in the day, that if folks were moving around a lot, they may be a little preoccupied to make sure that they didn’t accidentally throw themselves into oblivion.

Greek philosophers in the 6^th and 5^th Centuries BC proposed otherwise. But it took Aristotle in 330BC to prove by observation that the earth was spherical. Now we take the globe for granted. That’s a principle.

Gravity is another example. The legend goes that Isaac Newton was sitting under a tree one day when an apple fell to the ground while he was reflecting on the forces of nature. This led him to explore that there’s a force required to change the speed or direction of a moving object. Today we accept that gravity is the principle that keeps us firmly on the ground; is one of the factors that allows planes to fly; and is what enables our planet to stay in orbit around the sun. Another principle.

I guess you get the point.

The world is not sometimes spherical and sometimes not.

Gravity isn’t sometimes in play and sometimes not.

And Banks introduced the three principles in this context.

Three Principles

So what are they?

Thought is a human principle. It’s always working through us taking form, often on the basis of what’s going on moment to moment in our lives.

We’ll most commonly recognize it as the mental chatter that goes on in our heads 24/7. But it’s also what’s behind the conclusions we come to about this or that.

You can look at what appears to be an impossibly busy day and interpret that as meaning you’re going to be stressed out. Or you can look at it as just a day with a lot to do. In the first scenario you may go through that day finding everything difficult and feeling unable to give anything your full attention. In the second you may choose to give your attention to one thing at a time. In the latter case, you may be surprised at what you get through and how you feel about it. In the former you may reach the end of the day feeling wrecked.

The day’s demands are no different, it’s how you thought, and hence felt about them that creates the differing experiences.

On that point, thinking and feeling are two sides of the same coin. If your feeling is off somewhere, the genesis of your upset will always be some off thinking.

Feel anxious? You’ve got some anxious thinking somewhere. Not that there’s anything wrong with feeling anxious, by the way. Anxiety is part of the human condition. But sometimes it’s just worth asking yourself where in your thinking your creating it.

Consciousness is another principle. It’s that moment by moment by moment quality of our lives that gives us the experience of being alive.

But most of us don’t spend our lives in the present moment. Far from it, we live thinking of things in the past: aching back to times that felt happier; replaying conversations to wonder what would have happened had we said something smarter; looking at how things played out on a particular occasion to gain some indication of how they’ll play out this time.

Or we’re way out there in the future: the ambitious goals we want for ourselves; upcoming events and how we’ll be at them; holidays and retirement and how different life will be then.

People often paralyze themselves with anxiety about what might or might not happen in the future.

“What if I do this and it doesn’t work out?” is a common thing I hear from clients. I tell them they’re getting ahead of themselves. They’re not in that future moment yet. They’re here now. If they stay present and pay attention to their own wisdom, they’ll know what to do in the moment. Won’t automatically mean that future-stress goes away. But it does help just to know that if you trust the flow of life, things have an uncanny way of taking care of themselves.

Speaking of which…

Mind is the third and the universal principle. It’s the principle that knows that there’s a greater intelligence than us at work in our world. Some people call it God, others Spirit, or just the Universe. It’s the force behind today’s solar eclipse, for example. The force behind the existence of life. The force behind the unfolding of everything from flowers to the shape of our lives.

In all the noise and through all the chatter, it can be difficult to listen to and to hear mind. But it’s there working in any case.

Why share all of this?

I’m sharing all of this with you because sometimes the wellbeing advice becomes just another part of the noise. It can become another set of things to do when you’re already busy enough. From a 3Ps perspective there’s nothing you need to do. Our systems, it turns out, are self-correcting. All you need is bring your awareness to how things are working and you’ll have whatever insights or discoveries you need to realign. That alone is a refreshing thought.

Like we said last week, wellbeing is a place to come from. Not a place to get to. Like our creed says, wellbeing is our natural default position.

And I wonder, what changes, and what become possible for you as you hear that?

Photo attribution: Copyright: / 123RF Stock Photo

March 13, 2015 by Christine

Wellbeing: What Is It and Why Should You Care?

Stress levels are on the up.

Recent surveys show that 54% of Brits have rising stress levels, and that 8 in 10 US workers are feeling under increasing pressure at work. Many of us, it seems, are so consumed by what we’re doing that it’s affecting our health and happiness.

Not surprising, then, that talk about wellbeing is also in vogue. At a macro level ill health and less than great productivity affects the economy at a time when it’s still getting back to pre-recession performance.

And while all the high-level, organization level stuff is interesting to me, I’m more interested here in what you, as an individual leader, entrepreneur or creative can do to support your own personal wellbeing. Because, the way we look at it, it’s fundamental to your ability to innovate, compete and perform at your best out there in the world.

If you don’t nurture it, I’d argue, you’re under-performing. Indeed you’re doing yourself a huge disservice.

Wellbeing

But what is wellbeing? So, the Oxford Dictionary puts it this way:

The state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy.

I’d go a little further than that.

Way I see it, wellbeing is a measure of how you feel about your life. It’s a holistic thing that has deep roots in all areas of your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health.

If you Google the word “Wellbeing”, you’ll come up with about 52 million results. Look at a lot of the key articles and they’ll talk to you about the tools you can use to help you in your quest for wellness. Of course, so many of us are so keen to improve our wellbeing that we’ll try all kinds of things. A lot of them are not sustainable. Here’s why:

So much of the advice is written on the assumption that wellbeing as a place to achieve; something you can work towards if only you follow this or that anti-stress tactic.

But what if that was wrong?

What if wellbeing is something we already have? A place to come from. Our natural preset position. A state you can nurture and enhance.

Regardless of your current health or happiness, just notice how it feels to consider that you’re already okay. That there’s nothing you need to do or to fix in order to be well. Take the pressure off yourself to try to be well, and just be well already!

That framing kind of changes everything.

Nurturing Wellbeing

From that place, then, we believe there are 4 ways in which you can enable and support your wellbeing. They are:

Develop a few core practices that enable wellness. These could be as simple as limiting the amount of coffee or alcohol you drink each day; observing routine bedtime and waking up time; drinking a couple of litres of water a day; avoiding sugar.
Develop your consciousness about the quality of your thinking. Thought, as we’ll find out, is one of the fundamental principles of life. It’s a never-ending stream that flows through our brains. That’s a given and, at core, it’s not the problem. The problem is then what we think about our thinking, and the affect that has on us at a feeling level.
Create some basic habits and rituals to keep your wellbeing a priority for you. This moves wellbeing-supportive behaviors from the realm of chore, to the realm of routine and therefore makes them things you do automatically.
Reframe what it means to you to be successful. Many professionals have big ambitions. No harm it that. But sometimes we attach conditions to our ambitions that make these once laudable goals toxic and therefore stressful to achieve.

If there’s one of these that weighs more heavily than the others, it’s the point about thinking. We’ll be digging into this, and saying why in the weeks to come. So make sure you don’t miss the subsequent articles by getting your name on our VIP email list here!

Photo attribution: Copyright: / 123RF Stock Photo

March 6, 2015 by Christine

Wellbeing: Without It Nothing Works

There’s a lot of buzz around the business community these days about wellbeing, thanks in particular to some high profile names like Arianna Huffington, whose recent book “Thrive” invites us all to “redefine what success means in today’s world”.

Which is fine. Except that many of the senior people I speak to find it challenging, to say the least, to have the kind of calm happiness that Huffington seems to suggest is possible and be successful in their jobs, or in their businesses.

Ask people what’s going on, and you may hear about the pressure people are under, now that the global economy seems to be in upturn, and businesses are striving for growth again.

But while there’s no doubt that the overwhelm monster is bigger than it ever appears to have been (at least in my lifetime), I think if we’re honest with ourselves, that whole success vs wellbeing conundrum has always been an integral part of being a professional in whatever capacity.

So, what’s the solution?

Well, that’s what we’re going to be discussing over the coming weeks.

In particular, we’re going to be exploring:

What is wellbeing?
“Thrive” aside, why is it really getting press right now and why should you care?
What are the ways in which people attempt to create wellbeing? What works, what doesn’t and why?
What new thought, if any, exists about how to create it.

Health warning!

You should know that this is one area that particularly excites us here at Livingston Towers. We’re both keen gym goers and exercisers, and are very mindful of what we eat. Our personal philosophy is, like the title of this post says: without wellbeing, nothing works. At least, nothing works well. Not for us. It’s that simple.

We know too that this runs counter to how many business people think. For so many, work comes before absolutely everything else. And most folks have good intentions around wellbeing, but for the most part the real action on it is relegated to some short-lived New Year’s resolutions, or to a couple of weeks pre-holiday exercise blast to get in shape for either the ski slopes or the beach.

Last year I took my own interest to a whole new level, doing what I called at the time The Wellbeing Experiment. In fact, I wrote about it over the course of several months on my old and now defunct blog. The experiment sought to answer this question:

What becomes possible in my work and life if I upturn the apple cart and put my wellbeing first, rather than – as we all tend to do – marginalize it to some after work, or when I have the time to think about it concern?

The results for me were staggering. What I’ve realized in essence is that wellbeing is our natural default position. In other words, it’s what comes through when we take all the physical, emotional and spiritual blockers out of our way and allow nature to do its job. I’ll say more about all of this in the weeks to come.

Meantime, I’d love to get your take on the whole wellbeing thing. What does it mean to you? How do you help yourself achieve it? What gets in your way?

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