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The Personal Monthly Retreat
BY: Alan / 0 COMMENTS / CATEGORIES: Uncategorized
Why does life get so complicated and convoluted that we end up feeling stressed and off-course over and over again? Life getting out of balance is no new thing for most of us in the civilized world. But when we give in to it, it leads us down a road of a life that feels more like it is running us than us living the lives we were intended to live.
I continually found myself getting frustrated with having wonderful and lofty goals for what I would accomplish when I ‘got my act together’ which never seemed to happen. When the goals continue to get recycled month after month and year after year, you begin to need to fight off some feelings that resemble depression.
So, several years ago, (can it really be 18 years?) I began a journey that I have repeated and added to nearly every year since: A 40 day journey leading up to my birthday, to take my life into perspective and carefully map out what I wanted the year ahead to look like.
As that process evolved and I began to analyze the pieces that didn’t seem to work as well as perfect the pieces that did, one of the offshoots was the “Personal Monthly Retreat.” I found that merely putting some goals into a document once a year tended to sweep those goals into a dusty corner of my life, not to be discovered until the following year’s ‘spring cleaning.’ Therefore, going off by myself for a couple of hours every month developed into a ritual which today, I rarely miss.
I know very well the benefits that this ritual have held for my life, in actually bringing some of my goals for self-improvement, growth and development, and improving my relationships into reality. The question to put out there is, “What would a monthly retreat do for you?”
- Do you feel the need to re-focus on the things that are most important to you?
- Do you lose track of pursuing your life-long goals and aspirations?
- Do you have passions that you want to pursue, that get crowded out because ‘There simply isn’t enough time’?
- Do milestones like New Year’s and birthdays leave you feeling empty, like life is passing you by, or energized and eager to tackle the year ahead?
If any of that is you, consider these 5 simple tips to get started on your own Personal Monthly Retreat habit:
- Set a scheduled time each month that is blocked off in your calendar to focus on you!
- Get away from it all! Go off to a place where no one can find you, turn your phone off, and away from the distractions of your everyday life. (i.e. NOT at home or the office!)
- Stay focussed! Little ideas and projects that you have to do will occur to you. Write these things down, and schedule them into your monthly plan, but don’t get distracted from the goal of planning out the next month.
- Develop Action Steps – Each goal in each area of your life needs to be filtered down to the next actionable step. The bigger goals, in particular, will seem too overwhelming and cause stress. Find the next thing that you know you can actually do, and commit to doing it.
- Schedule your ideas! Merely making a list will not work for most people. You need to take your Action Steps and schedule them into your calendar for a specific time on a specific day. Then make sure to honor yourself by honoring your calendar. It is as important, or more important, than your other meetings and appointments with others!
If your life feels complicated and convoluted, you have been partly responsible for letting it get there. What is worse, is that no one else is going to reach down and simplify it for you. Like it or not, no one cares about what you are passionate about as much as you do. That means if any of your passion is actually going to happen in your life, you need to find a mechanism to make it work. So feel free to ‘steal’ my monthly retreat and make it yours. And if that isn’t your thing, then answer for yourself this question: “What am I going to do to get myself feeling like I am in charge of my life again?” Be diligent in pursuing that answer!
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Calibrate your Life
BY: Alan / 0 COMMENTS / CATEGORIES: Uncategorized
What happens in your mind when you wake up each morning? I find that some people wake up and their brain instantly fills their mind with the worries and concerns of the day. Other people just stumble off into their morning routine in a groggy state of habit. They aren’t ready to begin thinking for 20 or 30 minutes. Yet some people are capable of approaching each morning with a blank slate. A fresh template from which they can construct the kind of day they want to have.
It’s extremely important that we are intentional about how we begin the day. I think we need to know, and be in charge of what the brain been truly does in the first 10 to 30 minutes after waking up in the morning. If you’re the kind of person who moans and groans and complains about having to get up and do your day, then there are some very specific impacts that that introduction to the day is going to do to you.
If we begin the day with negativity, that negativity will be projected by your subconscious mind into the content of all of the rest of the events of that day. It becomes very difficult for us to have a successful and productive day. If you begin each day by letting the anxieties and the pressures and responsibilities that lie before you flood into your mind and fill you with pressure and worry, you set yourself up for a state of anxiety that will follow you throughout the day. For many of us, these waking up habits that we develop take on a life of their own, so that we don’t even realize that we have any choice to alter them. They become so commonplace that we even assume that what we are experiencing is what everyone experiences when they wake up each morning.
Now this is where being intentional comes into play. I’ve had stressful times in my life when the executive board of my brain is seemingly just waiting to kick in with all cylinders the moment that I’m aware that I’ve woken up. I’ve also had times in my life where I’ve been down about a few things and those thoughts are ready to flood into my awareness the first thing in the morning, and that has driven down my mood for days and weeks on end. No I’m not saying that from time to time you won’t have stressful events in your life, or some depressing circumstances that you may be dealing with. That’s part of life. But what I am saying is that you do not have to subject yourself to those waking habits, even if they have become firmly established in your daily routine.
And therein lies the true beauty of the luxury that the daily wake sleep cycle affords us. Every day we have the opportunity to press the reset button on our lives. If something went horribly wrong yesterday, today gets to be a new day. Each day to be a fresh opportunity to start with a blank slate, and fill it however we choose to.
We live in a world that has a lot of instruments for measurement. There are thermometers, altimeters, compasses, oxygen sensors, air-quality devices, speedometers, etc… There are tons of devices all around us that measure all sorts of things. In the medical field, from radiology to blood tests, in the electrical industry you have voltage meters, load testing, in meteorology you have radar and rain gauges. What’s my point? That every instrument that measures anything, at some point needs to be calibrated. And many instruments need to be re-calibrated, or have the calibration checked at regular intervals to make sure that their measurements continue to be accurate.
Webster’s defines calibration as a set of graduations to indicate values or positions. What I want you to consider today is that each day provides you with an opportunity to recalibrate your thinking your mindset and your life. Through the course of day-to-day activity many instruments such as scales can become gradually out of alignment. Perhaps if you’ve ever stepped on old-fashioned analog scale, you’ve noticed that there’s a dial somewhere to reset the scale to zero. Through the course of getting on and off depending upon the surface that the scale sitting on, the scale may not be set to zero. If that happens, the weight that it gives you might not actually be your true weight. What if you were able to identify a dial that you could adjust up or down that would help you recalibrate your attitude your feelings your emotions and your outlook towards life, and you could be in charge of adjusting that dial every morning?
So here’s the way to go about it. Tonight, as you’re waiting to fall asleep, set in your mind the idea that you’re going to wake up and immediately erase anything that’s on the blackboard of your mind the first moment you are aware of anything. Place in your mind the idea that the moment you hear your alarm, or come to in the morning, you are going to have a specific thought of clarity about the day ahead. Once we learn to program the mind the night before about the first thought we’re going to have when we wake up, we begin to realize that we have the ability of planting a specific thought in our minds that will occur at a particular time. Now that may not in and of itself completely eradicate some well-worn habits that you may have developed to begin your day with an anxious or depressed state of mind, but it will begin to provide you with an option upon waking up. When you do wake up, and become aware of the fresh opportunity that lies ahead of you, be very deliberate about beginning to write on that clean slate in your mind some positive characteristics about the day ahead. Here’s some options for thoughts to begin to set into motion during this process:
- “Today is a new and fresh opportunity for me to live the way I want to live.”
- “I get to make choices today that will positively impact me and those around me.”
- “I have the ability to turn the day ahead of me into a positive and fulfilling experience.”
- “This day has the potential to be a great day.”
- “I’m going to take charge of this day, instead of letting this day take charge of me.”
Now at first glance, this just looks like a bunch of self hype psychobabble. And if you want to think that that’s all it is or can be, go ahead and keep waking up the way that you like to wake up. But if you want to begin to change in a positive direction the energy motivation and hope you have for each day, you will take a list of statements like these, and customize them for where you are in life and what you need to hear yourself say.
Now the next step is vitally important. You need to allow those statements to not just reside in a cognitive logical place in your mind, but you need to move each statement one at a time over into your emotional mind. Any depression, any stress, any state you are habitually used to introducing at this time a day, will take place in the realm of your feelings and emotions. So the statements that you will be saying to yourself, need to also invade that part of your brain and you need to allow yourself the opportunity to feel the emotions that these statements will cause within you. From that point, the starting gun goes off, and you’re off to the races. You’re free to get out of bed and begin your day. But as you do that take some time each morning to begin to lay out and see yourself tackling the important aspects of the day ahead in a matter that lives into the positive thoughts that you have just laid into your mind. That allows you to frame up in your mind a positive and proactive approach to the tasks that like a head of you. Those ideas, that mentality, and those emotions, will then become more available to you as you approach the day ahead, even if some of those tasks and activities are things that would normally be stressful or difficult to deal with.
Just remember, old habits build deep roads into the neurons of our brains and those well-worn pathways are not easily re-routed, so this may be something that you will need to commit to for several weeks before it begins to become second nature to you. The good news is that we can retrain our brain. Brain scans of people who have been consistently exercising intentional new thought patterns are significantly different after a one month interval. You can actually alter the parts of your brain that naturally light up and retrain yourself to think differently. That’s not psychobabble, that’s empirical science. And what better way to begin to implement that ability than by training your brain to start each day with a positive outlook and forward-looking mindset.
A day in your life is a terrible thing to waste, so make sure you start each one that you are gifted with, with an intentional effort to make it great. Leave me some feedback on how this works for you. I would love to hear about what works, and what parts of this you may be struggling with as you attempt to claim each day.
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Your annoying Quirks, & Your greatest opportunity to Love
BY: Alan / 0 COMMENTS / CATEGORIES: Uncategorized
Opportunities to put Love into action
Does it ever tick you off when someone you care about calls you out on one of your annoying or irritating behaviors? Do you ever find yourself taken off-guard because you think you are being a pretty decent person, and then get slammed by a negative comment about something you did or didn’t do. Twenty things you just did right and the one wrong thing is the one that warrants the comment.
In fact, I just got called out by my wife yesterday on apparently being poor at putting things away after using them. More on that later. But it could be anything:
• You are always running late.
• You are so indecisive.
• Did you pass gas… AGAIN?
• You left the bathroom a mess.
• You are driving too fast/slow.
• How can you just sit there and watch TV when there is so much to do around here?
• Are you sure you want to eat that much? You’ve been putting some pounds on.
These are great opportunities for you to feel wrongly accused, judged, unappreciated and disrespected. But I’m about to suggest a different feeling, and a different opportunity that moments like this can offer you.
Face it, any two people doing life in close proximity to each other, no matter how in love they are, are going to have their little quirks and inconsistencies bubble up to the surface over time. No one is EVER going to be completely accepting of all of your little personality flaws. But we still seem to have some unspoken expectation that others shouldn’t ever be bothered by us. How absurd!
Of course the person you love, who also loves you is going to be annoyed and irritated with you from time to time! You should, on some level, expect it, and not let yourself get so bent out of shape when it comes up.
Love can be proactive or reactive. In other words, you can be intentional and assertive with your love by loving someone the way that you want to love somebody. Your ideas, your choice to give the way you want to give, impress the way you want to impress, compliment on the things that mean the most to you. Or you can be more of a reactive lover: doing the things that he/she wants to do, responding to their needs, helping them out on their projects and to-do items.
Effective love involves a mixture of the two. On the reactive extreme, nobody really respects the person who dotes after them, following them along like a lost puppy. “It doesn’t matter to me. What do you want to do?” At least, not all the time. And on the other swing of the pendulum, someone who always takes the bull by the horns and calls all of the shots tends to send the message that you are just along for the ride, and your opinions and how you want to be loved doesn’t really matter. Either approach, over time, loses respect and gets old.
So what does this have to do with your annoying quirks? It would seem that having your less than admirable qualities put front and center would put you in the reactive camp: “Sorry dear, I will try harder next time.” Which, in fact, is a better response than your average proactive lover, who will get defensive and feel disgusted that you don’t appreciate all he or she does. But in reality, that is simply a reactive response by a person who wants to be left alone to love when he/she feels like it.
Here is what I suggest:
1. That you carry around with you in your back pocket the reality that from time to time, one of your less than desirable qualities will invite a response from the one you love. Don’t be so surprised!
2. When the shot comes across your bow, you receive it and show that you are taking the time to think about the impact that behavior might have on someone else.
3. Resist feeling like you now have to reactively comply by bending yet another of your ways to get out of everyone else’s way. In fact, resist any negative feeling. It isn’t that you are sub-par or inadequate, it’s just your annoying quirk. There is a difference!
4. Instead, choose to feel empowered! You just uncovered one of the missing puzzle pieces for how you can demonstrate your love in a new way that honors the person you love. Be proactive in how you can lovingly respond by smoothing out one of your jagged edges:
• Make sure you are on time or early for everything for a week.
• Have the guts to make some decisions, even if some wind up being wrong.
• Got gas? Leave the room first.
• Leave the bathroom cleaner than you found it… every time.
• Let someone else drive, and just enjoy the ride, or drive a tad more responsibly.
• Put the remote down, and help out around the house. Take some ownership!
• Take smaller portions, skip desert once in a while, and invite him/her on a walk around the block.
So apparently, I leave things out after using them from time to time. Looks like that is one of my jagged edges. You have your jagged edges too. I have an opportunity in this coming week to work on improving myself, loving my wife in a new way (by cleaning up after myself), and subtly demonstrating that I am still capable of improving myself, while showing her that she is still worth the effort. In fact, that sets me up for a more challenging and engaging week than the one I would have planned.
You can let yourself ‘go negative’ when these bombs drop in your lap, or you can use them to expand the way that you express your love. Take the easy route, and watch the love between you grow a little colder. Put a little effort into the latter and you grow as a person and in your relationship. The choice is up to you.
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