How to NOT be Frustrated - A Beginners Guide

I don’t know about you, but living in today’s world is one non-stop frustration. If it isn’t traffic in the morning, it is queues to get anything done or irritating neighbours. The only time I am not irritated seems to be on those few and far between holidays…and even then something normally intrudes. Hardly an enlightened outlook and one that definitely does not fit into my stated objective this year of not letting other people and situations determine my responses and or emotional state of being ( a goal that I am not being wildly successful with), but as I have learnt over the years, the first step in changing a habit is becoming aware of how deeply entrenched that habit is. Gulp!

The more I pondered living an un-frustrated life the more I was reminded of a story from a story (The Inspector Shan series by Elliot Pattion, a really good series combining interested murder mystery in Tibet with a healthy dose of spirituality). Entrenched in this series is the life of the old monks in Chinese prison camps and how they still manage to keep who they are even under extreme physical stress. One of the quotes was how they see it as a challenge to their faith and serenity, the ultimate test if you will. That connected nicely to the concepts that Viktor Frankly talks about in his book , Man’s Search for Meaning (for those of you still exploring the book shelves who have not come across Viktor Frankl, he is an Auschwitz survivor) - here again is an example of a man who did not lose himself even though the people and circumstances around him insisted he should. What did they know that I did not ? How do you retain control over your emotional state of being regardless of who or what is around you ? Because that, that is the ultimate freedom.

Can you imagine not being controlled by the people and events around you ? Imagine how easy life would be if you could just be you, no matter what ?

One of my tricks when I face these challenges where I don’t want to be something is to imagine a situation that frustrates me (enter really irritating neighbours who live practically on my verandah and love loud music) and then imagining the situation the way I want it to be. Well my first guess on this is to remove the neighbours, but that is not something I control. Nor do I control the volume they play their music at, which brings me to what I can control (because if wishing my neighbours away and their music dead worked, we would not be having this conversation). If I took away the frustration I would be at peace with myself, I would be noticing everything BUT the thing that is frustrating me...what was that ?

I would be noticing everything BUT what was frustrating me! Hmmm! It made sense – when something irritates you the only thing you can focus on is that thing. It is instance. There I will be, quietly listening to TV, not noticing the neighbours at all…and then there is a quiet patch and now I can hear them…. End even when the show gets going again, all I can hear is them. I go from sane (well relatively J )…to insane in microseconds. My thoughts are fully hooked in.

But what if  I started to practice focusing on other things ?

What if the problem with anger or frustration (or any of the emotions that require active, consistent fuelling by thoughts and attention) is simply that I am focusing on what I don’t want, rather than what I want ?

Putting it into Practice:

1)      Know the rules :

-          You can’t create a negative, so what would replace the thing you don’t want ?

-          You can’t wish away things you can’t control, so stop focusing on them, on the people or the outcome and bring it back to yourself, what can you control ?

2)      Practice

3)      Give yourself permission to get it wrong. Change requires practice.

What would change if I started to focus on what is working in that situation ? Like the sound of the birds in the garden, the way the light reflects off the clouds, the warmth of the summer sun. To my surprise it worked. But it took effort to distract myself and unhook from those pesky thoughts.

It is indeed humbling to think that I have spent years blaming other people and events for my emotional state of being, only to discover, I had the power all along, but now that I know…. I will practice until I can spend a day at peace, no matter who or what is in my life. Could you ? Why not ?

Most of Us No Longer Fit in, so Now What ?

I was struck by a comment I heard myself make, that one of the problems we are experiencing in South Africa is that no-one seems to fit in anymore. I definitely don’t - I am the wrong race (white), the wrong gender (female), the wrong weight (over), live in the wrong place (northern suburbs), drive the wrong car (cheapest) and either have too much or not enough money depending on the audience. You would be wrong to assume a darker skin would solve this problem – successful Africans no longer fit in because they have betrayed their culture by somehow being successful (the term used is coconuts) – which is totally bewildering because the whole point of the new South Africa was to create success across all race groups and sexes.

It used to be easy to find your place and fit in - there were strong traditions that told you exactly where you fitted, except these days those traditions seem more and more antiquated and restrictive – who wants to be told that they can’t live the life they want because of a label like gender or ethnicity ? Who wants to be just like the 60 and 70 year older leaders who insist things have not changed ? Who wants to be stuck in the past ?

But what is the present ?

If I Can’t look to tradition, then where do I look to find my fit ? The magazines and TV shows that punt Hollywood consumerism ? Well, I don’t fit into that either. So who am I ? Where do I fit ? What happens if I refuse the labels society and tradition are forcing on me ?

I want to be the master of my own destiny but it is more than that, I want to feel confident and capable and able to manage any moment of any day - no matter what that moment might be. The problem is that until I find a strong identity I have no voice. How do I react ? Who do I look to for guidance ? Where are my role models ? All I felt was lost, desperately trying to be who the person in front of me wanted me to be, trying to find out who I should be.

The more I searched the more lost I felt and then it occurred to me that maybe I didn’t need to fit in. What if I could choose for myself who I am ? What if this was not so much a process of finding myself but a process of defining myself?

I tried it out in one of the most disempowering situations I have ever been in - watching my husband-to-be battle to recover in hospital after a bad car accident. I was held hostage by the nursing staff – if I complained they stopped even pretending to care and if I didn’t complain, they would not step up their game and actually give him the care he needed. In desperation I phoned my life coach and she asked me the question that changed my life, “How I wanted to feel ? “

Suddenly I saw a way out of the darkness. If I knew how I wanted to feel, then I would know who I wanted to be which meant I would know how to react, what to say and to who. It wasn’t easy by any means, but it was strangely liberating knowing that every decision I was making wasn’t based on what my vague idea of what I should be doing. I could not control the outcome, but I would know that I had stepped up and done what I needed to do to have no regrets no matter what.

Perhaps you are one of the lucky one’s with a very clear sense of who you are and so how to act and react and manage every moment of your day, but if you are not, then why not start to choose ?

Why not choose how you want to feel ?  Why not choose who you want to be?  It doesn’t matter who you were or who your parents were, in fact, the past doesn’t matter at all in this process. What matters are the decisions you start making now! What matters is this moment, the present because your present becomes your past.

It is not about who you are now, it is about who you want to be, so get that clear in your head. Find the emotion you want to be feeling and then do whatever it takes to create that. You have nothing to lose, so why not start to find yourself by choosing yourself.

Lessons on Mastering Your Life – Letting go of the Fight (#MasteringMyLife)

The essence of #ClaimingMyself is to create freedom and empowerment which translates into the ability to actively create joy and the life I want to live. In that search I read almost continuously, finding inspiration at the oddest moments, triggered by the oddest things. The following story from the Dalai Lama is one that just would not let me go. It just seemed to connect, speaking to the constant struggle and fight that seems to be my experience of life. When asked why he didn’t fight back when the Chinese took over Tibet, the Dalai Lama looked down, swung his feet just a bit, then looked back up at us and said with a gentle smile,

“Well war is obsolete, you know!”.

Then after a few moments, his face grave, he said, “Of course the mind can rationalise fighting back…but the heart, the heart would never understand. Then you would be divided in yourself, the heart and the mind, and the war would be inside of you”

I have never before labelled the turmoil inside, ‘war’, but what if I was at war with the world ? It made sense – the conflict between what feels right and what my thoughts insist is right and it got me asking what it would take to let go of all that ? Could I let go of the fact that no-one seems to respect the traffic laws placing my life at risk speeding and overtaking dangerously ? Could I let go of the need to force the world into what it should be and accept what it is ? What about things that I fundamentally believe are wrong - Murder, rape…all those nasties ? Could I simply breathe in and let it all go ? Imagine not being responsible for changing any of that ? Imagine the freedom, the relief ? Who am I without the fight ?

The possibility of living calm, accepting serenity regardless of what is happening around me is an intriguing one. I recently started to read a series of books based in Tibet by Eliot Paterson (The Inspector Shan mysteries) in which a convicted Chinese ex-party man meets Tibetan monks in the Chinese/ Tibetan prisons. A hard read – in fact I put the first book down, unable to read about the torture and sheer decimation of Tibetan culture that the Chinese have and are enforcing. Then I picked it back up and didn’t stop reading until I had finished all five books. Somehow Paterson was able to weave in the essence of what it means to be spiritually advanced. One of the most telling moments was where Chan is describing the life of the older monks in the prison camp. He says that he wonders if for the old monks they even notice the Chinese guards and the physical conditions, torture and pain connected as they are to another world in their meditations. Their lives are simply about compassion and non-war, no fight.

My life is hardly as extreme, yet the challenge doesn’t seem any smaller for that. Can I let go ? Probably! After a long struggle with myself that exhausts me I will finally find that moment of balance and let go. It is a hard thing to let go of - being right and expecting the world to be better than it often is.

But I can’t seem to let go of it. What if ?

What would open up for you if you let go of the fight ? What would your life be like if you could remain at peace with yourself ? What would it take to create that ?

Where is Your Focus ? Destination or Direction ? (Living Vision)

(part of the #MasteringMyself series, #livingVision)
Do you focus on heading toward a specific destination or do you use your goal as a direction, ? The difference is profound. Defining your ‘there’ a specific destination or a as a focused direction affects how you get there and I suspect, the speed, quality of experience and chance of success. What are the differences ?

When your ‘there’ is a specific outcome your focus is on one thing and one thing only - there - to the exclusion of anything else. You are invested in this specific outcome and are not willing to change it or evolve it. This investment creates the need to defend your position and why it is right from all challenges and inevitable requires a high level of control so that you can keep things on track. If you need a team to get your there (and you always do), then you are in for a rough ride because most teams like to be a constructive part of the journey - rather than pure, thoughtless minions. Will you get there ? Maybe. It is after all not an uncommon way of managing, but it is not guaranteed and it always comes at a huge price. And if you do get there, you may end up with egg on your face as your specific destination may no longer be so right after all.

When your ‘there’ is a direction your focus is on ‘always making choices and decisions that take you towards’ there. This inherently means that you are focusing on the present, using what you have and where you are and so optimizing every opportunity (if not creating them). It allows you to be open to new ideas and as importantly, new ways of getting there. When you are focused on a direction you do not waste time investing in a specific place or specific way of doing things or even (and this is the important one for me), in any one way of being, all of which means that you are able to let go of limiting thoughts, ideas and activities. When your destination is a direction you allow others to contribute which creates that all elusive buy in and we all know that groups of passionate people achieve success with less energy, more often. The best part of choosing a direction not a destination ? When you do get ‘there’ you often find it is way more awesome than your original concept.

It sounds counter intuitive to focus on a direction not a destination, after all, everyone always tells you that you have to be very, very clear on what you want and where you want to be if you want to create something. But part of the creation journey is learning and part of that learning is increasing clarity of what you want. It evolves as you move forward.

Focusing on a direction is not about losing that destination, after all where you want to be creates your direction. The difference is subtle :

- It is about letting go of ‘there’ but still holding on to ‘there’ as an anchor.

- It is about being present and making where you are now as important as where you want to be

- It is about allowing other people to be a part of the creative process which allows your dream to get bigger and better

- It is about having clarity but keeping flexibility

When I look around me at the people that build the teams I like to work in, they all use their vision as a direction which allows me to be a constructive part of that vision. Teams like that bring out the best in me. I love seeing how to improve a vision, making it even better. There is power to focused direction, so why not let go of control and allow the rest of the universe in ? Why not make a change from destination to focused direction ?

Stopping Worrying

What would we all do if we just stopped worrying ? Because if you think about it, what we spend most of our time doing is worry about things that may or may not happen. Let me ask another question, how is that working for you ? Does your worry actually make a difference ? Or do things just seem to happen on their own anyway ?


If you have done any reading around the power of thinking (authors like Dr Wayne Dyer or if you are more scientifically minded, Gary Zukov or my favourite Esther Hicks), you will know that what you think about expands. Which means in effect, you create what you are worrying about..

It is not possible to expect a habit that has been entrenched over a lifetime to just disappear, but there is something you can do about it.

1) Find that balance between being in this present and holding your vision in the present.

Conflict arises when you are in conflict with what is and what you would like it to be. The trick (and it really does seem to be a trick) is to accept where you are without struggle and also keep the energy of where you want to be present.

2) Shift your focus, from what is absent to what it would feel like with ‘it’ present

If you are worrying, you are focusing on something not happening. Shift your focus to the future and really see and feel yourself in that future moment. Stop focusing on it not happening and focus on it happening, how will you feel then. What does that moment look like, how does it unfold ?

3) Accept it not happening

Because it may not! Be comfortable with it not happening by having a strategy in place to manage that situation. Then you can let go of worrying and start creating. Accepting that it may not happen does not mean giving up. It means you need to rethink your strategy. If this approach does not work, move on, and find another strategy but the only way to move on is accept that sometimes things don’t happen exactly as we envisage. You need to be flexible.

4) Be flexible and use what you have

By letting go of HOW something should happen you allow it to happen. Stop worrying about the how and instead, pay attention to what is happening now. Ask yourself how this helps you and start to use the opportunities that are there yet you never see because you are so focused on the how you have in your head.

5) Step into your fear by taking the time to put down ALL the consequences of your choice.

Worry is the fear that something you desperately want won’t happen and the fastest way I know to move past fear is to consciously acknowledge understand every consequence. We are never trained to see consequences because we are told that thinking about what could go wrong makes it happen. Poppycock. Things go wrong and the people who manage those events best are the ones who took the time to think about what would happen if. In deep diving this is often the difference between surviving or dying.

6) If you can’t trust the people around, trust yourself

We control because we don’t trust others. We worry because we think that if we don’t, it won’t happen. But, if you trust yourself (which means you have taken the time to be prepared, have a plan in place for any consequence and have given yourself permission to learn), then you can let go and focus on what is happening. In diving, the moment you submerge is the moment you stop worrying about it, because now it is too late. That is the moment you start living it. When was the last time you stopped obsessively worrying and thinking about your vision and instead lived it!

Letting go of worrying feels uncomfortable. It feels like you are deluding yourselves, but here is how I made peace with it. Would I rather be happy in this moment and not get what I was hoping for, or would I rather be miserable in this moment and still not get what I was hoping for. If you are still not convinced how about this, your thoughts create your reaction to events and by now you should know how you react to something is often the difference between a successful or disastrous outcome. If you are focused on what you want to happen you will not jump to the wrong conclusions, instead you will be firmly linked to the present, working on using what you have to create what you want. It is the most empowering place to be and one that every leader I have met instinctively knows.

PRACTICE ! Take an hour, a day, or even a week and find out what happens when you let go of worrying! You have nothing to lose, after all, you can always go!

Mastering Work – Creating High Performing Teams and Individuals (Why Context creates Performance, not Training)

As an individual striving to succeed in the world of ‘big corporate’ I have become obsessed with finding that ‘x’ factor that differentiates high performing teams and individuals. My natural tendency is to want to perform and perform well (if not better than my peers), which has been very difficult to accomplish in the world large corporate. I could have given up and just blended into the corporate background but that is not in my nature either. It has to be possible to succeed, after all, I have a world record, how hard can success in a corporate really be compared to that ? At this point you would have thought I had learnt my lesson. When I started my world record journey the question that drove me was, yes, you guessed it, how hard could it be ? Then again, I had no experience in creating exceptional success, so this time should be a whole lot easier.

In diving I took a lot of time to understand the environment I was in and then to correlate what people did to service that environment and understand what they were doing and why. In diving it was easy because the environment was almost exclusively physical, at work, well the environment is not that simple. In diving I also never had to worry about other people’s performance or impact on my success, not so in the work place. So what causes a lack of performance in the work place ? As if often the case, a book gave me an answer that really connected for me and that book was ‘How Nasa Builds Teams (Pellerin).

Pellerin refers to another book (that is not on Kindle, I hate it when that happens) by Stolovich and Keeps (2004) - Training ain’t Performance, where the cause of performance in the workplace is linked to environmental rather than individual factors. The context then in which individuals find themselves is therefore the key aspect that defines performance. Their research indicates that 80 % of team performance is associated to environment (context) with individuals’ abilities only contributing about 20% of the time. Which basically means that training ain’t going to fix your problem, managing the context will.

Even more thought provoking was the finding that context/ environment drives behaviour and in fact modifies it, which can turn a high performing individual into a non-performing individual just through consistent exposure to the behaviour norms within an environment. We all know unconsciously that context drives behaviour because we do it all the time. How you behave at a dinner when your in-laws are there, or your boss or your best friend or it is your bachelor/ ette party are all different with the different contexts clearly defining your behaviour. This control of an individual’s behaviour is managed by the participants in the environment, with people who do not ‘conform’ sanctioned until they do.

Malcolm Gladwell makes a compelling argument that our character has more to do with environment/ context than who we are innately. He states that the reason most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment”. Corporates are even better at controlling behavior through a mechanism Pellerin calls normalization of deviance.  This is what happens where bizarre behavior that even the individuals exhibiting it would consider inappropriate outside the workplace, is completely appropriate and propagated within.

Now take all that and apply it to your workplace.  You are either in an environment that supports high performance or you are not! No amount of training will change that as it is the environment and not the skills that are creating the non-performance, and as training is what companies do to create change, you are now stuck in ground hog day… with the people around you exerting enormous pressure for you to behavior just like them, no matter how destructive that may be.

So what do you do ? I fundamentally believe that individuals have the power to create change (even when stuck in a world of instituitionalised disempowerment), which means that I do not believe in sitting back and letting some-one else fix the environment I am in. As an individual I am empowered and I can make a difference through who I am and how I behave. If the problem is create by environment and context, I can start to actively change the environment toward something that would support my vision (in this case, high performance). Focusing on environment is something that is  outside my nexus of control, which leaves me with one last tactic - consciously managing my behavior by choosing a ‘self’ that does not change based on context. By becoming more authentic I become part of an environment that supports high performance instead of becoming part of an environment that creates non-performance. I also am operating within my nexus of control, which means that I am fundamentally more at peace and more confident with who I am and whilst that may not matter to my company, it certainly matters to me.

There is a warning that I must attach to the concept of choosing who you are and so how you will act and behave - especially when you find yourself in an environment where conforming is required – it can create huge conflict if managed incorrectly. Then again, think back to those rare managers who have walked into a team and fundamentally turned it around through a combination of who they are, how they behave and how they manage the context. Sometimes, all it takes is one person with a strong vision of how it could be. Sometimes, that person is you!

The Lonely Road - Turning a ‘No!‘ into a YES!

I stumbled on a new TV program last night called, ‘Peter Jones – How we made our millions’. Peter Jones is well known to Dragons’ Den fans and as a permanent fan of people who ‘stand out’, I watched the show with mild interest, only to be stunned at the level of honesty and exposure that was hardly normal in a documentary of that nature. Two quotes popped for me, the first by one of last nights, entrepreneurs, Richard Reed  really encapsulate what explorers do, they turn a world of No’s, into a  ‘Yes’ and the second was observation about what it feels like to walk that road – very lonely which is definitely a feeling I could relate to.

It is indeed lonely being an explorer. You are outside the known limits, outside of the comfort zones of all but a few people which means there is very little external approval or support, both  of which are things that most of us are born to seek. I often found myself ‘seeing’ my journey as a road that stretched out into oblivion with me, the only pilgrim anywhere in sight. Some days I  would wonder if I was even sane ? Was it really worth it ? Maybe I should go back to that well beaten path where I at least would have company ? I would return for a while and surround myself with the constant barrage  of No, No, No until it irritated me so much I would head back out and look for another way to turn that No into a Yes.

Because that is really all that a world record holder or successful entrepreneur does, challenge the reasons why something is not possible and look for a way to turn that resounding  No into a Yes! How do they do that ? With their persistence, their creativity and their ability to let go of who they are and become who they need to be to get to that Yes! Think about it. When you are in a negotiation/ discussion how often do you find yourself letting go of what you want just to be right ? But, if you were really serious about getting what you wanted, would you not let go of being right or start to listen to the person opposite you so that you could understand his position and how you could both  move closer to yours ?

Next time you find yourself stopping dreaming because the prevailing opinion is, “No! That is not possible! “ and you can not find a single person who believes in your dream, relax and remember, lonely is normal. Then start to focus on exactly how to get from where you are to where you want to be.

Let go of everything else! Let go of your ego! Challenge your beliefs! Get creative but don’t stop until you have turned that No into a Yes!