The Blog is Moving

To www.vernavanschaik.com

I will no longer be posting here. All my old posts are available on the new site. Please join me there!

How to Change Your Focus

If you aren’t hitting your target, then there is a good chance that your focus is not on what you want and you are being distracted. So how do you keep your focus tight ? The steps below are not sequential, but rather different practices that allow you to strengthen your focus and can be used separately or together.

Step 1 : Become Aware of Your Focus

Until you become aware of what you are thinking your focus will automatically follow your thoughts. To create awareness of your thoughts you need to create a conscious practice throughout your day where you stop for 5 minutes and allow yourself to be the observer. I imagine it as me stepping outside of myself for a while so that I can watch my thoughts flittter by. You will find when you start that you get pulled into your thoughts and the story that they are telling. This is natural simply because it is what you have always done. When you find yourself engrossed in the story, stop, take a deep breath and start again. The more you practice, the more aware you become of what you are thinking and how your thinking affects your actions.
Practice : For 5 min every hour stop what you are doing and just watch your thoughts.

Step 2 : Practice Choosing Your Focus

Becoming aware of your focus is a long term strategy that requires continuous practice. A more direct approach to creating the right focus is to consciously choose it! What do I mean by consciously choose it ? Well, during your day how often do you remind yourself of what you have chosen to focus on ?

How do you start your day ? Do you just jump into your day ? Or did you spend 5 minutes creating a focus for your day with a set of things you want to achieve and ways of being you want to attain ? If you didn’t then your day will almost definitely not be yours and at the end of it you will find that you were pushed and pulled in any direction but the one you wanted to go.

Practice : For 5 min before you start your day, create it in your head first.

During the day, when you find yourself in a challenging situation or when your plan suddenly falls apart, do you stop and allow yourself to just check where you are and remind yourself of what your focus was ?

Practice : For 5 min every hour or so, remind yourself of how you created your day that
morning. Repeat, repeat, repeat

Focus on what you want or what makes you smile We are taught to focus on what isn’t working and if you pay attention during the day, you will start to hear that most of the conversations are about what is wrong. Well, what if nothing was wrong ? What if all that needed to change was how you see the world ? Start consciously looking for what is working and you will start to see more of that. You will also start to see more opportunities where other people just give up.

Practice : List 5 things that are working right now! List 3 things that made you smile!

Step 3 : Focus on what you have and be grateful.

I know, who doesn’t tell you to be grateful ? If you do one thing that will make a difference today it is this, just be conscious and grateful for what you have But it is important enough to be a step on its own and if you do one thing, do this. Being grateful is not a habit most of us have – instead we focus on what is missing, never being present to what we already have..

Step 4 : Know what you want to Create !

And if you don’t know, start to become aware of what you like and don’t like. Take the time to end each day with a short review…what worked today ? What didn’t ? What made my smile ? What didn’t ? And then tomorrow, focus on what is working.

Step 5 : Keep Practicing, especially when you are 'failing'
It sounds obvious, but this is a new habit you are creating. Don't get despondent when you find yourself failing to get it right first time. Keep practicing!!! And give yourself permission to fail!

It doesn't matter where or how you start, just start. It doesn't matter for how long, in fact sometimes less is more, just start! Why ever not ?

Not Hitting Your Target ? Why You Need to Manage Your Focus

Yes, it is about being good at what you do. But what happens when you have the skill set but you are still not getting where you want ? How do you pull it all together and create your ultimate goal ?

That was the big question I found myself asking back in 2000 after yet another year of getting nowhere diving. I was stuck at 121 meters and nothing I did really seemed to make a difference. I knew how to dive. I had practiced the skills over and over until they were unconscious reactions, yet somehow I could just not get that dive that would take me to the world record. I had to change something, because obviously what I was doing was not getting me where I wanted to go, but what ?

Hindsight being a wonderful thing I can now look back and see what I needed to let go of, what I was focusing on. For almost three years I was stuck because all I could see was how I wanted it to be. The more I wanted things to be the way I thought they should be, the more stuck I became. Let me put it another way – I was focused on the people around me and trying to get them to change. I was focused on the outcome, all things that I had no control of. What I needed to do was change my focus onto what I could control and what I could control was my skills and my choices.

This is where it can get tricky because you only have choices if you are able to accept what is, which means letting go of the word,‘should’. To do that I had to first become aware of how much time I spent bemoaning the fact that nothing was the way it should be. But here is the thing – things are what they are and wishing it is different will never change anything. The only way to create change is to use what you have and not wait for things to miraculously change.

I love this idea of changing my focus from the outcome which I can’t control, to myself and my actions all of which I can control. The moment I do that it feels like a huge load has suddenly been removed from my shoulders. I don’t have to control things anymore. I am not responsible and to blame for things I have no influence over! Now that my focus is on what I can do I feel more confident. It feels right because I am now the Master of my own Destiny!!!

The short and sweet summary

• Stop focusing on the outcome and focus on what you can control, which are your actions.
• Become aware of how often you expect the world to be the way it should be, which is not how it is and how that creates conflict and changes your behaviour

In case you were wondering what happened on my dive, well the moment I let go of forcing the world into the way I thought it should be and started to act on my own behalf, acting as if diving to world record depths was easy, as if I were already the deepest woman in the world, well, the moment I started that I went solo to 141 meters and that dive gave me full corporate sponsorship, an entire dive team and in the space of 6 months, my first world record dive attempt ( I reached 186 meters which would have been the Guinness record if an Italian diver had not made 211 meters the month before me).

I will blog about how to change your focus later this week, but until then, start practicing:

• Become AWARE of what you are focusing on.
• Do you focus exclusively on the outcome ?
• Are you using the word SHOULD a lot ?
• How aware are you of what ‘is’ ?

Start with something simple, like your golf game, but start!

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!   

Mastering Emotions with Meditation

I don’t know about you, but the ability to stay calm, cool and collected at work (amongst other places) is quite high on my list of things to perfect. It is even more frustrating to be stuck on this and know that who I am is something that can change – my diving taught that irrevocably. Who I was when I started diving and who I am now are so different I can hardly recognise myself in the girl who was soo scared of the world she took three years to even join the underwater club to learn diving.
If you have tried to change your reactions you will know how hard it is. I guess 30 or so years of unconscious practice can be blamed for that, which begs the question, how do you change your wiring ? Because if you take a stroll down the EQ shelves you will quickly discover that your emotions are chemical reactions and that these are patterned into our brains -the pattern being reinforced every time we experience the trigger and reaction. This in effect means that you can re-pattern you brain and so your reactions, the question is how ?

 

Meditation seems to be a valid answer and one that even the guru of EQ, Daniel Goleman has explored. Here are some interesting facts and conclusions that I took from his book, The Meditative Mind.

 

The Basic Premise

•  One’s thoughts create one’s emotions. To change the way you react you need to be able to manage the unconscious thoughts that then create the emotional hijack that then ruins your day.
• Meditation works directly with your thoughts and the pattern of your thoughts by retraining your attention, which in turn gives you the mental space to make another choice and practice something else.
• Meditation fosters concentration. This means instead of the normal random and scattered thought stream you actively work on focusing your thoughts by fixing your mind on a single object (the meditation topic) or by practicing detachment from thoughts (mindfulness meditation).
• Meditation is different from other ways of relaxing because it trains and improves you capacity to pay attention (as opposed to letting the mind wander as it will).
• The effects of meditation last beyond the meditation session, making it a highly efficacious method for improving your mental health

 

Medical Reasons Why you Should Meditate

 

1) Reduce anxiety and stress

Meditation has been shown to reduce the effects of anxiety and stress (and who doesn’t need that). When you suffer from high anxiety your body fails to stop reacting when the problem is over. This means that you react to ‘normal’ events as if they were crisis.

   Each minor happening increases your tension which in turn magnifies the next ordinary event (a deadline, an interview, a doctor’s appointment), into a threat. Because the anxious person’s body stays permanently mobilized it has a lower threat threshold for the next event.

 

2) Change the Bodies Physiology

Meditation is also beneficial for heart disease and diabetes, lower cholesterol as well as having a positive effect on asthma sufferers.

 

3) Improve EQ & Communication

Meditation improves empathy, communication skills, listening and social awareness. This improvement is based in the improvement in attention which means that you are better ability to pick up on subtle perceptual cues in the environment and to pay attention to what is going.

 

A supporting experiment

Two groups of volunteers came into Goleman’s physiology lab. One group comprised meditation teachers who had been meditating for at least 2 years. The other group who were interested in meditation, but how had never practiced it.

   The volunteers were then split into two groups, one of which was told to relax for 20 minutes, the other to meditate for 20 min. When a non- meditator was in the ‘meditate’ group, they were given instruction on how.

   Ater twenty minutes both groups were shown a short film depicting a series of bloody accidents among workers in a woodworking shop - a standard way of inducing stress for lab studies.

   The study found that the meditators (whether or not they were new or experienced) had a unique pattern of reaction to the film. As they watched the film, their systems prepared for the accidents they were about to witness and then, as soon as the accident was over, they recovered more quickly than those of non-meditators. After the film, they were also more relaxed than the non-meditators who still showed signs of tension.

   From this (and other experiments) it can be concluded that meditators handle stress in a way that breaks the threat-arousal-threat spiral.

 

How to Meditate

There are numerous ways to meditate, but they can be broken into two primary themes – you are either focusing on something or you are being mindful.

 

1) Using Focus to meditate

By focusing on a specific object and practicing holding your attention there, returning to that object when focus is lost the meditator makes the habit of repetition stronger than the his other mental habits. This enables him to then use this ability to focus on a specific thing to focus and practice behavior that he chooses and that will support his goals in an interaction.

  

The focus can be :

• The breath
• A chant which can be the repetition of a name. mantra or phrase, spoken. It can be silent verbalisation or mental or out-loud.
• An object, picture or specific point in space

2) Mindfulness meditation.

 

In this meditation practice the meditator is not focusing on something, instead he practices adopting a neutral stance toward whatever comes and goes in his stream of awareness, placing an equal value on whatever arises. He is in effect practicing being an observer rather than being ‘in the action’. The meditator’s reaction is simply to register whatever he observes. If any further comment, judgment or reflection arises in the meditators mind, these are themselves made the focus of ‘bare attention. They are neither repudiated nor pursued, but simply dismissed after being noted.

 

Practically Applying Meditation

There are two parts to a meditation practice, the first is to introduce it regularly into your day (even if it is for only 15 minutes). The second is to practice using meditation to detach yourself you’re your normal reactions in difficult situations. I have found that a simple mantra (I am calm) works really well at work. When I feel myself starting to react I immediately repeat that to myself, remembering what calm feels like and returning to that state. If that does not work I revert to the traditional meditation of noticing the breath. Does it work, yes, if I remember! So I often start my mantra as I walk in, rather than hoping I remember in the heat of the moment.

   Suprisingly, I actually used meditation to overcome my intense fear when diving! Not that I called it meditation. I found that by repeating over and over the Buddhist mantra Ohm Mane Padme Hung, before and during my dive I was able to distract my brain and stay outside of the panic and fear it was experiencing and so get on with the job of diving.

 

Meditation is not a quick fix, but it is a scientifically proven mechanism that changes the way your brain fires and that affects your emotional response habits. All it takes is 15 minutes a day!

Life Lessons from a Record - Turning Hope into Reality

We fall in love with hope, hope that promises us that there is a way out of our lives. There is! But it is not easy or something that can be given to you. It takes courage - the courage to start asking yourself hard questions.

• Who am I being ?
• What am I creating ?
• What am I afraid of ?
• How would I like it to be ?
• What do I need to start thinking, saying and doing to start creating THAT INSTEAD!

How many of you are prepared to start finding those answer ?
Yes it is easier to sit and wait for someone else to notice you and create it for you...but having done that for years diving I know from some very bitter experience that the only way to make your life happen is to be your own master!
ONLY YOU CAN MAKE YOUR LIFE HAPPEN! And if you are not taking ownership of it, you are relying on blind luck and the good will of others to create it for you.
That is the lesson behind any accomplishment!
That is the lesson behind my world record!
When will you start ?

When is Enough, Enough ?

We all have a sentence that drives us, for some it is, ‘I am not enough!’ I know it is one of mine, a fear that sits there, eating away inside me. What if everyone finds out ? I could not bear the humiliation, the laughter and of course, the rejection. For a while I spent hours trying to find out where and how I started to believe this. Focusing on why, trying to find someone to blame let me off the hook. I didn’t have to dive into that blackhole and see if it was true. Then one day I just stopped and instead asked myself a different question. I replaced why with when, when will I be enough ? After four decades of trying and improving and giving and sacrificing, when would I be enough ? When would it let go of me ? When could I finally stop, breathe and rest ?

When I got a world record, then I would be enough ? Wait, I have one of those!

When I got married, the I would be enough ? Yes, have that checkboxed checked as well.

When I finally made it in the business world, then I would be enough ?

Or maybe if I climbed Everest, deepest and highest, then I would be enough ?

Or maybe…. Maybe  if I went deeper, maybe the problem was that I had not gone deep enough, I was only the deepest woman, not the deepest ever, the men were 100 meters below me, then I would be enough ?

What will it take for you to stop and rethink how you are living your life and what is driving you ? When will you be enough ?

Making it Hapen - An alternative take on an old recipe for Dream Making

How do you fundamentally change your life ? How do you find a new job or even a new relationship ? What is it you should be doing ? What is it you should not ? If anything is the Holy Grail in life it would be the ability to manifest what you want. Avid readers will have their well thumbed copy of “The Secret” and know all about using vision to create the future, the problem comes in the practice. Somehow, our interpretation and who we are gets in the way and instead of creating something new and exciting what we create is an obsession revolving around the absence of our hearts desire. We have not learnt to let go and let God. We have not learnt to step through our fear, into our souls and so into limitless being. I managed it once, in diving and have been chasing it ever since. Here are some things I have learnt along the way.

It is an uncomfortable feeling to let go and let God. It is even more uncomfortable if you don’t have a relationship with God and can not even acknowledge that word (been there, done that). But whether you call that ultimate force God or the divine or the universe, the ability to let go and trust in something that is outside of yourself is, whether you like it or not, part of the process. We have been taught to put our destiny in our own hands and we have been taught that to do that we need to be doing to be always doing and moving and controlling. Trusting that the universe will present opportunities is not something we have learnt, besides, God helps those who help themselves, which is something the sceptics will be quick to point out.

So what do you do when you have a clear vision of what you want, but it does not seem to be getting closer ? The first thing is challenge that vision.

1) How open is your vision ? If you are looking for a new job, have you decided that the only success scenario is this specific job in this specific company ?

2) What are you focusing on now ? Are you obsessing about doing ? Are you worried about what will happen if things don’t go according to your exact plan ?

Most of us create tightly focused visions with one and only one success scenario and most of us stress ourselves stukkend (for non- South African readers, stress ourselves silly) by focusing on the complete absence of our goal while throwing ourselves into a frenzy of activity. In my experience this predisposes you to failure not to mention the fact that other opportunities float straight by as you single mindedly pursue the one and only one answer.

The trick is in changing the recipe, without changing a thing!

Step 1 : Create a vision, but instead of focusing on exactly what you physical want (this job, in this company, a man who looks like this and works here and drives that), focus on how your new job (or relationship) will make you feel. This allows the universe to present you with things you have not even thought and that are often not even close to what you would have chased.

Step 2 : Bring the Future into the Present. This is probably the hardest part, allowing the universe to create your vision by refusing to focus on the absence of your hearts desire! Simply stop stressing about it! Simpler to say than do, but also a strong choice you need to make for a number of practically reasons outside of manifestation. If you are obsessed about the outcome and desperate then the chances are the way you are engaging with people is not going to be conducive to a successful outcome. Most of us have been in the situation where, when we are looking for a job we just can’t find one and then when we have one, we ace the interviews and get job offers we don’t need (or finally get into a good relationship and find ourselves surrounded by nice, available, interested men when a few weeks back you could not even find one). Consciously spend time just imagining how you will feel when your dream comes true and carry those feelings through into your day, actively and consciously replacing all thoughts that revolve around “what if it all does not pan out”. So what if it doesn’t ! By just doing this one step you will have had fun trying and probably found out a whole lot more about what it is you really want.

Step 3 : When you have done everything, do the one thing you have been avoiding. Yes, you did not want to hear it but you are going to have to actively step out of your comfort zone. When I look back on how I managed to get an impossible world record this is the step that always jumps out for me. I never knew about either of the previous steps, so did it the hard way and trust me when I tell you, it was the hard way. When we are trying to create impossible dreams we tend to do so without wanting it to be hard or uncomfortable - which means what we do is normally within our confident zone. And that is the problem.

Who you are and what is comfortable for you created where you are now. If you want to create a new experience with new possibilities you are going to need new behaviour and that is not going to be comfortable. You are going to need new behaviour, behaviour that is natural your dream. Think about it, if I were born a natural world record holder I would not have ended up stuck for almost 5 years trying to get there. I would have had a more Nuno Gomes experience (the world’s deepest man and scuba diving colleague) just got on with it. Instead, I got very, very stuck trying to hold onto me (think victim, insecure, afraid) but at the same time doing something that naturally required me to be brave, self confident and thick skinned.

You have to do the things that feel awkward, the things that are ‘not you’!! Yes, I use the words ‘have to’ with intent, because of all the steps, the ability to act outside of your comfort zone and do the one thing you are hoping NOT to have to do, is probably going to be the only thing that gets you toward your goal. Mine was letting go of waiting for Nuno to give me the answers and help me get my world record and instead stand alone, all self conscious and do it myself, without proof or permission. I spent two years avoiding that, hoping, no wishing that something would happen and my path to my dream would not be so hard. Guess what, the path to your dream sometimes is hard! And the way I did it was born out of sheer desperation, I discovered Step 1, I started to behave as a world record holder would even though I did not have a record yet.
If you think that you have done everything ask youreself this, If I stop now, will I regret not trying harder ? If the answer is a niggling yes, then there is something you are avoiding and you will avoid it until you no longer have any other option but give up or step through your fear. (by the way, that is the hard way)
Step 4 : Practice relaxing! We are borne to micro manage, thinking somehow that if we stop stressing and obsessing, our dream will never arrive. Which means we try and force it, making it fit it into our schedules and time lines. Well, how is that working for you ? What about practicing relaxing, letting go and letting God. No, that does not mean wishing and not doing. You can’t sit on your couch and expect the universe to dump your dream into your lap. You have to keep doing and trying new options, but in doing so, let go of the outcome, relax. Remember step 2 and practice bringing the future into the present. You can’t make people support you ….all you can do is give as many people as possible the opportunity to do so and keep doing that until you arrive where you want to be. Don’t get stuck trying to convince people - move on! Keep searching for people who want to make your dream happen. They are there, waiting to be found all you have to do is stop trying to drag those who don’t want it along with you.

No-one said being a dream maker would be easy, but the moment you let go of the fact that who you are is set in stone and instead accept that you have a choice and that you can change how you behave and align that to what you really want, is the moment you start to live limitless being.

It is a process, a journey of discovery, so DON’T THROW IN THE TOWEL TOO EARLY!!! Get creative when the easy options fail, experiment with new ways of getting there and being outside of your comfort zone, practice until you get it right and above all, be kind to yourself! No-one every gets ‘there’ without some detours and mishaps – they are all part of the process.

How to Get What You Want! By Giving!

How to Get What You Want! By Giving!

This is still an incomplete thought, the edge of an idea if you will. All along my journey has been this rather oblique statement that to get you have to give. I have never really understood it!

And then I tried to use the power of intention to sell my house. 5 months in and …nothing! I was feeling worne down (which is not the right feeling to allow the universe to fulfil your dreams, it meant I was focusing more on NOT having sold my house then getting the damn thing sold). So I took some time to rethink my intention, trying to find a wording that would get me what I want, but that felt right. All of a sudden I realised I did not want to ‘sell’ my house, I wanted to find someone to ‘give’ my house to (for a stated amount of money of course). Just that shift in thinking from me getting money for my house, to me giving my beloved house to someone else seemed to shift everything and literally within 2 weeks the new owner walked in.

Had I used the power of giving to get what I wanted ? That experience sat with me, niggling as they sometimes do. So I started to think about other areas of my life where I want to receive ‘stuff’ (oh ok, yes money, money, money…who doesn’t need some more to do those extra things with). What if I stopped focusing on what I was going to get and instead focused on what I was giving in the exchange ? Could I create a writing career by changing my focus on what I was giving to my readers rather than focusing on the all too obvious book sales ? Suddenly one of my biggest goals, getting out of the corporate world and into the ‘real’ world where I can be a guide, showing people how to step into their power, came into focus.

So this is my challenge to you, how can you turn around what you want into an exchange where you still get that house or car or job, but where the way you ask is focused on what you are giving ? Try it and see how different it feels when you are no longer just focusing on what you are taking. Trust that the universe has your back and that in your giving you will get everything you need and want.

Fear is

Fear is…


   Fear is a coward!

     Fear is a liar!

         Fear is a bad habit!!

Why do you have to be worse than me for me to be better ?

Why do you have to be worse than me for me to be better ?

Actually I could not work out a title for this one. It seemed that years of lessons suddenly came into sharp focus and all it took was a walk with my dogs and two nieces. Along the way they started their usual ‘picking’ at each other – a bad habit that involves each one telling me what the other one does wrong and is bad at and a habit that evokes a rather immediate mini lecture along the lines of,

“I hear enough about how bad I am at things and how bad everyone else is at work, I don’t need to hear that at home”.

And it is true! I have finally become aware of how continuous and prevalent the negative judgements aimed at me and others is. The most consistent feedback we either receive or give is about what we are bad at and what we are not doing.  It is draining not to mention demoralising and demotivating.

To give my niece her due, she immediately stopped telling me what her sister was bad at and instead started to tell me what she was good at…the problem was the wording.

“She is much better at Afrikaans than I am”. I was immediately struck by the comparison and how she had not really changed her thinking. Before she was making her sister wrong and so making herself right and in the process better than her sister. Now she was making her sister right at the exact same time as she made herself smaller and ‘less than’.

Do we really do that ? Do we really only know how to compliment and encourage people by making ourselves ‘less than’ and smaller ? Do our minds really work in such a black and white way  ? For someone else to be good requires everyone else to be bad ?

Think about how you word your day ? How many times do you compare yourself to other people and come to the conclusion that you are lacking ? How many times do  you do the reverse, make them lacking and congratulate yourself on being better ?

All of a sardine the concept that there is enough for everyone started to come into focus. Why does someone else have to loose for someone to win ? Why do you have to be worse than me for me to be better ?

For this month my focus is going to be on creating a win-win, rather than the standard win - loose. For August I am going to allow myself to be awesome at exactly the same time I allow everyone else to be. I am going to practice changing my thinking so that I am never comparing anyone to anyone or anything.

Imagine how awesome it would be if we lived in a world where your greatness was the focus of the day ? Now imagine how you can create that! And go!

The Quick Guide to Escaping Suffering

If you were absolutely honest with yourself, your entire search for a more spiritual existence is driven by the desire to escape suffering. There will come a point in your journey where everything you have read suddenly sinks in and  you will know that suffering is nothing more than an unconscious attachment to a specific outcome. We spend our lives fighting the universe, trying to force the outcome we want. And we suffer when things don’t go our way. You will need to hear this many times on your journey so hear it is again, stop focusing on the outcome. Focus on this moment! Focus on the one thing you can control, the way you are feeling!

If I had to put it into 5 easy steps:

1)      What was the outcome you so wanted ? Get that clear in your mind

2)      How did you expect to feel when you got ‘there ‘ ?

3)      Visualise yourself in that expected outcome and start feeling the moment

4)      In this moment actively and consciously OWN your feelings. Start to do, say and think whatever you need for you to be able to maintain those feeling

5)      Stop obsessing about your outcome, refocus and obsess on the feeling that outcome was going to bring you

So, next time you find yourself stuck in a state of suffering make a stand to own your life. Ask yourself what it was you were hoping for. Get conscious about how you wanted this to turn out.  And then, when you have that outcome clear in your mind, take a new step, ask yourself the big question, “How did I want to feel ? “

Now, take those feelings and bring them into this moment, right here and now! Visualise yourself with the outcome you wanted until it is so clear that you are living those feelings. You can stop there if you want or you can take it that step further and make a conscious decision to create those feelings regardless of the outcome.

Make a list of things you can start doing, stop thinking, start thinking, start saying that will allow that feeling to exist right here and now. And instead of obsessing about that outcome, start obsessing about how you want to feel.

Remember, claiming yourself and mastering your life is a new way of being that uses a whole new set of skills and skills take time to learn. They also take practice. There is also now time like now to start practicing! Why choose a life of suffering when you could choose a life of freedom and mastery ?

Using Resistance to Create True Acceptance !

Perhaps you are one of those lucky few who never learnt resistance. Regrettably, this is not one of my natural habits. Resistance is the enemy in a spiritually advanced soul – the way is flow, acceptance, trust! Then again, it all depends on how you understand those words. What is acceptance ? What is resistance ? What is true ? I started to ask myself what is, ‘is’ ? and aside from being entertained by the pure Zen of the sentence, started to uncover a whole layer of unreal that I had never seen before. Instead of stamping out my natural resistance I am celebrating it.

I have spent my life resisting! My earliest memories have been of me resisting, I refused to accept my Dad’s definition of who I was and what I could do, I refused to accept my schools rules and labels. I rebelled when everyone around me told me that I could not dive deep, and I have a world record as a result. Most of my suffering and struggle comes from my inherent resistance and I have always thought that what I was resisting was what is – a futile task – only what is the true is ? How much of what I think ‘is’, is nothing more than some-one else’s reality being forced onto me ? When I started to ask that question and start to see what really is...I was astounded to realise that my resistance was not to what is, but to what other people insisted was true.

So now I am celebrating my resistance because it is my spirit pointing the way to what really is. Next time I feel the urge to rebel I will know it is because someone is trying to warp what is to suit their own agenda. Resist what is false and search for what really is! Never accept some-one else’s view on the so-called truth because no-one (including you and me) can see the truth clearly, we always see it through our lives, our baggage and our own stories. In the spirit of all good blog articles here are my three stops and starts to step into your power using your own resistance

-          You live and create what you believe to be true - so make sure that vision is of your own making

-          Keep asking what really is ! This is the only way you will  uncover inherited limits & beliefs and it is these more than anything else that are stopping you from using your power to create.

-          Trust your instincts & trust your resistance! The trick is not in resisting ‘resisting’ but using it

-          You can’t resist what is, but there lies the dilemma, you first need to see that clearly.

At the edge of this realisation is another that I will be exploring by living over the next few weeks, that resistance is not about creating a fight or drama, that you can flow and resist at the same time. But that is another blog and right now I am merely revelling in a new aspect of my power, searching for what really ‘is’ through my innate resistance to what is not.

Unpacking that word ' Service' - Why it is sometimes really not about you at all

I hate the word ‘service’. Hardly an enlightened stand, but I have never been able to understand it. It seemed forced on me, as if somehow to qualify as spiritually advanced I needed to be living a life of service. Ugh! Why ? What was it I was supposed to be learning from being in service ? To subjugate my ego ? Perhaps! I get that argument, but it still seemed to be missing something. Instead of easy acceptance, the rebel in me came out and I just flat out refused to play the game just because everyone else was.

Why be in service ? What was the point ? Because so far on my journey everything has had a point and in most cases, it only made sense when I was ready to learn it. That is perhaps the problem these days with the spiritual journey – it is so accessible thanks to the media that we forget that it is a learning journey and what that means. You can only learn what you are ready to learn but because we have so much access we are expised to steps on the journey that are way ahead of where were are now. To become an expert acrobatic pilot you first have to learn how to fly, so become an advanced soul there are essential building blocks you have to first acquire, experiences you have to live. Instead of relaxing into our path we instead buy into the ever popular belief that you can mimic some-one else’s journey. But here is the thing, there is no-one like you. Your journey is unique simply because where you are starting from and what you are starting with is unique. Yes, there are common markers on the way, common lessons that I suspect need to be learnt in sequence but mimicking an advanced lesson will not teach you that lesson. You have to get there the hard way. The further I get on this road the more I think that practice without understanding, practice for practice sake can actually be harmful, trapping you in a place you are not ready for and preventing you from learning what you need to learn to get there.

But back to that word, service. I strongly suspect that this is a rather advanced stop on the journey and that for it to really make sense, for the act of being in service to have the value it was intended, then you need to be ready to learn the lesson. What is the lesson ? What is the point of being in service ? Well, what if there comes a time where the experiences you are living are no longer for you ? What if not every experience or lesson is your lesson ? What if there comes a time where the other person’s lesson is the point of the experience ? To get that, there has to no longer be so much for you to learn, in fact, to get that, the only way left to learn and grow is to assist the other in their lesson.  Without even trying the ego is subjugated simply because, it has not survived the experiences that got you to here, where the only way forward is to be in service.

Just the thoughts…of a soul on her journey… learning to let go and just flow J