Obligation Nation

Nothing can help you to avoid being accountable for your own stuff like having a significant other to blame everything on. Getting them to change so it fits your plan for happiness can be the mother of all energy sucks.

Rather than take flight with the above plight, try first to: [A] “Accept” your partners action (bonus points for doing so without judgment) and [B, C] “Be Curious” about your own reactions instead. Sure enough, what they’re doing may fall well on the wrong side of awful, but the opportunity to understand you gets missed if you snap into habitual, patterned action.

“Accept” helps you take a necessary moment. “Be Curious” allows you to look inward when you’re most exposed. Adding this step before letting ‘em have it can help inform effective, meaningful and lasting change. Relationships help bring forward the parts of ourselves that still require some compassionate and enlightened futzing. Reveal, deal, heal, repeat…

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When watching actors, especially on the big screen, we tend to focus on the one doing the acting as opposed to the other who’s doing the reacting. Unless it’s exaggerated, reacting doesn’t demand our focus. When it comes to dealing with those who consistently create drama in our lives, try shifting your focus to the reactor — i.e. you. Like doppler radar, you’ll see your own stuff move in over your brain with varying intensities, most of which you can choose to let blow through OR let stall to unleash a deluge.

What kind of storms are you creating for yourself in the presence of someone else’s upheaval? What things are you telling yourself and what actions might you be taking that have nothing to do with what you really want in the moment? If you seek true calm in others, it really helps to first have it in yourself.

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Are you one of those people in a tizzy over what it is you’re supposed to do with your life (a.k.a almost everybody)? Many talk about this eternal question in terms of “passion.” But “what’s that?” our minds ask? Like love, passion is a difficult thing for the mind to understand. To bridge this gap, I offer the much maligned concept of curiosity. You know, that nosey compulsion that’s supposedly ended in many a feline fatality. Don’t let a baseless, fear-driven fable cheat you out of an incredibly valuable tool for unearthing passion. Chill out and embrace the question, “What are you curious about?” With the opposite of curiosity being disinterest, you can see how quickly the things you spend your time doing start to gravitate under one column or the other.

Familial expectations, peer pressure and, of course, the mind-spinning Media can do a convincing job of making us think we want to take part in something that we actually don’t. For instance, the flurry of entertainment and “news” shows we’re bombarded with would suggest that being an actor/celebrity is where it’s at. But are you truly and deeply curious about Meisner technique, political punditry or perhaps being so despicable that you’re famous? If yes, go forth and prosper. If no, try being guided more by what feels good rather than what looks, sounds, or pays good.

It’s hard to feign curiosity because it bubbles from within and, if you’re honest in your assessment of it, you can harness this pure energy and ride it off into a sunset overflowing with purpose and meaning. Meow…

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Do you often say “Yes” when you’d rather say “No?” If you just replied “Yes,” well — there you go again. Wouldn’t you have rather answered “No” to this question? Easier said than done though, I know, but is it really audacity to speak this truth when it is warranted and appropriate? New Oxford defines audacity two ways:

1) the willingness to take bold risks
2) rude or disrespectful behavior

If you’re harboring the notion that it is bold, risky, rude or disrespectful to say “No,” then therein lies the misguided obligation. Ideally, no one should know what’s better for you than you and clearly stating such boundaries can be a healthy shift, especially for those who make people-pleasing an art form. Try to recall a moment when a clear “No” was brewing at your core, but by the time this “No” feeling made its way to your mouth, poof — out came a “Yes.”

Keep it simple and follow your body’s lead on this one. Practice with small and uneventful “Noes.” Pay attention and if you find that you suffer from trigger mouth with the “Yes” thing, then take a moment before you answer. Whoever it is can wait. This is your choice and an inaccurate offering can send off a cascading tide of misinformation, unmet expectations and resentment. Now who in the world has the audacity to do that?

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Here we sit in the wake of Valentine’s Day, a.k.a. the celebration of the heart. Funny how no such celebration is required for the mind. I’m guessing it’s because we seem to be celebrating that one every day in our hyper-rational world of formal education, credentials, IQ’s, SAT scores, etc.  But one day is all we give the most useful navigational tool that we have for guiding us toward our right lives? Hardly seems right that a single silly 24-hour period of candy, flowers and greeting cards could adequately honor this incredibly under-understood organ, which ironically seems to be at the root of most all human triumph.

I recently had a reader who posed the question, “How do you know when what our heart tells us, lines up with what our mind says?” Well, I got to thinking, sorry, feeling that we just might have the hierarchy all wrong. Since the heart doesn’t speak in our native tongue, it doesn’t figure that it can lie to, or manipulate us like the mind can. On that alone it might become clear which is the more reliable source of counsel. Leadership expert Robin Sharma offers that “the mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master,” yet we’re obligated to flip this truth in the name of protecting ourselves from the foolishness of our hearts.

So, alignment of the two might be less important than the balance of power that we afford them through choice. If your heart aches to paint, listen and then use your mind to find the art store. If your heart aches to play the tuba, listen and use your mind to take lessons. The heart still knows what you’ve perhaps forgotten. Sure we’ve blamed it for things like gambling losses and disastrous romances, but if you look back at all the things you told yourself about these ill-fated decisions, you just might see that behind it all were stories fabricated by our minds. Follow your much vaunted brain and you’ll, at very best, end up with many many masters, i.e. everyone who’s ever filled your head with erroneous information. But follow your heart and your life, at the very least, will be your own.

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In honor of this weekend’s Super Bowl 44, here’s some X’s and O’s. Pretty simple really. The O’s have someplace special that they want to get to and the X’s want to stop them from doing so. The advantage for the O’s is that they have a secret idea of how they’re gonna do it. The X’s, well they have to guess.

When we obsessively focus on our obstacles, it’s like the O’s telling the X’s, “by the way, here’s what we wanna do, so please stop us!” That gives the X’s a whole bunch of power and advantage over the O’s. But if the O’s were to instead create a crystal clear picture of where it is they want to get to and develop an executable plan on how they’d like to get there, well then, they’ve got their power back and then some.

Stop empowering the things that are standing in your way by giving them your focus. Instead, be clear with your vision and bold with your actions — Super Bold.

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