How to Make Changes; How to Vanquish Fear... Brene Brown and Eleanor Roosevelt

An excerpt from my 2017 book, Red State, Blue Heart, a memoir of my years in North Carolina….

HE WAS ENORMOUS!! THE SIZE OF AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER!! Well, maybe a pocket battleship. He came at me with vicious intent, a blow glancing off my skull and then he landed on my computer keyboard just as I hit the Publish buttom for my last night’s blog. I screamed (of course).  He attacked again and I screamed again, remembering to cover my mouth this time. He landed on the keyboard again.  The rational part of my brain (not doing much at the moment) would like you to know that he looked almost exactly like a (slightly) smaller version of the Shadows on Babylon 5, and I have my ex-husband the entomologist’s voice in my head telling me that most bugs are female, so I should say “she.”  

Notwithstanding the fact that she was the size of a house, I draped a towel over her and got her out the back door, but not without several false-starts and enough blood-curdling screams to bring my neighbors running. [Nice to know I have backup when I need it – god bless Southerners!]  So – what’s the point here, besides don’t invite me to a restaurant to eat chocolate-covered multi-legged creatures?

1) There are a lot more bugs in the moist and humid Southland than in the dry climates I live in now, and some of them are ENORMOUS and using all of their persistence and brain power 24/7 trying to get into my home to terrorize me. [I also need to work on my paranoid tendencies, yup.] Native Southerners have been laughing (mostly good-naturedly) at me for over three years. Laughing at one’s neighbors did not end with Jane Austen in 1815. It’s still good, clean fun in the 21st century. Y’all in non-southland states who are laughing at me right now – quess what? As global warming continues, the bugs are moving northward. Ah-ha!

2) fears are frequently not in proportion to the actual threat. Oh, yes, this is the big one. It’s fun to laugh at people who have exaggerated fear-responses to bugs and wasps, but the reality is that all of us have exaggerated fear responses to something – and it is usually more social/interactional than related to bugs and snakes and mousies, oh my. I work with people in career transition, people who want better health and vitality, and people in other kinds of transitions, many of whom stall part of the way through their way to where they say they want to go. Lots of reasons on the surface. They all add up to – at some point, fear takes over and no amount of encouragement or inspiration from others can counteract that internally-generated fear. My terror when confronted by a non-woman-eating insect is ludicrous.

When I look around me, I see all of us running away from little bugs who loom enormous in size and power, in our imaginations. Our brains are wired to respond to fear, as a way to keep us alive in a predator-filled environment. In today’s world, it is primarily social “death” we fear, an interpersonal attack, with words expressing judgment, condemnation or contempt. We unleash these weapons on each other to show how powerful we are [not realizing that it actually demonstrates just the opposite, to someone who has a strong sense of their own power], or to [benevolently] try to protect each other from what we see as dangers [because, of course, they are all-knowing and all-wise, godlike in their own perceptions and 100% know what the future will bring], or for gain [promotions, a date, you name it].

Most of what we are afraid of is not really the size of an aircraft carrier. So, what “bugs” have you been afraid of? Sure, you’re not screaming loudly enough to bring the neighbors running.  Maybe you have been shutting yourself down before you ever really consider certain options. Maybe you let them start to surface before you thrust them away, unconsidered.

A big source of fear in our lives is What Will [People in general or a Specific Person] Think? None of us like to admit that we crave approval, but nearly everyone does nonetheless. We hold ourselves back from achievement to avoid being criticized. We hold ourselves back from the possible failures that would propel us light-years ahead in personal growth, because we are afraid of the I Told You So and the amorphous Feeling Like A Fool. Well, I am here to tell you that actually acting like a “fool” is the least foolish thing you will ever do in your life.

It’s sometimes painful, when you are walking a pristine path without a trail, but it is in those moments that you are most truly alive, most truly in touch with the DNA and the person you were born to be.  Lots of people think my bug freakouts are funny; some consider them shocking, and try to induce shame in me for being so "weak," because I am "so strong and capable the rest of the time."

As Brene Brown would say, “Nonsense!” 

As Eleanor Roosevelt tells us, you gain courage from every time you stop to look fear in the face and don’t back down.  After a while, you can’t be frightened by anything.  You tell yourself, “Well, I lived through these horrors, I can live through the next thing that comes along.”  Eleanor conquered her extreme shyness and became a wonderful public speaker and fearless advocate for the powerless, one scary confrontation at a time.  Some of them turned out to be tiny insects when she confronted them, other fears stemmed from real danger.  But she built her courage muscles, step by step, and so can you.  And so can I. 

Your homework assignment for next week: 1) consider some of your fears as possible bugs, annoying but not life-threatening, 2) come running if your neighbors scream, and 3) put up plastic sheeting on your windows. It not only cuts heat/cooling losses and lowers your fuel bill, but it also keeps the damn wasps out.

Contact me for your FREE Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch).  Victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com

Creativity to Boost Your Sleep!

My regular readers know how enthusiastic I am about creativity.  My class on using Creativity to Cleanse and Clear Specific Chakras (on learnitlive.com) is a big hit.  I use specific creative exercises whose action is to clear blockages in a specific chakra.  It's been a happy all-day class and I recently experimented with dividing it into chunks of a chakra or two, for people who digest big changes slowly.  I also include specific creative activities in all my really powerful transformation programs. 

Why?  Do I just like the idea of the whole world painting, drawing, coloring, making things with wood and cardboard, building kits, making mosaics and collages, and on and on?  

No, I'm not really addicted to paint.  I'm addicted to alleviating suffering.  Getting into your unconscious mind is the fastest, most powerful route to ending problems.  [I also use thinking-oriented, cognitive-behavioral techniques, but they only work if you already have an accurate idea of what really is the problem, and that is NOT usually the case.  My entrepreneur friends, you don't just need a tutorial on the new magical marketing tool in order to instantly have a million-dollar business.  Nope.]  

And how do you get into your unconscious mind when you don't have me in person or via video to guide you?  One way is deep meditation.  Another is listening to a journey with Belleruth Naperstek.  And another is to get yourself engrossed in color, shapes and the feel of creation in your hands.  My friends, you will never feel so close to god-like powers as you do when you step back from a work you created and realize the spine-tingling awe of "I MADE that.  From nothingness."  When you look at something you did and you feel deep into your DNA that you LIKE it - and you love yourself.  When you look at something you made with your own two hands (or whatever you have), and you feel deep in your DNA, "OMG, NOW I understand why I have always had trouble with taking charge, swimming, speaking in public, being praised, failing to excel at anything I try, ."

THAT moment of either pure joy or transcendent enlightenment is the real purpose of a consistent creativity practice.

So what about sleep?

After you have taken warm milk and melatonin, you turn off your blue light electronics, you have a bed that is not too hot or too cold, and you have made sure that you weren't arguing about politics or other aggravating topics for the two hours prior to bedtime, if you still can't sleep, start reiki-ing yourself.  Don't know reiki?  How about tapping?  Meditation of the Ommm and breathe style.

And if you haven't learned any of that, after you made a note for tomorrow AM to go to www.soaringreiki.biz and sign up to learn, then it's time to get up and pull out the pencils.  [Painting at midnight requires you to wash your brushes.  If you live with people who will be disturbed, go the colored pencils on quality paper route.  Same effect!]  Breathe deeply.  Close your eyes, call on your spirit guides, your goddess guides and helpers [another class at learnitlive.com, very powerful and fun.], or your Wise Adult, take a walk at the beach, or along a forest trail, and tell them all about it.  Then start to draw, without waking up your conscious mind at all.  Just let your "feelings" guide you to colors, shapes, and effects.  I have glitter glue sticks, animal eyes and all kinds of magazines, for pictures.  Whatever hair-brained idea pops into my mind, I breathe deep to make sure I'm not thinking, and then I let myself do it.  The results can be quite extraordinary!

When the emotional energy is discharged in a good cry or some creative arts, you'll be able to sleep.  Sometimes I take a few minutes to write down the insights into my journal for later cogitating as well as feeling.  But with the emotional burden lifted, I drift away.  

Bliss.....

What Happens Inside Your Body When You Get Flu Shot - And How to Boost Your Immune System In Fall/Winter

I got a flu shot today, as I do every year.  You should, too.

Some folks are afraid of side-effects.  The CDC reports that 90+% of the side-effects are rashes or swellings at the injection site.  So let’s all take a deep breath together.  I get a rash if I wear wool.  My husband was stung by a yellow-jacket while gardening last weekend and had a rash and a swelling.  The rashes and swelling with shots of all kinds go down in 24 hours, as his bee sting did.  Not exactly a major medical emergency. 

My sister swears that the one time she got a flu shot, she came down with flu, so therefore the flu shot must have given her flu.  Lots of people think this.  Reality: dead viruses can’t hurt you, and the viruses being injected into you are DEAD.  Sis is falling into the “if two things happen together, one thing must have caused another” fallacy.  Two things happening is a correlation; they happen together.  But correlation is not causality.  I sneezed just as I switched on my TV and the tube blew out, so I was convinced that sneezing caused the blow out.  [I was very young.  Have compassion.]  That’s ridiculous, yes, but so is dead viruses making you sick.

Truth is, there is a danger involved in flu shots, but it’s not the danger Sis is worrying about.  The real danger is that injecting dead viruses into my body gets my body focused on fighting this collection of three dead invaders [the most likely influenza variants to crop up this season] AT THE EXACT SAME TIME that there is a high probability that other viruses and bacteria – the whole soup of bugs that are circulating during the winter “flu season” – are also attacking you.  If the timing is just right, your immune system is focusing on building protection against a future invasion by the three deadly flus and another bug just happens to invade when your protection squad is not paying attention.  It can waltz in without being detected until it’s too late!  Now if you are used to thinking logically, you will ask: what is the mathematical probability that the timing will be exactly right to allow that second bug to invade just when your immune system is focusing on preparing its defense against the deadlier potential threat?  Not very high.  But you roll the dice every year over the span of a long life, and the probability that it will happen eventually gets high.  And unlikely events DO happen.  Sis won the virus jackpot on her very first outing.  But she’s still making a foolish choice. 

So, how about some basic info on how your immune system works?  Sounds good to me!

Your “immune system” is a collection of systems and processes that are all focused on 1) detecting, and then 2) fighting off, invasions of your body.  Your mouth, nose, eyes, lungs, digestive system and urinary/vaginal/anal openings are the most likely entry points, so you have the most defenders there.  Your “detection” defense consists of sentinel B and T cells who are constantly patrolling these high-risk areas, as well as all through the rest of your body, in case some miscreant gets past the border sentinels.  One type of T sentinel, the NK cells, also check your own cells for problems, eliminating most cancers before they are larger than a few cells.  [When they get confused and decide that your own body organ is an invader, you get auto-immune diseases.]  Detection is the weakest part of the system.  Far too many invaders manage to fake out or elude the sentinel B and T’s and establish a beachhead.  If you are a military history fan, you know that the first 24 hours of D-Day were critical.  Once the Allies had a beachhead and could land tanks and artillery, the war’s outcome was not in doubt.  In the same way, you want your sentinel cells to be numerous enough and smart enough to smash all the invaders before they start to settle in and proliferate.  [My programs use hypnotherapy, reiki and other tools to help your sentinels to keep their numbers up AND to be smart about taking out cancer and leaving healthy tissue alone.  Call or email for a FREE Getting Unstuck session.]

When a sentinel cell detects an invader, it alerts the major ground forces, the attack cells.  B sentinels alert their own B attack cells, who inform the T sentinel and attack cells.  At this point, a major reproductive move starts, as your major ground forces attempt to assemble an army large enough to take the invaders out.  BUT – this takes too much time, usually!  If the bug makes a beachhead, you are going to get sick.  If your attack cells can reproduce fast enough, it will be a quick, light illness.  [If they nip it before it even gets started, you won’t even know you were invaded.  Maybe you’re tired for 24 hours but don’t know why.  Now you know why.]  If your attack cells don’t get alerted soon enough or they are vastly outnumbered by the invaders, you’ll be down for the count.  Four days or four weeks sicker than a hound-dog in July. 

Swelling at the site of the injection just means that your sentinel cells noticed that your body has been invaded by the dead flu viruses, it alerted the B and T attack cells, who are starting to mount a defense.  This is a good thing!  Swelling, redness, fever and pain are the “cardinal signs” that your attack cells are fighting off an invasion, and many doctors are now suggesting that adults allow a moderate fever to remain.  [Virus replication is inhibited at higher temperatures.  If you fight your immune system and bring a low-moderate fever down, you are helping the invader and foiling your body’s defense strategy.] 

The sentinels tell the attack cells exactly what to look for.  The attack cells kill all the invading dead viruses AND manufacture memory cells who remember the exact configuration of the proteins that define those invading viruses.  This is why vaccination protected George Washington’s army from being decimated by smallpox, and it protects you and your children from death as well.  Those memory sentinels ID the invaders immediately and marshal a very strong defense from the attack cells.  With a vaccine, you have a massive army on your side in hours instead of the usual days.  Your attack cells have an excellent chance of wiping out the invasion before you even know it’s under way.  That 24 hours of tired and you dodged the measles, meningitis or pertussis bullet. 

It also explains why your baby and child needs as much protection as possible, as soon as possible, because their sentinel cells are not very clever yet.  Those sentinel cells can easily detect and the attack cells can do their thing, and create lifetime immunity [or long-term, as the case may be] memory cells for several diseases at once.  Sure they can.  

You wouldn’t want to be vaccinating your kid against pertussis when they are actively fighting off a measles invasion, but if everyone vaccinates, then there IS no measles virus floating around.  And keeping our herd immunity high is a matter of life and death – literally – for the adults and children with compromised immune systems who lack sufficient sentinels and attack cells and whose B and T’s can’t even handle the invasion of dead viruses and bacteria very well.  To protect them, we all have to make sure that we eradicate the childhood killer diseases, by not allowing them any hosts to take over.  I am old enough to know the terror my parents had to endure, because the killing and crippling diseases had no cure and, most importantly, no prevention.  

I deeply, passionately, don’t want us to return to those dreadful days.  I just returned from a vacation in Alaska and was reminded that the first Iditarod was literally a race against death.  Diphtheria had hit Nome and if treatment wasn’t received in 10 days, the whole town would be infected and most would die.  Death had Nome in its sights.  The serum did arrive in time, everyone was treated and the death rate was low.  But other towns that did not have the Alaska railroad and dedicated teams of dogs just died. 

Can you imagine that?  Because of modern vaccination, we are not a nation of sobbing parents, burying child after child, utterly helpless to prevent death.  Children aren’t growing up without their parents, who also died in droves of what is now preventable through vaccination.

Flu does kill, but not as many as diphtheria, pertussis or measles.  But I want to give my immune system every advantage, so I am building memory cells as I write this, and they will circulate at a high level for 3 months, protecting me for the start of the season.  I hope that you will give your hard-working sentinels the leg up that they need as well.

And what else can you do to help boost the number of sentinels circulating in your major entry points? 

Ø  Sleep.  The more you sleep, the more B and T cells you have.  Forget taking a supplement.  Sleep.

Ø  Reduce stress.  Take breath breaks.  Learn and practice Reiki and/or tapping (EFT).  Meditate.  Get out of your car and take transit, so you can snooze, do stress reduction and read calming philosophical literature or watch cute kitten videos.  I know someone who reads her Bible every day on the bus.  Someone else reiki’s and snoozes for his 2-hours-each-way commute.  Exercise every day.  You can do it.

Stress lowers your number of B and T sentinels, so you lose that precious time to zap the invaders before they get a beachhead.  It lowers the numbers of your B and T attack cells so you have less of an army to throw at the invaders when you finally detect them.  Take one of my serious stress zapping classes. 

And for heaven’s sake, don’t be a selfish schmuck and come to work sick and spread your damn germs to everyone else!  Stay in bed, give your attack team a chance to win the war quickly.  Why do you think you have all those fancy e-gadgets anyway?  If you aren’t allowed to work from home, take 7 hours of intense stress reduction and see how quickly you get better, and how much smarter you are when you DO go back.  My immune system has a lot to deal with during flu season.  I don’t need you adding millions of viral particles into our shared air with every sneeze, no matter how well covered. 

So:  get a flu shot.  Start reducing stress to as low as possible.  You’ll be reducing your chances of illness as well!

And call or email victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com for a FREE Getting Unstuck session to get you started... www.soaringdragon.biz

Step Forward from Intention to Action!

I just finished an interview on sharewisdom.tv, on Marianne Marlow's show Conscious Conversations. Marianne was my mentor when I was learning hypnotherapy, and now she is starting a new TV show!

My segment (from 20 minutes to 40 minutes of the hour) continued her theme of taking action. We have to step away from the thinking about it phase to the taking action. You don't want to race off a cliff in an excess of enthusiasm, but after you have done serious and analytical as well as intuitive searching for info, you need to put steps in your calendar and start SOMETHING.

[Or call me for a FREE Getting Unstuck session. This is not an offer for a sales pitch. I will get you through your first, starting step - the hardest - on your road to your goal!]

If you enjoy Marianne's content, some more wonderful free content on the same subject of taking action in my YouTube channel humanbio4everyone. Lots of encouragement as well as specific steps! Go for it!

And the funniest part of it is that until 30 minutes before airtime, I thought that it was a radio interview! [I was a last minute addition to the show, so some details fell through the communications cracks.] When I got a checksheet telling me about lighting, backgrounds, etc., several very genteel and ladylike expression fell dulcetly from my lip as I dashed into action. How appropriate for the theme of the show!

Earrings and lipstick, because my mum always said you can walk out the door for a meeting with the Queen with just those two. Eyeshadow because I didn't have time for makeup. No time for my truly spectacular, gorgeous wardrobe. So I had my tv debut in a denim dress and fabulous earrings. A tan in place of professional skin products. My hair all which way from a hair-wash 30 minutes earlier. If my philosophical framework is wrong and there is a humanistic deity in charge of events, all I can is that he, she or it was splitting their sides laughing.

How do you take action?

1) Start with the overall goal and break it down into specific, small, discrete tasks to get you to the first milestone. Forget about the rest, just focus on the first milepost.

2) Choose the easiest task on the list that doesn't depend on an earlier step and do that. Feel yourself moving! Cheer when you get it done!

3) Pick another easy step. Don't agonize over which one. Just one easy one. See you your muscles are unknotting as you are in Action?

Keep moving until you get to the milepost. Celebrate.

Name the next milepost and create steps. You're in motion. Just keep going.

The minute you feel resistance, stop. Meditate and ask your unconscious mind to tell you what it's really about. If the answer doesn't come, call me for your Free Getting Unstuck session and I'll get you moving again. [Not a sales pitch, remember.]

www.soaringdragon.biz 253-203-6676

What is the #1 "Pain Point" people come to me to relieve? Go ahead and give it your best guess....

 What is the #1 quest people come to me for?  It’s not fame and entrepreneurial fortune, although many of them do, and I can definitely show people how to get more fortune.  It’s not a better career, although ditto.  It’s not freedom from physical pain and significant health problems, although many of them do.

Nope, the absolute #1 quest is – clarity.  If there were a tagline for this age it might very well be “I’m so confused and I don’t know what to do.”  What they mean is that what they really WANT is buried so deep under layers of “This knowledge is too scary – don’t, whatever I say, let me know this truth” that they couldn’t excavate it with a power-shovel.

Truth is so scary for so many of us because if we knew what we really needed and what we really wanted for ourselves we would have to initiate really, really scary conversations with people about the amount of relative power we have in our lives.  We might need to have conversations that threaten our financial survival or our definition of ourselves. 

When someone comes to me seeking clarity, it is nearly always true that clarity is being deliberately obscured as a self-protection mechanism by the person’s deep unconscious.

I particularly admire the clients who, when they start to realize what clarity would really mean, take a deep breath, strap on their Courage backpack, take their Courage vitamins, and plunge into the depths.  When that happens, the most glorious transformations become possible.  Sometimes, the reality isn’t as scary as the nightmares dreamed up by their (frequently mistreated or emotionally abandoned) child-selves.  Sometimes the reality is about right.  Sometimes the reality is much, much worse.

What is always true is that the courage to dive deep and face truth with deep breathing and slow steps and as many emotions as come up is a rare and glorious commodity.

The people who walk that path to their own and genuine truth, whether they are looking for clarity, more entrepreneurial success, a better career, better health or better something else, are my personal heroes.

God bless you all, every one!  You are the brave souls who bring light to human life.  Bless you all, every one.  

Get a FREE Getting Unstuck session!  Not a sales pitch, a real session.  Contact me at www.soaringdragon.biz or call 253-203-6676

Seek Happiness, yes! Insist on character and integrity in yourself, yes! They go together, yes, yes!!

 Character, integrity and self-control: Starting to look kind of attractive, actually

Do more of what makes you happy.  It’s so easy for this to become a joke, an invitation to self-indulgence and hedonistic indifference.  I was struck this week at how American culture has shifted from character values that I grew up with.  A woman that I gifted with a $100 piece of exercise equipment complained to the Facebook group admin because the equipment didn’t fit under her bed.  Oh, waaah.  [I mistook the vendor and posted it wrong, then corrected it.  Hint: the originally-described equipment wouldn’t have fit under her bed, either.  And since when am I or anyone else responsible for something fitting under your bed?  Bring it back or otherwise deal with it.]  

How I was raised: if someone gives you something as a gift, the ONLY acceptable response is “Thank you.”  Then shut up, completely, permanently and forever.  Even if it’s the wrong size, the color is horrible and it doesn’t fit under your bed.  You don’t pretend to be grateful to the gifter’s face and then spew complaints to an authority-figure third party or the rest of the family or Facebook Friend cohort behind your gifter’s back. 

People used to think less of you for that kind of weasely behavior.  No more.  And maybe that’s a mistake.  Maybe we want to take our culture back in the direction of character.  Maybe we want to embrace actions of integrity – like talking TO people, not ABOUT people.  Maybe we want to deal with it a bit more and whine a lot less.

I know that after the Great Recession, in which I and millions of other Americans lost our shirts, with a weak, contingent-labor-loving employment paradigm, and about 1% of the previous level of economic and emotional safety, a lot of us are very, very frightened, to our cores.  Frightened of outcomes that would be unthinkable in any other advanced First World country, like living on the street.  And when people are scared, and know that they have no power to get back at their oppressors, they look for the nearest easy, weak target for their rage.  They find that easy, weak target in people less able than themselves – people who are financially struggling even more (and can’t fight back effectively), who are disabled, who are a minority color or religion or culture.  Or even just the nice people like me who are kind, generous and not as sly and political as they are.

What if we all just collectively cut it out?

Do more POSITIVE THINGS that make you happy.  Color with your kids, then put them to bed early and relax with a book for an hour.  Make nice with your neighbors who like you kids and will supervise their homework while you go to the gym, listen to Taylor Swift and improve your health.   Find the “free museum” day and take yourself off for a date with joy.  As the frustrations of the day build up, stop, take five deep, slow breaths and visualize tropical paradises or some of your life’s happy memories.  You have them, you know you do! 

Do this enough times and you won’t come home ready to spew lies and vitriol on your fellow-travelers through the travails of life.

Do more of what makes you genuinely happy.  Kicking the dog – or your fellow struggling humanity – will never do it.  My mother taught me to have courage and be kind a half-century before Disney turned it into a cliché.  Do more of that – and you will be happy.  

Having trouble being happy?  Call for a FREE Getting Unstuck session!  No sales pitch, a free roadmap to how to make life less fraught and more fun.  You deserve to be happy....

Call 253-203-6676 or email victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com.   www.soaringdragon.biz

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Being Real

Over a century ago, this American essayist wrote a profound truth about human nature: we don't want to hear the truth about ourselves. We respond to truth from others like we respond to rattlesnakes. We don't tell ourselves the truth. And our conscious mind is so 100% focused on protecting our social selves from any kind of negativity that we suppress all that we could know. But all that energy spent fending off deep self-knowledge, if it were harnessed to the wagon of our dreams? My god, we could rocket to the stars, couldn't we? So much peace of mind,just waiting to be harnessed. Such creativity - blazing fountains of creativity! - if only we could reclaim all that blighting energy.

What are we so afraid of? The scorn of the "world" when we show/admit that we aren't perfect people, in one or all of our roles (entrepreneur/career, parenting, spouse, citizen, Christian/Jew/Muslim/other - every single label that matters to us - and we all have labels that matter to us!) The disappointment of loved ones who see the real us for the first time. [They preferred to put us on a pedestal, so they didn't have to do the hard work of being real, either.

Take one small step nearly every day. Be real in one moment with one person. Eventually you'll be able to fire your social self's internal "safety net" but don't expect to do that today. For today, one person, one moment. As the Buddha said, you fill the pitcher drop by drop.  

3 Powerful Reasons Why CSI-Type Shows are the Road to Career & Business Success

 All right, so if you’re not already addicted, you don’t have to start.  But if are already a heavy consumer of modern who-dunnits, you also don’t have to stop.  [If you are living a high-stress life situation, you do need to limit your viewing.  Too much violence and mayhem, even if most of the focus is on intellectual cleverness, has a well-studied negative impact on your longevity and health.]

So what do these puzzler shows do to you, that has a positive impact on your life and career:

1)      You get into the habit of not jumping to conclusions.  In real-life crime, the most obvious suspect usually did do it.  Spouses, gangs, drugs and alcohol: that’s where real detectives look.  But in the puzzler shows, your brain gets programmed to stop and do 360 interviews, digging for what’s hidden, before you come to any conclusion. 

Think about what this would be like as it plays out in your career and personal life.  Stop, breathe, get your pre-frontal cortex involved before you let your limbic system lock on to  the first (stupid) thing that occurs to it.  What would your life and career be like if all your ideas were fully vetted by your thinking brain before it gets cast in mental concrete? What if everyone around you, especially management, did this? Oh. My. God.

2)      You collect actual physical evidence before you believe anything.  You collect evidence that could potentially contradict the first batch of physical evidence.  No stone is left unturned.  Real law enforcement doesn’t have this kind of budget.  But our fictional detective processes, where science is the real hero of the show, are thorough, meticulous and don’t believe anything unless there is lots and lots of irrefutable evidence for the conclusion. 

Translate this into your own career life.  I’ve watched shoot-from-the-lip jerks be admired and promoted, more times than I can count.  But I also have lived the corporate life long enough to have seen what happens when managers realize, a year too late, that they bought the sizzle and ignored the steak.  The sizzler is sent packing.  Listing the possible options with pros and cons out loud, while your thinking brain is doing its diamond-sharp analysis as a background process, allows you to, at worst, promise a data-driven robust conclusion later in the day, and at best, end the oration with your really wise, “steak” conclusion.  Nice place to be, either way.

3)      You get shot, stabbed or conked on the head regularly, but very rarely die, unless you were hoping to leave the series for a new job anyway.  If we could deeply believe the maxim of all the wisdom tradition – “It’s going to be all right, long-term.” – we would be more willing to try things.  Some new ideas fail.  Most are so-so.  Some are spectacular.  All of them reward your courage and vision with growth. 

If you watch enough cliffhangers that turn into recoveries, you might start believing that you are bullet-proof as well – not enough to get you stupid, but enough to give you courage to jump off a mountain with a skilled tandem hang-gliding partner.  For a millisecond or so, before the lift grabs you and saves you, you are dropping through the air, with no force but gravity working on you.  The more times you drop and are saved, the more certain you become that, whatever happens in your career, you will walk away alive, with lessons and knowledge that no one can ever take away from you. 

If we all did this in our non-TV lives, human history would take a dramatic turn for the better, as would your career or small business.  Try it and see!

Victoria C. Leo creates blast-through-barriers programs for career professional and entrepreneurs.  Visit www.soaringdragon.biz, http://soaringdragoninjapan.blogspot.com, Facebook group Healing Minds, Healing Bodies or email victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com.

Reframing Insults Puts Power Where It Belongs - In YOUR Pocket

Sometimes it's the small things that count.  I have a client who recently transferred to a new group with a "mentor" who was making him miserable.  In listening to him, the causes and solutions became clear.

The cause?  She raced along at breakneck speed, such that Michaelangelo or Einstein couldn't have kept up - and used an exasperated tone of voice when anyone asked a question or even asked her to slow down.  You can understand his pissossity at the meta-communication that he was an idiot.  You can understand why he wanted the basic respect that he deserved as a highly-regarded professional.

I started by getting him to reframe the situation from anger to an understanding that this young thing just didn't know how to teach.  When he was sure that no sane person would actually think he's an idiot, he was able to hear that, and shift his energy from defense to commiseration.  Who doesn't remember what a jerk they were when they were 20-something?  

Getting angry at a jerk is usually a "weak" response.  Realizing that your respect and integrity will never be diminished, in discerning eyes, by the actions of a jerk gives you the emotional space to take a breath and make a non-attacking response.  Truly, emotionally realizing that the jerk is incompetent, not powerful, defangs the attacker in the eyes of your reactive limbic system.  This is easier with a hypnotherapy journey, which my client used, but if you devote time to it, you can reprogram your deep heart and soul on your own. [Call me.  It's shorter, more fun and more comprehensive if a pro does it with you.]

Then I got him to manage her - with praise. The first time he thanked her and praised her for her knowledge and thanked her again for her efforts (all very sincerely), he saw the first smile he'd ever seen on her face.  "She walked away with a spring in her step," he marveled.  A month later, he has no trouble interacting with her.  She will probably continue to not know how to teach anything – and not be motivated to learn! - but the exasperated bad manners are gone.  In any case, my client knows how to interpret her bad manners.  Reframing it as her incompetence at teaching [“these young folks,” he tells himself] allows him to genuinely praise the things she does well and ignore her incompetence.  

His stress level (and all the bad effects that brings) is way down, so it’s another example of how healing minds heals bodies as well.  Call me for a free Getting Unstuck session.

6 Tools and Techniques to Make Healthy Self-Love a Reality

For some people, brought up by caring parents who wanted us to be generous and humble adults, the difference between healthy self-love and unhealthy selfishness, arrogance and narcissism, was not made clear to us.

In consequence, we grew to adulthood happily prepared to take care of everyone around us, be a rock of care and concern for all our loved ones, while relying on the attention of others to see to it that our own nurturing - emotional feeding - gets done.

That's not the way things are supposed to roll.  With due respect to our well-intentioned parents, hoping to steer us away from self-absorption, they missed the healthy balance point.

Self-love, so far from being a character flaw, is the foundation upon which every other healthy ediface of adult love and character is built.

Let me explain what healthy self-love is, and give you some specific techniques and tools that you can use to build this capacity within yourself.  It's never too late!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKQe5VFm0gc

Ready to Find Your True Path in Life?

 January, the first month of the new year.  What glorious feelings of new beginnings start to stir. 

Mixed in with all the ideas that are easily actionable, like losing weight and exercising more [take my new class https://zparkl.com/course/about/transform-your-relationship-with-exercise/] are the very different stirrings of the heart that is starting to yearn for a new engagement with life.

I know what my true path in life is, and I am living in full-time.  One of my passions is finding great resources for my clients.

Elizabeth Gilbert loves it.  So do I.  A charming new book on how to find and follow your passion, titled The Crossroads of Should and Must (Elle Luna), coughed up some gems that I rarely find in such books. 

After explaining the difference between Should and Must, and explaining that some Shoulds will become Musts, because they are righteous and good – like supporting and nurturing whatever children you may create, intentionally or not – she talks a lot about the Must of your life, the work that you have to do in some way, somehow, because it’s what you were born for. 

And this is the place where so many well-meaning people, from Marsha Sinetar to Marianne Williamson and dozens in between, have gone aground. 

Luna addresses all of the key worries that assail my clients when they are considering going deeply into the question of what they love: what about money?  What if what I love doesn’t pay enough to support my family?

Here’s her answer:  “If doing what you love doesn’t pay the [necessary, not extravagant] bills, then you must find another way to make money.  Period.  Being able to pay your bills can create the temporal and mental space to find your calling.”

Have you heard “Do what you love and the money will follow”?  When you’re in your twenties and sometimes thirties – when you don’t know much about life and are prone to confusing the desperately wished for, for the even plausibly possible – that phrase resonates strongly.  It is accompanied by a manifesto on having passion and intention, whence your longed-for brilliant future magically manifests.   Decades later, having received some belated education in how business works, I discovered that success occurs in the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, and what a significant portion of the rest of the world wants desperately and has money to pay for.  You can create the world’s most fabulous canal boat ropes, because you are a history enthusiast, but there isn’t enough of a market there to keep a flea alive.  Do it, by all means, but have another occupation for making money, and be proud of it.

As I explain in my Take Back Your Lost Heart, it isn’t more noble to work at Other work and do your Calling part-time until you have the income that you need to support yourself in reasonable comfort.  Not to mention the other things that contribute to your peace of mind.  The responsibility to provide children with safe and secure housing, education and as much of a leg up in life as you can.  The peace of mind that paying all your bills in full at the end of the month gives you.   Philip Glass, who worked as a plumber to ensure he had the cash flow he needed, while also pursuing his love as a Broadway composer is the poster boy for this, as is of course Albert Einstein, who used his slow-moving, un challenging work in the Patent Office to set his mind free to soar. 

Call me for a Getting Unstuck session today!  

We will explore your search for your calling and I will give you the inspiration and the practical tools that will get you started on the road to your dreams.  You CAN do it!  Put wings on your dreams  so they can soar, and put feet on your dreams so they can become reality.  www.soaringdragon.biz

New Year Resolutions 2: What Do I Focus On?

Resolutions 2: What Shall I Focus on?

Study yourselves; and most of all note well
Wherein kind Nature meant you to excel.
Not every blossom ripens into fruit.

Amen.  

When it comes to the character virtues of good listening, good will and good heart, we are all equally capable of excelling.  Not so with all the other characteristics.

There has been a lively debate among researchers and also among us average Joes and Jills about what to focus our self-improvement energy on.  When I was a kid, the focus was all on removing or ameliorating one’s weaknesses.  We studied ourselves to find our weaknesses and then added education or training to our To Do list and we got rid of it.  It’s a good plan.  Celine Dion couldn’t make it as a singing mega-star until she had elocution lessons and plastic surgery.  Reality is what it is and women are judged on their appearance before anything else.  Consider the mean tweets about Carrie Fisher’s appropriately-aged face this week.  So removing barriers is always a good idea.

The 21^st century spawned the Strengths movement, specifically to counteract the all-pervasive search for defects, and that has merit as well.  As Longfellow’s quote shows, this isn’t a new idea. There is a great deal of value in knowing what you are already good at or naturally good at, and focusing on that.  Polishing your gemstone so it gleams even more brightly.  There is some evidence to support this as a strategy, in that hiring managers and potential spouses over-focus on one’s shining points if you dazzle the eyes with them.

The dilemma is succinctly explained in the last line of the poem fragment: not every blossom will ripen into a fruit and you only have 18 usable hours every day, less if you exercise and you will exercise, right?  [If you don’t exercise every day, and you have $20 in your pocket – you know you do – click and start changing your internal landscape now! https://zparkl.com/course/about/transform-your-relationship-with-exercise/  ]

So what shall I spend my precious time on: fix it or get better at what I already do well?  Fixing things, if they are barriers like Dion’s, can give you a big bang for your buck.  Better organizing of paperwork?  Probably not, but it might significantly lower your stress at the office and give you more time to ride a bike or do yoga or paint.  If I focus on what I know I am good at, I will have a thrill of victory as I climb higher and higher on a path that I am already halfway to Denali’s peak on.  There are pros and cons no matter what you choose.

For me, it’s still fix-it.  Healing what needs healing, growing in virtues, and making time for the creative activities that feed my soul, that’s where it’s at for me.    

New Year's Resolutions 1: Your Burdens, My Burdens

 If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough….. Henry W. Longfellow

I am a big fan of resolutions to improve health (lose weight, stop smoking, exercise, change eating) and improve one’s money situation (new job, promotion, more clients, less time wasted with poor organization).  My profession, after all, is healer and change agent.  Using hypnotherapy to effect deep changes and energy healing to reduce anxiety and stress, with life coaching to set up goals, rewards and timetables, it’s a very powerful toolkit and it gets very powerful, fast results.  What’s missing?

Nothing, if your goal is the utterly admirable ones of physical health and the end of limiting beliefs about yourself.

But that’s not all there is to a human life.  We also have a striving to be better people.   All of my tools work really well to help people to extinguish the lingering remnants of harm from childhoods with imperfect families, traumas from adult life like criminal assaults, natural disasters and war, as well as personal imperfections that can’t be traced back to a particular cause or event. 

It’s noble, I think, to truly want to cause less pain to others by wanting to be less quick-tempered, more patient, more kind and understanding or more generous with praise and focus on catching people doing something right.  All of these and more have been resolutions of my clients over the years.  Removing the defect entirely is wonderful, but when we are talking about deeply ingrained barriers like this, even removing a layer or two of habitual patterns is a victory.

There is one challenge that I think underlies all the frustration, the envy, and the anger over the Good Luck in others’ lives, and that is what I’d like to talk about today.  We look at others in the superficial way that we do when we are assessing others’ lives, we see what we think they have, we compare it to what we know we don’t have, and anger arises.  We spin stories about why we don’t have, and why they do.  That story becomes our truth and we live our lives believing the story.

Let’s break this whole conundrum apart, piece by piece, and let’s start with a really common example: you have a particular burden holding you back and I don’t.  One of my many clients who is also a coach or healer tells me that it’s harder for her than for me, because she has two young children and I don’t; in fact, I have an easy life all around.  You’ve done this a million times, and so have we all.  Even I, who am super-aware of the fallacy, occasionally fall into the pit before I realize what I did and jump out.  The truth that we need to learn at a deep level is that we actually DON’T know a damn thing about what burdens our fellow humans are bearing.  All we know is what is public and obvious. 

People assume I don’t know how black people suffer because my hair is blond; they don’t know that I grew up with African American brothers and a sister.  People assume I have no burdens because I tend to be cheerful and don’t ride in a wheelchair.  During flu season, people learn that I have immune system weaknesses that make illnesses very common, but if you meet me in summer?  Nope.  My other health concerns are private; that doesn’t mean they don’t exist or don’t hold me back in myriad ways.  Only their closest intimates (usually) know that a person had a deeply-abused childhood, has been a victim of violence or is battling their way back to wholeness from the effects of PTSD.  And you don’t know any of this.  You know your life.  You don’t know the truth about the hundreds of people you are telling stories about every year. 

The underlying purpose of the story-telling that Person X has fewer burdens than me is to have a ready-made reason for why s/he has something and I don’t, an ignoble goal if ever there was one.  If you find yourself wanting to push back on this wisdom, now you know why your limbic system doesn’t want to let go of the Everyone Has It Easier Than Me story. 

How to overcome this (frequently wrong) story-spinning?  Every time you hear your mind coming to a conclusion about someone, especially after a short acquaintance, STOP.  Take two long, very slow, deep breaths and remind yourself that You Don’t Know A Damn Thing About This Person.  If you are in I Don’t Know territory, your mind is open to collecting additional information.  As soon as you have spun a story, you will interpret all new sensory information (what they say, do, twitch, etc.) through the filter of whether or not it fits in the story. 

The goal of this exercise is NOT to turn off your intuition – absolutely the contrary!  We just to the story that we can trust a person based on our limbic system liking the person’s welcoming smile and generous offer of home-baked cookies.  But sociopaths and garden-variety manipulators are very charming and “nice.”  You need to reserve your story-making/judgment until you have a lot more data.  Only a true sociopath can keep up the smokescreen forever.  The others will start to slip up.  If you are paying close attention, you’ll notice it and step out of range.  If you have your “S/he’s a great guy/gal” story/frame in place, you’re by definition no longer paying close attention. 

Acknowledging your own burdens – you are building a career or a business and want to be a good parent as well; you are battling asthma or ADD to get to your goals – allows you to generate goals that fit your physical and mental limits.  You won’t choose the same goal or timing as some outside entity thinks you should.  You know what you can realistically do and if you don’t, call me and we’ll figure it out in a coaching session.  You can walk from Panama City to Washington DC or from a Auschwitz to Hiroshima if you just keep putting one foot in front of another and don’t give up; my mom the dedicated peace activist did both, in her 60s.

For 2016, let me suggest this additional Resolution for your consideration:  slow down the creation of stories.  And when you hear yourself getting ready to conclude that another person has less burdens than you, remind yourself that you know all the secrets of your own soul and absolutely nothing about theirs.

Call me for a Free Getting Unstuck session, on whatever your goals for the year or your life are.  253-203-6676.  victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com   www.soaringdragon.biz