4 Powerful Reasons Why You Have to Listen to Rudolph ... every day from Thanksgiving to New Years

Don't you just hate it when you have to listen to Rudolph and Frosty prior to December 24th??

No? Me, neither!

I put up holiday wreaths on the doors the week before Halloween. I have decorations in the windows now. Gonna start listening to holiday songs and singing lustily with them for two solid months...

WHY? you ask.

Yeah, I know, having holidays go on and on can be annoying. What other cultures do is they have numerous holidays throughout the year. It reminds people of joy and love and the essential sweetness of life at regular intervals year-round.

We benighted savages of the USA really only have two holidays - July 4th (one day, big deal) - and the period from Thanksgiving to New Years. We are forced to work too many hours, with no or expensive health care "benefits", we have practically no holidays, we spend our weekends doing the chores that we can't do during the week. We are the most anxious people on Earth - and no wonder! Every other industrialized nation on earth removes the basic worries of life - health care and education, elder care help and baby care support - so that citizens can soar and strive and live good lives.

So we are exhausted, scared/worried and desperately needing rest most of the time.

When you only have one extended holiday, when you have to pack a year's worth of joyful play into one month of weekends and (if you're lucky) a week off from the long-hours grind.....

Even I, who absolutely practice what I preach and do the 5 Tools every day of the year, yearns for the plethora of official holidays that the rest of the world enjoys. Sure I make every Sunday a spiritual and creative oasis, but - it IS more fun to have fun when the rest of the community is smiling as well.

So - tired of Rudolph by Dec 1st? Have compassion on the rest of us holiday-deprived revelers. And work for a nation where the national good trumps corporate greed. Bless us all, every one.

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

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.

The #1 Factor That Will Keep You Going Toward Your Personal Goals

 How often do you celebrate?  Official holidays and family events only?  Or do you also celebrate your small victories and achievements on the mountain that you are personally climbing?

Some of us aren’t aspiring to anything.  I know lots of people like this.  They have achieved what they have always wanted – a certain income, grandparent status, a comfortable job – and they are satisfied.  They will read and learn and grow intellectually, or not, but they don’t have any aspirations burning a hole in their souls.  They have no mountains that they are attempting to summit.

Now please note: a mountain that you feel compelled to summit need not be something tangible.  It doesn’t need be healthy weight, a strong, muscled body, graduating from college or the Displaced Homemaker program or completing a marathon.  It could be getting through an entire week without snarling at anyone, feeling completely free and happy in one’s sexual expression, meditating for 10 minutes a day for a month or graduating from the eternal Yes Woman at your church (and being OK with everyone being mad at you, up to and including needing to find another church).  I particularly love the clients who come to me for that 2^nd type of mountain!

Some of these mountains are public – you tell everyone that you are changing your eating pattern forever, or becoming tobacco-free, so they will help and encourage you if you are tempted to return to your life-killing choices – and some are completely or primarily private.  My personal fitness goals have been in the latter category.

I have had a couple of injuries, which have kept flaring up, and other complications that have kept me from completing the six hours/week that the Surgeon General says we all need for optimal health.  I couldn’t even complete the three hours needed for minimal conditioning.  Most weeks I could complete 1.5 hours. Some days, I did 10 minutes of yoga or hand weights at home and it was all I could do.

The end result: poor physical condition.

But I’m celebrating today!  For the third day in a row, I was able to complete a 30 minute interval program on the treadmill, speeding up my walk to nearly running for at least half of those minutes.  I warmed up for 10, and then started a “5 minutes fast, 2 minutes moderate” progression.   I felt great every day, no relapses.  I can see muscles starting to form all over my torso, arms and legs.  They have been silently building for months, clearly, even as I’ve struggled and thought I was failing.

This is not the mountain summited, no.  It’s not the beginning of the end of my conditioning mountain.  But it is clearly the end of the beginning*.  

Along every mountain trek, there are interim resting spots at the ends of the switchbacks.  If you are a project manager, or have ever painted your house, these are the checkpoints along the project road, the places where you stop and assess your progress.  If you are literally climbing a mountain, you look out and down and realize, in awe and appreciation, how beautiful the view is and how much you have accomplished.

It’s so important to take these progress assessments!  Not in the way we do assessments in the corporate world, where their exact translation is “let’s see what you HAVEN’T accomplished so I have a stick to beat you up with the next time you want a concession on time, flexibility, whatever,” but in a Wow, I’ve Taken Some Steps, Haven’t I spirit. 

This is also what I talk about in my programs when I say that all behavior change goals have to have rewards for every effort toward a goal, as well as rewards for interim steps.

This is my day to celebrate with a non-food reward, and I intend to – extravagantly!  An entire hour of crochet tonight, finishing up a meter-tall stuffed animal, a fuzzy, funny wolf for a wolf-obsessed colleague.  It is not great art or great technical execution but it is fun, and another milestone in its way.  After all, how many people do you know who have ever created a 3 foot tall plush toy wolf that sorta-kinda looks like one? 

When you reward yourself, when you don’t allow your inner damage to slough it off and push you to spend your Reward time/energy/money on some other chore or goal, you are sending a powerful message to your subconscious mind that these actions DO matter, that small actions taken every day, consistently, rain or shine, tired and busy as you are, WILL get results.  It sends the message that these mountains that you are climbing are formidable, but you are more formidable.  It sends the message that you believe in your mountain-summiting ability, your ability to get to the very top and survey the entire world from the highest height.  It sends the message that you matter – to you, which is all that really matters.

Tomorrow, I go back to the gym and return to the climb.  For now, I am celebrating!

*[Extra points if you know who I plagiarized.]

www.soaringdragon.biz
For a comprehensive class on navigating the barriers to a daily movement habit (only $20): https://zparkl.com/course/about/transform-your-relationship-with-exercise/
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1 Simple Step to Improve Your Home Life in 2016

Even the most career-obsessed person knows that an unhappy home life sucks the energy and joy from your life.  And most of us are more balanced than that. So here is one simple step to make a big difference in your personal happiness for 2016 – and you’ll make your spouse or partner much happier as well.

Here’s the scenario that most of us live with:

Ø  There is no demarcation in communication between the tactical (kids’ dental appointments, other calendaring, the bill that needs paying) and the strategic (where are we going on vacation next year, what % of our time are we spending on kids, parents, hobbies, our spiritual growth, an irritation I have with you, an important way in which you are disrespecting me, my time or my importance in your life).  The tactical gets sandwiched into whatever snippets of time are available.  The most important strategic questions – the primary relationship and its emotions, meaning the meaning that the relationship has in our lives, how valued we are, how trusted you are – require undivided attention and a calm interior, so they never get aired until the bucket overflows on a particularly stressful day.

Ø  Important conversations (both tactical and strategic) about finances, vacations, problems or opportunities with the kids, problems and opportunities with in-laws, ourselves, our careers, our <fill in the blanks> gets sandwiched in to a brain that is tunneled on the stress of the moment.  A tunneled brain cannot even absorb all the details and nuances of the issue, much less process it with both analytic and intuitive wisdom. 

Ø  Because we cannot absorb the full reality that is being presented to our tunneled brain, we lose most of the context and half the content.  Our spouse correctly concludes that we aren’t listening and (possibly incorrectly) that we really don’t value them. 

Ø  Whoever is paying the bills, dealing with the teacher or the nasty neighbor, or mediating the in-laws knows what’s going on, but the other partner really doesn’t, so that miscommunications with the external world occur, wasting everyone’s already scanty free time. [The time you should be spending at the gym, right?]

Some people have a weekly What’s Going On? Meeting in which they coordinate the tactical.  It’s a step toward wisdom, certainly.  It’s a rare family that sets aside well-rested, unpressured time to tackle the strategic.  You need to.

To the rescue – the mandatory weekly Family Meeting!  Have a scribe, either the person with the best handwriting, or the person who really loves to take notes or who is the most comprehensive note-taker [that would be my partner], or both/all parties on a rotating basis.  Start with the tactical stuff.  Write everything down!  This ensures that whoever dealt with the problem, challenge or opportunity isn’t the only adult who knows who said what and what was done.  

So far, so tactical.

Then start on the strategic, specifically the non-relationship-oriented events, plans, goals.  Brainstorm.  Talk about retirement, or your career plans, or the possibility of relocation, or what kinds of investments you both really care about.  Focus on listening twice as much as you talk.  Take three long, deep breaths and don’t respond to any idea that upsets, scares or enrages you until you are calm again.  Have a Time Out process.  Stand up and stretch.  Talk about reducing expenses on things you want but don’t need, so that the longer-term strategic needs can be met – or even the strategic wants, like a life-altering trip to India or above the Arctic Circle, can come true without incurring debt.  You can forego the $5 cup of coffee if you know what you are getting instead.  Keep your eyes on the prize!

The last element of the Family Meeting is the relationship.  Keep reminding yourself that no human being is going to support you in your life goals, including your business and career goals, if they are disrespected themselves.  Cheer when your spouse trusts you enough to bring up something that s/he wishes you’d do or not do, or do differently.  You are finding out about it while s/he still loves and trusts you.  If I had a dollar for every male friend, colleague, relative or client who has told me in bewilderment that he has no idea why his wife is divorcing him, I would have a fully-paid condo in Lahaina.  With the exception of the 3% of humanity who are sociopaths, people are only mysterious when we aren’t listening.  Coaxing problems out of hiding when they are still small and fixable keep the garden of love well-weeded.

And that is the most effective, most powerful boost you can give your career and your life for 2016.

3 Steps to Career Success AND Family Joy in Nov/Dec

 So many things culminate in November and December.  At least six major family and religious holidays.  End of year git-er-done deadlines at work.  Everyone’s deepest non-rational needs and craziness being triggered.  Kids enraptured with the magic of lights, desserts and all the decorating at home.  One’s own remembered delights and memories of magic can be ruthlessly tamped down in the service of Reality, but since deep desires can’t really be tamped down, you find them popping up at the most inopportune moment.  Spending more money on gifts and travel than you soberly would choose to allocate from the resources you have. 

Can we really be surprised that so many people, especially parents with full-time jobs, wish they could just fast-forward to January, when they are being honest with themselves?

The good news: there is a way out of the madness!  You need to solve these three problems:

Ø  You’re not paying complete attention to work when you’re at work.

Ø  You’re not paying complete attention to your family and/or your personal needs for joy and magic when you aren’t at work.  Exacerbated by not having enough hours for your non-work life.

Ø  You’re spending too much money.

Let’s take them in turn:

You’re not paying complete attention to work when you’re at work.  Yes, I know that you think you are.  But if you are not giving your children, your spouse and your desire to enjoy this special time of the year its due, those concerns will leak into your work time and you will be constantly fighting distraction.  Or the guilt at your long hours when you know that your family really wants to share this time with you will take up cognitive bandwidth, even when you’re not aware of it.  Or you’re shopping online when you need your cognitive resources 100% focused on the supply-chain problem.  So you can solve this problem by solving problem #2, right?  Let’s do that.

You’re not paying complete attention to your family and/or your personal needs for joy and magic when you aren’t at work.  This is exacerbated by not having enough hours for your non-work life.  Your kids need your undivided attention in order to thrive.  Your spouse needs to know that s/he is undisputed #1 in your life.  Full stop.  If you want to live a long and happy life, have kids who cry buckets at your funeral and a spouse who sustains you for a half century of adult life with his/her unvarnished appreciation and adoration, you need to deserve that.  Full stop.  Kids remember these holidays.  You can’t buy them off with toys and other “stuff,” not in the long run.  They might get all excited about the stuff, but what will keep them away from drugs, early sex and general life stupidity is the strength of their connection to you.  Your spouse needs your help in cutting down the workload, firming placing 90% of the obligations in the No pile.  S/he needs you 100% emotionally present in the evenings, for the joys of decorating the house, making desserts, writing a yearly holiday letter.  S/he needs your 100% emotional presence as you explore a new light show, or visit an ethnic holiday you know nothing about, or do a service project together.  The end of year holidays are about love, about family, about goodness and generosity and caring for others.  They are about joy.  You, my friend, need joy.  You need to sit your kids down and tell them about holidays when you were a child.  You all need a dose of magic, as much as you need to step away from consumerism.

If you are truly present when you’re not working, you can pour it on 100% when you are working., and head home at a reasonable hour.  And by that, I mean no later than 6 PM.  Don’t even think about trying to negotiate this.  If you are 100% focused, you can get a reasonable amount of progress every day toward your organizational goals.  Do it, and then leave, guilt-free.

You’re spending too much money.  There are so many reasons why your spouse deserves your undivided attention during your non-working hours, and one reason is that when your spouse has what s/he needs from the love of their life, they will be more amenable to walking away from the Shoulds that generate too much spending. 

Ø  Gift only children.  Buy them educational toys. No gadgets, unless it’s a group gift from several families.

Ø  Or have a Pick a Name Out of the Hat at Thanksgiving.

Ø  Or create things.  I crochet while I’m relaxing with videos.  You might have talents at baking or crafting or building.  Sometimes I inflict my art on people.  They can throw it out and re-use the frame, I don’t care; having them know that I love them matters.

 

Unless you have more money than the Queen of England, you are probably spending too much.  You need much more money for retirement than you think you do.  Your kids need some seed money for college.  The animal welfare groups need a big donation.  The polar bears are drowning and the planet needs saving.  These things matter.  You can deal with selfish people trying to guilt-trip you into shopping now much more easily than you can deal with an unhappy retired life or kids with crippling education debts. 

Work with your spouse on an announcement to both families about your firm commitment to reserving the holidays for love and service projects.  Write a heartfelt letter about teaching your kids the value of sharing and caring, including creating small and meaningful gifts.  Wrap one or at most two nice educational gifts for your kids under your own tree or other symbolic object.  Whether you are pre-parenting, post-parenting or non-parenting, the same rules apply. 

All the holidays are about Light – the Light of wisdom, the Light of love, and the Light of joy.  They all dispel the darkness.  Focus on wisdom, love and joy, and don’t confuse them with “stuff.” 

So you see the solution!  When you fix the “time-at-home” problem and the spending problem, you automatically resolve the distractions that are keeping you from career success in November and December.  When you fix the “focus on work, then come home” problem, you automatically resolve the deprivation that you are inflicting on yourself, your vulnerable children and your spouse.  Life isn’t linear.  It’s a web, in which the solution to one part of the web relies on progress elsewhere.

You deserve to excel at work this holiday.  And you deserve excellence in your spouse, parent and human being roles as well.  You can do it!  Let the Light shine!

It's the Simple Things..... That Are So Hard

The Power of Simple and Sincere Praise

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?

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, but the exasperated bad manners are gone - and 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. 

His stress level (and all the bad effects that brings) is way down, so it’s another example of how healing minds heals bodies.....  The next time someone insults instead of mentoring you, or you feel legitimate anger arising, stop, take a deep breath, and consider the possibility that your "enemy" is just incompetent - and we've all suffered from that disease.  The same person who has literally saved lives can't figure out her GoPro, allegedly the simplest camera on the planet.  I need compassion.  We all do.