I was reading some articles about dominant themes for 2024, one cited destruction lust as the primary theme. This means to be consumed, even at a subconscious level, with the desire for destruction of that which a person perceives to be against their best interests.

It said that “over the course of history, what you see is that when a society feels frustrated and failed enough by the very society they live in, they tend to elect and/or support a leader that promises to create drastic change and fulfill their destruction lust regarding whatever is causing them that frustration and pain.

And these leaders, who are poised to satisfy this destruction lust, are the very ones who instead bring about negative change motivated by self-interest rather than positive change motivated by actual care for the people.

These leaders exploit and manipulate the people’s pain and subsequent destruction lust for their own personal agendas. Throughout history, people have fallen into this trap again and again because the relief that destruction promises, blinds them to the consequences. And what it often takes to get elected, is the exact opposite of what the people actually need.”

It’s interesting as a recent article in Time Magazine talks about how globally more voters than ever in history will head to the polls in at least 64 countries (plus the European Union), representing a combined population of about 49% of the people in the world that are meant to be holding national elections, the results of which – for many – will prove consequential for years to come. 

In New Zealand we will certainly be seeing the ramifications of the 2020 election in which the Labour Party won a historic victory, being the first party to form a majority government in the MMP era, for many years to come. It is not unsurprising the pendulum swung in the opposite direction last year when the national election then saw the worst defeat of a sitting government since the introduction of the MMP system; with Labour losing almost half their electoral seats in Parliament.

What really struck me, as I was applying some critical thinking to whether and whom to vote for last year, was how the left/right arguments were so dominant and distracting. When plotting where political parties sit on a continuum, there appears little notice or credence to the other axis that represents a continuum between personal power and a nanny state.

After the complete loss of many personal freedoms during Jacinda Arden’s time in power, it was something I personally paid a lot of attention to. As far as I can see, fear drove many of the supporters of her party’s decisions to fall in behind them without critical questions being raised.

When I wrote Is It Time to Break Free of That Holding Pattern You’ve Been In? there was a recommendation to evaluate decisions from the perspective of imagining how we might feel looking back on those decisions after we are dead. And to become as aware as possible of the positive and negative consequences of those decisions before we make them.

In the article about 2024, it was suggested that it will be a pivotal year and decisions will play such a big role that decision making is a contender for the dominant theme.

It says ”When it comes to making decisions this year, each and every one of us must gather all the information possible, without only seeking information that confirms our biases. We must also deeply know our values.”
Knowing my values hasn’t always been easy to articulate. Among things I value most deeply - and believe in vehemently - are human potential and personal empowerment. I like the article’s reminder to share inspiring and heartwarming stories and post beautiful images that remind people of the magic of life on Earth. Human potential may not always be obvious and yet it is always there, ready to be unleashed through the making of intentional choices and purposeful decisions. This, it suggests, is the antidote to the desire for destruction.

I can well believe it. I think one thing we humans all share is a strong desire for freedom of choice. From Mel Gibson’s well known movie battle cry “Freedom!” as William Wallace in the movie Braveheart, through to  Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, books and movies – fiction and non-fiction – abound with the theme of our human capacity when our freedom is thwarted.

Years ago I commented (in a company I worked for) on how marvelous it would be if we could repurpose every person in our call centres, give them the freedom to bring their own values, talents and gifts to work every day in order to best serve the company’s main goals and aspirations. The response was interesting; it flushed out fears of how people would take advantage and couldn’t be trusted.

Perhaps. I have read about various experiments where people have been given freedoms they had wanted and abused them, but those experiments then show what is only logic – when faced with the natural consequences of their choices (rather than society’s punitive consequences) over the longer term - behaviours changed and people become more responsible and accountable.

I believe in the potential of human beings to achieve great things, to recognise their interconnectedness and act with cumulative effects in mind. I believe good decision making requires people to practice making decisions full stop, we will make bad decisions along the way, but we will learn.

As mentioned, throughout history, people have fallen into the trap again and again of following, electing and/or support a leader that promises to create drastic change and fulfill their destruction lust regarding whatever is causing them that frustration and pain, heedless of the consequences.

These are patterns that we can see when we step back. To be able to do this, I need space and time to think and contemplate. What space and time to contemplate do most people take in today’s world? As we move forward and we are faced with decisions about which leaders to follow and support, especially when they promise drastic change, it will be more vital than ever to be able to step back and really critically examine all of those promises and consequences and not just be blinded be people promising to take away pain points.

So how well can you articulate your own values? Where are the pain points in your own life that could blind you to making good decisions? And where and when can you make regular time in your life for reflection and contemplation so that you are able to maintain a broader perspective?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Leverage the Astonishing Power of Intuition, Flow and Kindness, How to Receive and Be More Confident in Your Needs, Desires and Opinions, Explore Your Limitless Potential, Is It Time to Break Free of That Holding Pattern You’ve Been In? and Life – Will You Take the Easy Way or the Hard Way? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

When catching up with some friends last weekend they asked what had brought us to the area. We explained it was a corporate event, a brand relaunch, and they then went on to express their misgivings about such things. It started with an eye roll, followed by a not atypical tale of many rounds of consultants having passed through their organisation over the years to talk about the culture, vision and brand and so forth and, ultimately, “nothing ever changes”.

It’s interesting, many people who have worked in organisations will have brushed up against something similar, and many express similar feelings about “those types of initiatives”. And no wonder really. All our friend wants is clear recognition of their value, whereas they constantly feel no one appreciates them or the vital nature of their role.

For me, this big picture stuff and how it connects in across an organisation was – and still is (though in quite a different way) – my livelihood for many years. I can acutely remember arriving in New Zealand in 2006 and, in the process of carving out a new life for myself, meeting lots of new people who would inevitably ask “What do you do?” The answer to that was that I worked in Customer Experience transformation, which would generally elicit a blank stare.

Further explanations about working with people, culture, leadership development, brand, communications, processes and systems and so forth would then cause foreheads to crease and a pained expression to appear.

While it is true that many people have never worked in an organisation that has the luxury of splitting the multifaceted aspects of running a business into large departments (like operations, customer services, human resources, marketing, communications, finance, technology and so forth), even those that do often don’t get the depth and breadth of change required to change their customers’ experience of the organisation – far less equate it to the experience most of the employees are having inside the organisation.

Yet there are few among us these days that haven’t been sent down the endless rabbit holes of automated phone systems and, when we eventually reach that glorious moment of reaching an actual human, it is short lived when it becomes the latest in a long list of unhelpful encounters over some quite simple thing.

Regardless of a person’s personal experience of all things corporate and the associated language and jargon, most people can relate to having sub optimal interactions with some kind of organisation or business. And many of us will relate with my friend’s experience of feeling undervalued and unrecognized in their work.

Whether – and how – organisations deal with these interactions was my bread and butter. I had come from a country that was densely populated and, the larger the organisation, the more complex the changes and transformation were to improve things. Why? Because there are more people involved.

All this I am sure seems obvious. Just as I would have hoped the links between employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction and sustainable profits were.

And yet… in every large organisation I was involved in that said it wanted to transform the customer experience, it often didn’t happen. Why? The prevalent issue is that the person or people who actually make decisions on the direction of an organization most often were not the ones driving it.  This might be the CEO, managing director, a board member, an owning group, politicians and so forth.

As I socialized with people from various training and development functions last week, I observed that the conversations hadn’t really changed much in the six years since I’d last been involved with a large organisation. Sure, topics such as flexible ways of working and artificial intelligence are new, but the endemic problems in leading change and transformation still exist – in short the people who need to lead it don’t.

From my observations, many CEO’s, managing directors, board members, and those at similar levels of leadership among owning groups and politicians, don’t have a people focus. It’s rare to find Human Resource or Customer Experience professionals in those roles, more often it’s people with an operational or financial bent, with qualifications in business economics, finance and accounting most common. Yet these people are leading people who serve people.

As much as I used to enjoy compiling monthly financial reports (which is about as much as I enjoy sticking pins in my eyes) the same I am sure is true in reverse for those whose natural bent is numbers and logic compared with psychology and people. None of the departments in large organisations are superfluous to requirements, yet careers have been carved out in a way that can makes many professionals oblivious to the value of their peers and colleagues in other areas.

One guy I met last week runs a fantastic networking organisation for CEOs, a place where those at the pinnacle of the organisation structure can come along and hear about the different issues they are each facing and brainstorm ideas together. As he said, it can be the loneliest job in any organisation.

I think most of us can relate to getting placements or new jobs we felt quite nervous about starting, and I know from my many conversations with CEOs across many fields and organisation sizes, it’s really no different. Except… I would say there is an added pressure of having the position at the top and a sense of – whether rational or not – “I should know all the answers”.

Terms like servant leadership have been around for many decades, but it really is rare to meet individuals in those positions who have the level of self confidence that is needed to take that approach. Many have an egotistical confidence, sure, but the kind of confidence I’m talking about requires a lot of inner personal work, which many have never had the opportunity to explore. And it is fair to say that the many messages we all receive growing up about success (through media, stories, modeled in family systems, education and so forth) are often rife with not showing any weakness.

It’s also understandable why people and teams start operating in isolation or competition and don’t really have a grasp on what their interrelationship with every other department needs to be in order to deliver the basic product or service well never mind to deliver strategic things like new vision statements, values, culture and brand.

Really the kind of change and transformation programmes that can make a real difference is where the person who sets the direction for the organisation has undergone a lot of personal growth and transformation or leads the way by embracing it personally.

Coming back to that friend with their eye roll, I can well understand their cynicism. And that little venture back into corporate life has given me clarity and assurance on the types of organisations and people I like to work with, really it’s the ones where I can makes the biggest difference.

When I left Auckland nine years ago, I swore never to return to that scale of corporate transformation. “Never say never” my old boss said. He’s right of course, but it would take someone out of the norm with extraordinary commitment to entice me back.

I notice it often takes being “in” something that I don’t like or want – be it a career, relationship or otherwise – to know what I do want. I’m far happier these days working with those people who run smaller businesses, where who they are and what they do affect changes far more quickly because the buck stops with them be it on finances, recruitment choices, how they develop their staff or the look of the website.

Moreover, I work with people to align their business direction with their personal values and passions. I’m not interested in anything other than helping folks’ line up their inner world with their outer world as I think that is when not only are they happier, they attract and are attracted to, people with similar interests and goals, and it sets the context for a much more contented, more productive workplace with happier staff, customers and balance sheet.

What have you been “in” that has given you the kind of impetus to follow your heart in another direction? Do you recognise any of these issues in your own workplace? What changes can you make to your working choices to live a happier life? Sometimes the biggest change and transformation we have to make is the one within ourselves to be able move on and try something different, something more aligned with our own inner passions, talents and desires.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Want to Make a Heartfelt Change to Your Career?, Profit, Purpose and Personal Fulfillment Can Thrive Together - A Remarkable New Organisational Construct, Make Choices That Will Have the Most Positive Impact in Your Life, Leadership: Why Trust Leads to Better Business Outcomes, From Frustrating to Fantastic – How Do We Get Organisations to Meet Our Needs? and Normal Is Dysfunctional That Is the Growth Opportunity. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

This week is the busiest I’ve had in a while. Normally, when the kids stay with their dad, I take time to catch up with some friends and relish in a bit of solitude. However, this rhythm that has been my life for most of the last year, is like anything, subject to change.

Life moves on. Sometimes it’s something or someone who lands in our world quite unexpectedly; at other times the changes are so subtle that they are upon us before we really notice. But for a while now, I’ve recognised that change is afoot, my temporary resting place cruising down a river whose landscape seemed unchanging has served its purpose, and now the scenery is starting to look quite different.

Part of me wants to cling to a branch and try to retrace my journey back upstream, to the life that had become comfortable. Another part of me – the more expansive part - is happier to go where the flow takes me and is quite comfortable with the possibilities emerging.

And so it is, life’s ebb and flow will continue, I can go with it or resist it. On this occasion, as has been the case on so many others, it’s not just one area of my life that is in transition. In my professional life, nothing has outwardly changed, but on the inside the landscapes, desires, and motivation are becoming clearer all the time.

In my personal life, I’m at the beginning of the journey to intentionally integrate with another over time. With lots of possible future scenarios in mind, it can be tempting to get lost trying to figure out the when and the how, rather than just focusing on the what and trusting that the when and how will
become clearer as we progress along the river of life while enjoying the now.

A dear friend was relating to me how they had envisaged themselves in their current home for the rest of their life. Now there is a possibility for great change and they are trying out future potential scenarios like an array of clothing in a store, checking to see what might fit and what won’t, becoming simultaneously daunted and excited about the opportunities potential change presents.

Also, my eldest child is staring down the barrel at transitioning from earlier school years, where she has been very comfortably in a routine with the same group of kids from kindergarten, out into a much bigger world. There is a default path, which seems daunting to her, but there are also many other possibilities, and it really comes down to what her priorities are.

Sometimes I see only one way ahead in my life when in fact many exist. I might start getting fixed ideas about needing a certain sized house with a particular number, of bedrooms, for example, and then I start to worry about what that might cost in the area we live and whether it is affordable.  Instead of identifying a solution (size of house etc), I’d be much better served holding an intention for something that more generally accommodates the need for everyone to have space to defrag, create, and rest which allows life to continue with ease.

I find when I become fixated on particular scenarios, I become very closed off to anything else. I’ll never forget trying to agree on a schedule with someone who wanted to do something on a Sunday, that I couldn’t accommodate whilst meeting my own needs. We became locked in a no-win situation because we focused on the outcome rather than the problem. It took another person to facilitate and suggest another day of the week that worked for both of us. All along, it wasn’t so much about the specific day for the other individual, it was more about needing an extra day in the schedule, but they hadn’t presenced their needs and I hadn’t asked because I was so fixed on defending my own position.

Time after time, situations have changed, people have arrived in my life - or exited – yet I often experience the grief that arises from our impermanent nature even although time after time I know things have a habit of growing in ways I wouldn’t want to change.

Eckhart Tolle tells the story captured in Edward Fitzgerald's (1852) story Solomon's Seal:

“One day Solomon decided to humble Benaiah Ben Yehoyada, his most trusted minister. He said to him, “Benaiah, there is a certain ring that I want you to bring to me. I wish to wear it for Sukkot which gives you six months to find it.”

“If it exists anywhere on earth, your majesty,” replied Benaiah, “I will find it and bring it to you, but what makes the ring so special?”

“It has magic powers,” answered the king. “If a happy man looks at it, he becomes sad, and if a sad man looks at it, he becomes happy.” Solomon knew that no such ring existed in the world, but he wished to give his minister a little taste of humility.

Spring passed and then summer, and still Benaiah had no idea where he could find the ring. On the night before Sukkot, he decided to take a walk in one of the poorest quarters of Jerusalem. He passed by a merchant who had begun to set out the day’s wares on a shabby carpet.

“Have you by any chance heard of a magic ring that makes the happy wearer forget his joy and the broken-hearted wearer forget his sorrows?” asked Benaiah. He watched the grandfather take a plain gold ring from his carpet and engrave something on it.

When Benaiah read the words on the ring, his face broke out in a wide smile. That night the entire city welcomed in the holiday of Sukkot with great festivity. “Well, my friend,” said Solomon, “have you found what I sent you after?” All the ministers laughed and Solomon himself smiled.

To everyone’s surprise, Benaiah held up a small gold ring and declared, “Here it is, your majesty!” As soon as Solomon read the inscription, the smile vanished from his face.

The jeweler had written three Hebrew letters on the gold band: gimel, zayin, yud, which began the words “Gam zeh ya’avor” — “This too shall pass.” At that moment Solomon realized that all his wisdom and fabulous wealth and tremendous power were but fleeting things, for one day he would be nothing but dust.”

Eckhart also points to the story of the Zen Master whose only response was always "Is that so?" which shows the good that comes through inner non-resistance to events, that is to say, being at one with what happens. There is another story of a man whose comment was invariably a laconic "Maybe" illustrating the wisdom of non-judgment, and the story of the ring points to the fact of impermanence which, when recognized, leads to non-attachment. Non-resistance, non-judgment, and non-attachment are said to be the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.

There does great wisdom indeed in embracing impermanence, yet despite its inevitability it is definitely something that is an ongoing practice for me. But I cannot argue that yesterday is gone, tomorrow may never come and so there is only now in its glorious impermanence.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy  Embracing Impermanence to Find Your Happy Future, Give Yourself the Gift of Presence to Relieve the Torture of Stress and Explore, Uncover and Show Your Real Needs and Desires to Be Happy . To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was doing a short workshop on self leadership this week that provided a couple of ah-ha moments.  This was about how I approach my life and lead myself, which is also usually an indicator of how we lead all other aspects of our life (including our families, or teams of people).

Facilitated by Yvette Rose, the workshop posed some interesting questions that I thought it worth sharing:

“Who was the leader in your house? (meaning who set the rules/tone)

In my case it was my mum. Yvette talked about her dad’s “it’s my way of the highway” attitude that I resonated with and think many people recognise.

How did you respond to that?

I responded by trying my best to be as good as possible to avoid any wrath or punishment.

How did you experience your ability to step into leadership as a child?

I would often fear having my desires belittled or attacked and, instead, I started to feel more responsible for how my parents felt instead of how I felt. As an adolescent I took on more leadership roles through my swimming and school activities, looking back I had an over-developed sense of responsibility.

In relationship to that response you had as a child towards the leadership in the home, how did that influence your ability to lead later in life?

I got burnt out, trying to please others too much. I didn’t really know myself, nor have any boundaries as I didn’t know what my wants, needs and desires truly were. I always wanted to get ahead of any criticism and hated feedback, trying to micromanage the feelings of everyone around me.

What does being a good leader mean to you?

It means setting a good example, having good boundaries, being respectful, being kind, letting others take responsibility for themselves, communicating clearly and authentically.

What leadership qualities do you possess?

I have great vision, a strategic mindset, I’m a team player and I follow through on my word. I have been busy learning about developing healthy boundaries and how to communicate with emotional intelligence.

What are you good at in your life?

My organisational skills, ability to see under the surface, see patterns, analyse and empathise with what is going on for people on a psychological and emotional level; and I understand how developmental trauma impacts people’s psyche and behaviours. I have good business acumen and try to show up as the best version of me possible in all my relationships, particularly as a parent.

Where in your life would you like to be a better leader?

I’d like to be more mindful of only giving advice when it’s asked for. And perhaps on a personal level in self leading as I transition into a new phase of my career. I’m journeying towards aligning my inner and outer worlds in every area of my life.

How have you failed to achieve this?

I’ve been distracted and on a road to recovery from some pretty toxic patterns in my life.

What step can you take today to correct this?

I think it’s a case of continually reminding myself of the positives, the life lessons, and consciously applying all I’ve learned about my how to bring more of myself into the world while honouring others and where they are at.

An article by Briana MacWilliams also caught my eye this week. She was talking about breaking free of toxic relationship patterns, and recommends that we strengthen our connections with loving supporters, and commit to connecting back in with ourselves, before we try to break free. Otherwise, she says “you will feel physical withdrawal and go running back to repeat the cycle”.

It was an interesting piece describing the role of naturally occurring dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and adrenaline in our bodies (and how they interact when simultaneously attracted to and threatened by someone), saying the addiction can be every bit as intense as, for example, a cocaine addiction.

It was a good reminder that recovery and discovery time is actually important in order to strengthen the relationship between me and me. 

Where in your life do you feel you have a fear of leading?

Yvette’s answer here was about bringing out more of herself in social situations as, once people discover what she does for a living, socialising can often turn into work. For me, I can see this could become a similar challenge and I’m mindful of incorporating more fun and adventure into my life as I also lean forwards into the next phase of my career.

What would happen if you fully stepped into leadership?

There is possibly also a lingering fear of getting too wrapped up in whatever I’m doing and losing myself again. And there is another part of me that draws a blank at this question, as if I’m in freeze mode.

Is that how you felt in childhood in response to your individuality?

Yes. I suspect as a child a degree of my sovereign self went into a kind of stasis , so when I try to imagine “me” with a fully integrated inner and outer world I still draw a bit of a blank.

What do you need to embrace in life to be a better leader?

Continuing to embrace the path of thawing out and integrating my inner and outer worlds, along with developing the skills to do that.

Who or what can you not control in your life?

What other people think, do or feel. Also situations and circumstances around me are often outside my control. Many of these things I can influence, but the only thing I can control is my reactions to people and circumstances.

What are you willing to commit to today in order to make what you want as a leader a reality?

I commit to investigating and working through the stasis/freeze/thaw and allowing the fullest expression of myself to engage with the world in a meaningful way. I also commit to only giving advice when it is asked for, and even then in the context of my own experience.

Yvette then had me acknowledge the difference between leading and feeling too much responsibility, the difference between leading and feeling attacked and the difference between leading and being in a freeze state. It was interesting to bring those into my awareness.

She also talked about how, as we look around at the moment, it can feel like a “shit show” playing out on the world stage. Her solution for that would be to have each leader get a psychologist or a life coach so they could stop taking out their “mum and dad stuff” on the rest of the world. While that would be amazing, she also recognised the only thing we can control is ourselves.

Can you see the opportunity in answering the questions posed in relation to yourself? Make a start today to become the unwavering and genuine leader of your own life.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy In What Unseen Ways Are You Abandoning Your Own Free Will?, Be the Change You Want to See, Have the Courage to Follow Your Heart (and Let Your Kids Do the Same) and Do You Always Express Your True Feelings?To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Sovereignty, our inherent freedom, and yet because of the way many of us are indoctrinated into the world it has become something we think has to be given or taken.

My friend and I were having a philosophical debate about a famous quote from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, “Sovereignty is not given it is taken”. My friend said, would it be truer to say “Sovereignty cannot be named because it just is”?
I think both are true, but the reason Atatürk’s quote had resonated with me at this moment is because of the challenges – and therefore the lessons – that have been showing up in my life of late. It brings up for me two very contrasting things:

• Those who seek to take other people’s sovereignty,
• Those who are waiting for someone else to give them their sovereignty

Both of these concepts deal in power and control, something James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy describes well. He depicts control strategies that we each develop in order to stop others draining our energy. These sit on a scale of aggressive to passive and he describes four archetypes; it’s often easiest if you start by taking a look at which strategies your parents employed:

• Intimidator’s threaten verbally or physically and come on too strong, making others frightened. They are so wrapped up in their own anger they don’t care what is happening inside the other person.
• Interrogator’s constantly question, criticize, nag and find fault, making others self conscious and eroding their confidence.
• Aloof’s shut down when confrontation happens. They often withdraw physically or verbally, forcing others to struggle and dig to find out their true feelings.
• Poor Me’s tend to guilt trip, projecting themselves as the helpless victim in need or care and attention. This makes others feel guilty even if they know there is no real reason to feel this way.

Each of these are linked with the corresponding strategies that created them, and that they create. For example, Intimidators create Poor Me’s appealing for mercy, or, the child will endure until they are old enough and big enough to fight back, creating another Intimidator, and so the cycle continues. Becoming  aware of the strategies I and others employ, is how I would start to break the cycle.

Each of us arrives in the world completely dependent on adults for our survival. The predominant tenet of parenting for generations has focused on “controlling behaviours” and it’s little wonder therefore that each one of us adopts patterns that fool us into thinking we have to take or be given sovereignty.

When I attended a course last year, run by the Family Court here in New Zealand, there was an enlightening poster pinned on the wall. It showed two wheels side by side; one showed what equality looks like, the other showed what power and control looks like. And while the wheel showing control clearly depicts physical and sexual abuse on the outside, it very adequately describes the more covert and “ordinary” kinds of psychological, emotional and financial control that happens between people.

In essence this gives some more clarity around quite a simple concept, equality. This being where a person’s rights, needs, desires etc are held in equal regard to another’s. Power and control is where those rights, opinions, needs etc are not held in the same regard.

This is very apparent to me across many areas of society: from familial structures and dynamics to corporate structures and dynamics; from education to health systems; the relationship governments’ hold with their people; the use of media to manipulate popular opinion; and pretty much everywhere there is any kind of human interaction.

I have spent much of this last year, for example, in correspondence between lawyers. Over this entire process, it very much appears that the person I have been negotiating with cannot seem to hold my rights in equal regard to their own. They are represented by a lawyer who – again and again –expresses the same disregard, with correspondence full of backtracking, contradictions, barbs, personal attacks, deflections, threats and a continually emotive and provocative tone.

The whole strategy appears to be about taking power and control, which seems short sighted. There is a requirement in this case for ongoing interaction and cooperation. I cannot fathom why anyone would believe goodwill or cooperation could exist after continued unhelpful and aggressive communication.

However, apparently this is quite normal. Kate Davenport QC, when elected as President of the New Zealand Bar Association in 2018, said she “had set a goal to stamp out rude and aggressive behaviours between barristers (lawyers who can advocate in courts)”. The article at the time said that “much of that aggressive behaviour involved personal attacks on clients and that lawyers were obliged to show that correspondence to their clients”.

She had previously written back to barristers asking them to redraft letters with a reminder of the rules for courtesy. My lawyer set aside most of these nocuous comments and focused on the actual issues at hand which required negotiating. While practical, it often had the same effect of leaving my good character feeling sucker punched without being able to defend myself.

Like many countries there is a regulator for lawyers in New Zealand, which operates a complaints service and it deals with complaints about a lawyer’s conduct, such as “treating you with discourtesy or behaving in an intimidatory manner” among other things. However there was also an article a few years ago reporting that there is no action taken in the majority of cases against lawyers.

As I have traversed these negotiations, many people (who are not directly involved) sit in shock listening to the details and wonder “how do they even get away with that?” and believe a magic “someone” should hold people accountable.
I once believed this too, that the human constructed systems of power and control would themselves protect the sovereignty of the individuals within it, how ridiculous that seems to me now. As my friend said, sovereignty is inherent.

But growing up – like many others – I was taught to be good, to tell the truth and often to put others opinions and needs before my own – particularly if they held positions of authority. It has been a long road to learning to have and hold healthy boundaries even in the face of being manipulated, threatened and my rights tossed to one side.

Of course there are various forms of control, and learning what we can and cannot control is part of the lesson. Clearly there are many cases where one human/groups of humans exerts control and power over others, and just as many cases that highlight that even in those extremes there is still a degree of self sovereignty that determines how well those being victimised fare.

But society would have me believe I control far less than I actually do, which is why most of my lessons are learning and writing about personal power and how to reclaim it.

In my experience there is no magic someone, no one who will come along and give me my sovereignty, not even someone I employ to represent me legally. It is down to me to hold my centre and stand firm on what I believe to be fair and reasonable – in spite of the pressure coming from every angle of those directly involved.

Recently when extremely aggressive attempts were made to railroad me into waiving my legal right to independent representation in the transfer of a property, I remained determined, probably moreso after being threatened. In situations like this it is tempting, when taking my sovereignty, to want to get into the power control game also. But my mantra is I stand up for my rights and allow you yours.

“Therein lays the gold in all of this” my friend said “the courage to speak your truth regardless, where once that had all but been eliminated from you”. That is true, my voice has been long in its reclaiming, and it is a journey – an art and a science - to developing one that can be heard while standing in my centre calmly, solidly, rather than spinning out.

I was reminded of the words Claire Zammit uses in situations where people have an underlying unhelpful belief pattern about not being seen/heard. She has a number of deeper truth statements that I think are worth pondering:

• I see myself. I am deeply present to my feelings, needs and desires. I intuitively know how to ask for my needs and desires in ways that inspire others to meet them.
• I came here to be seen and heard. The more I presence my needs and desires the more I empower myself and others.
• I deeply see and anticipate my own needs and I create structures for their fulfillment in advance.
• The best way to see how much other people do or don’t care about my feelings, needs and desires is to tell them clearly what they are and then see how they show up.

Our sovereignty is inherent; we can take it or relinquish it at any time. To take it we must presence ourselves and be willing to let go where we can of those around us that disregard our rights, opinions, needs and desires. That is our inherent sovereignty though, the right to choose.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Reclaim the Sovereignty of Your Soul, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation, Normal Is Dysfunctional That Is the Growth Opportunity, Do We Need to Better Understand the Pivotal Role of Parenting to Evolve?, Looking Back to See the Clues to Your Destiny and Build a Healthy Self Concept. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was watching a movie called Freedom Writers based on the real life story of Erin Gruwell who in 1994, as a naive straight-out-of-college teacher, worked with class of juvenile delinquents, gang members, drug pushers and underprivileged students. The school deemed these kids incapable of learning and felt it was more a matter of them being warehoused until they were old enough to drop out on their own – if they lived to see that day.

Instead of giving up, she inspires the kids to take an interest in their education and planning their future. She encourages them to keep journals, recording the stories of their lives to get them engaged, and assigns reading material that relates to their experiences before taking them on trips to places beyond the streets of their childhood lives, to museums and so forth, and teaching them about the wider world and other people’s struggles.

Specifically Erin uses The Diary of Anne Frank to show them, like them, a 13 year old girl who faced baseless hatred, bigotry, persecution and a system out to destroy her. Eventually, the class’ study of Anne Frank and their continual journal writing leads them to extend an invitation to one of Frank’s protectors, Miep Gies, and to raise enough money to bring her to their school.

When the old woman arrives, she tells the group, “I did what I had to do because it is the right thing to do—that is all.… Anyone, even a teenager, can turn on a small light in a dark room.” After a student calls her his hero, Gies quickly deflects the title: “I have read your letters, you are the heroes, you are the heroes every day. … Now your faces are engraved in my heart.”

The kids went on to graduate from high school, half went to college and some even went on to university and higher studies. The stories of Erin Gruwel and her students, as they move from their freshman year to senior years from 1994-1998 were collated and published in The Freedom Writers Diary, which is what the movie was based on.

It was a timely reminder for me of how – specifically in those years of adolescence – the difference it made to me have someone who believed in me. I was lucky in fact to have several people, two fantastic swimming coaches and others who just said the odd thing along the way that made me dig a little deeper and do that little bit extra that made all the difference to the outcomes.

There are so many ways in which kids’ self esteem can take knocks. Just recently my daughter related a story from her own classroom, where a teacher told her that her writing wasn’t good enough and, after flipping through her whole book told her she needed to “try harder”.

Apparently he then went on to tell the class that their writing can be a reflection on who they are. Ergo my daughter, who has struggled will dyslexic tendencies and made huge strides in her reading these last couple of years, received a message that isn’t good enough, and that she isn’t good enough. From all the study I’ve done on the human psyche and trauma I know this is one of the most common subconscious messages that people play in their heads.

But it’s not just kids who need to feel that belief. I saw an open post dedicated from husband to wife (a lady I know) that was inspiring. It was a page from N.R. Hart’s Poetry and Pearl’s 2 called Unexpected. It starts “She’s the girl you never saw coming. The unexpected one who calms you, centres you…she gets you, really gets you, like no one else ever has. She is your best friend, lover and soul mate wrapped up in the prettiest package” and so it goes on.

It’s a beautiful prose that reminds me of just how powerful having another see you and believe in you can be. But of course, it comes with a warning in my head. I know it’s normal and healthy to want others to see us and believe in us, but it’s not healthy when I need others to validate who I am.  That is the sign of codependency, when my very sense of self is shaped by that approval and disapproval, which is not a fun place to be.

I was also reminded of another aspect of believing in people this week when a friend of mine pointed out that there were times they felt I was trying to change them by empowering them, which can also be seen as a criticism. Again true, I am guilty of seeing people’s potential and forgetting that unless they can see that and want to reach for it, I’m a better friend that can accept them as they are.

My daughter’s teacher may have been trying to convey that he believed she can do better, for example, meanwhile it also implies that who she is isn’t good enough. It would be a different matter entirely if she had heard “I can read this, but I believe there’s a beautiful hand writer locked inside you waiting to be seen, if you want to explore that let me help”.

I think the key is really about allowing people to determine what is it is they want and helping them believe they can be it, do it or have it. I will admit I find it so much easier to believe in others than myself.  Human potential is something I’ve always been interested in and I do believe – objectively – we can each be, do, have whatever we believe we can.
Sometimes the circumstances of my life provide overwhelming evidence that maybe I can’t be, do or have the things I often don’t even allow myself to dream of. I get caught in a loop of inner voices and evidence of my not worthiness. Then I get so distracted with other things it just falls off the radar.

Until I watch something like Freedom Writers and that voice inside me says “remember” and I start to feel inspired again.

Lately I’ve chosen to set aside the inner voices that have distracted me constantly in a bid for justice. Fighting for what I want and deserve is something I became well practiced as growing up. But it’s also an illusion when it creates inner turmoil and not inner peace; the calm, clear knowing of inner peace. Where I’m not concerned with what others think, only how I feel. And from that place I know I’ll make good choices.

Bringing myself back there I’ve started to see again the many reminders of who I am, what inspires me, what I’d love to offer and do in life. The job at hand now is to stay in that centre of inner peace and believe in myself enough to reach out and take the opportunities that are sure to come my way if only I am open to seeing them.

Because there are many people out there, kids growing up every day, and the many adults who try their best to raise these kids. Adults, while trying their best, who still have the inner doubts they had that were seeded there when they were kids, which have inevitably attracted many experiences to really enrich the idea that they are not worthy, or are not enough or are different and so on and so forth.

Breaking this chain is what calls me. It’s why I write to create awareness in myself and others, and why I feel called to be and do more to help kids as they are starting to grow, before life gathers too much momentum and shows them time and time again they are not worth it and stop believing it is even worth trying.

So what inspires you? Where have you felt called to be, do or have more than you are/have/do now? When there aren’t those around us who believe we can reach for what inspires us, we live in an age where it’s easier than ever to reach out and read, hear or watch the stories of those who have overcome the odds and made a difference anyway. Will you?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Magic Happens When You Believe in People, Shine Your Inner Light - Let No One Keep You Down, Start From Where You Are, Now Go and Be Great, Mankind’s Great Summons: Turn Your Pain Into Medicine and Heal the World and Finding Your Purpose – the Magic of Those Who Believe in You. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I know that might seems obvious, but the more personal work and development I do the more I realise just how often parts of my younger self take the reins by default.

There was a point this week in which I just felt utterly stuck and powerless. It was in relation to a reaction I’d had which, on the face of it, was an overreaction. It was in fact the perfect storm, an accumulation of slights and poor behaviour towards me which I had reaching breaking point on.

The reason I felt stuck and powerless in that moment wasn’t because there were no choices available to me, it was because I couldn’t see them clearly. I was in flight or fight mode, my prefrontal cortex (the thinking part of my brain) was closed for business, my nervous system was dysregulated.

And it wasn’t even that in itself that had made me feel so powerless. It was the knowledge that this was a pattern, a PTSD response to an ongoing toxic situation that is requiring a huge amount of time and persistence to extricate myself from, in tandem with the dearth in understanding among professionals and people generally about narcissistic abuse, which can leave me feeling very frustrated and isolated.

That is a topic for another day perhaps. This week’s lesson was more around the realisation that there is no quick fix in this situation. That making the shift within my nervous system and neurobiology will continue to require focus and practice.

The sympathetic nervous system controls “fight-or-flight” responses. In other words, this system prepares the body for strenuous physical activity. However, while this works well if I’m running from a tiger, it doesn’t help when the threat is more psychological or emotional in nature.

Whether it’s responding to something as chronic as the situation I’ve described, or it is some other threat (perceived or real), the real key is to get the parasympathetic nervous system back online. That is the part of my nervous system which regulates “rest and digest” functions and – more importantly – allows access to more the rational and creative thinking that can allow me to move forward more positively.

There are many ways to do this in the moment ranging from tapping to tension and trauma release exercises and everything in between. Guess what though? With the prefrontal cortex shut down it’s actually near impossible to remember what they are or even feel inspired to try them because every cell in my body is by then responding to what it believes is the equivalent of an immediate and urgent threat. Especially when caught up in the harried details of day to day life.

I was listening to a talk with Jodi Sternoff Cohen, founder of Vibrant Blue Oils, who describes smell as a great way to send a fast message to our brain to calm anxiety in the moment. Having lost her son in a car crash a few years ago, Jodi knows the value of having something that can help navigate life in the moment when our body or brain would otherwise be shutting down.

When she feels herself starting to spiral – or more accurately – become dysreguated, she sniffs an aromatherapy blend of clove and lime to help send a calming signal to her brain.

Of course that is not to say I am (or she is) advocating that I ignore what wants and needs to be processed, it’s simply recognizing that it’s not always possible or appropriate to do that in the moment. With so many mental and emotional pressures, the “threat” isn’t always as immediate or urgent as the body believes so it’s about how to take control and give myself the best opportunity of navigating these situations for the best outcomes.

Working with a client this week, I used a NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) technique that I described in What Resentment, Frustration and Pain Have to Do With Your Boundaries for making changes at a fundamental level. The pattern we were working with was one that many of us face when under stress, when we start becoming more withdrawn and less available not just to those around us, but also to opportunities and choices we just don’t see when we are closed off.

The exercise takes a look at what is showing up in the environment that isn’t wanted. I suspect many can relate to there being a constant tension between too much/not enough work when self employed and feeling a bit stuck. So we started to peel back the layers and look at what sort of behaviours and habits surface in this environment, what beliefs drive those, what are the values driving those beliefs, and therefore what part of the psyche is that person identified with.

Often in stressful situations it’s the survivor in us that takes the driving seat. But going through this process helped us to see exactly what part of their identity was taking the lead, and an opportunity to switch it out to something more positive, like the part of them that thrives on challenges.

With the thriver in the driving seat we then start to look at what the thriver values, what those beliefs look like and therefore what sorts of habits and behaviours show up – and what results - when that part of the psyche drives the outcomes instead.

I find it’s a good tool for creating a shift in both my thinking and energy and taking more control of my experiences rather than being a slave to them.

When I apply this logic to my own situation, and the accumulation of slights and poor behaviour towards me, I can see it sends me into rumination, defence, anger and grief. I become dysregulated and enraged, I believe that I have to respond now, and if I don’t stick up for myself who will? I believe no one understands and I can’t focus on anything else except getting this immediate threat sorted.

This is the reaction of my child-self, a warrior spirit that values justice, reasonable behaviour, rational argument, standing up for myself and quelling the threat. But the threat is – more often than not – not immediate.

Instead if I put my more mature feminine self in the driver’s seat, that part of me that values inner peace, flow and self integrity, things start to look and feel quite different. That part of me believes that what others think of me is their business, only the VIPs in my life get explanations. That part of me truly believes that – with my focus on positive outcomes – I can trust something much greater than myself to figure out the how, I take only inspired action.

And of course that shows up through more supportive habits and behaviours. I meditate, practice gratitude, actively regulate my nervous system, set positive intentions and focus my energy and attention on inner peace. It’s no surprise then that, when this part of me takes the driving seat, things go with more ease.

It’s an active practice, and I can justify both those parts of me being in the driving seat, but I know which one feels better, and which creates the kind of shifts I’m looking for in my life.

If there is an issue you’re stuck with in your life, what part of you is in the driving seat? And what is an alternative that would create an immediate shift and drive better outcomes?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress, What Makes You So Afraid of Conflict?, How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances and Be Virtuous – Be Victorious. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Last week my kids were watching the Kim Possible movie. It’s about a teenage spy who feels overshadowed by a new agent. She loses her identity as “being the best” and doesn’t know who she is anymore. Her mum says “You are who you have always been, you’re still Kim Possible”.

The same day I read a quote from Glennon Doyle “Ask a women who she is and she will tell you who she loves, who she serves and what she does – I am a wife/sister/friend/career woman. The fact that we define ourselves by our roles is what makes us untethered and afraid. If a woman defines herself as a wife, what happens when her partner leaves? Or the kids go to college? Or the company folds?”

I observe the same regardless of gender, our roles in relation to others seem to define our very sense of self.
Perhaps having been through many changes in my life that have redefined the roles I’ve played within relationships and careers and other arenas, it has helped me to see the qualities that make me uniquely me:

• I am always curious about why people behave the way they do
  
• I am always curious about life, energy and creation beyond the physical senses
  
• I am always curious about the interconnectedness of everything on our planet, seen and unseen, understood and misunderstood, and beyond
  
• I am always looking for ways to best express my thoughts and feelings
  
• I am generally kind, sensitive, thoughtful and generous in nature
  
• I am a person of my word, and take promises and responsibilities very seriously
  
• I enjoy being around people who evoke my curiosity and evolve my worldview
  
• I prefer quality over quantity
  
• I love being out in nature, especially near the ocean and other bodies of water
  
• I trust in the process of change and transformation - in all its guises. I’ve seen it from a retrospective standpoint enough to welcome it in and embrace it even though it’s usually not the most pleasant experience
  
• And I am well aware that I am not everyone’s cup of tea
  

There are times when different parts of me take the lead, and those parts are not always defined by healthy behaviors, yet they were all born from healthy reactions that – at the time – served me. I’ve had to look at these parts of me, the behavioural patterns that may no longer serve and observe, question and make different choices in order to create healthier patterns.

As a result there are times I can be fiercely independent and at other times codependent. There are times when I am centered and confident, and others when I am anxious or in flight or fight mode. There are times when I’m deep and serious and others when I’m carefree and playful. There are times I am extremely introverted and closed off from the world, and others when I am open and social and really quite extrovert. There are times when I’m present and times when I’m distracted. I’m human.

You might like me, you might not. You might like me one minute and hate me the next. My job is to learn to be okay with that rather than bend my shape to fit something you might like and lose myself again in the process. I’m always coming back to myself, and that happens more frequently and with a stronger pull these days if I veer off course.
I listened to someone express their opinion on something recently, who felt the need to preface it with these words:

“Things do not seem to me to always match the popular narrative. We are living in a time where people are being silenced and alternative opinions are being monitored for questioning the narratives pushed to the public. It is a time of living in fear of ridicule, judgment and social persecution.

Even if I wanted to share my most honest insights about the global and collective energies I would likely be censored, deplatformed or trolled. I am aware I have to filter much of what I have to say, to be careful with my wording so as not to offend others. Yet ultimately I am not trying to convince anyone of anything, I am not attached to anyone needing to believe my truth as their own.”

I feel the truth of where they were coming from. In so many ways, aspects of this world seem to be going backwards. While I firmly believe this is actually part of a process of “turning up the heat” on the things that really need to change, I also believe that the thing that will see us through is getting a clearer view on who we each authentically are.

I read an email from Brianna MacWilliam yesterday “Oprah once said that the greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude, which I personally found really inspiring. But she left out one really crucial part – how damn hard it can be to change your attitude when so much that compels our thoughts, feelings and behaviours is largely unconscious, and therefore beyond our awareness and control. That is of course, until you become aware. Then a whole lot more falls within the bounds of your control”.

I believe the key to human evolution right now lies in this bit of work, becoming aware of who we each truly are. The ability to define our qualities and talents and anchor ourselves in that, to observe our thoughts and our reactions and figure out which part of us is in the driving seat and whether it is serving us, this is the key to a kinder, more empowering world. So who are you? Go ahead and introduce yourself to the remarkable human behind the roles that you currently play and anchor yourself in that.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Introducing the Authentic You, Take a Small Break from Your Life to Restart from Your Authentic Core, Leverage Your Feelings to Find Your Authentic Self, Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress, Change Unhealthy Reactions, Meditation – the Cornerstone to Your Success and Do You Always Express Your True Feelings? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I’ve just been for a walk at the beach, the first in a week as I’ve been busy moving house, moving lives. This has been a long anticipated moment, after cohabiting with my ex partner for over eight months for largely financial reasons. My friend asked “How does it feel to be in your own place?” I responded that I hadn’t yet landed enough to feel, my nervous system hasn’t yet got the memo that all is now well and it can relax, there still seems so much to do.

It’s a beautiful sunny autumnal day here, there are only a few white fluffy clouds in the sky, although it’s windy at the beach and the paragliders were out making the most of the conditions. As I watched one paraglider start the laborious process of pulling in his sail, I thought how well it represented the process I’d gone through earlier today to rein in my focus.

I’m in the early days of setting up my coaching business and had met with a client not long before the house move to gather lots of information that I hadn’t yet had time to distill into something clear and crisp. So, since the kids are with their dad today, I thought I’d take the opportunity of some headspace to do just that.

After figuring out which box my notes were in, I then began the process of pulling in my energy and focus to wrap my head around everything I’d captured over a number of occasions. It really did feel like I had been up there among the clouds just like the paraglider, and now I was standing on the ground having to pull myself in piece by piece. And just when I thought I’d got a hold of it, suddenly a strong gust would pull me in a different direction.

After about an hour of this I began to feel that I was able to navigate what I was doing with much more ease and focus. Finally I was able to block out the chaotic scene of unopened boxes around me, and stop thinking about what else needs to be done. Sound familiar?

The irony is that one of the things my client and I had been discussing was overwhelm. When he first started out in business, it took a while to get used to the vacillating sense of not enough work one moment, and too much the next.

We had talked through the upsides to the sense of overwhelm, which my client had described as part of an internal healthy check and balance system, and one he has developed helpful coping mechanisms to manage, such as writing lists and breaking things down into steps. And we had talked about how to reframe things when that feeling of overwhelm is upon us.

Serendipitously that next day I saw a post on LinkedIn called How to Reframe Your Thoughts When You’re Overwhelmed. The examples were:

• “There’s no way I’ll get this all done” to “I can do this one step at a time”
• “I don’t know where to start” to “I’ve prioritised before and I can do it again”
• “I’m not qualified to do this work” to “I am smart and capable”

So as I sat on the beach, after having consolidated our discussions into something more streamline and tangible, I thought about what overwhelm actually feels like in my body. Other than the aching, arms, neck and shoulder muscles I’ve felt this week, as I had said to my friend, I hadn’t really had time to think about how I feel.

At this point I became aware of a sense that that something over my left shoulder was wanting attention. It was more of an energetic nagging kind of feeling rather than anything physical that was there.

I wondered what that might be, as it was similar to the tugging sensation I used to get at night in the temporary welcome silence between switching off the TV and devices before dropping off to sleep when I worked in the corporate world. So I simply imagined this nagging feeling as a person who could give me an answer and I asked “who are you and what are you trying to tell me?”

In my imagination came an answer “I am a part of you that you have temporarily abandoned”. That made sense given the context. “What do I need to do to reintegrate you?” I asked. “Just focus upon me” came the reply.

And as I sat there on the beach having this conversation with myself and focusing my awareness into that space outside me and over my left shoulder, I became more aware of my breathing, more aware of my surroundings, and of the waves that seemed to be pressing across the tops of each other in a motion that reminded me of the way a massage therapist smoothes out tight and tired muscles with a rippling movement.

Back in my body, back in conscious awareness of my life and where I am, with gratitude for my beautiful surroundings and new place to call home. I no longer felt overwhelmed, I feel I have everything in hand, I just needed to remind myself of the bigger picture and then zoom into what was happening on a more micro level so I could focus on the next right thing on my path.

One of the benefits that client had mentioned of having me as a coach was “the work you do to quieten the minds of the directors and managers to allow them to create strategic direction that fits with their purpose and values”. This reminded me again of my busy corporate career and the mentor I had engaged for that same purpose.

The truth is though, that while I and others can certainly create space and questions that allow for someone to switch gear and come back to themselves for a while, note that it is about coming back to oneself. The answers are not out there, they are inside. And whether it’s an imaginary conversation with myself, or one assisted by another human being, it’s all about that continual flight and landing on my own unique path.

​Allow overwhelm to be part of your vital check and balance system, take its steer and come back into yourself to discover what your next right step might be.
 
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Simplify Your Life to Be Accepted and Loved as Your Authentic Self, Focus Not on What Was Taken but Embrace What Was Given, Life Really Does Support Your Deepest Desires (And How to Access Its Support) and Take a Small Break from Your Life to Restart from Your Authentic Core. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“Just because it’s common doesn’t make it right” I said. I was talking to a lawyer about a response she was composing for a client. Her client had been acting in accordance with initial good faith agreements between the parties involved while, instead of just saying they had changed their mind, the other party had been denying there had ever been any agreements.

Not only that, but rather than addressing anything directly, the other party had started accusing her client of excessive expenditures never made, threatening to cut off finances and being verbally abusive on a number of occasions, with many examples of petty, spiteful and dishonest behaviours.

Her client had wanted to address these directly along with the evidence that had been carefully documented through emails, texts, social media trails, recorded conversations and others who could confirm what had actually taken place.

The lawyer seemed reluctant, she said “We are trying to reach agreement; I like to keep emotions out of it, stick to the facts and just focus on the deal. Going down that road will just piss off the other party”.

While I could see the sense in that, I said “But isn’t that precisely what the other party is doing? Meanwhile they are not being confronted with the evidence of their lies and are actually dictating the narrative while not even coming close to a fair deal”. She responded “It’s just tactics, I see it all the time, and it washes over me mostly”.

“Yes,” I said “But just because it happens all the time does not make it right”.

This reminded me of an interview I heard last year with a national politician I used to work with. In retaliation for whistle blowing he found himself personally attacked through revelations of his private life. He commented on how affairs were rife in Parliament and said “While I’m not saying it was right, it was all part of the game, it was the accepted norm”.

I used to see this often in corporate cultures too where behaviours that would not be misplaced in a school playground would often come to the fore wrapped in a professional gloss.

It puts me in mind of a talk I once attended with author John Parsons, whose most popular book is about keeping children safe online. He points to this tendency for us to look at online games as being a separate reality that exists outside of ours where it’s okay to kill people because “it’s not real”. Yet the themes and narratives of the games are played by real people, through real interactions.  

Just as they are in the legal system, or the political system, or any other system I could care to mention.

It’s as if we live in a society where the fundamental traits that create cooperation, cohesion, compassion and a more joyful and peaceful existence, are just swept aside in a bid for power and control. What happens in the legal arena, the political arena, the corporate arena and the online world, are just examples of sub sections of our culture that are somehow seen as less real and just a game making quite deplorable behaviours somehow okay.

As I had been contemplating all this I opened up my Insight Timer app to listen to a Sarah Blondin meditation and the quote “What you allow is what will continue” popped up on my screen.

There are many people who help those at the receiving end of toxic behaviours, but who is holding those responsible for them accountable? Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “There comes a point when we need to stop just pulling people out the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in”.

When author, philanthropist and activist Glennon Doyle started looking upstream, she learned that where there is great suffering, there is often great profit. Now when she encounters someone struggling to stay afloat she knows not only to ask “How can I help you right now” but, once they are safe, to also ask “What institution or person is benefitting from your suffering?” which is how she became an activist.

At what point do we stand up and say, actually, our legal system isn’t working, our political system isn’t working, our corporate cultures don’t work, these online gaming systems don’t work, nothing big and institutional works, it’s simply breeding grounds for the power hungry and the worst of human behaviours get perpetuated.

Another interesting point Glennon  makes, when asked about why she refers to god as a she, and whether she believes god is female, she says “I don’t. I think it’s ridiculous to think of god as anything that could be gendered, but as long as women continue to be undervalued and abused and controlled here on Earth I’ll keep using it.”

She makes a point worthy of exploration. It does seem that these covert power plays, that are rife in our society, do play nicely into suppressing females in many ways – though not exclusively by any means.

I can certainly attest that, as someone who was very independent (financially and otherwise), it was extremely hard for me to forego that in order to look after my children. When I met their father he had talked about being a stay-at-home dad initially, but isn’t something that appealed so much when up close and personal with the tasks of daily child rearing and domesticity.

I too had wanted to give our children that gift of my attention they needed but, as the main breadwinner at the time, it wasn’t feasible. Nonetheless with a baby and toddler at home wanting my attention all night long after being farmed out all day – albeit to a beautiful and loving soul who looked after them well – I was soon in the burn out zone and knew something had to give.

Moving to another part of the country where house prices were more affordable meant being able to be with the kids in the ways that they needed.  However it also meant moving away from the opportunity for me to earn income in the way I had previously.

The last 15 years of my paid career were spent in senior management roles working for large organisations advising on and leading strategic people changes to enable transformation to their customer experience. These roles are few and far between in New Zealand as a whole, but generally not available where I now live.

In the meantime I helped the children’s father establish and run his business, which is now thriving. My personal intention in returning to work, when the children were old enough, was to use some of my previous skills and experience to work more directly with individuals.  

With a special interest in the field of trauma and how it impacts on human potential, I have been on a very personal journey of study and self growth and have amassed a large body of published work in the years since I left my corporate career. Training in clinical hypnotherapy was how I had planned to re-enter the workforce and make a living.

But with the urgency of a separation, and the introduction of restrictions in the educational sector as well as mandates in the healthcare sector, I instead decided to combine all my previous experience to provide business coaching, contracting and consulting to businesses.

What that means though, is that - in addition to the initial period of financial uncertainly while establishing a business and hours obviously restricted within school hours and term time - being full-time carer of our children put me at a financial disadvantage both during the relationship and post separation.

Given that it will likely take at least 12-18 months to establish a stable income history to enable a home loan to be secured, house price rises and loan restrictions could make this an impossible goal. In the meantime, my share of the equity from the sale of our family home will diminish as it will be needed in order to pay for living costs. This is a common scenario facing women everywhere.

Then when you add to that some of these common underhand tactics being played out between parties in the legal system, it’s not hard to see where Glennon Doyle’s conclusions have come from.

I for one intend to ensure that I fully express what life is like from within these sorts of unjust scenarios, and what I have and can learn from them, in the hope that by sharing it brings into the light what lives in our shadows and plays over time and time again. Only through examining the toxicity that we allow and learning new ways of approaching things, will we start to foster the kind of cooperation, cohesion, compassion and a more joyful and peaceful existence that we all deserve.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How to Find the Courage to Let Us Hear Your Heart’s Voice, Kneel at the Doorway of Your Heart to Usher the Dawn of a New Era, You See What Happens When You Learn to Speak Your Truth, Let Us Hear Your Unique Perspective – But Be Kind and Be Wise, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight and Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary). To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was talking to various friends this week about those three magic words I love you. Our experiences of hearing and speaking those words all vary widely, and my own relationship with them has changed dramatically over the years.

The first person I ever said those words to, and recall hearing those words from, was my boyfriend when we were twelve or thirteen and we used to write letters to one another. I grew up believing – mainly through movies and books - those romantic relationships were where a person expressed any kind of big feelings.

Saying I love you to family members was more in the domain of those crazy Americans we used to watch on TV. Certainly not in our homes, nor in popular culture in the UK, it just wasn’t something people said to each other; a definite overhang of centuries of emotional repression.

Yet in recent years it has crept in. I personally remember the creep very well, I didn’t just suddenly find myself saying those words to all and sundry, and still don’t of course, I am selective. But my world of expressing and receiving love now goes beyond romantic relationships and it was a process.

My niece and I were having a conversation about what is happening with Russia and the Ukraine. To me, this is all connected; it isn’t something that happens in isolation. I was sharing with her that I resonated with one of Brene Brown’s posts where she said “We stand with every Ukrainian. We stand with the thousands of brave Russians demonstrating in protest, risking their safety to do so, and all those devastated by this unprovoked, terrifying, and reprehensible war”.

It also brought up for me the hundreds of thousands of protesters around the world whose governments are not only ignoring their messages about the overreach in regards to COVID19 restrictions, but vilifying peaceful protesters in the mainstream media as violent troublemakers. I’ve seen many times now firsthand live footage of what is actually happening versus what gets reported.

So, what do I think is really going on... first COVID19 extremism and now Putin invades the Ukraine, is the world going to hell in a hand cart? 

No I'd say not. I'd say it's more like Mother Earth is ridding herself of a poison. All that was hidden beneath is bubbling to the surface. The atrocities of 80 years ago amid the horrors of WW2, with characters like Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco etc did not just disappear. The narcissistic traits that created pain and war then are still seen in many people today, in many households, workplaces and they are very obviously and sadly seen in many people in power positions.

I think this is a time of taking off rose coloured glasses, and many still have them on so there could be more to come, but we are collectively starting the process of clearing out all the junk in our trunk.

As I awakened to the lie that power is an external force to be complied with, and is instead an internal allowing of love from within, that is when space was cleared within me. I have come to feel this love as the powerful force it is.

I think it was around the time I started to find my feet as an adult I can remember my mum saying “Love you Sho”. For a long time those words would send me into freeze mode. As I spoke to in Who Are You Protecting? Why Telling Your Story Is Powerful the relationship I had had with my mum in childhood had created a lot of anxiety as I grew. Love was not unconditional.

As in most households and upbringings, there were expectations around behaviour and, if not met, there would be punishment, withdrawal of love and words such as “you should be ashamed”. So for many years I was not able to receive those three words I love you from my mum, nor anyone else outside of a romantic relationship.

I would feel like a cat caught in the headlights and avoid saying anything in response and come up with other phrases to smooth over that awkward moment. It wasn’t really until I started doing my own inner work not long before my mum died that I began to clear space for the love that I am to rise up within me.

There was – and is ongoing – a necessary and conscious look at all that dwells in the shadows, and a deliberate process of forgiveness and healing. This also gave rise to new possibilities, new connections and a place to receive and give those three words more freely.

But perhaps the biggest gift has been the ability to feel those three words in relation to myself. As I have begun to reintegrate the parts of me I had rejected as I grew, because they hadn’t fit into what was expected or desired of me back then.

In recent years I’ve been able to more easily say to my closest confidants, family members and girlfriends “I love you” with more and more ease. To me it means something like “I see you, the real you, in all your glory and pain. I’ve got your back. I trust you not to betray me. And it hurts my heart when I see you being dishonored”.

And it’s also been easier to say it to my guy friends recently without that romantic overlay/entanglement. That boyfriend from my younger days is still in my world. The level of intimacy in our relationship has obviously changed over the years as we each went on to have other relationships, had kids and moved to different countries.

But our friendship has endured and I love to hear how he and his family are doing, and we generally have the other’s back when life throws some pain our way. These things are not always easy, and I have to respect and honour the other people in my people’s lives. Everyone is at a different stage of their own journey and the relationship they have in terms of self love and the words I love you.

I do believe that as each person finds their way back to and expresses the love that they are, it purges more and more of the poison that stops each of us from feeling and receiving the love that is there.

The more we take responsibility for healing our own wounds, the less we will see of the atrocities that are happening today. We can rise in anger, and well we should, it is better than powerlessness, but we can also find the powerful force of love within and allow that to rise up and to get to know our true nature which is powerful beyond imagination.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Why the Integration of Feelings and Logic Will Save the Human Race, How to Quieten the Inner Critic, When to Act on Possibility, Embracing the Feminine within All of Us, , What You Give Your Attention to Is Your Greatest Contribution, Connect to Your Well-Being  and Could a Broader Perspective Benefit Us All Right Now? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

By happy circumstance I found myself at a Soulful CEO circle this week. Six of us sitting in the shade of a mature Cherry Blossom tree in the summer sun, taking time out to contemplate the topic for the session, which was around using our intuition to grow/start our business.

The conversation centred on those intuitive nudges, or flashes of inspiration, we get and – often in instant response – the voice of the inner critic that comes up with all the reasons why that is a bad idea.

It was a good reminder of the tug of war that often happens in my inner world. The inner critic is very convincing as it’s all about safety. However, its voice was born very early on in my life when safety was linked (as it is for all humans) to approval from my primary caregivers. The messages were then reinforced over and over in various settings in childhood, like school and competitive sports, where the desire for approval was very much linked to the innate instinct for belonging and safety.

There was never really a point in my life where someone said “trust your inner voice”, it was more the opposite. Even as an adult it is the same memo that society often plays back, the messaging around the current pandemic could be no clearer a case in point. The overarching theme – certainly here in New Zealand- is “do not trust yourself, trust your government instead, this is the one source of truth”.

I am in wonder that more people are not incredulous at the wildly differing advice, approaches and mandates globally, from these one sources of truth. The only one source of truth that exists, I believe, exists inside each of us.

And yet I suspect the biggest pandemic on planet Earth today is self abandonment.

This is sometimes referred to as the mind versus heart, or ego versus intuition, and how to know which voice is speaking?

Serendipitously, as I’m reading Glennon Doyle’s book Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living at the moment, she has been talking about this very issue. She recounts a conversation she had with a friend about a pivotal decision in her life. Her friend had suggested that she get really present in her body and out of her head.

When she had become more present in her body – which for me is most easily achieved by intentionally focusing on breathing in/out my tummy and becoming aware of how my body is feeling – her friend asked her to relook at her choices one by one, each time asking “Does that feel warm to me?”

At this point her decision felt obvious, as one choice felt cold, icy actually, like she might die of cold. The other felt warm, soft and spacious. Her friend said “Your body will tell you things your mind will talk you out of. Your body is telling you what direction life is in. Try trusting it. Turn away from what feels cold and toward what feels warm”.

Glennon goes on to say that these days, in business meetings, she is not looking for justifications, judgements or opinions, she is looking for knowing. She listens for statements like “I did the research and sat with these options for a while, this one feels warm to me”.

I was talking to a friend about growing his business. Since starting the company, he had taken on a couple of employees, both more by chance rather than through a specific job search. I love this organic approach, but I also think its potency truly comes into its own when setting some intentionality around it.

If he can take some time to imagine a future team of people who collectively represent the same values that he himself projects from his inner world, who can collectively deliver his vision, he can start to wonder just how that might come about and listen out for the intuitive nudges that will undoubtedly pop into his head.

Envisioning the biggest contribution I can make in life, spending time just wondering how that could look, then actively asking, “I wonder how this will come about” primes me neurologically to receive all sorts of interesting insights and impulses into how my dreams can be achieved. The trick is to follow the ones that feel right, without letting my inner critic sabotage each idea before it even takes flight.

Right now I have the impulse to update my online presence and profile in terms of what I have to offer in the business arena. My current presence doesn’t convey the level of skills and experience I have working on businesses as well as in them very succinctly.

With all the years I had in senior management, working at the strategic end of business, I haven’t even listed three of the four businesses I have helped set up and run; far less joined a lot of dots that give me quite a comprehensive toolkit as a business coach/consultant. I need to create outwardly the shifts that have occurred within me.

As I said in Do You Want to Make a Heartfelt Change to Your Career? between my own personal growth that needed to happen, and the collective dysfunction that I’d seen over and over in organisations getting in the way of meaningful and lasting change, I hadn’t expected I’d even want to return to that world so I hadn’t really focused too much on it.

Of course my inner critic has been hard as work with every impulse I’ve had, “who are you to offer these services?”, “are you good enough?”, “do you have enough skills and experience?” and lots of comparison with many others out there. In the session under the cherry tree this week, I listened to most of the others voice the same concerns about growing their own ventures while simultaneously thinking, felling and saying to them “Of course you can do it, go for it”.

I recognise these voices for what they are, momentary doubt from my inner critic just trying to keep me safe. But it’s all good, I am safe. It’s actually mainly with excited anticipation I think about stepping back into the arena. I have an authentic edge now that makes all the difference to me in the type of work I’ll engage in, assisting and guiding people in running a business by helping them clarify the vision of their business and how it fits with their personal goals. 

As I listened to some of the others air their inner critic at the Soulful CEO circle, I thought of Glennon’s advice and realised that, when I lean into this, it feels warm, smoking hot, like I’ve got this. I can hear and I trust my inner knowing.

What about you, have you had any impulses or intuitive nudges regarding your career or business? What has your soul been whispering and what has your inner critic had to say about it? Maybe it’s time to thank our inner critic for trying to keep us safe but, smiling, say “I’ve got this” and go step forward into your new future.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Why the Integration of Feelings and Logic Will Save the Human Race, How to Quieten the Inner Critic, When to Act on Possibility, Embracing the Feminine within All of Us, , What You Give Your Attention to Is Your Greatest Contribution, Connect to Your Well-Being  and Could a Broader Perspective Benefit Us All Right Now? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

As someone who has had the misfortune to be intimately involved, both personally and professionally, with a few characters who use manipulation and control tactics such as gaslighting, triangulating, lying, invalidation, minimisation, moving the goal posts (and so the list goes on), I have learned not only to develop and hold healthy boundaries – but to take notice when my gut tells me the ground on which I’m standing suddenly feels less solid beneath my feet.

I feel like that right now in relation to the environment here in New Zealand around COVID19 restrictions and what I’m seeing happen elsewhere.

Attending a parent’s evening at the kids’ school this week, one of the important topics up for discussion was how we promote inclusion around the issue of vaccination status as some fractures are beginning to rear their ugly heads in reflection of what is going on in society at large. To put this into further context, I am talking about a class of nine-year-olds, where playground and classroom talk really should not be focused on these adult issues and themes.

I imagine this is particularly difficult for any teacher whose only basis for getting a vaccination themselves was in order to keep their job (all teachers in New Zealand were given a matter of only weeks’ notice to become fully vaccinated or leave).

In another post I saw from a professional contact of mine, who runs a customer experience consultancy business, she was recounting a story of an elderly gentleman who had entered a store that required a My Vaccine Pass. Upon advising he did not have one, the clerk frantically and loudly pointed him to the door and ushered him out.

She was making a plea to service providers to give their teams guidance on how to say “No we can’t serve you” without humiliating their fellow citizens.

I responded “I suspect these are fear driven responses and, until we are able to address the fears, it will be hard to avoid this”.

At the parent’s evening I heard parents respond with fears from two polarised perspectives. One was fearful of masks not being worn in the classroom because her father had been in intensive care being treated with COVID19, whereas another parent’s father and mother had both suffered strokes within a week of having the vaccine administered.

In New Zealand the government announced the My Vaccine Pass a matter of weeks ago and, from the third of December, many venues and facilities became inaccessible to those who cannot show this. To qualify for one you have to be fully vaccinated and have a booster (at this stage) every 6 months, though I suspect New Zealand will follow suit with other countries who now recommend a booster every 3 months as it’s becoming less effective.

The recent mandates have left many workers without jobs and many citizens unable to access services, facilities (like swimming pools and libraries), and education unless they get behind the governments drive to fully vaccinate.

Now, until recently, we in New Zealand have been relatively sheltered from COVID19 which, I suspect, has perhaps made many of our citizens even more fearful of the virus. The whole of Auckland (population 1.7 million) has been on lockdown since August when the Delta variant took hold. The Prime Minister has been promising to open it up again at 90% vaccination rates.

Vaccination is touted (and now mandated) as the key to social and personal freedoms.

Despite this, COVID19 has spread but - to put it in perspective, we are talking (as of 12 December 2021) about 6738 active cases in the whole country (population 5 million). My gut tells me the measures are way out of kilter with the actual threat. So I took a good look at some of the statistics around the world to see what’s actually been happening and gain some perspective. Was I being too glib?

I will quote the UK figures as it’s been one of the most impacted countries, and is also my country of birth where I have lots of family and friends who have shared their stories over the last year and more. Here is what I found...

Looking at the stats taken from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ total active cases in the UK right now are 1,171,000 (of 69 million population). So 1.7% of the UK population have currently tested positive for COVID19.

Now while this is a particularly tricky coronavirus, it is a coronavirus nonetheless; one of the most common causes of cold and flu symptoms worldwide for centuries. 1.7% of the population having it doesn't sound that extraordinary to me.

The total accumulated cases in the UK since the start of the pandemic is 10,771,444. This means 15.6% of the population have tested positive for COVID19 at some point.

Total deaths in the UK (attributed to COVID19) since the start of the pandemic are 146,387, which is 0.21% of the UK population.

So only 15.6% of the UK population has actually caught this virus since the start of the pandemic and 0.21% have died.

Someone I know who lives there said to me the other day "I dread to think where we would be without the vaccine, this virus is doubling every two to three days!”

I responded “Let's look at that, where would you - a healthy individual (who has barely ever had flu, never mind the common cold nor any other respiratory issues) - be?  If you were in proximity to the virus, as you probably have been on many occasions, would you even catch it? Probably not. And if you did catch it, what are the chances of dying from it? Very little, odds are you would recover”.

Then I saw a post from Esther Jacobs on LinkedIn, citing the example of a flight from South Africa to the Netherlands (where you have to show proof of a vaccine or a negative test) which demonstrates why vaccinations themselves do not stop the spread. All passengers were detained for testing on arrival in the Netherlands, 61 of them testing positive for COVID19, which means a lot of vaccinated people are carrying the virus without knowing it.

Now that I am looking more widely, I’ll share the global figures.

Total cases (of COVID19) since the start of the pandemic are 269,917,935 (3.86% of the human population) of which 5,316,825 i.e. 1.97% have died (i.e. 0.076% of the total global population).
By far and away the vast majority of people do not catch the virus and, of those who does, the vast majority recover. So why all this fear and panic? Why all the stringent measures?

Have vaccines slowed down the virus any? It is one year ago since the first Pfizer vaccine was administered to a 90-year-old grandmother in the UK. Prior to that, according to the same data source, using 4 Dec 2020 as a reference point (pre vaccine), globally 1,626,314 had died at that point, out of a total of 67,120,936 cases i.e. 2.42% (which is 0.02% of the global population).

Of course I know it’s a particularly nasty virus and not one I’d want to catch anymore than I want to catch any virus particularly. Of course it's incredibly sad that people die from this virus or suffer symptoms of long COVID19, but I wanted to gain some perspective.

It's hard to tell what impact vaccines have had. The first variant of the virus appeared in September 2020, months before vaccines started to roll out (from Dec of 2020) and it is unknown what the virus's natural path could have looked like. Certainly enough modeling was done to scare people into complying with public health measures and positioning vaccines as the silver bullet to social freedoms.

Vaccines that are entirely new technology, different from any vaccines used before, and on the market and in people's arms in record speed. The vaccines are losing effectiveness by the day as the virus mutates and people are being asked to have more shots more frequently.

I particularly like an article written by Guy Hatchard PhD who has applied in depth critical thinking on the topic and has been in correspondence with the government’s closest advisors here around the management of the virus over the last year or more, and until the last few months.

One of his key concerns is the lack of any mandatory reporting about vaccine side effects. He says “The failure to alert the public that there was a measureable and significant risk to vaccination was compounded by false government assurances that there was no risk… Public perception of safety (of the vaccines) has become so entrenched that individuals posting about their adverse reactions on social media are often mercilessly trolled”.  

As I said to my friend in the UK “The bottom line is that, while this is a particularly nasty virus, and while there is certainly some truth in what you're being fed and regurgitating, it is not the whole truth and it's most certainly not in context or unbiased”.

When I look at this reasoning about wanting to avoid an overload the health system, for example, sure there was an initial influx last year, doctors were baffled dealing with something new and it took everyone by surprise.

But where is the load being accounted for in administering millions of vaccine doses and tests? Vaccines that are becoming less effective. And where is the tracking of the load being created by vaccine side effects?

And if there's such a load on the health systems, why aren't governments investing in and promoting good healthy eating and lifestyle practices that support and boost healthy immune systems? Where is the investment in effective treatments?

Why are perfectly healthy people being penalised when unhealthy people - so long as they're vaccinated - get to walk around spreading the virus? And all of this in the context of barely a dent on the overall global population.

I don’t mean to trivialize this by any means, but if someone would have told me a couple of years ago that we would all be walking around wearing masks and segregating our society into vaccinated and unvaccinated in response to a global pandemic, with people losing their jobs and access to facilities and services for non compliance, I would have imagined a scenario where a good proportion of my friends and family had died.

But it just doesn’t bear out in the facts.

Meanwhile, what is very obvious, is pharmaceutical companies are making some good money, and creating some great repeat business. Governments have people divided and distracted, so I have to wonder if it’s worth checking what other legislation is going through at the speed of light while people are all looking elsewhere.

I have had a look on the parliamentary website for proposed legislation and submission dates. There has been an interesting array of legislation slipping through here, from our water systems to artificial intelligence, all with extremely short submission deadlines.

But now I am venturing into another territory, the possible motives behind the government and media manipulation and control tactics. This has the potential to create more fear and, since I know no further facts around it nor have any real perspective on it at the moment – and certainly no control over it – it’s not where my focus lies.
​
For now it is only clear to me that the fear mongering around this is disproportionate to the facts, as perhaps are the public measure in place and the extraordinary drive to vaccinate. It has certainly quelled any unbalanced fears in relation to “what if” I catch the virus, or what if anyone around me has it.

Regardless of where you stand on the issue of vaccination, is it worth the time to take a broader perspective right now to help alleviate any fears you many have in relation to this topical issue? And, if not this issue, what else is taking centre stage in your life that might benefit from a broader perspective?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Be Purposeful in Your Focus - Your Glass Is Actually Still Half Full, How to Reclaim Your Freedom Instead of Feeling Trapped, When Life Is Uncertain It Feels Good to Take a Positive Step, How Do I Honour What I Believe and Care Less What You Think?  and Empower Yourself - When a Difficult Reaction Sends You Into a Tailspin. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I know it’s become a bit of a cliché, but I recognised this week just how much my attention has been focused on the things in my life that cause me pain. That causes me to feel stuck, which is simply frustrating and unhelpful.

Yet it’s not the whole picture. In New Zealand it’s the start of summer and the water is getting warmer, it really is quite beautiful. I went for a walk along the shore earlier and, as I was walking along with the waves lapping over my ankles contemplating what life has taught me this week, I thought about some of the things that had gone well for me.

Understand, probably like you, there are plenty of things in my week that drained my energy. Between navigating a long term relationship break up, and more government restrictions, I don’t think my life has ever been so challenging.

But as I walked along the shoreline appreciating the sun glinting on the water and the cobalt blue of the sky, my inner voice prompted me to dwell awhile in the things that are going just fine. When life is so challenging it makes the contrast between what is going well and what is not even stronger.

So I started to reflect back on my week, a week in which certain my attention had been diverted to one or two things that screamed loudly, and I realised in that moment with the waves lapping just how reassuring the timelessness of nature is. No matter what is going on in my life, the tide continues to come in and out, the sun continues to rise and the sand and sea continue to get warmer beneath my feet. 

And lucky me, it was the third time I had made it to the beach for a short walk, giving my nervous system a chance to find its equilibrium and my mind to let go of its worries and drift and contemplate, even if it was only for ten minutes.

I then purposefully thought back over the week. I thought about how much lighter I’d felt last weekend when my daughter’s party fell on a day that her dad was looking after her. For the first time, it wasn’t me who was wholly responsible for making her day special, it was liberating.

I’d been able to relax and enjoy catching up with some of the other parents as they came to collect their kids. In fact, because of another child’s party, I also spent a lovely late afternoon at the local park after school one day having a picnic and chatting with friends while the kids ran around playing their games. The weather had been perfect, warm and cloudy but with a gentle breeze.

Friends from far flung places checked in on me this week to see how I’m doing, letting me know they care, which was heart warming. I’d also had amazing support from other friends to help tackle the metaphorical fires that had consumed so much of my attention, which was worth its weight in gold.

Then when nipping to the shops before 3 December (when many businesses here became off limits to those without full vaccination certificates), I got great reductions on some gifts that were on my kids’ wish list; the sale happened to start that day.

I was even thrilled when, on one day that was forecast rain, it was instead warm, dry and windy at the outset and I managed to get three loads of washing out and dried before the heavens opened. And when I ordered our groceries this week, the supermarket send a surprise chiller bag full of goodies as a thank you for our custom.

Once I started contemplating the things that had gone well, and the ones I’ve shared here were only really a start, I got on a roll and realised that my glass is well and truly more full than empty. From there it was easy to get into visualising the future because my heart felt open and no longer stuck.
And that really was – and always is – the aim, particularly at this time: to stay out of fear and get into visualising the future.

So where is your focus? When you recognise where your mind is dwelling, can you purposefully switch focus to the think through the things that are going well for you to allow you to more clearly see there is a better future calling?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Reclaim the Sweet Spot of Being in Your Element, What If The Thing You Dread Is Actually Your Dreams Trying to Unfold?, When Life Is Uncertain It Feels Good to Take a Positive Step, Ask No One to Be Different So That You Can Feel Good and Empower Yourself - When a Difficult Reaction Sends You Into a Tailspin. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.​

This is the story of my childhood and the inadvertent trauma I experienced that wove its way into the fabric of who I became in ways that were not always helpful - as published on TinyBuddha.com. Click here to read 

Every now and then I hear something that feels like a fundamental truth about how life works. When I hear it, there is an internal shift, a feeling that something has just clicked into place.

One of the most pivotal things I’ve heard in my life, were these words:

“YOU are the only one who creates your reality. If you knew your potential to feel good, you would ask no one to be different so that you could feel good. You would free yourself of the cumbersome impossibility of needing to control people and circumstances.”

Cumbersome impossibility, those words felt richly mined from the depths of my experiences. At the time I heard them, back in 2006, I was reflecting on every relationship with every person I had ever had to that point. I could see the countless times I had not just tried to persuade people to my way of thinking on any number of things, but literally believing my way was the right way.

And over the years that followed I observed it both within myself and among others. Those words have remained with me like a rod that will not be broken, pointing to a true north it cannot deny. Over the years I have slowly broken old habits and softened my stances and now generally stand in an attitude of live and let live much more of the time.

There are a collection of those kinds of beliefs within me, some that are harder to articulate because I haven’t yet perhaps taken them out into the light, dusted them off and been awed with how they shimmer and gleam. But one I have always felt within me as a truth is “Everything works out for the greater good”.

I mean this in a broader, collective sense. Words that speak to this, and come to mind, were written in one of Belinda Alexandra’s novels, reflected by one of the main characters:

“All honourable causes eventually succeed even if at first they fail. The spirits of good people – even if they die in defeat, return in future generations to continue moving the human race forwards to higher and better things.”

The same character also reflected that “Out of darkness and suffering can come hope, joy and progress”.

I was asking my almost-teen niece this week what she thinks the most important thing is right now for people in the world to consider.

She mentioned both that COVID19 isn’t yet gone and, separately, how she is seeing anger getting played out in ways that aren’t getting the attention needed to resolve the issues. One of the examples she gave was a 13-year old who was stabbed by a so called friend, and she was trying to fathom how a 13-year old had enough anger that he could actually kill his classmate.

I could relate to this as I can recall being shocked when two boys at my own school got into a fight and one stabbed the other. As I’ve learned more about childhood trauma I’ve learned that anger is an emotional reaction that occurs when boundaries have been overstepped. And often that anger gets misdirected at someone whose actions were simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I have often wondered, looking back on that fight at my school, what sort of emotional or otherwise abuse was going on at home for both the kids involved.

I agree with my niece that waking up to that is important in our society. Becoming consciously aware of the narratives in my head, and what narratives I’m passing onto my kids either intentionally or unintentionally, has been life transforming for me as I explained in Normal Is Dysfunctional That Is the Growth Opportunity.

But I feel this lack of general awareness and intentionality is actually tied to the other issue my niece mentioned, that COVID19 hasn’t gone away. How many kids around the world right now are hearing a narrative in their homes about COVID19, its effects and government restrictions? And what sort of impact is it having on them I wonder? Are these narratives ones that are making them feel empowered or disempowered? Fearful or safe? Angry or apathetic?

The arguments appear to becoming more polarised and fear driven. In particular the central, single most damaging theme – in my opinion – is a narrative that says “my safety and freedom depends on your actions”.

These are the very antithesis of those words I heard back in 2006, that feel to me like a fundamental truth:

“YOU are the only one who creates your reality. If you knew your potential to feel good, you would ask no one to be different so that you could feel good. You would free yourself of the cumbersome impossibility of needing to control people and circumstances.”

I can’t help compare that with political statements and media campaigns I’m seeing at this time in our society. Trying to persuade people that one way is right and another wrong is what has started every human conflict on the face of the planet.

Going back to that same novel of Belinda Alexandra’s, which was set in the era of the Second World War, the character reflected further:

“While most had not wanted war, they had chosen a path of greed and pride and the result had been war. For where else does violence begin but within each individual human heart? It started with violence of thought and action, jealousy of others and loathing of oneself.

It had its beginning in the daily choices one made. Including indifference to others’ suffering and oppression. From there it escalated into a collective competitiveness, selfishness, pettiness, spite and greed. Violence of even the seemingly innocuous kind begets more violence. That was the origin of war.”

While I can readily sense the violence of the 13-year old my niece mentioned, I can sense it just as much in trying to force people to do something they don’t want to. And I mean this in both senses when it comes to choosing a course of action for each individual.

I have seen those who have chosen to accept a vaccine come under as much pressure from well-intentioned family members as those who don’t. “My safety and freedom depends on your actions” is the narrative I am hearing from our government. I am seeing anything that speaks against this narrative – or which even questions it – being torn to shreds, censored and outright vilified.

But what about having the freedom of choice I wonder? Of having sovereignty over my own body? Has that been lost in the fog? Have people been beaten down by the endless lockdowns and loss of other freedoms? The lack of connection with loved ones?

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said “No price is too high for the privilege of owning yourself”.
And what is the price in this case I wonder? These issues are not going away.

Final reflections from the character in Belinda’s novel might add some insight into my own way forward as I navigate these times:

“Peace on a worldwide scale is determined by each of us creating peace in our own hearts and minds first, and doing our best to live in harmony with people and other living creatures around us. When we can do that, I believe we will become a force powerful enough to create positive change on a scale never before conceived.”

I believe this too. But it was so much easier in easier times. Now is among the worst of times, and it may get even worse before it gets better.

The most important task for me has been creating peace in my own heart and mind. And to stick to what I felt true, and still do - to ask no one to be different (or do differently) so that I can feel good. I didn’t feel it as a fundamental truth and now think “ah yes, well COVID19 will be the exception”. No, what is happening right now is not the exception; it’s simply an extreme circumstance to which the same truth applies.

“Live and let live” isn’t something I aspired to in the best of times and am now going to ditch. The privilege of owning myself is one that is not always comfortable. The external world can force itself physically, but it cannot change my mind, my beliefs or my values – and the more force it applies the more it exposes its true nature.

Going back to what I said in Why the Integration of Feelings and Logic Will Save the Human Race, the current world view – Materialism – is based on physical objects as the stuff of creation and yet reality remains inexplicable.

In that article I shared that Deepak Chopra cites our most urgent problems as overpopulation, pandemic disease, refugeeism and climate change and says “you may hope and pray that science and technology (which have been the most urgent things in the age of materialism) will come to the rescue, but the chances are tenuous without a huge change in how we think”. All of this leads him to conclude that the change necessary is a change in self awareness.

I also recall a talk by Eckhart Tolle talking frankly about the human need to be right, and the shift in self awareness required to see our thoughts as nothing more than subjective opinions.  And what has been thought of collectively as “good and true” among us simply marks a point in time.

Remember the widespread belief that all computers and electronics would crash as the clock struck midnight heralding the year 2000? I was even paid to do training with companies to protect them against the so-called Millennium Bug. Remember the panic in the 1970’s that oil was going to run out within 30 years? And the panic was purely consumer driven; there was zero thought about what we were doing to the eco-system. Remember the belief that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling nuclear weapons which launched a war killing tens of thousands of people?

This list could go on and on and without even including the vastly differing beliefs of people in societies depending on who is in rule and which dogmas are in place at the time, and without even pointing to some of the fundamental shifts in beliefs that civil rights movements have driven. It is inconceivable to many people now that humans were thought of as unequal just because of their gender or race, and yet that oppression existed and stay plays out today in many ways seen and unseen.

Therefore challenging and compelling people to change their beliefs or their actions does to me feel like a cumbersome impossibility. What if, instead, I just trust my own inner knowing about what is best for me? And trust that others can do the same for themselves? And to trust in the overall direction of life, that the human race is – even if in a snake-and-ladder type fashion at any point in time – moving forwards to higher and better things.

Are you able to ask no one to be different, or take different action, at this time so that you can feel good? What would it take for you to create peace in your own heart and mind right now? Which narratives would feel more empowering?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do YOUR Research! Strengthen Your Character to Stop Getting Triggered by Wild Beliefs, How to Appreciate Our Differences Enough to Admire and Want to Embrace Them, Empower Yourself - When a Difficult Reaction Sends You Into a Tailspin and Make the Invisible Visible - Celebrate the Gold in Your Emotional Reactions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

With all the parenting advice I’ve read and heard, which has a wealth of information about understanding the different developments stages and what is needed at each, and how to manage my kids undesirable behaviour, there seems to be one huge piece missing and that is about how to manage myself.

No one forewarned me that, as Lisa Marchiano puts it “You’re going to project your stuff on your kids. There is no way that you are going to get through any amount of time with your children and not meet those parts of yourself you cut off and sent backstage (the aspects of yourself that are unconscious but we see in others, our blind spots)”. It just brings up so much discomfort and pain.

The inherited patterns of behaviour in parents that children react to, and unwittingly develop patterns in response to, are essential for survival in childhood but become unhealthy patterns later in life; and will certainly get passed on unless the cycle is broken.

The best description I’ve seen of these is in James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, he describes four archetypes (on a scale of aggressive to passive) that are “control strategies we each develop in order to stop others’ draining our energy”. I summarised these more in Normal Is Dysfunctional - That Is the Growth Opportunity.

The thing is, normal developmental trauma arises from normal parenting and remains largely unseen precisely because it is deemed normal. Yet it creates power struggles and destruction; it creates disease, chronic pain and illness; and it stunts individual and collective abilities to address systemic issues within relationships and society.

That is the ultimate challenge of parenthood, the ultimate responsibility, to recognise and break the cycles of dysfunction that are still very much alive.

Amy McCready of Positive Parenting Solutions says “Children have two major needs: attention and power. And if they are not getting positive attention and positive opportunities to make their own choices they will settle for negative attention and ways to gain a feeling of personal power”.

Not only that, the lack of positive attention or opportunity to express personal needs and desires is precisely what leads to the kind of dysfunction that is prevalent in society today.

Yet we live in a society of distraction – parents distracted by devices and responsibilities. Not to mention the pass-the-parcel of before/after school care, split families/housing.  Men and women, whether parents or not, really struggle in relationships today with break ups rates higher than ever before. Where in all of that, I wonder, are we allowing for and compelling attention on our kids’ development?

Relationship expert Terry Real says that the traditional walls for men and women in a patriarchal culture are changing, but are far from changed – and those traditional walls preclude intimacy.  As Raine Eisler said “It’s an old fashioned word, but patriarchy really means dominion (power over) instead of power with.”

I was sent one of Constance Hall’s blog post’s this week that demonstrates how patriarchy is still very active and it really resonated for me. Her main point was that every consenting partnership should consist of two adults whose working hours are equal regardless of whether they are paid or unpaid work.

The original has a sort of angry rant feel to it, yet she makes some really good points, so here is a version with the emotional charge toned down a bit:

“The thing about not doing your share of house work or child rearing is that is more insidious than a simple “I can’t be bothered”; domestic responsibilities do not disappear.

Children do not raise themselves. Housework doesn’t do itself.
 
Every time you sit on the toilet, eat food from a clean plate, watch on with pride while your fed, educated children smile, it’s because someone has put in effort for you to receive that privilege. And if it wasn’t you, it was someone doing your share.

Remember that expecting someone else to do your workload is oppressive. It’s saying “you can have equal rights only when you’ve met the basic needs of others”.

Support each other because domestic duties are about so much more than clean sheets, it’s about respect and showing your kids what is and what isn’t a healthy way to care for themselves.”

I think that is a great message, but there is another side to it, which is the person who allows that to happen. I know because I am one of those people who has too often taken more than my fair share of responsibility and felt overwhelmed and overburdened and then resented the heck out of it.

This represents a typical narcissistic/codependent relationship, which is also typical of the type of normal dysfunction I refer to earlier in the piece. Trauma expert Pete Walker describes this as the most common relational hybrid. Terry Real describes the same blueprint as grandiosity versus inferiority/shame-based and is the most prevalent pattern he sees in relationships also.

“While women can show up as narcissistic”, he says “it is more common for men to be this way”.

Terry’s view is that we don’t value relational skills in a patriarchal culture. He goes on to say “We code relationship as feminine and we do to intimacy what we do to many things feminine: we idealise it in principle and we devalue it in fact”.

I know this reality well. Having worked since I was fifteen, first through school and university and then in a corporate career, I know what working long hours and having high levels of responsibility looks like.  What I didn’t know was what motherhood looked like.

At first I saw my corporate career as a welcome temporary escape from the monotony of those early childrearing years, but then it became clear that regardless of how I felt (which with a baby and toddler was starting to look more like burnout), my children needed me at home.

There was a piece I wrote describing a typical night after getting home from work, and one day I will publish it, because it heralded the start of this journey to me, but for now I’ll just share my concluding thoughts that night:

I know it’s too much. I know my child is telling me this. Yes, as exhausted as I am, as distracted by work, the long arduous and unfulfilling hours of work, it’s time. Time to uncover what the heart and soul desire, for all of us.

Six months on from that I published my first blog and have done so ever week since, recording the deliberate journey to a more authentic me, which included balking and rallying against this idea of my own feminine nature and role as a mother.

I was raised in an era where I was brought up to believe that women can do anything men do. But as a friend of mine said beautifully “that overlooks the essence of the feminine, the need to find her own rhythm and inner desires in her own time and in her own reflection”.

We had been having a discussion about the government’s financial support for parents with low income. I find it infuriating that - on one hand - our law (through Property Relationship law) recognizes that a stay-at-home parent is equal to a full time job, yet the government will not support a stay at home parent of school age kids unless they are at least in part time work.

When I recently tracked how many hours of my week are dedicated to childcare and domestic duties, it was seventy hours on a typical school week and ninety on a non school week. Bear in mind school weeks typically only represent 180 days (allowing for ten days where at least one child is sick), how many employers are happy with employees only working half the year?

Recognising that encouragement of women into the workforce was an attempt to stop the judgements of not only solo mothers but women in jobs, it was however done in the context of patriarchal structures.

Quite aside of keeping the toilets clean and putting food on the table, the job as taxi driver, chief attention giver, boundary holder and referee, the role and responsibility of a parent can be all consuming.

One night when my kids’ father and I were talking, our youngest daughter came into the room and asked for my help with something. I thought then that this is precisely what being a mum looks like, constantly being interrupted and on duty. And those interruptions can range from an innocuous “how do I spell...?” through to world-war-three erupting in the lounge.

In fact, I find distraction my biggest challenge in parenting. If I am distracted, there is no connection, and the constant pull on my attention triggers responses that are less than optimal for my kids.

As the primary caregiver, my attention being on the kids is just a part of the job when they are around, from the minute they wake up to the minute they go to sleep. Adapting that attention as they grow to help them towards independence is also part of the job, but that’s on a continuum; in development terms though kids are in their teens before they can healthily handle longer periods of more independence.

So while going to work as soon as kids are in school is encouraged, to me it’s not okay to be required to work on top of the typical seventy hours of attention required on the home and kids in order to receive financial help. 

Before the world of COVID19 restrictions we had been on a family holiday in Hawaii. In conversation with the retail assistants, hotel staff and restaurant workers, it became clear that working two jobs to support their families was necessary, and this was women who had partners who also worked.

What kind of quality parenting can people give in these scenarios?

Terry Real is quick to point out that both men and women are knocked out of real intimacy and connection with themselves and others from childhood. Citing the work of Jean Baker Miller and Carol Gilligan at the Stone Centre, he says:

• “Young women are knocked out of real, honest connection at the edge of womanhood. They stop telling the truth and instead they move into – as Carol Gilligan puts it - “the tyranny of the nice and kind”; they lose their voice. It’s changing but it still needs a lot of work”. And
• “Boys are knocked out of authentic connection much younger, by the time they enter kindergarten they’ve already internalised the code to be invulnerable. What research tells us is they are no less emotional or sensitive than girls at that age but they’re less expressive. They’ve learned to keep their mouths shut, to wall it off”.

The problem is, as author, research professor and social expert Brené Brown has taught us, we connect through vulnerability. Terry believes that “While Millennial’s (thankfully) are different, the rest of us are still suffering under the old codes. Leading men and women into real intimacy is synonymous with leading men out of patriarchy.”

In Why the Integration of Feelings and Logic Will Save the Human Race I quote Teal Swan as saying “The restoration of balance within the human race is not about decreasing masculine power while increasing feminine power...it is about both rising to power simultaneously”.

I particularly like the short article from psychologist Shari Derkson that explains the aspects of masculine and feminine and what integrating them within ourselves might look like.

She says “There is a movement towards inviting more feminine aspects into our lives, states of being, rather than doing; such as through stillness, meditation and tapping into our intuition and creative processes. Equally, it is important for both male and females to develop the more masculine qualities of rational and logical ability, clear non-attached thought and problem solving etc.”

James French, who works with rescue animals and cultivated The Trust Technique, demonstrates through his work how lack of connection in humans (and propensity towards dominion or power over instead of power with) shows up just the same in animals as it does in children.  

James says "Any animal displaying fear, aggression, anxiety etc is a sign of an over-thinking state, but when brought into a peaceful state you can connect through more positive imagining/feeling states instead”.  

What I love is his observation that sensitivity in animals or people doesn’t change, it just transforms from positive sensitivity (the feelings of connection, joy, love) to negative sensitivity (the feelings of fear, shame, guilt). This could equally be applied to children.

“As a child”, as Dr Gabor Maté explains, “we are born feeling our connection to our parents and we are reliant on them for survival. Being rejected by them in any way, big or small, is devastating. So when we are rejected, we have a choice, to reject them or reject ourselves (or more likely parts of ourselves). But we can’t reject them as our survival depends upon them.”

Luckily the skills needed for connection with children, and with each other, are skills that can be learned. Terry Real makes the point “There’s skills in learning to connect to yourself and others. There’s skill in learning to love yourself. There’s a skill in learning good boundaries. And there are skills in learning how to stand up for yourself with love and respond with generosity instead of defensiveness.”

Changing the way we see parenting is pivotal, but that requires first a change in who we are as individuals. To begin to recognise our dysfunctional stances and structures and perhaps to look at them through more integrated eyes that include more of the aspects of our true nature without the walls we have erected around us in response to our own childhoods.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being, How Dead Does the Horse Need to Be to Want to Get Off?,  Womanhood: A Story of Our Time and Embracing the Feminine within All of Us. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

One of the biggest challenges for me in learning and maintaining healthy boundaries is letting other people own their own reactions, rather than taking them personally.

I was reading a booklet on managing separation for children, which sums this up nicely under a section on reassuring them. One of the key points is “Just listen, don’t feel you have to fix their feelings; it’s painful and you can’t change that”.

However well placed that advice is “don’t feel you have to fix their feelings” telling me (or anyone) not to feel something is not helpful. I feel what I feel. It has been more helpful to me to explore why I feel the need to fix other people’s feelings.

In particular, in the last few years I’ve become aware that my people pleasing tendencies have deep hooks. Usually the more critical a relationship is to me the more I’ll bend over backward to please, not just to be nice or considerate, but rather as a response rooted in trauma.

That said, I have also always had a critical mass where I eventually get fed up and blow up about injustice and exploitation, which Complex PTSD expert Pete Walker says is typical of people who have codependent relational tendencies.

Codependency is the continual state of being focused on the needs, wants and problems of others in order to gain approval and attempt to control outcomes. It's very intertwined with enmeshment trauma and people pleasing.

Enmeshment is when there is no real recognition of self in the family or relationship. The signs I have learned to recognise are when I find myself confusing my emotions with those of a person I have a relationship with, and the cost of individuality feels high.

This means that when someone who is important to my perceived survival (be it in personal or professional relationships) has a negative opinion of me or a negative reaction towards me it can elicit a trauma response within me.

Once I understood why I felt this way, which began in childhood as I explored in Are You Overly Responsible? Actually Seeing Yourself Through Fresh Eyes, then it was a matter of starting to recognise my reactions in the moment and changing my response.

None of this is comfortable, not by a long way. In Perpetua Neo’s article on Fawning: The Fourth Trauma Response After Fight, Flight, Freeze, she talks about stress responses and trauma responses. She says “These are ways the body automatically reacts to stress and danger, controlled by your brain's autonomic nervous system, part of the limbic system. Depending on our upbringing, we can sometimes learn to rely too heavily on one of these responses and this is where the trauma comes into play”.

A critical part of healing is learning to reset my limbic system to, as Perpetua puts it, “update the timekeeper in your brain to understand that then is not now”. This way old trauma can stop replaying in my body in the present.

It sounds simple, but rewiring my brain is a matter of consciously catching what’s going on in the moment and actively working to regulate the nervous system while changing how I react. This is no easy task when, by the very nature of these triggers, the frontal thinking part of the brain shuts down.

To give an illustration of just how challenging this can be in everyday life, I only have to look at what relationship expert Terry Real refers to as the Core Negative Image (CNI) we have of our partners. He says it’s an exaggerated version of our partner at their worst.

For example, Terry’s wife Belinda has a CNI of him as an irresponsible, selfish, undependable, charming boy. His CNI of her is a demanding, insatiable, critical, micromanaging witch.  As Terry says, it’s not their baseline, it’s certainly not their best, it’s not even an accurate description of them at their worst, it’s more like a caricature of them at their worst.

So, in action, Terry might leave the milk out of the refrigerator on the kitchen counter, just as he used to do years ago when their kids were growing up. This triggers Belinda’s CNI of Terry, so she starts talking to him like he’s an irresponsible child. This would trigger his CNI of her and he’d react saying something like “Oh come on it’s just a milk carton, don’t be such a witch” and so on it goes.

Most people react to the exaggeration and fight against it. To break this cycle, Terry says our CNI of our partner is something we want to learn take with a grain of salt. What we should really take notice of is our partner’s CNI of us.

Most people know exactly what this is without asking, because it’s the characteristics and behaviours that get thrown at us like bombs when the other person is triggered.

He says “The beauty of knowing their CNI of you is, instead of fighting, you can duck under. The more you push against it the tighter it gets, so move under or into it instead of opposing it. That would mean, instead of opposing Belinda’s opinion about him being irresponsible, he could own it and say “I know I can be like that at times, I just forgot sorry (and puts the milk away).”

I suspect anyone putting themselves in these shoes can appreciate how tricky it could be to do this without getting sucked into the CNI wrangle. While it is very disarming to know and own the CNI someone has of me, there’s still that deep tap root that feels owning something that is not only negative but perhaps untrue (or at least grossly over exaggerated) feels really unsafe in my body.

For this reason Terry recommends firstly having a modicum of self recovery around self esteem and good internal and external boundaries. Once good boundaries are developed a person is then better placed to observe and think “Mm, so this is what my partner is making up about me. This is their CNI of me, isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that important information about my partner?”

What I notice in going through a separation, if not careful, the predominant interactions can be a tango between each person’s Core Negative Image of the other, making all the sensible advice I was reading extremely challenging.

Even with something that doesn’t elicit a trauma response though, it can still be a challenge to let others have their own reactions. This week I was talking with a close friend who is going through what I can only describe as an existential crisis.

My heart aches for all the challenges life has thrown her way over the last few years, it’s been incredibly intense. My tendency is to want to find words to help, to at least sooth. Nothing I could think of felt adequate. Then I remembered some words I’d read in an email from Teal Swan about self love:

“When people tell you about themselves, receive them without trying to fix them or change their minds. Provide a safe apace to connect.”

So I focused on just that, stopped thinking about it and spoke from the heart instead just acknowledging where she was at and that it’s okay to be there. I just wanted her to feel seen and held.

Then I realised, that is my job, it’s not to fix anything, I simply want the people I love to feel seen and held (emotionally) by me. And, when dealing with negative reactions directed towards me, I want to feel seen and held – by me first and foremost. That is where my boundary work comes in.

There are lots of wonderful boundary statements I’ve read but I’ve found that, in that moment of fire when the frontal lobe of my brain closes up shop and ducks for cover, the only statement I’ve been capable of is the raw observation of the emotional reaction I’m witnessing.

But the great thing is, instead of getting stuck for words, pulled into the line of fire, pushing onward in frustration through the emotional blast determined to make my point, or exploding in fury, I reflect what I am observing and retreat with dignity.

While I’d love to do some deeper somatic work, I know that by calling out the reaction and retreating I’m rewiring my brain and retraining my body to feel more confident and less threatened in those situations. It just takes practice.

​Are you able to see how your nervous system reacts in response to someone else’s difficult emotional reactions? Ultimately becoming aware of why it is happening and when it is happening, then starting to change your reaction is the work to empower yourself instead of allowing it to throw you into a tailspin. 

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Resentment, the Family Business. Are You Willing to Let It Go?, Your Mind Will Try to Protect You By Resisting Your Healthy Boundaries, I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak and What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Someone, who knows I’m interested in childhood trauma, recently told me she thinks I should “just let go of negative memories”. Another person wondered, if something was so lacking in my relationship with my parents, how am I not experiencing greater dysfunction or even death, which he proposed was statistically more likely than being able to draw intelligent conclusions.

Interestingly I have never said nor felt that my childhood was negative, it was normal, with some good memories and some not so good memories; and I certainly had two parents who wanted and loved me. They were just two people doing the best they could, parenting in the normal way.

So I decided to write this as resource for people like me who do personal work in order to move past any suboptimal wiring and fulfil my potential, while some look on in bemusement wondering why I would feel the need to do any work when I had such a normal childhood.

Normal doesn’t mean optimal, and can be as traumatic within our bodies as a readily recognised trauma. In fact, I believe this is society’s biggest opportunity for growth.

For a long time the predominant theme of child rearing has been about teaching children to be good and fit in. This is all very well, but it is best done after a healthy sense of self and safety has been established, and this appears to be little understood.

Feeling safe relates directly to the nervous system, the command centre of a human’s flight-fight response. Neural pathways connect one part of the nervous system to the other and neural pathways do not care whether parents/caregivers intentions are good or how much they love their children; they simply start forming in response to the child’s reaction to how well (or not) their needs are met.

“As a child”, as Dr Gabor Maté explains, “we are born feeling our connection to our parents and we are reliant on them for survival. Being rejected by them in any way, big or small, is devastating. So when we are rejected, we have a choice, to reject them or reject ourselves (or more likely parts of ourselves). But we can’t reject them as our survival depends upon them.”

Some examples I gave recently: there is the baby who is left to cry, the baby or child who has to eat to a schedule, the child who wants their parent’s attention and will do anything – positive or negative – to get it, the child who is given no opportunity to explain their side of the story, the child who is left alone to think about their actions, the list goes on. These are all normal, everyday occurrences, not things an adult necessarily thinks of as rejecting their child.

However, if I put my adult self in those shoes, imagine I am so upset I’m crying and everyone ignores me, how do I feel? If I’m not hungry (or feeling sick) and I’m made to eat how do I feel? If I am trying to get someone’s attention and they ignore me, how do I feel? If I appear to have upset someone and yet they won’t communicate with me, how do I feel?

None of these feel comfortable; at one extreme they actually make me question my very existence (especially if they are regularly occurring situations) and, at best, make me feel isolated and unimportant in the moment. So it’s not hard to imagine how utterly devastating such things are to a baby or small child who is completely dependant on that adult to meet their needs.

This creates a type of developmental trauma, which is sometimes known as small-t trauma. This kind of trauma is normal in our society, and it happens bit by bit over time.

Then there are the inherited patterns of behaviour in parents that children react to, and unwittingly develop patterns in response to. These are essential for survival in childhood but become unhealthy patterns later in life, and will certainly get passed on unless the cycle is broken.

The best description I’ve seen of these is in James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, he describes four archetypes (on a scale of aggressive to passive) that are “control strategies we each develop in order to stop others’ draining our energy”. He says “It’s often easiest if you start by taking a look at which strategies your parents employed:

• Intimidators threaten verbally or physically and come on too strong, making others frightened. They are so wrapped up in their own anger they don’t care what is happening inside the other person.
• Interrogators constantly question, criticize, nag and find fault, making others self conscious and eroding their confidence.
• Aloofs shut down when confrontation happens. They often withdraw physically or verbally, forcing others to struggle and dig to find out their true feelings.
• Poor Me’s tend to guilt trip, projecting themselves as the helpless victim in need of care and attention. This makes others feel guilty even if they know there is no real reason to feel this way.

Each of these are linked with the corresponding strategies that created them, and that they create. For example, Intimidators create Poor Me’s appealing for mercy, or, the child will endure until they are old enough and big enough to fight back, creating another Intimidator, and so the cycle continues”.

I suspect no one wants to feel like a victim or held hostage to their past circumstances, but rejecting the idea that unconscious reactions in childhood may have inadvertently created limitations or unhelpful belief patterns and behaviours is a missed opportunity for growth.

The kinds of common subconscious unhelpful belief patterns that get perpetuated are: I’m unworthy, I’m too much, I’m alone, I don’t have, I’m powerless, I’m not wanted, I’m invisible, I’m bad, I don’t belong, I’m a burden, I’m crazy, I’m different, I’m not enough, I’m a failure, I’m not important, I’m inferior, I’m not loved, I don’t matter, I’m not safe and/or I’m worthless.

Claire Zammit and Kathrine Woodward Thomas created a fantastic document that goes into each of these in much more depth and is well worth a read.

This is not our only trauma of course, I just think it’s by far the most common and least recognised and – bottom line – the one that needs addressed in order to grow and evolve from the other types of trauma we create.

One therapist told me she has worked with children who have no apparent developmental issues but instead inherited predispositions to emotional dysregulation (having emotions that are overly intense in comparison to the situation that triggered them). Considering genetics does, on the face of it, seem sensible.

But as you may deduce from what I have written above, I find it hard to imagine that most people are not in some way affected by parental – usually well meaning – interactions in our early years. I am also not keen on the genetics argument; it feels too much like a free pass to behaving poorly on an all-too-regular basis, when I truly believe that (if you can read this) it is within your gift to change how you react when triggered, and also in fact your responsibility.

Remember those neural pathways? As in the seemingly normal and benign examples I gave of rejection, these became very entrenched in my system throughout childhood, as my nervous system did what it needed to continue to do to keep me feeling safe.

I can’t change those pathways that fire ever time, say, someone criticises me (which is exactly the kind of situation in which I may have emotions that are more charged than the situation warrants). However I can:

• Become more aware of my reactions and start to understand if and why I overreact
• Take responsibility for helping my body feel safer, using techniques to calm/regulate my nervous system
• Learn new ways to respond, like learning how to have compassion and to have and hold healthy boundaries

I cannot change my reactions through a decision alone; it requires awareness, curiosity, focus in learning new skills and persistence.

Also bear in mind that no child is born with emotional regulation, so it’s having a parent or caregiver who cannot model effective coping skills that puts a child at risk of emotional dysregulation.

Upon suggesting we educate future generations on the impacts they have on newborns and young children through secure attachment and attunement, the therapist I was talking to was concerned that would put huge pressure on parents and create a sense of blame for those who are doing their best.

I believe each person is always doing their best (in any given situation, with the cards they have been dealt and with what they know). But it is the adults (not the children in their care) who have the capacity for reflection, insight and change, to develop healthier coping styles.

That said, even with good intentions and good emotional regulation it is inevitable people will suffer other types of trauma in the journey through life. But, overall, people would begin with a sense of safety and self, and that would make a huge difference to the way other trauma is dealt with and, in fact, whether it is even created.

Therapists like Dr Terry Levy, who runs the Evergreen Psychotherapy Centre, won’t work with children until they’ve worked with the parents. They also use a life script that gathers the kind of information that is relevant to getting to the heart of the types of dysfunctional beliefs and behaviours at play in a person’s life.

For me it's not about "oh look at my trauma" in the sense of "isn't it terrible". As light-touch as my experiences are (in comparison to some of the atrocities that happen to people), they have shaped me deeply. I see how I have been limited by my own beliefs and trauma reactions within my body, it has kept me playing small, from fulfilling my potential and acting from a place of compassion.

So I can wholeheartedly appreciate that if light-touch trauma can do that, what a slam-dunk the big-T trauma (sexual abuse, violence, war or political violence, natural disasters, serious accidents, life threatening illnesses etc) causes.

Now the real key for me is this. Big-T trauma and its effects are becoming well recognized. But little-t trauma, especially normal developmental trauma, remains largely unseen and yet lives within almost every single person on the planet today. It creates disease, chronic pain and illness and it stunts our ability to address systemic issues within our relationships and within our society.

That is why I share my experiences and insights, to shine a light on the microscopic stuff, the irritating sand in the oyster shell that are our pearls of wisdom, our key to compassion and evolution.

Could I be wrong? Sure there’s always room for a misread of reality because it’s all about perspective. But if this resonates with you then I have every confidence that with awareness, curiosity, focus in learning new skills and persistence, you can fulfil your potential in every area of your life.

As family therapist and author Terry Real says “We may not (right now) be able to bring peace to the Middle East or to Syria or whatever else but we can bring peace to our living rooms. So start with your life. And your life is your relationships. So learn how to do that and do it really well.”

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being, Life Really Does Support Your Deepest Desires (And How to Access Its Support), You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Is Your Responsibility and Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was having an interesting conversation my hairdresser, a young adult, about childhood trauma. It may seem like the kind of conversation to have with a therapist rather than a hairdresser, but she was fully engaged in the conversation and I love that it’s something she readily recognised as an opportunity for our collective growth.

The kind of trauma we were talking about is developmental trauma, the kind everyone experiences (as distinct from the big issues that are more readily recognised as traumatic). She is at a point in her own development, having recently moved out of home, where she is more readily able to express the impact her parents have had on how she feels about herself.

Like me she comes from a pretty normal family, and in fact her parents both work with people who have experienced the big-T trauma we all recognise, and they regularly have to deal with addiction, violence and abuse. But she can see how her parents, although well meaning, created limitations in the way she feels inside herself and interacts with the world.

That in itself is huge. From what I observe, most people do not want to be held hostage to their childhood if, in fact, they even think about it at all. I certainly felt it was something to put behind me when I was free to live as an adult, determined to be different in all the ways that had irritated or wounded me.

Well, there were two problems with that:

1. I still had to deal with my parents. They still had the same beliefs, ideals and expectations of me having brought me up a certain way
2. I somehow kept attracting unhappy and often difficult experiences into my life through varying relationships (be it a partner, a friend or a colleague or even institutions that I had to regularly deal with).

With enough difficult experiences under my belt, and enough distance from most of them, I could see the patterns. While it’s easy to blame others, I finally recognised that the common denominator in all my experiences was me, and I was the only part of any equation I could control.

Many people never really feel safe to explore whatever junk they have in their own trunk, but I knew that there must be something I was doing or a way that I was being that kept eliciting the same variety of responses, in ever increasing intensity.

I also knew that I had become someone that didn’t feel real to me, but I wasn’t sure what was real for me because I had been moulded and had grown accustomed to the way I interacted in the world.

Now with years of personal work under my belt I can readily recognise that I suffered from insecure attachment, a lack of attunement and enmeshment trauma . I had become a co-dependent, people pleaser with poor boundaries; susceptible to those, like narcissists, who care not for others.

That is a mouthful I know, and it’s all psychology-speak to most people, but what it comes down to is that I needed more positive emotional attention and connection from my parents than they gave.

This had nothing to do with my parent’s intentions, which were good. There is no mystery or malice about any of this; it arises from their own anxieties and ways of being, and the predominant beliefs in our society (for many centuries) about child rearing. That is to say, children are to be moulded rather than to be held as they unfold.

To give some examples, there is the baby who is left to cry, the baby or child who has to eat to a schedule, the child who wants their parent’s attention and will do anything – positive or negative – to get it, the child who is given no opportunity to explain their side of the story, the child who is left alone to think about their actions, the list goes on.

Even if I put my adult self in those shoes, if I am so upset I am crying and everyone ignores me, how do I feel? If I’m not hungry (or feeling sick) and I’m made to eat how do I feel? If I am trying to get someone’s attention and they ignore me, how do I feel? If I appear to have upset someone and yet they won’t communicate with me, how do I feel?

None of these feel comfortable; they actually make me question my very existence at one extreme (especially if they are regularly occurring situations) and, at best, make me feel isolated and unimportant in the moment.

Yet as an adult I have full mental and physical capacities that allow me to express myself, to reason out others’ behaviours and to take action. As a child, and as a baby especially, I have none of those things. It doesn’t take a huge leap to imagine the magnitude of devastation felt by the burgeoning human when ignored like this, especially if it’s the common pattern.

And it doesn’t then take a lot to understand that the chemicals that get released in response start to form our neural pathways, within our brain and nervous systems. The emotional reaction, in the form of chemicals released in our brain and body, starts to wire our responses to similar situations.

This is the essence of trauma. If a baby or child is questioning or worrying about its existence as in the examples above, those chemicals that form our neural pathways are in the survival category. This then creates an ongoing chronic trauma response to similar situations throughout the person’s life.

And, as I have discovered, that is generally what is at the root of all human dysfunction. It manifests from small-t trauma, the kind of developmental trauma pretty much most humans on the planet are subject to, resulting in unhelpful and self-limiting patterns of beliefs and behaviours. As it also manifests from big T-trauma, the reliving of horrific experiences again and again.

It would be easy to see myself, or anyone, as a victim of these circumstances. But what I’ve discovered is that I – and anyone - can form new neural pathways. I also realised that it wasn’t my parents’ behaviour that made me who I am, it was my reaction to it; albeit subconscious. And if these are my reactions, I can change them.

More than that, I realised if I didn’t change them, not only would I be living a life of limitation and chronic unhappiness, I would perpetuate the same thing with my own children through my own anxieties. I realised that the only way for me to be able to be fully present with my own babies and children was to take a good look at the junk in my trunk that was constantly distracting me and weighing me down.

In short, I realised that my childhood experiences were not my fault, but they are my responsibility.

​If we want the next generation unencumbered by the  often invisible chains that have held our families (and the family next door, and next door to that and so on) in bondage to unhealthy and self-limiting responses, then we have to be the one to make it a priority to get free of them by creating healthier responses.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation, Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being, In What Unseen Ways Are You Abandoning Your Own Free Will? Overcome the Greatest Human Fear – Be the True You and Why Projecting is the Best Tool for Self Awareness. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

There is a Scots expression about making a “helluva caffudle” which translates as “a lot of confusion” that sprung to mind this week when dealing with the corporate office of the online grocery supplier I’d used for many years.

The conflicting replies I received were indeed confusing, on one hand sympathetic and responsive, on the other contradictory, uncaring and disingenuous, which pointed to a culture that isn’t exactly customer driven, the experience depending entirely on the individual who I happened to be interfacing with.

Not much different to most places right?

To be fair, it’s one of the key reasons I exited the corporate world. It gave me a bit of a litmus test of where the customer experience has evolved to (or not) since I last worked in that field. And I realised that, after all my study and experience of human potential, psychology and dysfunction, if I were to liken most organisations to a personality, it would be a narcissistic one.

To explain what I mean by this, I’ll quote from a few sources to explain what lies at the heart of most dysfunction among humans, and thus at the heart of most organisations of humans – lack of attunement.

Dr Dan Siegel says “Attunement is the process by which we form relationships”. When we attune with others we allow our own internal state to shift to come to resonate with the world of another.”

One of my all-time favourite articles happens to be on this topic, and the crux of the issue is summed up exquisitely by Teal Swan:

“Ask yourself the following questions...Do I feel like my parents understood me when I was little, or even tried to understand me? Did they see into me and feel into me and have empathy for me and adjust their behaviour accordingly or not? Did they acknowledge how I felt or did they invalidate it, telling me I shouldn’t feel that way? How did my parents treat me when I was cranky, frightened or upset?”

When our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience. We either learned that our survival depended on:

1. disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble, where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience (otherwise defined by Daniel Shaw in his book Traumatic Narcissism as “The child who externalises their experience, projecting onto others the shame, guilt, humiliation and fear they experienced and cannot tolerate themselves”). Or
2. being hyper attuned to the people in our lives so that we could perceive them, anticipate their behaviour and make adjustments to our behaviour accordingly in order to avoid harm (otherwise defined by Daniel Shaw as the child who internalises their experience and persecutes themselves).”

She goes on to explain that neither state is healthy. “It is not a fulfilling life to spend all your energy obsessively trying to keep yourself safe by attuning to other people at the expense of tuning out to yourself.

But the destruction on this planet owes itself to those people who have learned to cope by retreating into the egocentric bubble...You cannot attune to someone and say the wrong thing to them. You cannot attune to someone and stay in denial about his or her reality.”

So let me tell you the story about strawberry jam, and you can judge for yourself how much a lack of attunement contributed to my online grocery company losing around $25,000 per annum of our business...

I’d been having trouble with my online grocery shop for the last year and things seemed to be getting worse, with more and more items appearing to be in stock at the order stage and then not getting delivered because they were out of stock on a regular basis. This was resulting in regular trips to other stores to get what was needed, far from ideal.

While it is plausible that, between me ordering, and the store picking my order from the shelves, other customers may have come off the street and purchased those items each week, it seemed to me that it was happening with such regularity that something wasn’t right. Somehow, behind the scenes, the demand didn’t seem to be informing the supply.

Calls to Customer Service, and discussions with people at the store directly, resulted in no change. So I did what I’ve learned is most effective when I want to get to the bottom of root cause issues, and I contacted the Managing Director. This is usually an excellent entry point to find the person in the organisation who can investigate and help fix the cause of chronic issues.

All I really wanted to know was whether the company had some management, process or systems issues it could easily fix, or whether this was a good as it gets for now.

It was a disappointing start, having contacted the Acting-top-bod (whose day job is looking after the online offer, which I thought fortuitous at the time) but having had no acknowledgement after week, I had to follow this up. This, however, led to a phonecall from one of the online managers, who assured me this was not the level of service that I should be receiving.

She investigated and found some process issues and she also mentioned that the area’s online store should be the one offering the widest variety to customers, which makes absolute sense to me. She asked if I had any other issues aside of the ones I’d mentioned so I brought up the topic of the strawberry jam.

I buy a particular brand that has no refined sugars added and, about a year ago, the online store mysteriously stopped supplying the strawberry option. It still offered the raspberry, blueberry and apricot, but no strawberry.

However, the same company have another store a couple of kilometres away who offer a much wider variety but don’t do online deliveries (begging the question “why not?” apparently it’s something to do with loading bays, though it’s not entirely clear to me). However, what they do have is stock of the strawberry jam. So this told me – and the online manager - the company itself is obviously not having supply issues around this particular product.

So I allowed a number of weeks to pass to see whether the process issues would be sorted and I could rely more on stock levels. This was a bit hit and miss, but certainly there was no reappearance of the strawberry jam.

So I decided, last ditch attempt, to go to the newly appointed top-bod and see whether this could be resolved. This was delegated to another digital manager who replied:

“The size of the store means that unfortunately the full range is not available. Unfortunately the review of the spreads range won’t take place until March next year (i.e 10 months away), but we’ve made a note of your feedback... It’s always our intention to provide our customers with a great online shopping delivery experience – feedback like yours will ensure we can continue to improve this service.”

Then there was the matter of their other store, the bigger one with more variety, not being the online store. Aside of loading bays, the response cited “the location of the store is in relation to the suburb demand to keep our carbon footprint small.” While this might seem sensible, I should point out one store is 6.7 kilometres away, while the other is only 6.8 kilometres from our suburb.

I will confess this response tipped me over the edge, eliciting from me frustrated expressions like “Seriously?”, “Give me a break”, “Shame on you” and “Utter utter garbage, what a complete waste of my time”.

By this point, I’d come to the conclusion that this was the best I was going to get from my online shopping experience with this company. While in some ways it would be awesome to have a one-stop-shop for all our consumable needs, it is a bit like saying it would be awesome to have a partner who meets all my emotional needs. Neither is really realistic nor, actually, desirable since life would then likely lack variety, growth and expansion.

So I decided the best way forward was to register with another online grocery company and split our business between the two, thus insuring a wider variety of product availability. Despite the time consuming process of registering and filling that first virtual trolley, it was worth it to have options.

I will say that my spluttering response, while not actually eliciting a response from the Managing Director directly, did result in a response from their leadership team; the person who is in charge of the company’s public relations. Those of you not familiar with corporate set ups might not know that this is the person usually responsible for a company’s reputation via the media; it’s quite a different field from those who deal directly with customers.

For someone who has worked in both fields, I would have preferred and appreciated an authentic response from someone directly involved in the leadership of the day-to-day operations and customer supply chain.  I then received two crates of strawberry jam, some cereal and the promise of a discount voucher for my inconvenience. Despite the generosity and immediate follow up, I would have just preferred an explanation for the disparity in previous responses if I’m honest, and clarity on the real issues.

While I’m not wedded to the idea of a response directly from the person I’d written to, I would have expected an answer coming from, or being delegated by, a leader to be an honest reflection of the shortcomings. As I concluded on this question of character last week, people who own up to their faults and weaknesses are to be admired, and so it is with business.

I will never forget when I left the railway industry in the UK, one of the extremely frustrated customers I had spoken to many times over the years said “while I will probably never like the service (since it was prone to delays and failures on occasion due to infrastructure issues that were not quick fixes nor within the direct control of the company), your honesty has made it tolerable and I have felt that at least the issues were tabled and someone cared”.

It is my experience that behind the customer interface of most well established companies, quite aside of political agendas, is a veritable feast of legacy systems and spaghetti junctions of often cumbersome processes to manage, the archetypal swan on water. Knowing the limitations and being able to articulate them goes a long way.

There is no doubt that, on my wish list for online grocery shopping,  I’d want a reliable system to capture not only the customer demand failures of the stock the company does offer, but which products the company does not and customers’ buy elsewhere (i.e. opportunity). While that seems a long way off based on my recent experiences, it would certainly create more loyalty.

What I had come to realise though in the years I did work in the field of customer experience was, whether the customer is on the agenda (from a universal experiential perspective, rather than the individual hit-and-miss interactions) entirely comes down to whether its leader is attuned to the customer needs.

By leader I mean the person who actually determines a company’s culture, which is not always obvious. It can be the local Managing Director or Chief Executive, or a Group Executive or at Board level – and that not only changes from company to company, but at different points in time within companies as well. For example, I’ve found its pretty common for many local chiefs to be left alone so long as they are meeting Shareholder expectations. In times of economic or political turbulence the screws come on.

Having worked behind the scenes in a few large organisations, and had exposure to many more inside views of corporate structures, systems and processes through colleagues and consultants in the field of customer experience over the years, I came to the conclusion that organisational dysfunction will only resolve and evolve once people – in particular the leaders of organisations - start to do their own personal work to evolve beyond the dysfunctional patterns of behaviour learned in childhood.

And, so, it seems on the face of it, that this is where society remains still. That said, I have great hopes as we move forward with initiatives like the Inner MBA Programme (a Sounds True collaboration with LinkedIn, Wisdom 2.0 and Mindful NYU) leading the way.

And how do those of us who are not the true culture leaders of these organisations make a difference? How will we get organisations to meet our needs?  Get healthy. By recognising and rinsing out our dysfunctional ways of relating to others, attuning to ourselves and each other, developing healthy boundaries, and learning to communicate them and holding others accountable with grace, it is inevitable that organisations will start to attune more to those whose needs they serve.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy You See What Happens When Leaders Are Not Grown Up on the Inside, What Do You Want The Prevailing Global Culture to Look Like?, Stand in Your Own Truth and How to Be True to You When Life Pulls You in Different Directions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

My young niece had shared with me a powerful poem she has written about women, in part of it she wrote:

“Imagine a life
Where she wouldn’t look over her shoulder
And see a man doing no work
But he will still be paid more than her”
 
I longed to be able to say “We’ve evolved beyond that” but, while many men do of course work (and work hard), it gave me pause knowing this was an observation from our next generation and correlates with many of the facts and statistics I’ve read about ongoing inequality.

She gave me permission to share it and a good friend of mine responded:

“It is true, our hearts are somber that our young rising women look out and see a world that works only for a few. However, we, the elders, know there is good work to be done, and we eagerly pass on the baton encouraged because we can now hold better reflections and conversations than our elders did.”

This is so true.

When I was invited to speak as an influencer at a summit for woman this week, an interesting mix of emotions ran through me. I was grateful for the opportunity, surprised to be thought of as an influencer and excited about the prospect of women taking a fresh look at themselves.

But while speaking fits with my longer term vision, I had to step back and really assess whether this is something I’d like to say yes or no to in this moment. My gut told me “Not yet, I’ll be over extending myself”, my mind niggled “Am I just making excuses? Am I afraid?”

I sat with these questions for a while. I can’t deny wondering how I’d measure up, but I generally enjoy public speaking. I find it easier to express myself when I know people are actually interested in what I’m talking about and the platform is mine uninterrupted for a while.

So I laughed at myself and thought how ironic that the true issue lies at the heart of an aspect of my feminine side that needs to be honoured.

Having operated in the corporate world for many years running from meeting to meeting, which plays to the masculine aspects of my nature, I now try to keep everything as fluid as possible because so much of my life still revolves around the kids’ schedule, which in turns revolves around school (again a very masculine way of working).

I’ve discovered I need time that is fluid so I can dial it up or down depending on how I’m feeling.

For example, I was reflecting in a conversation this week on how I see a woman’s monthly menstrual cycle in terms of my energy; to me it’s like four seasons in a month. There are days when I feel decidedly Spring-like and want to get on with more physically-taxing tasks, there are days that are Summer-like when I feel very social, then there more Autumnal days when I turn inward and reflect,and finally the Winter days when I really do not feel like going out at all and want to rest a lot more.

Why is this talked about so little still?

The whole female physical structure gears up month after month, for four decades of a woman’s life, to create and host another being. And having brought two beautiful little beings into the world, I know it’s nothing short of miraculous. The whole process is not an aside, it’s inherent in my existence as a female, and I feel the beat of my life goes way more smoothly when I can go with that rhythm instead of a man made one.

I was reflecting on my life changes further after having a quick e-catch up this week with a publisher I haven’t spoken to in quite a while, who was wanting to use a quote from an old article I’d written. I was asking her how she is finding motherhood and, in return, she asked – other than busy – how I’ve been?

I know that seems like a routine kind of exchange, but given the topics I write about and the ones she publishes, I thought more deeply “how have I been?”

The ten years since I began my own journey into motherhood flashed through my head.

In that time everything has come under a spotlight, no stone left unturned. When the pressure is on – and it was, the heat higher than at any other time in my life, everything came into sharp focus.

I had a short, pointed reminder of my old life a couple of weeks ago when I found an old schedule of my day I’d written out when the kids were very young:

You can probably guess by the schedule I quickly lost patience and energy for the career and corporate world I had worked so hard to attain success in. Motherhood demanded the more feminine aspects of me to come to the fore, the children needed me to really see them and be able to hold their space emotionally.
 
The codependent relationship style I had unwittingly entered into as a child and unconsciously adopted in adulthood became untenable. My strong desire for my children to be who they truly are, forced me to identify and take responsibility for my people pleasing ways. Becoming healthier and creating better boundaries has shaken all my primary relationships to the core.
 
It’s been nothing short of a metamorphosis, one I’m still emerging from. It left me depleted and, while I’ve found more balance, I’m only really starting to rebuild strength from that more authentic platform.
 
But the thing that struck me was just how intense and polarizing the middle years were, suddenly thrust into the realms of watching my mother die (from colon cancer) while simultaneously dealing with violent outbursts and constant tantrums from both kids over a period of a few years as they started school and struggled (neurodiversity can be subtle).
 
I swung from one extreme to the other in my close relationships. No longer able to give others the attention I once had, being hyper attuned to their needs, I became much more self centred out of necessity; getting angry and resentful when my boundaries were trodden upon. While I survived, it was painful.
 
I see this in a similar way to the male-female balance having swung to an extreme as women have tried to reclaim a more worthy sense of place in the world. So many women, in the name of equal rights, have swarmed to university, to jobs and a world that was predominantly the domain of men.
 
In the process a new archetype arose in our collective consciousness, the superwoman, she who can do it all. In truth, having been one of those for a while, I feel it was nothing short of torture, and I was certainly not comfortable in my own skin. I think men too have become confused and resentful about their roles. What’s the answer?
 
What I’d dearly love to see more than anything, is the needs of the newest born of our race being recognised far more than they are so the emotional pandemic and dysfunctional cycles of human existence are broken. In those earliest months and years, if I had known then what I know now about healthy attachment and attunement, I would not have shipped my children off to someone else while I went to work, no matter how wonderful she was.

But what my kids needed wasn’t just their mother present in body, they needed me fully present in myself, not the wounded child in an adult body that I was.

As Teal Swan so eloquently says “You cannot be attuned to a child and have them grow up narcissistic or codependent. You cannot be attuned to someone and drop a bomb on them or shoot them. You cannot be attuned to someone and say the wrong thing to them. You cannot attune to someone and stay in denial about his or her reality”. 

If a woman wants to become an engineer or a CEO, sure, why not. Or if a man wants to become a stay-at-home-parent or a hairdresser, fantastic. Or, possibly even more controversially these days, if a woman wants to stay at home to look after their kids while the man wants to work, let’s make that work.

But I think the key to all this doesn’t lie in equal rights or opportunities the way it’s been played out, the key seems to me to lie in each of us stepping into conscious awareness of the dysfunctional cycles of thinking and behaviour that appear to get played out generation after generation. In short, while I was hyper-attuned to others, I had to learn to tune into my own needs and desires.

As I have become aware of and ferreted out that dysfunction in my thinking and habits, I’ve rediscovered that the only true power exists within me – a fact I suspect that man-made power constructs like schools, health systems, governments and economic systems would prefer I am not acquainted with.

I can only imagine as people begin to attune to and honour their own unique needs, talents and desires, men and women will see each other through fresh eyes.

My niece wrote:
 
“Imagine a world
United at last
The thick fog of inequality
Raised at last”
 
I believe the inequality of opportunity that exists will melt away in a world where we attune to ourselves and others. We will become comfortable enough in our own skin to be able to admire and embrace the diversity around us. The structures of success will fall away and morph into structures that support the many, rather than the few. This is not a conversation about male or female, this is a conversation about re-parenting ourselves, creating healthy boundaries, truly seeing ourselves and others and fulfilling our potential as unique, wonderful, strange, marvelous beings.
 
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How You Are Complicit in the Oppression of Others, Womanhood: A Story of Our Time, Even in Grief There Are lessons to Be Learned, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight, Take Back Your Power - Only One Thing Need Change for You to Feel Good  and You See What Happens When You Learn to Speak Your Truth. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

When the kids and I first met the character Reyna Avila Ramirez Arellano in Rick Riordan’s Heroes of Olympus series, it was the observation of her by another character that really struck me, because it could have been someone describing me for most of my life:

“Annabeth recognised something else in her face too – in the hard set of her mouth and the deliberate way she raised her chin like she was ready to accept any challenge. Reyna was forcing a look of courage while holding back a mixture of hopefulness and worry and fear that she couldn’t show in public.”

Later, in the Trials of Apollo series, she reflects, as I have reflected in recent years:

“My whole life I’ve been living with other people’s expectations of who and what I‘m supposed to be...But you showed me how ridiculous the whole situation was. That’s what healed my heart, being able to laugh at myself again, at my stupid ideas about destiny and fate...That allowed me to break free. I don’t need to wear anybody else’s label. I need time to just be me, to find out who I am.”

As I have been on this journey to me, I have uncovered quite a few self destructive beliefs that have been lurking in the shadows of my mind, driving my thoughts and actions like a hidden force,

When I get triggered about something in my life, I take this as a signal to explore those hidden beliefs and bring them into the light of day for a good shake down.

This week I retuned to do some work using Brandon’s Bays Emotional Journey process when I could feel myself getting irritated by a sense of giving too much to others.

What I discovered in the process is that giving too much stems, for me, from this subconscious idea I’m not enough. My true state is actually receptivity, openness and warmth and the guidance (that came from a deeper part of myself) was to remember I am not the personality or the experiences, but the benefactor of the growth that arises out of those.

In fact, the wisest part of me said “You are love itself and there’s always enough love, in fact that’s all there is.”

Another aspect of my hidden belief structure that I had been experiencing lately was a sense of feeling under-valued, unseen and under-used in my gifts and capacities. What I uncovered in the process is my true nature, which is radiance, standing in my own power. I can choose to combat and play small, or compassion to play big; to see others as comrades not combatants.

In this scenario the wisest part of me said “Be expansive. There are many things that you know you know, live those.” I understood that I must have compassion for myself and others to grow beyond this unhelpful belief pattern.

I have also been reading another beautiful (fictional) book by Anthony Doerr called All the Light We Cannot See that weaves together the backdrop of the lives of a young orphaned German boy who was eventually drafted into the Hitler Youth at the age of twelve or thirteen, and a young blind girl who lives in France with her widowed father.

The story slowly wraps its way towards a point in which they briefly meet in occupied France just before liberation. It then continues to unfold into the years following the war into the present day, demonstrating how those events became so interwoven into the lives of the sister of the German soldier (who did not survive) and the French girl (who lived to a ripe old age) and her family.

It was nothing sort of tragic, as I am sure it must truly be for anyone directly touched by the ravages of war, regardless of side there appears to emerge only tortured souls. In this I felt the utmost compassion and the sense that these two enemies were kindred spirits who had found themselves wrapped up in circumstances beyond their control.

While I’m not wading in that extreme of life, I certainly find myself unconsciously creating us and them scenarios, both in my personal life and as I look out into the world.

For a completely different kind of example, I’ll use the recent Harry and Meghan interview with Oprah. This sort of hyped razzmatazz is not my usual fodder, I don’t tend to actively follow any kind of current affairs or news, but I'm like a little meerkat who pops my head above ground every now and then to get a gauge on what's going on out in the magical mist called the media.

Growing up in the UK in the 1970’s and 1980’s, Charles and Diana's wedding, the births of their sons and Diana's death, were all moments I remember well because of the vast media storm that accompanied them. Not least I recall the haunted faces of the two young boys made to walk behind their mother’s casket in the funeral procession.

All I know of Harry and Meghan is what the media lines have fed us for last few years, which my dad aptly summed up after he exclaimed “You watched the interview!” by words like self serving, egotistical and manipulative.

That's exactly why I listened to it, I like to hear and see people speak directly because it gives me a much better gauge on what is going on than a third party account.

I had also read a book by one of my favourite fictional authors, Lucinda Riley, a year or so ago that was based around the British royal family and a huge cover up that stemmed back decades to the early part of the twentieth century. It was all about the 'old firm' and the security services that surround the family.

While it was a captivating story, the most interesting aspect lay not in the fiction but the facts around the book finally reaching print.  

As a young author she had much interest in the book when it was first written. It even had a publishing deal but the deal got withdrawn and all doors were closed. It is only several decades later and after the successful publication of later books, it finally reached print.  I'm guessing the fiction was too close to the truth.

This idea of the velvet curtain has always intrigued me. So I found Harry in particular interesting in the interview, although Meghan I think was better able to explain how it works.

It gave me pause as I thought about what it must be like to be born into that machine, to not know a world any different.

Now what is their agenda? Well that's an all-sided question. Certainly I start with the media who have had some very strong opinions on Ms Markle. I don't know her from Adam, and she could be a sociopathic narcissist for all I know, but I wanted to hear her voice. And she made some very interesting points.

As for Oprah, I like her. Does she have her own agenda? Sure. Don't we all? The only thing I felt about Oprah's interviewing was that it missed something quite key. While she fully explored the racist component about why little Archie wouldn't become a Prince, it missed completely exploring the idea that it could be because she was a divorcee, something that has caused so many issues within the royals.

That said, does it serve the needs of our society to dismantle white supremacy and white privilege, absolutely.

While talking about it with family and friends afterwards reminded me of the kind of polarisation I looked at in The Internal Shift You Need to Help Solve the Social Dilemma, it was, I felt, probably one of the most true-to-life looks behind the velvet curtain that I've ever had, even if (like everything in life) it was serving multiple agendas. I understand my call to watch it was an extra layer of my learning around compassion at the moment.

In every crevice I am finding compassion; from the echoes of the ravages of war, through to something as distant to me as the media swirl surrounding royals, and as personal as those deep shadows etched on my own soul. The message is clear, embrace compassion over combat and step into your true power.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Be Compassionate and Curious to Live Your Best Life, What Do You Want The Prevailing Global Culture to Look Like?, How You Are Complicit in the Oppression of Others, Let Us Hear Your Unique Perspective – But Be Kind and Be Wise and Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary). To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

A few times in the last week I’ve been triggered by communications I’ve received and my mind has gone into overdrive compiling responses.

I know enough now, and generally have enough restraint, not to react when I’m triggered. This is eloquently summed up by Teal Swan in her article on criticism when she says “Be aware that the reactivity that spirals us into criticism is always a by-product of trauma we have suffered. It is indicative of the ways that we have been hurt. If we tend to that hurt, we will be less reactive and become less critical. Our opinions will then be wanted and received well by others.”

Tending to that hurt is the bigger part, as I talked through in How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight. I think of it like doing the groundwork before a new construction project can take place.

By the same token, I want to express my perspective and to hear that of others. As Teal says “We need feedback, our growth and awareness depends on it…

But feedback falls into two distinct camps:

• Criticism
• Your individual and honest perspective or experience

Criticism is often done in a state of reactivity when we are in a state of defense, it has no regard for whether the person on the other end is receptive”.

She makes the point that there is really no such thing as constructive criticism “The more the person you are criticizing feels compelled to defend their value, the less capable they are of absorbing what they are hearing.”

Then she goes on to say “We have to be aware of why we feel the need to share our opinion. And even if we have good intentions, we must still ask ourselves if - despite the good intentions- we are harming the other person with our critique.”

I thought these were really good questions as I worked my way through the fire consuming me, not wishing to leave my relationships in the burnt ashes of my reactions.

Relationships are important to me, but I also often have a tendency to put other people’s needs before my own, and to rush in quickly to prove my worth, which I covered in How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns. So I have to look with real curiosity at what’s actually going on in each situation.

What was triggering me this time were some communications from the kids’ school that opened up an old wound. A wise person once gave me an analogy of putting our hurts into the manure pile versus the freezer, the manure pile being preferable as it fades to nothing over time. But this wound had obviously been bunged in the freezer, unattended, since it stung just as sharply as if it were fresh.

Anything that requires or encourages extracurricular activity throws me into a spin, since my kids have well and truly had enough in the process of just attending school each day. By the same token, I’m a person who attended school without any real issues while also managing a few extracurricular things and, later, an all-encompassing training program as a competitive swimmer.

I prided myself on my resilience and strength (part of perfectionist tendencies designed to prove my self worth and avoid the harsh criticism and punishment), and still laugh/cry at the memory of me pulling my daughter’s dummy out of my bra in the middle of a corporate meeting, wondering what it was that kept itching my skin.

So when receiving various communications this week contradicting the school’s own philosophies (zealously encouraging our kids into extracurricular sports activities and daily violin practice), on top of extensive requests for my personal participation in fundraising activities, meanwhile hearing a comment made to the whole parent group that was clearly criticising my individual decision on pursue external remedial support for my kids to help them work with their brain instead of against it, triggered me in gasket-blowing ways.

It created a surge of feelings comprising being overwhelmed by contradictions, criticised, disregarded and undermined. The little girl inside me whose thoughts and feelings were unimportant to the adults making decisions, who had to strategise to canvass and rationalise my opinions, and get my needs and desires met, swung into full counter attack and defense mode.

I observed all this. I struggled between the part of me that that wanted to lash out at those whose words poked at all my old wounds, and the part of me that wanted those people to simply understand the unintentional ways in which their words have landed.

I want people to understand what it feels like when your kids have different wiring, unseen and yet overwhelming. I especially want those who are charged with the care of my children during their time at school to know this. If I go further with this, what I deeply desire is an educational approach that caters to the neurodiversity and differing talents of all children.

But I also know that, while those who educate my children during school hours care about them, there are another twenty five or more other unique kids in the class to cater to – quite aside of the teachers they report to, the school board, the Education department and the many other stakeholders involved. I know that those who educate my kids also have their own rich perspectives, and most likely their own wounds. I know that in order to be truly heard, I will have to be kind, to tread softly.

I recognise people don’t make me feel a certain way, I simply feel what I feel in reaction to what they are saying because of my own unique circumstances, experiences and disposition.

So, while tending to that wounded part of me - the groundwork that has to happen before I share anything - I have asked myself many times:

• Why do I want to share my perspective?
• How can I share it in a way that is not going to harm? In a way that is not likely to invoke a defense response?

I have reworked my response many times in my head; continually refocusing within myself to hand the talking stick to my heart; the warrior self versus the infinite self. Early in the week, in a more peaceful moment, my inner voice spoke its truth plainly. It took another few days to get my mind aligned in order to proceed without the criticisms that wanted to work their way in there.

All along the way I kept asking myself whether any response was required at all.

In the end, I did send one because – as I’ve said - I deeply desire an educational approach that caters to the neurodiversity and differing talents of all children. So I believe it is important to voice our perspective in the current environment to create the seeds of awareness that may one day spout into positive changes.

I received a response thanking me for my insights and also for seeing what the teachers are contending with, and with – I felt – a genuinely hopeful interest in seeing where the approach I’m taking with my kids leads.

I have a perspective that is different and valuable and so do you. But be kind to yourself and to others, and be wise in your ways of sharing. Tell us your story in a way we can hear it, so it can benefit the growth of the whole.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Change Unhealthy Reactions, How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think and Honour Your Story but Free Yourself of Its Shackles. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Image by CJ from Pixabay

Eckhart Tolle, a master teacher on the concept of presence, said “Stress is caused by being here but wanting to be there”. I can relate to this.

When I was at the chiropractor, I asked her what she had noticed in my body this week and she said “It was twisted, it easily untwisted but it was twisted none the less (in my usual left hip to right shoulder pattern) – like you are being pulled in this direction and that direction”.

As soon as she said it I pictured a tug-of-war, rather like Dr Dolittle’s fictional Pushmi-Pullyu animal being pulled in different directions. It made absolute sense to me because it’s how I feel when the family are all at home and I have things I need to do, yet they are clamouring for my attention.

Of course, here in the southern hemisphere, it is school summer holidays, but this year – with so many lockdowns in process – I am sure there are many parents around the world contending with the same issues and on more intense levels.

For my kids I’ve found there is balance needed between planned activities and having enough downtime in order for boredom to kick in.

School takes care of much (often unwanted) planned activity during term time, but during holidays that falls more to me. Though as the kids get older they obviously have more of their own ideas and plans, which can bring about a whole other level of conflict and logistics to manage.

Another of my favourite Eckhart quotes is “Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found”, it has also always been the place in which I am most in touch with my own thoughts and feelings, my sense of self, which is something I desire for my kids also.

When boredom kicks in for the kids, though, I both relish and dread it.

I dread it because it is a temporarily painful experience for me, they start to complain and pick fights with each other, looking towards me as a beacon of hope to solve their boredom and their conflicts. However, I have found that it is often wiser if I avoid doing either, and simply give them each some positive attention before turning my own attention back to whatever I was doing.

But I also relish their boredom because, once they get over this hump – which they do (and they do a lot quicker without devices on the scene), I see the magic of their creativity come to life.

This used to create other issues as, when they were younger, it often involved turning our lounge into some fantastical kingdom, which could look like someone had taken the contents of our cupboards, strewn them over the floor and then stirred with a big spoon. However, as they get older, they get better at tidying up with less intervention.

Then, of course, there are the other things that need to happen, like clothes being washed, food purchased, meals prepared, alongside the support I provide to my partner in his business. And because none of this really floats my boat I heed Annette Noontil’s advice:

“It is best not to do more than 50% for people because it takes away their opportunity to learn and grow. If you have to do 100% for someone make sure you are learning something for yourself from this opportunity.”

Which is why I make it a priority to type these posts each week, it’s my time to really sit down and take in what lessons are presenting themselves.

So when I ponder on what I really need to know when I feel pulled in these different directions, here is my take out:

• I have a tendency towards people pleasing, and the fact I feel pulled in different directions is a signpost to relook at the lessons I’ve learned about what being hyper attuned to others’ needs and feelings has taught me, including defining and asserting my personal boundaries.
• No one will respect my needs and desires unless I prioritise them; I teach others how to treat me.
• In my situation, no one is going to die if I don’t get the balance right between doing too much or too little. But the fact I’m feeling so torn probably means I would more likely benefit from doing less; my expectations of myself are too high.
• Nothing needs to be perfect, whether I get it right or wrong for me, the kids and/or my partner, there are always going to be things I can learn and grow from, so either way I’ll get where I want to go. As my gran always said “What’s for you won’t go by you.”
• Be present to whatever is happening in the moment. Even in the process of typing this up, I’ve had to press pause a number of times and switch my attention to conversations with the kids and with my partner and each interruption provided an opportunity for connection with people I love.

With humanity experiencing so much turmoil right now, I imagine many people feel pulled in different directions. What is your life trying to teach you? What do you need to know right now to feel less torn and more present?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, When the Thing That Binds You is the Road to Freedom, How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think, How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.