Happiness equals reality minus expectations -Tom Magliozzi
A Fine Balance
Christmas can be wonderful and it can also be stressful. After decades of celebrating this annual holiday I am still learning the fine art of balancing the pressures with the joy. Along the way I’ve discovered some strategies that help me stay grounded and receptive to all the love that is trying to happen at this special time of year.
Because Christmas is so rife with expectations and family history, it is easy to become enmeshed in the needs and desires of others. It can be challenging to hang onto one’s centre and sense of self, when expectations are many and everyone’s emotions are running high. Some people fall into old patterns of “people pleasing”, some may become aggressive, while others want to run for the hills. I believe emotional maturity involves balancing our autonomy with our desire for connection with others. Striking that balance is a life-long learning process.
I’d like to share some Christmas strategies to which I aspire each year. They are designed to help us foster connection with loved ones during the holiday season, while maintaining healthy boundaries. I invite you to experiment with the ones that resonate for you.
On Christmas invitations and activities:
* Consult your loved ones regarding shared plans and activities. Find out what is important to them.
* Take the feelings of others into consideration in your decision-making, without abandoning your own desires and needs. Look for the win-win.
* If you choose to adapt your preferences in response to others, commit to do so freely and without resentment.
* Give yourself permission to accept OR decline invitations. Remember: You always have a choice.
On spending:
* Create a Christmas spending plan (in consultation with your partner) and stick to it. (This includes how much you spend on each other.)
* Determine what spending is appropriate to your budget and your values, without caving in to perceived expectations from others. Remember: Your value and worth as a person does not equate with your ability to buy expensive gifts. A gift from the heart has no set price tag.
On selecting gifts:
* Trust your choice of gifts. Don’t waste time second-guessing yourself or trying to mind-read what will “make” the other person happy.
* Take pleasure in your gift-giving. Let go of expecting the person receiving your gift to react or respond in a particular way.
On sharing the preparations with your partner/family:
* Make clear, clean requests for what you need.
* Don’t expect others to read your mind regarding the help you need – or resent it when they don’t.
* Give others the room to accept and decline your requests, without emotional punishment or blackmail.
On family meals and traditions:
* Share the workload. If hosting, let your guests know how they can contribute to the meal. If you are a guest, ask your host how you can contribute.
* Realize that Christmas traditions may differ and make space for the traditions/preferences of others.
* Be prepared to roll with unexpected changes. There’s bound to be some!
* Make room for differing opinions and viewpoints during mealtime discussions – enjoy the diversity of personalities and perspectives!
On feeling gratitude:
* Before Christmas Day, make a list of EVERYTHING in your life that you are thankful for. This can powerfully shift your focus from to-do lists to gratitude.
* Use the giving of gifts as an opportunity to feel and express your love and appreciation to those whom you love.
* LET IN the love (and hugs!) from others.
Pick one or more strategies that appeal to you and experiment with them over the Christmas season. You CAN choose how you want to be this Christmas – and what experience you will have. This might be the year to take your balancing of connection and boundaries to a new level.
Until Next Time,
Shirley Vollett
Shirley Vollett, BSW PCC is a Life & Relationship Coach. She works with women and men in transition, who are frustrated in their quest to find a long-term relationship. Shirley helps them rekindle their hope, stop repeating past mistakes and create a game plan for attracting the love of their life.
If you’ve dated people who invaded your boundaries in the past, and would like to avoid dating such people in the future, read on. There’s a reason you’ve let such people slip past your porous boundaries, and that reason lays in your past, where you had incomplete training about boundaries.
Boundaries are essential in virtually every area of life. Great artists—whether they’re sculptors like Michelangelo, composers like Puccini, or basketball stars like Jordan–had to learn their craft. They spent hours alone disciplining themselves, studying and practicing within the boundaries of marble, sheet music and gymnasiums. Working with boundaries freed these geniuses to soar into the boundless, giving us “The Pieta,” “La Boheme,” and 360-degree flying reverse dunks.
It’s imperative to learn boundaries in your relationships, as well. When you were an infant, the universe was one amorphous “yours.” Your parents taught you, when you were ready to learn, the difference between what’s yours and what isn’t; it was all part of the education they gave you on boundaries. That is, if they themselves knew the boundaries. If they were alcoholics–who loved the bottle more than they did you–or emotional vampires–who needed you more than they loved you–they likely did a very poor job of teaching boundaries. How can they teach what they didn’t know, and what wasn’t taught to them by their parents? They couldn’t; so the ground was prepared for you, as their children, to endure a lifetime of potential abuse–emotional, physical, and sometimes sexual–from parents, relatives, bosses, spouses, even ministers. How do you reverse these vicious cycles? The answer is knowledge.
I coach a woman in her ‘30s—let’s call her Sharon–who grew up in a home where boundaries weren’t communicated. What was communicated was rage by her alcoholic father. He dominated the atmosphere of their home. Sharon concluded, as a girl, that her job was to be the family’s peacemaker. (It wasn’t, but she mistakenly thought that it was.) This role that she took on calmed the battle around her for a while, but it robbed her, over time, of her integrity. She wanted everybody to feel okay even though there was something going on in the house that was anything but okay. For the short term she found a strategy that enabled her to cope with the battles going on around her. For the long term, however, she paid a big price for this: She learned to give away her power on a daily basis.
Being a peacemaker also attracted angry people into her life so that, once and for all, she could heal this pattern. If this is your pattern, you’ve been lacking the knowledge that it’s not your responsibility to make everyone in the world happy. Especially since it comes at the high price of your own peace and happiness. Being a people pleaser is a very fatiguing and fruitless way of being. Herbert Swope said it beautifully: “I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure–which is: Try to please everybody.”
Inner Vitamins
In the same way that adding a vitamin to your diet helps make up for a nutritional deficiency, adding an affirmation to your mental diet helps overcome errors in thinking. Here are three I like for boundary deficiency:
* I am responsible for my feelings and emotions and everyone else is responsible for his.
* I create the pleasure and pain in my life and others do the same in theirs.
* I can support others without taking on their problems.
Stuart is a coaching client of mine, who’s working on improving his marriage. Recently he told me that he’s now committed to making his wife happy in a very big way. So he dreams up great things for them to do, and great things to buy for her. Suffice it to say, his wife is one happy camper. I applauded his dedication, then reminded him that it’s not in his power to make her happy. As the Vedic wisdom of India teaches, “Ignorant is one who thinks he makes others sad or happy. The wise do not reflect thus.”
I encouraged him to stay unattached to the fruits of his efforts, and paraphrased a wise saying: “You can lead a wife to the water of happiness, but you can’t make her drink.”
So if you want to make the world happy, remember, you don’t have that power. But since you are a part of that world, you can make that part of the world happy. And you can start right now.
Until Next Time,
Cary Bayer
Cary Bayer is a Life Coach who conducts a national private practice from his two offices: by the ocean in south Florida (954-788-3380) and in the mountains of New York State (845-679-5526). He is the author of more than two dozen publications, and leads workshops on various topics of personal growth throughout the country. You can visit him on the web at www.carybayer.com or email him at successaerobics@aol.com.
Men and women across the globe spend their lives searching for love in hopes of companionship, excitement, family, happily-ever-after, sex, security and even status. But now science suggests that love also has the power to ease physical aches and pains. A study has found that being in love activates the reward centres of the brain — the same regions impacted by painkiller drugs.
The research out of Stanford University tested pain levels of men and women by applying heat to the palm of their hands. Looking at photos of their lovers significantly reduced their experience of pain and MRI scans connected this love-induced analgesia to activity in the area of the brain associated with addiction to painkillers, cocaine, and other drugs.
“This tells us that you don’t have to just rely on drugs for pain relief,” explains researcher, Dr. Arthur Aron. “People are feeling intense rewards without the side effects of drugs.”
And though big pharma isn’t about to roll over in favour of love-therapy anytime soon, these findings offer support and encouragement to all the hopeless romantics out there. Not only does it relieve pain, but love of all sorts (not just the mushy romantic kind) has also been linked to improved cardiovascular health, lower cholesterol, strengthened immune system and a longer life. And you don’t want to get me started on the health benefits of sex…
So go ahead and indulge: look for love, fall in love and heed Ke$ha’s advice and make love your drug.
Until Next Time,
Dr. Jessica O’Reilly
Dr. Jessica O’Reilly is a board-certified sexologist committed to helping clients enjoy healthy, pleasurable sex lives. She loves her work (obviously!) and splits her time between public speaking engagements, freelance writing, program development and consulting in the field of sexual health. Learn more about Jessica at www.jessicaoreilly.com
Gratitude is part of a natural evolution. When we truly embrace the concept that there is treasure in everything, when we fully trust ourselves to always be at the right place at the right time, when we accept that we are in charge of our lives—then being grateful in all circumstances and to everyone, including ourselves, is easy.
Gratitude is not just an attitude; it is a stance, a way of being and thinking that requires practice. A metaphor for gratitude is the old proverb, “stop and smell the roses,” which, considering the fall timing of this article, I have adapted to “stop and smell the pumpkin pie.” How perfect, thinking of gratitude with Thanksgiving around the corner. When we slow down and smell the pumpkin pie, we are taking the time to appreciate who and what is on our path, who we are and what we do. What if, instead of forgetting to “smell the pie” in our busy plan, we made it a priority on our life journey to move at a pace where the details—the smell of pie, the smell of the roses—could be appreciated?
Practice Makes Perfect
Learn the good habit of slowing down, and make it a conscious practice to express your gratitude and appreciation until it becomes natural. By this time in your life, you will no doubt acknowledge that relationships are the most enriching way to personal growth. Taking the time to let people know how much you value them for who they are and what they do has great rewards. It opens your heart and theirs and deepens your connections—all of which has a ripple effect.
Make the decision that being grateful and appreciative will improve your life, and then design a ritual—a precise, regularly repeated activity—to support you as you slow down and continue to smell the roses when pie season is over.
As an entrepreneur, every Friday, for example, you might take a few minutes to sum up the week:
· What worked for you and what didn’t?
· What do you want to carry over to next week?
· What do you need to complete?
By assessing the week, consciously acknowledging both the events that went well and those that were more challenging and then letting them go, you energetically become better prepared for the week to come. Reach out weekly to the people who have supported you—family, friends, colleagues—to let them know how important they have been to you and your world will expand your life experience both in the moment and beyond. And it will attract more to be grateful for, because … what you focus on grows!
You might want to buy flowers (even jut one flower!) on the way home every Friday to celebrate yourself and the end of another week and to symbolically shift to the relaxation and enjoyment of the weekend. What plans have you made to recharge and honour yourself and your loved ones?
Until Next Time,
Monica Magnetti
www.meetmarketadventures.com/singlesdatingblog/contributors/
Life/Business & Brand Consultant
Author of 30 DAYS TO A NEW YOU: Get What You Want Through Authentic Change
The quality and duration of a relationship with a significant other is affected by unresolved issues with other people in your life like an ex-spouse, ex-lover, parent, or boss. Don’t you know people who keep attracting mates who resemble people they’re most incomplete with? That’s no accident.
The systematic Completion Process that you’re about to learn frees you of the toxic energy you’ve been carrying about such people for years. It gives you tools to become at peace with anyone you’ve ever known, stop re-creating dysfunctional relationships with your current or next mate, and become free to create an authentic relationship with such a mate.
Unexpressed anger lives inside your body and poisons you. The desire for revenge is a choice. One client described this as “Eating poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
For all its authority and excellence, the health column of The New York Times and the articles on relationships in women’s magazines are derelict in their duties, because they don’t tell readers that one of the fastest ways to enrich the relationship with your mate is to forgive so that you are peace with everyone from your present and past.
Many years ago, there was a close relative of mine who stopped talking to me for several years and returned my letters unopened. I was deeply wronged by her. When I finally completed with her through the process I’m about to she suggested we leave the past in the past and create a whole new future. I was so surprised you could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather. In the next seven days, I lost seven pounds, without changing my diet or exercise program. I didn’t know that our estrangement was so heavy it weighed seven pounds. Within three days of our conversation, I landed my largest marketing client ever and, four days later, signed two more clients. (It usually took three months to sign three clients; this time it took seven days!)
One of the other side effects of being incomplete with someone—especially when it’s a parent or an ex-spouse—is the divinely comical way that they seem to show up in different guises in our lives. Bringing incomplete people from your past into your present gives you the opportunity to complete with your past, but if you don’t take advantage of that chance—Carpe Opportunities?—they’ll keep reappearing like a recurring bad dream. If you want to avoid attracting the same mate over and over again a la Groundhog’s Day, quickly use the technique I’m about to describe.
Step One:
Write the person—let’s call him Joe–a letter you’ll never send, and keep it because you’ll need to refer to it shortly. Tell him, in no uncertain terms, how you feel about all the horrible things he did or said to you—or didn’t do or didn’t say that he should have. Say what a terrible low life he is. Don’t hold anything back, and obscenity is great here. Blame him for your unhappiness, and everything awful that’s ever happened between you two. List each thing before hand, so you don’t forget them.
If you’re writing to a parent, go extra heavy on blame. You can accuse him or her of being responsible for everything that ever went wrong in your life. In other words, had they done a decent job of parenting, these calamities never would have happened. This letter isn’t supposed to be fair, and it’s therapeutic to speak like a victim in this letter, which lets you release toxic energy that’s been in your body for far too long. Emotions, by definition, aren’t rational, and you don’t have to be reasonable in communicating them.
Step Two:
Incorporate the wisdom of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who said: “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Joe obviously didn’t kill you, so you’ve been made stronger by knowing him. Focusing on how you became stronger, wiser, more creative, resourceful, and adaptable or self-sufficient is the purpose of this letter. Remember, you’re not sending it.
Life often teaches us lessons; when we’re lucky, we learn them painlessly. When your mother told you, as a small child, not to put your hand onto the stove, and you listened to her, you learned the lesson without any sweat. If, on the other hand, you put your hand into the flame, you learned a lesson that’s left a permanent scar.. The stove is a lesson you learned painfully. You’re learning a lot in this column without suffering, so you don’t have negative feelings toward me. Joe, however, is a person who taught you lessons painfully. The reason you’re writing to him is because your heart is on the pain, blocking your mind from seeing the lesson. In the first letter, you released stored pain from your heart, so that when you write the second letter your mind is clear enough to see the lesson.
The first lesson is about releasing the pain, the second about seeing the lesson; the third integrates the two, and is intended for the Post Office. By then, you’ll have released the venom with the first writing, and you’ll have seen how you grew because of his mistreatment. This leaves you healthy and wise enough to express your pain in a way that he can hear.
Step Three:
Review the first letter, and communicate without anger or judgment, what you felt unhappy about. As Sgt. Joe Friday, from Dragnet, used to tell the people he interrogated, “Just the facts, ma’am.” Itemize each thing that annoyed you. In the second part of each item, write how you felt about what Joe said or did, or didn’t say or didn’t do. Leave judgment or anger out of this part, too. (If you’re feeling anger, go back and fire off another few paragraphs in the first letter to get more toxic emotion off your chest.) Then, indicate what you learned, or how you grew from these upsets. (This is what you did in the second letter.) Finally, thank him for the lessons you learned and the growth you enjoyed. You’re not thanking him for his mistreatment; you’re thanking him for what you learned or how you grew as a result of what he did. This is the pivotal piece of the communication. When you can go into gratitude for what happened, you can forgive and be free.
It’s important to have a coach or therapist look at the letter before you send it to make sure it’s ready to be sent. If you don’t have one, show it to a close friend who can be objective with you; not a yes man. You need someone to honestly tell you if what you’ve communicated is ready for Joe’s eyes. My experience with clients is they generally need several cracks at that third letter before the anger is gone and is ready to be mailed.
If the person is deceased, there’s symbolic value to putting it in the mailbox. Leave your return address off, but put the recipient’s name on the envelope and give him the benefit of the doubt–send it care of Heaven.
If he’s probably still alive but you don’t know where, send it to him care of Anywhere, USA. Let the Post Office sort it out. Such letters have brought relationships virtually back from the dead. Miracles have come out of such communications, but not always with the person you write the letter to. You might not want a relationship with Joe after completing with him. Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting; you might never want to see him again. There’s no need to be around cruel people.
You’ve heard it said that as you give, so shall you receive. I like to say that as you forgive, so shall you receive even more. It’s hard to predict exactly what will happen first; the Lord, as the saying goes, works in mysterious ways. But forgiveness works because it removes toxic energy you’ve held in your body. Once that energy is released, a vacuum is created. Mother Nature abhors a vacuum, so She fills that void. This might mean a new friend, a new lover, or an enrichment of the relationship with your current significant other.
Until Next Time,
Coach Cary Bayer
www.carybayer.com
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