How Do You Spell Success?

How Do You Spell Success?

By now you know how much I enjoy playing with language, with the meanings of words, and what we do with them. Things got a lot easier for me when I recognized that patience and tolerance were some serious shortcomings for me in certain situations. I put up with way too much nonsense. It got me started thinking about other words that make my life harder.

“Chores” was one such word. I had a lot of baggage attached to that word. Chores were meted out as punishment sometimes, or paying jobs. It was confusing, and I grew to hate them. As I grew up, I changed the word to “blessings” and it transformed the way I felt about those tasks. I would much rather bless my little house than do chores.

“Failure” was another word like that. It kind of went hand in hand with “mistakes.” I felt wrong as a person, and used those two words to beat myself up. I took mistakes and failures as indications that I was somehow less than everyone else. I saw failures as indications that I wasn’t good enough, and that I could never measure up to some mysterious standard.

Why am I a winner? What makes me successful? How am I accomplished?

By changing my beliefs about what failure meant, I released a lot of icky stuff. I didn’t get there all at once, I kind of chipped away at it. I saw myself as a failure, a loser, I felt like a mistake. I needed to separate myself from that personalization. I had to practice noticing that I made mistakes, it wasn’t something I was. I had failures. And life isn’t a race, so feeling like a loser usually meant that I felt like I didn’t meet an arbitrary standard I had imposed on me.

I often fail at stuff. I try something new, and get it wrong. Instead of going to hopeless, I choose to learn. I get curious. Curiosity is a powerful tool in our cache of resources. I can ask questions like, “What did I miss? How can I better understand this? Do I need a new skill? Does this just need more practice?”

Failure then turns into an opportunity, or several opportunities. I get to have compassion for me. I get to experiment, and be creative. I get to add information to my list of what doesn’t work for me. I can choose to feel optimistic about what I will try next. I get to decide if whatever I am trying to do is worth it to me, so I practice deciding and choosing for myself. That empowers me.

Because I am creating a new relationship with the word, I am also giving myself permission to try new things, to have new experiences, to meet new people. When I felt like a failure, I avoided letting people get to know me. I didn’t want them to see past the facade I put up. I didn’t want them to see that I was a phony fake. I wasn’t sure what I was being phony about, but I sure had the feeling. Parties were torture. Any kind of social gathering was fine, if I was working as a hostess, or server, but to just be a guest? I would find a place to sit, and try to go invisible.

How do I connect? What makes me engage? Why am I interested in you?

By letting go of feeling like a failure, I had more energy for intimacy. Because I was developing my curiosity, I got curious about you. I wanted to know you better, and I wanted to let you know me better. I was able to let down my shield of impenetrability and feel vulnerable. It got easier to trust.

Now, I will often review my successes at the end of a day. Sometimes they are big, like making a big decision that can change my life. Sometimes they are tiny, like choosing to leave the treat in the freezer, or vacuuming the stairs. I count ‘em all.

How have I changed from being a miserable failure to reveling in my success?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 07182014

Stress Into Success

Stress into Success

Resolution, progress, answers, solutions, decisions, choices, options, outcomes, results, success.

Nice words, good feelings. How fun to be full of good questions that lead to good answers.

One of the ways I know I have good questions is that I have good answers. When the answers or solutions I’m coming up with suck, I’m asking bad questions. The worse the answers, the worse the questions.

It’s one of the reasons it pays to be self-aware, so that we can notice our bad questions and change them before the answers get us by the throat.

We know we are asking bad questions when we stop feeling good. It’s that simple.

Why do I feel good? How do I know I am right? What makes me victorious?

Many of us feel like we are under a lot of stress. There is a verb we use in NLP that I like a lot; to presuppose. In order for us to be under stress, we have to presuppose that stress is a real thing. So we have two things so far. One, stress is a thing. Two, we can be under it.

The same thing works for the notion of success. One, we presuppose success is a thing, and two, that we can have it.

Both of those ideas are based on our judgments. I judge this as bad, so I go to stress, I judge this as good, so I go to success. Using our judgment is really important, and learning to use it to decide when it’s a good idea to unchoose stress as a thing can transform a day from an awful disaster to something fine.

When we are stuck in the past, we can get depressed. Depression is rage turned inward.  We are having big feelings about how our past played out, and we are hanging onto that angry feeling, to resentments, to shame, to guilt. We presuppose that things should have gone differently than they did, and that we somehow lost out.

When we are stuck in the future, we can get anxious. Anxiety is negative fantasies about ourselves. We may say to ourselves, “I’m worried about so-and-so” but we really mean that we are scared for ourselves and how we would feel if something bad were to happen to someone we love. We presuppose that something bad will happen and we will lose out.

When we choose to be in the present, we let our life flow.We presuppose that everything changes. We presuppose that everything happens in its time, with good in it, and that we can find the good. We presuppose that we have power to make a positive impact. We presuppose that we are enough, that we are good, that good things happen for us. We have a lot of presuppositions, but they support our well being, our growth and evolution, and support us supporting each other. We understand that loss without judgment is change.

When I choose to experience my life as flow, miracles happen. I am successful. I feel fantastic, engaged, wise, and happy. When I am present, change is change, neither loss nor gain. I am full of compassion for both of us, for all of us.

How have I changed from choosing stress to choosing success?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 03102014

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How Do You Spell Success?

How Do You Spell Success?

Quick, off the top of your head, can you name three successes you’ve enjoyed in your life? How about three from yesterday? What are your criteria for success? Do you need to win something, or get acknowledged by us? Or do you determine your success by how you feel?

It can be a tricky thing, measuring our success. We get all sorts of rules as we grow up for what constitutes success. Some of them support us, and some really don’t.

Years ago, when I was struggling with the whole concept of success, I found myself thinking about the bad day I had. I was praying for a miracle to snap me out of my blues. The thought I had was along these lines:  What if, during my bad day, I was protected from all sorts of other things that were a whole lot worse than my bad day? What if I didn’t get hit by that turning car? What if I left the bar just before the two crazy guys started to fight? What if I stopped just before the mugger got to me? Well, you get the idea.

It was a small shift in my point of view, but it worked. It also gave me a cartoon movie in my head, where anvils and pianos fell on the sidewalk just behind me, and those grates in the sidewalk for delivering waited until I passed to open. It made me feel lucky.

That sense of being lucky can be a nice part of feeling successful. Especially when we take responsibility for our luck. So much of being happy is about feeling fortunate. An old friend used to talk about feeling lucky, or fortunate, with a sense of shame, like she was lucky, but didn’t deserve it. She dropped the last part, and has been enjoying great success in all areas of her life.

Why am I fortunate? What makes me successful? Why am I lucky? How do good circumstances find me?

What would your day be like if you kept your eyes open for all the luck that surrounds you? What would your day be like if you kept finding nice treats, happy coincidences, serendipitous events all day long? What if finding that nickel made a difference? Or getting an email from your old pal you hadn’t heard from in a while? What if you felt like finding that parking spot, or a coupon on the shelf for something you needed was just for you?

As we start looking for good things to happen, we find them. All over the place. And things will often work out for us in ways we might not expect, but in ways that we like.

You can call it luck, or the Law of Attraction, you can call it living each day successfully.

When we start to expect those nice things, it shifts our mood. We get a bit more smiley, and we find that people smile back at us. Sometimes, a smile from a stranger can feel like a miracle. We start expecting nice things, and we find ourselves doing little nice things, just because it feels good.

How do I spot good things? What makes me notice little kindnesses? How do I see that my life is sweet?

Loosening our definitions of success can create a big shift in our point of view. Some days, I may count getting dressed before 3:00 being successful. With that attitude, I may find a pocket of motivation or inspiration that I might have missed if I berated myself for lounging around so long.

How have I changed from judging my success on old criteria to finding successes every day?

(c) 2014 Pam Guthrie all rights reserved 02062014

Accessing Your Personal Global Support Unit

Accessing Your Personal Global Support Unit

Somewhere along the line, I decided to look at the world as though it exists to help me become the best person I can manage to be.

It is a big and interesting shift in point of view, one that makes everything different.

In the olden days, I subscribed to the notion that life was a bitch, and then you die. Grim, terse. I believed that bad things just happened to me, to you, too, but more to me. It’s an attitude called “inverse grandiosity,” the idea that I am the worst, unluckiest, saddest, baddest, etcetera, person in the world. Yeah.

Bad stuff happens and you just have to slog along as best you can. Some people have good luck, some people have bad luck.

Yeah, right.

So, it turned out that when I decided to look at life as a great big kick-ass opportunity, stuff changed.

How do miracles come my way? Why am I so lucky? What makes things go my way?

So, it seems like when I consider the crappy situation I’m in as holding a personal lesson for me, I get to spelunk around and see what I can find. When I find and integrate the lesson, the crappy situation resolves itself almost instantly. Crazy.

If all the world is here for me and I’m not relishing that, it’s about me, not the world. Why is it all for me? What makes me take responsibility for me?

When the world is all about supporting me, and I let that in, I can afford to be helpful and kind. I gain by being helpful and kind. Being helpful and kind ends up being easy and natural.

When the world is all about supporting me, and I let that in, I find benefits, lessons, opportunities, and treats, all over the place. I expect solutions, resolutions, and progress. I find that I also expect that things will work out for me, go my way. I find myself feeling like life is peaceful, relaxed, satisfying, blissful, and I am content at the end of the day. I have satisfying things to do, lovely people to do those things with, lives of all kinds to take care of, and I feel taken care of, too. Balance.

What makes me so successful? Why am I accomplished?

As I let my sense of the world supporting me sink in, something else happens. I start feeling like a winner, but I lose the sense of someone else having to be a loser.

I like that a lot. As someone who saw the world as winners (you) and the Biggest Loser (me,) I gave those words a lot of negative power. Now, I review my day before bed, and most days, I can say that I won, and helped at least one other person win, too. Simple. Easy. Natural life.

Every time I take a step away from letting my past dictate my present, every time I make a conscious and thoughtful choice, every time I seek a new thought, a new way of doing stuff, or seek a fresh solution, I win.

How have I changed from letting my past dictate my present to being the boss of my own life?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 01152014

How to Put Out the Put Downs

How to Put Out the Put Downs

So many of us have a favorite put down we use on ourselves. We call ourselves “loser, screw up,” and worse, we tell ourselves that we can’t do anything right. We tell ourselves we that we are stupid. or lazy, or fat, or ugly. We talk to ourselves in such awful ways that it breaks my heart to think of it.

We can recite our failures with ease, but brush aside our successes with a casual wave of the hand. We mark our failures with even more negative behavior, like getting drunk or otherwise bingeing. And then, in addition to the first failure, we now feel like crap. Awesome.

We are asking, and answering, terrible creative questions. Remember, what makes a question a creative question is that the result is built into the question. So when we are asking questions like, “why am I such a loser?”, or “what’s wrong with me?”, I’m totally setting myself up.

It’s a funny way to think of it, but these are lifestyle questions. They set the tone for our decisions, our choices, our behavior. I know, it’s wacky. So, now the question is, do I want this lifestyle, where I am putting myself down, medicating myself, flirting with depression, or chronic anger, fear, dis-ease.

When I beat myself up, for whatever reason, I am not only doing myself a disservice, but also you, because I am spending all that energy on being awful instead of spending it on my wonderful gifts, gifts that benefit all of us.

How would I feel were I successful? How would I feel were I competent? How would I feel were I accomplished? Why do I live the lifestyle I want?

When we are making big changes with Creative Questions, we have a huge advantage over many other healing modalities for the simple reason that Creative Questions help us change the habit. And therein, my dear, is the gold.

When I am making big changes, I know that using my Creative Questions will support me in making the tiny changes I need to make to allow the big changes to take hold. When I am making big changes, the old habits run wide and deep, so I like to ask a nice variety of Creative Questions to pull up all those weeds, and make room for a good, solid foundation for my new life.

In many modalities, we can experience instant change, but we are screwed unless we can break the old habits that supported to old behavior, or the old circumstances. This is why so many of us fail with losing weight, and regain all we lost. We shed the fat, but not the underlying habits.

Why do I support my new body? How do I care for my body? Why am I so successful?

Why are you so successful? What makes you accomplished? How do you recognize that you are a winner?

When I choose to see myself as successful, competent, a winner, I behave differently. I carry myself differently, and you will see me differently. How cool is that. When we change our thoughts, we pull out new parts of ourselves, aspects of our personality that have patiently been waiting their turn to shine. And we will shine, we will feel successful, and we will be satisfied, happy, peaceful and enthusiastic about our lives.

How have I changed from thinking old, icky thoughts to choosing to see the best me?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 09062013