August 3rd, 2009

Do You Use Your Intuition?


Imagine having your own personal mentor/guide that was with you all the time, telling you what decision to make, when to turn left and not right, when to go ahead and when to hold back. And was correct every time! People who have developed their intuition and follow it have just that.

Intuition is that gut feeling, that non-rational thought process that can help you overcome the challenges of fear, find your life’s purpose, make decisions, trust yourself, and so much more.

Many people believe that intuition is something that you are born with – either you have it or you don’t. Recent studies have shown, however, that everyone is intuitive to a greater or lesser degree and that even if you haven’t consciously used your intuition you can still develop it – just like any skill can be developed over time.

Intuition tends to be more of a ‘right-brained’ function, aligned with creativity and artistic ability so has tended to be associated with creative and artistic people. In fact, creative and artistic people tend to be more naturally intuitive and can develop their intuition more easily than predominately left-brained, or more rational individuals tend to. However, since everyone uses both sides of their brain, intuition can be developed and accessed by everyone.

So, how do you know it is your intuition that is ’speaking’ to you, and not one of your other internal ‘voices’ ?

Shakti Gawain, in her book Developing Intuition: Practical Guidance for Daily Life, talks about a number of energies that reside in each of us. These energies are paired with their opposite energy with one from each pair being the dominate energy, and other from the pair tending to be a bit more submissive. The pairs identified by Shakti Gawain include:

The Rational Mind ………………………. Intuition

The Responsible Self ……………………. The Free Spirit

The Caretaker ……………………………… The Perfectionist

The Vulnerable Child ……………………. The Playful Child

The Doer or Pusher ……………………… Being

The Rule Maker …………………………… The Rebel

Self Acceptance ……………………………. The Critic

The Straight Talker …………………….. The Pleaser

Shakti Gawain states that from all of these you can tell it’s you intuition speaking to you because “Intuition never guides us with an authoritarian or critical edge. It doesn’t impose rules, it never feels heavy handed or burdensome, it doesn’t push us to anything that we-re really not ready to do, and it never makes us feel guilty about anything. It’s also not self-indulgent or rebellious, and never leads us to do something that isn’t good for us physically or emotionally.”

If we are feeling any of these, then the voice is not that of our intuition.

Intuition, on the other hand “…brings a feeling of enlivenment, openness, even sometimes relief and release. It feels good in our hearts and soul. It feels like exactly the right step to take in the moment.“

Sounds good, but how do we develop our intuition?

Shakti Gawain’s book also provides a number of exercises that can be used to begin to develop your intuition. The one that I really like involves journaling.

For this exercise you need a small notebook that you can carry with you wherever you go, and a pen.

For a period of a week or so, every time you experience a hunch, have an intuitive impulse, notice that something feels right or doesn’t feel right, etc., write this experience down in your journal. Keep a record of what the feeling is. The ‘feeling’ doesn’t need to be just a voice in your mind (in fact, intuition often appears as something other than a voice in your mind) but is likely to be a reaction in your body like a tingling or tightening in your gut or a numbness or sensation in your arm.

For those who are more rational-minded, you could also keep track of the outcomes of these feelings.

The more you practice noticing and identifying these feelings of intuition as intuition, the more you will be able to follow your intuition on a daily basis.

Do you follow your intuition? If so, how does your intuition present itself to you? What feeling do you receive from your intuition when it is asking you to notice it?

TTFN

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No Comments | In: Authentic Happiness, Baby Boomers, Retirement Coach, Retirement Lifestyle Plan, intuition, life coaching, lifestyle design skills | tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . | #



July 17th, 2009

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”


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“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice.
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cheshire Cat.
“I don’t much are where —” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cheshire Cat.
“— so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.

Lewis Carol, Alice in Wonderland…….

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I love that quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In fact, I have probably lived that quote far too many times in my life. Movement became the benchmark through which I gauged progress in my life – as long as I was moving forward, I was getting somewhere and making progress, or at least that is what I used to think.

Then I started learning about life purpose and how to find my life purpose – that quality or passion that I wanted to center my life around. That ‘thing’ that I wanted to build a career on, or spend time studying, or spend time doing. That ‘thing’ would make me feel like I was accomplishing something with my life and not just going somewhere; anywhere!

OK, so I’m not the only person that is seeking to identify their life’s purpose. Seems that there are a few other baby boomers, and Gen Y’ers that are currently searching to define their life’s purpose.

There are numerous techniques that people use to explore and identify their life’s purpose. Many techniques involve answering questions, like the one’s below.

10 Questions That Can Help You Discover Your Life’s Purpose:

source: florindasdesigns Flickr, Cretive Commons

source: florindasdesigns Flickr, Cretive Commons

  1. What do you love to do, whether in your spare time or at work?
  2. What parts of your present job or life activities do you thoroughly enjoy?
  3. What do you naturally do well?
  4. What are your ten greatest successes to date (in your eyes)?
  5. Is there a cause about which you feel passionate?
  6. What are the ten most important lessons you have learned in your life?
  7. Are there some issues or perceived problems that have occurred over and over again?
  8. What do you daydream about doing?
  9. Imagine you are writing your epitaph? What things do you want to be remembered for at the end of your life?
  10. What would you do if you know you could not fail? What would it take to achieve that?

There is another technique that I really enjoy using to identify topics that I am interested in, but that could be because I am more than just a little bit book obsessed. Try spending some time wandering around a large book store. What topics are attracting your attention? History? Architecture? Travel? Look for a pattern in what book topics attract your attention.

You can also look at the books you own. What topics have interested you enough that you have actually bought books about the topic – and spent time reading them?

And you can look at what magazines you subscribe to. What are the topics of the articles that caught your attention and you enjoyed reading?

Once you have all of this information collected, see what patterns you can identify, what topics keep popping up. These common interests and patterns will point towards your life’s purpose and will help you set life goals, help you design your lifestyle, or help you maneuver through a major life transition.

With your life’s purpose, a goal and a plan in hand, you can begin building your best life. Or at least that is what I plan on doing :-)

TTFN

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4 Comments | In: Authentic Happiness, Baby Boomers, Retirement Coach, Retirement Lifestyle Plan, beginnings, lifestyle design | tags: , , , , , , , , , , . | #



July 9th, 2009

Random Acts of Courage


A discussion on courage came up the other day, in a Mastermind Group that I belong to. We were asked to define what we thought courage was. Automatically the discussion turned to the courage that Firefighters, members of the Police Force, and members of the Armed Forces show in the line of duty.

But then the discussion took an interesting twist and started focusing on everyday acts of courage, the kind of acts of courage that we all face on a daily basis. For some in the group, enrolling in University as an undergraduate student in their forties was courageous. For others moving to a country on the other side of the world where you had never been to before and where you had no friends or family and living there for a couple of years, wasn’t so much an act of courage as it was an adventure.

The difference between what we saw as being courageous versus what we saw as be adventurous revolved around the idea of stepping outside of one’s comfort zone.

Everyone has a comfort zone, a depth and breadth of experiences that we are used to dealing with. We have our routines: we get up at a specific time most days to head to work where we do the job we were trained to do. We head home at roughly the same time every day to have dinner. After dinner we have our routines of either watching tv, or reading a book, or doing some shopping, or visiting a friend, that kind of stuff. Within this realm of experiences we know that we can deal with most things that come along, so we are fairly comfortable.

However, when our routines change or disappear (like when we retire, or begin a location independent lifestyle, or become a solo entrepreneur, or experience some other major life transition) we can lose much of our comfort zone.

I’m not a ‘fear fit’ person, and when I stopped working last year my comfort zone shrank considerably. I lost my routine of getting up in the morning, driving to work, interacting with coworkers, do my job, etc. Rather than live within this smaller comfort zone, what I decided to do was to commit random acts of courage and use this opportunity to expand my comfort zone and increase my fear fitness level.

These ‘random acts of courage’ involve my doing things that I have never done before. I’ll tackle small things at first, then gradually build my random acts of courage to involve situations that currently illicit a fear response.

By facing new challenges and dealing with the unknown I plan to increase my self-confidence level, develop new coping skills, reduce my fears, and generally expand my comfort zone.

And, by expanding my comfort zone a little at a time I will be learning more about fear and how to:

  • identify which fears I can develop coping mechanisms for so they are no longer a problem;
  • which fears are coupled with excitement so that I know that I am doing something that is right for me; and
  • which fears are protective, indicating things that perhaps I shouldn’t be doing at this point in time.

I have several major lifestyle transitions planned for the next couple of years. By doing these random acts of courage now, and gradually increasing the fear level involved with each random act of courage, I should be able to increase my comfort zone enough so that the transitions I have planned for won’t be too scary when it comes time to make them.

Well, at least that’s the plan.

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p.s. I wanted to thank Cath Duncan for challenging my thoughts on fear. Her new Bottom-line Bookclub has been presenting some fascinating and thought provoking ideas on fear – on how we can learn to identify different types of fear and become fear literate; and on how we can develop our coping skills so that we can become fear fit. I will definitely be making use of a number of her suggestions as I practice my random acts of courage in my bid to expand my comfort zone.

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July 8th, 2009

Are You ‘Fear Fit’?


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Being ‘fear fit’ is about:

  • identifying if the fear we are feeling is one that will help us or if its a fear that will harm us, and
  • expanding our comfort zone so that we become increasingly more comfortable with feeling our fear, and reacting accordingly.

In this month’s Bottom-Line Bookclub, one of the points that Cath Duncan pulls from the book Escape From Cubicle Nation is the idea of being ‘fear fit’.

Basically, fear can either protect us from getting hurt by preventing us from doing things we probably shouldn’t be doing (the ‘fight or flight’ mechanism), or fear can show us what is really important to us and become an indicator that guides us along our right path.

Unfortunately, most of us tend to identify all of our fears as the ‘fight or flight’ type and miss out on the opportunity of letting fear help us figure out what is really important to us. After all, if what we were doing or thinking about doing wasn’t important to us, we wouldn’t care if we did it or not and we wouldn’t feel fear when we thought about it or tried to move towards it.

So, how can you tell if you are feeling a good fear, one that is trying to help you, or a protective fear, one that is trying to prevent you from hurting yourself??

An effective technique that Cath Duncan described is to recognize when you are feeling fearful and to identify what you are thinking about or doing that evoked the fear response.

Take, for example, a situation where you are thinking about making a major lifestyle change. You wanted to incorporate into your life something you have been dreaming about doing for a long time, like opening your own business, or becoming a professional Travel Writer. If every time you begin to think about opening your own business or being a Travel Writer you begin to feel fearful, then you should analyze that fear. Ask your self if the fear is identifying something that is important to you, or is the fear trying to protect you from hurting yourself?

If you believe the fear is trying to protect you from hurting yourself, then make a list of everything you can think of that might hurt you if you made this change. Go through the list and identify any fear that is related to a situation that you can develop a coping strategy for. The coping strategy could be anything that either reduced the impact of the situation, changed the way you felt about the situation, or eliminated the situation all together. If you can identify coping strategies for most or all of the fears you identified, then the original fear you felt was very likely to have been a good fear. This is the kind of fear that identifies things that are important to you and lets you know you are on your right path.

I did this exercise recently and was quite surprised by the results. Of course, these weren’t my fears that I was analyzing, which made the exercise a whole lot easier to do :-)

Recently, Corbett Barr from Free Pursuits and Lea Woodward from Location Independent Living ran a Location Independent and Digital Nomad Survey in which 268 people took part (94 location independents, and 174 aspiring location independents). Location Independence is a lifestyle design that combines extensive travel with a career, something that requires a fairly high fear threshold.

One of the questions asked participants to identify fears that they had regarding either living this lifestyle, or planning to live this lifestyle. A total of 86 unique fears were shared by the 268 participants. Several of the fears were shared by dozens of the respondents.

In looking at each fear I asked myself if I could develop a coping strategy for that fear, or if this was a fear that identified a situation that would be totally beyond my control and therefore something I should be afraid of.

Over 90% of the identified fears were fears that a coping mechanism could be identified for, with less than 10% being the ‘protective’ kind of fear. What I found most interesting was that 80% of the ‘protective fears’ were identified by people who were already living a location independent lifestyle (these included fears of plane crashes, border control problems, not getting home in time if a loved one died, those kinds of fears).

Using the idea of being ‘fear fit’, it seems like those aspiring Location Independent/Digital Nomads that participated in the survey were experiencing the ‘good fear’ – the kind of fear that indicates that they have found a lifestyle choice that is important to them.

So the first half of being ‘fear fit’ is to identify and analyze your fears in order for you to determine which fears are acting like a ‘fear radar’ and are showing you what is important to you, and which fears are the ‘fight or flight’ type of fears that are protecting you from harm.

The second half of being ‘fear fit’ is to learn how to find the courage to expand your comfort zone so that you can stop letting your fears prevent you from doing things that are important to you. But that is a topic for my next post :-)

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3 Comments | In: Ageless Explorers, Baby Boomers, Fear Fit, Retirement Coach, Retirement Lifestyle Plan, lifestyle design skills | tags: , , , , , , , , , , . | #



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