The Tax Man Cometh

Did you know that 75% of adults responding to a recent American Psychological Association survey said they experienced moderate to high levels of stress in the previous month? More than half the respondents claimed their stress had increased over the past year!

Doing the tax dance can produce positive or negative stress. We like the positive and work hard to eliminate, ignore, or deny the negative. But we’re still stressing.

Unlike other forms of coaching, healer coaching does not simply provide temporary relief from stress. Clients learn to untie the mental knots affecting their mind, body, spirit and emotions, releasing themselves from habituated patterns of reaction. By learning to distinguish between the activity/ story and the stress to which they attach, clients transform their relationship to stress. They are more competent to correct and monitor their thoughts, speech and action. Most of us can’t do self- surgery when it comes to changing ourselves. We need someone upon whose guidance and expertise we can rely.

Recognize You’re In Stress:
Identify one area in your life where you’re living with chronic stress. Each time a thought or experience creates agitation or dissonance, you’re stressing. Learn to recognize the difference between ease of mind and agitation. The constant internal chatter of “I like this, I don’t like that” breeds stress.

Make Friends With Your Stress:
Get to know your stress. Be curious about its texture, flavor, focus, and themes. Invite the Stress into your home where all guests are welcome. Sit with your stress on the couch. If you don’t familiarize yourself with your stress, how can you transform it?

When You’re In The Stress:
1. Develop a daily mindfulness practice. Whether you sit for ten minutes or one hour it’s the quality of the practice that counts. John Cabot Zinn materials provide a nourishing place to begin your sitting practice.

2. Time Outs. We assign them to our kids when they’re acting out, why not assign one to yourself

3. Exercise (cardio or yoga). Try both to see which activity fits your need. Regular exercise conditions your body to serve yourself and others. 

4. Find a Way to Release The Pressure: Many of us attach to our stress, re-telling stories in numerous ways so that the story gains more fury. Like a pot of coffee cooking all day on the stove, the stories/secrets we harbor become acidic, leaving us weaker, less powerful to take action. We become victims to our stress. Find a committed listener, who has no personal agenda. Whether you choose a therapist, coach, or mentor, the one requirement is that your listener passes no judgment, provides no feedback unless you ask for it.

5. When in the middle of a storm, do damage control. If you’re getting swept away by your destructive emotions, pull the plug. This step is not always easy to do because when we’re experiencing negative emotions, we enjoy going for the jugular. Stabbing someone we think is hurting us feels good, even when we know it’s not how we want to be. Again, take a time out. Even if the person you’re stabbing is yourself!

6. Acknowledge the event. Apologize to yourself or to others who got caught in the fire. Make amends. Promise not to repeat the pattern for a specific short period of time (hours, not days). Whether you can change your behavior or not, acknowledge that you tried. Forgive and forget. 

7. Sticks and Stones Can Break Your Bones. But names can never harm you. Our egos are big even when we think they’re not. If you say something regrettable, or someone has spoken harshly to you, remember, words alone do not harm us. It is your ego, your pride that’s taking what is said personally. Developing a mindfulness practice will help you roll with life, instead of fighting.

What would it be like to be free of negative emotions causing stress? As April 15th draws close why not look at areas in your life where you are chronically stressed. Then ask if the tips and techniques you’ve tried have alleviated your stress? If you’re settling for temporary relief, call me.

Rhona Post, a master certified coach with the International Coach Federation since 1999, has traversed the landscape of coaching with certifications in ontological, somatic and intuitive energy healing. A mindfulness practitioner, she provides a unique approach that supports clients to be comfortable in their own skin. Rhona hosts a monthly Energy Work & Coaching Community of Practice for ICF coaches. Her current book, Navigating Tomorrow, a self-change manual is available in print and eBook on Amazon.com. She maintains an international individual and group healer coaching practice in Sarasota, Florida, working by phone, Skype and in person. Learn more: www.thehealercoach.com.

Who are you meant to serve? Finding the courage to be true to yourself.

Who are you meant to serve? The process of getting really clear on this can be quite a journey.

Caterina Barregar of Imagine Life Coaching is a perfect example of what happens for many coaches who keep asking, “Who is my ideal client? What am I really meant to do?” A graduate of the Passion Into Profit program, she volunteered to share her story about moving more and more into alignment with her true passion.

Check out this interview by clicking the image below.



Developing your credo isn’t just an exercise – it’s a journey. On your journey, you must find the courage to be true to yourself, to find your passion and your love, and to embrace the entrepreneurial mindset: to say, “How can I turn that passion into profit?” For the sake of sustainability and living a life that you love, you must be true to yourself. Caterina is a great example of that. It's been a journey, but today she is solid about how she wants to make a difference in the world – and she knows how to communicate that to others. That’s what it takes to turn a passion into profit.

Passion Into Profit Coach Challenge: Ask yourself what is my life story? Who am I perfectly designed to serve in this lifetime?

Teresia LaRocque MCC, is the Director of Entrepreneurship and Business Building Mentor for the Erickson Business Center – www.ericksonbusinesscenter.com at Erickson College International www.erickson.edu. Teresia is a pioneer in the booming profession of personal coaching, the first recipient of the International Coach Federation’s Master Coach Credential in Canada and cofounder for the Vancouver International Coach Federation chapter. She is the founder and facilitator of the Passion into Profit Program, a customized business building program for coaches and is committed to supporting coaches to take their talent and passion for coaching and make their entrepreneurial dreams come true.

The Value of ICF Membership

 

 

Visit the ICF Global YouTube channel for other ICF and coaching videos.

I Break For Success

“Stop” is probably not something you frequently say to yourself and your clients. It is a dirty word and a radical concept in work cultures where ‘powering through’ is an expectation, a badge of honor, and in some cases, an addiction.

An opinion piece in a February issue of New York Times should be the spark of a work and lifestyle revolution that turns “stop” into our battle cry and marching orders. The article, Relax! You’ll Be More Productive by author and productivity expert Tony Schwartz, is packed with exciting data about the benefits of taking breaks in all shapes and sizes. Here’s a sampler of what got me break dancing:

• A 2012 study found that sleeping fewer than six hours per night is the best predictor of job burnout.
• Air traffic controllers who napped an average of just under 20 minutes were more vigilant and had better reaction time than their non-napping counterparts.
• Longer nappers who nodded off for 60-90 minutes did as well on memory tests as those who slept a full eight hours, according to a nap researcher at the University of California-Riverside.
• Here’s my favorite one: An internal Ernst & Young study last year found that, for each additional ten hours of vacation a staff member took, her or his end-of-year performance scores improved by 8%. This same study said that frequent vacation-takers were much more likely to remain with the company.
• Despite the above, in 2011, Americans did not use six of their vacation days, and in 2012, that number skyrocketed to 9, according to a Harris Interactive poll (EU readers are shaking their heads in disbelief right now).
• Better performers work in intervals of 90 minutes and never work for more than 4.5 hours per day, so say researchers at Florida State University. This may be due to daytime energy rhythms that have many of us cycling from alertness to fatigue every hour-and-a-half.

So, why aren’t we napping on the job, getting the nightly sleep we need and taking the vacation we earn? If we want ourselves, our clients and those who work for us to be more productive and perform at a higher level, this data along with many other recent and well-researched findings say, work less!

Or at least, work smarter.

There’s another compelling reason to take timeouts. Breaks can prevent stress symptoms such as muscle tension, eye strain, bad moods and anxiety from turning into back pain, headaches, poor communication, refrigerator raids, panic episodes and low quality sleep.



Brief breaks rock, too. Take this 3-minute time out with Jordan Friedman’s Quick Calm, deep-breathing exercise.

Why don’t we conduct our own experiments? For those of us who sit in the driver’s seats of our work lives, let’s plan and take regular breaks for a couple of weeks to see if we realize the same payoffs as the subjects of the studies sited earlier. If we do, we need to make breaks permanent and influence others to try this new way of working for themselves and those who work for them. Fortunately, more and more, culture change has come to workplaces who’s leaders have put the breaks on nonstop work habits that many can’t kick on their own.

Continually armed with the latest data and break-taking success stories from workers and employers, we will win the battle for lower stress and greater success.

I leave you with this triumphant statistic: The French, on average, take more time off from work than any other people, and they are consistently ranked as the most productive in the industrialized world. Les miserables? Not anymore.

Jordan Friedman, a.k.a. The Stress Coach, is a global stress management speaker, trainer and former director of Columbia University’s health promotion program. His Stress Coach U program trains coaches and other professionals to teach their clients and students stress reduction techniques (www.stresscoachu.com) Jordan is the author of The Stress Manager’s Manual and co-author of The Go Ask Alice Book Of Answers. He provides free how-to videos, exercises and other resources for coaches, trainers and stress- relief seekers at www.thestresscoach.com. Copyright 2013 Jordan Friedman. Published with permission.

What do you choose? Fear or Joy?

Can you relate to that terrible imagining? 

You know how you're watching your child fast asleep; just a little baby, and you're thinking how blessed you are and how much you love him? 

And then your thoughts wander to how you can barely remember what life was like just a few months ago, before you had kids. 

And then you watch him breathe and suddenly imagine he's not breathing… 

And then you get really scared and imagine all the terrible things that could happen to him…

I think we all do this. I know Brene Brown talks about it in her amazing books. 

Here's the thing though, I realize that we do it in our business as well.  It's not just about the people we love or the things we care about…it's a kind of 'giving in' to the fear.

What will happen if I don't get more clients?
How will I survive if this latest idea doesn't work out?
How many times can I bounce back after I fail?
How can I be so sure that this will work?

These are very natural fears that come with the courageous act of having your own business.  The question is how can they be managed? Or disappear?

Just the other day, I was talking to a business owner about the power of finding your story and how it's an amazing way to beat old sabotaging ideas and fears. She said, yes, "I get that logically but how do I really begin to live it?"

I explained that we tell stories all the time and that they really define our reality. It's all in our stories. Think about it, every time we have any kind of meaningful experience, we tell it.  And what we tell is completely subjective; we choose everything about the story. The strange thing is that then we tend to imagine that it somehow just 'happened' to us and we had absolutely no control. So we allow our stories create our reality.

And that's good news. The minute you start paying attention to your stories, you can tell more empowering ones; stories that are not about fear and crisis, stories that are about possibility!

So next time you catch yourself telling a story that is based in fear – catch it, watch it, and notice that it's simply your story. You can tell it – or not. You can choose to tell a story that serves you well; a story of joy, a story of beauty, a story of blessings and a story of possibility. 

Which would you prefer?

Lisa Bloom, PCC is founder of Story Coach Inc. and the Certified Story Coach Program.  Download her ebook ‘Using Stories to Get Great Clients’ at http://www.story-coach.com.