Inner180

I’ll never complain about anything again, I swear, after spending last weekend reading Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust.  The author, Immaculee Ilibigiza, was just 22 years old when, in 1994, Rwanda suddenly descended into an unspeakably brutal genocide in which machete-wielding Hutus slaughtered nearly a million ethnic Tutsis.

The memoir recounts the brutal murders of Immaculee’s beloved parents and brothers, along with scores of her friends, neighbors and schoolmates.  She escaped her own death only by hiding in silence for three months in a local pastor’s three foot by four foot bathroom with seven other women, only to emerge starving and still in great danger.

This is a deeply moving love story, in which Immaculee transcends her fear and hatred of those who tore her life, her family, and her country apart.  Ultimately, she faces and forgives her family’s killers.  It is a remarkable and inspiring account of unconditional love under the most challenging circumstances imaginable.

And you think you have problems?

That it’s hard to forgive your ex?

That the economy is scary?

That you can’t let go of your dysfunctional childhood?

That life handed you a raw deal?

If you ever have whiney, victim-y thoughts, read this book.  If you hold onto your painful past for any reason, read this book.

You’ll get a new perspective in a flash, I promise.

Sometimes good fortune arrives in our lives so effortlessly that we can’t believe it.  We hesitate and hold back.  Surely it can’t be this easy, we tell ourselves.  Our smaller, more painful interpretation of life is so much more familiar so it seems safer and more real.  We shrink from the beauty and magic unfolding before us.

Rumi urges us to seize life fearlessly, to let go and merge with it, and to embrace with ease the joy and opportunity as it comes to us:

The Seed Market

Can you find another market like this?
Where,
with your one rose
you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?
Where
For one seed
you get a whole wilderness?
For one weak breath,
the divine wind?
You have been fearful
of being absorbed in the ground,
or drawn up by the air.
Now, your waterbead lets go
and drops into the ocean,
where it came from.
It no longer has the form it had,
but it’s still water.
The essence is the same.
This giving up is not a repenting.
It’s a deep honoring of yourself.
When the ocean comes to you as a lover,
marry, at once, quickly,
for God’s sake!
Don’t postpone it!
Existence has no better gift.
No amount of searching
will find this.
A perfect falcon, for no reason,
has landed on your shoulder,
and become yours.

Has a perfect falcon landed on your shoulder?  What do you want to do with it?  Do you welcome it wholeheartedly?  Will you honor yourself, believe it, and allow it into your life?

Or are you thinking “this can’t be real if it comes so easily”?  Or “this can’t be valuable if it has come so easily”?  Are you believing that struggle is a necessary component of your life?

Where can you be more open to the rose gardens, the divine breezes, and the magnificent oceans which come to you?

I recently spoke with Carolyn Gable about Fear and Finances on her radio show.  Carolyn Gable is a Chicago dynamo who went from high school grad and waitress to CEO of her own $30+ MILLION company.  How’s that for fearlessness?  She now has a weekly radio show dedicated to empowering single moms.  You can learn more about Carolyn here.

As a former single mom (with a 12 month old nursing baby and a high-energy, high-needs toddler), I know how scary it can be.  I’m honored and thrilled to have participated in this effort dedicated to helping single moms!

You can listen to our conversation on the button below.

A quiz:

1.  The electric drill breaks in the middle of a big project that you had set the whole weekend aside for. You:
a.  Tell yourself the drill shouldn’t break because it’s not that old.
b.  Curse the drill, the traffic on the way to the home store to buy a new drill, and the long checkout line in the store.
c.  Tell yourself and the person next to you in the checkout line that it’s a rip-off that drills cost so much and don’t last long.
d.  All of the above.

2.  Your printer is feuding with your computer when you need a document pronto for an important meeting.  You:
a.  Tell yourself that the printer should work because it was working fine a minute ago.
b.  Hit the print command over and over.
c.  Tell yourself you are an idiot for waiting for the last minute to print the document, and worry about losing your job.
d.  Tell yourself that bad things always happen to you
e.  All of the above.

3.  You leave late and hit a huge traffic jam on your way to your dental appointment.  You:
a.  Tell yourself the traffic shouldn’t be jammed at this hour.
b.  Grab the steering wheel tightly, clench your teeth, and curse the traffic.
c.  Think up dramatic excuses to tell the dental receptionist, the dentist, and everyone in the waiting room about why you are late.
d.  Complain to everyone in the waiting room that you have way too much to do and not enough time to do it in.
e.  All of the above.

4.  You are remodeling your kitchen and the granite you ordered doesn’t arrive on time, requiring your contractor to postpone the installation of your counters and new sink.  You have a big party at your house Saturday night, and you were planning to show off your new kitchen.  You:
a.  Chew out the contractor about how he missed an important deadline.
b.  Cancel your party and tell your friends (and yourself) how stressful it is to remodel.
c.  Get in a huge fight with your partner who doesn’t want to cancel the party, and who just doesn’t get it.
d.  Spend the afternoon crying.
e.  All of the above.

If you chose a, b, c, d, or e, it’s called arguing with reality, and it’s an argument you will lose.  Always.

Here’s the truth:  drills break, printers don’t print, and traffic jams happen.  Refrigerators and washing machines break, too, usually when they are full.  Kids forget to take their homework to school, granite doesn’t arrive on time for your party, and your last pair of contact lenses rip as you take them out of the container.  No matter what you are endeavoring to do, sometimes there will be glitches, delays, foul-ups, screw-ups, and mess-ups.  Count on it.

Now, answer one more question:

You are in the middle of something and a glitch, delay, or foul-up happens.  You:

a.  Accept reality
b.  Respond with a peaceful heart
c.  Find your sense of humor
d.  All of the above

There’s an ancient mango tree next to my cottage; it’s magnificent, with a thick, gnarled brown trunk and long glossy leaves.  How many hurricanes it’s withstood is anybody’s guess.  It’s been barren for at least 35 years, which is how long I’ve had this place.  This year, inexplicably, it flowered, and then, magically, massive clusters of fruit appeared.

A few weeks ago, its mangoes began falling.  I sampled one, but it was tasteless.  The fruit drops day and night, thudding on the roof and plopping to the ground, but I’ve ignored it, except to gather it up from time to time and bury it, to keep it from attracting insects.  I have two other trees providing fruit, so I gave it no further thought, except at midnight whenever a hard, green mango smacks onto the roof and rolls to the ground.

As I cleaned up the fruit this morning, I spotted a couple of really pretty, golden specimens.  Curious, I took them in to sample, and they were an extraordinary surprise–sweet, tender, and delicious.

I think the tree is telling me that we can always regenerate,  sweeten, and offer the best of ourselves to the world.  And that sometimes, our assumptions may not be true, even when we think we’ve investigated them.

Aren’t those messages we can always take to heart?  No matter how many times we’ve told ourselves we couldn’t do something, no matter how many times our creative mind seemed barren, no matter how many times we’ve failed to seize the opportunities that come to us, we can always regenerate and bloom and sweeten.  And even when we’ve told ourselves the same old story, over and over, we can look inside again, and find liberating new truth.

The mango tree is just outside my bedroom window, and late at night, as I’m drifting off to sleep, I hear it out there, releasing it’s sweet golden offerings.  I hear them rustling through the palm fronds as they descend, then landing in the thick jungle of vines below.  Each time I hear it, I remember all of the regeneration and opportunity and sweetness and truth in the world.  And that whether I pay attention or not, they’re there–delicious surprises,  just waiting for me to notice.

Last week, the topic of mistakes and failures came up in many client sessions.  It was also a huge topic in several classes I taught.  “I’m afraid I’ll fail,”  “I’m afraid of making a mistake,” and “I can’t let go of my failure or a mistake I made in the past,” were the themes.

This morning a passage in Deepak Chopra’s little book, Creating Affluence, practically jumped off the page at me:  “In reality, there is no such thing as failure. What we call failure is just a mechanism through which we can learn to do things right. . . . This is the principle of feedback.”

There’s nothing really new in the concept that “there is no such thing as failure” or “there are no mistakes,” but I got really excited when I read this.  A huge light flashed on for me:  I have a whole new way to conceptualize setbacks, mistakes, and failures—it’s FEEDBACK.

I’ve spent plenty of time wrestling with being fearful about mistakes, and having utterly no tolerance for my own. When I was beginning my own deep inner work, I remembered that my dear mother (who passed away when I was in my early twenties, so I don’t think she’ll mind my sharing this now) had told me when I was about ten years old that I was “a mistake.”

This was intended to impress upon me the importance, in her view, of not having sex before marriage.  But that’s not what I got from it.  I think that I somehow internalized this message and was extremely intolerant and fearful of making mistakes.  I was dedicated to avoiding mistakes at all costs.

And, even though I’ve made light years of progress in my personal “mistake and failure acceptance,” I’ve never had much of a sense of humor about it until this morning.  It struck me for the first time that I wasn’t a mistake—I was FEEDBACK!

The more I thought about it the funnier it got.  I was notorious as a child for being into everything; incapable of walking, I only ran. Some handful of feedback, eh?  The facts of life being taught to a young, small-town Southern girl, courtesy of a curious toddler who would never be still.  Somehow, being of such great educational value to my mother made the sting of her words completely vanish.

So thanks, Mommy.  Thanks for the lessons we taught each other.  Perhaps our journey together can help someone else.

And now, how about you?

Can you find any more ease, lightness, or humor in your “mistakes” and “failures” if you see them as feedback?

Could you look forward to your new challenges and activities with more excitement, more enthusiasm, if the worst thing that could happen is that you got feedback?

1.  It’s fun.

2.  Creativity is associated with positive emotions such as happiness, joy, and love. Contrary to popular myth, the negative emotions of fear, sadness, and anxiety stifle creativity.  Don’t believe it?  Read this.

3.  It’s useful.  When you need to solve a problem, you have more options to choose from if you can access creative solutions.

4.  It helps you access all of you. Creativity uses both right brain, wholisitc and image based brain processes as well as left brain, logical, verbal, sequential thinking.

5.  It requires you to take risks, which develops courage and confidence, and courage and confidence are handy things to have.

6.  It develops efficiency.  When you are comfortable thinking outside the box, you can get to new solutions more easily.

7.  It encourages you to experience “flow,” where you are so fully immersed in what you are doing, that you effortlessly lose your sense of time.

8.  It relieves boredom.

9.  It makes life way more interesting.

10.  Because you are creative.

Sarah was stuck.  She came to our coaching session this week hurt and confused, and was wholeheartedly committed to a painful interpretation of a situation with a co-worker.  Blinded by her thoughts, Sarah clung to her painful position.  I watched her face crinkle in confusion and doubt, as her pain grew worse and worse.

Towards the end of our session, her frustration grew so great that I began to contemplate how to conclude the session without her achieving much insight.  In the next instant, she broke through her pain and confusion.  “I get it,” she said, as tears of relief streamed down her face.  “I feel like Helen Keller.“ she told me.  As I recalled the powerful scene in the movie The Miracle Worker when Helen “got it,” tears welled up in my eyes, too.

For the remainder of our session, Sarah was able to discuss the relationship with her colleague with clarity and calm.  She had had what we call an “aha” moment. These moments of insight, arrived at by our own hard work, investigation, and effort are the most powerful learning experiences there are.  Sure, there is often a struggle and there may be plenty of discomfort, but when that “aha” arrives, it’s akin to what Helen Keller called “the most important moment” of her life.  She finally understood that Annie Sullivan’s incessant and incomprehensible hand gestures and sounds could unlock the doorway to connecting with and understanding the world around her.

This is why coaching and indeed any process that allows us to discover our own answers is so potent—we struggle through a problem ourselves and find our own answers.  When we do this, rather than being given advice or handed the “right answer,” we are actually forging new connections, new neural pathways in our brains.  In fact, our brains actually release a small spurt of energizing adrenaline, which we interpret as a pleasurable sensation.

We are all familiar with these “aha” moments and they feel very different from other types of learning, like, for instance, attending a lecture. So the next time you are frustrated, confused, and unable to solve a problem, hang in there.  Your “Helen Keller moment” may arrive in the next instant.

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?” ~~ Howard Ikemoto

We do forget don’t we?  What happens to us, to our creativity?  How do we forget that we can draw and dance and paint and playfully express ourselves in thousands of creative, fun, meaningful ways?

I’ve been reading Ellen Langer’s excellent exploration of creativity, On Becoming an Artist. Here’s a rundown of some of the culprits she names as enemies of our creative expression:

–Judging your creative ideas or attempts.  (“Ugh.  My painting sucks.  I’m just no good at it.”)
–Comparing your creations to the work of others. (“My photography is just not as good as Ansel Adams’.”)
–Fear of making a mistake.  (“I can’t draw noses right, ever.”)
–Believing the myth that creativity requires special talent or gift and that we don’t have it.  (“I’d love to write a poem, but I don’t have any talent.”)

If you are telling yourself any of this, notice the effect it has on you.  Notice how you feel.  Are you inspired, do you want to sit at your piano when you are critical?  Do want to pick up a pen?

Where are you judging yourself, comparing yourself, fearing a mistake?  Let it go and just dive in.  Enjoy the process of painting, with no thought about the quality of your result.  Grab your camera, and point it at the light.  Forget about whether a masterpiece will emerge.

Remind yourself of the fun it is to put beautiful color on paper, that practice or a class will improve your skills, and that even accomplished artists spend time developing their gifts.  Find the thoughts that liberate and inspire you.

Take a lesson from Howard’s daughter—remember that you know how to draw.  You know how to paint and sing and dance, too.  You’ve just forgotten how for the moment.  When you put down the thoughts that get in your way, and instead, pick up the pencil, you’ll remember exactly how to do it.

I once met a woman who won the lottery.  Even though she’d already won about $500,000, she still bought lottery tickets regularly.  She told me it is very common among lottery winners to continue to play the lottery.  She absolutely knew she was lucky, and actually intended to win a second time.

My friend Kathy says she has great parking space luck.  Every time we go somewhere we park right by the front door of wherever we’re going.  She says this always happens.

I no longer think that this is random or coincidental or weird.  I think we create our luck.  We choose to allow it into our lives.  So how can we create more luck in our lives?  Try these suggestions:

Notice the luck you already have. Remember how you found that amazing jacket that fits perfectly, the last one in the store, the one that was on sale?  And how all of the traffic lights were lined up green as you drove downtown?  And how you sat next to someone at a luncheon who became your best client?  You are lucky already, aren’t you?   Now, just notice it more.

Believe that life happens for you, not to you. Even when circumstances are tough—you are laid off from work or your teenager is picked up by the police for violating your town’s curfew—know that this opens a doorway to something positive, something better for you.  Maybe it will be a more satisfying job or a chance to connect more deeply with your teen.  Whatever happens, allow it to be an opportunity to move forward, to allow something better, to grow.

Think like a lucky person. Our thoughts determine our feelings and from there we act in ways that bring us the results we get in life.  Lucky people think they are lucky, and act in ways that confirm it.

My friend Kathy has good-parking karma because she begins and ends her search with the best parking spaces in the lot.  She does this because she expects an opening there.  If she searched for a space in the back row, that’s where she’d find one, and that’s where she’d park.  And she would never think she was lucky.

Because they think they are lucky, lucky people feel lucky and act like they are lucky.  In other words, they make their luck.

So what would happen in your life if you thought you were lucky?  What if you expected life to be filled with wonder and magic and luck and great parking spots?  What thoughts would you think?  How would you feel if you believed that wonderful things would come your way, all day long?  Would you act differently?  Would you look for the best parking spaces in the lot?  Try it.  Then just notice what happens.