There is no such thing as a small change.

Change of any kind, however, is impossible without an awareness of what needs to change and an understanding of how your personal approach to your life can be used to bring about the success you desire. Deborah’s compassionate, action oriented approach that moves you continually toward your dream will support you in make this coaching club the one that enables you to make 2008 the year you finally get ‘it’ done.

If 80% of success is showing up..what’s the other 20?

Learn the most powerful thing you can do to connect successfully with your potential clients, patrons, buyers…fearlessly.    What got you though the door.. won’t get you the gig.

What got you through the door, won’t get you the gig.

Dalia has a great product, is always presentable and knows her facts inside and out.  She goes to networking events regularly to meetup with a tight group of friends and she has a good time. Shes’ created great marketing material and a streamlined  sales process.  Dalia knows that when her time comes, when she meets the right people.  She’ll be ready.  But she hasn’t met the ‘right’ people yet and her business is stalled.  She’s showing up for events.  When is it going to happen for her?

Dalia is waiting to be discovered.  Are you?

When you walk into a room of friends and loved ones, how tall to you stand? How alert are you to people in the room, how friendly are you?
How was that different than the last time you walked into a room of potential clients, patrons, or buyers sprinkled with a few ‘perceived competitors’?    Do you stand tall or stand back? Reach out or become invisible?  Do you feel empowered or disempowered?    How do you perceive powerful people?
How would you define ‘power’.  Does it smack of negativity for you?  Is someone with power a bully, an oppressor, ‘have the upper hand’  or do you see it as a positive thing?  Something that enables confidence and a certain ‘sureness’?
The kicker here is that your sense of power is yours alone.  It’s neither positive or negative.  You pre-determine how you will use it by how you feel about it.

How do you think Dalia felt about power?

How do you feel about it.  If you felt powerful or empowered how would you use it to show up differently at the event with potential clients?   Owning your power determines if you walk into a room ready to ‘play ball’ or you’ve decided ahead of time to ‘sit this one out’ .   Are you still waiting to be discovered? Hoping that someone will give you a break?

Okay, Okay.  Guilty as charged.  What do I do now?

The first step is a mere hint of a willingness to claim your power.  It is a willingness to show up as your very best self and allow your passion for what you do and you’re delight in what you have to offer the world carry you to connect with others and learn about what they are passionate about. It’s a belief that you are equal in every respect to everyone else in the room (because this is the truth)      So often we approach events with this logic:  the more important the event feels to us, the more anxious we get and completely forget who we are and what we truly are about.  We walk in,not as ourselves, but instead with the facade of who we think we ‘should’ be.    If we maintain this (and far too many do) we wind up walking into the most important meetings of our lives ‘pretending’ to be someone we are not.   As good a recipe for regret and missed opportunities  as I’ve ever seen.  Yet far too many of us do it, and continue to to it even when we regret it and beat ourselves up afterward.

Why does this persist?

Fear. Fear of rejection.  Fear of looking like a loser.  Fear of feeling stupid or of not being good enough.. fear of ______ (you fill in the blank).   When fear is in charge,  we give our power away to whom ever we have deemed the decision maker in the room to determine for us our worth.

Not ‘when will it be my turn’ but ‘how do I make it my turn? ‘

Whoa!  ”But I don’t have the confidence for that” you say.  ”That’s why I’m coming to you to help me be more fearless.”   I get that, and in the challenge below you’ll find an exercise that will help you do just that.   The truth is that claiming your power, claiming your equality with everyone else in the room, are the first best steps to building the confidence you seek. 

Take the Challenge:

Be willing to ‘own’ your power    Define the word power.  (not the dictionary’s version or your best friends answer, do this one on your own).  _______________________________________________
Does your definition encourage you?
If it feels discouraging or negative, be aware that if our unconscious definition of power brings up negative feelings, it goes along way toward explaining why we have a hard time owning our own power and putting it into action in our lives.
If there is negativity, I invite you to re-define the word ‘power’ until it brings up a sense of integrity and becomes something you feel you can own.  Good Job!
Bridge Club Members:  Login in before the end of the month to get additional integration exercises and bonus material.
Fear less, Live More,

(P.S.  If you’ve just breezed though this article but you are truly serious of becoming more fearless in your business and eliminating chaos  I invite you to grab a paper and pen and go back through this article again.  This time through, however, stop at every question and answer it fully and wholeheartedly for yourself.  If you take it just 5 or 10 minutes at a time, you’ll be doing serious work in moving toward a more effective and fully lived life each day. )
(P.P.S If you’re not the ‘self’-study’ kind of person and  like more interaction consider joining the Bridge Club to participate in a lively discussion on fearless living principles and integrating them into your life today, their integration lead personally by me and receive solid ‘feedforward support on the work you’re personally doing twice a month.

Overcoming Obsticles (Reprinted from September)

For many of us Fall seems like the season of obstacles.  As we get back in gear following a lovely summer, check in with ourselves in relationship to our goals and pick up steam, we may find that the terrain has changed and we may run into a roadblock or two.
When you hit an obstacle, what do you do? Do you go into victim mode (fear): “I’m doing everything I can, why is this happening to me now!?  Or growing mode (freedom):.  “Working though this will support me in having the skills I need to move forward faster than if I hide out and try to avoid this.”
When we choose not to deal with an obstacle on our path to the life we want then fear is in charge.  Fear will tell us we don’t ‘deserve’ this problem or we look to take it as a ‘sign’ that we shouldn’t be on this path in the first place.

Overcoming Obstacles

Overcoming an obstacle always means learning, growing and risking. Fear is working overtime to keep us safe so instinctively taking any kind of risk feels like a really bad or even scary idea.

If you don’t get your fear in check, you begin to ‘awfulize’ and to consider all the things that could go wrong and the potential for disappointment in ourselves grows and sucks the air out of the room.  We use even the thought of it not panning out perfectly to serve as evidence that we don’t have the mettle for success. Now let’s take a look at a different approach.  When fear is not in control we see opportunity and possibility and a chance to practice using the skills we are developing in a real world environment.
Road blocks are an opportunity to further clarify and commit more fully to your vision. You want to know how committed you are to your vision? A road block will tell you in a heart beat.  There’s no more talking about your vision and what you are ‘going to do sometime’.  There’s no more waiting for the perfect time or the right moment. The self-deception is over.  There’s a road block between you and your dreams.  You decide if that road block stops you.  No one else.
When we allow roadblocks or obstacles to stop us, we are allowing fear to determine our progress. When we give obstacles power over us, we are saying we are victims of circumstance and are helpless to change them. When we think obstacles define our path, we are not connected to our vision, to our passion or to our purpose.  When we are clear why we do what we do, obstacles become a mere formality. They become a challenging game, an opportunity to learn more about who we are and show us how to become more fearless.

What seeming roadblocks are on your path?   Are you viewing that roadblock from a place of anxiety or opportunity?  If you were fearless, how would that obstacle appear?

Life is Messy

At some point in our timeline we gradually begin to take over the molding and shaping of our own lives.

Sometimes, however, we believe that by making excuses or blaming others, we can deny that we are in control of certain areas of our life until ‘all issues’ are resolved in that area.

Some of us crossed that line of responsibility for our own lives long ago and are just afraid to fully put our hands to the work. Maybe because it just feels so messy.

I tried recently to think of one creative process that we as human beings engage in that wasn’t messy at some level and I couldn’t think of any.

I invite you to lay claim to that part of your life that is messy and become a fearless creator and shaper. See the possiblities and opportunites that exist because you exist and shape yourself into the type of person, mother, friend, companion you want to be.

What happens to clay if it’s not worked? It becomes brittle and cracks under heaviness instead of being pliable and adaptable when there is change – and there is always change.

If you feel like you’re ready to get your hands dirty but don’t know how or where to start, and don’t want to go it alone consider working with a life coach. Creation is messy but the results of pushing your life and growth forward are profound. Live the life your soul intended.

Deborah@crossingbridgescoaching.com

The discipline of being free

Twala Tharp, world famous choreographer and dancer was demonstrating how, in her late 60s, she stays limber.  As she went through a series of rolls and stretches and then rewarded herself happily by bouncing around on a very large bright blue aerobic ball, she was joyful and yes, very limber.  When done she slapped her knee and said  ” that my friend, is the decipline of being free”.  As I sit here, much less limber, than a woman nearly twice my age, I was struck by the ache in my knees just from watching her and the beauty of the phase: “the discipline of being free”.

If you’re used to my writing than you know that I truly believe that those ‘ah ha’ moments are magic. And this was certainly one of those moments.  But that is where my romance with those moments end.  Because I also believe that they don’t change your life one iota without the work.

What Ms Tharp was saying, was what I’ve been saying from day one.  “Trust the process. Show up and do the work and you will be free to develop yourself and your creativity in the process”.

In my Fear less, Live More Bridge Club I invite all members to do the same: There’s no ‘right moment.  Let’s do the right work, right now and the freedom to live the life you want to live will come in the process.

As far as doing the work as the ‘decipline of being free’ – I,for one, have been stretching every day since I saw her bouncing on that ball!

As a special treat for the creatives in all of us, here’s a bit more from Twyla on  motiviation, creativity and ‘doing the work’.

All the secrets of success in 3 minutes

more about “8 secrets of success“, posted with vodpod

Secrets to Success in 8 words and 3 minutes

3rd world Anarchy, a board game, and a lesson I will never forget!

As a teenager, I lived in the heart of a very politically unstable third world country. During an election year it was not safe as a foreigner or as a young woman to travel alone. At one point there had been many reports of attacks, especially in the city where we lived.

Once, I went to a friend’s house, where I intended to stay only briefly and wound up staying for several hours. When I left to return home it was dark and a friend drove me back to my house even though it was only a few hundred feet away, because we all knew it wasn’t safe. When I returned home, I noticed that the family car was gone (rare in those days because there was a gas shortage) and my brother was sitting outside (rarer still because he was always out with friends). He said ‘where have you been?’ in a way that made me suddenly realized I hadn’t told anyone where I was going, and he shook his head as if he was resigned to my beheading.

My response? — I went completely numb. I didn’t think, I didn’t feel, I didn’t panic, I just sat there and waited, which was interpreted as indifference. It wasn’t, I simply didn’t know what else to do, I had no skills to deal with a mistake this bad. I hadn’t done it on purpose or to be stubborn or inconsiderate I just wasn’t thinking the way a parent would think.

I don’t know how much time past but the next thing I remember there were tires screeching on our long gravel drive way and the family car appeared in a cloud of dust. As clutches were popped and doors were flung open, and people rushing toward me, there was a blur of questions and I sat there numb, as hands flailed about, and father hoarsely screamed about trips to police stations and missing person reports and drives to hospitals to see if I was one of the beaten bodies unclaimed that day and an entire tank of gas used up running ‘up and down the countryside’ trying to find me.

His fear for my safety erupted into anger long before it dissolved into relief that I was okay. As a parent of 3 daughters today I begin to understand what my father must have gone through as I benignly played board games at a friend’s house that day at the age of 15.

Today as an executive coach, experienced in supporting my clients productively through difficult situations, I understand that anger is often a common response to fear. So is going completely numb. Here is no desire to go numb without the presence of fear neither is there anger unless fear of some type is present. Think about the last time you got angry? What was the circumstance? What was the anger really about? Really?

Responding to fear in the form of anger is what creates ‘turfs’ in neighborhoods and keeps our inner city youth’s world too small. It’s what causes a mother to beat a child after yanking him back from a road and the path of an oncoming car. It’s what makes a man -who thought his daughter had been brutally attacked and left for dead – slap his daughter’s face upon finding her alive and well. I understand how a person who loves you can hit you because he is scared for himself and for you. I don’t condone it, I don’t support it, I wouldn’t tolerate it, I simply understand it.

My father had never slapped me before or since. And in his apology later in the evening he said he was sorry he had to slap me over ‘such a thing’. Yes you read that correctly. He felt he had to slap me. He felt he had no choice. His lashing out was the only tool he had at his disposal.

At the time I felt the only tool I had at my disposal was to go completely numb. If it had been my brother he would have spent his time planning an apology and if needed, an escape route. We all had our own way of dealing with fear, but only my brother’s way would have been productive.

I have spent many years since that time, learning about mastering the fears that keep you from showing up for your life the way you want to so you can accomplish your goals and I love supporting my clients in doing the same. And while getting angry or going numb turns out not to be very effective in moving the ball forward, sometimes a sincere apology, quick thinking and an effective exit strategy is just the thing to protect your integrity, your proverbial hide and a life lived in freedom instead of fear!

Compassion for the world…of course… compassion for others? absolutely…compassion for myself…. ummmmm?

The power of compassion is changing the world in many wonderful ways. I know that many people reading this are part of that change.

However, over and over again, I see the most compassionate people I know unwilling to extend compassion to themselves. I see it because I know exactly what to look for. I used to be pretty void of compassion for myself for alot of years! We have compassion for humanity at large but beat ourselves up when we stumble or feel inadequate in business or family relationships or life.

I invite you take a moment and imagine the following:What if there was nothing more to learn, no future growth possible? What if we were as competent in all areas of our life as we were ever going to be? Think about that for a minute ……………. okay now stop thinking about it– Yuck. Pretty abysmal thought ain’t it? But day in and day out, many of us live as if this were true in one or more areas of our lives because we believe we can’t change. We may even feel we are unfixable or broken in some way or that ‘fixing’ would require risking a vulnerability we are just not willing to deal with and that it probably wouldn’t ‘work’ anyway. When we do this to ourselves we are living as if no future growth is possible so why bother even discussing it? This is the big lie we tell ourselves.

Now I am not suggesting we walk around in T-shirts announcing our weaknesses to the world. I am suggesting, however, that when fear of feeling inadequate, or stupid, or weak, or like a failure, stops us from going after our goals; when we invest more energy and emotion in making sure we do nothing that exposes our chinks, instead of living fullout and learning what to do about chinks as we go along, then we are wasting a whole lot of our life and our energy on things that are worth neither time nor energy.

The truth is we all have chinks in our armor. It’s part of the human experience As we begin to see our own humanity, we begin to see that the chinks in our armor are not defects but gifts to us that help us remember that we are by nature, learners and growers.

Do chinks keep us humble? you bet they do. Yet when I think of all the leaders I truly admire, all of them were humble, capable, passionate and had weaknesses that they neither boasted of nor denied — most of them made mistakes as they grew into becoming who they were meant to be and all were great life long learners who understood they were capable of growth in all areas of their lives. Just like you.

What’s in a name? – maybe alot

Often when an older child is placed for adoption, they are given the option of selecting a new first name. Many cultures and faiths give you a new name when you commit to live a new life. This is not odd and it is something that has supported many a high school student as they transitioned from high school to college or college to the work place. Artys became Arthurs and Patty’s became Patricas. Nicknames give way to more formal birthnames. When I left high school i consciously left behind the rapid fire feel of Debbie Guy for a more, so I thought, elegant sounding Deborah. Debbie was a kid’s name. Deborah (Deb-or-ah) was heroic and lyrical.

Once married i simply tacked on my husband’s name of Skriloff (1st syllable rhymes with drill) and carried on, I was really a grown up now! Then recently something happened, I introduced myself as Deborah Guy Skriloff and someone quickly, brutally and perhaps accurately pointed out that by the time I’d gotten my last name out they’ve forgotten my first and that my name was too difficult to be good for business. (And this from a guy named Detleif who goes by the name Ted). When I relayed this to a friend over dinner (by coincidence another Deborah (pronounced Deb-ra) )she pointed out that she loved the ‘zip’ of ‘Debbie Guy’ and thought I should go back to it  because it suited me and was much easier to pronounce and remember (“good for business!” she opined).

What’s this got to do with being fearless? For me. Everything. The name Debbie is associated with alot of unpleasent memories in my life and becomming Deborah as I entered College was my way of saying “We start fresh here” and that move really supported me. (okay…Moving 3000 miles away didn’t hurt either).

I purposely put a wall up between the two eras and chose to live on the side where i was known as Deborah. If someone asked “can I call you Debbie” I would get a pang in my gut, stare them down and state “No, ‘it’s Deborah’”. As I got older, my staring them down mellowed into a pleasant, experienced, and understanding smile, but it was still “Deborah”.

In Fearless Living terminilogy, many of us have our ‘trigger’. for me. often it is being seen as ordinary, and in my mind ‘Debbie Guy’ was ordinary and kinda corny. If I was Deborah, I was in control of my own destiny, If I was Debbie, I was 8 years old again, named after a snack cake, at the mercy of others and somehow ‘less than’. Triggers can make you think of things in the most irrational of ways.

When Detlief, know as Ted, and then Deborah pronounced Deb-ra, suggested I use Debbie Guy professionally, I thought hmmm, If Debbie Guy works better than Deborah Guy Skriloff so be it. WHAT!?! WHOA!!!! when did that happen!?!? When did my name cease to be a trigger for me?  There was nothing. No kick in the gut, no emotional attachment, nothin, zilch, nada.  i realized in that moment i understood who I was, what talents I had to offer to the world so far and the facade was less important than the work.

Now does that mean I’m going to start introducing myself as Debbie Guy tomorrow?  No I don’t think so.  I do happen to like my name as it is, but maybe I’ll let them call me Deb.

Fearlessly,

Deborah

P.S. Ironically enough, my 30th high school reunion is just around the corner and no matter what my engraved business cards say they are all going to call me ‘Debbie Guy’ anyway. And that’s okay with me. Finally.