Arminda Lindsay

Being On Purpose

Choose Your Own Adventure

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Reading has always been a vital part of my life. It was not uncommon for me to beg my mother to drive me to the library once a week during the long months of summer vacation so I could restock my exhausted book supply. I would decide how many books were enough to take home based solely on how many I could safely carry at one time wedged between my chin and the farthest reach of my hands in the opposite direction, using myself as a walking bookend.

I immersed myself in books, escaping to lands far away and imagined, some with completely otherworldly plots and some whose stories didn’t seem so far-fetched. I loved nothing more than to escape through the pages of books to places and people and creatures I believed to be as real as the pages I turned in real time, becoming so immersed in these alternate realities I legitimately believed I was part of the unfolding saga.

When Choose Your Own Adventure books hit the scene my enthusiasm could not be sated. I devoured these books, always reading them from start to stop as many times as I could choose a different direction to guide the fate of the main character through one seemingly critical decision after another, never tiring of the delightful discovery of how one choice could lead to such different consequences and possible outcomes. When I came to the conclusion of a series of choices, I happily turned back to page one and started over again, always choosing differently than my previous read through the same plot.

I’ve come to understand that my life is no different than the storybooks I’ve always loved to read. And up until a few years ago, I was so invested in believing my own story to be true that I was no more writing my story as much as I was allowing it to be written by everything and everyone around me. I was a character in my own story, but one who existed at the mercy of the plot unfolding around me.

Through a series of conscious choices that included working with a coach, I realized my life, and the story about it in my own mind, wasn’t one I had to believe as fact any longer. I had become so accustomed to living my life as it happened, attributing the good stuff to luck and faithfulness and the bad stuff to lessons I must still need to learn and faithlessness, that I failed to see the adventure option in front of me, to turn to a different page for a different outcome. So I began testing the idea of my life as a Choose Your Own Adventure instead of a travelogue of What Happened To Me.

Testing this idea of choice felt like a game, and playing inside of my life was definitely more fun than watching it happen in front of me without my participation. It took some practice, certainly, but actively choosing how I interacted with and interpreted the myriad life situations happening outside of my control created a surprising result. Losing my attachment to being in control had the opposite effect! Instead of feeling like an unwilling participant in a game of chance, I slowly became the controller and creator of my own game: The Story of Me.

Stephen Covey, in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, attributes Viktor Frankl, well-known neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, with the following quote:

“Between stimulus and response lies a space. In that space lie our freedom and power to choose a response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.”

Frankl’s theory proved accurate for me. I started to see that I was actually interpreting events and other people’s behavior as having caused me pain or joy, as negative or positive, bad or good. Those interpretations were, in fact, my own personal judgments: thoughts inside of me that I chose to believe as truth, and then I reacted accordingly.

When I practice an intentional period of separation between what Frankl refers to as the stimulus and the response I give myself time to consider my reaction. This practice is not dissimilar to my childhood training of counting to ten before saying something I might regret.

Through this practice, which I still maintain, I spend more and more time in Frankl’s space between stimulus and response. The growth and happiness I experience are directly related to the choices I’m making in that space. No longer am I emotionally exhausted by the constant barrage of my own judgments about what other people are doing or saying as having anything to do with me.

When I feel frustrated or stuck, I simply look to see where I’m not choosing my own adventure and then I happily turn back a few pages and start over again, returning to the awareness that emotional freedom and power are always available to me through a different choice.

Create 2017

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While reviewing your year is a great exercise in seeing all you’ve accomplished and recognizing for yourself what an amazing person you are, it’s in the creation of “What’s Next?!” that you really get the chance to shine.

For this exercise to be most effective, I encourage you to schedule some reflective time for yourself without normal distractions. Really get into a different head space before responding. Allow yourself to fully imagine you in the next year; visualize each of these scenarios and from that place, write down your responses.

Don’t self-correct or talk yourself out of what comes forward for you. Write it all down. There is also no rule that you have to limit yourself to just three responses. Go crazy! Keep writing! This is YOUR 2017 and you get to visualize and create it however you like.

If you’d like to share your responses with me (yes, please), then simply send me an email (coach at armindalindsay dot com) with your 2017 projections. I can’t wait to read your future.

1. What are the top 3 things you will achieve?
2. List 3 challenges you anticipate.
3. What are 3 things you need to learn to grow your business?
4. Identify 3 things you want to grow and/or learn about yourself.
5. Which are the 3 relationships you intend to grow and/or develop?
6. Name 3 things you want to create or bring into the world.
7. What are 3 ways you will make a difference in 2017?
8. List 3 ways you will have FUN in your business.

 

The best way to predict your future is to create it.”
— Abraham Lincoln

Year In Review

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This is a time to thoughtfully reflect back on 2016. Perhaps you’d like to answer all the questions twice, once for your personal self and once for your professional self. Any way you choose to respond is perfect.

* Your Top 3 Achievements
* 3 Challenges You Overcame
* 3 Things You Learned About Yourself
* 3 Relationships You Developed
* 3 Things You Created
* 3 Ways You Made a Difference
* 3 Favorite Memories
* 3 Things You Learned Professionally

* Questions adapted from Simplicity Life Coaching

Frozen Assets

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frozen-assets

Earlier today as I was walking Eli we came upon what appeared to be a frozen fountain. Upon closer inspection I realized while the fountain’s main water had, indeed, frozen, there was still quite a bit of water still freely flowing, uninhibited by the sub-zero temperatures to which its fellow drops had succumbed.

Earlier this week I conducted multiple coaching sessions with clients who each arrived to our respective conversation feeling stuck and unable to move past what seemed like insurmountable barriers. Here’s a sampling of four of those barriers:

1. Frustration with a business partner whose actions had offended a key vendor
2. A marketing plan that didn’t seem to be producing the desired results
3. Overwhelm from starting a new business and implementing multiple strategies simultaneously
4. Personal issues that were “leaking” into the professional space

Upon closer inspection, some targeted questioning from me, and a safe space in which to review their assets, my clients were each able to see avenues to continue moving forward, uninhibited by the surrounding events previously blocking their path.

When we had completed our time together every single one of those “stuck” individuals experienced an overflow of joy that accompanied their awareness that sometimes, or perhaps especially, when feeling stuck it might do to remember Winnie the Pooh‘s sage advice:

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.”

Remember that being stuck is optional and if you need some assistance just let me know what’s in your way; I’m happy to stand on the bottom rail with you.

Loving you,
arminda

Can You Spare a Dime?

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Alexander Graham Bell was onto something big, but could he have anticipated the iterations his history-changing invention would take? Raise your hand if you’ve personally experienced dramatic changes in the way you use telephones from the time you first started using them? My mother remembers party lines. Her parents had a rotary phone in their house that I used. We had a red push-button phone that hung on the kitchen wall as the main hub of communication until it broke and was replaced with another push-button phone, but one with more “options” (it sported a fancy hold button)! Remember the first cell phones? My brother carried one around in a bag and the phones gradually reduced in size and cost, while increasing in functionality and even my parents now only carry cell phones, having finally discontinued their landline.

Seeking out and adopting change can be intimidating and sometimes scary, but would you agree that’s primarily because of what you don’t know on the other side of the change?

Twice this week I’ve had clients tell me that the work we do together is hard and uncomfortable because they’re not used to looking introspectively, especially not for answers to questions that are easier to either complain about or to maintain status quo, rather than explore different solutions.

Why do we hypothesize and experiment? To tweak and to adjust and to update our experience with being human. This is all one big experiment and life is your lab. Grab some goggles and a white coat if it makes you feel more official, but settling with a system because it’s the way it’s always been done? Phooey. That is so payphone of you.

What if you can’t make a wrong decision because whatever decision you make is an experiment to simply see where it takes you? Can you spare yourself the drama of complaining and release your attachment to status quo? What’s the worst thing that can happen?

CAUTION: You might feel a whole lot better and have a whole lot more fun in the process.

In scientific researches, there are no unsuccessful experiments; every experiment contains a lesson. If we don’t get the results anticipated and stop right there, it is the man that is unsuccessful, not the experiment.” — Alexander Graham Bell

Beware of Dog

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beware-of-dog

In ancient Pompeii homeowners used large intricate tiles in their entryway floor to ward off potential intruders; BEWARE OF DOG signs have been around for ages, it seems. Whether the dog is real is irrelevant; it’s the thought there might be a dog that triggers a fear and an inability to move ahead that the BEWARE OF DOG signs illicit, rendering the signs so effective, thus preventing any perceived negative advances.

I often work with clients who are deeply frustrated with themselves because they’re not achieving their goals and feel anger, anxiety and hold themselves in severe self judgment at how seemingly long it’s taking them to gain any traction toward their next big thing, or each time they attempt a step toward their goal they experience extreme resistance around the very thing they say they want to do.

If this is you, then in my experience you’re completely normal.

Most likely you’ve got a “tile” of thought warning you against proceeding, so every time you come up close to progress you hit internal resistance and hold yourself back.

What’s most interesting is the buried, or competing, thought: you aren’t consciously aware of its existence. Look underneath what you’re not accomplishing to discover your block.

What’s the worst thing that could happen if you succeed, if you do the thing you’re NOT doing?

Too often we have a great plan and a vision and we stay out in that expansive space and get overwhelmed at all that has to happen to realize the vision, so we do nothing. It’s great to have a plan and a vision, but then we must pull it all back to center and see what the one next thing is and do that, rather than thinking the big plan and vision should be complete at conception and then we judge ourselves for not having done it and we create distance from the very thing we think we’re supposed to be doing and creating.

Good grief. That’s exhausting.

My assumption is the judgment and misidentification of yourself is your “tile.”

Who would you be without all those thoughts, without that “tile”?

When you expose the tile, you also expose the thought’s irrelevance. Remember it’s only the thought there might be a dog that prevents an intruder from breaking in. The same is true for you. It’s only the made up thoughts you’re having that are preventing you from moving forward.

Identify and expose your internal competition. Then step out of your own way, stop making up stuff and move forward — one step at a time.

There is no dog.

Clutter or Bust?!

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clutter-or-bust

Recently a client contacted me with sincere apologies because a travel delay would prevent him making our session and he wondered if I could please still meet with him that afternoon? He was shocked to learn through my response that our session had come and gone 24 hours prior and he’d been a no show.

Clutter can look like the obvious physical piles stacked across the tops of our desks, inboxes that haven’t been at zero ever, calendars that are double and triple-booked, or calendars that live only in our heads because we mistakenly trust ourselves to keep up with all the details, to the not so obvious clutter hideouts like the unresolved interpersonal issues my male clients in particular like to classify as “compartmentalization,” busyness (because p.s. busy does NOT equal productive), incomplete tasks, resistance to action (which can manifest itself in lots of different ways), or relationships — both personal and professional — that do not support us.

“Clutter is the physical manifestation of unmade decisions fueled by procrastination.”

― Christina Scalise

Clutter catches up with all of us at various stages and spaces in our lives. And just like my client experienced firsthand, his cluttered world caught up with him. I wasn’t the only appointment he’d ever missed, but I might have been the first to call him out on it 🙂 And that’s where he and I went to work by slowing everything in his frenetic world down and identifying what really mattered.

“The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t.”
― Marie Kondō

It’s amazing how little we actually need or even want in our space when we’ve intentionally and thoughtfully decluttered. I love Kathi Lipp‘s definition of clutter, as it resonates with my own experience:

At its heart, clutter is a lack of peace.”

External experience is a reflection of internal reality. If your external space is cluttered and disorganized, I guarantee you’ve got the same thing happening inside of you, and whether you’ve slowed down enough to acknowledge that is irrelevant.

Your internal peace is the barometer by which your external world functions.

Let’s do a clutter check. Take a glance around your office. How does it look? Where is there an opportunity for some tidying? Is it time for a check in(ward)? How would you describe your internal peace meter today?

Get unstuck and decluttered so you can keep creating and building and growing. You and your team need you in top form.

Sunrise

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sunrise

Every single morning I wake to the sunrise. This is a new phenomenon for me, having recently moved to a new city with a new view. Shockingly, even without me witnessing it, the sun has still been rising every single day.

Last night I was out for my evening walk with Eli and happily playing my made-up game of surrender. The rules are simple: I don’t choose which direction to walk; I follow the crosswalk signals only and we eventually find our way back to our building. I’ve had so much fun wandering in this way, following the lights and learning all sorts of things about the downtown streets and where they might lead me. Except last night’s game took an interesting twist when I disobeyed my own rules.

Thirty minutes into our adventure and approaching our next intersection, I distinctly felt pulled in the opposite direction of the current walk indicator light, so I decided to mix things up a bit and waited for the light to change, then followed my intuition. Within a few minutes we happened upon a small group of people gathered together, lovely music was being sung, and there was an excited energy permeating the square. We paused our walk to take a closer look and a lovely woman asked if I would please take her picture. Taking strangers’ photos is one of my favorite things to do, so agreeing was easy, but there was something about her, something in her eyes, something she needed and couldn’t speak, and I asked if I could also please give her a hug?

She silently nodded and as I embraced her she began to gently cry and I held her, making it safe for her to feel whatever she was feeling. I soon learned more about my new friend and the source of her tears and how my crossing her path was a gift for her.

I consider my breaking of my own rules to follow the light inside of me (rather than placing a greater value on the walk signals) to have been the highlight of my day. I was able to turn a game of “what’s next” into an awareness that “who’s next” is much more important.

When I get distracted by my own invented significance and become so focused on what I’m doing and what I’m creating and where I’m walking it’s as if I’m existing in my own cloudy haze and I neglect to notice the sun is always still rising and giving light despite my personal clouds.

When I quiet my notion that my agenda matters and look up and look inward, my clouds disperse and I see my own light is always still shining and showing me what to do and what to create and where to walk and with whom to connect and what to say. I also notice that same light exists within everyone around me, whether they see it or not.

Positive psychology expert Shawn Achor has outlined five essential daily tasks that together comprise the formula needed to live happier and more productive lives. And number five on that list is: deliberately perform random or conscious acts of kindness once a day.

Shockingly, even without you acknowledging it, your internal light still shines every single day. Light up the world and disperse the clouds around you by consciously losing yourself in some daily acts of kindness.

Good things happen and lives are impacted when you intentionally shine your light.

loving you,
arminda

Free Candy

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free-candy

American Halloween

The American tradition of Halloween has spread to many cultures, so you’re likely familiar with the concept of hordes of children dressing up in costumes, pretending to be something they’re not, and going door to door collecting free candy. I’ve never been, nor met, the child who doesn’t sincerely believe she IS on her inside whatever she’s parading on her outside through makeup and costume and sometimes just the right pair of shoes.

Personal Halloween

Personalities are just like costumes. It’s become a widespread tradition to dress up in a personality, pretending to be something you’re not, and go day-to-day collecting sympathy for “who you are.” I’ve rarely met an individual who doesn’t sincerely believe he IS on his inside exactly the personality he’s parading on his outside through stories from his past he cloaks himself in, as if they were fresh and relevant.

Don’t Pretend

Have you ever said, thought, or believed any variation of the following:

“I always. . . .”
“I never. . . .”
“That’s just the way I am. . . .”
“You know how I am. . . .”
“I have a tendency to. . . .”

These are statements of belief, of permanence, of irrefutable patterns over which you seemingly have no control. And if you believe your personal patterns are a thing at all, this is what Steve Chandler calls a “mental mistake.”

Anytime you do or don’t do something and blame it on your so-called personality, you are “going back into your past to find the patterns and tendencies that explain it. You refuse to see that the past is over. It counts for nothing. Your word counts for everything. Your word you give yourself on whether you are going to do something.”

Why would you do that, you might wonder?

Because most of us spend most of our lives afraid of what might happen in our non-existent made-up futures, so instead we spend our time avoiding.  Avoiding our own potential, avoiding the things we don’t like, avoiding what we fear, avoiding what we hope won’t happen, avoiding conversations, and the list goes on.

“. . . we are using our creative imagination in the most negative, perverse way because we are using it to worry about the imaginary negative future. The antidote to that. . . is to reconnect human beings to their innate natural birthright of pure creativity” (Steve Chandler).

New Costumes

If you spend any amount of time with young children, you might observe their tendency to not limit their dressing up in costumes to October 31. In reality, children play make believe every single day. And their costumes are widely varied and not dependent on what they pretended they were the previous day. They are constantly creating new versions and visions of themselves. Additionally, they don’t even require external costumes to act out their internal stories of their own greatness and creativity.

What would it take for you to shed your costume of personality and step into your “birthright of pure creativity”? Does it seem frightening? Are you worried you’ll mess it up? That others might laugh at you? That you’ll have regrets?

Steve Chandler suggests the following encouragement:

Just jump in. Forget about making the right choice, and forget about being afraid of your intuition leading you wrong, and forget about attaching a story of regret to a time in your life when you were doing the best you could and then now looking back you are going to attach a story of regret to it — there’s no value in that. You can’t be creative when you’re taking things personally.”

Try on new ideas, test a new pattern, make up a version and a vision of yourself that you haven’t seen yet and go dream to dream collecting a bag full of encouragement from yourself because who you are is entirely up to you.

Loving you,
arminda

Steve Chandler quotes are from chapters 31 and 33 of Steve’s book:
The Life Coaching Connection; How Coaching Changes Lives 

The Illusion of Control

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the-illusion-of-control
During a recent trip to the Boston area I was staying with friends in the suburbs and decided to take the train into downtown. After purchasing my ticket I made my way to the platform and enjoyed the beautiful fall weather as I sat on the bench, having plenty of time awaiting the arrival of the 12:40. At the appointed time, the train approached the depot and I realized (too late) that it was stopping much farther away from me than where I was standing. As I ran to try and reach one of the cars the engineer slowly inched the train forward until it was coming toward me faster than I could reach it, and as the train completely passed me by the conductor shouted to me that I should have paid better attention to the signs. I had mistaken the benches where I was sitting for the platform, itself, and thereby missed the train.

I’m no rookie when it comes to public transportation, but this was a classic first-timer mistake.
Surveying the schedule, the next train wouldn’t be available for another two hours.
Before I allowed frustration, anger, self judgment, and/or judgment against the engineer and conductor for not allowing me on when they clearly could see I was there to get on the train, I walked back to the store where I’d purchased my one-way pass and asked for a refund, which I received.

My knee-jerk reaction was astonishment, judgment and anger, but I replaced it with laughter, taking myself right back up my emotional ladder and called for a car to carry me into the city.

I arrived downtown with seven minutes to spare before my daughter finished her class and our afternoon plans commenced.

Easy.

Especially when I remember that everything always works out for me.

Funnily enough, the very next day neither the train nor the bus ever arrived at my out of town station, leaving me once again out of (illusory) control of my situation and my intended transportation.

Drs. Ron & Mary Hulnick describe control as being “based on the ego’s search for comfort, safety, and security; and its effort to hold everything in place. It’s basically a survival mechanism marketed as a means to attain what most people desire — especially money, sex, and power. The ego creates a picture of the ideal way things (life, the world) should be, and then it uses control to try to make reality match its ideal” (Loyalty to Your Soul, 24).

Both days as soon as I let go of the illusion of control of my situation, options immediately became apparent to me. And both days I was able to easily and effortlessly find my way downtown without stress or upset to my inner peace or to my plans with my daughter.

Is there an illusion of control managing any aspects of your life: personally and/or professionally?
What options might be available to you if you let go of the illusion?

Are there any other modes of transportation operating in the periphery of your life?

Real control comes when you let go of the illusion you have any control at all.

But only every time.

Loving you, arminda

allarminda.com | 2024