Arminda Lindsay

Being On Purpose

Regret and Fear

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In my capacity as a leadership coach, I work one-on-one with my clients and truthfully just do a lot of listening. When I do speak, it’s usually to ask questions intended to provoke and to poke holes in what I call limiting beliefs. A limiting belief is anything you hold to be true, which beliefs limit (and oftentimes prevent) your ability to move your life/career/relationship/education/finances forward. Essentially, I’m a remover of (perceived) blocks that show up in every single one of us at various stages and phases of our being human experience.

During a recent coaching session my client revealed their frustration at having just moved across the country for a new job only to discover the job wasn’t anything like what was promised in the interview phase. Not only was the actual job a surprise on arrival, but also the culture, the compensation structure, and the new city all proved to be negative environments for my client’s mental health.

“If I leave, this is going to be a red strike against my career! I’ve worked so hard to put in reasonably long stints at each of my previous employers’, so you can see I’m growing them and me.”

First, as a recruiter, let me assure you in the same way I assured my client — no one is going to give you a demerit for a short stay in a position. Quite the contrary — this now becomes a talking point in future conversations!

“Tell me what happened here?” or “What were the circumstances surrounding this situation?”

It’s that simple. Your short stay becomes an opportunity to learn more about yourself, to better define (and maintain) boundaries, and to learn better questions to ask next time. Because there will be a next time, I promise.

But how did we work through this limiting belief held by my client? What were they holding onto, and why? They were holding onto two beliefs:

  1. Regret
  2. Fear

Let’s look at the regret first — my client was tailspinning into their very recent past, replaying over and over again the “What ifs.” What if I had taken Job A or Job C instead of this Job B? What if Job A still wants me? (They don’t.) So my client was spending a LOT of time regretting the choice they made thoughtfully and in good conscience.

They were spending the rest of their time (an easy 50/50 split) paralyzed with fear of making any changes to their current, regretful, and toxic situation. What’s going to happen if I leave? Where will I go? If I leave it’s going to ruin my career!

I’m going to share with you a technique I use with myself and my clients to work my way out of limiting beliefs. If you feel stuck, ask yourself:

  1. Why do I feel stuck?
  2. What’s blocking/stopping me from taking ______ action?
  3. Am I experiencing regret?
  4. Am I afraid? Of what?

Regret and fear are clear indicators that time and energy (which we each have in limited and finite amounts) are being spent in the past and in the future, respectfully.

Regret is a harbinger of the past, of moments, experiences, and decisions that have already happened. We cannot change what was, and any thought we expend toward the past is wasted time. Conversely, fear is future-based. With rare exceptions (you encounter a bear in the woods or an active shooter in the mall), when we feel afraid, we are imagining something that does not, in fact, exist. In the case of my client, they were afraid a departure would ruin their entire (future) career.

Personally, I prefer to spend my time in the present, focusing my energy and thoughts on creating today, the tomorrow I want to enjoy. I coach and encourage my clients to do the same.

Together, my client and I created a list of questions to ask before moving to a new position, questions that came out of the very real and abrupt experience this current job has provided. We talked through that previously-mentioned Job C, which happened to extend another offer, and what would be the ideal scenario. We talked about coming back to the present, how to let go of the past and of the future every time we find ourselves in either one again.

I invite my clients to imagine they’re wearing a rubber band around their wrist. Whenever you notice and catch yourself feeling regret or fear, snap your imaginary rubber band and bring yourself back to the right now. Learning to think about the thoughts you’re thinking is hard work. It takes practice. Identifying your own personal limiting beliefs takes even more work! And then unlearning them. . . .

Listen, being human is hard. I get it and I’m here to help you navigate the learning curve, if you’d like.

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.

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 

Focus

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focus

Charles Fillmore suggests “There is an inherent law of mind that we increase whatever we praise. The whole of creation responds to praise, and is glad. Animal trainers pet and reward their charges with delicacies for acts of obedience; children glow with joy and gladness when they are praised. Even vegetation grows better for those who love it.”

But there’s a flip side.

What you focus on grows, whether that focus is on something praiseworthy and valuable, or whether on something unimportant and without merit.

When I water my plants, they flourish; when I neglect and disregard them, they become limp and lifeless.

The same principle also applies to our mindset, thoughts and behaviors.

During a recent conversation with the sweetest CNA I know, she told me she is really bad at taking blood pressure and because she’s so bad at it, she’ll never be able to advance her position into a different environment that would require her to regularly take patients’ blood pressure.

Her mindset in this situation is currently “fixed,” as she sees herself as good as it gets with no option for anything different.

Her thinking about herself is negative and comparative to others and she (mis)believes she’s incapable and less than.

Her behavior is resigned to where she is right now and because she can’t ever possibly take blood pressures differently than she does right now, she’ll always be working in a place where that’s not a daily requirement.

Up until our conversation she was focusing on what she can’t do (take blood pressure readings) and so she was simply creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Plus, her fear and inhibition around the idea of being asked or required to perform this task were escalating.

I suggested a little game:

  1. Believe she’s capable of learning something new.
  2. Tell herself (out loud and at least once a day) she is great at taking blood pressure!
  3. Create regular opportunities to practice taking blood pressure.
  4. Update her resume in anticipation of a new working environment in which she will be using her amazing blood pressure taking skills!

What you focus on grows.

Focus on what you want to grow.

Now go bloom.

Practice creates talent.” — Steve Chandler

Loving you,
arminda

Peace by Piece

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Peace by Piece

Puzzles are curious toys: put all the related, but disconnected, pieces together to form a big picture, but don’t get frustrated in the process and quit, because the reward for sticking with it is intrinsic and will leave the player wanting to do it all over again, only a little bit more challenging next time.

Children learn the system of puzzle solving by first playing with puzzles that have only four or five components. Once they’ve mastered the small picture, they graduate themselves to larger and larger pictures, increasing the personal challenge with each subsequent upgrade in puzzle size, and the bigger the puzzle the more reliant on systems they become. Locate the four corners, then the border pieces, colors become helpful in identifying in which quadrant the piece might fit best, fill in the middle part, and so on, and piece by piece the bigger picture takes shape until it’s all completed, just as the picture on the box indicated it would look.

During a recent coaching session my client shared with me her frustration at how overwhelming her job currently feels to her. She detailed the multiple demands on her time in an effort to explain how impossible it is, and perhaps to justify her exhaustion and frustration. Maybe, she wondered, she’d taken on too much? Or just doesn’t know how best to manage her time?

I didn’t buy it.

Does she love her work? Absolutely.
Is she in her own self-selected ideal field? Definitely.
Is she feeling at peace in her work life? Nope.

This is a classic example of forgetting to remember that the picture on the box is the end objective and that picture is never created by dumping the puzzle pieces out of the box.

Remember that the vision of what it all will look like upon completion is just that: a vision, an image, a picture of what’s possible only after you take a bunch of individual steps to create that bigger picture. If you’re holding yourself to the standard of daily creation of the big picture you will experience overwhelm, frustration, resentment, exhaustion, self-judgment and fear.

But only all the time.

If you’re experiencing overwhelm and are not at peace, may I suggest you test a new system? Locate your four corners, then establish your borders (create boundaries), and notice the colors on the pieces because that will inform in which quadrant of your creation they might fit best, and lastly fill in the middle part.

This might take some practice, but play with it. Ask yourself what one next step could you take toward the bigger picture? Then take it, do it, create it, whatever IT is. Now, rinse, lather and repeat that process until you’ve put it all together and voila! You’ve got yourself a completed picture. Time to create a new vision and play with its pieces from a place of peace because you didn’t quit and walk away when you forgot to remember it was all a game, anyway.

Find your peace, piece by piece.

Loving you all,
arminda

Willing to Bloom

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Willing to Bloom

Nothing in the universe thinks there is anything wrong with you. 
— Robert Holden, Ph.D.

I love living into my magnificence and supporting others in their desire to do the same in their lives. Those “others” are my loved ones: my family, friends, neighbors, clients, workshop participants, retreat attendees, readers of my articles, viewers of my videos, vendors, store clerks, peers, classmates, followers on social media, and anyone with whom I come in contact.

What does it mean to live into your magnificence? To be exceptional? It means you are open to continuous expansion of self and that expansion is achieved through a willingness to surrender your belief system, to be open to another story, another possibility, to be vulnerable.

How do you commit the surrender? You expose your old stories, one at a time, and write new ones. You own your vulnerability. You face your fears. You make courageous self-honoring choices rather than constantly seeking to please those around you. You see that you cannot possibly be in service to others without first being willing to be in service to yourself.

“Can you see what’s really happening here? You are the actor in your own story, but you are acting as if your story about you is a biography, not an autobiography.” 
— Robert Holden, Ph.D.

What does this surrender look like? 

  • not resisting
  • not defending
  • not justifying
  • not hiding
  • not puffing
  • not pretending
  • not covering up
  • not excusing
  • not deferring
  • choosing YOU

Dr. Brene Brown teaches that “vulnerability is our most accurate measure of courage.” This living into magnificence takes courage, for it is a scary thing to face your fears. Why is that, you might wonder? Because fears cover up our deepest hurts and if our deepest hurts were to be exposed, well, that might be embarrassing, or painful, or lonely, or true, or all of the above! In fact, you might fear the greatest fear of all: that you’re not lovable or worthy.

“The real you is not afraid of love, because the real you is made of love.”
—Dr. Robert Holden

Dr. Ron Hulnick suggests that the easiest way to overcome a fear is to do the very thing that scares you while fully in your fear of doing it!

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” (Marianne Williamson)

Step into your fears. You are courageous. Liberate yourself from its grasp on you. Believe in your own magnificence and not in your limitations. Be willing to blossom. One petal at a time.

Loving you,
arminda

Pompeii’s Got Dirt

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Pompeii's Got DirtHistory First

Pompeii: ancient city best known for its notable volcanic ash covering it received on August 24, 79 AD, by the impressive Mount Vesuvius.

Pompeii: ancient port town lesser known for its impressive aqueduct system that pumped water throughout the entire city.

The streets of Pompeii were nightly flooded with water to clean them from the dust and dirt of the day’s activities, allowing for a clean start the next morning for its 20,000 residents. To compensate for the daily flooding, city planners used stones as crosswalks that could be used in times of high water to still cross a street by foot. The three stones you see pictured here indicate this road was a major thoroughfare in Pompeii. Less-trafficked streets had fewer stones across. Regardless of the street, the stones were all equally-sized and spaced to allow for chariots to pass through unencumbered. Visible today are deep wheel ruts from heavy chariot use on every street I walked.

Let’s metaphor.

Your Ruts

If you were to analyze your regular thoughts and behaviors — the ones you have without consideration or intention because you think or behave them every single day — what would fall into that category?

Have you been riding your mental chariot so frequently over the same roads that you’ve created ruts? I guarantee you that’s true. We sometimes refer to those as neural pathways. And those paths can run very deep. When we create neural pathways we don’t usually do so consciously.

Think of it this way: Imagine standing in the middle of a university campus with an extensive sidewalk system that provides access to every single building. However, as you look across the green spaces between the sidewalks you notice well-worn dirt paths that are the clear pathways walked by the students, natural paths connecting a shorter or easier distance between A and B.

This is exactly what happens inside your brain as you introduce a thought and think it over and over and over again. You’re creating new pathways, new patterns of thinking. Habits are created in this exact way until we no longer think about them, we just do.

Your Stepping Stones

And oftentimes, those patterns of behavior we’ve been running for so long and whose tracks run so deep, are not serving us, so we also lay stepping stones to justify, excuse or skirt around the thought or the behavior when needed. This skipping across the pathway is our way of avoiding getting wet when the guilt or the embarrassment or the self-judgment comes rushing through.

The accusations or awarenesses or the judgments can come from ourselves (most often) or they can come from someone else or from an organization or a cultural expectation that we don’t feel we are meeting. So we skip across them.

Your Dirt

We experience the guilt, embarrassment, and judgment as dirt, something that we shouldn’t have, but do and think skipping across the stones we’ve carefully placed and positioned will allow for a cleanse. Maybe this looks like yet another resolution to make a change, or a recommitment to doing things differently from now on. The skipping across can also look like defensiveness, self-justification, blaming others for where or why you are where you are right now, and all of these thoughts and behaviors are born out of fear.

Real Cleansing

Of the items on your list, can you imagine what it would feel like to cleanse yourself of any of them? To purge yourself of the weight of those behaviors and thoughts?

In my experience, creating a new neural pathway takes 33 consecutive days and I love making new trails in my brain!

The old wheel ruts will likely remain, but whether you continue using them is entirely up to you. If you give yourself some alternative routes to follow, you might just surprise yourself with how easy the new paths are to use.

If you’d like the digital calendar I created for myself and that I share with my clients, send me an email (coach @ armindalindsay dot com) and I’ll happily share the file with you. I use this to keep track of my daily path creation and by the time I’ve filled in the calendar, I no longer need it to remind me where to walk and what new behavior I’m employing.

I also offer a unique program that includes just two sessions with me for individuals in need of additional support in rewiring themselves from particularly difficult and long-standing behaviors that no longer serve them. If you’re interested in learning more about this highly-effective and individualized program, please send me an email (coach @ armindalindsay dot com) and tell me more about what’s going on and what behavior or habit you can’t seem to cleanse.

Choose to wash away any pathways that are no longer serving you and ride your chariot in a new direction.

Loving you,
arminda

Emotional Drag

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Is fear creeping in on you again? When you’re experiencing the physiological “side effects” of fear, what do you do? Do you inadvertently hold your breath? Do you stop eating consistently? Do you bite your nails? Do you phone a friend? Do you . . . ?

What if FEAR is wearing a mask to make you THINK it’s fear, but it’s not actually?

That sneaky fear. . . always playing tricks on us.

You should probably watch just to find out what my drag queen name would be!

Sell From the Top

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Sell From the Top

Let’s play a little game of pretend. Picture with me that your emotional life is lived on a ladder.

If at the top of the ladder are joy and happiness, then you’ll find things like fear and obligation hanging out at the bottom.

In order to “win” this pretend game I just made up, you’ll need to be aware of some rules:

  1. Your objective is to move yourself as far up the ladder as possible
  2. The more time you spend in the top half of your ladder, the better you’ll feel toward yourself and toward others
  3. All of your interactions with clients (family & friends) will have the best outcomes if the other “players” are also as far up their ladders as possible
  4. The only person you can move up or down the ladder is yourself
  5. There are four fast tracks* to the top of the ladder; you are free to use any of them alone or in combination

The best sales advice I can give you is to sell from the top of the ladder. If you come from a place of fear and worry and needing the sale (bottom of the ladder), then your prospect intuitively knows it and won’t buy. Ever.

Move yourself up the ladder. Come from joy and pure service (not a variation on a theme of service) and you’ll astonish them every time.

*Four fast tracks:

  1. Laugh
  2. Sing
  3. Dance
  4. Serve 

Decision Making

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Do you believe your “decision maker” is broken?

When you don’t trust yourself to make decisions, you aren’t making any decisions because you’re not willing to make a choice for fear of risking making the wrong choice.

Full stop.

No decision is final and when you watch this video I’ll provide you with some different perspective on all the choices we get to make along the journey.

allarminda.com | 2024