Coaches’ Corner

Why The “Conflict Avoiders” Are Actually The Conflict Creators

Posted on  //  Posted in Coaches' Corner, Life Coaching, Parenting  //  Tagged , ,

I hear a lot about “conflict avoidant” people. Seemingly these are people who steer away from creating conflict, because they “don’t like” to have conflict with people in their lives – they prefer harmony, apparently. They will either call themselves this, or other people will refer to them as this: oh, they didn’t do that because they’re conflict avoidant…

 

I’ve begun to have a different take on this and I offer a 360 re-frame here from a professional point of view.

 

I’ve come to believe that being perceived as conflict-avoidant gives a person a bit of a free pass: they are not expected to, or are repeatedly excused for not, dealing with difficult matters head on by having a conversation – i.e. using communication skills – that sorts things out and avoids an actual conflict from ever escalating.

 

None of us like having these conversations: whether you call them Robust Conversation or Courageous Conversation – they’re hard to do and they require a certain amount of courage activation, and a certain usage of what we call “skilful means” at both ends of the dialogue – the bringing of something difficult up, and the managing the other person’s response once you do.

 

What is actually happening is “communication avoidance” – the avoidance of conversation / communication. What this fundamentally leads to is – you guessed it! – conflict. What that then leads to is a number of behaviours that perpetuate the avoidance, and prevents the conflict (which has now been created as the other person has been negatively impacted due to the initial avoidance) from ever being resolved. 

 

I’ve begun to recognise and name this pattern as Communication Avoidant and therefore Conflict Creative. I haven’t copyrighted it, you are welcome to use it.

 

Whether we are in the workplace, in a hierarchy, in the parent community, or at home with our families, this is a toxic dynamic, and by naming it we can begin to change it. Either as the person who inhabits the traits, or the person who may be on the receiving end, or the person somewhere in between.

 

This does not mean that you have to be – or indeed should revere people who are – a High Conflict Personality (Google it) – people who are “a hammer looking for a nail”. This is the other end of the spectrum. Although the temptation for solving a problem is to go to its extreme opposite, this is rarely useful! (Everyone who’s ever worked for me knows what a fan I am of finding that beautiful middle-ground, the healthy grey-area, where the best of both worlds exist, and can serve as a functional dynamic).

 

What the Communication Avoidant person is, is anxious. They don’t trust themselves to manage the skills at either end, and they don’t trust themselves to be emotionally regulated should anything bring out a discrepancy within them that they may need to take ownership of, look at, and perhaps adjust in relation to others. What they become is resentful, because they aren’t raising things that need raising, and it pisses them off exponentially over time, leading to unpleasant and/or more avoidant behaviours. What they have is a high degree of shame, and shame stops people from achieving the benefits of self-reflection, personal-insight, and genuine apology, where they might be able to say, right, OK, so you feel like that? Maybe I contributed to that, and for that I’m sorry…What they are doing is, confirming their own belief system, which is that not bringing things up was the correct course of action, because now the other person is emotionally dysregulated from whatever the result that the non-communication had, and has now reacted “so badly” that it means – see, this is why I never raise things, look how over-reactive other people are! 

 

And don’t get me wrong: this is not a judgemental post; this is a psycho-education post. Whether you perceive yourself on either end of the spectrum, or recognise where others may be, it can help you. 

 

As adults in relationship with others, it’s a personal responsibility to:

 

  1. Put your big pants on and address things in a timely way, before they harm or negatively impact others
  2. Develop the right amount of skilful means to resolve disharmony as and when it arises – this means managing other’s emotions, managing your own, and using communication skills (which can be learnt from AI these days)
  3. Own your own parts in any human discord: nothing ever occurs in isolation
  4. Practice genuine apology, see how far it gets you (hint: very far)
  5. Protect yourself from people who cross your boundaries and can become harmful to you. This means knowing what your boundaries are.

 

A balanced approach, see? A middle ground, taking the best from both ends of the spectrum and operating from a functional grey-area. 

 

Questions to ask yourself:

 

What might have happened if I’d brought that up at the time I felt initially concerned?

What did I keep to myself, that ate away at my brain, that caused resentment in me?

When I imagined bringing this up, what was I afraid of? What am I REALLY avoiding?

What did I contribute to this conflict? 

Was I a hammer looking for a nail? 

What could I do differently next time?

What can I do now to contribute to a resolution?

What skills would I like to learn to make this easier next time? (Do I have Chat GPT downloaded yet?)

 

Whether you’re a leader, a parent, an employee, a child, a dog, remember: communication always wins.

 

As always, I welcome your comments and feedback.

Charlotte.

Launching into the unknown, letting go of control and activating trust

Posted on  //  Posted in Coaches' Corner, Life Coaching

As I’ve shared before, I’m not exactly thrilled when I have to go into situations that require a complete letting go of control. My two recent experiences with general anaesthetic and surgery are prime examples – once you’re knocked out, you’re knocked out! Not having had a great deal of experience for most of my life of this (fortunately), the mental preparation required in the lead up and recovery both times was crucial for me: I had to manage my anxiety around it, and that required me using particular effective skills to do this. I know, hand on heart, were it not for such skills, I would have had panic attacks as the twenty-something me would have (the only skill she knew for situations out of her control).

 

And now, I’m just about to launch into something else: an international trip! Long-haul flights, with my two young children and taking them by myself. I haven’t done a long-haul to my home country (UK) – or anywhere – for exactly 8 years. It feels unfamiliar territory for me. And back then, there were two of us adults handling one child, albeit a young one, and now there’s two children and one responsible adult – me!

 

The thing that’s important about all of these examples (personally for me, surgery and international plane tickets) is that once you’ve agreed to it and it’s locked in, you can’t just turn around and say – er, no, I’m too scared, I’ve changed my mind….Well, I mean you realistically could, but you really know deep down that you really can’t, and therefore you simply have to do it. You’re in a position where, in reality, you’ve decided to take your choices away. In this case, when you have to, it’s a question of how are you going to do it, to get though it, and even enjoy it, despite the inevitable anxiety and fears that will arise?

 

I think some nerves around these big things are reasonable, given the life and death risks, and is simply my nervous system having a completely normal reaction to the situation at hand. I could beat myself up for it, tell myself I shouldn’t have any nerves because I’m a professional helping person, but I gave that up a long time ago (see previous article). The nerves are there to signal that it’s time to prepare and get your head in the game as best you can – and then to let go and trust. It’s all you can realistically do, is it not? Including trust is crucial. 

 

During a session the other day, I was highlighting the difference between catastrophic thinking (or future-based negative thinking that causes anxiety in the present moment) and actual strategic mental planning that can help ease the nerves in the now, allow one to feel in a good state (confident) about an upcoming, unknown and out-of-our-control future event.

 

So, I felt right in there with my client that day, as we were going through her strategies to prepare for her event, I could speak to my own recent and current experiences of using these strategies for my own self.

 

So, let’s lean in and let go of control and activate the trust required and get on with it. There’s no real choice other than to do so!

 

  1. Identify obstacles: research tells us that when thinking about a goal or a future event, when someone asks you – Well, that sounds difficult, how are you going to manage that? And you say – Oh, It’ll be fine, easy,  I’ll just say no to that slice of cake – is negatively correlated with successful goal achievement. Contrast with the strategy for success then – where you stop, and think about a possible obstacle, and say – Hmm.. that’s a good question, that’ll be hard at a birthday party and I’ll be hungry too! I’ll need to think through that… In other words, not knowing and/or ignoring possible obstacles or  “things that could go wrong” and calling on the hubris required to say – oh it’ll be fine – is NOT the success set up we’re after. So, step 1 =  brainstorm all the things that could be an obstacle for you having a successful experience with a successful outcome, and be realistic! Write them ALL down. And then go to – 

 

  1. Strategise: now you’ve brainstormed all of those possibilities (and this can also include things that could go wrong with YOU – not just practical things that could happen to you (i.e. like your luggage getting lost) but your own emotional and physical state. If you’re prone to anxiety, then one of the things you might’ve brainstormed is having a panic attack, or a heart attack or a meltdown). Step 2, then, if you hadn’t guessed, is going to be planning for said possible obstacles – what needs to happen if xyz happens? What can I do if xyz happens? Some of this will end up as good solid practical plans, and some the answer will be that it’s out of your control, and so there’s nothing you can do (believe it or not, this can provide comfort).

 

  1. Mental Rehearsal: if your brain can conceive, it can believe. So, take yourself through the future. Not in a catastrophic manner (see above), but just visualise yourself, at the other end preferably. For me it’s about seeing my best friend and being at her house, I keep visualising that, and that’s my successful outcome. I’ve taken my brain through the long flights, passport control, tiredness and managing two kids’ tiredness. I can see us going through it all. So my brain is tricked into thinking we’ve kind of already done it, and taken the “big scary unknown” component out of it. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

 

  1. Growth / Resilience Self Havening: for those who are familiar, using self-havening with specific language statements is an actual game changer. I did it for before and after both surgeries, and am just about to begin my regime for the trip! This is one of the most powerful ways to help yourself. It’s hard to teach this here, so get in touch if you want to know more about this. For those I’ve taught – time to pick up those notes and use it again! 

 

And there is my four-part strategy for launching into the unknown, letting go of control, and activating trust. 

 

Love, Charlotte.

Busting the 2 HUGE Myths About Therapists & Coaches

Posted on  //  Posted in Coaches' Corner, Life Coaching

As many of you know, I recently had major surgery at the end of February (all went well) and two weeks later I received a break-up message from a friend in my close inner-sanctum (or so I thought), via text. I won’t go into detail now, but needless to say it was brutal and painful, and got me thinking about and researching lots of things which I’ll write about in more detail soon – look out for upcoming articles on:

 

  • Friend vs Frenemy (and how to educate our young girls at school)
  • The Friendship Graveyard (not what you think)
  • How To Identify a Toxic Friend In A Group
  • Managing People With NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder)
  • Understanding Your Attachment Style And How It Influences Friendships

 

One thing it did for me was change my use of social media. I haven’t been keen on it for a while generally speaking and haven’t had the scrolling habit for years, but I did like posting Facebook stories about my kids and what they’d been up to. It was the Covid lockdown that first started my dislike for it, and more so business wise since attending a day-long AI workshop last year, where it became apparent that much of the content is generated (or at least influenced) by AI, and then gobbled up by AI, and then fed back to us again (by AI). It got me thinking – what was the point? I’ve never managed to crack the code for increasing my followership via socials for my line of work anyway, which relies on client confidentiality, plus authenticity-while-not-over-sharing on my part. I’ve become quite disillusioned by the whole thing. It feels like a party where noone’s high any more, but everyone’s still hanging out there because they don’t want to go home (as Liz Gilbert once said).

 

Following the text-message break-up brutality post-surgery, and the last thing I needed was to be seeing “best friends forever” photos of said friend with another friend, who had been in the same friendship group before it got blown up unnecessarily. So, I decided to go on a mission to find another platform where I can write and share authentically, in a way that feels safe and nourishing for me, and hopefully helpful for the people who follow and work with me. Enter – Substack!

 

Also, while  I was recovering, I finally read a book which had been on my reading list called Just About Coping; A Real-life Drama From The Psychotherapist’s Chair, written by Dr Natalie Cawley.

 

I think this is the kind of book that most of us in the helping profession wish we had written ourselves – I certainly do.

 

I won’t spoil it for you, as I think the title gives enough for you to know what it’s about, and, it’s a topic I feel is SO SO IMPORTANT in my world: the world of therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors, coaches (of any kind) and any other kind of professional qualified to help other people heal and achieve. People who are not in these professions often (not always, but often) will hold two risky assumptions about the people who are:

  • We have no problems and therefore just have life “sorted”
  • If we do have issues, then we can “just sort them out using our skills”

 

I have felt judgement from these assumptions, sometimes acutely, and have so for YEARS (I became a therapist at age 27 and am now 47). Not just from those on the outside, but from certain “friends” and colleagues, too.

 

The book skilfully disabuses these two myths. I don’t know if that was her aim in writing it, but it’s certainly provoked some resonant passion on my part, things I have thought, felt and believed since starting this profession fresh from university in my early 20s.

 

I’ve noticed that people tend to idolise those of us in the helping world. People – or clients – can admire us, role-model us, and wish they could just as easily embody the qualities that we seem to portray. We seem like we’ve found a solution to the things that they want solutions for, and this can lead to idolisation, or, as I like to call it “guruitis”. I’ve been afflicted by guruitis myself, when I first started my NLP training in 2005, and I can reassure you all that I no longer suffer with it, and certainly discourage it in my own clients. 

 

It’s part of the job and totally awesome to role-model functional behaviours and have your clients wish to embody them, of course. But – not if it leads to another stick in which they use to beat themselves over the head with (“why can you do it, but I can’t?” or “How come you do it so easily?”). It’s useful to remind our clients that we spent thousands of hours of training, professional development, and paying lots of attention to ourselves to even begin to authentically embody and model some of those desirable qualities. It’s true of course also, that when your client sees you, they’re seeing you in your professional role, where you’re at your best, having spent some time getting into a good state so you have access to your inner-resources in which to help them. They aren’t seeing you when you’re at the end of your tether on a Friday evening, when your kids are refusing to eat the dinner you spent an hour preparing for them, without an ounce of energy left in which to coax or negotiate.

 

Look – let’s be clear. We, in this profession, have a RESPONSIBILITY to be working towards being as FUNCTIONAL and as WHOLE as possible, to be using our own skills as much as we can, to be authentically and honestly role-modelling wholesome and healthy behaviours – be it food choices or boundary setting or time-management or whatever. We have a responsibility, if we are holding the space for others to do their inner-work and heal, to be working on OURSELVES, continuously, to try always to be a few steps ahead of our clients and anything that might arise in the therapy room. We need to be grounded enough and clear enough to not be getting triggered every 5 minutes by what’s presented to us. And, if we DO get triggered, we are responsible for addressing this with our own professional consultative-support person. We have to do our best to be as clean and as clear as possible, to be able to do our work effectively and achieve the best possible outcomes for our clients. I believe personally, that if you’re an addiction counsellor, then it would be harmful for your clients if you yourself were not healed from your own addiction. A life coach shouldn’t be sleeping on a park bench either, right? I, personally, wouldn’t hire an overweight nutritionist or personal trainer, for example. I want to know that they’ve had the experience of achieving the results I want to achieve myself. I think these things are ethically, morally and professionally fair to expect (I know this is a bit of a straw-man argument – but you get the point I’m making). 

 

HOWEVER: the notion that we should have it sorted at all times and if we don’t then we should be able to just use our skills to sort ourselves out, is unrealistic – and dangerous. It’s part of the affliction of guruitis, and has never, actually, been part of our job description! It’s ultimately not helpful to our clients either, because it creates this notion of an unattainable future-state, where everything is perfect and no one ever suffers. I don’t believe in this as a notion or a goal – it’s not reality and it’s not helpful. 

 

It’s also – most certainly – not helpful for us, either. I spoke to one of my lovely, highly skilled, qualified and highly effective colleagues recently, who’d had a week of sleep deprivation personally and was running a sleep workshop that week. They said they felt “incongruent” – AKA they had fallen prey to these unrealistic standards as a therapist and coach and were venturing into beating-self-up land. 

 

In the book, she not only parallels her own personal issues and healing journey with that of the clients she’s working with, and how one informs the other (thank you for articulating this process so beautifully). She also tells the stories of some of her colleagues, dealing with their own demons and mental health issues, some of which, unfortunately, were unsolvable.

 

Being trained and skilled does not make us immune to life’s many challenges, nor does it make us bad at our jobs, sometimes quite the contrary (as she skilfully depicts in the book). I do my best work when I’m personally working on something hard/meaty/confronting. It makes me a significantly better helper – there’s more resonance and connection. In this way, the whole “practice what you preach” adage works and can not be seen as hypocritical: my practice is to keep improving myself, not to pretend perfection.

 

Sometimes we simply do not have access to our inner skills and resources. Sometimes our nervous systems are traumatised, overwhelmed, too delicate. Sometimes – often – we’ve had a shitty and dysfunctional past, which is what led us into this work in the first place (we’ve been helped, and we want to help others). I certainly didn’t have my life together at age 27, but still became bloody good at my job. We can’t be objective to our own subjectivity, it’s just not humanly possible. We need our own objective helping-people too; this should be part of our job, of course. And sometimes we need even more than that. Sometimes we’re vulnerable and we’re going to struggle and wobble and not know the best way to deal with an unprecedented challenge. It’s from this place, that the life we’ve spent “our skills” creating, that can successfully hold us while we work through it and upwards.

 

I, for one, am hoping that by being as real as Natalie, we can authentically help our clients (and others) without having to pretend that we are somehow invincible or immune or always regulated, and therefore not role-modelling that unhelpful notion of an unattainable future-state of perfection. 

 

I – personally – am no longer buying into the pressure of my profession, I’m tired of it. I am – instead – going to be 100% honest. I’m not going to pick and choose my honesty to attain more social media followers through some kind of strategy. Whenever I have bent what I’ve wanted to actually say in order to do this just doesn’t resonate. It’s only heart-spoken words that do.

 

I believe authenticity, which is communicated in a skilful way, is the best tool we’ve got in our profession to really help people change their lives. My clients want to know I understand their struggles and that I’ve been there, that I’ve done the work and improved things for myself. And if I haven’t managed to improve, then I’ve accepted, which is also a very worthy achievement.

 

NOTE: this is not – as Brene Brown says – “letting it all hang out”. You have my solemn promise that I won’t be sharing anything about my life that would cause you any concern and that I haven’t processed myself FULLY. I will only share things that I’ve processed with my own (current) psychologist, professional consultative-support supervisor, or by myself in my own way. I will be through the other side by the time I share, with hopefully helpful insights and tools of resilience that will help you too. And if I haven’t found my way through something completely, but I’m resilient and not emotionally triggered by it, then I’ll share that honestly too. 

 

In some therapeutic disciplines, psychotherapy or psychodynamic approaches for example, it’s expected that very little is shared about the therapist’s personal life with their clients, so that they can be a completely clear and blank slate in which to enable their client to project and transfer all and everything that they need to onto them, in order for it to be effectively reflected back and then processed. Life coaches, however, if they’re a purist coach, are not bound by the same process, and can freely share (as much as they feel is appropriate at least) because they are not doing deep therapeutic work and don’t need the blank slate. Although I’ve never trained in psychotherapy, I did start my career as a therapist, before training and establishing myself as a life coach, so I guess that means I can make my own rules up and skillfully share as much as I think is helpful for the client I have in front of me? And basically write what I want, on my own platform?

 

What do you think? Are you with me?

Love, Charlotte.

How Much Anxiety is NORMAL?!

Posted on  //  Posted in Coaches' Corner, Life Coaching, Parenting

A lot of my lovely current clients are dealing with anxiety at the moment, as so many people are, and wishing to turn the dial down, turn off huge anxious or panic responses, and get back to a sense of normality, in certain situations at least! Once they’ve experienced the amazing healing that both NLP and Havening Techniques can offer them, where they’ve settled dramatically and turned “off” the main panic response, they are noticing that they still might get “triggered” and are now pondering, what’s normal? How much can you realistically “turn off” and how much do you want to, actually? What’s normal and what’s not?!

These are very interesting ponderings, and of course, I have a professional opinion on this. So let me answer that for you:

There’s a big difference between an organic surge of adrenaline, in response to a trigger in your environment that’s out of the ordinary, and the layering on of thoughts – known in Buddhist psychology as the second arrow – which creates anxiety and/or panic for you, and/or makes that normal organic response worse and escalates things. We also need to consider: how debilitating is this issue right now?

  1. The Organic Surge of Adrenaline: Here’s the scenario: your nervous system has a good baseline, you’re fine. You’re walking around, living, and feeling OK or good. Something “not normal” happens, a trigger.  A car cuts in front of you on the motorway causing you to swerve. Your amygdala, the fear-detecting and safety-making part of your brain takes this information in very quickly through your senses, and sends a message to your adrenal glands to create extra energy, because your life’s been threatened, and you don’t want to be asleep for that….. you want to be able to spring into action now. Once the perceived “threat” is over, you recover and go back to your baseline OKness/goodness.
  2. Layering or the Second Arrow:  In the midst of a scenario like the above, your Nervous System is unable to just let the adrenaline surge and peak simply come and go. There’s past trauma in the mix, a reason to try and control things to the max. So now we have: OMG, it’s happening again! Why does this always happen? I was just anxious then! It might happen again tomorrow!  I should be better about this by now... and so on, and so on. Sometimes we can perform this layering process in the ABSENCE of an organic response, just by THINKING about the possibility of an organic response, or even one that you’ve had in the past. You get anxious right then and there, or exacerbate the anxiety that was organically and USEFULLY triggered.

Look – you actually can’t programme yourself to be a robot, no matter how hard you try. We’ve inherited this brain through evolution and there needs to be a level of respect for this ancestral heritage. Your brain is designed to keep you safe, respond to alerts and threats by surging your adrenaline so you can do what needs to be done in the moment with energy. You want to turn off this response completely? Good luck in an actual emergency. Well, you won’t need luck, cause you can’t turn it off completely, your brain won’t have it. You CAN teach it what’s appropriate to respond to and not, and turn the dial down when it’s NOT a functional response, absolutely yes! I feel like this is the essence of what I do in one context or another.

Do you have agency over #2, then? Absolutely yes! The layering over of thoughts that trigger or exacerbate the anxious response is absolutely within our control, and often I seek to heal this FIRST and re-train those thought pathways, so we can then get to the core issue, and the rest is organic from there, and you can enjoy your amygdala doing its job in an organic and functional way.

See if you can start to tell the difference between the two?

Much love, Charlotte.

Re-enter Your Life on Purpose, With Courage

Posted on  //  Posted in Coaches' Corner, Life Coaching, Parenting

[Illustration by the amazing Sue Kerr]

In New Zealand it has just been announced that from this Thursday, we start transitioning out of lockdown and in to a lower alert level. This will mean the re-opening of most businesses, schools, travel within the country and socialising with groups no greater than 10 people. This is a huge transition from where we have been. Before we go rushing back into ‘life’ again, let’s take a moment to pause, reflect, take stock, and start out lives again on purpose, and with the courage to learn from our experience, let go, and re-shape our lives going forward.

If you’re anything like me, you have mixed feelings about re-entering ‘normal’ life, or as close to what your past normal life used to be like (the ‘new normal’). On the one hand you are excited about the return of some freedoms you’ve missed and of schools starting up again. And on the other hand you are feeling anxious about being thrown back into a full life again. Whatever your situation, things have changed.

If I’m really honest I lean more towards the anxious side. Not that I am anxious about the virus per se – I’m not – I just don’t want to go leaping back into what life was like before this experience of staying home with my family for six weeks. I know from talking to people that I’m not alone: a lot of us have enjoyed this enforced time at home (albeit despite its challenges!) and aren’t looking forward to our bubbles completely popping after all.

Why are we feeling like this? Surely we should be chomping at the bit for our old life? And what does this say about the way we’ve been living our lives? 

I don’t know you all personally but I can take a stab at what this fear we are feeling is. It’s not that we don’t want things like schools to start, do a bit of socialising and the occasional meal out. It’s that we don’t want to go back to the things that we (perhaps only newly realised) do not like about living a full life. We don’t want to just ‘go back to things’ mindlessly, without consideration and intention. There are things we just haven’t missed, and we are not in a hurry to return to them.

But we are afraid. Afraid of saying no, afraid of choosing more wisely. Afraid of letting people down, afraid what others may think of our new choices. Perhaps we are afraid of losing people, money, status. 

Personally, what I’ve realised about myself during my lockdown is the exceptionally high value I’ve placed on socialising. I know where this comes from: as a child I was shy and insecure. I had attachment issues. I didn’t make a group of friends that I felt totally comfortable with until I was 16, and from there, fortunately, my friendships went from strength to strength. I had developed the belief that as long as I’m doing something with a group of other people, then it’s worthwhile doing. It’s like I was not living properly unless we were all doing it together. In other words, I got my self-esteem from surrounding myself with people at all times.

To some degree of course this is a truth: people need people. However, there’s degrees of it that I want to take into account. I’ve prioritised saying ‘yes’ to social invitations at the expense of my own wellbeing and sometimes the wellbeing of my family, and fairly recently, too.

I’ve always thought of myself as an extrovert who just had to socialise at every opportunity. Now I’m looking forward to saying ‘no’ more often and channeling my inner introvert, and that of the family, too. It won’t be easy, it will take will and courage and different decision making.

I’m also not that keen on returning to rushing around getting to places on time, my endless to-do lists and multitasking to fit it all in. I like how empty my calendar is! My mission will be to keep it empty, only putting in the things that spark joy, and not at the expense of my other values. For another thing I’ve definitely learned about myself: I can be very happy with less, much, much less. 

As I’ve said repeatedly, this has been a gift given to us and is the perfect time to make changes. So, how do you re-enter life and its activities mindfully, purposely, with intention and courage?

I’m a firm believer that we all have our own inner-wisdom. Sometimes it is just heavily obscured by a load of other crap, like social pressure and expectations, insecurity, perfectionism and people-pleasing. What this means is that we have a sorting exercise to do!

No matter how busy life is, we can all find 30 minutes in a day. Take that time to get rid of distractions, either be alone or talk to your significant other if you have one. Get quiet:

  1. Make one list of all the things you’ve missed, and on the same list what you’ve enjoyed about being at home. This is what you value, what really matters to you.
  2. Make a second list of all the things you haven’t missed, that you’re not in a hurry to get back to. These are the things that no longer fit with your values. If your job is on that list, then you have some work to do in identifying how you can work differently. Perhaps it’s working remotely more often, perhaps it’s working less and spending much more time with the kids.
  3. For the list of things you haven’t missed, write down what you want to drop completely, and what you want to change. Be brutally honest with yourself! No one has to know, for now anyway. For example you may want to ditch the gym membership and just continue biking with your family. You may not want to completely ditch a group of friends, but you want to change the way you catch up, and what you do together.
  4. Lastly, ask yourself: what action do I need to make these changes? And how can I cultivate the courage required to do that? As I said, most blocks to change will be driven by social expectations and fear based: the word ‘should’ will feature highly here. Here’s where channeling some Brene Brown and her work on vulnerability and courage can be a game changer. If you don’t know her look up her Ted talks. Oh, and her new Podcast – Unlocking Us – is just great, too.

Leave a Facebook comment or PM me with your insights, I’ll help where I can.

Love, Charlotte.

Are You Suffering From Zoomzaustion?

Posted on  //  Posted in Coaches' Corner, Life Coaching, Parenting

[Illustration by the amazing Sue Kerr].

We could say we are lucky to be living through a global pandemic in this current age of technology. Staying connected to our colleagues, friends, family, our children’s teachers, school friends and friends is easily integrated into our home lives. We can continue most of our ‘normal’ activities: exercise classes; buying music, movies and books; online shopping; stalking our favourite celebrities on social, and so on.

One the one hand, I marvel at it! Last night for example, I was able to attend my live-stream yoga class in my living room in front of the fire. I had my teacher’s lovely voice directly in my ears with my bluetooth headphones, which are designed to sit just outside the ear, enabling me to still hear sounds around me. I had the yoga playlist playing simultaneously though Spotify on my Google Home Speaker. All generated from one device – my phone. Pretty cool!

On the other hand, are we getting overloaded by the amount of technology in our home? In distance working and learning, are we putting proper boundaries in place to separate our work life from our home life? Are we succumbing to social pressure and saying ‘yes’ to more Zoom meetings that we actually need to? Are we feeling too personally responsible for keeping those email chains or Facebook nominations going when we’ve been tagged in them?! You know the ones, recipes, albums, tag ten people to keep the chain going etc., etc. It can all mount up to the latest phenomena of ‘Zoomzaustion’ – technology burn out during this time.

I was privy to a conversation a few days ago where working from home was being discussed. Every single person (bar one) said they were doing way more (too much) work than they would normally do: they missed the ‘water-cooler’ conversations with their colleagues; they checked their emails as soon as they work up at 7am and kept checking them way into the evening; they were on ‘way too many Zoom meetings’. They were way more available for longer during the day then they normally would be, and not enjoying it! Let’s face it why would they? Doesn’t sound like much fun.

It’s so interesting that our boundaries between work and home tend to blur more when we are working virtually, at a time where we don’t physically leave the office and travel to our homes. We aren’t getting the benefit of that change of scene, of literally ‘leaving the office behind’, of entering into a completely different environment with cooking smells and kids, or whatever your home situation is. And yet it is during this time we need to be much more protective of our time and draw those clearer lines in the sand between work and home. Not doing this will just spell stress and burn out over time.

And why, why are we on more Zoom calls than we actually want or need to be?! What’s going on there?

Because we are ‘just at home’ we feel like we can’t say no, after all, we have no where to be, so no excuses. I want to challenge this: again, this is the time to be even more protective of our time, not less. Not doing so spells stress and burn out. If we feel we have no reason to say no, because after all we are ‘just at home’ then we end up saying yes to way more things than we need to. Does your child really need three Zoom calls a day with their classmates and playdates? Do they really actually enjoy those meetings? Do you really need to be keeping in touch with your family or colleagues that often? What would happen if you didn’t?

In my last few blogs, I hope I’ve driven the message home that yes, this is a crisis. And within that crisis we have been gifted an amazing opportunity. When else in our lives have we been forced to strip everything back, apart from the very basics? This gives us an insightful benefit of contrast. We get to say, OK, I miss that, I want more of it in my life, or I don’t miss that at all, so I want to let it go. We are more in-tune with what we value and want in our lives right now. And because we are in this unique position of sorting the wheat from the chaff, we get to choose what we say yes and no to.

So, what can you do?

  • Channel a bit of Marie Kondo: Does that Zoom catch up spark joy (for you or your child)? If it is not 100% required of you because of the expectations of your role, then ask yourself that and see what the answer actually is. If not, say no! If you have the ‘should’ word reverberating around your head it’s a sign that it doesn’t spark joy and is only an obligation.
  • Just say no, occasionally: I’ve written extensively before about why we find it hard to say no. Ultimately we don’t want to let people down, offend them, or have them think less of us. Understandable as we are tribal creatures. Historically without our ‘tribe’ we would die. Things are different now. Consider setting some boundaries and saying no occasionally, and just see what happens. Be brave! Instead of thinking less of you the person or people may think more of you, and it may even give them permission to do the same themselves. We can become so personally responsible for other people’s feelings, and in most cases there is no need.
  • Get some boundaries between work and home, now: Treat your work at home much like you would work in the office. Start it at a particular time, finish it at a particular time. Take your lunch break. Stop feeling guilty, or as if you ‘should be doing more…’ or ‘be seen to be super available so they know I’m actually working…’. Most Importantly – do something to mark the end of the working day. Turn off emails on whatever device you use, go and exercise, shower, change your clothes, whatever you need to do to mimic that physical feeling of leaving the office behind. You will be more productive for it, trust me.

We know from research conducted in palliative care that the biggest regret of the dying is that they lived their lives according to what other people expected them to do, rather than what they desired themselves. It’s a lesson for all of us with breath left in our lungs. Let’s not waste that breath.

Our next post will be exploring how we re-enter ‘normal’ life after so long in our bubbles. We want to do so purposefully, and intentionally, in a way that respects the insights we’ve had during our lockdown period.

As usual, I’d love to hear what better boundaries you feel you could have in place right now, and what action you will take. Leave me a FB comment or feel free to PM me, anytime.

Love, Charlotte.