The weight of being human

Turning weight into light is our journey as a spirit in human form. Being human is heavy sometimes. The heaviness of the layers of protection that we build up as we grow. The layers of beliefs, behaviours, emotional baggage. We reach midlife and realise that we are carrying our own cross upon which we can crucify our own ego or our truth, depending on the path we decide to take. The path to truth and love or the path to lies and limitation.
I realised today that my body is my most reliable barometer reflecting my inner state of being. Where am I still carrying weight?
My tummy, reflecting my need to protect my creativity, my sexuality, my feminine beauty. To hide my truth from the world.
My legs, stopping me from moving with speed, swiftness and knowing when I am aware it’s time to leap. ‘I can’t run’ a lie I have told myself my whole life.
My arms, making me feel old before my time, stopping me from reaching for people when I feel the urge to connect and hug them for no reason other than we are both human and alive.

I am perfect now. I am expanding into more and more perfection the more choices i make that are aligned with my truth of being. Something my soul knows at its core and yet my human finds hard to accept and embody. Finds hard not to judge against some false socially agreed standard.

The journey towards becoming light is one of constant truth speaking. Constant truth living. In order to become our light body, to bring more light into our cells, in our minds and our hearts we must choose to think thoughts that take us towards the light of our lessons, gifts and blessings whether we have chosen to label the associated experiences as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. To feel light emotions like love, gratitude and awareness and believe things that move us into our truth, that empower us and allow us to expand into our intergalactic self. These things help us to transcend limitation, time and space and become our truth at its core. To become the love that our lives are governed by.

Why do we find loving our human selves so hard?

Most of us are programmed throughout our lives that we are not enough, that we should be more, that we need to strive to achieve societies standards by which ‘happiness and success’ are judged. The thing is that we are waking up from this illusion of reality. We are all starting to challenge this lie. To know deep inside that this is NOT the truth of who we are and why we are here on the earth.

The process of awakening is a journey not a goal. I feel as though I walk up an ever expanding spiral of time and consciousness, always finding more, deeper, wider more expansive areas to distinguish my truth. To choose to be my limitless self. To embody and live from this place of being and hold a powerful space for those around me to find the same in their own way.

I love myself more each and every day. Sometimes this is hard and sometimes it’s easy. Always it’s essential to my human life. My truth is that I am always love. Already love. Only love. It’s time to wake up and know this every moment of every day. To show this in every word, gesture, breath and smile. To take action from this place and know that the universe is in me, supporting me and has my back eternally.

Do You Dare To Be Slayed By Love?

If you had asked me a year ago ‘How miraculous do you think your life can be?’ I would have given you a pretty convincing answer of ‘Amazing baby!’, ‘the biggest ever’, or perhaps on a really good day ‘it can be the second coming!’.

Did I actually believe that at the time? Of course I did, although the strange thing is that we are never really aware of our blind spots until we encounter one of those blessed life lessons that points them out to us loud and clear.

Coming up to Christmas last year, I was flying high! Things had never been better work-wise, my relationship was so good (I pinched myself on a daily basis just to make sure it was real!) I loved my family and they loved me and I was travelling to amazing places in the world. Everything was pretty peachy….

Then out of the blue I ran head long into an amazing gift. Catherina Ogorman, the CEO (Chief Empowerment Officer) of a global company called ‘Think Love’, emailed me and told me that she knew she had to connect. She didn’t know why, or what we were supposed to do together but she had seen me purchase two Think Love wristbands for Christmas and felt an immediate connection. Now, being one of these intuitive, heart-connected, spontaneous people myself this wasn’t all that surprising. What did amaze me was the complete conflict I felt within myself when I communicated with her. One part of me knew this relationship was destined, fated and was going to change my life forever. Another part of me was fighting to keep the current status quo in my life with all its might. Because of this, it took me a full month before I was able to finally arrange a Skype call with Catherina and when I did……….

WOW! Catherina and I talked for three hours on that first call. She read me like a book and told me I was calling on every level for the next stage of my evolution. She shared the Think Love vision with me and clearly told me that I was on this earth to be a part of it. She told me I was here to be slayed utterly by unconditional love.

Now the funny thing about unconditional love is that it is an easy thing to say and not such an easy thing to embody. I had been uttering a mantra for years about wanting to live in unconditional love with myself, those around me and my life and yet it had pretty much remained just words, not really understood or heart felt.

I realized through my subsequent (and sometimes very uncomfortable) conversations with Catherina that I had actually developed big time resistance to love! I had so much STUFF in the way of allowing myself to experience unconditional love of myself and other people. Wow – and here I was thinking everything in my life was perfect. In one way it was perfect, because it had led me to my next biggy. My next leap in self-awareness and evolution. My next leap out of my comfort zone.

It feels right to share with you some of my insights and profound moments throughout my ‘Quest for Greatness’ with Catherina and Think Love so far as the quest will continue forever…

➢ Everything is love (the good, the bad and the ugly). It is all love because it is all a route towards finding out who we really are, our truth in life
➢ We are all love at our core – this is who we are born to be. Love of ourselves, love of each other and love of this beautiful life we are blessed with. We just seriously forget along the way
➢ When we give ourselves permission to FEEL, we HEAL. Our emotions are not ‘bad’ or ‘good’. They just ‘are’. They are messages from our soul that we have new choices to make
➢ When we love unconditionally magic happens, we become limitless beings and we manifest like lightening speed
➢ When we have the courage each and every moment to speak our truth and live our truth (not conforming to something that others expect) we naturally call this level of personal power and beauty out from those around us. We become limitless, gorgeous and irresistible to everyone and everything.
➢ We make the thought of self-forgiveness, self-awareness and inner work look and feel harder than it actually is. When we are willing to face up to who we are, claim our light and our dark and love ourselves in everyway, life becomes easy, graceful and full of joy.

So there it is. I have submitted completely to love – allowed myself to be slayed by it. I forgave everyone in my life including myself (for every teeny, tiny thing) and realized my entire life has been one big journey of love, towards love and embodying love. Every lesson and challenge had allowed me to discover who I was, so I knew who I was not. Every person had brought me a gift of self-awareness.

Another funny thing is, that a lot of people spend their whole lives running away from themselves and their past – from their painful memories or experiences. In truth, that’s the hard bit. Standing up and recognizing that the being that you are isn’t scary at all, is liberating, it’s the journey of life. Living in deep self love makes you want to yell from the mountain tops the joy of everything that is you and at the same time sit in quiet bliss and appreciate the smallest grain of earth, each leaf on each tree, the heartbeat of the earth.

I am blessed for the lessons and the love that Catherina and Think Love has brought me and you are now reading the words of their fully realized, loved up, ready to ‘go and get ‘em’ Global Ambassador baby.

When you Think Love, you become One with the vibration of Love. Love of ourselves, love of those around us and love of our lives and the planet on which we live.
Through true self-love and acceptance, we are able to deepen our love of others and create lives of true purpose and meaning. When we make our decisions and choices based on true love of self, we start to embody the greatest truth. We are all One.

Wanna come and join the party? Check us out at http://www.thinklove.com
Come and join us and be slayed by love!

From Chaos to Conscious Creation

Given how much I have been playing in the field of Energetic NLP over the last year, I thought it was about time I dedicated a blog to the powerful and life-changing subject!

My journey with Energetic NLP began at age 28 when I found myself smack in the middle of one of the biggest ‘dark nights of the soul’ of my life. I woke up early one morning and as I lay there in bed realized that my world had turned distinctly grey. I was married to a man who I was not in love with any more and where fighting had become the norm. I was in a career that was extremely challenging, involved working horrendously long hours and paid well but was not fulfilling in any way. I was overweight and unfit, justifying my lack of exercise and healthy diet on the fact I ‘was too busy with my career’. The final nail in the coffin was that I found myself living in the suburbs of Coventry, a city that didn’t inspire me visually, culturally or mentally in any way. Every aspect of my life was not where I wanted it to be.

As I lay there in bed, I made a pact to myself and to the universe that it was time to change. The question was just how.
As in the way of these things I find that when you finally make a decision (especially an ‘enough is enough’ decision) that strange things start to fall in your path to help you. During a review with my manager at the work the next week, I found myself in the luxurious position of being offered the chance to embark on a six month Neuro Linguistic Programming course. Neuro Linguistic Programming (or NLP) for those of you, who are not familiar with it, is a form of positive human psychology. Essentially, it helps you to break down the map of who you are; your beliefs, your values and your thought patterns and how these patterns affect the choices we make in life and the experiences we end up having. Through the course of the next six months I had what I can only describe as a roller coaster, seat of your pants, magical mystery tour of my consciousness. I came to know who ‘I’ was for the first time. What was important to me, what made me tick and most importantly, where I was holding on to beliefs and thought patterns that were holding me back and creating ‘greyness’ in my life. I had discovered my spirit again and was starting to feel free…..

It was around the mid point of this course that I found Energetic NLP. Being quite an energetic, vibrant, spirit filled person anyway, a friend of mine grabbed me by the arm one day and excitedly asked me if I had ever come across Art Giser or Energetic NLP (ENLP) saying ‘it was right up my street’. As I started to say ‘no’, I experienced a feeling in the center of my chest that I can only describe as warm honey. It was a kind of ‘knowingness’ that I had been introduced to something incredibly important for me. Something that was going to change my life.

Hooked, I immediately signed up for a teleseminar that was being run by Art Giser, the creator of ENLP. On the night of the call, we had another one of those ‘funny life coincidences’ (I now call them universal synchronicities) where when I dialed in, expecting to be one of hundreds of attendees, I quickly realised that due to a technical hitch, it was only myself and my friend who were live on the call.

And you know the warm honey feeling I had got in my chest the day I heard about ENLP? Well, after being on a call pretty much one to one with Art Giser for 90 minutes, I knew exactly what this meant to me. ENLP had taken me, rocked me around and connected me to something deeper than the usual personal development methodologies out there.

I became what I can only describe as an ‘unstoppable force in my life’ from this moment on. Not only did I now know what I wanted in my life, I had the abilities and tools to go out there and create it. In the space of eight months, I got divorced and met the partner of my dreams (who had been right under my nose for 7 years), I changed my career completely to one that focused on community work (with no previous experience in the field), I lost 2 stone in weight through taking up yoga and moved to my favourite place in the UK, Glastonbury. Phewww – I was inspiring myself let alone everyone around me!

How did I do all of this you might ask? One of the foundation principles of ENLP is to unleash people in all their glory; to connect them deeply to their own source of inner wisdom, authentic energy and spiritual knowledge. Through training with Art Giser and completing his Level 1, 2 and 3 ENLP courses I had connected on a deep level to the biggest version of myself imaginable. Every choice and decision in my life was being guided by my true inner wisdom and spirit and it felt great.

I had become what I now call a Visionary; someone who had the ability to envision something from my inner wisdom and then take inspired action to make it happen. Using this new found personal power I have continued since to manifest many beautiful things in my life. I now run my own social enterprise, Emergency Happiness which helps people from all walks of life to life transformational lives. I work with an amazing and inspiring network of people from across the globe and breathtaking projects and collaborations fall into my lap on a daily basis. I envisioned becoming an Energetic NLP Trainer and here I am delivering seminars and teaching others the energetic miracle that gave me back control of my life and my destiny.

I have come to realize that everything is in this universe is made up of the same stuff ……energy. As a massive Star Wars fan, it is my pleasure to tell you all that the force is real! Our thoughts, beliefs and feelings all have an energetic blueprint that go out into the world and create the experiences that we have in our lives. The best part of this is that we are the only ones that can choose our thoughts, beliefs and feelings! We get to choose the lives we end up living – how exciting, liberating and fascinating is that?

If you are hooked like I was and want to find out more about the wonderful energetic toolkit that is ENLP, then check out our  upcoming events.

Being Young, Playing Big

By Youth Brilliance Conference organisers Genevieve Boast & Jackie Thoms

Young people today are the future leaders of an unprecedented and unpredictable world in which nothing will be as it has been before. They’re globally connected and aware, like no generations before them, through the Internet, world-wide gaming, social exchange programmes and our evolving collective consciousness. Technology, science, human abilities … everything is changing so fast that it’s going to take a new kind of learning, a new kind of thinking and a new kind of creating to bring our youth into the future of their own magnificent creation. The Youth Brilliance Conference, being hosted in London on October 1st, has the vision of unleashing the brilliance in our youth today so that they come alive to generate a brilliant new future for us all.

 

Genevieve Boast, founder of Emergency Happiness
http://www.emergencyhappiness.com

Our beliefs create our world. Whether these are our own personal beliefs or the shared social and cultural beliefs we hold, they filter our view of the world and our experience of reality. Running a social enterprise that works with young people to develop leadership skills has allowed me to be closer than most this year to the current social beliefs held about them. Along this journey it has astonished me to see the vast difference between the attitudes of the real, live people I have spoken to vs. the attitudes that the media claim to represent how ‘society’ in the UK feels.

The recent riots in the UK for me represented this dichotomy crystal clearly. As headlines reported ‘young thugs’ and bemoaned the broken state of society, we were simultaneously hearing multiple eyewitness accounts reporting that looting was being carried out primarily by adults. Our social networks came alive with young people renouncing the rioters behaviour and asking people not to blame these actions on the overall ‘disengagement of youth’.

Having spent the last couple of years working with young people across the world, I am seeing and feeling a very different energy starting to come through from them. True, many young people living in the more economically deprived areas of the UK have certainly ‘had enough’ but in the main they are looking for choices and opportunities to express their potential. They embrace different ways of thinking when it’s offered to them and they welcome the opportunity to do something new as opposed to just accepting the fate that their current situation gives them. Many young people are seeing the potential of thinking in new and innovative ways and are actively looking for opportunities to work and create differently in society.

So what is the brilliance that is being unleashed by the young? Take Sabirul Islam, dynamic and passionate teen-entrepreneur and visionary with a huge vision to inspire and transform the lives of 1 million young people in 20 countries in 12 months through engaging in entrepreneurial activities. His aim is to create a reality where people know and believe that no matter what the circumstances are, an ordinary individual can become an extraordinary individual. http://www.inspire1million.org

Young brilliance is super connected, super creative and aligned. It is the pulse of aliveness that brings people together and sparks initiatives. It is collective in nature and has vibrant society effortlessly at the core of its being.

 

Jackie Thoms, co-creator of the Centre for Social Brilliance
http://www.socialbrilliance.org

The energy of people power is being demonstrated like never before across the planet with humanity waking up to our collective and collaborative power to change things. In Libya, Egypt and more recently the UK, we are seeing people expressing their hunger for social change and their need to express the potential that a new way of being and creating in communities holds for us. There are countless amazing projects, programmes and organisations popping up all over the world to create more vibrant, sustainable living and the Internet and social media are having a massive impact in opening up our communities and creating a medium for movement and change.

With this as the backdrop, there is a power in the voices of the young, a power and freshness that is shifting and shaping our communities, that is creating a rich weave in the fabric of our future society. Young entrepreneurs and leaders are stepping forwards from every part of the globe, creating amazing evolved businesses, projects and social movements.

To celebrate and bring this youth energy to the world, The Centre for Social Brilliance, Emergency Happiness and Cricket for Change are collaborating to create The Youth Brilliance Conference, Being Young, Playing Big. The conference will bring together many voices and expressions of this new youth energy so people from across the globe can experience and connect with its creative and collaborative potential.

We are gathering together inspiring young people like Adam Hall, an ex youth offender from East London, now Development Manager at Cricket for Change http://www.cricketforchange.org who transforms the lives of young people through cricket, unleashing their potential so they are shaping a vibrant and connected world that is the future young brilliance.

In the past we have chosen to allow social challenges like youth unemployment and disengagement to bog us down; however this paradigm is rapidly shifting to one where instead, we are witnessing many young people stepping up and using the current economic and social climate as an opportunity to do things differently, work in new ways and connect to their visions. Youth energy is something that people of all ages and cultures can embody and harness to connect to each other and the world in new and vibrant ways. It is truly an amazing time for society to be young and play big.

Find out more by going to http://www.youthbrilliance.com

Having the courage to let your dreams come true

Having just got back from an amazing couple of weeks in Colorado, I have a new understanding of courage.

To put this in context: Colorado is my favorite place on the planet. To be honest, it is more than likely my favorite place in the entire universe or multiverse or whatever dimension it is that we all exist in. I was born there and spent my first six years of this lifetime running around wild and free in the Rocky Mountains. It was sunny almost everyday of my young life and I rarely had a care in the world. Roll forward to October 1984, my parents decide to move us all to Cambridge, England so that my father could do his PHD. Not a popular move in my book. We go from the glorious Colorado mountains with an average of 285 sunny days a year to the flat fenland environment of Cambridge where I would guess there are more like 5 sunny days a year. A bit unfair perhaps but I was only 6 and prone to exaggeration (I have since forgiven them for this move given all the amazing things that have happened in my life as a result but I have to be honest it took a long time to come to this expanded sense of awareness!).

So it has always been my dream to go back to Colorado and own a house in the mountains there. A dream that I have held on to my entire life and often been laughed at or scorned for by people who felt like I was living in a land of fantasy .

Now being the good self-development junkie that I am, I had started about a year ago playing a game of make believe. I had created a ‘vision board’ that included a fabulous house in Colorado. I had spent morning meditations imagining what it was going to be like waking up in the morning and making tea overlooking the fabulous view that I would have. So much so that I could even imagine the feeling of the wooden boards of my deck under my bare feet as I walked out in the morning sun.

Wind forwards to June 2011. I am given the opportunity to attend The Festival of Enlightenment in Estes Park, Colorado, supporting my good friend and mentor Art Giser, the developer of Energetic NLP. Obviously I jumped at the chance to go back ‘home’ and spend some time becoming more ‘enlightened’ there. Still going along with my game of make believe, I also decided to take it a step further and book some appointments to look at mountain land and houses.

6 pieces of land, 1 builder and 11 houses later and wouldn’t you know it, the last house we looked at both my partner and I fell in love with it. The price was good, the land is gorgeous, there was a deck just like I imagined and to top it all off, Elk wandering in the garden. My amazing partner turns to me and says ‘We can do this, what do you think’?

Now what do you think I said?

“YES OMG YES’?
‘WHOPEEEEEEE’?

‘LET”S GO BABY’?

Nope, none of those things. My strange little head actually started coming up with all the reasons why we couldn’t / shouldn’t / mustn’t buy it.
I actually was so dumbfounded at myself to witness all of these objections coming up that I had to take 5 minutes alone and have words with myself.

Where was all this coming from? Why, when I was at the brink of realizing my one, all time childhood dream was I finding ways to talk myself out of doing this?

As I was sat there on the mountainside, something occurred to me.

Sometimes when we want something badly enough, we spend all of our time absorbed in the ‘wanting’ part and none of our time focused on how it will feel to actually ‘have it’.

Sometimes we can consciously want all the things and feelings in the world whilst unconsciously running patterns of belief that say ‘we don’t deserve these things’ or ‘if we have more, others will have less’ or my personal favorite ‘it is frivolous and greedy to have more than you need’.

Sometimes when the universe delivers a great gift to you, it takes courage, real courage to accept it and accept all the life changes that go along with it.

It occurred to me that courage was more than just bravery and determination in the face of adversity. Courage for me was accepting your dreams, believing that you are worthy of them and they are worthy of you. Accepting full on that you DESERVE to be happy, fulfilled and jumping for joy everyday of your life if you choose to be.

Courage was living up to being the best version of me that I could be and accepting the gifts and rewards that come along with that.

I have since had the courage to say ‘YES PLEASE’ to my house in Colorado. I have also had the deep gratitude to say ‘THANK YOU’ to myself everyday since then for deciding that my dreams were worth it.

Creating Connections

A year or so ago, I had an epiphany whilst sat eating breakfast with my boyfriend. Looking across the table and realising (again) that I was completely in love with him, completely in love with our life and completely in love with myself, made me realise that there is one true secret to life…. and that’s connection.

I looked back over the 32 years of my life and saw that every time I have been struggling, every time I have been frustrated and every time I have been confused and unable to make a decision, it was because I had allowed myself to loose connection with whatever the source of that feeling was. Multiple relationships had gone down the toilet because I had lost connection to my lover (at the same time loosing the motivation to recover that connection). I had without fail, changed my job every one to two years when I got bored (lost connection) of the role I was doing. I have lived in nine different places in my life so far, each time because I was no longer excited and interested (lost connection) by the place in which I lived.

Equally, my greatest triumphs have come from a place of extreme passion, motivation, drive – you could say connection to the project, person or situation that I was involved in. When I finally learnt in my late twenties how to make decisions that are driven by my values and how connected an option is to my personal truth’s, my life has been blessed with miracles, joy’s, great love and fabulous challenges.

There is not a single person or situation in my life now that I am not intensely connected to in some way because I choose only the things that I connect to. I live according to my bliss. For me bliss = connection.

Is the pattern obvious yet?

How does this work for you? Take a moment and look at your life. Which areas do you feel engaged, excited and connected to? Which ones do you not?

This same principle works in terms of leadership.

Many organizations out there understand the benefits that having people and leaders who are engaged with and connected to the organizational vision and mission is to important bottom line metrics like customer satisfaction and retention. Leaders who are connected to themselves show self-awareness and personal vision, and are therefore able to create connections to other people far more effectively. They are able to connect with the organization in ways that allow them to spot opportunities and future leadership needs based on the evolving nature of their industry and customers. They are connected on multiple levels.

I am constantly being awed and surprised by how people from all over the world today are discovering wonderful ways to connect to each other in new ways. Finding fresh and evolved ways of working, co-creating and being together that are transcending old beliefs around separation and competition.

At Emergency Happiness we dedicate our time to helping people to connect more deeply to themselves, their career, their relationships and to the world around them. To see the light go on in someone’s eyes when they too find their connection is our greatest joy.

We invite you to connect with us further in whatever seems right for you. Check us out at www.emergencyhappiness.com

The language of beliefs

‘Whether you believe you can or you believe you can’t, either one is true’.

Henry Ford

I remember thinking when I first read this quote ‘I get the concept that we control our thoughts and our thoughts create our emotions, but surely the only reason that we believe something is true, is because it is based on hard, undeniable facts….. right?’

Since then, I have spent a lot of time evolving my skills in the field of human consciousness and psychological concepts like ‘the truth’ and ‘fact’ have become much more transitory for me. The process of reading and digesting various scientific research papers and then using my own personal experience as the proverbial guinea pig, I have come to some rather interesting conclusions about human beliefs.

 How we form beliefs

The process our brain undertakes when it is forming a belief is very similar to the process is goes through when we are learning a new skill. This time however, we are teaching our brain to give specific meaning to types of events and experiences that we encounter in our lives.

When we experience a stimulus event (this could be a fight with a family member or colleague, or a positive loving experience with a partner) our brain automatically goes to two places in its database.

First, it pulls out any memories of past experiences that it has stored and fires off the neurological connections that created the beliefs, thoughts and emotions that were present in these old situations. This is why when you see someone who looks like a childhood sweetheart or equally a childhood enemy, you start to experience the same thoughts and feelings you had at this time in your life. Your brain is firing up the same neurological pathways that it created when those events were actually happening!

If our brain draws a blank when looking for past experiences that resemble the stimulus event we are experiencing, then it resorts to watching other peoples responses to this stimulus and making new neurological connections based on our interpretation of their beliefs, thoughts and feelings. For example, as a young child you may have never seen a honey-bee before. Your brain attempts to find a past experience to compare this to but fails to pull anything out of the database so instead observes your mother who is running away fast from the bee, screaming that it might sting her. What sort of neurological connections do you think are being made here? On this basis you might decide that because your mother seems to know a lot more about life than you and because she is reacting in this way, this means that you should also believe that all bee’s are dangerous and might cause you pain. You might start to ‘think’ this on a regular basis whenever you see a bee in the future (because this time your brain is finding past experiences to draw upon) and you will probably start to feel fear and anxiety every time you are approached by a member of the bee species.

You get the picture right. What choices do you think this belief and its associated thoughts and feelings will prompt you to make when you are approached by bees in the future?

Will you reach out and say ‘Ahhh look at the beautiful bee”?

I don’t think so either.

Our reactions to stimulus events are almost always governed by the neurological pathways we have created based on past experiences or by observing the behaviour of others. The challenge this presents to us is that our learned beliefs, thoughts and emotions might not be appropriate in every stimulus event, yet we respond to them with our generic pattern of behaviour that we have filed under ‘bee’s’.

Widen the scope of this to look at the beliefs we hold about our capabilities, our role at work, our boss, our partner, the society we live in, and you start to get some interesting insights into how much of what you believe is actually authentically yours.

Our challenge is to start to gain an awareness of this process and interrupt the pattern when we catch ourselves acting from beliefs that no longer serve us.

Our beliefs create our reality

Our beliefs are the basis for how well we decide to do in our lives. Whether we believe we are capable of great things or we believe that we will always be held back, either of these beliefs can become true for us. I believe its one of life’s greatest gifts to help people realize that they are the masters of their own systems of belief and that they have the ability to change them for the good of themselves and others. “I never believed that I was capable of doing that….” Is one of the most beautiful sentences in the universe.

In May and June we are running a series of seminars exploring the concept of human beliefs and the role they play in us becoming human leaders in every part of our lives. To find out more and to join us at the Lead Like A Human seminars click here.

Creating a different space

Having spent the last year researching and developing the latest Emergency Happiness programme Lead Like A Human, I had the pleasure of talking to hundreds of different leaders from all walks of life. 99% of them spoke about the daily challenge of finding space within the craziness of their lives ‘to just breath and think’. In most cases they were referring to their own internal mental space, however, when I dug beneath the surface of this confession, very often its ripple spread outwards to include the need to find a ‘space to think’ within their teams, intimate relationships and within the organization for which they worked. Some of them even spoke about a burning desire to create a new space in which to innovate and connect with people on a global scale.

So what do they mean by ‘space’ and why does the creation of it appear to be such a difficult goal to achieve?

In my view there are three distinct types of space being eluded to here.

1. Head space – our ability to slow the constant, high velocity flow of thoughts that race through our minds at a million miles an hour in order to take a calmer, more objective look at our lives. Some of our greatest insights and ideas come to us when we are relaxed and in a ‘flow’ state. (Mihay Chickimehay). Being able to create a calm, resourceful state in your head- space is essential to your health, growth and how often you smile.
2. Team space – whether it’s the connection between two individuals or the bond between a group of people, for any relationship to be truly fulfilling, successful and long-lasting, it needs to be created in a space of true respect and commitment. This shared space needs to be created again and again for connected relationships to flourish. The most kick ass partnerships and highest performing teams are the ones who are constantly renewing their shared space of connection and purpose, respecting and enjoying each other’s evolving strengths and life journey’s.
3. Collaborative space – As humans, some of our greatest achievements happen when we align our vision and work together towards a common goal. When we create a space between a group of people where creativity, authenticity and responsibility are the norms, then true collaboration shines through. Through creating a collaborative space, organisations can empower their people, innovate in their industry and create commitment to their company vision. Leaders who are able to create a collaborative space in any part of their lives tend to be those who create the most positive change for themselves and for those around them.

So we all know the theory, then why do we find it so hard – when immersed in our personal, work or social lives – to apply it?

How often have you continued an argument with your partner or a family member so you could ‘be right’ when you knew creating some head space would help you to renew your relationship team space from a different angle? At work have you ever pushed yourself and others to meet a deadline, failing to practice true respect for different points of view and sacrificing team moral in favour of on time completion? Perhaps a greater focus on team space would have led to an exceptional collaborative space and higher performance overall?

I have observed many people who ‘know’ (cognitively) that creating these spaces are important in order to create high levels of performance, success, and happiness in all areas of their lives and yet in the heat of the moment they didn’t know ‘how’ to choose to create them.

If you are finding that you lack quality ‘space’ in your life or the simply lack it full stop, then you might want to join us on the 1st Dec for our Lead Like A Human masterclass. Here we are bringing together leaders from various different backgrounds and industries to talk about how we can start to create more positive space in our heads, in our teams, in the organizations we work for and in society as a whole.

Click here for more details.

Lets create some new spaces together!

The Art Of Human Leadership

Back in my corporate days, when I worked horrifically long hours and getting up at 4am to catch the red eye flight was the norm, leaders who could give me a reason to keep going and even better, to have fun, were few and far between. But they were there.

The types of leaders who stood far above the crowd for me were the people who lived somewhat differently to the rest. They were the ones who were supremely comfortably in their own skin, were confident making decisions with integrity and were guided by their own moral compass to do the right thing. They were not afraid to be different and express who they uniquely were as people; driven, pressured, caring, glorious, genuine, funny, sometimes sad, always them.

Things haven’t changed much today and it is still these types of ‘human’ leaders who impress the hell out of me. Leaders who have the ability to wake up to our own ‘humanness’ and honor the gifts that only our species have been given on this planet.

In the box of human tricks lies;

• Consciousness – the human ability to become more and more aware of our own patterns of thoughts, emotions and belief’s; spending our lives enhancing, evolving and changing these for the good of ourselves and others
• Curiosity – far from killing the cat or anyone else for that matter, the human ability to be curious about why things are happening in our lives and the role we play in creating them, allows us to make different decisions and work towards growing levels of awareness and maturity
• Creativity – we are truly some of the most resourceful creatures in the universe aren’t we? From the discovery of fire to the invention of the wheel, to more recently the creation of the internet and nanotechnology, humans have an amazing ability to overcome adversity and create breathtaking solutions when we put our hearts and minds to it
• Connection – When humans decide to connect fully, deeply and passionately to something, the results are stunning. Whether this is another person, a work project or our life vision, once connected we have the ability to move mountains if necessary in order to achieve our goals
• Responsibility – Taking full responsibility for something often means transcending our own personal human needs and taking on responsibility for helping others to fulfill theirs. When fully committed, this becomes an enjoyable and satisfying act that nourishes our own sense of development, validation and happiness.

Human leaders are the people who bring all of these traits to some degree or another into their lives and their interactions with others. Human leaders harness these abilities not just at work but in guiding and enhancing their personal, spiritual and social lives as well.

One of my favorite quotes on this subject comes from the mouth of Ken Thiry, CEO of Da Vita, a company that strives to bring human interactions and values into every aspect of their business operations. He said:

‘In order to become a better leader, you need to become a better human. You need to approach becoming a better human with as much rigor, relentlessness and creativity that one uses to acquire traditional business skills’.

It is amazing how many people in positions of leadership seem to forget this in favor of focusing on targets, processes and the bottom line. Ironically, there is a massive amount of research available clearly demonstrating that in companies where a high percentage of leaders work to develop and enhance the human traits mentioned above, their commercial performance reaps the benefits. Employee satisfaction, loyalty, retention and performance all benefit from having leaders in place who demonstrate human skills and encourage those around them to do the same. You can imagine the positive effect this then has on their customers and the local community right?

Bingo! Literally, winners all round.

It was my years of experience working for both excellent human leaders and their nemesis’s (the self involved, egocentric managers) that really got me thinking about how you can develop these invaluable human leadership skills.

It was for this reason that we created the Emergency Happiness, Lead Like A Human programme. If you are as passionate as I am about becoming more ‘human’ then it would be great to have you join us for our upcoming free teleseminar where we will shoot the breeze, make connections and get curious about what it is to be a human leader.

Join us, it is going to be insightful and fun!

For more information on the Lead Like A Human programme and the upcoming free tele-seminar, go to www.leadlikeahumanseminars.emergencyhappiness.com

When things don’t go your way

It has been a strange week.

I had the privilege of going skiing with my partner and stepchildren in the beautiful Austrian Alps. An experience that brought with it a steep learning curve, teaching me a lot about my approach to adversity (with each lesson being emphasised with its very own bruise).

Through the process of learning how to fall and get back up again, I was forced to face my own limiting beliefs and negative emotions about ‘not being very good at something’ head on. This was a very enlightening and humbling experience. I had to admit that despite being a coach (who is supposed to have their emotional s**t together) I was still prone to the same outbursts as everyone else when things didn’t go my way.

When things don’t work out the way we expect, or we suddenly encounter a situation that clashes with our view of how the world should be, in my experience humans do one of two things, they either:

a)    Get very defensive/angry at the world, pulling the ‘why me’ (aka victim card)

Or they:

b)    Get curious about the situation and their own reactions to it

In my very recent and physical experience, option A only leads further down the track of pain. When we are in ‘victim mode’ we relinquish our power of choice. We decide that no matter what we do, we will loose and therefore there is no point in even trying. Life is happening to us and we have no ability to control events or our reactions to them. Life is a series of random experiences, some good and some bad.

DEPRESSING!

Who in their right mind wants to live here? Scary thing is, I think if we were all made to swear on the bible then we would have to admit that we all choose option A occasionally. Some of us more than occasionally!

Option B on the other hand opens the magical doors to awareness. When we catch ourselves in an emotional tizz or about to rant at the world, taking a moment to get curious about why we are choosing to react in this way is like a margarita on a hot summer evening to our psychological state. It brings on an instant awareness that even though we are feeling bad about something, we can take a moment to identify why and choose to give it a different meaning and thus a different feeling.

Whilst I was up on the slopes having fallen over for the millionth time, I was forced to look at the meaning that I was giving to my incompetence. I was choosing to blame a weak hip, tired legs, tight ski pants, even a rock to get away from the inescapable fact that I was simply not very good at skiing yet and I had a healthy fear of careering off the edge of a cliff! As soon as I admitted to myself that fear was the underlying factor in the whole thing then I was able to give a new meaning to my experience. I decided to see the whole thing as a massive lesson in ego and limiting beliefs and laugh at myself for falling into the same trap that I teach many other people to avoid. My whole outlook changed, and as a result, my feelings about the situation changed.

Luckily enough my physical performance also changed and by the end of the three days I proudly skied down the whole mountain with my family.

Curiosity is the essential ingredient to learning and expanding your self-awareness.

It may have killed the cat but it will certainly save you from a future of victimhood!

Peace