Those of you who have the inclination, might have noticed that I have been rather remiss in the article posting stakes over recent months. My excuse? In Weight Loss for Food Lovers I wrote about how we need to be aware of the unconscious forces that will keep us stuck in the ‘nice idea’ phase of a project for so long that we don’t get  into the ‘execution’, the ‘doing’ phase. If we don’t execute our project, whatever it may be, we don’t finish. If we don’t finish, the greatest idea in the world will be relegated to Unfinished-Idea Heaven – the place that ‘nice ideas’ go to to spend the rest of eternity lounging by a half-filled pool while listening to the first part of all the unfinished songs. Euripides, the Shakespeare of Ancient Greece who wrote over 90 plays, said it simply: ‘Do not plan for ventures before finishing what’s at hand.’

Beware the seduction of the new, exciting and fascinating

There are several reasons why we don’t finish things we start. As I wrote about in Food Lovers, sometimes it’s failure fear, sometimes it’s success stress. For me it was seduction. Let me explain. Last year while on holidays I started writing a book about how to choose a healthy partner. I was several chapters into it when I realised I was at risk of making another contribution to Unfinished-Idea Heaven. You see, four years ago I started writing another book, a sequel of sorts to Food Lovers, although very different in many ways. I had finished writing it and was in the laborious rewriting and editing phase. This is the most tedious part of book writing, unable to compete with the alluring seduction of researching, writing and falling in love with a fresh, exciting and fascinating new book. In relationship therapy I often see people make the mistake of comparing a fresh, exciting new partner with the too well known, no-longer-exciting one that they have spent the last few years with. You can guess who usually wins. A few years on the exciting new partner is looking a lot like the last one … sometimes worse!

The danger is that we can give up on equally valid, or even more valid, ideas and projects as the shiny new ones grab our attention. To combat this temptress I made a deal with myself that I would not write anything else – blog articles included – until I sent the book off for publication. This happened just last week. So over the coming weeks you can expect to see me bothering your Inbox as I catch up on a pile of articles that came to me while finishing off this last book. Oh … by the way – wishing you all a belated healthy, happy and prosperous 2012.

I often see people make decisions much more quickly than they need to. It is certainly a habit I am trying to rid myself of. As humans we feel the need, when presented with a question or a problem, to answer it sooner rather than later. It comes from a need, that we all have to varying degrees, for closure, to take the issue off our mind. Alternatively, we can feel we look like we are not that smart if we cannot come up with a quick response. One of my favourite writers, Mark Twain, dealt with our need to respond more quickly than we need to. With his inimitable wit he suggested, “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.”

Our drive to respond quickly in making important decisions is not a problem if we’re choosing a movie, big problem if we’re choosing a car, a house, a career … or a partner. From a weight management perspective you would be surprised how much less you eat if you slow down your decision making when it comes to choosing what to put in your mouth next. You see all of these choices are initially driven by emotions around these needs for closure, comfort, or not to feel a fool, or to keep up with the Joneses. Over time, the emotions will be replaced by rationality as our higher self  is given the space to do what it does.

In certain situations, one has to make lightning fast decisions. The following comes from a pre-flight briefing from a Canadian Starfighter F104 instructor (thanks to Noel Whittaker the financial guru who sourced this lovely quote). These jet fighters were the first combat aircraft capable of sustained Mach 2 flight – yes, that is twice the speed of sound – and at full noise, it could go quite a bit faster again! NASA later used them for spaceflight training. So things happen very quickly in these machines and they did not have a great safety rating. Indeed, the Canadians’ nickname for it was the ‘Widowmaker’. Accordingly, the briefing by the trainer to trainee co-pilots went like this:

‘If you hear me yell, “Eject! Eject! Eject!” the last two will be echoes.

If you stop to ask “Why?” you’ll be talking to yourself, because by then you’ll be the pilot.’

Fortunately, we can generally make decisions more slowly in life. I would suggest that as a rather obvious guideline, the more important the decision, the more time should be put aside to make it. So a movie, several minutes; a car several weeks and a partner several months – and then a couple of years more before embarking on the complete lock-in – having children!

When I have to make an important decision, my first response is a question: When is the deadline? Read more »

Rules for Being Human were first popularised by Jack Canfield in his bestselling  book Chicken Soup for the Soul. They were published as by ‘Anonymous’ simply because that was the way they came to Jack. It was Dan Millman, author of The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, who set the record straight and contacted Jack to reveal the author. They came from the book If Life is a Game, These are the Rules by Cherie Carter-Scott. Amongst other things she was inspired in writing this book by Helen Keller. To remind you, Helen Keller became deaf and blind at the age of 19 months. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree and went on to become a prolific author and social activist. Carter-Scott references, in particular, this quotation by Helen Keller, “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”

It is worth being reminded of the 10 Rules even though you will probably have seen them. The only one I could not leave alone was Rule Nine. Whenever this principle is spoken about I am compelled to qualify it as sometimes an inner voice can get us into trouble or hold us back.

Here they are: Read more »

It’s not often that I watch a movie twice. Often, if it’s not what I’m looking for, I don’t watch a movie to the end once! And I’m not really into football. My wife says one of the reasons she married me was that I had no interest in spectator sports. I have enjoyed State of Origin, but only because I was lucky enough to be invited to watch the last two games, the equaliser and the decider, from private boxes. At lunch with my wife’s family for her mother’s eighty-something birthday, for the brief period that I remain a world authority on State of Origin, I was sallying forth on football. My father-in-law waded in and argued that League wasn’t real football, Rugby was the game.

Now to be honest, I’m sure there’s a difference between the two sports but be blowed if I have a clue what it is. My nephew chimed in with ‘Rugby is not life and death, it is more important than that.’ So, feeling out of my depth, I went to safer ground and asked if they had seen the movie Invictus. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it is about Nelson Mandela’s first days in office as the President of South Africa and how he brilliantly uses the Springboks rugby team to reconcile the races and their tinderbox tensions. Matt Damon plays the captain of the team while Morgan Freeman does a magnificent job as Mandela. I was more than happy to watch the movie again, because it is not about rugby, it is about inspirational leadership and Mandela’s amazing capacity for forgiveness. Having read his autobiography, I, like the rest of the world, have a deep admiration for this unusual human. So the next day, as we had ten of us at our place watching the film for the second time, I noticed things that were not so evident to me the first time round.

A couple of times Mandela referred to the poem that saw him through his 27 years in prison. Afterwards, I found myself returning to the last lines of the poem, ‘… I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.’ A message I am repeatedly trying to deliver in psychotherapy. Read more »

Have a listen to this beautiful song and then read the story behind it … then listen again – click here: Man In A White Shirt.

The Story Behind The Song

Most of the population have no real idea what we do in psychotherapy, especially group psychotherapy. They often assume it’s about getting advice and who would want advice from unqualified strangers!? One of the things forbidden in group therapy is, in fact, giving advice. I’m the only person in the room qualified to give advice and one thing drummed into me in my training was not to give advice. It’s all about helping people to come to their own awareness of the values that they want to live by and the dynamics they have learnt and stored in their unconscious that determine why they do what they do. These dynamics often stop us from living by our values. Once you have worked out  the dynamics that hold you back from meaningfully pursuing your values, you can start to more powerfully author your own life. To do this you need to assimilate this awareness at an emotional level, rather than at an intellectual level. Group therapy, because of its experiential and confronting nature, is a powerful tool for bringing about this emotional shift.

As a group member explores his or herself in the safety of the group, others from their distance, can more easily see how their own values and dynamics work. In short, psychotherapy, group and individual, is simply accelerated personal growth. Read more »

Sorry I haven’t blogged for a while. My Muse has channelled my writing energy into completing my next book – but more of that in time.

Today I want to write about wisdom. I was at a workshop recently with Professor Kelly Wilson from Mississippi. He is one of the founders of ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) and while he was rather scatty, he made some stimulating points. One was that wisdom is essentially the capacity to shift perspective. People who start with only one perspective and doggedly stick to it (also known as a ‘teenager’) would be considered the least wise.

A person who is slow to adopt a particular perspective, and who, along the way to doing so, considers multiple perspectives is what most of us would see as more wise. Some of these perspectives may be what Edward de Bono would consider to be more ‘lateral’ i.e. they are not perspectives that the majority would come up with as they abandon the usual presumptions.

This got me thinking about wisdom in another way, from another perspective. Group therapy has a surprising power – a power that I have been awed by on many occasions in my 20+ year career as a group therapist. When you have eight people in a room considering an issue, you automatically have multiple perspectives. No one person may be particularly wise, but ‘the group’ is, at its very essence, a wise entity. Diversity is the key. This wisdom gives group life-changing power. Teams in the workplace that work well, where people respect each other’s different perspectives can harness industry-changing power – think Google, Apple, Microsoft (back in the old days).

Which, finally, brings me to the smallest and most important group – couples. As a relationship therapist, the greatest tragedy I witness, day after day, is people not appreciating that their partner’s perspective, being different from their own, is a wonderful gift of wisdom. Our egos, being the narrow-minded, precious things that they are, feel threatened by another not agreeing with us. Deep down their different view might leave us worrying that we are not smart enough, or that to accept our partner’s view means we are ‘wrong’. This is the greatest relationship natural disaster known to humankind. In this way, we can take the gift of wisdom and not just completely negate it, but we can turn it into conflict. Read more »

Some wisdom on the all important subject of meaning through choice. And how awesome is the wise author of this article … here’s the link: The consequences of choice …

Guy Hendricks, on writing about Fearless Living, has some profound thoughts (thanks to my wife for passing them on). When we work out who we are and what we do, the day to day achievements and material rewards become secondary – or a hindrance. Here is what he has to say:

The purpose of life is to discover an existence within ourselves that passing time can’t take from us. Fear is born from what is taken away from us loss of kids/career/health  etc.

When we win, achieve, have family – all pass with time. We lose our sense of self because we have identified with something in time. Our sense of self is confined by what it is defined through. We have pain because we have identified with something temporary and hoped it to be eternal.

Deciduous trees lose their fruit and leaves, but even though they look barren, they have not lost their potential. A bare tree is something nature requires of the tree so it can meet the winter and store energy to create new life in the spring. When life comes along and blows the leaves off us, and all our fruit is gone. The disappearance of the leaves and fruit is not the disappearance of our possibilities. It is setting us up, to realise there is something greater coming if we will allow it.

The purpose of life is to discover who and what we are intended to be – created anew, brighter, broader, better every moment. When we allow the moments in our lives to reveal that who and what we’ve been has gone as far as it can go, but not as far as there is to go, our happiness is eternal. We are part of ceaseless transformation. And we are both creators and creations ourselves. Life reveals for us where we can take part in an internal and eternal creation. But we need to give up the part of us who only knows ourselves through our creations. Life inevitably reveals to us what needs to change.

This 30 second speech by Bryan Dyson (CEO of Coca Cola) is worth repeating.

“Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls in the air – work, family, health, friends and spirit. You’re trying to keep them all in the air.

You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back.

But the other four balls – family, health, friends and spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same.”

Thanks to Dr David Rimmer who broke us all up at my Brisbane workshop with this wonderful example of how creative the unconscious mind can be as it rules our conscious mind and our life. I was talking about how powerful the unconscious can be in getting us to avoid things that threaten it in some way … how we never forget to pick up lotto winnings, but we do forget root canal appointments; how we can ‘forget’ that we have Type 2 Diabetes when our favourite dessert is in front of us etc.

Procrasticleaning is when we suddenly find ourselves cleaning the house, the desk, the car, instead of doing something we would rather avoid!

At my last workshop I promised to post details of the living psychiatrist (going strong at 79) that has inspired me more than any other. He is an authority on both Group Therapy and Existential Psychotherapy – the importance of finding meaning in one’s life. What makes him so unique for me, is that while his textbooks are highly respected in these respective fields, he has written best selling novels that spoke to my heart. I enjoyed reading these three books as much as I have enjoyed reading anything (and I read a lot). Few psychiatrists are prepared to talk about their failures and personal feelings as publicly and as openly as Yalom does (read The Fat Lady from Love’s Executioner). He lives his mantra that ‘it is the relationship that heals’ (not clever advice). In making himself vulnerable to the world he allows us all to be perfectly flawed humans. And then he writes like an angel. My three favourite books are:

• Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
• When Nietzsche Wept
• Lying on the Couch

His two textbooks that are must reads for students of these fields are:

• Existential Psychotherapy
• The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy

To read more about him, here is the Wiki on this great psychiatrist: Irvin D Yalom

To go to Amazon, here’s the link: Yalom’s Books on Amazon

(While I have read all of his books the only one I’m not so enamoured with was The Schopenhauer Cure – it was a little too spiritually bereft for me.)

I shared this thought, one of my ‘rememberings’, with one of my highly insightful, surprisingly enlightened, young patients. She said how as a young child she had journalled: ‘God doesn’t care if I’m scared or angry, he only cares about the choices I make and what I end up doing.’ Very cool.

The point is, we need to decide whether or not to do things based on how meaningful it would be for us to do them. If there is little or no meaning, or if we’re just doing it for the money, or the recognition, skip it. But if it talks to us, if it reflects our values, if it’s about who we are and what we do …

Thanks to one of my patients, let’s call him Joseph, who forwarded me these wonderful words on the importance of taking risks in life – so central to the purpose of this blog. He points out that the piece is often attributed to the poet Leo Buscaglia, whereas the real author of this inspirational verse is Janet Rand.

RISKS

To laugh is to risk appearing the fool,
To weep is to risk being called sentimental.
To reach out to another is to risk involvement.
To expose feelings is to risk showing your true self.
To place your ideas and your dreams before the crowd is to risk being called naive.
To love is to risk not being loved in return,
To live is to risk dying,
To hope is to risk despair,
To try is to risk failure

But risks must be taken, because the greatest risk in life is to risk nothing.
The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing.
He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn, feel, change, grow or love.
Chained by his certitude, he is a slave; he has forfeited his freedom.
Only the person who risks is truly free

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There are two types of Giving. There is the giving that expects a return (even if it is later down the track). Then there is the Giving where the reward is simply that which comes from the experience of being part of what is the oldest, purest loving act. If you feel in any way depleted by your act of giving then you are giving with a little ‘g’. Big ‘G’ Giving is done without the Ego getting in the way. This allows us to Give more powerfully, with the recipient getting the full potential of the act of Giving.

In relationship therapy, I often see couples with problems giving with a little ‘g’ – or ‘tit-for-tat’ giving – i.e. I’ll do this for you on the basis you do this for me – often unspoken – it’s not worth much. It does not capture the fullness of the key strategy of  ‘working to be the best partner you can be’ irrespective of how your partner responds (whether they develop this skill for your current partner or your next one).

And then, few things shift a negative mood state more effectively than big ‘G’ giving.