Pointing Your Compass

2009-06-30T07:53:00.000-07:00

Excerpted from Dream Big

Years ago, I was at a motivational conference when the speaker asked the group what at the time seemed like a simple question. She asked us what we would do if we knew we would not fail. If we were guaranteed success, what would we attempt? I find that question to be one of the most clarifying we can ask ourselves. When we eliminate all of our self-doubts and remove all our inner (and outer) critics, we have a better chance at getting at the truth.
Therein lies the answer to the age-old question: What do I want to be when I grow up? Think about it. What would you do if you were absolutely guaranteed success? Would you be a stand-up comic, an architect, a photographer, a social worker, a café owner, a clothes designer, a midwife? Whatever your fantasy, that’s what you should be doing—guarantee or no guarantee.
I truly believe that discovering our own passions and finding the courage to follow them are our greatest callings. When people ask me what the single most important tool is for unearthing our dreams, I tell them solitude. In order to find our authentic purpose, our passion, we have to spend lots of time listening, really listening, to ourselves. It seems so simple really, but how many of us actually do it? Our days are so overflowing with to-do lists and phone calls and emails that we rarely just unplug and hear what our hearts are telling us. At the beginning of something there has to be nothing. We have to give ourselves a clean slate—and permission to dream.
By giving myself that permission to dream, I gave birth to a company that has been one of the most worthwhile adventures of my life. My hope is that through telling my story and sharing a few of the lessons I’ve learned (usually the hard way!), I will inspire you to dream big, too.

Eric Harvey

2009-02-03T07:20:00.000-08:00

My son Alex and I at my Father Son Weekend.

*note: we get plastered when we make a cast of our face

2009-02-03T07:18:00.001-08:00

Talent is God-given; be thankful
Praise is man-given; be humble
Conceit is self-given; be careful
-Dave Driscoll

2009-01-27T11:12:00.000-08:00

I have indepth conversations with my patients. I'm thinking of writing a book, Musings from the Table that would contain wonder revelations and insights. What do you think?

Author Unknown

2009-01-27T11:11:00.000-08:00

Emasculation happens in marriage as well. Women are often attracted to the wilder side of a man, but once having caught him they settle down to the task of domesticating him. Ironically, if he gives in he’ll resent her for it, and she in turn will wonder where the passion has gone. Most marriages wind up there. A weary and lonely woman asked me the other day, “How do I get my husband to come alive?” “Invite him to be dangerous,” I said. “You mean, I should let him get the motorcycle, right?” “Yep.” She shrank back, disappointment on her face. “I know you’re right, but I hate the idea. I’ve made him tame for years.”

2008-11-05T05:16:00.001-08:00

"If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track, which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living."
— Joseph Campbell

2008-07-09T11:48:00.000-07:00

If I am content with what I have, I can live simply and enjoy both prosperity and free time.
If my goals are clear, I can achieve them without fuss.
If I am at peace with myself, I will not spend my life force in conflicts
If I have learned to let go, I do not need to fear dying.

excerpt from the Tao of Leadership by John Heider

2008-06-16T15:46:00.001-07:00

"Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong."

Peter T. Mcintyre

2008-04-28T16:08:00.000-07:00

"Money is one of the most important subjects of your entire life. Some of life's greatest enjoyments and most of life's greatest disappointments stem from your decisions about money. Whether you experience great peace of mind or constant anxiety will depend on getting your finances under control."—Robert G. Allen: Financial adviser, author

2008-04-18T12:42:00.000-07:00

Seek to do less and to accomplish more, to achieve more. Doing is action. Achievement is successful action.

Between Two Goods

2008-02-11T10:30:00.000-08:00

How do you decide between doing two good activities when you know doing both will most likely overtax you on time and energy?

I’m in that boat now. It’s good to ask myself two questions. (1) Which one best fits my personal mission? (2)Which one will I be most energized by?

Being clear on the specifics of my own personal mission statement is where I started. My life mission is to create freedom by realizing the truth. I have the choice of becoming more involved with my motorcycle group that does great acts of service. I also have the option to help develop a men’s conference. Both activities fulfill my mission, but the men’s conference is more directly focused on completing my mission, since I will be personally involving others to reach a place of personal freedom. I can still be involved in my group, but I will not take on an officer/leader position which will require more time and energy. This keeps me from burn-out and the task of managing stress (see previous blog article).

I have this happening with each and every request made of my time and with each idea that I come up with. I get excited about the prospect of being involved, but weigh it against my time with family, my business, my home, social and spiritual life and proper exercise and rest. Like juggling, there can be so many balls in the air and we must choose wisely how many to handle. I would rather provide excellence to a few things than settle for average with too many commitments.

Concerning Plans, "Solomon Says"

2008-01-18T08:37:00.000-08:00

Proverbial Life Coaching

Plans fail for lack of counsel,
But with many advisers they succeed.
Proverbs 15:22

Sure you think you know it all. Or maybe it’s just the opposite; you think you don’t have what it takes. Either way you are wrong. Sometimes it’s being open to advice or feedback from someone, especially someone with experience. Be open to new ideas and test them against your true values. Your plans will be more likely to succeed.

All a man’s ways seem innocent to him,
But motives are weighed by the Lord.
Proverbs 16:2

We can rationalize just about anything. We can even set out to prove we are right. But before putting any plan into action, ask yourself these three questions:
Is this plan in harmony with God’s truth?
Will it work under real-life conditions?
Is my attitude pleasing to God?

Commit to the Lord whatever you do,
And your plans will succeed.
Proverbs 16:3

Have you heard, “Hope for the best and plan for the worst”? This verse says to trust God as if everything depended on him, while working as if everything depended on you.

In his heart a man plans his course,
But the Lord determines his steps.
Proverbs 16:9

If you want God to laugh, show him your five year plan. Be sure to stay focused on what is admirable but don’t get married to the plan – it should flex and change as you move forward. It may change drastically. Be open! God happens.

As you can see, I didn’t have to search far to find verses in the Proverbs that were relevant to Life Coaching.

2007-12-31T07:34:00.000-08:00

Stress as a Choice - Part 5 (closing statements)

The most common form of laziness is staying busy.

What we think about expands.

A thought is eternal until it is unthought.

Remember that the human mind works better moving toward something rather than away from something.

Doing out of love energizes us while doing out of fear depletes us

2007-12-27T16:27:00.000-08:00

Stress as a Choice: Part 4

Still on the subject of stress! (Is that stressing you out??)

Again, stress is a choice and it is created.

When someone fears losing their job, they are concerned about their sense of power or security being threatened. This co-dependant approach to your work is loved by the employer, but is not so healthy for you.

The cool thing about that is the power.

If you created it, you have the power to un-create it.

If you did not create it and are only a victim to it, then there is nothing you can do about it – except manage it. Why manage rather than eliminate? Know that when you feel stress you can change your mind.

Example: You catch yourself with your shoulder shrugging up, your heart beating a bit faster, you are breathing in the upper part of your chest, and just plain hurried. I am using the body responses because our mind will play tricks on us but our body never lies.
Remember the second greatest urge? Anyway, now what to do? I myself go back to the day I came back to work after my dad’s death. You will need to do a thorough self-examination to know what your hooks are. They probably came early in life and have great risk to give up.

2007-12-07T10:28:00.000-08:00

Stress as a Choice: Part 3

How many of you are confused about stress and fear? Excellent! Just try it on. You have to leave this present moment and go to the future to experience fear. That is why I use the acronym False Evidence Appearing Real for fear.

Let me ask you, “do you have everything you need right now?” You have shelter, you are not starving? What else do you really need right now? If you are truthful I think you will agree that we have all we need right now. How do you feel knowing you have everything you need right now?

Back to my main point. Stress is a choice. There is no stress “out there”.

Just like there is no anxiety out there to attack you. It is something you make a decision on based on what you have learned, how you perceive things, your experience, everything! Again, the feeling of stress is fear. A thoughts proceeds a feeling. A thought first occurs. The feeling follows.

For example: If I lose my job, how will I pay the mortgage? Then comes the feeling of fear. Then comes tachycardia. Then more stomach acid. Then the blood pressure. All this happened because a thought occurred, one that jumped to the future, and caused a response.

Why? Why do you that to yourselves? As I said, I’m perspicacious, meaning observant, thoughtful, insightful or my definition “getting to the heart of the matter”. I could tell you all the nuances of this or I could cut through all the rhetoric and give you what really happens after its boiled down to the final element. You, like me, will want to observe the following statements for sometime so you can take it on as a belief system of your own. This will penetrate to the heart of your stress. I observed this for a long time and still have not found any reason to refute it. Believe me I wanted to because I fought it the moment I heard it. It is this:

The boiled down bottom line of men’s problems comes down to power.

The boiled down bottom line of women’s problems comes down to security.

2007-12-03T17:18:00.000-08:00

Stress as a Choice: Part 2

I want to share a story with you. Back in 1989 I found my father dead in his bed. It was a shock since he was only 58 years old. I went through the grief, the funeral arrangements, the financials, the details of his apartment and furniture, dealing with my family, and all that comes with something like this. But it was also a spiritual experience.

It’s a long story so I’ll have to share that some other time. The moral of the story is that I came back to work as a project manager and I stood in amazement at the craziness all around me. People were all stressed out, meeting deadlines (Why is it called a dead line anyway?)… After having seen the whole picture, that none of us are gett’in out here alive, it seemed such a waste to be stressed out over such “small” stuff.

I'm not going to lay on my death bed and say, "I wish I would have been more stressed out." Success really is in the journey as well as the destination.

I saw the whole office stressed and I could never go back to that state of frantic. I could not, after stepping out of the fear, go back to it.

When calm in the midst of a workday, someone once asked me, “Aren’t you afraid of losing your job?” NO. What will happen if you lose your job? GET A NEW ONE. "You can't really mean that?" ACTUALLY I DO. They also thought because I did not stress out and act crazy that I didn’t care. There is a risk in letting go of stress.

Actually I was more productive than ever. Management finally saw this (with my help) but it was a long process. Bottom line is significance overtook material success. Substance overtook fear. I made a choice not to go back to a stress-based lifestyle. I was tired of living in fear. I considered life too short to be based on fear.

Fear is the feeling of stress.

It is the bodily response to the thoughts we think AND fear is only experienced in the future. Just as sadness is about loss which is the past.

For example: A tiger walks in the room and you feel what? FEAR. Why? Isn’t that in the future? Maybe he isn’t hungry, maybe just been fed and a tame tiger. Regardless, anytime we feel fear we are jumping to the future. You can plan for the future, but don’t live there.

I consider living in the future as neurotic since the future does not exist. If it does not exist, it is a fantasy. Wouldn’t that be neurotic – living in a fantasy?

What is even more incredible is that when we live in our own developed fantasy, why do we choose a negative one instead of a positive one? We could dream of how healthy and successful we are going to be instead of wondering how we are going to pay the mortgage, the bills, worrying about health problems not yet surfaced, etc., etc.

Stress: Problem or Symptom?

2007-11-30T12:06:00.001-08:00

My first post is my first post because of the importance of the topic.

STRESS!

Stress as a Choice - Part One

I’d like you to know the root cause of stress -- to be able to treat the problem, and not just the symptoms. I’ll address a number of stress-reduction techniques on another post, but I want to focus on the idea of stress itself.

Stress is a choice and you create it because it serves you in some way.

Let me repeat that. Stress is a choice and you create it because it serves you in some way. Now this may be a hard pill to swallow for anyone.

In the vein of treating the problem rather than only the symptoms, I have come to treating stress, ‘the problem’ rather than only the symptoms. Coming to accepting stress as a choice will be hard to believe for someone who wants to hold on to their stress, for someone who subconsciously wants their stress. If you give it a chance, if you step away from yourself and become an observer you will give yourself a chance to not only believe this idea of stress as a choice, but you will experience it. There is a gap as large as the Grand Canyon between believing and knowing. We see this in people’s faith as well. Believers’ struggle with their spiritual values and those who KNOW have a passion for theirs.

So what I am asking today is that you suspend your beliefs while reading my thoughts on stress. This is not hard to do, it is something you have done before. You go to a movie and suspend your belief for that period of time – you aren’t thinking this is a two-dimensional illumination of light on a screen. You feel the feelings, you cry, your heart races. After the movie, you re-enter your old belief system and go to your car. You can do that here too, though I hope that you will test my theories to see if they are true, rather than spending your energy defending your old belief system.

Remember that rationalization is the second greatest urge for a human being. (No, sex is not the first, it’s survival.) You will automatically want to maintain your status quo. It is human nature to rationalize the way we are and to defend and protect that belief system, but I ask you to take a chance.

What I propose is that instead of managing stress you eliminate it.

Live a life that does not have stress, but instead has peace and calm.
Stress is not a problem - it is a symptom.

Thoughts are the problem – change your thoughts and you change your stress. The stress I speak of is internal stress. I am not speaking of earthquakes, volcanoes, and even gravity. They are external stresses. You may think a death in the family is an external stress. Not really, it is how we react to the death. I’m not saying you shouldn’t feel sad and grieve. Just know the difference between internal and external stress.

It’s not so much what happens to us but what we do with what happens to us.