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By Phil, November 26, 2009 1:19 pm

Reading Time: 1 minute and 47 seconds

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States.  This is a day devoted to gratitude.  Thanksgiving’s origins are from the original settlers setting aside time to be thankful for the harvest and having food to survive the harsh winter.  In the modern world, it has become a time to be with the people we love and to be grateful for all we have in our lives.  In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I wanted to share an amazing story of one man’s experience of struggle and gratitude.

In 1983, Rom Houben was driving home when his car was caught up in a huge accident.  He nearly died that day, yet somehow he survived in a coma.  Doctors ran every test they knew and found no response to any stimulus – Rom was diagnosed in a total vegetative state, and for 23 years he remained in hospital, motionless.

In 2006, Dr. Steven Laureys, an experimental neurobiologist was working on a project to better understand long-term coma patients.  Laureys decided to run new tests on patients to monitor their brain activity.  When Laureys ran his tests on Rom, he saw something remarkable – normal, healthy brain activity.  Everyone had assumed that because Rom’s body had stopped moving, his brain had shut down too.  Laureys realised that inside his still body, Rom’s brain was very much alive.

For 23 years, Rom was a prisoner in his own body.  He could see everything that was going on, hear the conversations of the nurses, smell the food on the next patients table and do nothing.  Rom heard about the death of his father from his distraught mother and was powerless to respond.

Laureys used intensive physiotherapy to help Rom break his silence using a voice machine operated by slight movements of one finger.  Rom was free.  So how does Rom explain his ordeal?

When the doctors first pronounced his coma, Rom “screamed, but there was nothing to hear”.  In the first few weeks and months, Rom felt “powerlessness. Utter powerlessness. At first I was angry, then I learned to live with it.”  Miraculously he learned to cope through intense periods of mediation, “I travelled with my thoughts into the past, or into another existence altogether”. Sometimes, “I was only my consciousness and nothing else”.

And after 23 years of being trapped, how did he feel when Laureys finally made his discovery?  “I’ll never forget the day that they discovered me,” he said. “It was my second birth”.  Rom had no anger or bitterness over his experience, only gratitude at a new chance at life.  His remarkable attitude shows the power of gratitude.  This story had helped me to reflect on my experience and feel immense gratitude for the countless blessings in my life.

Wherever you are in the world, I hope that you can take a moment today to think about your life and be grateful for your experience, and the world around you.  Happy Thanksgiving.

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By Phil, November 19, 2009 2:32 pm

We have a guest posting today by the best selling author Tony Wilkinson, whose book the Lost Art of Being Happy has provided inspiration for thousands on finding happiness.  If you enjoy this, click here to subscribe to never miss another post.

The Lost Art of Being Happy – by Tony Wilkinson – Reading time : 3 minutes and 24 seconds

The Lost Art of Being Happy

It’s tempting to think that happiness is achieved by solving life’s problems. But if you wait to be happy until all your problems are solved you will never be happy, because when today’s problems are gone others will take their place. If you are going to live happily you have to live with your problems.

I worked for twenty years in the City of London, but few of the rich and powerful people I met seemed happier than poorer folk. In the course of writing my book, The Lost Art of Being Happy: Spirituality for Sceptics (Findhorn Press) I finally realised why. The book shows that living happily depends on cultivating inner peace. It’s a very old idea, of course, but I’ve worked on the practical details as they can be applied today.

Living happily depends mainly on your inner life, meaning your thoughts, emotions, desires – your entire mental and emotional scene. Happiness is about what you think and believe, how you feel, how problems affect you. This may sound obvious, but often we focus instead on our external lives, on getting and spending and “having fun” and then wonder why we are not happy. But it’s when our inner lives are serene that we are happiest – and this is inner peace.

The difficulty is that our inner lives are based on patterns and habits. You don’t choose, occasion by occasion, how you respond inside. This happens and you feel angry; that happens and you feel sad. Because of these habits, events don’t necessarily leave you with inner peace. So the key is to change the patterns and acquire new inner habits.

Deliberately learned habits are of course skills. Inner skills are very like virtues, but if you think of them as skills rather than virtues you benefit from a liberating shift. Instead of “I must become a better person” you can think: “I could live more happily if I worked on my skills”. It’s a process of training yourself, like all skill learning.

I suggest five main groups of skills, although the training system is less important than the commitment to devote time to improving your inner life skills. Practice is the key and it requires effort but the reward is what we all want most – deep happiness. Here are the five:

1 Mindfulness: The problem most of us have with thought is having too much of it – the worrying and mental “chattering” our minds are prone to. Mindfulness is awareness without the chattering. Concentrating on your breathing is one way to practise but many people achieve the same focus through sport, dance or martial arts. Mindfulness is a key inner skill because, as it gets stronger, it lets you focus on your own inner life and catch your habits in the act. Once you can see what they do the change you are seeking often happens of its own accord.

2 Benevolence: It comes as a surprise when you first hear it but benevolence or love starts off as a practical skill which counteracts negative emotions like anger and hatred, terrible wreckers of happiness. Try it the next time someone annoys you: put yourself in their place and ask yourself what they might be thinking or feeling to behave like that. It doesn’t mean they should get away with it, but if you get into the habit of thinking more tolerantly – understanding that their actions are also ruled by inner habits – you’ll find you can react with less anger. And less anger equals more happiness for you.

3 Story skills: Your beliefs, including the ones you are almost unaware of because you have never questioned them, have great power over your life. Start to think of them as stories and it is easier to accept that other things might be true as well, or even instead. Even true stories only select the little bit of reality we are focusing on at the moment: no one story is the whole truth about any situation. This is not about make–believe, it’s about ‘reframing’ situations to look at them from a different perspective and see a different truth.

4 Letting-go: This is particularly helpful when we are unhappy not getting what we want. Generally, we are encouraged to think that more will make us happier, whether it’s clothes or money or even love. But wanting is a treadmill and to be happy you either have to satisfy all your desires (which is unlikely) or let go of some of them. Sometimes what we want is revenge or retribution, which is why forgiveness is an important letting-go skill: it’s not about letting anyone else off, it’s about letting ourselves off the hook of anger about the past.

5 Enjoyment skills: This last group includes patience, humour and especially gratitude. You don’t have to be grateful to someone, it’s enough to cultivate gratitude for things. Our minds naturally scan the environment for dangers, probably once a useful mechanism but it can make us unnecessarily pessimistic – focusing on the 5% we lack rather than the 95% we have. Cultivating gratitude will help redress the balance.

The important thing is to practise your skills, preferably until they operate without you thinking about them. Practice itself can be a rewarding way of life, a path between religion and materialism. I look on it as a form of secular spirituality, spirituality without any supernatural belief, because it has so much in common with traditional religious spiritual practice. But that’s just my way of looking at it. It’s the path to living happily if you follow it.

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By Phil, November 17, 2009 2:54 pm

Before we start, thanks for reading Less Ordinary Living and I hope you find some inspiration.  I’m Thinking Big to get 1,000 subscribers for Less Ordinary Living (currently 72), please click here and subscribe to never miss a post.  Thanks to every one of you for reading. Enjoy!

Reading time: 3 minutes and 2 seconds

We’re all human and change can be tough.  Its easy for us to get stuck in a rut, or in our comfort zone – and this can lead to our good intentions and Big Thinking dying on the vine.  Nasty things like fear and emotion can sometimes block us from action.

Getting unstuck and out of a rut is challenging.   I always start out by taking baby steps.  For example, looking at my personal vision and goals, my first step is to identify my most urgent goal.  Currently this is getting more involved in my community and building out my network of friends.  My goal in 5 years time is to be a leader of a community organisation, and to be an active member of a two other groups focused on areas of personal interest.  The next question is – what can I do this week to move forward with this?

I’ve learned that to successfully achieve goals like this I need to take two parallel tracks – taking actions in the world around me, and working on what goes on between my two ears in my internal world.  To achieve my goal I came up with the following plan that covers both areas:

1. Actions in the outside world – I’ve already researched community groups that interest me on the internet and identified an organisation called Slow Down London and a local running club.  I’ll commit to calling a representative of Slow Down London to find out more about how I can be involved.  I’ll also commit to going to the running club next week to see how I enjoy it.  Making these real life commitments and keeping them moves me towards my goal and vision.
2. Actions in my inner world – Although I’m a sociable and outgoing person, I have always avoided joining groups and societies.  Something inside me has held me back from this for all of my adult life.  I’ve been meaning to attend this running club for nearly a year now and haven’t done it.  To successfully achieve the goal in a sustainable way, I need to understand more about this and overcome this issue, or the initial actions I take will probably quickly fade away.  I’ll commit to observing the thoughts and emotions that come up this week as I take my first steps.  Perhaps I’ll identify a fear of rejection if I turn up to the running club and no-one talks to me the first time.  I know that I have a tendency to think I can do things better than anyone else (I’m wrong of course), and get frustrated in group situations, so I’ll look out for that feeling.  I’ll record the thoughts, emotions and stories I’m telling myself about groups, and spend time analysing them to see what is working for me and what isn’t.  I’ll come up with different ways to think about clubs and different stories to tell.  If I commit to this and work hard at it, it should make it easier for me to happily commit to clubs and societies in the future.

I know that joining a new group is hard for me and the physical action of doing so will help.  However, unless I can get my head straight, it will never get any easier.  So taking the first step, actually involves taking two steps and each is vital.  At the beginning, I said that making change is hard for us, and this explains why.

So how can you take your first step?  Follow this simple process to design your actions this week:

1)   Identify your most pressing challenge or area that you want to work on (for me, my community)

2)   Identify the specific area for development (for me, involvement in community groups)

3)   Design some specific actions to take that are realistic over the next week.  Remember that great journeys start with a single step, so don’t overdo it

4)   Think about how your thoughts, emotions, fears, beliefs and stories might be impacting your ability to be successful.  Determine to observe these over the next week without judgment and write these things down.  When did you feel fear and what was behind that?  What stories did you tell about yourself (I’m not good with new people) that might stop you in your tracks.  Consider which thoughts might be holding you back and analyse them – is that story, fear or emotion realistic?  How could you think in a different way or tell a different story that would be more helpful in achieving your goals?

This approach was difficult and frustrating when I first tried it, however over time and with practice it has become more instinctive.  If you can stick with it, you’ll find it gets easier to take the actions in the external world as you remove the mental and emotional blocks you’ve built up.  Week by week you’ll start to get unstuck and make steady progress towards living your vision and achieving your goals.

So now you have the three steps that I use to think big and make it happen– creating a vision, setting a 5 year plan, and taking external and internal steps to achieve this.  The world is your oyster, so think big and make the most of your life!

For the rest of this year, Less Ordinary Living will focus on making the most of 2010, so please subscribe to make sure you don’t miss a post!

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By Phil, November 12, 2009 10:58 am

Reading time – 2 minutes 58 seconds

What could life look like in 5 years?

What could your life look like in 2015?  In the second part of this three part series on Thinking Big, the focus is on creating a clear picture of how your life could be in five years time (for music lovers, this post was inspired by the song 5 Years Time by Noah and the Whale)

What were you doing in 2005?  What was life like back then?  What were the most important things in your life?  What did you want your life to look like at the beginning of the next decade?  One thing I’ve found for myself is that life was a lot different 5 years ago.  A lot has changed, a lot has happened and I’ve learned many lessons (some easy, some pretty tough).  I also know that creating a plan back then, along with a certain female country singer has helped me to make the most of my life.

Five years ago, I was very happy in my personal life and quite dissatisfied with my professional life.  I was an accountant and couldn’t get excited or see the meaning in the work that I was doing.  My department was struggling and shipping people off to anywhere projects could be found for long periods of time.  At one point, I found myself in Minneapolis, working 14 hours plus a day, seven days a week, doing a repetitive task.  I was out of shape, bored and missing my wife and friends back home.  One night I drank most of a bottle of red wine, and found myself weeping into my pillow whilst listening to Sheryl Crow.  It was time to change and start thinking bigger.

In 2005, I started to think about what life could look like in 5 years time.  I realised that I couldn’t change everything overnight, but I started to formulate a picture of what my ideal personal and professional life could look like in 2010.  Professionally, I knew that I wanted work that I enjoyed, that allowed me to work with interesting people and most importantly was meaningful.  Personally I wanted to be a happier person, be able to react more calmly to life’s ups and downs, and to have enough time to enjoy life.

I started to get specific on each part of my life – career, family, health, financial, my community and my spiritual development.  Some of the areas were easier than others to think through and visualise.  I started with the question, what would be ideal in this aspect of my life in 5 years time?  When I got stuck, which I did with the career question, I then asked how could I find out?

To answer the career question, I started to look around me at people who seemed to enjoy their careers.  I asked them about the reality of their work – what they enjoyed and what made it meaningful for them.  I also looked internally and started to ask myself important questions – what are my values, what gets me excited and passionate, what are my strengths, what DON’T I want from my career.

It took me a fair amount of time to work through each area and come up with an answer to the question of what would be an ideal situation in 5 years time.  It wasn’t always easy to do and I was lucky to have support from a coach, my mentors, friends and family when I got stuck.  Once I had the questions answered I’d developed a blue print for what life could be.

So, your challenge is to think about how life could be ideal at the start of 2015 in each of the following areas; your career, your family situation, your heath and mental wellbeing, the community you live in and your support system, and your spiritual understanding.  Use the vision you created in the first post to help guide this process.  I won’t pretend that this is easy or won’t take time.  Get support, think it through, do some research, don’t get put off and think big about the possibilities.

So how does my life now compare to the plan I created in 2005?  Well first, it certainly isn’t everything that I’d visualised.  A lot happened between now and then including some unexpected and delightful opportunities.  I used my vision as a compass to set the rough direction, rather than a map that had to be followed.  However, I have found incredibly meaningful work, a much better balance in my life, more peace and the ability to react to external circumstances with more calm.  Without Sheryl Crow and my 5 year plan I know that a lot of this wouldn’t have happened.

In the final post, the subject is taking action to start Thinking Big.  Subscribe here to make sure you don’t miss it!

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By Phil, November 10, 2009 3:11 pm

Reading Time: 2 minutes and 53 seconds – Value: Priceless

Find your vision

The next three posts on Less Ordinary Living, are about Thinking Big and creating a powerful, clear vision for the next decade (and beyond).  At the end you’ll have a no-holds barred plan for the future, which will help you make the most of your personal and professional potential, and feel happier and more confident.  Please take part over the next three posts and encourage all your friends and family to do the same.

I’ve been trying to think big over the last few weeks and the biggest challenges I’ve faced are my own thoughts and emotions.  I’ll suggest a big dream like running a marathon and raising money for charity and… BOOM – I start thinking about how hard the training will be.. POW – I feel afraid that I might fail and let all my sponsors down.  It’s easy to think ourselves out of the life we’d like or to get afraid of failing.

A technique I’ve found particularly helpful in overcoming these challenges is to create a vision of the future.  Most of us like to daydream and start imagining what life could be like.  We create an image of a life where we are fabulous happy and have time to do all the things we’ve always wanted to.  I’ve found that if I can grant myself permission to dream for half an hour without any critical thoughts I can really start to think big.

Visualisation is an incredibly powerful tool in preparing for the future.  Professional sportspeople use visualisation to prepare for a big race or tournament.  Neurological studies have found that the same parts of the brain fire in the sportsperson’s brain when they visualise as when they actually compete.  So visualising helps us practice the future and train our minds to focus on what we want to achieve.  I’m trying to take time to visualise my vision as much as possible and finding it helps to quieten some of the negative thinking and fear that arises.

One exercise I’ve found particularly helpful for this process is the Party.

In this exercise you find somewhere comfortable and set aside 30 minutes.

• First, you make an agreement with yourself that you’ll allow yourself to dream without judgment or fear.
• Now close your eyes and start to imagine that you are at your 90^th birthday party and are surrounded by the most important people in your life.
• Everyone has gathered together to celebrate your life (so far!) and to talk about you.
• Start to imagine who is at the party, where it is being held and take a minute or two to walk around and just soak it all in.  Don’t worry if it takes a while to see it – that is natural.
• Once you are ready, let the toasts begin, as the most important people in your life talk about you
• Some people might talk about the amazing things that you’ve done in your life – how you travelled the world, gave your time to a charity, were a loving family member or parent.
• Others might recall some of the great times they spent with you – the parties, the holidays, the projects, the businesses they worked on with you, or just the quiet times.
• Others will talk more about the kind of person you are – your best qualities – kindness, love, compassion, dynamism, sense of humour.
• Take some time to enjoy the party and listen to what everyone is saying – what are the most important things that are coming through about you.
• Once you’ve heard everything you need to hear, call the party to an end by thanking all the guests and being grateful for their role in your life.
• Now take a little time to write down the key ideas in a notebook or journal – think about some of the key achievements, the good times and importantly how you applied your best qualities.

This exercise helped me to really get an understanding of the vision for my life.  It clarified my priorities, identified a few really key things that I’d like to do, and helped me to work out what kind of person I’d like to be today.  I’ve used it several times to firm up my vision and to get a clear picture of the life I’d like to lead.

So, step one of the Thinking Big process is to create your vision of the future.  Don’t feel you need to get out your crystal ball and get every detail right – and don’t feel that this will tie you to achieving the exact vision you create.  The vision is guide for how to act each day and the direction to take – but just a guide.  Often life will create opportunities we couldn’t even have dreamt of.   As your vision develops, spend time with it and learn to quieten the doubts and any negative emotions that arise.

Congratulations – you have taken the first step to creating your vision for the future.  Next time, we’ll look at how to plan for the next five years.  Take a minute to subscribe by clicking here to make sure you don’t miss the next two parts.