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By Phil, February 18, 2010 5:29 pm

Reading Time: 3 minutes and 12 seconds

Get off the Hamster Wheel

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Have you ever felt like you’re stuck on the hamster wheel – running as fact as you can and going nowhere?

Life can be seen as the sum total of all the choices we’ve ever made.  Every day we’re faced with hundreds of decisions – some inconsequential such as which brand of toothpaste to buy, some very important such as choosing a new career direction.

It is what it is….

Many people believe that our life is determined by fate and that there is no way to influence what happens to us.   This theory suggests that we have no choice in any events in our life.  Living by this philosophy can lead to giving up on life.  In this world, our life is little more than a piece of driftwood floating on the stream of fate.

The Smarter Choice

The alternative mindset is that we live in a world full of choices.   From this view point, the world fills with possibility.  In a given situation we face a huge range of options. If you are in a meeting with your boss, you could choose to answer her questions earnestly and to the best of your ability, you could choose to be challenging and stand up for your views, or you could choose to run out of the door screaming and never come back.   Each choice has potential consequences and inevitably some consequences may appear preferable to others.  However, we have the power to choose.

The Hamster Wheel

Even if we believe in choices, it is easy to close ourselves down to our options.  We can get into a routine or a rut.  Life becomes about survival.  Welcome to The Hamster Wheel.

Getting off the Hamster Wheel can give us tremendous energy and power.  It allows you to feel in control of a given situation.

Choose Life

Over time and through self-reflection we can learn to slow down and see the bigger picture.  Once we realise we have options, life stops being about survival and starts to become about possibilities.  We step off the hamster wheel.

When we are making deliberate choices it becomes easier to take responsibility for our actions.  When we choose and commit to our actions we can own the results regardless of the apparent level of success.   We make choices, we commit to them, we accept the results and we grow as a person.

Exercise – Getting off the Hamster Wheel

This exercise is a quick way to get off the hamster wheel and learn to see all the options.  You can work through it in advance to plan your biggest decisions by doing it every morning.  This also works in the moment when you feel stuck on the hamster wheel.  Asking these questions opens us up to the reality that we do face options.

• What is the challenge that I face today / am facing right now?
• What are my options?
• What other choices could I make (regardless of how feasible they may be)?
• What could I do if I had no fear?
• Which choices best align with my values and who I am as a person?
• What support can I get in taking this choice with power and committing to it?

Getting off the hamster wheel and choosing life is a tremendously powerful approach to life.   Try it today and see what happens.

Picture credit – Sebastien Davies (from Flickr – Creative Commons)

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By Phil, December 1, 2009 7:24 pm

Reading Time: 3 minutes and 49 seconds

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Are you still keeping your New Year’s Resolutions for 2009?  A quick show of hands please.  To the valiant few with hands aloft, congratulations.  For the rest of us mere mortals, don’t despair.  A study by clinical psychologists at the University of Scranton showed that of people making a resolution, only 75% made it past the first week and less than 50% were maintaining their resolution after 6 months.  New Year’s Resolutions are one way that we try to make our lives happier, so how can we improve our chances of keeping them?

Making a resolution is usually a commitment to a lasting behavioural change – whether it be exercising more, eating healthily or changing the balance of how we spend our time.  Changing ingrained habits and behaviour can be extremely difficult.

New Year’s Resolutions are typically an all or nothing immediate leap into the deep end of change.  They are the equivalent of putting all your chips on number 23 at the roulette wheel of life.  Psyhcologists who have studied successful change have found that taking a longer-term approach which has a clear strategy can dramatically improve our odds of successfully changing.

The powerful “States of Change” model created by James Prochaka and Carlo diClemente in the 1970s outlines a robust six step approach to making lasting personal change.  Following these steps with due care and effort has been proven to increase the chances of making a successful change:

Step 1: Precontemplation. Prior to making a change we need to admit we have something to change. In this stage we have yet to admit that something is worth changing, although the issue may be buzzing around in the back of our mind.  This stage is sometimes thought of as being “in denial” due to our claims that a pattern or behaviour is not a problem.

Step 2: Contemplation. During this stage, we start to consider the benefits of making a change, however we often focus on the downsides.  This creates fear of change and can lead to extended procrastination and delay before moving forward.  The contemplation stage is about admitting that we want to change and seeing the positives of the change (for example, if I were to lose weight I would feel healthier, happier and fit into my old clothes in the wardrobe).

Some of the key questions to answer at this stage are:

What is your motivation for wanting to change?

What are some of the benefits of changing?

What may be holding you back from changing?

What are some factors that could assist you in making a change?

Step 3: Preparation. During this phase, we start lay the groundwork for the wider change ahead.  We may start to introduce smaller changes into our life.  For example, if you are planning to get fitter, you might start walking to the next bus stop each day on the way to work.  This stage requires creating our plans for a successful change.  Good preparation is vital to success and some of the key things to do include:

• Find people with a similar goal that might support you, or find others to hold you accountable.
• Research as much as you can about the area you want to make a change in – find out about others who have been successful in making the same change and how they did it.
• Identify and write down your motivation and inspiration for making the change.
• Create a clear plan for change and design a process for monitoring and rewarding progress.
• Design contingency plans for “falling off the wagon” and prepare yourself for this happening.

Step 4: Taking action. This is where the rubber hits the road.  If your preparation has been thorough, you’ll start executing on your plan and using your support systems.  Its important to take action in the knowledge that changing personal habits takes dedication and time to achieve.  Ingraining a new habit can take months or even years to achieve and will almost inevitably involve ups and downs along the path.  This step will need you to reward success and forgive yourself for slip-ups.

Step 5: Maintenance. Once you’ve taken action successfully, you’ll start to see the fruits of your labours.  If you’re objective was to stop smoking, you may last a day, or a week without a cigarette.  The key to maintenance is to find ways to avoid being tempted to relapse (for example, avoiding a trip to the pub with your old smoking buddies) and rewarding yourself for success (for example, treat yourself to a massage to relieve the stress of nicotine withdrawal).

Step 6: Relapse. Relapse is a normal and inevitable part of making a life change.  If not managed correctly, relapse can undermine all the good work that you have put in, and take away the self-confidence you’ve built up.  The key to moving through a relapse is to understand the reason for falling down, and to work out the best way to avoid a repeat.  Remembering that everyone who has successfully made a change has been through this process can be helpful in forgiving yourself.  Once you’ve understood the relapse, it is best to go back to the preparation phase and “get back on the horse”.

Finally, the best chance of keeping your resolution in 2010, is to start at Step 1 today.  Following the six-step change model above, and particularly focusing on the preparation phase prior to jumping in, is proven to increase your chance of making a lasting change in your life.  So get started on making 2010 your best year yet!

If you missed our three step guide to Thinking Big for the next decade, click here to get started….

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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, August 17, 2009 4:36 pm

Less Ordinary Career Perspective – We Are All Entrepreneurs

Reading time: 2 minutes and 42 seconds

How can you create a successful and fulfilling career in the 21^st Century?  The traditional post-war model of a job for life and relying on a company to provide for retirement has rapidly crumbled over the last couple of decades.  We’ve all been impacted by revolutions in technology, logistics and communications that have created a global economy.  Many leading thinkers argue that the traditional definition of a career is dead including Reid Hoffman, CEO of Linkedin:

“I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not. . . . Average job length is two to four years. That makes you a small business. . . . You are the entrepreneur of your own small business. How do you get to your next gig? How do you do your career progression? All these things now fall on the individual shoulders.”

This change of mindset challenges us to be much more active in managing our careers.  It is important to assess the rewards of our current role and ensure that they are the best ones for our personal small business. The revolutionary changes in the world mean we have more career options than ever before.  If your current role is not giving you what you need, it might be time to start considering the next direction to take your enterprise.

As an individual entrepreneur, the first step in making a change is to understand which rewards are most important to us.  Career rewards include:

• Financial reward – work allows us to earn money which provides short term quality of life and the opportunity to plan for the long term
• Balance – certain roles require more personal commitment of time, and energy to be successful, others leave more time for other personal priorities
• Benefits – different roles allow us to work full time or part time, be more or less flexible in location and hours, take more or less vacation, provide healthcare and other services or not and provide other perks
• Meaning and fulfilment – choosing work that provides personal fulfilment and feels meaningful and important can provide huge personal satisfaction and pleasure
• Culture – we can choose whether to work in a big or small organisation, whether we are part of a hierarchy or flat structure, and many other considerations

Think about what is most important for you with your work? Traditionally, work has sometimes been seen as a means to an end – a pay cheque that allows us to put a roof over our head and if we’re lucky enjoy some of the better things in life.  As a personal entrepreneur, you get to choose how to employ your talents and time and what rewards you get for that.

My personal choice was to take a less orthodox path and to start my own coaching business, leaving a good job in the corporate world behind.  This has certainly meant a short-term sacrifice of financial reward, and benefits.  In return, I’ve found work to be truly meaningful and been able to create a flexible working culture I love.  At the time of leaving the corporate world, it felt like a risky path, however the immediate benefits and the long term potential rewards outweighed the risk for me.

As in my example, the choices you make about the rewards of work come with accompanying risks which need to be assessed as you take control of your career path.  However, Reid Hoffman believes that the reality of these risks has changed:

“But I think that one of the key things — the reason why I think risk tolerance is important is because what happens is people delude themselves they’re not taking risks. They say, oh, I’m going to get a job at, you know, Hewlett-Packard or I’m going to get a job — and that’s not risky. Well, look at current economic climates. Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it. And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don’t.”

As the CEO of Me Ltd. you have a choice about where you employ your talents.  Taking time to realistically identify the short-term and long-term rewards and the associated risks can really help to make smart choices.  The key lesson is that you need to be actively planning the direction of Me Ltd. as the world changes.  By doing so, you give yourself the best chance of having a successful and fulfilling career in the 21^st Century.

What do you think about the idea of everyone being a career entrepreneur?

How do you manage your personal business?

What are the rewards you look for from your work?

What risks are you most concerned about?

Please take a minute to comment on this article.  If you’d like to think these ideas through and are ready to take control of your career, please contact pbolton@colosseumconsulting.com or carly@carlygoldsmithcoaching.com .