The debate continues – should we separate leadership from management? We explore that question and look through a self-awareness lens at authenticity and vulnerability.In my experience, the words leadership and management are used interchangeably in the workplace. In the management and leadership classes I've taught over the years, we define those terms differently, while recognizing that leadership is a critical part of management. In this episode, we look to Forrest Gump’s mamma for some sage advice about this distinction.I recently facilitated a leadership boot camp where we discussed the importance of leadership authenticity and vulnerability – yes, in a boot camp! Of course, going to those vulnerable places begins with self-awareness and a ton of bravery.In this episode, I answer the question, “What do Forrest Gump, The Who, and leadership have in common?”I would love to hear from you. What do you suppose keeps us from our vulnerability and authenticity as leaders?With love,Maria
How to Have Meaningful Work and Enjoy What You Do
Did you know the majority of heart attacks occur around 9:00 AM on Monday mornings? “One study showed that the most common factor in these heart attacks was that the victims were people whose work had become joyless striving. In other words, they could not find meaning in their work, and their lives had become so out of balance that, one Monday morning, their bodies said, You are not going to work today. Zap.”* Researchers found those victims in a state of “joyless striving” – in other words, without meaning. In today’s video, I share with you five steps to get started on the path of self-discovery and meaning and read an excerpt from my book, Love-Based Leadership: Transform Your Life with Meaning and Abundance.I would love to hear from you. What techniques do you do to go inward?With love,Maria *Study cited in Leading with Soul” by Lee Boleman and Terrence Deal.
A New Professionalism and Emotional Intelligence
What would a new professionalism look like? We are taught to remove ourselves from any emotion (including love) and be “professional” as if being professional makes us non-human or even worse, super-human. This practice, and many of us have gotten this concept down good, has propelled us in our careers, but also has left us empty. Developing emotional intelligence in the workplace with leaders and all levels of the organization will help to create a new professionalism.Being professional does not mean being distant, aloof, uncaring, and impersonal. We are in a world of transition and change. We are in a world where many of us are creating new models for living. In this spirit and in the spirit of love, let’s create a new professionalism. Let's create a professionalism that stands for something powerful, serving, supportive, and love-filled.In today’s video, I share what a new professionalism looks like.I would love to hear from you. How would you create a new professionalism and what does it look like?With love,Maria
Keepin' It Real (With Your Personal Brand)
I recently conducted some market research to learn from leaders how I can best support their leadership growth and development.I asked a series of questions and received great responses, food for thought, and feedback.When I spoke with a man in the military, he said one of the most important aspects that he looks for in leadership is “keepin' it real”. OK, he is quite a bit younger than I am! However, this message is ageless and timeless.Most of us have a pretty good B.S. meter and can smell fake a mile away. This is especially important to us, as leaders, to tap into truth and stand in our authenticity. When we stand in authenticity, we stand in power. THAT is what makes us powerful leaders – authenticity. And let’s face it; there is nothing more authentic or real than love.When we lead with love and authenticity, we practice:• Truth• Mindfulness• Awareness• Non-judgment• Honesty• Integrity• Compassion• Service• Presence• HumanitarianismBranding and image consulting are terms that we’ve no doubt heard before, typically in the context of marketing. Have you thought about your brand? No, I am not talking about the company for which you work—I am talking about YOU!What is your brand, your leadership image? Are you keepin it real? Are you respected because you’ve earned it or are you feared because of your title? What is the first thing your team thinks about when your name comes up?Some of us may say that we don’t care about what others think about us. Really, is that really true? As leaders, our primary task is to motivate and influence others toward a vision and/or goal. If others are not buying our brand, then we don’t really have followers.How can we consciously create our leadership brand?Follow these 5 simple steps:1. Intentionally determine what you want your brand to represent.2. Reverse engineer the steps necessary to develop and create that brand image.3. Be accountable to doing the work – find an accountability partner or coach who willbe honest about your progress and a resource when you are stuck.4. Be vulnerable and do spot checks with others to see if you are on the right track (inother words—ask!).5. Keep it real – Authenticity is a real attractorI would love to hear from you. How would you describe an authentic leader, one who is keepin' it real?
Open Heartedness = Open Mindedness
Living with two bulging, herniated discs can be a pain (no pun intended), especially in our rainy season, when my back seems extra sore. During a family barbecue, my sister, who is an RN, asked if I was experiencing pain. When I asked why she inquired, she said that I looked like I was guarding. This is a medical term indicating when a person has pain somewhere in their body they become rigid as though to protect the area from further pain or injury. We do the same in our lives with our minds and hearts. We protect ourselves from perceived pain…basically, we guard. To be open, for many of us, means to be vulnerable. We’ve been open and we’ve been hurt--at least that explains some of the our experiences.Ego loves it when we stay closed and works over-time to ensure we do not enter openness. “Remember when you did that before and this happened?” is one of the many voices of ego. When we are open, the gates of Divine guidance, to intention, to the flow of Spirit happen. Closing the gates of our minds and hearts is insanity.Why do the barriers to openness show up, guarding our sacred spaces, putting another brick in the wall? Ego, again is the answer. Blocks to openness manifest in the forms of negative voices cemented in our dialogue and culture. Evidence of this insanity in our workplaces includes statements like,” Nice guys finish last”, or when considering doing something nice for someone, like a favor, we hear, ”If you do that for one, you’ll have to do it for everyone”, or “No good deed goes unpunished”.Opening our perceptions and inviting in Spirit through surrender, allows healing of the mind and heart to take place. Through healing, the ego no longer has hold on the barriers and blocks to the gates of openness. Just as a clenched fist cannot receive a gift, a closed mind cannot grow and a closed heart cannot receive love.So how can we practice openness? Here are three strategies to being open:1. The first step is reflection. In what areas of your life do you feel closed or blocked toopenness? Work? Love? Spirituality? Journal your thoughts.2. Practice random acts of kindness. These don’t need to be grand gestures,sometimes the smaller the better!3. Develop compassion and let go of your need to be right.I would love to hear from you. What are some other ways can we practice being open?With love,Maria
Influence Your Team and Your Boss
How can I gain influence with my team? How do I influence my boss?I’ve heard repeatedly from my clients, students, and colleagues these questions. While teaching leadership or marketing courses, I’ve often thought…Leading people and marketing are really the same activity. Isn’t the primary objective of both to influence people in the direction of a goal?You may challenge that statement! True, marketing and leadership could sometimes be an activity of manipulation, and not of influence. We have seen and experienced this many times in both marketing and leadership.Both activities of influence and manipulation have power. The key is that only one has sustainability. Manipulation can be an effective influencing tactic, but it is not sustaining; in fact, it is exhausting!Influence, on the other hand, is nurturing, motivating, and full of momentum. In today’s video are 10 specific strategies to increase your influence.I would love to hear from you. What else would you add to this list to increase your influence? What time did you gain buy-in and what strategy did you use?With love,Maria
Secrets and Challenges
The secrets of leadership include awareness, mindfulness, intuition, power listening, and perception shifting. These five skills are innate, although they become buried for many of us based on our cultural upbringing. The great news is that they never go away! Reconnecting with and developing these five leadership essentials are key to successful leadership. These skills help leaders know themselves better, enabling them to understand and influence others. Let’s face it: leadership is about influence. We cannot influence others in an authentic and effective manner without first understanding ourselves as well as those whom we lead.The challenges that leaders face take on many forms. When we peel back the layers of challenges or problems, we find that in most cases the same root cause affects everything – fear. Manifesting itself in many forms, fear shows up as ego, micro-management, misunderstandings, and reactionary behaviors. When we learn to recognize the underlying cause (fear), we then will know how to rectify the real problem instead of just putting on a band-aid or superficial fix. When we only treat the problems superficially, we experience the same issues repeatedly.What is your biggest challenge with leadership and what secret solution do you have? As always, I love hearing your insight.With love,MariaDr. Maria Church, CPC, is a leadership coach, speaker, and author of Love-Based Leadership: Transform Your Life with Meaning and Abundance and her upcoming book, A Course in Leadership: 21 Spiritual Lessons on Leadership, Love, and Life. Maria holds a doctorate of management in organizational leadership, teaches at several universities, and is CEO of Dr. Maria Church International LLC, a leadership coaching, development, and training firm. For more information, visit www.DrMariaChurch.com.
Leading with Fear Works!
Many of us learned how to lead with fear…and it works…sort of. Leading with fear comes with a price.Using fear as a motivation technique is sometimes effective, but the key to understanding the use of fear is that this method is not sustainable. When leaders and managers leverage fear in the workplace, it is important for them to understand that while it may move people immediately in the direction in which they want to go, it also immediately erodes trust.Know that when employees are motivated and moved by fear, employee movement continues both literally and figuratively. Employees start planning their escape. Literally, they escape by leaving the organization. Oops, there goes another one. We know the expense of employee turnover.Even more significant are the employees who escape figuratively…read “employee disengagement”. Employees disengage when they distrust. When people check out, they are not motivated, productive, or loyal. Think of the cost to your organization with a team who has checked out.Fear is not sustaining; in fact, fear is debilitating to an organization.We need to recognize that fear is the go-to method for many leaders and managers -- we learned it, cultivated it, and thought we perfected it. I challenge you to reconsider this technique due to the long-term destructive ramifications. Get your creative juices flowing for more innovative, value-centered, and love-based approaches to influence others.What are more effective techniques you use to motivate your team? Please share your comments below.As always, I love hearing your ideas.With love,MariaDr. Maria Church, CPC, is a leadership coach, speaker, and author of Love-Based Leadership: Transform Your Life with Meaning and Abundance and her upcoming book, A Course in Leadership: 21 Spiritual Lessons on Leadership, Love, and Life. Maria holds a doctorate of management in organizational leadership, teaches at several universities, and is CEO of Dr. Maria Church International LLC, a leadership coaching, development, and training firm. For more information, visit www.DrMariaChurch.com.
From Chaos to Order
We are in the home stretch of this year, looking to complete the goals we set. Clearing the clutter from our space will support us in the last quarter stretch, taking us from chaos to order.Below are 7 simple steps my friend Dr. Dorothy Bonvillain and I came up with based on Gail Blanke’s book, Throw Out Fifty Things[1], to guide you as you move from room to room. You can use these same steps in your home, office, car, and any other space in which you spend time.
- Label each of your 5 boxes or bags:
- Donate
- Trash
- Sell
- Move to another room
- Unsure (only one box)
- Remember the rules of engagement:
- If you makes you feel bad, toss it
- If it adds nothing positive, toss it
- If you have to think about it too hard, toss it
- No room for fear, toss it
- Set a timer to one hour before you plan to stop, and stick to it!
- As you go through each space, put items in the appropriate container:
- Donate. Many items that you donate may be a tax write-off. Be sure to list everything you are donating and get a receipt from the charitable organization. Be sure to check with your tax advisor on specifics.
- Trash. Throw away those items that cannot be donated or sold. Come on, you know those items when you see them – the single sock cannot be sold at the Salvation Army and no one is going to buy it for a rag!
- Sell. These items may be sold in a variety of ways, depending on their value. Yard sales, consignment shops, Ebay, and Craig’s List are some of the most popular ways to sell perfectly good items to someone else.
- Move to another room. Don’t stop your momentum to take items to their appropriate room. Put them in this container and use the last hour you committed to this process to relocate those items.
- Unsure. Only ONE box per room for this one! These are items that you are truly torn about what to do. The rules are very specific for this one:
- One box per room.
- Label the box with a date six months from now.
- On that date, go through this same process and see what you can donate, trash, or sell.
- Use gallon zip storage and sandwich bags to hold and organize small items such as jewelry, makeup, screws, rubber bands, paper clips, etc.
- As you go through your spaces, “To Do” items are going to come up for you. Write these items down so you can act on them after your timer is done. Don’t let anything distract your momentum.
- Make the process and event, a celebration. Turn on some music that energizes you, and celebrate the transition from the old to the new, un-cluttered space.
Congratulations on clearing your space and keeping your eye on the prize!With love,MariaDr. Maria Church, CPC, is a leadership coach, speaker, and author of Love-Based Leadership: Transform Your Life with Meaning and Abundance and her upcoming book, A Course in Leadership: 21 Spiritual Lessons on Leadership, Love, and Life. Maria holds a doctorate of management in organizational leadership, teaches at several universities, and is CEO of Dr. Maria Church International LLC, a leadership coaching, development, and training firm. For more information, visit www.DrMariaChurch.com.
[1] Blanke, G. (2009). Throw out fifty things: Clear the clutter, find your life. New York, NY: Grand Central Life & Style.
Lead Without Being Bossy
I often come across leaders who want to be strong leaders but don’t want to be bossy. Many of the leadership models and examples they’ve experienced are aggressive, pushy, and downright nasty…and they don’t want to be like that!Yet, this same group of people doesn’t want to be “weak” or considered pushovers. They don’t see strong leaders being taken advantage of, not listened to, or not respected.Well the great news is that you don’t need to lead at either end to be a great leader.Strong, powerful leaders all have something in common and it doesn’t hurt or require you to do something super-human.Follow these seven practices and you’ll be leading without being bossy in no time:
- Ask questions before you talk. Find out what your team needs.
- Listen, really listen to their responses.
- Get dirty. Don’t ask your team to do anything that you would not do.
- Walk the talk. Maintain your integrity and do what you say you are going to do.
- Take responsibility for yourself and your team. When you honor them, they will honor you.
- Care about your people, individually and collectively. Remember that actions speak louder than words.
- Don’t rely on unspoken expectation. Be very clear what is expected of your team and of you.
- Invite people to participate rather than telling. Rarely, if ever, will your team decline the “invitation”. If you are following these principles, your team will not only accept the invitation, they will probably follow you wherever you go!
What else would you add to this list of being a great leader without being bossy? As always, I love hearing from you.With love,MariaDr. Maria Church, CPC, is a leadership coach, speaker, and author of Love-Based Leadership: Transform Your Life with Meaning and Abundance and her upcoming book, A Course in Leadership: 21 Spiritual Lessons on Leadership, Love, and Life. Maria holds a doctorate of management in organizational leadership, teaches at several universities, and is CEO of Dr. Maria Church International LLC, a leadership coaching, development, and training firm. For more information, visit www.DrMariaChurch.com.
Have You Shed today?
“We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.” - Joseph CampbellI read this quote today and it struck me on several levels.First, I think that many of us are afraid to change or “get rid of” our current life, even if our current life is not serving us well. We are fearful of the unfamiliar and even if the current situation is unhealthy, dysfunctional, or negative, it is familiar – and that familiarity is enough to keep people stuck and paralyzed.Then I started thinking about the “old skin” and how this is such a beautiful metaphor of how we cover ourselves with a skin, mask, or armor. You know the old skin…it is the stories we tell and believe that keeps us stuck. The skin is also a mask that we sometimes hide behind, so we don’t really have to show up. The skin is also armor we put on to “protect” us from being hurt. The problem with armor is that nothing can penetrate from either direction, meaning we cannot send out love, compassion, or joy.While Joseph Campbell may have been referring to radical change, this rich quote is also applicable to small changes. Like I often tell my clients, sometimes only a minor shift or course correction is necessary. A ten-degree shift may be all we need to shed our old skin and start living the life waiting for us.What are you waiting for?With love,MariaContent copyright 2012. Dr. Maria J. Church. All rights reserved.
LoveFest 2013
I am so excited to share with my latest project with you – LoveFest 2013!
Along with Laura Wilson, CPC, (Love Coach Laura), we are honoring 11 other people who integrate love into their work in BIG ways!
This FREE virtual event, LoveFest 2013, next week, September 16 – 19 demonstrates the exciting transformational shift from fear and competition modalities toward love and collaboration with heart-based methods.
Our speakers represent thirteen major areas of life (politics, leadership, business, money, health, sports, community, relationships, self, intention, networking, social media, sales, and education) experiencing the profound benefits of shifting to a love-based approach.
You will hear from money and business expert, Maria Simone, sales expert Carolyn Coradeschi, social media and marketing coach, Tassey Russo, the go to business coach for healers, Karen Monteverdi, bullying prevention expert, Vicki Abadesco, and several other experts bringing love to work in corporate America, communities, schools, business, health/wellness, weight loss, making money, sports, arts, and of course, relationships.
Not only will you hear 13 of us talk about this shift from fear to love, but you will hear about the incredible results that we and our clients are experiencing from this shift!
I sure do hope you will join us at our FREE virtual event, LoveFest 2013. Just click here to register!
Don’t miss Jone Bosworth, J.D.’s interview, “Unchain the Heart of Democracy”, or Sandy Zeldes’s interview, “Love: Your Weight-Loss Solution” and so much more!
Join us today!
Register at http://www.LoveFest2013.com
“See you” at the Fest!
With love,
Maria
Content copyright 2012. Dr. Maria J. Church. All rights reserved.
Your Way Out of Conflict
Like presence, when we fully connect with those with whom we are communicating, when we find common ground, we come together. Our ability to find common ground is easy when you combine presence, power listening, and perception shifting, with intuition.
Discover shared values, shared objectives, shared goals, and/or a shared vision. You are now on your way to discovering the true issue of the conflict. This clarity creates a shifted environment to now empathize with this person, which will move you into a collaborative vibe.
Once you’ve determined the true issue, now together, you can create a shared vision of collaboration…a plan to move forward. Remember as you create your plan of collaboration, apply the four actions of presence, power listening, perception shifting, and intuition, while always staying focused on common ground.
When you create your plan of collaboratively moving forward, remember to include follow-up, keeping the lines of communication open, demonstrating your commitment to improvement, and always be gracious—thanking the person for bringing this issue to your attention. Shoot for always ending the conversation on a positive note.
With love,
Maria
Content copyright 2012. Dr. Maria J. Church. All rights reserved.
Processes, People, and Grace
T
here are many leadership books that talk about processes and policies. “The tragedy of our time is that we’ve got it backwards. We’ve learned to love techniques and use people. This is one of the reasons more and more people feel alienated, empty, and dehumanized at work. Many organizations today would be surprised at how much more people would be willing to give of themselves if only they felt loved.”1 Organizational leaders have been serving the processes and the policies, not the people.
As the Rev. Dr. King, Jr. said, we need a heart full of grace. Grace is found in love. Grace is the knowledge that you’ve been blessed, and so you respond by giving freely to others. Grace personifies elegance, politeness, and generosity of spirit. Our generosity of spirit is shared in an Love-Based Leadership organization. An organization steeped in love, is an organization steeped in grace.
How do you see grace manifested in the workplace? As always, I love hearing from you.
With love,
Maria
Freiberg, Kevin, and Jackie Freiberg. Nuts! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success. New York: Broadway Books, 1998.
Content copyright 2012. Dr. Maria J. Church. All rights reserved.
Better Late Than Never
Several years ago, I had a tremendous learning experience regarding forgiveness.
My mentor, a consultant hired by our corporate office specifically to mentor me for one year, leveraged the difficulty in the relationship I had with our division general manager to his advantage. By indicating that he was still needed beyond his contract (due to the strained relationship between the division general manager and me), he prolonged his lucrative consultant income for another two years.
I was eventually relieved of my managerial role and the consultant continued his monthly visits to manage and lead my department. I was hurt and resentful. I became exhausted carrying this load of pain and then I finally realized that holding this anger was not honoring or serving anyone, least of all, me.
After reconnecting with my spirit, I knew that I had to forgive him. The next time he was in town, I apologized for my behavior and told him that I forgave him for his part in reinforcing the wedge between the divisional general manager and me.
The immediate sensation I had was lightness. I could hardly believe how physically light I felt, and I remember holding on to the edge of the desk as it felt like I was going to float away. I was nearly giddy with delight and wondered what had taken me so long to get there.
What is keeping you from forgiving someone or yourself? The weight and burden are only hurting you. Free yourself with the amazing gift of forgiveness.
Better late, than never…
With love,
Maria
Content copyright 2012. Dr. Maria J. Church. All rights reserved.
The Bull S#%T About Power
Let’s break open the lid on the belief that power must be kept tightly in order to be effective – BULL S#%T!
Power, like abundance and love, multiplies when you give it away.
That is why I cannot understand why leaders are so afraid to share power and empower others.
Power multiples when you give it away – really!
Boleman and Deal wrote in Leading with Soul, “When people have a sense of efficacy and an ability to influence their world, they usually seek to be more productive. They direct their energy and intelligence toward making a contribution rather than obstructing progress or destroying their enemies.” At Saturn automobile factories, employees are empowered to stop the assembly line any time they see something wrong. The employees have pride and ownership in their product and they are the quality control.
Another benefit of shared power is the reduction in conflict. We often suppress our feelings when we feel powerless. When this happens, our anger can only be contained for so long, then the conflict and anger comes spewing out, often times in a rage. Empowered people empower others. In a Love-Based Leadership organization, shared power equals shared ownership. You cannot have one without the other.
Have you empowered someone today? If not, what is holding you back?
With love,
Maria
Content copyright 2012. Dr. Maria J. Church. All rights reserved.
You are Branded!
Branding and image consulting are terms we’ve no doubt heard, typically in the context of marketing. Have you thought about your brand? No, I am not talking about the company for which you work—I am talking about YOU! 
What is your brand, your leadership image? Are you respected because you’ve earned it or are you feared because of your title? What is the first thing your people think about when your name comes up?
Some of us may say that we don’t care about what others think about me. Really, is that really true?
As leaders, our primary task is to motivate and influence others toward a vision and/or goal. If others are not buying our brand, then we don’t really have followers.
How can we consciously create our leadership brand? Follow these 5 simple steps:
- Intentionally determine what you want your brand to represent.
- Reverse engineer the steps necessary to develop and create that brand image.
- Be accountable to doing the work – find an accountability partner or coach who will be honest about your progress and a resource when you are stuck.
- Be vulnerable and do spot checks with others to see if you are on the right track (in other words—ask!).
- Celebrate your successes along the way.
For more information on image, check out this previous blog post, Leadership Impression.
Please share your progress and aha’s! I love hearing from you.
Love,
Maria
Content copyright 2012. Dr. Maria J. Church. All rights reserved.
Who Are You?
Do you remember the classic rock song by The Who, Who Are You? It is truly one of my favorites! Little did I know when I first heard this song in 1978 that I would ponder the importance of this question 35 years later.
I just returned from facilitating a leadership boot camp with Dr. Dorothy Bonvillain for the Sierra Vista Chamber of Commerce. We talked about the importance of leadership authenticity and vulnerability, which of course, begins with self-awareness and a ton of bravery.
We tell the truth to ourselves when we acknowledge our own imperfections. As we move through our journey, “to deny imperfections is to deny our humanity and to become disconnected from our soul.”1
Accepting our imperfections and taking the introspective, reflective journey, we travel to our core and find our authentic leader within.
What do you suppose keeps us from our vulnerability and authenticity as leaders? As always, I love hearing what you have to say.
With love,
Maria
1. Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal, Leading with Soul, p. 67.
Content copyright 2012. Dr. Maria J. Church. All rights reserved.
The Stories We Tell
Perceptions are the stories we tell ourselves regarding what we see and how we interpret the world around us. Les Brown, one of the great 21st century storytellers said, “How people live their lives is as a result of the stories that they believe about themselves,” What are your stories? Do they serve you as your aspire to reach your highest potential? Do your stories lift you up or do they bring you down? Do your stories represent who you really are, your true essence?
Let’s look at a possible story: If you greeted someone in the morning at work and he or she did not return your greeting, what would you think? Are they mad at you? Do you wonder all morning what you may have said to tick them off? Do you toss and turn that night because you fear that it was when you laughed too loudly at something they said two weeks ago that you thought was a joke, but it turned out it wasn’t? Or what if the answer is simply that they didn’t return your greeting because they didn’t hear you. Alternatively, perhaps they were distracted replaying a discussion they had with their teenager last night. What are the stories that you tell yourself? These skewed perceptions sabotage our relationships with others and our relationship with our self. If your stories no longer resonate with who you are, it is time to create a new story. Change your perception and you change your world.
The uncomplicated beauty in this lesson is that by standing in awareness and looking at our beliefs and thoughts, we can simply make a choice to keep them or release them. When we release those beliefs and thoughts that no longer serve us, we take back our power from fear to love, from negativity to positivity, from ego to Spirit. We see and understand perceptions and stand in our power to change those beliefs to experience miraculous shifts in our reality, lives, and work.
What story do you tell? Does is serve you or drain you? Please share your insights!
With love,
Maria
Content copyright 2012. Dr. Maria J. Church. All rights reserved.
What Were You Thinking?
Thoughts are powerful; they are the seeds of ideas, beliefs, creativity, attitudes, knowledge, wisdom, and reality. Thoughts can be our best friends or our worst enemies. Not by happenstance do thoughts come to us; these powerful seeds come to us through choice. Choice and thoughts are action movements, directed by us, whether we are conscious of these activities or not. The key lies in awareness of these two incredible gifts—thoughts, and choices.
Unconscious thoughts are just as powerful as thoughts steeped in awareness. Earl Nightingale, in The Strangest Secret, likened the mind to a fertile field with two planted seeds—one with corn and one with poisonous nightshade. Both seeds, watered and nurtured, grew—because to the field, the type of seeds planted did not matter.
Our minds are the same way, growing whatever our attention plants and nurtures. I saw a sign the other day that stated Worrying is like praying for something you don’t want. With the continued nurturing and care (attention) given to the seeds of worry, the source of worry will grow and become reality. That is how our minds work; we create our realities.
In Thoughts & Feelings, Matthew McKay, Martha Davis, and Patrick Fanning identify fifteen key groups of disempowering perspectives:
- Filtering – Focusing on the negative details of a situation and filtering out all positive aspects.
- Polarized Thinking – Seeing a situation as either good or bad, right, or wrong, perfect or a failure.
- Over-generalization – Making a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece of evidence.
- Mind Reading – Making assumptions about what people are feeling, why they are acting as they are, and how they feel about you.
- Catastrophizing – Assuming the worst possible outcome will happen.
- Personalization – Thinking that everything people do or say is a reaction to you.
- Control Fallacy – Thinking that you are responsible for everyone or everything around you.
- Fallacy of Fairness – Being resentful because you believe that everything in life should be fair.
- Emotional Reasoning – Believing that what you feel is the truth. For example, if you feel unwise, it means that you are unwise.
- Fallacy of Change – Believing that you can’t be happy unless you can change those around you to behave, believe, or think the way you want them to.
- Global Labeling – Generalizing one or two qualities into the negative global judgment.
- Blaming – Thinking that someone else causes everything negative in your life.
- Shoulds – You keep a list of rules about the way the world should operate and become angry or disappointed if others don’t follow your rules.
- Being Right – Going to any length to demonstrate your rightness because being wrong is terrible.
- Heaven’s Reward Fallacy – Feeling bitter when the rewards do not come that you think you deserve after working hard.
Awareness is the first step to disassembling disempowering thoughts. For today, be in awareness of your thoughts and please share your Aha moments!
With love,
Maria
Content copyright 2012. Dr. Maria J. Church. All rights reserved.