This morning on the Breakfast Show a reporter was interviewing a girl who was running a haunted house.  The reporter asked what she thought people liked best about Halloween.  She excitedly replied that it was the one day of the year that you could put on a mask and be anyone you wanted to be.  So true and so fun!

I thought back to my days of teaching Math and recalled that my most popular costume was my calculator outfit.  The kids loved that I was such a nerd.  And then, as it is often inclined to do, my math nerd surfaced.  I thought, “If this is the only day of the year that we can be exactly who we want to be, then who are we being the other 364 days?”

And of course the truth is that so often we not only wear a mask on Halloween, but we also wear a pretty convincing mask many other days too.  The difference is that on Halloween, people we meet realize that we are pretending.  They know that if they look behind the mask they will get exactly what they are expecting, and so they are not really afraid to look.  They know that the real person behind the mask is ok.  On the other days it isn’t so simple.

Sometimes people in our lives don’t even realize that we have donned a mask.  Sometimes they do realize it but don’t want to peak behind it, for fear of what they will see.  And sometimes we have been wearing our masks for so long that even we begin to feel normal with it on.  As James Bond said in a trailer for his new movie, “You came across me so many times and yet you never saw me”.  What a powerful line.  I’m not sure what the context of this is in the movie but I do know in life that I have come across people whom I do not really see.  I also have experienced people talking to me and I sense that they have not been really seeing me either.  I have learned to try to make a practice of being good at seeing people.  There is no nicer feeling than to be really seen by a friend; to have someone in our life who knows who we are underneath our carefully crafted exterior, and who is ok with that person.

Once the trick or treaters have gone home this weekend, may you be brave enough to become exactly who you want to be.  May you take off your own mask to let others see you.  May you also be brave enough to take a look beneath the mask worn by others.  There is likely a wonderful story awaiting your discovery.

May we not be known as people who “come across others and yet never really see them”.
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Happy Halloween!

Last week in my blog, I wrote about changing perspective and finding the gift in every situation.  Well, as I’ve discovered so many times during my coaching life, just when I think I have a really good handle on something, life gives me a little reality check.  This week the check has been about perspective.
 
I was working with my own coach this week (most professional coaches walk their talk and have a coach too) and my topic was about figuring out a good balance in my life between really growing my coaching business and enjoying my newfound freedom away from a scheduled work life.  I have been feeling like I have been working long hours.   The truth of this is that I have been working long hours and this does not feel foreign or bad to me.  So I was getting curious about whether this work, work, work thing just feels good because I am used to it, or do I really LOVE everything I am now doing.  My coach pointed out that my curiosity is a real ally to me.  I said that I feel like if I am working, then I am not wasting time.  She then mentioned that my judge voice (my saboteur - that critical little voice that stops us from believing we can make change) seemed to have a strong opinion about wasting time.
And then she said, “What is it like to waste time?”   I had no answer to this. 
 
Silence.
 
More silence as I thought about why I had such a blank reaction to wasting time.
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And then it hit me.  The perspective that I have been using about this comes from my childhood.  My mother died when I was young and all of my siblings and I seem to have come to the same conclusion about the preciousness of each day.  We know that our mother would have loved to have had one more day and that she would not have ‘wasted’ it.  The trouble with my story, I realized, was that I had made up my own definition of wasting time.  I have defined ‘wasting time’ as not doing something productive (think: working).   I know that if my mom had one more day, she would not have spent it working.  I am guessing that she would have spent it with the people she loved, doing the things that she loved to do.  But my story was that if I was not doing something that could be checked off a list, then I was wasting time.
 
This brings me to Betty.  I have known Betty for a long time and she has been a far better friend to me that even she knows.  I taught Betty’s children, then I taught with Betty, then Betty taught my children.  The best gift that Betty has given me is to continuously model her belief that I (and everyone else she knows) am 100% fine how I am and that however I choose to spend my time is ok.  She also believes that no activity is a waste if it is what we want to do.  She and I talked about this the last time she and I had another great visit in her living room.  This Betty is clearly my real life ally. 
 
I told my coach about Betty, and lamented that I needed Betty around me more and then I laughed.  Since my name is Elizabeth, Betty is one of the shortened forms of my name.  I do have a Betty around me and she is right inside of me.  So now if my real life Betty is not nearby, when I need a little reminder about giving myself permission to waste time doing something other than work, I will just call upon my own little inner Betty that I carry right in my heart.  And I’ll create a new word to replace waste.
 
May each of you also spend some time this week, Bringing Out Your Betty.
 
Learn how to Bring Out the Betty in your life through coaching.  Contact me for details.

In my coaching practice I often use the tool of “Perspective” to help clients make change in their lives.  Sometimes the hardest changes are not things we need to but rather they are learning new ways to think about things.  Again, it’s the ‘being’ vs the ‘doing’.
 
Jim and I moved last month, from our beloved acreage where we had lived for 22 years, into the big city.  It was the right time, but it was a difficult transition.  I had convinced Jim that for this move, we (and our family and friends!) should not be doing the moving ourselves, and so we hired a moving company.
 
The day of the move was not what we expected.  Let’s just say that it involved damaged walls in both homes, scratched furniture and floors and one dropped and broken treadmill.  It ended with me firing the movers at 5:30pm after only one load had been complete.  Jim was sitting on the back deck of our new house, head in hands wondering what we would do.  I quickly texted a couple of friends, and they texted two friends and they texted....
 
When we arrived back at the acreage at 6:30 we were greeted by one horse trailer, 6 pickup trucks and about 20 happy, hardworking friends and family.  My friend, Susan, set up a table on the lawn, complete with a table cloth and served a dinner of burgers, salad, cookies and lemonade to all!  By 9:15 we were all standing in the kitchen of our new house with full stomachs, with every last piece of furniture moved and with the acreage house completely clean and ready for the new owners.
 
Later that night Jim mentioned that he felt just sick about having to ask our friends and family to help when that was what we had been trying to avoid by hiring movers.  I told him that I was looking at it another way.  To me, the evening had felt like an old fashioned ‘barn raising’.  We had needed a rescue and our friends were the ones to do the rescuing.  Jim and I both know that people love to be needed – and boy, were they needed that night.  In so many ways, the evening was absolutely perfect.  I am quite sure that each of them had a great story to tell at work in the following days about their adventure of rescuing us.  It was an evening that brought us all closer together, gave us a sense of community, a great story to tell and it reminded us that while we might be moving locations, our friends were steadfast.  It really was a gift.
 
Whenever I work with a client on perspective the magic question is, “What is the gift here?”  In every situation, there is a gift to be found.  We do not have to wait until the crisis passes to see it.  We can train ourselves to find it amidst crisis, amidst difficulty, amidst plans gone awry, amidst heartache.  The gift does not erase the challenge; the gift stands beside us as we face it.
This week my question for you is, “What is the gift here?”  May you find an abundance of gifts in your everyday life.
 
Learn how to find the gifts in your life through coaching.  Contact me for details.