I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my yoga classes this fall.  Our instructor, Mona, seems to have been nudging us a bit; encouraging us to find our edge and to stay there.   It’s interesting to discover that when I do this, my edge shifts on me and before too many weeks have passed, I become comfortable with things that once seemed out of reach. 
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I particularly love the balance poses in our classes.  I think that I might secretly believe that I am REALLY doing yoga when I’m doing these and that I really look the part:)

Whenever we strike a balance pose, to ensure that we have the most success possible, Mona carefully guides us through a systematic series of steps.  She begins by letting us know that we will be concentrating on balance.  This way, if anyone needs an extra bit of support, they can make their way to a nearby wall so that they can use it for stability if required.  The second step is for us to put our weight on one foot, and to make sure we have a little bounce in our knee.  This ensures that we don’t put too much strain on the knee and that we have some flexibility.  We pause at this step to really focus on the foot that is grounding us.  We work to distribute our weight evenly between each side of our foot and between the front and the back.  And then once that is in place, we move into our pose.  We also receive reminders to have a focal point, and always, to think about our breath.

In one of the classes this week, I was just nicely in a pose, weight balanced, knee soft, eyes focused, when Mona reminded us, “Make sure that your big toe has connection with the floor.  If you lose your connection, you lose your balance.”  If I’d had a pen and paper handy, I would have leaned over just ever so slightly to write this down so that I wouldn’t forget it!  I thought about my work in coaching and how this is exactly what I teach to clients!  Once again, what I learn in yoga also applies to my non-yoga life.

Many times, when I work with people, one of the areas they wish to focus on is balance.  They feel like their lives are ‘out of balance’.  This can be true of personal lives and of professional lives.  Sometimes, when I query individual clients further about this, it turns out that they may have an idea that lives should contain roughly equal parts of work, family, fun, etc.  Other clients who are talking about professional balance may feel as though they are bogged down in paperwork and minutia and do not have time for creativity and growth.  They wish they had time each day or week that they could set aside for each important part of their work. For most of us this is not realistic and in fact this is not what is meant in coaching when balance is being discussed. 

So, what then is balance?  And how does it relate to yoga?

I’ve noticed there are times in life when we are busier with work than with play.  Other times we are more focused on family than on friends or work.  Other times our health takes priority and other things take a back seat.  This does not indicate that our lives are out of balance. It simply reflects the season we may be in and the demands that that season puts on us.   In each of these cases we can still have balance in our lives.  Even when our time seems heavily skewed in a particular area it is possible to feel in balance.

The secret to this is having a deep understanding of who we wish to be and having a solid connection to that.  When Mona said to make sure that our big toe stays connected to the floor because when we lose connection we lose balance, I realized that this can be true in life too.  Sometimes when we tip ourselves into a position in life where we have to focus so, so hard on something, it does not take much for us to lose balance.  If, however, we keep our connection with others during this time, and perhaps more importantly, if we keep our connection with who we are trying to be, our balance is much easier to maintain.

When we remember and follow Mona’s yoga steps for balance poses, we find we are able to bring more balance into our own lives. 

Mona’s Rules for Balance:

• Acknowledge that you will be balancing (Even just noticing this helps)
• If necessary, find a wall (Let others know and accept help)
• Put some bounce in your knee (Allow yourself some flexibility.  Don’t be too hard on yourself)
• Plant your foot firmly on the floor (Get clear about what you are about to focus on)
• Focus (Not only on the doing, but also on who you are being while you do)
• Move into the pose (With grace and fluidity)
• Breathe (You are most effective when you are not holding your breath)
• Keep connected (When you lose the connection, you lose your sense of balance) 
• Don’t compare (It isn’t fair to compare your beginning with someone else’s middle)

This week, bring some balance into your busy life by remembering the lessons from yoga.  Take yourself to your edge and pause.  Stay connected with the important people in your life and most importantly, stay connected with the person you are striving to be. 

Namaste.
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Elizabeth creates and facilitates custom workshops for corporate, public and private groups.  She also provides leadership coaching for individuals and groups.  Book a session with Elizabeth to learn how to achieve balance in your life.

This past week I had the wonderful opportunity to facilitate at a retreat for the school board of Foothills School Division and their Executive Council team.  The board was elected a few weeks ago.  With the exception of one person, all members are new, so clearly there is a learning curve for them to navigate. My job was to help them uncover their strengths, to help them find ways to work productively as a team and to create a framework that they will use to do the important work with which they have been charged.  This is the kind of leadership work that I love.  I love helping motivated people discover the leader within themselves and find ways to bring their leadership to their world.

As often happens in my life, several seemingly unrelated things have found an intersection this week.

I’ve been taking a new certification course for my coaching practice.  Aptly named, ‘Playing Big’, we are learning how to help our clients recognize and deal with their Inner Critic (saboteur) and to ‘play big’ in their lives.  In the learning of how we can use this skill with others, we are first looking at how it shows up in our own lives.

The first key piece of learning for us in the course was to learn how to recognize our own Inner Critic.  More importantly for me, I learned about the role of the Inner Critic.  Tara Mohr, the creator of this course and our instructor, says that we all have a part inside us that is called the Safety Instinct.  The job of the Safety Instinct is simply to keep us safe. In this day and age, safety is much more about emotional safety than about physical safety.  The Inner Critic is the voice of this Safety Instinct.  The Inner Critic will say anything to us to make us keep the status quo.  Anything. Even lies.  It simply is trying to keep us from trying new things that could cause us emotional danger; embarrassment, shame, discomfort, loss of friendships, damage to our reputation or any other of the myriad of things that we would naturally like to avoid.  However, the Inner Critic does not distinguish between our well thought out ideas for change, and true reckless, emotionally dangerous change.  In the mind of the Inner Critic, all change must be avoided.

In our course, we are fortunate to have participants from all over the world and it has been interesting to discover that many of my classmates have mentioned that they seem to have many different critic voices that want to ‘help’ them out.  The more I have thought about this the more I understand that this is also true for me.  Thus, a couple of weeks ago I decided to call my group of critics ‘The Board’ or ‘The Committee’.  It seems that when I want to make a change, my Board has a meeting to talk to me about all of the possible things that could go wrong. Each member of the board brings their own perspective.  One member, the longest serving member, reminds me of what happened some long time ago and reminds me not to put myself in that situation again!  Another member, the fiscally responsible one, reminds me that my money could be used in a better way somewhere else.  Another one, the ‘world peace’ advocate, lets me know how my idea might upset someone.  And on and on they go, around the Board table.  This of course is their job; to trouble shoot, to notice places where I might get hurt and to stop me from doing it!

Luckily, I have a sense of humour and I was able to see how my upcoming workshop with The Board of Education, and my personal Board of Inner Critics had come to a shared intersection on my road of life.  The good news is that there is hope for both. 

In terms of the real-life Board, their actual job is to carefully think about each policy they may be charged with writing and to make sure they think of all of the possible ways that it might fail.  By doing this they ensure that they set themselves up for the highest possible chance of writing policy that enhances the quality of education of the students they are charged with serving.  The danger to them is getting bogged down so deeply in the possible pitfalls that they become paralyzed and never make progress.  It can be scary to know that members of the public are waiting in the wings, ready to scrutinize and criticize.  And yet, it is imperative, once all possible angles have been examined, to move forward with the business of the Board.  After getting to know this group, I am confident that they will move well beyond pointing out the dangers of new ideas and that they will find a way to use their combined voices to embrace change, to become innovators and to take their places as leaders in their school division.

In terms of The Board in my head, I have learned that they are not going away.  When I agreed to create this workshop, my Board became quite noisy.  They reminded me of the many reasons that doing this job was a bad idea.  Luckily, I have learned not to let this group of Board members in my head, lead me.   Instead, when I am doing something new, I do the thinking myself.  Then, knowing the Board will call an emergency meeting, I plan for that.  Knowing that they simply want to ‘protect’ me, I take them on a tour of my ‘hallway of ideas’.  We walk down the imaginary hallway together. I open one door after the next, revealing to them all the components of my exciting plan.  Then I can assure them that I have thought of solutions to all of their worries and that they can go back to the Board Room until I need them again.  I’m grateful for my Board of Critics.  They serve the valuable function of helping me minimize the chance of disaster.  However, I am more grateful that I now realize that their fears are not my fears, their wishes for my life are not my wishes and their dreams are not my dreams.  I also know that I can choose to notice them, reassure them and then become the leader of my own life.  I do not plan on letting them lead me.

I challenge you to get to know your own Board.  Learn to recognize their voices and more importantly learn to differentiate their worried voices from your own strong voice.  Find out what fears they have for you and figure out a way to set their minds at ease so that you can become all that you were meant to be.

This week my inquiry for you is, ‘Which member of my board is speaking now?’  Then thank him/her for watching out for you, reassure him/her, and ‘Play Big’!
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Book a coaching session with Elizabeth to help learn how to identify and deal with the members of your personal Board.  Elizabeth provides leadership coaching for individuals and for groups.  She also facilitates custom workshops for teams, groups and businesses.

This weekend, as we mark Remembrance Day, each of us has paused to reflect on the sacrifice of those soldiers who have gone before us.  As a nation we are incredibly lucky.  Most of us will never see war.  None of us has been forced into active duty.  And our soldiers have an incredible reputation, not only of service, but of peacekeeping and of aid to war torn countries.  We know we are a lucky nation.

The most recent count that I could find stated that there are approximately 61 000 World War II Veterans living (as of March 2016).  This is out of the approximate one million who served.  It is inevitable that this number will dwindle rapidly in the next decade.  As such, it is important that we learn as much as we can from these Canadians while we still have their first-person accounts.

One of the things that has struck me as I have watched news reports featuring veterans from WWII , and as I heard stories from much younger veterans, like the ones who participated in the Invictus Games this fall, is that while they were serving, they had to be on high alert.  They knew they had to have the ability to act almost reflexively.  They, in service to our country, gave up the luxury of slowly thinking things through.  They were trained to assess and react; to obey and to trust; to remain vigilant and to be ever watchful.  Many of them payed the biggest price for this service, others have come home with minds that don’t seem to know how to turn off the high alert mode, and they struggle to figure out a way to fit in, in a world that seems to have sounds and triggers they thought they had left behind.

Because of their service, the rest of us have the luxury of not living in a state of high alert.  Very rarely do we find ourselves in situations where we need to react instantly, to obey with complete trust or to remain vigilant for weeks upon weeks.  And yet, as a nation, this is exactly the behaviour that we seem to be choosing.   When we hear someone give an opinion that we disagree with, be it one about politics, pipelines, religion, education, women, men, immigration or art, we seem to have become a nation of people who jump to their post to find fault with, and then attack, what has been said.  We attack with printed words on social media and we attack with verbal words in person.  We do not take time to ponder the effect of our words.  We do not consider that it is possible to listen to an opinion that is different from our own without hating the speaker and without acting upon that hate with our quick words. 

 As I think about Remembrance Day, I can’t help but think how disappointing it might be for a soldier to watch us as we indulge ourselves with the unnecessary battle lines we have drawn for ourselves.  I can’t believe that any soldier dreamed that by serving his or her country, the reward would be for them to come home to a country that seemed to make a sport out of warring with each other.  Our soldiers fought and died so that we could have freedom.  Freedom to live in a peaceful society and freedom to express ourselves.  But they did not fight so that we too could become ‘soldiers’, always at the ready to fight off any opinion that is different from our own.

We don’t need to look too far south to recognize where some of this stems from.  If there were an Olympics for dividing a county, our neighbours would have a good chance of winning a gold medal.  They have become experts on demanding that people take a side.  They must choose Democrat or Republican.  And once the choice is made, heaven forbid that they take time to understand the other side.  They are either pro-guns or anti-guns.  Pro-wall or anti-wall.  There is no fence sitting on these issues.  On and on and on it goes. And we as Canadians have a front row seat.  It is not surprising then that some of this behaviour has rubbed off on us.

In Calgary, along Memorial Drive, hundreds of white crosses are erected each year; one for each local soldier who sacrificed his or her life in one of the wars.  Citizens of our city are encouraged to walk among the crosses, to read the inscriptions, and to stay for one of the services.  Each year, this memorial, this quiet place along a busy road, is constructed with love. 

As we have walked through it each year, I have wondered what it must be like to see the crosses in Flanders Fields.  And this year I wondered what would happen if two Canadians, with very different points of view stood in the quiet of Flanders Field, where poppies blow between the crosses, with a few rows of crosses separating them.  I wonder if one of them would hurl insults at the other, and then the other fire one right back.  Or perhaps they would stand side by side in silence.  Or perhaps they would have a conversation and really try to understand a different point of view.  I imagine that in the quiet of this almost sacred place, there would be no insults hurled.  There would be no right-fighting.  There would be no forcing of one opinion onto the other.  There would be no volleying of hate as they stood in Flanders Field, between the crosses.  We might remember that John McRae asked to take up our quarrel with our foe.  He did not ask that we take up our quarrel with anyone who has a different thought.

May we never forget, the service and the sacrifice that our Canadian soldiers gave for us.  May we be thankful for their willingness to stand on high alert so that we would not have to.

As I go about my daily interactions this week, before I speak too quickly, or with too much force, I will imagine that I and whomever it is I am speaking to, are walking softly in Flanders Field. Where poppies blow between the crosses.  It could just be that this is the tone that I need to use most often and it may remind me that I can like and be kind to people with differing opinions than my own.

Lest I forget.
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Book a coaching session with Elizabeth to help learn how to take control of who you choose to be.  Elizabeth provides coaching for individuals and for groups.  She also facilitates custom workshops for teams, groups and businesses.
 

This week I have been challenged, twice, on Facebook to do the same thing.  The first time it was by my cousin, Joan.  The second time was by my sister, Margaret. Both invited me to do the seven-day black and white photography challenge.  The challenge is simple; for each of seven days, post one black and white picture that I have taken.  No explanation is necessary.  Just post a picture.  When Joan challenged me, I was delighted.  I absolutely thought this would be fun.  Then I looked at my pictures.  Dear heavens, I thought.  What in the world will I post?  So, I delayed.  And a few days went by and I secretly thought that perhaps I would be able to slip under the radar and avoid participating.  Then came the challenge from Margaret.  Out came my pictures again.  All I could think about was the time I had taken a short photography course.  On the first day, the instructor taught us the difference between a snapshot and a photograph.  Driving home from that workshop with my friend Shelley, I remarked, ‘I have albums filled with snapshots, and not one single photograph’.  When I take pictures, I seem to be able to either focus on the close up or on the distant.  I can either get a snapshot of the people, in which case I miss the landscape, or I get the landscape but miss the details, but I can not seem to figure out how to manage all of it at once.

In the real world, I am much better at being able to balance this and it is one of the skills that I share with my clients.
When I talk to young adults, people of the age where they are talking about ‘adulting’, I hear them say that one of the questions they dread is the one that asks them, “What are your plans?”  This happens to high school students when they are in the final year, or even years, of high school. People ask them what they will do when they finish high school.  Will it be college, university, travel or a job?   Then, they no sooner choose their next step, perhaps university, when people ask where they hope to work once they are finished.  Once they land the job, the question arises about potential advancement.

The same applies for young dating singles.  They only have to be together about a year when people begin to make polite inquiries about whether this could be ‘the one’.   They no sooner announce their engagement than we want to know the date and details of the wedding.  The cake is barely eaten when people start to wonder about babies.  Babies are no sooner conceived when we want to know if mom will work or stay home.  And on it goes.

In my life, people ask me what is my next big goal.  What is my ultimate dream, they wonder.

In all of these examples, there is absolutely nothing wrong with people wondering about our lives. Ok, it might be a bit much to have people speculating about our plans for love or pro-creation, but mostly people are simply trying to make polite conversation.

The problem begins to surface when we feel a pressure to know; to know exactly where we are headed.  And the problem really shows up in colour when we become tied to a long-term goal; tied so tightly that we become racehorses, blinders in place, finish line in our sights.  I meet so many people in my work, who have a clear knowing that the path they are on is not the right fit for them, and yet who are terrified of changing paths simply because they fear they will disappoint others with whom they have shared their goal.

It’s a fine line to walk.  It is like trying to figure out the focus features on my camera.  It is being able to know when to focus up close and when to gaze beyond.  It is knowing how to make the most beautiful picture with the material that is right in front of you. 

It is always good to have a goal and to take bold steps toward it.  The secret is to not focus on that goal so firmly that we miss the opportunity of what may lie either right in front of us or just at the periphery of our vision.  In coaching I call this, ‘Softening the Focus’.  Instead of having laser vision, staring straight down the hallway and looking only at the door at the end, and the treasure behind it, it is good practice to slow our pace just a bit as we head toward our goal.  I don’t advocate slowing to a crawl.  I do advocate slowing enough to notice if we are passing other doorways along the way that might be begging for us to open.  These could be the doorways, behind are which people able to help us with our dream.  They may be doorways of respite, giving us the rest and rejuvenation we need to continue.   They may be doorways leading to new ideas and new dreams; dreams even more in line with who we are becoming.

Sometimes when I think I am taking a picture of something in the distance, I later examine the picture, and I am shocked to notice beautiful things in the foreground that I completely missed while I was focussing far away.  I know that this happens in my life too.  I can be so focused on achieving my goal, on taking the perfect far-shot, that I can miss some of the opportunities right at my fingertips.  When I remember to soften my focus, I am able to slow down just enough to find joy in the moment.

As you head into this upcoming busy end-of-year season, notice where your focus lies.  Are you bound and bent to get your goals achieved, to focus only on the end goal, or are you willing to adjust your settings and to capture some unexpected beauty along the way?

As for me and my Facebook challenge, I am deciding to accept. I am going to quit worrying about the end goal of having seven perfect pictures.  Instead, I will focus on the joy of looking back at some of my photographs (ok, snapshots) and focusing on the great memories they evoke.

Book a coaching session with Elizabeth to help learn how to focus on the distance without losing the beauty of the moment.  Elizabeth provides coaching for individuals and for groups.  She also facilitates custom workshops for teams, groups and businesses.