Each Tuesday, weather permitting, I take part in a Tuesday Trek, with three of my friends. Tuesday Treks are hikes, hikes in the foothills and mountains of the majestic Rocky Mountains. These are precious days to each of us in our group. The value of the hours spent together is impossible to define. There is no dollar value to be certain, and even the value on our physical and mental health is hard to calculate. But this we know. Our lives are indisputably better because of this time spent together. Time spent slogging uphill, hashing out worries and dreams, laughing uproariously at our own hilarity, and breathing in the beauty all around us. Inevitably, our hikes also involve many, many pauses for taking pictures.
I’m not a particularly great photographer but still, I’ve loved taking pictures ever since I was old enough to buy myself my first camera. In those days, we used film. The stuff that came in the little rolls, that had to be inserted and fed into the back of the camera, and then once enough pictures had been taken to complete the roll of either 12, 24 or even 36 pictures, had to be removed to be sent away to be developed. In my case, we lived in the country, so I had to mail away my rolls of film. Sometimes, several weeks later, when the developed pictures were returned, also by mail, I’d be surprised to open the package and see a few pictures that might have been taken a full year earlier. We never considered ‘wasting’ pictures. If only nine pictures from a roll of twelve were taken during a holiday, the remaining three (or sometimes four if we were lucky enough to get a bonus frame) were saved to be taken on the next important occasion, usually the next summer holiday!
This ritual of film buying, and development continued long after Jim and I were married. We used to have a little habit of, when the photos came back from the lab, which at that time had been upgraded to one-hour service, scanning the photos for ‘rippers’. Rippers were any photos where, according to ourselves, we looked awful. We would literally say, ‘Ooooh, that one’s a ripper’, then take the photo, rip it up and dispose of it. We never called a photo of someone else a ‘ripper’, nor we we allowed to rip up a photo of someone else. The fun was all in only noticing ourselves.
This of course is what most of us do. Even though we’ve progressed to the modern technology of digital photography, when we take our snapshots, we often quickly glance at them, specifically honing in on ourselves. When we don’t like what we see, we click on that handy little garbage pail icon in the bottom right corner and rid ourselves of the evidence.
This week I’ve spent some time looking at and thinking about pictures, specifically about the ones with me in them. No, I haven’t been scrutinizing them to see where I look the best, after all the landscape is so forgiving there is plenty of room for less than perfect human models. Instead, I’ve been thinking about how I would like to see myself when I look back at the picture I’m creating of my life.
The thing is, we don’t need to wait for the photos to be developed or reviewed in order to eliminate the rippers. We can deal with the rippers of our life in real time.
Each of us has the capacity to imagine the picture we have of our very best selves. We know who we are striving to be. We know our values, whether they be family, hard work, success, financial stability, integrity, adventure, security, generosity, or any of the endless values we have to choose from. We also, when we are at our very best, can notice when we are being true to those values close to our hearts. We are completely aware when we are not living our lives in alignment with our precious values.
It is in those moments when we get that ‘off feeling’, when it is as if we are standing on a balcony looking down at ourselves and truly noticing our behaviour and our impact, and recognizing we are not being the person we want to see in our pictures, that our behaviour is not giving us the impact we desire, that we have the split-second power to shift. We have the chance to notice a ‘ripper’ in the making, and stop it long before it is developed, and the envelope opened for all to see.
Even little kids can be taught to think before they act. It takes them a few tries to learn to self-regulate enough to stop and think before doing. But they can do this and so can we. We alone have the capacity to create the picture of who we want to be in the picture of our lives. We cannot always paint in the surrounding landscape. We do not always have full choice over all the details in our lives. We do have full choice over how we show up, over who we are, and over who we are being. The best thing about it is not only do we have the choice, we also have the ability to choose this over and over and over again, making subtle changes as we go until the picture is exactly right.
When I look over our pictures from last Tuesday’s Trek, I am lucky to see the gorgeous scenery in each of them. Other than making the choice to get out of bed and hike up Prairie Mountain this past week, none of us had a thing to do with that incredible landscape. What we did have choice about was how we could be seen in our pictures. I notice in all of those containing humans, that there is joy, interest in one another, a readiness for adventure, and interest in and compassion for our fellow travellers. They are pictures I am proud of.
Elizabeth is a certified professional Leadership Coach, and the owner of Critchley Coaching. She is the founder and president of the Canadian charity, RDL Building Hope Society. She works with corporations, non-profits and the public sector, providing leadership coaching. She creates and facilitates custom workshops for all sizes of groups and has expertise in facilitating Strategic Plans for organizations. Contact Elizabeth to learn how to catch rippers.
I’m not a particularly great photographer but still, I’ve loved taking pictures ever since I was old enough to buy myself my first camera. In those days, we used film. The stuff that came in the little rolls, that had to be inserted and fed into the back of the camera, and then once enough pictures had been taken to complete the roll of either 12, 24 or even 36 pictures, had to be removed to be sent away to be developed. In my case, we lived in the country, so I had to mail away my rolls of film. Sometimes, several weeks later, when the developed pictures were returned, also by mail, I’d be surprised to open the package and see a few pictures that might have been taken a full year earlier. We never considered ‘wasting’ pictures. If only nine pictures from a roll of twelve were taken during a holiday, the remaining three (or sometimes four if we were lucky enough to get a bonus frame) were saved to be taken on the next important occasion, usually the next summer holiday!
This ritual of film buying, and development continued long after Jim and I were married. We used to have a little habit of, when the photos came back from the lab, which at that time had been upgraded to one-hour service, scanning the photos for ‘rippers’. Rippers were any photos where, according to ourselves, we looked awful. We would literally say, ‘Ooooh, that one’s a ripper’, then take the photo, rip it up and dispose of it. We never called a photo of someone else a ‘ripper’, nor we we allowed to rip up a photo of someone else. The fun was all in only noticing ourselves.
This of course is what most of us do. Even though we’ve progressed to the modern technology of digital photography, when we take our snapshots, we often quickly glance at them, specifically honing in on ourselves. When we don’t like what we see, we click on that handy little garbage pail icon in the bottom right corner and rid ourselves of the evidence.
This week I’ve spent some time looking at and thinking about pictures, specifically about the ones with me in them. No, I haven’t been scrutinizing them to see where I look the best, after all the landscape is so forgiving there is plenty of room for less than perfect human models. Instead, I’ve been thinking about how I would like to see myself when I look back at the picture I’m creating of my life.
The thing is, we don’t need to wait for the photos to be developed or reviewed in order to eliminate the rippers. We can deal with the rippers of our life in real time.
Each of us has the capacity to imagine the picture we have of our very best selves. We know who we are striving to be. We know our values, whether they be family, hard work, success, financial stability, integrity, adventure, security, generosity, or any of the endless values we have to choose from. We also, when we are at our very best, can notice when we are being true to those values close to our hearts. We are completely aware when we are not living our lives in alignment with our precious values.
It is in those moments when we get that ‘off feeling’, when it is as if we are standing on a balcony looking down at ourselves and truly noticing our behaviour and our impact, and recognizing we are not being the person we want to see in our pictures, that our behaviour is not giving us the impact we desire, that we have the split-second power to shift. We have the chance to notice a ‘ripper’ in the making, and stop it long before it is developed, and the envelope opened for all to see.
Even little kids can be taught to think before they act. It takes them a few tries to learn to self-regulate enough to stop and think before doing. But they can do this and so can we. We alone have the capacity to create the picture of who we want to be in the picture of our lives. We cannot always paint in the surrounding landscape. We do not always have full choice over all the details in our lives. We do have full choice over how we show up, over who we are, and over who we are being. The best thing about it is not only do we have the choice, we also have the ability to choose this over and over and over again, making subtle changes as we go until the picture is exactly right.
When I look over our pictures from last Tuesday’s Trek, I am lucky to see the gorgeous scenery in each of them. Other than making the choice to get out of bed and hike up Prairie Mountain this past week, none of us had a thing to do with that incredible landscape. What we did have choice about was how we could be seen in our pictures. I notice in all of those containing humans, that there is joy, interest in one another, a readiness for adventure, and interest in and compassion for our fellow travellers. They are pictures I am proud of.
Elizabeth is a certified professional Leadership Coach, and the owner of Critchley Coaching. She is the founder and president of the Canadian charity, RDL Building Hope Society. She works with corporations, non-profits and the public sector, providing leadership coaching. She creates and facilitates custom workshops for all sizes of groups and has expertise in facilitating Strategic Plans for organizations. Contact Elizabeth to learn how to catch rippers.
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