Self-Coaching Tip: Enjoy Doing Your Taxes

For many of my new clients in the U.S., getting their taxes done is one of the most stressful chores they face each year. However, after learning to coach themselves around taxes, they experience a sense of peace, empowerment and satisfaction.

Today, I'd like to share some of our self-coaching strategies for tax season. Try what feels good to you and ignore the rest. After all, what have you got to lose? Days of stress? An onerous chore? Teeth gnashing?

Before you go any further, get clear about how you want to FEEL while doing your taxes. Some of my clients want to feel abundant. Some strive to overcome their procrastination. I like to feel at Peace.

Once you've identified the FEELING, list 3 things that usually make you FEEL that way. Here's my list to help you get started:

1. watch my favorite movie (always puts me in a 'go with the flow' emotional state).

2. Visiting with my son or best friend.

3. Meditation.

These sound like rewards, don't they?

Well, that's exactly what they are.

Now, here's the really important part: REWARD your self before starting your taxes.

Yes, you read that right.

Reward your self first.

Here's why....

To do your taxes without getting stressed out, you have to move into a new state of BEing. One of the easiest ways to teach your body-emotions-thoughts a new state of BEing is to do something that will bring you into that state of BEing. That's usually something fun!

If you have always been stressed out when doing your taxes, your current state of BEing around taxes is, yep!... you guessed it, stressed out. That's the pattern your body-emotions-thoughts automatically go into when you do taxes. I'll bet your body-emotions-thoughts go into a stressed out state just thinking about doing your taxes!

So, this year, try a new pattern:

1. Choose how you want to FEEL while doing your taxes.

2. Make a list of 3-5 things that usually make you FEEL that way.

3. Reward yourself.

4. Set aside time to work for 30 minutes on your taxes right after the reward.

5. State an Intention to stay in the 'reward' FEELING as long as possible while working on your taxes.

6. As soon as you feel the reward FEELING draining away from you, stop working.

7. Repeat steps 3-5 over the next few days, as needed, until you've finished your taxes. As an added bonus, you'll have a new pattern of BEing for next year's taxes.

Wishing you a joy-filled tax season!

Carolyn

To learn how to Coach Your Self each day, join our Spiritual Cross-Training program, risk-free!

Self-Coaching Tip: Find the Guidance in Your Procrastination

This week is National Procrastination Week, a time for me to celebrate. I learned some of my best self-coaching strategies while struggling with my tendency to procrastinate.

Did you know that procrastination isn’t caused by laziness?

Just like anything else, procrastination has a body-emotion-thought connection. For example, research shows several causes for procrastination:

BODY: Procrastination can be caused by low activity or damage in the prefrontal cortex. This is the part of the brain that filters out stimuli, especially distracting stimulation that makes it difficult to stay focused and organized around completing a task.

EMOTION: Procrastination can be caused by our emotional state, such as depression, fear, anxiety or addiction.

THOUGHT: Procrastination can be caused by the way we think about a task. If we think the task is too small or insignificant, we’ll tend to procrastinate. On the other hand, if we think it’s too big and overwhelming, we’ll have a tendency to procrastinate

While learning to coach myself around my procrastination, I had to first identify the body-emotion-thought patterns that supported my procrastination. The results were surprising! Here’s how it broke down for me:

BODY PATTERN: I tend to procrastinate when my environment is too stimulating. Lots of noise, bright lights, temperature extremes, odors, etc. made it difficult for me to stay focused.

EMOTION PATTERN: When I can’t stay focused, I tend to get overwhelmed, a form of fear pattern. When that happened, I didn’t feel safe enough to complete the task.

THOUGHT PATTERN: When I don’t feel safe I begin to think like a victim. I believe I’m not competent enough to take care of myself. At this point, my brain shuts down and I can’t figure out what needs to be done in order to complete the task. I want to be rescued.

Each pattern I identified was guidance about what was causing my procrastination. The solutions became more obvious.

Once I identified the patterns, I thought each pattern led to the next. So, I began by changing my environment. This strategy helped me get started on projects, but it wasn’t enough to complete them.

Patterns become entrained in our brains. This means they pull or draw themselves along, like the current in a river. They seem to have an energy of their own. For example, try to sing doh-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti and stop. Notice how your body feels without that final doh. Notice how agitated your body, emotions and thoughts are.

Ok. Go ahead and sing the final doh. Enjoy the release.

The same is true for procrastination. It has an energy of its own. So when you develop a strategy, remember to plan a body strategy, an emotion strategy AND a thought strategy.

To learn more about coaching yourself through procrastination, join our 4-month self-coaching program, Spiritual Cross-Training: Coach Your Self to Inner Peace & Outer Success.

Self-Coaching Tip: Change Your Environment

When I was little, my mother used to tell me, “don’t slouch.” I can still hear her voice in my head. Little did I know, that admonition would serve me well when I began learning how to coach myself.

Think about it. Every moment of every day, your body is interacting with environmental forces, such as lighting, seating and gravity. If the environment is in harmony with your body’s needs, you maintain good posture. On the other hand, poor lighting or sitting at a desk that is too big or too small, causes you to adapt your posture to the poor environment.

Change in posture is the body’s way of communicating that there is a change in your energy. The longer you maintain incorrect posture, the more constricted your body becomes. As the tension grows, your breathing is restricted, reducing the amount of oxygen getting into your system. You become more myopic—seeing less, hearing less, understanding less, and fearing more.

That’s right. Your posture actually affects your emotional state. Think about it. Fear constricts your breathing, making it shallower and faster. Fear constricts your body, tenses your muscles, making it more difficult to move. And, once fear sets in, your brain seems to shut down, reducing the number of choices available to you.

Your posture reflects how your environment is affecting your body. When you change your posture to adapt to a poor environment – walk more slowly, slump in your chair, lay your head on your arm, sit closer to your work, tilt your head – it’s your body’s way of telling you that your energy is decreasing. Your body is trying to coach you.

This week, spend some time playing with your environment and notice it’s impact on your body. Here are some suggestions to help you get started:

Change the lighting. If the room is very brightly lit, turn off some of the lights and see if your body relaxes a bit. If the room is dark, turn on some more lights.

Change the height of your chair when working at your desk. To get the correct height, place your elbow on your desk and put your hand on your face. Your fingertips should just reach your eyes.

Change the placement of your computer screen. The top of the screen should be even with your eyes so you are looking down at a 20 degree angle. This allows you to read your screen at the optimal position for your neck and back.

Change the sounds in your room. If there are a lot of sounds, reduce some of them. If it’s quiet, try adding some sound. Notice what kinds of sounds relax you and what sounds tense your body.

Move your whole body. Every hour, take a 1-2 minute movement break. This allows your body to take in more oxygen and realign your body for greater energetic efficiency.

To learn more about how your body impacts your self-coaching abilities, try our 4-month Spiritual Cross-Training program, risk-free for 30 days.

Self-Coaching Tip: Expect the Unexpected

A few years ago, I set an Intention for peace and harmony in my relationship with my ex-husband. Within three days, the energy of the amplified intentions was having an impact on my life—but it didn't look anything like peace and harmony. Almost overnight, the situation with my ex-husband threatened to become litigious. I felt overwhelmed and threatened at a core survival level.

I knew what usually worked to coach myself through this situation, but I was having some difficulty. I became angry with my ex-, blaming him for the situation. For days, I held my anger as a protective shield against the primal fears that were surfacing. The anger interfered with my abilities to function effectively as a parent, a coach, a CEO. Finally, after several days of missing deadlines and appointments, I called a fellow Coach and asked for help. After doing the body movements that help me move out of my fears, I spent some time working through one of my favorite tools that helps me get out of my head enough to partner with the fear I was feeling. Then, my colleague led me through a visualization in which I saw all of my issues with my ex-husband as rocks, stones and pebbles loaded into a backpack. Below is the visualization and how it worked for me:
She directs me to a small footbridge spanning a river of healing, loving waters. I stop halfway across the bridge and open the backpack. I pull out the first rock. It is an old friend—abandonment. I hold it, touching the rough surface, feeling the emptiness of the emotion in my body. When I am ready, I toss it into the river and watch, transfixed by the changing colors as the rock is transformed by the loving energy.

I continue emptying the backpack, revisiting old, familiar issues I've been working on for years: self-worth, loneliness, betrayal. At the bottom of the pack is an unfamiliar issue. A small pebble, the size of a marble, dense and heavy. I hold it in my hands, waiting for guidance.

Sobs burst forth. It is guilt. A very old guilt. Time swirls around me, the past and future blending into the present. I am two years old, maybe three. My father is ill. He is changed. He is in pain. The guilt is born in that moment: guilt that I cannot alleviate his pain. I cannot make him laugh.

Every moment of my life takes on a new meaning. The buried guilt motivating my every action: if I don't fix the pain, I am not worthy.
me:
She directs me to a small footbridge spanning a river of healing, loving waters. I stop halfway across the bridge and open the backpack. I pull out the first rock. It is an old friend—abandonment. I hold it, touching the rough surface, feeling the emptiness of the emotion in my body. When I am ready, I toss it into the river and watch, transfixed by the changing colors as the rock is transformed by the loving energy.

I continue emptying the backpack, revisiting old, familiar issues I've been working on for years: self-worth, loneliness, betrayal. At the bottom of the pack is an unfamiliar issue. A small pebble, the size of a marble, dense and heavy. I hold it in my hands, waiting for guidance.

Sobs burst forth. It is guilt. A very old guilt. Time swirls around me, the past and future blending into the present. I am two years old, maybe three. My father is ill. He is changed. He is in pain. The guilt is born in that moment: guilt that I cannot alleviate his pain. I cannot make him laugh.

Every moment of my life takes on a new meaning. The buried guilt motivating my every action: if I don't fix the pain, I am not worthy.
That was my story. That was what I'd been telling myself since the birth of that guilt. Now that the story was out, I began to change it, re-script it, find new evidence of my worthiness. The evidence was already there. I just hadn’t let it in yet because it didn't fit my story. Every compliment, thank you, or gift I'd received over the years had been deflected, pushed away, because that little girl knew she wasn't any good. Now, I could re-visit those moments of acceptance in a new light, and begin to let the love and acceptance into my heart.

Is this how I expected peace and harmony to manifest in my life? Not at all. At some level, I was expecting my ex-husband's behavior to change, too. But, this inner peace and harmony is much more than I ever expected. I love myself in a new way now that I have found a new level of self-acceptance. And it affects my interactions with everyone else in my life. I judge myself and others less harshly. I love others in a new way. While you may find the unexpected as you develop your self-coaching skills, keep in mind, that the unexpected will be even better than you could imagine.

Self-Coaching Tip: Move Your Body, Change Your Thoughts

For a large part of my life, my Inner Critic often stopped me from learning or doing something new by saying, "I'm not smart enough to learn this." And then, it reminded me of all the subjects in school that I struggled with like math and science. I literally re-lived the pain and embarrassment and confusion of various math and science classes throughout my school years each time I tried to learn something new.

Here was a belief about myself that was not supporting me.

I was convinced that my brain was just ‘too slow’ to understand new ideas. But, my story about ‘being slow’ was only a part of the picture. When I applied self-coaching to look at the whole picture, I discovered a few surprises. Remember, self-coaching includes looking at your body, emotion and thought patterns. Here’s what the whole picture looked like:

• Story/ Thoughts: I’m too slow to learn new ideas.
• Emotions: pain, embarrassment & confusion
• Body: quick, jerky and clumsy movements

For me, being stupid meant being slow. My body movements, however, were anything but slow. My breathing was fast and shallow. My movements (walking, talking, picking things up) were too fast and uncoordinated.

Somewhere along the line, my body, in a constant state of stress, had forgotten the pattern of slowing down. So, I used contrasting movement to learn how to re-gain control of my body. I began by speeding up my breathing and movements and then contrasted that with slower breathing and movements. When I noticed I was racing across the room, I slowed my walking to a crawl before resuming a more normal pace. When I became aware that I was talking very fast, I took a breath and forced myself to speak more slowly. When I recognized that I was racing through housework, I stopped and did it in slow motion for a moment. When I resumed the housework, my movements were more coordinated and graceful.

It only took a few days before I began noticing the difference in my thoughts and reactions to situations. First, my Inner Critic quieted down enough so I could remember that some subjects in school were very easy for me. English, French, and History classes were so much fun for me that they didn’t seem like work. When I came into contact with other people, my thoughts were calmer and I could access many different options in a situation. My responses became more appropriate for the situations and people were being kind, rather than attacking me.

By changing my body movements, I easily and permanently changed my belief about myself. I no longer think of myself as stupid. The thoughts you think about your self are just patterns. They are held in place by emotional and body patterns. And the body pattern is the most predominant pattern. By changing your body’s pattern, by moving it differently, you can change very deep-seated beliefs that no longer serve you.

So, as you begin to coach yourself, don’t use sheer willpower. Move your body and change your thoughts. To find out more about the most effective movements to add to your self-coaching, join our 4-month Spiritual Cross-Training program, risk-free.

Self-Coaching Tip: Partner With Your Emotions

Did you know that emotions prioritize your thinking? For example, when I am depressed, my thoughts tend to focus on what I don’t have: enough energy, creativity, love, etc. Once my thoughts start down this path, I begin to perceive lack in other areas of my life, such as relationships, finances, health.

This emotion-thought pattern can feed on itself. Pretty soon, I begin feeling a great sense of hopelessness and I just stop trying to do anything. For many years, I tried to ignore my depression. I’d distract myself from it in an effort to make myself feel better, such as shopping or eating. But, then, as my self-coaching skills improved, I learned to partner with my depression and all that changed.

Partnering with your emotions can be very scary, at first. Emotions can feel huge and overwhelming. I never wanted to really feel my depression because I was afraid it would swallow me up and I’d never find my way out of it. But, when I learned how to partner with my depression, I discovered the depression was actually trying to help me prioritize my life and my spiritual growth.

For me, feeling depressed is a sign that I have stepped off my Spiritual Path. It means I am focusing on the wrong thing in my life. But, if I acknowledge the depression and begin partnering with it, the depression leads me back to my Self so I can continue on my Spiritual Journey. My energy returns and I no longer feel a sense of lack.

Here are some suggestions for partnering with your emotions:

• Set an Intention to partner with one emotion. Don’t try to partner with every emotion at once. That’s just too big a job to begin with.

• Pay attention to that emotion. Notice what it feels like in your body. Write down the thoughts that show up when you’re feeling that emotion.

• If that emotion was a person, what would it look like? Sound like?

• Begin a dialogue with your emotion. What does it want?

To learn more about partnering with your emotions, try our Spiritual Cross-Training program, risk free

Self-Coaching Tip: Play Every Day

As a child, I loved writing about distant planets, exotic aliens and grown-up, adventurous space-farers. But I got the details wrong. I didn't know enough of the world to recognize that cream puffs were not the breakfast of aliens or that clocks don't belong in prehistoric caves. The details were inaccurate, but I was connected to my passion for stories. I was alive and exploring my Authentic Self.

As I got older, details gained an even greater importance in my life. Now, ignoring details had consequences. Catholic school nuns insisted I learn my catechism or go to hell, classmates deconstructed my clothing style - or lack thereof - to determine my popularity, teachers demanded I behave or it would go on my "permanent record."

Eventually, I went off into the real world of adults, armed with an obsession over getting the details "right." Convinced the world would come to an end if I didn't arrive at work on time, pay the bills as soon as they arrived or iron the creases "just so" in my husband's shirts, I wrapped myself up in the "fear of consequences."

Then I discovered the greatest consequence of all: too many details will smother the soul. And the story. My Life Story, like my writing, suffered from boredom brought on by pages of insufferable details that distracted me from my Life's Purpose. I'd lost my soul-connection, that part of me that lit up with delight while contemplating reptilian monsters munching on puff pastry.

By the trial-and-error method, I eventually learned which details were important to my spiritual growth. And I learned these lessons by re-connecting to my interests and passions. In short, I re-connected to my ability to play.

In her book, Deep Play, Diane Ackerman describes the spiritual nature of play:

Swept up by the deepest states of play, one feels balanced, creative, focused. Deep play is a fascinating hallmark of being human; it reveals our need to seek a special brand of transcendence, with a passion that makes thrill-seeking explicable, creativity possible, and religion inevitable.

Re-connecting to my ability to play with words also taught me how to coach my Self. Playing teaches body-emotion-thought patterns that are more in alignment with your Spiritual Nature:

• Playing brings your body patterns into balance.Your posture and breathing changes as you relax into the fun you’re having. You breathe more deeply, smile and laugh often. Your body is moving in the patterns of ‘fun.’

• Playing shifts your emotion patterns by releasing any self-judgment. While playing, you take risks and embrace mistakes, knowing you will learn from those experiences and use the lessons the next time you play.

• Playing focuses your thought patterns on the goal of the game. While playing, you’re not planning how to complete all the tasks you have on your to-do list. You’re not thinking about housework or yard work. Instead, you know what you want and you figure out the best way to get it within the framework of the game.

These body-emotion-thought patterns are the same patterns needed to successfully coach your Self to the kind of life you want. So, by playing every day, you’re strengthening the neural pathways you need to successfully change your life.

This week, add some play-time to your schedule each day and re-connect to your Spiritual Nature.