by Kate James

‘The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realise that you control your own destiny.’ Albert Ellis

Over the years I’ve worked with many clients who have reached a point where they feel they can go no further in their careers or in life in general. They feel completely stuck. It’s only when they look more closely that they come to realise that what stands in their way is their own inclination to sabotage success.

Most of the ways that we self sabotage are unconscious. The characteristics that come into play are those that Carl Jung referred to when he spoke of our ’shadow’. All of us have degrees of every personality trait possible - some we are comfortable to own, others we’re not. Our shadow includes both the parts of ourselves that we disown (and generally dislike in others) as well as those that we admire in others (but are too modest to claim for ourselves). Simply put, Jung’s philosophy is that in order to grow we must confront our shadow and begin to embrace and make peace with all of our character traits.

This process requires courage and commitment and is often best accompanied by working with a professional but you can begin on your own. Start by paying attention to the styles of self sabotage you favour. Once you become aware of these otherwise unconscious thoughts, you have the opportunity to challenge them with your inner dialogue (more about this in next month’s newsletter).

Blaming

This method of self sabotage is pretty self explanatory. You believe that your circumstances are not your fault. Whilst it’s possible that there is some degree of truth in this, blaming leaves you feeling powerless. Blaming often goes hand in hand with a ‘victim’ mentality which is equally disempowering. Ultimately, you are the only person who has the ability to change your situation. When you begin to take responsibility, you feel better about yourself and more in control of your life.

Likely self talk: ‘I can’t help it’; ‘It’s their fault’; ‘Things are just really hard for me’.

Procrastination

How many times do you repeatedly put off an unpleasant task? The most common are doing your tax, tidying your desk/wardrobe/garage, getting your finances in order, starting an exercise program or a healthy eating regime. Procrastination is a very popular method of self sabotage.

Likely self talk: ‘I don’t have the time’; ‘I’m too tired’; ‘The time isn’t right’.

Over Committing/Overwhelm

Many people over commit themselves. They say yes to everything and then find themselves feeling completely overwhelmed (and quite often resentful). This method of self sabotage often helps you to avoid your ‘real’ goals (the ones that would bring you the most fulfilment if you were brave enough to pursue them) by distracting you with a range of incidental activities.

Likely self talk: ‘They need me - I can’t say no’; ‘I’m the only one who will do the job well’; ‘I just like to stay busy’.

Lack of Self Belief

This is quite possibly the most popular method of all. Like all others, it is also a self fulfilling prophecy. The less you believe in yourself, the less likely you are to take on new challenges and the more likely you are to believe you are unworthy of great things.

Likely self talk: ‘I’m not good enough’; ‘No one will want me’; ‘I’m too tall; too short; too heavy; too unattractive; not interesting or not smart enough’.

Unclear Goals/Lack of Direction

This is a difficult area to tackle as it generally presents as an overall sense of confusion. Not being clear about what you want in life is often connected to not wanting to make the wrong choices.

Likely self talk: ‘I don’t know what I want’; ‘Nothing interests me’; ‘What if I get it wrong?’.

With all of the above methods of self sabotage, the first step is to notice your dominant style. Most of us use more than one so begin by just becoming aware of your self talk. If you feel ready to challenge that thinking, find a way to reframe your original thought, for example ‘I’m not good enough’ could become ‘I’m as good as I need to be to give this a go’.

ON A PERSONAL NOTE

I think I can safely say that I’ve dabbled in most of these methods of self sabotage at some point in time in my life. These days ‘over committing’ is probably my favourite. I find it helpful to acknowledge this on a regular basis even though it’s an ongoing challenge to change.

I’ve been a little more disciplined at taking on less over the past few weeks…it’s so much easier when you’re on holiday.

We had our usual stint at my sister’s beach house which was beautifully relaxing. Then both of the girls went away with friends for a week so Chris and I had the house to ourselves. We lazed around for a few more days before starting our planned painting project. We’re not talking fun, arty painting here but house and fence painting. Not that I really minded…once you have all of the right equipment, it is actually quite therapeutic.

I put the iPod on and listened again to David Whyte’s ‘Clear Mind, Wild Heart’ CDs (http://bit.ly/IL8e) which I adore. I made quiche and frittata with the leftover ham, baked almond bread and bought delicious white nectarines so we had lovely food whenever we stopped for a break. I relished the feeling of physical tiredness at the end of each day - I haven’t slept so well in years.

And now the front of the house looks fresh and clean so it has been well worth the effort. Now we just have three sides to go so the new challenge for me is to keep enough time free to get it finished.
‘Kate James is a work life balance coach, writer and speaker. She works with professional people who want to enhance their quality of life by making the right career and life choices. You can find Kate at www.totalbalance.com.au.’

By Andrew May

Remember the ‘monster mobiles’ we used in the late 80’s and early 90’s? I remember back in high school when Mum and Dad were having a cuppa and sponge cake, proudly looking over the finished plans that had been dropped in by Macka the builder. ‘What’s he like?’ I asked, taking a huge bite. ‘Really successful,’ replied Mum. ‘He’s got a mobile phone’.

Today’s mobile phone is faster, lighter, stronger and more convergent than ever before. Not only do we use them to talk and text, they are a digital camera, movie camera, diary, phone book, GPS, radio, MP3 player, web browser, data storage device, encyclopedia, alarm clock, Dictaphone, personal organizer, flash light and a whole lot more.

Now don’t get me wrong, mobiles used wisely are a great productivity tool. But more and more people from teenagers to the twilight years are showing signs and symptoms of mobile addiction.

Are you a mobile addict?

1.    Do you get anxious if you don’t get an instant response to an SMS?

2.    Does the thought of turning your mobile off send you into a shiver?

3.    When you go out to dinner, do you sit the mobile on the table in front of you?

4.    Do you feel unloved if your phone doesn’t ring, ding or zing for a few hours?

5.    When you hop off a plane or finish a movie, is the first thing you do to check your phone?
If you answered YES to any of the above – you may just suffer from mobile mania.

Mobiles in Australia

Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) led a study on mobile phone addiction. They found the average Australian spends an hour a day making calls and sending text messages. 22% of respondents were classified as ‘heavy’ or ‘very heavy’ users spending up to 4 hours or more a day on their mobiles. Interestingly, only 11% of phone time measured in the survey was related to business.

Mobiles around the world

•    2 billion people worldwide are now hooked on to a mobile phone

•    Half the people in the world are expected to have mobiles in the next 2 years

•    4 out of 10 young adults in Spain are considered mobile phone addicts

•    48% of Spaniards between 18 and 25 spend more than 4 hours a day talking and texting

•    In South Korea, where 40.2M people from a total population of 49M have mobiles, the government is considering a ‘curfew’ limiting the amount of time teenagers spend on their phones

•    Orange Tree Theatre in London has a zero tolerance policy to mobiles going off during productions and has a bonus waiting for the first actor to lead the entire cast off stage until the offender has been ejected from the theatre

•    A Scandinavian chauffeur booked himself into a clinic for SMS addiction after his habit left him sending more than 300 text messages a day

•    Psychologists are predicting mobile addiction will become one of the biggest issues over the next 5 years

Symptoms of mobile addiction

While the 5 questions were a bit of fun, hard core mobile addicts will tend to neglect obligations and even important activities like work or study, can drift apart from family and friends, send and answer messages throughout the night and the thought of switching off their phone can even cause anxiety. They also tend to suffer more from sleep disorders and sleeplessness. The majority of mobile phone addicts have low self esteem and feel the urge to be constantly in contact with other people via their metallic mobile devices.

What about teenagers?

Mobile addiction is becoming more and more of a problem for teenagers. Discovering whether or not your child is a mobile addict is not an easy task. It’s much easier to see if someone is sitting at their computer for 8 hours a day. Reasonable use of mobiles can be positive for social development, yet too much can lead to withdrawal and decreased face to face contact. It is a good idea for parents to be proactive and monitor their child’s mobile usage.

Mobile mantra

1.    Practice turning your mobile off when at movies or sporting events – you don’t need it on 24/7

2.    When you do need to concentrate or finish a project quickly – turn your mobile off to avoid interruptions

3.    Go out to dinner with your loved ones, family, or friends – not your mobile. Turn it onto silent and put it in your pocket, not on the table!

4.    Set some mobile hours – learn to turn it off at night

5.    Don’t sleep with your message alert on – this can wake you up throughout the night and cause disrupted sleep patterns

6.    If you do need to have your mobile on keep the ring tone on a quiet setting – the whole world doesn’t need to know that your phone is ringing!

7.    Try going mobile free for a day or two – you might even enjoy the peace and silence.

Andrew May is is considered Australia’s leading expert on performance and productivity and is the author of the bestselling book, Flip the Switch. Andrew speaks at conferences across the globe, mentors CEO’s and senior managers. He is published throughout national and international media, with regular segments on 2UE radio, Mix 106.5 Body and Soul and Channel Nine’s TODAY show.

By Fiona Cosgrove

By the way, botox is only in the title because it fits well and let’s face it, it’s a bit of an attention grabber.   Why do you think that is?  Botox is still a controversial treatment and not everyone wants to try it.  But a lot of us are mildly interested in these alternative treatments.  Strangely it does fit the theme of this article because I am writing about trying new things. I have been thinking of all the assumptions we make, how we define ourselves and how easy it is make a judgment with limited information.  The end result – we make our world smaller than it is.  Not to say that a wrinkle-free face would make your world any larger, but who knows?!

The real point of this article is to raise a few questions about how we see ourselves.  If anyone asked you right now, “Who are you?”  What would you answer?  Your name might be a start but you would probably go on to list some roles that you play in life.  For me, I am a mother, a partner, a coach, a speaker, a friend, a daughter, a writer, and high on the list would be a bike-rider.  Because these are all things that I value about myself.   I like to think of myself as an above average bike rider, and possibly even “good for a girl.” High self praise indeed.  Self knowledge is a good thing.  So what if someone asked you “Who are you not that you would like to be?”  How would you respond to that?  Trickier isn’t it?  Possibly a bit uncomfortable too.  After all, we are touching on unfulfilled dreams and goals.

So to play it safe, I might refer to something in the fitness realm that I have failed to accomplish and with a cough I would mutter, “I’m not very flexible”.  Which three months ago would have been true.  Absolutely.  I have spent most of my exercising life moving in a straight line.  Unless I was carrying a hockey stick in which case I would swerve when necessary, but only when necessary. If asked a few years ago, I would have also listed “marathon runner” in my response.  In recent years this sport has had to be replaced with bike-riding.  I am somewhat proud of my limited ability to move quickly – in a straight line but I am aware that it has caused some anatomical problems.  I have tried to stretch - with a trainer, on my own, in a class - but to no avail.  It just didn’t excite me.  Until a few months ago when I was encouraged to try Bikram yoga.

Now for those who don’t know what Bikram yoga is, think of a room the temperature of a hot bread oven, many sweaty near naked bodies of all shapes, sizes and ages and an instructor asking us to get into positions that seem to go against what nature intended.  And there I found myself.  90 minutes later, one word came out of my mouth when I left the class and it wasn’t, “Wonderful!”  But being stubborn I was determined to do at least three classes before giving up.

Now those three classes took me into uncharted territory.  First, I was useless.  Strong legs help but don’t cut it when you’re as inflexible as I am.  My dignity suffered,  My competitive nature was flattened. To simply survive some of those classes required more discipline and tenacity than anything I had done in a while.  I was sharing space with people who seemingly were born with a different anatomical make up to me and I doubted that I was of the same species.  It was humbling.

Three classes ticked off and I was free.  But no, I found myself there again.  And again.  And again!  A few weeks later and my 10 pass needed renewing. I realized that I had done 4 of these 90 minute sessions in 8 days!   I was shocked and wondered if there was some subtly addictive foul play at foot. But no, the reason I kept going back for more was that I felt so amazingly good afterwards.  I slept well, I felt more relaxed than I had in years and lo and behold, getting on the back of the vespa no longer was an embarrassing struggle. I leapt on in one smooth movement.  Inexplicably, I was becoming stronger on the bike.

So what did I learn from this experience?  The fact that we box ourselves in with our own idea of who we are.  We think of what we are rather than what we could be.  As we get older, this gets worse.  Our self esteem and value system are set around our accomplishments.  We stop taking risks that aren’t logical or safe.  We ignore possibilities and narrow our experiences.

The moral of the tale?  Try something new.  Do something you know you won’t excel at and do it for reasons that are bigger than your need to be the best.  I hope that my new found interest will help me live longer, move more freely and provide something in my life that was missing around stillness, calm and  freedom of  movement.  Perhaps it will, perhaps it won’t.  Give yourself chance to explore, be someone new and you too may find the hidden yogi within!  And if you do, chances are you won’t need botox.

Fiona Cosgrove has over 20 years experience in the wellness & fitness industry - owning and managing clubs in Australia and Asia, including No 1 Martin Place, NSW Fitness Centre of the Year, 2006. Fiona is the author of Coach Yourself to Wellness and she regularly runs corporate seminars and workshops in the areas of healthy lifestyle, motivation and wellness.

By Dr. Adam Fraser

Latest psychological research tells us that our emotions drive and guide our behaviour, develop or ruin relationships, guide attention and help us store memories. Put simply our emotions control our performance and quality of life. They even have a dramatic impact on our health as negative emotions lead to the release of toxic chemicals that damage our body. Intensive care units have shown that patients who are comforted by others have lower levels of stress hormones, lower blood pressure and even have lower secretion of artery clogging fatty acids.

Obviously emotions have a big impact on you, but do your emotions affect your environment?

The reality is that emotions are carried through your organisation like electricity through a cable.

Put another way your emotions are contagious. The question is are your emotions worth catching?

A closed loop system is one that regulates its self and is not influenced by the outside world. Your emotions/mood is an open loop system meaning that the environment affects them. This open loop system allows a mother to consol her distraught child, or a manager to rev up their sales team.

This means that our mood affects the mood of our team. In 2000 Caroline Bartel at New York University and Richard Saavedra at the University of Michigan found that people in meetings adopted the same mood (good and bad) within 2 hours. They also found that teams of nurses and accountants tracked the same emotions over the week, even thought they varied in terms of external stress and challenges.

Depending on what sort of emotions you bring to work you could be quite literally killing your co-workers. Pause for a moment and consider how do you affect the mood of your team? We so often only focus on the role of the leader, however we all affect the mood of our team.

Having said that the greatest influence on a team is the mood of the leader. It is so potent that many leaders should consider their primary task as the emotional leadership of their team. This is not to say that leaders cant have bad days, however research tells us that teams perform best and solid culture is built when the leader regularly has an optimistic, authentic and high energy mood.

Can we change our mood? In a word YES!. A person’s emotional state and attitude are not genetically hard wired, they can be changed. However we all have a bias towards a certain style and emotional set point.

The more we act in a certain way be it happy, cranky or sad, the more we reinforce that pattern in our brain and the more we act that way.

This is where emotional intelligence matters. An emotionally intelligent person can be self aware of their mood/emotions, change them for the better through self management, understand their impact through empathy and act so that they improve the emotional state of those around them.

Steps to improve you emotional state:

1.    Picture it up!

What emotional state do you want to be in? Picture how you want to act, be perceived, what is the mood of your team like. Get a clear understanding of how you want things to be.

2.    Take Stock!

Find out your starting point. Many leaders do not know how they affect their team and environment. I have spoken to many leaders to have them inform me of the great “vibe” in their team and how their team loves their leadership style. Only to be informed by the team that they see them as a “tyrant” and unapproachable. Park the ego and ask your team for feedback. The best way to do this in anonymously, you might also consider getting formal 360-degree feedback. In addition make it ok for your team to give you feedback on your emotional leadership.  Relax we are not as perfect as we think we are.

3.    Bridging the Gap!

How do you start to develop your leadership? First step is to up-skill yourself. Here are some things I have seen other leaders do in the past.

a.    Simply start to research and educate yourself on this area through books and courses.

b.    Take time to reflect, some of the best leaders I have worked with spend 30 mins a day reflecting on their emotional leadership. They analyse different situations during that day and examine how they reacted and how they could have responded in a better way.

c.    Some look outside of work, they develop empathy and emotional regulation by coaching their children’s soccer team or devoting time to a local charity.

4.    Practice Makes Perfect!

Choose one emotion to work on. For example you may choose to practice more patience with your co-workers, more empathy, greater optimism or simply look at removing anger and judgement from your leadership style. The way we change our behaviour, is to do and redo the new behaviour, over and over again. This breaks old neural patterns. An added bonus is that we can fast track this with visualisation. Imagining something in vivid detail fires the same brain cells and neural pathways that are actually involved in the real life task. Before a meeting or on the way to work start to run through your head and picture how you want to lead and manage your team.

5.    Get some Help!

Find a coach or a colleague who you can debrief you activity with. I have encouraged many leaders in large corporates to form coaching groups where they discuss their challenges and how they handled them. The feedback has been that they are exceptionally beneficial.

“Dr Adam Fraser is one of Australia’s leading educators, researchers and thought leaders in the area of human performance! In this time he has worked with elite level athletes, the armed forces and business professionals of all levels. Check out his websites www.dradamfraser.com & www.theglucoseclub.com.au.”