This past weekend was a real gift for me (and, I venture to say, for my chorus too). I direct an a cappella barbershop chorus, and this past weekend was an extraordinary success for us. Our contest weekends are always joyful, as we are a part of a culture of community rather than competition. We cheer for each chorus and quartet enthusiastically, at the start and after each song. We take classes together, we sing together, we share and have fun together into all hours of the evening. It’s amazing.
And this past weekend, I got to experience the joy of knowing we did everything we set out to do. And as it turned out this year, that was enough for us to hit all of our goals: to qualify for the international competition, to receive fourth place (and a chance to sing for all of our fellow members after contest at Moonglow), and I received an award as director of the most improved chorus who qualified for the international contest.
Photo: I hold the Don Regan Award, smiling; our chorus performs (wearing their fourth place ribbons) at Moonglow
I also had the gift of spending time in nature, watching mother ducks and their babies swimming, spotting all sorts of gorgeous birds up close, and just enjoying some serenity – a beautiful contrast with our chorus contest.
Unfortunately, as I returned home and started to pay more attention to the headlines, I was reminded of how many people are putting their bodies on the line right now, simply by participating in peaceful protest, and of how precarious things are in so much of the world right now. Even journalists are being targeted for simply documenting what’s taking place.
I wish I had all the answers. I wish I could wave a wand and stop atrocities and create a world that is more equitable and life-giving to everyone.
But in the meantime, I will encourage you to be present today. Find small joys to be grateful for and savor. Hug a loved one if you can. Enjoy a treat if you can. Share a good conversation, a meal, a dollar or a kindness.
If you are privileged enough and willing and able to put your physical presence on the line, I thank you for that. If resistance for you looks like making donations or having conversations or even just caring for yourself, I see you too.
Keep doing what you can. As my chorus reminded me that I said recently, each of us makes a difference. Each person on the risers, or each person in the world, has the opportunity to do their own best or instead choose complacency (or even to do harm). Please believe, and please know, that your actions DO make a difference. To the people you interact with, and to the world as a whole. I truly believe that.
Take good care. Keep embracing joy. Keep breathing.
P.S. One way to take care of yourself is practicing good self-care. If you’d like to learn more about yourself in community with others, join my Enneagram program, or set up a time to learn more about mental fitness (which you can study in community or 1:1 in coaching with me).
Photo of me, hair down and smiling, leaning against our RV in 2021. (Head here to be notified when my book on our travels is ready for pre-order!)
Hi friends. It’s my anniversary weekend (yay!), and in spite of that, I’m out of town spending time competing with my chorus and enjoying all of our amazing barbershop friendships too. I hope you have some plans to fill your own cup as well.
Today, I just wanted to mention a few ways that you can work with me, if you’re ready to take the next step in your own personal development journey. While we can go it alone, there is just some work, even inner work, that is often best done with support from others who have been there.
#1 Join my Enneagram summer group!
The Enneagram is my favorite tool for personal development. It helped me to figure out why I am the way I am AND figure how the work I can do to become a healthier, happier version of me. I have SO much more compassion for people due to my Enneagram study, and it’s extraordinarily helpful in relationships of all sorts.
We use a three month video series created by the wise Enneagram godmother, Suzanne Stabile. We meet weekly to share our own reflections on her teaching, learn from each other, and touch base about our own journeys, goals, and progress. Everyone who has completed this program with me has found it helpful and even transformative.Learn how to join us here.We’ll coordinate schedules based on the participants’ plans for the summer.
#2 Tackle anxiety, anger, and the negative voices in your head by studying mental fitness with me!
I use the Positive Intelligence mental fitness platform, and it’s been the best tool I know for teaching me and my clients how to stay present, handle negative emotions, and become a more efficient and effective version of me. If you struggle to stay regulated or grounded, if you need some concrete tools to use when life gets really uncomfortable, you need mental fitness in your life.
Book a call to learn how the saboteurs are keeping you from living your best life. Learn to get through your day with less stress and more joy. This program is available as individual coaching or in a group format
Wherever you are today, take a moment and breathe. Listen to the sounds around you. Enjoy the outdoors if you can. And give yourself a pat on the back. You’re doing great. It will get better.
This past week was a beautiful juxtaposition for me. Maybe it was for you too? I had family in town, and I was so privileged to spend time with them, to go out to eat or for a drive and even to a speakeasy, and otherwise to run around playing tourist and share my beautiful local community with my mom and my sister.
Photo of my sister, my mom, myself and my husband seated on an antique couch at a local speakeasy, Reddins
At the same time that I got to spend time with them, I was aware of the devastating cuts that have passed the House and could potentially pass the Senate of the United States in the guise of a “big beautiful bill” that will actually take away the protections built into our constitution (in irrevocable ways) and steal essential resources, including environmental resources, from the poor and middle class to give tax breaks to the wealthy.
If I had allowed myself to focus on the potentially horrendous future ahead of us, I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy my time with my family. Thankfully, I’m well-practiced in mental fitness techniques, and even with the extra stressors that can pop up when interacting with family (due to old childhood patterns) or in being in new environments, I felt very equipped to enjoy my time with them.
So today, I thought I’d explore the saboteur that can often be at play when navigating these challenging times, as well as some ways to combat those thoughts and patterns as they arise, in hopes that it can help you too.
In the words of Positive Intelligence, “Saboteurs are deeply ingrained patterns of thinking and behavior that limit your potential and hinder your ability to perform at your best. They are internal critics that operate based on fear, self-doubt, and negative self-talk. Saboteur patterns can take various forms, such as the Avoider, the Hyper-Achiever, the Victim, and more. Each Saboteur has a unique way of sabotaging your wellbeing and success.”
Vigilance itself can be a very wise characteristic. Businesses, individuals, families, and other organizations benefit from people with the skill to be paying attention to future possibilities and preparing for them in a wise way.
But the Hyper-Vigilant Saboteur is perpetually alert, constantly scanning the horizon for any threats and anxious about what can go wrong. The Hyper-Vigilant Saboteur becomes chronically stressed, and by doubting yourself and other people, the saboteur makes sure that you aren’t able to be present, relax, or enjoy the present moment.
While these saboteurs originated as a way to protect us and keep us safe in childhood, when we overly rely on one type of behavior, it becomes disproportionate and gets in the way of our ability to enjoy life and to be efficient and effective. The Hyper-Vigilant Saboteur can look like the “boy who cried wolf”, getting anxious about EVERY possibility and potentially missing the true, actual dangers that deserve our focus and attention.
A 24/7 news cycle is built for those of us with a strong Hyper-Vigilant Saboteur. The news media focus on the negative and seize on our fear to keep us watching, reading, and tuning in. This makes us suspicious of other people and question our own safety and our own ability to weather the storm. You may feel skeptical or anxious or even constantly worrying thanks to this saboteur.
If you find your own anxious thoughts getting in the way of your ability to enjoy your present company, there are a few things you can do to help the situation:
When you catch the anxious thought patterns repeating themselves, stop and let those negative thoughts go. Recognizing that these are your saboteurs and your saboteurs’ limiting beliefs is the first step. (This is what we study and practice in my mental fitness programs.)
Take a ten second break to hyper-focus on your senses. This is mindfulness, but with extra focus. Feel the sensation of the wind in your hair or observe the inhale and exhale of your breath. Command your mind to be fully present on the colors or textures in front of you. (I teach some of these techniques when we complete a Saboteur Assessment. Consider joining me!)
Here are some other ideas for conquering your Hyper-Vigilant Saboteur:
Practice mindfulness – take a walk, meditate, do a body scan, mindfully enjoy a drink or a meal
Practice being present and discerning between true threats and the dangers you perceive. Take a breath and pause before deciding how to proceed in each situation
Find ways to challenge worst-case scenario thinking: consider alternatives, consider what’s likely,, or even follow your worst-case scenario thinking and then imagine how you’d handle it or how realistic that is
Ask a friend, or a coach, or a therapist for support and their perspective
Move from worrying and anxious thoughts to taking meaningful and specific actions
Though by adulthood, the neural pathways of our saboteurs are well-worn and well-honed, we can learn to create new neural pathways and build new habits using the wiser part of our mind. We are more than our saboteurs. And the more we do this work, the more joy we can find in the everyday moments, like a meal with those we love.
With the state of the world, some of us are inclined to huddle under a blanket. And some days, that’s what you might need. Me too. But if you’re finding yourself avoiding important things, getting stuck in a doom scroll, neglecting responsibilities, or wishing you were doing more to fight for [insert your cause of choice here], here are some tips for activating your inner doer.
Photo by Anh Nguyen of a person with light skin and black clothing and shoes leaping in midair.
Get in the zone. Turn up your favorite energetic tunes that make you want to take action.
Dance. Yes, dance. Move your body, in whatever ways you can and want to. Dance like no one is watching.
Repeat steps one and two as needed until you’re feeling pumped up and ready to do something.
Take a few breaths. Focus on the details of the present moment you’re in. Repeat an affirmation that inspires you, like “I am capable” or “I have the power to make a difference” or “I am so happy to be able to…..” or whatever makes sense for you. Not sure what to use? Think of what your wisest friend would advise you to say.
Take an assertive pose, like a “wonder woman” pose with a confident chest, and repeat that affirmation again, several times. Or just hold the pose and smile, for at last two minutes. Let the pose empower your inner doer.
Do the thing. Break it into bite-sized chunks. After each baby step, do a congratulatory dance/pat on the back/give yourself a proportional treat (praise/candy/tea etc.), and take a few more good breaths or tune into your body somehow.
If you’re still in the zone, ride it and do some more!
When you need to stop, or when you want to, see if you can do something for 2 more minutes. If that isn’t happening, celebrate your wins. And tell the judge in your head to take a break. Be proud of yourself. You’ve done well.
Return to huddling under a blanket, or do something else nourishing.
Remember that ANY progress is progress. I love when I’m able to tap into that magical flow state, where it feels like I can work forever. And what’s amazing is that we can use mindfulness tools to achieve that state, on command! The trick is breaking the old habits.
What’s your personal recipe when you need or want to go do something?
Friends, I am disgusted and fearful and angry and sad and more when I read news headlines or simply think about how many children and adults are suffering and whose rights are being stripped away.
I just called my senators to oppose Casey Means for Surgeon General. I will keep calling my representatives to hold them accountable each week. And I will spend a little time each day being open to the best ways that I can make a difference in the world.
But you know one of my favorite things in the world?
Sunlight.
Photo of a happy dog running down a path by Pixabay
A sunny day, with blue sky and mild temperatures, is such a gift. And in our part of the world, I am getting more and more beautiful sunny days to enjoy. Spring is a beautiful time of year. I’m watching tulips begin to bloom, and watching bumblebees and honeybees at work. Friends are beginning to share the bounty of their gardens with us. I’m taking more joy (and less layers!) on my walks.
While I know there are plenty of people in the world, like my husband, who struggle to deal with the heat that the sun can bring, we know the sun isn’t just a beautiful gift for us. It’s also essential to life. Without the sun, plants and nature can’t do its job, and our food supply would be at stake. We’re all so interconnected, and the sun is an essential piece of the puzzle in our lives.
You may also be feeling stressed. You may feel pressured by some saboteurs in your minds. Perhaps you’ve got some thoughts popping in on the regular, telling you that you can rest AFTER you achieve your next goal, or hit your next financial milestone, or finish doing ______.
I want to challenge you to ignore those voices. Be here NOW. Enjoy the sun as it comes through your window or touches your face. Smell the flowers. Savor the feeling of a breeze on your face, or the wind in your hair. If you are a gardener, enjoy the cool soil between your fingers, or the delicate seeds and plants you cultivate, or the glistening water as you water a flower.
We have no idea what’s coming tomorrow. If habeas corpus is eliminated in the United States, none of our rights to due process are safe. That could mean we’re also rounded up and imprisoned in the days or weeks or years to come. We can try to fight it, but it’s something much, much bigger than just us. The fight may or may not be successful.
So what can you do, in the face of uncertainty? In the face of possible peril?
Be here now. Enjoy the sun. Savor that slice of cake or a moment or play or joy with loved ones. And remember that rest is also resistance. Life is a marathon, and not a sprint. Keep tuning in to where you are, and appreciate all of the nuisances, details, and even fun that it offers.
Take good care. Enjoy the sun.
Want to learn more about the saboteurs getting in the way of a more efficient, effective, and happy life? Let’s talk.
Looking for a speaker for an online or in-person event? I’d love to hear from you, or have you recommend me to a friend.
Hi friends. In the face of an increasing number of horrendous headlines, including (as I write this) the news that transgender service members were referred to as “dishonorable” by the Supreme Court and the ban on transgender people serving stands, I am going through waves of emotions.
But after reading those headlines, I forced myself to walk to the mailbox, and you know what? I felt joy. I felt gratitude. The sun was overhead, it was warm enough for me to walk outside without a coat on, the birds were chirping, and so many beautiful flowers were blooming.
So in thinking about what to write today, I’m reminded of the progress I’ve made on my book – as well as the realization that I’m still potentially years from seeing it out in the world.
You know something kind of unique about me? Before I wrote this book, I nearly wrote another book’s first draft. Yes, I have at least ¾ of a memoir about a particular summer of my life in professional theater sitting in the cloud.
Something that I’ve learned about myself, in my Enneagram and in my mental fitness studies, is that I as amazingly creative as I am, when I take on a really big project, and when I don’t have accountability, and when it’s for me, and not for someone else, I may not finish it. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s my “shadow side”, as they say. You could also call it my “restless saboteur”, or what it looks like when I am in “low 7” according to the Enneagram.
Not doing anything with this book is just one of many of these projects. And this will probably blow the minds of some people who know me and can rattle off all the things I’ve accomplished along the way. But I think that for me, when we’re talking about how to take a book from first draft to finished product, there was really a feeling of being daunted by what I didn’t know. Combine that with the realization that this particular book didn’t actually have a clear purpose for me in my career, and I let it sit on a shelf instead of focusing my energy on sorting out next steps.
But this time, my friends? This time will be different.
I think I first announced to the world publicly that my book Crafting Our Life Adventure would be published years ago. I even created this sales page so you could sign up to learn when the book is ready. (Still works!)
But you know what? Publishing a book is a giant task. And it’s tough to stay motivated on a giant task when you’ve got several or dozens of other tasks, many of them urgent, demanding your attention.
You may have heard this advice before:
“How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”
Photo of tiles with the letters spelling “try baby steps” by Brett Jordan
And so while last time, I let myself get pulled toward easier and/or more pressing wins than publishing my book, this time is going to be different.
I started out with the knowledge that I needed to sort out what the steps actually will be for me to publish a book.
So over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been asking friends and friends of friends for all of their tips.
After I have all that research “done”, or at least feel MUCH more informed than before, I’ll be using the research to create a checklist or road map for myself, outlining the next pieces of the puzzle and giving me smaller wins that I can celebrate along the way.
And finally, I will begin taking daily, or at least weekly, steps to realize my vision: to have my book published and out in the world.
This process is actually a process I repeat over and over again in my life. If you want to read it for yourself and reference it in the future, you can. I call it the Four Steps To Your Dream Life Blueprint, and you’ll find it here. I’ve used it throughout my life to accomplish my goals, and I hope it helps you too.
And it can work for anything, I think.
But if that’s too much, to look at all four steps toward a big vision, just focus on breaking your task up into smaller pieces.
Find taking a shower too hard today? Break it up into smaller steps. Gather your towel and toiletries. Gather clean clothes.
Want to reach out to your rep but not sure what to say when you call? Break it up into smaller steps. Write a list of bullet points to cover, or even write yourself a script. Practice saying it out loud to yourself.
Know you need to do some batch cooking, but feel overwhelmed? Break it up into smaller steps. Grocery shop with a few meals in mind, or roast some veggies and rice and a protein that will make it easier to make dinner from there.
So I hope that’s helpful. At minimum, breaking a daunting task into small steps is really useful for me. And if you have the brain space to think about the big picture right now using your wise mind, feel free to grab a copy of the Four Steps and give it a try.
And if your brain isn’t allowing you to tap into your wiser self right now, I 100% get it. And if you’d like some support in doing so, schedule a Saboteur Assessmentwith me. I’d love to help you learn to let the sabotaging thoughts, the ones that get in the way of living a life you love, go.
The world is so much right now. That in itself would be more than enough to deal with, don’t you think? But we’ve also got voices in our own heads. And those voices, though they originated from a helpful place, get in the way and stop us from tapping into the wisest parts of ourselves.
So today, using the language of Positive Intelligence, I’ll explore ten types of saboteurs that might be getting in the way of your life – and while there are MANY ways that we can counteract these habits and voices, I’ll suggest one.
Photo credit: Adorable donkey in a green field by Peter Jochim
Want a fuller understanding of how saboteurs are getting in the way of YOUR brain and YOUR life? Let’s set a time.
The Judge
The Judge is the universal saboteur. We’ve all got some level of judgment happening in our brain, whether it’s judging ourselves, judging other people, or judging the circumstances we are in.
Some of us have a perpetual inner critic that will never truly quiet down. For others, it comes and goes.
Dealing with anxiety, distress, or suffering? Feel guilt or shame? Do you struggle in relationships with other people? Chances are the judge is at the root of that.
The Judge will tell you it motivates you and you need it or you’ll get lazy and complacent. That’s a lie!
The Avoider
Do you find yourself focusing on the positive and avoiding potential conflict at all cost? The avoider wants to avoid difficult things, so the avoider will try to tell you everything’s great.
The lie of the avoider is that it says things will go away if you ignore them. Instead, they often will get bigger and blow up in your face.
The avoider suppresses any anger or resentment – another recipe for problems down the line.
When we deny conflicts or negative circumstances in front of us, the avoider is preventing us from actually doing something about them and making the situation better.
The Controller
The controller wants to deal with anxiety by controlling people and situations around them.
The controller is often a micromanager – incapable of seeing the bigger picture, which might tell us that it’s better to empower people or teach them to handle a situation themselves than always try to do it our way.
The controller gets temporary results, but at a major cost in our relationships and long-term ease, efficiency, and happiness.
The Hyper-Achiever
This common saboteur (especially seen in the corporate world) tells us we can relax, be happy, and stop working when we hit the next milestone. The hyper-achiever won’t let you celebrate for long, or relax, or enjoy the moment you’re in. It’s all about the achievements.
Your self-confidence and self-worth are, according to the hyper-achiever, defined by your achievements. But your wiser self knows you have inherent value, with or without achievements.
The hyper-achiever may avoid trying things unless they know they’ll be successful.
The Hyper-Rational
This saboteur focuses on the rational mind, to the exclusion of emotions, soft skills, and nuisance.
Those with a strong hyper-rational saboteur can be seen as cold, unthinking, and arrogant.
A refusal to acknowledge the role of people’s feelings and emotions can have a severe impact in relationships, whether at work or in your personal life.
The Hyper-Vigilant
Find yourself getting caught in worst-case-scenario thinking?
Are you anxious about the future and what could happen? Struggling to let go of your fears and be present?
The hyper-vigilant feels continuous and intense anxiety. This is exhausting and exhausts those around you too.
The Pleaser
The pleaser has learned to put the needs and desires of others first as a way of ensuring their own safety and survival. The pleaser believes this is how they will be loved.
The pleaser doesn’t express their own needs directly – everything is indirect. Meanwhile, they flatter and do for others. In an especially unhealthy place, this can come across as manipulation.
The pleaser can forget their own needs completely (emotional, physical, financial) which can lead to burnout and resentment. Others can also become dependent on them.
Restless
The restless saboteur is impatient. If they don’t see quick wins in a project or situation, rather than wait to see if it pans out later, they’re likely to try something out. This can lead to “shiny object” syndrome and keep them from pursuing and completing more complex projects.
The restless saboteur is always in search of excitement, experiencing FOMO, and easily distracted.
Underneath the surface, they’re escaping from the present to avoid dealing with hard things.
Stickler
The stickler is a perfectionist, and the stickler may struggle to accept the idea that “done is better than perfect”.
The stickler often holds themselves to higher standards than they do other people, though they may also hold others to those high standards.
They tend to have an inner compass telling them how to do things correctly – the problem is that we can’t do everything perfectly. It’s really only a small portion of things that NEED to be perfect.
They try to quiet the judgment of themselves and others through perfecting things.
Victim
The victim uses emotion to get attention and affection for themselves.
They tend to be dramatic and become depressed and fatigued due to what’s really repressed rage.
In their search for attention, it can backfire and actually push people away.
They may not feel seen or understood by others.
At the root of it all of our saboteurs, no matter what childhood experiences helped shape them and develop them, is fear. And while there are lots of saboteur-specific strategies that we can employ, the best way to face it all is to begin practicing non-judgmental self-awareness.
If we judge ourselves for when our saboteurs get a hold of us and we fall short of our highest goals, we are reinforcing the habits of our saboteurs – the habits we likely want to lean less heavily on, for our own health and happiness and to be more effective in our work.
Instead, try practicing non-judgmental self-awareness. If you notice your Victim or your Hyper-Achiever or your Judge, you can try laughing about it, or saying “hello there!” to your saboteurs. You can journal about it or just make a mental note. This practice is the first step to beginning to change our behavior.
Want some more guidance and more tools for conquering your own habits and saboteurs? I’d love to help.
Hi, friends. I’m fighting a bad cold right now, so rather than tap into my wisest self for some reflection as I aim to each week, I thought I’d do more of a quick life update.
Photo: I took a photo of a few early spring flowers peeking up through a garden full of dead leaves
I’m also proud of myself that I finally completed my book draft and submitted it to a publisher for a review! I’m expecting that my very rough draft has a long way to go before publication, but I am feeling proud of completing the thing, at least in very rough form, and I look forward to updating you on how you can support me on my book journey in the months and likely years to come.
It’s been a busy and beautiful spring as always in the arts, with one performance behind me, several to come, and a barbershop competition too in June. I’m exploring new opportunities with friends as well in the coming months.
It’s weird to highlight personal wins when the world is so challenging right now. Some things I am making noise about are the LGBTQ+ suicide prevention hotline going away in the U.S., the disturbing conversations and plans around autism, and the decisions to remove all regulations related to things like the environment – not to mention taking away funding for things like food inspections. I also read a disturbing article giving an important breakdown about where the trans people in sports outcry has come from. Spoiler alert: it’s not based in fact.
I continue to be grateful for all the people reporting accurately and for everyone standing up for all of our rights.
And I am so grateful to be in Canada, living a life that I love and helping others to do the same, wherever they are. Even in very challenging circumstances, we can learn to see what’s possible, conquer our own sabotaging thoughts, and enjoy our journey.
There are lots of stressors in our lives right now, but staying involved and finding joy keeps me grounded and grateful. I hope you have tools to do the same. And if you want to learn how to get out of your own head and do the same, let’s talk.
In stressful situations, we tend to default to old habits and/or move into survival mode to keep ourselves safe. All of this is completely understandable.
Because we’ve all had different experiences, have different brains, differences, personalities and more, what one person does under stress can look quite different from someone else. It’s part of what makes us unique. But what isn’t unique is that we are all hardwired to do certain patterns of behavior under these circumstances.
In thinking about the state of the world right now, I’m especially aware of how dangerous traveling is for so many people right now. Perhaps you don’t feel safe traveling internationally (or at least, you don’t feel safe crossing the border to get back in). Perhaps you don’t feel safe going to the grocery store or even leaving your home.
The situations may be different, and the reasons may be different, but in any of these circumstances, the goal is for us to be able to stay calm under pressure. We want to know that we will be calm and in control of our actions, even if we are being interrogated or profiled or otherwise threatened.
So I want to talk a bit about what happens to us under pressure, and how we can strengthen our practices and our minds to help keep us safe (or at least increase the likelihood of a positive interaction) in future encounters.
Photo of blue sky and branches by Optical Chemist
I’m going to do so with compassion for others in challenging circumstances, to the best of my ability. I’m going to do so using the lens of the Enneagram and mental fitness. As usual, please keep in mind that I’m not a scientist or a therapist, and what I’m sharing are my own opinions based on my own experiences. If you want the technical scientific jargon, I probably won’t be going there, and I’m also not a lawyer or a therapist, so consult your own if possible and do your own homework and come to your own conclusions.
My personal belief is that we all have some sort of wise, wonderful being inside of us. Maybe you’d call it your soul, or your sage or your wise mind. This special being is there from the time we are born. As soon as we’re born, basically, we start having experiences in the real world. From the noises and feelings when we first leave the womb, to the ways our family of origin treats us, to the kind and the harsh and the horrible humans who cross our paths along the way, we are challenged.
As a result of these experiences, we start developing a personality. We pick up traits along the way. We find that we get positive reactions or are safer more frequently when we do certain things, so we lean into those more. In the language of Positive Intelligence, the mental fitness program I use in my training and coaching, we find that some of our skills and characteristics serve us well, so we do them more and more, eventually resulting in some “saboteur” behaviors. We might discover people-pleasing tendencies, or a hyper-achiever who tells us we must keep “doing” or we don’t have value. Maybe we develop restless or avoider or controlling saboteurs as ways of coping with the world.
In the language of the Enneagram, by the time we are adults, we’ve settled into a grab bag of personality traits that sometimes help us and sometimes hurt us, because we overly rely on them. They trap us. If we study the Enneagram, we’ll learn that there are other people in the world very similar to us, whose personality types are also aligned with ours, though our own individual circumstances and that underlying soul within us means we’re still all different people.
Whether we’re using the language of mental fitness or of the Enneagram, if we are privileged enough to begin working on ourselves, it begins with non-judgmental self-observation and a recognition that we’ve been holding so tightly to these personality traits and behaviors that they are no longer serving us. We recognize that if we want to become more of that beautiful soul, more of that lovely sage being, so wise and as we were created, we’ll need to let go of the grip that our personality holds on us.
And if we’re able to see this, whether it’s because we did a saboteur assessment or read a book or experienced a life-altering circumstance or something else entirely, then we’ll find ourselves asking the question: what’s next? How do I step out of these habitual patterns that I’ve been in for so long, that have me trapped in my own patterns of personality?
The answer, in a word? Presence.
When we are able to let go of the sabotaging thoughts and judgment of our own mind, and instead practice being in the present moment, it’s the first step toward our own self-actualization.
It sounds lofty, but if we are able to practice, day in and day out, being fully present where we are, whether that’s by getting outside in nature or fully savoring a meal or feeling the water on our hands, we are, step by step, loosening the grip of our personality and making it easier for the wisdom of our wise mind to make it to the surface.
You may be wondering what the heck this has to do with staying calm when we’re traveling. That’s fair!
But it has everything to do with it. If we practice grounding ourselves, using any tools of mindfulness, while letting go of judgment, we are increasing the likelihood that when we encounter a stressful situation, we will be able to hear the wisdom of our wise mind. We’ll increase the likelihood that we will know how to best take care of ourselves in that situation. We become calmer, and wiser, and less anxious. Our wise mind will recognize whether we need to go hide, or explore a solution, or fight back, or simply have the words to answer a question calmly and in the wisest way possible.
We don’t usually learn to do this work. We are rarely, if ever, taught these skills in school. We are not taught that our mental muscles need to be strengthened and exercised just as much as our physical muscles do.
If you’re curious about this, I’m pleased to offer a Saboteur Assessment, without cost, to anyone interested in learning more about how they’ve been getting in their own way. Whether or not you choose to work with me in the future, I’d love to help you gain the understanding to move forward in the world without being held back by your own patterns of personality.
I can’t control what happens to you when you travel. But I’d love to empower you with the tools to control as much as you CAN control in your life.
Crafting The Life You Want: A Practice in Living 