If you’ve been subscribing for a while, you know that I like to share processes you can use to experience coaching and to generate insights or even changes. This month I’m providing a tool from Gestalt Therapy that I use for myself and for my clients; it is for measuring satisfaction in different areas of your life.

Imagine your life is this beautiful temple. It is stable and beautiful and protects everything that is important to you as long as all of its pillars are strong and its roof lays evenly over all of them. If one or more pillars is weak and becomes smaller than the others, the roof will slide to one side, and the whole architecture of your temple—your life—could crumble and crash.

Please take a pencil and imagine that each pillar represents 100% satisfaction with your experience in its designated area: work/performance, material safety/money, social networks and relationships, etc. Ask yourself—maybe with closed eyes and after taking in some deep breaths to connect with the question and the specific area you are considering—on a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you in this area of your life right now? Whatever number comes up, take that as a percentage and fill the corresponding column up to that point. For example, let’s say the number is 6 for work and performance; you would convert that to 60% and shade in the first column up to the level of 60%. Continue to do the same for each pillar.

After finishing the whole temple, take a step back and review it.

• What is your first thought upon looking at it?
• How accurate is it?
• What does it tell you about your life and about each pillar?
• How stable is your temple of life?

Be careful: With extremely low satisfaction across the board, the roof will look balanced and stable, but who wants a temple that’s just three feet high?!

• Which pillars have a level of satisfaction that make you say, “Great! That can or should stay the way it is.”? (These are your assets and resource areas!)
• Which pillars show such a low level of satisfaction that you think and feel, “This must change.”?

When it is time for a change, this question elicits different answers from different people. It is linked to your expectations of yourself and life in general. Some people are more easily satisfied and demand less than others. So don’t compare your temple of life with someone else’s. Use it to compare your own progress by doing this exercise every six months!

Your sense of urgency and importance of “NOW is the time to change something” depends on your interpretation of the image you created.

What have you decided? Is it time for a change?

One thing I always admire about my husband Peter is his ability to create new routines in his life. As a project manager working inside cloud-computing for HP, most of his work days are very stressful, dealing with hidden agendas, internal politics, impossible deadlines and hours of conference calls with people all over the world while trying to meet client demands, solve delivery problems and please cost-cutting CEOs. In addition, he has a demanding wife and two elementary-school age boys. How does he manage his sanity?

He does yoga.

For your inspiration about how easy it can be to integrate something healthy into you work life, watch this short two-minute video:

I know. It helps that he works from home most days. But still, it’s an example of creating a healthy habit, and I’m going to teach you how to do that too!

I’m going to explain how you can coach yourself to change an old habit and install a new one. The process is based on my 15 years of expertise in change management and my years of studying the brain and how it can rewire itself. I developed the process and have had huge successes with it—for myself and for several clients. Will it be easy? Maybe, but I hate how all the “super success” gurus scream from the rooftops how “easy” success can be. This makes me feel as if my hard struggles aren’t seen or respected, so I prefer to simply tell you that this process makes the change possible, and it might be easy. Even if it is hard, you can still succeed.

At the end of this article is a link to a shorter, printer-friendly version of the process that you can download and use as often as you like.

10 Steps Habit Mastery™

When to use this process: 1) If you want to change something at work or in your life that you know is based on a habit of feeling, thinking or acting and that you haven’t been able to change by simply using your willpower. 2) If you have tried several times and failed.

Success-generating attitude: Open mind, open heart, gentleness, compassion and curiosity

The Process

Step 1: Become aware of what in your life or at work calls you to change it.

Step 2: Use self-reflection and introspection to see which of your habits created the situation as it is now. Distinguish clearly between habitual thoughts (beliefs and your drama-story), habitual feelings (righteousness, reactive patterns) and habitual actions (being on autopilot).

Step 3: Let go of any judgment and any resistance you might have against your habitual thoughts, feelings or actions.

Step 4: Understand that at the time you created these habits, they served a positive purpose. (Hint: Most of the time your ego created them, and the purpose was to protect you from assumed and projected pain!) Times have changed. The circumstances and challenges of your life have changed. You have changed…

Step 5: Forgive yourself for creating these habits and for having them for so long.

Step 6: Design new thoughts, feelings and actions that are better aligned with your desired change. (See step 1.)

Step 7: Commit to train yourself to think, feel and act this way until it becomes a new hard-wired habit.

Step 8: Act as if it is already a new habit and start NOW!

Step 9: Enjoy seeing yourself grow as a change master.

Step 10: Celebrate your successes by sharing them with others, which reinforces the successes’ habitual nature!

Expected results: Lasting, powerful desired changes.

Important Hints: If for some unknown reason none of the expected changes happen or they are not lasting, check the quality of Steps 3 and 5, which are the most difficult ones for many people. You are either holding on to negative self-judgment or you resist forgiving yourself. Please check your success-generating attitude as described above.

If all steps are done properly and still no results occur, please ask a friend or a professional coach to help you go through the process. Maybe there is a blind spot you don’t see.

Disclaimer: This process is created for mentally stable and healthy people to conduct self-coaching and research into their own sub-consciousness. If you suffer from strong traumas or mental diseases or brain dysfunctions, please don’t try this process alone; do it only under the supervision of your mental health provider. Sylvia Becker-Hill is not responsible for its proper use or outcomes for you or anyone else.

As promised in the last post, here’s another free tool* to help you take advantage of all the opportunities this year might bring…

Goals can only be met when there are enough positive emotions to motivate their realization—and when they serve as steps on the way towards a fulfilling vision. If you want this to be the “best year ever,” you need to set aside some time for careful planning and reflection.

I created The Change Master’s Design-Your-Year Process™ to help you work through this. An abbreviated version is included below, but to really take advantage of this process, I recommend downloading the black and white printer-friendly version and using it to write out your answers.

“2012—A Year by My Own Design!” The Change Master’s Design-Your-Year Process™

Most people overestimate what they can achieve in one year but underestimate what they can achieve in ten years. Therefore: relax, sit back and allow yourself to dream and think BIG…

1. Where, how and with whom will you live 10 years from now, in 2022? How will you feel? What will you think? What will you do? What will you own?
2. What must happen by the end of 2012 in order for your vision of 2022 to come true? Formulate 3 to 5 goals using the word “I” and active verbs. Don’t use auxiliaries like “want” or “will” and avoid words like “maybe.” While formulating your goals, keep the end result in mind.
3. In order to reach your goals, it is important not only to have a precise plan but also to have a strong conviction that you will achieve them! On a scale of 1 to 10, determine how strongly you believe you will reach your goals, where “total conviction” is a 10 and “nothing but doubts” is a 1. Do that for each one of your goals.
4. When you are lying in bed at night, imagine how you will feel once you have reached your goals. Try to experience your feelings as if your success has just been achieved, right NOW.
5. Each month choose one goal to focus on and ask yourself, “Which new habit, if established daily, would make the biggest difference in helping me reach this goal?” Commit yourself to this new habit. Simply do it without hesitation for at least four weeks.

Read more

* If you missed my last newsletter or have not yet downloaded my questionnaire, The Change Master’s 2011 Completion Guide, you can get it here: Completion of 2011. Do yourself a favor and complete 2011 before designing 2012!

The end of December is when most people start thinking about the next year and making plans for what it should look like. What I see happening again and again, however, is that people plan the future without giving much thought to the recent past. From the perspective of your brain, this is a costly mistake. Let me explain why… In the June issue of my newsletter and the corresponding blog post, I said you need Brain Alignment™ for every goal you want to reach. In short, this means that your subconscious mind needs to say “Yes” to every conscious goal you pursue. If you start planning for 2012 without emotionally completing 2011, you will create resistance inside your subconscious mind. You subconscious mind is highly organized and wants things to be emotionally complete before it moves on. So in order for your plans for 2012 to get your full attention and the support of your subconscious mind, you need to look back on 2011 and do the following:

• Celebrate what you accomplished.
• Take responsibility for your mistakes.
• Integrate any emotions that remain unresolved.

“Integrating emotions” means to become aware of what you’re feeling and to allow yourself to feel it without resistance. When you fail to do this, the feelings you resist get pushed into the deeper layers of your subconscious, tying up energy and attention, which consequently is then not free for your new endeavors. I created The Change Master’s Completion Process for 2011™ to help you work through this. I have included some of it below, but to fully take advantage of this process, I recommend downloading the printable version to use as your personal self-coaching template.

Magic Moments and Pearls of Wisdom: A Short Version of The Change Master’s Completion Process for 2011^TM

Please set aside time to go through this process BEFORE you start planning for 2012. I promise, you will gain not only intellectual insights, but also emotional relief and a sense of renewed energy. Working through this process is the mental equivalent of spring cleaning: removing accumulated clutter and preparing space for all of the possibilities the new year brings.

One of the favorite lessons I teach students in my coaching training is the distinction between trigger and cause. “Cause” is what we all know from science: it’s the cause and effect relationship. When “A” happens, “B” has to follow. No choice. No variation.

For example, if I tossed a glass of water into your face during a normal dinner conversation, in a scientific cause and effect relationship, you couldn’t avoid getting wet. Your face would be wet, right? Here is the interesting question: How will you react to the fact that I made you wet?

You have lots of options. You could become angry, take your glass and toss the water in my face as well. You also could start to laugh and say, “Thank you! It’s so hot in here that I needed that.” Or you could stand up angrily, leave the room and never talk to me again. These are the possible responses triggered by my action.

So here is the takeaway distinction from this example. If I throw water in your face (cause), you will always get wet, and you can’t change that (effect). However, the (triggered) response to the thrown water varies from person to person, and you have a choice of how to respond.

When people integrate this distinction, it opens up a totally new paradigm of freedom because most people misunderstand what I define as a trigger—it’s a cause and effect relationship that means e.g. “When my boss says this or that to me I have to feel angry and I have to refuse to do the task that he asks me to do.”

They think that what they feel and what they decide to act upon is not coming from free choice. They believe, “The other person forced me to feel that way and to do XYZ”.

When you get this distinction, you can really see it—“Oh my gosh that’s me! I’m making the decision about how to react! Do I laugh about it? Do I throw the water back into the other person’s face? It’s my choice!!!”

This is a distinction for more self-management and for better emotional management. It gives people the insight and power to react out of free choice in a conscious way and not just from being on autopilot when someone pushes a button.

So again, a variation of the question from the title: Do you choose to be “right”—to believe that external factors or people are responsible for your mood and actions? Or do you choose to be free and take on the responsibility to choose how you to feel and act?

Please share your comments.

Note: If parts of this text sound familiar to you, the main text is a quote from my chapter “Leaders With Four Hearts” from the book Bushido Business—The Art of the Modern Professional. You got my chapter as an ebook when you signed up for this newsletter! Have you read it, yet?

Because of my background in organizational development and several years’ practice in Post Merger Integration Process work, one of my greatest areas of expertise is change management. In addition to giving public talks on the topic, I educate my executive clients and coaching students on change management. All of this made it incredibly embarrassing to discover a blind spot in my personal change management last month, a story that I’ll share with you now.

One of my basic models in change management is The Comfort Zone Challenge™. The comfort zone in any area of our life—work, relationship, living, etc. — is defined as the area in which we feel safe, confident and comfortable because we know it deeply and don’t expect surprises, challenges or threats. Depending on your character (whether you’re a change-avoider or change-seeker) and your values, you react to extended time in your comfort zone by feeling more comfortable, relaxing and melting into known structures, habits and patterns with less and less desire to change anything, OR you react with boredom and frustration and want to change something.

When you want to change something, or you have to deal with a change that has already happened and demands a response from you, you automatically start moving from the center of your comfort zone toward the inside edge. While doing that your feelings change, and you feel increasingly excited, nervous or anxious. Again, depending on your character and values, you welcome this and judge it as positive, OR you resist it and think negatively about the process.

Moving with one foot, or both, out of your comfort zone requires a leap of faith to face the unknown outside your known circle of life. Some people experience panic and others elation, depending how much adrenalin or serotonin is produced in their brains.

One common mistake is to think that when you leave your old comfort zone, you leave everything behind. This is wrong. Instead, you take what is aligned with your new life from the past with you. Elements of your old comfort zone help you create a new comfort zone while you explore the new “unknown” and turn it into your new “known.” You never really lose what you had and what you had grown into. You just expand, and your comfort zone expands with you. Isn’t that wonderful? Eventually the next change process starts, and you grow again.

This is the model, and I know it by heart. The part I wasn’t aware of played out like this…

I change a lot in my life, and people think of me as very courageous and willing to take high risks. From their point of view that might be right. But for me, I realized that by avoiding certain things in my business that make me feel uncomfortable, like planning, marketing and selling, I stay in my comfort zone, focused on becoming a better and better coach. But if I want to fulfill my mission in life, which is to raise the level of freedom and love on this planet, I need to reach more people. If I want to reach more people, I need to become a great businesswoman and not just a great coach.

For the benefit of potential clients, I have to stop hiding behind my expertise and the clients I already have. I can’t grow by staying in the center of my comfort zone! Feeling uncomfortable means doing things I haven’t done before — doing things that make me feel stupid and double left-handed. I have to do this in order to grow myself and my business.

When this realization hit me like a lightening bolt during Pamela Bruner’s event, I knew I had to act upon it within the next 24 hours, or it would be just another forgotten insight that vanished into the back drawer of my stubborn brain. I would have to do something that would make me feel highly uncomfortable and learn to be okay with feeling this way.

So this is what I did. On the second morning of the conference, which was attended by about 200 people, I didn’t change, fix my hair or apply any makeup. I went straight to the conference looking the way I did when I got out of bed, my breathing and heart rate quickening as I felt irritated eyes upon me.

In the first part of the morning session about “7 Elements of a Transformational Entrepreneur,” when Pamela asked if anyone had something to share about “putting yourself out there like there’s no tomorrow,” I did. I stood up trembling, feeling naked and vulnerable in my thin, braless pajamas, and went to one of the microphones to share my insight with the full house. I tell you, I don’t remember if I have ever I felt soooo uncomfortable in my own skin like I did during those three to five minutes! But I got standing ovations and opened the door for other people in the room to face their resistance to feeling uncomfortable and to overcome it too.

What I now know for sure is this: My level of success in business and in life is a direct reflection of my willingness to feel uncomfortable. I’ll repeat that because I really want you to get it: Your Key to Your Success is Your Willingness to Feel Uncomfortable!

What about you? Where in your life and business do you resist feeling uncomfortable? Are you killing your potential by doing so?

Feel welcomed to my new club of “anonymous comfort zone lovers.” Become honest. Do what you normally avoid, feel uncomfortable and act despite it, reaping the wonderful fruits that are waiting for you outside your comfort zone!

If you want to get a FREE 60-minute coaching session with me (a $497 value), you have to step out of your comfort zone and do something productive that you haven’t done before—something that makes you feel uncomfortable—and share that story below!

You have until the 15th of September to do this. From all of the stories shared we will draw one and announce the winner in my next newsletter. If you want to remain anonymous, send your story via email, and we will keep your name confidential.

For 20 years I have been studying and practicing three things in order to understand my own brainand therefore myselfbetter: meditation, methods for raising my own awareness, and neuroscience. I do all of this with an attitude of research and trial and error. I love experimenting with myself and creating new processes that are derived from the great tools and teachings I have obtained from wonderful books or teachers. I owe many of them deep gratitude, but unfortunately, sometimes after years of digging, I am no longer able to attribute from where or whom some of the pieces of wisdom came. Please forgive me.

The process I give you here today is designed by me and was first communicated and successfully practiced by my students during my The Coachmakers Training coaching educational program.

Indicators of when to use this process:
You experience strong emotions (e.g. stress, anger, panic) or uncomfortable emotions (e.g. irritation, vague fear, nervousness), or you have a vague sense that something significant is happening inside yourself, or your intuition is on alert and wants you to check in about what’s going on right now.

Success-generating attitude:
Open mind, open heart, gentleness, compassion and curiosity

The Process

Step 1: Recognize that “something” is happening inside you and that emotions have been triggered.

Step 2: Stop whatever you are doing and stand or sit still without moving.

Step 3: Direct your full attention like a spotlight onto whatever you are experiencing and feeling right now until your mental chatter calms down and you are quiet and fully present.

Step 4: Ask yourself the following questions while keeping your full attention on your emotional sensations:

• Where is this coming from?
  Pause and listen for the answer.
• What is it trying to tell me?
  Pause and listen for the answer.
• What are you resisting?
  Pause and listen for the answer.

Step 5: Integrate whatever answers you get by observing, without judgment, whatever comes up. You might want to take some notes to remember your insights or the decisions you make as a result of your discoveries.

Expected results:
Deep insights. Emotional relief. Raised awareness. Empowered confidence. Sometimes emotional or even physical healing. Sometimes a shift in beliefs. Sometimes a change in habits. Maybe new actions based upon new decisions.

Important hints:
If for some unknown reason none of the expected results happens, check the quality of Step 3, which is the most difficult one for most people. Either your attention is not fully on your emotions or you are not completely calmed down.

If all steps are done properly and still no results occur, please trust that a wiser part in you has decided that it is not yet the right time to raise the veil from your sub-consciousness. Be in peace with it and go through the process again at another time.

Disclaimer: This process is created for mentally stable and healthy people to conduct self-coaching and research into their own sub-consciousness. If you suffer from strong traumas or mental diseases or brain dysfunctions, please don’t try this process alone; do it only under the supervision of your mental health provider. I, Sylvia Becker-Hill, the creator of this process, am not responsible for its proper use or outcomes for you or anyone else.

I would be delighted and honored to hear some feedback from your research with these five steps. You can leave comments below or speak with me directly via email: sylvia@becker-hill.com.

In my last post, remember how I tried to inspire you to “brainwash” your brain for your personal spring cleaning?

Here is another reason why you should do that regularly: When you consciously set goals for yourself to change something, your subconscious mind needs to support that. Otherwise, you’ll drive your “car of change” with one foot on the gas and one on the brake. Consciously you think, “I want to reduce my TV time to have more time for my active hobbies.” But subconsciously you might think, “I feel so comfortable and safe when watching TV. It reminds me of the happy times spent with my dad, and I want to stay connected to him.” Guess what? You’ll end up with your bag of chips and a beer in front of the TV!

The frustrating news for all of us is that the subconscious mind always wins in the end. (Remember, conscious willpower is a depleting resource!) In cases of strong disagreement between your conscious and subconscious minds, you literally create an inner conflict that not only destroys your change attempts but, in the worst cases, can even make you sick! Your own body becomes a war-zone and starts to show symptoms that may later be diagnosed as diseases by your doctor.

To make lasting change possible and to accelerate the change, you need your conscious and subconscious mind to work together. This is what I call Brainalignment™! (Don’t look it up. I invented this term .)

One of the biggest problems in the conflict between our two minds is that they often operate in different time zones. Neuroscience has recently shown that the subconscious mind can’t distinguish between past, present and future. For it, everything is always happening NOW!

What does that mean? Let me share an example of brain-misalignment™ that I discovered recently in myself. For about one and a half years I have wanted to start using videos for my own marketing. I paid money for webinars to learn how to do it, and I bought all the professional equipment necessary to create my own little video studio in my house. I was totally clear about why I want to do it and felt highly motivated. But the results: None. I didn’t know what blocked me.

Finally, I sat down and used some of my coaching tools—one of which I will teach you in my next ezine—to discover the following: When I was 11 years old and in high school, we went on a class trip with an overnight stay in a youth hotel where we had a dance party. The day after we came back, I entered the school and was greeted by laughter and people whispering behind my back. Anxiously wondering what was going on, I went to my classroom and discovered a big pin-board beside the door with photos from our dance party. In the middle of the collage of photos was one of me dancing with a mini-skirt in full motion. The photo was taken by someone lying on the floor, and the view was totally distorted. I looked like a disabled alien trying to swim! I was too embarrassed to take it away and played teenage-style “cool.” Because of that event, my subconscious mind decided to do whatever it could to prevent such humiliation from happening again—no more embarrassing pictures of me going public!

This incident happened 33 years ago. I didn’t remember it consciously. But for my “always being in the now’” subconsciousness, the attempt to start video-marketing triggered this old emotional trauma and “Bang!”, the old programming was running it’s course, finding ways to distract me from my goal and making sure I wouldn’t “go public” visually. Isn’t that interesting?

Whenever you experience yourself not doing something that you have decided to do over several days, weeks or months, you can be sure it’s not your conscious actual self blocking you from doing it! It’s your younger self trying to protect you through the old conditioning of your subconscious mind that doesn’t care if you are in the year 2011 or 1978.

Does this make sense? Are you currently experiencing a struggle with your younger self? Is your subconscious mind keeping you from achieving a recently-set goal?

Finally spring arrived here in Michigan, and during our family stroll through our neighborhood after lunch yesterday, we noticed that about one third of our neighbors had their garage doors open and their driveways piled up with stuff from them. “The sun brings it to the light” we say in Germany, and in spring most of us have this strong urge to clean up and clear out, creating a fresh canvas to start the new season. What about you? Do you have any “Spring Cleaning Urges”?

My strongest urge to clean and wash doesn’t involve our garage but rather my own brain. Or to be more specific, my subconscious mind. Why and how? Read the article below, the first in a series of “change-tips” inspired by my passion for our amazing brain and the research surrounding it.

Why “Brainwashing” Is the Best Spring-Cleaning Action You Can Take

A lot of people wash their hair every day, clean their bathroom once a week and their garage once a year. Have you ever heard of someone “washing their brain”? And I don’t mean some horrible, cruel method used by spies in thrillers. Seriously, I mean how often do you consider how much old junk you might have piled up from your past in your own mind?

Most people—including myself—always have areas in our lives we would like to change for the better: make our jobs more fulfilling, spend more relaxed time with family and friends, make more money in order to contribute to good causes… the list for potential improvement is endless. A few people always seem able to pull off the change they want, but most get stuck on the way from A to B and give up. To make it worse, well-meaning friends say, “You’ll get there one day. Where there is a will, there is a way.”

I hate this saying for two reasons:

1. It is unintentionally cruel, causing the person hearing it to feel inferior by implying that the only thing missing for their success is the discipline to change what they want to change. Feeling bad neither helps nor motivates them.
2. Recent neuroscience has proven that this saying is wrong! Willpower is a resource that gets depleted over time through lack of sleep, poor nourishment, stress or just because of time passing. You can observe that easily with people who are on a weight-loss diet to improve their health. They are able to stick to the diet the whole day, but when they feel tired after a long day of work, they binge late in the evening! Is it just a lack of willpower running its course here? No!

We all have something way more powerful in our brain then just willpower: Our subconscious mind. And if this force is not with us, it works against us. It’s like you are trying to drive your “car of change” in your desired direction, but one foot is on the gas and the other on the brakes. This makes driving quite difficult and slow, doesn’t it? You would sometimes even crash with your car stopping and jumping awkwardly.

In the next issue of my newsletter, expect more details about how our subconscious mind kills or supports our attempts to change. I’ll reveal how to access it and really “wash” it in the one after that.

Please send me your comments and questions, and I’ll try to address them in one of these posts or in my newsletter.

For now: Happy Spring Cleaning!

Since Super Bowl Sunday I have a new morning ritual when I turn on my PC: I watch a very inspirational special video to start my workday with high spirits. Before you click on the YouTube player below, please stop and answer the following question:

When you hear the city name Detroit, what comes to your mind?
The big 3? Jazz? Madonna? Or riots? Racism? Poverty?

When you watch this video, pay attention to the highly thought-through text in which every pause, every ‘ahem’ and every emphasis counts. Pay attention to what kind of effect the music has on you. Enjoy… then come back to my post.

Do you get goosebumps like I get every time I hear and watch it?
Why do you think I showed this to you?
What can we learn about change management from this car ad?

Detroit is a city in desperate need for huge change. There are a lot of stories—mostly negative—out there about Detroit. In order to change something, you must stop repeating the past; you must stop repeating the old story. You must start telling the story about how the change will look like, what the results will be and what you want to experience.

This car ad shows us the power of changing our perception through a designed story telling supported by trance-inducing rhythm and music, which helps the words go straight into our emotional brain areas. A message from a change agent delivered like that will stick!

When you are clear about the change you want: Tell its story. Sing it, when you can. And see our perception shifting and your success unfolding.

Comments are always greatly appreciated.