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How is it that people look so look forward to the holiday season and yet there is so much conflict, disappointment and family arguments around this time of year? Revertigo, the humorous name given to what psychologists call Associative Regression at this time of year explains why conflict happens and how you can avoid it. Click below to listen to this 12 minute radio segment on the ABC Radio’s Breakfast Program with Robbie Buck and Wendy Harmer on 14th December 2019.

Investing in one’s physical and mental health is essential for wellbeing and is a powerful foundation to achieve personal and professional goals.  However, it’s also good for business in terms of the culture, workplace environment, team well-being and business results.  In this podcast interview with CPA Australia I look at:

• Exploring the relationship between mental health and physical wellbeing: 02:16
• The cost of mental health on the Australian economy each year: 03:46
• Characteristics of poor mental health to look for in others: 05:54
• What are three ways to improve mental wellbeing? 08:52
• Identifying characteristics of a mentally healthy workplace: 13:18
• Signs that an employee is struggling and steps to take to offer support: 18:17
• The importance for businesses to invest in mental health and the implications if this is not addressed: 23:28

Here’s to removing the stigma that is often associated with mental health challenges and improving the quality of our communication by having the conversations that matter

Are you frustrated, fed up and feel totally undermined in meetings where everyone’s on their mobiles and you feel your power as well as what you’re saying goes out of the window?

If this is you (or you’re the perpetrator of this contemporary new social behaviour), then the September 2017 article in The Boss Magazine of the Australian Financial Review is worth a read. It’s entitled, The Mobile in the Meeting: How to deal with the distracted and whilst it might bring a wry smile to your face as you recognise it well, it contains tips to help you overcome the frustrations of people’s mobile addictions and ensure your voice gets heard.

READ:  http://www.afr.com/brand/boss/the-mobile-in-the-meeting-and-how-to-deal-with-it-20170802-gxnysw

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If you had access to all the money in the world, had all the contacts, confidence, resources and support …

What would you begin to do right now if you knew you couldn’t fail?

Your answer reveals whether you are on the right path.

Each of us are programmed by economic, educational, political and societal systems to think and create in certain ways. We follow in the footsteps of our families, believing the only way to be happy is to work hard, gain financial freedom and then ask, “What really makes me happy”?

When you reach this stage, you’ll probably delay answering the question, instead feel compelled to prepare your children and grandchildren for the same journey. Having the conversations that matter with loved ones about changes that also affect them, is likely to be avoided because they’re just too difficult. Instead, you may settle for a lesser dream, one which takes you on exotic holidays and remodelling of your kitchen or home.

Will this really be enough to say you’ve had a well-lived life?

Is it even possible to have it another way or does that make you prey to the ‘Get Rick Quick’ deals promising greater freedom?

There is another way but you have to change your mindset, challenge the myths that keep you thinking and feeling in certain ways and put in place a system that allows you to create a life where you’re happy with your answers to three essential questions.

Here’s a re-recording of a talk I gave to 50 women at the Behind Closed Doors Connexions event at the Australian Institute of Management in Sydney. Conversations with people since then, reveal that these are the questions we really want to address.

I invite you to answer these questions and take action, so you avoid regrets later in the life, live life on your terms and in the process create a better world for everyone.

WATCH this 20 min video to reveal your answers to those three important questions.

Think about the last day of your life.  It may be today or tomorrow or some time ahead.  As you face your death, would you be satisfied with what you’ve done, who you are and what you’ve been or will you go to your grave with a song in your heart that you never got to sing?  In short, how would you answer these questions:

• Did I live?
• Did I love?
• Did I matter?

On that last day you’re likely to be faced with two things:

1. You’ll be more upset what you didn’t do that what you did. Thing about it.  Will you wish you had spent more time in the office or will you lament the mountains you didn’t climb, the conversations you didn’t have or the causes you didn’t start?
2. Of the things you set out to achieve and did, you might ask, “Why did I aspire to do so little and why didn’t I find a way to collaborate with others to make that bigger dream possible?”

What is it that you truly want your life to be about?

• It may be grandiose on the world stage, maybe ending world hunger, creating a new invention that improves the quality of people’s lives, or the industrialised abuse of animals.
• Maybe you want to change your own family’s dynamics so that your children don’t continue the legacy of the problems you inherited.
• Or, like the Australian marathon runner, Janette Murray-Wakelin, you search for a cure for the cancer you’ve been diagnosed with because you made a promise to your grandson that you would always be there for him.

The Privilege of Being a Psychologist

I find myself in a privileged position. As a psychologist, I have heard the personal stories of 1000s of people around the globe who struggle to make sense of what this world is really all about for them.  They all want their lives, work and relationships to mean something and all of them want to truly live, truly love and truly matter.

On 11th March 2017, I was the Keynote Speaker at the Sydney Gala Premier of Raw: The Documentary and this article arose from the speech I gave that night.  The guests at that event were tremendously inspired by the world-breaking record set by two extraordinary Australians, both of them in their sixties.    In my speech, I implored them to look at their own lives and remain open-minded enough to consider the implications the marathon runners ‘achievement in the context of their own lives and ask, ‘What else is possible?”  This article outlines some of the challenges I presented to those people on the night of that Premier.

Singing Your Own Song

Why do so many of us go to our graves with songs in our hearts we never get to sing? I believe it’s because we buy into the personal, familial, social, religious and cultural myths and limitations that keep us from living on purpose.  Instead, we live very conformist lives or as the philosophy and writer Thoreaux once said, we live “Lives of Quiet Desperation”.  When those myths and unquestioned assumptions of what IS possible are challenged, each of us is faced with two broad choices.

1. Make Excuses For Why We Can’t Achieve Things.
   You can lament that your own circumstances are different, saying, “I am not rich enough, young enough, educated enough or connected enough”.  You can say you left it too late or didn’t have a good start in life so you continue through life making the excuse that you’re not good enough.
2. Embrace Record-Breaking Achievement as Inspiration To Act.
   You can become excited by new evidence that someone out there has broken all records and demonstrated that it’s possible to get outcomes that others believe isn’t possible.  You can say to the yourself and the world, “I WILL make my dream possible and do whatever it takes to break records”.

Evidence that the Impossible is Possible.

Let me give you some inspiring examples of where the impossible was embraced and outcomes achieved that previously people believed were impossible.

1. Breaking the World Record for Distance Running.
   The 4-minute mile for distance running was once thought impossible but in 1954 it became a reality.  Not only was it broken but subsequently so many people achieved it  this that it has become the standard for male professional middle distance runners.  What was deemed ‘impossible’ is now a ‘standard expectation’.
2. Achievements that Medical Science Deemed Impossible.
   The Dutchman Wim Hof, nicknamed ‘The Ice Man’ holds 26 world records including the world record for the longest ice bath.  Wim Hoff sat for 1 hour 12 mins in a bath of ice without his core body temperature falling.  This defied all medical science, yet he proved that it could be done.
3. Record Number of Full Marathons Run Consecutively in One Year.
   In 2009, the world record for the greatest number of full marathons run consecutively in one year was fifty-two.  It rose steadily over several decades, and although unclear as to the exact number achieved because of record-keeping and the Guinness Book of Records not unable to monitor claims by runners, it rose to over two hundred.  Then in 2013, a staggering figure was reached.  Three hundred and sixty-six full consecutive marathons were run by Jeanette and Alan Murray-Wakelin, a couple from Melbourne, Australia.

Raw: The Documentary premiered in March 2017 charted their journey running around Australia and celebrates this phenomenal world first. In my keynote speech at that event that I asked the audience to consider what this achievement meant for them in relation to their own lives.  I implore you to do the same as you consider what this Australian couple did.

An Existential Imperative

Janette and Alan’s achievement is SO mind-blowing that it’s almost impossible to digest and yet you, like the audience on the night, you have a choice of how to respond. Choose to be inspired not only by their achievement but the existential imperative its message offers, to ensure you sing your own song and make your impossible, possible.

I have chosen to believe, without a shadow of a doubt, that we can create a more compassionate world not only for people but animals and the environment we share it with.

This is my personal dream that some would say is impossible.  I refuse to believe that.  Every day I act to manifest a more compassionate reality and I have chosen to do this in a number of ways:

1. Create a context for the integration of ethical leadership principles in business practices so principles come before profits.
2. Teach people to have the conversations that matter (with themselves and others).  Together with the mindset to reach for the impossible, people can learn to truly create lives that matter and which, in turn, positively impact others.
3. My personal big impossible vision is to become part of a rising tide of social awareness that there is a better way to treat animals, particularly those caught in the abusive process of industrial production.  Few people know that every year, a mere seven billion of us on the planet incarcerate, abuse, torture, rape, kill and tantalise one hundred and fifty billion animals.  This number is difficult to digest for we ask, “Where is all this going on?”  The vast majority of abuse takes place in an industrial system of which intensive factory farming and commercialisation of animals occurs.  It is horrendously miserable for animals but people and the planet also suffer in the process. And all of it is totally unnecessary and is causing the destruction of our planet and moral fibre.

It’s stories like those portrayed in RAW – The Documentary, that inspire me to ensure I stay on track with my dreams so that at the end of my life I can turn within and say, “I truly lived”, I” truly loved”, “I truly mattered and it made a positive difference beyond my own existence”.

I invite you as the reader to do the same.

If you love your job and can’t wait to get there in the morning and, at the end of the day feel energised, satisfied knowing you make a difference, then stop reading now.

If that’s not the case and you feel trapped and frustrated, wondering how to escape the treadmill, knowing your values are compromised and the thought of politics leaves you demoralised and you know there’s a better way, then I challenge you to examine what it is that’s stopping you changing it?

Whatever your reason, the underlying theme no doubt will be fear.  Twenty-five years of being a psychologist has shown me that the underlying cause of people’s inaction is the fear – conscious or unconscious – of what might happen if they step out of line.  Here are some of the typical things I have heard over the years:

• Once I have enough money put away, I will take the risk.
• If I knew the future was predictable, I would quit now.
• If my new venture was a guaranteed success, I’d leave in a heart-beat.
• Once I am truly qualified, I’ll feel confident to make the change.

What is the Fear?

Underlying each of these excuses is the fear that you will:

1. Fail and feel stupid.
2. Run out of money and have to live on the street.
3. Be humiliated with smug naysayers saying “I told you so!”
4. Feel foolish that you ever thought your situation would be different.
5. Feel isolated because there are so few people on the road less travelled.
6. Never get back on the ladder and have to be satisfied with less.
7. Feel even more trapped, having gone through savings or worse, got into more debt.

These fears all take place within what Alain de Bottom (2004) calls Status Anxiety.

The desire of people in many modern societies to “climb the social ladder” and the  anxieties that result from a focus on how one is perceived by others

it is this anxiety that will keep you from acquiring the mindset and skills to:

1. Get up every morning, vibrant and existed about your life.
2. Develop the ability to have the conversations that matter with yourself and others to find new solutions to age-old problems.

Let me tell you a secret.

• No-one is watching.
• People who criticise you may do so because your actions reflect on their own status anxiety e.g. parents who resist their children going against the norm.
• Those who ridicule you as naïve do so because if they no longer feel safe in the knowledge that everyone is in the same boat.

The majority of what keeps you trapped in a job and life you don’t enjoy is Uncertainty. If you have any doubt about the power of avoiding uncertainty, consider the attempts we have created to maintain certainty:

1. Life insurance – so others will be looked after if you die.
2. Health insurance – so you’ll be supported if you get sick.
3. Income protection – so you’ll always have enough.
4. Superannuation – so you don’t end up old and poor.
5. Mortgage – so you will have a roof over your head.
6. Investment properties – so you’re not left behind.
7. The list goes on…..

The Certainty Myth

One of the myths I explore in The Myths of Life and the Choices We Have is the Certainty Myth.

It is better to be part of a group than to be an individual.

In our world of overwhelm and fear, conformity is sold to us disguised as certainty and safety. However, such conformity in its most powerful form stops you even thinking about other possibilities, instead acquiescing the going along with the norm that says, “Work hard, put enough money and security aside and one day you will be free to choose the life of your dreams!”

I come across every day, with people telling me that their anxiety is reaching intolerable proportions, and no amount of foregoing the pleasure of doing meaningful work, is helping them face with the dread and mundanity of having a job and lifestyle they despise.

How do you escape?

If this article resonates with you and you know you’re are not truly doing what you want, eager each morning to face the world, there is a way to get out of the trap.

If you want to have what you have not, you must do what you do not

1. Question Everything.
   Don’t accept the status quo.  Look for ways to make your dream a reality and ask people who have successfully made the shift for their advice.
2. Embrace Fear.
   Make friends with your doubts and use them to highlight what you need to change and what you don’t.  See anxiety as a loyal friend who is saying things are out of balance and negotiate with it to discern what is self-sabotage and what is excitement.
3. Accept that No-One’s Watching.
   People are preoccupied with their own status anxiety and fears to worry about yours.  Those who criticise you for taking steps to improve your life may not have your best interests at heart.  Surround yourself with people who truly want the best for you.
4. Romance Your Dream.
   Create a vision of the future you want to create.  Don’t allow doubt and practicalities to get in the way of thinking big and access the emotion you anticipate feeling when you make it happen.  Quantum Science tells confirms that this technique is a powerful way of manifesting reality, not merely alternative trickery.
5. Embrace Uncertainty.
   Accept that there is no insurance policy on life, but you will be safer if you embrace ways to ensure you can deal with whatever comes along.  See uncertainty as a normal and predictable part of life, bringing new opportunities and challenges to live meaningfully.

Contact me if you want to explore how I can help you make this happen.

DOWNLOAD your free digital copy of The Myths of Life and the Choices We Have to further explore the unquestioned social, personal and cultural assumptions that keep you trapped in the “Shoulds, Oughts and Musts” of life.  By identifying the myths against which you make choices, you will expand your options and take the steps to improve your life.