Standard transmissions, business coaching & consciousness! What do they have in common?
What do those three things have in common? ME!
my mazda (the "funnest" car ever)
A couple of years ago, I could drive a standard…if I was forced to. It was rough and jerky and I tended to just tell people I couldn’t, rather than get sucked into doing it. The suited me fine. My hubby had a standard, but my car was automatic, so I never needed to drive one. And he probably dreaded trying to be patient with me as I jerked and stalled and caused havoc with traffic, so he never forced me to.
Time to buy another car…and the one I wanted was a standard!
I actually never thought twice about it. I thought to myself…Hey, I have all the tools I need. I can do it, I just need practice and what better way to ensure that I practice, than to set myself up so that I ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO. And this was the case with 2 standard vehicles in the family now.
To be honest, I had a buffer period. We kept my old car about a month, while I was learning. Eventually there comes a point where you’re either going to do it, or your not. And I invested a lot of money into it…so I HAD to. The other choice, to admit defeat and lose thousands of dollars trying to resell the thing (not to mention the time and the headache) just wasn’t an option for me. So I learned. And it didn’t take that long. When you immerse yourself in an environment where you have to succeed, you succeed much quicker.
The brain is a fascinating thing (much like automatic transmissions! I’m telling you, they are truly miraculous! If you’ve never had to drive a standard, you can’t possibly realize how masterful they actually are. To get a machine to do it so smoothly….).
There are 4 stages of learning.
1. Unconscious Unknown.
This is where you don’t even know what you don’t know. Years and years ago, when I learned the basics of driving as a teenager, I didn’t know all of the stuff that went into driving! I never paid attention to the different kinds of signs, and what everything meant, and how to actually get from one place to another without hitting anything, or killing anyone. My coaching is the same. My first year in business, I had absolutely NO CLUE! I thought I did, but there is so much to know it’s impossible for anyone to figure it all out on their own, and be successful in the first year. (Hiring my own coach was the best choice of my life…because she is in a very advanced and aware stage 3).
2. Conscious Unknown
This is when I knew I couldn’t drive a standard. I sucked at it. Same with business (or anything else, really). After being in business for a month or so, I was very much aware of how much I didn’t know. This is also great, because it opened up doors everywhere. There was opportunities in places that I never even thought to look! And because I had someone who knew where they were (and how to get there…and how to open the door and fit in with the crowd beyond it) my transition through these stages was much smoother than most!
3. Conscious Known
I could finally drive a standard. I just wasn’t very good at it. This is the fine line between knowing you don’t know something…and just starting to try it. At this point all you can do is practice, hope for the best and don’t give up! It takes effort, but you’re also starting to see results (I finally got out of the driveway without stalling, and no longer accidentally spun my tires when shifting to first gear).
In my business, things were starting to take off, but it still took a lot of conscious effort! I spent countless hours screwing up my autoresponders, getting the forms wrong, and straightening out my messes! There were so many times when I would get something “just right.” Then my intuition would start bothering me….”you better recheck that.” So I would, and of course, I’d missed something! (I got really good at listening to my intuition!). It took all of the screws up to grow my understanding. If you want to know the ins and outs of your business, you need to learn to do it yourself at first. You’ll grow as a person, and you’ll really appreciate how much work it is when you can hand it off to someone else!
Ideally you will get to an advanced stage of conscious knowing, at least for the majority of your life. I’m not saying that you need to think through every thing you do, but being present as you do it will create appreciation and gratefulness for the small things in life.
4. Unconscious Known
This is a habit. And this isn’t necessarily the place you want to be in life. I’ll explain in a second, first the analogy.
Now I am at the unconscious know state in driving my car. I shift easily, without jerking or spinning my tires, or even noticing. It feel completely natural. In fact, I can’t remember what the big deal was about learning in the first place. I have this assumption than anyone can do it, and that it is really simple. Not a problem!
There are some things in my business that are at this point…my autoresponder is one of them (at least until I switched software, which I did about 2 months ago and the process started all over again!). Now, you might be thinking that this is the ideal place to be. But it isn’t. Do you really want to go through life, unconscious? Uh uh, you sure don’t.
This is what they’re talking about avoiding when they say, “live in the moment.” Again, it’s not that you need to put a lot of effort into thinking about the process for everything you do. But at least do it, aware that you’re doing it! Sometimes I have a bad habit of driving somewhere, caught up in my thoughts, and I arrive at my destination not really knowing how I got there. That is the kind of unconscious known I want to avoid.
What stage are you in right now? Where do you want to be?
If you are in stage 1 or 2 and want life to get a little easier, the fastest way to get there is to find someone who has gone through and get them to “show you the way!”
Want to use this in your ezine or blog? That’s fine as long as you don’t alter it in any way and add the following bio:
Kimberly Englot is the Authentic-Life Coach, & CEO of Authentic Self Personal Development. Her VIP Coaching and group programs will teach you to discover your authentic self and be free to change careers, find relationships, lose weight and pursue greatness! Clear away 6 years of “baggage” in 6 weeks with The Master LIFE Cleanse.
Stop Picking At It Already!
I was thinking today about when I was a kid. I’d fall down and get a gash on my knee, or go flying into the bushes while riding my bike and come out scratched up. Because the body is a miraculous thing, within a day I was well on my way to being healed.
Now if you have a mom anything like my mom, you remember how mom’s know everything. And some of the wise advice my mom shared with me was, “stop picking at it!”
She was right, of course. The more you pick at something, the worse it gets. Eventually it scars and you’re disfigured somewhat, even if it’s in a place where only you can see it.
The exact same is true with life. There is a more eloquent way of putting it, but “Stop picking at it” works really well too.
When there is something bothering you in life, it is tempting to try and force it to go away. So you “pick.” And what happens…it comes back, probably uglier. So you try to ignore it for a while, but eventually you get the urge to “pick at it” again. Finally you can’t help yourself, so you do. And after years of doing this, it scars you. You’re doing it to yourself and it’s unnecessary.
You can avoid the scarring process all together if you remember one thing: “You can only be exactly as you are in the moment.” This is the eloquent way of saying “don’t pick it.” You may not like it, but you can only be what you are, at any given time. Sometimes that involves feeling pain or being hurt. Sometimes it means being happy. Either way there is no use fighting it, because that moment cannot possibly be any other way.
You can argue with me. You can come up with all sorts of “alternate universe” or “what if” hypotheses, but guess what…it still is what it is. And that means the moment is perfect. No point in fighting it, or picking any longer. AND because everything is perfect, you will heal yourself, if you stop aggravating it and making it worse. (Just like your body heals scratches without you “willing it” to.)
Time to leave your wounds alone. Stop telling the story over and over again. Love the scars you have because they demonstrates how you’ve grown, but you don’t need to pick them anymore.
Want to use this in your ezine or blog? That’s fine as long as you don’t alter it in any way and add the following bio:
Kimberly Englot is the Authentic-Life Coach, & CEO of Authentic Self Personal Development. Her VIP Coaching and group programs will teach you to discover your authentic self and be free to change careers, find relationships, lose weight and pursue greatness! Clear away 6 years of “baggage” in 6 weeks with The Master LIFE Cleanse.
What I learned from Maxx
Maxx Christmas 2006. Doesn't that look cozy?
This is an article I wrote for my newsletter this summer, just after getting back from a week in the woods with my family.
Nothing like a bit of time away from everything to add clarity and perspective to life. While I was away I had a lot of time to catch up on my reading and actually breathe! I was lying in the hammock thinking about life when my cat, Maxx, when breezing by me on the hunt for a particularly irritating squirrel. I got this light of inspiration at that moment:
Why read hundred of books and spend thousands of dollars “pursuing” happiness and success when you can learn it all from your pet?
Maxx is a perfect sample of what it means to be happy and have a great life and I want to share some of my insights with you for how I learned happiness and success from my cat.
1. Maxx is incredibly persistent. Have you ever tried to pry a cat away from a tree that a squirrel is hiding in? I have, and let me tell you that cat has a one track mind and isn’t letting you derail its mission!
2. Maxx take life as it comes. Yes, she might be unhappy when I stick her in the car kennel to go to the vet (or on a fairly long road trip), but after a loud meow and some crying she cut her losses and re-prioritizes (comfort above all), and goes to sleep. This leads me to the next point…
3. Maxx has her priorities straight! Food, sleep, chasing bugs, sleep, cuddles. That is what her day usually looks like, and she “tolerates” the odd disruption, but always does her best to refocus on one of her priorities afterward.
Kim and Maxx (both as "babies!")...seems like yesterday. This was 2004?
4. Maxx can be happy without effort. Even when a cuddle is “forced” on her, she can express her disatisfaction with you by flicking her tail, but also enjoy the moment by purring. (She would never want YOU to know that she is actually enjoying it, but I happen to be a cat mind-reader and I can tell. Ok, I lied about the mind-reading bit…)
5. Maxx has purr-fected “living in the moment”. Yes, all of the above points have been leading to this last one. Maxx lives moment-to-moment. She has no sense of time, she lives on a schedule of her instincts and what makes her happy. You would never see Maxx intentionally hurting herself or calling herself bad names. You never see her struggling with self-esteem issues. She realizes her life is great and she is going to enjoy it!
Bad jokes and puns aside, we can learn a lot from those around us…even when “those” include 4 legged furry creatures.
A Lesson from Lord of The Rings
I was watching Lord of The Rings:The Fellowship of The Ring (the first one) last weekend with my husband. This line from the movie really struck me:
Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world Frodo, besides the will of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring. In which case, you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.
It is from the beginning of the adventure, when the fellowship is not that far into their quest. I think it is exactly at the point where they are trying to get into the mines of Morian. Anyway my geekiness is showing 
…The point of this blog is that we don’t always know what is meant for us. What appears to be hardship, is actually destiny and there is no way for you to predict how things will turn out. Everything is exactly as it is meant to be…because that is how it is. Do you best to see light, focus on what you might learn, rather than how you migh suffer.
