Old Crow

Well I finally did it. I got into Crow asana.

Unfortunately, seconds later I got into a Crow face-plant. Oh well, it was glorious while it lasted.

 

 

 

Not Wearing Pants

That’s one of the reasons I love yoga.

It’s the only place Marion will let me go where I can be in a room full of women (and too few men) and not be wearing pants.

Wonderful.

Are You A Coach?

I got asked that question at last night’s meeting of First Oakville Toastmasters.

I was the Toastmaster that night. The Toastmaster’s role is pretty simple and it’s to warmly introduce the speakers and hand out the awards. You’d think this would be pretty simple for someone with 17 years of experience but I had three speakers each of whom had tricky names. This week I practiced and practiced the names and when I got up to introduce them I had a brain freeze and mispronounced each one with abandon. Our grammarian noted it was the first time he could remember a Toastmaster introducing the same speaker with a couple of different pronunciations of their name. After awhile you’ve just to laugh and move on.

By the end of the night I felt pretty good about my overall performance and vowed to do better with names next time (less intense practice and more conscious attempts to use difficult names over a longer period of time. What happened is I over practiced and under trained.).

But best of all the general evaluator and the vp of membership pointed out my warm style of making our relatively new speakers feel great about their efforts. I was really pleased to get this positive feedback.

So (and finally I get to my point) when I was talking with one of our Toastmasters she asked if I had been a coach?

For over 20 years now I’ve been involved in coaching men in men’s groups. I’ve done a lot of facilitating and coaching in mixed and couple’s groups plus tons of one-on-one coaching. As much as I am not especially wowed by accreditation (I wouldn’t let some accredited “professionals” mow my lawn while, in the past, I’ve have put my life in the hands of some folks with more street smarts than I’ll ever have.) I do hold a certificate in solution-focused counselling from University of Toronto.

So what have I learned?

Number one is most folks say they want to change and would love to be coached but when it comes right down to it, they really don’t want to change and thanks for the coaching but I’m okay.

Fair enough. So if you want to be a coach find people who really really want to change.

Number two is there are two ways (or more) of coaching.

One style comes from the world of sports. As an athlete you join a team or hire a personal coach who sets performance goals for you which you practice until they are achieved.

The other kind of coaching comes more from counselling (or the world of therapy) where you as coach guide (or even direct) the client (or patient) into realizing goals to be set and encouraging them to find ways to achieve those goals.

Then there’s solution-focused coaching which I practice (although I mix a few other disciplines in depending no the client).

Solution-focused coaching comes from a very different place. To give you a suggestion of how this works here’s a list of the basic tenets of solution-focused coaching (I’ve taken this list from Brief Coaching for Lasting Solutions by the founder of solution-focused coaching the late Insoo Kim Berg and the amazing Peter Szabo who I have trained with):

• If it works, don’t fix it
• If something worked once, do more of it
• If it doesn’t work, do something different
• Change is constant and inevitable
• The future is negotiated and created
• Small solutions can lead to large changes
• Problems and solutions may not always be directly related
• No problem happens all the time
• Ask questions rather than telling clients what to do
• Give compliments
• Gently nudge to do more of what is working

The biggest hurtle to understanding solution-focused coaching is to agree that (for the most part) understand the problems of the past have no effect on finding a solution in the present.

In other words, in solution-focused counselling we aren’t involved in doing the client’s therapy or work. We are committed to supporting the client to discover what is working in their life and what will work in their present life to accomplish the future goals they’ve set for themselves.

And, like all coaching or therapy, if there isn’t a clearly stated goal then nothing really gets done and both of you are wasting your time and their money.

So to go back to my Toastmaster performance. In the evaluation and comments about my performance my fellow Toastmasters were warmly enthusiastic about my positive behaviours and offered that in the future there was the likelihood I’d do better with names and they looked forward to the next time I’d have a chance to practice.

That’s solution-focused coaching at its best as done regularly in our meetings although most of the Toastmasters wouldn’t realize that they are indeed amazing coaches (and mentors).

So if you want to be a coach, start by joining a Toastmaster club. You’ll be amazed at the results.

Raising Junior

A couple of us were talking about raising kids after our regular Thursday morning yoga class.

Seems some pre-teens and teens were acting up at home. I was listening to what these women were putting up with and I had the thought that if this was my kid talking back at me in the manner being described that kid’s world would instantly stop until we figured out where our relationship had gone off the rails. Remember if you’re not happy nor is your acting out child.

Of course in most families going off the rails happened sometime in the first three years of the child’s life but that’s another story.

In the men’s groups I was associated with we dealt with the aftermath of broken relationships that started back in grade school and trust me it wasn’t pretty.

Look the old saying that what you do in one thing is the same is what you do in all things applies to our children as well.

If the child is being disrespectful and difficult at home, you can rest assured they are behaving the same way at school and with their friends. What this means, of course, is the consequence of their actions will be made very clear to them very quickly and they aren’t going to like it.

So what do you do if you’re well past the three year mark?

I highly recommend reading Dr. Phil. Yes the TV show is often way over the top but Dr. Phil is one of the better cognitive therapists I’ve ever seen. His stuff on the family and on parenting is well worth reading. I can remember one show where Dr. Phil recommended removing everything in a child’s room until they started to behave. Talk about the kid’s world stopping. Wow.

Parents who don’t step up with their kids are dooming themselves to another decade or so of strife and a life of unhappiness for their child.

Being Responsible

Had a great example of how not to be responsible for yourself yesterday after my yoga class.

At my favourite yoga studio we had just finished a fabulous class with my number one BYTE (best yoga teacher ever) and about a dozen students. We flowed out into the reception area all giggly and feeling as young as spring. Everybody was smiling and saying goodbye and see you later/ But as we left another teacher, who I’ve never had, came from the upstairs room complaining about the noise we were making…

Those of you who know and love me can guess where this conversation went…in a hurry.

I was sitting in the waiting area as I was going to take a second class with BYTE and I turned to the teacher and said something to the effect of being quiet is going to be a problem for me.I’m noisy and not very considerate

The look on this woman’s face could have stopped a clock. She pretty much just got up and left the building. My story is she wasn’t happy.

So you’d think we could have been more considerate, wouldn’t you?

You’d think as yoga students we’d be more open to being “nice”.

Well, you’d be wrong

Here’s how it goes for me.

In the yoga studio itself we are very respectful of each other and there’s an overall effort to maintain the tranquility of the room. New people get the message pretty quickly and overall it works out.

But this particular yoga studio has two rooms. There’s a closed big room (usually used for hot yoga) and a smaller open more intimate upstairs room. Students (much like yoga teachers) come and go. It would be pretty impractical to attempt  to enforce a silence in the building and not only that it would create an oppressive sad experience for me and I guess many other students. No. For me, yoga is about joy and letting go (which I’m working on).

When we practice in the upstairs room, we’re almost always subject to noise from outside and conversations from downstairs. But somehow we manage to practice and meditate. I can’t think that some of the big yoga joints in India would be awfully noisy as well. I mean what would you do? Go out and shoot the cow? Shoo away the children? Stop the traffic and the honking? I doubt it.

I do have some compassion for the yoga teacher. She came downstairs with the story that we’d ruined the shavasana for her students. I doubt it as I find it pretty hard to ruin anything for anybody else without their express permission (whether consciously or not).

But there was the story about a ruined shavasana and how we’d done it.

Never-ending Therapy

An article in The New York Times Sunday edition (It’s one of a dozen newspapers I read today after returning from vacation down south.) called “In Therapy Forever? Enough Already”  got me thinking about a couple of my friends who are “in” therapy.

Both of them have been seeing multiple therapists for years at a significant cost in time and money.

And are they any healthier?

Well let’s say they aren’t any sicker and that’s not necessarily a compliment.

Why?

I think long term therapy often provides an income for the therapist and a never-ending outcome for the patient.

What happens IMHO is some people seek out counsellors who support them in their neurosis rather than confront them with their issues.

Of course, my friends are likely to fire anyone that confronts their version of reality (I’m too sick…too poor…too unhappy…too busy…too broken…fill in the blank) and so the therapy continues but so does the problem.

Want to get better fast? (And I’m not talking about mental illness which requires major medical help.)

Read Tolle’s The Power of Now and Ruiz’s The Four Agreements. (There are other books but these two are a good start.) Go to yoga classes. Learn to take care of yourself.

Oh yes…and fire your therapist.

The Power To Create Reality

In another article (See below on the sex scandal ripping through a well-known yoga community for the first lift from the Globe and Mail) in this morning’s newspaper, the T.G.I.M. business column is about Steve Jobs ability to create an alternative reality using the force of his mind. Really!

In the article, the writer talks about how Job would set impossible deadlines and made outrageous demands upon vendors and workers which they would meet.

This is a lesson from a master. The universe, life itself, is malleable  to our own thoughts.

Truly, we are what we think and we create our own universe based on our thoughts.

Taking Responsibility

One of the keys to living a happy life IMHO is the ability to take personal responsibility for yourself.

A sad example of this lack in some of us to be responsible for our own behaviour came up in today’s Globe and Mail in an article about Anusara-style yoga founder John Friend’s controversial admissions of having sexual relations with some of his consenting adult female students of whom some were in marital relationship.

Oh BTW I’m not saying John Friend’s behaviour was at issue. Could not care less. Sex among consenting adults is none of my business thank you very much.

But the twaddle that followed in the newspaper article is appalling.

Sure I can appreciate that after paying big bucks for a 200-hour course leading to an Anusara-teaching certificate (whatever benefit that might have is dubious at best) and then finding the founder is also a philander is upsetting but it’s hardly new. And yes it does tarnish the reputation of the Anusara yoga brand and the teachers might want to consider a class-action suit to recover the cost of their certification but it’s no surprise. Gurus sleeping with their students is not new.

Men and women  (and for that matter men and men and women with women) have been having “inappropriate” sexual relations since the beginning of time. The “inappropriateness” seems much more based on someone else’s opinion that these extra-conjugal couplings are wrong as to the behaviour itself which was between consenting adults.

There might be an argument that the yoga teacher was in a position of power over the student but that is taking the concept of personal responsibility right out of the hands of the adult women students (and men for that matter as there are a couple of yoga teachers I’d bed instantly if (a) I wasn’t in a committed relationship; and (b) if anyone one of them was so desperate as to agree). Next thing you know, someone will be saying we should checkout if our auto mechanic is living a moral life.

You can’t have it both ways. Either you’re a consenting adult or you’re a vulnerable person in need of adult (government) protection.

Perhaps the saddest comment was made by one Anusara teacher who has found the controversy “strangely liberating” as now she feels free to attend different yoga classes to pick up new techniques and methods. She says she is experiencing a sense of euphoria in the fact that “wow, I can do anything now.”

Welcome to life as an adult and actually taking responsibility for yourself. You might find the rewards of thinking for yourself outweigh the cost of studying under (in more than one way) the guru.

The online comments that followed the article are scathing.

My House Was On Fire

I had a dream that my house was on fire, people laughed while it burned – lyrics by Blue Rodeo

That is the issue this morning. It’s almost 10 am and I’ve still got three newspapers to read. I’m trying to get through a pile of emails. I’ve got coffee that needs drinking. I got the garbage out to the curb and spent half an hour on the phone with my partner in our up-and-coming wedding photography business (I’m his second shooter as I’m retired now.) I’ve committed to doing the grocery shopping and I’ve got to pickup some other stuff and drop more stuff off.

I’ve got a headache from doing a power yoga class last night which went well during the class but was exhausting.

And I’m thinking I’ve got to get busy. I’ve got stuff to do. You have no idea!!! Let’s get it on….

And then I got an email from The Centre of Gravity.

In it is a piece about leaving a burning building. I offer this to you and invite you to take five minutes and read it. Perhaps you brew a cup of green tea first and then read it. However you go about it, please read it.

My house was on fire, people laughed while it burned.

I’m Going To Sugar Anonymous

Sugar is so toxic that it should be controlled like alcohol!!!!!!!

Yup that’s the headline on the front page of today’s National Post.

Sugar is reported to be behind diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

According to SHAPE, the average American eats 22 teaspoons of “bad” sugar daily.

BTW all sugar is sugar but naturally occurring sugar, when consumed in moderation, is considered healthy because it’s bundled with fluids, fibre, minerals and antioxidants. SHAPE says about 17 grams of sugar can be found in every cup of cherries!

Think of what might be in your morning rice cake covered in peanut butter and topped with banana.

And you know who you are