Maria, Arnold, Your Three Brains and Time for ChangeUp
Staying faithful a task for some: MyFoxTAMPABAY.com
Maria, Arnold, Your Three Brains and Time for ChangeUp
My friends at Fox and I chatted a bit about Maria and Arnold a while back…but we really got into some deeper issues and dynamics…unfortunately we ran out of time.
Affairs, infidelity and betrayal are always big tough issues to work through.
Getting beyond betrayal, healing infidelity and moving past the hurt, pain and trauma of an affair is very challenging and can be overwhelming.
In other words, making a change of that magnitude is very difficult AND very uncommon.
The last question raised was on the show was: “Getting back to the whole trust thing; would somebody in that situation, let’s say Maria, ever trust anybody to that same level?”
My response was that Maria could actually trust more.
What?!! How could that possibly be true?
For a moment, forget about this being specifically about Maria.
After all, she does deserve some privacy, right?
AND this is a much bigger issue with HUGE underlying dynamics.
As odd as it sounds, you would think somebody that’s been wounded at this level would never allow herself to be hurt again.
Which would be a great choice…but HOW she does it is really the key.
The big question is more about working through the “woundedness.”
Quick fix?
No…not at all. In fact, it will most likely take a lot of time, effort and energy. Most likely some intense therapy, a tremendous amount of honest self-reflection and some major reworking of the inner values and outer boundaries.
Change at this level requires a mammoth commitment.
And most people, unfortunately, will NOT put the necessary time and energy into the healing and growth process. Actually most people probably don’t even know that they can heal and grow past the pain.
Instead, they walk around hurt, wounded and unhealed and, as a result, make even poorer decisions in their future.
Do you think you can really make a good decision if your mind is clouded and influenced by the hurt, anger and resentment of past wounds?
The real question for anyone in this situation is: Do you WANT to heal, grow and expand?
Most everyone responds with a resounding “Yes!”
But why, then, do most people not follow through?
The same reason people overeat when they know it’s unhealthy, overspend when they know they don’t have the money and get into relationships they know are not good for them.
Why do people do all this!!?
Brain confusion…yes, their brain gets confused with too many different messages and usually does not pick the most logical (and usually healthiest) path.
Why does the brain get confused? Because you actually have three brains all trying to deliver varying messages to you.
Which message do most people listen to?
Usually the one with the biggest emotional charge.
Are emotions rational and logical (or healthy)?
NO!…Not usually.
The three brains:
- The Inner Brain: The most primitive and activates your fight or flight mechanism. Also, the basic survival drives for food, water and procreation. Basic emotions of fight or flight, freeze or hide and live or die.
- The Middle Brain: More advanced but still without reason… the basic “love and loyalty” drives originate here.
- The Outer Brain: The most advanced (only humans and apes have this) and where logic, conscious thinking and reasoning come from. Also, this where our “ethical thinking” comes from, meaning unique values, rules and guidelines for living.
SO…for example: The Inner Brain is obsessed with pure lust. The Middle Brain is driven by love and devotion. The Outer Brain is infatuated with an amazing romantic experience.
A pretty woman or handsome guy comes along and the Inner Brain screams out for sex, the Middle Brain falls in love and the Outer Brain tries to figure out how to make it all happen ethically.
See the conflicts? And ALL the different and even contradictory messages?
And too often the Inner Brain wins….the primal survival instincts.
Another example: You are offered the Super Duper Size order of French fries. Your Outer Brain says, “No, those are bad for you.” Your Middle Brain doesn’t really care one way or the other although it does recall a time when you shared French fries with a past romantic interest. And your Inner Brain screams, “Get all you can as this could be the last meal you ever have and more fat with help protect you!”
The Inner Brain often wins again.
See and hear the problem?
Add to that the many complexities of memory, conditioning and all the other known and unknown variables of the brain and you can quickly surmise why people have some of the issues that they do.
AND why people don’t change for their own good.
When you bring this all back to Maria (and all those others who have had similar experiences) you can see that she could work through all this and actually be even more conscious, more aware and more loving….AND even more trusting.
Will she? Who knows? That’s totally up to her.
And bringing it back to you: Is there anything you’re still reacting to from your past that is getting in the way of your future?
Perhaps now is the time to clear it.
Is it easy? No. It probably will require a great deal of effort, energy and commitment…and a lot of going out of your comfort zone…a whole lot!
Are you worth it?
Yes….
Time to ChangeUp…it works when you work it.
Today: Marry YourSelf First!
Fight, Flight, Fear or Free
Dr. Tom Hanson recently released his latest book, Play Big.
If you don’t know Dr. Tom, he’s a Tampa-based sports psychologist whose niche is helping baseball players (professional and amateur) perform optimally.
More than anything else, he helps these athletes get the inside game won.
Play Big is a fictional story about a player struggling with hitting the ball (only known as “number 21”) who serendipitously meets this extremely shrewd sage who has no name but is very wise about knowing how to win the inside game of baseball (and life).
Think The Peaceful Warrior meets Field of Dreams.
On page 179 the sage introduces the “inner caveman” as the survival and safety mechanism everyone has in their brain.
When the inner caveman perceives a threat, whether it’s real or imagined, it sets off an alarm to be on guard.
When most people feel this alarm they perceive it as anxiety and usually tense up and back away from whatever the perceived threat is.
The problem with that response pattern, whether you’re playing baseball or just interacting with life, is when you tense up and/or back away, you never perform optimally.
This is an overreaction of the “fight or flight” mechanism of the brain, known more formally as the sympathetic nervous system.
When a baseball player steps up to the plate and is in a state of fight or flight, his muscles tighten up too much and he is not able to swing the bat with his natural and instinctual capabilities.
These natural capabilities are actually wired for high performance.
Yes the athlete (and everyone, including you) is wired to succeed and excel at a very high level.
More simply put, you are wired for greatness.
The ONLY thing that gets in the way is the overreactive fight or flight mechanism.
Yes…the mind simply malfunctions at times without you truly knowing why or how.
But what activates the fight or flight mechanism?
Fear.
Fear of failure and rejection to be exact.
Back to the caveman: He needed his tribe to survive, so any threat to being ostracized from the tribe would literally be life-threatening.
In spite of all the information and technological advances and discoveries made over time, the human brain is exactly the same as caveman days.
No…there is no human brain 2.0!
This means if your inner caveman perceives that a failure may lead to rejection, which may in turn lead to being ostracized, then the sympathetic nervous system is activated and you will not perform optimally if you happen to be playing baseball.
This same dynamic is also occurs in all areas of your life and as long as it reacts this way you will not perform optimally.
Not even close, in fact.
This is why the fear of failure and the fear of rejection are so prevalent (and so destructive).
Dr. Tom really didn’t write this book for the athlete; he wrote it for everyone, as everyone can benefit from this technology.
The next question: How does someone change this response pattern?
Simple…they think differently and create a different emotional response.
Here’s an example: Think about something you do every day without much attention. Something that is almost automatic. Maybe driving, or brushing your teeth or putting on your clothes.
Most people do these tasks, and most daily tasks, automatically and very confidently.
So confidently, in fact, that they don’t even think about it much or at all.
When you engage in one of these activities, you’re being unconsciously confident and competent.
Now imagine you’re able to recreate that same automatically confident energy in other tasks that maybe have been anxiety producing in the past.
What happens when you do?
You feel calmer, more at ease and more peaceful.
And when you feel calmer, more at ease and more peaceful, you automatically feel more confident and perform optimally.
You feel free. Welcome to your greatness!
So, when you visualize yourself doing anything, always see yourself doing it with great ease, calm and peace…breathe deeply and smile, as your body will automatically calm itself with breathing and smiling.
(Yes, stress, deep breathing and smiling cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Stress is overruled by a big smile and a deep breath, and then cast out.)
And remember to stop by and say thanks to Dr. Tom….sneaky guy he is trying to convince the world that this book is about baseball.
Play Big is about life and how to win in a way that will bring you the most happiness and freedom.
That is what you want, right?
And Marry YourSelf First!
Ken Donaldson Says, Manage You First: New Beginnings…Beginning With You
How do you manage yourself, your work-life balance, and at the same time, maintain physical and mental health, harmony in your family and an overall sense of happiness?
Life is challenging today and when additional pressures are added, without the proper resources, something can break down, resulting in decreased performance, poor health, unnecessary personal power struggles and an overall bad attitude.
The good news is that you can do something about all this.
It all starts with YOU managing YOU First!
Are YOU up for it?
Let’s look at some of the current research related to work-life balance (or the lack thereof) and career satisfaction:
1. 26% of U.S. adults report being on the verge of a serious nervous breakdown.
2. 40% of U.S. workers describe their office environment as “most like a real-life survivor program.”
3. 62% of U.S. workers routinely end the day with work-related neck pain, 44% report strained eyes, 38% complain of hand pain, and 34% report difficulty in sleeping due to work-related stress.
4. 26% of U.S. workers take no vacations at all.
5. 88% of U.S. employees say they have a hard time juggling work and life.
6. 70% of U.S. working fathers and working mothers report they don’t have enough time for their children.
7. 64% of Americans report that time pressures on working families are getting worse, not better.
8. Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers. The Japanese document approximately 10,000 cases per year of “death by overwork,” or karoosh. Considering the above stats, what must the undocumented U.S. numbers be??
9. People in the U.S. work approximately 8 weeks longer per year than in 1969—in the space of a single generation—but for roughly the same income (after adjusting for inflation)
10. AND the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks just about everything but worker satisfaction.
So…what does one make from all this?
Work-life balance? Where is it? It doesn’t seem to exist.
Let’s add in a few more “realities of life.”
- 50% of first marriages end in divorce. This goes up to 60% for second timers and 70% for third times.
Obviously changing partners is not the solution, but more importantly, take a look at what must be relational ignorance.
Relationship intelligence? Lacking, to say the least.
How, then, do we cope with all these work and relational challenges?
Not so well.
Here’s more:
- One in every five Americans suffers from a diagnosable mental condition and the majority of those people never receive treatment.
- Alcoholism and alcohol abuse are the third leading cause of the preventable deaths in the United States.
- From 1960 to 2006, the prevalence of obesity increased from 13.4% to 35.1% in U.S. adults age 20 to 74.
- 15 million people display some sign of gambling addiction.
- A VERY conservative estimate suggests that 3% – 5% of the U.S. population struggles with “sexual compulsion disorders.”
SO…what to do with all this?
Manage YOU First!
Yes, you must know how to manage you first.
What does this mean?
How about a new 13 Step Program?
1.) Manage Your Personal Vision
2.) Manage Your Life Purpose
3.) Manage Your Unique Values
4.) Manage Your Fear
5.) Manage Your Past: Feel It, Heal It and Release It
6.) Manage Your Emotions
7.) Manage Your Thoughts
8.) Manage Your Belief System
9.) Manage Your Actions (and Reactions)
10.) Manage Your Relationships
11.) Manage Your Career
12.) Manage Your Free Time
13.) Manage Your Health
There…start with that.
Effectively manage these 13 steps and you’ll avoid being one of the above statistics.
Manage You First and you’ll win every time…you’ll win with your health, your career, your relationships, your happiness and, of course, your life.
And Marry YourSelf First!
Ken Donaldson and The Quarter Hoarder
“I think we have to be not so afraid of scarcity. We have to be willing to give away all things.” ~Sharon Stone
Here’s a story about the dangers of hoarding, but probably not what you’re thinking.
Let me explain…
First let’s get a definition clarified.
Hoard: To collect and store, often secretly and usually unnecessarily, large amounts of things, such as food or money, for future use.
So there I was in downtown St. Petersburg on a beautiful Sunday morning having a nice time with a friend of mine.
However, there are these things called parking meters that require a certain amount of feeding every so often and the one where I parked was getting hungry and was going to run out of time soon.
(Silly me; I didn’t pre-plan to bring quarters…I wonder how many other people have had the same experience on a relaxing Sunday – “I don’t have to think about anything”- morning??)
So I simply asked the waitress if she might have some change I could exchange with her for some dollar bills.
“No…I don’t.”
Okay, so then I got very tactical and asked, “What about the cash register, could you maybe get some change from it?”
“No…we don’t have any extra change.”
Okay, so you’re probably getting a sense of what I might be thinking and feeling at this point, right?!!
How could a business open on a Sunday morning NOT have change?
There could only be one answer: They were hoarding!
(Well, at least that’s the one answer I came up with.)
So during the course of our stay there, our waitress came to our table several times asking if there was anything else we needed.
Half kiddingly (and half very seriously), I responded the same every time, “Do you have any change yet?”
I will say that she was consistent (I think maybe that means she had good boundaries, right?) with her responses, “No,” every time.
So finally I decided that I would need to go to some other places to find some change, but I figured I might have a chance to “pull a quick one” when I paid for the bill.
I walked up to the bar and placed a $20 bill on top of the bill and asked (again) really nicely, “Might you have some extra change?”
Our waitress asked the apparent manager (and now the seeming quarter hoarder) if she could use some of their quarters for my change.
The manager, somewhat begrudgingly, said yes.
So I guess you could say my persistence paid off.
But I believe there are a couple bigger lessons here.
Lesson #1 is about planning.
Any business in downtown St. Petersburg open on Sunday morning should know that there are parking meters and there are bound to be people like myself that are in a very relaxed Sunday mode and may not even think to bring change.
I believe that would be categorized as “good proactive customer service.”
Lesson #2 is something that can be paralyzing if not consciously seen and addressed.
It’s what I call “The Scarcity Myth.”
It’s the fear of not having enough.
In this rather benign situation, it was the fear of not having enough change to make it through the day.
(Of course, this is only an assumption on my behalf.)
But let’s look at this a bit deeper:
- Many people fear that there’s not enough love, so they often settle for a relationship beneath their standards and end up creating unnecessary pain and heartache, which could have been easily avoided if they had not let the scarcity fear rule.
- Many people fear that there is not enough time, so they spend their time in a chaotic fervor trying to “do” as much as they can oftentimes much to expense of their health and relationships, both of which could easily be enhanced if they simply prioritized their life and lived according to their priorities (and values).
- Many people fear that there are not enough opportunities in life so they settle for a job or a career path that slowly drains their passion, energy and optimism for life, and slowly and unconsciously turns them into a rigid, pessimistic and sarcastic cynic.
Yep, the scarcity fear does all that and probably much, much more.
So what’s the moral of the story?
Don’t be a quarter hoarder…be a quarter supporter!
Meaning that it’s always good to plan ahead (lesson #1) and when the opportunity comes, give as freely as you can (lesson #2).
When you hold on to something out of fear, you block energy from flowing to you and you can easily create a self-fulfilling prophecy in which what you fear can become that much truer.
However, when you put trust in the Universe (by the way, the Universe is endless as far as we can tell at this point…slightly “abundant” I would have to conclude) you allow the Universal energy to flow to you.
I know…it takes faith and trust, both of which may be big steps at times.
But what’s the option? Being a quarter hoarder?
Naw!!…be a quarter supporter…start today!
“There is no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love; there’s only scarcity of resolve to make it happen.” ~Wayne Dyer
P.S. After proof-reading this, my assistant just reminded me of lesson #3…Always carry extra quarters in your car.
Yeah, I guess I could have planned ahead too, right?!!
Today is a great day to Marry YourSelf First!
Ken Donaldson on Putting Out Fires, Crisis and Integrity
I had a fire to put out last Thursday.
A REAL fire.
Evidently some trees rubbed my power line to the point of creating an open line and all the lights started to flash in my house, the backup battery systems started to beep and finally there was a puff of smoke followed by sparks and then an outlet burst into flames.
Wow…all before 9 a.m.!
I was fortunate to be here at home and not at my office, otherwise, I may not be writing this today as I’m sure there would have been a significant fire.
Yes, I am VERY grateful.
But I noticed something as all this was going on.
I noticed how calm I was.
I’m not meaning to brag, but I have to say that I impressed myself.
I guess all those years of deep breathing, meditation, positive thinking, mental reframing and self-hypnosis paid off.
I think I’ll keep practicing what I’ve been doing…it seems to be working.
All of which brings me to a question: How are you at “putting out fires?”
This term of speech, “putting out fires”, typically means responding to crisis, conflict, unexpected surprises or, as some call it, the “do-do” of life.
How are you at all of that?
I’ve noticed that there are four basic types of responses:
Freeze: These are the people who are the proverbial “deer in the headlights” reactors. They get immediately overwhelmed and their emotions override their intellect and wisdom. They don’t take action. They don’t do anything. They freeze.
Fight: Some people are so reactive that when anything is the least bit upsetting their emotions go into full tilt overdrive. They get angry, frustrated, irritated or just go into a rage. Their action is irrational and often inappropriate. They instantly burn the bridges between themselves and others. These are the “reactors” of life.
Flight: They run. They run more. They keep running. Sometimes they forget what they’re running from. Their emotional response is such that they instantly see things as “life threatening” and obviously overreact by running. These are the conflict avoiders of life.
Fix: These people stop, pause, think, analyze and then go into action. Although their emotions are present, they are able to keep their emotions in check. Their intellect and wisdom override their emotions. They go into rational action and stay focused until they have completed the task to the best of their ability.
Which are you?
I can honestly tell you that I have been all four at one time or another in my life.
Today, fortunately, I do my best to stay in the latter category. I stop, pause, think and respond.
It’s very easy to allow one’s emotions to make their decisions. Emotions are very powerful and very helpful in many ways, but NOT to make decisions with…especially the super important decisions.
In my case, I had an impulse to throw water on the fire, since I know that water puts out fire. However, if you throw water on electrical fires, you can create many more problems.
I wonder how many people in life react and “throw water on an electrical fire.”
I have learned over the years that when I practice meditation and Qigong breathing, I seem to have better control over emotional situations. I can’t tell that I really know how that all works, all I know is that it works for me.
I also have a very empowering mantra:
Every moment of every day, I get better and better in every way.
Every moment of every day, I get richer and richer in every way.
Every moment of every day, I get stronger and stronger in every way.
Every moment of every day, I get wiser and wiser in every way.
I think there’s a part of me that actually has begun to fully believe that message.
It’s only taken 53 years….and I know it’ll get better and better every day…in every way!
As somewhat of an aside, I was also quite surprised with the power company’s seemingly lack of concern that my house could have burned down. I found it alarming that the customer service representative wanted to tell me all about their policies and procedures. She also said she would get back to me regarding having the trees trimmed.
It’s been three days now. I have a feeling I won’t hear back.
No worries, I’ll write a nice letter to the CEO. Don’t really like to do that, but have found that that is sometimes the only path to any resolution.
I bring this issue up for only one reason: Integrity.
How is your integrity? Are you living at your highest standards? Are you “your living word”? Are you “being whole” with yourself?
So, a few things for you to ponder: Fires, emotions, meditation, integrity.
I think it’s called “Life”, or as one of my older and wiser clients says, “It all comes with the birth certificate.”
Feel free to leave a comment below.
And today is a good day to Marry YourSelf First!
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