Self-awareness — how well do you know yourself?

January 22, 2018 by Sara Jane Lowry

Brown box with lid open stuffed with black and white photographs of relatives and a baby. Self-awareness begins with knowing your lifelong patterns Self-awareness is critical to success. How well do you know yourself?

Stay with me here.

We are talking about something much greater and of higher consequence. I am asking about who you are at your core, what most matters to you, what makes you come alive, what feeds your soul and what drains your spirit, and how to know the difference so you choose well as you give your best energy, and commitment to something.

If you are lacking a lot of self-awareness, you may still live a life somewhat in alignment with who you are but only by accident or sheer stroke of luck. And you may be living a life that doesn’t fit. What if you could be certain that you live in alignment with who you are not by accident or luck, but rather on purpose, by intention, by design.

How? By getting improving your self-awareness and getting to know yourself really well. One way to do that is to learn your values, passions, and goals. Another is to ask the right questions. (More about that later.)

In my coaching practice, I’ve been working with people how to create better lives for themselves which in turn changes their work, their relationships, and their happiness. They have grown their “self-awareness” quotient and:

gotten clarity on their life’s purpose

determined where they want to go in their career or business

boosted their incomes

deepened their relationships

connected with their gifts

Self-awareness and Mindset

I am so passionate about how we can create the right life for ourselves by first knowing who we are, and then creating the right mindset. So, your mind believes anything you tell it. Is it true? Let’s see.

What is it that you tell yourself all day long? You might be exceptional but most of us walk around saying relatively negative criticisms to ourselves or about ourselves.

Let’s say someone asks you whether you can run a marathon or you can give up dessert for a week. Usually, we hedge unless we’ve already done it. Sometimes the response is immediately I can’t. I can’t learn that or do that. Or you hear yourself saying “I can’t take this anymore” but don’t take action. That phrase “I can’t” is part of our everyday dialogue and that is your message to your mind.

So, how well do you know yourself?

Your mind says “ I can’t do that well, so we’re not going to even bother because I know I can’t do that”. You’ve already woven a story that your mind believes. As you repeat this over time it becomes a fact to you. It becomes the truth whereas it’s really just something you’ve been telling yourself.

Some of you know that I used to be an opera singer in my early career life. At that time, I had a personal transformation in my singing journey that I still to this day cannot believe I am able to do because the story I had been telling myself was so powerful.

Singing the role of the Noemie, Stepsister of Cinderella in Massenet's Cendrillon, with my foot on the stool holding the glass sliipper — Singing Noemie in Massenet’s Cendrillon

I remember a voice teacher telling me that I would have to be able to sing notes higher than a high “C” (think Pavarotti’s high notes) if I wanted it to be a good one in performance. Of course, when my voice was younger, that wasn’t too much of a problem. But as my voice and body matured, my voice was no longer light but instead had a richer, darker middle and lower note capacity which added “weight” to the sound. And it’s hard to take that weight up high.

Now, of course, I know that my body can do this but the first time it happened I had to convince my mind that I was capable of doing this. In reality, my body was already there. My teacher said your body has no limitations on doing this at this point in your singing journey but my mind had been keeping me from doing so because I have been telling myself the same story of “I can’t.” I was trying to sing it but my mind didn’t think I could do it. My mind wasn’t ready to change the outcome.

Knowing yourself and what the mind believes

So what is it that you’re telling yourself all day long that you cannot do, that you don’t know how to do, or what to do, or whatever other negative phrases that you’re using? How well do you know yourself?

Remember: your mind listens and believes you and then uses that as a fact to run your life in a misguided effort to protect you.

You can send it a different message.

You can choose to believe in a different story: a story of being a confident person who CAN make changes and choose differently, and seeing that there is a deeper truth than you’re believing about yourself.

Change your mind on how you see yourself and see how that will integrate into so many better results in your life. Start to question those beliefs. Get to really know yourself.

The opportunity has never been greater to… Neon sign saying Do Something Great which is possible when you have self-awareness

Show up as the people we have grown into becoming

Sustain thriving relationships

Discover and follow our highest calling

Create prosperous careers aligned with our values

Experience radiant health and vitality

Live in ways that are spiritually connected

Ignite and empower others to step forward into their greatness

Be catalysts and change agents shaping the future of our world

Happiness is when we have clarity of purpose, our work and relationships are meaningful, we have health and vitality, we feel connected to the Universe – in other words, we are in alignment.

If you take this journey, you will realize that: you are a unique human of this world. Are you brilliant, wise, and generous? Perhaps you are perceptive and fascinating. Know this: you are gifted and talented beyond your knowing. You are beyond capable to do what you dream. It starts with getting to know yourself and changing your mind.

Negative self-talk is a habit you can break

November 2, 2017 by Sara Jane Lowry

Stop sign to end negative self-talk

Negative self-talk – stop the habit.

All of us are subject to negative self-talk in the form of an inner critic. And that inner critic can talk faster than we can externally: 1300 words to our 200 words. Some of our self-talk is about things outside us. For example, when we find our lost keys, we might say to ourselves, “There they are.” But another part of our inner dialogue is about ourselves. For example, when we can’t find the keys, we might say something like, “You idiot; you’re always losing things.”

Self-talk is a habitual way of responding to our experience and unfortunately, it often takes the form of an inner critic who is very negative and pessimistic. For example, if you feel like you’re not getting the contract, the promotion, or the new job, your inner voice might say something like, “You’ll never get anywhere. You don’t know what you’re doing. Every time you try something, you fail.” Or, you assume someone else’s behavior or actions are about you and have a negative meaning. For example, if someone you know doesn’t greet you at the store, your inner voice asks, “Why did I do? They are rude.” Or, “they don’t like me. I just can’t win.”

Negative thoughts make you feel anxious, sad or hopeless. These feelings, in turn, make it difficult to act constructively. And preoccupation with your negative emotions may even intensify them and trigger more negative thinking.

How our negative self-talk triggers our behavior

There are three ways our negative self-talk manifest in behavior:

Overgeneralization or Catastrophizing
Drawing a broad conclusion based on a single incident or insufficient evidence.
Jumping to Conclusions (Mind Reading)
Assuming we know what others are thinking and feeling.
Shoulds
Using inflexible rules about how we or others should act. We feel guilty when we violate these rules.

Confronting negative self-talk patterns

In order to confront our negative self-talk, we need to take some steps.

Creating Distance

We can start by creating a bit of distance from them in order to recognize when and where we are having them. This means some self-reflection is necessary, and it can be done through journaling about your day and noticing your most extreme moments that you notice. Pay special attention to when you are exhausted or feeling depressed about your day because the self-talk at those points is a clue to your habitual thoughts. In creating distance, you can ask yourself whether you’re seeing things in a balanced way of both positive and negative experiences in our lives.

Testing reality of the self-talk

The next step is to begin to test the reality of the thoughts. In order to test whether your automatic thoughts are valid, ask yourself what is the evidence for and against your thoughts. Try writing down the evidence, both pro and con, to help you gain some distance from your thoughts as you become curious about whether things are as bleak as you think. For example, if your thought is “Things are always a mess in my life” you might list on the pro side the times when things were going smoothly and successfully.

Seeing alternative options, or “coming back to reality”

If you worked through the first 2 steps, you will arrive at an alternative interpretation of your experience (if you refuted the thought) or a more balanced thought that summarizes the valid points for and against (if the evidence was mixed).

By being curious about our self-talk, rather than refuting or indulging it, we can learn to see our situation in an accurate, yet hopeful, manner, and move our habits of thought toward more realistic reality. From there we can begin to practice positive self-talk.

You have the power to change negative self-talk. Take a month-long journey to reprogramming your mind with tips delivered to you daily, and change your self-talk from negative to positive. Please sign up today and take back your mind.

Coaching can promote your career to the next level

May 8, 2017 by Sara Jane Lowry

Getting to the next level through coaching

Think coaching is only for senior leadership? You appear to have missed one of the biggest ways leaders improve their skills and performance. Working with a coach may help push you up the ranks too.

When you move up the ranks, you will be having a different level of conversation from what you’re having now. You will be expected to think and make decisions about subjects not in your own expertise or skill sets, and you will be expected to lead people whose job you couldn’t necessarily do yourself. You’re now in a team or group of leaders that help transform the company or nonprofit and are no longer just fullfilling your own function area. Sometimes you will need to deliver difficult messages, and navigating the politics at this level requires new skills.

Working with a coach focused on you

Working with a coach provides a safe and confidential place to share your challenges with someone who is qualified to help you. A good coach helps you to find your own path as well as decide on your management style, all in a Coaching focused on you supportive environment without judgement. Coaching is non-judgmental listening – helping people to think through the decisions they are in. People often have artificial obstacles in their mind. Coaching can help people reframe issues, so they can resolve those problems.

Recently I worked with an executive director who came in as president of a large nonprofit. She was struggling to work out how to work with flat organizational chart, especially given that funding was in peril for an important division. So, instead of working with the chart as it currently stood, we instead wrote the chart as would be serve the highest potential of the organization. We went from 12 direct reports to 4, one of which was a position that did not exist previously. She then began to rewrite titles and responsibilities, and determine who best fit those roles. The obstacle was thinking she needed to work with the current situation, rather than transforming it.

Building your interpersonal style through coaching

Most leaders must rely on their influencing skills to win people over in getting them passionate about the next strategy, or to discuss new ideas, and coaching to perfect your interpersonal style can be very useful. It’s particularly important for developing relationships with investors, donors, and partners. It allows you to think about how you are going to take others with with you when they don’t always trust the message or strategy.

Like seeing a therapist, the relationship between coach and client is confidential. The coach helps the client outline the goals they set to become a leader, and discussing the ROI they want to deliver in terms of impact.

Are you the next leader?

With increasing focus on having a more diverse leadership team and companies are looking into talent pools that they may have previously dismissed. Nonprofit executives are retiring, and boards often think they need to go outside the organization for the next leader. Instead, companies and nonprofit benefit when get people ready for leadership roles. And coaching can help develop people who may have all the firepower, but not all the leadership skills or experience.

Coaching helps leaders to self-reflect. To be really effective, they have to know who they are and what their motivation is. This is a skill that any person can use in lifting their career path. When we’re connected to our strengths, we find the fire we need to lead.

Mindfulness benefits my business? I thought it was just for yoga.

May 3, 2017 by Sara Jane Lowry

How does mindfulness benefit my business?

Mindfulness benefits business but only if you use it. If you’re a start-up company, a freelancer, a small business, or a nonprofit, you are stressed – about money. Stressed thinking does not lead to good decisions, more sales, or improved relationships. It damages our health. In our agitation, we often focus on small things we can control, rather than bold moves. We try to manage the details of what we are already doing rather than calmly analyzing what’s going well and what’s failing. We are unable to come up with creative solutions.

And what is failure anyway? Failure is part of critical growth. Did you see a child give up walking after falling down? Of course not. You see them learn to hold onto things, to take shorter walks, and to fall down but get up again. There are dozens of studies on how mindfulness practices can improve our stress levels, and our sleep. Stress can also have a huge impact on our creativity and decision-making.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

– Winston Churchill

Creative paralysis is fear of failure

We procrastinate in making hard decisions, and holding the hard conversations we dread. It’s as if avoiding things will make it get better. Mindfulness benefits include converting our fear of failure to action. One of the most frequent sources of creative paralysis is fear of failure. It’s nonaction that keeps us stuck doing the same thing over and over with no improvement rather than risk ‘failure.’

So, back to mindfulness and what benefits it brings to my business. Mindfulness does 4 important things for business leaders: it brings focus, clarity, creativity, and compassion (for yourself, and others) back into your field of awareness. I recently was working with a nonprofit executive. She was simply unable to see how her reluctance to create an earned revenue program was keeping her tied to fickle foundation funding. When we began to explore her beliefs around money using mindfulness, she began to let herself explore new opportunities. Mindfulness benefits for her were connecting again with skills in leadership that she could use in this new endeavor. And, happily she was able to gain foundation dollars to support the launch.

Mindfulness benefits: is it really as simple as breathing?

Breathing is where you begin to focus your attention. And the breathing that is part of mindfulness work is where you start to get some distance from the pressure of current issues. It’s where you start to tune into what your body is feeling, and the emotional surges that upset your day. Mindfulness is a practice which means you might try to do it every day, or even several times a day. You do it because the practice bears fruit within days of keeping at it. You can read more about the steps to mindfulness here. Or find a more in-depth blog post by John Parrot called The Art of Mindfulness: Why it Matters to get a full look at the benefits of mindfulness.

beach mindfulness benefits

When you go to the beach, you breathe in the salt air, you feel the warm sun on your lips, and the wind across your shoulders. You notice the ocean, the sky, the sand as you gaze at the ocean waves coming in and out. You often find you’re not thinking about much of anything. And, you can probably see mindfulness benefits easily in this scenario.

Now imagine having a moment like that in your day where instead of waves, you see those things you believe to be failures, or irritating people, or worrisome sales numbers also floating in and out with the breath. Can you be a witness and observer and look at it on all sides? In a place of detachment, can you step back and let it just be without assigning pejoratives, and see what isn’t working?

Shifting beliefs

Mindful benefits your ability to face what scares you. It is possible to see how your beliefs and thoughts can be transformed to ones of confidence, to courage, to a creative solution as we see how to shift our usual patterns by becoming more aware of them. And, your mind can become a bridge from the problem to the answer.

Mindfulness is for everyone, especially leaders: 4 steps to begin your practice

April 21, 2017 by Sara Jane Lowry

Mindfulness is for everyone, especially leaders

We are well aware that our bodies can be trained to make us healthier, flexible and stronger. We now know from neuroscience research that there is mindfulness training can cultivate and strengthen our mind’s capacities. Mindfulness is something we all have naturally, but it is more easily tapped into when we practice on a daily basis. Mindfulness lights up parts of our brains that aren’t normally activated when we’re mindlessly running on autopilot.
According to the Institute for Mindful Leadership, mindfulness practice can strengthen and cultivate four hallmarks of leadership excellence-focus, clarity, creativity and compassion. I have been working with some clients in developing a mindfulness practice and we begin with these steps:

#1. Set aside some time to be mindful.

Even 10 minutes. Best if you do it first thing in the morning while your creativity is at its most free. But you can do it over coffee, or lunch, or walking from one meeting to another. Make time. You don’t need special cushions.

#2. Observe the moment you’re in that you’ve chosen to get mindful.

Mindfulness is not stopping all your thoughts, or attempting to achieve a state of calm. The goal is actually simple: we’re attempting to pay attention to the present moment, without judgement

#3. Thoughts will come and go

Let them pass by. And if you end up following them? When you catch yourself, bring yourself back without judgment of them or of you.

#4 Return to the present moment

Observe the moment as it is right now. What you’re thinking, feeling. Where you’re sitting or walking. Feeling your breathing in and out. Over and over, this is the practice.

This is the work. Just this. Here and now.

It sounds simple, but it isn’t always easy. Let the mind stay focused here and now. Don’t get discouraged when your mind goes off – that’s why this is a discipline, a practice. Mindfulness isn’t about “fixing” you, and it’s not about stopping your thoughts.

Meditation and Mindfulness

You can use meditation practice as a way to practice mindfulness too. There are a couple of ways to do this:

We start with focusing on the breath as a way to anchor your mind in the moment by focusing in on breathing in and out. I suggest that you focus on where you feel the breath in your body, in your nostrils, whether it’s warm or cold, do you feel your diaphram against the chairback. When your mind wanders and you notice it, just say “wandering” and bring it back to the breath. Be kind to yourself in this process. Find a sense of ease and well-being in this moment of breathing and being present.
We also use the mind to focus by moving through our body from our feet to our head, and seeing where there is tension. Just bring the mind back to the sensations of breathing, or of our bodily tensions. No expectations or judgments, just noticing each thing.

Mindfulness can help you enjoy a cup of tea more fully, walk mindfully down the hall to your next meeting and be more present, have a more engaging conversation, or wind down for a relaxing night’s sleep. And that feels like it might a practice worth doing.