We Grow Through Pain

One of the adages that I try to remember when the going gets tough is pretty simple. A close family friend first said it to me and it’s only four words long:

We grow through pain.

It’s easy to remember, it’s a little more comforting than Nietzsche’s “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, and most importantly, it’s 100% true.

Think about the life stories of famous people, of your family and friends, and of yourself – what stands out the most? Sure, definitely the happy moments and successes are what keep us going. But how do people really learn about themselves? How do they grow and mature into the people they are today? From personal experience, it’s been through the tribulations and challenges that I discovered the most about myself.

Transitioning from university to the working world, I spent sixteen months travelling and teaching ESL in Asia. For the first year, I was living in South Korea, and had the absolute time of my life. I was working with other foreign teachers and made fast friends, my students were excited and curious, and the city was dynamic and easy to get around. Life was, in a word, a blast.

When my contract was up, I decided that I didn’t yet have Asia out of my system, so I chose to extend my time in Asia and try teaching somewhere new: China.

Without sounding too melodramatic, the four months I spent in The People’s Republic were absolutely miserable. My school placed me in a slum apartment with roommates I couldn’t relate to, I was sick constantly from the food and the pollution, my students were little hell-raisers, and I just couldn’t seem to make friends.

One day, while on the hour-long commute home from my school, I just about broke down. I had been sick with a sinus infection that wouldn’t go away, I was so incredibly frustrated with my students for constantly being disrespectful, and I knew I was going home to my apartment where my horrible roommates were lurking. In that moment, I wanted to be anywhere else in the world than as the only foreign face on that congested subway car. On top of that, it was a few days before Christmas and I was so unspeakably lonely and homesick that I wanted to curl up into a ball right then and there. I remember trying to Skype with family and friends back home to get some comfort, but my internet connection was so terrible that conversations simply weren’t possible on a regular basis.

Safe to say, others have faced much, much tougher challenges than that in life – let me make it clear that I’m aware of that! But at that moment, I had never felt more lost.

In the face of my predicament, the thing that saved me in China was reading. I decided that if I was miserable with my surroundings, I’d read as much as possible about other places I wanted to be in. So, with the help of my e-reader, and authors like Ernest Hemingway, Haruki Murakami, and W.O. Mitchell, I was transported to the streets of Paris, Tokyo, and small-town Canada. It was a much needed escape.

I only lasted four months in China, but I survived. At the time, I felt trapped and completely alone, but I made it through. I learned a lot of different things, like how to navigate through a sea of people on rush hour trains, how to order food with only hand gestures, and how to feel totally lost and make the best of it. I wouldn’t exchange that for anything.

I recently caught up with a friend and was recalling some of my stories from China. In this particular tale, I was explaining how I had ordered some food on the street and couldn’t determine what I was eating – was it chicken? Fish? Lizard? Rat? It could have been any of the above, but my insides told me it was the latter. At the time, it was a truly traumatizing meal, but in telling the story to my friend, we both had tears running down our faces from laughing so hard.

From this experience, I’ve realized that it’s the struggles in life that provide us with the opportunities to push ourselves – to see what we are really capable of.  While in China, I learned a lot about what makes me happy and what makes me miserable, and what I can do to get by. To be sure, feeling overwhelmed, lost, and lonely are nothing new to the human condition – but having to deal with these issues, on my own, made me more resilient.

I now also have a great cocktail party story about how I ate rat in China.

For further reading, check out the article called “What Suffering Does” by the NY Times columnist, David Brooks, who inspired this post.

Janus January

Do you know what this coin is picture above?   Where have you seen it?  Or, maybe like me, it is a new image for you - I was only introduced to it a week ago.  It is called the Janus head.  
Janus is the Roman god of beginnings and transitions.  This why the first month of the year is January - in honour of Janus. As we think about January we consider transitions, beginnings and endings as well as a time people use to consider the past and the future.   The Janus head represents this as well - with it's two faces, he looks forward and backwards. He also conjures thoughts of gates, doors, passages, endings, timing and transitions. 

September often has the same feelings - a time of transition for many people.  We hosted another blog about transitions in the fall. 

Are you always looking in the past?   Are you worried about the future?

Coaching might help you pass through endings, create bridges and help you make sense of when to look each direction. 

Sometimes we are unsure which direction to face.  In September, we tend to meet families and potential gappers that are unclear as well.   Taking a gap year can help you find a direction by looking at the past and looking to the future. 

Part II: Alignment: Judger/Learner

There was a reason the blog signed off with a video about the book: Change your Questions, Change your life.    The first question in the next set of questions from Martha Beck is listed below.  If we focus too much on what is wrong, instead of looking towards what is right, or what could be better one can fall victim to aligning yourself and attaching negative experiences.   This traps us.

On October 27th, mygapyear has created a forum to help open two groups to question their relationships, conversations and how they align themselves with a changing world.  Young Men Finding Direction is a collaborative event hosted by mygapyear in partnership with several men who can relate to questioning being a man growing up in the 21st century.  We invite families and their sons to come and explore this question.

In the meantime, laugh and live into these questions.  

11. Where am I wrong?
This might well be the most powerful question on our list—as Socrates believed, we gain our first measure of intelligence when we first admit our own ignorance. Your ego wants you to avoid noticing where you may have bad information or unworkable ideas. But you'll gain far more capability and respect by asking where you're wrong than by insisting you're right.

12. What potential memories am I bartering, and is the profit worth the price?
I once read a story about a world where people sold memories the way we can sell plasma. The protagonist was an addict who'd pawned many memories for drugs but had sworn never to sell his memory of falling in love. His addiction won. Afterward he was unaware of his loss, lacking the memory he'd sold. But for the reader, the trade-off was ghastly to contemplate. Every time you choose social acceptance over your heart's desires, or financial gain over ethics, or your comfort zone over the adventure you were born to experience, you're making a similar deal. Don't.

13. Am I the only one struggling not to {fart} during {yoga}?
I felt profoundly liberated when this issue was raised on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update." Not everyone does yoga, but SNL reminded me that everyone dreads committing some sort of gaffe. Substitute your greatest shame-fear: crying at work, belching in church, throwing up on the prime minister of Japan. Then know you aren't alone. Everyone worries about such faux pas, and many have committed them (well, maybe not the throwing up on PMs). Accepting this is a bold step toward mental health and a just society.

14. What do I love to practice?
Some psychologists believe that no one is born with any particular talent and that all skill is gained through practice. Studies have shown that masters are simply people who've practiced a skill intensely for 10,000 hours or more. That requires loving—not liking, loving—what you do. If you really want to excel, go where you're passionate enough to practice.

15. Where could I work less and achieve more?
To maximize time spent practicing your passions, minimize everything else. These days you can find machines or human helpers to assist with almost anything. Author Timothy Ferriss "batches" job tasks into his famous "four-hour workweek." My client Cindy has an e-mail ghostwriter. Another client, Angela, hired an assistant in the Philippines who flawlessly tracks her schedule and her investments. Get creative with available resources to find more time in your life and life in your time.

16. How can I keep myself absolutely safe?
Ask this question just to remind yourself of the answer: You can't. Life is inherently uncertain. The way to cope with that reality is not to control and avoid your way into a rigid little demi-life, but to develop courage. Doing what you long to do, despite fear, will accomplish this.

17. Where should I break the rules?
If everyone kept all the rules, we'd still be practicing cherished traditions like child marriage, slavery, and public hangings. The way humans become humane is by assessing from the heart, rather than the rule book, where the justice of a situation lies. Sometimes you have to break the rules around you to keep the rules within you.

18. So say I lived in that fabulous house in Tuscany, with untold wealth, a gorgeous, adoring mate, and a full staff of servants...then what?
We can get so obsessed with acquiring fabulous lives that we forget to live. When my clients ask themselves this question, they almost always discover that their "perfect life" pastimes are already available. Sharing joy with loved ones, spending time in nature, finding inner peace, writing your novel, plotting revenge—you can do all these things right now. Begin!

19. Are my thoughts hurting or healing?
Your situation may endanger your life and limbs, but only your thoughts can endanger your happiness. Telling yourself a miserable mental story about your circumstances creates suffering. Telling yourself a more positive and grateful story, studies show, increases happiness. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, choose thoughts that knit your heart together, rather than tear it apart.

20. Really truly: Is this what I want to be doing?
It's been several seconds since you asked this. Ask it again. Not to make yourself petulant or frustrated—just to see if it's possible to choose anything, and I mean any little thing, that would make your present experience more delightful. Thus continues the revolution.

Read more: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Martha-Becks-20-Questions-That-Could-Change-Your-Life_1/3#ixzz27m8mvqKq

Part 1: Alignment: Find the Questions First

Today's blog is part of the fourth and final blogs that relate back to the Book of Awesome.  The power of questions and questioning bring us to unique spaces, both in body and mind that help us to align our vision with our goals.  Ultimately, we see results through this process.    Let's explore some questions, both from tow insightful woman Martha Beck and Marilee Adams. 
 

20 Questions That Could Change Your Life

Finding the answers starts with posing the right questions—and Martha Beck has 20 to get you started.

By Martha Beck

 

1. What questions should I be asking myself?
At first I thought asking yourself what you should be asking yourself was redundant. It isn't. Without this question, you wouldn't ask any others, so it gets top billing. It creates an alert, thoughtful mind state, ideal for ferreting out the information you most need in every situation. Ask it frequently.

2. Is this what I want to be doing?
This very moment is, always, the only moment in which you can make changes. Knowing which changes are best for you comes, always, from assessing what you feel. Ask yourself many times every day if you like what you're doing. If the answer is no, start noticing what you'd prefer. Thus begins the revolution.

3. Why worry?
These two words, considered sincerely, can radically reconfigure the landscape of your mind. Worry rarely leads to positive action; it's just painful, useless fear about hypothetical events, which scuttles happiness rather than ensuring it. Some psychologists say that by focusing on gratitude, we can shut down the part of the brain that worries. It actually works!

4. Why do I like {cupcakes} more than I like {people}?
Feel free to switch out the words in brackets: You may like TV more than exercise, or bad boys more than nice guys, or burglary more than reading. Whatever the particulars, every woman has something she likes more than the somethings she's supposed to like. But forcing "virtues"—trying to like people more than cupcakes—drives us to vices that offer false freedom from oppression. Stop trying to like the things you don't like, and many vices will disappear on their own.

5. How do I want the world to be different because I lived in it?
Your existence is already a factor in world history—now, what sort of factor do you want it to be? Maybe you know you're here to create worldwide prosperity, a beautiful family, or one really excellent bagel. If your impressions are more vague, keep asking this question. Eventually you'll glimpse clearer outlines of your destiny. Live by design, not by accident.

6. How do I want to be different because I lived in this world?
In small ways or large, your life will change the world—and in small ways or large, the world will change you. What experiences do you want to have during your brief sojourn here? Make a list. Make a vision board. Make a promise. This won't control your future, but it will shape it.

7. Are {vegans} better people?
Again, it doesn't have to be vegans; the brackets are for you to fill in. Substitute the virtue squad that makes you feel worst about yourself, the one you'll never have the discipline to join, whether it's ultra-marathoners or mothers who never raise their voices. Whatever group you're asking about, the answer to this question is no.

8. What is my body telling me?
As I often say, my mind is a two-bit whore—by which I mean that my self-justifying brain, like any self-justifying brain, will happily absorb beliefs based on biases, ego gratification, magical thinking, or just plain error. The body knows better. It's a wise, capable creature. It recoils from what's bad for us, and leans into what's good. Let it.

9. How much junk could a chic chick chuck if a chic chick could chuck junk?
I believe this question was originally posed by Lao Tzu, who also wrote, "To become learned, each day add something. To become enlightened, each day drop something." Face it: You'd be better off without some of your relationships, many of your possessions, and most of your thoughts. Chuck your chic-chick junk, chic chick. Enlightenment awaits.

10. What's so funny?
Adults tend to put this question to children in a homicidal-sounding snarl, which is probably why as you grew up, your laughter rate dropped from 400 times a day (for toddlers) to the grown-up daily average of 15. Regain your youth by laughing at every possible situation. Then, please, tell us what's funny—about everyday life, about human nature, even about pain and fear. We'll pay you anything.

Read more: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Martha-Becks-20-Questions-That-Could-Change-Your-Life_1/2#ixzz27m6clUcl

Also, if you prefer to listen and learn an interview from Marilee Adams.

 

Going Aboard: Our Shared Fate

September marks an interesting time for families. Many families bring their children to university or college, and for some who have chosen a gap year, maybe to the airport.  After a summer of fun and preparation, it is time for these young adults to start out on a new journey.  What we read here, is many young adults are making different choices:  choices that take them on a global journey.  .

Jennifer Larr has the itch to go abroad. She's 26 years old and has already spent a year studying in France and two years in Rwanda with the Peace Corps, and she is headed to Uganda this summer for an internship. She's also a graduate student, studying international relations at UCLA.Larr is part of a growing number of 20- and early 30-somethings whose American dream has moved beyond suburban homes and traditional nuclear families, and it's one that now goes even beyond U.S. borders.Larr and others like her are more likely than previous generations to live, study and work abroad. As they travel the world, they're now abandoning some of the traditional tenets of the American dream that their parents held dear.National pollster John Zogby has been chronicling this trend for years. His book The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream discusses some of the changes taking place in Larr's generation. He has a name for young people like her: "first globals."It's a generation just as likely to watch the World Cup as it is the Super Bowl. It's not, however, just the children of the wealthy and the educated, says Zogby. "This is expanding beyond the Wellesleys and the Stanfords," he says. "It's different now.""Two out of three of them have passports," Zogby says. "They are well-traveled; technologically they have networks that include people all over the world. They have a desire to be nimble, to go anywhere and to be anywhere. They also have a desire to change their world and feel like they're in a position to do that."There are a few reasons why. More than 270,000 students studied abroad in the 2009-2010 school year, according to the International Institute of Education. That number is three times what it was two decades earlier. At the same time, the Internet and social media have made every part of the world seem instantly accessible. America's youth is just more diverse — and international — than ever.On top of being globally minded, Zogby says, these first globals have a different perspective on the idea of ownership as a tenet of the American dream. They are putting less emphasis on accumulating traditional things like homes, cars and the types of families their parents had. Instead, they're putting more energy into acquiring experience.  Larr, for instance, says she can do without the house and the kids."People will always rent you apartments wherever you go, [and] not every woman wants to have a child and be a mother, and be in the house all the time," Larr says.She could even do without the marriage."I've been in a really long-term relationship, and we're really happy the way we are. We can be committed to each other without necessarily having someone approve it," she says.Zogby says that all of this is reflected in his research, and that much of what made older generations tick just doesn't work for first globals. "The permanence of owning things doesn't exist," Zogby says. "The permanence of living somewhere doesn't exist. The permanence of getting a job and holding on to that job for the next 40 years doesn't exist."For many of these first globals, the idea of public service is a common thread. La Mikia Castillo, 28, recently graduated from USC's Price School of Public Policy. Her family is from the U.S. and Panama, and she has studied and traveled in Mexico, Costa Rica and Guatemala."My American dream is for other people to be able to achieve whatever they want to achieve," Castillo says. "It's not really about me and what I have as an individual. It's about trying to make a difference around the world."  Franklin Gilliam, dean of UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs, says dreams like Castillo's represent a new way of seeing the world that's become common among first globals. "It's a sea change in orientation," Gilliam says. "They understand this idea of a shared fate, or a linked fate. That somehow, what happens to somebody in Mumbai may have an effect on me in West Los Angeles."Julia Capizzi, a 33-year-old recent USC graduate who is studying for the Foreign Service exam, agrees."The larger world beyond L.A., beyond Chicago and my immediate experiences is an extension of me," Capizzi says. "So I feel an obligation to know what that is. Otherwise I feel like I'm walking around with blinders on."Capizzi also says her American dream is better than that of her parents, because she and people like her aren't afraid to literally go anywhere to accomplish their goals. "I think that my generation will be more fulfilled than my parents' generation," she says. But she admits that she had to make some sacrifices to live the life of a first global. She doesn't own a car or a house, and she says she would love to have already owned a house. There are a lot of different parts of her life, she says, that she's had to come to peace with to pursue her goals. In spite of any reservations, the Capizzis, Castillos and Larrs are here to stay, says Zogby, as is their new take on the American dream, and it may upend traditional ideas of family and citizenship as we now know it."[There are] going to be so many families out there where Papa's in Singapore and Mama's in Mauritius, and Baby is somewhere back and forth," he says.  The question is, what will that baby's dream be? And will it even be called American?

Article link and audio clip of article located here:http://www.npr.org/2012/07/10/156463825/globals-generation-focuses-on-experience?sc=17&f=1001

Redefine Possible

Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out. 
Karl Augustus Menninger

Redefine Possible - Overcome Fear

The world has played witness to two very interesting and powerful experiences for two motivated individuals. A man crossing Niagara Falls and a man climbing a mountain. Two individuals who decided to redefine possible.  I am borrowing this idea of "redefining possible" from  Spencer West and Free the Child - one of the two men I previously mentioned.  If you have not followed his journey to reach Uhuru Peak, the summit of Mount Kilimanjarro what you might not know about Spencer is that he will be accomplishing this feat with out....feet. Training for a year, Spencer and the team set out Africa's tallest free standing mountain to raise funds for clean water projects in Africa.   Check out the team reaching the summit below. 

 Seven days later.......

The first video captures some insights into how Spencer's journey started.  His life changed course from what others anticipated what would happen.  In his case, a story was written even before it had a chance to unravel.   Sometimes that is what we need - a change in direction to re-educate our minds how to think, believe and dream differently about the path in front of us or the life we choice to live.   The second video is of Spencer achieving this incredible milestone!  One of the pieces that stood out to me as I followed Spencer was the incredible sense of team between the climbing group.  With a team, anything can be possible. 

What is on your bucket list?  Big or small redefine possible for yourself!  Who is on your team to help you achieve re-writing your story? 

So what are your inner gifts?

Take ten minutes out of your day to think about unique gifts and talents that lie within you.

Jot down what you bring to the table of life. Write as many examples as you can think of. Then. Really think about these wonderful qualities that once developed, will have the ability to move mountains and change your world. Then consider: you spent time identifying all of the positive qualities you possess and probably came up with many, but you have barely scratched the surface of the infinite and dynamic you! Each time you do this exercise you will discover new things that you contribute to this world.

" when you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then , for that is just the place that the tide will turn "
Harriet Beecher Stowe Socializing the Tech-Generation

Pigeonholing - A reason for a Gap Year

 

Once a jock, always a jock.  Once a nerd, always a nerd.  Once a shy guy, always a shy guy.  Once a ditz, always a ditz.  Ever feel like your are stuck in a rut, limited in what you can do, being held there by your peer’s perception of who you are?

We all know that standing up to peer pressure is hard.  What is even harder is realizing that you are not really what people perceive you as.  As you experience new things, you discover so much more about yourselves and who you truly are at your core.  If you discover your core is different from how you are perceived based on your past, how can you become your true self?

Being true to yourself at your core requires a deep understanding of who you are and the confidence to go against the grain and redefine your true self. 

A gap year provides a great time to step away from the external pressures placed on you by your peers, your family and your community to be who you always have been and to explore and understand who you have grown to be.  Through challenging yourself in new situations, you can present as your authentic self, learn about your true self and gain confidence in who you are.

These experiences can help you to return back to your communities, families and peers with a greater understanding of who you want to be and not what your past has defined you as.  This deeper understanding will give you the confidence to break out of that pigeonhole and show the world the true you!