Therapy or change work does not always have to be restricted to the therapy couch or counselling room.

Many of us have good friends who have great advice or push our buttons in a way that makes us reflect on what we are doing in certain aspects of our lives.

It’s not always what we want to hear but for me it’s not always the advice but how we react and then how we constructively respond that moves us forward.

Something I know I do is over analysis or counter argue ideas or facts.

This can be great in some ways because I can see other perspectives. The problem comes when it keeps me stuck.

Something I noticed on reflection yesterday was how when a good friend was breaking my balls, was my internal response to her ‘humble opinion’ as she put it.

My first line of defence was attack.

My heckles went up and I got all the physical feelings of being under attack, which often shows, what the person has said resonates with you at some level!

I’m a big believer in writing your rage down because it traps it and stops it running around in your head and winding you up even more! I call it ‘thought fly paper’.

However in this instance I wasn’t capturing my thoughts, I was building my defence.

I grabbed my pad and went to work on my response.

One of the things that occurred to me after I had written my argument winning response and theories that would make me right, was that I was spending all my time and creative juices in attack but still staying stuck.

I thought if I spent this time – (an hour of angry writing) – on finding out  what I do want, and what it is at this present moment that is making me want to fight, then that’s got to be a better idea.

I was spending my time trying to be right, rather than looking at how I could be better.

Many of us see the world from our own perspective and it’s easy to make others wrong.

We can spend our time blaming people and circumstances and wind up in a spiral of self-destruction, anger and resentment.

It’s certainly a lot easier to blame others and victimise ourselves, but I found yesterday it was a lot less tiring when I stopped attacking and started looking internally at what was really going on for me and how I could change it to get a positive outcome.

This is an old post that originally was written for another page I was asked to write for but I thought it was still relevant and worth reposting –

If nobody else benefits from this page and it ends today, from my point of view, it won’t have been for nothing.

Already from this process of helping to create this page, I have been able to recognise a lot of my own hang ups.

It’s highlighted a few key areas where I get stuck and what I can do about it.

A lot of the time, it’s not taking the action that’s difficult. The difficulty is often in recognising and breaking our own beliefs about how we think things should be, or how they will turn out.

What can seem like an uphill struggle or even an impossibility, can often only take a minute to implement.

Change is instant, it’s getting to that point of change that takes the work!

“Change is not easy, but it is simple.” Peter Drucker once said.

When I created this page I had 100 questions running round my head, including whether there was even any point.

How would the page look, what topics should I talk about, should I have a forum and on and on and on. Added to this was the worry that I would not be giving any real value with what I was planning to share.

Even after launching the site and seeing that the “start where you stand…..grow as you go” adage was true in this case, and that, “getting it perfect, but often never getting it done at all”, resonated with me, I still found myself getting bogged down in what to write about first.

What would be the most valuable topic to start with? What would be the foundation piece for me to open with? Should it be motivation, goal setting, fear of failure and how to overcome it, procrastination and so on? Or should I do something totally different that would be relevant but different from the mainstream? How should the show open!

Sometimes when we want to change something in our lives or want to achieve something so much, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with the details.

We can become so panicked that we psychologically freeze and metaphorically find ourselves ‘rocking back and forth in the corner’. We can find ourselves unable to do anything or just running away and giving up.

During the time I was thinking about this ‘The Voice’ final was on the television. One of the finalist was having a backstage breakdown. Throughout the weeks this particular contestant had been really built up because of her amazing performances which up until that point in the show had been ten out of ten.

Just before going on she said to her coach “my voice is very bad today! It’s not good enough!”

Her coach, Will.i.am from the Black eyed Peas brilliantly changed her focus in one sentence from what she believed, but could not control, into helping her concentrate on what she could both control and change. He turned to her and simply said:

“Let’s not stress out that your voice is not a 10. Let’s just make the very best out of 6”

Just with those few words she was able to refocus and it allowed her to go out and give, what was her very best in those moments.

By understanding the patterns that stop us, we can give ourselves an incredible insight and ability to use those exact same processes to actually achieve what we do want.

Ironically, by getting out of my own way and redirecting how I went about this first post by just talking about my own experience regarding the trouble with getting started, it has naturally and effortlessly given me the answer I’ve been looking for all weekend regarding what topic to start with.

“When old patterns are broken, new worlds emerge”

If you find yourself judging yourself or others, before reacting it might first be worth checking in with yourself to find out why you really feel this way and in doing so give yourself the chance to make a better informed decision.

As I sat in my room one morning, I looked around at all that I owned in that space and realised much of what was there had been given to me. I personally had not bought the majority of it.

I realised that if what was ‘not mine’ was taken away I would have very little to show for all the years I had been on earth.

For a moment it depressed me. What had I been doing all this time? What had I got to show for the years I’ve been working?

It’s very easy if we continue into this line of thought and to become very low. To feel hopeless. To compare ourselves with others who seem to have acquired so much more and who on first look appear to be so much more successful and often at a much younger age!

It’s very easy for relationships, work, how much money we have in the bank or on our payslip, what jobs we have, where we live, whether we rent or have managed to buy and so forth, to insidiously create an idea of ‘who we are’ like iron filings to a magnet.

Our sense of self – our identities – are forged inside of ‘what I do’ and ‘what I have’. We are judged on this, not just by others but more importantly by ourselves which can often be detrimental to our development despite the idea that a pursuit for more and better is often hailed as the driving force behind success.

As I found myself slipping into self-judgment I allowed myself to investigate what was the underlying emotion that was attracting this narrative and feeling of failure.

It’s often hard not to get caught up in the story we are telling ourselves and to be able to look at what we are feeling objectively as a silent observer, because often we can’t actually articulate what is is or why we feel this way.

Over the years I have found several ways to do this, and when I am experiencing moments of self-flagellating emotional attacks, I often stop and simply symbolise the emotion. I look at where it sits, its shape, colour and movement patterns. I investigate its temperature and density and weight in my hands.

And after each investigation I look again and see how with each enquiry it changes its characteristics, and as these change, so does how I feel and reflect on what I am experiencing.

I uncover the real meaning rather than the story I’m using to cover up a deeper underlying truth meaning with.

I looked at what was sitting in the pit of my stomach and I found ‘A ball’.

At first it seemed solid and heavy but on closer inspection it was hollow and black, like one of those children’s ‘plastic pool balls’ but not at all colourful.

Then as the story continued, I watched it being stamped on and crushed. It was still there, but now all that remained was the crumpled husk of plastic that was once the ball.

This is what I got. Not a new idea but perhaps a different way of describing it.

When we identify ourselves with our jobs, houses, relationships, money, the car we drive and the friends we have become like plastic balls, which from the outside look solid but are in fact are very vulnerable to collapse in seconds. A life we judge ourselves by, for better or for worse, is just a hollow inflated illusion of ‘who we are’

We all hold on to an idea of ‘making it’ or even of having made it, where life is perfect and we are safe and if we haven’t, we can sink into regular moments of often deep depression because we don’t think we hold up to an ideal of who or where we should be at this moment of time.

But as many of us know, this is not the case and unless we are continually cultivating our lives, what we call ‘our lives’ can be removed in the blink of an eye.

But this is not news and not the main point of my enquiry.

For me what I found more profound was this idea.

Inside of the ball is space. Nothingness. Outside the ball is nothingness. Space.

The only thing that allows us to be crushed is the plastic shell what we call ‘the ball’. All the things we acquire or who we say we are actually separates us from everything else.

The question I am still pondering from this is ‘Does a sense of identity separate us from the whole?

Is it Symbolic of a larger problem?

Does the formation of identity actually segregate us from self?

Does it actually create a Prejudice of self?

And, being this is the ball we live in, do we project that out into our world?

If we take away the shell of the ball all we are left with space. With nothingness.

The shell is the only thing that makes the space namely the ‘inside’ or ‘outside’. Them and us. You and me.

With no shell there is no inside or outside or any other name you wish to give nothingness.

Inside of nothingness is everything. A whole.

If we don’t build shells, can we potentially be more?

By not identifying with what we have and do, do we invite the opportunity to have and be everything?

Can it be done or is that called enlightenment?

By taking away our shells, do we connect automatically with the rest of the world? The human collective?

But this is all very nice and perhaps just a philosophical debate, but how do we use this today?

Right now I don’t know, or that it’s even possible to remove our shells.

However by just being aware of how we contain ourselves inside of what we have and what we do, we can shift our focus to perhaps making better or less limiting choices. To understand we are not all so different and that we all have the same stuff going on. That its not so much ‘them and us’ but more of a collective ‘us’.

Just like me sitting in my room, outside of self-awareness and the willingness to enquire what’s really going on when we are faced with emotional episodes, I could have spent the day consumed in self-pity and blame or escaping into any of the many ways we find to remove ourselves from negative pain that hold no long term potential for growth.

Connected pondering’s to reflect on.

I am not my identity or the stuff I am.

As soon as I identify myself with things I enclose me. I trapped myself in a virtual but illusionary bubble of safety. That identity can either drive me or it can hold me back. But at any time who I  am relying on being can be removed.

My identity makes me feel I belong but really it separates me from the whole. Its limiting.

Only inside of my ‘plastic ball’ can I be crushed and destroyed. (Try stamping on a plastic ball. When you are done try crushing the air around you with your foot. See how you get on!)

My mother used to have a picture that said – ‘I do not seek to follow in the footsteps of men of old, I seek the things they sought.’

When I have these thoughts and days later hear people like Dan Siegal talking about mindfulness and his brief loss of identity because of a horse accident and the consequences of that I think Im on the right path. To where I don’t know but interesting all the same.

Its going from ‘what to do’ to ‘how to do’ that is where the work takes place Intellectually understanding it is not enough!