Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Alan Shelton on Awakened Leadership. Alan is a leadership coach, blogger, speaker, and the author of Awakened Leadership: Beyond Self-Mastery.
The idea behind Awakened Leadership is to transcend beyond trained behaviors to awareness, and lead a life of authentic leadership. In other words, to be a more effective leader, you have to be more of who you already are.
I’ve been reading Alan’s book. It’s entertaining and deeply engaging. The stories really bring Alan’s insight to life, as we follow him along on his journey to enlightenment.
What I really like about Alan’s approach to leadership, is that it reminds me of Bruce Lee’s approach to martial arts. Bruce Lee rose above techniques through awareness. I think of the Bruce Lee quote, “When one has no form, one can be all forms; when one has no style, he can fit in with any style.” Another Bruce Lee quote says, “I do not experience; I am experience. I am not the subject of experience; I am that experience. I am awareness. Nothing else can be I or can exist.” In the movie, Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee said, “Don’t think. FEEL. It’s like a finger pointing at the moon.” The point is that thinking is assessment, while feeling is awareness. We can respond better in the moment, when we are actually in the moment, embracing the experience in an authentic way.
Without further ado, here is Alan on Awakened Leadership and how we can be better leaders by being more of who we already are …

Often the leadership world is divided into two categories, transactional and transformational. Transactional in how we give and receive from our learning and from one another, and transformational in how we choose to view and grow in our own personal maturity.

The reality is, in order to arrive at the doorway to transformational growth, many transactional concepts will have been learned. That is to say that there is a normal course, or arc, that human beings follow in the journey of life. In my experience this is absolutely true. In the beginning of our life we are exposed to learning which involves concepts, diagrams, and written examinations to measure our learning. All of this learning is in the service of becoming a polished ego or self. The arrival point of this process is normally designated as self-mastery. Self-mastery, however, is just the doorway to a new style of learning. And in order to pass through the doorway we must stand on the shoulders of those who brought us to this point.

Self-Mastery

In the self-mastery approach, we are taught that we are all self-contained entities to which attributes apply. For instance, we say that some people possess humility, intelligence, or even leadership capability. In this kind of learning we are the lump of clay to which all exterior forces are brought into play in which to shape us. Our goal in the end is to stand as though we were a product of Michelangelo himself.

Most of us, however, come to the end of this kind of learning somewhere in the first 10 years of our career. And then what are we supposed to do? Surely you’ve noticed that many executives continue to pursue exactly the same style of learning that they always have. If you ask many of them, you’d be surprised to find that they know that they are simply going through the motions. They can tell because of the tiredness and boredom that arises in the 10th or 20th time that they have heard exactly the same concept.

Internally they know that concepts did not translate into anything else all by themselves. It is no longer effective to onboard content and concept from the outside with the expectation that something will change.

Reactive to Transformation

Many times the frustration of learning less and less from the same activity begins to motivate managers to look for something new. They realize that this external learning of new concepts has exhausted itself yet they’re left longing for more. So, it occurs to many executives that it’s now time to take an internal look at themselves. When this observation takes root they have now entered into the transformational or developmental world.

So what is the difference? Each leader’s behavior is now seen as having the possibility of being either an obstacle or an enhancement to leadership itself. Human beings by nature arrive at adulthood with conditionings known as reactive traits. These reactive traits are unconscious and triggered by events and everyday life. Unfortunately, many times these reactions do not belong in the business process.

How many times have you sat in a meeting and watched while some moment of behavior defies any of your ability to understand it? That is reactive behavior. Dedicated leaders see that their own behavior cannot be allowed to derail leadership outcomes. The frustration of the old style of learning transforms into the challenge of internal development and transformation.

Leadership has now seen an entirely new light. No longer is it the Christmas tree holding the ornaments of personal attributes such as humility and the like. True leadership emerges from the ability of the leader to stand in his own personal authenticity. Leadership is now who you are.

Much like athletes who find that mentally processing their plays make them slow on the field, leaders begin to see that the game slows down for them. They no longer see themselves as an individual attempting to execute an idea. Now, they are part of the game and the authenticity of their leadership capability is the field on which it is played. No longer does the leader take the big space and the followers squeeze into what’s left over. Now, the leader sees himself properly situated as a member of the team and in the situation stands to respond to the action when it comes his way.

In my terms, I call this Awakened Leadership – where all the concepts have been transcended and the leader simply allows his response to occur. It is a felt experience, this new style of leadership. All transformative experiences are. From concept to ‘who you are’ indeed is an awakening.

So, what’s holding you back from embracing Awakened Leadership?

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Eric Brun on lessons learned from the book, Crucial Conversations. Eric is a colleague at Microsoft, and he leads a development team.  As you can imagine, there are a lot of high intensity scenarios, with tough deadlines, conflicting opinions, and different communication styles.  I asked Eric to share his insights and actions he learned from applying the Crucial Conversations model to work and life.

It is a few years ago, as I was working on communication and influence that I met J.D. I got to tell you, it was one the most intense and exciting conversations in my life. As I was telling him I was looking for a way to deal with conflict, sometimes finding myself in situations where my emotions were limiting my effectiveness. He mentioned “Crucial Conversations” as a very good reading.

Our Reptile Brain Doesn’t Always Help

One of the ideas that had a lasting impact on me, is that we have two brains: our Sapiens brain and our reptilian brain.   While thinking about it back home, I realized that was the heart of the issue.  The reptilian brain helped us to survive by short-circuiting the low-speed complex Sapiens brain.  It did this by putting us in a “fight-or-flight mode.” This was useful to escape a saber tooth tiger, but in a civilized setting, such as a business meeting or a family dinner, it doesn’t serve us very well.

I could recognize situations where I was not very proud of my achievements. For example, these were some situations where I was entrapped in silence, and could not find my words.   On the other end of the spectrum, I would feel mad and have angry arguments.

Stakes are High, Opinions Vary, and Emotions Run Strong

When I reviewed he situations, they had three things in common:

1. The subject was important to me.
2. I was feeling strong emotions.
3. The heat was intense

In the book Crucial Conversation, the authors define a crucial conversation as a discussion between two or more people where stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong.

Crucial conversations generally precede “crucial confrontations.”  With a  crucial conversation, the goal is to discover the problem, work through the problem during the conversation, and get to an agreement.  With crucial confrontations, you are dealing with broken promises, such as when the agreement is not honored.

While the scenarios and intensity may vary, both crucial conversations and crucial confrontations are based on the same principles and work in a similar way.

Recognize the Signs

First, you need to recognize the signs. What happens when the reptilian brain takes control? …

In fight mode, you feel heat, and you raise your voice.

In flight mode, you might feel anxious, and retreat in silence.

Even if you try to control or negate your feelings, they are most likely going to act up and probably not at the best moment.

Get Prepared

To get prepared, you need to do your homework.  This includes collecting the facts, defining what you really want, and mastering your stories. Stories are those intentions that we think people have and which alter our perception.

The authors propose a powerful yet simple mental exercise to master your stories.   They suggest, ask yourself why a decent, respectful person would think or do that?  I would add: “question one’s own virtue” as proposed in the excellent Leadership and self-deception.

I have found for myself that these thoughts have a profound impact.   They bring a calm and open mind.

Establish Safety and Create a Shared Pool of Meaning

There are two very important concepts:

1. Establish Safety — Establish safety by seeking mutual purpose and showing respect. The more respect you can actually, genuinely feel, the easier the conversation. Mutual purpose comes from looking at what is really important (do you care more about “wining the argument” or creating a “win-win” outcome?) and genuine respect makes you really persuasive as well as more resistant to cutting remarks that can burst out – especially before your interlocutor is convinced of your intentions.
2. Create a “shared pool” of meaning.  The “shared pool” of meaning is the ideas and understandings. This is the material from which solutions will emerge.

Who Does What, and By When

When the crucial conversation comes to an end, it’s important to get to an action-oriented conclusion. This means defining with clarity, “who” does “what” and “by when”. It’s really important to have the discipline to define all three.  Defining all three helps avoid ambiguity and future frustration.

Command, Consult, Vote, or Consensus

The authors identify four ways that require increasing efforts and time:

1. Command
2. Consult
3. Vote
4. Establish consensus.

Personally, I was almost always seeking consensus, until I understood it was probably more costly and less efficient. Then I started exploring and using vote, consult, and command. These additional options  really made a big difference, both at work and at home.  For example, in some scenarios, I now appreciate the fast decisions and clear instructions as part of a command style.  And I’m often surprised that it makes the situation easier for others, especially when they are looking for direction.

Honesty, Respect, and Courage

What I like in the Crucial Conversations model is that it is based on honesty, respect, and courage (Yes, getting into a Crucial Conversation in a calm and willful way requires courage). In addition, the model is simple, applicable, and highly effective.

I first applied the Crucial Conversations model at home, telling myself I should practice a bit before trying it out at work. That was probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.  I learned that being able to have crucial conversations at home is just as important, if not more important, than on the job.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Jason Selk Ed.D. on how to apply principles of mental toughness to improve your performance at work.

Jason is the bestselling author of 10-Minute Toughness and Executive Toughness.  His mission is “the relentless pursuit of greatness” and he makes a living training entrepreneurs, executives, and world-class athletes in how to bring out their best in any situation.  Jason has also been featured in USA Today, Men’s Health, Muscle and Fitness, Shape, and Self Magazine, an he’s a regular contributor to ABC, CBS, ESPN, and NBC.

What I like about Jason’s approach is that it’s about accountability, focus, and optimism.  I also like that Jason draws tools and techniques from sports psychology that you can apply to “win” in the boardroom and win at life.

In this post, Jason shares the same tools he’s used with the St. Louis Cardinals that you can use to change your game in the workplace. Without further ado, here’s Jason …

When spring arrives, my mind always conjures up the baseball fields in Jupiter, FL, where I spent many seasons helping the St. Louis Cardinals get into peak mental condition for spring training.

Mental conditioning? What’s that?

Back in 2006, I was hired by the St. Louis Cardinals to train them in Mental Toughness. They already had a coach that to teach them the mechanics of pitching, batting, and fielding. What they needed was to learn how to set goals, focus on their priorities, stay positive, be disciplined, and win. I became their first Director of Mental Training, and that year they went on to win their first World Series in 20 years.

The principles of Mental Toughness are as useful in the workplace as they are in the dugout. In fact, I have trained not only world-class athletes but countless entrepreneurs and executives as well, using the same techniques. Not surprisingly, highly productive business leaders and high-performing athletes have many traits and behaviors in common.

5 Ways to Build Your Mental Toughness

Businesspeople are prone to many of the same unhelpful behaviors and mindsets as underperforming athletes, which prevent them from being at the top of their game and outshining the competition.

Let’s look at five ways to train your business brain in Mental Toughness, taking a cue from the world champion Cardinals. These will prevent unproductive habits from getting in the way of your personal best.

1.  Pay Attention to Your Swing, and Forget the Home Run

If you focus on the target—e.g., finishing the report, making the sale, acquiring the new client—you may never get there. That’s because you can’t accomplish a goal without first having a sound process in place. Instead, identify those daily goals that have the greatest influence on your performance and, therefore, your success. I call these process goals. Then put all your energy and courage into tackling them every single day. If your aim is to double your client load in one year, then figure out three specific tasks, or process goals, you need to complete each day that will help you reach that ultimate target. If you are relentless and consistent about completing your three daily process goals, you will succeed.

2. Don’t Take Your Eye Off the Ball

Many high-performing businesspeople believe they can multitask and still maintain focus. For instance, they answer emails and check their calendar while talking to a client. However, recent research from Stanford University found that multi-taskers are both less productive than their single-minded counterparts, but also suffer from weaker self-control. In other words, multitasking can be addictive. Control your tendency to become distracted by keeping your eye on the task you are involved with right now. While completing the three tasks you identified above, turn off your cell phone and shut down your email. The American Psychological Association cites a study showing that multitasking leads to as much as a 40 percent drop in productivity.

3. Be Your Own Ref

If you want to be more productive, you need to establish your own limits, or “not to-do” list. This might include counterproductive tasks such as responding to company emails during family time, talking to clients after 3:30 p.m., or not saying yes right away to a new project, but giving your answer the next day, after you’ve slept on it. Be sure that you are scheduling your calendar rather than allowing your calendar to schedule you.

4. Get R&R Between Workouts

Nearly 4 out of 10 workers are regularly fatigued, according to a recent study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Lack of sleep causes fatigue, and that’s a productivity killer. In fact, the rate of lost productivity for workers with fatigue was 66 percent, compared with 26 percent for workers without fatigue. Total lost productive time averaged 5.6 hours per week for workers with fatigue, compared to 3.3 hours for their counterparts without fatigue. Make rest and rejuvenation a priority. Give yourself 7-9 hours of sleep per night.

5. Listen to Your Body

In sports, when athletes try to push through the pain, they end up on the DL with injuries. In the workplace, this is known as “extreme working,” and it results in lower performance. New research found that 69 percent of extreme workers—super high achievers who regularly work 60-80 hours a week and are in the top 6 percent of earners—admit that their extreme working habits undermine their health. Most of these workers can’t sustain this level of performance, and end up burning out, just like promising athletes who have to sit on the bench all season or retire early because of injuries.

Editor’s note: Meet Jim Camp.  This is a guest post by Jim on how to use the power of “No”, to negotiate more effectively.

Jim is a best-selling author of, Start with No, and NO: The Only System of Negotiation You need for Work or Home.  He has trained and coached more than 100,000 people in the art and science of negotiation over the last 25 years.  Jim’s approach has been featured on CNN, CNBC, Fast Company, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, and The Wall Street Journal.  The FBI and many Fortune 500 companies rely on Jim’s approach to negotiate with skill.

What I like about Jim’s approach is, it’s different.  It’s refreshing.  Jim’s approach gives you permission to say “No.”  And rather than see “No” as the end of a negotiation, you can see it as the beginning.  The best part is, it’s about taking the pressure off the other person, as well as yourself, and getting down to real, authentic communication.

I also like the fact that rather than coerce somebody to a “Yes,” it’s about getting the concerns on the table.  When somebody is pressured into a “Yes,” it’s not real buy-in, and it can often lead to a “Say yes, do no” pattern.  If it’s OK to say, “No,” then people can really open up.

I’ve asked Jim to share his best insights and actions on how readers of Sources of Insight could add the power of “No” to their negotiation skills.  Here is what Jim has to say …

The best word to hear, invite, or say in any type of negotiation is “no.”

When negotiating, “yes” is the worst word to say or to hear at the outset.

But if you are like most businesspeople, you were taught negotiating strategies that were designed to get the client to say “yes.” You learned to impress with your speech and your dress. You learned how to sway people’s decisions with dramatic presentations. You learned how to use charts and graphs to back up your claims. You learned how to persuade, cajole, and manipulate. And you learned how to spot the right moment to close the deal.

“No” Will Liberate and Protect You

“Yes” was the word you associated with winning.

But there’s a problem with “yes.” A quick “yes” is generated by out-of-control emotions. “Yes” just betrays a fear of failure, a fear of losing this deal, and primes you to please the other side, to rush ahead, to compromise early and often, and to come to a deal—any deal.

There’s a better way. Learn to harness the power of “no.” “No” will liberate and protect you.

Forget what you’ve learned about win-win solutions, the art of compromising, and getting to “yes.” A negotiation is defined as the effort to bring about an agreement between two or more parties, with all parties having the right to veto, or say “no.”

In other words, if you don’t like what’s happening in the negotiation, say “no” and we’ll go from there. Conversely, if I don’t like what’s happening, I’ll say “no” and we’ll go from there.

If you’re a parent, you know that every child hears “no” as the start of the negotiation, not the end of it. As adults, however, we’ve been conditioned and trained to fear the word.

“No” is Simply a Decision

Politely saying “no” to your respected opponent, calmly hearing “no,” and just letting the other side know that they are welcome to say “no” has a positive impact on any negotiation. In fact, your invitation for the other side to say “no” has an amazing power to bring down barriers and allow for solid beneficial communication.

Let’s take a look at the word “no,” and the power of “no.” Where does all that come from? What is “no,” really? To the professional negotiator, it’s simply a decision, and it’s a decision to be changed.

But do you know what the really great pros know? And what I teach and coach? They know that “no” maintains a status quo. It’s the safest decision our adversaries can make. Change is scary. People gain comfort when they say “no” because it keep things the way they are. The word “yes,” on the other hand, brings change—and that’s scary.

“No” is When the Negotiation Begins

There’s something else that’s very interesting about the word “no.” When you give someone permission to say “no” to your ideas, the emotions go down, the effectiveness of the decisions go up, and they’re allowed to really look at what you’re proposing. They’re allowed to hold it in their hands, to see it in their mind’s eye, to turn it around. To try to envision all the different complexities that might come with that thought, that idea. Great negotiators seek the “no” because they know that’s when a negotiation begins.

Invite your adversary to say “no.” Here’s how to do it. “Well, Ms. Smith, I have no idea whether what we do has any relevance for your business. I just don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t. If not, just tell me and I’ll get off the phone. Is that fair? Ms. Smith, who handles your accounting services? I’m with Acme Financial Services, and I’d like the opportunity to sit down with you and allow you to discover the opportunities.”

“No” Releases Emotional Pressure

By inviting her to say “no” from the get-go, you put the other party at ease and allow them to feel in control.

Seeking “no” may seem counterintuitive to those who follow the “win-win” philosophy that drives compromise and assumption in today’s politically correct world, but in fact, allowing the other side to say “no” releases emotional pressure in a negotiation, encouraging a real exchange of information.

Think about the negative reaction you’ve experienced at one time or another when dealing with a hard-closing salesperson. That negative feeling is your reaction to their effort to take away your right to say “no.” Instead of folding under this pressure, most of us run as fast as possible in the other direction. Even if a deal is made under this type of duress, later it often falls apart.

If the salesperson had invited you to say “no,” however, you would have gladly listened to the pitch. This is the power of “no.”

Every “No” is Reversible

When we say “no” we are not closing the book on further negotiation. Every no is reversible. But when we say it, we must do so in a nonthreatening manner. Use a nurturing statement along with the “no” to mitigate any perceptions of harshness. For example, “I can’t agree to that, but I do see where you’re coming from. I see the problem and would really like to help. What other possible solutions do you see?”

As the negotiation is winding down and you’ve gotten the other party to agree to your proposal, invite them once again to say, “no.” Let them know that there will be no hard feelings if they decide your proposal is not right for them.

You will be amazed at how inviting a prospect to say “no” relieves pressure and turns skeptical opponents into willing partners.

Take “No” for a Test Drive

Take “no” for a test drive—and see for yourself. Have some fun and take the opportunity to practice using “no.”

With a smile on your face, tell someone in a low-risk situation that you “just can’t do that,” or that you “just don’t see it that way.” Then encourage the person to go on. Say, “no,” and in the next breath, encourage the person to convince you that what he or she is proposing is the right course.

Or, go the other way. Tell the person that you have an idea and you want him or her to be comfortable saying “no” to you. Promise the person that he or she won’t hurt your feelings.

In either case, you will see results instantly.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Walter Oelwein on lessons for life learned from Zelda.

Walter is one of my colleagues at Microsoft, and he knows his stuff.  What’s his stuff?  Performance improvement.  Walter focuses on improving performance through systems, skills, and tools to get results.

Walter has more than 15 years experience as a management and performance consultant,  where he improved business and strategic planning skills at the individual, team, and organizational level at places like Microsoft and Nintendo.  Walter also has a varied background with a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature, a Bachelor’s in English, and he has been a student of philosophy in Paris.

What intrigued me the most is what Walter learned from the game, The Legend of Zelda, and what we could apply to life.  So I asked Walter if he could share his gems of insight with the readers of Sources of Insight.

Without further ado, here’s Walter on life lessons learned from Zelda …

I like to joke that, at one point in my career, I was the “The World’s Greatest Zelda Theorist”. Back when I worked at Nintendo of America, I had the awesome job of training the Game Play Counselors, the people who would help you get unstuck in your game via phone support. Yes, this was before game walkthroughs were commonly available on the Internet.

As the Game Play Trainer, it was important to understand the structural underpinnings of 2000+ games that we provided support on, and, of course, in the gaming world nothing matches The Legend of Zelda games for its structural elegance in creating a gradually unfolding adventure. Zelda games were also, by far, the game that drove the most call volume.

So every Game Play Counselor needed to know Zelda. So I developed a module in the training program called “Zelda Theory” and taught it over and over again to the waves of intrepid newbies joining the mysterious elite known as Game Play Counselors. Once you knew your Zelda theory, you could effectively translate the theory into effective game play counseling, not just on Zelda games, but on any adventure game.

That is how important Zelda is.

I was proud of my Zelda Theory. The thousands of calls we took that helped people get unstuck provided ongoing practical application of Zelda Theory to the incoming slew of Zelda players who needed to know where to find that last heart piece or which item was to be used to get out of a dungeon room. It was applied Zelda Theory.

So proud was I of my Zelda Theory, that I mustered the courage to tell the great Shigeru Miyamoto, while he was on a visit to Nintendo of America’s headquarters, that I was the “World’s Greatest Zelda Theorist.” He listened, and did not dispute this wild and impossible to confirm claim. Yes!

After amusingly recounting this anecdote with J.D. Meier, he asked me to write this article, “Life Lessons from Zelda.” I guess that when you claim to be the world’s greatest Zelda Theorist, this is the kind of assignment you get. So here goes.

Quick Overview of Zelda Theory

Now, the core of my Zelda Theory was developed for Game Play Counseling purposes. This is not to be confused with Zelda Timeline Theory, which attempts to construct a coherent timeline of the different adventures and improve the narrative cohesion of the series. My Zelda Theory draws significantly from the critical approach of Structuralism, which examines an underlying (or overlaying) structure to understand the greater whole in a system — in The Legend Zelda’s case, that’s Hyrule.

In Structuralism, the use of binary oppositions informs the structural elements. In Zelda Theory, the key binary opposition that must be understood is the distinction between the “overworld” and the “underworld”.

The overworld is a single connected world that provides access to several distinct underworlds.

In Hyrule, Link explores the overworld in a seemingly haphazard manner until he gains focus on what the main task is – go into the underworld (either a dungeon or palace), pick up a key item that grants Link a new skill, and defeat the boss that adds to his lifeline (heart piece). The item obtained will open up new sections of overworld, and the quest-style adventure continues.

Once you know that the overworld is for exploring, and the underworld is for focused action, you now have the core understanding of Zelda Structuralist Theory.

I could go into other Zelda Theory, like Zelda Psychoanalytic Theory (seminal text: The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, with it’s strong themes on dreams and Link’s unconscious) but that doesn’t have the same immediate practical application of Zelda Structuralist Theory.

So now our key life lesson from Zelda Theory: There’s a time for exploring, and a time for focused action.

Overworld Ethos

The Legend of Zelda games teaches us that when you first start, you know very little about the world, and it is best to just wander around and talk to people, pick up pots and throw them against the wall, and cut down bushes in hopes of finding rupees (money). You may also get refills of your magic, bombs, and arrows.

Fine, so real life doesn’t really net money and other weaponry when you cut down bushes haphazardly (so this is decidedly not a life lesson from Zelda), but what this does teach is that it is OK to just wander and explore – get to know people who may help you out, and soon you will get an idea for what is important to you and you can create specific goals. You will also pick up inventory in the process.

So don’t forget life in the “overworld” – it is a key phase that one must return to on an ongoing basis – a time for discovery, exploration, opening new parts of Hyrule. Use your new skill to explore the edges, and you’ll discover new things and have new adventures that will get your further on your quest – but in an exploratory, unfocused, and less risky manner where people are available to help.

In the overworld, the elements are: Talk to people, wander around, try new things, listen, and gradually gain focus on what to do next.

Underworld Ethos

But life isn’t only an “overworld”; there is also an underworld. Zelda Theory teaches us that in an underworld, there are very specific actions and goals. At the most basic level, Zelda Theory teaches us that there are Items to be found and Bosses to be defeated. There’s always that focus. When you go into a palace or dungeon (an “underworld”), you have specific tasks with limited resources:

The task: Get the item, then defeat the boss (a structural consistency across all Zelda games).

The resources: Your existing inventory of items and knowledge of how to apply them, limited heart pieces, limited magic, limited arrows, limited bombs, no keys, and no map.

So prior to going into the underworld, max out on the resources you can get – do not go in with half of your heart pieces filled or a half-filled quiver of arrows. Also, make sure you remind yourself what the items you have in your inventory can do – Zelda games do an excellent job of requiring that you apply your recently acquired knowledge and items – better than any other game series, ever. When in the underworld, the focus continues: If you find something in an underworld, like a map or key, you use it in that same underworld. There’s definitely an opportunistic element of the underworld experience!

Explore with a Focus on Getting Further

During this focus period of “getting something done” in the underworld, you still need to explore, but it is done under duress – increasing amounts of enemies, escalating puzzles, a dwindling lifeline, quickly-shutting doors. So you must manage your resources, take risks, and master each successive room. You may need to exit the underworld and replenish. But you aren’t going out to the overworld to wander around, as before, but to use the less stressful time to recharge.

Once back in, get focused and battle – Zelda games require that you apply your recently acquired skills. What was the last item you obtained? You most likely need to use it in a new and creative way – either to get further into the dungeon, or to defeat the boss. This may take a few tries.

Apply Your Collective Knowledge on What Works

It’s easy to get stuck in a Zelda underworld. The first lesson to apply here is to “try everything” (that worked before). When exploring an underworld in Zelda, you must first defeat all enemies (unless they can’t be defeated, like the pesky laser turrets in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past), and then apply your full repertoire to try to open the door to the next room. Depending on the Zelda game, this could include the following:

1. Defeat all enemies
2. Push on walls
3. Push on all blocks (from all angles)
4. Pick up and throw blocks/pots
5. Step on switches/push or pull levers
6. But most importantly – look at what you have recently learned, and try applying that to the situation.

If you got the Hookshot recently, you need to select it from your inventory and try it. It could help you get across that chasm that was impossible before. The same goes for the boss. Got the Bow and Arrow recently? Try that on the Boss.

In later underworlds, you will probably need to use a combination of your items in creative ways – Create a block with the Cane of Somaria, throw it over the chasm, and use the Hookshot to latch onto it and you are now on the other side.

Celebrate Achieving Your Goals and Reflect on What You have Learned

Once you have achieved your goal in an underworld (you have obtained the item and defeated the boss) you are now stronger (with an extra heart), have new skills, and you should take a moment to celebrate. That’s a good life lesson.

Now take the newly acquired skills and apply it back to the overworld with general, unfocused exploration. You will meet new people learn new things by just talking, and eventually arrive at the next focused task. But what’s the hurry? The overworld experience informs the underworld experience, and vice versa.

Key Binary Oppositions in Hyrule

So Zelda Theory teaches us that there is value in both the overworld and underworld experience, even though they have opposite qualities:

Overworld: Singular, Expansive, Unfocused, exploratory, “light”, unthreatening, replenishing, upbeat

Underworld: Multiple, Limited, Focused, clear objectives, “dark”, depleting, somber

You need to be creative in both phases, but there is value in the different modes of learning. Precisely because of the “darker” elements of the underworld(s) in Zelda, this is where skills are stretched the most. But you also need time in the overworld. Don’t forget that, or else you will always be “in the weeds”, where it is always dark and you will be defeated.

Always Learning

You are always learning in Zelda, whether in the overworld or underworld. In fact, the only time one is considered “stuck” is when you have stopped learning. And a common way to be “stuck” is not applying to your adventure the things you have most recently acquired. So Zelda teaches us to keep learning and exploring and acquiring new skills, and it can be done by either exploration or by focused action with objectives, and is best done when you apply a combination of both.

Zelda has tons of life lessons, as does Zelda Theory! This only scratches the surface as the Zelda universe and accompanying theory possibilities are huge. I hope you have enjoyed this introduction to Game Play Counseling’s intro to Zelda Theory, and how it applies to life!

Image by Walter Guru Larry.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Rob Boucher on his lessons in love. I’ve worked with Rob for many years at Microsoft, and he was one of my early mentors. Rob is more than a colleague. He is a good friend, and one of the most insightful people I know.

In the spirit of Valentine’s day, I asked Rob to write a special guest post on the best lessons he learned in love. I asked him to put down on paper, the most insightful lessons on love that he now knows, that he wish he knew back when he was starting out in life.

Rob delivered. And he dives deep. His insights are powerful on multiple levels. No matter how much you already know about love, you are sure to find some new ideas, fresh perspectives, and brilliant “ah-has” that you can use in your own life, or share with someone you know.

Rob’s post is organized in three main sections: lessons in love, ways to grow, and an approach for fear and wounds. I think you will find each section to be an incredible gift, as Rob shares his lessons of the heart, from the heart, in a very raw and real way.

Without further ado, here is Rob on what he learned about love …

I’ve been through a lot in my lifetime with love.  Valentine’s day brings the concept of love to the forefront, but I know that in my past I’ve been confused about what love really is and is not.

Our heart knows what love is, but the messages from society have often diluted our inner wisdom, at times even misleading us entirely. What we believe about love will greatly affect our experience of it.

I came from a place of need and trying to make people love me into a place where I understand what’s happening and can more readily flow in life. As I’ve gotten better, I can open more and more and even handle complexities of love that I couldn’t before.

12 Lessons Learned in Love

The following is a list of some of the learnings that have helped me over the years.  This is what I wish someone had told me while I was growing up.  While at first it might seems that all this kills the fun of love, I’ve found that it actually frees me to have more fun because I understand the mechanisms of how I feel loved and I can love others.

Lesson #1 – Love vs. Fear. Don’t Confuse Them.

Ultimately, we have the ability to choose between these two. The most succinct contrast I’ve seen is
“Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hordes, harms. Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals. Fear wraps our bodies in clothing, love allows us to stand naked. Fear clings to and clutches all that we have, love gives all that we have away. Fear holds close, love holds dear, Fear grasps, love lets go. Fear rankles, love soothes, Fear attacks, love amends.”

Lesson #2 – Separate Love from Need and Wanting.

Ignore popular culture.  Separate love from need and wanting.  Do not confuse these even though songs, TV, and literature often make them the same. They are not.

1. Need is the belief that you cannot possibly live without that someone or something.
2. Wanting is the belief that you do not have something and the desire to obtain it.  When you grasping for a want, you are saying it’s a need. e.g. “Please don’t leave me. I can’t live without you”.

I say belief here because I’ve noticed that in changing my mind about what I need, some things have fallen away. They were never needs or wants at all. I was after something else that I thought that the want or need would bring me. Like asking for a soda because I was thirsty and only after realizing that soda actually dehydrates me in the long run.

Certainly attraction is part of love, but when you start to grasp and become desperate, you’ve left the realm of love. You simply cannot force or manipulate someone into loving you. Wanting is fine in that it can expose our desires and motivations, but if you have an expectation that your wants will always be fulfilled, you are crossing the line into need. The more you need from another, less you can truly love them.  You are generating your internal energy and well-being from trying to control your outside world.

Controlling the outside world is always a struggle. You end up running your life like it’s a juggling match, trying to arrange it so all your needs and wants can be met. How are you going to love someone if they do not show up how you need them too? You get bitter, resentful, or at the least, drained. Naturally, you will fear losing the outside source of your well-being and you attempt to control the other person(s). This suffocates your relationship(s) over time. Confusing love and need leads to mistaken ideas like jealously is love, drama in a relationship is love, codependence is love, love hurts, and other such confusion. While these are common and normal, they are not at all related to love.

Love is NOT need.

Lesson #3 – There is Only So Much Love to Go Around.

This is a fear based idea. There may be limited time or resources to spend on people, but when you give love to one person, you don’t have less to give to another.  If anything, I’ve found that it can increase your capacity to love elsewhere. Jealousy is our ego saying “I’m not getting enough” . This should be addressed in the relationship by accepting it, loving it and then moving on from it. Concentrate on what you want to create with the other person and who they are being with you vs what else they are doing with their time or energy. Get out of the scarcity mentality.

Lesson #4 – Unconditional Love. No Conditions. Not trading.

Give to empower with the birthday present model   Unconditional love means “love without condition”. Much of this confusion can come from religious beliefs since many tell us that we have to meet some criteria for “the Creator” to love us.  Entertain that it’s possible to love someone without conditions and the more whole you are, the more that’s possible. Most of us have rarely experienced that because of the confusion with love and need.

Unconditional love can only be given when the giver is not dependent on the other person for something.  The givers love has to be generated internally. It follows that true love is freely given without requirement or expectation. It’s a gift. This doesn’t mean the giver doesn’t have needs as well, but a giver can remove the expectation of receiving when they give. Do not turn “I love you very much” into “I trade you very much”. If as the giver you are getting drained, then concentrate on what will give you energy. Don’t demand that that energy come from your lover.  Ask for it, but don’t demand it.  If you are tired of giving, stop and recharge. If you notice the giving is disempowering someone and making them more dependent, stop giving and help them to learn to meet their own needs.

I try to remember this by thinking about getting or giving a birthday present. I give with no strings attached and I try to give what the other person says they want. It is easier if they tell me what  they want instead of my trying to guess, but I’m willing to try either way. That gift should mean something to them, not necessarily to me. The other person may throw the gift out, that’s fine. I draw energy in that I gave. Then if I need something myself and I don’t get it for my birthday, I go out and buy it for myself. I encourage the other person to do the same and not rely on me to give them everything they want.  This frees everyone up to receive and to give without putting expectations into the picture. We don’t expect to get our basic needs met on our birthday. I’m not going to rely on someone to feed me via birthday presents.

Lesson # 5 – Fearful Protection is Only Necessary Because of Our Needs and Wounds.

Heal them and you reduce the need to protect yourself. As mentioned in point 1, love expands and opens itself. What about being hurt? Where does that come from? That’s pretty common in our close relationships. If someone physically hurts us, that’s a bodily response. But most of the pain around love in relationships starts or remains in the emotional area.

I’ve used the model of “emotional wounds” in myself. It makes it easier to think about what I should do because it seems more obvious if I had a physical wound. When someone touches an emotional wound in me, it’s like they’ve brushed up against an open wound on my skin. It hurts.  We are hurt when someone reinforces judgments we may suspect about ourselves. Those judgments show up as our wounds.

Use caution, but not fear. Caution here means that you realize that you have these sensitivities and you don’t needlessly expose them and get hurt. Fear would mean you are in a constant state of dread that someone will hit them and so you run away or seal up.

If you suspect that someone is likely to reject you, factor that in to how you proceed. Caution acknowledges natural consequences. You want to play football, but you’ve got a wound. So you put on a band-aid or even a plastic covering taking into account the environment you are entering.

However, when the need to protect yourself or another comes along with anger and emotional drama, it’s from fear. When there is a desire for retribution, that’s fear. Often when we open up, we at the same time fear that another will not.  Others behavior can inform you. It doesn’t have to hurt.  You can actually be open and not be hurt. The hurt comes from needing another to return that same feeling, thus proving you are lovable. If you believe that you are lovable, this is not a problem. You simply move on to those where you can express love and receive it back.

Lesson # 6 – The More Needs You Have About How Someone is Supposed to Show Up, the More You Have to Protect Yourself.

Personally, I make it okay that my mate can change her mind about what she wants in the future and so can I. This allows for growth.  The less you give yourself from the inside, the more requirements you have about how others show up. The more you love and accept yourself, the less necessary it is to protect those inner parts and you don’t resist change.

Lesson # 7 – Ultimately, Love Lets Go.

If you’ve followed what’s above, then you understand that “needing” and “grasping” is fear based.  When you don’t need as much, you can see that you can continue to love people even when their wants and desire conflict with yours.

Lesson # 8 – Be Dedicated to the Quality of Your Relationship, Not its Longevity.

We all know people who probably should not be together because the energy they create together is toxic to them and/or those around them. If you concentrate on how to heal yourself, meet your own needs,  and make your relationship healthy, you may either stay together or separate.  One is not better than the other.  If you figure out how to be healthy and stay together, your relationship deepens to the next level and you have a greater capacity for trust and intimacy. If it does not, you may separate, but you will not have the bitter, no holds barred, damaging divorces that seem to happen on a regular basis. These are caused by needs and expectations. You may separate with or without sadness, but never malice. You may actually find that your love relationship with that person still grows. The love doesn’t (have to) go away. The relationship just changes.

Lesson # 9 – Love Another as Yourself, not Instead Of, or More Than.

A misinterpretation of the ethic of giving has led people to believe they can love themselves only through others. “Love your neighbor as yourself” means keep the two as equal as possible. “Love your neighbor and yourself” “would be a better translation to me. When giving progressively drains you over time, you are not giving from a sustainable place. Eventually, you give yourself away and then there is nothing left.  Love considers the well- being of those doing the loving.

Lesson # 10 – Reject the “Complete Me” Model. Think Three, not One.

Don’t try to be one person with your mate.  This leads to a belief of needing another to be whole. Relationships change and move. Have you, your mate, and the relationship.  Think of a relationship as something you both have to feed with time and energy. When one person doesn’t want to be in the relationship anymore, then it affect two parts, but it doesn’t take you with it. You let go and you are intact.

Lesson # 11 – Understand the Difference.

Understand the difference between intimacy, connection, infatuation, lust, touch, sex, nurturing and love. Be clear on what you are trying to experience. Most people fold these all together in some way.  It’s not that these things can’t go together with love or enhance it, the same way the food in a recipe comes together to make something greater than the whole. But if you think that milk and eggs are the same and then you keep adding more eggs to a recipe, you are going to come out with something that’s not likely to taste good. In the same way, your relationship will seem like something is missing or you have too much of something.  Later in this post, I go through definitions of each of these and how to draw distinctions.

And don’t expect your desires to matches your mates. You are two different people.  There has to be some overlap obviously, but respect that people have different tastes and so want different proportions in their recipes.

Lesson # 12 – What Makes Us “Feel Loved” Varies.

Lesson #11 doesn’t include every possibility of course.  Feeling loved often boils down to a set of attributes like those listed in lesson #11.  When you experience them with your lover, you naturally become closer.

We each have our love languages. There is even a book called “The 5 Love Languages”. Take the time to figure this out and express it to your mate. Don’t make your mate responsible for figuring it out.

4 Ways to Grow in Life and Love

I’ve grown from my experiences.    I’ve learned a lot of lessons the hard way.  I continue to grow.   That’s just it though … It really is a journey.   Here are some ways that I’ve learned to grow throughout my journey:

Way to Grow #1 – Be Aware and Look Inside.

Our motivations are often mixed. Pay attention to how you are feeling. If you pay attention (be aware), you see more about what is driving you. Your body and indeed your heart will feel like it’s opening or contracting. Accept when you are coming from fear and look at what you think you need. With more awareness comes the ability to choose your response and avoid behaviors that feed painful relationship drama. Actions like bullying, threatening, verbal attacks, name calling, passive aggressive behaviors, etc, fall away as you see they are not effective and add to the contraction of both parties.  Your inner compass will naturally start want to make decisions from love and your inner stability will not be based on the other persons feelings or reactions.

Way to Grow #2 – Own Your Emotions, Actions, and Needs

You slowly dissolve need by realizing you aren’t always going to get what you want from other people. You take responsibility for your own emotions, actions and the ability to meet your own needs, even if not fully. You work to find the right people who can give you what you desire. My wife likes to say “You can’t get bread at Radio Shack”. No matter how much you jump up and down and scream, it’s not going to happen.

Try expressing that you do not need something and see what happens. Ultimately all needs are a strategy for us to feel peaceful and complete. We may have a belief that we have to do something to be someone and feel complete, but in truth the other way around is more effective. Be someone, feel complete and have your doing flow from that. If I’m loving and lovable, how would I express that? How would I feel? Would I be what I’m doing now?

Is it not wrong to need things or someone, but be clear on the difference. I still need my wife, but I’m slowly removing those needs by healing myself. And the point of decision comes when you can’t get that need met anymore. Do you hold on or do you shift and readjust? Get more support from around you. Don’t place all your needs on your mate. Note that you don’t actually need drama to feel passion. There are other healthier ways to create the tension and release cycle that many people get addicted to. Instill the belief that everyone is worthy of being loved, and start with loving yourself.

Also, find out what is not negotiable in yourself. Be careful and pick as few things as possible. For example, I made it clear to my wife that if I had to choose between music and her, music would win because it’s such a part of me. That means being able to listen to it, play it, etc. I chose someone who respected and appreciated that need, even though it may not be “real” in the sense that I may transcend it at some point. I only learned this was a non-negotiable part of me by expressing that I did not need it and seeing what happened inside myself.   I started to wither and be less happy.

However, other things I thought I needed have fallen away just from changing my belief or as I’ve obtained them and realized that I wanted something else. I’ve had attachment to how someone is supposed to look, act, jobs, feelings, etc. Now I’m more careful about what I say I need. Need leads to greed, since I need this is often a justification to take it at whatever cost. I ask myself questions when I say that I do need something. What am I trying to experience through this need?

Way to Grow # 3 – Have You, Your Mate, and the Relationship.

Make this principle more important than staying together. It’s okay for things to be going badly, but notice their general direction and get help to make sure you are resolving your issues. Be wary of conflicting values and don’t make the other person wrong for having a different way of relating or different needs. Recognize the general societal reward for the longevity of a relationship over its quality (“we’ve been together 50 years” <clapping> ) and remind yourself that’s not the best measure.

Way to Grow # 4 – Get Clear on What Characteristics You are After

Earlier I talked about how people can confuse many different characteristics with love.  Get clear on what you are after. Put yourself in different situations, even if only in your mind to find out what you are really after.  If I had this, but not that, would I be getting what I want? You may not be sure or you may be. Either way you learn something.  Understand that certain aspects are short-lived and may be inherently unstable in that they put your energy outside yourself. That is, you are basing how you feel largely on your interaction with another person.

• Intimacy – Best said by separating the word – “Into me you see”. This implies transparency and honesty with yourself and another. It does NOT mean that what you see will be pleasant.  Seeing your mate on the toilet or struggling after surgery is as intimate as is knowing their deepest wishes, dreams and pains. Usually, people can only handle a certain level of intimacy. It stops at the point when they find something in someone else that they are not comfortable with and they resist it.  Test if this is what you want by asking yourself if seeing things that are undesirable or even painful still somehow make you feel closer. If you do, you are likely after intimacy. If not, then you are after something else.
• Connection – The feeling you get that you and someone else are close and safe in that closeness. This doesn’t require intimacy, as is often evidenced by people being able to tell total strangers things they wouldn’t tell their own mate. Certain drugs have been known to create this feeling as well, even when a person is not connected or even safe. One can feel connected and not be. One can be connected and not feel it, as evidenced when people who are loved and cared about commit suicide.  Ultimately, I believe that we can all tie into a spiritual form of connection with ourselves, but it’s something I’ve only glimpsed at this point. Since this is partially about safety, acceptance seems related in my experience.
• Attraction – The desire to be around someone or something. Usually due to some sort of shared interest or appreciate for a quality that another shows that we value. Things like beauty, talent or a certain skill, a manner of being.
• Infatuation – Attraction with an emotional component that’s usually addictive at some level and fed by the novelty of the experience. This is typical in the early parts of a relationship when we can project who we want a person to be in all the places where we don’t really know them. We assume the best. Unstable and likely to dissipate over time because the novelty subsides and intimacy grows.  A friend of mine calls this “New Relationship Energy”.  Most people mistake infatuation for “falling in love”.  This can be extended when the infatuated person doesn’t ever really get to know the object of his or her infatuation. You become sort of an obsessed fan of the other person.
• Lust – Much like infatuation, but focuses on physicality and/or sexual energy of another.  Also likely to dissipate over time as novelty subsides.
• Touch – Physically touching someone. This can be pleasurable to most people (regardless of gender) and may be more  desired by some people vs others. Touch is not sex. Touch a pet, cuddle a child or baby or even a person of the gender you are not attracted to and you’ll start to make this separation.
• Nurturing – Giving your presence and energy to another to provide safety and encourage them to grow.
• Sex – The feeding and release of sexual energy. I use the word energy here because you can have sex with someone and never experience any of the other items above. I can feel this difference, though it’s easy to get it mixed up with other things. I found that when I started to experiment with the other items in this list, 80% of what I was after was actually not sex. This was the beginning of my understanding that these are different characteristics.
• Love – love doesn’t require any of this, though it may be expressed through one or more of these characteristics. I’m sure you can find times in your personal experience where one or more of these qualities was not present and you still loved that person. During the times when you are most loving someone, you may not feel any of the above. At that time, love is an action. It’s a choice where you use the energy you get from other sources to give to whom you are loving. During those times, it’s most important to keep track of your internal energy and balancing loving yourself with loving another.   I’ve had this experience several times. When your mate is in a coma on a respirator, they can’t give you anything. Similar experience can occur due to other traumas or the slow decline of a relationship.

Some common patterns that happen where the confusion between these items shows itself.

• Falling in love and then not lasting long.  A relationship starts based on lust or infatuation, which naturally dissipate over time. People say they “fall out of love”. If they think that initial spark is love, then they have nothing to transition to. Even the concept of “falling in love” implies they have no control and it’s created from outside themselves.
• Trying to get intimacy from sex.
• Resisting sex – A mate resists sex because they are not getting what they need through it.
• Trying to meet non-sexual needs with porn – Not going to work of course, but it’s common to keep trying and get addicted because they aren’t clear what they actually want or need.
• Belief that lust is love – A person feels that their love is based on the physical beauty of their mate. When that fades, so does their love.
• The Cinderella fairy tale -   Someone will come to love and save me. We live happily ever after.  We never experience a time when either of us doesn’t feel loved by the other.

A Model for Fear and Wounds

Fear and wounds can hold us back.   I’ve had to learn to deal with fear and to heal my wounds of the past.  I use this model which works for me.

• People are going to hit your wounds. Expect this. You can’t be intimate and not hit them at least once. Eventually as you get more intimate, someone will hit these wounds and you’ll react, but they won’t know what’s going on. So the trick is to own them as where you are right now and then heal them. My belief is that all wounds can be healed, though I’ve had to work decades on some.
• Own your wounds. Don’t make others wrong for hitting them. Own them as something created from your past.
  Teach people how to be sensitive. If you had a broken arm and you were going on a hike, you’d have to tell someone and give them some advice of what you can and cannot do.
• Heal it. Believe that you can. Own it and then transcend it. Don’t assume that the wound is there for life.

With this model, it makes more sense how to act:

• Wound from past? You can see how life is different now and the wound left over.
• Wound happening in present? If your life is not different, then you can take action.  Change your beliefs, thoughts, behaviors and who you interact with so you are not continually wounding yourself or letting other wound you.  Don’t stay in situations or mental states that keep you wounded or create new ones. If someone is really trying to hurt us (including ourselves), this reinforces the wound and keeps the sensitivity cycle going.
• Get good at healing and you don’t have to protect. Remember Wolverine in the X-Men? He can heal almost instantly? When you can heal faster, you don’t have to protect as much.
• Accept that pain doesn’t mean something is wrong. It’s information. When you feel pain, you can follow that down to where you are wounded if you ask questions. If you run away from the pain, you cannot find the source and you stay wounded. It’s like taking a drug for a headache, covering up that you have a brain tumor. Also, pain can be part of the healing process. You can also evaluate if another is trying to help you with emotional equivalent of physical therapy. It may hurt, but it’s for the intention of healing. The intention makes a difference.
• Have caution around the formation of new wounds. In my case, my now wife has almost died 5 times over the past 9 years. I hadn’t had a wound around death and in this case I was consciousness enough to keep a deep one from forming.   Otherwise, I’d run around being afraid of that happening again, thus removing my ability to connect with her while she’s alive and taking a lot of energy to heal it. It did affect me, but I went through most pain in the moment vs. continually for months or years after.  I’ve also watched over time as commercials try to generate new wounds (wants) in myself around the size of my penis or how much hair I have on my head.  While these may be actual factors that people use to choose (which is fine), they have nothing to do with if you are lovable or not. Appreciate yourself and be the person you like. Then find someone who appreciates what you like about you.
• Be careful of mislabeling wounds in others.  A drawback of this model is that you may label a wound in someone else inappropriately.  Use this on yourself and keep it in mind for others, but be careful of boxing them into your way of thinking. You telling them who they are can be what’s causing them to be wounded.

Those are my lessons, my ways to grow, and my model for fear and wounds.  While we each have to learn our own language for love, and go on our own personal journeys, I hope that my lessons help you see your own love life in some new and helpful way.

Photo by Julien Haler.

Editor’s note:  This is a guest post from Carolyn Elliot on how to read poetry to expand your heart.

Carolyn is author of the book  Awesome Your Life: The Artist’s Antidote to Suffering Genius.   She won several awards for playwriting, fiction, and poetry, fresh out of high-school, and later, taught the courses Reading Poetry and Literature and the Contemporary. She is well read, and some of her favorite authors include Dickinson, Emerson, Goethe, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Neruda, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Whitman. Carolyn did her undergraduate work in Creative Writing and English at Carnegie Mellon University, and in her dissertation, she investigated the relationship of literature to the soul as it is imagined in romantic aesthetics.

Given her background and passion, I asked Carolyn if she could tackle the following challenge:
How can anyone, without a poetry background, get started with poetry as a source of inspiration and insight in their day to day?

The result is a powerful recipe below for awakening your senses and dipping your toe into the evocative pool of poetry.  Without further ado, here is Carolyn …

Poetry isn’t just for folks in tweed jackets with leather elbow patches.  The greatest poetry is language infused with the wisdom of a powerful heart.  If we learn how to read that great poetry well, we can let that infusion soak into us and transform our own perception for the better.  Reading poetry sensitively can be a spiritual practice that gradually alters our consciousness so that we see our world with vast insight and love.

The mode of encountering poetry that most facilitates heart-expansion isn’t the kind of technical, critical reading that’s taught in most English classes (“The caesura in line 8 creates a tension that magnifies the alliteration within the ABDDC rhyme scheme, highlighting the hendiadys that follows in line 10….”).  That kind of reading can be interesting if you’re already a balls-to-the-wall poetry buff and you want to “get under the hood” of a poem.  But most of us don’t want to tinker with the engine of a fantastic car.  We just want to drive it.

The way to “drive” a wonderful poem so that it opens you up is through contemplative reading.  In contemplative reading, we meet a poem via our intuition and imagination rather than our analytic brain.

To get a feel for contemplative reading, try this exercise (I’ve used it with my Reading Poetry students at the University of Pittsburgh for years to great effect):

Entering the Aether

Select a poem that you want to meet deeply.  For those just starting out, I suggest the opening pages of “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman, “Ode to a Lemon” by Pablo Neruda, and “I Dwell in Possibility” by Emily Dickinson.

For the purpose of this example, we’ll use a magnificent lyric, “The Orchard” by H.D.  Sit comfortably with the poem within easy-reading reach.  Read the poem once, not bothering to “figure it out,” just getting a sense of what’s there.

Now close your eyes.  Settle in by breathing deeply and slowly.  Imagine that you see swirling all around you a very fine, very silvery substance called aether.  Aether is the material of the imagination and spirit, thought to be a basic element by classical and medieval philosophers.  The aether is fluid like silk, and moves around you in spiraling eddies.

The aether is extremely sensitive.  Whatever words or images you bring to it, it will amplify by means of all the senses and emotions available.  In a moment, you’ll bring a line from your poem into the aether, and the aether will respond by creating visions, sounds, scents, touches and feelings.  You might see whole scenes unfold.  You might hear music.  What you experience may or may not directly relate to the words you bring in.  The aether offers its response from a place of deep wisdom beyond the conscious mind.

Bring into the aether the first lines of the poem, “The Orchard”: “I saw the first pear / as it fell.”

Now close your eyes again and observe how the aether responds to just these lines.  What do you see? What do you hear? What do you feel?  Sit in contemplation for a few moments, allowing the aether to fully unfold its response to these lines.

After observing the response of the aether to your satisfaction, write down what you witnessed in terms of every bodily sense.

Here are responses my students have recorded:

“I caught a scent of lemon mixed with black coffee, and felt overwhelmed.”

“I saw Versailles, with rows of round pear trees and a huge blue sky.”

“I saw Adam and Eve under the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden.”

“I saw a giant primeval forest, with a huge pear falling slowly, bursting with juice.  I heard the sound of quick-beating drums.”

“I felt a woman’s cold hand on my shoulder.”

You’ll notice that some of these responses pertain directly to the words of the poem, and some don’t.  That’s perfect.  The point is not to find what the lines “mean” but instead to discover what they do.

Repeat this process of bringing lines from the poem into the aether, observing the aether’s response and writing it down until you complete the poem or until you feel full (like you’ve eaten all you want from a delicious meal).

The wonder of this mode of reading is that it requires no background knowledge, no technical terms, no “expertise” at poetry.  And yet again and again, I find that when my students partake of it, they intuitively and immediately discover all the rich mythological and historical resonances that a poem has to offer, often finding more depth than the most highly-trained critics offer in their essays on the same poem.

Reading contemplatively by entering the aether with a poem gives you a way to create a meeting space between the wisdom of poetry and the wisdom of your own imagination.  Over time, this practice of reading feeds your deep self and renders you capable of seeing from your calm heart rather than your frantic mind.  It accomplishes what the great poet John Keats called the work of “soul-making,” a process of being able to discern the profound truth beneath disturbing appearances, so that bliss rather than worry becomes your default experience.

Love!

Carolyn

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by best selling author, Lisa McCourt.  Lisa is here on Sources of Insight to share with you insightful and actionable steps to be comfortable in your own skin.

If you don’t know Lisa, you’re in for a treat.  Lisa specializes on the topic of self-love and her books on unconditional love have sold more than five and a half million copies.  Lisa’s latest book, Juicy Joy –  Seven Simple Steps to Your Glorious Gutsy Self is all about leading a life that is rich, real, and powerfully satisfying, while embracing your biggest, gutsiest, and most authentic self.  It’s you, at YOUR best.

I asked Lisa to write a guest post to share her best lessons learned on how to be comfortable in your own skin because of her personal experience.   I’m a fan of people sharing what they have learned the hard way or what they have had to work at.  It’s always deeper and more meaningful.   Most of all, it’s keeping it real.

Whether or not you are already comfortable in your own skin, I think you’ll really enjoy this post.  I’m impressed with Lisa’s ability to distill and share such pragmatic wisdom on the fine art of loving yourself, flaws and all.  This is more than a beautiful piece of prose.  It’s life wisdom that you can use to live a little better every day.

Without further ado, here’s Lisa with her top ten lessons learned on how to be comfortable in your own skin …

Imagine being blissfully comfortable in your own skin, knowing with the utmost clarity exactly who you are and feeling eager to lovingly, proudly share that authentic you with the world. Imagine being perpetually sustained by an inner source of joy—not the smiley, fluffy kind of happiness we sometimes associate with the word “joy,” but the rich, meaty, substantial flavor of joy that comes with extraordinary self-knowledge and self-appreciation. That’s the vantage point I want for you. From that vantage point, in the words of Franz Kafka, “the world will offer itself freely to you. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

In uber-consolidated nutshell fashion, here are the top 10 ways to be comfortable in your own skin:

1. Get real.

Do the work to get clear about who you are—not just who you routinely consider yourself to be, the person you habitually show the world—but who you are in the deepest recesses of your authentic heart and soul.

The word “authenticity” is misunderstood sometimes. People think of it as a virtue, like honesty . . . like you owe the world your authenticity and you should feel bad if you’re not authentic. That’s not the case. I’m not suggesting you should become more authentic because it will make you a better person—you already are a phenomenal person. I’m telling you that becoming more authentic is your golden ticket—to joy, to success, to vibrant health and energy, to easily manifesting the life of your dreams. It’s every bit that transformative. You’re not doing this to better serve the world; you’re doing it to better serve you. But—happy bonus!—it happens to be the best way to serve your loved ones and the world as well.

2. Adore YOU.

If you’ve been on a personal development path for a while, I’m probably not the first to suggest that you need to love yourself. But I’m surprised to discover how often my students don’t really seem to know why I’m so insistent on that point. Are you tired of hearing about how you need to love yourself more? Does the thought of it feel kind of like of a burden—one more thing to check off your To-Do list? Does the whole concept feel a bit worn-out and cliché? Maybe you just need to understand what’s in it for you.

Self-love is the fastest route to literally anything you want right now. Money, love, health, romance . . . it all hinges on your level of self-love. The circumstances of your life are always providing you a crystal-clear, precisely accurate measure of how much you love yourself and what you believe you deserve. All you can ever create is what you believe you’re worthy of experiencing. It’s an immutable energetic law. That’s why elevating self-love is the not-so-secret path to elevating everything else.

3. Trust your wants.

Stop trying to justify and rationalize your most heartfelt desires. Your desires are the clearest indicator of who you are. Denying them is denying you. No one needs to understand why you want what you want. You don’t even need to understand it yourself. Just trust it, and trust yourself to manifest it. The reason you don’t already have everything you want is crazy-simple. You don’t love yourself enough yet to deeply believe that you deserve everything you want. My students argue that sometimes, but they always discover it’s true. You might even believe, on a conscious level, that you do deserve a certain thing, but I promise you that if you were fully, wholly believing you deserved it—even in the cobwebby corners of your unconscious belief system—it would already be in your life.

4. Stop trying to vanquish the “bad stuff.”

And stop whining about it, too. Celebrate our unwanted circumstances because there’s so much valuable information for us in them. Get clear on why your unwanted circumstances are here and why you created them. Then use them as a springboard. Once you can start genuinely thanking “the bad stuff”, it’s pretty easy to move past it.

5. Take responsibility.

Own every last drop of everything you’ve ever created. We’re so conditioned to blame our unwanted circumstances on other people, or on the “system” or the world . . . What if it’s really all within your control? Taking full responsibility for the life you’ve created for yourself and the life you’re in the process of creating is hugely empowering. But it requires first getting uber-honest to a degree that’s terrifying for most people. Don’t be “most people.” Understanding that you alone are holding the reins on your life is the first critical step toward learning how to operate them.

6. Stop tolerating.

Tolerating is slow emotional suicide. It sucks the life out of you, drains your energy, numbs you, depletes you, and keeps you immobilized. There’s no reason for you to ever tolerate anything. We sometimes confuse tolerating with accepting—we all know it’s good to accept the things we can’t change, right? If we make very clear distinctions between what can be changed and what can’t, then it’s astounding the kinds of life-altering adjustments people are able to easily, joyfully make when they understand the underlying reasons they’ve been tolerating things.

7. Get out of the spin cycle.

Where in your life are you on autopilot, creating the same situation for yourself (in essence) over and over again? Maybe you keep dating the same romantic partner. Maybe the current model is better looking, or more successful, or slightly more open than the one before, but in essence you’re with a lover who triggers your tried-and-true insecurities, defense mechanisms, and familiar unhealthy spirals. Or maybe you find yourself in the same employment dynamic over and over again—even if you change careers completely. Maybe you’ve attracted a series of supervisors, or a series of friends, who stir up the not-good-enough feelings a parent invoked for you as a child. Escape the spin cycle by learning how to look closely at how these patterns develop and how to benefit from the opportunities they offer.

8. Permanently shift your beliefs.

Focus on the deliberate rewiring of your belief system because your beliefs are determining everything you experience as your reality. That’s not New-Age speak anymore; it’s common knowledge. It’s why researchers always have to use placebo control groups whenever they test any drug. If they don’t have a group taking a sugar pill, their findings won’t be considered valid by the agencies that govern pharmaceuticals. In pain-control experiments, when a new pain pill is tested, fully half of the sufferers who are given a placebo will report having less pain. The mind is that powerful and the scientific community knows it. Changing your mind will change your life.

Many of your limiting beliefs are not unique to you; our culture suffers from a long-standing epidemic of crappy shared beliefs. Most of us, at some level, harbor the same fears, the same tragic self-doubts, and the same profound longings to be liberated from our self-made prisons. In our outer circumstances, we may vary greatly, but at deeper levels, this is seldom the case. If you aren’t living the precisely blissful, richly textured life you crave, take the steps to discover which of your beliefs are keeping you from it and what you can do about that.

9. Dream loudly.

Stop limiting yourself according to what seems practical. Practical goals do not inspire enough passion to propel you toward their certain fruition. As John F. Kennedy wisely surmised, “The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.” Be those men (and women.).

10. Live passionately.

Once you’ve done the self-examination work to uncover your most delicious desires, don’t pussyfoot toward them. Hurl yourself recklessly in their direction! Trust that the Universe wildly adores you and is always orchestrating on your behalf. It’s been waiting for you to get pumped and grow a pair so that it could swoop in with divine assistance that will leave you breathless.

The author Natalie Goldberg has a cake analogy I love. When you bake a cake, you have ingredients, right? You have eggs, butter, milk, sugar, flour. The ingredients are the different parts of your life. You mix them all together in a bowl but this doesn’t make a cake. It makes goop. To turn it into a cake, you have to add the energy of intense heat. To turn your life into a life worth living, you have to add the heat and energy of your whole heart and soul. Otherwise it’s just goop.

Being comfortable in your skin and living with authenticity is knowing precisely who you are and passionately adoring who you are—with all the countless accoutrements and benefits that come along with that practice. You are spectacular. Not the elaborate representation of You that you routinely show the world, but the raw, uncensored, vulnerable You underneath all of that. Find that You and learn how to deeply love and honor that You. That’s feeling blissfully comfortable in your own skin, and it’s the secret to everything you’re longing for.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Paul Enfield on how you have to take risks, to get the rewards. I’ve worked with Paul for many years at Microsoft, and he was one of my early mentors. I’ve learned a lot of life wisdom from him, and I thought this particular nugget was especially useful. It’s about taking a leap of faith.

The big idea is that for so many things in life, there is no way to be 100% certain before we act. We have to take risks. We can spend all our time trying to make things certain, know the unknowables, and wait for the perfect conditions, or we can dive in a little more.  We can do more big things and act on more windows of opportunity.  This is the heart of bold action.

Without further ado, here’s Paul on the leap of faith …

Some life decisions we face can seem colossal. Some seem so large that we can get stuck attempting to reach our decision and fail to ever act. I found myself in one of these situations when I came upon a revelation that empowered me make my decision.

Quite a while back, I was faced with a decision on whether or not to propose to my wife. While pondering the decision, I realized that no matter how much I thought about it, I would never be 100% sure that I was making the right choice. It was at that time that I also realized this correlated to a concept I had learned in college Statistics class called “degree of certainty.”

In a simplistic form, degree of certainty indicates how likely it is that the decision is the correct one. You can be fairly sure of your choice, and therefore have a high degree of certainty.

I also realized that different people will need to achieve different degrees of certainty before they will act upon their decisions. However, the commonality would always be that you can never achieve 100% certainty on your decision. Therefore we are always faced with a “gap” we must jump to reach 100% certainty. I chose to name this gap the “leap of faith.”

I was 90% sure I should make this decision to propose, but was forced to realize that I must make this leap of faith if I were ever to make my decision.

Being armed with this truth is empowering. Once you realize you must be willing to take a chance no matter what your decision, you can move forward and evaluate other factors.  Other factors might include what is the opportunity cost for not making the choice. IOTW, what will I lose if I fail to act?  Also, what is the benefit I can obtain by making the choice?

Empower yourself to make tough decisions. Recognize your personal needs to support your decision and when you reach your threshold, jump. Make your decision and take your leap of faith.

Photo by Hunterrrr.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from David Straker on how to influence and change behavior. David is an expert on influence and change.  He is the creator of ChangingMinds.org and author of  Changing Minds: In Detail, where he shares his wealth of insight and action on the art of change.

Not very long ago, David and I had been discussing effective ways to persuade.  I had said to David that a rule that worked for me is, “Win the heart, and the mind follows.”

David responded that where we start depends, and that we’re most effective at changing ourselves and others when we fully engage head, heart, and hands. I liked the the idea of “head”, “heart,” and “hands” because it was simple and sticky. I asked David if he would write a guest post to share his thoughts on how our actions, thoughts, and feeling are shaped by our “head”, “heart”, and “hands”.

Without further ado, here is David on shaping change through  “head,” “heart”, and “hands”.

In the field of business and personal change, there’s a pattern that keeps coming up. I’ve met it in change seminars, psychology text books and assorted theories and models. I call it ‘head, heart and hands’. You may have come across it in other forms, such as ‘cognitive, affective and behavioral’ (if you’re a psychologist) or, in more common parlance, ‘thinking, feeling and doing’.

Here’s a story of how it all began, at least in the history of management and psychology.

It was All About Hands

A century or so ago, psychology emerged out of the evolving ‘age of enlightenment’, where science grew wings and truth was what you could prove rather than what the local priest said. Psychologists sought to use the methods of natural sciences, where measurement, causality and proof were the order of the day. They could not measure what brains were doing, but they could analyze what people said and did, which led to behaviorism developing as the first step along the way.

Hard at the heels of psychological science came management science, which adopted the behavioral principles and where people such as Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford viewed people as ‘rational man’ for whom behavior was directly correlated with external cues. Treat a person in a certain way and they will respond in a predictable manner.

In other words it was all about ‘hands’.

Hands Follow Head

Further developments in psychology found that to explain what people did, you had to consider what they were thinking. Game theory tripped over it in John Nash’s theory-of-mind equilibrium. Therapy went this way too, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) recognizes how behavior is closely linked to thinking. Then management followed suit, with motivation being more about getting people to understand rather than just telling them what to do.

And so we had ‘hands follow head’.

Hands Follow Head and Heart

Yet this still had problems. Psychologists had largely ignored emotions for a long time as they were almost the opposite of rational thinking and rather hard to measure. But they steadily realized that how you feel is real and cannot be ignored. If you are to treat an anxious person, it helps if you recognize and acknowledge the individual experience of anxiety. And in management, emotions at last poked through, notably in Daniel Goleman’s ‘Emotional Intelligence’. We can even see and measure emotions now, thanks to advances in brain scanning, with systems such as fMRI and PET.

And so now we had ‘hands follow head and heart’.

Explain or Enthuse First?

Is this the end? Well, not quite. There isn’t another ‘H’ on the horizon, but what we are finding is that the relationship between head, hands and heart is not as simple as we first thought. For example, to get somebody to act in a certain way, should you first appeal to their feelings and then explain, or should you explain first and then get them enthused? The answer seems to depend on circumstance and the individual.

Changing Actions, Changes Thoughts and Feelings

In a curious reversion to the original command idea, there is even an argument that you can change what people think and feel, just by getting them to act in certain ways. This is explained in Robert Cialdini’s classic ‘Influence’ book, where he talked of compliance and consistency, showing that if we have to do something, we may change our beliefs and what we feel about this to justify our actions. This helps explain some of the darker side of human behavior, from the cruelty of prison guards to conversion in brainwashing.

We can go from head, heart and hands to any of the others, with a quite reasonable thinking process to take us from A to B, as indicated in the table below.

Engage Head, Heart, and Hands for Effective Change

So how do you use this? In change, you really want to get to full engagement of head, heart and hands. A path you can follow is to use the above table to identify the best first step for your situation. Then use the table again, to reel in the third aspect. For example to go ‘head, heart, hands’, you first need to get them to think ‘This makes sense, so I feel good about it’, and then add in hands with either ‘I like the idea so I’ll give it a go’ or ‘It makes sense so I’ll give it a go’.

Whenever working in change, when you are trying to understand people or when you are just trying to persuade them of something, it can be very helpful to consider all three H’s in your analysis and plans. If you can get a person’s head, heart and hands all working together, then you have the person.

Photo by Swaity.