Everyday Bliss For Women In Leadership

Huzzah! The book has arrived. The real book, not just the jpg, which was all I had of the cover photo. And here is me with book, very late at night after being out all day and coming home to the box on my doorstep. Weary, and without makeup, but the grin is 100% gen-u-wine.

Mitties Anoushka and Tashi-Claire immediately sat in the box and pawed its contents but unlike swift friend Andy, who caught his sitting in the book box, I was not fast enough to get a photo. 

The illustrations reproduced beautifully and friends have praised the self-coaching system as clear and concise. Reviewer’s copies are now being shipped (stay tuned for acid-test thoughts on Everyday Bliss from the most provocative minds in America and Europe!).

As an author, one comes to look at their book in terms of a series of chapters, or this or that section. It’s nice to finally see it all hang together. For a gift book, it certainly is wide - the spine is about an inch wide. Too much goodness to contain in just one place. I can’t wait for it to be on shelves all over so I can share this information with you, too.   

More soon on how to purchase, and get in on our super-special Publication-Day Special "Energy of Everyday Bliss - Spring Training" Telesummit…here’s a preview:  

The biggest of these "Reader’s Circle" bonuses however, is a cutting-ege NEW:

This groundbreaking free event May 5 - 7 is being held ONLY for those who buy the book at Amazon.com on May 1st.

(Can’t make it? Purchase and come back to the everydaybliss.org website on May 1st anyway - We have webcasts and replays and bonus gifts for you - you can attend ANYWHERE in the world!)

I’m bringing together the best presenters from the international conferences of the two professional groups I belong to: The Association of Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP) and the Institute for the Advanced Study of Health (IASH) plus experts and professionals I have worked for years in wellness, performance enhancement, parenting, personal development and leadership coaching.

We are all coming together to bring YOU the most exciting teaching event and community kick-off ever, to help you realize and actualize a Deep and Lasting Field of Bliss in your life and the lives of those you influence.

If this thought intrigues you, buy the Everyday Bliss book at Amazon.com on May 1st and get in on this amazing "Spring Training" Telesummit.

It’s the only place you’ll find all these amazing teachers, therapists, spiritual masters and creators of the New Earth, to quote Eckhart Tolle, all in one place - all free to you, just for the price of "Everyday Bliss For Busy Women" - and Amazon, as you know, does give a discount which makes it even less expensive and more value-packed!

Support your growth into Everyday Bliss by registering now for free, over at EverydayBliss.org. You can’t get into the Reader’s Circle until May 1st, but you’ll have a jump on the process when the day comes.

See you there!

I just wrote a post over at Oprah.com for those studying A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle. (gotta love it!)  I thought I’d duplicate it here, and also over at the 12 Keys to Bliss course for our own private forum of folks studying this book. If you’re having difficulty getting your head around any concept in any setting, try this:

"…I teach Eckhart’s philosophy in my courses and use it in my coaching program… Occasionally my students and/or clients have similar difficulties understanding these concepts. It really helps to remember that you have an immense resource and BS-detector in your physical body. While being a component of the overall pain-body for some people (it sure has been for me), it is also a wonderful truth-teller.

Research from the Hearthmath Institute in Boulder Creek California (www.heartmath.org) has shown there to be a huge correlation between the heart, emotions and your effectiveness in the world. When your heart is "in congruence" (or "agrees with") what you want to do, you’ll feel good about the thing and it usually turns out that was the best thing for you to have done.

Ever gone against that feeling? When you feel uneasy about doing something or hanging out with someone and the situation turns out badly? When you said "I wish I’d listened to my gut instincts on that one"?  That’s your heart, telling you what’s true. Ignore its advice at your risk. The heart always knows best and unlike the tongue (who will say anything), will never lie to you. The body as a whole is innately truthful.

So how does that relate to this class? Simple. Try out just one of the new concepts you’re reading. Put your hand over your heart. Take a deep breath in and out and ask yourself "Is this true/right/good for me?".  Pay attention to how your heart feels, to what it tells you.  Really, deeply listen to your heart, and feel with that hand that covers it. Listen not only with your ears, but with your whole body.

How does your heart feel as you contemplate this new concept? To start out with, is it broadly speaking "good",  "bad" or "neutral"?  Once you have a large direction to look in, you can seek refinement in your heart’s messages to you if you like.

One thing - your heart’s messages to you may not be "correct for all". They are messages meant only for you. But they will always be true for you, and always be in your best interest.

Hoping folks find this helpful….

Love & Blessings,
Maryam

I just wrote the below to the folks taking the 12 Keys to Bliss class with us over at ECI and thought I’d share, as it really applies to all of us. I get the daily motivational niblet from TUT.COM. The messages come, "From the Universe" and they always touch or tickle me. This one though, my mom would have called a real pip. To wit:

"Gabriel, did you register Maryam Webster’s epiphany yesterday? Raise expectations on all human beings another 72 gigatrons, and tell not a soul."

How do you do that?
The Universe

It’s worthwhile to note that this message is sent out to everyone who signs up. This is one of the more fruitilicious ones, but it does have a point. How can we all:

• trust our inner senses
• trust the unseen
• stay present
• have piercing life insights and epiphanies
• do what we do for the highest good of all

Post a commment if you like. The folks in the 12 Keys course have been having a busy little dialogue about this in the ecampus, but I can’t share that with you here. You can however share your thoughts for others to read if you like. Just hit the button below and let us know: How would you feel if this message came to YOU, with your name on it, telling you that these things had already happened, were a foregone conclusion. What might the difference in your life be?

In my thinking for one, self-esteem would not be an issue. Neither would courage, bravery, personal strength or any of the other traits that people seem to have trouble with. This is a small subset of all the possible personal betterment practices. As a spiritual practice, this list above pretty much covers what a shaman, priest or priestess does. As spiritual teachers in our own lives, who are we when we have these skills native in us, and intact and functioning since birth?

In a future week, we’ll learn how to reinvent your early life to give you what you would like to have from birth onwards as skills, tools or other resources. And we’ll experience how our life changes in moments, and the different timeline that arises. Generally speaking, a much more copacetic timeline. Interested?

Your feelings on this would be lovely to read.

Warmly,
Maryam

The phenomenal Lisa Wilder has brought to our attention the American Lung Association’s 52 Proven Stress relievers.  (Pollyanna Power, girl) Chief among them was: Don’t do anything now you’d have to lie about later. It really took me aback to realize that this is not right now a foregone conclusion for us as a species.

What a gritty way to say…

live from your center

from the blessed bowl of your belly

sup wisdom…

and give to get

All affect each other,

none is seperate

Please get it.

Thank you.

To quote Reverend Dr. King, whose memorial day we recently celebrated, "I have a Dream."  I personally have a dream that all beings will experience simultaneous enlightenment, release of pain and attachment to illusion. And that we’ll all realize we’ve already won the lottery and already live in paradise, each and every day. It’s both a past fact and foregone conclusion.

Doubt that this means you? Then listen to your Bliss Compass: the winged messenger of your Breath, and the measured thrumming of your heart.

This just out from Watson Wyatt Worldwide Research Reports: stress plays a large part in why employees job-surf and high-pressure companies find loyalty difficult to guarantee. Execs, take notice. If you don’t already have one, you NEED a stress reduction program in your company NOW.

Read the below and contact me if your company of 20 - 1500 employees is willing to have:

a) Far fewer collateral sick days

b) Employees able to take pro-active care of self and others

c) A comfortable, respectful work environment

d) Sky-high morale at ALL levels of the company

e) No snags to trip up and derail the workforce (and those few that might happen easily resolved)

f) Serious longterm employee loyalty and support

If you’re willing to do some of the most pleasurable work you’ve ever done as a team, contact me for a complementary prescriptive analysis.

From: watsonwyatt.com/research/resrender.asp?id=2007-US-0164&page=1

Playing to Win in a Global Economy – 2007/2008 Global Strategic Rewards® Report and United States Findings

Executive Summary

The increasingly global market for talent makes it critical for companies to understand the factors that affect employee attraction and retention everywhere they do business. Organizations that do not balance financial imperatives and employee reward preferences risk losing their best talent.

The 2007/2008 Global Strategic Rewards® study examines how companies in Asia-Pacific, Canada, Europe, Latin America and the United States are tackling attraction and retention issues and reward management. The first half of the report highlights the similarities and differences between the regions, while the second half focuses on U.S.-specific data.

Global Key Findings

Regardless of region, the study found:

• The majority of employers have problems attracting critical-skill employees (70 percent) and top-performing employees (67 percent).
• Employers have an incomplete understanding of why employees join or leave their organizations. For example, employees rank stress as a top reason they would leave, but it is not even among the top five reasons cited by employers.
• When employees are satisfied with stress levels and work/life balance, they are more inclined to stay with their companies (86 percent versus 64 percent) and more likely to recommend them as places to work (88 percent versus 55 percent).
• Financially high-performing firms get performance management right. For example, their managers are much more likely to link organizational performance to rewards (51 percent versus 38 percent of low-performing organizations).
• Clearly setting expectations and delivering on the reward promise is a formula for a more engaged workforce. Sixty-nine percent of employees who say their employers succeed at both promise and delivery are highly engaged, versus roughly 25 percent overall.

U.S. Key Findings

• Employers report difficulty in attracting and retaining employees — particularly, top-performing and critical-skill employees — for the fourth year in a row. Almost two-thirds (64 percent) of employers are having difficulty attracting critical-skill employees, while 60 percent are having difficulty attracting top performers.
• Consistent with the global findings, U.S. employers and employees have different ideas about why employees join or leave (see below*). As a result, some of the actions that employers are taking to attract and retain employees may be counterproductive.
• As employers continue to manage their cost structures, they are putting more money into variable pay and raising the bar for performance. As in 2007, more than one in five (21 percent) increased the size of individual target awards for 2008.
• Merit-increase budgets for 2007 remained relatively stable, at an average 3.6 percent, and are expected to rise only slightly, to 3.7 percent, in 2008.
• Highly engaged employees are more than twice as likely to be top performers than are other employees.

Interesting stuff, no? It says basically what most savvy execs have known all along - value someone appropriately, keep them engaged in interesting duties that fulfill them and invest them with personal power insofar as possible. Do this and there isn’t anything they wouldn’t do to stay on the job and tout the company and its products to all they meet.

Why employees actually leave is found in another Watson Wyatt report (here and in charts below) of the European market where we learn that there is a large gap between the employee’s values and the employers perceptions of those values.

You can’t market where the market doesn’t exist. Employers wanting to pitch their employees on longevity of their position within the company, need to take a more prosaic set of employee needs into account: people hate long commutes, they don’t want to spend most of their waking hours during the week in a pressure cooker environment with little to no release, and they want to have some security when they finally do decide to take a job. That and a dollop of feeling like they’re in control of their life. From the study:

"…employers need to increase their focus on more immediate needs as well, such as the nature of the work they do now, and the internal and external pressures that affect employees’ working experience, like stress and length of commute.”

What attracts employees?
The three reasons most frequently given

Why they leave?
The three reasons most frequently given

Found here: www.watsonwyatt.com/news/press.asp?ID=18396

Is this you? Your company? Then you may be able to benefit from what I offer executives and their teams. Contact me for your company’s complementary prescriptive assessment.

As  business demographics face shifts in North America and Europe, many women are moving up in rank from middle management to executive leadership positions. The baby boom executives are nearing or already in retirement. Smart companies are focusing on internal promotion rather than external recruitment. Promoting from within can have great advantages for the company, while sometimes leaving the new leader and their team with gaps in their knowledge and process. 

Whether you are currently in a leadership role or ready to become the leader, if you work in a group, manage a team, multi-task in your department, oversee projects, deal with multi-national contractors or adjudicate between colleagues, you need Leadership Coaching. You may be a brilliant negotiator, financial whiz or a technical genius. But do you have what it takes to manage other high-level employees? Particularly if you’re coming up from middle management to fill slots left by retiring executives as is currently happening in the American workforce.

Get Leadership Coaching, Below

"There is going to be a real premium for companies to try to retain talent," says Mark Marcon, an analyst with Robert. W. Baird. "And the talent out there to replace the people retiring is going to be scarcer and scarcer."

As a result, companies will have to rely on younger people to take on management roles, says Gary Burnison, Korn/Ferry’s chief operating officer. And they will have to identify candidates who might have been overlooked in past years. "What we see is a war for talent," Burnison says. "Despite all the technological innovations of the past century, a simple truth remains: people make businesses successful."

Leadership coaches aren’t just for executives who are struggling to get the job done. Those overlooked middle-managers, in fact, might be prime candidates.

Leadership coaches often work with managers who have been highly successful, but see barriers preventing them from reaching the C-suite. Some are technical whizzes who don’t have the interpersonal skills to manage a large staff.

In other cases, coaches are called in when there has been turnover on an executive team, and the senior officers need to get to know each other. Leadership coaches can help a new CEO adjust to his or her position, or aid a board trying to develop a succession plan.

Do you realize what opportunities are now opening up for women in business? Barring the women’s work movement during WWII, we have never had such corporate opportunities like this before. And yet, many of us are blocked from achieving the positions and opportunities that they see in their own companies.

Why?

What I see commonly in the women I coach is perception of the invisible "glass ceiling" barrier preventing their upward momentum. While we know much of the glass ceiling is perceptual, some of it is actual. Barring real covert discrimination however, persevere without exception and believe deeply in yourself.

Leadership Coaching For You

If you are a woman in middle management and  leadership positions are opening up that you would really like to acquire, don’t allow this to stop you. Here are some coaching tips to help pull you forward:

1) If nothing stood in your way, no glass ceiling, no discrimination, no derailment - what could you accomplish?

Hint: Using only the skills and talents you already have, where you sit at present.

2) If you are short political savvy or knowledge of corporate culture, how can you acquire it in the swiftest, most comprehensive way possible?

Hint: This is the time for corporate mentorship. If you don’t already have a senior mentor in your company, now is the time to cultivate one.

3) If your communications, people management or interpersonal skills are off, or you have personal barriers to leadership success, get leadership coaching while you’re still working in lower or middle management. It is imperative when such opportunities as executive retirement open up spaces for others to advance, that your skillset be in place.

Hint: If you’re a woman in management looking for leadership coaching with cutting edge blockage removal tools, see who I coach here.

My buddy Donna Steinhorn, of the Association of Coaching Excellence just tapped me to reply to a post she made over at her blog on what we do to give away our power and how we can get it back. I’m happy to oblige with a few thoughts on the matter…good question!

Hey Donna, Donna!  For giving away power, I’ll have to go with you and say it’s getting dragged *back* into things that I had already found support on…then found support staff wasn’t doing what I needed them to. I’ve made out reams of instructions, spent personal time, taught them how to teach/create/whatever, and even set up a support help desk.

Yet, when the salami hits the fan, my students and customers complain directly to me as the buck really does stop here, on my desk. Sometimes though, no matter how much I gently redirect their complaints to the help desk, or counsel with an employee how to deal with the complaint on their own, I still occasionally, find myself embroiled in the thick of things.

This is a liminal time. Liminal, in the sense that it represents both a challenge and an opportunity. An opportunity, that comes to me in the form of empowering others to deal with things on their own that I have told the Universe I do not wish to deal with anymore. And by golly, it’s working, and the staff do their jobs really well for the most part. A challenge though, to shape gently and minimally, letting others do their own work without the temptation to become re-involved.

I stand on the threshold of two doorways, a hallmark of liminality.

One doorway, holds the new life I have affirmed over and over and over (and over…) that I want to lead. Not doing the "busy" in my job, but handing it off to others who are so much better at it. Not doing the main bulk of teaching in the post-graduate program I created, but hiring brilliant and qualified teachers from my own pool of graduates. Not coding every webpage and shopping cart item in my online store, but jobbing it out to the nicest VA’s in the world, who also run my help desk with polish and elan.

Life is good through this beautiful doorway. Life is as I want it to be. With this support system in place, I now have the time to create again that I badly needed, to cause my business and life mission (the two are indivisible really) to take off and truly fly. And lo and behold, it has.

But annoyingly sometimes, there is that other doorway. Rimmed in flame, in my imagination. The doorway through which previously ingrained pattern behavior wants to pull me backwards into the mental maelstrom of "no one can do it as good as I can!"  and "it takes me as long to teach them to do it as it would be for me to do it myself!".  Cue energy and power flowing away and down the drain.

That way lies insanity. Here there be Dragons.

While I have strayed back through the Flaming Door a few times in the past few months, such jaunts are becoming rarer and rarer. And it’s really okay if some folks think I’m a bitch because I don’t continually give and give and give to them of my time, expertise and energy, asking them instead to deal with the appropriate staff member. That nearly always happens when you make a shift like this. (watch for it…) And it’s okay if the staff doesn’t do it perfect, doesn’t get it right the first time or makes a spelling mistake (aaaaggh!!! pet-peeve-o-rama!) in official correspondence. Really, it is.

How I’ve made trips to the past in terms of pattern behavior dwindle to nothing is first by doing energy work, such as NLP processes, EFT, ZPoint Process or others on the patterns I know sabotage and weaken me. That done, I focus entirely on feeling good, to quote Wayne Dyer and Abraham-Hicks. Taking a page from Dr. Andrew Weil, I eschew the news more and more for reading things that educate and make me feel better and take also his prescription of a deep belly-laugh at least one a day…but you never can chuckle just once, can you?

And I take a leaf out of my own book on Bliss in slowing down, way down, no matter what. It’s a lifesaving move, and one you’ll thank yourself for. I remember Kim George’s sage quote: that nothing which is meant for me can be lost, and I reflect that I have all the time in the world, all I’ll ever need. That is a richness of reserve that keeps me looking towards the beautiful door, that keeps me going through it every day when I wake up, with singleminded intensity. 

Andy Andrews said that to truly succeed at anything, we must persist without exception. I choose to be happy every day. I choose to go through the beautiful door and live in the life I am dreaming into being. I choose to persist without exception in these things. That’s how I do it. There’s no "Secret" to it, there’s no magic other than consistently persisting in making these pivotal choices.

So how about you, dear reader? How do YOU give your power away and what do you do about it when you notice your energy going down the tubes to a power drain?

Leave a comment and let Donna and I know! 

And…I’d like to tag Krishna De, Jasmine White, Tara Katchaturoff, Suzanne Falter-Barns, Andy Wibbels, Jennifer Louden and Ellen Britt! Tag, you’re it!

Do you Yoga? Yin Yoga and power sessions of Vinyasa Flow keep me unstressed and working in the top level of my capabilities most days. I don’t get colds anymore - I credit yoga among other self-care methods with keeping me healthy.  And it helps us ladies of a certain age to keep limber, prevent joint and back pain and keep the body fit and flexible

And others in business have found yoga to be their secret stress-busting weapon. Just listen to these professionals:

_“If you asked him a couple years ago whether he’d be doing yoga, Eddy Kelly would have called you crazy.

"My thing, for exercise, was to lift weights, go for a run, maybe play hockey in the fall and winter - but no thoughts of yoga," the 36-year-old said.

To the untrained eye, yoga looks more like the stretching you do before exercising than the actual exercise itself. It’s the warmup, not the muscle burner.

"I won’t say I thought of it as feminine at the time, but certainly not the type of workout where I would get in shape - not that strenuous thing I look to do twice a week," Kelly said. "But my opinion’s changed.

"It looks like you are stretching, but 10 minutes in, you are sweating."

"(Yoga) balances your day," Brenda Brown said. An executive assistant at a Bayers Lake-based company, she came up with the idea of holding the class. Yoga was offered at her previous job, and when she moved to Halifax, she made it her mission to introduce yoga at work.

"You have stressful things going on outside the office, inside the office, and if you just take an hour of your day, it really is productive. You can go back to your desk and tackle what you have to," she said.

Every Tuesday, about a dozen - mostly women - of the more than 100 employees get together in the cafeteria, push back tables, and roll out their yoga mats._”

Read the whole article here.

Have you found this? Because we have such different ways of processing and working together, experimentation is rife, ideas flow and merge and new forms are created.  Lucy Ward and John Carvel of the London newspaper, The Guardian, found this to be the case:

“ Teams of workers come up with the most innovative ideas if they are made up of even proportions of men and women, according to researchers. A study published yesterday by the London Business School found that professional teams with an equal gender split were much more likely to experiment, share knowledge and fulfil tasks, regardless of whether the team leader was a man or a woman.

An even mix allowed "a psychological safe communication climate" and self-confidence among members, which in turn provided fertile ground for innovation, says the report from the school’s Lehman Brothers Centre for Women in Business. ”

If you’re gender segregating your teams, now might be the time to integrate.

Read the whole article here

Michelle Courtney Berry tells us (and boy don’t we know it) -

"….Several top banking executives in New York State requested stress management training for their employees during the historic merger with Chemical Bank in 1996. One of the more progressive CEOs in Rochester requested a hands-on stress management workshop that blended elements of storytelling, poetry and meditation for an evening soirée for employees. Although other business associates might have thought his desire to blend tactical information with humor and relaxation was odd, he was clearly a visionary ahead of the times.

Indeed, it is only within the last few years that trainers and corporate coaches have combined workshops with meditation, massage and reiki (a hands-on energy ancient healing method designed to relieve stress) for corporate employees. This is a decisively new trend but one with ancient roots certainly worthy of replication in our over-exhausted, harried society."

Read the whole article right here.

What kind of culture are you encouraging in leading your company? How well do you value your team members, your own health, your unbridled creativity and productivity? All come with a more blissful, reduced-stress life.  If you haven’t yet, go look at the toys I give you to play with and reduce your own stress, here.