Everyday Bliss For Women In Leadership

I rarely make political statements, but this is one I happen to think is important, and it’s not about people, it’s about the environment. It’s a good point they’re making along the lines of  an untutored person thinking "if one pill is good, five must be better" and killing themselves through ignorance.  Biofuels are great, but the authors of this newsletter Avaaz (see below) have a good point about green technology caveats. Vote your conscience…

Not all biofuels are bad–but without tough global standards, the biofuels boom will further undermine food security and worsen global warming. Click here to use our simple tool to send a message to your head of state before this weekend’s global summit on climate change in Chiba, Japan, and help build a global call for biofuels regulation:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/biofuel_standards_now/9.php?cl=60989106

Sometimes the trade-off is stark: filling the tank of an SUV with ethanol requires enough corn to feed a person for a year. But not all biofuels are bad; making ethanol from Brazilian sugar cane is vastly more efficient than US-grown corn, for example, and green technology for making fuel from waste is improving rapidly.

The problem is that the EU and the US have set targets for increasing the use of biofuels without sorting the good from the bad. As a result, rainforests are being cleared in Indonesia to grow palm oil for European biodiesel refineries, and global grain reserves are running dangerously low. Meanwhile, rich-country politicians can look "green" without asking their citizens to conserve energy, and agribusiness giants are cashing in. And if nothing changes, the situation will only get worse.

What’s needed are strong global standards that encourage better biofuels and shut down the trade in bad ones. Such standards are under development by a number of coalitions⁸, but they will only become mandatory if there’s a big enough public outcry. It’s time to move: this Friday through Saturday, the twenty countries with the biggest economies, responsible for more than 75% of the world’s carbon emissions⁹, will meet in Chiba, Japan to begin the G8’s climate change discussions. Before the summit, let’s raise a global cry for change on biofuels:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/biofuel_standards_now/9.php?cl=60989106

ABOUT AVAAZ
Avaaz.org is an independent, not-for-profit global campaigning organization that works to ensure that the views and values of the world’s people inform global decision-making. (Avaaz means "voice" in many languages.) Avaaz receives no money from governments or corporations, and is staffed by a global team based in London, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Paris, Washington DC, and Geneva.

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.

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!

My publishter, New Harbinger, sends out a very interesting monthly newsletter. The following is from their onboard promo for David Skibbins’ book Becoming a Life Coach: A Complete Workbook for Therapists and it is very sage advice  - especially for Energy Coaches in training…or at any level of their practice.

As we are studying ethics shortly in the Certified Energy Coach Program, this advice becomes particularly poignant. And those coming into coaching out of any kind of therapy background, do read this book posthaste for it highlights among other subjects, very important shifts in worldframe that therapists must make to be successful as coaches and what our rigorous training prepares us beautifully to coach around.

A "bravo" and two thumbs up to my colleague David Skibbins, PhD, CPCC for a wonderful book and job well done. Highly recommended for Energy Coaches and anyone transiting from any form of therapy or healing work into coaching.

    Maryam Webster
    writing as Director, The Energy Coach Institute

********     ***     ********     ***     ********     ***     ********

From Chapter 1:
CONTRASTING THERAPY & COACHING: DIFFERENT LEVELS OF AUTHORITY

{worthy text which can be read here excised}

Experts Can’t Be Trusted

Many mentally healthy clients distrust therapists. And not unreasonably—all our training in psychology has warped our point of view. We are experts in the assessment and treatment of psychopathology. And so we tend to see it everywhere: everyone is neurotic, corporations are dysfunctional, the government is addicted to power and control. Most people are mentally healthy. Until you wrap your mind around that fact you’ll be re-creating your clinical practice wherever you go. You’ll be unconsciously disempowering your clients by finding problems they need to solve. They’ll sense that you don’t completely trust them, that you regard them as patients. You may get compliance or you may get rebellion—both of which are expressions of dissatisfaction

The Wrong Tool for the Job

It’s inappropriate to apply a therapeutic perspective to most real-life situations, especially work settings. Therapeutic perspectives are well-honed tools that are invaluable in assisting dysfunctional clients to become functional, but they are simply inadequate for addressing the dynamics of already functional environments. Of course, this hasn’t stopped psychodynamic and psychologically based systems theorists from analyzing the workplace. Indeed, these ideas have been elegantly applied to the workplace for years—with no apparent impact on work environments whatsoever. Pointing out the narcissistic qualities of leadership, analyzing top-down communication fl ow patterns, and discoursing on parentifi ed employer-employee relationships have all fallen on deaf ears. Having twenty-three names for snow doesn’t help you much in a jungle—and all that accurate clinical terminology doesn’t translate very well to corporate America. That’s because people at work have work to do and don’t have time for psychological mumbo jumbo. It’s simply the wrong tool for the job.

Functioning companies are intelligent, responsive, complex living systems. To superimpose a paradigm that evolved out of personal, psychological clinical work onto the richness of the minute-to-minute challenges and choices that face a growing corporate entity is absurd. The concepts of an outside expert—especially a clinically trained one—are going to have very little impact on that environment.

The Special Bonus of Therapy: We Know How to Control Ourselves

Therapists are particularly well suited to an egalitarian approach because of our training in self-management. The intensive interpersonal training we’ve gone through also serves to make us outstanding empowerment coaches. We’ve already learned how to moderate our responses in the service of the client’s needs. Other coaches-in-training also have to struggle with selfidentification as a helper and the habit of giving advice, but few of them have gone through the deep, insight-oriented inner work required of a psychotherapist. Thanks to our training as therapists, when we realize the negative impact controlling behavior can have on a client, we can modify our responses to better coach our clients. Once therapists stop trying to sneak therapy into coaching, therapists become outstanding empowerment coaches—primarily because of our self-awareness and our self-management abilities.

GIVING UP AUTHORITY

However, just reading a few paragraphs about authority may not be enough to persuade you to give up years of feeling in charge. So let’s see exactly what’s at stake here:

• What do I enjoy the most about feeling competent and in control as a therapist?
• Where else in my life do I think I need to be the one in charge?
• What might I get from letting go of my authority role when I coach?

Now that you understand how different coaching is from therapy—and why it should be—here’s an exercise to help you fully step into this new perspective:

You can read the rest of this article here.

Last week I gave a speech to a group of technology workers about workaholism being the standard, not the exception these days. I also shared the statistic that women work longer hours than men do, traditionally in the home  and also at outplacement work sites. Remember mom putting in hours on dinner, cleanup and mending or other jobs while you and dad watched tv and hung out? Most moms worked up to bedtime when I was a kid. Work at home COUNTS as "work". We’re seeing this historical tendency transfer into the corporate workplace as well where women are asked to work longer hours and then come home to resume working. Reading a 1980’s women’s magazine, my mother was once heard to mutter "Time for myself? Whatever do they mean by that?" For many women world-wide, little has changed in the past twenty years.

The point I was making is that housework and child rearing are historically un-valued or undervalued jobs, and are typically taken on in a majority of households by women. Once a woman has worked a full day in the office, she potentially comes home to meal preparation, cleaning and parenting taking up her time in far greater proportions than do male parents. This is not my observation, but that of dozens of clients, industry research and formal surveys. I cited the article below and so am running it again for those of you who missed it back when…

This study cites how women in the UK are working longer, harder and as a result, are accumulating more stress. When you translate that to America, you can tack on a few hours and perhaps even add a quarter more bother to the stress load. Why? While they are fast approaching levels of job-stress we have in the U.S., Europeans tend to have more realistic work/life balance than Americans.

From:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3178554.stm

WOMEN WORK LONGER HOURS

A woman’s work is never done may sound like a tired old cliché - but it may be more true than ever.

According to a new survey a woman’s working week is now half a day longer than it was five years ago - and that’s without housework.

The increase is down to the growing number of women in more high-powered management and professional jobs, say researchers.

In contrast, the total number of hours worked by men has fallen slightly over the same period - from 45.5 hours to 44.8 hours.

Girls to work more

According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (www.cipd.co.uk/default.cipd ) who conducted the survey, the shifting pattern is down to changes in the UK economy.

And these are more likely to become more magnified, not less, in the future, as the UK economy shifting from male-dominated manufacturing to the more female-friendly service sector.

Mike Emmott, head of employee relations at CIPD, said: "If efforts to secure equal treatment for women at work are to bear fruit we can expect to see their experience of work and working patterns aligned more closely with those of men."

However, men are still working much longer hours in paid jobs than women.

Compared to an average week of 44.8 hours for a man, women are working 33.9 hours.

Flexible friend?

The impact of the government’s campaign on work-life balance has had little effect, the report says.

The element of the report’s findings contradicts a recent report for the Office of National Statistics which said that six million workers were now benefiting from flexible work.

The government has introduced a range of family-friendly and flexible working measures.

It signed up to the European Social Chapter shortly after coming into power - and many European-inspired policies have subsequently been introduced.

In recent years: new fathers have gained paternity rights; women can take up to a year’s maternity leave - and parents now have the right to request flexible working patterns.

In addition, people working part-time have gained the right to equal treatment as full-time employees.

But according to the report there is an increasing proportion of people working long hours - more than 48 hours a week - up from 10% in 1998 to 25% today.

These long hours can have a negative effect on quality of life, with more than a quarter of those people who are working long hours admitting health problems as a result.

A quarter said had led to stress or depression and it had affected their sex lives and their relationship with their children.

More than four in ten workers say long hours "gets in the way of" their relationship with their partner or spouse.

"The only crumb of comfort", the report says is that one in four employees have cut back their hours in the past five years, although this is largely down to parenthood.

Thanks to Krishna who tipped me off about putting this at my blog. You can read her sage suggestions here on how to use this research to market your self growth business!

Do you AQ? If not, you might want to. AQ stands for Abundance Quotient and is a system developed by my friend Kim George to e-x-p-a-n-d the potential and possibilites of your life. I loved her newsletter intro of today so much I am reproducing it below as a sterling example of a wonderful Everyday Bliss mindset. Savor this delicious slice of summer savvy and get yourself on over to Kim’s site and sign up for her newsletter and classes today.
 

Kim

If you’re reading this blog, then you’re undoubtedly dedicated to the experience of Everyday Bliss. So I KNOW you’ll want to participate in the FREE Teleclass I’m doing TODAY with Ellen Britt, for her Everyday Qi program.

I’ll be sharing the first FIVE Keys to Everyday Bliss from my upcoming Everyday Bliss For Busy Women book, a technique you can use to rev up your energy (even when you are tired, ill or have had a horrible day) and how to use the energy of intention to transform your  limitations into a precious treasure.

Interested? Calendar open at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern TODAY, Wednesday 5/23?

Great!  Sign up here:

http://www.everydayqi.com/signup4webster.html

There are MASSES of goodies included of course,  and you’ll also get to hear LOTS of other fantastic speakers on energy techniques and other health and wellness promotion info that you can really use.

See you there!

Warmly,
Maryam