So how to take better care of both your results and your own vitality?  Have an average day every day.  Perform at a moderate, sustainable level.  Your adrenal glands will start gathering cobwebs, but your metrics will go off the charts.  Our client – let’s call him Joe – has been wowed by this lately.  He’s a sales manager who used to think that “staying ahead of the pack” was the secret of his success.  He tried every day to prove his worth and some days he did amazing things.  But he was exhausted, and it wasn’t sustainable, so he’d then have to slow down to recover and gear up for another push.  He thought it sounded crazy, but he went with us and experimented for a month with aiming for “average” productivity every day.  “I was bored at first,” he told us.  (You will be, too:  it’s not as anxiety-producing, and many of us are hooked on adrenalin.)  “But then when I saw the numbers and realized I hadn’t actually felt like I was working hard to attain these awesome results, I thought:  This might actually work!”  That was in his first ten days.  From there, it has just kept getting better.  He’s got more energy at the end of the day.  He’s been having new ideas for his team and a longer vision of where he wants to go.  All the ways he’d been wanting to “pull up” out of the everyday firefighting are now happening naturally.  So much for average.

These things were on my mind as I arrived at yoga.  I tried to set my thoughts aside to focus on my practice.  My teacher Elizabeth Rainey opened the class by sharing with us that she recently spent three days with John Friend, the founder of Anusara Yoga, at the annual Advanced Intensive.  Rainey cherishes this intensive because she is able to push her boundaries and go to new places in her practice each time.  But this time, to her dismay, she had a terrible cold.  “As a type-A person, that was tough.  I LIKE to push myself, but I had to relax into my practice instead.  What surprised me was that the relaxation forced by my illness actually allowed me to go deeper in my practice.  I had MORE capability, not less.” 

I thought about the parallel between what Rainey shared about her own softening because of her cold and my wish for my clients that there was some force that would support them to drop into the other half of their power.  I know I do the same thing, and I’ll bet you do, too:  we over-rely on that aggressive side of ourselves.  We’ve actually come to equate the words strength and strong with driving, pushing, and efforting.  We so often go rigid in order to be stronger.  We push in order to go faster.  But those are only some of our options.  And once we’ve developed a lot of strength and speed through those means, additional gains have to come from some other source.  Sometimes going softer makes us stronger.  Sometimes letting go is what helps us move faster. 

I’m not advocating a change in our intentions.  Moving the dial forward, reaching our sales goals, nailing our to-dos, attaining the exotic yoga pose:  good goals.  Let’s keep ‘em.

What I’m observing is that for those of us who are good – either advanced yoginis like Rainey or advanced make-it-happen salespeople like my clients – if we’re good at hardening, at strengthening, at activating and moving – it may well be that our next edge, our next edge of potential may be attained by activating the very opposite of what we’ve been thinking of as our greatest strength.

Lorraine writes: “I had lunch with two great women last week, Sara Harvey Yao and Michele Lisenbury Christensen. They are the two brilliant minds behind a company called Working with Power. The conversation naturally drifted into a discussion about the current state of business locally and globally.

“With one insightful sentence, Sara & Michele gave me a wonderful dose of clarity. They said “This year’s problems are not the same as last year’s problems!” And then they asked “What are you doing to solve this year’s problems?”

“Whether you are a business owner or working for someone else, there has been a lot of soul searching and reevaluating, trying to figure out how to adjust and ride out this economic turbulence. The people who stay current and create ways to respond to this year’s problems are the ones who stand the best chance of making it through and being well positioned when things finally turn around.

“So I am passing along Sara and Michele’s question to you. What are this year’s problems for your clients or customers? And what are you doing to solve those problems?

“My clients and prospects include job seekers and entrepreneurs. Their current challenge is to clearly and quickly articulate their value in the marketplace. They must stand out in a very competitive business landscape. Using some of my tried and true tips and strategies, I’m helping people get back to basics of identifying the needs of their target audience and communicating with confidence and clarity.

“I’m also going back and contacting clients I have helped in the past, reestablishing the connection and finding out how they are doing and what they need. If there’s something I can do to help, I’ll suggest it or I’ll pass along a referral to someone else who may be able to help them.

“If you are looking for affordable ways to improve or refresh your skills, check out my new webinars and small group classes that focus on communicating for networking and presentations. To find out more visit www.mediaskillstraining.com/classes.

“Sara and Michele helped me stop the “worry machine” and look for new ways to help my clients. They could do the same for you. If you’d like more information about Sara and Michele, check out Working with Power at www.workingwithpower.com.

Lorraine”

Lorraine’s company is always instrumental when we need to refine or articulate a message for the media or for new customers. If you’re retooling to solve this year’s problems, check out her retooled, accessible offerings. And congratulations: you’re going to weather this recession just fine. If you’re not retooling, be prepared for a scary and scarce few months (or years). We’ll keep preachin’ it, though, so maybe you’ll smell the coffee soon and learn to thrive by meeting your customers’ current needs. We hope so. Your company still has lots to offer and your customers still need you; there are just a new set of problems to solve. Enjoy!

What I wanted to blog about is that wound-up experience.  Clients have taught me that not everyone shares my degree of bodily awareness about anxiety.  Most people just walk around feeling anxious and think it’s normal.  If I ask about it:  “Are you feeling stressed?”  they often deny it vehemently.  And authentically, I think:  we’re like fish in water, the way we swim in tension every day.  So, having a more finely-wrought sense of the sources of our anxiety than most, I wanted to articulate it a little for you, through the lens of my own experience today, in the hope that it helps you disentangle these threads for yourself in a way that lightens your load.

See, my and Sara’s anxiety today has two different sources.  One’s more helpful than the other.  The helpful anxiety: “hey, we want to kick butt in March, so let’s know what’s going on before Sara leaves.  And let’s make sure we get her input on everything that needs it, so nothing’s on hold that shouldn’t be.”  Smart stuff.  It compresses time, sure, and raises blood pressure a little, but nothing too terrible.  It’s the less-helpful stuff that really messes with us (and, we’ll wager, with you):  the head-trips that say “we have to get everything for the whole year figured out before tomorrow.”    “There’s never enough time.  We’re always behind.”  “We have no idea what we’re doing.”  And so on.  You can probably fill in the blanks yourself.  And if you’re thinking I sound like an insecure, scattered ding-dong if those things are running through my head, my guess is that’s because your own ding-dong thoughts are so well-masked that they’re unconscious.  Problem is, if you don’t really hear them, they have that much more power to run your life. 

The take-away for me and you, both:  let’s differentiate between helpful anxiety and the head-trip stuff that just wastes our energy.  Next time you notice a knot in your stomach, or tightness in your head and throat, check out what you’re anxious about.  Some of it will be helpful anxiety, spurring you to productive action.  Some will just be mental spinning.  Take a deep breath and let that junk go.  Then get back to work!  The clock is ticking!  J

But over time, as they recognize the long-term depletion they’ve experienced by continually pouring out, giving, providing, driving, producing, going, going, going, and seldom pausing to refill, refuel, and reconnect to their inspiration, many of them circle back and say, “Okay. I’m not sure I fully know what you’re talking about, but I’m willing to give it a try. How do I open to receiving?”

And we gleefully rub our hands together. Aha! They’re on a very good path! If you’re in that place of willing and wondering, too, we’ll share with you the bottom-line, most basic tool for receiving:

The #1 most important component in receiving is seeing yourself – in part – as an empty vessel hungry to be filled. It’s not that this vessel-facet of your being is ALL of who you are, it’s just that to expand your receiving capacity, you have to be willing to taste for yourself that void, so that it can be filled. Practice having your guard down, within your body: Spend 10-20 minutes in a comfortable position like savasana (relaxed on your back) or sukhasana (“easy pose” – sitting comfortably cross-legged, perhaps on a pillow or blanket) or simply sitting in a chair with your feet on the floor. During this time, scan your body for the sensations of need, longing, hunger, sadness, emptiness, or just willingness to receive…. Not so you fall into those, but so you can say “here’s the doorway” through which you can receive – those are the places where you can open to that which you desire, and that which you need but are so courageous and generous that you don’t even know you need.

After you’ve spent this time noticing sensations in your body, your mind will likely ask (impatiently, I might add!), “Okay, so now what?!” That’s its impulse to drive, to do, to make something happen. But there isn’t anything to do this time. That’s the counter-logical power of receiving: it’s a form of power you have seldom used. As a result, it’s untapped. It’s new territory. It’s like finding a fat wallet full of cash in the the other pocket, in addition to the one you already had. Jackpot!

Just don’t ask your receiving power to behave exactly like your driving power. It doesn’t. It’s more yin, in contrast to the yang of driving. Your attention to those sensations will cause changes in your attention, in your presence, and in your feeling state. It will, almost without your realizing, give you new ideas and new options in responding to people and challenges.

If you keep doing it, you’ll find motivation naturally bubbling up to help you do things you’ve wanted to do but that your driving power didn’t get done. What happens when you tap into your receiving is different for each of us. Please leave a comment and let us know what arises for you.

Iskra was once invited by her salsa instructor to demonstrate with him before the entire group of dancers.  At some point, his wild twirling took her into a state of overwhelm and she sort of froze.  To the class, the instructor smoothly commented:   ”The follow doesn’t know what happens next… So she relaxes.”  That hadn’t at all been what Iskra was doing, but she took the hint.  And whaddaya know?  Things got easier!  When she relaxed into her uncertainty, she found more grace, safety, and confidence than she’d known she could have.

Amid snowstorms and collapses, bailouts for Wall Street but none for your street, where are you uncertain?  And how are you responding to uncertainty?  If you’ve tried the clenching-up route – and we’re sure you have! – you know that doesn’t exactly leave you nimble and resourceful.

It’s clear (or ought to be) that you’re not the lead; you’re the follow in many important ways.  Given that, and its intrinsic uncertainty, how can you follow Iskra’s dance instructor’s counter-logical (but highly intuitive) guidance:  “The follow doesn’t know what happens next… so (s)he relaxes?”