People often talk about their moment of clarity when they shift into a higher awareness about how to tackle the problem. Some call it their “aha” moment. Some are less certain about what changes have come about but know something is different in the way that they approach a problem.

This process of illumination is different for all, and as varied as there are people experiencing change. It’s a very personal and subjective experience, but transforms both inner and outer environments in a profound way.

How do you jump from “tree-to-forest” perspective in your own life? Concerning the important changes that you have made in your own life and relationships, what has the illumination process consisted of for you? How have you made the changes in your life that have brought you improved awareness and success?

We know when we have achieved the forest perspective when things in our life (subtle or not) begin to take effect. Our loved ones respond to us differently. Maybe we feel less stressed. We can experience moment to moment happiness for once without mentally living in the future. Or maybe we can learn to stop being so hard on ourselves and develop a little more patience and gentleness.

Remember how great your “A-Game” once was? Remember how you felt in control and really enjoyed what you were doing, whether in work or in your personal life? Yeah, we’re talking about that quality of life were you’ve achieved that sense of mastery, enjoyment and free flow, where everything seems to just line up for you – that effortless zone of achievement and happiness that makes it all happen the way it should happen.

For a lot of guys, before they know it, they’ve lost their game. Or maybe they’ve never had it. Whatever the case, bringing your “A-Game” back to your life will help drive you past feeling unmotivated and uninspired by your life. Life is way too short for a “B-Game.”

Bringing your “A-Game” back is about facing what needs to be faced in your life. It’s about summoning up the strength to burn out the barriers that are right in front of you that prevent your forward motion. It’s about taking responsibility for your self, your success and your own happiness, and taking the actions needed to optimize yourself, your life and your relationships.

Consider these possible barriers to losing your “A-Game”:

• Losing focus on what your values or goals are
• Losing your sense of self – “Who am I anymore?” (e.g. the midlife – or quarterlife – crisis)
• Avoiding anger or other negative feelings that, if dealt with, can push you through back to playing ball on the “A-Game” field
• You’ve been job hopping, unsatisfied by your work, or unstimulated by what you’re doing to earn money
• You feel blue, de-energized, lazy or shiftless a lot
• You’re angry, or just plain irritable, most of the time with others who don’t deserve to get it from you
• You are dwelling in the “it sucks to be me” state, and are pissed when others are enjoying themselves.

Setting an action plan for Bringing Your “A-Game” Back is important. Ask yourself these questions:

1. Where do I really want to be in my life? In my job? In my health? In my marriage or relationship?
2. Be specific: what does that look like? Write down the images, thoughts, ideas or draw pictures/make a collage about what that looks like in your head. Communicate it to yourself before you can clearly communicate it with anyone else, including your partner.
3. Identify the barriers to those changes: stress? depression? money? fear? lack of support from others? There are always barriers, so becoming clear on those things are important, as they tend to be a bit out of our daily consciousness.
4. Design ways to overcome those barriers: how will you figure out what it will take to conquer those things – do you need exercise? More money? More time? More communication from someone? Counseling? Time management? It could be more than one of these things you need.
5. Rank and prioritize those things that need your attention and resources. Set a reasonable time frame in which to chunk off small “baby step” goals, and then commit to the small goals every so often – once or twice a week, once a month. Remember: achieving the smaller goals, en route to the larger one, is the path to success, not chewing off a huge goal and then disappointing yourself.

Bringing your “A-Game” back will take some time, but with effort, diligence, patience and foresight, you’ll be getting back to the happy flow of your life that you’ve been missing all this time.

Know somebody who’s just chronically disorganized, or can’t seem to juggle a schedule for the life of them? Not having enough time, or being chronically at the mercy of one’s schedule, makes for a pressurized life, not to mention all of that stress that keeps accruing and those relationships that wear thin.

I notice sometimes that people who are chronically managing their schedule (sometimes) tend to use their busy schedule as a way to avoid the other, deeper problems going on with them. You know how we tend to use others as excuses for the problems we encounter? We can just as surely use our schedules or our “busy lives” as an avoidance technique, a convenient way to avoid having to deal with the bigger issues, such as unhappiness, a bad marriage, a job we hate or, worst of all, negative feelings about ourselves.

Bad time management is a function of this. We incorporate so much into our lives, that it seems as if we are chained to our hectic lives and schedules. We get to a point where they control us, not the other way around. We learn to gradually neglect ourselves, and our needs, so that our schedules (and others) get our time and attention. But guess what? Those people and appointments never get the best of us; we are only giving them so much of us, because we’re not taking the time to take care of ourselves, or don’t know how to, or both. The latter problem is more difficult to deal with than the former, but are so mutally related to each other that people often experience both problems together.

When we neglect our values, we neglect what is truly important to us. With the limited time we have as a human being, on this Earth, we tend to get so caught up in the minutia of everyday life – the ads, the errands, the deadlines – that we forget to check in with the things and people that matter most to us. They get sidelined because “life” is happening, or the busy prison cells we call our schedules. We forget to check in with ourselves, and savor that which is most important to us, which is often people and relationships with others and with ourselves.

Creating more space in our lives is important to incorporate more quality time to do the things we really want to do, or need to do, to maintain what’s really necessary. If you’re not living a life aligned with your values, or if you don’t know what your values even are, it’s time to sit down and hammer out how to find them. They are what can guide of lives, create joy and meaning, and lessen stress and anger considerably.

What is this, you ask? How can I possibly love my life if I hate my job? I hear you, and wondered that same thing for so long.I ended up leaving my job three months ago to do my counseling private practice three months ago, but was miserable at my previous job. I hated it, but got through it. And survived. And am here to tell you that there are things you can to do help yourself mentally cope, as well as build action steps to get the bat hell out of there and do what you really want to do.

So, two categories come to mind: coping skills, and action planning. To cope with a bad job, it’s important to see the job for exactly what it is: paid employment. It gives you a check, and you check in everyday and work, or feign working, or whatever you do there. To know that it’s pay for your time reframe it a little bit.

Also, it’s really important to get a good support system, which includes plenty of friends, family or your significant other that make it better. My friend, Mark, was an incredible source of support for me, and he worked there, too. It made it all seem like I wasn’t the only crazy person there. It helped to know others were in it with me, and saw the same things that made me hate my job.

Getting out of the building for lunch always helped me, because I could then saw the day into two distinct halves, which kind of helped me see it all as less overwhelming. Exercising and eating well, as well as getting 8 hours of sleep a night, cooled my anger and frustration, and helped me deal with the experience much more. Mindfulness meditation helped me to deal with a negative experience, so that it felt just a little bit less negative and more neutral.

Lastly, not putting in 100% was something I did to cope. Being a 100% person, I found it challenging to actually do less superior (quality or quantity) work, and accept doing a so-so job. I found that I pressured myself less, because I really just didn’t want to work that hard at a job I hated. I started to work less hard, and pressure myself less.

In the action planning stage, I worked hard to market my practice, set deadlines as to when things would happen, and, most importantly, set a 90-day target date to leave the place I couldn’t work at anymore. I started to realize that the job wasn’t going to leave me, that I needed to leave the job. Empowering myself was scary, because I had operated under the premise that I could lazily allow my job to tell me when it didn’t want me, which was never. I had to take the bull by the horns and make the jump. I had to start to pack away savings to make the jump, and verbalize my intentions to myself (journalling and planning) and to others in my life. This legitimized it all, and made my intentions reality. Now that I told others, it forced me into a situation where I had to back up my words with actions.

So, there is hope to get out of a bad job. I know there are a lot of external factors – such as money, family, and severe lack of jobs during the recession. But, when the recession ends, you won’t have the same old excuses for staying in a job you hate. But, we can control the inner factors, such as how we think about our situation and what we really want for our lives, that we have a lot of control over. It’s all about how bad you want it.

Feeling like you’re stuck in a rut these days? Feel down and depleted and like a flat tire, and not your usual self? Here’s some ideas to lift you out of the mud and spinning your wheels on ground again.

There’s a lot of reasons for being stuck. First, it is possible that you aren’t enjoying something major in your life, whether that’s your relationship or your work? Do you hate waking up in the morning because you don’t want to face that certain someone or something? I know when I was employed, and not working for myself, I dreaded going to work because I knw I wasn’t living my passion, what I was meant to do, which was to have a counseling practice for men and couples.

Second, it’s possible that you are experiencing depression, or at least the blues. Sometimes, depression is biochemical in nature, but just as often it’s a reaction to a situation or an environment that we think we have no power over, yet feel helpless to change it. We resort to depressing about it because it’s easier in some senses than to take action, or even know how to take action. Now, now, I’m not saying that people always choose depression, but I want you to consider that it’s one of several contributing factors to depression. Biochemical or nutritional imbalances can be as much to blame, as well as other lifestyle factors.

Third, do you know what you really want? Are you living your life aligned with your values – what you blieve in and the way you really see your life being lived (without all those messy mental constraints you put up). If your self-critic wasn’t saying “no, no, no” to everything, what would your life look like? Is being in a rut an expression of giving into that “no, no, no” and not enough “yes, yes, yes”? I doubt you’d be stuck in a rut if you were living your life saying “yes, yes, yes.”

Sometimes situations keep us in a rut, but, as Victor Frankl (well, and the Buddhists) say, it’s our perception of events that we have control over, not the actual events. So, how can you make lemons out of lemonade if life keeps you in a holding pattern right now?

If we listen closely to our inner voice, our true nature, we usually come up with a lot of good things. We know because we listen inside, not outside. It’s hard to be in a rut when we listen to that inner knowing, which almost always knows the answer. Meditate on it, and see what comes up.

I hope this helps you spin right out of the mud onto the road that awaits you.

As men and women, we get a lot of our self-esteem and identity through outside sources: work, sport, friends, partners and through roles we play. But how much of that is internally-derived self-esteem?

Depending on outside sources for primary self-esteem needs is a losing proposition in the long run. Because outside sources sometimes fail to provide or to come through for us when we need them, we need to look to inner sources of self-esteem inside of ourselves.

How do you create self-esteem from the inside?

From my work with men, a lot of self-esteem comes from identity sources, like the work that they do. Men often overidentify with their work and careers in a way that their self-esteem becomes overly contingent on their professional life. When the professional life fails to come through, then self-esteem becomes damaged. Depression and stress, as well as relationship difficulty, often come as byproducts of external sources that fail to provide for our self-esteem needs.

Refining your inner self-esteem, that place of knowing and centeredness inside yourself, is an important step in “living from the inside.” It becomes easier to weather the storms of our lives and our environment, especially when those “external” sources that we expect will come through for us fail to do so. We cling less to those sources for the fuel that we need, because we become generators of that self-esteem from within.

(Article taken from Newsweek.com, published Feb. 14, 2009)

By Mary Carmichael:

If you aren’t already paralyzed with stress from reading the financial news, here’s a sure way to achieve that grim state: read a medical-journal article that examines what stress can do to your brain. Stress, you’ll learn, is crippling your neurons so that, a few years or decades from now, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease will have an easy time destroying what’s left. That’s assuming you haven’t already died by then of some other stress-related ailment such as heart disease. As we enter what is sure to be a long period of uncertainty—a gantlet of lost jobs, dwindling assets, home foreclosures and two continuing wars—the downside of stress is certainly worth exploring. But what about the upside? It’s not something we hear much about. 

In the past several years, a lot of us have convinced ourselves that stress is unequivocally negative for everyone, all the time. We’ve blamed stress for a wide variety of problems, from slight memory lapses to full-on dementia—and that’s just in the brain. We’ve even come up with a derisive nickname for people who voluntarily plunge into stressful situations: they’re “adrenaline junkies.”

Sure, stress can be bad for you, especially if you react to it with anger or depression or by downing five glasses of Scotch. But what’s often overlooked is a common-sense counterpoint: in some circumstances, it can be good for you, too. It’s right there in basic-psychologytextbooks. As Spencer Rathus puts it in “Psychology: Concepts and Connections,” “some stress is healthy and necessary to keep us alert and occupied.” Yet that’s not the theme that’s been coming out of science for the past few years. “The public has gotten such a uniform message that stress is always harmful,” saysJanet DiPietro, a developmental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University. “And that’s too bad, because most people do their best under mild to moderate stress.”

The stress response—the body’s hormonal reaction to danger, uncertainty or change—evolved to help us survive, and if we learn how to keep it from overrunning our lives, it still can. In the short term, it can energize us, “revving up our systems to handle what we have to handle,” says Judith Orloff, a psychiatrist at UCLA. In the long term, stress can motivate us to do better at jobs we care about. A little of it can prepare us for a lot later on, making us more resilient. Even when it’s extreme, stress may have some positive effects—which is why, in addition to posttraumatic stress disorder, some psychologists are starting to define a phenomenon called posttraumatic growth. “There’s really a biochemical and scientific bias that stress is bad, but anecdotally and clinically, it’s quite evident that it can work for some people,” says Orloff. “We need a new wave of research with a more balanced approach to how stress can serve us.” Otherwise, we’re all going to spend far more time than we should stressing ourselves out about the fact that we’re stressed out.

When I started asking researchers about “good stress,” many of them said it essentially didn’t exist. “We never tell people stress is good for them,” one said. Another allowed that it might be, but only in small ways, in the short term, in rats. What about people who thrive on stress, I asked—people who become policemen or ER docs or air-traffic controllers because they like seeking out chaos and putting things back in order? Aren’t they using stress to their advantage? No, the researchers said, those people are unhealthy. “This business of people saying they ‘thrive on stress’? It’s nuts,” Bruce Rabin, a distinguished psychoneuroimmunologist, pathologist and psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, told me. Some adults who seek out stress and believe they flourish under it may have been abused as children or permanently affected in the womb after exposure to high levels of adrenaline and cortisol, he said. Even if they weren’t, he added, they’re “trying to satisfy” some psychological need. Was he calling this a pathological state, I asked—saying that people who feel they perform best under pressure actually have a disease? He thought for a minute, and then: “You can absolutely say that. Yes, you can say that.”

(Read more here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/184154)

This virtual anatomical model reveals just how stress affects your health. Interesting!

http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/health/Mind_Body_Health_Interactive_Stress_Tool.php

I know everything in the media seems to be revolving around the economy: the market, home loans, business concerns, and credit crunches. I think that that stress may be also trickling into some unforeseen places, like your marriage or relationship.

Sex and money are two common sources of stress, and both are highly underemphasized in most relationships. It’s not comfortable talking about these things, so what do we do? Sweep it under the rug, and go on using money with the negative, dysfunctional messages that have always characterized our relationship with money. 

Maybe one of you spends to alleviate stress, or the other has a habit of overspending to compensate for guilt or shame in your relationship. Maybe you both live in separate fantasies about how money works in your life – and those fantasies don’t match the other one. The current economic realities have started to slap you in the face, and now you’re wondering why you needed that last minute trip to the Bahamas.

Money, and our relationship with it, is a very powerful agent (and container) for our dysfunctional messages and neurotic compulsions. Mix in our issues with our relationships, and we’re looking at a perfect storm of problems. 

So, what helps this mess out? Stopping the hiding from your spouse about those gambling weekends you and your buddies had last month? All these are good starts, but there is more.

I think that understanding how to minimize conflict is another key. conflict will come from not being on the same page together if there are money issues. Honesty is essential. I think that money brings a lot of discomfort and fear, especially of the other spouse getting mad, and rejecting their mate or their spending habits. Spending habits are directly linked to one’s personal psychology, and rejecting the spending habits may risk rejecting the spouse, especially if their is excessive spending or addictive behaviors going on. Then, more intervention may be needed.

The economy has its ups and downs, just like a relationship. Taking preventative measures, and knowing how you will navigate (both in your finances and in your relationship) will calm the waters quite a bit. Knowing how to work with your spouse as a team, and not malign, blame, criticize or anything else to make the situation worse will help. Seeking professional help, such as with a good financial coach and a relationship counselor, will help minimize these issues.

- Jason

So, is it true? Is your self-critic running your life? 

I’ve found that one of the biggest problems that smart, successful men deal with is their own self-critic. Guys with loud self critics never feel satisfied, need to feel in control most of the time, and in their hearts, don’t feel good enough or like they measure up to others’ standards. Even though they have accomplished a lot in their lives and in their professions, they still somehow feel like they fall short.

The self-critic is critical of self and others, always strives for perfection and unreasonable accomplishment, and is never at ease and satisfied with itself. It needs to keep pushing, and getting to “more.”

Consequently, it can be the source of a lot of stress, anger and insecurity, which will inevitably create problems on the job, in relationships, and in our own skin. It is the epicenter of a lot of the problems that you may be experiencing.

So, how can I help you to quiet this overly aggressive self-critic? Together, we’ll:

• Learn about your unique self-critic, and see how it works and runs parts of your life
• Figure out how to stop feeling less successful than other people
• Learn how to still accomplish and get stuff done, without the loud self-critic making it worse
• Understand the role of anger in your self-critic, and use it to better transform your critic
• Feel more in control, and stop feeling out of control
• Get less feedback from your woman about being controlling of her and the things that she does
• Create easier and deeper relationships for yourself

I invite you to make an appointment with me to work on your self-critic. Call me now at 602.309.0568.

- Jason