The importance of fun and adventure

At the Handel Group, we believe that a full human life is comprised of 18 areas. The areas of life that clients typically want to work on are relationship, body, career, money, time, character traits. In the shadow of the “big 6,” the other 12 often get overlooked, and yet are just as important in contributing to our overall happiness in life. I decided to test this out by taking on the area of fun and adventure in August.

As many of you know, I spent 2.5 weeks working from Switzerland in August. In the mornings, while my US clients were still slumbering, I would walk around town, go to museums, take tours, sample cheese and chocolate, and visit churches. I would coach for the better part of the afternoon and early evening, and then hit the town with my friends Elke or Helene in the evening to see concerts, performances, or swim in salt springs. On the weekends, I went for bike rides, visited festivals, hiked in the Alps, went to the circus (twice), met interesting people, swam, and went to barbeques. In other words, I spent 2.5 weeks focusing on fun and adventure.

Fun and adventure, I found, is like a drop of yellow die dipped into the flowing river of your life: it makes everything else seem a bit brighter. For example, I faced my fair share of “stressful” incidents while in Switzerland. My health insurance fell through, and so I had to scramble to find a new provider in 12 days (and in Rhode Island to boot, which ain’t no Massachusetts). I accidentally ended up in Germany when I thought I was still in Switzerland, and had to figure out how to scrounge up Euros. An old sports injury, which had debilitated me for 8 months in 2004, flared up again.  But none of those things phased me nearly as much as they would have had I been back in Providence. I was simply having too much fun to be weighed down. Fun is the jolt of happiness that puts all of those worries in perspective.

Adventure helps you become more aware of the present moment. Those 2.5 Swiss weeks seemed to last for several Providence months, not because Swiss clocks are funky, but because each moment had something new and exciting to observe in it. A gorgeous Alpine vista. A new type of cheese I had never tasted. A Swiss person with a funky outfit. Because I was keenly aware of more moments in my days, my days felt fuller, longer, and more satisfying. Like I was sucking the juice out of every last bit of them. Now that I am back in Providence, I remember to take a minute or two to simply stop and savor.

Finally, adventure connects you intimately with the web of humanity that is all around us. Adventure plucked me out of my known world in urban Providence, and placed me down in a land where I didn’t know the language, customs, or infrastructure. Even how to buy vegetables in the local grocery store was non-obvious. In the midst of so much uncertainty, I needed to rely more than ever on the kindness of strangers. And as in every other travel experience I have encountered, humanity stepped up to the challenge, and then some. We really do live but for the grace of others, and stepping out into the adventurous unknown provides a keen reminder of that.

Mission accomplished, fun and adventure IS a very important area of life to attend to. The good news is that you don’t need to travel to Switzerland to have fun and adventure. I’m finding that Providence has plenty to offer, too .

What adventure are you taking on this month?

A blog by Dr. Samantha Sutton, senior life coach at the Handel Group

Do we really need to achieve our dreams in order to be happy?

After insuring a minimal level of comfortable survival,  one of the top desires of most people is to be happy. Even people who lust after money, power, or love usually want those things because they believe that those things will make them happy. Indeed, we often think that happiness is defined as having a dream, being proud of yourself for getting closer and closer to it, and then finally achieving it.  We then bask in the happiness of finally having what we wanted, and may do so for some time… but sooner or later, the thrill of the dream-come-true typically wears off, and we feel the need to set our eyes on the next dream in order to ensure that the happiness continues. For example, I wanted to double the traffic on my site. I did that, and was jubilant for about a month (once I got true content hits, and not the airplane-photo hits). And now, when I look at my traffic, I am looking eagerly for days where I hit triple!

The thing is, this can be a pretty energy-intensive tactic to keep ourselves happy. It requires us to be constantly striving, scheming, achieving. And if we hit a road block, or heaven forbid fail, we feel a blip of unhappiness. Surely there must be another way to be happy that can complement this one?

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, described such a way in his TED talk. He defined two types of happiness: natural happiness, which comes from something great happening to you, and synthetic happiness, which comes when your brain just decides to be happy, no matter what has just happened around you. The human brain, Gilbert argues,  has developed the ability to create synthetic happiness as a coping mechanism.  For example, if a person is shown two paintings, and is given as a gift the one he likes the least, there is a good chance that, when surveyed months later, he will profess to preferring the one he actually got over the one he didn’t get.

Now, of course, our first reaction to hearing a story like that is usually “sure, he SAYS he likes his painting better, but he’s probably just putting on a good face.” We presuppose that synthetic happiness is not as potent or delicious as natural happiness… like “making the best” of the bad painting doesn’t make us truly as happy as getting the good painting in the first place.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case, argues Gilbert. He cited a study with amnesia patients. Gilbert’s team showed the patients paintings, had them rank them, and then gave the patients a painting that wasn’t their first choice. The team then left the room, and came back 30 minutes later. The patients didn’t remember Gilbert’s team, the paintings, or which painting they had ended up with in the first round. Gilbert had the patients rank the pictures again. And lo and behold, the patients tended to rank the picture they ended up with in the first round as their favorite. So even though they couldn’t consciously remember getting the painting, their brains had shifted to prefer it. Their brains legitimately were happier with the “bad” painting.

So it seems that we really might be able to be legitimately happy with most any outcome. The key, then, seems to be to develop and strengthen this perspective-shifting part of our minds so that we can conjure up synthetic happiness on demand. Because goodness knows, that part of the brain currently misses many opportunities to cultivate synthetic happiness… many of those misses occur, Gilbert argues, when our choices are reversible. Which, alas, many are.

How to develop the magic synthetic happiness wand? I am no expert, but am a sleuth on a mission to be one. My coaching buddy practices what I call the reasoning approach. She sees everything that happens to her as “this is exactly as it should be.” In doing this, she shifts what at first glance is a “bad” event into an important part of her life’s path. Thus, every occurrence becomes something to celebrate, because it is getting her where she wants to go. Another friend practices what I call the religious approach.  She sees occurrences in her life as “God’s will” and so they must have a higher purpose. If the man upstairs wants it, then surely it must be great. Elizabeth Gilbert (yay the movie comes out Friday!) practices what I call the vigilant approach. Through mental discipline developed in meditation, she consciously dismisses unhappy thoughts and allows only delicious, happy thoughts to linger in her mind. In her words: “You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”

I’m not saying to give up on dreaming and striving altogether, as I do think they play a vital role in life. But it’s not the only show in town, and thank goodness for that! And if you can couple synthetic happiness with achievement happiness, you’re set. You can be light and happy while in pursuit of the dream, no matter what happens, and immune to the often-paralyzing fear of failure. Which means that you will probably be even more likely to achieve your dream. All the while getting closer to guaranteeing that you’ll meet your #1 goal: happiness.

To sum it up in Dan Gilbert’s words: “Our longings and our worries are both overblown because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing.”

Where do you need to start cultivating synthetic happiness in your life?

A blog by Dr. Samantha Sutton, life coach at the Handel Group

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcygallery/

Experiencing happiness vs. remembering happiness: more different than you’d think

We say we want to be happy, but how exactly do we register happiness? I recently saw a TED talk by Dr. David Kahneman (thanks Kathryn and Galen for sending it on!) about this topic. He described two different selves within us: the experiencing self, which lives in the moment, and the remembering self, which looks back at experiences and gauges them. It turns out, says Kahneman, that the happiness of the experiencing self is very much different than the happiness of the remembering self. In other words, happy moments do not necessarily translate directly into happy memories. Dr. Kahneman gave two great examples to illustrate this.

Example 1: Colonoscopy
Yes, we all know they are painful. Dr. Kahneman showed, however, that how painful patients report their colonoscopy to be was largely dependent on how painful the procedure was at the end. So patient A whose colonoscopy lasted 10 minutes but ended with high pain remembered the incident as being more painful than patient B, whose colonoscopy lasted 20 minutes, had the same high pain as patient A at minute 10, but ended with less pain at minute 20. Patient B experienced more individual moments of pain, and hence more pain overall, than patient A, and yet patient A remembered the experience to be more painful.

Example 2: California vs. Ohio
Where would you rather live? Most people, said Dr. Kahneman, would say California, because of the milder weather. But studies have shown that weather doesn’t influence experienced happiness very much. So people who live in Ohio and then move to California don’t experience much of a shift in daily happiness… but when asked to reflect on it, they will think they are happier, because they think of the cold weather in Ohio and conclude that they made the right decision to move.

So then, when we say we want to be happier in our lives, which are we talking about? The moment-to-moment happiness of the experiencing self, or the satisfaction or pleasure when we think about our lives, which is generated by our remembering self? The answer is probably both. We want to have a fun day, and look back at it with satisfaction when it’s over.

But what happens when the experiencing self and the remembering self are at odds? We call this reauthoring, and it can be dangerous. For example, when I remember the last apartment I lived in on Bromfield Road, I groan. It was too big and isolating. It was drafty in the winter. It was in a quaint but backwater neighborhood. I would have been better off living in the hip hustle-and-bustle of downtown Boston. I would rate my remembered happiness at that apartment as maybe a 5 on a scale of 1-10.

But anyone who knew me during those 1.5 years on Bromfield road would be surprised by this rating. I reveled in my apartment. Given that I work at home, and spend 75% of my time in my apartment, I deliberately picked a spacious apartment that wouldn’t feel claustrophobic. I had my own large office, hosted dinner parties in the dining room (my very first dining room!), lifted weights in a separate exercise room, indulged guests with their own spacious guest room, reveled in my endless closet and storage space, and delighted in filling the seemingly endless wall space with art and pictures. Three times a week, I’d run favorite running route in New England (the Mystic River Watershed), and the other four days I’d walk my puppy on the endless grassy meadows of the Tufts campus. A few times per week, I’d hang out at my favorite coffee shop ever, True Grounds, which was a mere 5 minute walk from my doorstep. I found a great chorus, stained glass instructor, dog trainer, and spiritual study group, all within 15 minutes of my doorstep. Yes, my experiencing self really dug the Bromfield pad.

But then toward the end, things changed. Anthony started commuting to Providence, and was never around. The apartment felt empty. The cold that came from my cheapness with the heating oil (I am a true Bury) started to get to me. Anthony and I had agreed to move to downtown Boston after 2 years at Bromfield, so I could live my “Sex and the City” metropolitan dream… but then Anthony took a job in Providence, and we moved to Providence instead, and I wondered if I’d ever get to live my metropolitan dream? Our time at Bromfield started feeling like a mistake. We should have moved downtown instead, while we had the chance. And so now that we are no longer at Bromfield Road, my remembering self tells the story about what a cold, isolating, back-waters mistake it was.

This remembering self is a thief. It has stolen the beautiful memories and experiences of Bromfield Road, the ones that made the experiencing self so happy, and locked them behind a curtain of its own choosing. It tells a version of the story that leaves me sad and angry. No happy memories are safe, because they can be reauthored at any time… and the experiencing self cannot jump back into that moment to defend it. We are at the mercy of the remembering self.

I see my clients’ remembering selves do similar reauthoring. They reach back to their past to tell sad or angry stories in which their parents, teachers, schoolyard friends, or ex-spouses scarred them for life. But they don’t jump into the experiencing self to understand how that previous version of themselves actually felt in the moment. The girl being chased around the playground by boys was actually feeling exhilarated because she was getting attention, not emotionally damaged for being different. The sulky boy being yelled at by his parents is not being taught that his opinion is inconsequential, but is instead feeling guilty for having done something that he knew was wrong. The ex-Mormon blames the church for stifling her sense of individuality, but forgets that in the moment, she actually enjoyed being part of a large group that did fun activities with people she cared about. Once the experiencing self is gone, however, these momentary feelings are lost, and the remembering self is free to go back and tell the story any which way it chooses.

So the moral of the story, then, is to be sure to cultivate a compassionate, loving remembering self. One that believes the best in people (the best in YOU), and that cherishes each of the events that have brought you to the present, beautiful moment. A storyteller that aspires to tell a story of joy, hope, and love instead of despair, sadness, and folly.

What stories does your remembering self like to tell?

A blog by Dr. Samantha Sutton, life coach at the Handel Group

Guest blog: From corporate America to running with the homeless

Today, I’d like to welcome guest blogger Sera Snyder, one of my clients. Sera made a profound, beautiful, and brave career shift to pursue the career of her dreams, and so I asked her if she would share her story with all of the other people out there who are considering similar transitions. Without further ado, take it away, Sera:

I never thought I could work in a career I really loved.  I never thought I could wake up every morning and spend my day pursuing my passion and getting paid for it.  From the time I was a teenager my dream was to live a big, corporate life.  All I wanted for my life was prestige, money and status.  I never really thought about what I would do to reach this dream and if I would be happy.  Didn’t money just make you happy?  My goal was to go to college, get an important corporate job after I graduated and get promoted through my career until I had the corner office.  I used to sit and day dream about the corner office and the windows and how important and happy I would be, “oh, when I got there.”

I was not really quite sure what I would be doing when I got “there,” but that didn’t matter, just as long as I was important and making money.  I wanted to be noticed and respected and admired and I would push and push and push until I got there.

Four years after I graduated college, I was doing a good job of getting to “important.”  I had landed a job at a financial services firm directly out of school and I had worked my way through a variety of positions.  I was getting closer and closer to my dream every day.  The problem was, I wasn’t happy.  The prestige was there, or at least I felt important because I was working in my corporate job, my bank account was padded thanks to my corporate salary, but my soul was empty.  I was living in motions – get up, go to work, sit at a computer, go to meetings like a zombie, and try to get excited when the board approves your proposal.  Repeat.

Lucky for me, during this meaningless time in my life, I found purpose and joy volunteering my time with a local organization that married my passion for running with my desire to give back to my community.  I supplemented my lack-luster corporate life with morning runs at local homeless shelters that filled my days and life with joy, happiness and a feeling of being needed.  It was a past-time, a passion and fun that filled my free time.  I never thought it could be more.

Insert the Handel Group, and Samantha into my life and I learned much, much different.  I learned that I did not have to live a life of motions and I could really be happy in my career.  The problem in my mind, however was that, to me,  the corporate job I was in was what I was “supposed” to be doing, this was the road to my dream, so there was really no way to leave – or was there?

I do not remember the day I decided that maybe, just maybe I needed a career change or the moment I realized I could live my passion everyday and get paid for it, but I’ll forever be grateful that Samantha helped me realize this. With Samantha’s help, I started asking myself questions like, what makes me happy? what is my mission in life?   I started interview people that worked outside of corporate America and it was amazing!  These people were happy AND they made great money AND they were so respected in their field.

I started paying attention to what really made me happy, not a fake happy, but a sunshine in my belly happy.  I started to really dream about a new kind of success – living my life to be happy and fulfilled and I found that money and status really were not that important to me.  I loved to help others live their life to their best potentials, I loved giving back and I love revolving my life around a healthy lifestyle.  I started to manifest my dream career and I found it – right in front of my face.

In 6 short months, I went from a miserable career in financial services to a career, working in the non-profit sector that filled each and every moment of my life with happiness.  I took a job with Back on My Feet, the organization I had been volunteering with for over 2 years.  My job was to lead the programming for the running program that used running as a vehicle to build self-confidence and self esteem to the homeless population.  I was giving back, helping, feeling needed and loving my life.  I found an inner peace that finance could never provide me.  I also chose to go back to school part time to pursue a passion in health and nutrition.  Upon graduation, I would have a degree in health coaching, another fulfilling way I can give back to those struggling with their health and nutrition choices.

I continue to live my dream every day and I feel like I never work a day in my life.  After 2 months of working for Back on My Feet I continue to ask myself everyday if I am living my mission and I push myself to fulfill my mission everyday – and now I do daily.  It’s such a satisfying and fulfilling feeling that no money could buy.  People often ask me how I did it.  How did I have the courage to leave the safety of my corporate job to work in my passion?  I don’t know how to better answer this question other than to say I started to tell the truth.  I started to be really honest with myself about what made me happy, not others.   I started to live my dream and by being true to myself.  In this process, I believe I have earned the respect and admiration of others that I so ignorantly yearned for years ago.  I have found “there” that place I had been looking for all those years and its better than I ever dreamed it would be.

Sera in the news

Back on my Feet

A blog by Dr. Samantha Sutton, life coach at the Handel Group

Image courtesy of  http://www.gettysburgtimes.com/articles/2010/04/22/sports/2525464.txt

A multitude of voices

We all have behaviors that we want to change. For me, I am quick to get angry and vengeful. My hairdresser gives me a bad cut? I get angry and contemplate flaming him on Yelp. The neighbors park in my spot? I get angry and fantasize about ways to box them in. Anthony apologies for something about something he did? I get angry that he did that thing in the first place, and vow to make him pay. In deciding what colors it wants to paint with, my heart often chooses the reds of anger.

Now, for a while I have been working on replacing this behavior to something more loving. Sounds like much more fun, eh? Make love not war, the whole 9 yards. Now, I noticed that in setting my new intentions, I was using the language of “what do I want to cultivate INSTEAD of anger?” Like my heart is a garden of briars, and I want to replace it with tulips instead (this analogy is in honor of SRPING!). Like I need to learn a *new* way of being in order to replace the old behavior with a new.

But I’m realizing that the heart is actually not like that. We are not mono-chromatic; all briars, or all tulips. At any given time, we have a veritable ecosystem of emotions in our hearts; but one of them wins our attention at any given moment.

For example, take the Anthony apology. The other day, Anthony barges into my office when I am in the middle of a call, and proclaims in utter dismay “The dog peed in the bedroom!!!” Not the most professional situation ever… to the client out there who was on the other end of the phone, my apologies again . At that moment, if I was vigilant observer of my heart, there were actually many different feelings growing there:

• anger at Anthony for interrupting. Does he not respect my job?
• embarrassment that my client heard it. And here she was in the middle of opening her heart about men…
• endearment toward Anthony. His phobia of excrement is truly cute, and makes me laugh… and wonder how he ended up with someone who is just the opposite.
• guilt that I am not strict enough with the dog. Really, we should have fixed this by now.
• anger at the dog. What a pea-brain.
• sadness/hopelessness that maybe the dog will never stop this annoying habit.
• happiness that at least this time, the accident didn’t occur on MY watch.

Lots of feelings in one instant… amazing, the human heart. When Anthony apologized later on in the day, and it was my turn to speak, I had a realization. I would ordinarily overlook every emotion but the anger. I would embark on a 5-minute rant about how awful he had been. Just to make sure I drive the point home, and let my anger manifest itself.

But this time, at that moment, I suddenly became aware of all of the other feelings in my heart (probably as a result of all of the heart-logging I’ve been doing). It felt like one of those times when you’ve been going to the same building for years, going through the same door into the same office, and one day you look up and are like “I never knew the building had a blue roof!” And the building just looks a bit different after that.

Anyways, I asked myself “which feeling do I want to focus on? It doesn’t HAVE to be the anger, you know.” Really? Let’s try it out. So I tried #3: Endearment.

“Awww, Schmoops, that’s ok. I know how much her pee puddles drive you nuts” (at which point I remembered this one time he stepped in one of her puddles… maybe it shouldn’t be funny, but it does make me smile). “Thanks for apologizing.” Voomph. The briars of anger receded, to be replaced by the new reigning species, daffodils of endearment. It really was that easy.

So the moral of the story for me was that changing a behavior isn’t necessarily about cultivating something new within yourself…  transforming from being an animal of anger to one of love. It can be much easier than that–not really a transformation at all. It’s about being aware of what is already there, organically, and choosing which of the many plants in your garden you will focus on. The native flora has plenty of variety. No need to bring in the exports.

Which of your abundant feelings do you want to be bringing to the table?

A blog by Dr. Samantha Sutton, life coach at the Handel Group

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/randysonofrobert

The biarchy of the head and the heart

If your life were a country, how would it be ruled? By a president who is democratically elected by all of the voices in your head? By a parliament representing the different facets of you? By a dictatorship of your will? I’d like to propose, as introduced to me by Lauren Zander, cofounder of the Handel Group, that our lives are actually run by a biarchy of the head and the heart.

“Biarchy” means a country run by two equally-powerful rulers. I’m no historian, but off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single example of a successful biarchy in the history of the world. It’s not hard to imagine why– imagine the difficulty of finding two individuals who are perfectly in balance with each other and can reach consensus on all of the difficult issues facing an empire.

And yet, it seems to me that that is what rules our lives: a biarchy of the logical, analytical, and strategic head, and the sensitive, feeling, emoting heart. Each of them gets a vote, and a bill isn’t passed until both agree. For example, choosing a spouse might look something like this:

Head: I want someone who is well-educated, has a good sense of humor, is honest, shares my religious beliefs, is extroverted, wants to have children, and is willing to move to the Midwest.

Heart: I want someone who makes me feel giddy, is exciting to be around, who makes me happy in both the little and big things they do, and whose smile and good looks are electrifying.

And then for each person you date, both the head and the heart get to vote yay or nay.

The thing is, most of us don’t have a very good balance between our two biarchic rulers. One of the rulers is strong and loud, and the other one whispers and hides. Some people have a virtual dictatorship of the head, while others have a monarchy of the heart.

For example, take me. Mine is a dictatorship of the head. My MIT-educated brain is an analytical machine, optimizing different variables and striving to churn out the most efficient answer to any choice or question I face.  In making decisions, I am far more likely to decide based on the logical conclusions of my head than on the feelings of my heart. If my heart can’t produce some hard data, my head ignores it. And then my heart abstains from voting, usually in protest.

A classic example of my head-heart dynamic was my choice to major in Electrical Engineering in college. It was the 1990s. Electrical engineering was a hot field. There was an abundance of high-potential jobs,  lucrative scholarships, and exotic internships to anyone who chose engineering. Many of the best and brightest of my high school class went into engineering. Many of my esteemed family members were engineers. I was great at mathematics and science. So, understandably, my head voted for Electrical Engineering. It really was a no-brainer (haha… pardon the pun!). Like Obama voting for an intercity school lunch program. But what did my heart have to say about it? Not much. A few times, my heart mumbled something about “I don’t really feeeeeeel electronics” or “this is boring” or “this feels forced,” to which my head replied “just wait until you understand it better. THEN you’ll LOVE it.” My heart shrugged, said ok, and then abstained from voting. It didn’t have a better candidate to propose, anyways.

Fast-forward five years. My heart was raging at my head. “You idiot,” it said. “What kind of an incompetent leader are you? It was plain as day that Electrical Engineering was not a good fit!” To which my head replied “Where were you five years ago? Just like those people who abstained from voting in 2000 and ended up with 8 years of W Bush, you have no right to complain.” And on and on, back and forth. So much for the balanced biarchy. The truth is, my heart did have something to say about my choice in college majors, but it didn’t speak up. And my head was perfectly content calling the shots on its own.

And there are other people who have a dictatorship of the heart, such as my friend Jill. Sometimes my other head-centric friends and I (there are many of them… birds of a feather really do flock together) look at her decisions and scratch our heads in bewilderment. She recently bought a condo because it “feels so light and airy. It makes me want to dance around inside it. Like it’s giving me a nice warm hug and saying ‘you’re home!’ And I love how cute and funky this neighborhood is.” Her heart voted strongly for the condo. But what did her head have to say about it? That it was overpriced, very far from work, and very far from friends. So her head whispered “this might not be a good idea.” But her heart was too busy dancing to notice, so her head just sighed in resignation and waited for the day when it could start whining and complaining about the commute.

In both of these examples, it’s not as if Jill or I made the wrong decisions: my head and Jill’s heart had very good reasons for making their choices. The problem is that the decision was made using only half of our expertise. There was a whole other voice that did not contribute to the decision-making process; that voice brings a valuable second perspective.

Moreover, I would posit that it’s only by living a life that makes both the head and the heart happy that we can be truly happy. If this is the case, then we should cultivate our ability to listen to our more recessive voice. It’s there, no doubt about it. We just need to turn up the volume, to give that voice the attention it needs.

On this week leading up to Valentine’s Day, I am listening intently to my heart… which voice are you going to give the microphone to?

A blog by Dr. Samantha Sutton, life coach at the Handel Group.

On keeping your 2010 goals: The beauty of a good consequence

We are now squarely in the New Year. We’re back at our jobs, sleeping in our own beds, and the New Years Eve celebration seem long ago.

If you’re like many Americans, you entered 2010 with a set of goals for what the coming year would bring: losing weight, finding love, dusting off a few old projects. For each of these goals, there is a list of actionable daily, weekly, or monthly actions to take: drinking your 8 glasses of water each day, finding and going on one date per week, spending 5 hours each month reading the current literature on how to build a self-sustaining biosphere (maybe that one’s just for me ). I’d like to tell you about a great tool for making sure that you take those actions, so that 2010 really will be the year you achieve your goals.

The tool is, quite simply, giving yourself a consequence. When you have made a promise to yourself about which actions you will take on, if you don’t take those actions, then you owe the consequence. The consequence should be something light and quick, and that you don’t want to do. Here are some examples of popular consequences from some clients:

• throw a $5 bill in the street
• give up your Friday evening glass of wine
• call your sister-in-law who drives you nuts and find 5 cool things about her (this one’s good to do anyways!)
• write and print up your 2010 goals, or an embarrassing story from your childhood, and distribute it downtown to passersby (this one really is the nukes)
• buy the ticket for the person behind you at the movies, or buy the coffee of the person behind you at Starbucks, and explain why

The idea behind these designed consequences is simple. When you break a promise to yourself, like eating a plate of brownies when you are dieting, you often won’t feel the actual consequences of that incident until several months later, when, say, you go on your tropical vacation and are embarrassed to get into your swim suit. But with the designed consequences, you feel the effect immediately. $5 into the street. It’s enough to give you pause.

A key distinction is that the consequence is not a punishment. You are not atoning for any transgressions. You are just attaching value to your promises to yourself.

One of the most popular consequences is a throwing-money-away consequence. After all, who likes to blatantly waste money like that? Here is what one of my clients had to say about her consequence to throw money into the street after she broke her water-drinking promise:

Boy, you should’ve seen/heard my thoughts as I was dealing with dropping my money. As soon as I got the cash out of the atm on madison and 58th, I kept a $20 in my hand. As I walked down the sidewalk, I thought,”I can’t just drop it – what if it blows into the street? what if it gets covered by the snow? It’s dark – people won’t see it, the sidewalks are so crowded.” Anyway, after reminding myself that the whole point is just that – throwing money AWAY, I dropped it on 59th street, next to Crate&Barrel. I kept walking, but looked behind me as I continued on, wondering who would see it. I waited for a minute, and then saw a man see it, look around, and then pick it up.
Then, as I returned home, my mind was going through all the best scenarios of dropping my second $20. After much debate with myself, I decided to drop it in the 97th street subway station….not sure what happened with that one. Great lesson – and let me tell you, I sure am pounding my water now!!

One of my most successful money consequences was the “Late Lincoln” consequence: whenever I was more than 5 minutes late to a meeting, appointment, or lecture, I had to give the organizer a $5 bill. Let me tell you, this consequence worked wonders. First, it was a way to apologize for being late. Second, I sure felt stupid giving my dentist or kick-boxing instructor the $5. They thought I was nuts. And let’s not forget my friends, who quickly latched onto this consequence and eagerly watched their clocks in the hopes that they would make some money on me. The results were impressive. I paid about $35, and soon was on time to everything. A bargain for a bad habit corrected!

What value are you going to attach to your 2010 goals?

A blog by Dr. Samantha Sutton, life coach at the Handel Group

Give other people the gift of giving

Giving feels good. It makes us feel important, like we are making a difference. It makes us feel needed. It makes us feel good about ourselves, and good about the relationship with the gift recipient. It touches our hearts, and allows us to radiate love… rich, warm love.

So, then, one way to grow your relationships and connect with people in your life is to ask them for help. Give them the gift of giving. Let them experience the giving high. One of the best gifts my friend Sandra has ever given me was asking me to be her maid of honor. The days of the bridal shower and wedding, I became 100% focused on her and her happiness… everything I did was in service of making her experience great. And let me tell you, I have never felt closer or more in love with her than I did those two days.

I have found that many of my clients don’t want to ask people for help. They are afraid of being vulnerable, of looking bad, of losing control of a relationship, or of inconveniencing the other person. But they don’t look beyond themselves and think of the good that their request for help could have on the other person, and on their relationship.

A good illustration of this is a debacle that happened one Christmas at my aunt’s house. Several people had asked to stay with her; she was happy to have the company had set up a bunch of beds for them. But when the guests realized that so many people would be staying with her, they went down the “I don’t want to impose” path and one-by-one bailed to stay at other relative’s houses, or in hotels. At the end of the night, only one couple stayed with my aunt, and she was sad. She had wanted to experience the joy of giving. But there were no takers.

I’d like to point out that an important bedfellow of giving is honesty… the two have to come hand-in-hand. When you ask a favor of someone, you have to be able to trust that the person will tell you if they don’t want to do it, as opposed to doing it anyways and grumbling about it in their heads. In the Christmas housing incident, each would-be guest asked my aunt if it would be ok if they stayed with her, and she said of course! And yet the guests didn’t fully believe her. “Oh, she’s just saying that to be nice. You know her, she would never say no.” I don’t know why they didn’t believe her, but without trusting that she was telling the truth, they decided not to risk any bad feelings and just stay somewhere else.
So the moral of the story is that giving people the gift of giving strengthens love, connection, and happiness, given that we have developed honest relationships where what is said is so.

A blog by Dr. Samantha Sutton, Life Coach at the Handel Group

We have a choice about what we like

This blog post is inspired by a conversation I had with a client last week about in-laws. She professed to hating her husband’s parents, to the point that the parents arrange to visit their son when she is on business trips elsewhere. My question to her: why would you choose to hate your in-laws?

I think that we choose what we like and don’t like. There are a few things that are universally, objectively loathable, like murder, anthrax, and anything sung by Paris Hilton. But by and large, almost everything has “positive” and “negative” characteristics, and we choose which ones to focus on.

My first experience with this was in high school, with asparagus. I hated the stuff. My mom would make me choke it down on occasion, and I loathed every minute of it. But then one day, I was watching the movie Clueless, and there is a scene in which Alicia Silverstone, looking all cute in her designer outfit, playfully wags an asparagus spear in the air before biting off the tip in her mouth. Crunch. There was something so cool about the way she wielded that stalk. I wanted to be like her. And from that day forth, I have loved asparagus. Go figure.

I think the same is true of most things that we like or dislike. It really is a choice. And once we have made our choice, we continue to gather evidence about why our choice was the correct one. Likes and dislikes are a lot like theories in that regard. For example, my client who dislikes her in-laws is a sponge for all of the annoying things they do—she soaks up every drop, and retains it—but what about the nice things they do? Like water off a duck’s back. All of that is a choice. If you sit back and think about it, why in the world would you want to design it that way? Talk about a ticket to no-fun-ville.

I’m not saying that you should switch to an all-asparagus diet, or move in next door to your in-laws. But when an asparagus crosses your plate, how are you going to treat it?

A blog by Dr. Samantha Sutton, Life Coach