Governor (of New York) Eliot Spitzer has come down off of his self-righteous high horse this week. I guess it is more truthful to say that he has been knocked witless off of the horse. Don’t get me wrong. I have appreciated his knight in shining armor persona, and, as someone who worked peripherally on Wall Street for seven years, have cheered his every toppling of abusive and greedy investment executives and companies. Lest we all forget that we are human, however, it is best for all of us, including Governor Spitzer, to remember that too much holier than thou speechifying is not becoming to the species. We all have feet of clay.

Then there is the wife of Eliot Spitzer, the beautiful, brilliant (by all accounts), and accomplished Silda Wall Spitzer. She has out-earned him, and perhaps in her own way even out-accomplished him. Women in the press are wondering aloud or at least a-print why she, looking as haggard and shocked as the rest of us, would submit to his public confession, would “stand by her man” as Hilary and others have done before her. Isn’t it time for women to end the perception that it is OK for their husbands, partners, or intimate buddies to do really stupid stuff and they’ll just smile wanly and keep the family together?

And what in heaven’s name could I have up my sleeve about coaching in all this? It is this: coaching begins where we are. In this case, Eliot Spitzer is at a horrible crossroads in his career. Perhaps he is at the end of his political career. Let’s say for the sake of imagining that Governor (perhaps by the time you read this, ex-Governor) Spitzer comes to you for coaching. What do you discover together in your first session? Surely you would notice the vast crusading he has done against many kinds of corporate greed, and the successes he has had, at least in part due to his single-minded focus and perhaps outsized ego. Ego works for good as well as evil. Then you would notice his evident pain. What will he do with this pain of shame and horror at having been discovered doing monumentally stupid stuff, and at having done it, of course? Would you be able to empathize rather than to judge?

And then suppose that Silda Spitzer came to you. What would you discover with her? Would you recognize the resources she has to bring to this unique situation? Would you affirm that her skills as a lawyer, mother, and scholar can be applied in this time of perhaps unequaled rage and hurt? Would you acknowledge the rage and hurt and by doing this help her to stay with these uncomfortable feelings so that she can make good decisions about what’s best for her, and then for her family?

It is way too easy to posture over sex scandals such as this one. Eliot Spitzer has made a career out of just such posturing. When we discover that he did not meet his own standards of behavior (and none of us do all of the time), and that he put at least three other people (his wife and three daughters) in jeopardy because he ignored or flaunted his own standards, we can posture or we can look inward at the ways in which we have not met our own standards. Coaching as managers, parents, teachers, and counselors requires this inward look so that we might effectively aid the wrongdoer, in this case Eliot Spitzer, to acknowledge his acts, be responsible and accountable for them to others, forgive himself, and rebuild his life. We might also then empathize with the victim, Silda Spitzer in this case, and help her to find a reasonable way to separate herself from the carnage without necessarily losing or leaving those she loves.

Dear coaches and folks interested in positive processes,

I’ve begun another book, and it is about happiness and well-being. The chapter I’m currently working on seems to need some stories and so I offer you the opportunity, and ask for your help in creating stories of a time when you knew you were especially happy. The length of the story might be anywhere from a paragraph to a page, your choice. If you are interested, please post your stories below as response to this blog entry. No pressure. Do this only if it makes you happy! I will credit you in the book if I use the story, or use a pseudonym if you prefer.

Here are some thought starters:

Describe a time when you knew you were especially happy…

What was going on (describe the scene as best you can)…

Who was involved (were you alone or with someone else)…

Has this scene or occasion of happiness ever been repeated (is this something you do regularly, or more than once, like mountain climbing or your work)…

What are the elements of the time you are describing that particularly contribute to your happiness (family, achievement, new sox)…

Thanks for your willingness to read this, and perhaps to play.

What does time management have to do with positive processes? Well, I can tell you that I, for one, feel a lot more positively about my life when I’m not stepping over piles in my office and when my bills are paid on time. I have found David Allen’s book Getting Things Done particulary helpful in seeing the big picture of organizing my time and my stuff. He writes that there are five stages of mastering workflow.

• 1. Collect things that command your attention
  • a. Capture in containers (folders, notes on your planner, email alerts, voicemail reminders)
  • b. Use as few as you can get away with
  • c. Empty them frequently
• 2. Process what they mean and what to do with them
  • a. What is actionable
  • b. If not actionable, trash, delegate, keep as reference
  • c. What is the next action
  • • i. Do it
  • • ii. Delegate it
  • • iii. Defer it
• 3. Organize the results
  • a. Calendars, list of projects
  • b. Reminders of next steps
  • c. Reminders of things you’re waiting for
• 4. Review as options for what we choose to do
  • a. Weekly review
• 5. DO
  • a. Criteria by which to decide what to do
  • • i. Context- what you can do in the moment
  • • ii. Time available
  • • iii. Energy available
  • • iv. Priority

Hope these are helpful in your work, your studies and your life. Allen’s book, available in paperback, is well worth your valuable time.

Yikes this is a hard one.  Forgiveness should be, perhaps must be, included in the positive processes that lead to happiness.  I have colleagues who have written about and struggled with forgiveness in personal relationships as well as in fields such as spiritual direction and restorative justice.  For me, this word is almost repulsive.  (I know I’ve just told you more about me than about the word.)  The aversion to the word is a part of my own turning away from the difficulty of forgiveness.  At some times in my life, I seem to have been more willing to carry a burden of anger or self-pity than to explore the positive possibilities of forgiveness.  At a minimum, forgiveness means a “cessation of hostility, [and] the forswearing of revenge,” according to Boston University’s Charles Griswold, author of Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration.  At best, forgiveness has the potential to change the person who did the injuring, as well as the person injured.  Asking for forgiveness requires that the person who injured commits to not injuring again, making the act more than an apology.  Forgiving implies that the person injured believes at least in the honest intention of the person who injured that she will not injure again, making the acceptance more than a momentary reconciliation.

What are your thoughts on this?

With all of the positive processes I study and use, you might think that I’d be a pretty happy person, and you’d be right most of the time. There is one area in which I fail miserably to be happy, however, and that area is often described as obsessing or overthinking. When something happens that causes me to regret an action or a conversation, when I feel like I’ve wronged somebody else, or someone has wronged me, I tend to think in circles (like the proverbial hamster on his wheel) for at least 24 hours. I hardly ever solve anything and I frequently lose at least one night’s sleep. As I replay conversations and “what if” myself over and over, I can feel myself getting more and more anxious.

Within the last year, many of the academic researchers in positive psychology have begun to write books for popular audiences. One such book is The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky. Thankfully, Dr. Lyubomirsky has an in-depth section on overcoming overthinking. She suggests a three step process I’ll describe here. The first step is to “cut loose.” This means literally to distract yourself in some way from continuing to run the hamster wheel. Some things you might try include:

• Get some physical exercise; walk, run, swim, dance–anything you enjoy.
• Watch a movie, play, sports, the house going up next door.
• Read a book, magazine or blog about something unrelated to your overthought issue.
• Talk to a friend about the issue. This gets you off the hamster wheel and into relationship.
• Meditate. Any technique will do; visualization, paying attention to your breath, a mantra.
• Write about the experience in a journal. There is something about this that helps to get it out of your head and at some greater distance from your obsessing.

The point is to distract yourself from thinking about the thing you were overthinking.

The second strategy is to STOP by some means such as imagining a red light or stop sign. You may have to do this more than once but as you keep practicing, this becomes easier. You can then replace the overthought issue with a distraction above.

Finally, Lyubomirsky recommends a Dear Abby technique that I have also used. In a column many years ago, Abby suggested that you set aside 30 minutes and overthink yourself silly. But limit yourself to 30 minutes, or 20 if you think that will be enough. If you find yourself thinking about your issue at another time, remind yourself that you have set aside a time later in the day. By the time you sit down to overthink, you may be done with the issue.

I tested out several of the strategies under distracting when I found myself recently overthinking. First, I meditated for 15 minutes before I went to bed. When I still found myself awake at 2 AM overthinking, I visualized a flashing red light. I went back to sleep. In the morning I was refreshed and I was done with further thinking about the issue. I didn’t even need my strategy in reserve which was to set aside 30 minutes on day two.

If overthinking is something that plagues you even occasionally, try one or more of these simple strategies. I promise they work.

Wow, two messages in one week. It must be the holiday feeling! At my monthly women’s group this month we spoke briefly about “homework” we might do daily or weekly to be prepared to be more joyful. Here is Robert Emmons’ (thanks!, Houghton Mifflin) take on homework for gratitude, not quite the same thing, but appropriate for Thanksgiving nonetheless.

1. Keep a gratitude journal - catalogue gratitude-inspiring events every day

2. Remember the bad- then the good in the present shines by comparison

3. Ask yourself these three questions;

1. What have I received from ____?
2. What have I given to ____?
3. What troubles and difficulty have I caused ____?

(Helps to see the reciprocal quality of relationships)

4. Learn prayers of gratitude- these needn’t be religious, and can be said silently.

5. Come to your senses- be grateful for the functioning of your body.

6. Use visual reminders- pictures, stones from favorite hikes, other grateful people. Gratitude comes with awareness.

7. Make a vow to practice gratitude- swear an oath in front of others.

8. Watch your language- language determines the nature and content of thought; what you say to yourself influences how you feel about yourself.

9. Go through the motions - “act as if,” as we say in AA. Act happy to be happy.

10. Think outside the box - be grateful for your enemies, for what they teach you about how you want to be. Be grateful to those you help.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Neuroscience tells us that novelty, or learning new things, keeps our brains healthy. That means that if you are a veteran crossword puzzler, doing tougher crossword puzzles will not necessarily make your brain’s neurons fire more actively. What you need is novelty, perhaps learning to write haiku (poetry) rather than doing sudoku. While novelty is good, neuroscientists also tell us that stress is bad for brain health. So, if you put pressure on yourself to write beautiful haiku and writing it only makes you feel like a bad poet, that trumps the benefit of novelty. So, to keep our brains healthy and full of firing neurons, we need to learn new things, novel things, but not things our boss tells us we have to be good at by next Thursday.

I’ve recently begun to sing again after thirty years of not singing. I have a trained voice. I was a church soloist, and a member of numerous community choruses. Then life and work got in the way. Singing was one thing I could give up in order to lead a somewhat sane life. Now I find that reading music again, creating harmony, and learning all kinds of contemporary songs makes me happy in a sustained way. I look forward all week to my singing class and sing with pleasure while I’m there. While singing is not strictly novel for me–I did, after all, sing as a much younger person–it does bring an old/new element to my learning without stress. Nobody cares if I sing well, and I love making music.

In Appreciative Coaching we encourage clients to review their past experience, to mine it for expertise and wisdom. We then encourage them to apply that expertise to a new situation, to take their past experience and retrofit it to something in the present or something they want to create for their future. Given the brain research we now have, we might also think of trying things about which we have not established expertise to create what we want, as long as the trying doesn’t also create stress. What would you like to try if nobody was watching and there was no pressure to be good at it? If this thing would add pleasure to your life, AND keep your brain healthy as you age, what’s stopping you? What activity, or process could add to your vision of the future, could enable you to do or be something you are not now? How can you make use of novelty in envisioning and realizing your dreams? On the other hand, what stressful activities that are currently part of your life could you lessen or stop?

I got some feedback from one of my coaching clients that the last post about personality wasn’t entirely clear. Let’s see if I can elaborate on yesterday’s post. Simply, I’m suggesting that when we have an intuition about something someone else says to us, we make that plain to the other person–not in a judging or “I’ve got the answer” way, but in an “I’m noticing that I’m thinking about this” kind of way.

If I keep thinking about my mother when you are telling me a story of your success with your cooking class, this may mean no more than I’m remembering what a terrible cook my mother was. Or it may mean something entirely different to you, that relates to your story. If I say, “That reminds me that my mother was a bad cook,” we may take the conversation off to my mother. This is not what I’m suggesting by putting more of your personality into coaching. What I am suggesting is that I say something like, “I keep thinking about my mother as you are telling me this story. Do you see any connection to mothers in your story, or maternal behavior, or any connection you have?” Then we have the chance to explore what might be a fruitful direction. Or not. If you look at me as if I’ve just spoken Swahili, well then maybe my mother has nothing to do with this and I’m distracted.

But these links can be important and we can’t explore them unless the coach makes explicit what is going on in her head, or in her body. If I get a headache listening to your story about a work situation, maybe there is more tension for you than you are revealing, or than you are aware is there for you. I think you are beginning to get the idea.

I’m taking a writing class as I do periodically. I’m looking to get feedback in two areas. Most of my published writing has been fairly impersonal, and I’d like to write a more personal piece. The other reason is that I like to get feedback from other published writers/instructors about my work. This week we talked about putting more of ourselves into our writing—not our deep, dark secrets, necessarily–but our personality. I thought immediately that I wanted to write something about this for you.

As a coach it is important to give my full attention to you, to hear what you have to tell me, and not to impose my own views, or opinions on you. It is also important to be transparent. Transparency is a word and concept that seems to be way overused in business these days (in my opinion). What I mean by it here is that I owe you as partner in our coaching the courtesy of speaking my truth. So if something keeps occurring to me as you are speaking, I have the obligation to notice it out loud. If, for instance, you are telling me a story of how your boss does not give you her full attention, and you would like to learn how to solicit that attention respectfully, I may hear a story of my own experience with a former boss, or I may have an intuition about your other relationships. In order to be your best coach, I think I should notice out loud that my own situation keeps coming up and I tell you about it, not to impose it, but to see if there is anything helpful to you in there. Or I ask you about your relationship with you son, or your best friend—which might seem to come out of nowhere. This is putting my personality into our coaching.

The more of your personality you put into our relationship, the better we can SEE each other and therefore can co-create something that really works for you.

1. I love to hear a new or potential client’s story. Our stories are powerful, vivid, and give shape to who we have been, who we are, and who we want to become. When I hear these stories, I feel like I have been given a precious gift.

2. When I am coaching, I am reminded of both the fragility and the strength of all of our selves. I don’t mean by this that we are delicate, but that we are changing all the time and that our fragility relates to who we are in any given moment. At the same time, we are all strong beyond our own understanding. Each of us has places where we stand up for what is important to us, where we give more than what we are required to give, and where we remain true to unpopular people and ideas.

3. When I am coaching, I see my own vulnerability more clearly than I can at many other times. I see the importance of being present for another, and of being present to my own experience of that other. I also see my tendency to be judgmental, advice-giving, and a know-it-all, and I am humbled by these tendencies. My awareness sometimes prevents the voicing of judgment, advice, or pronouncements, but not always.

4. When I am coaching, I see how hard it is to change. I see how hard it is to change myself, and therefore, how hard it must be for any other person to change.

5. When I am coaching, I wonder at client’s courage to start something new at 20, or 50 or 70! I am joy-filled when I hear them describe dancing, or painting, or learning to risk a relationship for the first time.

6. After I have coached, I feel better about the world and myself.

7. After I have coached, I see possibilities that I have not seen before, and I see people in the street or in the next office with new and more appreciative eyes.

8. Coaching helps me to pay more attention to my adult daughters, my grandchildren, my husband, and my friends for I know just how wonderful they are, and I also know how tolerant they are of my foibles and shortcomings.

9. Coaching has brought me to writing, to meditation, and to singing, in an effort to be a better coach.

10. Ten is an arbitrary and and somewhat contrived place to finish. So at ten I end for now with the observation that there are very few coaches I admire. This may be because I believe clients deserve better than what I and others currently provide, and that I, for one, want to provide coaching that helps clients see their own possibilities with greater clarity, and their own paths to these possibilities with enthusiasm and commitment.