peace

Positive Influence

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"When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others." ~ Peace PilgrimA few weeks ago I wrote about emotional contagion – how others can affect us and we can affect others, similar to how a virus gets spread from person to person. Most of the time people talk about emotional contagion, it’s in the negative sense, how “one rotten apple spoils the barrel.” My article provided tips for combating negative emotional contagion, but the other side of the contagion factor is, how can we influence others positively?

Researchers have been studying brainwaves for years and have found that when two people are placed together in a room, without talking, their brainwaves synchronize within minutes. Entrainment is the process of causing brainwave frequencies to adjust to a desired state, and scientists have found they can influence entrainment through use of rhythmic sound or light. Enthusiasts of brainwave entrainment have noted that it has been used in one form or another for centuries, such as shamanistic societies use of drumming.

But if people do this to each other naturally, without the introduction of sound or light, which brain state is the stronger one? Which one pulls the other into alignment? You may be surprised to learn it’s the peaceful brainwave state that is the most powerful. Think of the peaceful revolutions led by Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. that were the catalysts for massive change.

My personal practice, and one which I now help many clients with, has been to find my peaceful center and then return to it or maintain it even in stressful or difficult situations. Finding my peace was a process. As a busy executive in a demanding career, I had become quite adept at stuffing my negative emotions and allowing the many distractions in my world to keep me from paying attention to what I really wanted. As coping mechanisms go, it wasn’t the most unhealthy, but coping only works for so long. I feel so much better being in my peaceful state, and now my focus is on holding it during stressful situations or returning to it quickly if I find myself off-kilter.

When you can maintain your peace during intense meetings, negotiations, or confrontations, not only do you feel more calm and content, you are also more likely to positively affect, or entrain, the others in the room. What we do and how we are affects others. Whether your goal is to feel better or to influence others, the starting point is the same: it begins with you.

Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable

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Peace cannot be found outside of ourselves; it must be found within.As I write this week’s blog post, I’m sitting in an airport. I’m freezing, and I’m so cold I’m actually considering putting on all the clothes in my suitcase. I’ve had a job assignment the past couple days that has kept me on my feet for hours at a time. While I wore comfortable shoes, the long amounts of standing triggered the scoliosis in my back, and my lower back and right hip are painful. Sometimes I can ignore it, but the pain is at the point at which it will not be ignored any longer. The scoliosis (curvature of the spine) usually acts up during PMS each month, and oh, yeah, I might be experiencing that fun, too.* I’m tired – having spent a couple nights in a noisy hotel, just down the street from a busy firehouse and across the street from an active, early-starting construction crew – and being sleep deprived never helps anything.

All of this “background” helps explain (at least to me) why I’m having such difficulty writing a decent blog post this week. Usually, writing for the blog comes easy to me, and I find it enjoyable. But today, I’ve gone through three different topics, none of which turned into anything worth sharing, and the last one, which I thought maybe was good enough, disappeared when I unexpectedly and inexplicably lost my Internet connection. (F*&K! Saving ridiculously often now.)

So I realized all of this Uncomfortableness is actually a pretty decent topic. My mentor, Martha Beck, talks about the Cycle of Change in her book Finding Your Own North Star. In it, she describes four squares we go through during any major change in our life. Square 1 is known as “Death and Rebirth,” and this is the stage at which we feel the most confusion (“I don’t know what the hell is going on”) as the way we had defined ourselves has changed, and we haven’t yet figured out who we are without the old role or title. Square 2, “Dreaming & Scheming,” is when we begin to create concepts of a new future, and Square 3, “the Hero’s Saga,” is where we test out those schemes and figure out what really works for us. Square 4 is “the Promised Land,” where things smooth out, but the mantra is “Everything’s changing, and that’s okay” because everything always does change. I love sharing the Cycle of Change with my clients because it provides people with a sense of understanding and community (“Oh, so that’s what’s happening to me! And everyone feels this at some point”) and also a sense of hope (Square 2 and 4 are the most-looked-forward to).

Martha’s been saying lately that with the rapid pace of change in our world, we are pretty much in Square 1 nearly all the time. (So much for my hope idea.) So to survive, to not drive ourselves insane, we have to get more comfortable with being a little uncomfortable. We have to learn to roll with the punches, surf the chaotic waters, and maintain our equilibrium.

How do we do this? By going within. Peace cannot be found outside of ourselves; it must be found within. And when there is peace within, then we can take that peace out into the world.

As I play out the role of airport hobo today and stop fighting the Uncomfortableness, I let myself sink into feeling grumpy, tired and in pain, and I actually find a little relief. I don’t have to be anything more than what I am in this moment, and there’s some peace in that. Struggling against it all, wishing it wasn’t happening or thinking it should be better just prolongs the suffering. Accepting the present moment, just as it is, not trying to MAKE it be better than it is, actually feels better.

Or maybe the ibuprofen I took is finally kicking in. Peace out!

 

* If you want (or need) a really funny (and accurate) Life Coach’s Guide to PMS, go visit Bridgette Boudreau’s site. Hilarious and some great advice for getting through it!

Calling Your Energy Home

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“When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.” – Francois de La Rochefoucauld

We often get so scattered, pulled in different directions by our families, our work, our electronic devices, the multitude of  marketing and advertising around us vying for our attention.

While our culture prizes multi-tasking, scientists have shown it’s not a true concept. The brain really can’t focus on multiple things at the same time, but only one. And shifting between things takes energy, as anyone who constantly switches between tasks can tell you. Have you ever tried to write a white paper (or book, or thesis, or any large body of work) while simultaneously tending to your email, periodic phone calls, coworkers stopping by to ask brief questions and calendar reminders popping up? How much did you get accomplished?

Besides the practical advice of blocking out chunks of time to work on different tasks (and by all means, consider NOT checking email, Facebook, Twitter or other potential addictive and time-sucking social networks constantly – in fact, close the windows or programs for awhile), a simple, yet extremely effective technique is to Center yourself.

One of my favorite definitions of centering is “calling all your energy home.” I like that explanation because I know what it feels like to have my attention scattered among multiple projects, concerns and an endless to-do list. The most basic way to center yourself is to breathe. And while yes, I know if you’re reading this you’re still breathing, we often breathe very shallowly, especially when our bodies are in “fight-or-flight” mode, trying to battle all the information and demands in our environment. For just a few minutes, try out this exercise.

Centering Exercise

Sit with your feet flat on the floor, relax your belly and take three deep breaths. As you feel the air expand your rib cage, drop your shoulders away from your ears. Feel your body, this amazing vehicle we get to inhabit, and for just this one moment, simply Be.

Benefits of Centering

Centering yourself like this has many benefits, including feeling more peaceful, feeling less stressed and being able to think more creatively. (When you’re in fight-or-flight mode, the creative process is stifled.) The more often you do it, the more benefits you will realize.

So leverage the technology that makes you a chained slave to its persistent demands: create a daily reminder to take a few minutes (just 2-5…you can fit this in!) to Breathe and Center yourself. Call all your energy home. Your body will thank you.