Jennie Marlow

Coaching for intelligent, aware people who want to live deeply fulfilling lives

Question Everything You Think During a Setback

By Leave a Comment

setbackWhen a setback happens suddenly, the shock can reverberate in our thoughts and feelings for extended periods of time. The amount of time it takes to recover corresponds to the degree of loss the setback represents. Loss taps into very deep structures in the brain, and if we do not employ consciousness to navigate the emotional landscape of our loss, it can easily morph into a prolonged melodrama which we act out unconsciously.

How can you cope when your reactions to a setback are chaotic and intense?

Recognize what is happening in your brain.  The brain’s fight-or-flight response is designed to keep you from thinking straight, so don’t let it dictate your words and actions. The brain is also a story-teller who loves to embellish the tale with each telling. So, stick with the facts. Just the facts! Refrain from going into what-if scenarios of how close a call it was, or dwelling on what might have been, if only… What occurred is what happened, and nothing your Mind makes up about it is real.

Bring yourself back to the present moment. The events leading up to a big setback often play like a movie inside our heads. When you catch yourself reliving the events or trying to “rewrite the script” of what happened, bring yourself back to the present moment by breathing deeply. Notice what is happening right now: the chair in which you are sitting, whether or not it is day or night, the sounds you are hearing, etc. You cannot sense these things in any other moment than the one in which you find yourself, but also realize that, at least initially, you might have to do this exercise every few minutes until your emotions calm down.

Delay taking action. Many of us medicate our emotions through action. If we don’t take a breath and try to restore calm before we act, we can expend a lot of energy doing things that are not really constructive and which might even be counterproductive. If you need to evaluate the action you’re contemplating, ask a trusted friend who has no investment in the outcome whether or not it makes sense to take the action you want to take. On the other hand, if you are paralyzed when you know you need to act, breathe your way through it and do the best you can.

Wait out your emotional wave before making any big decisions. After a big setback, the emotional wave can have the force of a tsunami, and its power to distort your reality can be very great indeed. Wait, wait, wait and wait even longer. The dilemmas created by turbulent emotions usually resolve themselves into emotional clarity with the passage of time. Since most of the things you think when you are emotional are not altogether true, wait until your emotional wave has subsided, and don’t fall into the trap of believing that getting the decision behind you will solve anything, especially if that decision is made prematurely.

Watch for new opportunities. When we undergo a setback, opportunities emerge that didn’t exist before the setback occurred. Although we may be unable to see them right away, changing conditions often reveal choices and resources that weren’t obvious under other circumstances. Without making up a fantasy or going into denial, it’s important to have faith that we will eventually be able to change difficult things for the better with time, patience and the wisdom we always gain from meeting our challenges with willingness.

Keep in in mind that big setbacks usually represent our greatest opportunities for transformation. The key to actualizing these opportunities is simple but not easy: be willing to embrace the uncertainties that setbacks invariably magnify. Bottom line: come back to the now-moment, stay here, and wait until your clarity and calm are restored. Then, with a clear head, you can decide what, if anything, to do.

7 Ways to Unstick When You’re Stuck

By Leave a Comment

When we feel stuck, getting our energy moving can feel like a Herculean challenge. It can even feel as if we are glued to wherever we are, with no hope of a remedy. Here is some practical advice for getting our stagnant energy to start flowing again.

Do something constructive. This can be something as mundane as washing up the dishes, making your bed or clearing a pile of clutter. It can be as simple as drinking a glass of water, eating an apple or talking a walk. It can be as fundamental as taking a deep breath and bringing yourself back to the now-moment from wherever your mind has taken you.

Challenge your thinking. When we are stuck, there is typically something in our now-moment that we are resisting with all our might. It is as if we have dug in our energetic heels and refuse to budge. Usually what we resist is not the thing itself, but what we imagine about it. So, ask yourself, “What am I making up about this?” There are usually a number of ways to look at something, so do yourself a favor and think of another, more constructive way to look at what you’re convinced is true.

Expand your awareness of what is possible. When we are stagnating, we have stopped being curious about possibilities. Expand your awareness of real, tangible potentials that can be actualized with the time, energy and money you have right now. Explore the alternatives to what you’re doing right now, and take care that you don’t prejudge a possibility before you have had a chance to investigate it to learn if it is a practical, achievable and beneficial step forward. If the potential you’re investigating turns out to be too big a stretch, then scale back and look for alternatives within your reach.

Break your pattern! Feeling stuck and stagnant follows a pattern. Find the pattern in your thought process, your behavior and your choices. Target something in your pattern and do one small thing differently to change that pattern.

Identify the source of your anxiety. Stagnation is nearly always a result of anxiety about the uncertain future. So stop that nebulous, anxious thought and ask yourself, “What is the specific uncertainty that is causing me to be afraid?” Once you have identified the uncertainty, it is usually easier to simply accept its presence in your now-moment, just for the time being.

Deal with one thing at a time. If you are feeling overwhelmed it probably means you’re taking on too much at once. You may not be able move a thousand-pound pallet of boxes, but you can probably lift and carry one 25 lb. box. Divide up the task at hand, and do what you can manage right now.

Take care of yourself. Rest when you’re tired. Eat when you’re hungry. Let that after-hours phone call go to voice mail. If you’ve been sitting a long time, get up from your desk and take a walk. Avoid medicating with alcohol, drugs or food. Don’t veg in front of the television or lose yourself in cyber space. The world won’t fall apart if you stop to look at a sunset, read a chapter in a good book, or slip into a hot bath. Taking care of yourself often depends upon learning to make your self-care a priority and in balance with the needs of those close to you.

Here’s the deal. Flow is a product of movement, and it can result from very small, incremental changes in the status quo. So if you’re stuck, move your body, move your mind, move your habits, and move your behavior. Movement is what you’re after. Movement is flow!

How to Become Aware of That Trickster, Your Unconscious

By Leave a Comment

F_E_A_RSelf-awareness is absolutely fundamental to a life that works. That said, there is a trick to becoming conscious of what’s going on behind the scenes in that Stone Age brain of ours, especially as it relates to our out-of-power behavior patterns of which we can be strikingly unaware.

The truth is we tip in and out of clarity and power on the fulcrum of our fear of the uncertain future. Here we encounter the anxious mind, that part of our psyches that lurks in the shadows of awareness where it cannot be seen directly.

Our conscious awareness doesn’t readily track what is happening in the anxious mind, and because of this, the anxious mind can have a devastating effect on our behavior and choices. What we are conscious of while this is happening may actually be a massive projection that we have confused with objective reality.

While the conscious mind may be completely unaware of how the anxious mind is distorting our reality in this way, our behavior will always track the anxious mind perfectly, even when the conscious mind does not track the anxious mind at all. So, by observing our behavior patterns and patterns of interpretation (the story-lines made up in the mind), we are then able to indirectly track, with great accuracy, what the anxious mind is really up to.

The Stone Age brain we all carry around in our heads has an extraordinary faculty for pattern-recognition. When we use it to see ourselves acting out an unconscious pattern of behavior, suddenly we have a manifold increase in our power to change that pattern, and thus transform our lives for the better.

Lessons Learned from the Fish Slapping Dance

By Leave a Comment

Fish_Slapping_DanceHow we deal with life can look a lot like that hilarious old Monty Python sketch called, the “Fish Slapping Dance.” We can spend a lifetime dancing around our fears and issues, only playing at confronting them. Then every now and then, life pulls out a big uncertainty and gives us a good wallop.

Yes, we need to have a sense of humor about it! But more than that, in undergoing life’s surprises—when our assumptions about the future are challenged—there is so much to be gained by what we learn during the crisis.

Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of Chicago and President Obama’s former Chief of Staff, said something pretty interesting back in November of 2008. He said we should never let a crisis go to waste, that during a crisis, we are often more willing to do things we would never consider when things are going great.

This is a bit of a two-edged sword, I admit. Frightened people are usually the most likely to do something reactive and, frankly, stupid. On the other hand, a crisis can create an opening for necessary changes that can happily be put off when everything is going smoothly. Let’s face it: the so-called “good times” can make us complacent.

Like in the “Fish Slapping Dance,” we all have the luxury of dancing around big problems for a while, but it’s often not until they knock us silly that we are willing to admit that a transformation is required of us.

Originally posted in 2010

The Surprising Truth About Stress

By Leave a Comment

Wants-vs-Needs“I know it’s a big, DUH!” a good friend once said. “There is almost no stress when I am perceiving my own needs clearly and in balance with the needs of others.” It was so well-put, I feel compelled to share it, along with a little commentary on why this is vital to living well during big challenges.

It always amazes me how hard it can be to anchor our attention in the now-moment, even when things are going well. When things go awry, it can seem nothing short of monumental to perceive what is real, without the distortions of past interfering and causing us to go into our stuff. When we’re stressed out, it is such a powerful temptation to feel that others’ problems, wants and desires are more important than meeting our own needs, or conversely, that our own wants and desires matter most. It’s also very confusing sometimes to distinguish between needing to take good care of ourselves and just wanting what we want when we want it.

The truth is, the only basis we have to perceive things in an authentic way is to bring our attention back to the now-moment. When the now-moment contains things we wish weren’t there, our resistance tends to rob us of the clarity and presence to face whatever challenge is before us, and to understand what it means to simply “put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others” without self-absorption or undue sacrifice.

Our issues and conditioning certainly rise up when we resist the present moment. And we can surely choose to be stressed and freaked out. However, if we are to take dominion over our lives, a confrontation with our distortions is inevitable.

Seeing our pattern of distortion is fundamental because without owning our patterns, we will be unable to free ourselves to perceive things in an undistorted way, to behave in a manner consistent with basic self-care and consideration for others, and to choose what we would choose if our thinking were not distorted by fear that we can’t be happy unless life is exactly the way we think we want it.

It’s a tall order, but then again, being a human is not spiritual kindergarten. It’s more like a PhD program in how to live your authentic life, in spite of the material plane’s uncertainties and discrepancies with the mind’s expectations.