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Category Archives: professional development category


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when you keep getting red lights

Hello

When you keep bumping into roadblocks you may be on the wrong course or you may be going in the wrong direction (or you may be trying to please the wrong people) – whatever it is stop, look, listen and re-direct yourself.

There seems to be a flow in the natural world around us.

Carl Jung talked about this as synchronicity in his book by the same name.  This concept of flow has been popularized by such books and authors as The Secret, Ask and it is Given, Joel Osteen, Esther Hicks, and Depak Chopra to name a few.

I think about it as something that is both perception and attention.

Ever notice how when you learn a new word, all of a sudden you see it everywhere in print?  You hear news anchors using it and you think wow, it’s everywhere all of a sudden.  In actuality it probably had always been around but then once you became aware of it – perception, you started to see it everywhere  – attention.

Many authors talk about a phenomenon where we create what we pay attention to – this follows a concept of energy that brings to you that which you focus on predominantly.

The information about creating positive memories to fill you rather than just the hardwired trauma memories is in this same vein of thought.  That what we attend to is what we see.  (This phenomenon of believing is seeing (faith) versus seeing is believing (proof) is a long-standing ideological argument which I am not addressing directly today.)

I think you can tap into the fabric of the natural world around us- the flow of energy, through many avenues.

The medicine that I use each day is about connecting to the flow of the individual and unblocking where the flow is stagnant – this is true from the paradigm of therapy as well as acupuncture.

The more one is paying attention and listening, and responding to the message from the natural world, the more  one is able to take action to remain in the flow of the natural world around us.

Anger can be used as a message that someone has crossed a boundary or that there is a habit reaction pattern that needs to be shifted.

Frustration can be a message that your actions are taking you away from the flow of energy.  Just as with anger there may be a perception that something is wrong and you have to change your direction.

When you are in the flow it seems that things are moving smoothly toward your goals.  When you get roadblocks things start to bump or not move smoothly, that’s what I’m calling frustration.  It tells you that something is not working.

You have to stop, look, and listen when you feel the bumps or roadblocks.

It may be that the equation that you have developed about what your goal is or how to reach your goal is in someway flawed.  Or it may be that you have to flow with the bumpiness to the end goal because you are on  a change course which is requiring a release or transformation of hidden agendas and/or habit reaction patterns.

When you are in the flow you will feel when you’re taken out of the flow.  That blocking or redirection is something to consider when deciding your course of action.

I have found that perception and attention to the flow around you, as well as what you are experiencing internally, informs you about your course in your own life.

Using the stop, look, listen technique to evaluate in the present moment the roadblock, the natural world around you, whether you are in a habit reaction pattern or whether others are caught in such  – gives you information of both figure and ground so that you can evaluate your course of action within a fuller context.

To determine which it is, a wrong direction that requires you redirect your direction OR a change course which feels bumpy but requires you stick to your vision and push through, evaluate feelings of fear, or defensiveness.  These feelings within yourself or from others typically indicate a habit reaction pattern that needs to be released or transformed.

See you tomorrow.

Beth


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A mother by any other name still loves

Hello

I have an interesting phenomenon in my life.

Many of the people whom I work with (professional) and love (personal too) relate to me as if I were their mother.  Sounds odd I know especially because in almost all the cases I can think of there’s no way I could be their mother = but it still exists that in the relationship, mother issues prevail.

In some instances this is cool because I get to be the mother they wanted which is rewarding for both of us.  But in some cases I have to play out the mother they didn’t like or that in some way let them down – Not so much fun really – that job.  I can at times make a difference in how they actually relate to their real mother in their own psyche as a result.  It’s challenging to be in the role.

Some say that’s one of the roles of therapist –  re-parenting.  From my experience I think that’s true in the best of situations.  As a result of this I have had a lot of practice at mothering way before I actually was in the actual role of mother.

I can tell you that loving from the perspective of Eric Fromm and Thich Nhat Hanh is the most successful tool.  Understanding and accepting as a form of loving is the most useful tool for diminishing defensiveness and accessing a person’s own capacity to forgive.

To Forgive herself, forgive her parents, forgive others, and  forgive God for all the ways in which she, they, we, and God let her down.

It’s extraordinary to feel understood and accepted.  It’s more extraordinary to feel forgiveness.  Forgiveness sets you free to be present and acting in the now.  It allows you to create fully without limitations.

We hold onto things, images, emotions, memories to remind us of important lessons.  It’s a way we communicate with ourselves and I think its hardwired into our psyches.

Often these are negative.   Angry and fearful emotions seem to have a direct line to our memories so that things are embedded in our cores – it’s as if to say REMEMBER this so that it NEVER happens again.

Intelligent, really, from a genetic point of view.  But there are some flaws – our emotions aren’t always right – we don’t always accurately interpret cause and effect or intent – as a result we make connections that are miscommunications.  We actually set up patterns to continue making the same mistake rather than the other way around.  That’s why I write so much about mindfulness and living/relating in the now.

Through forgiveness you let go of the preconditions set up by the negative experience so that you can view yourself and the other in a more whole perspective.  Like the figure/ground illusions that I have discussed – sometimes the negative emotion gets us so focused on the figure that we forget the ground and so miss out on the big picture or bigger message of the event.

So I suggest this.  Whenever you are experiencing everything happening just right – like your life is working the way you want it to be – consciously set that into a memory.

Look at your life as if in slow motion drinking in the perfectness of it in that moment, the colors, the sounds, the words, the smells, the tastes, the deep and beautiful feelings – the positive feelings.  Set it into a memory that you can access in the future.  Imprint it with a date and time so that you can go back to it to remind you that life does work.

In this way you will consciously be setting up a pattern of success.

Doing this allows for you to have a tool to remind you of your true best self.  Having access to that helps you to allow yourself to understand, accept, and forgive yourself and others, to have faith in the rightness of something rather than avoid the wrongness of something.  It allows for the injuries of your childhood to remain there in your past, so that you may create joy in all its forms today.

It allows you to be your own best mother – reframing and refocusing on your strengths in a loving and accepting way.

See you tomorrow.

Beth


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Love, it’s not just for soulmates

Hello

Valentine’s Day or what my daughter calls Love Day got me thinking about  love.

I have some interesting ideas about love.  My favorite author on this subject is Eric Fromm.  He wrote a book called the Art of Loving.  It’s great.   Its focus is on a paradigm shift in relation to love.  Romantic love from his perspective is not very loving.  He writes about looking at how your partner shows love rather than looking for what love looks like to you.

I actually think this is the key to happy relationships.

Happy loving couples are couples who have learned to experience love from their partners point of view; they have discerned what actions their partners do to show their love and so FEEL loved when that occurs.

Additionally they have figured out a way to teach their partners what they love to experience, what feels like love to them.  I know it seems complicated; actually it’s mindful.  It shifts the perspective and increases connection in the now.

So here’s the thing.  Love isn’t changing the other person into who you want him to be.

Love is accepting him EXACTLY where he is.  Loving him how he is now, not as the person he could change into being.  Really important point.  Loving  from this point of view doesn’t necessarily mean you have to stay together.  It’s an active word – to love.  Loving someone and choosing to be with someone are two distinct actions.

This follows the same theory that Bliss isn’t having what you want – Bliss is wanting what you have.

This helps you to BE congruent and congruence increases a sense of well-being.  You can tell your partner what you don’t like but the goal is to accept him as he is.  In doing so he may not like an aspect of himself that you also don’t like.  Then he may choose to change for HIMSELF.  This may result in an increase in wanting but the loving part is acceptance.

Thich Nhat Hanh my favorite mindfulness teacher talks about Love in these terms.  His concept is that loving is understanding, and understanding is accepting.

These ideas are all a far cry from the rituals typically played out for the traditional Valentine’s Day.

But since we are on the course of mindfulness why not try just loving the person in front of you – it may get you a lot closer to feeling the closeness you desire.

Happy Love Day and if you haven’t a partner that you’re sharing the day with, how about just applying these ideas toward yourself – accept yourself EXACTLY where you are – the feeling of Bliss may present itself.

And if you feel you can’t accept  yourself (or another) exactly where you are, remember this:

Understanding, Acceptance, and Love  decrease defensiveness.  And lowering the defenses allows for any change that we may want to make in ourselves to increase our sense of well being.  You can’t really change until you know and accept where you are.

See you tomorrow.

Beth


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Patience, how to keep it

Hello

Ah, patience.

Patience can really assist one in maintaining perspective and working toward goals.

Developing our own patience and that of our children is challenging.  Practice makes perfect usually requires the patience to push through the mistakes of practice to get to perfect. This teaches resilience and inner strength and the capacity to delay gratification – but patience is still hard for everyone.

You can see this in sports.  Where an individual’s inability to keep his cool results in the person’s inability to remain focused on the goal.  They can get too affected by a mistake.  It’s as if they get caught in a downward spiral that takes them away from the goal because they are not acting from their center.

Patience requires a sense of centeredness and it keeps you centered.

In some ways, the culture of our world makes it more difficult – there’s a push to have it now, especially in the advertisement world.  And there is a lot of hurry up and wait; these actions tend to erode rather than develop patience.

Delaying gratification – having to work for something – is good; it turns out that resilience develops out of the process of not winning, and living through that, to then win. To get there requires patience, perseverance, and inner strength.

The thing with patience is that it’s always relative.  No matter how patient a person is, life can push you just a little too far and then there you are losing your patience or temper.

A number of things help to increase or maintain patience.  Looking at it from a Spirit, Mind, and Body relationship:

Daily Yoga or meditation, prayer – spirit.

Thinking things through before acting, keeping the big picture in mind (figure and ground) – mind.

Exercise, and sleep and eating right – body.

Breathing, Staying centered and focused – spirit, mind and body.

If you are out of sync in any of these areas it’s really difficult to center – and a lack of centeredness often results in a lack of patience.

When faced with a situation which is trying your patience, first, Stop, Look, and Listen.

As soon as you notice that you’re being challenged to be patient – try to focus on what is actually happening, what may be going on for you – are you tired, frustrated or stressed; what may be going on for the other person – is she tired or stressed in some way.

Notice what is going on then pay attention to the sound of your voice or that of the other person is it angry or whinny.  Each are indicative of someone who is dealing with a conflict that they may be bringing to the situation.

Then while you’re doing all of that (in split second time), also allow yourself to breathe – consciously try to focus in on your own breath.  Breathing connects spirit, mind and body by getting you into the now and centering you.  It allows you to experience these levels of being at once.  Breathe deeply, remembering to breath in for a shorter period of time than breathing out.

From that space, see if you can get even more perspective on the situation – ask yourself in the scheme of things how important is this? If you are focusing from the now, and not the past, future, or to get another’s approval, you can evaluate whether losing your patience is an appropriate action.

Increasing your mindfulness and your centeredness allows you to take an action that is informed by the actual situation and this typically results in increased patience.

Notice this over the next few days and see if you have a better handle on remaining patient.

See you tomorrow.

Beth


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Building Strengths

Hello

When looking at how to connect it’s important to look at strengths and limitations.

Find the places where you can connect or the ways you feel similarly that’s the best way to get and stay connected.  Those are the strengths.

Limitations are equally as important.  When you understand where you diverge you can begin to look for ways that even in your divergence you have connections.  Try to not jump to conclusions or assumptions or to the next proof of your argument.

When the focus of the relationship is connection then slowing down the process of communication – taking your time to get to the underlying beliefs and feelings  – is the most important.

In chess the player is attempting to use information to guess and speculate about the other players next and subsequent moves.  If one does that in relationship then little time is spent in the now.  Most of the time is spent in the future – working on counter moves in order to capture the king only keeps you distanced from the other person.

In parenting you want to build the strengths of your child and diminish the negative effect of their limitations.  Trying to get your child to think about what was the antecedent feeling, experience, or action that caused the negative action or their misbehavior helps to get them to start to think about their own strengths and limitations.

By encouraging them to see the antecedent feeling or behavior, it helps to put things within a context that they can manage – so rather than being overcome by a feeling or behavior they can actually see the relationship between feelings and behaviors and make choices in the now and learn to live mindfully.

Resilience and self-esteem are characteristics built from the inside out – from knowing yourself and standing in the center of yourself.  Having unrealistic expectations about yourself, both positive and negative, will decrease resilience and lower self esteem.  It has to be real, and dealing with real things is what builds a sense of positivity.

Another way to focus on creating strength and resilience, and deal in the real world, is work done by a School Counselor who has for many years now been lecturing across the country trying to teach counselors and school counselors to stop creating victims.  His premise is that some of our biggest school tragedies have been the result of victims’ heartless actions.  His name is Izzy Kalman and he teaches anger management classes called “Bullies to Buddies”.

He teaches that you can “turn Bullies to Buddies by treating them like your friend,” (by not getting mad at them, not reacting, and therefore reducing their power over you).   His work focuses on not reacting to what others say – if it’s true then you don’t need to get mad and if it isn’t true then it shouldn’t matter and you don’t need to get mad.  It’s another way to talk about being centered and mindful although he never uses those words.

His work uses basic psychological theory to prove that our current focus on victimhood has actually resulted in decreased self esteem, and decreased resilience.  He reminds us that “Bullies” feel like victims too so that we need to change the paradigm or lens through which we look at the problem of bullying and victimhood.  His work when actually introduced in schools has had some very positive effects.

So the next time someone says something critical and you feel yourself getting defensive see if the paradigm shift of responding as if they are your friend keeps you in the now in the interaction and allows for a de-escalation of the interaction.

And if they really are your friend or you are in a negotiating situation see if you can look at where you connect first and make those connections before you view where you diverge in belief or principle.

Knowing yourself – your strengths and your limitations – will help you to interact in a way that you do not lose your self or your priorities.

See you tomorrow.

Beth


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Centering and Breath, Focus on Connection

Hello

The expression of anger and fear, can be a charge that creates or triggers the unconscious habit reaction patterns in another. Or, it can allow for a powerful communication that can lead to connection.

The degree of expression, the level, tone, and word choice are the factors that affect how another responds or reacts.  Using breath to get you into your center and remaining centered is the most helpful way to begin to use the mindfulness process to assess what may be happening in the interaction.

When you are feeling angry or put off by someone’s comments it may be one of your boundaries has been crossed, or that you are reacting from an unconscious habit pattern, or that the other person’s  comments are the result of their unconscious habit pattern.

The most difficult of these to deal with is the latter.  The first two are within your control you can look at what boundary is being crossed and take steps to respond to that OR in the second case you can become more mindful by questioning your anger and habit reaction to help you get into a more centered space to respond more clearly, and in a more defined way.

However when it is the other person’s unconscious reaction pattern, you can only get through to them if they are wiling to hear that they are not in the present moment reacting with you.  This is difficult because the basic position of the unconscious habit reaction is defensive so it negates the opportunity for being open to insightful information.

Usually your level of intimacy can increase your ability to help the other person look at their behavior; but sometimes the closest people to us are the least willing to learn from us about themselves.  Especially if they are invested in the relationship not growing – in other words if the pattern of the relationship serves them from an unconscious habit pattern.

Emotion and feeling can mediate between figure and ground.  Using feeling, “I” statements, to evoke a softening of the defensive position of the other person is the best strategy to help to unravel the unconscious habit reaction pattern.  Go for connecting statements rather than separating statements.  This is counterintuitive most people want to define how they are different when they feel at odds with someone but actually that just increases the defensive reaction.

Focusing on the connections brings down the wall of defensiveness so that mindfulness can come in to play to replace the unconscious reaction pattern.    After this is secure then you can look at where you and the other person diverge and perhaps see if you are actually dealing with a figure/ground dichotomy.

Gestalt is roughly translated to mean ‘the whole’.  Gestalt figure ground illusions show us there are (at least) two perspectives that make up the whole.  In order to make the transition to one from the other one has to be mindful – and open to the possibility of the other perspective.

Breathing and centering, using feeling and connecting statements, these actions all allow for the line between the two to be less bold so that one is more able to view the other perspective.  And in some cases move back and forth between the two – between the figure and ground perspective.

This allows for connection and increased understanding of each point of view as well as the whole.

In Reiki a type of energy medicine, two of the guiding statements are very useful in focusing one into a state of mindfulness and creating the opportunity for connecting and centering.  One is Just for today I will have the attitude of gratitude and the other is Just for today I will not Anger.

I encourage you to pick one of those statements and use it as a mantra as you go through your day.  It may help you to focus in on yourself and the situation in a more mindful way and open new pathways for change and connection in your relationships.

See you tomorrow.

Beth


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Outer, Inner; The Spiral and The Tree.

Hello

Child development seems to follow this course of outer, inner in its focus.  Develop new skills, incorporate the skills into your self, practice the new thing learned, and then build on it.  So when you look at child development literature you’ll notice this spiral of skills development and then integration.

Psychotherapy follows a similar course: address the outside layer and then go deeper uncovering layers and then recombining into a new self, so to speak.  Often I will hear people say:  “I’ve already worked on that.”  And indeed they have – but there is a spiral to personality and character development where we learn skills or coping strategies and then we have to incorporate them, and then we have to sometimes unlearn and re-incorporate.  Over time it’s a spiral:  outer work, inner work, outer work, inner work and so on.

Change seems to have this dynamic focus as well.  Identify something you want to change, comprehend what interferes with change, make efforts to move the block and incorporate the new behavior (outer), then after time the change occurs internally  and there is both a new thing or cognition (inner) about the identified thing as well as a new action or behavior (outer).  Outer work, inner work, outer work and so on.

These shifts in focus are like mini-paradigm shifts of figure and ground.

Letting go of unconscious habit patterns follows this spiral; you notice the habit reaction patterns are there and how they are interfering with living in the now.  Then you increase your mindfulness to see if you can be more present and respond from a centered and mindful place.  This process is dynamic and it is spiraling which means you may feel as if you’ve already dealt with an issue and then find yourself dealing with a similar issue in a different context – outer, inner.

The emotional charge or energy that’s connected to the unconscious habit pattern gets released once the inner change has rooted.  So just as you don’t feel the charge you are more centered and able to connect to yourself from the inside out.  So you feel simultaneously more flexible AND more stable.  This allows for you to remain flexible and centered even when something from the outside goes wrong.  You are not thrown off by the unexpected event but rather you are able to bend and be flexible and respond to the event without anger, fear, or any other emotional charge.

The visual for being simultaneously flexible and centered is the tree bending in the wind while safely rooted into the soil.  It can respond to the environment around it without losing its center and grounding.

The Spiral and the Tree.  Keep these two visuals in your mind as you go about your days for the next two days as you view yourself, and yourself in your world.

You may even want to attempt the Yoga Tree Pose.

See you tomorrow.

Beth


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I pressed my nose against the window of his life

Hello 

Today I’m going to share a poem I found in an old book, that I wrote a long time ago.  

No matter how hard we try to ignore it 

There are people who are special. 

The light always turns green 

Just as they step to the edge of the curb. 

He was one of them. 


 

When I first met him 

I pressed my nose against the window of his life, 

With the fear, curiosity and interest 

Of a five year old. 

It was the safest scared I’d ever been. 

And then, he let me in. 


 

It’s not to say that there are those among us who are totally exempt. 

But there are a few….only a few 

Who display great courage and style. 

They break away and enhance their lives. 

They are people with imaginations that multiply 

Like rabbits. 

And, no matter how hard we try to ignore it, 

There are those among us who are special. 

He was one of them.                  …….bgineris. 

  

The thing that’s cool about poetry is that it plays on how we develop images in our brain to match what we’re reading.  

Figure and ground, values and valence, psyche and reality all play into the interpretation of the poem as we read it. 

A successful poem, like any successful communication has to be able to hit the figure and the ground of a thing such that others can come away affected or connected. 

Try writing a poem about something that matters to you and see what you find is the figure and the ground of you and that thing.  It’ll be fun.  

I have a friend who writes what seems to be a limerick a day – and he’s pretty good at moving between figure and ground when he needs to in communication.  

It’s like exercise for your brain.  🙂 

See you tomorrow 

Beth


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How we see the world

Hi

In The Talmud, the guide for understanding the Jewish 613 mitzvot, there is a saying we see the world not the way it is; We see the world the way we are.

For me this is interpreted that my first reaction may be informed more intensely by my previous experiences and personal history, values and roles, than by any actual information.

In order to get to neutral and respond rather than react one needs to know one’s own frame of reference and paradigm.  This is especially true when interacting with others who haven’t the same frame of reference.  I’ve been writing about the importance of slowing down the unconscious habit reaction and that continues to be very important.  In addition consider what you may be bringing to the situation.

Angle of vision is affected by perspective.  The same is true for our perceptions.

Many miscommunications happen because people think they are talking about the same thing when indeed they are talking about different things.  Part of that comes from how much inference we use when communicating.

Another important part is that words, phrases and expressions don’t actually have globally accepted meanings.  Language is imbued with feeling and energy.  We learn to speak and write in the context of our early childhoods.  So we actually link extra meaning to words and phrases.  These take on the contextual information as well as their formal definition.

An example of this that is generalized more globally, is a colloquialism.  One I used to struggle with was a french one Je ne sais quoi.  The meaning is: that certain something – but if you interpret literally the words in the phrase they are: I don’t know what.  So the phrase has imbued extra meaning that then got generalized to the global language.

Most of us have many words and phrases that mean more than the dictionary definition, that have expression, and charge and intensity for us when we hear and use them.  This is a source of Major miscommunication.  Because we also presume that everyone is using the words the way we Know them.  But they aren’t.

There is a lot of work on this subject from the fields of Phenomenology and Existentialism.  Thought and Language by Lev Vygotsky is a discourse on how children think out loud first, that the child talks through problems and situations out loud  and then it becomes an internal conversation – thinking.

My favorite two books on this subject are On the Way to Language by Martin Heidegger and Words as Eggs, Psyche in Language and Clinic by Russell A. Lockhart.  These are dry but fascinating and pithy.

So it is my observation and assertion that each of us has our own language and successful relationship is the process of learning each other’s language.  Individual’s in long-term relationships, children and caregivers, and close siblings (especially twins) have their own shared language .  This increases the intimacy between the shared language group and excludes those outside the group.  We see this in high school where small groups develop new words with personal meanings that hold them together as a group and exclude those who don’t know the language.

What words mean to us, how we see the world and communicate within it, these things are dramatically affected by our experiences and our interpretations to those experiences.  That’s a frame of reference.

Knowing yourself means understanding what has meaning for you and how much of that is transferable to and/or agreed on in your relationships, work, groups and situations.

To begin to interpret meaning in your own language and that of those close to you – notice when you have/hear emotional expression with specific words.  Try to follow the thread of that emotional expression back to its source.  It can be revealing.

See you tomorrow.

Beth


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Argue for Your Limitations…

Hi

Argue for your limitations and sure enough they’re yours… another great line from Richard Bach’s Illusions.

I think this speaks to habitual reaction patterns and victim scenarios.  Arguing for your limitations is the way in which our history defines us and sure enough they’re yours has to do with the way energy seems to work – what you focus on is what you see.

One way to change your perspective is through affirmations.  There is a lot of work out there about the use of affirmations to recreate your view of the world.  Of course the most famous is Louise Hay, she developed a whole system of symptoms and affirmations.

I have a couple of favorites on this subject currently, one is Joel Osteen’s work called Become a Better You, and another is Esther Hicks’ work Ask and It Is Given.  They come from VERY different paradigms, one is a Christian Pastor and one is a New Age Channeler, but they actually say the same thing.

And that is this:

FOCUS on WHAT you WANT rather than what you fear.

They each, in their own way, discuss the importance of reorienting yourself away from what you don’t want toward what you want to create.  This is a great internal mantra.  It keeps you focused within for your guidance, so that more of you and your goals are in your life.  When you do this, life stops happening to you and You start living.  You move from the passenger seat, to the driver’s seat of your life.

Remember from the Gestalt perspective anxiety is a function of being in the past or the future.  Another kind of anxiety comes from not living in your own world, or from getting guidance from outside sources rather than within.

The theory behind this is that what gets created is just a function of energy.  If we put a lot of energy into fear and anxiety then that gets created.  If we focus on what we want we actually create more of that.

Affirmations have gotten a bad rap ever since Al Franken did his SNL skit with Stuart Smalley about I love myself and gosh darn it people like me. Try not to link what I’m writing about with this.

Affirmations are statements that are affirming rather than disconfirming.  It’s a way to question those negative misbeliefs that are the basis of our habitual reaction patterns.  You’re affirming yourself rather than disconfirming yourself.  The negative misbeliefs are not you, they’re historical definitions of yourself in a specific situation rather than true aspects of yourself.  The trick with affirmations to work, is to get the right one.

I’m not suggesting that there is a specific one for everything; I’m suggesting that simply stating to ourselves a mantra that is affirming will help us maintain a positive connection to ourselves, so that we can then allow our best self to guide us from within.  This is reconnecting to that instinctive aspect of yourself that is hidden by the habitual reaction patterns, the victim scenarios,  and negative internal self talk.

Start with just saying the opposite.  If you feel like you’re stupid.  Say I’m smart.  Then look for supportive evidence.  If you want to create something, say I can rather than saying I can’t.  Focus on what you want rather than what you fear.

Try it with something small first.  Don’t pick your biggest challenge.  Notice how you feel.  It’s a little stilted and difficult at first but as you get the hang of it, it gets easier.

See you tomorrow.

Beth