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I’ve heard, “It Never Hurts to Ask”

It never hurts to ask and what I learned from Honda…

Honda stojan

Image via Wikipedia

 

I am a believer in Honda.  They’ve won me over with their automatic doors, convenience in just about any way they can, but mostly because of their Starbucks coffee, fresh-baked cookies and 10% discounts.  “Ten percent?,” you ask.  Well, not so easy as that.  We have to ask.  Ask nicely.

Honda has, if not taught me, reinforced my once shaky belief that if you ask for something, you’re more likely to get it.  Sounds obvious but how often we don’t.  We don’t ask.  What are the barriers?  Flip it and we wonder what helps us ask?

We bring out our biopsychosocial model again.  (Hear the whip-ahhh! as it comes out of our pocket?!)

Question:  What do you find when you break it down?

Those barriers or the helps we have in other areas of our life, including with our own friend, Me.

Self-Care Tip #277 – If you want to change something, ask.  Including when it’s about yourself from yourself.

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What Comes To Me From Others Is a Gift

DSC_0065

Image by krystal.pritchett via Flickr

Self-Care Tip #246 – Take care of yourself and expect that what comes from others is a gift.

Do you ever ask,

Why does drama follow me?!

It is just darn hard taking care of ourselves (including taking psychotropic medication.)  Much of the rest of the world has difficulty with it too.  Despite our best efforts to go towards what is friendly, we might decide that choosing the company of un-self-cared-for loved ones is more friendly to ourselves than cutting them off.  That is our choice.  If we want them in our lives, we are not able to just take the bits that are friendly.

Some of us are more dramatically affected by this than others.  Wonder about why that is.  I’m wondering if it has to do with our different perspectives of who will take care of us.

Feeling like someone else is going to take care of Me is a trap.  Expecting someone else to find us for love, to expect leadership, to follow without accounting for our steps, to decide without knowing we decided, thinking someone else decided for us – these are traps.

Drama-icon

Image via Wikipedia

What do we expect other people to be for us?  We will interpret the drama we encounter differently when we are our own leader.  If we take care of ourselves and if we come in a state of readiness then we can offer more of these gifts and visa versa.  Gifts are free and as free of agenda as our flawed selves can give.

We embrace our emotional self, our thinking self, our judgmental self, our sensory self, embrace and live ourselves up most fully, and we are most friendly when we do it with the freedom our lives were designed for.

Drama will always come up as long as we think that someone is worth being in our lives.  We will remember that we chose them and can choose quantity of time, the volume, the reception and the degree of connection.  We can choose freely what we will do or not do with them and live and die surrounded inside of ourselves and outside of ourselves by the connections we fought hard for.

Questions:  Why do you think drama is in your life from the perspective of self-care?  Since you’ve been more in tune to being a friend to yourself, has anything happened to the drama in your life?  Please tell me your story.

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Wearing A Bit Of Disguise For The Sake of Being Open

Self-Care Tip #110 – Find your masquerade and let it teach you how to be open.

We often talk about taking masks off.  About being open and “face” our lives with courage.  However doing that isn’t always as easy as saying it.  Sometimes doing the opposite makes it easier in preparation for when we have courage to try again.  Sometimes putting the mask on makes it easier to more completely know and be known.

On Twitter today, this came from bigfishtopdogs Theresa BradleyBanta:

Here’s my #FF. These people rock! They engage!
And there was my name.
I wondered why we can say these high-fivers so spontaneously on Twitter from people we know only a few pixels deep.  I “met” Theresa BradleyBanta on her blog site bigfishtopdogs.com only a few days ago and she’s already telling people that I “rock!”  It is so cool!  (Just as an aside, she rocks too.  Her site is all about coaching and mentoring on entrepreneurial endeavors.)

Getting that fresh compliment almost stung when I realized how I preened underneath it.  Here in the real world, I don’t know who to show my feathers to.  My reply to Theresa was

Wow. How come I can’t hear anyone say that in “real life?”.  Twitter is like a smokey dark room where anything can happen.

Sometimes people think of hiding behind things as a way to do indiscrete lascivious acts that you wouldn’t want to do if you were identified.

I propose that a little hiding is a good thing for ourselves.  To get up close and personal.  To share over-the-top compliments and receive them.  It doesn’t mean something bad unless we use it badly.  I propose that when we disguise a little on occasion, we might remember how to act more freely when we are in the open – how to, when we try again.

Having the courage to try again and again to connect gets easier when we have fun reminders as to why we want it so bad.

Question:  What have your positive experiences been when you were a little less inhibited?  If fantasies could come true, how would you like it to carry over into your “real” life?  Please tell me your story.

 

 

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Bringing Your Worst or Your Best – Family

When I go to work, I feel my spirit get up off the floor, onto its knees and then it’s feet, and then fly into skies of happiness and inner congruence.  Work is where people are respectful to others.  If not they disappear.  (i.e. They’re fired.)  They do their chores and sometimes even with pleasure.  I am less often reminded of the fine line between success and failure, and I can always find my scissors, tape and stapler.  I’m sitting at home now, letting out a dreamy sigh.  Ah.

Why do we treat strangers so well and our family not so well?  Why do we give our best where our best is valued only as much as the going rate of gold and

silver?

John Tauer, Ph.D. states that coöperation and competition are not an either or.  He tells us from 4 years of research at basketball summer camps that the effects of combining coöperation with competition (intergroup competition) is much more powerful than either one alone.   In other words, individuals competing isn’t as fun or successful as a group of people competing against another group of people (i.e. teams.)  I propose that this might be part of the play in the difference between home and out of home behaviors.

In the home, we tend to see ourselves as individuals maybe even competing against each other.  Out of the home, we ally with others whom we can work with to compete against others.  We bring our best to the playing field perhaps.

In The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss, we see a family who is marooned, cooperating as a team against dangerous elements (intergroup competition) to survive.  They have so much fun doing it that when rescue finally comes, nothing could entice them to leave their happy treehouse.

We see other examples of this (intergroup competition) when a family member gets sick and everyone rally’s to fight the disease together.  I wonder how we can do that good stuff without having to wreck a ship or fight cancer.  I’d like to give my best to my husband and kids every day.  The fraternities, the gangs, the undying lure of neighborhood rivalries, reality TV show Survivor – all show us that this intergroup competition is pleasurable and effective.

Question:  Have you experienced this kind of success in your own home?  Please tell me your story.

Self Care Tip #57 – Bring your best to the people you love.  Be a friend to yourself.