Blog Posts - International Staff Care

Is there such a thing as a 'true life purpose', and do we need one?

12/5/2016

As some of you know, I'm involved as a faculty member at Primal Happiness' online community Thrive.

Every couple of months the Thrive community has a theme to focus on and explore for 30 days. This month's theme is 'The Super Power of Serving'.

It got me reflecting on the idea of 'life purpose' and whether there is such a thing as 'one true life purpose', as promoted by many self-help approaches? And whether we even need one?

I'm finding that the more I see what a shifting feast *I* am, that I prefer to remain open to 'purpose' in the moment and find it more helpful to ask: 'What can I do to serve, today, now, from who and where I am now?'

Here's how it's described by Lian at Primal Happiness:

'Due to the way the self-help world has often misunderstood and over-used the word ‘Purpose’, it can come loaded with ‘shoulds’ and the sense that life isn’t worth living unless we’re following some grand, world-changing passion.

So we want to be clear, when we’re talking about Purpose we don’t mean a big Holy Grail that we have to spend our life seeking (however if you have found that, more power to your elbow!), instead we mean something that’s a natural part of how humans are designed.

What we’ve often seen is that people overlook the significance of Purpose and can believe it’s somehow optional... something that’s just too hard to figure out and that they can choose to opt out of. But it's essential to humans that they are contributing to their community in some way, as it’s one of the fundamentals that allows humans to survive and thrive.'

To encourage Thrivers to think more broadly about how we can serve in the moment, these are the questions being posed to Thrivers:

* What are my super powers of service - what am I good at?
* What do other people say I’m good at? (And please do let others in the group know what you see as their super powers of service.)
* What can I do to increase and grow my super-powers?
* Who can I help?
* What am I passionate about?
* What do people need?

I'm looking forward to exploring all these - alongside my fellow Thrivers - as well as experimenting with giving my attention to the idea of regularly carrying out acts of service.

If you fancy joining us, you can take advantage of the 2 week FREE TRIAL being offered by Lian and Jonathan http://primalhappiness.co/thrive/. You will get to share and learn and get an experience of the Thrive community AND get access to the BRILLIANT and quite frankly (life-changing) Happy School classes. You will also get to take part in any Q and A coaching calls, and Thrive Masterclasses that are taking place. I'm leading a Thrive Masterclass on Loss on Tuesday 17th May and it would be lovely to have you join us.

Love to you, Kate x

Ebb and flow, ups and downs

12/5/2016

Ebb and flow is something Lian and Jonathan at Primal Happiness talk about a lot and I find it so helpful.

I used to strive to be more consistent, to not fall into low states of consciousness, to keep level as much as possible, and BOY was I disappointed in myself when I couldn't keep that up for more than a short stretch at a time.

I tried it all (not very consistently mind you...!): acknowledgements, grateful fors, affirmations, morning pages; dabbled in CBT, meditation, attempts to be more mindful.

Last week I felt full of energy, did more and more, got less and less sleep, but felt good (or so I thought) and energised by my energy.

And then Wednesday evening came, and I flipped at a tantrum one of my kids was throwing at bed time. I saw red, I blew my top, I swore (not a regular occurrence, especially when the kids are in ear shot), and all this, seemingly out of nowhere.

And then I blew my top some more, downstairs once my husband was home. And I realised how tight and closed and tense I'd become, despite, seemingly, enjoying all my busy-ness that week, and, I had thought, without any adrenaline being involved.

So I noticed my tightness, thought the blow out was it, but then found myself in a puddle of tears on Friday night, telling my husband I wasn't sure I wanted him to be the birth companion at our baby's birth because I felt so disconnected from him.

We can go into the whys and wherefores all this came about, but what was super interesting to me was how on Saturday morning everything all looked different.

I have my hunches why I got myself in a twist during the week - my busy-ness was taking me further and further from myself (though my ego obviously thought it felt fine). I know that when I'm disconnected from self, from source, I suffer.

But the biggie here is that we ebb and we flow, we're up and we're down, life is super-duper transient: from a puddle of tears at the kitchen table on Friday night and a total sense of disconnection, to singing in the car with the windows down on Saturday morning, feeling peaceful and grateful.

Quite frankly: we can try our hardest to hold on, to keep steady, to be consistent in mood, but we're wasting an awful lot of energy:

Life has a rhythm and an intelligence of it's own. We can tap into that rhythm, be aware of it, but we cannot dictate the overall tune.

The best thing we can do is stay alert, play as beautifully as we can when we remember, accept our bum notes when we don't, and keep admiring and wondering at the composer - who's genius is so great, we're never going to hear or understand it all.

Love to you all, Kate x

The infinite creative potential of ‘I want’ vs. 'I need'

13/4/2016

I had the coolest conversation with a coaching client the other day.

We were exploring ‘I need’ versus, ‘I want’.

We came to some pretty mind-blowing realisations:

So many of us are so consumed by thoughts of what we ‘need’ to be okay, to feel secure, to feel we’ve ‘made’ it, to feel we’re worth something, to feel we’re valued, that we seldom look to what we ‘want’.

No wonder we feel stuck, frustrated, unmotivated.

The truth of the matter is that until we stop saying (and focusing on) what we ‘need’, and start honestly stating to ourselves (and the world) what we ‘want’, the things we want to change in our lives don’t change in any significant or meaningful way.

It’s at the point of ‘wanting’, or stating our ‘want’ to the world, that we open ourselves up to the infinite creative potential within all of us: suddenly the world (and we) can plainly see our deepest desire, and from there all sorts of options/ ways forward possibilities arise. Without this statement of our deepest desire, none of this is available to us.

So why don’t we state more ‘wants’ to the world, why do we live in a world of ‘I need’?

My theory is that when we state what we want to the world, we open ourselves to a kind of openness and vulnerability and responsibility/accountability we’re not accustomed to: ‘What will it mean if I say what I really mean, what I really want?; ‘What will it require of me?’ – we shy away, for fear of what it might require of us.

But we’re never going to find satisfaction or peace of mind or sustained wellbeing in our needs as they’re founded on an untruth:

that if we have all the right things ‘out there’, the right sized TV, the latest iPhone, the dream colleagues, the perfect ‘job’ , a certain amount of money, then we’ll feel okay, then our wellbeing is a dead cert.

The fear that we won’t be okay without all the ‘right’ things keeps us from voicing what’s deeply true for us and keep us playing small.

We’re all consciously or subconsciously aware of this distinction between the smallness of our ‘needs’ and the expansiveness of our ‘wants’.

Clients often come to me wanting to be clearer on what it is they ‘want’ from life. In fact, they often know what their deepest desire around that aspect of their life is, but they’re too afraid to fully voice it to themselves and the world until they know how the ‘want’ will play out, or because they’re afraid of what it might mean for their future.

For example with my client, she has for a long time been focusing on what she ‘needs’ to be different at work in order for her to be ok. Those thoughts have consumed her:

‘I need so and so colleague to be different, to be less controlling, to be less manipulative’; ‘I need me to be more motivated, to get more done so I feel satisfied’; ‘I need to move up in to a position of more authority, then these problems, these feelings I’m experiencing will go away’.

When we dug deeper, we discovered that there was an unvoiced ‘want’ in there, which my client was repressing because she didn’t know how to make that ‘want’ happen. And because - even deeper still: she’s scared of what the truth of that ‘want’ might mean.

The unvoiced desire is that perhaps my client wants something else, something other than what she’s doing now. She doesn’t know what she would do instead, and what that other reality might require of her – to exist on less money, a period of unemployment – who knows?

All the projected unknowns she’s creating in her mind are manifesting in a fear, which stops her from stating her deep-felt desire.

I’m realizing more and more that we don’t need to know the specifics before we take the leap and state what it is we want in life.

In fact, casting an unformed, ‘I want’ - but a heartfelt, soul-deep one - into the great unknown is ‘how’ the answers come.

To honestly state to ourselves: I want something other than this (even when we don’t know what that something is) is a super-powered thing in itself; there’s no need for specifics, just in that opening up, the ‘work’ is done, the ball is set in motion, the answers will come.

We’re playing small to keep ourselves safe from something which is inevitable: unknowns are inevitable – we pretend we can control life, control the future, but actually we’re WAY more out of control than we think.

The very best thing we can do is look to how this life thing works, the principles in play behind it.

When we do, we see the truth of the fact that when we state what’s deeply true for us to the world, the answers come, the world (and our brilliant psychological immune system) has a way of taking care of us, of bringing fresh ideas to us – which we can’t see until we change our level of perspective or consciousness and look at our situation from our ‘I want’ rather than the distraction of our ‘needs’.

From Mental Misery to a Moment of Grace, via Gratitude

7/4/2016

This week I've been getting myself into increasing knots of exhaustion and mental misery - you know the one: perspective on life closing in til it's there's just a little pinprick of light you're squinting out at the world through.

Miles to empty? Running on fumes....!

Yesterday, I woke up and EVERYTHING looked like a problem.

Being in my mind was like being trapped in a burning building - and everywhere I looked for an escape route I saw things which just compounded my situation: a jerry can full of petrol one way, a barred window another.

So not a nice morning: grumpy with husband, kids and life; I couldn't see a way out of my misery.

And then two things happened to perk me up, to alert me that the world wasn't actually against, me, just my thinking about the world in that moment was.

First, the traffic - which is normally backed up way along the road I take the kids to school along - wasn't there - if you know Nairobi, you'll know that's nigh short of a miracle.

I noticed the absence of traffic and noticed I felt grateful for it (a far nicer feeling than any of the ones I'd experienced so far that morning).

Second, at school, we were greeted by a teacher before we'd even got out of the car, which meant I delivered the children straight from the car into her arms and didn't need to get involved with a lengthy drop off - I was out of there in minutes.

The feeling of gratitude, of the-world-is-actually-an-okay-place-I'm-just-struggling-right-now, grew.

That feeling enabled me to see and feel a light at the end of the tunnel that was a tiny bit bigger than the pinprick I'd been operating through at the start of the morning.

That increased perspective on life, which the feeling of gratitude afforded me, slowed my mind down just a little bit. It eased my ego-chatter just enough for my little voice - the one I call my wisdom-voice - to speak to me; to tell me to forget the list of 'to-dos' and things I was determined to get done to 'make me feel better'; to forget rushing about town; to go home, to have a cup of tea, to breathe, and to take the day from there.

Reflecting on yesterday shows me two things:

1. Understanding that the hell I was living in was thought-created, not real, gave me some distance (even if only a millimetre) between Me (big me, all of me), and the ego-thought-created reality I was experiencing.

That understanding didn't make me feel better in the moment - the feelings of what I was experiencing were all 'there' - but my understanding of the fact that I am not my thoughts; that my thoughts come through me and create my experience, but that is it: they are not fully Me - helped keep me floating a millimetre above my experience... (at the same time as feeling ALL of it).

That gap between my experience and my relationship to my experience was enough to keep a tiny chink of my heart open - just enough - for me to notice that somethings were going in my favour, that the world was not against me - just my thoughts in that moment were. And that despite my mental misery there were things to be grateful for.

2. The experience of gratitude took me out of myself, it slowed my thinking down and eased my mind enough for fresh thought, for wiser thought to come through. It allowed me in that moment to be guided by something wiser and bigger than my ego-created thought-nightmare I'd been living in on and off for 3 days.

So gratitude is as powerful as people say.

That said, the way I see it today though is that genuine gratitude is only possible to feel when we are not 100% sold on the world working from the outside-in; when a part of us (however small) believes it's possible it actually works from the inside out.

Just that openness to life possibly working that way creates enough space for genuine heartfelt and transformative gratitude to flow in.

PS....Just so you know the truth of the matter: the day did improve, and then went down hill again - reached crisis point in the evening, in fact (ask my husband...).

I sit here this morning feeling a whole lot better.

And grateful for what I learnt yesterday.

We are ALL wiser than we know

6/4/2016

Life doesn't have to be as hard as we make it.

We ALL have access to more wisdom than we know. The thing is that the incessant, (often quite shouty, in my head...!), ego-voices more often than not drown our small, quiet, wisdom-voice out.

I had the most amazing experience of the power and potential of this small voice on my way back from a retreat in Essex with my friend and colleague, Ann Ross.

We'd arrived into Paddington Station earlier than we'd thought we might and we were in time to catch an earlier train back to Devon. The choice we are faced with was to rush a bit to get the earlier train, or to take our time, have some lunch at the station and wait for the train we'd planned to get on.

In that moment my ego-voices got going, trying to second guess what Ann might like to do; trying to do the 'right' thing by her, and me. And I got lost, I couldn't decide: I didn't know what to do.

I told Ann as much: the usual: 'I don't mind... What do you want to do?'

Ann (in her wisdom) turned the question back at me and gave me the opportunity to see my own wisdom in action:

What does your wisdom tell you to do?', she said.

Now that can be a super-annoying woo-woo question which well-meaning coaches throw at their clients in a slightly cliched, slightly makes-you-want-to-punch-them-square-in-the-face, kind of way. But there something about the way Ann asked the it, and the space that we'd been in for the last few days and hours, which made me listen to that question properly.

I stopped for a moment, got quiet inside, and let the small voice speak....And to my surprise, it did! Super clearly and succinctly...: 'Get the next train.'

I was gobsmacked. I remember thinking: 'I know what I want to do, clear as a bell!'. And most significantly for me, I remember witnessing that what I wanted to do felt so true, so powerfully true, that I had the courage to speak it (without all the usual ego-chatter/ second guessing what's going on for other people: what will people/ Ann think of my decision/ desire).

And that's what we did. We spent a very pleasant hour pottering in the station, taking our time, buying some coffees and eating our lunch, and then off we went to our appointed train.

I've played with my little voice ever since. It's AMAZING what I know!

If I notice my mind getting busy and chattery, I stop what I'm doing. I get quiet and listen. Sometimes I ask a question, sometimes I don't. (The more I practice acknowledging the presence of this voice, and allowing it to speak, the more just being aware of my busy-ness and ego-chatteriness does the work for me.)

For example, this morning I was caught in a thought-storm of egoistic thinking - it felt like the walls were closing in and there was no way out - every way I turned I saw more problems. The ego-voices got louder and louder until I was so confused and noisy in my head I couldn't think straight. I surrendered to the fact that I really didn't know what would be the best thing to do to support myself, and immediately the small voice spoke and told me to forget all the 'to dos', to go home, have a cup of tea, and take it from there.

The answer which comes when I surrender to this small voice, is always something which looks after my best interests in that moment: take a break, eat something, go to the toilet!, sit back down and get on with the article in front of you, call a friend, go for a walk, GO HOME and take it from there.

There's an infinite number of responses available when we stop and listen, and I love seeing which one's going to show up. Whatever the response is: it's always got my back.

Ego-voices have become so LOUD in our society that we've forgotten about the small voice. Or, we're so noisy up there in our heads, we can't hear it. Next time you notice you're up in your head and you don't know what to do, or you're not enjoying life/ the thinking you're having, try having a listen.

That voice is always there, and we always know what to do for the best, even when we think we don't.

Thriving by living within our limits - (...or perhaps it's about living closer to what actually is.)

4/4/2016

A while back I read a blog post and a line stuck with me:

'How many miles are you from empty?' (or something to that effect).

The effect it had on me was huge. 'How useful is that?', I thought: to ask yourself each and every day (or when it occurs to you): 'How many miles am I from empty right now?', and to adjust your expectations for yourself and for the day accordingly.

I was reminded of it yesterday lying in the bath and listening to my little boy having a meltdown outside the door and my husband dealing with him. I reflected on how exhausted I was feeling, how tired I knew my little boy was after an 'up and down' night, and how tired I knew my husband was from dealing with it (and us) all.

It occurred to me to wonder 'how many miles from empty are we all right now'...?

Answer: About 0.5....! And then to wonder how best we might arrange our day to accommodate for that deficit.

As it turns out we even had to downsize (what we had thought was) a gentle, manageable plan of a visit to the cafe in the forest and a play on the play park there. Things began to spiral downhill as soon as we arrived (over tired three year old/ very busy cafe/ no hope of food or drink anytime soon). My husband and I looked at each other questioningly and mouthed 'abort?', and made a quick ( or not so quick with two screaming toddlers in tow) exit.

What I find handy about this is that so often we have our plans, our expectations, our ideas about what we should get done today; how the day should be. We are setting ourselves up for a major fall if the reality of the situation is that we don't actually have enough miles in the tank to cover all that ground.

When I don't acknowledge my tank is getting low, I struggle: I push to get things done when I'm not in the right frame of mind; I push to have conversations when I or the other person are not in the right frame of mind; I expect things of myself and of other people which just aren't possible right now, or if they or I can muster just enough physical energy to get the things done, they'll be done without love; out of a grudgingness, or an effortingness, that doesn't feel good, doesn't get the best results, and which leaves me and or them, even closer to the really serious business of the big red warning light.

Some of us operate close to empty for years, steering just clear of acknowledging that emptiness by reaching for caffeine, alcohol, adrenaline to keeps us artificially fuelled. I know I did, and the result: an eventual burn out.

I know I'll never get close to that now, but even on a day to day basis, the, 'How close am I to empty?', or 'How close are they to empty?', question makes for a much nicer experience: it's handy for keeping myself grounded, for staying realistic about what's possible, keeping my expectations in check; for keeping this (sometimes a bit clapped out, and in need of a service) car on the road.

Leaps of Faith

17/3/2016

My friend Nike is taking a leap of faith in setting up the Imagination Unschool in Nairobi. All around me, people are taking leaps of faith.

And I love it. Why *should* things be done the way they've always been done, because they've always been done the way they've always been done?

I love the reversals of what's 'normal' in this video; the questioning this visionary, this leap-of-faith-taker, does, of himself, his company, and the school system he oversees - all so they, and he, can *thrive*.

Nice and comforting as hiding behind what we know can seem, it's important for us to keep questioning why we do things the way we do, and if the way we do the things we do is still serving us, the ever evolving, ever emerging, ever converging, ever diverging, collective 'us'.

Why my 'sticking plaster coaching' days are over

17/3/2016

I was never a pure, A to B, coach: ie. client comes with problem and wants to move from situation/ position/ feeling A to feeling B and then we create a strategy/ techniques/ approaches to use in order to make that adjustment, and get to point B.

This has never particularly interested me, though it's what a lot of people who come to me for coaching, and what a lot of us want, when our lizard-brains are doing the talking: a quick fix to make us feel better/ get what or where we think we want to go or be.

That type of coaching has it's place and brings rewards of a kind, but I've always encouraged my clients to look deeper towards where their experience of life is coming from. I've always tried to probe and to push us both towards looking towards cause rather than symptoms, to look to what's deeply true, rather than what's superficially so.

I didn't quite know what I was pointing to, it was just a feeling, a surety I had, that clients were never 'broken', they didn't really need coaching or me, that they had everything they needed to thrive in life, they'd just lost sight temporarily of that truth, that part of themselves. I would tussle with myself and them, wanting more for us, but not quite knowing how to REALLY get there. And often, though we snuck beneath the surface as much as we could, our main focus was the job at hand: how to get from A to B. We got results and people seemed to enjoy our time together, but I always knew there was more.

It was a funny thing: knowing there was a place I was trying to point people, but not having the words to describe the facts I knew to be true as I didn't quite know what the facts were in an intellectual sense, I just.....well, sensed them.

What's new, and different, and incredibly exciting, is that since coming across the Three Principles understanding 2 years ago I have that vocabulary, I have that missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle, I have the words (to the best of my current ability) to describe the indescribable, the palpable, yet formless principles which explain how human experience works.

The impact on my work with clients is mind-boggling - they're seeing things faster and deeper, and the beauty of this understanding is, that as we catch a glimpse of it, as our understanding and consciousness about how we create our experience of (all aspects of our) life deepens, so all aspects of our life begin to improve, to heal.

No sticking plasters required.

A Tale of Two 'Me's a.k.a What's Really Powering the Show

17/3/2016

I used to think there was one of me, but no: there are two.

There’s me, little me, personal me, little mind/ ego me, and then there’s me, the me that’s not possible to define with words or labels, or letters after my name, or marital status, or familial history but I know to be true, far truer than the shifting ego-powered part of me.

When I was travelling in my late teens and early twenties I experienced big, exciting, awe-inspiring feelings, a sense of connectedness to everything, a sense of freedom and exhilaration and joy I’d never felt in ‘normal’ life.

I put those feelings and those times down to the fact I was away, I didn’t have the concerns and worries of ‘normal’ life on my shoulders: I *was* free to an extent, so of course I *felt* free.

I presumed, therefore, that when similar (though perhaps more muted) feelings occurred in everyday life, here and there, that it was because in those moments I’d managed to shake the cares and worries of my everyday life and be ‘free’ again, even if just for a brief moment.

But what I see now is that there isn't a free me and a not free me - that's a false separation: the feelings of freedom and joy and connectedness I enjoyed when travelling are available to all of us, all of the time, alongside and beneath ego-created cares and worries.

*That* part of me is like the sun in the sky. Even when it looks like a cloudy day, the sun is still there, behind the clouds. It is constant, it never goes anywhere, regardless of what’s playing out on the stage of the sky in front of it.

So what I see now is that there are two 'me's.

There's my ego, personal mind/ little mind me, and there’s a Me behind and beyond. A me that is not ''me and *all* me; which is impersonal, which is universal; which is me and not me, because it is everything and all of us.

Our egos are not ‘us’; they are part of us - a wonderful, glorious, many-hued part of us which allows us to experience life in all it's multicoloured glory - but they are not what’s powering the show.

What’s powering the show is that other ‘me’, or you...

or us.

Why there's freedom in questioning the 'truth' of what we think

14/3/2016

There's nothing I can think about a circumstance or event - or a person, come to think of it - which is True.

I was sitting having my lunch earlier, and I was looking around at the garden and thinking how lucky I am to live where I live.

Nothing remarkable about that, perhaps….

apart from the fact that that thought brought to mind another thought I'd had yesterday:

that I wished I lived somewhere else.

The transience of the flavor of my thinking (and therefore my feeling about where I live) over a 24 hour period struck me. It had me wryly smiling about how little point there is in believing my thinking, in any given moment, about anything, to be True.

Our thoughts about our spouse, our partner, our house, our children, our job, go up and down according to our level of consciousness in any given moment.

We’re feeling low: we see impossibility, problems, issues that need dealing with, NOW.

We feel a bit more buoyant the next day (for whatever reason): and we see possibility, potential and most importantly for me, peace with what is.

And that’s exactly what happened:

feeling low yesterday: saw problems
felt more lighthearted today: saw expansiveness, okayness.

This natural up and down, ebb and flow, is SO natural for human beings. Yet the magical power of the universal principles of thought and consciousness are such that our thinking appears REAL to us in any given moment. So much so that we believe our thoughts to be true.

And until we see the ebb and flow or our thinking/ feeling states, our consciousness, as natural, we can think that the not so pleasant ones, and the pleasant ones, MEAN something more than they do.

Said another way: our feeling in any moment, is a reflection of our thinking in that moment. End of. NOT a reflection of any truth about life, circumstance, events, people, ‘out there’.

What was revealed to me, again, (this stuff takes a while to sink in…), this lunchtime, is that those universal powers or principles never stop functioning – they bring the good feelings and the not so good feelings. They bring the: 'I’m so lucky to live here', and the 'I wish we lived somewhere else' thoughts and feelings in a 24 hour period. Both appearing so true to me that they had me sold.

But if both thoughts are possible, then neither are any truer than the other, they are just thoughts, and thoughts come and go, ebb and flow, nothing for us to do but observe the magic in action.

And eat our lunch.