Caitriona Reed • Mindset-Coaching Solutions for Success • Hypnosis • NLP • Los Angeles • Manzanita Village

Entrepreneurial Spirit, Leadership Spirit, Organizational Spirit, and Spirit

Published in Conscious Leadership Training. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

entrepreneurial spiritThe Art of Conscious Leadership is a course for business leaders that Clare Mann, and I conduct in London twice a year, to which people come from all over the world.

This morning I wrote a list of some of what we cover on the course. Then I realized that although the substance and the language was different, the essence of what I wrote was much the same as something I might write to describe a personal development training, or even a meditation retreat.

Some of my outline was specific, and included elements that would only appear in a course designed for business or organizational leaders; for example  –  business needs analysis, comprehensive systems for performance analysis, effective assessment in the hiring process etc.

But it also included the following:

  • Secret ingredient #1: developing your intuition. You already see (or would like to see) yourself as a leader. Perhaps you are already in a position of leadership. If so, it is because you have a naturally intuitive capability. Now learn concrete new ways to develop your intuitive capability.
  • Secret ingredient #2: Rapport and communication: the Principle of ‘Liking”. People follow you because they know that you understand, appreciate, and like them. This is not something you can fake.  However, you can effect changes within yourself that will echo the internal patterns of some of the greatest and most charismatic leaders, so that people will trust you.
  • Secret ingredient #3: What are the things that help you focus best?. This is different for everybody. Knowing what helps you focus best and what supports your best performance, and then by systematically reinforcing that focus, you can enhance everything you do.
  • Communication is more about listening, and knowing what to listen for, than it is about getting your point across. Everyone has heard that listen is important, many people have not yet learned how specifically to do so.
  • Leadership (as described by Nelson Mandela) is often best done from behind, so that people feel they are leading themselves, as they must, to become leaders in their own right.

I often hear people say that personal development and business development are the same. I wish this was always true. I think only the very best training is fully comprehensive. When it is, there’s another ingredient you can add. There is business, personal, and organizational development. Then the next element that seems to insert itself is something you might call ‘spirit’. Of course, spirit is a loaded word, and means different things to different people. You could call it ‘inspiration’, but it’s more than that.

I leave it to you to call it what you like. Suffice to say, that the best training, whatever its ostensible purpose, leads you to greater happiness, greater effectiveness, and greater congruence with your own deepest values – greater ‘spirit’. Call it Jung’s Transcendent Function, call it congruence between conscious and unconscious, or call it spirit–we all recognize it when we are living and working effortlessly towards full capacity.

In this context we believe the Art of Conscious Leadership to be one of the very best and most comprehensive trainings of its kind available anywhere.

http://consciousleadershiptraining.com/

Published on August 26, 2009

Are You a Cultural Creative?

Published in Life Coaching. 0 Comments

cultural_creativesI’ve been asking people,“Have you heard of the term ‘Cultural Creative’?” Most people I ask say that they have not.

Then I ask “Do you know what a Cultural Creative is?” Most people, even though they have not heard the term before have a pretty good idea what it means. They also identify with it, “Oh yes, that’s what I am.”

Wikepedia suggests that a quarter of those living in the US are Cultural Creatives, slightly less in Europe. Who’d have thought!

There are green Cultural Creatives, there are high achievers in business who are Cultural Creatives – embracing ambiguity, and thinking outside of conventional norms.

Cultural Creatives are by nature free thinkers. We may have specific ideals and values orientations, but we are flexible and don’t generally join groups. Nor do we identify ourselves as Cultural Creatives – affirmed by all the people who had not heard the term before.

It’s a label that works well for our times. Gone are the days of singular class identity, singular ethnic affiliation, at least for some of us. If you identify as more than one thing – an artist AND a social activist AND a contemplative. Or if you are am Entrepreneur AND a poet AND a serious advocate for alternative energy – then you are also probably a Cultural Creative.

Cultural Creatives value authenticity, social justice, creativity, sustainability, feminism, plurality, independence, spiritual practice outside of the bounds of organized religion, education, volunteerism… Add your own. If you’re reading this the chances are you are a Cultural Creative, or know one.

So what’s the point of this new label? As always, to add a little clarity. I remember one friend whose face lit up in excitement, “Oh yes, that’s what I am, a Cultural Creative!” It was comforting for her to have something to identify with even though she didn’t ‘do’ groups or identify with any particular demographic. She was a Buddhist meditation teacher, a writer, of mixed race, a free thinker.

Now she could condense it all into the single phrase, “I’m a Cultural Creative!” at least for that moment.

More at http://www.manzanitavillage.org

Published on August 14, 2009

18 Ways Meditation Will Change Your Life

Published in Meditation. 1 Comment

18ways_meditationHere are 18 ways that meditation can help you. (from a combined NLP-Buddhist perspective) There’s more! A lot more, actually.

This list forms the basis of our online and teleseminar meditation classes Meditation Teleseminar Classes Click Here. Note: The class will be a teleseminar, so you can attend regardless of whether or not you are in Southern California. All you need is a telephone and a commitment to start putting the tools you will learn over the course of the six-week class into practice. Join our list to be sure you receive registration info.

Also listen to a Podcast on 18 Ways Meditation can change your life.

We also have frequent meditation retreats at Manzanita Village .

Note: This list of 18  is the ‘Why’. The ‘What’ and the ‘How’ will be covered in the upcoming class.

  1. Focus
    Focus is first because it is the most basic. Every other benefit of meditation comes from your increased capacity to focus; how you focus; and what you focus on.
  2. Sensory Perception
    Through focus you derive increased sensory awareness, as well as increased awareness of your own internal process. The world becomes more vivid as does your own internal representations of it.
  3. Open options and choices
    With greater awareness and clarity comes a greater range of behavioral choices and options, how you live, what you do, the choices you make.
  4. Change State
    With more focus comes the realization that you have the ability to choose your emotional state, just as you choose how you respond to events. It’s all up to you.
  5. Let go of what doesn’t work
    You can let go of what doesn’t work. Happiness is a real option.
  6. Change perspectives
    Meditation leads to greater flexibility and flexibility means that you can change your perspectives as you learn new information
  7. Flexibility
    Changing perspectives means that you have greater behavioral flexibility
  8. Deduction and Induction
    With focus comes clarity of mind and the ability to learn, inductively and deductively, rationally and intuitively.
  9. Empathy – respecting others’  point of view
    When you are able to naturally respect others’ view of the world and interact with them based on who they are rather than who you might like them to be you communicate and empathize naturally.
  10. Gratitude
    Appreciation for others, and for the miraculous circumstances of living.
  11. Generosity
    A sense of unlimited potential, a sense of intrinsic abundance
  12. Love
    Love is an expression of generosity and joy, in celebration of others
  13. Energy
    Focus and congruence bring energy
  14. Health
    Freedom to make the choices outlined above lead to less stress and greater health
  15. Motivation
    Focus brings clarity and the means to effect strategies that work. Clarity also means being clear about and congruent with your intentions, plans, and aspirations.
  16. Levels of perspective and priorities
    Focus also brings the ability to see things from multiple levels of abstraction, to see the big picture as well as being aware of the necessary details.
  17. Time and time-line flexibility
    Your experience of time is relative. Standing in line at an airport for an hour can seem to take longer than a leisurely afternoon spent with a good friend. Skills learned in meditation allow you to speed things up or slow them down at will.
  18. The Transpersonal Dimension.
    All the above contribute to a sense of the interplay and interconnection between the elements of your life and the life of those around you. The world is your lover, the world is you!

These are just a few potential benefits. The specific ways meditation benefits you is something that is revealed over time.

Published on July 26, 2009

Permanent Personal Change

Published in Life Coaching. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

whirlingThere are those who make change in their lives willingly – because of restlessness, because of inspiration, or through curiosity. They begin by changing their habits, or their external circumstances, or the meanings they give to things. And once they truly change any one of those things, the others change too.

Then there are those who accept change only when they must.

How we change is our own responsibility and our own choice. Change is not good or bad in itself. We each look for happiness after our own fashion.

There’s an idea in many circles that real change is hard – personal change, social change, organizational change … But often change is simpler than we think. By looking from a new perspective, by considering factors previously disregarded, by challenging basic assumptions, a new world of possibility opens up to us.

One of the great masters of Budo (a physically demanding Japanese dance and performance-art form) didn’t take up the art until after he was seventy.

Thomas Edison went to school for a total of only three months then went on to become the man we consider the most brilliant inventor and engineering innovator of all time. The original business of Richard Branson, which have made him one of the richest men in the world, was named Virgin because everyone in the company, including himself, was completely new to business.

Neurolinguistics (NLP) is based on studying how we make change, internally and externally, and how we make, and can change, the meanings we make of things.

It’s not a religion, or a cult, or a sales technique. Originally it was developed by modeling such luminaries as Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson, and Gregory Bateson.

As someone who has been passionately interested in the nature of change for as long as I can remember – as a Buddhist teacher, as a poet, as a clinical hypnotherapist, and as a women of transsexual experience – my passion for Neurolingistics has reawakened because I have come to it as the tool par excellence for implementing effective person change in any area of your life or work, and as the ideal compliment to any personal or spiritual discipline for change.

- I hope you can join us for our ten day training in July http://www.manzanitavillage.org/retreats/nlp/

Published on April 26, 2009

Stress, anxiety, anger, and depression

Published in Anxiety and Stress. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Ribbonwood

Stress, anxiety, and depression are the order of the day for many. I always make a point of checking my own state of mind. Denial is not an option (it never was) nor is  anxiety, despair, anger, or fear. These are not places to live. They are emergency emotions.  If you spend any significant time in any of them I have to ask you to consider how you manage to do so? I mean, doesn’t it take an awful lot of energy!?

The fact is, such emotions don’t leave you in a state to be very creative or resourceful!

Of course, people do live in negative states, especially with all the current talk about the economy, not to mention the environment … as though we’ve collectively woken up to the fact we have a global environmental emergency on our hands. H-E-L-L-O … where have we been for the last several decades?

And people do live in negative emotional states like anxiety and helplessness because they’ve learned to do so.

Are they real? Of course. It’s always real. But whose reality does it represent? Where did you learn to be in that state and who or what has been reinforcing the idea that it’s a useful thing to be stresses out, bummed out, freaked out?

My point … and the reason I’m even writing this is that you have a whole lot more options than you may have imagined and it begins with your own ability to manage you own internal states, to change the words and pictures in you own mind. Because you can do that you know. It’s a whole lot easier than you think too!

http://www.manzanitavillage.org/retreats/nlp/

Published on March 17, 2009

Four Keys for Mindfulness Life Coaching, towards Living on Purpose and Creating Change

Published in Life Coaching. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

quadrant1-150x150Practical spirituality – is learning to live in balance, being in congruence with your essential values (the values that define who you truly are). It also means being in harmony with your surroundings. It means bringing specific positive change into your own life, and being capable of being of real service to others.

Here are four keys, four distinctions that may help you understand the process of change, as well as the process of communicating change. They are based on a map of learning that is common to all of us, yet  slightly different for each of us. This is a key distinction in our Buddhist Coaching.

1. Why? Why do I even need to change. Give me a reason. Inspire me. Tell me a story. Capture my imagination, so that I can begin this journey with you.

2. What? What will this involve. What will it cost me? What will I have to sacrifice? What will I have to give up? What will I gain? What will happen in a day, a week, a year … where will this journey take me?

3. How? Let’s start. Tell me, show me. Let’s do this now together. Show me how. Talk me through it.

4. What if? Now that I have learned something about this let me ask a question. What if … ? Suppose I did it this way … or that way …?

Some models of change dig into your history and  presuppose that it is important to know the causes, reasons, and conditions that may have limited your options for change. That is a “why” modality.

Have you ever met someone who was interested in the theory, history, and background much more than in the practicalities of how to do something? For example someone who had learned all about how to make something, yet never got around to actually doing it? That’s a “what” person.

Have you ever been at a lecture and listened to people who ask purely hypothetical questions before they have absorbed, or started to put into practice the subject of the lecture. Those would be “what if” people.

The best models for change, and a key component to the work we do with Mindfulness Coaching is “how.” It means that our prime focus is specifically on helping you, and providing the leverage for you, to implement change. Mindfulness Coaching is all about how you change (thoughts, actions, habits)  - so that you can, so that you do.

Published on January 9, 2009

More clues from La Commedia

Published in Life Coaching. 0 Comments

canto3 dore's dante… the first encounter that Dante has on his journey down into the Inferno is with an endless stream of those who are described to him as neither good nor bad. This miserable throng is ferried down into the underworld by Charon whose endless task it was to go back and forth across the river. He has to hurry them on by striking them with his oars to hurry them, because there are so many of them.

“.. neither good nor bad” an ocean of the banal, the unthinking, the accidental.

And isn’t that exactly what life becomes for us when we don’t choose, when we have no clear intention. Isn’t that what life becomes when we listen to the talking heads on tele-vision telling us what our vision should be.

None of it overwhelmingly good, nor overwhelmingly bad, simply an ocean of the banal, the mediocre, and the mundane.

My grandmother was fond of saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

And Dr. Martin Luther King said, “All that needs to happen for evil to prevail is that good men do nothing.”

How easy it is to fall asleep, to do nothing, to be satisfied with compromise.

What are you doing? And what are you intending to do?

Published on December 2, 2008

Dante Alighieri as Life Coach

Published in Life Coaching. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

francesca-da-riminiRevisiting Dante’s Divine Comedy, for the first time since I was a precocious teenager with literary aspirations, I am astonished and excited by the utter genius of this work. Words escape me. There’s simply nothing quite like it in any language from any period.

And I am excited by the lessons implicit there. Lessons I wouln’t have understood on my first reading. In Dante’s first extended encounter in the Inferno he meets Francesca da Rimini – a perfect example of someone not willing to accept responsibility for her actions. “It’s not my fault.” “Love made me do it.” “What I read about Lancelot and Guinevere made me do it.”

.. an interesting idea – that other than Francesa being doomed to eternal damnation for her adultery, her actual experience of hell consists of her refusal to take responsibility for her actions or their consequences.

Is it hyperbole to suggest that being unwilling to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions is a kind of hell, endlessly self-perpetuating? Its essence is the blindness that keeps us stuck where we are. If we can’t take responsibly for the situation we’re in, we’re unlikely to take responsibility for getting out of it, or changing it.

So whenever you get into blaming, explaining, and complaining, remember Francesca da Rimini and Canto V of the Divine Comedy.

Published on November 17, 2008

What are you afraid of?

Published in Life Coaching. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

continued from Practical Spirituality

walking-meditation“Have a great ride,” he said.

Great ride! What an understatement!

Because it isn’t just the vehicle. It’s where you travel. It’s how you travel. It’s the places you pass, and it’s your destination. It’s who you meet on the way.

With all that power under the hood, I took my time. Because power isn’t just speed. It’s something you feel in your veins, in your heart. It’s the essence of what the journey is all about, and it’s the certainty that you will arrive – that you can’t fail, that there’s a kind of destiny to it. That you have, in some sense, already arrived.

Anyone you meet on the way is going to help you. Sometimes you don’t understand how or why. But if you stop, if you know what to ask .. even when you don’t know what to ask,  sometimes it’s enough just to know how to listen.

I pull into a rest stop and meet others on the same journey, traveling in their own style, traveling on their own road. There are others on foot. It doesn’t matter how you travel. There’s nothing intrinsically better or worse whether it’s a Lamborghini or a pair of flip-flops. It’s your choice, you pay, and you deal with the consequences. And when you know how to love the journey, and know that you will reach your destination, you will.

Published on October 25, 2008

Practical Spirituality

Published in Life Coaching and Meditation. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

continued from The Law of Distraction

'the monk was smiling'

'the monk was smiling'

“would you like to test-drive it?” asked the monk, handing me the keys with a smile..

“Of course,” I replied, feeling a little nervous, knowing how much power was under the hood, knowing how fast this baby could go, when you want it to.

I mean, that’s what spiritual practice is – knowing that the resources you have at your disposal are virtually limitless. And by power I mean love, patience, creativity, humor, intelligence.

Practical spirituality isn’t about rules, you can call it “everyday mysticism” – that’s not to diminish it in any way. By everyday mysticism I mean keeping the big picture, keeping balance. Seeing the road ahead and enjoying the landscape, and remembering where you’re coming from.

And celebrating the journey, celebrating your accomplishments.

He opened the door for me. It was the kind of door that looks like seagull wings. He lifted it up, and I ducked under his am and sat down in the driver’s seat.road ahead, practical spirituality, everyday mysticism

It was surprisingly comfortable. “I thought this was supposed to be difficult,” I said.

“Have a great ride,” said the monk. He was still smiling.

continued

Published on October 17, 2008