Susan Jeffers's Blog, page 8

When You’re Living Your ‘Whole’ Life

The last several years have seen lots of changes in our daily lives, so here’s a question for you: Have you revisited your Grid of Life lately?

Susan’s idea of the Grid of Life, also known as the Whole Life Grid in Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, is to make sure that we are living full and rich lives. When our lives are well-rounded and richly developed, if one part goes away, losing that one part won’t gut us. For example, if all aspects of your life are fulfilling, if you lose a job or a relationship, you won’t be as devastated because you have your friends, your family, your hobbies, and more to balance things out.

To create your own Grid of Life, draw a nine-boxed grid, then ”In each of the nine boxes, write one aspect of life that is important to you, such as family, friends, career, relationship, contribution to community, spiritual growth, alone time and so on. Then commit to participating fully in every area of your own personal Grid of Life…and this is important…with the knowledge that you count,” wrote Susan in Life is Huge.

When you are finished, take some time to look at each box and consider what you need to do to make sure that you are committing to all the areas of your life. Susan recommended meditating and visualizing what each part of your life would look like. Then ask yourself:

If I were really important here
what would I be doing?

Susan said, ”Ask yourself this question for every area of your Grid…and then begin doing it, one step at a time. You might be asking, ‘Susan, what is the point of this exercise?’ As you look at your Grid of Life, you see relationship is an important part of your life…but it isn’t your whole life. In fact, your life is huge!”

The Grid of Life is an important tool in recognizing just how full our lives can be if we commit to making it that way. But it is not a one-and-done sort of thing. Priorities in our life change. For example, at some point in our past we may have put a lot of emphasis on work, but now we are raising our kids or spending more time volunteering. Perhaps we are no longer in a relationship, and not looking to get back into one, so we expand our Grid of Life to include more time for creative endeavors and friendships.

The last few years have seen huge changes for many of us. For some, we may now work from home, which can create imbalance between work and home life. Since there aren’t as many opportunities to visit family and friends, we might have let go of keeping in touch. Perhaps you’ve put a hold on working on personal growth and instead are binging TV shows (and that’s okay!). Things will have changed for everyone.

Change is a constant companion to us, no matter what is going on in the world, so we need to make sure that our Grid of Life is updated and filled up with what is currently important to us and that we are engaging with it. This can be done by Susan’s special technique, ”I call ‘knowing that you count’ and ‘100% commitment’ the Magic Duo. And, indeed, they create magical results.”

You can ”know that you count” by starting with Susan’s exercise, Act As If You Really Count. This exercise helps to show you that you can make a difference, no matter what the circumstance. As for the second part of the magic duo, ”The second ingredient you need to have is 100% commitment to all areas of your life that are important to you. For example, when you are with your family, be there 100%—not reviewing work, reading the newspaper, or wishing you were somewhere else. If you commit to giving 100% to all areas of your life, your sense of focus, excitement, participation, enjoyment, fulfillment, and happiness come alive.”

So, dig out that old version of the Grid of Life, or create a brand-new version. The important thing is to keep asking yourself, ”How whole is my life?” When you can honestly say that you are investing yourself in all the parts of your life that are important to you, you will know the answer. As Susan said:

You will create such richness for yourself
that nothing can ever take away
your basic sense of completeness.
Can you imagine then how little
you would have to fear?

When Caring Masks Neediness

This month we’re talking about becoming a loving person by loving ourselves first. Sometimes a person who seems very loving has very little love for themselves. In this case, they are using their love to mask their neediness.

Talia seemed like a confident, loving single woman in her early thirties. She had a great job and plenty of friends. She didn’t like doing things alone, so she’d always invite a friend, often paying their way at a restaurant or to see a movie. What it was hard for her friends to see at first was that behind all her supposed confidence was a woman who was afraid to be alone and who depended heavily on her circle of friends to fill up her life.

Susan wrote in Dare to Connect that “Very often we THINK we are very loving people, when we are actually very needy. We ‘give’ purely for the purpose of buying love. We give, not from the openness of our heart, but because of the neediness caused by our own spiritual separation. And if you think people don’t notice, you’re absolutely wrong. They do notice and they don’t want to be around that kind of negative energy. As you have probably discovered for yourself, there is a smothering quality in a needy person that is very difficult to be around.”

While Talia had many friends, none of them lasted for very long or were very close, leaving her feeling even more needy for companionship. Susan has the “cure” for neediness—creating meaning in every part of our lives.

To heal ourselves of neediness, Susan wrote, “It is one of those step-by-step processes that we focus on daily. It requires the creation of a rich life, one that has warm friends, meaningful activities, nourishing time alone, loving contributions to society, healing relationships with family, and so on. In addition, a rich life requires commitment to all of the above, knowing that what we do in this life really makes a difference. Those of you who are familiar with my ‘grid of life’ know what I am talking about.”

When we are committed 100% to every part of our life, we won’t need to depend on others to fill us up. The neediness will go away and we can live a life rich in real love.

Dropping the Act for True Connection

In this excerpt from Dare to Connect, Susan describes the fear that all of us feel when we put ourselves out in the world, wishing and hoping that others will like us.

Metaphorically, we all wear an “I want you to like me” sticker on our foreheads. Whether we are conscious of it or not (and most of us are not), much of our behavior—good and bad—is simply part of an “act” that we developed as children in the hope that it would earn us much needed attention and/or approval. Our “act” probably underwent some modification as the years went by, but the reason for the “act” always remained the same—we want to be liked. In fact,

We need to be liked.

John Powell presents us with a very poignant answer to the question “Why am I afraid to tell you who I really am?”

I am afraid to tell you who I am, because, if I tell you who I am, you may not like who I am, and it’s all that I have.

A good clue as to why connection is so difficult! Implicit in this answer are the following truths we consciously or uncon­sciously hold about ourselves:

I want you to like me. But I don’t like me. If you really knew me you wouldn’t like me either. Therefore, I’ll pretend to be dif­ferent than I really am.

And to make matters worse, the person with whom we are playing this sad little deception is consciously or uncon­sciously saying to himself or herself,

I want you to like me. But I don’t like me, and if you really knew me you wouldn’t like me either. So, I’ll pretend to be dif­ferent than I really am.

And what we are left with are two people trying to connect, wanting to connect, yearning to connect, but who have no way of penetrating each other’s masks. It doesn’t matter whether these two people are sisters, brothers, parents, children, friends, co-workers, lovers, mates, “strangers” in the street or some combination of the above.

Consciously or unconsciously, we believe that no one could love us as we truly are. Eventually, we lose all sense of who we really are and our “act” becomes our identity. What is left is a fearful robot who has long ago forgotten the answer to the question, “Who am I?”

When we are lost to ourselves, how can we possibly connect meaningfully with someone else?

This alienating pattern changes only when we begin the process of re-conditioning ourselves to feel the enormous power and beauty that we truly possess!

The Power of Saying YES!

Since we’re talking this month about opening up to the Universe, here is an excerpt from Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway about how important it is to say Yes:

Life offers many opportunities to practice saying yes to your universe. The baby spills milk all over the floor; your computer dies before you can save an important letter; the cleaner ruins your suit—get the picture? Every time you find yourself resisting what’s happening at the present moment, recall the phrase “Say Yes to your Universe.” You will watch your life become more and more pleasurable. Relationships with the whole world will improve dramatically.

Once you master the concept on a day-to-day level, you will be prepared to handle the more serious issues that confront you. You will notice that your level of fear slowly starts to drop as it is replaced by a greater sense of trust in your ability to handle your world. As you start to see the possibilities in the impossible, you will begin to see that the world works “perfectly.” You can find reason and purpose in everything—if you open your mind to it.

The only time you will fear anything is when you say no and resist the universe. You may have heard the expression “Go with the flow.” This means consciously accepting what is happening in your life. I once heard it said that the key to life is not to figure out what you can get from the flow, but, rather, to figure out how to get into the flow. Or, as Barry Stevens titled her book, Don’t Push the River (it flows by itself). Stop fighting your life. Let go and let the river carry you to new adventures by the way you experience your life. In this way—and only in this way—it is impossible to lose.

Setting Intentions: A Great Way to Start a New Year

Whether you are trying to lose weight or get fit, whether you are angling for a better job or to start a side business, whether you are looking for love or looking to reconnect with yourself, there is no better time to get started on making things happen than at the beginning of a new year. Here are five steps from Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway that you can take to set your intentions for 2022

1. Create specific resolutions or goals. We need to be explicit in describing what we want to achieve. The more realistic we are, the better we can envision the end result. If you want to get fit or exercise more often, instead of saying “I want to get to the gym more often,” say “I will go to the gym three times a week including Saturday.”

2. Take personal responsibility, make a commitment to yourself. When we get up each morning and go to work we are fulfilling a commitment we’ve made to our employers. Yet when we set goals for ourselves, we often let them fall through as not a priority. Why should our commitment to ourselves be any less important than any other commitment? It shouldn’t, so when you make your resolution commit to it.

3. Create a timeline for achieving measurable goals. When we write deadlines on our calendar it makes it much easier to keep track of what we should be doing. By creating a timeline for when we should achieve certain steps we are breaking down something that feels huge and unachievable into increments that don’t feel so overwhelming. If you want to lose weight, say 30 pounds by July, it becomes much less daunting to set a goal of one or two pounds a week for 26 weeks. Taking baby steps may take longer, but we’re more likely to achieve our goal.

4. Follow through. We’ve set our goals, made a commitment, and set-up achievable milestones. Now we’ve got to DO IT! Get started—sign up for a class, join a club or gym, buy healthy groceries, or prep your resume. Once we start, we’ve got to keep going.

5. Have faith in yourself and your objective. This might be the most formidable step of all. Susan said, “This is one of those concepts that seems easy but requires diligence to put into practice.” Our goals and resolutions are only as achievable as we believe them to be. If we don’t believe in ourselves, our chances of succeeding dwindle down to nothing. If we don’t have faith in ourselves or our dreams, we are saying NO to Universe. The Universe’s blessing are there, but we have to believe that they are.

Intention is a powerful tool in creating something you want in your life. Intention combined with action is almost guaranteed to help you achieve your resolutions and goals. Take the time to set your intentions, follow through and make 2022 the best year possible.