…So I am back again after another beautiful beach weekend.  Gosh how I love the summer, being 3 hours from the beach, and the fact that my parents have a wonderful second home in Cape May, NJ.  I get to go away most weekends in the summer and am so grateful to have this vacation space.  While I was sitting on the beach sunning myself, I had the opportunity to listen to some of my webinar lectures for my Institute of Integrative Nutrition  (IIN) course.  How excellent; sitting in the sun tanning, watching the waves of the sea, listening to the gulls chatter, and learning all at the same time!…

…One of the lectures really hit home to me.  It was so inspirational and had so many intriguing ideas I decided I would share some of the thoughts with you.  It was a talk given by a life coach named Debbie Ford (wow, and I just looked at her website and it is quite amazing!).  She gave a 90 minute or so lecture on transforming the next year while we are involved with the IIN course.  But some of her main points and quotes were just so true to coaching, I wanted to share them…

…She said over and over “what we resist, persists.”  So what we are trying to get away from does not let us be.  Think about something in your life you are trying to avoid, trying to resist, or trying to get rid of.  Do you ever find that by resisting it only makes it stronger and more in your face?  For example, if you are trying to resist eating chocolate candies, do you notice that you are more and more drawn to inhaling a snickers bar and then feeling badly about it afterwards?  Her point is that which we are trying to get rid of or avoid only becomes more apparent.  So her answer to this was, why not just embrace it?  Embrace that you may not be confident enough.  Embrace that you are scared.  Embrace that you may not be smart enough.  And once you embrace it, you let it go.  Once you let it go, you can focus on the more necessary positive things…

…So here is a real life example from me.  I get nervous and anxious talking in front of groups, doing group presentations.  So instead of the thoughts of “you won’t know all the answers” or “you are going to be so boring” why not just acknowledge, you know what I may not have all the answers and to some people in the crowd I may come across as boring.  Once I acknowledge this and no longer resist it, I can move on to bigger and better things like actually planning the talk and knowing my material…

…Debbie also gave an interesting visual analogy.  Think of yourself in a pool or ocean or body of water.  As a child did you ever try to hold the beach ball under water?  What happened when you tried to keep the ball under water?  Well, naturally it did not want to stay under the water and kept popping up above the surface, and at times in fact, hit you right in the face!  Right?  I remember this as a child, we would try to sit on balls and beach balls in the pool and no matter how hard we tried the ball would just push up to the surface and sort of pop out of the water air-bourne!  So the same is true with what we resist within ourselves.  What we are trying to get away from, avoid, or resist in our lives will eventually bubble up to the surface and hit us right in the face!…

…So why not just acknowledge that we have flaws?  We all have imperfections.  We all have some traits we are not that fond of.  We all have things that make us human.  And what if some of these negatives can be put to use?  I mean she said it wonderfully; she talked about a negative trait such as “manipulative”.  Sometimes coaches need to be manipulative.  We need to guide our clients where they need to go.  We may need to get their thinking patterns to change, their behaviors to improve, and their short-term goals accomplished.  One might view this as manipulative work.  So here a negative trait becomes useful.  And we can do this with any negative trait.  But the point is, why not embrace the things we may not want and just allow them to be and therefore we can move forward to concentrating on the things we want more of?…

What do you resist within yourself?  Do you find that the more you resist it, it persists?  What are your reactions to the idea that we can just allow these things we resist to be and then move on to the things we want to put time and energy and focus into?