Hello - And Welcome To This Week's Edition Of Adam Up Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Adam Up,
This week I am delighted to welcome another guest writer to Adam Up, another good friend of mine; Lucy Hyde.
Lucy assists here on my diploma courses and other seminars, she is a world-leading coach, and has so many talents that I could not do them justice within a brief introduction such as this.
Do go and take a look at her Lucy Hyde Website
for more information about her and her work.
Lucy is going to be my guest on Hypnosis Weekly in coming months, so make sure you listen out for that edition and get a further flavour of who and how she is.
Hypnosis Weekly is up and running again, we had New Zealand based Reg Blackwood last week and this week welcome US based Paul Ramsay, you'll love both editions and I have some very exciting other guests coming in future weeks.
I'll hand over to Lucy and her article now.
Enjoy it, I'll be back next week with some very interesting things to share and projects to tell you about.....
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On to this week’s edition of Adam Up then… Three Keys to the Kingdom, and a Gift for
Transformation By Lucy Hyde
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I hadn’t been practicing therapy and coaching for very long before I noticed a pattern, and I wonder if you’ve noticed it too…
Each person would show up with a problem or a challenge
they wanted to resolve so that they could grow and move into the next stage of their life. Sometimes this would be as simple as changing a bad habit, sometimes it would be something more endemic like improving self-esteem, increasing happiness, or tapping into creativity. Regardless of the issue, there seemed to be a definite pattern that showed up again and again amongst the people who created excellent outcomes. This thing, whatever it was, also seemed to be markedly absent from people who
didn’t do so well. This pattern wasn’t just confined to their coaching or therapy work with me, it echoed into every area of their lives.
Some people just seemed to find their lives easy. And that’s definitely not the same thing as having an easy life. Despite inevitable challenges and obstacles that presented themselves, this first group of people lived their lives with a certain kind of grace. They walked into new challenges
courageously with their eyes open, they tended to experience more joy, more gratitude, and deeper connections with the people around them. On the whole, they felt their lives were successful, and found they could quite easily create more of the things they wanted, whether that was money, love, better relationships, better health, more career success, or more free time.
Conversely, the people who didn’t do so well tended to find
life challenging. And that’s definitely not the same thing as having a challenging life. They could tell excruciating stories of feeling overwhelmed by daily living, of extreme stress, of feeling lonely, of being rejected, of being hurt, of not being good enough, of deep pain. They would avoid challenges and keep themselves far away from their potential, and would on the whole find change really, really hard.
What was it?
What was that thing that separated this first group of people, who I call the graceful, from the second group?
If I could identify and distil what this thing was, perhaps I could utilise it in my work with clients. Maybe I could even give them the gift of transformation, to give them the tools
to be in that camp over there with the graceful people.
I worked over my notes again and again, and I did find some answers. There were some common threads among the people who lived the most happy and successful lives, and they weren’t at all what I was expecting to find.
These people had:
- A willingness to deliberately expose themselves to discomfort;
- A willingness to live with uncertainty;
- A willingness to be imperfect.
It made perfect sense.
For anyone to successfully change a habit or way of being, the change requires a sustained but limited period of discomfort. To create or try anything new or to do something differently means you can never be certain of the outcome you’ll get, and so requires living for a time in uncertainty.
Achieving new things means not waiting until you’re perfect before taking action, and so requires a willingness to do things anyway, even with your imperfections on show. These were the three keys to the kingdom of a happy and fulfilled life!
I mean, this realisation should have been great for my work, right?
In reality is caused a bit of a meltdown. The fact is, I
struggled myself with being one of the non-graceful. Happiness and contentment did not come easily to me. Life was a slog, and “Poor me” was kind of a theme tune. I lived with an acute fear of being rejected, being found wanting or unacceptable in some way, so it was tough to connect with people and just be me, to the point I’d largely lost touch with who that person was. In my years as a barrister I’d learned that weakness was unacceptable, so I did my best to show up in all areas as
armour-plated perfect.
It turns out that my lifelong struggle to make myself comfortable, safe, and as perfect as possible, was the exact thing that was keeping me away from living my dream life, full of happiness, abundance, love, and deep connection with other people.
As I said before – meltdown. I didn’t know how to BE any other
way.
Luckily, in this business you get to know a few outstanding therapists and coaches. I called a coach who I trusted enough to admit my massive mistake to. I felt foolish and ashamed that I’d gone so far down the wrong path, and had even been teaching my strategies for strength, comfort and security to my clients. What he said stayed with me:
“Lucy, you associate strength with being hard, staying level under pressure, being rigid and uncompromising. Well, those are the qualities of something that is brittle. One knock too hard and you shatter. What if real strength was in vulnerability? In softening? In being elastic enough to withstand being deliberately uncomfortable, not knowing the answers, and being imperfect, so none of that could break you?”
While my head was spinning with that idea, he pointed me to the work of Brené Brown, a researcher-storyteller who studied shame. (Well, she began by studying
connection – who deliberately sets out to study shame?!) And she had discovered something very interesting. In her search for what underpinned connection, the primary thing that gives purpose and meaning to our lives, she noticed a pattern. She saw that the people who struggled the most with connection, those who had problems with feeling worthy of compassion, love and belonging, were crippled by shame.
Shame, at its most basic level is the fear of disconnection.
Now, shame is universal. Everyone with the capacity for empathy feels shame. She too, had noticed two types of people: those who lived easily with a sense of connection, love, and worthiness, and those who struggled for it. The common thread was shame. Not whether they felt shame (we all do), but whether they were crippled by it.
Let’s be clear – NOBODY likes feeling shame. It’s about the most harrowing human emotion. Shame from rejection follows the same neural pathways as physical pain, and shows a high correlation with addiction, depression, eating disorders, bullying, violence, and aggression. Shame SUCKS, so perhaps it’s not surprising that most people will do what
they can to avoid it.
However what separated Brené Brown’s two groups of people is whether they viewed the risk of shame, failure, and rejection as necessary in order to live fully expressed lives. She called this the practice of vulnerability. And vulnerability takes courage. - It requires getting uncomfortable and risking
rejection, like being the first to say, “I love you”.
- It requires acting when we’re uncertain, when there are no guarantees, when we could fail.
- It requires the courage to be imperfect, to be compassionate with ourselves, and allow ourselves to be seen – really seen – as we are, instead of
how we think we should be.
Those three keys had showed up in her research and with the deliberate practice of vulnerability, perhaps I could join the ranks of the graceful people I so
admired for their courage, their authenticity, and their capacity for feeling worthy of love and connection.
I haven’t looked back since, and my life has been immeasurably enriched with close friendships, deep happiness, loving connections with my family,
and more success in business. Vulnerability now forms a cornerstone of my coaching and therapy practice, and I feel so privileged to see these types of transformations happening with my clients too. Vulnerability is scary, there’s no denying it, but dare to live vulnerably, risk failure and shame, show up as yourself with no armour and all your imperfections on show, and you will discover your true strength. Your whole world will change.
If you would like to know more about Brené Brown’s work, she published a book called Daring Greatly.
I’ll leave you with the speech that
inspired the title:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and
shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
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