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You don’t know how it feels

October 6, 2017January 9, 2021thecausecoach

This is another week in which I wrote something that will be saved for publishing another day. When I work with clients, sometimes it becomes apparent that there is an emotional issue we need to work through before we can focus on anything else. The term we use for that is clearing. Sometimes the client needs time to be in that moment…to be angry, sad, concerned or even celebratory…before they can focus on next steps toward their goals. So as this week unfolded, I realized I couldn’t just publish what I wrote last weekend. And honestly, it has taken me all week to process my emotions.

Americans are absolutely right to be outraged at the toll of guns. Just since 1970, more Americans have died from guns than all the Americans who died in wars going back to the American Revolution (about 1.45 million vs. 1.4 million). That gun toll includes suicides, murders and accidents, and these days it amounts to 92 bodies a day.

We spend billions of dollars tackling terrorism, which killed 229 Americans worldwide from 2005 through 2014, according to the State Department. In the same 10 years, including suicides, some 310,000 Americans died from guns.

Nicholas Kristof, Jan. 16, 2016, Some Inconvenient Gun Facts for Liberals, New York Times

Five tips if you’re considering your first marathon

September 26, 2017January 10, 2021thecausecoach

Fall Marathon season is upon us. The Berlin Marathon was Sunday. Chicago Marathoners are starting their taper now for the October 8^th event, and New York City is the first weekend in November. In addition to those World Majors, FindMyMarathon.com lists another 201 Marathons scheduled for just October and November. It’s quite easy at this time of year to get bitten by the Marathon Bug.

People decide to run their first marathon for a variety of reasons. Some are seasoned runners who have accomplished other distances and the marathon seems like the next logical step. Some decide to tackle the distance for the first time as part of a charity team as a way to honor their values or pay tribute to a loved one. For some, like me, they see news coverage of a marathon event, and suddenly think for no apparent reason, I want to do that.

The Best Way to Tour Brooklyn

May 24, 2017January 9, 2021thecausecoach

My father was from the Bronx. My mother grew up in Queens. The Bronx, home to the New York Yankees, was certainly the “cooler” borough of the two. As a kid, I’m not sure I knew anyone from Brooklyn. Historically, the Irish settled in the Bronx and Queens. Can’t recall ever going to Brooklyn. Although, my father told stories about horrendous subway rides back from a day at Coney Island – after sustaining blistering sunburns on his fair Irish skin – back before the train cars were air-conditioned. He always said he’d take me to Coney Island to ride the Cyclone. He never did.

Excuses

March 27, 2017March 27, 2017thecausecoach

Ir’s the last week of March. I’m about a week behind my goal of weekly blog posts. When I published Friday’s I was surprised to see my previous post had been 15 days earlier. I lost an entire week! And here I was talking about goal setting and planning this month, and obviously not quiet getting there myself. Life gets busy of course and there are some very legitimate reasons why we don’t get done what we set out to do. That’s why I will dedicate an entire post in the next month to allowing for some flexibility in your training plan.

If you remember our R.A.C.E mnemonic acronym (Realistic, Action, Commitment, Evaluation) from last week, you know it’s time for me to evaluate my progress. What was getting in the way? In looking at how I was spending my time, I realized there were other activities that were taking up my time — yet were still part of the journey toward my big goal of establishing my coaching business. I was putting time into new clients and I was spending some time in developing presentations that I can give on life transitions and running to local organizations (Chambers, Rotaries, Women’s Clubs, etc). That’s all okay and was part of the time I dedicate each week to my business. So what else?

I spent several days cleaning my office. Really cleaning it! Going through files and purging every piece of paper that no longer pertained to my career; stuff I had been holding on to for literally 20 years. Gone! It felt good. And now that I think about it, there’s probably a blog post in there somewhere. So all good, right? And that was a big time sucker! Time well spent, because now I can face my new career in an organized, clutter-free office. I will also probably get back a lot of the time I spent on the project when I won’t be required to spend a crazy amount of time looking for stuff. So good. Still an activity that gets me to my ultimate goal.

Then there are other activities that are important to me, that don’t quite support my business goals and personal vision, but honor my values and are important to me. First, I serve as the volunteer race director for my running club’s event, a 4 x 2-mile relay. That event was yesterday and it was a great success. In the weeks leading up to race day, I have a lot of lose ends to take care from ordering medals and portable toilets, to tracking registrations, securing refreshment donations, and managing the relationship with the park’s department. Plus I report to the club’s board regularly and run the show on the day of the event. I have to be super-organized so nothing falls through the cracks. I make lists of lists. Cross my Ts, dot my Is. Sometimes just thinking about an event like this in the days leading up to it can be enormously distracting. But it’s work I enjoy. It’s the one piece of my fundraising/special event management career that I hold onto. It doesn’t support where I want to be professionally, but it supports my running club’s activities, and I get a lot of personal satisfaction from that. So again. Time well spend. And a conscious choice to spend my time doing that and not writing my blog.

I’ve also gotten involved in an issue in my town that could effect property values. I feel I’ve sat on the sidelines too long, so I volunteered to chair the “outreach committee.” The fight on this issue supports my values and my need to feel like I’m doing something to affect change. I am making a conscious choice to spend time on this. A big chuck of my time is also taken up by my role as Mom. Maybe I should have led with that since it’s my number one priority and a big factor in all the other choices I make. I do try to get all of my other personal and professional tasks done during school hours so the time when she might be around is flexible.

So up to this point, I have made what appears to be a lot of valid excuses to why I’m not getting everything done. Add to all of that keeping up with my training schedule and I could easily say, “I don’t have enough time.” But we all have the same 24 hours in every day and many use that time much more productively and seem to achieve so much more. What makes the difference?

Sure, some of it is in the planning and the choices we make; deciding to spend time on things that make us happy, but don’t lead to our big goals. When we start saying things like, “I don’t have enough time” however, we’re listening to our saboteur, our gremlin, “the dark side” or as author, Seth Godin, calls it in his book Linchpin, “The Resistance.” It’s that voice inside your head that makes excuses for you. I’m too old. I’m too young. I’m too fat. I’m too slow. I don’t have enough time. I don’t have enough money. I don’t have enough talent. I can’t do that! Saboteurs are the biggest challenge facing my clients. They come out of fear. Fear of failure. Fear of success. Fear of emotions. Sometimes they are hard to see because they hide well behind what appears to be legitimate excuses. It often appears like we don’t have time to get it all done. But do we really? As we hear ourselves making excuses, we need to pay close attention, shut down those voices and question our authentic selves. What do you really want? What is really getting in the way? The answers help us clarify our priorities and uncover what we fear. We need to acknowledge our fears and the challenges we are having in order to move forward.

The static from the radio is the things we do on a daily basis that moves us no closer to our goal than yesterday. It is the unproductive habits. The sleeping in late, the habitual scrolling through social media, the watching too much television, the procrastination of what can be done today and telling ourselves “I’ll do that tomorrow.” – From The Seeds4Life. Read more here.

Me? No excuses. I will admit to spending too much time on Facebook, and too much time analyzing my NCAA Tournament brackets in the last couple weeks. I’m not going to waste time analyzing why at the moment. At my best, I know I am disciplined and focused. I learned a technique from another coach that helps us make a habit out of being our best. At my best, I am (fill in the blank; I will (do one thing each day supporting that). So if I wanted to get back to a better fitness routine, that might look like, “I am an athlete; I will do 30 minutes of some sort of exercise each day.” My effort to get back to my regular blogging routine, might be “I am committed; I will write down one idea each day for a blog post.” And maybe, just maybe, I will have one more thing to write about before this month is over.

The De Novo Harriers 4×2 Relay Course. Saddle River County Park, Rochelle Park, New Jersey. March 2017.

Hell hath no fury

January 22, 2017January 9, 2021thecausecoach

The alarm went off at 3:15 a.m. yesterday morning. While I didn’t exactly jump from my bed with the enthusiasm of a child on Christmas morning, I was up and moving quickly, dressing and gathering items carefully laid out the night before. Perhaps more surprisingly, about 15 minutes later, my teenage daughter was moving too. Usually only an early flight – or for me, a big race! – would have us rising so early. But this day there was no flight to an exotic vacation. There was no marathon – not even a training run. But this day, we were about to make history.

A little after 4 a.m. the dog had been walked and fed and we were out the door and on the road heading south. Two hours later I began to sense what was about to happen…in the dark on the southern tip of the New Jersey Turnpike…a swiftly moving concentrated glow of tail lights for miles. It was just passed six. Peace and understanding, friendship and solidarity, cooperation and patience…from the long lines for the ladies room at rest stops in Maryland to enormous crowds on the streets of Washington. It was the Women’s March on Washington. Originally, concieved in response to the November election, it ultimately had less to do with the 45th President, and was more about sending a message to all American law makers that women – as we have a history of doing – will not be silent when something needs to be done. The issues aren’t new. They are many of the same issues women have fought for before.

“Hell hath no fury” is an interpreted line based on a quotation from The Mourning Bride, a play by William Congreve, which reads in full “Heav’n has no rage like love to hatred turn’d / Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d.” (Wikipedia)

Women have demonstrated that we are a force possible of making powerful change. Real change has occurred because of pissed off women who got fed up and rallied a movement. Women like Bernice Sandler who’s rejection for a professor’s position and being told it was because “you come on too strong for a woman,” led to Title IX prohibiting sex discrimination in education (1972). Women like “Jane Roe,” an unmarried woman who wanted to safely and legally end her pregnancy that led to the Supreme Court ruling recognizing for the first time that the constitutional right to privacy “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy” (Roe v. Wade, 1973). Women like Candy Lightner, who after the death of her 13-year-old daughter at the hands of a drunk driver (1980) founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving ultimately cutting drunk driving deaths in half since its founding. Women like Nancy Goodman Brinker who founded the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation in her sister’s memory (1982) because she felt her outcome might have been better if patients knew more about cancer and its treatment.

It was not only these courageous women, but the 100s of 1000s of women (and men) who supported their efforts after they took that first brave step. Because of these movements girls and young woman have opportunities to learn leadership skills and cooperation from team sports that we now take for granted. Women can manage their healthcare and family planning in a manner they and this physician feel is best (prior to Roe v. Wade, 17% of deaths due to pregnancy and childbirth were the result of illegal abortions). Almost 15,000 fewer Americans are killed each year by drunk drivers than in 1980 and the breast cancer mortality rate has decreased 37%.

Yesterday was about seeing to it that we don’t lose what so many before us have achieved. It was about honoring our values as women and Americans, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for ourselves, immigrants, people of all faiths, races, and sexual orientation or gender identity; by protecting rights and protecting our planet. We will be victorious. We always are. Because we are stong. Because we are powerful. Because we are courageous. And because we are not alone.

The most powerful moment yesterday for me came after we returned home. Looking through everyone’s social media posts about the March, I was struck by a link to a New York Times piece showing pictures from all the marches around the world posted with the message, “Scroll through all of them then see if your eyes are dry by the end. Nothing like this since Vietnam or No Nukes.” He was right. I cried. It was like after 9-11. I finally broke down during that emotional week while watching a news broadcast showing the outpouring of support from around the world. We weren’t alone.

I sunk into my bed around 10 p.m. after 5 hours on my feet and logging 8 miles, bookended by a total of 9 hours driving back and forth. I was grateful for the time with my girl and that we shared this moment in history knowing too this was only the beginning. I coach my clients on the importance of honoring our values. I hope I am also setting a good example for my daughter. It’s okay to get pissed off. As long as you turn it into action.

After a good nights sleep, today it was back to training. I ran 12 miles. With a lot on my mind.

Washington, D.C. January 21, 2017.