Weekly Reflections

An Oasis is a good place to pause and reflect. Each of my weeks provides ample inspiration in terms of topics; from coaching sessions, conversations with family and friends, my own reading, or one of the many podcasts I absorb when on the move. A topic will resonate with me early in the week and I get great pleasure from the iterative process of drafting, revising, polishing, and finalising each essay. Then comes the selection of a suitable photo, usually a product of yet another creative hobby of mine. I invite you take a little time out, to create your own six-minute oasis, find a comfortable chair, and read. You will hopefully find some inspiration from or a degree of identification in these Weekly Reflections. If you do, feel free to subscribe to this section. You will then receive future installments directly by email. Also, feel free to share the link among your circle of friends and associates. Finally, feedback and comments are always most welcome. EnJOY!

Business Performance

Explore!

Our large holiday home was the most downstream of three fishing lodges located on the Owenduff River, two miles from Blacksod Bay. A day would begin before dawn (that’s early in July) with a hushed breakfast in the cavernous kitchen downstairs while the rest of the family slept above. Sufficient food for a twelve-hour expedition was then packed in our fishing bags. As the day began to dawn, we would depart quietly in his old car to drive several miles upstream towards the mountains, to the junction where the two main rivers met. From here onwards we would spend the rest of the day on foot…

Mental Fitness

Woodpeckers

Like the woodpecker in the quote above, coaching participants who tap twenty times on a thousand trees may get nowhere but stay busy. Those of us who tap twenty-thousand times on one tree, get dinner. The PQ Programme supports us in staying the course until the benefits of our efforts can be truly experienced. We then find ourselves on the path of cultivating Mental Fitness for life and reap the benefits of improved personal and professional outcomes…

Mental Fitness

Transference

Carl Gustav Jung, one of the founding figures of depth psychology and psychotherapy, referred to the integration of supressed aspects of our personalities as `Shadow Work´, the idea being that, as we emerge from childhood, we consign those aspects of our history, thinking, and behaviour which we find unpalatable, to the shadows, in the hope that they would somehow be rendered harmless or even disappear…

Mental Fitness

Dynamo

This prompted ideas about the various forms of energy, and the smooth conversion from one to the other, we humans require to operate well at full potential. Physical, emotional, and spiritual are three that come to mind. In everyday life, if at all, emphasis is placed on the physical, in terms of physical health, and that generally only after something has gone wrong. The approach taken by the culture now shaped by the medical-industrial complex is similar to how we approach the mechanics of a car. We break down, find the broken element, replace it, and hope for the best.

Mental Fitness

Practice

The beginning of the new calendar year is a good time to take stock. While deciding on the topic for this week’s reflections, I compiled a list of the ninety-two essays – all still accessible in the `Weekly Reflections´ section –which have appeared on this website since the very first, on February 2nd, 2021. That essay was aptly named `Imbolc´, which is the Irish name of the feast day of St Brigid, which falls on February 1st, and marks the beginning of the Celtic year.

Transformation

Christmas

The fire was already burning brightly in the hearth, and, in the heavily curtained bay window, the large, decorated Christmas tree with its baubles, figurines, lights, and shining tinsel provided a further source of warm light for the happy scene. Towards the end of the melee, we found ourselves wading ankle-deep through a kaleidoscopic sea of reams of torn wrapping paper, each child creating their island with the gifts they had gratefully received from various relations, near and far.

Business Performance

Gossip

The conscious witnessing of this phenomenon of internal gossip is relatively new to me, something I have learned in the PQ Coaching Programme. The simplicity and user-friendliness of this mental fitness programme, as devised by Shirzad Chamine and his PQ Team, has been helping me greatly in this process…

Mental Fitness

Stress

I state the following key principle of Positive Intelligence: All your distress is self-generated. To be more precise, all your distress in the forms of anxiety, disappointments, stress, anger, shame, guilt – all the unpleasant stuff that makes up your suffering – is generated by your own Saboteurs.
Shirzad Chamine, `Positive Intelligence´

Business Performance

Disconnection

Loss of meaning is yet another widespread social phenomenon and an affliction of the modern workplace. In his latest book, `The Myth of Normal,´ (page 290), Gabor Maté writes that: Just 30% of employees in the US feel engaged at work, according to a 2013 report by Gallup; across 142 countries, the proportion of employees who feel engaged at work is only 13%.

`For most of us, work is a depleting, dispiriting experience, and in some obvious ways, it’s getting worse,´ wrote two leading economic consultants in the New York Times.´ Draw your own conclusions…

Mental Fitness

Forgiveness

The core goal of PQ mental fitness training is to train three mental muscles: The Saboteur Interceptor, the Sage Enhancer, and the Mind Command muscle. The latter enables us to strengthen our ability to switch from Saboteur to Sage, ideally in real time. PQ can thus be regarded as an `Operating System´ on which a wide range of applications (business goals, team building, relationship issues, parenting, healthy living, etc) can better run…

Community

Trapped

As long as we are constantly hijacked by our Saboteurs, fear rules our lives and the lives of those around us. This takes place sometimes very obviously, sometimes more subtly. Fear’s toolbox contains a very powerful device that, if not addressed and relinquished, will ensure that the old order will forever rule the day. This device is denial. For many years I stewed in the juice of denial. Sara Bareilles describes the dynamic eloquently in her sublime song “Orpheus“:
Missing the world
The one you knew
The one where everything made sense because you
didn’t know the truth…..

Indeed, many of us didn’t know the truth for long stretches of our lives. Denial has an important role to play in our survival…

Leadership

Mind The Gap!

My general observations lead me to conclude that we are either in autopilot and react in line with the coping mechanisms and survival strategies we developed before our fourth birthday (approximately) or, having developed sufficient awareness, mindfulness, and mental fitness, we learn to pause before responding to whatever stimuli cross our paths in a conscious, loving manner – beneficial to the healing, growth, and joy of all concerned. The term “autopilot” may be considered charitable. Some would call it “sleepwalking through life” (Dr Allen Berger) or even refer to a “Zombie” existence. And of course, this is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon…

PQ Mental Fitness

Balance

So, it was really telling when, in a recent yoga lesson, we went though balance exercises which included the Vrikshasana (The Tree Pose, where standing on one foot we bring the other to the inside of our upper thigh), that the terror of childhood – as a felt state – returned. My heart began to race; I began to sweat and couldn’t maintain my balance for longer that twenty seconds. Of even more interest was the fact that my breathing froze. Despite all the insights and, indeed, practice in so many other modalities and situations, here we had the default patterns re-asserting themselves immediately, and with a vengeance…

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