A Winged Life!

I was sitting with my husband in our little fishing boat on the Lewis river recently waiting for the fish to bite, and waiting and waiting....
It's so beautiful out there. I was trying to take it all in when I noticed a bird soaring above us, so freely, so high. I could almost since it's joy.

As I thought about that bird, I thought about us humans who seem to have no wings at all-to mount up into the life of freedom and joy.

We are terribly conscious of our lack of joy, lack of power and lack of victory.

We experience depression, (a lot of the time caused by anger turned inward) moodiness, boredom, frustration and fear.

We are slaves to destructive habits and unable to master our impulses. We are earthbound because of our own choices and character.

If I've learned anything in the last 30 years working in the weight loss business, I have learned that conquering those things, flying above those things, will get us to our goal and keep us there.

So what do those birds have that we don't have?

BIRDS mount up into a region altogether their own. They soar beyond the reach of their enemies. As long as they stay up in the sky, no one can set limits to their freedom or restrain them.

BIRDS can see farther than creatures without wings. Theirs is a sphere of vision with great distance. The higher they go, the further they see.

BIRDS have a song life! It's a song of joy they sing in their triumphant experience.

To live a winged life, like the birds, it takes a decision! A decision to look at life differently, to look at yourself differently.

So how would we live a winged life with our weight loss program?

WE choose to mount up and make decisions all on our own, against the world, or maybe or co-workers, children or loved ones. We feel free to chose food we want. We say no thank you when we want to and set our own limits...no one sets them for us. I'm sad to say that many of us live and work with our weight loss enemies! Having wings means we don't walk there. We don't allow the circumstances below to affect us soaring!

WE choose to dream BIG! We have big vision for big change and no one can stop it because we are soaring too high. Living a winged life requires great eye sight...the ability to see into the future! The minute we take our eyes of the future, off our dream, off our new truth, we plummet down to earth. There are enough earth dwellers...we've got to soar above!

WE choose to sing a new song! I can't help but think of a few song titles that people with a winged life sing..."I've got a new attitude" "Celebrate good times...come on" "I believe I can fly" "Climb every mountain" ...just to name a few!

Staying on earth, walking among your enemies, continuing to allow food to win, doesn't serve you! It doesn't bring a song of joy to your lips.

A winged life truly is the way to live. A life with vision, discipline and joy.
You have every opportunity to live a winged life...starting this very moment. Make a decision today to soar above it all, have vision for the future and sing a song of joy.

Here's a little imagery for you to read. Allow it to soak in!

Imagine yourself living a winged life. Feeling confident to make choises all on your own. Instead of walking with the crowd, you soar above and choose a healthier, happier life style. You are setting personal limits for yourself and it feels great. You are a person of vision. You dream big dreams and they are about you! Dreams to accomplish your weight loss goals and more importantly dreams about how it's going to feel to live the rest of your life at goal weight! You think about change and you are soaring so high that no one can discourage you. As you set limits for yourself and begin to change, a song of joy comes over your lips that you've never sang before. You've got a new attitude and it's showing in every area of your life. You are living a winged life and nothing is going to bring you down again!

Always encouraging you,
Letha

Let's Summarize...

We've spent the last 5 weeks discussing a very important subject: Being fully engaged. Fully engaged in our own lives. It's not something that just happens, being fully engaged is something that we work for.

The ultimate measure of our lives is not how much time we spend on the planet, but rather how much energy we invest in the time that we have. The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and the quality of energy available to us is not.

To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interests.

To recap...here are the four principles necessary to fully engage!


PRINCIPLE 1:
Full engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy; physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

PRINCIPLE 2:
Because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and with under use, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.

PRINCIPLE 3:
To build capacity, we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do.

PRINCIPLE 4:
Positive energy rituals-highly specific routines for managing energy-are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance.

Being fully engaged is a wonderful place to live. To be fully alive in every area of life takes balance and a desire to do so. Days, weeks, months and years are wasted by many people, just going through the motions of life and surviving!

I hope that you have learned something new in these last weeks and will dig a little deeper at experiencing this kind of life; a fully engaged life.


Always encouraging you.
Letha

"Are You Fully Engaged?" Principle # 4

Continued from last week..

a reminder:
To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interests.

The challenge of great life performance is to manage your energy more effectively in all dimensions to achieve your goals. Four key energy management principles drive this process. They lie at the heart of change, and they are critical for building the capacity to live a productive, fully engaged life.

So…to fully engage the following 4 energy management principles will be key:

This week we'll address Principle #4

PRINCIPLE 4:

Positive energy rituals-highly specific routines for managing energy-are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance.

Change is hard…we are creatures of habit. Most of what we do is automatic and non conscious. What we did yesterday is what we are likely to do today. The problem with most efforts at change is that conscious efforts can’t be sustained over long haul. Will and discipline are for more limited resources than most of us realize. If you have to think about something every time you do it, the likelihood is that you won’t keep doing it for very long.


A positive ritual is a behavior that becomes automatic over time-fueled by some deeply held value.

I use the word ritual purposefully to emphasize the notion of a carefully highly structured behavior. In contrast to will and discipline, which requires pushing yourself to a particular behavior, a ritual pulls at you.

Think of something as simple as brushing your teeth. It’s not something that you have to remind yourself to do. Brushing your teeth is something you feel consistently drawn to.
You do it largely on auto pilot, without much conscious effort.

The power of rituals is that they insure that we use as little conscious energy as possible where it is not absolutely necessary, leaving us free to focus the energy available to us in creative, enriching ways.
Look at any part of your life where you are successful…you have probably built routines around that action.

With your eating, exercise, at work, in your home…the areas that you have routine, you are successful.

This week as you identify rituals in your every day life, consider more that you might add regarding your choices to eat healthy and live a fit lifestyle.

I'll close this topic out next Friday. It's been good sharing the power and importance of full engagement with you.

Working to be fully engaged and always encouraging you,
Letha

Are You Fully Engaged? Principle # 3

Continued from last week...

a reminder:
To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interests.

The challenge of great life performance is to manage your energy more effectively in all dimensions to achieve your goals. Four key energy management principles drive this process. They lie at the heart of change, and they are critical for building the capacity to live a productive, fully engaged life.

So…to fully engage the following 4 energy management principles will be key:

This week we'll address Principle #3



PRINCIPLE 3:

To build capacity, we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do.

Stress is not an enemy in our lives, it is a key to growth. In order to build strength in a muscle we must systematically stress it, expending energy beyond normal levels. Doing so literally causes microscopic tears in the muscle fibers. At the end of a training session, functional capacity is diminished. But give the muscle 24 to 48 hours to recover and it grows stronger and better able to handle the next stimulus. While this training phenomenon had been applied to building physical strength, it is just as relevant to building “muscles“ in every area of our lives.

From empathy and patience, to focus and creativity, to integrity and commitment. What applies to the body, applies to all other dimensions in our lives.

We build emotional, mental and spiritual capacity in the same way that we build physical capacity.

We grow at all levels by expending energy beyond our ordinary limits and then recovering. Expose a muscle to ordinary demand and it won’t grow. With age it will actually lose strength. The limiting factor in building any “muscle” is that many of us back off at the slightest hint of discomfort. To meet increase demand in our lives, we must learn to systematically build and strengthen muscles wherever our capacity is insufficient. Any forms of stress that prompts discomfort has the potential to expand our capacity physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually so long as it’s followed but adequate recovery.

This week as you face stressful situations, demands on your emotional and personal life and are tested even spiritually, remember that discomfort in those areas brings about growth if you properly cope with them and then find time to recover and refresh yourself as well.

Next week we'll look at principle #4.
Until then I'm

Always encouraging you,
Letha

Are You Fully Engaged? Principle # 2

Continued from last week...
a reminder:
To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interests.

The challenge of great life performance is to manage your energy more effectively in all dimensions to achieve your goals. Four key energy management principles drive this process. They lie at the heart of change, and they are critical for building the capacity to live a productive, fully engaged life.

So…to fully engage the following 4 energy management principles will be key:
This week we'll address Principle #2

PRINCIPLE 2:
Because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and with under use, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.

We rarely consider how much energy we are spending because we take it for granted that the energy available to us is limitless. In fact, increased demand progressively depletes our energy reserves, especially in the absences of any efforts to reverse the loss of capacity that comes with age. We can dramatically slow our decline both physically and mentally, and we should actually deepen our emotional and spiritual capacity until the very end of our lives.

When we spend far more energy than we recover and the eventual consequence is that we break down, burn out, atrophy, lose passion, get sick and even die prematurely. Sadly the need for recovery is often viewed as evidence of weakness rather than as an integral aspect of sustained performance. The result is that we give no attention to renewing and expanding our energy reserves, individually or organizationally.

The richest, happiest, and most productive lives are characterized by the ability to fully engage in the challenge at hand, but also disengage periodically and seek renewal. Instead, many of us live our lives as if we are running in an endless marathon, pushing ourselves far beyond healthy levels of exertion.

We become flat lines mentally and emotionally by spending energy without sufficient recovery. We become flat lines physically and spiritually by not expending enough energy. Either way, we slowly wear down.

Think for a moment about the look of many long distance runners. Gaunt, sallow, slightly sunken and emotionally flat. Now visualize a sprinter. Sprinters typically look powerful, bursting with energy and eager to push themselves to their limits. The explanation is simple. No matter how intense the demand they face, the finish line is 100 or 200 meters down the track.

We, too must learn to live our lives as a series of sprints. We must fully engaged for periods of time, then fully disengage and seek renewal before jumping back into the fray to face whatever challenges confront us.

Here's to a week with a series of sprints!
More next week.

Always encouraging you,
Letha

Are You Fully Engaged? Principle # 1

Continued from last week...

a reminder:
To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interests.

The challenge of great life performance is to manage your energy more effectively in all dimensions to achieve your goals. Four key energy management principles drive this process. They lie at the heart of change, and they are critical for building the capacity to live a productive, fully engaged life.

So…to fully engage the following 4 energy management principles will be key:
This week we'll address Principle #1.


PRINCIPLE 1:

Full engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy; physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

The truth is that humans beings are complex energy systems. Full engagement is not one dimensional. The energy that pulses through us is physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. All four dynamics are critical. None is sufficient by itself and each one profoundly influences the others.

To perform at our best we must skillfully manage each of these dimensions. Subtract any one of these and we lose our capacity to fully engage…much the way an engine sputters when one of it’s cylinders misfires.


Energy is the common denominator in all dimensions of our lives. Physical energy capacity is measured in terms of quantity (low to high) where emotional energy capacity is measured in quality (negative to positive).

These are our most fundamental sources of energy because without sufficient high-octane fuel no mission can be accomplished. The more toxic and unpleasant our energy, the less effective we perform. The more positive and pleasant, the energy, the more efficient it is. Full engagement and maximum performance are only possible when we are living lives with high physical energy and positive emotional energy.

The importance of full engagement is most vivid in situations where the consequences of disengagement are profound.

Imagine for a moment that you are facing open-heart surgery. Where on a scale from low to high would you want your surgeon to be? How would you feel if he entered the operating room feeling angry, frustrated and anxious. How about overworked, exhausted, and depressed. What if he was laid back and slightly spacey? Obviously, you want your surgeon energized, confident and upbeat.

Imagine that every time you reacted inappropriately at someone in frustration or did sloppy work on a project or failed to focus your attention fully on the task at hand, you put someone’s life at risk? Very quickly, you would become less negative, reckless and sloppy in the way you manage your energy.

We must learn to hold ourselves accountable for how we manage our energy, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, just as we do our time.

So for this week...be fully engaged by managing your energy, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Next week we'll look at principle #2

Always encouraging you.
Letha

Will you be fully enagaed in 2012?

We are only two weeks into 2012...how many of you already feel like the demands of your life exceeds your capacity to make it all happen?

We live in a digital time. Our rhythms are rushed, our days are carved up in to bits and bytes.
We survive on too little sleep, fuel up on coffee, and go non stop from morning until night. We have demands all day and arrive home feeling exhausted and often experience the things and people waiting for us at home as one more demand instead of a place to refuel and feel renewed.

Our lives feel over burdened.

We take pride in our ability to multi task, we have cell phones, pagers, emails and pop up reminders. We use words like obsessed, stressed, crazy and overwhelmed. Feeling starved for time we feel we have no choice but to cram as much as possible into every day.

Managing time efficiently does not guarantee that we are living our lives fully engaged…it does not guarantee that we are bringing sufficient energy into whatever we are doing.


The ultimate measure of our lives is not how much time we spend on the planet, but rather how much energy we invest in the time that we have. The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and the quality of energy available to us is not.

To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interests.

Full engagement begins with feeling eager to get to work in the morning, equally happy to return home in the evening and capable of setting clear boundaries between the two. It means being able to immerse yourself in the mission you are on, whether it’s grappling with a creative challenge at work, managing a group of people on a project, spending time with loved ones or simply having fun.


I want to do something fun and compare our lives, our busy, successful, time crunched lives, to those of a professional athlete.

Think about it…
Professional athletes typically spend about 90 percent of their time training, in order to perform 10 percent of the time. Their entire lives are designed around expanding, sustaining, and renewing the energy they need to compete for short, focused periods of time.

They build very precise routines for managing energy in all spheres of their lives. Eating and sleeping…working out and resting…summoning the appropriate emotions, mentally staying focused and connecting regularly to the mission they have set for themselves.

Although most of us spend little or no time systematically training in any of these dimensions, we are expected to perform at our best for eight, ten even twelve hours a day.

Most professional athletes also enjoy an off-season of four to five months a year. After competing under extraordinary pressure for several months, a long off-season gives athletes the critical time that thy need for rest and healing, renewal and growth.

By contrast, our “off” season amounts to a few weeks of vacation a year, Even then we probably aren’t solely resting and recovering. More likely we are spending a least some of our vacation answering emails, checking our voice mail and thinking about our work.

Finally, professional athletes have an average career span of five to seven years. If they have handled their finances reasonable well, they are often set for life. Few of them are under pressure to run out and get another job.
By contrast, we can probably expect to work for forty to fifty years without any significant breaks.

Given these stark facts, what makes it possible to keep performing at our best without sacrificing our health, our happiness and our passions for life?

We must become fully engaged!

To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interests.

The challenge of great life performance is to manage your energy more effectively in all dimensions to achieve your goals. Four key energy management principles drive this process. They lie at the heart of change, and they are critical for building the capacity to live a productive, fully engaged life.

So…to fully engage, four energy management principles will be key:

We'll look at those principles for the next 4 weeks!
Until then...be fully engaged, be in the moment.

Always encouraging you,
Letha