In recent years the field of Coaching started expanding from the corporate world for work-related performance to private lives for all sorts of personal improvement. People are now seeking Personal Coaching to accomplish specific goals. But many are looking for something bigger and less defined.We want more purpose and meaning in our lives. We want to challenge ourselves and try new things.

We want variety and adventure and fun. We want to get out of a rut and leave ongoing boredom behind.We want to be happy.In recent years psychology has started to catch up. A new field is developing, Positive Psychology, or the Psychology of Happiness. Social scientists are using research to understand the necessary components of being happy and enjoying life. It’s about time!

But there’s a little problem. Positive Psychology is very—positive! It focuses on optimism, accomplishment, and points of view that emphasize personal power, connection to others, and growth—all good and meaningful goals. But it can come across as unrealistic. I listened to an interview with a CEO recently about Executive Coaching and he made a comment about his objections to Positive Psychology. He said it’s out of balance, focusing on attitudes and thoughts and ignoring struggles and difficulties. And he was being interviewed by one of the pioneers in Positive Psychology!

His point resonated with me. As I’ve entered the field of Coaching the overly positive attitude has been a concern. There’s a lot of talk about developing a vision, setting goals, planning steps, and making things happen. There’s a lot of talk about amazing changes people can accomplish. But there’s not much talk about why people don’t set goals and accomplish amazing things very often.

It’s because it’s really, really hard to do. It takes a lot of work. Sometimes it’s frightening, because change takes us into the world of the unknown. Sometimes it’s lonely, because everyone around is living in comfortable ruts and sees the world in little boxes. It’s overwhelming to think of what we can accomplish once we take control of our lives, because we have a sense that we might leave behind a lot of our current lives, especially some of the people.

Change is difficult. Life is difficult. Tiny little steps can be terrifying when you’re facing insecurities or getting out of routines established by decades of habit. But taking those little steps can be a huge victory.There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about taking charge of your life. When you see other people make big changes, it inspires hope. But those changes come in small steps. You have to face some big fears, get up after stumbling, and regain ground after setbacks.

The goal of Coaching is Thriving. The path to thriving is through Striving. I will keep that balance in mind here. I will acknowledge the long, slow struggle it takes to make meaningful changes. I will also acknowledge the powerful changes people make in their lives when they face those struggles and take those steps with the help of a Coach, Mentor, or Friend.

Adapted from an article written for the Highland Meadow Montessori Academy Newsletter

I work as a volunteer child advocate with CASA of Tarrant County and have a fantastic supervisor named Charlotte Smith. Last month she received a community service award from the Tarrant County Black Bar Association. I was proud for her, but not at all surprised, because she is warm and friendly and persistent. Charlotte was surprised. She told me now that she realized people were watching, she was going to be careful what she did! I had to laugh. She found out she was being noticed when she was given an award for doing great things, but she felt self-conscious and was worried she better be more mindful about her behavior.

Charlotte and I talk about being parents sometimes, and her reaction reminded me: Our children notice what we say and do. They don’t just see a little bit once in a while. They see what we do well and what we do on purpose, but they also see our shortcomings, the times we give in, and the times we respond with frustration or hostility. Parenting is long, slow, cumulative work. It’s consistently our job, even when we aren’t being consistent. We are training our children at all times. Even without realizing it, we teach them how to treat other people, how to get what they want and avoid what they don’t want, and how to make choices between different priorities. Yikes!

As parents we want to encourage self-sufficiency, nurture good habits, build up self-confidence, and cultivate strong character based on principles and deep values. Lectures and occasional “crackdowns” on behavior don’t accomplish this. We nurture these attitudes and habits a drop at a time over many years. For example, I want my children to understand that other people aren’t obligated to give them what they want, or even to give them help. People often want to help and are willing, but they want others to respect their freedom to decide and to acknowledge their cooperation.

I want my sons to see even small favors as a gift that deserves a little gratitude. Giving reminders about using their manners as they head out the door won’t be enough to instill a spirit of gratitude. A sticker chart might get them to use polite words, but it won’t teach the value of gratitude. I have to make it my goal and find opportunities to teach and train. For example, I will be sure to use “please” and “thank you” with simple requests of them. I tell them how the favor specifically helps me. When they ask for help with something I make sure I hear “please,” especially when they’re talking to each other. If I don’t hear “thank you” between brothers, I comment that one went out of his way to help the other. This prompts a “thank you” and a specific statement of appreciation. It’s then that I see the spirit of gratitude and cooperation coming through.

This approach applies to most habits that define maturity and character. Children can learn to avoid chores and complain about them, or they can learn the value of taking care of their own things and the connection built by sharing in family tasks. They can learn to put work first and play second, or they can learn to go out with friends and put off homework and chores until later. They can learn it’s okay for brothers and sisters to fight and argue constantly, or they can learn to resolve problems and treat each other with consideration. They can learn to be rude and sassy to us in front of their friends if we agree “fitting in” with rude and sassy friends is more important than kindness and respect. Or they can learn to take a stand for being considerate and respecting their parents. It depends on how we lead them.

Parenting isn’t a sprint and it’s not even a marathon. You train for those, you run, and they’re over. Parenting isn’t accomplished in individual moments of quality time. It’s the culmination of recurring patterns of affection, directions, consequences, words of praise, and words of guidance. These patterns come from keeping our purpose clearly in our minds and stopping occasionally to ask: What am I teaching my child about life and about being a person of strong character?

What makes a community? This is the question my friend Sarah Sharp used to begin a telecourse called Cultivating Community we co-presented at the beginning of the month.

Our participants suggested that community is defined by many things. These included:

• Having similar interests
• Being a supportive environment
• Accepting other people
• Encouraging members to grow through their involvement and become more than they were

Next we asked, What other qualities do communities have?

They said communities usually have:

• Mutual goals
• A specific culture with values that define it
• Strong ethics

We agreed communities need:

• A commitment to personal growth
• Sharing
• Compassion
• Justice
• Heart values

One participant provided a metaphor from the story of stone soup, where one stranger helps all the group members share what little they have to create a wonderful meal of abundance when they otherwise think they are poor.

People come together in community by focusing on the group’s shared goals. This helps them let go of their individual agendas and helps create a spirit of cooperation. Decisions are made jointly, through consensus. In a genuine community differences are respected and even seen as valuable.

Conflicts are resolved openly and with honesty, but with enough care and respect that individuals feel comfortable to express their feelings and opinions. At the highest level of connection—a very rare thing—a community can be a place of great personal safety, where individuals can disclose thoughts and feelings and past experiences they normally keep private. The group’s empathy and acceptance can bring healing and transformation.

Each of us can take steps to cultivate community in groups we are in. We can take courageous steps to model honesty and openness. We can go out of our way to see things from someone else’s perspective. We can encourage discussions that help the group discover its goals, and we can help the group stay focused on them.

This is a journal style account of my day off, taken to learn more about my interests and passions and unique way of viewing the world. I’m sharing the day in detail to encourage you to take a day off and see how much you can learn about yourself.

I was talking with my friend Henry Packer about a telecourse we were planning called The Ferris Bueller Approach to Career Choice when Henry asked me a big question. He said, “Are you going to take a ‘Ferris Bueller’ day off before the telecourse?”

The correct answer was obvious: Yes, of course I’m going to do the exercise we’ll recommend in our telecourse and take a day off for spontaneous fun. But honestly, until he asked, I hadn’t realized I should. More importantly, I hadn’t realized I could. So I found a day where my wife could drop our sons at school and my mother could pick them up so I would be free to head out and explore without a schedule.

Henry is the mastermind of this idea, although he had an enormous amount of inspiration from the John Hughes film. Henry’s idea takes the template of a slightly rebellious, brash, but whimsical teenager who packs a lot of fun and limit-pushing adventure into one day and rewrites it for adults who feel stuck in an unfulfilling routine. Henry first used this model to give himself permission to take all the chores and projects off his schedule and focus on fun while his wife was out of town with a group of friends for a couple of days. No, it’s not that kind of fun. It’s Ferris Bueller, not Risky Business.

Henry, wise man that he doesn’t realize that he is, has included a Ferris Bueller day in his life once in a while to help keep himself connected to the things he loves but misses in his daily life. He understands that by taking time away from repetition and demands and opening the day to possibilities, he can reconnect with himself and hear his heart telling him what he enjoys.

As I approached my day off, I didn’t make any specific plans, just tentative ideas so I had the freedom to follow my interests. I got online that morning and looked up the Ron Mueck exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth. I had read about Mueck after seeing the signs for the exhibit. I also checked out foreign and independent film listings in the entire Dallas-Fort Worth area. I enjoy seeing small-release films but only go once a year or less because they’re usually far away. Unfortunately, nothing was showing that sounded compelling.

I headed out thinking about what I wanted in my day. I thought about driving the two hours to a small town I know where the river meanders through rocks and trees and carries away daily stress and brings in grander thoughts. I compromised and decided to go to a park in Fort Worth near a river. I bought a chocolate chip croissant on the way. The park sits high up on the bank of the river, which has been reshaped for flood control. The trees are far back from the benches along the trail at the top of the bank. I like rivers, and I like being right next to them and in them, so the arrangement was somewhat lonely.

I had time to think about the upscale older neighborhood where the French bakery is. I was seeing things more like a traveler in a new city. The people were more interesting and I wondered about their lives instead of focusing on the long lines and lack of parking (I didn’t ignore those, obviously!).

I thought about biking one time on the trail along the river with a friend many years ago, and how I was worn out at the end. He was biking for fitness and some sort of timed accomplishment. I was biking for enjoyment at first but had to focus on trying to keep up and breathing. I had a similar experience with a different friend who was into mountain biking and took me to a seven-mile course on the edge of a lake. I enjoyed the trails and the trees and the views of the lake, but I was wobbly and sore at the end. I didn’t ask to go on any more biking trails with him, which was probably a good thing, because he wound up crashing into a tree and getting a concussion shortly after that. Some people take fun way too seriously.

What I rediscovered in that half hour or so by the river is that I love being outdoors (when it’s not too hot) and that I love outdoor activities—just not strenuous ones! I thought about bringing my bike to the trail and riding for fun—just fun, with no number of miles to cover or time deadline to beat. I left thinking of taking another day off to drive the two hours to enjoy the river with the rocks and the trees and the rapids.

I headed straight for the Museum of Modern Art eager to see the Ron Mueck exhibit. Mueck makes sculptures that appear lifelike of people in different ages and stages of life. Some are small scale and some are huge. None are exactly life-size—that’s part of the magic when he shares his perspective. Some look annoyed, some fearful, some very content, and others contemplative. They are made of materials carefully tinted to look like skin, with detailed contours and wrinkles and toenails. And other parts of anatomy, as many of the pieces are nude. I was amazed at the ability of one man to conceive of a piece of art with such detail, figure out how to make it look exactly correct, and make it happen.

I discovered that I enjoy approaching things by deconstructing them, understanding something about how they are made, to entertain the sequential and logical part of my mind. Then I back up and experience them as a whole, using emotion and intuition and symbol to entertain the creative and intuitive part of my mind.

For lunch I went to a Lebanese restaurant which I don’t often have a chance to visit. Discovering different cultures, and especially different styles of food, is enjoyable to me for the immediate taste pleasure and for the more subtle pleasure of thinking about how people live. I was reminded I have an ongoing interest in cultures of all kinds that I want to include in my life more often.

Part of me was pretty tired from the intensity of the Mueck exhibit. I needed to use a different part of my mind so I went home to look at all the movie listings, not just foreign and independent films. None of them grabbed me, and then I remembered I had received the Pedro Almodóvar film Volver as a gift and hadn’t watched it yet. I made my plan to watch it that evening and headed to the bookstore.

I enjoy the bookstore but always have my sons with me and have to keep up with them and suit my schedule to theirs. Going on my own I got to enjoy a frozen coffee drink, thumb through a magazine on new cars (a passion of mine since childhood), and look through thesauruses. It might be hard to understand, but I know people who love reading dictionaries so a few will understand. During the day I had a dictionary and thesaurus in my car because I was thinking of different words to express the coaching and training business I am starting. Following one word through its meanings and related words leads me to distant connections. This helps me get a bigger understanding of how to describe things, and it’s like gymnastics for my brain. Reading huge thesauruses for a while was playful fun.

I talked with my wife and she suggested Indian food for dinner. It was my second choice for lunch, so having it for dinner was a wonderful idea. This left me with time to consider another whimsical pleasure—test-driving a new car. In college I was able to test-drive a BMW with no chance of being able to buy one. Over the years I’ve always volunteered to go with friends who are looking at cars. I love new cars, fasts ones, sporty ones, luxurious ones, and even quirky ones. But something was different. I didn’t want to test-drive a BMW or Mercedes because they were no longer completely out of reach. They can be affordable purchased three or four years old. I wanted to test-drive a smaller, fun car since my older son will be driving soon. I didn’t have enough time to drive all the cars I had in mind, but I had the chance to visit one dealership and look at one car. I realized I can do this for fun every month.

Dinner with my wife was a rare treat. We ate at a small Indian restaurant we recently discovered and tried new things—more adventure! I talked about my day, what I had done and what I had figured out so far. She had stories from work and from her riding stable and we laughed a lot.

At home she settled into some computer work and something on fashion or home makeovers on television so I put on Volver. The television in the family room is seventeen years old and the picture is not always clear, but I loved the movie. Almodóvar has a quirky, even twisted view of the world, and sometimes I have this eerie feeling he’s directing my life, especially when I see a hatchback full of clowns drive by (which happens far more often than it should). I remembered that I not only love story—the structure, patterns, symbols, and resolutions—but I especially love stories told visually so the meaning is in color and movement and juxtaposition and composition.

Sounds like my ideal career would be to make a film like A River Runs Through It set in an interesting foreign town with clowns delivering chocolate croissants in new cars to people reading thesauruses to each other. All the extras would be Ron Mueck style sculptures. But that’s not how the Discovery Day works!

It points me to what I love: words, associations between ideas, strong personal vision, detailed work, artistic meaning, visual composition, people in all their differences, great food, and discovering new things. A lot of it fits into coaching and community building, but I will keep looking for ways to bring more of my interests into my life, especially those things that make my brain and heart dance. And I will take more days off to make more discoveries.

One huge obstacle people often face when they’re ready to make big changes to improve their lives is money. At least, it looks like money’s the problem to most of us. We want a different job or a completely different career but need the current salary level to cover all our bills. There’s no time to go to school, even part-time, without risking the salary.

We want more family time but we think the kids will suffer if they give up the things our extra work hours can buy. We want a dramatic change, maybe moving to a new place and starting a business, but the equity in the house barely equals the balance of the mortgage and the emergency savings fund is—okay, we don’t have an emergency fund. That’s what credit cards are for, right?

When people feel stuck in a job or stuck in a pattern because they need money to change, they’re likely to give up their dreams or get desperate because of money. Sometimes we get desperate even when we have the money—at least I did. I had saved up about $30,000 to cushion the transition from business ownership to a new career when my mother and I decided to sell our preschool and child development center. Instead of following my own plan of living on the proceeds of the sale through the transition and keeping the cushion until I saw how things were going, I spent it before the sale was final.

I bought a “small business opportunity” along with my parents and set up an office and paid for some marketing. Just over a year later the parent company was crumbling, and we found out they had thousands of people in different industries who had paid them tens of thousands of dollars for different businesses that didn’t work. The Federal Trade Commission closed them down. Nearly one hundred million dollars was gone.

Boy, did I learn my lesson! The next time I paid for a scam small business opportunity, I spent lots less. I came across a business selling discounted products over the internet and pulled money from the sale of my business to buy it. Two months later I heard my first ad for Overstock, a national company doing the same thing with real success. Six more months later, that company was also taken over and closed down by the Federal Trade Commission.

Both losses were hits to our family financially, but they didn’t take us down. However, I was on e-mail lists as both companies were collapsing and heard stories of people taking $20,000 advances on credit cards and expecting to make the payments from their profits. They had no cash reserves and their current income just covered their bills. Some were retirees on small fixed incomes. They wound up in serious financial trouble.

Now I’m extremely skeptical of any opportunity that is marketed based on greed. Some do work, such as specific training in a field from a respected organization, but when the ad copy tells me I’ll be earning six figures for a four-figure investment, I cringe. I’ve seen too many people who feel trapped by debt fall on their faces borrowing even more money they can’t pay back to chase a dream of finally earning enough to catch up to their debt.

It doesn’t have to be that way! I advocate a different relationship to money, to things, and to work. Let’s discuss it here each month.

Q-How do you eat an elephant?
A-One bite at a time!
Q-What if you get bored eating elephant?
A-Make elephant burgers!

One of the discussions on the Fast Track Your Dream forum for people in creative career transition brought up the question of finding time in a busy schedule to take steps towards a goal. One memorable response came from a member who raised the iconic question: How do you eat an elephant?

This led to other questions from people who generally thought they wouldn’t like the taste of elephant or would get tired of eating it. We even heard a response from a vegetarian. Okay, all metaphors have limits! But the key idea is strong.

One of the creative members wrote a post about finding a few minutes here and a half hour there in her busy schedule by keeping focused on the task of finding time. She had her list of items and could do ten minutes of phone calls or fifteen minutes of web research or a half hour organizing thoughts for a project. She referred to these isolated steps taken during recaptured time as elephant burgers. I love the image and have extended it to include the answer to the question of overcoming boredom or the feeling of overwhelm with a big project.

Elephant burgers means using creativity and mindfulness to take a large or ongoing project, break it into individual steps that can be accomplished, and keep yourself motivated and accountable so you move forward. It combines organization and planning with fun and sometimes whimsy.

I’m not a smashing success at this. I use the idea with success, but then fall back into old ways. For example, I used to have large stacks of paper and debit card receipts (personal, not business, because I save those for deductions) piling up around my shredder. I would sit down and take an hour or so to shred it all, especially with un-jamming the shredder and waiting for it to cool down after several minutes of constant use.

Then I decided to shred just ten items per day until they were gone. It worked! The shredder didn’t overheat and the pile went down, although some days I added to it. I had small piles of “confetti” that were fun to recycle instead of bulky bags full of shreds. What a system! It worked for many weeks.

Now I have two small piles slowly building on top of my shredder and recycle basket again. I stopped using my system and went back to old ways. But I have a simple plan that worked before and I can conquer this elephant one burger at a time. Today I shredded my cleared debit card receipts from last month, nearly twenty. Tomorrow I’ll shred ten unsolicited credit card applications. Those are fun! At this rate, the pile should be gone in a week or two.