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 In Xth grade, I was 165 cms. To my shock, I measured only 160 cms during a routine health check-up when I was pregnant with Anya. I had lost 5 cms in 17 years due to poor posture inspite of regularly waking up in the wee hours of the day to do yoga. A year back, I changed to another yoga teacher, far more experienced, and yet, continues to learn from her own teacher. I measured my height yesterday and my back has strengthened just in one year for me to be standing straighter at 163 cms. I gained 3 cms of height at 50 years of age. Sharing my learnings from here, in case they serve you in some way: 1. Learn from a teacher / mentor / coach who has a teacher / mentor / coach because a great teacher / mentor / coach is a great student for life. 2. Learning from your own experience is not enough because we can never see our own self. We need the luxury and a privilege of a teacher / mentor / coach who has the courage to ongoingly show us the mirror. Without that mirror showing us our blindspots, we don't have the ability to show our students / mentees / coachees / team-members / kids their blindspots and therefore, no ability to support their growth because growth is in response to a blindspot uncovered. A blindspot has to be uncovered by one's own self through skillful coaching of our teacher. A blindspot told remains hidden and is resisted vehemently. 3. It's not enough to do yoga during that one hour in a day as a tick-mark activity. Yoga has to be lived moment by moment. The awareness of mind, body and breath during the yoga practise is required to be carried forth from the class to Life and experienced moment to moment. Today, I have the awareness to catch myself slouching in a coaching session and straighten up in response to that awareness. 4. It's not enough to do an RYD Habit. An RYD Habit is transformative only if the essence of that is practised moment to moment. Do we acknowledge ourselves for 5 minutes in the morning and spend the rest of the day criticising ourselves in our head? Are we writing gratitudes for 5 minutes; and then spend rest of the day being critical of others and being upset with circumstances? 5. In the earlier years of my yoga practise, I didn't have mind, body and breath awareness even during the yoga class. Yoga is a journey like any other RYD transformative practice. It bears fruit only if practised consistently over a period of time and letting its essence flow from the practice to Life. Keep learning, contributing and growing to joyously lead yourself and your businesses from good to great, realize your dreams and have it all with ease and grace; experiencing beauty, balance and harmony within and all around; while having lots of fun and adventure along the way 💜 Loving you, j.
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Book of the Week: Mindful Leadership Coaching (Journeys into the Interior) by Manfred Kets De Vries7/3/2019  What connects me the most with the author, Professor Manfred F R Kets De Vries, is the fact that he finds and recommends the group coaching format for CEOs as most effective. I have always loved getting the CEOs / Business Owners together in a group coaching format instead of working with each one only individually. The learning is accelerated in this format because the participants get to observe others getting coached instead of being on the hot seat 100% of the time. The combination of being on the hot seat (getting coached) and being a fly on the wall watching others getting coached gives the participants breakthrough insights and deeper understanding of their own blind spots, opening them to a new way of looking at everything. New actions can only arise from a new way of looking at oneself, others and Life itself. New actions, not taken before, create unimaginable impossible outcomes. The group coaching format of CEOs / Business Owners also gets them to be part of a Mastermind Group. It is pretty lonely at the top, so to have a peer group constantly challenging you to be better than your best and yet covering your back all the time is undeniably a gift. You do become an average of 5 people you spend your time with. Always being surrounded by your subordinates is definitely not a way to grow. A cross-industry peer group with similar challenges and providing to each other a safe space to drop your masks is an incredible growth structure. That is why I connect deeply with Professor Manfred F R Kets De Vries from INSEAD. Not only because he has a similar experience of the effectiveness of group coaching formats for CEOs but also because he employs psycho-analytical tools to delve deep inside the inner workings of his clients’ mind, heart and spirit to unleash productivity, performance, creativity, innovativeness not available before. There are very few in our industry who go beyond the mind to coach their clients to realize their greatest dreams in deepest communion with their highest self. That makes him one of my favourite leadership experts / super coaches in the world. I loved reading his book and couldn’t resist smiling as I read the book to see so many of my unconventional ideas validated. If you are a CEO, Business Owner, High Performer on your way to the top job or a Coach, this book is a must-read for many reasons: 1. There is very little understanding of what coaching truly is and its incredible power to enable leadership development to support organizations to cut-over from good to great. 2. A certification is no guarantee that the coach will deliver. 3. At the rapid pace with which technology is evolving and its impact on social structures, current style of leading is no longer viable. Leaders have to evolve to become coaches instead of managers. 4. Coaching begins at the top, not at the bottom. If the CEO doesn’t have a coach, coaching will deliver so much less value to the organization than what it can. 5. Before hiring a coach or implementing a coaching structure in your organization, you should know what coaching is really about. Here are introductory key ideas from his book - Mindful Leadership Coaching (Journeys into the Interior) - in the form of excerpts. Hope this article inspires you to read the book cover-to-cover for breakthrough insights and deeply fulfilling outcomes in all areas of your life. 1. Leadership Coaches offer expertise that is not necessarily found inside the company. Another, which probably accounts more for its attractiveness, is that most find it easier to confide in an objective outsider. External coaches are more likely to offer a confidential relationship within which executives can discuss delicate issues freely, let their defences down, and explore blind spots, biases and shortcomings. 2. The higher executives climb on the organisational ladder, the less they can depend on technical skills and the greater their need for effective interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence. This is where leadership coaches can make a major contribution. 3. At its most basic level, the role of a leadership coach is to help the executive acknowledge and deal with realities that might otherwise be avoided, denied, or accepted with resignation. … Effective leadership coaches contract with their clients to not only improve their clients’ performance, but also to guide them on a journey toward personal transformation and reinvention. … The coach also has a role in helping executives to build shared understanding, that is, learn how to think and interact better in a work setting, through courageous conversations, assisting them in giving constructive feedback. Coaches may <also> help executives to create better functioning teams and design organisational cultures that will get the best out of their people. 4. Mindful Leadership Coaching … means drawing the clients attention to the experience of the present moment in an open and non-judgmental manner. This can be viewed as a distinct state of consciousness, distinguished from the normal consciousness of everyday living. Mindfulness leads to wiser judgment about what is and isn’t important. Taking a reflective pose, rather than resorting to a flight into action, gives clients room to roam from perspective to perspective, from one incomplete thought to the other, until those thoughts begin to crystallise and become the basis for insight and growth. … While most of what we achieve is by “doing”, mindfulness achieves its ends by “not doing”, simply by taking the time to observe - before doing. … The aim of mindful interventions … is to help us become more aware of our thoughts and bodily sensations, and in so doing be able to cope better with day-to-day emotions and problems. … Although the burden is on coaches to be mindful in their work, they should help their clients to acquire mindfulness skills at the same time. 5. Mindful consciousness is quite different from the ordinary consciousness that is appropriate for our day-to-day activities, where attention is actively directed outward, in regular space and time, normally in the service of some agenda or task, and ruled by habitual response patterns. Mindfulness helps us to become more aware of the unhelpfulness of some thoughts. It helps us direct awareness inward and focus on the present moment. Mindfulness makes us aware of what is, as opposed to what needs to be done - to experience non-doing, or non-effort. In a state of mindfulness, we self-consciously enable ourselves to suspend agendas, judgements and common understanding. In being mindful, we are being several things all at once: passive, alert, open, curious and exploratory. In addition to the passive capacity to witness experience as it unfolds, the purpose of mindfulness is to allow us to have a different, less conflict-ridden relationship with our thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations. The expected outcome is an increase in well-being - to have more control over our own mind as we spend less time dealing with difficulties and focus more on constructive activities. Thanks to mindfulness, what were once seen as difficulties may disappear altogether. … When mindfulness is used appropriately, it can be a very powerful and effective method to bring about personal insight and change. Being mindful will help coaches unravel negative thoughts and painful emotions. It will help us and others free ourselves from unnecessary fears and unhelpful, habitual patterns. 6. Mindfulness, and the capacity to coach in depth, are closely intertwined. … Effective leadership coaches are like gardeners. The presenting problems are weeds, we’ve got to get to the roots to prevent them from popping up again. 7. Much of what happens to us is beyond our conscious awareness. … All of us have blind spots. There are many things we don’t want to know about ourselves and to preempt this kind of knowledge, we resort to defensive processes and resistances to avoid experiences that we find disagreeable. Unfortunately, many people derail due to the blind spots in their personality. … It is important to realize that these resistances come to the fore due to conflicts within ourselves; we need to accept that inner dissonance is part of the human condition. … To have a better understanding of unconscious patterns, our defensive reactions, and our blind spots, we need to explore our inner theatre and pay attention to repetitive themes and patterns in our lives. … Exploring the relationship between our past and present will be very illuminating, as it will enable us to become liberated from habitual, ingrained behaviour. 8. Nothing is more central to who we are than the way we express and regulate emotions. Emotions determine many of our actions and emotional intelligence plays a vital role in who we are and what we do. Intellectual insight is not the same as emotional insight, which touches us at a much deeper level. To understand others, and ourselves we need to explore the full range of experienced emotions. These emotions will also play an essential role in why we do what we do, why we take on certain roles, and why we are passionate about certain things. 9. Napoleon Bonaparte said - “Leaders are merchants of hope.” Leaders need to speak to the collective imagination of their people to create a group identity to help people become better than they think they are. … help people to have dreams about the future. … see people acting on those dreams. 10. You can never have an impact on society if you have not changed yourself. - Nelson Mandela 11. Unfortunately, there are far too many leaders who fit Albert Einstein’s alleged definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.” 12. …in much of my research and writing, I have made a plea for leadership group coaching as an experiential training ground for creating more effective leaders. 13. … work with the coachee’s past, present and future in order to provide insight about the reasons for specific, behaviour patterns. …<such> interventions contribute to a deeper understanding of the significance and meaning of personal patterns and the inner structure of a person’s personality, complex human relationships (including deeply buried and repressed emotions), and the role of teams, group dynamics and organisational processes. 14. … essential for both the coach and coaches to understand the degree to which their actions are affected by what is going on below the surface. This necessitates an exploration of the clients’ own personality, their implicit underlying values, the experiences that have shaped their character, and the kind of effects they have on others. Furthermore, … these dynamics influence the undercurrents operating in teams or organizations. Such deeper understanding will help the people who are being coached to function in a more effective manner in whatever situation they will find themselves. 15. Organizations that recognise the benefits of leadership coaching can profit in many different ways: improved interpersonal skills; out-of-the-box thinking; better conflict management; more effective team behaviour; an improved ability to manage and advance personal career goals and the career goals of others; and the ability to create a coaching culture, and authentizotic organizations - places of work in which people feel at their best. In this kind of organization, people find meaning in their work, celebrate the people they work with, have pride in what they are doing; and trust the people they work for and with. 16. Good leadership coaches take leaders where they want to go. Great coaches, however, will take them to undiscovered shores. … coaches <should> take a reflective stand. Leadership coaches are not sport coaches. Taking a reflective stand - practising mindfulness - cautions against knee-jerk reactions in leadership coaching. Exceptional coaches have the ability to acquire knowledge and analyse it both logically and emotionally, the true test being the ability to recognise a problem before it becomes an emergency. We should all aim to be exceptional coaches. Wishing you a deeply fulfilling, authentic uncovering to joyously come home to yourself so that others in your life, at work and at home, experience the courage to do the same. Love, Jyoti.  My job is to mess up with my clients’ thinking, not tell them what to do. My clients are experts and top leaders in their fields, they probably know much more in their industry than anyone else. They already have everything figured out. Advising them and telling them what to do will not give them a breakthrough in their creativity, productivity, performance and innovativeness. What gives them ideas they hadn’t thought of before, emotions they hadn’t felt before, actions they hadn’t considered before that takes them to the next level that they didn’t even think was possible or available is getting challenged in the way they think, how they think and what they think. Which is what I call messing up with their minds, totally turning their thinking around upside down, inside out. This is what gives them a new way of thinking, a new way of feeling, a new way of being which raises the bar in every area of their life - career, relationships, kids, nurturing and nourishing themselves, making a difference in the various communities that they are a part of and most importantly, creating an abundance of time within the same 24 hours for things that they are deeply passionate and committed about. I got a call from a client today for an urgent advice. I told him I don’t do that. Though, I would be happy to coach him if that’s what he wanted. The coaching call didn’t go in the direction he expected. I told him that’s the problem seeking someone's advice. We have already made up our mind and all we want is someone’s agreement on that. Since we are on a coaching call, I will not give you what you want but what you need to see, hear and feel; and you would resist that though that’s what would support you the most in creating a breakthrough for yourself. My clients have enough yes men and women in their lives and I am about tough love. I love and care so much for my clients that I don’t really care that they love me back. In fact, if my clients don’t hate me for sometime during their engagement with me, I know I need to serve them more powerfully. The same is with my kids. If I don’t hear I hate you often enough, it’s a signal for me to parent them more powerfully instead of easing myself into winning a popularity contest with them. They understand the value of that just as my clients do. So much so, that my 12-year old has taken me on as her coach to fulfil on her greatest dream. This is the toughest assignment that I have taken up so far because when you coach someone, you step into a relationship of equals and you take on being coachable yourself. I no longer can use the line when she asks the question ‘Why do I have to do that?’ - Because I am your mom. I also have a constant watchdog observing whether I am living my personal inner commitment and my values, which is totally tough though serves me very powerfully to grow. So, in a way, she is running the toughest coach training program for me. Parenting, leading and coaching are intertwined. Each of the roles have to play the other two roles equally effectively and powerfully to do justice to their specific role. Parenting is about parenting (unconditional love and acceptance) and leading (doing 10X what you tell your kids to do) and coaching (supporting your kids to realise their greatest dreams in deepest communion with their highest self, supporting them to be happy and fulfilled with their genius joyfully expressed). Coaching is about parenting (unconditional love and acceptance) and leading (doing 10X what you tell your clients to do) and coaching (supporting your clients to realise their greatest dreams in deepest communion with their highest self, supporting them to be happy and fulfilled with their genius joyfully expressed). Leading is about parenting (unconditional love and acceptance) and leading (doing 10X what you tell your team to do) and coaching (supporting your team to realise their greatest dreams in deepest communion with their highest self, supporting them to be happy and fulfilled with their genius joyfully expressed). Wishing you the joy of being a deeply fulfilled leader, parent and a coach creating breakthrough outcomes in all areas of your life. Love, Jyoti.  One of the entrepreneurs in the session I was leading yesterday was curious to know why I have a coach, though I am a coach and for how long would I work with a coach. I loved the questions, so taking time to reflect on them more deeply than the brief discussion we had during the session. First, lets define a coach. Just like a railway coach, the job of a human coach is to be the vehicle for transporting the passengers / coachees from point A to point B in their life journey. Sure, you can travel on foot instead of catching a train or taking some other transport; just that the velocity with which you will reach your destination will vary. Here’s my personal definition of a coach. A coach’s job is to support their clients to realise their greatest, unimaginable, impossible dreams in deepest communion with their highest self while having it all - a deeply fulfilling successful career / business, loving harmonious relationships, happy responsible kids with their genius joyfully expressed, lots of nourishing nurturing me-time and making a huge difference in the world through living their purpose this lifetime. The way a coach delivers on the above is by coaching their clients to be in perfect health and well-being across the four bodies of their Being - physical, emotional, intellectual / mental, spiritual. Without the highest level of fitness across the four bodies, we don’t have enough inner strength to embark on the journey to fulfil on our purpose this lifetime to realise our dreams and have it all. The job of a coach isn’t to motivate but to connect their clients to their inner inspiration that brings stars to their eyes, dance in their feet, a song on their lips, a smile in their heart and joyous stillness in their mind so that their clients are unstoppable in taking powerful effective actions to realise their greatest dreams; however unimaginable, however impossible, however scary. The job of a coach isn’t to give solutions but to lead their clients from their present questions to even bigger questions because it is the quality of our questions that determines whether we will ever throw off the lampshade to let our inner Light shine brightly. We may waste our entire life solving the wrong questions. A coach leads us to the right questions and our inner wisdom that truly guides us forward on our path. A coach’s job is to show the mirror to their clients so that they can discover their own blind spots, their inner barriers that they are blind to that give them limited or no results in different areas of their wheel of life. Our only access to dropping our inner barriers is by self-discovering them instead of being told. It is the skill of a coach that aids this self-discovery. A coach also coaches through modelling the behaviour, thoughts, skills, emotions, attitudes, mindset, heartset, healthset, soulset they know would serve their clients. That, in fact, is the way humans learn; not through information but by seeing others taking action because of what are known as mirror neurons. Therefore, if I want my clients to be coachable; I have to be coachable. If I want to support my clients to realize their unimaginable, impossible dreams by going to places inside that scare them, by facing their deepest fears, darkest secrets and embracing their resistances; I have to be on the journey to realise my unimaginable, impossible dreams by going to places inside that scare me, by ongoingly facing my deepest fears, darkest secrets and embracing my resistances by doing exactly what I fear, what I resist and sharing my darkest secrets with another being so that those fears, resistances, secrets no longer have a hold on me. That also means I need someone to show me the mirror so that I can discover my blind spots for me to go beyond. I need someone to model for me growth habits so that I can inculcate them in me because our mirror neurons support us to learn with speed by mirroring others. That is why a wise advice is to choose your company carefully because we become the average of five people we hang around the most with. I need someone to lead me to greater questions and connect me to my inner wisdom through what is known as a socratic discussion or a conversation where you are lead with questions to facilitate self-inquiry. I need someone who holds the space for my inner Light to shine brightly. That is why I have not one but five coaches - karate, yoga, fitness, golf, and a coach supporting me to realise my greatest dreams in deepest communion with my highest self while having it all. And, I am on a lookout for more coaches because I want to live more each moment, create more than what would have been possible otherwise, love and give so much more beyond the paper-ghost fears that hold me back. When will I no longer need a coach? When I don’t want to grow anymore. I hope I have the wisdom never to end up in that spot. Am I dependent on my coaches? Is that not dependency, neediness? I and my coaches have a relationship of equals, just as I and my clients have a relationship of equals. To the degree I grow, to the same degree they grow. To the same degree they grow, to the same degree I grow. That is mirror neurons at play. So, when my clients connect back with me many years later thanking me with gratitude for the difference I made in their lives; I turn towards them with loving joyous gratitude in my heart and thank them deeply for the difference they made to my life by being coachable and choosing me as their coach because I am privy to the secret that I am going to share with you now. There was a time nothing was working for me and then, I had a moment of epiphany as I was lit up with the realisation that the only way I will get what I want is to give it to others. I knew this intellectually before but in that moment, it was a visceral experience. The knowing came from deep within. As I have helped my clients build their businesses, discover and connect to their authentic selves, nurture loving harmonious relationships, raise happy responsible kids, realise their greatest dreams, create health and well-being across the four bodies of their Being, find time to nurture and nourish themselves while contributing to their customer & employee communities and people in their lives, experience fun, fulfilment, freedom; I found the very same things come alive in my own life. To the degree I gave, to that exact degree it became alive in my life. It is interesting that great people from two very different fields arrived at the same truth and shared it with the world in their words: Isaac Newton’s 3rd Law - Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. St Francis of Assisi in a prayer that I love and connect so deeply with - It’s in giving that we receive. Should you have a coach? The answer to that lies within you. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. I have experienced the truth of that. When you are ready, the coach right for you will show up. How do you know the coach is right for you? It just feels right. Wishing you the joy of the journey. Love, Jyoti. Reference: Mirror Neurons - The most powerful learning tool  Real (The Power of Authentic Connection) by Catherine and Duane O'Kane has the potential to transform what it means to be a human being by giving us a structure to come home to ourselves forever. If the CEOs learn to authentically connect with themselves and with people in their organizations; unimaginable productivity, performance, creativity, innovation and profitability will be unleashed. It is the CEO on an inner journey of personal transformation who will have the courage to lead his / her business on a journey from good to great. If business excellence be the house, leadership depth is the foundation on which the house is built. Running a business is an opportunity to be on the path of personal mastery. As the leader at the helm learns, grows and evolves; so does the business because the organization invariably mirrors the strengths and weaknesses of the CEO. This book has had a profound impact on the way I run my businesses, how I coach, my relationship with my parents, sisters, spouse, kids, clients and myself. It has been a tipping point on my journey to myself. All the work that I had done on myself up until prior (and I have done some massive inner work on myself) had me intellectually understand and be aware of how the 'suspicion of self' was playing out in my life. It is only on reading the book and doing the self-application that the jigsaw pieces fell in place with clarity that I hadn't seen before. I am standing taller than I have ever stood in my life. Much gratitude to Catherine and Duane for your vulnerability, authenticity and courage to share your work and your life with the world through a book. You both made a difference to my life. I recommend that the book be read from start to end to do the work to come home to yourself. Here are a few excerpts from the book: 1. Human beings are happier, healthier and live longer when we have strong relationships. We are at our best when we are living a connected life, surrounded by people we love and care about. 2. The lack of authentic connection permeates the very fabric of how we organize ourselves in the modern world. It explains and contributes more to our personal malaise, work issues, high divorce rates, mental illness, and physical sickness than any other factor. 3. We aren't avoiding each other because of the problems. We have problems because we are avoiding each other. We aren't separate because of the wars. We have wars because we are separate. 4. Connection gives meaning and purpose to our lives. We all want to belong, to love, and be loved. 5. Just as fitness is a by-product of exercise, happiness is a by-product of loving, relational action. 6. There is nothing to fear, because we belong and are good enough as we are. 7. The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large scale revolution until there's personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first. - Jim Morrison 8. We prefer to see the problem as something outside ourselves, therefore the solution must be outside ourselves as well. Therein lies the dilemma. If the problem and the solution are outside of self, then we are doomed to be victims of the effects of external causes ultimately beyond our control. If the problem and the solution are within, then we can change. 9. How you connect is the strongest determinant of how you feel, and how you connect exerts a powerful influence on all those around you. 10. We cannot not communicate. Connection is active all the time, with every thought, every word, every action. Not communicating is communicating. We are communicating all the time and are connected all the time. There are no neutral moments or situations. Every time we actively communicate, there are two levels to that communication: there is the content or literal message, but underlying that is a relationship message that is conveyed mostly non-verbally, through body language, facial expression and tone of voice. In terms of the impact of a communication on the receiver, the content of the message is worth about 20% of the communication, while the relationship level is responsible for 80%. The relationship message always overrides the content: you cannot lie at a relationship level. What you are really feeling always comes through, and when what you say with your words doesn't match the relationship message, people will respond to the relationship message. … We are impacting others all the time with what we believe about self, other and the world… … Thoughts and beliefs such as these are not neutral, dormant, sitting by themselves on an island inside my head. They are active as hell - or heaven. These are the thoughts and beliefs that I brought … before I met you. They are eager to prove themselves. 11. The difficulties we experience in life, which are ultimately relationship difficulties, are because of what we hold in the basement of our psyches. If our psyche is metaphorically a house, the basement is the place where we hide our fears and vulnerabilities. We all have fears in the basement about not being good enough, being inadequate, unlovable, and so on, but we rarely reveal these fears. Instead, we hide, pretend and defend, and that is ultimately what gets us into trouble. 12. …it is impossible to get out of childhood without developing a basement to some degree. This isn’t because of bad parenting, it is simply because of how we develop as human beings: we do not have the ability to understand nuances and context until adulthood. If we accept this, then we can proceed with the task of adulthood, reclaiming self from the basement in an integrated fashion, so what we know to be true matches what we feel to be true. That is what we can do to prevent the horrific stories from replaying in the next generation. 13. What is really happening as we wander obliviously through our daily lives is that something or someone triggers our underlying Suspicion of Self (that we are unlovable, not good enough and so on) and we don our armour to protect ourselves, attacking the thing that triggered our old, historic fear. We mistake the person knocking on the door to the basement for the one who put us there. However, that isn’t how it feels; it feels as if him or her or this or that is causing our upset rather than simply triggering it. … We fear that if we let that aspect of self be revealed, we will be rejected. To prevent that outcome, we consciously or unconsciously do what it takes to push people away. 14. How we hide, pretend, defend, and offend in all our relationships is key to what we end up experiencing. 15. … busyness (has) a hidden agenda: it allows (us) to focus on “what to do” and avoid what (we) are feeling. 16. … we set up people around us to become the very thing we are trying to get away from in our past. Because of what we are hanging on to in our basement, we are wired for fear and defence. We are hyper alert for evidence that what happened back then is happening again. In essence, we see what we are looking for. It is as if those fear-based beliefs are written on the lenses of our glasses, and as we look through them we latch on to what agrees and screen out what doesn’t. … We are looking out through the lenses of our suspicion of self (that we are unlovable, not good enough etc.). We are hot-wired from the basement to react with our strategies and defences. How we respond then invites the very thing we are trying to avoid. 17. We are not so much perceiving reality as projecting our own version of it, seeking to prove our own fear-based beliefs. Our defences create the very thing we are defending against. Our SOSs (suspicions of self) were made up in relationship with another person and must be corrected in connection with another person. We cannot heal alone. … 18. The waves we create with what we upload into our connecting relationship lines or system do not just go out. They return to us a perception of the world in front of us in such a way that it reinforces whatever we already believe about self, other and the world. 19. Have you ever achieved some goal you set for yourself and then wondered “Is this all there is?” Because we hold these suspicions of self, we end up resisting the very thing we want the most, even when it lands right on our doorstep. We do not allow the good things we have in our lives to enter because we don’t feel worthy of them. … In order to address what is in the basement, we must stop the harmful (strategic - masks & armours - and defensive) behaviours we engage in. When we do that, what is hiding in our basement will make itself apparent. Opening up requires opening the door to the basement, where this hurting aspect of our authentic self resides. We are frightened of being vulnerable because we are convinced that what we made up about ourselves is true. It is not! … When we are brave enough to risk being seen, fully and deeply seen, then the good stuff can go to where we need it the most. 20. Throughout the history of your family, people have experienced losses and hardship and have developed ways to cope with these losses. … the family develops a strategy for survival on the foundation of loss, which (out of the best of intentions) is then transmitted to the next generation. … The difficulty in this is that when you are set up to make up for someone else’s loss in the family system, you will carry a weight of expectation, of dreams unfulfilled, that isn’t actually yours to carry. You will be subtly or overtly directed away from things that might be more authentic for you and directed towards things others want for you or expect of you. Not only might this contribute to your own loss (because you sacrifice doing what you want), but you might not even know what you want because you have become more attuned to what is expected. … When a family teaches a strategy that is founded on loss, it also transmits the anxiety, fear and unprocessed grief around the loss. The person receiving the directive might know nothing about what happened but still feel the anxiety. 21. We actually have two related fears about allowing someone close to our basements. One is the obvious: we don’t want anyone to see who we fear we are because if they do, we fear we will be abandoned, rejected, punished, or found lacking in some way (just like when …). We also fear allowing someone power, allowing someone to be important. In our attempts to avoid letting someone have power, we withhold our love. We refuse to give because we don’t want what we give to make us vulnerable. This is a really important thing to realize: we are not only trying to hide, we also actively hold back from contributing positive feelings and giving ourselves fully to our relationships. We are just as frightened of the good as we are of the bad. If it gets too good, we fear losing it, and we would rather just have it be mediocre or even bad, believing that if we don’t let it be too good we won’t feel the pain of loss. The fear of loss comes from our personal experience around what happened when someone was important, and from the legacy of loss in our family. The above excerpts are from the first few chapters. Read the book to understand and escape the tyranny of the trap of living life from the default limiting self into freedom, authenticity, wholeness and joyous connection.
When that happens, you will find the courage not only to lead your business from good to great; but also to have loving harmonious relationships at work and at home, happy responsible kids, lots of nourishing nurturing me-time, while making a difference and increasing your impact in the world. Love, Jyoti.  Leadership is a journey, not a destination. It is a way of being, not a place to go to. You don't become a Leader by moving into a role in an organization. By role, you may be a Leader and yet not know how to lead. By role, you may not be a Leader and yet be powerfully leading the business function within your influence from good to great. Leadership is an inner journey of personal evolution from good to great that results in you transforming your environment (personal, professional, social) from good to great. It is a journey over 5 stages. We iteratively move forward by focussing on key skills at each stage involving all the four bodies of the Being (physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual). I find it useful to call the stages Gears as you cannot force your way to Gear 5 without immersing yourself in the learnings of the previous gears, as in a manual car. 1. Leadership Skill: In Gear 1, we learn to 10X what we tell others, drawing power from giving unconditional love to ourselves and relating to our own self as extraordinary. 2. Nurturing Skill: In Gear 2, we learn to unconditionally give our love to all beings and relate to others as extraordinary. 3. Coaching Skill: In Gear 3, we realize the futility of talking from where we are and learn to communicate while being in the world of others by learning to coach. Rich is a master coach. He has beautifully put together a comprehensive Deep-Coaching checklist. I am grateful to have been coached by him for nearly a year. I still look up to him and continually learn from what he puts out in the world in the form of his writings to forward my own journey as a coach, even as I have moved to another coach to deepen my experience of living and giving. I have enclosed his checklist to support you to learn to coach to be a successful leader / prosperous entrepreneur / an effective parent. How can you live the learnings from this checklist moment by moment to shift to Gear 3? 4. Integration: In Gear 4, all the above skills get integrated and a Leader is born. 5. Being: In Gear 5, you become these skills and these skills become you. A Master is born. Though it should not come as a surprise, a smile escapes me to see that it always does come as a surprise to my clients that as they work on the inside to shift from one Gear to the next, all areas of their life (work, finances, relationships, kids, health, making a difference) simultaneously move forward. When you eat food, you don't expect to get energy only to work or only to drive or only to read a book. Wishing you the joy of the journey. Love, Jyoti. 
What Do We Need to Realize Our Greatest Dreams in Deepest Communion with Our Highest Self?31/8/2017  Here’s what we need. Of course, as I always say, mine is a view from a point. Walk to this point and choose to stay there, only if it serves you to take powerful, effective actions to create unimaginable, impossible, magical outcomes that are authentically yours. A. You need someone
Assess every guru, coach, mentor, guide or a teacher on the above parameters; before giving them the right to be your guru, coach, mentor, guide or a teacher. A good question here would be – Why does one need someone outside of our self? Why does one need a guru, coach, mentor, guide or a teacher? There are many reasons but the most important is that we cannot see our own blind spots. Growth is available to us only in continuous uncovering of our blind spots as only that allows us to take powerful effective actions effortlessly, which is not available to us before the uncovering. Check in with yourself on a scale of 0 to 10 if you have an Inner Knowing if the coach is meant to be your coach. Even if the coach is 9.9999 on 10, don’t take them on because a coach is a channel of your transformation and growth. You will pull through that channel, whatever you need on your Hero’s Journey from good to great to realize your dreams only if you have a 10 on 10 Inner Knowing about them being your coach. Trust your Inner Wisdom, your Inner Knowing to guide you to your coach. With a less than 10 on 10 belief in your coach, you will not be able to fully receive from the channel that the coach is and it would become an ineffective relationship. If you are not a Hell Yes about a coach, just be a Hell No and walk away. A coach is an important part of our Hero’s journey, our Good to Great journey to realize our greatest dreams in deepest communion with our highest self and have it all because the coach is our truth-teller, way-shower, space holder for our greatness, blind-spot mirror, doubler of our thoughts and feelings, unshakeable believer, unconditional nurturer, wind beneath our wings for us to fly high in the vast sky of our limitless possibilities. B. You need to be – You need to be committed to realize your greatest dreams in deepest communion with your highest self. C. You need to do – You need to take action every single day, action that accelerates you on the path of fulfilling your intentions and realizing your dreams. D. You need to have – an intense burning desire to live your Greatest Life. You need to have an impossible, unimaginable, crazy Dream that brings stars to your eyes, a song on your lips, dance to your feet, joy in your heart, peace to your mind, love in your soul and yet, it scares you a wee bit too otherwise the dream is not big enough. The size of your dream limits the size of your life, limits the growth available to you this lifetime, limits the potential you will realize this lifetime, limits the positive impact you will create and therefore, limits how happy and fulfilled you are. E. You need to surround yourself with people who are on the path to their Highest Self, who are on their own Hero's journey from Good to Great because you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. When you can cause all the above five to come together, you will find yourself living in the expression of your Light, your Genius. Wishing you aliveness, deep fulfilment and joyous freedom of experiencing and living in the expression of your undeniable Greatness this lifetime. Loving you, j. Edited on: 2-Aug-24 |
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