Gail Cowan

It’s November 20. Which means, friends, that we are just on the verge of holiday madness.

Every year, just before Thanksgiving, I swear that I am going to Martha Stewart the heck out of the last five weeks of the year. Not in a manic, crazy, perfectionist way. But in a “how can I slow down and exercise the creative and fun and expressive part of myself these holidays?” manner.

And so I plan to make adorable turkey-shaped cupcakes with my son, a recent baking convert. And to order my Thanksgiving meal with appreciation for the food we will eat and the decorative table it will sit on. I envision buying candles that will carry the scent of the holidays throughout our cozy apartment. Of decorating the tree with our three little ones, helping them tie ornaments on the branches while we listen to Christmas carols.

I mean so well. I mean to recreate the feeling I get when I read one of Martha’s magazines – the way the images seduce my inner artist. The imagined feeling of satisfaction I will get from nurturing coziness.

And then every year, on a random Monday or Tuesday in the weeks following Thanksgiving, I lose my mind.

This is not a slow process: I go from a feeling of peace and satisfaction to feeling as though a train has run over me.

I used to believe that it primarily had something to do with the sheer number of requests and tasks that pile up in my head: gift cards for teachers, presents for kids who keep changing their lists for Santa, sign-up sheets for winter break camp, remembering to tip the professionals in my life who make things so much easier.

But lately I’ve realized that these things, while more intense and concentrated than during the rest of the year, are just tasks. And I can handle tasks. Put together, they are not the mountain I believe them to be.

I’ve begun to think instead about where the stress really originates for me. I have a theory and an antidote that I’m going to try out this year. If it resonates, I invite you to join me.

It goes something like this:

The holidays are lovely and festive, yes.

They are also shrouded in a blanket of expectation and demand that we not take care of ourselves. But rather, that we care for others: through giving, giving, giving.

And while I appreciate the sentiment, lately I have been questioning the sanity of jamming such an intense period of GIVING into five weeks at the end of the year – especially when these are weeks during which so many among us are triggered by complicated feelings of loss and loneliness and grief in our own ways.

I can’t speak for us all, of course. I can only say that this year, the holidays bring with them a profound sense of loss and sadness for me. It’s the result of my own processing of childhood grief that has led to my silence in your inbox this year. To pulling away from activity and leaning into myself. I have had to step away from life a bit to put on my own oxygen mask.

I know I can’t be alone. So many among us, in different ways, experience sadness at the holidays. Loss of past days, relationships, life. In many different forms. It can even be as simple as not being able to recreate the holidays of your own childhood. There is loss in that too.

This is not to say that there isn’t also tremendous joy.

But it is to say that, instead of a focus on giving and festivity, I wonder if we wouldn’t be better served by thinking about creating more space for ALL the feelings that the holidays bring – happiness, joy, sadness, grief, fatigue.

Instead of deciding that we are going to ramp up and meet the joy of the season, we can decide that we are going to BE with ourselves through whatever comes up. And create spaces in which we can ride the waves.

Riding the waves is different than a determined fixation on joy.

I also think it helps no one if we become manic about giving because of some manufactured idea about what the holidays are.

The truth is that giving and receiving – in equal measure – is always important, 365 days a year. It’s how we maintain balance and a loving ecosystem throughout life.

So I invite you to join me – in putting on your own oxygen mask this holiday season, in committing to maintaining a loving relationship with yourself, no matter what is swirling around us. And in deciding that we can decide as we go.

And if you are someone struggling with loss or grief this year, know that I’m with you, I love you, and I support you in doing whatever you need. Even if it means hugging your December copy of Martha Stewart Living one day and cursing it the next. Which actually, just might be the very definition of sanity.

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Gail Cowan Coaching

www.gailcowan.com

To sign up for a free phone consultation and receive personal advice on how to stay with yourself this holiday season, visit www.gailcowan.com/schedule.

HOME | Gail Cowan Coaching Gail Cowan | Life Coach. Life is beautiful. And messy. Let's do this together.

Quick: think about the most difficult person in your life right now. You know, the one you can’t stop picking random fights with in your head. The one you’d like to provide with very specific instructions about how they need to change RIGHT NOW.

Could be a co-worker (it’s often a co-worker), a family member (it’s even more often a family member), a friend, or an acquaintance you see every now and again who really gets under your skin.

Doesn’t matter, just pick the one that sticks to you the most.

Got it?

Okay, good.

Now I want to talk to you about how to change your relationship with this person without ever saying a single word to them about it.

I’m serious. Stay with me for a minute.

As human beings, we experience conflict with other people all the time. I believe there are three general ways to deal with such conflict:

1. Deal with the problem directly by speaking with the person and talking through differences.

2. Avoid the person and/or any direct conversation about the conflict whatsoever, opting instead for one of the many reactions available at the Coping Mechanisms Buffet: passive aggressive behavior, plain old aggressive behavior, avoidance, substance use, shopping, etc. The options are virtually endless.

When dealing with conflict, most human beings tend to use the buffet strategy. This is because talking to people with whom we’re having conflict is: a) hard and uncomfortable and b) rarely a skill we are taught or witness as children. So, we simply find other ways of dealing.

These ways may work for a while to distract us or make us feel like we have the upper hand. But they do absolutely nothing in the long run to fix the situation itself. And similar to a buffet, such strategies can also leave us feeling uncomfortable and more than a little regretful when all is said and done.

But fear not! There is a third way.

One that involves neither direct communication nor a box of doughnuts.

It’s like a Jedi mind trick for difficult people.

Stay with me here.

I’ve learned over the years that any interaction between two people brings its own particular energy. To get a sense of what I’m talking about, close your eyes for a second and bring someone in your life to mind. Pick a name, any name.

How does your body feel when you think about this person?

Now think about a few other people in your life and repeat the exercise for each.

I’m guessing that the feelings were different for each person. Perhaps you tensed up thinking about person A, while your body went all relaxin’-on-the-beach-with-a-good-book for person B.

That’s energy!

As a helpful reminder, I do absolutely no scientific research for my blogs because I don’t want to. But I can say with some certainty that I’m pretty sure science has been and continues to bear evidence of the energy that exists between any two living (and sometimes non-living) things. You know, neurons, synapses, quantum physics, whatever.

Relationships and people are no different.

With this idea in mind, we can choose a new path when things get a bit difficult on the relationship side.

We can delve more deeply into this energy and see whether releasing a little bit of it from our side helps to alter the overall energy of the situation.

For example. A co-worker – we’ll call her Judy – likes to come into your office every afternoon and sit for 30 minutes to tell you all about her health problems and complain about the lack of work ethic in the office while you sit there screaming about irony inside your head.

We’ve all had a Judy, haven’t we?

As you continue to remain seated and say nothing, a massive resentment begins to take shape as a giant ball of nerves in your stomach.

This, again, is energy.

And we can do something about it without ever telling Judy the cold, hard truth of the situation. Hurray!

Instead of stewing endlessly and overdosing on Tums, try this:

1. Sit quietly for a moment and breathe. (Previous readers will recognize this as an optional step. If it makes you uncomfortable, skip it.)

2. Bring “Judy” (i.e., any person you are struggling with) to mind.

3. Ask yourself what belief is keeping you from kicking Judy to the curb each afternoon. (e.g., I can’t be rude, I am afraid of conflict). Identify where this feeling lives in your body (e.g., My stomach feels upset, there is a lump in my throat.) And then just sit with that feeling for a moment.

4. Say to yourself “THIS is what needs healing, not Judy’s attitude.” (note: Judy’s attitude may in fact need a major adjustment, but we’re going to stick with what we can control.)

5. Ask this feeling what it needs in order to heal. Perhaps it needs to feel safe. Maybe it needs comfort. Or perhaps it just needs a little attention from you. Try to provide yourself with that thing.

6. Repeat this exercise as often as possible and see what happens.

Over time, in my own life, this exercise has had almost miraculous effects. That’s because the energy that exists between two people can only exist if both parties choose to engage in it.

As I have learned to sit with the feelings of discomfort that a given person brings out in me – anger, anxiety, etc. – and truly listen to it, my relationship with the other person has changed on its own.

A difficult person I would see everywhere disappeared from my path. I simply stopped thinking about the family member I couldn’t stop picking mental fights with. And Judy moved down the hall to a co-worker who needs to do her own energy work.

Give it a try and let me know what happens. You might even find that, after doing this exercise for a bit, you’re able to have hard conversations or speak up.

But at the very least, you’ll be sitting and listening to your feelings. Which is usually preferable to overdoing it at the buffet.

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Gail Cowan Coaching

www.gailcowan.com

To sign up for a free phone consultation and receive personal advice on how to become a Jedi, visit www.gailcowan.com/schedule.

Holiday stress and I have a terrible, yet consistent relationship: like two people who are clearly the wrong match but just can’t seem to quit each other, annoying everyone with their bickering and co-dependency.

Every freakin’ December, I swear I will be calm and collected and do only the things I want to do. I promise to say no to the pressure of the season and yes to feeling merry, bright, and peaceful.

And each year, this lasts about 1.5 days until I find myself on the couch, immobilized and feeling as though a Mack truck carrying the entire holiday section at Target has run over me. (Regular readers may be concerned about the other dysfunctional relationship I have in my life, which is my ongoing dependency on Target, but that is for another blog. I can only address so much on any given day.)

This year, my holiday overwhelm arrived on Tuesday. I began spinning like a top, unsure how to do everything that needs to be done. How to get through another season that boasts the tagline “Hap-Happiest Time of the Year” while feeling like there is not enough of anything – money, time, sleep, etc. – to sustain me.

There has to be a different way.

Which is what I want to share with you today.

Listen, I can’t promise that reading this will make you feel less stressed and stop you from sticking your face in a box of Christmas fudge every night. So, instead, let’s consider this the beginning of a conversation that we have with ourselves and each other. In other words, let’s set the bar low, which is something we can all get behind.

I’m working this out as I go, as I’m sure you are. But here are the steps that came to me when I sat and asked my soul for the way out of this madness.

1. Sit and breathe for a second. If this makes you roll your eyes, then sit there and roll your eyes. That’s cool too. I love a good side eye.

2. Realize that this time of year, your to-do list becomes a magnet for strays. If you’re like me, all of sudden, every task you’ve ever needed to do will find its way onto your list and ALL of it will feel really urgent.

Step one is sitting down with your list and dividing it into two sections:

a. Stuff that actually does need to happen before the end of the year.
b. Everything else.

Voila! You’ve likely just magically cut your list by about 70%!

With new list in hand, you’ll be able to focus on tasks like buying gift cards for teachers, making cookies for friends, stopping by the Dollar Store to purchase a bobble-head for the White Elephant gift exchange at work, and causing semi-permanent damage to the nerves in your hand by addressing 150 holiday cards.

You’ll be able to tackle these tasks because you will no longer also be focused on organizing every digital photo you’ve ever taken, duplicating house keys for a reason that is not well-defined, and buying an iPass for your second car, which you have no plans to take on a toll road until at least March 2018.

3. Examine the list of things that need to get done before the end of the year, and ask yourself which you are doing from of a sense of obligation and/or “I’d like to be that type of person” reasoning. Get rid of these tasks immediately.

If you’re able to do this, stop reading this blog. You need to be teaching ME.

On the other hand, if you’re like the rest of us, being asked to “simply” get rid of such tasks may feel like I’m asking you to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.

In this case, the task becomes simply noting which items you are doing from a sense of “should.” You have my full permission to still do those things, but beginning to note the difference between things that give you real joy and those you do because you’re afraid of what will happen if you don’t is real progress. It’s the start of honesty with yourself, which changes absolutely everything over time.

4. For the tasks that remain on your list, ask for help in getting them done: from your partner, your kids, your friends, your mom. If you’ve got an iron grip on your list (cough) and don’t like to share, that’s cool. Again, just note your reaction and if you’re able, get curious about why that is. Let it all be okay.

5. The last – and most important step: ask yourself what it is that would truly make you happy this time of year. What would give you a sense of meaning?

When I did this, I realized that what I really want is to do nothing. No part of me wants to run around seeing zoo lights, take the kids to see Santa, or even hang the stockings. Which I haven’t done yet.

What I DO want to do is be more present with my family, sitting with them at the end of the day and tapping into the calm and joy that the season really can bring. It feels like the sweetest relief to realize that, for me at this moment, enjoying peaceful holiday energy has absolutely nothing to do with outside activities. I can just allow it to be.

For you, it may be different. Your heart may actually be screaming with joy for zoo lights, ice skating, decorating your house until no surface is left untouched. Or you may wish to tune it all out and acknowledge the pain you feel at this time of year. I don’t know what it is for you, but you do.

The trick, as always, is to be honest with ourselves about where we are. And then see whether we’re able to use this wisdom to make even the smallest change that will allow us to grow closer to peace. Which for me, is the whole point of the holidays after all.

So that’s it.

I’d love to hear what works for you and doesn’t.

Wishing you a holiday that brings greater self-knowledge and peace, with permission to be human. We’ve got this.

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To sign up for a free phone consultation and receive personal advice on how to survive the holiday season, visit www.gailcowan.com/schedule.

Gail Cowan Coaching - www.gailcowan.com

One of the questions I’m asked most often is how to maintain one’s center and calm in the midst of parenting.

My answer is: I’m not entirely sure we’re meant to.

(Which may or may not be a cop-out on my part. I’m always open to that reality.)

But here’s what I do know: in the quest for peace and centeredness, it is far too tempting to create an end goal of eternal Zen – a state we are meant to achieve where nothing, not anything, can throw us off our game.

Which is sort of the opposite of why we are here as human beings, really.

The fastest way to see how spectacularly we fail at this ideal is to leave a yoga class with this feeling of Zen and step right into a situation where little ones are screaming in our faces, throwing food at us, demanding ridiculous things like a new toy, some more candy, dinner.

In these daily moments, we see how little we are actually in control of our centeredness.

Which may seem like a bad thing at first glance.

I mean, aren’t we the adults? Shouldn’t we have the upper hand?

Well, yes and no.

I think one of the most central challenges to modern parenting is what I label as my generation’s “in-between-ness”: we are certain that a new, more democratic way of parenting makes sense – these kids today almost demand it and such a way of parenting feels good down to our core.

And yet, our wiring from the past is anything but democratic. Most of us were raised in the “kids are seen but not heard” and “spare the rod, spoil the child” era – or at least by parents who grew up with such ideals.

We were brought up by parents who ruled with the “what I say goes” philosophy.

If we did wrong, we were punished.

Questions about feelings and reasons for engaging in said behavior were beside the point.

As a result, many of us ended up in therapy to connect with our feelings and discomfort with having had parents who were unable to really see us or engage with our emotions. If we haven’t been to therapy, at the very least we have been part of a culture exploration about how our childhoods have affected our way of being in the world.

This self-exploration has largely been a good thing: we have emerged understanding ourselves and the world better, with more knowledge about why we behave in ways that cause us pain and are no longer self-serving.

And we began questioning how we want to parent similarly – and differently – than our parents.

We decided that we wanted to listen to our children more. To make space for them to say, “I’m frustrated” or “I’m tired” or “I really, really need this thing.” And to make these feelings ok.

We decided to admit when we were wrong. Or at least to try to. To see parenting as more of a collective venture: we are ultimately responsible for running the ship and setting boundaries, but everyone on board gets a bit more of a say. Or at least we try to.

With us on this journey are our children, who help us along with their almost uncanny ability to call us on the crap that isn’t working. (I mean seriously, have you noticed?)

It’s been fascinating to engage in my own journey of parenting on this front and to watch my peers do the same.
I’m constantly impressed by our ability to live more in the gray zone than our parents did – to openly admit we don’t have all the answers and to struggle with the hard things.

To not think we always know better than our children do. And to raise little ones who feel like they have a right to their feelings, as messy as that can get sometimes.

But I’m also seeing a huge challenge: while we have one foot in this new parenting framework, the other foot is planted firmly in the past.

As evidenced by the voices in our heads.

We say “yes” more to the small things in order to avoid power struggles, which we know are a waste of time anyway. We say “yes” to these things when the wisest part of us knows that it is just fine to do so. No harm, no foul regarding an extra cookie at dinner or an extra 30 minutes of screen time, or the fact that a little one just screamed at us but we sense he or she is really just tired. So we let these things go.

Which feels lovely and right and peaceful.

Until.

Until that old voice in our head, the one so firmly rooted in our own childhoods, screams at us: “What are you DOING? You’re going to let him have his way? How is he ever going to understand the word NO??!! You’ll raise a spoiled child, and it will be all your fault when really bad things happen as a result.”

We hear this endless internal nagging as the voices of our own parents (sometimes reinforced in real time, but not always) and a culture that is afraid of what a new – still largely undefined –way of parenting will look like.

This fear leads us to focus on the results of helicopter parenting and doing too much for children and overindulging them. On the horror stories about how we are failing miserably as parents. About how parents today are simply the worst.

Most of us can agree that setting too few boundaries and over-indulging our children doesn’t create great outcomes.

But where is the cultural dialogue about how critical it is to listen to our children and allow them to have their emotions? About how much this matters in a world full of violence toward self and others too often perpetuated in the name of loneliness and disconnection? And about how well so many of us are doing on this front?

Why are we not celebrating this in ourselves and in each other?

We get dragged down by these internal voices and live in a constant state of self-judgment about our parenting.

Worrying that we are recreating the loneliness and shame so many of us felt as children, when in fact we are doing anything but.

So back to the question of whether we can always maintain our center as we parent.

Well, no, of course not.

For one thing, parenting involves sharing your space with other people who are, for a large part of their residency, incredibly needy, often unable to control their emotions, unhelpful, and generally destructive. These facts alone would probably make Gandhi a bit cranky at times.

But perhaps more importantly, like any relationship, the child-parent connection is meant to help us grow. Growth is never pretty and peaceful – it always involves chaos. Without even realizing it, we make the beautiful choice to engage in chaos with our children in the name of growth.

As we do, we teach our kids something far more valuable than staying in our center like some Buddha-like statue made of stone. We teach them how to participate in the inevitable process of change: how to honor it and how to manage our emotions and ourselves in the middle of it.

We teach them that life is not about constantly staying in our center, but about remembering to return on a daily basis, no matter what is happening.

This process is valuable for parents, but of course really applies to all humans everywhere.

Today, I’m wishing you a bit of chaos, the ability to see your growth in it, and a return to center as you are able. We’ve got this.

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Gail Cowan Coaching

www.gailcowan.com

To sign up for a free phone consultation and receive personal advice on how to find your center in the uncentered-ness of it all, visit www.gailcowan.com/schedule.

This is a hard time to be human.

Well, technically, it has always been kinda hard to be human (see: Black Plague, WWII, the Crusades, etc.).

But right now is a uniquely challenging time to be human.

We’ve never been so connected and yet so isolated – from each other, from communities that can support us, and, probably most importantly, from ourselves.

In the wake of horrible events like Las Vegas or Charlottesville or countless others, our common practice has become to quickly put a stake in the ground about what we are against.

We pick a side or a viewpoint, choose the enemy, and begin railing against the other.

Facebook and other social media platforms have become ground zero for this kind of behavior.

This is not to say that taking action around policy issues isn’t important. It is to say, though, that the level of animosity we evoke as we do so may, in fact, be far more destructive than what politicians are or are not doing in Washington.

Hating one another is neither taking action nor social justice. And it is imperative that we become clear about this.

The image that comes to mind for me so often these days is a burning building in which the inhabitants stand around hurling insults instead of figuring out how to save themselves and each other.

If this image doesn’t make sense to you, note the irony of decrying the deaths of 50+ people who were likely of various political persuasions by screaming at/hating someone of a different political persuasion than yourself.

At some point, we have to ask the question about how we, as individuals, are valuing human life.

Perhaps most importantly, we need to realize that a life spent mostly opposing things is not sustainable. The costs of such “against-ness” to a human system—and to each other—are simply too high.

In my work as a life coach, I often talk to people who are clear that this way of being is not cutting it for them anymore.

The challenge, though, is that they haven’t the slightest idea of what to replace it with.

So many of us know that this can’t go on.

But the reason it continues to is that we have lost our faith in just about everything.

We have so little faith in each other as human beings.

Little to no trust in our politicians or system of government.

Greatly diminishing faith in the planet to sustain us anymore.

Declining faith in our places of worship.

And, perhaps worst of all, so very little faith in our own selves.

One of the practices in which I’ve been engaging lately when I feel despair is to examine my own lack of faith.

Turning to some form of grace when the world is hard can be the difference between sinking into a deep depression and being able to carry on. For some of us, this comes from religion or spirituality.

But it doesn’t necessarily have to.

Even for the atheists among us, a belief in community or nature or making the most of our time here can be enough to pull us through. But it’s a question of where we focus our time and energy.

My practice on the darkest of days begins with making a list of where I find faith in life and in the human spirit.

Places, both big and small, where I can glimpse hope in humanity: the clerk at a grocery store who greets me warmly, the friend who offers to help with our impending move; pieces of stories from Las Vegas and Charlottesville about people jumping in to help strangers, no questions asked.

These are the pieces upon which I choose to focus. Sometimes just making this list and deciding to cultivate it can bring hope to a horrible week.

On days when this does not seem to be enough and I find myself pushing away the impulse to find the nearest “other” and begin an argument about X, Y, or Z, I engage in a more radical practice: I turn inward and ask the biggest question of all: “How much faith do I have in myself?”

Because I continue to believe that one of the most important ways to heal the painful and destructive divide we see all around us is to first heal the painful and destructive divide within.

The dynamics are simple:

When an inner divide exists, we look for places outside us to validate the divide and keep us from exploring painful inner territory.

Similarly, when wholeness and peace among all parts of ourselves exists inside, we cannot help but cultivate that externally.

For me, there is not—and will never be—a greater form of activism.

Here’s how it works:

On days when I am itching to pick a fight, if I stop and turn inward instead, I will always find that I am divided against myself: I’m angry about having told myself I’ll go to the gym and then once again going back on that promise. Or I’m calling myself names for not having done more work on my business. Or upset for yelling at my kids (again).

Or, as is the case most often, I simply cannot bear to let myself feel fear or grief and let it move through me.

In these moments, I am lacking faith in myself that I can handle being human. I am unable to get quiet and hear myself speak or know that I can handle deep and difficult emotions. I become my own worst enemy.

And when this happens, I immediately begin looking for an “other.”

Most of the time, this process happens on autopilot.

We log on to Facebook and not two minutes later, become convinced that the devil does exist, his name is Phil from Grand Rapids, MI, and he just commented on our former co-worker’s post about gun control.

Mind you, if Phil had died in Las Vegas, we would be decrying the fact that a really good person had lost his right to live out his days on the planet and go about his business.

Given this, maybe the problem isn’t Phil after all.

Maybe the problem is us and our lack of faith that we – and our fellow human beings – can figure this out.

I remain the eternal optimist. As long as the vast majority of people continue to spring into action and reach across the divide when tragedy strikes, I will believe that we belong to each other.

And I have faith that we will eventually remember to extend this grace to our everyday lives.

Wishing you all peace and at least a few moments this week to step back and explore your own contribution to ending the divide.

And when you do, I’d love to hear about it.

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Sign up for my free weekly newsletter at www.gailcowan.com.

To sign up for a free phone consultation and receive personal advice on how to end the divide and reestablish faith in yourself and the world, visit www.gailcowan.com/schedule.