Why Not "Why"?

If you'd been hypnotized in a nightclub act to do something silly afterward at the hypnotist's command, would you then ask, "Why am I clucking like a chicken?" No. You've volunteered to let someone make strong suggestions about your behavior.

As a child you were even more suggestible. Not only did you learn what was expected, you also learned how to maintain that trance. As an adult, your conscious mind and unconscious programming work together to keep the suggestions operating. Check it out for yourself. How many times a day do you say to yourself, "Don't be rude," or "Look out for yourself, nobody else is going to," or "__________" (fill in the blank for yourself). 

Does this mean you have to like the programming? No. You may consciously feel the urge to change, or you may have headaches, or tense shoulders, or acid indigestion, or depression. Something tells you this isn't who you want to be. These are wake-up calls--your attempt to snap your fingers and break the trance. 

You could spend the next few years exploring why you have the patterns you have. Or you could simply accept that you've been in a trance and ask how? How does my trance operate? When you observe this closely, you'll know how to break the pattern. It's not a surprise that we associate "being chicken" with powerlessness. But notice the implied meaning of "free-range chicken." You, too, can range free.

More in my Self-Coaching Workbook.

The Real Deal

Just as actors with a good director can portray a role that's completely believable to the audience, all of us have developed self-images to fulfill the roles expected of us as children, resulting in habitual, patterned behavior.

Although you may not be conscious of exactly how that happened, you were programmed as surely as if someone said, "Act this way and you will be accepted/ loved/ admired/ protected/ supported/ (add your own word)."

Furthermore, we all want to win the Oscar, so we've learned to interact with others in ways that reinforce the patterns and maintain the image.

To find the real you, the first and most basic practice is neutral self-observation. If you were an experienced birdwatcher you would want to identify particular birds, to know about their habitat, habits, plumage, and shapes. You would not be looking through binoculars and thinking, "Oh no! Those swallows aren't migrating in a perfect V."

A bird is a bird; a pattern is a pattern. Engage your curiosity instead of self-criticism.

More in Out of the Box Self-Coaching Workbook.

A Cool Re-Organization Nudges Your Memory

As a teacher or a learner, you know the power of acronyms for meaning and memory. Acronyms condense highly useful information in a way that's easy to remember.

I wondered if the word ACRONYM itself is an acronym, and found a site where readers had some fun, as in the borrowed title to this blog entry. But apparently the word acronym is not officially an acronym.

In modern times we've become accustomed to HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and LOL (Laughing Out Loud), as well as the maddening media trend (dare I call this MMT?) represented by BFF (Best Female Friend).

These examples don't intimate content, although we've endowed with meaning such acronyms as CEO (Chief Executive Officer), SCUBA (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus), and LASER (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation).

Even more powerful are acronyms that represent a system of ideas and also carry a specific meaning. AWE is the acronym I've coined to represent clients' potentially awesome progress (follow the links for examples):

1. Awareness of your unique patterns.
2. Watching, without judgment, how those patterns operate.
3. Experimenting with pattern breaking until your unwanted beliefs and behaviors drop away.