Two questions:

1) When does helping someone become self-serving or controlling?

2) When does asking for help become making someone else responsible for your happiness?

In therapy

If a client becomes overly dependent or shows signs of transference (diverting their buried anger etc onto the person helping them), there are established guidelines to follow. Sometimes this means referring the client on, other times it means trying a different approach. This professional detachment and objectivity create the conditions that allow the client to work on his issue - all he has to do is attend (and do the homework).

The therapeutic/coaching relationship is essentially a business partnership and comes with empathy, objectivity and focus built-in. It has to because that’s what you pay for. It’s a safe environment and the therapist is separate from your real world.

The boundaries are clear.

In the real world

In the real world - our homes and offices - the boundaries are not so clear. The overlaps in roles, relationships and expectations can be confusing, messing with our personal identity and perhaps even harming the person we are helping… or seeking help from.

Here are three examples of help-related behaviours that commonly lead to relationship breakdowns or poor self-image.

Making all major decisions for your child: It feels like you are helping him, but long-term his self-worth and self-belief is at stake.  He is missing out on learning to think for himself, to correct mistakes and to take responsibility for the consequences of his decisions. He may be learning to cast blame instead. Interacting with him without harsh judgements or ultimatums will help him explore with support. Create boundaries that encourage responsibility and personal development.

Playing on an illness: Sometimes a call for help becomes a reliance on being labelled as an “illness” or “condition”. Almost as if you’ve given yourself permission to stay unwell, it becomes difficult or unappealing to leverage the help you receive. The mind/body connection means that it’s worth speaking to a doctor or therapist if you find this happening. This is a hard step to take but important because often, the person doesn’t recognise he is risking:

1. Mentally keeping himself in a weak, incapacitated condition. Recovery is slow and tedious and further complications may develop if there is a subconscious desire to stay ill - perhaps to hold someone’s attention or some other secondary gain.
2. A one-track record playing inside his own head, strengthening his belief that he won’t recover. He complains a lot and may become manipulative and bitter.
3. Isolating himself or the people he loves.

Fuelling a demon: He urgently needs to lose weight but guilt-trips her into late night trips to the store for him. She does it for a quiet life and because she loves him. He blames her for his continuing obesity. He’s asking for help (buying excess food) because it means he can offload responsibility for his poor health. She’s helping (buying excess food) because she’s afraid he’ll leave her. They are both making each other’s life a continuously stressful experience.

His fear of taking responsibility is greater than his desire to reach a healthy weight or to be respectful to her. Her fear of being alone allows her to accept his resentment and blame. They’ve both tapped into a need in each other that they are fulfilling in a way that harms.  In real life, at least one of these people needs to be able to see what they are doing. Recognising their own part in the problem allows the opportunity to at least start making small changes in their own behaviour.

Temporary crutches

When you break a leg, they give you a crutch to use to help support you while your leg mends. After a while, they tell you to ease off the crutch so that your weak leg can build its own strength.

This works in relationships too. Help is assistance is support. It’s not replacement.

1) If you’re doing the helping, remember you are a crutch. If the person you are helping uses your support all the time, their own ability to stand will weaken.

2) If you’re asking for help, remember it’s up to you to use the crutch in a way that helps you to get stronger in that area. Like all things on loan, if it’s treated with respect and returned, it’ll always be on hand if you need to borrow it again.

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image: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Dippes
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I’m in Dubai where there is much construction taking place. The construction workers work hard all day long in 40 degree heat. At lunchtime, they lie in the shade to rest.

Looking out from my 17th floor balcony, I’m feeling quite content. The internet connection is stable, the room is comfortable, my work is all laid out on the desk and I’m just where I want to be.

As I look out, my attention is caught by a man lying in the shade. He is uniformed head-to-toe in blue like all the other construction workers and there is a shoe beside him. He has one leg stretched out. The other leg is missing. There is just a short, black stump where his right thigh should be.

I’m humbled of course. I’m also in awe of a man who does construction on high-rises with only one leg. How does he climb up and down? I wonder why the stump is thin and black. Is it an implant of some kind? I wonder what his life must be like. My mind weaves an intricate story about his misfortunes and in the background, I’m acutely aware of all my comforts.  I grow increasingly sad at the unfairness of it all.

As I’m about to turn, the man moves. Miraculously, his missing leg appears!! He had been lying with his right leg bent up at the knee. The black “stump” was his sock covered foot. The blue of his trousers had blended so perfectly with the blue of his top and the bird’s-eye angle was such that I had not been able to see this. Now I also see that the one shoe beside him is wide enough to actually be two shoes.

My relief was immediate and I said “Thank you” even though I don’t know who I was thanking… God for not crippling him? Or the man for freeing me from my humbling guilt?

Strangely, there has been a string of events in the last few days where I have been surprised by the reality of something being different to what I had thought. It’s almost as if I am being gently prodded to go slower, be less hasty to put a label on an event, take my time with evaluation.

If I had turned away a second earlier, I’d have spent the day (days probably) pondering this man’s life, creating a story, looking for imagined turning points. Elements of this story would come back in the future to remind me of what I “saw” today.  Instead, I’m full of humility at my own ability to see and run away with things that are not there.

Taking things at face value is of course normal. I saw what I thought I saw - the story I created based on what I thought I saw was however quite remarkable.

Whose face do you see when you take things at face value? In the spirit of the Paradox of Reality, we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.

This is part of a series covering my challenge of learning Arabic in 2 months. I’m using lots of Peak Performance techniques and sharing them along the way. The series is filed in the “Language Challenge” category.

The Holographic Mind

Scientists have shown that different parts of the brain are responsible for different activities. The frontal lobe is responsible for cognition, speech, problem solving and complex motor movements. The temporal lobe is responsible for visual and verbal memory, smell and hearing in different frequencies. And so on.

Subsequent neuro-scientific research into brain plasticity has found that despite this specialisation, there is a certain holographic quality to the brain, whereby if one area is damaged, it is possible to retrain the brain so that other parts of the brain take on that “job function”.  (See references below for further reading).

So, what does this have to do with learning Arabic?

From a broad perspective, it shows that different activities, such as reading, writing and speaking, are processed in different ways and that if you’re not terribly good at something, it’s possible to call in help from other parts of your brain. I suppose in some ways, you could say that ability is a learned response.

There is a lot going on in the brain and most of the time, it happens without us even being aware of it. Your brain helps you raise your arm to put food into your mouth. It helps you to feel outrage when you see an injustice happening. At some point, you trained it to do these things, but you didn’t necessarily do it consciously. Somehow, the brain has enough ways to communicate with all parts of itself that it takes what it experiences in the world through all your senses, and translates it into what you *expect* it to translate it into.

Over-using the mind through habit and repetition

I don’t remember the actual process by which I learnt to read, write and speak my first language. What I do remember is that by the age of 5, I was speaking a mixture of Hindi, Punjabi, Swahili and English and at that age, I had no idea that these were four different languages. My little child brain had taken the information being fed to me from the world around me and translated it into what little child me *expected* it to translate into.

Now, “people” say that adult brains are not as receptive as child brains and that learning a new language is not easy, even impossible, for an adult.

And yes, as we get older, we do over-use parts of our brains to the point that they encroach on the “brain space” for other activities. For example, a postman who has been delivering letters for 40 years will be an excellent reader but he processes what he reads in a different way to a poet who is also an excellent reader and has been writing for 40 years. The postman reads the words “Beechwood Close” and in his minds eye sees a task, a map, a route and immediately starts planning how to incorporate it into his round. The poet reads the words “Beechwood Close” and it becomes a different sensory experience as he creates his own story and emotions around them.

There are no such stories and emotions for the postman and the poet has no map or task in his mind. The areas that their brain considers non-essential (because they are rarely used) have weakened in size.

Because of the holographic and plastic nature of the brain, both the poet and postman can extend their mental reach into the areas that they have “forgotten” about through lack of use. All they need is a will and a way.

Using what you already know to help make what you don’t know something that you do know

I have not studied a language since I was at school. So certain areas of my mind need re-activation.

As a child, I simply took what was in front of me and allowed it to “do it’s thing” in my head. Adults are full of assumptions and presuppositions that kind of limit what they allow themselves to discover. Adults sometimes forget that they have an advantage - they can use their life-experience to tap into past experiences and know-how to make re-activation nice and simple.

Over time we all develop preferred ways of processing information. Identifying these optimum ways of processing information will accelerate my learning because I can concentrate on what I know works. Unlike a child trying to process everything in range, I gain the luxury of strategy and focus.

As you read the rest of this article, remember that your optimum ways of processing information may well be different from mine. As I describe what I am doing, look into yourself to see how you can capitalise on what you already do in order to make a new skill easier to achieve.

Reading

Technically, reading involves recognising shapes and associating a meaning to them. I do not need to know which lobes of my brain are doing this. It would be useful however to know how I am attaching meaning to the shapes I see.

I think of the word “Cat” (in English). With the eyes of my mind, I see a furry, smiley black cat that belongs to a witch. The word “cat” is superimposed on this image and I can spell “cat” by looking at the letters.

I think of the word “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and with the eyes of my mind, I see Mary Poppins dancing around and singing. The word is easy to spell because again, it’s superimposed on this image and I can “see” it.

Now, I think of a word I have trouble spelling. “Stationary”. Or is it “Stationery”?? Bleugh. With the eyes of my mind, I see myself doing a spelling test at a recruitment agency for a Summer job that I don’t want. I’m bored, unhappy and for some reason, my success hinges on this stupid word. And you guessed it, this word is not superimposed on this image. It’s there, but it’s broken up with bits of it all over the “screen” and it’s a struggle to make the pieces fit.

From this, I know that in order to attach a meaning to a (correctly spelt) word, my mind needs to attach it to a “happy” picture. Knowing this, I can now take all these new Arabic words and phrases I am learning and make a conscious effort to attach them to a “happy picture” as I learn them. If I do it the way my mind wants me to do it, there’s a good chance it’ll work beautifully.

So now I find that when I think of an English word e.g. “yoghurt”, my English mind sees a strawberry flavoured Ski yoghurt. My Arabic mind however sees a yoghurt pot on a shelf in Spinney’s, a supermarket in the Sahara Mall in Sharjah. And SUCCESS!, the word superimposed on this image is the Arabic word for yoghurt, written in arabic!! Now, my fluency isn’t all that great yet and I do have to concentrate to spell the word out in Arabic - but the key thing is that it’s there and I CAN see it, read it and spell it.

By the way, my Hindi mind sees my Mum’s home-made yoghurt in a pan in the fridge. Interesting how the same word is represented by different images in the mind depending on the language I’m thinking in.

Try this one for yourself - what happens in your mind when you think about a word to spell? Do you see it the way I do or is it different for you? It can take a few tries to get used to noticing something that usually happens automatically and unconsciously, but stick with it.

Writing

Writing is the process by which your thoughts are made readable. This is a completely different skill-set from Reading.

In order to write, my mind has to:

1. Create the thought
2. Find words to represent that thought
3. Identify the grammatical structure for the sentence
4. Identify the spelling for the word

My vocabulary in Arabic is not quite up to getting past step 2 yet and Arabic grammatical structure is completely different from English. So currently the best way to write is through copying sentences in my tutorial book. And this is fine because what I am getting through this is fluidity and familiarity. My letters are becoming neater (thanks to a tip from a friend who advised me to write the letters as small as possible). I am also thinking about the grammatical structure of what I am copying. The typos in the book don’t help but it makes me happy that I am able to spot them!

Speaking

Speaking is the vocal translation of your thoughts. The steps involved are similar to that in Writing with the practical difference that speaking is more forgiving than writing. I am not studying Arabic to exam standard so I can afford to enjoy the fact that body language can do some of my talking for me. I do need to watch this though in case it makes me lazy. Ensuring I work on my speaking skills every day will help me keep pace with my growing vocabulary.

Speaking in an authentic accent is important to me. Ordinarily, I have an even London accent - but when I am upset, excited or emotional, my Croydon roots show themselves as a distinct South London flavour modifies my voice. This indicates to me that initial exposure to the sound of a language will set the tone of how I speak.

Unfortunately, my tutorial CD’s are atrocious for accent. They are spoken in the stilted, exaggerated way that is common in language CD’s - I’m mimicking these awful accents very well and it’s doing nothing for my street cred.  I am in urgent need for authentic youtubes or online radio etc where I can immerse my brain in the sound of the language. I’d be grateful for suggestions of suitable material online that I can listen to! Preferably the type of accent/style common in the UAE (Dubai).

My Routine - one month into the challenge

It’s now one month since I started my challenge. I know the entire alphabet and have basic vocabulary. I’ve been averaging about 4 hours study a week (plus review time). I’m satisfied with my progress so far but definitely need to step things up a notch now. My standard routine is:

• Reviewing what I learn - flash cards with new words and phrases that I can test myself on throughout the day. I’m training my brain to remember and repetition is a great trainer. Also, I know from having modelled people with excellent memories, that they have a habit (i.e. automatic activity) of thinking about and reviewing what they have learnt or read.
• Maintaining curiosity and interest - Reviewing my goals keeps me focused, especially on sunny days when it would be more fun to go for a bike ride.
• Remembering what I learn - Again, from my modelling work on people with excellent memories for what they read, I know that a fact that is made memorable will become memorable. The people I modelled unconsciously and automatically treat the things they read as items of intense interest (even on subjects that they don’t care about!). Intense interest equals curiosity. Curiosity equals questions. Questions equal analysis of the subject and cross-linkages to existing information they already know. Cross linkages equals reinforcement of what is currently being learnt. Even with something as standalone as a new language, there are cross-linkages to be made that makes remembering that much easier.
• Prioritising and giving myself room to grow - Some things come in time, Arabic grammar is one them. If a rule won’t go in quickly and easily, I don’t obsess about it. I know that continuing my study will bring me into contact with this rule again and again. The same way that constant exposure to a song has you knowing the lyrics without trying, I know that I will pick up whatever grammar rule is escaping me at this early stage.

Resources for further reading:

The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge -  amazon.co.uk | amazon.com

The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot -  amazon.co.uk | amazon.com

The Britannica Guide to the Brain -  amazon.co.uk | amazon.com

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image: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/gul791
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Expectations are a component of relationships. They are formed in ways that include:

• A direct or indirect promise - e.g. we are a 4 star hotel
• Cliches - e.g. used car salesmen will say anything to close a deal
• Cultural and social teachings - e.g. the doctor/minister/professional have the interests of clients at heart
• Past experiences - e.g. using the pain of past relationships to distance yourself from new ones

Much is written about managing expectations - professionals and corporates have mission statements, contracts, legal obligations and codes of conduct that help them to manage relationships with customers. Personal relationship experts talk about the importance of good communication.

Managing expectations is something we all have to do once in a while in situations ranging from leap-year wedding proposals to planning a budget for a business project. Expectations are not always communicated, but you can tell when you are at the receiving end of one that is not being met because you’ll be up against some resistance or conflict.

And this is when you get the power to decide if you want to turn the situation into one that is going to serve you well in the long run. It is an action activity - you DO it.

Of course, expectations are about relationships, so it’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it that influences what you get.

Desiring a relationship

If your long-term goal is to build or maintain a relationship, you start off with this desire. This desire influences the way you go about handling the management or delivery of the expectation. 

It is possible to develop relationships even when the expectation is unreasonable. This is when desire becomes particularly important because it allows you to go the extra mile to define boundaries and convey more realistic expectations. Without this desire to maintain a relationship, you will simply go through the motions.

When expectations are reasonable, this desire helps you to meet them in way that generates loyalty and commitment.

Short break in Barcelona - Part case-study, part rant.

Take my recent trip to Barcelona as an example. We were on holiday and expected our pre-booked hotel to be clean and comfortable with staff who would point out local attractions if required (in that order). We got reassurance of this when we saw the 4 star rating displayed prominently on the entrance to the spacious, modern foyer showcasing an elegant zen garden.

Then we had our experience.

• The receptionist doesn’t acknowledge us for 5 minutes.
• When we are checked in, sadly it turns out that our room hasn’t been cleaned yet from the previous occupancy. We return to reception.
• We get the key to “the last room available”. Sadly this room smells like an ashtray. We return to reception.
• He shrugs and says it is a non-smoking room but what can he do if the previous occupant smoked in there. He tells us we can upgrade to a suite if we pay an extra 40 euros per night. We say “no thanks, we’ll take the room we pre-booked with you”.
• Another receptionist appears after half an hour and miraculously finds us another “last room available”. This one turns out to be lovely and even has a sea view.

• One day we return to our room at 8pm having been sight-seeing all day. They’ve forgotten to service the room. No problem, these things happen. We’ll tell reception and they’ll sort it out.
• We’re told housekeeping closes at 5pm. They accuse us of having left the “Do not disturb” sign out all day and that it’s our fault. We hadn’t and it’s not. 
• We are offered an upgrade to a clean suite for an extra 40 euros per night. We ask the receptionist to confirm that we are in 4 star hotel.
• Forty minutes later, the receptionist tells us not to worry about anything and that we can go to dinner and the room will be fully serviced by the time we return.

The hotel had set expectations when it advertised its 4 star rating. In fairness, it eventually met our most basic expectations of a clean and comfortable room… but it was done reluctantly and with an air of doing us a favour. Relationship building was not a priority.

Execution impacted our experience.  

All along, the hotel had a suitable room that it could have provided without nudging us to upgrade at our own expense. It also had housekeeping services on site that it could have provided without blaming us (unfairly as it turned out) or putting us through frustration and disappointment.

Through the way the hotel handled our basic expectations, they didn’t appear concerned about building a relationship with us and turning us into loyal customers. It’s a shame because it was a nice hotel. The room was comfortable and the staff were very helpful when we asked about local attractions and transport. The restaurant was among the best I have been to - the chef obviously loves what he does and is passionate about giving his diners a good experience.

But who wants to gamble or struggle with getting a clean room in a well-rated hotel when there are plenty of others around who’ll meet these expectations with pleasure?

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image: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/valike
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This is part of a series covering my challenge of learning Arabic in 2 months. I’m using lots of Peak Performance techniques and sharing them along the way. The series is filed in the “Language Challenge” category.

What’s Eating You?

So far I have covered Peak Performance states, Goal Setting and the motivating importance of Curiosity. Now comes a peek into subconscious influences that direct our behaviour.

First a confession - As far as studying goes, I have been slacking off all week, fitting in a mini-break to Barcelona and catching up with friends. I may not have studied much Arabic but I have been paying attention to improving the way I process information for this task.

Reading, Writing and Speaking are separate brain functions but they are all open to being influenced by our thoughts. Our thoughts - and our beliefs about ourselves - shape our behaviour.

As we go through life, we subconsciously pick up lots of different ways of relating to ourselves, to others and even the things around us. This affects what we believe and how we approach things. It contributes to our uniqueness, making us feel our thoughts are a solid, fixed and intrinsic part of our personality.  Which they’re not.

In this article, I hope to show that through understanding and addressing what lies behind our thoughts, we can change our thoughts and shape ourselves to how we deserve to be.

Identifying beliefs behind our actions

Our beliefs about our abilities come from associations we’ve made through experiences we have lived through - either directly or indirectly through others. Some beliefs help us while others don’t.

To achieve peak performance in any given area, it’s useful to ensure that we are working with beliefs that support our goals. To do this, we first have to identify the beliefs (good and bad) that are having impact on the goal. This is what mine look like:

Goal: Reading
I was reading at the age of 3. My favourite place was in front of a book and I enjoyed the entire experience - turning pages, the mystery within them, following words with my finger, total absorption in the pretty pictures making up my own stories to go with them. I felt a genuine thrill combined with safety when I was reading and I still feel it now. I believe reading is desirable because I associate it with something good.

Goal: Writing
At school age about 8 and wasn’t allowed to write in ink until I could write neatly in pencil. All my friends managed it but not me. In the end I asked the teacher if I could give her an ink test page to prove I could do it. She agreed, I passed and became the proud owner of a fountain pen.  It’s a memory I did not even know I had until I started practising writing Arabic. I believe writing practice is a pain in the proverbial because I associate it with a teacher who kept saying “no”.

Goal: Speaking
Nothing jumps out at me for this goal. To me it feels like an activity much like going to buy a stamp for a letter - you do it when you need to, no fuss, no mess, just functional. I believe speaking is ordinary and everyday to the point where I have nothing else to say on the subject.

Goal: Remembering
I’m going to throw in memory too because I’m discovering associations with it relating to exams and the sheer impossibility of remembering useless dates and facts. I believe I can’t remember facts because I associate it with fear of failing an exam.

If you try identifying your own beliefs, you may find that you come up with several associations or that your beliefs are caught in some kind of a loop. Take it gently if that happens - take a break and look at the resources mentioned below to help yourself or find someone who can talk it through with you.

The impact of associations

As I go about learning to read, write and speak Arabic, these beliefs are affecting my behaviour. I am automatically giving priority to the reading aspects, feeling nervous and “on my best behaviour” about writing and not paying any attention to speaking - after all, I don’t actually need to speak it right now. I am also nervous about being able to remember what I learn. It feels as if I should only study concepts and outlines because I will forget the details anyway.

My associations and beliefs around:

• Reading… will help me so no need to worry about that.
• Writing… have a motivating quality to them so will help me by making me work harder.
• Speaking… will hinder me because I don’t view speaking as important. This means I won’t practice the words and won’t develop a good rhythm or accent. This will hurt my goal.
• Remembering… could lead to procrastination or even giving up. Because I’m strongly attached to the feeling of being unable to remember, there may well be self-hypnotic undermining of my own efforts to remember. This will hurt my goal.

Understanding the influence of my beliefs to this level of detail helps me to recognise the ways that some of my thoughts have the potential to hurt my goal.

Breaking unhelpful associations

To be at peak performance, I need to change the way I think about speaking and remembering. I can do this with logic or I can use a combination of NLP and EFT techniques. It doesn’t matter how I do it so long as I end up being able to see things in a different way.

The actual techniques I used need a detailed write-up and because I won’t be able to do them justice in this one article, I am planning a series of step-by-step tutorials on the subject of breaking unhelpful associations.

**** Subscribe to this blog by RSS or email to stay informed of when the free tutorial becomes available. ****

In the meantime, if you want to get a start and read around the subject yourself, I recommend the following resources:

The NLP Workbook - I recommend this book to my clients as it’s suitable for beginners to NLP and also detailed enough to be valuable to practitioners too. The workbook format is practical and encourages you to put NLP into action yourself.

Try it on Everything - EFT DVD and companion book set.

MP3’s from the EFT World Summit - The people who held the EFT World Summit have put some free MP3’s from the event up for you. The downloads include an introduction to EFT.

Introduction to EFT Manual by Gary Craig, the founder of EFT.

Thoughts Support Success!

So, having broken the associations, I now find my thoughts are stronger and more supportive of my goals:

• Speaking seems more accessible and more vital in my goal of learning a language. I feel differently about it and practicing it every day actually feels more desirable… and attainable.
• Memory has placed itself in context. Exam pressure is no longer the first thing I think about. I’m more attuned to my successes and am remembering very clearly all the times I easily learnt things. Coincidentally (or not), I am noticing that in all these times I was highly motivated, interested and curious. Remember from previous parts of this series that intense focus and curiosity provide the ideal conditions for information to be stored in long-term memory.

When your thoughts are on your side, you’re automatically more attuned to following through because you’re not sabotaging yourself.

Next time I will be talking about the mental patterns of Reading, Writing and Speaking. If you enjoyed this article, please feel free to subscribe by RSS or email to receive updates.

Language Challenge Part 5 - Allowing the Brain to Read, Write and Speak

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