Tools for Rediscovering Your Ecological Intuition

Consciousness, Ecological Giftedness, Emotions, Healing, Psychology, Tools for Positive ChangeLeave a comment

Our world relies on the domestication of other species, yet we often don’t realize the degree to which we’ve also domesticated our own minds, bodies and emotions. It can be hard to feel beneath our conditioning and get in touch with our emotions, even when our survival depends on them. Now more than ever, we need tools and practices to access and feel our feelings so that we can reconnect with the power of our ecological intuition and find our courage to act for our survival. This article gives tools and a reflection process for “rewilding” your mind, reconnecting with your emotions and rediscovering your own inner ecological compass.

Mastery

Mastery: The Gifted Coaching Process

Coaching Process, Creativity, Gifted Coaching, Personal Effectiveness, Potential, Recommended Reading, Tools for Positive ChangeLeave a comment

As a gifted person, what should you do with your life? How should you use your talents? How can you find your inner callings and attain excellence in your domains of interest? Robert Greene’s fifth book Mastery is an exceptional step in helping all of us in search of answers to these often complicated life questions. Greene’s process toward mastery mirrors my own coaching method and process remarkably well, outlining the specific steps of the very same process I have been intuitively guiding my gifted clients through for years. If you are curious about where the coaching process would take you, are currently coaching and want to accelerate your progress, have been coached before and want a useful review and resource, or plan to start coaching and want to ‘get a head start’, I highly recommend you read this book!

values

Discovering Your Highest Values

Coaching Process, Gifted Coaching, Personal Effectiveness, Tools for Positive Change, Values2 Comments

If I ask you how a bicycle works, you probably will say yes; but if I ask you for a precise explanation of exactly how all of the bicycle’s parts work together, you may have to think longer, and might even need to consult an actual bicycle in order to answer the question competently. It is similar with our values: we think we know what we value in life, but when it comes to fully understanding our highest values, and living by them consistently, we aren’t so sure anymore. Sometimes, we need to consciously examine our most authentic values, and like with the bicycle, observe them closely to fully understand how they work. This article holds a favorite values exercises that I regularly do with clients in coaching.

slowing down

Slowing Down to Speed Up: Hurrying vs. Observing

Coaching Process, Gifted Coaching, Life-balance, Personal Effectiveness, Tools for Positive Change, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Sometimes hurrying up is to our advantage in life – when we’re running to catch a train, when we’re faced with an important deadline, or when we’re joyfully accomplishing a personal challenge. However, hurrying, beyond a certain point, becomes self-destructive. As a constant way of being, it is not sustainable. It is a “yang” energy in our lives which must be balanced out by the “yin” of slowing down, if it is to be effective and valuable. It is a “doing” micro-energy that can only have meaning and value in the context of a “being” meta-energy. Clients are often initially disappointed to learn this, because they arrive at the coaching process in a race to reach their goals, and are often impatient to move forward. But it is the wonderful yin meta-energy that gives their goals context; and to see this, they first must slow down and observe.

personality

Personality Preferences: Extraversion, Introversion and Authentic Action

Coaching Process, Creativity, Gifted Coaching, Personal Effectiveness, Psychology, Relationships, Tools for Positive Change3 Comments

Have you ever wondered why at times your creativity and productivity seem to flow, and other times you can’t think straight and produce mediocre work? Why at times you are happy to be with people, and other times you are fed up with their presence? In reality, each of us has a preferred way of approaching and ordering activities and tasks, and if we plan according to our preferences – when and with whom and how we collaborate, solve problems, make decisions, and brainstorm, for example – we naturally find effectiveness and joy. The trick is knowing our preferences in the first place! Let’s learn about them together…

Binocular Behavior

Binocular Behavior & The Gifted – A Dysfunctional Form of Self-Protection and Control

Coaching Process, Gifted Coaching, Relationships, Tools for Positive Change9 Comments

Observing others’ behaviors is, in itself, rather healthy. It allows us to appropriately anticipate and react to kindness or threat from others, which serves to give us motivation (anticipating kindness) or information to protect ourselves (anticipating threat). However, “binocular behavior”, as I call it, is a dysfunctional level of this observation behavior – when we try too hard to anticipate kindness or threat. Relating to the world from a distance, we distort reality in ways that cause us to lose our motivation or to create feelings of insecurity. Gifted people, with their strong imaginative, abstracting and pattern recognition skills – in combination with their general intensity of mind and experience – sometimes use their “binoculars” to create very elaborate, if misguided, theories about what is happening in others’ minds, the results of which can be socially unpleasant and painful. This article aims at helping gifted individuals put down their binoculars and relate directly with the world, and to understand the crucial role that differences in cognitive timing play in the tendency to pick them up in the first place.

carried emotions

Emotions and Carried Emotions

Coaching Process, Growing Up, Inner Conflict, Power of the Mind, Psychology, Relationships, Tools for Positive Change6 Comments

Many of our emotions are self-experienced; however, sometimes our emotions are carried emotions — emotions that we do experience but that are not ours. These emotions have been given to us by others (our parents, our culture, etc.) and they make us feel like we are living someone else’s life. In this article, I explore the difference between self-experienced emotions and carried emotions, and show how gifted people can gain conscious control over their inner emotional lives.