How we feed and nourish our bodies has so much to do with the level of energy that we bring to our mission in the world and to our loved ones.   And yet almost all of us are carrying some emotional baggage in our relationship with our bodies, and in our relationship with food—healing starts here.  The ultimate value for taking your nutrition to the next level is to find more joy and more energy and a greater sense of alignment and integration with your own body and the world around you

This post is all about cultivating the somatic connection between your mind and your body in your journey of joyful impact.  Check out the video and proceed at your pace of grace to cultivate your own intuitive wisdom about what works best for you, your body and your relationship with food.

When it Comes to Your Personal Energy, Metaphors Matter!

Key Resources to Take Your Nutrition to the Next Level

Nourishing Your Mind/Body Connection

 Foundational Ideas

1. A...

What do you do when you experience stress? How do you stop it from building up inside you to the point of exhaustion and overwhelm? 

Inspired by Emily and Amelia Nagoski's book, Burnout: Completing the Stress Cycle, the video and worksheet for this post are all about processing and releasing stress so that you can be more resourceful and more present and break out of the burnout cycle.  This is especially important for all of us with a calling to make the world a better place.  We tend to accumulate stress from living in tension with a world we want to be different than it is, and from constantly questioning whether we are doing enough to bring that better world into being.

 Unreleased Stress=Accumulated Fear  

…and Fear is the Gear that Drives the Burnout Cycle

Stress Release 101

1. Your Body Is A Reservoir That Stores Up Whatever Stress You Don’t Release
2. . Your Built In Stress Release Valve: Actions and Practices that Connect...

  All of us who have a calling to make the world a better place live in constant tension for two reasons. 

First, we want the world to be different than it is, and we are constantly confronting the tension between what's real and what's ideal--the world we hope we can help make happen.     Second, there's the tension within ourselves: am I doing enough in the face of what's wrong in the world? Or am I doing so much that I'm getting to the point of exhaustion, overwhelm and unsustainability?  

The video in this post is an opportunity to explore two ways of expanding your perspective that can help you navigate these tensions and reclaim both your joy and your impact as you seek to answer your calling to make the world a better place.  

Two Key Arenas for Expanding Your Perspective: Your Worldview and Your Moral Intuitions

Your worldview and your moral intuitions are lenses through which you view the world at an instinctive, often...

What If Excellence at Being In Conflict is the Foundation for Transcending It?

In America and around the world we seem to be getting more and more stuck in entrenched, high stakes conflicts.  In these high stakes conflicts, power dynamics come into play, and people often end up using coercion and violence to enforce their will on others.    When a conflict is rooted in abuse of power we often have no choice but to respond as forcefully as we can to defend ourselves.  But what if the root of the conflict is actually a misunderstanding, or a mistake for which genuine amends can be made?

Inspired by recent work from adrienne maree brown, as well as Amanda Ripley, Jonah Berger and Jonathan Haidt, the video for this post is about looking for ways that we can get better at conflict, particularly when the conflict is grounded in a mistake or a misunderstanding.  These ideas are aspirational, but hopefully not beyond the realm of possibility...

Seeing Past Yourself to the Larger Whole

Your highest and greatest contribution as a change agent rests on being able to transcend yourself.  To see the bigger system around you--to "see the matrix."  And not just to see it for yourself, but also to help others see the larger systems of which we are  all a part.   Being able to see the world around you in all its complexity, with a critical, yet appreciative eye is vital to "getting real" about how change actually plays out in the world.  Doing all that you can to see past your own blindspots and biases is also  critical to perceiving your own role in  the systems you seek to change. This is why Expanded Perspective is the 7th and final pillar of personal development for change agents.

Three Tools For Expanding Your Perspective

The video and the accompanying worksheet offer 3 paths to help you expand your perspective.

1. Tuning into your state of mind

The graphic below lays out a...

An extraordinary life is a stack of extraordinary moments, built up, one on top of another.  Recognizing those extraordinary moments and rising to meet them takes persistent courage.  That's why Persistent Courage is the 6th Pillar of Personal Development for Change Agents.  

Persistent courage is about finding a way to lean into life, show up as your full self and take action, even in the face of your fears.  A life of extraordinary joy and impact takes courage—and one of the biggest challenges to your courage are the defenses you create in your own mind to protect yourself from dangers—real and imagined. Here's the good news: you can cultivate your courage, and one of the most powerful ways to do this involves taking a frank inventory of your fears.  This session walks you through a process for overcoming your fear-based circuit breaker, inspired by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s book Immunity to Change.

1. Re-setting Your Survival...

For many of us the single biggest factor in our sense of joy and fulfillment in life has to do with the quality of our relationships and interactions with other people.  Elevating the quality of your own positive presence is the single biggest thing you can to do transform the quality of your relationships with others.  That's why positive presence is the 5th pillar of personal development in this series. 

Positive Presence= Attentive + Empathetic + Resourceful

 Positive presence is about being in a state of mind in which you can be attentive, empathetic and resourceful, all at the same time. This kind of positive presence with others and with ourselves is an essential pillar of personal development for all of us who feel a calling to make the world a better place. 

Three Key Tools for Elevating Your Positive Presence

The video and the accompanying worksheet lay out three key tools for elevating your presence and transforming the quality of your...

  The more strongly you feel called to serve something larger than yourself, the more strongly you’ll feel out of alignment when you feel unproductive. Getting the right things done is key to living a life of joy and impact. This is why Productivity is Pillar #4 among the 7 Pillars of Personal Development for Change Agents. 

Each of these pillars of personal development builds on the others 

Purpose (Pillar #1), Priority (Pillar #2) and plenty of energy from your personal Powerplant (Pillar #3) are all prerequisites for your Productivity, but  they are not a guarantee.  We live in a world that is full of more  distractions than ever. Many of us haven't done enough to build a system that helps us focus powerfully on what's important now and crank out productive output whenever and wherever we need to. This video and the accompanying worksheet will help you on the HOW of getting more of the right things done.  It will...

When it comes to your personal energy, metaphors matter! 

Do you treat yourself like a battery, or a powerplant? 

When you think of yourself like a battery, chances are you're just trying to make it through the day before you run your charge down to zero.  But as Brendon Burchard points out in his book High Performance Habits, when you think about yourself like a powerplant, you have a lot more options for engineering your energy output to sustain your joy and your impact throughout the day.  

This is a fundamental shift in thinking that has dramatic implications for how you approach this vital arena of your life: your personal energy level.  This is what we're going to explore with Pillar #3 in this series on the 7 Pillars of Personal Development for Change Agents.  The video and the worksheet are all about engineering your personal powerplant to maximize the energy you bring to your journey of joyful impact.  

...

We all have certain feelings that are fundamental to our joy and our impact as change agents.  And we also have certain feelings that are like kryptonite when it comes to undermining our joy and our impact...  

In Session 12 of this Understanding and Evolving Your Psychology curriculum, we are going to work on distilling everything you've been learning over these past 11 sessions into a single page, personalized map for showing up more consistently as your best self. 

This video and the accompanying worksheet will guide you through a process for summarizing your insights about the feelings you value most and least in your pursuit of joy and impact across all the areas of your life.  This is the heart of understanding and evolving your own psychology as a change agent with a calling to make the world a better place. 

What we’re going for in this last exercise in this series is a one-page list with two sections.

The Feelings that Form the Foundation...