Tag: Gregg DeMammos

Leadership Tip – Adore Them

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Adoring people moves them forward more powerfully than pushing them because you’re uncomfortable with where they’re at today.

The pushing comes through and then what you’ve taught someone more than anything is how to push back on you.

When you adore someone, you give them space to look on their own at areas to improve, because there’s nothing wrong. You can adore and offer learning, offer standards, offer consequences, for the sake of development, but once you push from your own discomfort, you’ve lost them, they’ve lost awareness of whatever better intentions you had and at best, maybe they’ll succeed to spite you. At worst, you’ve seen what happens…

Hurt is Complicated

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There’s the hurt that is happening now and there’s also what we do with the belief called “I am hurt”, which is mainly from the past coming into the present.

What really complicates the process of distinguishing whether we are holding a belief that we are hurt is that this belief comes up most prominently when we are triggered by something happening in the present. We are feeling both the present hurt and the past hurts simultaneously. When we feel something, we think feelings make something exclusively real and much more than a belief. So we may ignore the value of discovering if we have a belief, too, that we can do something about, as well as something that hurts right now. I am hurt is nearly synonymous with I am not safe. It makes sense. In the short term, the safest you can be is to relate to something that hurts as real. You’ll probably fight or flee and get away. When we look at the cumulative impact of what we do with the belief that we are hurt, the illusion of safety disappears.

Many of us who are stuck in the belief that we are hurt, hurt others, often with very little understanding of the impact. When we live with the belief that we are hurt, we may hurt others physically, we may hurt them by withdrawing, we hurt by not being reliable, we hurt by vociferously defending ourselves, we hurt by assuming that others are trying to hurt us and making them wrong, and on…

We may also hurt ourselves by blaming ourselves, not speaking up, holding low opinions of ourselves, accepting a consistent experience of suffering, going along with what we think others want to our own detriment, and on…

Many of those people who are hurting us and who we believe are hurting us, are stuck in the belief called “I am hurt”, too and may be unaware of exactly how they are hurting themselves and others. We’re usually more concerned with feeling hurt, consciously or unconsciously, than taking responsibility for the hurt we may cause. This is both obviously unfortunate and very human. We don’t want this to be true, but sometimes it is where people (and ourselves) are stuck.

I’m not telling you to excuse people and stay in the line of fire. Do not. I’m not telling you to make believe that you’re not in danger if you feel you are. If you are in danger, get out of danger the best you can. It is also not your job to fix someone who has the belief that they are hurt or to talk them out of it. That can be frustrating or dangerous. We all have the tendency to deny or defend our hurt.

I am saying that we could all make use of more compassion, giving it to ourselves and others and receiving compassion, which can be very challenging for those of us who believe we are hurt. Finding our own way out of our belief of hurt is invaluable and challenges us to be both brave and vulnerable. Understanding others’ belief that they are hurt can save us all more hurt. We can see what’s coming and know where it’s coming from and act accordingly.

I choose to work on this in my own life, because I love my family, my clients and myself and honestly, I love everyone (embarrassing, but true). I wanted to live outside of my distortions of feeling hurt that were coming from my past and all of the things I did and said while I was living inside those distortions. Choosing to live outside of “I am hurt” has been a daily challenge which has spurred on a lot of personal growth, success of all sorts and uncovered more and more ways to see how it has affected me, so I can be responsible for it. You don’t need a dramatic story of terrible things that happened in your life to wind up with the belief “I am hurt”.

Like I said, hurt is a complicated topic. There’s very little to take from here and put into use straightway, other than to look at yourself first.  Are you living in the belief “I am hurt”? If you think you are, get supported so you can live outside of it and give it your best effort.

Woody Allen on Relationships or, How to Make Better Tasting Eggs!

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“It reminds me of that old joke – you know, a guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says, hey doc, my brother’s crazy! He thinks he’s a chicken. Then the doc says, why don’t you turn him in? Then the guy says, I would but I need the eggs. I guess that’s how I feel about relationships. They’re totally crazy, irrational, and absurd, but we keep going through it because we need the eggs.” ― Woody Allen, Annie Hall

If we’re in it for the eggs, we’ve got no chance, relationships will eat us alive. You probably have bite marks, yourself (and given them)!

It’s what you can make out of the crazy, irrational and absurd that’s the opportunity of relationships. Our reactions to what happens in relationships are a window into our transformational process. I know, it would be so much easier to just have unlimited eggs, but when you take relationships on for the sake of your transformation and all of the success that can come from it in every area of life, relationships become the most powerful tool around.

From here, the eggs get better and better 🙂

Jedi Tip #471

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One of the keys to living a powerful life is raising one’s ability to tolerate the fear and discomfort we and others are going through without it taking us over and unconsciously choosing our next word or action for us.

When we’re/they’re upset (uncomfortable, scared, annoyed, angry, etc.), all of that yuck is constantly being broadcast outwards to the environment. All of us do this broadcasting when we’re upset. When two people are going through it together, they’re just throwing it back and forth. You can feel it even when you’re not directly involved, when you’re just in the room with that kind of energy, right?

Normally, we react and try to change the situation so we can get back to our normal, familiar and more comfortable state. There’s no future in that approach, though. It’s all we’ll ever do and it’s what we can’t stand other people doing to us.

Raise your tolerance. Practice allowing the reaction in yourself that comes up when you’re in the middle of that signal of upset coming from others (or ourselves). Initially, it won’t feel good. You won’t want to. It takes practice.

Over time, you’ll notice a powerful rise in your ability to tolerate this energy and a greater freedom will show up. The ability to be present in the midst of this is the power I’m talking about. It’s the ability to transcend the emotional conditioning we are all partly formed by and truly be ourselves.

What do you think this would bring to your relationships (Mom, Dad, sibling, boss, co-worker, kids, spouse)?

May The Force be with you

We Exist in Different Universes

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We exist in different universes.

No matter whether you’re strangers or know each other all your lives, you exist in different universes, because we each are the creators of our own universe.

This is something we know without knowing it, because we constantly try to have other people live inside our universe with us. That’s the essence of conflict. The closest we can get to fully relating with each other is acknowledging that all we have is our own universe and this is what others have to work with as well. From there we can be curious, understanding and forgiving.

You can be coached when you see a destination that you want to reach that seems somewhat or completely outside of your universe, but you’re willing to have the parameters of your universe change in order to get it. But when you hold fast to the definitions of your universe, expect familiar results.

You can truly be in relationship with others when you can allow their universe to exist alongside yours, where you’re well aware that sometimes these universes will not agree. When you do this, you have the best chance of relating to another person, because the threat of needing them to see things as you do goes away. This is the environment where ideas can be fruitfully exchanged and considered. Otherwise, all we are doing is defending our universe…

Great Relationships = Great Life!

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Have you ever noticed that when life isn’t as great as you’d like it to be, that there’s always a relationship that’s not working? It could be your marriage, your boss, your client, your children, your relationship with people whose opinions differ from yours or your potential market.

What we normally do is wallow or want to quit or settle.  We start to relate to the situation as immovable and back off into familiar ways of being and start the blame game, either blaming them or blaming ourselves for our situation.  We have made ourselves small in these relationships and this is what winds up running our lives and businesses.

The Relationship Circle is here to help people have this all go differently.  It’s here to challenge our conceptions, to simply not believe the truths we have set up in our lives that always seem to lead us to losing.  The Relationship Circle is here to empower you in your relationships like never before with information, tools, distinctions and most importantly PRACTICE to help you get out of the patterns that are keeping you from the great life that you deserve.

Through making a commitment to ending the patterns that hold me back in life and being coached to help me see them in the first place, I’ve overcome the wounds of childhood, of rejection, of thinking I’m not worthy and so many other things that kept me stuck, unwilling to be successful.  I’m in a wonderful marriage and relationship of eighteen years and love being the father of two beautiful boys and having fulfilling personal and professional relationships that help me succeed and create happiness in my life.  I have a career that I love, work for myself and am in the best shape of my life.  It took work to get here, to put myself on a path of self-improvement and healing where I began to feel strong enough to be the agent of my relationships.  I went from being afraid to speak my mind and letting people know who I really am to becoming an inspiration with my words and my life and so excited about bringing that to others.

Once you start becoming more powerful, more authentic, more real in your relationships, you’ll start to see your life changing, you’ll see your own resiliency and that your worries are not as big as you are making them.  You’ll feel the strength inside of you that tells you that you are capable of changing absolutely everything in your life you want to change.

I understand that things could be better.  Step one is trusting that you absolutely can live a great life by mastering your relationships.  Step two is getting yourself out of the communities and relationships that are holding you back long enough to learn new things, to bring new approaches to your life and learning over time to become more powerful in how you utilize them.  You absolutely can do this and The Relationship Circle is grateful for you choosing us as part of your path to get there.

THANK YOU!

– Gregg DeMammos