Make a list: Mistakes (and what I can learn from them)

If you are familiar with my writing in over 500 posts already, you know I do not use the word “mistake” often, because I think it has a negative connotation for most people. Personally, I do not think we make mistakes. We do the best we can and only think of our actions as mistakes when we realize they did not get us the results we expected.

We always do the best we can, because as humans, we do not have the capacity to do anything else. Can you imagine yourself looking around for options and saying to yourself, “This is the most horrible option I have, so let me choose it”?

I did not think so!

Before you continue with this activity, remember it is not meant for you to find out ways to beat yourself up for things you have done wrong. Kicking yourself hurts and it is not very productive. You can do much better feeling good about yourself.

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Racist Kids

As you probably know by now, I love stories and after you read this, you will know why I wanted to pass this story on to you.

“I am married to a Scottish man. Recently, our 3-years-old daughter’s birthday was coming. She said she wanted to invite friends from her day care center home, “But I don’t want to invite boys or blacks”, she said. I was very shocked. I’m as black as can be and always thought that because my husband has fair skin and comes from a different culture to mine, we are the perfect example of living in cultural harmony. I never thought my own daughter would say something like that”

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Eulogy by a Coach

It was Friday and many people gathered at the funeral home. I knew 3 people in the crowd – Nicole and her two kids, Jane and Russell. The hundreds of people in the crowd were all like me, pieces of the puzzle of the life of the person they were saying goodbye to.

I looked at Nicole and the kids. It is just an irony that when you feel you need lots of strength to survive the heartache in your life, worse things happen and change the whole picture. They stood there carrying a burden that I sometimes wonder if time can heal.

The dead are always at peace. It is the other people who remain to suffer their absence. The members of the Lance Family were left to suffer the shame, the guilt and the secret.

A week before, 45-year-old Bryan hung himself in his garage.

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Twin Decisions

A few days ago, our friend Helen called. A kid had dies as a result of violence at her son Oliver’s school and he did not want to go there anymore. Instead, he wanted to go to his twin brother’s school, except his twin brother objected.

“What should I do?” she asked me, “If I move Oliver to Ashleigh’s school, Ashleigh will stop feeling special and will have to share his circle of friends with Oliver, although he chose a different school so they could be apart. If I tell Oliver he must find another school, I’m limiting his choices and I’m not being a good mother to both of them equally”.

At first, I could relate to the problem. Sometimes, parents face situations in which doing the best thing for one child means not doing the best for another. For most parents, this creates the immediate pressure of “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t”.

Now, this was a friend and not a client, but sometimes, doing “the coaching thing” is the best way forward, because it keeps the problem where it belongs and brings the solution from the same place – the mind of the person with the problem. So I started asking Helen some questions.

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You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

Every relationship, with your partner, your parents or your kids, requires effort. No matter how compatible you are with the other person, each of you has a different background and continues to go through a different life. Each of you may be completely blind to the other’s experiences and feelings.

So typically, relationships involve a lot of guesswork. When we know the other person well, guesswork does an OK job in most cases, particularly when everyone is in a good mood and has enough energy to share.

Things get a bit messier when one person feels down and needs support and real storms can erupt when both people have gone through something unpleasant and both need an emotional hand.

In longer relationships, like a marriage over 10 years, a teenager or with your own parents, I would not be surprised if you have had a few storms already. Moreover, the same storm may have happened again and again, reaching full blast more quickly and increasing in intensity every time.

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Another Buggy Story

It is funny how things evolve. Last week, I drove with a friend of ours in his car and I saw a buggy – a real buggy, not a Toyota or any buggy-like car, but a beautiful yellow buggy. I did not think he would understand, so I just smiled to myself and said nothing.

This week, on the way to one of my clients, I saw a red old buggy. There was no one with me in the car, so I said to myself “Kiss buggy” and smiled, although there was no one there to kiss.

I felt a bit strange.

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Projection

Picture yourself sitting in an old cinema all by yourself, watching a movie. Turn your head towards the back wall and see there a big window. Behind the window, there is a projection machine. In that machine, a long, wide film is running, a film you have created.

A strong light travels through the film towards the screen. You can see the beam of light getting wider as it travels through the air, showing flickers of colors and movement inside it. Follow the beam of light with your eyes as it keeps on going and getting wider, until you are facing forward and looking at a huge screen, which practically fills your entire fields of vision.

As you look, you become absorbed in the movie, finding yourself emotionally attached to some of the characters, fearing some of the others, hating a few and getting carried away with the story.

Real life is very much the same. We become absorbed in our own story, which we project onto the world. When we interact with other people, we each look at our own “film” and can get into all kinds of trouble.

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How to Have More Intimacy in Your Relationship

Intimacy: couple lying face-to-face on the floor

Let’s start with some big words. According to Wikipedia, “Intimacy generally refers to the feeling of being in a close personal association and belonging together. Genuine intimacy in human relationships requires dialogue, transparency, vulnerability and reciprocity”.

When I mention intimacy to people, many of them immediately think of romance and physical closeness, particularly in the context of fear of intimacy. But this is only a borrowed meaning.

In fact, many sexual relationships have little or no intimacy in them, while other relationships are based on deep spiritual bonding without any physical contact whatsoever.

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Are You Listening?

In our modern life, one of the things we have the least of is time. A common expression I hear from people every day is “I’m very busy” and even “No time. Too busy”. We go to work, we work under pressure all day, we come back, we hurry our meals, we resent having to drive our kids to their various activities, we sleep less than we should, we have less quality time than we want to have and we finish every week completely exhausted from trying to do more than we can, only to start another week that feels exactly the same, if not worse.

But maybe that is only what we think. Maybe it is this tendency to rush into and out of things as quickly as we can that makes us waste more time than we would by relaxing and “taking our time”.

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Kiss Toyota

Every morning, we can drop my daughter off at one of three different spots around her school, but she asks to be dropped off at the school car park, because this is where Miss Weidman, one of the teachers, parks her white Beetle.

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