This is why sports are such a great learning tool, especially when it comes to living a PerformanceLifestyle.
Heather Dorniden shows us what it looks like to keep your story straight (in your head), when things aren’t going well.

Most people know the impact of the lifestyle challenges, but not what they are and how they need to deal with them.

In my own life, the hidden lifestyle challenges, one or another, sometimes a combo, have held me back or at times have driven me a little bit crazy. I don’t mean crazy, I mean, just a little bit crazy. And usually during stressful times, when stress has outpaced my ability to take care of myself, my body or matters of life better, two symptoms will show up.

1. Low energy and weight gain (of course, because I’m out of energy balance; a basic you can’t live without)
2. A negative outlook or attitude (meaning, my internal dialogue starts to fall apart, and become unsupportive as low energy leads to a very different outlook on life consumed by current circumstances.

What’s so interesting about these two outcomes, is that most people try to combat them by adjusting food intake or activity levels alone, as they deal with the consequences, and worse, they compare themselves to others when they are not in the position they want to be, and that’s about the worse thing you can do!

During these times, in what we call “The Perfect Storm”, you are in a most susceptible or vulnerable time. The reason is simple, you neither have the energy and endurance, or the right thinking to make sound decisions and move forward.

In Performance Lifestyle training, where we are essentially take healthy living to the next level so that we can achieve our goals better, we realize that there is far more to the lifestyle equation than eating better and exercising more to deal with the symptoms of our current circumstances.

We learn a broader array of lifestyle skills so that we can deal with situations and have more options available to us in any given situation to be more successful and make healthy choices.

Every lifestyle skill you learn depends on two aspects, or two themes that run through our lives. And if you want to get your lifestyle working better for you, and experience what healthy living looks and feels like at the next level beyond merely focusing on nutrition and fitness alone, then must learn how to improve…

• Your energy level
• Your understanding of how to tell stories about your life (or any aspect of it) that are supportive.

If you don’t understand how to manage your energy, and tell a supportive story, your capacity to function and perform well, diminishes in the inverse proportion to your skill.

And believe, me…

These are two skills you do no want to live without. I have bloodied my knees to learn these two skills and I must say, they present me with the biggest challenges.

I suppose there is a reason why, they everything you do and if you are going to do it well, depends on these two skills!

What's Holding You Back?

The debate between what is coaching and what is therapy rages on in the psychology and coaching worlds, but one thing is for sure. Whether coaching is right for you or you need to get “supportive psychotherapy” from a licensed professional, as the author of The Curse of the Capable, Arthur P Ciaramicoli PhD calls it; having someone in your corner to help you correct distortions in thinking or as we say in the coaching world, change “your story(s)”, is really helpful.

Now, I know mental health has had a stigma to it until just recently and that it lingers still, after all, why can’t you get your story straight all by yourself?

C’mon, you’re a competent person, you are capable, you should be able to do this all by yourself and frankly, it’s amazing that you even have any thoughts that aren’t supporting you!

Yeah, Right! (That is sarcasm as its best)

Everyone has to uncover stories -”thinking” – that are not supporting what they want (from the past, generated or reinforced in the present and that affect the future) so they can feel and function better. Basically, in a way, almost everyone needs therapy.

Here’s a recent article that I read on The Huffington Post titled “Everyone Should Be In Therapy”.

Here are a few thoughts from the author Thomas Moore:

One of the first things I learned after beginning to practice psychotherapy was that everyone is at least a little neurotic, and everyone, at one time or another, could do with a little therapy. I’m understating my case.

I’m tempted, and yet I’m not going to broaden the notion of therapy to mean any kind of guidance and help from friends and family. When I say that everyone needs it, I’m referring to structured, formal psychotherapy. Everyone could benefit from it once in a while.

We are not as rational as we might believe or act. Passions can get the better of the best of us. I have yet to meet a completely healthy, adjusted neurosis-free person. I include myself. I have clearly needed therapy on several occasions, and I still reflect on insights, dreams, stories and events from my experiences as a client in therapy.

It appears that the public doesn’t always understand what therapy is all about. Still today some people avoid therapy because it could cost them their jobs and reputations. The public seems to think that if you can’t maintain the illusion of mental health, then you are not fit to belong to normal society. You become what the Gospel calls a “leper,” referring not to a physical disease but to a condition of exclusion. You are ostracized because you are not perceived as conventionally normal.

Apparently there are two kinds of discourse about therapy: the public version that associates it with a Frankensteinian messing with a person’s head, and the discourse of those who practice it or know it from experience, the version that sees its benefits and effectiveness.

I am one of those people who sees it’s benefits and effectiveness, but I must admit that I too, at one point, thought having any thoughts that were creating conflict within me meant something was wrong with me (and it sure as hell felt that way). I went through a period of time, before I worked on the book The Curse of The Capable with Dr Ciaramicoli, where I thought that getting any type of supportive psychological help meant that I was basically incompetent or incapable. Something like that and it really worked against me.

I was promoting a “performance lifestyle”, but was still suffering from internal thinking that was driving me non stop, and that is not a performance lifestyle where living in balance is priority number one. But over time, I learned that I was suffering from performance addiction and one of it’s chief symptoms, pathological certainty stems from perfectionism. Perfectionists don’t want to admit that there’s anything wrong with them. So if it feel like there is, something must really be wrong.

That’s when I opened up to getting help. I looked at having a coach and getting the psychological support I needed more as a process of getting a few people in my corner, to help me sort through what was true and what was not true about my life, and I was able take part in a far more constructive discourse about how I was thinking and living.

What I discovered was that we can develop and maintain personal and professional stories that support a great deal more of what we want, not what we don’t want, when we have the support from a coach or a psychology professional. After all, it is unsupportive, novel or untrue stories about yourself and situations, including others, that hold people back to begin with; stories based on false data about the past and even practical elements about what you’re up to in your life and business that just aren’t true or supporting you.

That’s the curse of the capable person; unsupportive stories that hold you back. At first, you can’t quite put your finger on them, but you know something is wrong and you need help to sort through it. The curse can be lifted, when you begin to change the stories you have about yourself, your life and about others, to stories that are either truer or simply work better.

The book: The Curse of the Capable, is all about the 4 stages to greater love, health and success.

What could lead to developing better results in so many aspects of our lives?

Changing Your Story. Each stage in this process of changing your story, is about uncovering the stories that you’ve accumulated over the course of your life that are simply not true and not supporting you; stories that you created or bought into, usually in response to situations where you had limited knowledge and insufficient evidence to know whether or not your story was true, or would ultimately support you in what you want. These are stories that are usually protective in nature, but ultimately hold you back. Andy by the way, the stories you usually tell at any given time are directly related to your energy level.

Now tell me someone who doesn’t have a least a few unsupportive stories hanging around?

Frankly, I can’t think of anyone for that matter and that’s why the title of the most recent book I contributed to is called “The Curse” of the Capable“. You see, if you are having trouble balancing your life, living a healthy lifestyle successfully or achieving your goals for reasons other than market environment or logistical challenges (everyone contends with that type of stuff), but because of the hidden challenges created by your stories about those situations and other; you are likely suffering from the curse of the capable - and that’s why the same ole story my be repeating itself in your life.

In the fast paced world we live in, it’s very easy to accumulate a slew of inaccurate stories. We don’t exactly live in a world rampant with empathy and clear communication… as unclear email, cut-short fast chats, and overwhelm rule.

So what do we often do?

We create novel stories that help us make sense of the world, fill in the gaps and often make us right, and very often they are not true or supportive. They are judgments and projections and all kinds of other stuff that may make us feel good in the moment, but ultimately hold us back.

And that’s why having a coach or a supportive psychologist in your corner is so important.

What’s best for you?

Arthur P Ciaramicoli PhD and I will be talking about this in the coming weeks. Join into the conversation on Facebook and discover how to change your story; the 4 stages to greater love, health and success. You’ll be surprised by how powerful you can be, when you change the stories that are holding you back.

I will be uploading some pictures shortly.

We all had a good time, getting free from of some of the “bull shit” that get’s in the way of  living “the lifestyle” we want to live so that we can drop the weight of the past, live in balance with vibrant health and peace of mind and achieve even our most ambitious  life goals.

It was a great time and a unique experience for these road warriors who were going from session after session on exhibition metrics and case studies and panel discussions;  at our session, they got a chance to look inward and get some relief.

We also had quite a few good laughs as we stayed in tune with the “let’s get real and have fun” philosophy I ascribe to, particularly when doing events.

There is something amazing that happens when you address some of the stories floating around in the back of your head day, after day, after day that drive you to perform in ways that may be throwing your life out of balance, promoting weight gain, compromising your health and / or holding you back from achieving your goals.

I introduced The 4 phases for changing your story for greater love, health and success in our lives and ultimately, to find out what is (at least in part) driving those of us in attendance. Everyone partnered up with someone they didn’t know and shared their stories.

Your stories (your inner thoughts) are what drive you to behave (eat, think and live /work) the way you do each day of your whole life!  Even if your circumstances seem like they are in command, it’s still your story that is driving you.

Here are THE 4 phases for changing your story for greater love, health and success.

• Uncover Your Story
• Discover The Consequences of Your Story
• Acknowledge the Emotional Impact of Your Story
• Recognize How You Cover Up Both the Consequences and the Emotional Impact of Your Story

Change, Your Story.

I had two objectives for those in attendance.

1. To help them discover the ultimate lifestyle skill of knowing how to change a story and to get an experience doing so.
2. To help them change one story affecting the lifestyle they live, and their personal energy levels.

These just happen to be two daily practices that I practice each day; after all, it’s a beautiful thing to be able to change your behavior as needed, to adjust to changing circumstances and manage your energy.

Most of the attendees participating were road warriors managing exhibitions at conventions all over the world. They are constantly on different time zones and needless to say, live in restaurants, on the road and have quite a robust social life. So, knowing how to change their lifestyle as needed and manage their energy is a very beautiful thing!

I shared in that social life last night and I am exhausted today. Thank god I know how to live a Performance Lifestyle and know just how to recover from a night I also strategically prepared for beforehand, so that the consequences would be manageable in the middle of my work week.

I’ll let you know how I feel in my next post.

John Allen Mollenhauer “JAM”