Stop, Listen, No, Really Listen

"Most of us tend to suffer from “Agenda anxiety”, the feeling that what we want to say to others is more important than what we think they might want to say to us."  -- Nido Qubein

I've been thinking about just how difficult real communication can be.  It is difficult under the best of situations and even more so once we've developed expectations or mindsets about how another person will respond.  This often happens when parents and teenagers are trying to reestablish a relationship after going through a difficult or painful period. 

It's so hard to be present and to respond to what is ACTUALLY happening vs. what our history mindset tells us we will hear.  It's hard work but so worth developing the muscle that will allow you to be present and REALLY hear what someone else is saying without being filtered by beliefs and expectations.

Take the time to notice what goes on inside of you when you're communicating with others especially when the relationship has been strained for some reason.  Listen to the tone of your voice, notice tension arising in your body, and notice the tendency to want to promote your agenda vs. hearing what the other has to say. These are all cues that you've disconnected from the conversation.  Breathe, take a break, bring yourself back.  See what there is there to learn.  About you, about them!

Why DO Young People Use Drugs? Digging a Little Deeper!

There are many reasons why young people turn to drugs. This is but one reason but I think an important one.  I am saddened by how in this country education continues to be a place to sort children rather than a place where they come to know who they truly are.  I'm frustrated by how public education tends to focus on sameness and content versus uniqueness and meaning.  I'm disappointed that youngsters in school learn to compete with each other rather than learning to reach out to one another. 

One question I hear over and over again from teenagers is "why won't anyone listen to what I want?"  The sorting machine drives young people down the path to college and professions exposing them to intense competition and very little time to learn or reflect upon what it means to simply be a human being rather than a "success".

Education periodically swings back and forth between a focus on a more humanistic experiential curriculum and a content-based basics approach.  Why there is not room for both I'll never understand.  It's been quite some time since K12 focused on feelings and humaneness and today the focus is more and more on feeding kids facts. 

Those that are best at retaining and regurgitating are successful.  Those who are not fall behind, become disengaged and feel less than. As early as kindergarten kids are sorted into those who can and those who can't.  The kids sense the sorting and drift towards those in their respective groups. Those who can't begin a slow but steady disengagement from school. 

Neither group is well served by this process. Neither has a true sense of whom they are and what it means to belong to their community and to the community of man.  Classrooms are sorting tools rather than places where young people learn how relate with themselves and others and begin to explore their place in the universe. 

How many adults do you know who, after working their behinds off for years, wake up one day only to find that they have lost a part of their lives.  How many begin the desperate search for meaning and true intimacy in their lives?  How many have, during the course of their drive for success,  turned to alcohol and drugs as a replacement for meaning? All too often the alcohol and drugs begin long before the awareness that what they're trying to do is to fill the hole in their hearts that has been dug while their heads were being filled with facts.

Here's to learning who we are and what our unique purpose is for being on this planet.

Out Beyond Right and Wrong: Finding Your Way From Pain Back to Love

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other' doesn't make any sense.
--Rumi

Every family that has been through difficult or painful situations with their youngsters or anyone that has been through a rough period in a relationship knows how hard it can be to reconnect with the love that was once the core of the relationship.

Pain and hurt develop scars in our spirit or core self. Those scars provide a layer of protection and lead to the building of walls between us to ensure that we don’t feel that pain again. This approach rarely works as each time we are confronted by a comment or behavior that reminds us of the original pain it triggers the great protector, anger. The anger typically leads to more pain as we create new evidence of our need to protect ourselves.

Deep within each of us, and below the hurt and pain that has occurred, is a place that wants to love and be loved. I believe that within each parent and child that has learned to protect themselves in this way, is a core self that desperately wants to reconnect. However, our connection to our pain, anger, and the belief in right vs. wrong makes it very difficult to break down the walls and reach out to embrace one another once again.

It is not easy to move through the pain but it is also not easy to remain in a place of hurt and anger. Compassion and forgiveness are the keys to bringing down the walls. Acknowledging the pain within each of us, and remembering that each of us wants desperately to be loved, is the place from which we can begin to reach out, open up, and let the other in. Here there is no right or wrong only two human beings desperately trying to find their way back to love and acceptance.

The core of these feelings is usually found in our heart center. Acknowledging our heart center and recognizing that one exists in the other, is the first step to tearing down the walls. Meeting one another in that metaphorical field in which we are both a part of something bigger than both of us provides the perspective that holding onto right and wrong is but another symbol of the pain that is calling out for a path back to the love that connected us.

When you're with the person with whom you have experienced pain and hurt, notice the reactions that you feel in response to your communication with them. When you feel anger or pain, focus on your heart center and let that be a trigger for looking for, or acknowledging the same in the other. See if you can put aside the anger that is trying to protect you and replace it with a reaching out and a vulnerability that can connect you.

Topics that Touch Me

Just thinking about the families I work with that are starting to reestablish relationships with their teens after a crisis and wondering what I can write to help them. A few thoughts:

1. An article based on the poem about meeting together "out beyond ideas of right-doing, and wrong-doing" and the wonderful new relationship that awaits them there!

2. How to heal the hurts that get in the way of really letting each other in.

3. What lies beyond treatment that gets kids clean again? Who's waiting inside to be discovered?

Guess that's a start. More later.

Tips for Communicating More Deeply with your Teen

Typically, talk about improving communication is usually at a superficial level. More important is to focus on communicating with your teens in a way that deepens your understanding of one another and leads to a transformation of your relationships.

Tips for deeper communication:

• Listen beyond the words to understand how they uniquely view the world. Be fiercely curious about who they are. Robert Heinlein coined the term "Grok" in his book "Stranger in a Strange Land" to get at this concept of drinking deeply from the uniqueness that is another human being.

• Make the time. Most conversations in our lives are quick and simply fill in the spaces in our busy days. Create space and time for talking that is free of an agenda. Focus more on who you are as human beings rather than what you did today.

• Show appreciation for their journey and their courage in facing each day anew in spite of all the changes that they are going through in their lives.

• Leave judgments at the door. You may not agree with choices that your teens make but judging their behavior closes the door to deeper understanding and to helping them make different ones next time.

• Remember that you are both learners and will make mistakes. They know that you are not perfect but we often don't acknowledge our challenges as parents trying to do the right thing.

• When you find yourself shutting down step back and seek perspective. How did they make the choices or decisions that they did. Can you understand, given their understanding of the world, what led them there? Can you affirm how and why they made their choices even if your don't agree with them.

• Be patient. Change happens in biological time though often our expectation is that someone will change in remote control time or simply because we point out to them the mistakes that they have made.

• Make an internal commitment to do this work not just to change your teen's behavior but also to change yourself and the quality of your interactions with others. Only through a personal commitment is one able to continue to do the work.

• Practice. Deep communication is difficult. Understanding someone else at a deeper level takes time and commitment. It may feel awkward at first but if you keep trying you'll be surprised at how much you'll learn about them and yourself.


We are all complicated and ever changing creatures trying to make sense of our experience and the world around us. We're all partners in this path through life and taking the time and making the effort to understand one another at a deeper level is worth the effort and pays off in deeper more satisfying relationships.

Step 6 - BE THE CHANGE!

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony." -- Mahatma Gandhi 


Well, we've have come a long way on our journey along the 6 Steps to Change. So far we have:

• "Used your Imagination" to create an image of a new and better tomorrow.
• Gotten to "Know Thyself" better by surveying the 4 quadrants of your life and deepening your understanding of how you do yourself in the world.
• "Q'd it Up" to get a better sense of which quadrants you may need to develop new skills in to create more balance in your life.
• "Caught Yourself in the Act" recognizing online the behaviors that trigger you and what old habits arise in those moments.
• Begun to "Change Your Behaviors and Change Your Mind" first by stepping back to see how your habitual patterns have led to specific outcomes and beliefs about your interactions with others and then by seeing how, by trying new behaviors, your can create new outcomes and attitudes.

Now comes the final step to actually embody the change you've created in your life and in relationship to those that are important to you. You're on the road to fulfilling that dream of a happier and healthier family and a new you that is able to begin to enjoy life once again.

This is an exciting step but not an easy one. It'll take using the 4 Foundations of Change that I have talked about before. You'll need to be Committed to the hard work that lay ahead, you will need to have a fierce curiosity that enables you to seek to Understand what happened when there are breakdowns, you'll need to Communicate to others your intentions and your need for support to help see you through the inevitable potholes in the road that you will find along the way, and finally, you'll need Compassion for yourself for the hard work that you are doing and for what it means to be human and fallible.

Real change takes time and it is important to celebrate small successes and to have people around that can cheer you on when you make progress and give you a hug and a pat on the back when things get hard. The important thing to remember is that the Hope that you started this process with, and the new tomorrow that you have created in your imagination, are the sources of energy that will keep you going on your journey.

Remember, new thoughts and behaviors, new attitudes, a more balanced lifestyle, and exciting new outcomes to look forward to. Spend some time as you begin the journey deciding who will be your coaches and supporters. Seek out role models that you can look to as you try on new behaviors. And finally, don't be afraid to ask for help.

To Be, or not to Be.....

My mother said to me, "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope." Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

A little change of pace. This quote just jumped out at me. I don't know how many young people I've worked with who have said that they wished that the adults in their lives would let them be who THEY want to be. And, all too often, later in life, how many of us shed all our expectations and beliefs about who we "should" have been only to find who we really are.

Take some time to listen carefully not only to your own heart but also to the unique person that your child is trying to become!

Step 5 - Change Your Behaviors & Change Your Mind!

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." --- Marcel Proust

Now that you've had a chance to "Catch Yourself In the Act" you can begin to take a step back and see that the disconnects between your good intentions and the behavioral results of those intentions don't always match. Being able to do this is a HUGE step for now you are in a position to create a new set of behaviors AND change your thinking, attitudes, and expectations about what typically takes place in different situations and interactions with others. Now that you know that the patterns of behaviors between yourself and your teen or spouse have led to a particular set of perceptions and beliefs about their intentions and that they have developed their own about you, the opportunity arises to create new patterns that lead to new, more satisfying, and hopefully more productive outcomes.

This may take some work. For example understanding Emotional Intelligence and how our emotions can sometimes hijack us and lead to unintended behaviors you can learn to pull the switch on your emotions before the hijacking so that you remain present, clear, and relatively calm during your interactions. Learning and practicing to meditate or use relaxation techniques can help you to see how our thought patterns can create scenarios based on our past learning and experiences that are influencing our behaviors today. Learning to use Non-Violent Communication techniques you can learn how to be less blaming and accusatory and talk more about your feelings and personal needs in a way that doesn't press the other persons buttons. You can practice all you learn with people that don't trigger you as much to get better at your skills. These are just a few examples of how you can learn, practice, and implement new behaviors that lead to different outcomes, attitudes and perceptions.

Coaching is especially helpful here as you need someone to support and encourage you through these changes and someone that can model the skills that you would like to learn. It is hard in the heat of the moment to remember what you have learned and practiced so having someone to brainstorm and problem solve with is important. Learning new behaviors takes practice and like any other skill takes repetition, support, and encouragement.

Remember, it is all how you look at it! Like the story of the blind men who, all standing at different parts of an elephant, try to describe it, and cannot. They can only describe their experience from the part of the elephant that they are touching. Put all the perceptions together and you have an elephant! When we're interacting with others in our lives we only have our perceptions with which to judge what the situations that we find ourselves in really mean. Stepping back, understanding the need for more information, opening ourselves to new images of the other, and trying out new behaviors we can literally change our behaviors and then our minds.

Spend some time today reflecting on your interactions with people close to you. Think about what thoughts or ideas you have about those persons and how they might influence how you interact with them. Imagine how you might, despite your expectations, try on a new behavior and see what happens as a result.