12 Steps to Liberating Your Pizzazz! Introduction and Step #1 of 12

by Christine Sotmary M.S. L.Ac. CPC

Overview of the entire LYP project
This is the first in a series of 12 articles. Each article will be
accompanied by an audio version that you can download with additional bonus audio material. You’ll find interviews with experts in the specific area we are covering and related discussions, offering you a more in-depth exploration of each topic. Go to my audio blog and scroll down to audio to listen.
Generally speaking, I’ll be exploring what is getting in the way of your work. When I speak of work, I am not limiting the word to the accepted definition of paid employment. What I mean is your life’s work, accompanied by your passion, personal meaning, values and strengths. Lucky you if you also get paid for all that!
We’ll be exploring different ways that you can overcome obstacles, excuses, energy drains and finally get your work out into the world.
I’ll be covering the concept of reclaiming your personal power, what I’m calling “Liberating Your Pizzazz”.
By the end of these articles, I fully expect to receive hundreds of emails from all of you, telling me about your work, how your are experiencing your power and how proud you are of yourself for finally getting on track.
Let’s begin at the beginning. Why does it seem harder and harder to initiate new ideas, and then actually follow through on your projects? What excuses are getting in the way? I bet you sometimes feel overwhelmed and exhausted. Where do you start?
You might have been given the idea that you are a procrastinator. Is that what your family thinks about you? You carry around many beliefs, like this one, that are like old friends. “I’m too old for that, too set in my ways, too busy, I could never afford that, I don't have the strength for something like that.” Sound familiar? Maybe you feel disorganized. Is clutter your problem? Are you finding the support you need to move forward? You always read about these software inventors, working in their garage together, coming up with all sorts of innovative ideas. Garages have also been the home to many a musical exploration for all those bands we remember as teens. When a partnership works, both of you are carried along by your excitement and ideas. Is it time for you to start building your team?
I can guarantee that sometimes you feel stuck. I’ll be sharing lots of techniques to get you through the rough spots and help you change some of the beliefs you are presently struggling with.
By the way, how’s your health? Are you taking care of yourself? I’m certain there are times when you barely getting through the day and can’t even think about those tap dancing lessons you had planned to take. How would you ever have the energy to start that community children’s theater you always dreamed about? In this series of articles I’ll talk about how building a good foundation of health will help you reclaim that missing energy and how to easily incorporate healthy choices into your busy life.
In this first article I’m going to ask questions about one of the important areas we should be noticing in our lives. I’ll be asking whether technology is taking over, when it was meant to make things easier for us, give us more leisure time, more time to create. What happened along the way? I don’t have all the answers for you but you can ask these same questions of yourself and together we’ll explore how you can find a healthy lifestyle that’s right for you.

Step #1

Dateline Modern Life: Previously Intelligent Human Beings Transformed into “Entertainment Seeking Devices”First, I’d like to ask you whether you think passive entertainment is one major piece of the puzzle that might be robbing you of your creativity and pizzazz? You may agree or disagree. I’m just throwing it out there. The companion audio to this article has a fascinating interview with Robert Kesten of Screen-Time Awareness. He talks about the Scientific Research that’s been done on many of the topics we’ll be covering here. Go to www.sotmary.libsyn.com to hear the audio version of this article and further down the page is the bonus audio interview with Robert. You can download it and listen later.
It is easy to be part of the audience for TV shows, music events, movies and DVDs There is nothing wrong with taking a night off to unwind in front of the TV. It’s great to hear your favorite band’s new CD. It is just a question of balance.
When we sit in front of the tube night after night for hour after hour, what happens to our brains? What happens to our lifestyle, our relationships, our ability to think and converse? The scientists have found answers that you can read at Robert Kesten organization’s website www.screentime.org.
Everyone has experienced the fact that TV scheduling is set up to trap you with lead in’s to the next show, bursts of adrenaline and “feel good” entertainment. You might innocently tune in for the 6 o’clock news and find yourself glued to the couch until 11 p.m., except for the snack breaks during the commercials. That’s if you can find the remote control and get to the off button before Jon Stewart, Jay Leno, Steven Colbert and all the other late night celebrities come on. Then there are the Seinfeld reruns………….Where did the evening go?
What happens when you actually try to push back from the TV watching. Are you at a loss for what to replace it with? Do you pick up your neglected flute or your paint brush. With all the cooking shows on the air, I’m sure some of you are making soup from scratch. Right?
Sometimes the early stages of your project are the most difficult, the most embarrassing. No one wants to be a beginner, make mistakes, play bad notes, burn the entre.
Another difficulty with all this is that you are hard wired to be a creature of habit and it is always an adjustment to take on something new or put a new routine into your life. It takes some attention before the ideas start to flow. What happens when you can’t get past the title of the book you wanted to write, or the first couple of notes to a tune you are working on. Is this like writer’s block?
It might just be a case of use it or loose it. I’m reminded of a trip I once took to Norway. It was a solo expedition, mostly camping in my little pup tent. Maybe I was testing my self sufficiency, after a childhood of being taken care of in a large family and then straight to college with comfy dorms, cafeterias and student unions. I hadn’t had much time to be alone or to test my survival skills. Norway was not exactly the back country. I was staying in campsites with water and showers. The place was quiet and lead by my desire for isolation and reflection, I ended up not speaking to anyone for about 2 weeks.
As I headed out for the airport, at the end of my trip, someone asked me,
in English, “Where is the Youth Hostel?” I stared back blankly. My mind could not find the words to respond, I could barely understand what was being asked of me. The language that I had taken for granted would always be available to me was gone.
That disoriented feeling made a very deep impression, all those years ago.
You’ve probably walked into a room full of folks staring blankly at a TV screen, eyes unblinking, mouth hanging open. When you make a comment or ask a question it appears to be the same reaction I had in Norway. Your friends or family members have to first take a minute to understand that they are being spoken to and then register what was asked and finally decide to connect and answer you. It’s a question of attention and focus.
I just saw this same process the other day as a husband
came in for a crash landing from cyberspace when his wife asked him a
question. He had been checking his emails on his blackberry. You could
tell his thought process was far away and it was hard for him to focus
on what she wanted to know. Parents are often guilty of being
distracted in this same way around their kids due to the fact that more and more folks are bringing work home.
Recently, here in the USA, there was a national program to turn off all your personal electronic media for a week. The audio interview that follows this article describes the project called “Turnoff Week”. It was remarkable how once the participants unplugged from their TV’s, iPods, computers with internet and emails, cell phones and blackberries, they found more leisure time, less stress and lots of alternative activities. Find out more at www.screentime.org.
One of the inspirations for the project was a scientific study that had
researched what would happen if people stopped watching TV. It reported that reading went way up for both the kids and adults in the study. More frequent and longer conversations was next for the adults and fantasy play increased for the kids. I’m reminded of that famous Mickey Rooney line “Let’s put on a show!”.
For more details check out screentime.org
Doesn’t entertainment bring us closer together, a shared culture? People
have been convinced that watching TV is a social activity because of
the “standing around the water cooler” image. That type of socializing
technically happens the day after the show and now happens less and
less with cable TV, YouTube and the variety of media available to you.
Rarely can you come in all excited about something you’ve
seen the night before, even sports events, and expect that others will
know what you are talking about. Very few people are watching the same things. Modern entertainment is, in reality, a very isolating activity.

The same can be said of music. The diversity in the market place makes it an iPod world of one. Listening to music is rarely a shared experience anymore.
Just look at the number of satellite radio stations that are springing
up every day that cater to smaller and smaller niche audiences.
Even if I wanted to go out with my friends to hear live music, I doubt we could all agree on our musical taste.
So where does this leave you? In future articles in this series, I’ll be
talking about how all this effects your own creativity and what can be
done to get your creative juices flowing.
During the next 11 articles I’ll be discussing how to reclaim your vitality and get past your excuses and your limiting beliefs. We’ll cover how to get ready for your life's work with the changes you are making based on your strengths, values and where to find lots of support. I’ll cover how self-care is so important for your confidence and creativity. There will be several techniques we’ll go over, like Law of Attraction and Emotional Freedom Techniques to clear out the old patterns. Bring an open mind and even you skeptics will appreciate the discussion.
Finally, my belief is that the energy you strive to have for your life's work is better served when you are connected to a strong community. It’s the best way I know to avoid isolation, depression and burn out from the modern “go it alone” approach. George Ellis, a South African cosmologist believes it is one of the laws of nature to share in your community, as powerful as gravity! Robert Kesten believes that it still requires your efforts to connect and I would agree 100%. Sometimes the community experience can get messy and inefficient but by working together we can accomplish so much more.
All this will help you “Liberate Your Pizzazz”. Stay tuned for the next article about how your excuses are blocking your energy and power. Find out how to rethink what you want for your life and have this help you to show those excuses who's boss!

Let me know your comments about this article and future topics you would like to see included in this discussion.
Christine Sotmary
Email sotmary@gmail.com
Health & Wellness site www.gotbetterhealth.com
Lifestyle Coaching site www.gotcoaching.com
Metabolic Nutrition Coaching www.manhattanmetabolic.ocm
My blog www.sotmary.com
My audio blog www.sotmary.libsyn.com

Listen carefully for these statements

This is one coach's experience with what her clients said and how often they were successful. Very interesting.....
I won't. 0%
I can't. 10%
I don't know how. 20%
I wish I could. 30%
I want to. 40%
I think I might. 50%
I will try. 60%
I think I can. 70%
I can. 80%
I will. 90%
I did. 100%

Now that you've read it, it will be difficult to ignore it!

Can Rationality and Emotion Co-exist?

In this week's Speaking of Faith radio show on NPR, Krista Tippett
interviews George Ellis, a South African cosmologist. This is a short
excerpt of the interview that I thought you might like to see. You can
read much more here. Science and Hope


"Much our of life can be thought of as a struggle between emotion and rationality — the calm analyst deciding on a logical basis what we should do, versus the emotional hot-head who
rushes into action and just does things. A common view is that
evidence-based science represents that calm rationality which
exemplifies us how we ought to behave, and we should try to avoid
basing our lives on faith and hope rather than rationality and reason.
However this is also a bad misunderstanding. In facing our individual
and communal lives, we always need faith and hope as well as
rationality, and indeed the real issue is how we can best balance them
against each other. Take the case of my own country: there were very
many times in the past when it was rational to give up all hope for the
future — to assume that the nation would decay into a racial holocaust
that never happened. It did not occur because of the transformative
actions of those marvellous leaders Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela,
confounding the calculus of rationality. This is a really important
practical issue that I have only recently begun to consider. It is in a
sense the theme of the book The Far-Future Universe that I edited.

However as well as being a highly practical issue, this also relates to the
issue of reductionism and the way the mind functions. The reading and
writing I have been doing on that topic have led to a very interesting
appreciation: the fact that the rational mind is in a profound
developmental sense based in the emotional mind. This is true both
functionally and in evolutionary terms. So one of my latest projects is
looking at this fascinating theme, and even writing about it in
association with JudithToronchuk of Trinity Western University. So I am
now happy that though I am a cosmologist by trade, I have just had a
paper on this theme accepted for publication by the journal
Consciousness and Evolution. This paper shows that the tension between
emotion and reason has a deep grounding in the neurological mechanisms
underlying brain function."

Getting to the Finishline

I love this season "the promise of spring".
Just got back from a 20 mile bike ride in preparation for this Sunday's 5-borough bike tour of New York City.

What made the ride especially nice was having my piano player, Bert, leading the way. We talked about jazz, enjoyed the cool weather and went further than either of us had planned.

Two weeks ago I did 25 miles alone and the experience was full of self doubt about whether I would ever walk again and concern for the growing pain in my hind quarters.

Having company for our efforts is a great way to switch the negatives into positives. Make sure you pick someone who is inspiring to you, like Bert was for me.

New York City......I'm READY.