Research Paper By Dalia El Seddik
(Life Coach, EGYPT)
Teenagers are usually interested in songs and singers. But for me, I wasn’t interested in this at all. Only one song I couldn’t get out of my head. Maybe I forgot the song with life going on, till I found myself searching for it and want to listen to it. It seems it was hiding back in a corner in my head. The song is HERO by Mariah Carey
Actually I believe that deep inside each one of us, a hero is waiting to come out, but the question is: do we search for this hero to help it to come out? Or do we leave circumstances to reveal this hero? If we try to know and bring this hero out, does our society help us in this or not? Do we wait for our society’s approval in order to discover the hero within us? What makes a community or society stand against this journey? Is the community afraid of letting individuals go out of the frame they are supposed to be in? What would happen if we stand for ourselves and start searching and discovering this hero? How much power and commitment do we need to find this hero? Does community or society keep fighting back this search or after a while would surrender to the fact that we insist to find this hero?
The fact is that we all, individuals and communities, fear and fight change. When we know this fact and accept it we can deal with it. In this case we understand when our community or our unconscious mind pushes us to stop searching.
For example, if we know that there is monster in a room. When you open the door, you know what you are expecting to face so you are prepared. You may feel little doubt that you will succeed in fighting the monster, but you are not scared of the unknown.
Our fear traps us in society ambush. It is the same as a deer trying to run from a cheetah. Even if the deer is much faster than a cheetah, the scared deer would be hunted if the deer starts to look behind to see whether the cheetah is coming closer or not. It will become distracted and will slow down. At this moment, the cheetah would manage to catch the deer. If we compare this with our human being reality, we will find ourselves (deer) haunted by our society (cheetah), to keep us within its frame of norms, traditions, regulations. We have fears to discover the unknown of ourselves, start this journey, fear of society’s rejection.
We don’t deny the fact that we can’t live alone. We need to be within a group to feel secured. Either secured to be safe, or secured to produce food, or secured to find someone cares for us (this one in nuclear family). Societies play on our security needs to keep us within the frame it creates. If we went out of this frame, either we will be rejected, or we will be blamed on society unity collapse. We can’t deny that there were some rules established in the past for a good reason, but with time passing this good reason vanish. Societies don’t update their roles every once and while, these roles stay as it till something major happens to change. To prove and change these roles, you need to be strong and be a believer. A believer that these roles stopped being important or useful in the time being.
Please note that my talking isn’t a generalization it’s just reference to my life observations and reflection.
Why I have chosen this subject to write on? Simply because I was angry of myself not reaching the hero inside me, while I felt there is a lot need be discovered. With hero here I mean my true self, skills, talents and capabilities. Then I noticed I wasn’t alone in what I felt, a lot shared this with me Egyptians and non-Egyptians. I was lucky to have my family beside me, encourage and support me in this journey. This made me think what about the rest, what they would do if they don’t someone to support them? How they will discover the HERO inside them? What resources or help they need in their journey; if they choose of course to find their HERO. Life obligations sometimes don’t give us the chance or help to find this hero; they just can’t get their head up to breath and find their purpose, our mission in life, why we were created.
For me ICA and coaching was the key, and I believe coaching is there for this purpose, to make the clients think, question themselves, understand, believe, love, dream, achieve, be confident, commitment, peace, insight, self-awareness and faith. In this paper I wanted to show what is happening, inside and around us, to say that self-awareness is the beginning, then comes the way to change and surprisingly it’s so simple. It can begin by enhancing our way of breathing, self-acceptance and others, being happy and in peace with ourselves and the world around us. I believe that we have a finger print (impact) on the world, not just the world that has effect on us, to have the courage to move out of comfort zone.
Here is the lyric of Hero by Maria Carey;
| There’s a hero If you look inside your heart You don’t have to be afraid Of what you are There’s an answer If you reach into your soul And the sorrow that you know Will melt away |
And then a hero comes along With the strength to carry on And you cast your fears aside And you know you can survive So when you feel like hope is gone Look inside you and be strong And you’ll finally see the truth That a hero lies in you |
It’s a long, road When you face the world alone No one reaches out a hand For you to hold You can find love If you search within yourself And the emptiness you felt Will disappear |
Lord knows Dreams are hard to follow But don’t let anyone Tear them away Hold on There will be tomorrow In time you’ll find the wayAnd then a hero comes along With the strength to carry on And you cast your fears aside And you know you can survive So when you feel like hope is gone Look inside you and be strong And you’ll finally see the truth That a hero lies in you That a hero lies in you That a hero lies in you |
It maybe strange what I’m going to do, but I will take this song as guide in knowing the client, understand what he might going through, then changing his perspective.
First looking inside oneself:
It needs a lot of courage to gain self-awareness, to identify our feelings, accept, and then deal with. In a invalidation web site “First accept the feelings, and then address the behavior”.[1] How we can be self-aware, if we haven’t been trained to identify and accept ourselves. I don’t want to generalize the case.
But families may without intention teach children to stick with tradition and known behavior, which approved by their society and not give the free will to choose or try something new. Maybe parents in this behavior are afraid the child will be harmed, if the child did something new they don’t know about or tried before. Parents want their children to follow what they know in order to safe them the effort of analysis the situation the child will be in, and to stay in their comfort zone.
For one reason to keep the child safe, second, parents weren’t raised on knowing what is going inside them. We sometimes when experience new feelings, we got the feeling that it’s happening to only us. But actually, these feelings are natural that we all share.
Why we think these feelings are different than others, because we are afraid or shy to share it with others. And the cycle will continue, young generations got married having children, without accepting their feelings and dealing with, and their children will be the same. Only the courageous who dare to look inside themselves will get out of this cycle.
Second to start the process:
What is going to be our equipment and support during this process? We need a lot of support from inside and outside, by the way I meant this order, without the braveness from inside to know and explore ourselves. I call it the spark which will light the fire; nothing will happen. The only person will help you is yourself, of course we can’t ignore the encouragement we get from our families who with their help it become easier to explore, not fighting in all sides, inside and outside.
The process here means knowing what works with us and what works against, to know your enemy and ally is the first step.
One of the most important equipment for a person to start search for the hero inside himself/herself, he/she needs to feel loved from inside. That’s why we need to know how to build love inside person, to feel it to get the strength to find what really inside himself/herself, how to remind or create love to trust himself/herself to stand up search for this hero inside himself/herself.
The question here how to build this love?
- First we need to build the mind in order to fight and rescue us from falling in victim triangle. In “The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari” by Robin S. Sharma he is talking about “Willpower” he says “truly enlightened people never seek to be like others. Rather, they seek to be superior to their former selves. Don’t race against others. Race against yourself”, he says “building self-control and discipline into your life will also bring you a tremendous sense of freedom. This alone will change things” what he means by self-control, to be proactive rather than reactive, to be not like seafoam pounding against a rocky shore, going in whatever direction the tide might take them. Building willpower will offer the person freedom, freedom is like a house you build it brick by brick, it gives person energy to act with courage, it gives you the control to live the life you have imagined rather than accepting the life that you have. One way the book suggests is to fill our mind with thoughts of courageous, try while you are walking to repeat this mantra at least 30 times a day “I am more than I appear to be, all the world’s strength and power rests inside me”. A sign of weak mind a body that can’t rest, try to set still in place for a while repeating this mantra. [14]
- “Having the courage to say NO to the little things in life will give you the power to say YES to the big things”[15] maybe Robin Sharma, used this say in different to what I’m using, here I’m using as a way to differentiate between what we want and what we don’t want. If we learned to say to small things like no I don’t want eat By time when we are in position to say whether we want or don’t want something we have the courage to say it out loud without fear, to say our wishes. To love, cherish and appreciate ourselves.
- To feel valuable not only to ourselves but to others to the world we live in, the book give a suggestion, to perform some act of kindness and selfless service in person’s day, and not permit himself/herself to go to sleep if he/she didn’t perform this act in the day. Robin Sharma says a wonderful Chinese proverb “a little bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives you roses”.[16]
- Robin Sharma asks a very powerful question, “What would you do if it was your last day?” by using this question I want the person to choose to do what he love, to choose to be happy.
- All above is pieces of puzzle and the final piece to find our purpose in life, while reading Deb.Knauft Coaching for Purpose Research Project Final and I encourage you to go and read http://forum.icoachacademy.com/discussion/126746/debknauft-coaching-for-purpose-research-project#latest I got the idea in order to build LOVE from inside the person; there is a very important element which is finding our purpose in life, to give meaning to our life.
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why Mark Twain
In Debbi paper she talked about formulation “Gifts + Values + Passions = Purpose” where the seekers put all the pieces together in their own unique way[17]
As you can see from the five steps we raised above, person will learn to love himself/herself, to know that love doesn’t mean to give all the time or take all the time. Love means the smart giving and taking, to feel confident. We can see people around us giving so much to others with an extend you want to stand up and say enough you have done so much, if you search behind their stories you may find that they do so because they want people to accept them and they may can’t have the self confidence that people would know them for their personalities not for what they offer them of services. Of course it’s not all cases, but I saw quite of these cases, and you can say I was one of them till recently I found the balance between giving and taking and that my presence with others can be as good for them as offering them materialistic help.
In order for person to find his/her purpose in life, they need to build love inside themselves, to seek happiness and to “realize that our purpose is not just about ourselves and those whom we are close to. Our purpose can serve the greater good of humanity and the world at-large. There is no limit to our purpose.
Once my coach told me, in order to feel balanced you need to have an aligned mind, heart and body. How it felt to have the three elements on one line? Its Walk the Talk, your actions are matched and in harmony with your mind and heart. Can you see and feel the balance and relief a person can be in?
These three elements were given different names; some called it (mind, heart, and body), (mind, soul, body). In Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change book they refer to as (guts, head and heart and hand). They have conclude, a person starts taking action when these three components are aligned.
A prime source of this fire in the belly comes from feeling that if we don’t change, we are putting someone we love or something we care about in risk. Or seeing hope to move forward which is clear now than before. A third source of gut motivation can be the personal experience of deep discrepancy. [18]
Head and Heart: the work must simultaneously engage thinking and feeling. No amount of thinking or effort alone will be sufficient to solve an adaptive problem, since how we feel is inherent in the problem itself, meaning we can’t feel differently if we don’t know differently. We need a bigger emotional and cognitive space, one in which we experience that the internal conflicts and inconsistencies of our adaptive challenge are not inevitable and intractable. Tasting the possibility of living in a no less safe, but significantly larger space is intoxicating and a source of continued motivation to stay in the action and carry it through. [19]
Hand: the work is simultaneously about mindset and behavior, as Kant says “perception without conception is blind. In order the action or change we seek to be permanent and continue, we must join a change in behavior with a change in the way we think and feel, and in order to change the way we think and feel we need to change our mindset. [20]
Even how important to have (guts, head and heart and hand) aligned, a very important factor is missing, Society or environment which encourage your change. But if you ask me, I think it’s encouragble factor for faster and safe change.
In fact have you ever experienced a feeling of worry or fear or anger in your stomach, telling you something you don’t know what is it exactly. But it’s deep inside you, your intuition is telling you something, then you are starting thinking and feeling of what these fear comes from. And once you are settled and sure of what you want, you start discover and use all your resources to act and change what you want to change. Once you become sure of what you want nothing will change your mind, not society noting except yourself.
Conclusion:
What elements we need in order to start and to continue discovering and trusting the HERO inside ourselves.
Unlock the hero inside you and live happily ever after
Know God loves us the way he created us on, Not perfect, so don’t try to be perfect
Your perfection in not being perfect
[1] http://eqi.org/invalid.htm
[2] Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change, Harvard Business Review Press, 72
[3] Richard Bach's famous quote from his book "Illusions"
[4] http://eqi.org/invalid.htm
[5] http://rogernolan.blogspot.com/2010/09/doing-mode-vs-being-mode.html
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10] http://www.toddlertime.com/advocacy/hospitals/delamo/trauma-triangle-group.htm
[11] Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change, Harvard Business Review Press, 12
[12] Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change, Harvard Business Review Press, 17
[13]
[14] Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari, Harper Torch, 148 & 149 & 153
[15] Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari, Harper Torch,166
[16] Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari, Harper Torch, 174
[17] http://forum.icoachacademy.com/discussion/126746/debknauft-coaching-for-purpose-research-project#latest
[18] Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change, Harvard Business Review Press, 211
[19] Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change, Harvard Business Review Press, 214
[20] Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change, Harvard Business Review Press, 217
[21] Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari, Harper Torch, 77
[22] Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari, Harper Torch, 55
[23] Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari, Harper Torch, 100
[24] Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari, Harper Torch, 46
[25] Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari, Harper Torch, 57, 101, 102 & 139
[26] Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari, Harper Torch, 60
[27] Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari, Harper Torch, 75
[28] Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari, Harper Torch, 112