So how do you handle fear? Do you push it down and try and ignore it? Do you fight it like an adversary? Or do you find another way to approach it? I like to make my fear my ally. I recognize that I’m feeling fear for a specific reason and if I can identify that reason and address, I can turn my fear into an ally that motivates me to succeed instead of holding me back.

How I do that involves first acknowledging that I’m feeling fear. Once I know I’m feeling fear about something, I will identify what the fear is focused on. For example, maybe it’s a fear of being social and networking. Now I know I need to network in order to meet people and learn about them and build relationships that can benefit my business, but this fear could stop me from doing that, if I let it control me.

I can approach handling this fear several ways. I can ask myself: How is this fear benefiting me? What will I get if I give into this fear? what will I lose if I give into this fear? These answers can be useful for helping me understand what the fear is providing and what it isn’t providing.

Another approach is via meditation. Once I identify a fear, I do a breathing meditation technique. Breathing is an excellent way to get in touch with your body. You FEEL the fear, so in order to enter into a dialogue with it, using a breathing technique can help you feel it and work with it simultaneously.

The breathing technique I use involves drawing your kinisthetic awareness (i.e. sense of feeling in your body) from your belly to the crown of your head when you inhale, and then releasing it and letting it go down your body, while using that awareness to identify places of tension in your body.

When you are aware of a place of tension, you can then focus that awareness on dissolving the tension. not surprisingly what will also occur is that you will encounter emotions that are locked into the tension. This techniques allows you to feel the emotion and work through it. You may find yourself experiencing memories related to the emotions. These memories may not even seem to have anything to do with the fear you are feeling, but usually what those memories show you are incidents that contributed to that feeling of fear. For example, maybe you have a memory of being bullied in high school. That memory can be related to your fear of networking, as it contributes to your fear of interacting with people.

Once you’ve meditated on the fear and released the emotional memories behind it, you’ll find that the fear is no longer as powerful as it was. It may even dissipate all together and the result is that you now have no more reasons to stop you from doing what you need to do to make your business successful.

Book Review: Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion (Affiliate link) by George Thompson and Jerry Jenkins

Verbal Judo is an excellent book that presents techniques that anyone can use to help defuse tense situations with language. It also helps you understand how to be a better communicator with people in general. I like the stories and examples the authors use to demonstrate the technique, because it shows how it can work and what to do to make it work. The book is broken into small chapters which makes for easy reading, but I recommend taking your time and trying out the techniques. It is a little slow at the start and the authors do a bit of ego stroking, but overall the book is good.

Four out of five stars.

Technology has become a status symbol for many people. To be able to show that a person has the iphone 4 as opposed to a prior version is to show that the person is in, has status, and is able to keep up with the Jones. It’s no longer so much about the house you own or the car you drive (though to be sure those are still fetish status symbols in their own right) as it is about how complicated your smart phone is and how much it can regulate your life as a result.

I look at the obsession with technology with some skepticism, because I’m not sure the benefit is there as much as some might believe. I’m not a luddite, but nor do I think technology is always the answer. And much of my skepticism really comes down to wondering if the people who are constantly buying technology really understand what they are actually using, or just buying it for appearance sake, to show off to other people. But even in the cases where they really understand the technology, the question arises, at what point does continually consuming new technology go out of control.

Each year different companies will produce the latest version of technology. For example, each year for the last few years Adobe has released a new version of Creative Suite, even as Apple has put out a new iphone each year and undoubtedly already has an ipad 2 in this mix. These companies know they can do this because they know people will buy the technology. But what if we didn’t? What if instead we took what we had an used it to its full optimum use, and only when it began to not work did we actually look to replace it? It would certainly be more frugal and it might just put technology into the proper perspective.

Technology has become the new way for keeping up with the Jones. But as with any fetish it can’t really ever represent the person. It represents status until eventually it becomes outmoded and the next technology must be bought to show that one can at least put on the appearance of wealth, even if the actual wealth is lacking.

When I first started my coaching business, and ran into other coaches who did similar coaching and were doing really well in their business, one emotion or instinct I felt was a desire to compete. In some ways I felt a bit a threatened, because here were these people who were getting lots of clients and I was going to have to compete against them. It wasn’t until I went to a networking event at a local park and heard, “At this networking group, I learned I didn’t have to think about my relationship with similar businesses as competition because there’s enough work to go around,” that I began to think of competition in a different way. I realized focusing on who I had to compete against was taking away my energy and focus on who it should really be focused on: my clients.

As a published writer, I have sometimes felt competitive about reaching my audience and writing a book on a particular subject before someone else does. Just as with the networking situation, I realized one day that when I focused more on who I was trying to race against in writing a book, I wasn’t writing my book for my audience anymore, or myself. I was writing it to compete against someone else.

As I had these realizations about competition, I began to question what role competition should play in my business and in my writing. I know, realistically, that I do have competition. There’s no doubt that when I focus on a niche market and someone else also focuses on that market, there is some degree of competition. But how much of that feeling of competition is healthy?

What I’m getting at is that a life coaching relationship involves not just helping a client realize what s/he wants, but also helping a client recognize what s/he does not want in hir life. I use help, because it’s not for the life coach to tell the client what doesn’t work…The client has to figure out what resources aren’t useful, or what patterns of behavior hinder the realization of a success. The coach asks questions, helps the client realize well-formed outcomes and effects that changes will have on the client and other people, but the client, in the end, has to choose to act. The coach can help the client realize steps, even set up an acocuntability structure, but the client has to make the ultimate choice and follow through on what s/he wants to do, but also recognize what s/he does not need to accomplish those goals.

When I show a client a process, and we do the steps in the process, what is really happening is that the client is using the process to identify both the useful and not useful resources and then making a choice about what to do with those resources. Once the client knows what resources to use, then the client can make effective changes.

It’s an important distinction to remember. I’m not ust helping the client access resources, but also providing the client an opportunity to choose the resources that will help hir manifest hir imagination into reality.