Self Care Archives | Alicia Eichmann

Cultivate the Mindset that will Create the Right Practice

I’ve been listening to Gabby Bernstein talk about having a spiritual practice. And then I was re-watching a video by Bo Eason and he was talking about how those who are great at what they do focus more on the practice than the game, so that when the time comes, when the opportunity comes, they are ready – to perform at their best.

And I’ve realized I need a practice. No, I need to learn how to practice.

I need a spiritual practice, and a physical one, and a financial one, and a relational one.

Practice is defined as a) the actual application of an idea, and b) the habitual procedure or way of doing something.

It’s basically consistent ongoing action.

Yeah, I’ve always been bad at that. And it’s time for that to change.

Do you remember writing papers in school? Were you a procrastinator?

I wasn’t. I’d get the assignment, make note of the due date and start and finish the paper right in the middle of that timeline.

But you know what I never did? I never revised my first draft. I was a decent enough writer that I’d always write it, and turn it in to see what would happen. I almost always got A’s.

And so I never learned to hone my craft, to keep working at it, to make it better.

For the last 10 years I’ve been a multi-tasker and a generalist, both at work and at home.

I’ve decided it’s time to change that. It’s time to simplify and streamline and narrow life down to a few things, and do them really well.

That’s another reason I haven’t developed a habit of practice. When you’re doing a ton of different things, if you tried to do them all on a regular schedule, it’d be overwhelming. When you’re keeping plates spinning, you can’t be in that place of routine and regular practice of key activities. You don’t have the time or the mental capacity. You’re not making space for that state of mind that accompanies practice.

I was watching a live teaching recently by Morgana McCabe Allan where she talked about having places for thoughts, notes and ideas so that you don’t hold them in your head. I’ve heard this before, but I was freshly convicted.

It’s time for me to stop living a haphazard life and become intentional in my every day living. And whatever hinders me from that needs to be put in line or cut out.

At first I’m not sure how to change a habit that is so ingrained. I’ve found I have a deep compulsion to address things in my life randomly, and a strong resistance to consistent order.

How do I begin to change?

As I literally sit here and ask myself that question I realize I can start by looking at the habits I have changed and the practices I have started. And the big changes my husband and I have made in the past year with our family.

I started a journaling practice for the first time about a year ago and that has solidified into a consistent part of my life. I’ve also been consistently cultivating a mindset of gratitude and a dialogue in my head around giving myself permission to be happy, to feel good, to expand my awareness, to accelerate my personal growth, to seek and expect to change my life in increasingly dramatic ways.

I’ve been cultivating a mental state of expecting growth, joy, peace, and transformation.

So I’m seeing the fruit of that every month, every week, every day.

Ten months ago I quit my job of 9 years. Seven months ago I started making money on my own. Five months ago my husband changed jobs. Four months ago we sold our house of 5 years and moved. Three months ago I started homeschooling.

Two years ago I set my intention to change our lives dramatically and as I pressed into that with God what I found was that the first order of business was for me to change on the inside. And then at a certain point in that process things began to transform externally in our lives in big ways.

So now when I feel the need to go to a deeper level with personal disciplines, and I have a desire for further external change, I realize that one has to precede the other.

Which means the question is simply this: What mindset and attitude do I need to cultivate to become the person I’m meant to become in the course of this next season?

Centered. Confident. Patient. Aligned.

That’s my mission.

What’s yours?

How to Dismantle Your ‘Upper Limit’: 3 Truths for Removing Limiting Beliefs

Books, Business, Self Care

When I read The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks and his concepts of the Upper Limit and the Zone of Genius, I found these ideas revolutionary, and his practical advice incredibly powerful, yet it also raised questions it didn’t answer, at least for me. I finished the book moved and inspired, yet still missing something critical I needed to resolve before I could move forward and truly remove my hidden barriers (limiting beliefs) and embrace my own zone of Genius.

I was grateful to him for bringing us this far, and giving us these concepts and terminology to build on. But I began to look elsewhere for further insight on how to truly address the hidden barriers at their fundamental level. Because upon first really digesting all of these concepts I found myself feeling freedom in understanding them, but also not feeling immediately liberated from these limiting beliefs. I needed something more to help me to truly receive and internalize them.

I kept asking myself:

How do we stop feeling fundamentally flawed and realize we are worthy?

How do we internalize the truth that by becoming more fully ourselves we will lift others up, not leave them behind?

How do we truly get past feeling like a burden when we are successful and happy, or trying to be?

How do I free myself from the crime of outshining others, that I’ve felt since my youth?

I knew that once I had answered these, I could circle back around to his zone of Genius, and his intriguing thoughts about the nature of time. I needed to find true peace with being happy and successful, with fulfilling my potential, before I could move forward with his steps for finding and living in my zone of Genius.

After about a dozen books, I found my answer in The Power of Intention, by Wayne Dyer. For some reason the way he talked about it just clicked for me. Here is my attempt to explain the three truths that came together for me, and that I’m eager to share with you now that I’ve found them.

#1 You are a Divine Creation and Share the Divine Nature

The first big truth in the book builds on the fact that you are a divine creation, and the same spirit that is Intention is also in you. He lists seven primary characteristics of Intention which are creativity, kindness, love, beauty, ever-expansive, unlimited abundance, and receptivity, and he says the divine energy of the Universe that is all of these things is also in you, and you function based on these same rules and are heir to these same characteristics.

He gives examples from nature, etc. Basically just as this spirit resides in nature and exhibits inherent beauty and is always growing and expanding, so too we have this spirit in us and we also inherently embody beauty and are designed to be constantly growing and expanding, and loving, showing kindness, being creative, etc.

Dyer says that as you awaken to your divine nature, you’ll see beauty everywhere, and “the creative Spirit brings things into the world of boundaries to thrive and flourish and expand. And it wouldn’t do so were it not infatuated with the beauty of every manifested creature, including you.” (pg 51)

When you are connected to God, to the field of Intention, to the divine energy and spirit which is your Source, you see the characteristics of Intention, of Spirit, everywhere you look.

He goes on to talk about expansion and gardens, and says

“The all emerging universal force that intended you into beingness and commences all life is always growing, and perpetually expanding. As with all seven of these faces of intention, by reason of its universality, it must have a common nature with yours. By being in an ever-expanding state and growing intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, you’re identifying with the universal mind.”
Wayne Dyer, The Power of Intention, page 52

Do you see how once we really get that we are part of spirit, intended by it, flowing from it, connected to it, once we get that, and then we consider its nature we have to accept the same truths as our nature too?

God is love. So are we. The universal mind is kind. So are we. The life force of nature is always expanding and growing. So do we. And Intention is endlessly abundant, and so are we.

That was the first big truth. The second is that you are infinite.

#2 You are an Infinite Spiritual Being

Dyer explains that we “emerged from a universal field of Creation” that he is calling intention. We are from something that is infinite, and thus our true nature is infinite. He explains that the life we see is temporary, but what is true is infinity and that our connection with Intention (God, the Universe) connects to everything that is infinite.

You are an infinite being, having a human experience.

He says “this is an enormous inner shift that eliminates fear of death and connects you permanently to the infinite Source of Creation that intends everything from the world of infinite Spirit into a finite world.

Understanding this at first is difficult, part of your mind (your ego) will resist it, but the other part of your mind (your soul) knows this and recognizes it as truth.

You are an infinite being, having a human experience.

This understanding removes the fear of death and the grip of the ego. When you receive it, it will truly shift your overarching framework in how you think about life. When I read this part of the book (chapter 6) I could feel something shift in my thinking, and my thoughts and emotions are different now about life and death, meaning and purpose.

When you truly ‘get’ this you will be a serious step closer to owning your personal power, because death will have no hold over you.

#3 You are a Piece of God

This is arguably the same as number one above, but I found an important distinction I want to make here. Dyer talks about being a host vs a hostage. We are conditioned by the world to be a hostage to our ego, but when we choose instead to be a host to God, this means “always seeing your authentic connection to your Source”, knowing you cannot be disconnected, and enjoying an eternal connection to the Source, which is God, the divine nature in you.

The point is going to be that this results in self respect. I want to include a short passage from him on this, because I love how he relates it personally from his own experience and his thoughts about writing the book.

“As I write here each morning, I feel that I’m receiving words and ideas from the power of intention, which allows me to bring these words to this page. I trust in this Source to provide me with the words; therefor I’m trusting in the Source that brought me into this physical world. I’m eternally connected to this Source.
This awareness simply doesn’t include a lack of respect for intending this book into form. The conclusion I’ve come to is that I’m worthy of my intention to write this book and have it published and in your hands today. In other words, I respect the piece of God that I am. I tap in to the power of intention, and my feeling of respect for it enhances my respect for myself.”
So, by loving and respecting yourself, you’re hosting God and inviting the energy of Creation to your consciousness, to your daily life, as you connect to the power of intention.”
– Wayne Dyer, The Power of Intention, pg 135

I think there is true freedom in this for us if we choose to receive it. It’s time to throw off false pride, and fake humility and concerns about ego or worthiness, and boldly accept our identity as daughters of God, and divine beings.

As Marianne Williamson says, “The world needs healing desperately, like a bird with a broken wing. People know this, and millions have prayed. God heard us. He sent help. He sent you.

It’s time to get over ourselves, accept our connection to spirit, our identity as spiritual, infinite beings, inspired by God, and boldly offer to the world the gift that has been given us for them.

You are worthy to be awesome, you are equipped with awesomeness. Receive the truth about who you are and receive the truth that in order to walk in this place, this calling, this truth of who you are, you need to reject the limiting belief that you’re flawed or unworthy or a burden, and that you’re going to leave others behind or somehow make them feel bad.

It is time instead to repeat Gay Hendricks’ mantra “I expand in abundance, success, and love everyday, as inspire those around me to do the same.

This is your purpose, this is your calling. Expand, grow, love, extend beauty, joy, peace, whatever your gift or skillset is, offer it to the world in a spirit of love and power, knowing that you are a divine creation, an infinite spiritual being, a piece of God.

7 Ways to Create Room in Your Life for Meaningful Work (as a millennial mom)

Books, Business, Parenting, Self Care

For us as moms deep work can be incredibly elusive, but I’m committed to finding a way to carve out time for meaningful, creative activities. I finally finished reading Deep Work, by Cal Newport, and while his paradigm is that of a male professor and he talks in terms of being an office knowledge worker, I found quite a few useful gems we can apply to this pursuit as women.

In the first few chapters he defends the necessity and value of deep work. I had already accepted his premise but found his evidence both interesting and compelling.

His first big point is that deep work is valuable but not commonly valued or prioritized today, and that this provides us with an opportunity. I think this is even more true as moms. We all have similar struggles and questions, but most of us will not create the time needed to do deep creative work generating and sharing the solutions.

Here are my 5 biggest takeaways from the book, which I found greatly helpful and encouraging, and I hope will assist you too in finding room for deep and meaningful work, and resisting the lie that for us this practice is somehow intrinsically out of reach.

1. See How Craftsmanship Provides Meaning

In the section where he gives a philosophical argument for depth, he mentions All Things Shining by Dreyfus and Kelly, which is now on my reading list. In it they explore “how notions of sacredness and meaning have evolved throughout the history of human culture.”

He goes on to say that these authors are worried about a diminishment in our current time of sacred, shining things. Ever since Descartes we have moved away from the idea of “a God or king bestowing truth” and given that role to the individual.

He goes on, “For all its good in the political arena, in the domain of the metaphysical this thinking stripped the world of the order and sacredness essential to create meaning. In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what’s meaningful and what’s not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism.” ( pg 87)

That is a whole thing it would be good to get into another time, but I think at a basic level we all know and feel exactly what he is talking about, and the point he makes from this is that craftsmanship, and the deep work that accompanies it, has innate value we can feel, even when there is so much we don’t know, or at least that feeling that too many important things are up for debate.

He argues that no matter your job, career, vocation, etc that you can find ways to see it as your craft, and that having the attitude that comes with craftsmanship will bring meaning into your life in a fundamental way.

I love this, I found it intriguing and helpful and I’m trying to figure out how to apply it to motherhood, but I do know that it helps explain why I love writing. Writing is my craft. A well-written piece of work soothes something in me that longs for beauty, for truth, for meaning.

2. Take a ‘Journalistic Approach’ to Scheduling Deep Work

He provides several methods for approaching deep work in relation to integrating it into your schedule. As a mom I found the journalistic one to be intriguing and the only one that’s really practical given the responsibilities of running a household. This basically means rather than withdrawing from society, or taking weekends, or working for a couple hours at the same time everyday, you fit in time regularly as you go. In this scheduling method he says you must be mindful of the energy it takes to switch from shallow to deep mode, as it can sap your willpower, and he says it requires “a sense of confidence in your abilities – a conviction that what you’re doing is important and will succeed.”

I find it deeply gratifying to know that I can assume the same schedule as he does as a professor, because he too has obstacles to working at the same time every day, in a consistent daily routine. But he basically warns that this is not for the novice or the faint of heart. I’ll need to manage my energy, and sense of necessity, that through my writing I’m doing important work that needs to routinely finished and published, to contribute value to the world.

3. Our Daily Capacity for Deep Work is 4 Hours

He talks at length about how to remove some of the shallow activity from your schedule to make room for deep work, but he says our capacity for deep work is really only 4 hours a day. We’re only trying to make room for 4 hours of focused, intense work that will move the needle on important projects.

I found this incredibly encouraging and reassuring. I know from logging my time in the past that when you are mindful you can often find an hour or two, and careful planning can typically create an hr or two more, for something that’s really important to you.

I may have kids and a house to clean, but also don’t have staff meetings or a boss. I completely set my own schedule. If I find room for close to 4 hours of deep work most weekdays I’ll have created the time resources that he proscribes. I’m certainly not there yet, but I’m struck by the idea that this is totally doable for me, if I choose to be disciplined and motivated.

4. Mental Rest = Subconscious Productivity

As a mom I found this one incredibly encouraging, and validating. It’s something I’ve sort of started doing naturally as a result of practicing gratitude and working on being present with my kids.

He says the research shows that when you fully unplug mentally from work in between deep work sessions, your subconscious does valuable work. It productively works through ideas and issues for you, at a different level and in a different way than when you consciously tackle a problem.

As I move forward and get better at my current method of time blocking, I am going to embrace the truth that when I research and ideate for an hour, stop to take my kids to the park, make lunch, and then come back to a solid afternoon writing session, if I fully rest my mind and relax and enjoy playing with my kids, this is both healthy for my psyche and productive for the project at hand.

Our brains are so incredible, they are always active on some level. When we try to consciously work through a problem when we are either mentally fatigued or in an non-conducive environment full of interruptions, we are embracing the lie that only our conscious mind can solve it and neglecting to enlist the aid of our subconscious mind in working on it while we tend to other important but often less noble-feeling activities.

5. Try Productive Meditation

As he talks about being purposeful about leisure and off time, he talks both about resting your mind, and also looking for opportunities for deep thought work, to practice something he calls productive meditation. Similar but different to mindful meditation, this is when you are doing a physical activity and you use the time to mentally work over a particular issue in your mind. What matters here is staying focused on that specific question, and bringing your mind back to it if it starts to wander or loop unproductively.

I’ve already found myself doing this some times, but now I feel I have terminology and a framework for this. I can think about how and when to strategically fit this in, and consider it deep thought time, always being mindful to pay attention to when I can tell I need a mental rest instead.

I now feel equipped with two good uses for all that extra time watching kids and feeling unoccupied but ‘on call’. One is to truly rest my mind and enjoy my children. The other, which is great for exercising or doing housework is productive meditation, where a physical activity is devoted to a specific, strategic mental exercise. For me this will most often be either working out the outline and flow of a post, or thinking more broadly about ideas in my recent reading and how they interact with other ideas to help form a new paradigm for how we think about life.

6. Embrace Being Active and Feeling Alive All Day

This is a good one. I really like where he talks about how we don’t understand human nature, when we resist structuring our leisure time. Humans actually love to feel alive and be active 18 hours a day. He quotes another author who says what energizes the human spirit is change, not rest. Giving your mind meaningful things throughout the day makes you more fulfilled. The mind fatigues from prolonged attention to one thing or in one mode.

Of course this is huge for moms. I’ve really been struggling and wrestling with the question of whether I should embrace just being on my feet all day, and focus on finding a few short breaks to recharge, instead of complaining or wishing for a life with more so called rest or down time.

So this belief that humans are meant to be active all day and that we simply need to be intentional in our choosing and then vary our activities really resonates with me and increases my hope that I’ll find a way forward that allows me to incorporate all of my highest values, without having to compromise something truly important to me.

7. Assess Your Attention to Social Media

He has a follow up book called Digital Minimalism, that I want to read which is devoted to this topic. But his advice on it in Deep Work is pretty straightforward. With social media, he talks about identifying your highest priority activities that move you toward your few biggest personal and professional goals, and then look at how social media adds or takes away from that.

I’m undecided on this, I think for many of us who spend a lot of time at home social media provides a value connection to friends and community. And for those of us who work for ourselves social media provides a value way to generate business and communicate with both clients and prospects.

My current approach is going to be to focus on the other strategies, and continue to streamline my life and business that allows room for deep, meaningful work, and then once I’ve consistently done that, look at how social media is a useful tool for distribution and discussion of what will hopefully be deeply meaningful ideas and insights that arise from this endeavor, new or re-worked ideas that really help us in our lives in some way, because that’s the whole point.

The Key to Expanding to Your Full Potential

Books, Business, Self Care

An Introduction to your Upper Limit and your Zone of Genius

A partial summary of The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks

How do you celebrate a big win, or a perfect moment? What do you do when you are in one of those precious mountaintop experiences? What we tend to do in the moment is to sabotage it. We get the high, and then we immediately do something to lessen the experience or the joy we get from it.

For some reason a memory that sticks in my mind is a rare opportunity a couple of years ago when my oldest son and I went to a baseball game together, just the two of us. We got some hot dogs, were enjoying the game, the weather was perfect, the stands weren’t crowded. The moment was perfect. And then we decided to get ice cream, because it was an opportunity to get dippin dots. A few minutes after eating them we both didn’t feel good and my son was so distracted by his stomach feeling unhappy that we left, really early. In the middle of the perfect weather and the non-crowded stands and the rare occasion for just he and I to hang out, just be together in such a perfect setting. But I knew enough to tell the spell was broken, he was unhappy, we might as well go home.

I could tell you other stories from my life. Once I understood the Upper Limit, I started to recognize my behavior of self-sabotaging myself in those moments of perfect happiness. Since I’ve learned about my Upper Limit, I’ve become much happier more consistently, because I learned about an obstacle to my happiness, and how to recognize and overcome it. Most importantly, I have a radar in my head that watches for those moments where I’m really happy, and reminds me to savor the moment, and to really question anything I seek to add to it.

What is the Upper Limit? It’s the main premise in a book called The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks. From years of research and experience of his own and with his clients, he concludes that we each have a kind of ‘set point’ for our happiness and that we are not used to being happier than that level, so much so that when we raise our happiness to that level, we will do something to sabotage ourselves and bring ourselves back down to a level where we are comfortable. This is mostly subconscious, but you can learn to recognize it.

This affect often shows up when you are starting to have success in multiple areas of your life. Unless you dismantle your Upper Limit, when you have financial success, you will sabotage yourself in the area of relationships, or vice versa. It also shows up in small everyday events. A good example is when you’ve prepared for a party or a dinner and everyone is hanging out, and then you have the urge to go get one more thing, or run to the store for something. Is it really necessary, or are you just avoiding sitting still and receiving the good that wants to come into your life?

Your Upper Limit will keep you from living in your Zone of Genius which is his other big supporting concept in the book. You’ve probably heard this phrase used recently, it’s gaining traction because it’s a fun, powerful idea that evokes an emotional reaction. But people often talk about genius similar to passion, as if you just need to find it.

But your Zone of Genius is something you need to fight for. Hendricks identifies four zones; he says we each have a zone of incompetence, of competence, of excellence, and of genius, and that the temptation is to stay in our Zone of Excellence because that is where we are successful, and predictable; people can count on us. But he says if we don’t make the leap to the Zone of Genius, something precious inside of us will die.

The key to making the leap is removing your Upper Limit. This is done in two basic ways. The first is to identify your key limiting beliefs. He identifies four primary ones and calls them hidden barriers. The second is an ongoing process of reconditioning yourself and changing your thinking; he provides a great list of practical strategies for doing this.

So what are the limiting beliefs, the 4 hidden barriers he identifies? These are reasons that we believe we cannot expand to our full potential. They are: feeling fundamentally flawed, avoiding disloyalty and abandonment, believing that more success brings a bigger burden, and a concern around outshining others.

Here are the sentences he gives that represent the unconscious beliefs. He says everyone has at least one, some people have a few. For myself and everyone I’ve talked to, at least one of these jumps off the page at you.

I cannot expand to my full creative genius because something is fundamentally wrong with me. (ie. I’m not worthy of it)

I cannot expand to my full success because it would cause me to end up all alone, be disloyal to my roots, and leave behind people in my past.

I can’t expand to my highest potential because I’d be an even bigger burden than I am now.

I must not expand to my full success, because if I did I would outshine others and make them look or feel bad.

Having laid the groundwork, he calls it the ‘root structure’ of the Upper Limit, he says, “Your Upper Limit Problem lives in the moment-by-moment interactions you have with yourself and the people around you. There is only one way to get this data, and that is to focus your keen awareness on specific aspects of your daily life.” (pg 61)

For the ongoing process – he calls it a ‘lifelong pursuit’ – of removing your upper limit, he provides a list of common behaviors to watch for: worry, criticism and blame, deflecting, squabbling, getting sick or hurt, hiding significant feelings, not keeping agreements not speaking significant truths to the relevant people.

His approach here is to look at each of these behaviors when they occur, to ask yourself what they are really about, and challenge yourself to embrace and receive abundance, success and love in your life, and reject these behaviors when they come up, along with the mental thoughts that created them.

Your goal through this ongoing activity is to expand your capacity for abundance, love and success.

After establishing all of this, he goes on in the second half of the book to talk about how to find and live in your zone of genius.

For more on how to dismantle the four hidden barriers read my next post on this, How to Dismantle Your Upper Limit: 3 Truths for Removing Limiting Beliefs