photo credit: faungg
Our guest today is Douglas Cartwright, from "Living Words." Douglas, 36, is the CEO and Primary Coach of Living Words Coaching and Training.
He is an expert in cognitive-behavioural change techniques with over 15 years experience in helping people make significant personal transformations.
He’s trained in the USA, New Zealand and the UK and is an Associated Certified Meta-Coach and a Neuro-Linguistic Programming Trainer.
His expertise is in helping people untie their psychological knot, renew their minds and live their words so that they actually get to do what they say they want to do. He trains people to access their personal ‘genius’ states for heightened personal effectiveness.
He has been a Christian for 12 years and considers his faith to be central to how he lives.
Are you a People Blossumer?
Are you a ‘people blossumer’?
Are you someone around whom people blossom…?
In nature the sun shines upon a bud and the flower unfurls in its entire beauty. Do you have this effect on people?
Do people grow and change for the better because of your influence in their lives?
I work as a professional effectiveness coach with people who have gotten ‘stuck’ and want to get moving, and start taking action. And take action they do. But what about with the people I come into contact with day after day?
What about my family? What about my friends? Do my out-of-work people blossom around me?
What about you?
Are you a leader of people?
Do your people blossom?
What gets in the way of you ‘blossoming people’?
Bluntly, once you deal with your issues about people that have hurt you, and groups of people you don’t like, trust etc. I think it mostly comes down to your basic concept of human nature.
· What do you really think about people?
· Yes, but deep down, what do you really think?
Everyone has as a fundamental theory about what people arereally like. Fundamentally, are people good or bad? Do they rise to your expectations or fall to their basest nature?
What do you think?
Your philosophy will have been shaped by many things: parents, peers, school experiences, religious teachings to name a few.
Having had a rather unpleasant childhood, I grew up believing that deep down people were just out to hurt me. This didn’t make me want to ‘love my neighbour as myself’.
I had to re-examine my concepts of human nature. I turned to my Bible and decided that people were created in God’s image but had fallen from that. Therefore, they have a lot of potential to rise to do great things (and are capable of doing terrible things as well.)
The reasons your base-line beliefs on human nature are important are because during times of stress your attitudes and actions may reflect what you truly think people will do when the chips are down.
You can mouth platitudes about how all people are basically decent but if you don’t believe it, you won’t live it.
In The Sky’s Is Not The Limit Malcom Kiliminster says “There is no “middle ground”. Either you care deeply and passionately in the potential of people, even if you are seen as naïve for doing so, or you discard life as meaningless.”
It’s also important to respect people, and really listen to them. Even as a professional coach, I only took leaps and bounds in being able to truly listen to people when I took the position that I had no idea what they were going to say next.
Assuming that I knew absolutely nothing that was coming next awoke a hungry curiosity in me, an even stronger desire to understand how they thought – to build understanding. And this made me a more eager attentive listener. Have you ever talked to someone who made you feel like for that moment you were the centre of the world?
What helps people blossom?
I am fairly sure I have the answer: it’s love. Love is what motivated me to change. Love, from a friend who took me under his wing when I was young, impulsive and stupid and treated me like his son.
And because he believed in me, I changed for the better.
The most important thing is to love people. And loving people is not merely a feeling but a way of treating them.
To develop as a people blossumer you must know how to really love people – and not just when you feel like it either!
Your love for them must be like a rock raised high: a constant fixed point from which you view people and do not deviate no matter what waves of emotions swirl around you.
Your commitment to love – regardless – must be so far above and beyond you’re the ebb and swing of your everyday moods that they do not even touch it. Yes, it’s hard.
I understand recently that this is how Christians can say God (who is love) is their rock; because “ he does not change like the shifting lights and shadows”.
We do. He doesn’t.
Lest you think I am talking about being all huggy-touchy-feeling (calm down Type-A personalities!) I will state that it is entirely possible to feel furiously angry with someone and yet be calm and come at their situation from a place of love.
How?
Well, part of it comes from what I said above: it depends on whether you think people are deserving of love in all circumstances.
Another thing that helps is what Michael Hall, creator of Neurosemantics and Frame Games says “The problem is always the frame [belief, decision, value], not the person”.
You can change a belief more easily than you can change a ‘person’.
What does it mean to love people? How do I know when I am loving people?
I’ve talked a lot about love but what do I actually mean?
(We all have our own version of love but let’s look at one definition so respected that has so stood the test for the last two thousand years. You have probably heard it at a wedding ceremony.)
“The love of which I speak is slow to lose patience – it looks for a way of being constructive,
It is neither anxious to impress,
It does not cherish inflated ideas if its own importance,
It is never rude,
Love does not insist on its own way,
Love is not quick to take offence. Love keeps no score of wrongs.
Love is never glad when others go wrong, but joyfully sides with the truth.
There is nothing love cannot face; there is no limit to its faith.
It keeps up hope in everything.
It gives us power to endure everything.”
1 Corinthians 13: 4 – 8
In this definition love is a series of things you do.
You stay patient. You don’t take offence quickly. You side with those who tell the truth. You hope. These are all actions.
I realise that treating people this way, especially those that act like real jerks, can be difficult. I’m still working on it, believe me. I ain’t no angel but I do want to make the world a better place. I can do this one person at a time.
Fundamentally I believe that treating people any other way that this just breeds enmity and trouble.
And love never fails.
So if you want to blossom people, have a think about the following questions:
- How will you have to change your expectations of people in order to be more patient with them?
- What causes you to boast about yourself and your achievements?
- Do you feel like other people violate your boundaries? Is your expectation of them healthy and realistic?
- Do you get angry easily and without considering more positive outcomes?
- Do you want certain people to fail? Why?
- Do you hate?
- What will you have to change in the way you believe about people?
- Do you believe some people are more worthy than others?
Not all of these questions will be relevant to you. The important point is to get thinking about how you do treat, and how you want to treat those who can best be influenced by you.
If you are experiencing thoughts and feelings that are interfering with your personal and professional effectiveness, visit www.livingwords.net and sign up for the mailing list. You’ll receive links to articles that help deal with procrastination, perfectionism, and positive thinking, and product suggestions.
You can also receive a free ‘explore your breakthrough’ session with me, Douglas Cartwright. Read about it atwww.livingwords.net/freeintro.html
Follow Doug on Twtter and sign up at Living Words for a 7 part e-course, How to Stop Feeling Stuck and Start and download his free 61 page e-book,on Overcoming Procrastination Effectively.
