Midlife Mastery Journal » Uncategorized

The Consuming Corrosion of Fear

Les Brown — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:00:22 +0000

I drive a red 1994 Jeep Wrangler that I bought brand new. It has sat outside in all kinds of weather for the past sixteen years. Last week, I noticed with some annoyance that one of the tires was losing air . . . again. Last time, it was the left front. Now, it’s the right front. I was tempted to blame my repair place, because I’ve been bringing it back there with the same complaint a number of times. This time, when I picked the car up, I asked, “Why do the tires keep losing air?” The receptionist told me, “Oh, the wheels are pretty corroded and we had to clean them up and apply some special sealant.” I recognized that it was my seemingly-benign neglect that had been the trouble all along. The rust and corrosion is gradually eating up not only the wheels, but the bumpers and some of the body as well. Is the fate of the whole vehicle in question?

Think, if you will, about the RMS Titanic, resting on the bottom of the deep Atlantic Ocean since its spectacular sinking one cold April night in 1914. I’m sure you’re familiar with the photos and videos that have been published over the years since the wreck was finally discovered by Robert Ballard in 1977. The great ship, weighing in at 46,326 tons when she left the shipyards in Belfast, is now festooned with ugly growths called ‘rusticles.’ Gradually, the iron ship’s massive hull is being consumed – eaten actually – by iron-eating bacteria. Before too very long, the great ship’s entire structure will disappear into virtual puddles of bacterial excretions. The pile of refuse that remains after the bacteria have done their work will be unrecognizable.

The Jeep, the Titanic, and your most intimate relationships may have a great deal in common. We humans are subject to a corrosion that beats out the destruction caused by oxidation and bacteria hands-down. I am convinced that fear causes more destruction in the lives of men and women than any other single agent. We all have it; yet, when the bravado of self-assured adulthood begins to yield to the deeper questioning that comes with midlife, fear emerges with a ferocity seldom experienced at any other period of life.

When I was considering the subject of this article over the past week, I was troubled and questioning my own understanding and appreciation of this universal phenomenon. “If fear is so corrosive and damaging to life and to relationships,” I wondered, “why is it so universal? Why is it there at all?” I’ve often heard that a little fear is a good thing. The more I think about it, the more I am certain that fear provides us with the necessary protection that we need to avoid getting into life-threatening trouble. There definitely is such a thing as a ‘healthy’ fear. We all need it to keep us from getting too irresponsibly cocky and making rash and self-destructive decisions. A little fear is a very good thing, I concluded. “So,” I asked myself, “is a little fear like a little rust?”

I have come to believe that there are actually two types of fear. The one – healthy caution – provides us with the protection that we need against rash decision-making. There is another type of fear, however, that arises from insecurity and self-doubt. This kind of fear, like the iron-eating bacteria in the hull of the Titanic, slowly but consumes its host. Psychologist Carl Jung located the core of self-doubt in what he called the ‘ego,’ while the true personality he identified as the ‘Self.’ In this sense, your ego, convinced of your fundamental vulnerability, lives in mortal terror. While the Self continues to try to convince you that you’re fundamentally OK – regardless of what’s happening within or around you – the ego drowns out that more rational voice with its own terrified screaming.

At midlife especially, when the Self finds itself beset with radical changes on all fronts, the Ego’s constant doubts have a chance to erode not only your self-confidence, but also, at the same time, your capacity for acceptance, trust, and engagement. Under the fearful influence of your ego, your willingness to accept life on life’s terms (and your most significant relationships on their own terms), to trust in your own judgment and others’ good will, and to engage yourself unreservedly in the work of giving of yourself begins to collapse. Self-preservation begins to assume a priority beyond anything you’d previously experience. Your choices no longer to accept, no longer to trust, and no longer to engage begin to take their toll. Fear begins its corrosive corruption of your quality of life.

The popular spiritual work, A Course in Miracles, defines the ego as “a fearful thought.” I completely agree. The ego is convinced (and is determined to convince you) that you are in mortal danger and that only you can save yourself by withdrawing from intimacy. Ironically, under the guise of self-preservation, your ego infects you with the fear of being killed, while, at the same time, it’s in love with death. Its strangling fear begins by cutting off your vital connection with the divine Spirit by convincing you that your Higher Power, or God, cannot and will not save you from death and destruction: that the only Savior you can count on is yourself.

Next, its corrosive influence extends to your most intimate relationships, seeding doubts and watering them with imagined faults and failings in the other that “threaten” your security and well-being. It convinces you that, once again, only you can “protect” yourself from ruin. Finally, as its work runs its course, it not only cuts off your capacity for unconditional and unqualified love of others, it locks you into a kind of imagined self-protective mode where not even the grace of God can reach you. Ego-driven fear, left to run its course, will eventually succeed in causing you to forget, at the deepest level of your being, who you are.

Who are you? You are the beloved Child of a Power greater than yourself Who called you into being from the origins of the universe and who sustains and protects you in all your ways, regardless of any detours your fallible human consciousness my send you on along your way. All your Higher Power or God requires of you are the ‘virtues’ that I wrote about in my last article: acceptance, trust, and engagement (or ‘faith,’ ‘hope,’ and ‘love’). If only you would choose to ignore the fearful screaming of your ego and focus on the invulnerability of your Self and your connection with your Higher Power, you can be set free from fear to choose to respond to that Power with unconditional Faith, unconditional Hope and unconditional Love. Only then, in truth, can you accept, trust, and love yourself or anyone else.

Do your choices show that you actually believe that you are who you are? As a Child of your Higher Power, do you exercise unconditional acceptance of life on life’s terms and of the others with whom you share the gift of intimacy in this life? Do you trust that, no matter what happens to you or to others, you will always be cared and provided for? Are you willing to accept that your life depends on the quality of the commitments that you’re prepared to make on a daily basis?

“What about getting hurt?” “What about betrayal?” you may ask. In return, I want to ask you, “What is your circle of influence, and what is your circle of concern?” You may well be concerned about other peoples’ ideas or behaviors, but you have no control over them! You have control only over your own attitudes and choices. Your decisions to accept, trust, and be committed never depend on what the other person says or does. They depend wholly and exclusively on you and your willingness to love regardless of the cost. That’s the way your Higher Power loves you; that, in a nutshell describes the essence of Love itself. Love doesn’t necessarily involve intimacy; love doesn’t necessarily involve intimacy (those things require two committed people). But love does require you to choose commitment over fear, and forgiveness over anger and resentment. Can you handle it?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

Your Own Personal Stile

Les Brown — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:57:12 +0000

No, it's not a misspelling (and yes, I do make frequent use of my spell-checker). As our agrarian past fades from our collective memory, so will the images of pastoral scenes, farm implements, and, yes, even stiles. I even had some trouble finding a decent photo of one (and this one's from England, where the rural life still survives). What made me think of a 'stile' (a ladder providing access over a fence or wall) today was an interview I had last night with Rabbi Ed Weinsberg. Ed faced and overcame the challenges of prostate cancer just a very few years ago, and he's written a book that documents his story (and others) for the benefit of the 1/6 of all men who'll be facing that disease. For Ed, the experience catapulted him to a higher appreciation of faith, love, and even sex.

It's a fact of the human condition: transitions never come easily. They always appear as an interruption in the kind of life we desire and even plan for: a life of security, tranquility, ease, and peace. Yet, as I've written fairly often, the so-called 'interruption' is the reality, the sense of security is the illusion. Our 'common sense' lies to us, and tries to convince us that these disruptive events that come hurtling like projectiles into our lives are obstacles to our happiness and progress. Obstacles? Or, are they, in fact, the steps that take us up and over the obstacles? I submit to you that, just perhaps, these disruptions — even the big and painful ones — are what stimulate change and growth and that, without them, we'd face stagnation and decay. "No pain, no gain" is true particularly because every change involves a painful separation from our status quo.

Once we've faced and dealt with the pain (however successfully that may be), what we're left with is pure growth on a deep, personal level. We may see every transition as a kind of learning experience, and every pain avoided as lesson not learned that most assuredly will return again and again until we're ready to accept it and deal with it head-on. So long as we keep refusing to climb the stile of transition, we'll keep facing the wall of denial that keeps us trapped in the endless repetition of our mistakes.

Life can be very much like walking in a forest on a starless night. Even with the light of faith, we can only see a very short distance ahead. We can never be fully aware of exactly where the boundaries of our limitations lie until we bump up against them. For those of you who haven't yet experienced midlife, it's doubtful that you could ever predict exactly what area(s) of your psyche will wind up being 'ground zero' for your transition. Regardless, the point is that it's already there, predetermined by your nature, nurture and experience, waiting for you. The only awareness you need to be able to face that challenge, when it comes, is that there is no obstacle so large that your faith cannot transform it into a step-stair, a stile, that will get you over your hurdle.

For the rest of us, who have already achieved some modicum of acceptance of life on life's terms, our awareness needs to focus on the on-going process of growth. Once we've begun the transformation into maturity, we need only recognize that this is a never-ending process (in this world). There'll always be another wall, always another challenge, always another lesson, always another stile. Each one will take us a little bit further, a little bit higher, and make us a little bit stronger. One thing you must never do is to despair. Your reliance cannot rest exclusively in yourself. So long as you maintain your acceptance, trust, and engagement, you (and your Higher Power) remain ultimately undefeatable. Whether you're approaching the midlife transition or actively engaged in it, the key to maintaining your own personal stile is having the courage to trust that the One who has taken you this far will never fail you.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

Life Is Coming At You – Are You Ready?

Les Brown — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:54:27 +0000

Our local Giant supermarket has introduced hand scanners so that you can just walk up and down the aisles, collecting your groceries, while scanning them and bagging them right in your cart. Checkout involves downloading the inventory from the hand scanner into a self-serve checkout station. It's pretty cool. For produce, you pick out your fruits and vegetables, take them to a weigh station, enter the item code and it prints out a scanable label.

Here in Rehoboth, it's spring. Even though we're facing a (weekday) move to Washington DC in just about a month, Craig wanted to put in his annual garden. Since I'm no longer working 24/7 on my coaching business, I've been available to help shop at Lowe's and lug bags of soil and mulch around (which is about the extent of my gardening expertise). Last week, we came home with a Jeep-load of plants of several varieties.

What does our mutual shopping experiences have to do with midlife? Hold on . . . I'm getting there.

Last week, Craig picked up two or three of those vegetables that you make pickles out of and brought them to the weigh station. Looking up the PLC code for the item was a challenge, because, as long as he stood there looking at the vegetables in his hands, the name just wouldn't come to him. He stood there, helplessly staring at the list of vegetables and codes (hundreds of them), and looking at the items in his hands, stuck. Finally, he started looking through the pictures of vegetables displayed on the computer screen until he finally found them: cucumbers!

Yesterday, we were admiring the plants that Craig and planted in our giant glazed pots scattered around the yard. He had skillfully mixed jasmine on metal poles with vinca vine cascading over the edge of the pot with these bright red annuals for contrast. Bright red annuals. Were they begonias? No. What were they? We stared at each other in silence. Craig went into the shed to sort through his large collection of plant tags, but to no avail. The red flowers remained nameless. In frustration, I came inside to the internet and googled 'red annuals.' On the third or fourth page of photos, I finally found them: geraniums!

It's scarce comfort to realize that such (ever-more-frequent) memory lapses in midlife are often the result of having to search through increasingly extensive and complex data banks of memories. It's more a factor of a full and overly-stimulating life than OBS (organic brain syndrome). That knowledge doesn't help at all when you want to offer a friend a dish of cucumber salad or tell him about how well your geraniums are doing. If it's not happening to you yet . . . get ready, 'cause here it comes!

The realities of midlife — memory lapses, menopause and andropause, aging features, career change, relationship issues — are never easy to face or to deal with. That's why so many of us choose not to. 'Perhaps,' we tell ourselves, 'if I ignore it, it won't affect me.' I want . . . I demand . . . my comfortable routine, and I will banish any suggestions that something might disturb my sense of security. By midlife, generally speaking, lives have become symphonies of routine. Even the problems that we complain about most often are 'normal' problems. In spite of our grousing and griping about them, there's a sense of security that comes with focusing our attention on fixing the next thing that breaks. However, if it hasn't happened to you yet, midlife presents the perfect context for the collapse of your world, and pretending that it's not coming won't help you at all.

An earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale just hit d'Aquila, Italy in the middle of the night, catching the residents of that ancient city asleep in bed. Nobody was expecting it. Nobody was ready for it. It can be different for you: midlife doesn't have to catch you off-guard. You can prepare. You really don't have to do anything: you only have to be aware of the issues that are approaching. There are only three, really: your career, your relationships, and your health. Life is preparing to send you challenges in all three of these areas. In your career: are you ready with your exit strategy? Do you know what's next for you? In your relationship: have you built a sturdy foundation of trust and communication, so that when (not if) serious lifestyle changes hit, you'll both be ready for them? In your health: are you committed to doing whatever it takes to face the challenges that await you? Are your healthy habits in place now, or are you waiting 'until'?

You don't become prepared for life's eventualities by following your routine at all costs. Preparedness means deliberately breaking out of your routine, disrupting your schedule, letting go of some the 'important' features of your existence so that you can focus more clearly on what's essential. Look at your life as it is today and, in the words of Robert Kriegel, "If it ain't broke . . . break it!" In midlife, more than at any other period of your existence, taking the next step forward requires questioning everything and rethinking everything. Otherwise, when life does come at you with the next unexpected swipe (big or small), you just may not be ready. By the way, how are your geraniums doing?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

. . . The Wisdom to Know the Difference

Les Brown — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 13:00:00 +0000

One of the most difficult virtues to attain is wisdom. Nobody becomes wise through an accident of birth or by osmosis. As has often been said, wisdom derives from good judgment, which, in turn, derives from bad judgment — and an awful lot of it. Jesus told his disciples, "By their fruits you shall know them." Human history is an immense tapestry of good and bad judgment calls, wisdom and folly, all intertwined. "It seemed like a good idea at the time," represents a sad epitaph. Yet, when the smoke has cleared and the results of our decision-making have been revealed, there's no escaping the evidence. Credit default swaps certainly must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but now it'd take quite a stretch of the imagination to pretend that the results were anything short of disastrous.

There's never a shortage of denial among us human beasties. Just when you might imagine that all the evidence is in and irrefutable, someone shows up with his (or her) head in the sand, proclaiming the black is white and up is down. The world sadly experiences no shortage of Holocaust deniers . . . and that's only one example. Yes, wisdom can be very hard to come by and, when you do come by it, it can be very expensive. As a boy, my dad was having a lot of fun feeding paper into a reel lawn mower and watching the blades shred the paper. That is, he had fun until it lopped off the tip of his thumb, giving him a bump (where they reattached it) that he carried with him to the grave. Of course, I was much wiser than he: I was cutting photographic paper into narrow test strips on the paper cutter in my darkroom one day until it lopped off the top of my index finger. Unlike my dad, I'm carrying a flat top finger with me to my grave. As the Pennsylvania Dutch were fond of saying, "We're too soon old and too late smart."

"The wisdom to know the difference," says the end of the Serenity Prayer (short version). The difference between what? Between the things I can and cannot change. What, after all, actually falls within my power to change? Only time (and a lot of it) teaches the truth about that. There's very little (if anything) outside of myself that I can change. In fact, one of the things that I've learned through this long life-education process is that changing myself offers the only hope I have of changing situations. It's a Great Truth of systems theory that the more you try to impose change from the outside, the more resistance your system will offer. Yet, people keep pouring their resources into trying to change the world only to find themselves exhausted and the world virtually unaffected. You know the explanation the guy offered when asked why he kept beating his head against the wall, don't you? "It feels so good when I stop," he volunteered.

At some point, there exists a watershed point between the courage to work for change and the serenity to accept the world as it is. The Wisdom Point reveals itself in the continuum between commitment and insanity: between doing what you can and doing the same thing over and over again with the same results. Age seems to be of little help here. You've got more knowledge, skill and experience and can handle more difficult and challenging situations, so you'd expect to be able to accomplish more. Life allows you glimpses of progress from time to time, sometimes only to bolster your hopes. Successful casinos always let you win some; they know you'll be back, encouraged, and ready to fall prey to their lopsided odds. "The wisdom to know the difference." "Strange game. The only winning move is not to play." [War Games] There comes a point — graced by wisdom — that you experience the existence of that watershed point and you learn that it's time to say 'enough is enough'.

It may be true that winners never quit and quitters never win, but then along comes the midlife transition and you get to see that what got you here won't get you there. [Marshall Goldsmith] Wisdom gives you the power and authority to change from courage to serenity, from engagement to acceptance. I speak sometimes about the cardinal virtues: acceptance, engagement and trust: acceptance of the past, engagement in the present, trust in the future. While never abandoning trust, engagement must always give way to acceptance. That's the way of wisdom. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus recommend to his disciples: "When you have done everything you were
ordered to do, say, 'We are but unworthy servants. We have done only what
we ought to have done.'"

So, there comes a time when you stand and look around you and see that there's no more that you should do. Evidently, there's much more that you could do ('could' is a bottomless well of possibility), but there's no more that you need to do. The Wisdom Point comes when you reach Stage Five grief: acceptance. It arrives when it finally sinks in that your business is finished; when you look at your career and finally acknowledge that you can't do this anymore; when you realize that leaving a marriage will be much less painful than staying in it; when you finally accept that doing the things you love to do isn't worth dying for. That, after all, is the ultimate 'dead end,' isn't it? Wisdom dictates that you don't have to take it that far; you don't have to let your stubbornness kill you. Until the ultimate 'dead end', every ending is a new beginning, though sometimes it's hard to know one from the other. We can pray for "the wisdom to know the difference."

Since 2004, I've been working long hours to build my coaching practice and to produce programs that would provide great value to my prospective clients and anyone in a stressful transition. Out of those programs came the book, The Frazzled Entrepreneur's Guide to Having It All and the Frazzled Entrepreneur program. That expanded into The Balanced Life Program. A chance conversation on a shuttle bus launched the Midlife Mastery Program. Finally, insights from all of them merged into the Turning Point Strategies program. Unfortunately, in spite of the advice and encouragement of many talented and exceptional people, the market was not interested. Who knows why. It is what it is. So this is my Wisdom Point, my encounter with the Dead End.

As a writer, I'll continue to write, and who knows what shape or direction it may go in. As a coach, I'll continue to work with my handful of dedicated clients. But, the entrepreneur in me must acknowledge the facts of the situation, and it's time to close it down. Thanks to everyone for gifting me with your support. It's time for this guy once again to pray for "the serenity to accept the things I cannot change." Amen.

Avoiding the ‘Drop’ One Day at a Time

Les Brown — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:00:00 +0000

You may or may not recognize the 'drop,' depending on your age and what are of the country or the world you may be inhabiting. The 'drop' is that cataclysmic moment when the executioner pulls the lever, the trap door flops down, and the condemned plummets earthward . . . to an extent. Many people, particularly during the midlife transition, walk around as though they had a noose around their neck — their career, their relationships, their family, their health — and they're just waiting for the 'drop.' I can tell you this about the midlife transition: it isn't over until you've taken full and complete mastery over yourself and you've aligned yourself with whatever purpose or destiny is yours.

What does that mean in practical terms? It means that the challenge never ends. It means that responding to that challenge implies that the goal is much less important than the journey. In fact, one of the major midlife paradigm shifts between adulthood and maturity involves recognizing that the outcome of any of our decisions is not (and never was) in our hands. Success and failure ('winning' or 'losing') in anyone else's eyes really doesn't matter, and 'salvation' lies in recognizing that it really is all about 'how you play the game' (just like the old saying taught). Here's the way to avoid the 'drop' one day at a time: you can practice the three cardinal virtues: acceptance, trust, and engagement.

Acceptance is the key: it's the sine qua non of any mature life. As the Desiderata says, "The Universe is unfolding as it should." Can you get your mind around that? You weren't born into the 'wrong family', no matter what happened during your childhood, you were never a 'victim', and the decisions that you made, at the time that you made them, were the right ones for you. Acceptance means getting yourself out of the punishment mindset. Neither God nor the Universe punishes; not even karma brings retribution. All we experience from day to day amounts to the natural results of our choices and, whenever there's pain involved, it's only a life lesson trying to get our attention. Even God experiences our human limitations.

The late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, the 'original' televangelist (he and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale were the media groundbreakers) told the following compelling story:

In one of the Nazi concentration camps, a young boy was caught stealing bread. The camp was assembled and, as an object lesson, the boy was strung up with piano wire to die a horrible death in front of everyone. "Where's your God now?" growled one of the prisoners witnessing the horror. A fellow prisoner, standing nearby, pointed to the lifeless youngster and said, "There he is!"

It's not enough just to accept that everything is (and always has been) exactly as it should be. One of the lessons we have to learn throughout life (and re-learn nearly every day) is to trust that whatever will turn out for the best. If 'acceptance' is difficult, 'trust' can be nearly impossible. How can we say that everything will turn out for the best when there are so many bad decisions being made, not only all around us, but even by us? Here's the perspective: The universe has an origin and a direction, and everything in this universe is evolving along with it. When things align with this grand movement — this grand design — the whole moves forward. When things fail to align, they falter, they fail, they become extinct and no longer contribute to the whole. We always have the choice: to align ourselves with an evolutionary process much greater than ourselves, or to fall by the wayside as a useless evolutionary detour. To join with the forward movement, we have only to 'trust the process' and 'go with the flow' (as we discern it with all our hearts and minds and souls). Trust is, indeed, a day-by-day, even minute-by-minute choice.

Finally, the third essential approach to life is 'engagement'. Acceptance and trust are anything but passive. In fact, Edmund Burke said it best when he wrote, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." Acceptance is a struggle rooted in the past: freeing ourselves from the mentality that somehow we should have — could have — had more or been more. It's the fight to stifle the cry from within us, "Why me?" Trust is a struggle that wrestles with our own doubts about the future and our fears that, after all, the buck stops with us. It's the gross dichotomy between our resistance to any other authority than our own and our terror of being solely responsible for our own fate. Engagement means taking responsibility for the people we have become as well as the people we want to become. It means getting our hands dirty with the messy work of suiting up and showing up for life right now. It means doing the next right thing with no guarantees that anything will turn out the way we want it to, but with the assurance that it will turn out well.

These three — acceptance, trust, and engagement — are the attitudes that separate the mature man or woman from the adult. Disillusioned? Yes, but would you want to live in an illusion and longer than necessary? "Why," you may ask, "did I have to wait so long to learn these lessons?" "Because," I say, "nothing happens by accident: you can't know what you don't know until you know it; you can't accept, trust, or engage yourself in anything before you're ready for it." Once you stand on the other side of the midlife transition you get to see things so much more clearly. In fact, from this perspective, one day at a time, there is no 'drop' at all!