Eckhart Tolle and Oprah live webinar
By Scott Fusco | March 4, 2008
Oprah and Eckhart have combined forces and are creating a 10 week webinar about the evolution of consciousness. I just finished watching the 1st episode and it was great! I encourage everyone to log onto Oprah’s website, create an account and check out the archive for the first episode.
Eckhart is the real deal. The process that he describes for reaching stillness and enlightenment is spot on from my experience (which if you are curious, you can read about in my post about it here).
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New year’s update
By Scott Fusco | January 8, 2008
Hello everyone!
I couldn’t resist a post to update my progress with wrist tendinitis. The good news is that it is getting better, just talking longer than expected. I have had this injury before which makes it chronic and generally harder to treat. But I am working with some great people and my time table to return is 6-10 weeks depending on how the strengthening phase goes.
It has not been easy for this goal-oriented coach to sit out these past couple months but I have taken it as an opportunity to grow my business locally and enjoy myself. I’m doing something I’ve always wanted to do - learn to ballroom dance!
So there, I may not be able to write posts but I can do a mean foxtrot! Talk to everyone soon!
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What do coaches actually DO?
By Scott Fusco | November 7, 2007
Hello everyone,
I was advised by my doctor to spend as little time on the internet as possible for the next 1-2 months to heal the tendonitis. At first this news upset me because I have a lot of visitors to this site that I want to continue chatting with and sharing ideas. But I am looking at this as an opportunity to do some other things that I have been wanting to do that aren’t web-related.
A few minutes ago, I just had a really amazing coaching session with a client that was very personal and powerful. Coaching in these situations is really rewarding and I am grateful to all of those who have the courage to be vulnerable not only with me but with anyone that they trust. Keep plugging away and always shine in the integrity of who you are. Always stay courageous.
The more I coach, the more I realize how nearly impossible it is to explain to people what it is that we do for a living. We wear so many hats at different times. We don’t just help people reach their goals. Sometimes we just listen to them and really really love and support them. And for them in that moment in time, that is perfect and exactly what they wanted.
And therein lies what I do for a living - I provide people with what they are looking for (whether they are consciously aware or not). If they are unaware of what they want, I help them gain clarity. If they need to brainstorm on ideas, we do that. If they are super stressed out and the world is difficult then I simply understand and acknowledge. And that is often enough to re-inspire them.
This time away from the computer will be a good thing (we coaches know that problems are really disguises for opportunities 
). When I come back full-time in 1-2 month I will have nothing holding me back from making this site really great.
This time away is also an opportunity for my readers to reach out and connect with me outside of this impersonal internet medium. Do you like my posts? Are you curious about coaching? Give me a hollar and introduce yourself.
Let me give you a free coaching session. I really love doing it, I don’t even think of it as work. It’s fun, trust me!
If you don’t want a free session, who in your life do you think might find working with a coach to be helpful? By all means tell them about this site if you find it helpful.
I have tons more to say but it will need to wait another 1-2 months. Until then, take care!
Scott
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Update for the week
By Scott Fusco | October 30, 2007
I haven’t written a post in a while because I have developed tendonitis in my wrists. Not to worry though, I am learning how to use dragon’s naturally speaking program (which converts voice to text) and I just bought a mouse for my feet which I can use until the wrists are healed.
There’s always a creative solution! So bare with me…my goal is to have atleast 2-3 new posts a week once I get comfortable with the mouse and dragon’s program.
If you are subscribed to my RSS, bare with me - I have a list on my computer of about 300+ ideas for articles so this will be an exciting time once I adjust to this new process.
In the mean time, take a look at the archives if you haven’t already. There is a lot of good stuff in there.
One last thing….I have committed to myself to not comment on blogs anymore until I have the dragon program working. So it may take me some time to get back to you if you leave a comment.
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New wordpress theme!
By Scott Fusco | October 22, 2007
Well, I picked out my new wordpress theme and installed it today and did some minor tweaks. I think it looks great!
A BIG THANK YOU to Nathan Rice over at www.rockinthemes.com. Thanks a lot, buddy!
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Recommended reading from the blogosphere 10-22-07
By Scott Fusco | October 22, 2007
What goal would YOU like to accomplish? Contact me today for your no-cost 30 minute exploratory coaching session!
I stumbled upon a great blog and series of posts from Marc Andreessen about career planning. This is definitely worth checking out for anyone regardless of where you are at in your life and career. Here is part one, two, and three.
One of those posts led me to an older but still relevant and great article by David Brooks called the organization kid. Very interesting social commentary and comparison of the baby boomers versus generation Y.
Again, with all of the recommended reading, it is not whether or not you agree or disagree with what I recommend. Instead, it is about moving past that mode of thinking into one that embraces increasing your awareness for the sake of increasing your awareness. This means staying open and not letting your own personal biases prevent you from accessing this information, even if you disagree with it.
Because whether or not you disagree or agree with what the author has to say, your awareness of possibilities will increase, and that increased awareness is invaluable. Stay open to it.
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Is the sky actually blue?
By Scott Fusco | October 18, 2007
What goal would YOU like to accomplish? Contact me today for your no-cost 30 minute exploratory coaching session!
If you ask most people what color the sky is, they will likely say blue. But what if you ask a colorblind person? What will they say?
There is a good chance that it will be something other than blue. And this demonstrates an important point that most people don’t seem to understand yet - most of the time, truth is completely subjective.
Truth remains objective in exact sciences such as math or physics, but for most people, what we view as every day objective truth, is actually subjective.
By “objective truth”, I mean truth that is outside of the realm of perception. That is, it is pure, unquestionable truth. “Subjective truth” on the other hand is any truth that is filtered through your perception.
This becomes even more apparent when you ask someone a question about what they like or do not like. As soon as you ask a question that factors in someone’s personal values, you will likely get many different answers from many different people.
Ask someone what the best football team is this year and you will likely hear “the patriots or the colts or the chargers.” But you might also hear “the chiefs” from some rabid fan. So ask yourself, which is true? Which is right?
This is a trick question because if you try and answer the question within the frame that I asked it (by picking a team), then you will be trying to claim a subjective truth as an objective truth.
This post is really about shifting the way that you think about truth. Truth is not some objective thing. Even if you ask some people a very basic question such as “What color is the sky?” you will likely get many many answers.
The sky might be blue, but don’t try and convince a colorblind person. That person might swear that the sky is black or some other color. And their experience is just as “real” as yours, so who is to say that yours is right and theirs is wrong? Neither color is “right or wrong” - just right to him or her.
So if you recognize this, then you recognize how silly it would be to constantly fight over objective truth when truth itself is so heavily influenced by our perceptions (to further compound the problem, our perceptions create our reality). This type of thinking about truth needs to be shifted to a more flexible form of truth - subjective truth- which recognizes truth as something that is individual for each person.
If you ask me who will win the superbowl, I will say the patriots. And that is my truth. That is what resonates most personally with me. You could try and convince me otherwise, but what is the point of doing that? Even if you get me to switch from my truth to your truth, all I would be doing is swapping one subjective truth for another. There is nothing objective about this whatsoever.
And so the shift that I want everyone to make is one in which we start viewing truth for what it really is - a deeply personal opinion that varies greatly from person to person.
If you are interested in observing the danger of avoiding this way of thinking, turn your t.v. on to almost any channel and you will hear people arguing about what is right or wrong, what we “should” be doing, etc.. You will hear people that are so focused on observing the differences between people that they don’t see or acknowledge the connection that we all share.
So the shift to be made here is one that transcends the need to force our truth on other people or try and convince other people that our truth is better/right/etc. This shift is one in which we no longer view truth as something that is objective, but instead something that is deeply personal to people.
If we could recognize and support everyone’s individual truths instead of arguing with them, then everyone would feel more understood. Most people will do what feels right to them anyways, but at least if we recognize their feelings as their personal truth, we can support them rather than annoy them with notions of what we think they should be doing.
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Related Posts:
- Right or wrong vs. Right for you
- How thoughts create reality
- What does it mean to judge something?
- Useless rules and restrictions
- A how-to guide to following your intuition
Topics: Awareness-Consciousness, Decision Making, Intuition | 1 Comment »
Self-help? No thanks, I don’t need help
By Scott Fusco | October 10, 2007
What goal would YOU like to accomplish? Contact me today for your no-cost 30 minute exploratory coaching session!
Have you ever walked by the self-help section of a bookstore and saw someone browsing and wondered what was wrong with them? I catch myself doing this sometimes.
I really can’t stand the term “self-help” because it turns a potentially great idea (further developing oneself) and frames it in a way that makes people feel guilty or ashamed for even entering that section of the bookstore.
I much prefer the terms “personal development” or “self-development” because this is about evolving to a higher state of being, not helping ourselves. “Help” assumes that there is something wrong in the first place. “Development” doesn’t do this.
So it is the same idea, but the key is, one term triggers emotions of shame and guilt in us while the other inspires and makes us feel good about ourselves. If as a culture, we could all stop using the term self-help, we would be much better off.
All of us really need to work on raising our awareness of emotionally loaded words, especially those words that are emotionally negative words. There is just no need or place for them anywhere. They do all harm and no good.
At Coach U, we have a class where we focus on how language affects people. Let me just say that language is more important than most people realize. In fact, I remember watching a special on t.v. about a man named Frank Luntz who consults for political campaigns to determine which words trigger the most politically advantageous reaction in people. If you are interested in learning more about this, you can check out his book, “words that work.”
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Related Posts :
- How thoughts create our reality
- The concept of expectation
- Useless rules and restrictions
- Analyzing opportunity cost to simplify your life
- Optimism vs. Pessimism
Topics: Awareness-Consciousness, Emotional Intelligence, Logic-Intelligence, Shifts | 1 Comment »
How negative thoughts spiral out of control
By Scott Fusco | October 5, 2007
What goal would YOU like to accomplish? Contact me today for your no-cost 30 minute exploratory coaching session!
If you make a conscious effort to begin becoming more aware of your thoughts, you will notice many funny things happen.
What I want to talk about in this post I will call “thought spirals,” which is when you have a thought that continues to grow in intensity until it eventually spirals out of control.
So say that you have a negative thought like “This isn’t easy.” A few seconds later you might catch yourself having a thought like “This is hard.” Then you might catch yourself having a thought like “This is impossible.” Then “I can’t do this.” Then “I am no good at this.” Then “I am terrible at this.” And finally, the clincher, “I suck at life.”
These are what I am calling thought spirals. It is when you have a thought that continues to grow in intensity until it eventually completely boils over. If you look at the thought spiral above, it may be funny to note how you can go from something not being easy to you completely sucking at life in a matter of seconds or minutes.
This is a somewhat dramatic and comical example but bear with me. Your thought spirals may not be as severe as these, but your thoughts do spiral, perhaps just not as dramatically as in the example.
If you take a close look at the above example, you can see how our mind jumps from one thing to another. First, it complains about what we were doing, then it complains about our abilities in doing that task. So a thought that initially started as an observation about the difficulty of a task shifted into a thought of self-destruction about our potential. And finally the thought shifted from complaining about how we couldn’t do something to how we couldn’t do anything - e.g. “I suck at life.”
The most important observation to make about these kinds of thought spirals is that they are just an illusion of your mind. None of what you said to yourself was actually true. It is just a culmination of frustration and anger in the heat of the moment that ends up leading to more and more negative thoughts.
These negative thoughts will end up negatively affecting your emotions and your beliefs if you aren’t aware of their effect on you. So start making an effort to become aware, and that in itself will eliminate a lot of the damage that this type of thinking can do to you.
If you can step outside of your mind and just objectively watch it, you really see how nuts it is. It doesn’t stop going! One of the neat things about meditation is that you can really notice just how much your mind keeps going. If you have never tried meditation, try sitting quietly for 5 or 10 minutes without thinking.
I can almost guarantee you that you will have a lot of thoughts that seemingly pop out of nowhere. And no matter how hard you try to not think at all, it is almost like your mind has a mind of its own (no pun intended) and just keeps thinking! These are the thoughts of your unconscious mind. They keep thinking, whether or not we are aware of them. And they are just as damaging as your conscious thoughts while simultaneously being harder to detect.
This process can be incredibly funny or frustrating depending on how you choose to orient yourself. If you try to control your thoughts then you will be very frustrated. But if you just laugh at how crazy and relentless your mind is then you can really begin to transcend the effect that your mind has on your emotions.
For me, simply having the awareness of how crazy my brain can be allows me to laugh at the whole thing. Now that I know about thought spirals, I have the awareness to witness them happening while they are happening inside of me. And I don’t try to control it (because that would be trying to solve a problem from a frame of more resistance). Instead, I just observe it and laugh at it. In this way, I can really transcend the emotional effect that my mind has on me. It is almost like disconnecting your emotions from your mind. It’s possible if you play around with it.
Becoming aware of how this works grants you a lot of freedom. It is mental and emotional freedom - from yourself (or technically speaking, your mind)!
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Related Posts:
- How thoughts create reality
- Is the sky actually blue?
- Right or wrong vs. Right for you
- Building who you are on a house of sand
- Why your standards get raised
Topics: Awareness-Consciousness, Emotional Intelligence, Logic-Intelligence, Personal Development | No Comments »
How often do you take a break? Are you sure?
By Scott Fusco | October 1, 2007
What goal would YOU like to accomplish? Contact me today for your no-cost 30 minute exploratory coaching session!
How often do you take a break?
I made a neat discovery a year or so ago - that a break is simply when you stop doing what you are doing and do something else. It doesn’t mean that you have to lie down or rest, you just do something else.
Usually I feel like taking a break as a result of either physical exhaustion or mental stress. If it is physical exhaustion, then I can rest. But if it is mental stress, then I can simply do something easier.
For example, if I am reading something that is really dense and the reading is going very slowly, then I might just pick up a Dr. Seuss book and laugh a little bit. And it just eases the tension and sets me up to going back to what I was doing earlier.
If you are heavily vested in personal development like I am, then likely you are reading potentially life-changing books on a daily basis. This is great, but it can get stressful if you try and push things too quickly. Even if you move slowly, it can be challenging to read some of these books just because they are really dense and they make you really think about things.
If you feel your brain getting cluttered, take a break. Do something else. Maybe you don’t have to completely lie down and rest. You might be able to clean the house or do something else that is productive.
If you tune in and listen to your body, you will know when you have to rest vs. taking a break.
Also start becoming aware of how doing these things affects your emotional state. If you are feeling emotionally stressed and continue to push yourself, what happens to your emotional state?
I have learned of myself that my emotional state is the #1 most important factor in my productivity. If I am feeling stressed out, then I don’t feel like doing any work at all. And sometimes you can avoid a situation like this altogether if you just take a break when your body tells you to.
So for me, the cost of failing to take a break when my body tells me to is often much higher on my emotional state (and therefore my productivity) than if I were to try to continue barreling through what I was doing.
So for me, my emotional state is directly proportional to my productivity. The same is probably true for you. Play around with it and make a conscious effort to become more aware of it.
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Related posts:
- Using poker expectation to make your life easier
- The courage for personal development
- Building who you are on a house of sand
- How to understand unconscious decisions
- Useless rules and restrictions
Topics: Awareness-Consciousness, Emotional Intelligence, Intuition, Logic-Intelligence, Personal Development, Productivity, Time Management | 1 Comment »
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