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Success Teams Blog

| Mairead

(Continued from yesterday… Five Lives.) The kind of story I want to be in is one where every day I’m involved in something that lifts my heart.

You see, down in the everyday “stuff” of life it’s easy to get stuck and think you’re not worthy or that your ideas are useless or that you’ll make do with a life you find boring. Because…. it takes a lot of courage to do the things that you love, to share the ideas that you have, to go for the exciting (to you) things. It takes courage to lift your voice up and say “this is what I want.” It takes courage to wonder “what do I want?”

Fortunately, it doesn’t take much courage to lift your heart. It lifts on its own every time you are involved in something you love….. in sport, art, writing, walking, cooking, riding your motorbike (he, he)…. what is it for you?

(Nice cup of tea)

When your heart is lifting….. then you can make up a new story, of a new life.

When I finished the Wishcraft book and wanted more I searched the internet and found that Barbara Sher had devised Success Teams. A team doing the exercises in order to find out what you wanted and then encouraging you to go for it….. But there wasn’t one in Ireland.

I’d have to set it up in Ireland.

Oh, my goodness the FEAR……I’m not worthy, this is a terrible idea, I’ll make do with reading the book again. But it wouldn’t go away. So bit by bit I started telling people and something about my passion for the idea grabbed them too.

They joined me in my story and now we’ve completed the eight weeks course.  Each of us has our own project to lift our hearts. Each one of us is at a different stage. Each one of us feels the fear from time to time and then we meet and the team keeps us going. Going towards what we want.

And the amazing thing to me is…. it’s not about what we want at all…. it’s all about the journey towards it.

Thank you, (in alphabetical order, women!) Ashleigh, Frieda, Julie, Marion, and Molly – my team mates, for lifting my heart when I couldn’t! And now I’m going to do it again.

(For the Wicklow team who played today – Burn the Boats but Keep the Passion!)

Want to build a team to lift your heart when you can’t? Send me an email (mairead@hennessynet.com) or ring (086 827 2332) and get on the next team!

To your soaring heart from mine, Mairead.

Come on Wicklow!

| Mairead

(Wicklow are playing hurling in Croke Park on Saturday… Yes, imagine, Wicklow made it! – Story soon about one of the players…)

About a year ago I was reading a blog, there was a reference to the book Wishcraft – How to Get What You REALLY Want. The blog was American and it seemed this book and it’s author (Barbara Sher) were famous there. I’d never heard of it or her so when I realised the book was free to read on the internet I started reading.

(Lunch…)

Very soon I was hooked. It’s the kind of book that has exercises. So, you read a bit, then you do the exercise and you read some more. I finished the first two chapters in one sitting, and went on to finish the book over the next two weeks. Then I wanted more.

(Found a voucher for the Art and Hobby shop and bought some kit…. love that shop)

I love reading non-fiction books but what I love most about them are the stories. Other people’s stories, and this book had lots of little stories about John or Mary or Kate who had a dream to do such and such but they thought they couldn’t and “look, here’s the way they filled in this exercise”. So you feel like John and Mary and Kate were going through the book with you (well, I did!)

(This is what “Come on Wicklow” sounds like when said with PASSION at a Hurling match)

So for example, one of the exercises is called….

Ok, just realised this is going to be too long and I promised shorter blogs, so I’ll continue tomorrow and I’ll tell you about the exercise. In the meantime, enjoy the sun (you know it’s up there, ALL the time, even when it’s cloudy?) and have a great weekend.

Come on Wicklow! Mairead.

Stop asking yourself “Why am I so Stupid?”

| Mairead

Watched a movie called The Fastest Indian on DVD last week. It’s about a guy called Burt Munro from New Zealand who had a dream to set a land speed record on his Indian motorbike across the salt flats in Utah. It’s based on a true story and set in the 1960’s.
In his sixties himself, Burt had perfected his bike to run at speeds above 100 mph, so he worked his passage from New Zealand as cook aboard a ship on route to California. In the end the bike went even faster and the record Burt set is still unbroken over 40 years later.

Anthony Hopkins plays Burt, and really nicely introduces us to a friendly man, with his own ideas and a determination to follow his dream.

He reminds me of my daughter!

I attended a workshop recently where the learning is experiential and particularly about seeing the big picture first. Only then do get to notice the little bits and pieces and to put those bits and pieces into your own jigsaw puzzle. For me this is a very different way to learn and I sometimes struggle and fight with it. But when my picture starts to emerge it is both magnificent and solid.

What’s emerging for me at the moment is the connection between the movies, The Fastest Indian and The Shadow of the Moon and the concept of dealing with problems. In the past when there was something bothering me I thought about it, figured out what I had done wrong, figured out what that meant about me and about others and about life, asked myself over and over “Why did I do …?’, wrote about it, talked to others about it and in general felt terrible about it. I had been doing this for years and had ‘perfected’ my problem-based strategy!

Then I learned a possibility-based strategy. This is where you start at your best and you deal with everything from that place. So, I learned how to use this nearly three years ago, and I am learning to understand it slowly, since then.

Today another piece of my jigsaw fell into place.

When I saw In the Shadow of the Moon (see Recent Post) it had a very strong impact on me. As in life the details of this impact slowly unfold…

When President John F Kennedy predicted that the USA would land a man on the moon and return him safely within the decade he set up a goal for his country and particularly for the men and women who worked in the space program.

The Apollo artifacts in a museum in Cape Canaveral are very flimsy. The pod they parachute down to earth in looks like its made of golden tin foil. The processing ability of the computers they used then is no more powerful than a calculator (just a little heavier!)

Yet… they did it.

Burt Munro had a dream to set a land speed record with his Indian motorbike. When manufactured, this motorbike’s maximum speed was about 50 miles per hour. He worked on it for hours every day, making new parts out of scraps of metal smelted in a pot in the run-down shed where he lived. He used his neighbour’s carving knife to turn his ordinary tyres into high-speed tyres.

Yet…. he did it. Funny enough both stories are set in the 1960’s, but that’s not the link.

When the astronauts and space craft builders were starting to create something that would go to the moon their space ships kept exploding. Lots and lots of problems. I’m not sure but I’m guessing they didn’t spend a lot of time criticising themselves for getting it wrong AGAIN. If they had spent the time going over and over what they did wrong they may never have got to the moon. Their timeframe was set, they had to do the job within 9 years. (Because President Kennedy said they would….)

So they had to look for ways around their problems.

Burt had many, many problems – the biggest – he didn’t have enough money to go to America, was solved by his friends. But when he got to Utah he realised that he could not enter the trials – he hadn’t registered. He didn’t beat himself up and use his energy asking “Why am I so stupid?” His timeframe was set, the event would be over in 3 days.

He looked for ways around his problems.

Both the people in the space program and Burt Munro kept the dream in sight and looked for ways around the problems. All the time assuming they would make it to the moon or to the line drawn across the salt flats in Utah.

Stop wasting your life beating yourself up for doing something wrong. Stop asking yourself Why am I so stupid? Use your problems as feedback to find a way around them, That didn’t work, what else could I try or how could I do this another way? Use the energy saved to keep your moon in view.

By the way, it’s not the dream that’s all that important, they come and go. But the dream is really, really useful because….. in that direction lies your bliss. But that’s another story!

What are you like at your best?

| Mairead

My husband and I go to the movies every Monday night. Its our date-night! We flip-flop between art-house and Hollywood. By art house I mean going to a small theatre ten minutes from our house, where we can have a glass of wine before the movie but nothing during it. Also, there’s no choice, we see the movie that’s on this week or we go home (or we go to Hollywood). Hollywood means we can have wine, soft drinks, sweets, tacos or popcorn, before during or even after the movie and we get a choice of about eight movies. The art-house movies are varied and different and could be from almost any country in the world and in any language (plus English subtitles). The Hollywood movies are, generally, from The USA, the UK or sometimes Ireland.

Last Monday night we choose art-house. The movie was called In the Shadow of the Moon. It was a collection of interviews (well, face to camera, with no interviewer, whatever that’s called?) with the surviving astronauts from the Apollo missions of the 60’s and 70’s, and also a huge amount of video footage from that time.

Last year our family had the opportunity to visit Cape Canaveral in Florida and I was really enthralled by the exhibition of the Apollo artifacts. There was just something about that time and about their efforts to follow a dream with only the equivalent computer processing power of a calculator!

In the movie the men told of their experiences on the space program. The interviews were shot really close-up, making it possible to see all the lines and shadows of their faces. In the beginning I found this distracting, then a funny thing started to happen. As the movie progressed there were times when the screen was split down the middle showing on one half an astronaut telling about some work he did as part of the mission while the other half showed him as a young man doing that work, full of seriousness, energy and life. That’s when I became aware of a more complete picture of an old man and the faces became beautiful to me.

There was one man who was my favourite – Mike Collins. He was a member of the Apollo 11 team, the one that landed on the moon. While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got to do the walk Mike Collins circled the moon and picked them up to go home. I got the impression that he was the joker of the group and nothing had changed in the intervening 40 years – he’s still very funny. He talked about not wanting to make a mistake (screw-up), especially in front of “three billion people”.

Mike said at one point that he was on the dark side of the moon and on the other side was Neil and Buzz and the earth with all it’s inhabitants. On his side there was only him and yet he didn’t feel alone, he felt part of everything. That was something that came up a few times – being a part of something bigger. Mike and Neil and Buzz did a tour of the world after their moon tour and Mike said people saw their success as the world’s success also. In different counties they told him “We did it!”, and they meant the human race did it, we made it to the moon.

Working with people one of the questions I ask them is “What are you like at your best?”. Some people know straight away and others take a little longer, but when they find their answer and talk about the experience, the effect it has on them is profound. The effect they have on me is also profound, its why I love my work.
If you get a chance go see this movie. Listen to the men talk about their experiences, see their eyes light up and the years fall away when they relive that time. Then think about what you are like when you’re at your best. It may help to think about an activity you love doing, remember the last time you did that activity. It can be as simple as walking the dog, driving the car or maybe you went to the moon! It’s not the activity that’s important it’s how you are when you experience it. Experience it again, in your mind, now. Let go and fly back there. When you can do this you are connecting with you – the you without all the other stuff attached. By other stuff I mean your daily life, family, work, bills, problems……. The funny thing is that from here its easier to deal with the other stuff, because it’s not part of you, it’s just stuff.

The thing I didn’t realise was President John F Kennedy made a speech in 1961 telling the American nation that he wanted to land a man on the moon and bring him home safely before the decade was out. At the time of his speech all the rockets being tested were exploding. This did not prevent the men in this movie from joining the program and putting their lives on the line for a dream. Apollo 11 landed on the moon in July 1969, within the time limit set by a man who was by then dead. Somehow having a goal and a time frame allowed them to go beyond what they thought possible.

In 1969 when I was 8 and my Mum insisted that I watch the news to see a man stand on the moon, I wasn’t interested. So she told me it was important because no one had ever done that before and you never know the moon might just fall down! That got me watching and I’m glad now that I was one of the three billion people around the world who heard Neil Armstrong say “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”.

What are YOU like at your best?