The blame culture

The blame culture is all pervasive. After parents, it’s school, friends, boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife. The truth is that people can hurt each other no matter how much love they share.

There is no mythical partner or parent who will never hurt or disappoint. But by coming to terms with the concept of forgiveness, you can make allowances for human frailties and start the healing process.

For some people, there’s always someone to blame for something. Britain in particular has a reputation as a moan and blame culture. American Express commissioned a survey recently, which reported that a staggering 52% of UK respondents wanted to fundamentally change their lives.

Their excuse for not doing so? they couldn’t find the time!

What do you want?

Whether it’s the readers of self-help books, too busy reading to take action or the many people who feel stuck and trapped in their lives, feeling helpless and lost, the notion of being able to choose a better life seems fanciful. The simple question what do you want? throws them into a blind panic.

In a recent survey of 2,300 Britons, 57 per cent said given the chance of rewriting history, they would choose a different job. But how many will actually do anything about it? With low levels of self- belief, not many. But with high levels of self-belief, anything is possible!

As a coach, a vital part of my job is to spot excuses and highlight how and where my clients can take greater responsibility for their results. I want to do the same for you now.

Challenge

I want to challenge you to turn up your responsibility radar, so you’re acutely sensitive to your attitude and responses to everything. I want you to identify how and where you might give power away to outside forces.

Do you ever blame the weather, dark nights and the onset of winter for feeling flat? Resist! Taking responsibility in this instance could mean doing one of the following:

1. Buying a light box to provide some artificial daylight;
2. Taking St John’s Wort to boost your serotonin levels;
3. Doing more aerobic exercise to activate feel-good hormones;
4. Booking a holiday in the sun;
5. Planning a move to a sunnier clime

Indestructible self-belief

TAKE RESPONSIBILITY (part 3 of 6)

So far you’ve been exploring your relationship with you and grasping the critical importance of robust self-belief. You now know that the most powerful and influential person in your life is you. You are the thinker of your thoughts.

You have ultimate responsibility, the final say in defining who you are and how your life is. In particular, you have sole responsibility for choosing your response to any and every situation in your life, past, present and future.

Power & Influence

Oprah Winfrey rose from poverty and a troubled youth to become the most powerful and influential woman in television and the US. Her talk show is the highest rated in TV history and through smart business decisions she’s created a raft of magazines and websites which have made her the first African-American female billionaire.

It’s a phenomenal triumph for anyone, let alone a black woman who was born to teenage parents in rural Mississippi. Raised until she was six by her grandmother, Oprah then moved back with her mother, to a life of hardship and sexual abuse.

Rebelling by experimenting with drugs and sex, at 14 Oprah gave birth to a stillborn baby. These experiences could have destroyed her life, but instead she has used them to empower others, working her way up from presenting the news on local radio to create a global media empire.

She’s never blamed or looked to others to make sense of her traumatic past. ‘I’m surprisingly healthy, mentally healthy. I never internalised sexual abuse as this awful thing that had happened to me. I’m neither guilty nor angry.’

Take ownership

I want to coach you to take greater responsibility for yourself, to take full ownership of your attitude and mental approach to life. You can’t always be in control of what happens in life but you can always be in control of your response. It’s entirely up to you to assign meaning and significance to events and circumstances.

In his extraordinary book “Man’s Search for Meaning” Victor Frankl talks of his experience in a concentration camp.  ‘We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread; they offered sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’

It’s all down to you

Thankfully, few of us will be tested in the extreme way that Frankl and many others were or indeed many continue to be around the world today. Your everyday life and the challenges it brings give you ample scope for training and refining your mental outlook.

The first place to start in taking greater responsibility for you and your life is with your parents. The people you’re most likely to blame for anything, and I mean anything you’re not entirely satisfied with, are your mother and father. For some, the challenges are particularly tough, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still choose your response to even the cruellest upbringing.

The singer-songwriter Seal recalls the effect his tough childhood has had on him. Abandoned at birth and cared for in a foster family until he was four, he was taken back by his violent father.

But instead of allowing the years of beatings to ruin his life, Seal used it to spur him onto success. ‘My experiences as a child ingrained in me a survival mechanism and now I’m a very optimistic person. I always look for the light at the end of the tunnel – even if that light is so faint you can barely see it,’ he says.

‘My father could not see when life was good. I could be like him but I know I never will, because I see what all that anger, bitterness and negativity does to you in the end.’

Martin Seligman from the University of Pennsylvania has concluded in his 30 years work researching depression that, crucially, it’s how we regard events from our past which determine our present happiness.

‘Insufficient appreciation and savouring of the good events in your past, and overemphasis of the bad ones, are the two culprits that undermine serenity, contentment and satisfaction.’

The blame culture

The blame culture is all pervasive. After parents, it’s school, friends, boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife. The truth is that people can hurt each other no matter how much love they share.

There is no mythical partner or parent who will never hurt or disappoint. But by coming to terms with the concept of forgiveness, you can make allowances for human frailties and start the healing process.

For some people, there’s always someone to blame for something. Britain in particular has a reputation as a moan and blame culture. American Express commissioned a survey recently, which reported that a staggering 52% of UK respondents wanted to fundamentally change their lives.

Their excuse for not doing so? they couldn’t find the time!

What do you want?

Whether it’s the readers of self-help books, too busy reading to take action or the many people who feel stuck and trapped in their lives, feeling helpless and lost, the notion of being able to choose a better life seems fanciful. The simple question what do you want? throws them into a blind panic.

In a recent survey of 2,300 Britons, 57 per cent said given the chance of rewriting history, they would choose a different job. But how many will actually do anything about it? With low levels of self- belief, not many. But with high levels of self-belief, anything is possible!

As a coach, a vital part of my job is to spot excuses and highlight how and where my clients can take greater responsibility for their results. I want to do the same for you now.

Challenge

I want to challenge you to turn up your responsibility radar, so you’re acutely sensitive to your attitude and responses to everything. I want you to identify how and where you might give power away to outside forces.

Do you ever blame the weather, dark nights and the onset of winter for feeling flat? Resist! Taking responsibility in this instance could mean doing one of the following:

1. Buying a light box to provide some artificial daylight;
2. Taking St John’s Wort to boost your serotonin levels;
3. Doing more aerobic exercise to activate feel-good hormones;
4. Booking a holiday in the sun;
5. Planning a move to a sunnier clime

You have choices

You could add to this list. But you take my point. I’m inviting you to rid yourself of any tendency to moan or blame anyone or anything for your mood, mental outlook or situation in life.

Otherwise, you’re inadvertently giving away your power of response  to some outside force; seeing yourself as less than completely capable, totally in charge of your life. How very uninspiring that would be.

The reason people moan is that they feel they have no choice. They convince themselves that they’re powerless, and see themselves as victims.

Never, ever do yourself the disservice of thinking like this. You always have choices.

Practise seeing choices everywhere you look, for yourself and for others. Remind yourself that staying stuck and complaining is a choice in itself, however covert.

Cinderella Complex

Women, in particular, need to run regular checks on our psyches to ensure we are not guilty of the Cinderella complex, whereby we’re secretly waiting to be saved by our very own Prince Charming!

This conditioning runs very deep. You might even think being a bit hopeless and hapless is endearing. Not any more. Times have changed. Modern girls take total responsibility for their own happiness, financial stability and fulfilment. Relationships work better that way.

This notion of self-reliance is in tune with the times. Being unmarried no longer means being labelled as left on the shelf. Twenty years ago marriage was a girl’s only goal – even for the brightest female university graduates.

Now, increasing numbers of people are choosing to live on their own, people are delaying marriage and children, singletons are on the rise and divorce is up. Instead of treating this as a national crisis, look at it this way: perhaps more people are deciding that staying in a restrictive and unfulfilled relationship is no longer an option.

True love is a wonderful thing, but so is self-sufficiency and independence.

Being self-reliant is something to be saluted, not despaired of. So celebrate your independence and equality and ensure you’re not waiting to be rescued. Get off to that ball yourself! Don’t wait to be asked.

The science of happiness

How many times have people told you to look on the bright side? They have a point. Instead of endlessly dwelling on negative images from the past, and reliving moments when things went wrong, change your focus and recall the good times instead.

Experience the sense of pleasure which comes from a memory of a wonderful time and your spirits will lift. Regularly counting our blessings, rather than our burdens, have been proven to improve our mood, performance and relationships.

Another well-worn phrase is that laughter is the best medicine, and guess what? Modern medical findings are confirming this is true! Studies of individuals who live to over 100 has shown that most share a lively sense of humour, with researchers concluding that humour is a good indicator of how flexible and creative the person is in dealing with life’s challenges.

Get happy, get healthy

A good sense of humour can also bring amazing health benefits. A study at Indiana State University in the US found that roaring with laughter can boost the immune system by an amazing 40%.

Scientists took samples of the immune cells from two groups of healthy women, one who’d watched a comedy video, the other who’d watched a dull video on tourism, and mixed them with cancer cells to see how effectively they attacked the disease.

They found that the women who had found the comedy funny enough to laugh out loud had significantly healthier immune systems afterwards than those who had watched the tourism film.

Going hand in hand with laughter is being happy with your life. Many experts now believe that contentment is the key to good health. Research on heart patients has shown that the quality of a person’s marriage can help predict their recovery from surgery.

A good marriage can give someone a reason to fight back to health, while those with a bad marriage were up to eight times more likely to die within four years. Of course we can’t all conjure up a happy marriage out of thin air, but we can do much to lower our stress levels by checking our outlook, and choosing to be optimistic.

Happiness is often a choice about how you respond to a given event, so choose your responses carefully.

A similar conclusion was reached by scientists from Boston University. They discovered that hostility is a better predictor of heart disease than the traditional risk factors of unhealthy living, with incidences of coronary heart disease more common in those with higher levels of hostility than those with high cholesterol, alcohol intake or even smoking tobacco.

Grow younger

With people living increasingly long lives, experts predict that living to 100 will soon be commonplace. The astonishing increases in life expectancy have seen the typical male life spans go from 48 in 1901 to 75 in 2000, and female from 49 to 80.

And this could rise even higher as researchers continue to make breakthroughs into the science of aging. We’ll not only live longer, we’ll be healthier too.

Age better

In 2003, as younger rivals saw their shows being axed,  Des O’Connor became at the age of 71 the highest-paid presenter in Britain with his £3.7 million deal with ITV for just 12 months’ work. The showbiz veteran also became a father again at 72.

It’s all to do with spirit and attitude, not age. Today’s 30-somethings refuse to give up their old lifestyles, spending their money on the best clothes, holidays, clubs and restaurants. They’ve kept their curiosity, they’re still open-minded. And as for middle age, forget it. Forty is no longer frumpy – think Sex and the City’s Kim Cattrell, Madonna, Nigella Lawson.

The two main peaks in population are 30 – 44-year-olds and 45 to 55-year-olds, thanks to the baby booms of the 1960s and post Second World War. They’re a powerful economic force, with advertisers waking up to the fact that they can’t afford to ignore the forty-plus market.

But while there’s no such thing as a typical 45 year-old, what they do share is a thirst for discovery and experience. They’re healthier, wealthier and more style conscious than ever before, and they still treat life as an adventure.

Then there are the over-50s who are escaping the rat race for adventure holidays, or by taking early retirement and heading overseas. Today’s gap year traveller is as likely to be a stressed-out executive or pensioner as a pre-university student.

With their mortgages paid off, and money in the bank, they’re travelling the world, using some of the capital they’ve worked hard for to have some fun, instead of passing it all onto their children. There’s a great name for this – SKI-ing (Spending The Kids’ Inheritance)!

Adventure time!

Saga, the travel group for the over-50s, report that adventurous destinations are becoming more and more popular, as their holiday makers choose exotic destinations like Nepal, Vietnam and Cambodia .

For some, the experience is a catalyst for a complete lifestyle change, for others, simply an unforgettable experience.

By 2007, for the first time, there will be more Britons aged over 65 than there will be children under 16. Some see this as a demographic time bomb, but why should it be? Financially independent, and wanting to have fun, they don’t intend to settle for conventional retirement.

How about the fabulous Joan Collins as an example of how to age in style? It’s not always easy for great beauties to accept the passing of the years, so who could not have cheered as, in her late 60s, she exuded enviable style, pictured lounging on a yacht in bikini and shades with Percy Gibson, the husband half her age, by her side.

Joan shows no sign of settling for early nights in with a cup of cocoa, and why should she, when her energy, lust for life and glamour keep her so eternally youthful?

The same applies to those other great survivors, the Rolling Stones. The legendary rock’n’roll band show no sign of taking things easy, even after a 40-year career. Both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards celebrated turning 60 on the road in the middle of their latest world tour (their 190th!).

The band are rich enough for the incentive of money to be a distant memory. No, what drove them was ‘fun’ according to 56-year-old guitarist Ronnie Wood. It was a love of music which brought them together in the first place, they’ve been living out their passion every day of their lives, and that love has never died.

With their drug-taking days behind them, they’re fit and as lithe and lean as they ever were. So what if they have a few more grooves in those famous faces? Talk of their retirement is missing the point- making music is what they do, so why stop now when they still get such a kick out of it?

Get spiritual

Brain scans of devout Buddhists have found exceptional activity in a spot called the left pre-frontal lobe, which is associated with positive emotions and good moods. In people who are depressed, angry or stressed, the right frontal cortex is more active.

Are all Buddhists  born with a ‘happy gene’? Unlikely, to say the least. No, these findings would seem to suggest that there is something in their lifestyle which brings them contentment.

But do you have to commit to a life of orange robes and meditation to train yourself to be happy? Well, that’s one answer. But this is not just about religion. Calming the mind is a habit we can all develop. Striving to rid ourselves of ignorance, hatred and greed is something we can all do in our everyday lives.

Think of the delight a child takes in discovering the world around them. As adults, we lose that innocent optimism and tend to focus on what’s bad.

As Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury says, ‘we have stopped being surprised. We look at one another with boredom and anxiety rather than expectant joy.’

Choose freedom

Whatever your spiritual beliefs, you can choose to opt out of the consumer lifestyle which leaves us so ultimately unfulfilled. Constantly striving to have the latest designer outfit, state-of-the-art television or top-of-the-range car is a self-defeating exercise.

Whatever we have, there will always be something we don’t have. I’m not advocating giving away all your possessions, just that you be aware that contentment doesn’t come from material goods.

Shopping can’t give us what we truly need most because ultimately it doesn’t provide the fulfilment that it promises. Gripped by shopping fever and the need to impress, we have less time to consider anything else, let alone thinking about living the best and most meaningful life possible.

Actions of the Week

1. Let it go!

Eradicate all blame from your perspective. Choose to see the benefit in all your circumstances, however gruesome.

Remember: if it didn’t kill you, it could make you stronger. The choice is yours.

2. Watch your language

Your attitude is revealed in your choice of words. Be on the lookout for any indications of victim-slang. Don’t even joke. It’s far too serious

3. Don’t moan

About anything or anyone. It’s a bad habit, it’s addictive and it’s a slippery slope to an overall malaise. Train yourself to just not do it.

4. Develop gratitude

Adopt an attitude of gratitude towards yourself. You’re fortunate to have the talents, abilities and vision that you have. You’re smart. You’re way ahead. You don’t complain or blame. You’re taking responsibility.

5. Do something!

Choose something that you’ve been talking about, thinking about for some time, taking singing lessons, joining Amnesty, changing your job, moving house, whatever.

Take responsibility for making it happen. Take the first step today. Demonstrate to yourself that you’re a woman or man of action. You wait for no one. You’re a doer. You take responsibility. Right attitude. Right action. That’s you.

Have a terrific week. Next time we’ll look at Thinking Big and rising to the occasion!