Tag Archives: advice

Expired Skill Sets…

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The definition of SKILL is the learned power of doing something competently: a developed aptitude or ability.hourglass2 via blog.163.com

My definition of skill is “something I have practiced.”

During my tenure here on earth, I have practiced many skill sets that served me in the past but do not serve me here in the present.

For example, as a young child being beaten by my caretakers, I cowered and cried for mercy. However, I don’t need to cower and cry these days.

When I lived in NYC as a young woman, sarcasm came in handy with cheeky men and hateful coworkers. No need for sarcasm anymore…although I still use it from time to time, sorry to say.

While on vacation recently, I found myself in a bit of a bind when the outfit I brought for a wedding was suddenly not the thing to wear. I had to allow myself the luxury of the emotions that I felt and at the same time had to call upon new skill sets, like forgiveness and letting go, to help me navigate the incident.

I came through and I chalked it up to just another life lesson. One of the most important skills I used there was the skill of GRATITUDE. I made a mental list of all the things that had gone right and made a determined effort not to allow a few negatives to outweigh all of the positives.

One of the things I used to do was to allow negative life events to have more “weight” than positive life events. I now give every event the same score. Even if I feel like weighing one more than the next, I still do not trust myself to give a realistic score, so everything gets a score of one. At the end of the day, if I have more positives than negatives, I am good!

I am still trying to figure out which things need to be weighed heavier than others and which things are deal breakers. This is a good start for me, for in the past everything was a deal breaker and I was always ready to flee from a tense situation. Now I can call upon new skill sets to deal with the issues at hand and not infest the present with the hurts of the past.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a therapist is this….
“Indrani, this is not a court of law, stop your case building.”
Ouch.
So I have been trying to unlearn that very skill…Case Building. Now I look for the things I am grateful for and hope that there is more on the plus side than not.

Skills I no longer need:
1. Temper tantrums.
2. Sarcasm. (Well, I might need this one sometimes.)
3. Case building. No more dredging up all the old hurts and bringing it into the present moment.
4. Feeling worthless.
5. Minding other people’s business.
6. Giving my power away.

I can go on and on…I hope you get the picture.
A skill is something you have learned to do. If you can learn it, you can unlearn it.
Sometimes, unlearning is just what you need to have a more peaceful life.

I wrote a blog long ago about expiration dates on beliefs…you can read it here:
http://indranislight.org/2009/11/out-dated-beliefs/

I hope you take a few ideas from these two posts to apply new skills and let go of expired ones.

Love and light,
Indrani

I put my foot down vs. I share my wisdom….

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A while back, I was having a lovely conversation with a dear friend. She was telling me about a discussion she had with one of her siblings. They were talking about what friendlyadvice via moodraiser.comkind of car her sister was going to buy.

It turned out that the sister had been somewhat of the family hippie and never really took advice from anyone. It seemed that she was always in some kind of trouble. So when my friend found out that her sister was about to purchase a new car she picked up the telephone and did what any sister would do, right? She told her sister exactly what car she should get.

To be fair, she had given her sister lots of advice before but the poor girl never had the wits to take it. So here she was again, giving her advice….but this time she was REALLY forceful!

“I mean, why can’t she see that her decisions are absolutely disastrous and flighty? So what if she is an MD….she’s not married and is almost 35 years old and her eggs must be rotted by now!”

I listened for what seemed like an eternity and bit my tongue many times to keep myself from saying something like “Who do you think you are to try to run her life?” My tongue was scarred from the bites! Anyways, I digress.

After about 30 minutes she said, “Well, she finally came to her senses, listened to me and bought the car I told her to buy. It was a damn good thing I put my foot down, right?”

Was that an invitation for me to speak?
Yes, I think it was.

So I said, “Well, it was not so much as you putting your foot down, but you offering your own views and her making her own decisions.”

This was NOT the response she wanted….so she took a loud, deep breath and said, “Do you notice how much you are playing semantics these days?”

To this I replied, “Well, my response took the focus from your actions and put it on your sister’s actions….I do not think its semantics, but I can tell that you see it that way.”

Ok, now THAT was semantics!

I was not “playing” semantics with my first response; rather I was trying to show the difference in the energy between her “putting my foot down” and her sister “making her own decisions”. The advice offered may have persuaded the ultimate decision, but why take credit for that?

It feels so much better, energy wise, to offer the gifts of our own experiences rather than “putting our foot down”.
How old does a person have to be to care about whose foot is being put where?

Kids and abused people come to mind, when I think about the answer to the above question.
You can put your foot down and take away a teenagers car, telephone or x-box.
You can put your foot down and not let your child wear pajamas to school.
You can put your foot down and tell your wife that she must dress a certain way and HOPE that she “obeys” you. If she does obey you, is it because she loves you and is doing it to please you or is it because she is fearful that if she does not “obey” you will lash out and abuse her?

So, what does “putting your foot down” really mean?

If you are the foot putter downer, I invite you to try giving the gifts of your experience instead of ramming stuff down people’s throats.

If you are the person who gets the brunt of the all the feet upon them, I invite you to ask what accepting all of those dogmas will do for you.

I guess you can call it semantics, but since our words really do reflect how we see the world, it is worth investigating the words that fall out of our mouths and paying attention to the energy that goes with those words.

Love and light,
Indrani