VOLUME XIV ISSUE NO. 10 | October 2022 |
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"Productive insight; clear (often sudden) understanding of a complex situation." Free Dictionary
Pop the bubble of conditioned thinking and emerge into the creative realm of "no absolutes," continuous change, uncertainty and unlimited possibilities.
Then, there can be innovation, adaptation and optimal performance.
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Performance and Open-minded Mindfulness |
Open-minded: questioning everything, accepting diversity and uncertainty.
Mindful: consciously aware; concentrated.
Foundation for blending process, project, engagement and knowledge management into a cohesive approach to optimize performance.
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Managing Pain Skillfully
By George Pitagorsky
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Use your awareness to avoid transforming your pain into suffering. Pain, whether emotional or physical, is an unpleasant feeling which signals that something may be wrong. Everyone experiences it sometime in their life. Being able to manage it is a critical skill that supports optimal living.
Choices
When it comes to dealing with your pain, there are two choices - accepting and responding to it or reacting from it. Reacting, like tightening up around it or trying to ignore it, transforms the pain into suffering.
You do not have to be able to withstand an operation without anesthesia. Awareness and intention are what matters. Doing physical therapy, taking an anti-anxiety pill, pain killer, a drink, smoke, or sweet, or taking your mind off it with distractions of any kind are means for treating the pain.
They can be skillful responses or reactive avoidance techniques. The difference is whether you are aware, accepting the pain and choosing to apply remedies that make sense, knowing the benefits and risks. Seek help from experts to get the information you need. Get second and third opinions.
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Self-Aware Living - Mindfulness, Meditation, Self-Awareness
We provide online courses, workshops, podcasts and other web content to individuals, organizations, and consultants with a focus on mindfulness, self-awareness, and process thinking. Our content is based on George Pitagorsky's personal...
Read more
self-awareliving.com
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Use Skillful Means
Unbearable pain takes all your attention. You can't think. All control is lost. Making it impossible to cut through to awareness and your calm, peaceful center.
So, take the medicine or practice to calm down enough to find your center and observe the pain as if it were an interesting phenomenon.
Without awareness, acceptance, and the intention to find the cause of your discomfort, even meditation to calm down or perk up is the same as taking a pill. Though there may be fewer side effects and there can be healing.
Beware of Addiction
Beware. If you take the medicine just to kill the pain and you are never open to awareness, you end up addicted. You can be addicted to anything you use to reactively flee from your pain. Meditation, mantra, bodywork, and psychotherapy are as addictive as any other pain management technique.
Respond Skillfully
It is skillful to dull the pain enough to be able to create space around it, so you don't identify with it and react. Respond, and you avoid unnecessary stress and suffering.
Skillful responses are to accept and live with the pain, to do what you can to healthfully relieve it, and/or to find and address its cause.
Train the Mind
Train the mind. Replace the old mental habit of reacting and running away. Instead, cultivate a new habit of accepting, stepping back, deciding, acting, assessing, and adjusting.
The new habit is not for the faint of heart. Breaking old habits is hard to do. It requires patience, mindfulness, self-discipline, and courage to sit with an itch without doing anything about it.
The reward is a sense of relaxation, peace, and a higher likelihood that the pain will be relieved (no guarantees) because you are responding skillfully. The pain may still be there, but you can avoid the suffering.
Serenity exists behind the pain. Step back to experience it. You get behind the pain by cultivating the power of mindfulness and wise intention to use it to let go.
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Emotional Support for Ukraine
To support people experiencing the horrors taking place in Ukraine, we have published and wish to distribute freely
"How to Manage Difficult Emotions and How to Support Others"
in English and Ukrainian. Please pass the toolkit on to anyone who can benefit from it or can distribute it further.
Emotional Support for Ukraine is a small ad hoc group of coaches seeking to help relieve the suffering of those under fire, refugees, and helpers across the world.
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How to be Happy Even When You Are Sad, Mad or Scared:
How to be happy...How to be Happy Even When You Are Sad, Mad or Scared is available on Amazon.com. It is a book for children of all ages (including those in adult bodies). Buy it for the children in your life so they can be better able to “feel and deal” - feel and accept their emotions and deal with them in a way that avoids being driven by them. You can order the book at https://www.amazon.com/How-Happy-Even-When-Scared/dp/1072233363
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Performance and Open-minded Mindfulness |
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Open-minded: questioning everything, accepting diversity and uncertainty.
Mindful: consciously aware; concentrated.
Foundation for blending process, project, engagement and knowledge management into a cohesive approach to optimize performance.
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By George Pitagorsky
Success is measured in how well and how regularly you meet expectations. But what exactly are expectations, and how do you effectively manage them when multiple priorities and personalities are involved?
Using the case study of a Project Manager coordinating an organizational transition, this Managing Expectations book explores how to apply a mindful, compassionate, and practical approach to satisfying expectations in any situation. George Pitagorsky describes how to make sure expectations are rational, mutually understood, and accepted by all those with a stake in the project. This process relies on blending a crisp analytical approach with the interpersonal skills needed to negotiate win-win understandings of what is supposed to be delivered, by when, for how much, by who, and under what conditions.
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Managing Conflict in Projects
By George Pitagorsky
Managing Conflict in Projects: Applying Mindfulness and Analysis for Optimal Results by George Pitagorsky charts a course for identifying and dealing with conflict in a project context.
Pitagorsky states up front that conflict management is not a cookbook solution to disagreement-a set of prescribed actions to be applied in all situations. His overall approach seeks to balance two aspects of conflict management: analysis based on a codified process and people-centered behavioral skills.
The book differentiates conflict resolution and conflict management. Management goes beyond resolution to include relationship building that may serve to avoid conflict or facilitate resolution if it occurs.
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The Zen Approach to Project Management
By George Pitagorsky
Projects are often more complex and stressful than they need to be. Far too many of them fail to meet expectations. There are far too many conflicts. There are too few moments of joy and too much anxiety. But there is hope. It is possible to remove the unnecessary stress and complexity. This book is about how to do just that. It links the essential principles and techniques of managing projects to a "wisdom" approach for working with complex, people-based activities.
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