Jaclyn Beckerman Coaching

Life doesn’t have to go as planned.

We tend to think that things should or need to go a certain way based on how we envisioned our future to be.

But the truth is, most of the best things that can happen to you don’t come out of some life plan you made up before something new and great presented itself.

If an opportunity really excites you or you’re passionate about it or it brings you joy, and it is in line with your values in life, why wouldn’t you take it? What’s stopping you?

Well for most people, it’s fear.  Fear of things not working out or it being the wrong decision, sure.  But more paralyzing is the fear of the unknown.

The unknown scares us because we haven’t envisioned it.  And since we don’t know what it looks like, we therefore don’t feel comfortable or safe.

But consider this: the unknown is where opportunity exists.

So if you have the opportunity to do something that inspires you, would make you immeasurably happy or betters your future, and there is any conceivable way to make it happen, I dare you to take the leap.

Worst case scenario? It doesn’t work out.

Ooooh scary…

But so what?

Everyone is afforded a blank slate to start over whenever they need it.  An inherent fact of life is that it’s always moving forward. It is not obligatory that you drag your past experience along with you like an overstuffed bag of unneeded luggage, for which you’re paying a significant amount extra. Take only the golden nuggets that serve you and walk lighter and with a more empowered sense of what works for you into the vast blank canvas of your future.

If you never go for what inspires you, for what you want, you certainly never get it. Inspiration – Action = No results.

I left a full time job to become a life coach.  After a year and a half of continually growing my business, I owned up to what I really wanted which was to travel.  After passing through some nerves and a couple months of consideration, I decided I would travel around the world for nearly 2 years and started planning. About half way though my trip, I fell in love with the most incredible man I’ve ever known and have decided my next step will be to move all the way to South Africa to be with him, and we are maintaining and building that relationship all while I continue to finish the travels I’d set out to do, knowing I would regret it if I didn’t.  All of those have had varying levels of being scary, but they were also amazing opportunities that inspired me and were in line with what I ultimately value in life: joy, love and peace.

And the beauty in it is that they irrefutably fed into one another. I wouldn’t have summoned the courage to disregard what was expected of me and live my dream of traveling the world without having done the transformational work I received through coaching.  And I wouldn’t have met the man of my dreams if my travels hadn’t brought me all the way to South Africa, a place I’d wanted to visit for years.

So if you’ve created an opportunity for yourself in life for which you’re teetering on the fence of indecision, consider choosing the side that ignites your spirit.  Choose the path where you don’t have it all figured out and don’t know how it will go, that may surprise you with even more amazing opportunities and gifts than you could have even imagined.

Let me know how it goes…

I think that New Year’s resolutions perhaps do more harm than good.  They put a sort of all or nothing type pressure on us that more often than not leads us to give up anyway.

In fact, we pretty much expect that we’ll give up.

With that said, why make a resolution? Year after year, we continue to resolve ourselves to something we know we won’t likely take seriously anyway.

So this year, I propose instead declaring a theme for the year.  Choose something that you can try to keep present in your daily life and that will ultimately increase your sense of joy, satisfaction or well being.

This year my theme will be gratitude.  Getting present to it and expressing it on a daily basis.

I’m getting rid of the all or nothing and instead setting the stage for something.  Something that could make a difference..

What will your theme be for 2012?

So as you know I’ve started my journey to travel around the world.  It’s been over a month and a half now and I’ve driven cross-country with a couple girlfriends, spent an incredible week at Burning Man, tasted my way through San Francisco along with what turned out to be a very close new friend, spent almost 2 weeks in LA at my sister Jen’s having more quality time with her than ever and loving it, and spent a few days in San Diego before heading back to LA to stay with Jen for another week.  Tomorrow I’m off to Austin, TX for 5 days for a friends wedding, then back in LA for 2 short days and then I fly to Peru on Oct 13.

It has all been absolutely amazing.

The biggest thing I’ve noticed while traveling is that it forces you to be in the moment.  There are always incredible things you’ve done in the past but they’re no longer happening.  (And if there was any drama or not-so-incredible incidents, those too are behind you).  There is an unbelievable abundance of amazing things to come but they’re not happening yet and it’s almost a little overwhelming (and scary) to think about them much as it’s such an enormous journey to take on.  This leaves me at ‘now’, the present moment, front and center.

This has been the most poignant lesson in the joy, satisfaction and contentment of being present.  Many great philosophers point to it.  Your fear, your worry, your anxiety, they’re all attached to either something that already happened or something you’re assuming, expecting or fearing will come.  None of that exists in the present moment because the present moment is based on nothing.  It just is as it is.

Being in the now allows for you to fully experience your life as it’s actually happening.  This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make plans for your life, goals and whatnot.  You should.  But within those goals, and within the markers you set for yourself within that, the opportunity is to relish ALL of it.  Not just look for what you perceive to be positive or the end point.

So many people are never satisfied with the process or with the progress they’re making.  Nothing is ever fast enough, big enough or good enough.  Or on the other end of the spectrum, it’s too fast, too overwhelming or too much to handle.  None of that is presence though.  It’s all based on either fears about the past or fears about the future, fears of your own capacity not being big enough or sufficient.

But you’ve already got everything you need.  You have the ability to BE anyone you want and to create anything you say because you’re that powerful.  You are no different than the Bill Gates or the Donald Trumps of the world because anything they’ve ever had the capacity for, so do you.  We all start out the same.  You may have different gifts or talents, but you can express and capitalize on them in the same way if you choose to.

But a truly rich life?  That comes from relishing every moment of it.  Experiencing it fully.  Every ounce of joy, every tear, every human interaction, every bit of anger expressed.  It’s ALL meant to be part of the experience or you wouldn’t be experiencing it.  One emotion isn’t better than another, they’re just emotions.

If you truly want to know where peace and happiness come from you have to look within.  It’s not from trying to avoid experiences you deem as negative or uncomfortable.  That is precisely where your pain stems from in the first place.  Content comes from embracing them.  Allowing and being with them.  Not trying to circumvent them or explaining life away as good or bad, but rather relishing it all.

Everything you’ve every wanted, the experience of life you’ve always wished for, exists in being in the present moment, embracing everything life already consists of.  What will you embrace today?

So I’ve realized (with the help of some coaching) that I’ve got a serious layer of protection called “I don’t care/it doesn’t really matter/whatever”.  I use this to numb out to the consequences of not taking the actions I say I’m going to take or to not have to really be committed (with both feet in) to what I claim I’m committed to.

What this covers up is that I really deeply DO care (if I didn’t, I would have stopped talking about it ages ago).  AND I’m convinced that I’ll be devastated and get my heart broken because it inevitably won’t work out.  The ‘it’ could be anywhere from making a difference with people and getting people to stand for world peace to building my coaching practice to creating the relationships I want in all capacities such as romantic, friendships and with family.

The ironic thing is that the impact of this on me is that I end up feeling frustrated irritated, and really disappointed in both myself and others.  There’s also impacts on specific areas of my life like friendships, romantic life, my coaching practice, my family, etc.  And with me being that way I imagine it leaves others feeling left in the dark, disconnected, hurt and confused or even oblivious.

This isn’t how I want to live my life.  And I’m really well practiced at it.

So what I’m up to is thawing this ice that is covering the oasis below.  What I’m committed to is being a contribution everywhere.

Being a contribution doesn’t have to take a lot of effort and isn’t thwarted by not wanting to or feeling like it because it’s a way of being.  And it’s a choice to create or generate that way of being moment-by-moment.

What’s an act or shtick you can see you’re putting on in your own life?  What’s the thing you do to avoid getting hurt? What is that a facade for or what are you hiding from people (and maybe even yourself) that it covers up?  What’s the impact of that on yourself and others?  Actually let yourself really get present to and experience the impact.  Then decide if that’s what you’re committed to or if you want to create something else.

Every moment of every day you have to opportunity to create something different for yourself.  Is today going to be just one more iteration of how it always goes or will you have today be the day that you bring it to a full stop and create something else?  Invent a new perspective on life. Take a new action in line with it.  Tell people you’re giving up the crappy way you were being before and tell them what you’re creating instead.

Watch your life transform.

I notice that when I don’t relate to someone as their greatness or their highest self, when I instead see their faults or see them as their fear-based self, that it causes them to relate to me the same way. That is, they then see me as MY fear-based self instead of as the powerful and loving person I know myself capable of being.

This is because the reason I’m relating to them as their fear-based self is because I’m BEING my own fear-based self. I’m getting caught up in my own insecurities about not being good enough or needing their approval or to be liked and am then relating to them from that place.

Now, I know what I just said may have been somewhat wordy and possibly a bit confusing. The core of what I’m saying is that when you are coming from your fears or insecurities, you bring that out in others. And they then relate to you from and as those fears and insecurities.

When you are authentically coming from love and compassion, they will often come from that place as well and will relate to you that way.

Seems pretty simple right? If you always related to everyone from a place of love, you would bring that out in them as well and they would then relate to you as that. Which I’ll assert is the way you want them to relate to you anyway.

You can’t expect someone to relate to you with loving kindness if you don’t relate to them that way. (And ‘acting’ loving and compassionate as a strategy to get them to do the same, on top of your fears and insecurities, doesn’t count. It doesn’t count because it’s not an authentic expression of love if it’s still based out of fear.)

The beauty in this is that it is true not just for your partner or your friends, but for everyone. For that boss you just can’t seem to get along with, for you mother (who you love but likely don’t always relate to from love), to your neighbor who drives you nuts, whoever.

And yes, YOU are the one who has to ‘do all the work’, who has to take responsibility for your relationships. It is never another persons job to change. You lose all of the power you have to transform your relationships and your life by putting it on someone else and saying they should do it for you (or instead of you, or even that they should do it too). Love begets love. You bring it, they’ll produce it too. And even if they don’t, it won’t really matter, because who you’ll be being is love. Your experience of them will still be completely transformed.

Consider also that in relationships that have been heavily fear-based or where coming from love has been weak or absent, you will likely not get instant gratification. It may take some practice and some time. This isn’t a 100% game. You will always have fears show up here and there. But start noticing where you’re coming from with people and how it directly correlates to how they are with you.

When you start to BE the person you want to be with, whatever relationship that is for, they will start to relate to you differently, and your relationship will transform.

So I apologize I didn’t post last week.  I got caught up in some busyness.

Ok, that’s a lie.  To be honest, my body was taken over by “I don’t feel like it”.

I notice that “I don’t feel like it” sometimes does a hostile takeover and runs the show.  I guess it’s to be expected since I’ve definitely stubbornly lived life from that place in the past.  So it can’t be very happy that I’ve started to disengage from it and pay it less attention.  Yet although I’ve had huge breakthroughs around it in the past year (in fact, especially in the past 6 or 7 months), that doesn’t mean it goes away.

That’s the thing with our “stuff” .  Even when you transform it in a huge way and completely alter your relationship to it, that doesn’t mean it’s forever gone.  It just means that you’re more adept at recognizing it and not allowing it to take the wheel and control you. (Even though that may still happen sometimes – it will happen less and less the more practiced you are at acknowledging it and not choosing it.)

It’s funny because there are definitely plenty of times when I feel like I don’t have anything particular, useful or inspiring to write about.  Which compels me to put it off.  Yet I notice that when I just sit down and start writing about whatever is actually going on, it often turns out to be some pretty insightful stuff.

You’re like this too.  If you actually jump into the thing you’re avoiding, often times, it winds up being incredibly easier than you expected.

We can’t help that resistance shows up, we’re human.  We resist the way things are, don’t want to admit to or share it, and then get caught up in the drama of it without a lifeline.  Yet all it really takes is authenticity, recognition of ‘what is’, and ownership of it being that way to completely change the experience.

The point is that we ARE human.  Things aren’t always going to be rainbows and butterflies.  There are ups and downs to life.  But if you’re willing to ‘be with’ whatever your experience is and take responsibility for it, you can choose or create something else that’s more empowering or powerful.  The ‘ups’ suddenly start being more of the norm and the length of time you hang out in ‘downs’ gets shorter and shorter.

So, start noticing where you’re resisting whatever is going on in your life.  You have no power around it until you can fully own that YOU see things the way you do and have things going the way they are.  No one else created your experience for you (no matter what they said or did to you), YOU created it.  If you truly take full responsibility for how you think, feel and respond, then you can choose to have it go differently.  You can choose to be more compassionate, more loving and more understanding with both yourself and with others (and also with Spirit!).  Imagine what would shift in your life living from there.

I notice that people always seem to have some serious crazy resistance to normal well being practices related to their businesses – consistently taking vacation time off, working regular business hours (it doesn’t really matter whether they’re 9-5 or 1-9 – but regular), not working on weekends and so on and so forth.

I’ve always thought I’ve been really good about this myself.  I don’t take clients or prospects on weekends, I don’t schedule calls outside of 9:30a-6:30p and I will definitely take a few vacations a year (even if that means a staycation like it is this week).  Yet I really was just choosing not to count the email I answered here, the appointment I took the time to schedule there, the phone call I answered or returned outside my regular hours.  Even worse, I’ve known it’s important for me to take a day off for well being after using all my energy coaching for an entire weekend (leading the coach training program) and have still kept a regularly scheduled client on my Monday roster, or allowed myself to do *just one* consultation and answer emails.  I am committing to give that up and honor my time off as what it is, time to re-fuel and take care of myself.

The fact is, not holding your time off as sacred impedes on you building a strong and powerful foundation for which to operate on top of.

Most people cannot bring themselves to give their body, mind and spirit time to rest, play and rejuvenate for fear of losing business or upsetting a client or some other plausible excuse.

Yet then you’re really just trying to support your clients or business from a place of depletion.  Where your needs are not met, you’re not taken care of and you’re operating on top of a foundation filled with gaping holes and perhaps some duct tape trying to hold it all together.  Taking care of your well being builds a strong foundation for which to go generate possibility and success.  Without it, you’re trying to make a cross country journey running on fumes.

So stop lying to yourself saying you have to work more in order to build your business.  If your business is suffering it’s because you’re suffering.  And if it’s doing alright with with you overworking and overexerting yourself, consider it could be doing fantastic if you were operating as the powerhouse you could be during the specific times you designate to be working.

Start with taking back your weekends.  Then regular working hours. You’re like a rechargeable battery that you’ve currently only been giving a few minutes to recharge every times it dies, you’re then never operating at full power.  Start committing to recharging fully and just watch the difference it makes in your business.

This might speak more to those who have their own businesses than it will to those who work 9-5 in an office or at least don’t work on commissions but consider that no matter what your working situation is, there’s still a desperate need for you to be taking care of your well being consistently and reliably.  What difference do you see it could make in your life?

It’s funny – we always want our lives to be better yet we don’t want to have to be the ones to create it.

I can certainly be guilty of this myself too.  I want to be a leader yet I don’t want to have to be fully responsible for something when there’s a breakdown or something changes.  I’m happy to take something on with the expectation of it going smoothly yet don’t want to deal with the possibility of obstacles or unexpected roadblocks.

Sound familiar?

Yea, that’s pretty much normal life for most folks.

You have a goal you want, but, nevermind just the possibility of failure, you don’t want to deal with the hassle of the potential things that can and will get in your way.

The problem with this is, you never get the results you want if you don’t take the goal on in the face of your fears and the obstacles that will inevitably come up.

My most recent experience of this really has nothing to do with my personal goals but rather something I took on to support one of my communities.  I took it on, a breakdown ensued, and while I knew I had to be the one to handle it, my automatic instinct was to be irritated, frustrated and maybe even a bit insolent about it.

All of my reaction and ‘victimization’ by the situation does very little to support my community and create the result we need.  I get that the gap here this is really about full and complete ownership.  When you take something on, whether it’s your own goal or something that you took on to support another person or group, it is then yours to see through, regardless of what comes up or gets in the way.

There is always an ebb and flow in life.  Things go smoothly and then there are waves.  The distinction here, different than the ocean, is that you actually have a choice in whether you let the wave pull you under or if you choose to just ‘be with’ it and move forward and beyond it.  There’s really no use in getting dragged under by the waves because then you suffocate and cease to really live.  In the case of life, this looks like being ‘at the effect’ of what happens to you instead of ‘causing’ the life (and results) that you want.

What I got from this experience is to really just handle my reactions quicker and get back into empowered action so as to create power in the face of anything.  From this place, there will never be an obstacle that could truly hold you back.  There is abundance in the world and we inherently have the ability (and creativity) to tap into all sorts of resources and support when we choose to take ownership of everything that comes our way in life.

Chew on that for awhile and leave your thoughts below.  Where have you abdicated your commitments in the past or present?  How has that served you and what has it cost you?  How would your life be different if you chose to be ‘the one’ who can make it happen (whatever it is) all the time?

In this moment, right now, I am the possibility of love and abundance.

I generated and created this on Sunday in the Landmark Advanced course.

Following that, this week I’ve created 3 new clients, 5 requests for sample sessions, 1 promise to hire me mid-April, and a request for me to speak at a networking event.

Wow!  Talk about an amazing week!

I’ve also had 2 dates, spent time with amazing friends, took a salsa class and learned some tango.

If you’re looking for love and abundance, I am SO the coach for you!

What I really intended to share in this post is a new project I’m creating.  I’ll be participating in the Landmark Self Expression and Leadership seminar in May and was thinking about what project I could work on for it.  You create a community project where you generate the idea and lead it but actually give the project to the community to create.

One of the leaders of the seminar came in to tell us a bit about it and mentioned that she tells people to just think about what they’re passionate about – most folks create projects that have some bigger impact on the world or their community. One person arranged for two panda’s to be flown in from China (this costs millions of dollars), another created wind chimes they’re looking to sell a million of with all the proceeds going to Haiti.  So you get the idea.  Big impact stuff.

The idea I generated is to create a worldwide travel network/group for Landmark graduates.  It will be a website something akin to couchsurfers.com yet maybe more like a social networking site.  Thus far, my idea is to keep it within the Landmark community because it’s a trusted community that lives in integrity so it takes out the sketchy or potentially unsafe aspects that might stem from a network of just anyone.

The idea will be for people who participate to offer their homes (couches/extra bed) to travelers within the Landmark community from all over the world.  They could also offer to be a tour guide, provide ground transportation, offer frequent flier miles, etc.  Someone could post that they need to get a flight from point A to point B and people could contribute/donate to that flight.  (There are a million and a half Landmark graduates worldwide – if it’s a $1000 flight for example, 1000 people could each donate just $1 and the flight would be covered).  My vision for this is that it creates traveling as accessible to everyone where it’s currently inaccessible AND encourages community, generosity and contribution all over the world.

As some of you know, I’m going to be traveling come December.  I’ll still be coaching while I’m gallivanting country to country but am planning to travel through Central and South America, then to Africa, then to Southeast Asia. I’ve now created the possibility of actually getting this trip sponsored and I plan to blog about it as I go.  Part of what I see within this is to bring the travel program to Landmark campuses wherever I travel to and enrolling them in participating. I also want anyone who has ever wanted to travel to join me for whatever part of it they’d like – ideally using this program if they need it.

I’ve also had the idea to possibly get the website itself sponsored by an airline or travel site.  Perhaps that website sponsorship money could go into a pot for people to draw from to put towards traveling AND perhaps the airline or travel site who sponsors it can offer a discount to group members who use their services.  Basically this creates a win-win for the sponsor to get advertising to potentially a million and a half people for nearly free (since people would feed money back into them) AND people get money to travel!

If you’re interested in sponsoring any part of this (or have some connections to enroll anyone in doing so) or would like to get involved, let me know!

Please leave any thoughts, comments or ideas below!

I just started reading Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh.  Early on in the book it says the following.  “A human being is like a television set with millions of channels. If we turn the Buddha on, we are the Buddha.  If we turn the sorrow on, we are the sorrow.  If we turn a smile on, we really are the smile. We can’t let just one channel dominate us. We have the seeds of everything in us, and we have to take the situation in hand to recover our own sovereignty.”

I loved this piece.  It really illuminates in the plainest terms that we are what we believe and we can simply choose which experiences to ‘turn on’. Yet people so frequently get sucked in to crappy programming.

People are so persistently plagued by beliefs that disempower them.  They’re not good enough, they’ll never be able to do it, they can’t afford it, they don’t deserve it, people don’t like them and so on and so forth.  Yet they’re the one ‘turning on’ (and tuning in to) that channel.

It’s human nature.  I of course do it myself as well.  For example, for the longest time I turned on the “I can’t afford it” channel.  Living out the starring role of this show I freaked out about giving myself anything and had lots of reasons and excuses to justify not doing so.  And when I did spend money anyway, I had tremendous guilt or uneasiness about it.  For example, I would go to dinner with friends and be hyper-sensitive about only paying exactly what I owed.  Talk about anal (and unpleasant)!

Then I finally started to break down this ‘story’ of mine.  First it was little by little that I started to make changes.  I’d split bills evenly at dinner and not care if I owed less.  I’d buy little things for others or donate money here and there.  Then at some point my coach encouraged me to invest in things I really wanted for myself in service of my clients being able to invest in theirselves and what they want (coaching).  After all, how could I expect them to take on what I myself wouldn’t?  I still struggled with this for a month or two still unwilling to let go and trust the universe.  Until something switched.

I read Brian Weiss’ ‘Many Lives, Many Masters’ and was fascinated by the stories of past life regressions.  When I got home I googled past life regression therapy and found that Brian Weiss was doing a workshop in Philly for $139.  I was so excited to find it and knew I had to sign up so I put my money objections aside and registered.  I posted the workshop on my twitter and later that day Rethnea contacted me to share with me that she had studied with Dr. Weiss and does past life regressions and wanted to offer me a free 3 hour session which I gratefully accepted.  (Unbeknownst to me I was the last free session she was to offer anyone as she decided to start charging for her work). Then, after completing Dr. Weiss’ workshop, we did past life work in my intuitive tool classes with Deganit.  There’s another amazing example in my post, ‘What are you bringing into your life?‘  It’s amazing what the universe provides you with when you get over yourself and surrender your BS to it.  All you have to do is give a little bit of yourself and trust that the universe will take care of you and bring you more than you could have imagined.

Now I’m creating the story of, ‘I can create anything!’

What’s one ‘story’ or belief you’re holding on to for dear life that if you took action in the face of it, might create something phenomenal in your life?  What’s just one baby step action you could take within the next week?

On a related note, I heard an awesome statistic the other day that when people sign up for a coaching program, when they simply register, they are anywhere from 20%-200% more likely to get the results they want.  If you think about it, this makes perfect sense.  What we’re actually talking about is putting some skin in the game of life.  You can look at this in other areas of life just as easily.  For example, you’re unlikely to learn a new language until you sign up for a course, or to learn salsa until you register for a dance class. You have to say yes to life before anything new can happen.

What do you really want in your life that you’ve been a constant ‘no’ to based on some circumstance?  I invite you to go take any action towards being a yes to it and watch it snowball.