Church guide

Flipping Complaints to Commitments We have noticed that some days both of us can complain a lot. The complaints might be about everyday things, such as not sleeping well, we’re out of our favorite coffee, or bigger complaints about the state of the world. We have also noticed that every time we complain, there’s a little voice inside of us that sounds like a Victim. We don’t like to admit it because the word “victim” feels small and disempowering and we don’t want to confess feeling that way. If we could choose which of the 3 roles of Victim, Persecutor or Rescuer that form the Dreaded Drama Triangle (DDT), neither of us would pick “victim.” We don’t even like the sound of that word. We both would much rather pick the Rescuer role. The Rescuer is someone who intervenes intending to be helpful, often with the unintended consequence of keeping the Victim from taking responsibility for their own affairs. But if we’re going to go reactive and live in the DDT, we’d rather be accused of being a Rescuer. At least we’re trying to be helpful! When we came to understand that complaining is a symptom of the Victim role, we were bummed. We realized we can slip into the Victim role more often than we realized. Harvard professors Lisa Lahey and Robert Kegan have coined the phrase: “Behind every complaint lies a commitment.” When we first heard that phrase, we didn’t understand it. It sounded foreign and unclear to us both. But, think about it. You don’t complain about things you don’t care about. You complain because there is something you are committed to. A complaint means you care enough to say something. When you care deeply about something—enough to complain—you are committed to that “something.” Hence, there is always a commitment behind every complaint. On its surface, the habit of complaining can: Be a delay tactic to dodge your responsibility; Be a lazy way to assign blame; Help you avoid addressing your role in the situation; Create a martyr complex by manipulating others to join your pity party; and/or Become an unconscious and disempowering habit. Asking yourself “what’s my commitment beyond my complaint?” can help you flip from focusing on your complaint to your commitment – what you care about. In doing so you can interrupt your old habits that have kept you in complaint mode. This is the powerful and all-important Victim to Creator shift! We used this “commitment behind our complaint” mantra to look at our complaint about a poor night’s sleep. We asked ourselves: What is our commitment behind our complaint of a restless night? We quickly said: “We are committed to our health and being our best to start each day.” What is our responsibility? Our responsibility is to change our habits, such as turning off our cell phones, TV, establishing a regular bedtime and other well-known strategies. Finally, we asked: “Is our complaining an easy way to avoid our responsibility and simply be a victim to poor sleep patterns?” The answer was yes. So, we choose to take action toward our commitment. Following this line of thinking, we committed ourselves to new patterns that support a more restful sleep pattern. By flipping our complaints to help us discover what we are committed to, it becomes easier to take responsibility to create what we want. This is an everyday example. However, this concept can have great impact on your work and life in empowering ways. Creating the life and relationships you want requires commitment and responsibility. We encourage you to notice your complaints and learn to flip them toward what you are committed to manifesting in your life and work. By David Emerald & Donna Zajonc, MCC Like this article? Check out our Archives for more TED* Works!

Assume Innocent Intent Picture this scene: You are rushing out the door from work heading to soccer practice to pick up your young daughter. Your boss catches you and says, “We really need your project report in the morning.” “Sure” you say, “it’s all but done. See you tomorrow,” and you keep running to your car. On the way to soccer practice you obsess about your boss’s demand that you finish a report that originally wasn’t due for another week. In your mind, your story grows, you fill-in more details and become certain this is just an attempt to control you. We humans are storytelling machines! An event happens and we fixate on the beginning, middle and end of the story…..whether we have the facts or not. We just want to make sense out of what’s going on and tend to attribute a motivation to the other person’s actions or statement. We often do this unconsciously. One reason we humans fill-in-the-blanks of what is happening is to try and make sense of ambiguous situations. If things are certain in our minds, we feel more comfortable about what’s going on. The downside of this trait is that we can make unintended Persecutors, Victims and Rescuers out of people and situations that simply are not accurate. All three of the Dreaded Drama Triangle (DDT) roles can emerge when we assume we know someone’s intent. Back to the story: The boss meets you in the coffee room the next morning. “Good morning. Hey, sorry I didn’t explain last night why I wanted your report a week early. You were rushing out the door and I didn’t want to bother you with a long explanation. Hopefully I didn’t catch you off guard or cause you to worry. Your reports are so well organized, I wanted to share it with others on the team who are asking for more direction prior to that important meeting we are having with the client.” Wow! You missed lots of valuable information about this situation that could have saved an evening of angst if you had adopted the mantra: assume innocent intent. Even in the healthiest workplaces and relationships, “stuff happens.” As you go through your day, something unanticipated is going to occur—an email arrives that conveys a confusing or upsetting message; a co-worker, spouse or friend is late to a meeting or a meal; you “hear through the grapevine” that someone has said something about you that isn’t true. If you assume innocent intent you can create an opening for connecting, at least until there is more information. It also allows you to calm down, listen and learn more about what is going on. It is not necessary to assume positive intent. While that might be useful, assuming innocent intent allows for a neutral space to simply be with what is happening when a situation is unclear. By seeing and relating to others as Co-Creators, when stuff happens (and it will), it is important to assume that there is innocent intent behind their statements and actions and to check it out. Here are a couple of tips for checking out the intention of another when stuff happens: If you feel triggered and reactive, give yourself time to pause and remind yourself of your new mantra: assume innocent intent. Respond from the Coach role in TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic)®. For example, you might directly ask “What is your intent? What do you really want in this situation? It would be helpful for me to know where you are coming from.” Give yourself and others a break when stuff happens. By assuming innocent intent, you will cultivate your Creator best self as you co-create with others. By David Emerald & Donna Zajonc, MCC

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/womens-enrichment-series-bishop-jennifer-baskerville-burrows-tickets-49353155617

A crawfish at the church door! A Home for All God’s critters!! 🦞 ✌️❤️🌏

Where There’s Stress, There’s a Story I tried something new with my most recent vacation. I planned to spend seven days in Portland, visiting a friend, riding bikes, eating artisanal donuts and drinking craft beers. But I divided this week into two, and in the middle, spent an entire week at a silent retreat. The basic idea of a silent retreat is to see how quiet the mind can get when you stop feeding it entertainment, conversation, and daydreams. Instead, you notice what’s happening inside you and around you, and come back to that when you get distracted. Essentially you are meditating in some posture or another—either sitting, walking, eating or going to the bathroom—for the sixteen hours each day that you’re not sleeping. It’s hard to convey just how aware a person becomes after spending more than 100 hours in meditation over seven days. The world becomes incredibly quiet and simple. You can hear eight different sounds at once, and never lose track of what direction each is coming from. At first you’re mostly noticing the obvious things: bird songs, the breeze, the weight of doors you use, the feeling of your clothes, the creaking of floors. But then you start to notice subtler phenomena. Your thoughts really slow down, and at a certain point become obvious, like somebody saying something in a quiet room. The mind becomes so quiet that you notice the tiniest ripples in your feelings. Our experience is full of some very subtle feedback that normally gets drowned out—tiny gut feelings, emotional residue from thoughts about certain topics, faint attractions or aversions to tiny details like the way your food is sitting on your plate. Normally our minds are so abuzz with layers of dialogue, memories, fears and ruminations, that we barely notice we’re thinking at all. Our everyday experience is so saturated with ongoing idle thought that it essentially becomes invisible. We’re like David Foster Wallace’s proverbial goldfish—after an older fish asks him, “How’s the water today?” he quietly asks his friend, “What the hell is water?” When thoughts are as clear and far-between as they are on retreat, you learn what your mind is actually like—the events that send it spinning, the places it goes when you’re not watching, the trouble it gets into. You start to see the billiard-ball effect a single thought can have on you, how easily it sets off emotions, how those emotions shape your moods and attitudes. With so little noise, you can start to map out the mechanics of the everyday preoccupied mind—how thoughts make you worry and ruminate, and how unnecessary most of the resulting stress is. How stress is born One afternoon I was doing walking meditation along a gravel path, and a fellow retreatant was doing the same thing, only at a much slower pace. Just as I passed him, I had the thought “Walk on, brother!” or something similarly well-meaning (but probably unnecessary). Almost immediately, my mind came up with the similar phrase “Carry on my wayward son!” Another moment later the drums and guitars kicked in, and I was privately rocking out to the Kansas song of that name. Seconds later, I was reliving a memory of being a teenager, at a party where that song was playing. My friend had disappeared and I was too shy to talk to anyone new, so I sat quietly on the couch for four hours, avoiding eye contact, feeling like an idiot. Similar memories flashed through my head, and I felt really bad. This kind of painful shyness characterized my teenage experience, and much of my adult experience, and it’s never pleasant to remember. In the next second, I recognized what had happened. I was only about six or seven steps down the path from where I had the initial thought. In less goldfish than ten seconds, I had gone from total awareness and equanimity, to a well-meaning thought, to an irrelevant memory, to a painful memory, to a familiar kind of existential rumination, and then—thankfully—back to awareness. If I hadn’t been on retreat it might have led to a dark mood, maybe a day-long surge of social anxiety. I would probably stay home that night or maybe treat myself to a pizza or something—and have no idea why. All of this because a thought I had happened to remind me of a 1970s rock anthem. I witnessed this pattern again and again: a thought would come out of nowhere, it would remind me of something, then something else, then something else, and eventually land on something personal and often painful—a memory or imaginary future moment where something is at stake, something I need to do, or avoid. This is what the mind is doing all the time. The mind is an extremely powerful connect-the-dots machine, constantly and rapidly making associations between what it notices, triggering any one of a zillion memories or projections about the future. All of these scenarios include you of course, and often there’s something at stake, some fixation on having things go a certain way. Essentially, the mind is making stories: sequences of events, past or future, where you stand to gain or lose something. You imagine—or re-imagine—a date, an interview, a conversation, an argument, a Facebook comment thread gone awry, a future performance evaluation, a call-out from a family member who, it turns out, noticed you took the last Popsicle. Naturally, a certain desperation grows around the needs you face in these stories, which creates real stress, usually over nothing. Is it actually useful, or merely addictive, to re-enact a not-so-great speech you gave last month, for the sixteenth time? Or continually imagine a confrontation with a driver that cut you off on the way to work this morning? These stories are just a natural by-product of the human mind’s amazing ability to make connections between similar thoughts, but they reliably generate real stress. This free-association ability isn’t wholly a bad thing, and is in fact necessary for making plans and learning from our mistakes. But most of the time it is completely useless idle thinking, just random sequences of imagined events we endure and suffer for absolutely no benefit. Find the story, leave it unfinished You don’t need to go on retreat, or even meditate at all, to begin to address this problem, although it is almost certainly the most direct way. It’s enough to simply recognize this basic relationship between stress and stories. Virtually every time you experience stress, it’s a response to a narrative in the mind, a story about something you feel you need to have happen or prevent from happening. When you notice stress rising at some random moment, find the story. It can probably be summed up in a sentence. What’s the story? That the IRS will find an error in my return and send me a bill I can’t pay. That everyone will hate my article when I publish it. That I’ll go on a Tinder date and both of us will realize how boring I am. That the country will collapse if a certain candidate gets elected. Many times a day, we end up ruminating on stressful, unresolvable narratives for completely random reasons—such as remembering a bloody Kansas song—yet somehow it feels like important work is being done. Ostensibly, in each of these mental eddies, you are “preparing” for life by imagining or re-enacting encounters with co-workers, muggers, law enforcement officers or prospective bosses. But there’s no real decision-making happening, no useful preparation, just another unplanned session of self-flagellation, as we demand more control and certainty from our experience than is ever going to be available to us. Where there’s stress, there’s a story, and you probably don’t need to hear it. Or tell it. Whether the story is true or not (or may become true) isn’t important. You may still have to live through an actual audit or a nervous first date, and there is some uncertainty there, some real possibility of pain or difficulty. But even if the topic is decidedly relevant to your life, that doesn’t mean you need to tell or re-tell this story right now, or that it will help you in real life. Just leave the narrative unfinished—not that they ever can be finished—and go back to what you were doing before the storytelling started. That’s where life actually happens. *** By David Cain I teach basic meditation and mindfulness skills in my online course, Camp Calm. Mindfulness practice helps us let things go, reduce stress, heighten well-being, improve sleep, and deepen our enjoyment of life. Camp Calm is a gentle ramp to take you from total beginner to daily meditator. Your fellow campers and I will be there to support you on the path.

🙏 ✌️❤️

St Augie’s future 😃

Stations will actually start this evening, Friday March 8th, at 6:30pm

Friday Food for Thought The Secret to How People Change By David Emerald & Donna Zajonc, MCC March 8, 2019 Wouldn’t it be great if we could just snap our fingers and all that we don’t like about other people would suddenly change? But, you need to know, while you are snapping your fingers, other people may be snapping theirs trying to make you change! Most of us spend time trying to figure out how to get other people to change but, no matter what we do, we can never make another person change. There’s good news though: if we understand what motivates people to change, we can have a positive influence on them and be a catalyst for positive change. Maybe you have tried to get others to change by being demanding and authoritarian, hoping people will change by brute force. This approach may achieve short term results, but long-term sustainable behavior change will most likely not occur. Another idea is that people will change if they suffer enough. Over the years, I (Donna) was sure my teenager’s grades were going to improve if he was scared enough about not getting into the college of his choice. That strategy did not work well. Researchers who study why people stop smoking were sure they would stop smoking if they knew the gruesome health facts. The success rate of smoking cessation through this approach was almost nil. Long term change simply does not occur if suffering or force is the motivation. The chances are great that either strategy—being demanding or increasing the suffering—will trigger the Dreaded Drama Triangle (DDT) and you will be seen as the purveyor of “bad things happening,” and as a Persecutor. People do not make lasting change because of pain and suffering. Change occurs when people connect with an intrinsic value—something they deeply care about. When they get in touch with what matters most to them, they will invest in personal change efforts. Here’s the challenge: many people are very practiced at knowing what they don’t want. Few people are really clear about what they do want. When we support them in focusing on what they do want, it evokes their deep passion and connects with what has heart and meaning for them. That is also why organizations need to be able to communicate and constantly reinforce an inspiring vision, mission and purpose in serving the needs of its customers (internal or external) and other stakeholders. In such an environment, workers are most empowered when their values align with the organization’s. Here are a few suggestions that can support a person changing their behavior: Support others to see that change is a natural phenomenon of nature (just observe the weather and see dramatic change every day). Learning to be comfortable with change, in general, will assist someone who is resisting change. Be part of their support system that believes in them and inspires them to change. Show empathy for the feelings associated with change, while not reinforcing the reasons for resistance. Help them see the benefits—“What’s in It for Me?”—of the change. Reflect upon what is motivating them and what they will get from the change effort. This must be based upon what they really care about, not what you have told them they should care about. Continue to listen openly for what has meaning for them, as you support them to take steps toward what they can control and create. By following these suggestions, you will inherently be approaching them as Creators—rather than Victims to the old behavior. Now you are supporting them as a Challenger and Coach and empowering them through the TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic)® roles. That is what the 2nd Vital Question (“How Are You Relating?”) is all about, and it can lead to powerful and fulfilling change, both personally and professionally. Like this article? Check out our Archives for more TED* Works! Learn more about TED* - www.powerofted.com

Day one of a new Lenten Journey

Pancakes...Balloons...food & fun😃

AKA: “Re-writing the stories”

Neat app to try during Lent!

Hey St Augies family, Susan and I signed up for the online Lenten Journey that I pasted below. I invite you to check it out and join us. Why give up chocolate when something better is available 😉 Plus...it’s free. ✌🏼&❤️ Bill+ https://www.theseventhstory.com/a-lenten-journey You’re Invited to a Seven-Week Online Journey into Creativity, Community, and the Common Good We're living in a time of great upheaval, anxiety, and challenge; as well as great possibility, and even hope. We’re following the traditions of authentic spirituality to embrace Lent as a season for going deeper amidst the swirl of life. The best way to respond to something bad is to do something better, so we're taking a journey together for the 40 days of Lent, seeking ancient wisdom about a better story: moving from oppositional energy to creative hope, from fear to faith, from distraction to contemplation, from individualism to the common good. We’re inviting you into conversations about what we call the Seventh Story: transcending domination, revenge, isolation, purification, victimization and accumulation narratives with a new story of reconciliation - humans with each other, with the ecosystem, and with Love itself. What exactly are we doing? It's simple: a daily email and a weekly conversation. You'll get a short daily email for reflection for every day of Lent, and be invited to a live conversation each week for seven weeks. You'll get to hear conversation with Brian McLaren, Gareth Higgins, and friends from the world of creativity, community, and the common good - and you can participate in the conversations, too! Can't make the live conversations? Don't worry - they'll be recorded and available to watch at any point during Lent. So, join us, on your own, or gather two or more friends to take this course as a group. Sign up below - it's absolutely free. Learn More & Sign Up Thanks again for being part of the Porch Community Have questions? Want to know other ways you be involved in the festival? Or can't make it to the festival, but want more of The Porch in your community? Get in touch - we'd love to hear from you.

From the children’s Christmas program at church this morning.

Children & Youth Carols and Lessons program