What makes a bad mood bad?

A beautiful beautiful morning for my two-mile run today.

It was two miles full of ideas.

One of the things I was thinking about was moods: what causes them, whether we can choose them or change them, whether there is actually such a thing as a good or bad mood.

What makes us judge some feelings such as anger, frustration, annoyance and jealousy as bad whilst happy, excited, expectant, grateful and peaceful are all good?

Does it make it wrong or bad of us when we feel angry?

I would suggest not.

You feel what you feel, and making yourself wrong for feeling that way only accentuates and perpetuates the feeling of being wrong.

Also, wrenching yourself out of feeling angry too quickly can be like placing a thin layer of happy veneer over the angry base.

The anger hasn't gone away, it's just bubbling away underneath the surface waiting to emerge again.

However, if you can change your mood just enough to be able to look at the anger from a slightly detached viewpoint, it can help you dissipate it and move to somewhere more powerful for you.

What enables you to shift your mood enough to step back slightly and look at it from a different perspective.

I have a few techniques, but none of them beats a good run!

Lesson from an old Greek man

Last night, after another wet, squally but mild, 3-mile run with Sarah's fantastic Runners, I happened to wander through the room where my better half was watching TV.

At that precise moment on the programme she was watching, an old Greek man was at a funeral, and you could hear him speaking his thoughts.

He was saying that he was supposed to shed a tear whilst kissing his dead relative lying in an open coffin, but he was unable to make himself cry.

Then he thought abut his youth and the dreams that he had at the start of his life, and how none of them had ben fulfilled, and that now it was too late.

At that point he managed to shed the appropriate tears for the situation, although not for the prescribed reason.

Having read Julien Smith's excellent free book The Flinch yesterday, it made me realise that the outcome of our lives is based on thouands upon thousands of opportunities, where we have the chance to take (or flinch from) an action that can lead to our dreams.

What better discipline to start building now, to ensure you don't meet the same fate as that disillusioned old Greek man, than to start noticing when you flinch, meet it head on and take that action towards your dreams.

Learn to flinch forwards

I downloaded a free Kindle edition of a book called "The Flinch" yesterday.

If you are feeling, or have EVER felt, stuck, I strongly advise you to download this book now, or as soon as possible.

The dictionary definition of flinch is:

1. to draw back or shrink, as from what is dangerous, difficult, or unpleasant.
2. to shrink under pain; wince

We all flinch at the point where we step outside our comfort zones into our learning zones, and most of us flinch backwards into the "supposed" safety of our comfort zones.

In "The Flinch", Julien Smith likens our lives to a long corridor filled with closed doors behind which lie new possibilities and the life of our dreams.

Fear of the flinch keeps us going down the same corridor that looks the same all the way down to the end.

To quote from the book:

"The secret to overcoming the flinch is that everyone wants you to succeed. People are looking for proof that you can be amazing so that they can be amazing, too."

Take a look and learn to flinch forwards instead of backwards.

Actions, goals & purpose

I read a daily coaching tip I liked from Michael Neill yesterday, which I was thinking about on my run this morning.

In his tip, Michael talked about the three key components to living a life of purpose, which are the goals you set, the actions you take and having an awareness of the higher purpose behind everything you do.

An example he then gives , using his to do list, is to look at the goal behind filing his tax receipts.

His goal behind the task is to be completely up-to-date with his tax for the year.

He then looks at the purpose behind being on top of his tax, and that is to be financially independent within the next five years.

I like Michael's approach, and certainly think it can put some oomph behind what seems like a quite mundane task of filing his receipts.

I think I might try it out.

Turning work into play

I waited until it was light and went out with the fabulous Sarah's Runners again this morning.

I make that just over 18 miles I've run in the first six days of December.

Today, I have a Mark Twain quote on my mind.

"The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world."

This fits in with my philosophy of coaching people who hate to work.

We've all heard of those people who appear to have a dream job, because they say that what they do, doesn't feel like work. They would do it even if they didn't earn money doing it.

Isn't that the dream for all of us?

As a coach friend of mine says, with anything you look at, there are usually three ways that people do things, the hard way, the easy way and the middle way.

When it comes to work, the hard way is doing work that you hate.

The easy way is doing work that you love.

The middle way is making sure that even though you're not doing work that you love, you concentrate on loving how you do it.

My goal is to help as many people as possible move up the spectrum from hard to medium, or medium to easy.