Ike Lasater

Mediator, Trainer, Coach

Ike Lasater

When Your Mind Sabotages Your Dreams

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MYL-cover-2-revised-D (1)When your Mind Sabotages Your Dreams: Turning Your Critical Internal Voices into Collaborative Allies by Ike Lasater, John Kinyon, & Julie Stiles is the latest in the Mediate Your Life series, A Guide to Removing Barriers to Communication. When your Mind Sabotages Your Dreams is available for purchase at Amazon in paperback and e-book form. Click HERE to purchase.

When it comes to your dreams, do you ever feel like you have one foot on the gas and one foot on the break?

One of the biggest barriers people face in reaching their dreams is within: the self-sabotaging voices that arise when stepping out in a new way. Yet what if these voices can actually be your allies?

With practical tools and maps, plus real-life examples, When Your Mind Sabotages Your Dreams will help you to:

  • Clarify your dreams and how to achieve them
  • Identify and befriend the inner voices that stop you
  • Create new habits and change ones that get in your way
  • Learn how to be resilient in the face of setbacks
  • Emerge from judgments of your past actions with new ways forward
  • Make strong agreements with yourself … and follow through
  • Navigate the process of achieving your dreams with greater ease

If you’re ready to make progress on creating the life you desire, When Your Mind Sabotages Your Dreams provides compelling guidance that will enlist all of your inner voices to act in alignment/take strong action.

Written by authors with 40 years combined experience in a Nonviolent Communication approach to mediation and conflict resolution, who have trained thousands of people worldwide to transform conflict into connection. 

If you are interested in reviewing a copy of From Conflict to Connection for your blog or other media outlet, please email us and be sure to include a link to and info about your media outlet, as well as your full contact information.

 

Collaboration Through Connection

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Collaboration grows out of connection. Because connection (and thus collaboration) is ephemeral and cannot be coerced, we get lost when we think we can get what we want in the world by forcing others to bend to our will. Therefore, whether we are parents, leaders in our community, team members at work, political or military leaders and actors, attempting to get what we want by imposing our will does not give us the results we want in the end. By using force, we perhaps can get someone to do what we want them to do, but we can’t get them to do it for the reasons we want them to do it.

And so I return to this concept of connection, from which comes trust and from trust, collaboration.

Connection begins with myself, without which I’m not able to connect with others. So it follows, that, at the first indication that I’ve become disconnected from myself, I want to focus my attention on reconnection. There are a number of strategies you can use to create self-connection and in later posts I will discuss those strategies, as well as how to become quickly aware when you have become disconnected from yourself.

Similarly, at the moment we discern disconnection from another, I suggest immediately shifting our focus to re-creating connection. This connection with others, whether they are friends, partners, children, co-workers or strangers will give you a better chance to get what you want in the present moment, and on a larger scale, create what you want in the world and have the impact that you want. It is this connection that is the gateway to true collaboration.

(Read more about the power of connection in my book From Conflict To Connection:Transforming Difficult Conversations into Peaceful Resolutions, the latest in the Mediate Your Life series, A Guide to Removing Barriers to Communication

 

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An Operating Manual for Our Time

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We are not given an operating manual for our lives when we are born.

This was strongly brought home to me recently as I held my two newest grandchildren, born within two weeks of each other. Aside from the basics of filling their diapers, nursing, crying and sleeping, they have to learn everything else.

There are many unconscious processes that must mature as the child grows into adulthood. As biological beings, all of these processes have evolved since the first spark of life. We have not only been evolving as biological beings, but also as thinking idea machines. Richard Dawkins used the term “memes” to refer to these bits of culture that multiply by spreading from mind to mind.

We humans have learned by these evolutionary processes to cooperate and collaborate. In each generation, we are at the learning edge of our expanding envelope of awareness and understanding. We have learned to cooperate within a group, but always in reference to “others” and “outsiders,” hence the truth of bromides like “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Over the recent millennia, humans have looked to religion to explain the world in which we live and how to conduct ourselves. And before that, the more obvious and distinct forms of myth and storytelling provided some guidance. Now, we are in a new era where we are able to winnow out, using the scientific method, myth and superstition.

Now, we are facing challenges that do not have an in-group and an out-group. Challenges such as climate change and, I would argue, religious fundamentalism.

In this blog, I will explore what I would include in an operating manual in this new era, when cooperation and collaboration are essential to continued human existence.

 

Ayeish

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On a recent trip to Turkey, Ike collaborated with the nonprofit Aeyish, whose mission is to deepen the ability of political leaders to transform conflict into solution and connection. This video highlights the work they did with leaders of various Syrian groups (2016)