Messages from Angels

Lorna Byrne was born in the 1950’s in Ireland and was growing up, like many at the time, in a monetarily poor family. Despite being severely dyslexic with the help of speech recognition software and assistance with proofreading and editing, she has written seven highly successful books, with the first Angels in my Hair becoming an international bestseller.

Angels have been in her life from the moment she was born. She didn't realise they were angels but she remembers reaching up to try and touch them when she was in her cot. Later, when she was with her brother playing with blocks in front of a fire their hands touched and at that moment angels circled them telling her that she must keep them a secret. She was very young at the time but the angels told her that her brother had died before she was born and was a soul. Lorna thinks keeping it a secret was one of the things that the angels were doing to protect her. 

From a very early age, the angels told Lorna that she would write a book about them. She used to laugh when they said it, telling them it was unlikely because she had dyslexia and could not read or write. Because of her dyslexia she was put in the bottom class at school and never finished primary school education after doctors told her parents she was retarded

Some people see angels as a metaphor for goodness, kindness wisdom and knowledge but Lorna talks about actual entities and sees angels physically with clarity. When she was a child she didn't know they were angels and it wasn't until they told her that her little brother was a soul that she started to understand. Even then she still thought her parents could see them but the angels kept reminding her to say nothing. Lorna sees angels as a beautiful light and sees them tumble down from the heavens and stop before they land.  She can’t really describe them further but says they give a human appearance in the light but that they can be very faint. Sometimes they tell her their names but because they are always around people and give the impression they want to help even with trivial things, she gave them a name of the unemployed angels.

Lorna doesn’t know why she can see angels. She thinks perhaps it is because she was considered retarded. No one talked to her and she was very silent and quiet so the angels became her teachers. They also made predications about her life. They told her when it was time to write a book but at the time she was busy being a mother. When she was about 10 years old, an angel showed her the man she would marry and told her that he would die young so in some ways Lorna feels her life is predetermined and that she has no free will like everyone else but she realises that to do that the world has to play its part so she can play hers.

Lorna feels that it’s to do with spiritual growth, connecting the soul with the human person. She feels everyone has a soul and that it is waiting to intertwine - the soul exists and the human attaches to the soul so when someone dies, the soul continues with all knowledge of that human person. The soul is the life force. The human body gets weaker but the soul never weakens. She also thinks that everyone has a guardian angel that never leaves them while other angels or the soul of a loved one can come or go. The guardian angel tries to help and give guidance to make life a little easier. Connecting into that is really important.

For many people their resilience comes from their ability to believe and having a path laid out for them. Lorna feels her angels have helped her to push ahead and given her the courage and resilience she has needed to overcome the obstacles in her life. This has taken her to incredible places and extraordinary experiences and people and shows that being limited in some ways in terms of skills doesn't mean you don't have the capability to achieve great things. When her first book came out a number of young people who had learning difficulties approached Lorna and told her she had helped give them the courage and resilience to achieve what they wanted to achieve.  

Lorna doesn’t know how she has achieved what she has and has needed courage because she has been ridiculed by any people but she says she loves them anyway because the love she has for mankind and for nature overcomes all of the negatives. This represents the idea that if you are secure in yourself it doesn't matter what other people think about you. It doesn't matter what the source of the security is, whether it's a rational, cognitive thing or a faith, belief or spiritual, the idea of being a strong version of yourself is important.

Lorna set up a children’s foundation in 2015 that supports the work of charities around the world in helping children who are suffering from poverty, illness, grief or war and has also helped to set up a online sanctuary for people from around the world, of all backgrounds and beliefs to come together.

Over the years Lorna has met with a lot of scepticism but many other people have visited or contacted Lorna, seeking healing or wisdom through God and the angels. She feels the scepticism doesn't matter because she just wants to help to change people’s lives.

You can find out more about Lorna at lornabyrne.com

 You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
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Moral injury. A new type of burnout?

Post-pandemic there have been huge changes in the workplace. This has resulted in a large number of resignations with burnout being thought of as one of the contributory factors. The classic signs of burnout - mental exhaustion, disengagement, negativity, cynicism and reduced productivity - are well established but now a new study from the University of Sheffield, Affinity Health and Softer highlights that moral injury and stress in the workplace can contribute to a new type of burnout.

The new study, which looked at the experiences of workers in a number of different industries including law, healthcare and HR, considers that moral injury can lead to a type of burnout that is more intense, more challenging to overcome and even lead to increasing the number of resignations.

Moral injury originates from research with the military and refers to the violation of deeply held beliefs. This might be as a witness of an event or as being a participant who has to obey orders in circumstances that were felt to be morally wrong, for example having to shell a school or hospital where civilians would be injured. There has also been work with health care workers and education providers. This cited external pressures and circumstances such as the pandemic or financial interventions as being morally injurious, leaving them unable to provide the service they were employed to give and powerless to intervene.

In other businesses moral injury can be linked to working in toxic environments where an employees values and beliefs are challenged.  This could be around bullying, sexism, racism, homophobia or another moral issue and may be directly experienced, witnessed or learned about such as a colleague’s transgression or betrayal, an unfair redundancy or disciplinary procedure, a failure to act on a whistleblowing complaint, or unfair use of managerial power. 

The study found that although people’s experience of moral stress was different in source, severity and length, many of the respondents felt that the impact on them was so great they had no option but to resign from their positions. This would appear to show that as well as the original problem, there was a lack of support from managers and colleagues that exacerbated the situation and led to feelings of disengagement and, in some cases, of being in a type of abusive relationship.

Many of the warning signs of moral injury are similar to the ones experienced with classic burnout but additionally there may be a sense of shame, embarrassment and hopelessness. The loss of deeply held values and beliefs may also result in feelings such as guilt, anger, grief, anxiety and disgust as well as disillusionment with figures of authority and organisations, social withdrawal and a loss of trust.

Moral injury is caused and experienced differently to burnout but the feelings experienced by someone in a morally injurious situation can contribute to the development of burnout. As moral injury impacts on an individuals trust and self-respect, the strategies and tools needed to mitigate it are different to those needed for burnout and organisations need to be careful not to conflate the two.

Linking values and identity

Sam LaCrosse lived in Cleveland, Ohio for the first eighteen years of his life before attending university at Ohio State for the next four years. He then took an entry-level job in Boston before moving to Austin Texas in summer 2021.  Since then Sam has written a book called Value Economics. The study of Identity.

The motivation for writing his book came in the summer of 2019 when he was doing an internship. He was talking to his mother about believes and what to put your energy into. At the time there were a lot of different things going on culturally but they started talking specifically about Sam’s generation, Gen Z. His mother said that she didn't feel they believed in anything. Sam thought this sounded a little harsh so he decided to look a little more deeply into what was going on in the world. His conclusion was that there was some merit in what she was saying - he wasn’t sure if she was correct or not but he thought the idea was worth exploring.

Sam thought about his time growing up and, more specifically, the household he grew up in. Both his parents were there and his grandparents lived very close by so it was a tight knit family unit. The one constant was the ethos of values and growing up Sam know they were important but he didn't really know what they really were. Later he started asking what are values and from this the relationship between value and sacrifice. He came to the conclusion that the more you value something the more you will sacrifice to get that something. The less you value something, the less you will sacrifice to get that something.

When Sam was at university he had to take a mandatory economics class. One day in class they were talking about supply and demand and he decided that he would use the model of supply and demand to navigate and map out the value of sacrifice to relationships. Sam’s definition of value is that it is something scarce, rare or hard to find. There has to be a finite resource element to it – there is only so much of something to go around. He links value in an economic sense rather than in the psychological sense of beliefs and values. He does feel though that he is talking about both belief systems and values as the central thing you hold close as a person. He wanted to have a rationale when explaining it to people and he gravitated towards economics for explanation because he saw a clear line between the two things.

Sam feels that a value is something that you hold close to yourself and that it can depend on your culture, family or place you grew up, how people value different things. If you want to look at it from an economic stance, these values are generalised in the market place. You can go and purchase or gravitate towards something in the market place but you have to find values that you find work for you. This can be based on experiences - how you like interacting with the world or other people, discipline, self-awareness or how much you care about these things. You have to take the values that most closely match up with those requirements and use them as the anchoring point of who you are as a person. The sacrifice comes in because these things are so important to you that you have to sacrifice so you can live them and let them work for you.

Many people are fascinated by the idea of identity and it’s become an abstracted question to answer in a lot of different ways. Recently, its been seen as the subject of group identity and classifying yourself with a group of people - black, white, male, female gay, straight. Sam feels there is merit to having that side of identity, the genetic and biological characteristics of a person, but that sense of looking at people is limited. Identity should be composed at the individual level and formed of individual values. The implementation of your values is what truly forms an individual’s personal identity in the most total sense that you can capture in a person.

Sam’s proposition is that you have to figure out what you value and then make choices based on actually living those values by getting rid of the things you don't value and living a life around the things you’ve decided are important to you. Self-help is warranted in some cases but if you don't know who you are and don’t know what you find important then what good is any help going to do you if you go in the wrong direction - if you help yourself for the wrong reasons its not helping at all.

Sam feels you can’t help yourself until you know who you are and knowing your values helps to understand who you are and your identity. We all make a series of choices at certain points in our lives and these choices can change – things we may decide when we are in our 20’s will be different to those at 40 and Sam thinks we need to test our values over time. They are things that are really important and self-identification really matters and should we should live our lives around them but need to be capable of change.

 You can find out more about Sam at LinkedIn, read his blogs on dontreadthisblog.com or listen to his podcast Don't Listen to This Podcast. His book is Value Economics: The Study of Identity.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
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A practical approach to leadership. The Zen Executive

Jim Blake is the CEO of Unity World Headquarters, a spiritual, non-denomination, non-profit founded in 1889 in Kansas City, Missouri. It helps people of all faiths and cultures apply positive spiritual principles in their daily lives. He had previously held numerous executive positions in the corporate world, including as Director of Customer Operations for Landis+Gyr, a global leader in the utility industry, and Vice President of Products and Technology for Rhythm Engineering.

Jim is based in Missouri which is known for its weather threats including tornado’s and recently the state has been experiencing 95 - 100 degree heat. There is an on-going threat from nature whether its fire, snow or storms and you need resilience to deal with these sudden changes in weather. Part of being resilient is acceptance of where you are and what may or may not happen. Establishing the proper mind set for being prepared is important, as preparation is the key to eliminating fear. If we accept the risks and prepare properly then you can reduce the fear and anxiety that might come with threats from the weather and from anything else.

Acceptance is a vital skill of understanding. Taking the stoic approach when things happen - what you do about them is the thing that makes the difference. Some people come out of adverse events well whilst others are completely defined by it, sometimes for the rest of their life. Acceptance is also an important part of healing. Our emotional posture and thoughts about these things dictate our experience of it. Something happens in your life and its how you handle that through your thoughts and emotions that determines your experience of that event. Accept and move though it and you’ll still have the rest of the day to be fine or hold on to it and let it impact your decision-making and how you interact with people for the rest of the day. It’s an important self-awareness skill.

Jim’s undergraduate degree was in IT coding but although he enjoyed it he found it to be isolating. In the early 1990s IT companies were moving away from main frames and mid ranges to PCs. With new devices and the Internet coming on line Jim took the opportunity to move into network communications. It was more social and more big picture and so he took his career in that direction. Since then he has led teams in general IT, application support, coding and network development until in 2016 he joined Unity World Headquarters as CEO.

Leading a non-profit is a very complex role perhaps more so than a commercial organisation. Jim’s background in programming and project management work formed a great base and he had learned huge amount from the leading global organisations he had worked in. The main things he had taken away were their commitment to innovation, their dedication to new product development and their focus on bringing on talent. That innovation served him well at Unity and gave him a really powerful way to use his experience and apply a whole new set of thinking in how it does it does its work.

Unity sits under an umbrella of teachings called new thoughts from the late 1800’s. These ancient principals that were mainly taken from the east and are traditions based on spiritual principals related to emotions, thoughts and how these create the experience you have as your life unfolds.  All of these new thoughts, areas or traditions work on a practical level not as a lot of dogma. Unity didn’t want to be classified as a religious organisation because it wanted it’s teaching to continue to evolve over time. Through its website it provides a lot of resources that are practical with sections on healing, grief, addiction and other everyday problems but looking at them from a spiritual perspective that takes its truths from all of the major traditions from the east.

Jim’s book, The Zen Executive, is based on the experiences he had during his corporate career. The first section is about self care - getting in touch with how your feelings and emotions impact your experiences and why and how you can better care for yourself. The better we do this in mind body and spirit, the better we perform and the better we show up.  When we show up stressed and angry, it affects our decision- making and the relationships around us.

The second part of the book is about the intersection between business and life and the practices that make people feel that they cannot combine their spiritual and work lives. Jim feels they can be combined so you can bring your whole self to work. The last part is about leadership and understanding leadership from a new perspective so you bring compassion, empathy and wellbeing for yourself and those you serve with to bear. There is the idea that you cant be good to people and that you have to treat them with fear intimidation, command and control. Jim thinks that if you do it the other way the results are even better. When a person feels safe, heard and appreciated, they are far more productive than if they are in fear and stress around their work.

Some people confuse the message about being safe, heard and appreciated as being soft, woolly and non-accountable but those things are not true. People still need to be measured, to show they are doing a good job. They need to be encouraged and have their potential understood and maximised. Leadership is not just about letting people run riot. One of the major points in the book is that you can still hold people accountable but that you can do it in a way with compassion, respect and transparency so you bring out the best in their performance. People know when they are doing a good job and what they are capable of so it's the job of the leader to hold a lens up and say ‘you’re doing this and that's great but you could be doing more’. Some people find this threatening, challenging, bullying or patronising. That's their choice. The job of the leader is to see the potential and then help their employees to see it to.

Jim feels we need to bring our whole self to work and advocates that some of the things we do at work are in alignment with things that exist in our spiritual life such as compassion, empathy and deep listening. The idea that work just has to be work and that `I can t bring some of what I believe in terms of my own spirituality’. You don't have to put it on blast but Jim suggests we can bring a spiritual approach to our work and posture of service to what are doing and how we are doing it. We don't need to share the reasons and motivations that inspire us with everyone but we don't need to exclude them from the workplace either. Jim feels the way to do this is to bring the same spiritual posture we feel in our most comfortable setting to the office in how we treat people how we approach our work and how we endeavour to inspire others. By finding the why and then giving context you understand the meaning of the work you’re doing. You are linking work to meaning.

You can learn more about Jim at www.1amjimblake.com where there are details about his book “The Zen Executive”. You can find out more about Unity at http://www.uinty.org

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.
Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

The Bullied Brain. A new perspective

Dr Jennifer Fraser has been working for a number of years on the idea that if we are raised in a certain culture, in a very intensely trained belief system it becomes very hard to separate your mind from this. Your brain on an anatomical level gets sculpted by your experience. If we are all raised in a certain culture we all come to believe its reality when in actual fact its not.

In her first book Jennifer looked literature to consider how a person goes from being a reader of culture, growing up seeped in a belief system, for example racism, religion or financial, and how this belief system scripts your brain as a child and makes it difficult to see any alternatives. How does someone switch from being a reader and consumer of culture to someone who writes culture, thinks or does things differently and then expresses this to others.

In neuro science emotions aren’t just something innate or inherent within your being. Neuro scientists now talk about how our emotions are actually constructs that are built based on our past experience. One person might look at a loss that's pending and feel overwhelmed by grief because of past scripting whilst another suffer so many loses that they build a resilience to it. They know its not going to destroy them and use another emotional concept in reaction – the idea of really thinking very consciously and purposely about how they are going to act and behave and also how they are feeling. They aren’t just going to feel how they were told they needed to feel growing up as a child. They are an adult so are going to make some choices based on the emotional concept they’ve drawn on depending on they are faced with.

This is the nature of being an adult. In today’s world a lot of mental health practioners treat their clients as children. At work we see leaders and managers treating their teams as children then go home and treat their children as little adults. Have we lost the idea of adulthood?

Jennifer feels this idea is particularly interesting in relation to bullying and abuse. She was recently asked to comment about a case in Canada where a large group of teenagers physically beat and shamed a girl then filmed it and put it out through social media. It was an horrendous act and the police wanted to press charges but It is incredibly difficult to obtain a conviction for adult abusive behaviour.. The legal systems treats adults with kid gloves, people cover up for them and protect them but the police were keen to charge the teenagers when its well documented that the brain is programmed in adolesence to the age of 25 to be risk takers and reward seekers. The pre frontal cortex is not mature and so the decision-making mechanism isn’t good nor is the ability to think about consequences. The brain is not mature or thinking nor does it have rational adult like qualities.

This may relate to the language we use. The term stress is now devalued and meaningless, there is no distinction in mental health between dysfunction, illness or mental health. Low mood or depression means you have a mental health problem. In the same way bullying has lost significance so now anybody using an unpleasant tone of voice is bullying and this detracts from the real situation. Part of the problem is that we have lost the ability to define what we mean by these terms. Being rude to someone else isn’t bullying nor is saying something on Facebook. True bullying is something that takes place over time.

Jennifer doesn't talk about bullying amongst children. She feels it’s impossible to try to solve the epidemic in the youth populations. She talks about adults who bully and abuse children which she feels is the biggest power imbalance on the planet and the most taboo subject. People don't want to talk about parents, teachers doctors or coaches bullying children.

Brain works, paradigms or belief systems train us to behave in certain ways, stop us disobeying or thinking outside the box and tell us to stick to the plan. The plan is that we tell children at a very early age.and train and sculpt their brains to believe that adults, regardless of their behaviour are to be respected. That is a fatal law right at the beginning. When we use the word bullying it is part of the whitewashing because we don’t want to deal with the situation as it makes us uncomfortable. It brings a lot of anxiety and vulnerabiities. To be an adult a lot of people believe that it means you align yourself with power.

Some of the most powerful people in the world today behave like children. That has to be changed. The public encourages this behaviour and it shows that in a cultural way we have lost some of our training around critical thinking and empathy. We need to understand that if we want to get something done about things like bullying we’ve got to start working together in a thoughtful, purposeful, mindful insightful, educated, researched and evidenced based way. You should not be in a leadership position if you cant do that.

Jennifer has come to realise that what she thinks happens is when we become childlike in our behaviour its because we don't know what to do with our brains. We ignore our brains because we cant see it so we act as if its not there. It used to be thought that concussion was a moral testing ground. If you suffered a concussion and then straight back on the rugby or football pitch it was showing you had resilience, that your teammates came first and that you’d do anything for the coach and the win. It was seen as sign of great character but in fact a person with concussion has a brain trauma which can be really serious but because we are a visual, species we can’t see it so it hasn’t happened.

We can’t see our brains so we don’t think or talk about them. We don't teach children about them or encourage teachers to find out more. We don't tell organisations that when young people come to work for them they are not mature. They have incredible creative and vast learning brains but they don't have mature brains until they are 25 so you have to work differently with them if you want to be successful.

We have two choices if we don't pay attention to our brains. We can remain a victim and turn negative, bullying and abusive type behaviour that happen to us against ourselves and develop a mind bully mentality. We don't believe in ourselves, fullfiil our potential or suffer from substance abuse. We put on a facade when we go to work, become a perpetual victim and don't know how to get better. The other group that suffer bullying or abusive behaviour in childhood and their formative years go out and align themselves with the bully and become the next bully. They are as traumitised as the victim but  they align with power and identify with  the aggressor.

If someone has been abused and then goes out in the world when they meet people they are looking for the emotion concept that helps them navigate their world and creates a sense of reality for them. When they go though their file holder and find abuser they think they know how that works, they are comfortable navigating that world, they know the feelings so they can act it out again. They are not going to choose an emotion concept that they don't have in their file holder such as respect - they don’t have that emotion concept so can’t predict it in their next relationships.To get better they have to change their brain by using neuroplascity to purposefully create an emotional concept for respectful relationship with someone.

The human brain is remarkably skilled at learning everything we want it to learn. If you put in the time you can take someone who is highly abusive and rewire and reprogramme their brain. It takes a lot of hard work but after 6 weeks you can see changes that show the brain is not defaulting to bullying behaviour because its been retrained and rewired to actually pause, take a deep breathe and choose a different path - to choose respect, empathy, compassion, diplomacy or assertiveness because we can train all of those skills in the brain. The exciting thing is that as soon as we start working with our brains we can start changing things because our brains are highly adept at healing.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.

Find out more about our innovative Resilience and Burnout solutions.

Jennifer’s first book, Teaching Bullies: Zero Tolerance on the Court or in the Classroom (Motion Press, Aug. 8, 2015), explores what happens when the bully is a teacher or coach.

Her new book, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health (Prometheus Books, April 1, 2022), delves into how bullying affects the brain and how the brain can heal.

You can find out more about Jennifer at bulliedbrain.com

Breaking the code. Life how you want it to be.

Rusty Gaillard is a transformational coach who works with people who are ready to make a change. Whether it's a career dead end, being bored or unhappy in their chosen path or working too hard, Rusty works with his clients to transform their lives and find work they love.make a change.

Before he was a coach, Rusty spent 13 years at Apple. He was Worldwide Director of Finance when he realised that it wasn’t what he wanted to do for the rest of his working life. He had no aspiration to continue climbing the corporate ladder, didn't want to work for another tech company or foe a consultancy. He felt stuck and that the situation was hopeless. He wanted to do something new and different but didn’t know what it was.

It was a challenging place to be. From the outside things looked really good and in many lots it was but there was something missing. In such a big company is it really possible to make a difference? When you put all your energy into work what will you have to show for it? What is the purpose of what I’m doing? You don’t find it meaningful but how do you find a different path?

Rusty did everything he was meant to do. He checked all the boxes and became defined by his job but his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t feel he had got what he was meant to have got. He became less passionate about his job and less motivated.  He did what he needed to do and became responsive rather than proactive and didn’t have the drive to move things forward. So what was the first step he took to change his life around?

Rusty thinks that we all work towards a code, a pattern or belief system that we follow in life which can be very difficult to change. In Rusty’s case his code was to work for a big corporation, be a good employee with a stable job, and to be in a successful marriage with children. He needed to break this code before he could change his career path. It was during this time that Rusty got divorced and this external change was how he broke the code he was working towards. The divorce affected his self-confidence and self-image but coming through it broke the pattern and belief system and gave him the ability and confidence to move forward.

Without a big issue like divorce it is still possible to break the code. We need to find something we really want to do, something that we’re willing to stretch to get it. We need to acknowledge the way we think about the world. Our code is how we see ourselves and we need to deliberately step outside the code to get what we would really like in life - what is meaningful or what life we want to create for ourselves. If we create a picture beyond our current code it becomes the motivation and the key to break the code.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information about Rusty here. Our previous podcasts, upcoming guest list and previous blogs are also available.

You can find out more about Rusty and his work here. His book is Breaking the Code: Stop Looking for Answers and Start Enjoying Life