When I first wrote this blog at the top of the year, we already weren’t off to the best start. Betty White and and Bob Saget had passed and we weren’t but a couple weeks into the year! COME ON 2022!!! Am I right? Especially after 2020 and 2021 being so difficult with the pandemic and changes that brought.
There was still a lot of time between us and the next year…2023. I hope for your sake you were able to turn the ship around in your own personal life.
Now that we are looking at only a few more months of this year, I want to be sure that you really are KILLING IT IN 2022 and beyond. This video shows you some ideas I shared at the top of the year that are still applicable now. Watch this Vlog and learn more about how to use your own wisdom and intuition to help you.
The following are the four questions I talk about in the video, which can help you to access this personal wisdom:
What has worked?
What hasn’t worked?
What will I keep doing the same?
What might I change to better serve me?
My example here is how to do this in parenting, but these questions can work in any area of your life. Try them…and tell me about it by replying below in the comments. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how these work for you.
And know, I have a monthly Master Class for FREE, in an intimate coffee and conversation setting. This is a great place to get some FREE Group Coaching from me, helping you be the best version of yourself all the time. Please be sure to sign up. Even if you can’t join every month, you will be part of the mailing list to hear about the topics and get the video highlights I send out afterwards, so it is well worth it.
Or, if you are looking for something a little more in depth, take a look at the Online Courses that I offer to help people with their personal growth and development.
It’s the fall and most of us in America have been conditioned to think of fall as football season. Both college and professional. And how many times have you heard or seen the idea of “a house divided“. This is a tongue and cheek way of talking about living in the same household and favoring different teams that are arch rivals. It’s fun and we see lots of memes about it. It can get dicey, but for the most part it is all fun.
But what if the division is inside yourself? What if there are parts of yourself that you desire to disavow? Do you have these aspects of yourself that you want to reject? Here is my question for you… How do you know that these are parts of yourself that should be rejected? Where did you learn that these aspects of yourself are not worthy? Could you unlearn this?
More than likely where you learned not to love this aspect of yourself was in the rules of social conditioning. Social conditioning is a powerful pull. It teaches us what we should and should not be. And I don’t mean to give this a totally bad rap. There are values to social conditioning, including that this keeps us on the straight and narrow, away from making bad choices that could be harmful to ourselves or others. This has value in some places in our life. However, it’s a runaway train. Social conditioning starts to make opinions about subtleties and aspects of our self that we cannot change. When this starts to happen, we start to be a self, divided.
We take the war from the outside and turn it inside. Our internal conflict with parts of ourselves that we do not like about us, creates a discomfort that we seek to numb or deny. One way or the other we are pushing against our own self. And when we are in conflict with our self, we start to be in conflict with our outer world as well.
Warning this is a part where you will hear some therapist speak that likely will irritate you. It’s the section of the blog where I say things that you know to be true, but hate when I’m right.
If you are noticing more irritability in your life or that you’re trying to numb away with over eating, drinking, overworking, or whatever your favorite numbing agent is, then it is likely that there is division within yourself. What you’re noticing on the outside is an effort to make this division either go away or to escape from this discomfort. Yet, the division really isn’t on the outside, it’s on the inside. What about this thing you’re pushing away from, this irritation, this aspect in your outer world that you do not like, has a parallel on the inside of yourself? Think about it.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say that you are in line at the grocery store and someone asks you if they can go ahead of you because they only have a few items and you have a full cart. Normally this is something you would offer to another person, however you hadn’t noticed this individual standing behind you. Now you’re irritated that they have the audacity to ask. Yet, you let them go ahead of you anyway. Now you’re irritated with this person. Irritated by their arrogance in asking, or at least that’s what you tell yourself.
You know what I’m going to say next. You aren’t irritated with this person at all. You are irritated with yourself. Maybe you’re irritated that you allow people to walk all over you. Maybe you’re irritated that this person has the capacity to ask for what they need, and you do not. Maybe you’re just irritated that you didn’t notice that they were there and weren’t able to offer before you were asked. Whatever you’re irritated with, you can bet that it’s a part of yourself that you don’t like. It’s an aspect of you that you’ve noticed in the past and you try to push away. It may even be an aspect of yourself that you don’t think is changeable. I assure you that is not the case. Anything inside of you is changeable. But maybe it doesn’t need changing. And that is where true irritation comes to play.
Why wouldn’t we change some thing about ourselves that’s irritating? I’ll tell you why…because it’s not a part of us that needs changing. It’s a part of us that needs acceptance. It’s a part of us that needs loving. It’s a part of us. And therefore it should not be something that we reject but some thing that we pull close. But what if these aspects of our self are in opposition to other aspects of our self? How do we accept those? This is the paradox. That two seemingly opposite things can be true at the same time, even when they are opposite things about ourselves. These can be excepted. These can coexist. And the way we facilitate peace about this is through loving all aspects of our self…the good, the not good, and everything in between.
And know, I have a monthly Master Class for FREE, in an intimate coffee and conversation setting. This is a great place to get some FREE Group Coaching from me, helping you be the best version of yourself all the time. Please be sure to sign up. Even if you can’t join every month, you will be part of the mailing list to hear about the topics and get the video highlights I send out afterwards, so it is well worth it.
Or, if you are looking for something a little more in depth, take a look at the Online Courses that I offer to help people with their personal growth and development.
Have you ever tried to get somewhere without using your GPS or a map? How’d you do? Probably not well. Most of the time we are all pretty good about looking at the map, using the GPS, reading the instructions, etc. But when it comes to our lives, we mostly are just winging it or following the path set for us by society, family, religion, or culture. It is very infrequent that we seek out professional help from a coach or clinician, unless we have gotten stuck and need a boost. Dr. Natalie suggests that we access help sooner, almost like we are consulting with a map maker to help us set up the map to a better life. Take a look and see what you think of this idea.
Have you ever thought about how the roles that you play in your life? Hidden within them can be a rigid plan for who and what we can be in our lives? When we get over identified with the roles that we serve in our life, we might begin to lose our zest for living.
Roles can be like a straight jacket that restrict us to only being able to fill the qualities of the part that we play in that role. It does not allow for creativity and is at the heart of feeling “stuck“. Watch as Dr. Natalie helps us better understand in this video why roles are so restrictive and how we can change that in our lives.
Come to our monthly Master Class for FREE, in an intimate coffee and conversation setting. This is a great place to get some FREE Group Coaching from Dr. Natalie, helping you be the best version of yourself all the time. Please be sure to sign up. Even if you can’t join every month, you will be part of the mailing list to hear about the topics and get the video highlights sent out afterwards, so it is well worth it.
Did you know that the way that you tell your story to yourself and others greatly impacts how you see the world? Many of us don’t think of it this way, however Dr. Natalie helps us in this video to understand how the two are linked. She goes on to help us understand how to catch ourselves when we are telling a story that is creating or accentuating our suffering. She helps us to see that by changing our story we can change the outcome of our perceived enjoyment of our lives.
Pandemics, social distance ending, returning to work, ending the school year, starting the summer…need I list more of the transitions we are all going through right now? We are exhausted and we have reason to be. Yet, there is a hidden exhaustion that comes from the borrowed trouble of worrying about things that haven even happened yet. Is this something you do? If so, take a listen to Dr. Natalie’s Vlog this week and hear her tips on how to address this.
Is loving your story really the answer? Yes…it totally is!!! If you look back on your life and want to erase parts of it, or do it over, or just are unhappy with what you see; then you are saying you want to erase parts of yourself and are unhappy with who you are. In order to find joy and contentment in life, you must learn to embrace all aspects of yourself. I promise you this isn’t as hard as you think it is. And we now have hundreds of years of science to help support the methods we use to help people with this. Take a listen to Dr. Natalie on the subject. And watch until the end…she tells you about some FREE STUFF coming your way.
Dr. Natalie breaks down in today’s blog why story is such a powerful healing tool. Did you know that story telling was likely the first form of therapy? Really! We sat around a fire and talked to one another, sharing our wisdom, pain, goals, regrets, etc. and felt healed by the experience. We wrote on cave walls to help others see what we had learned illustrated for them. And think about how we teach our kids…story! Take a look at the Vlog to learn more.
I know you’re asking, “What is she talking about with rumble strips?” Well, let’s jump right in. You know what a rumble strip is. It’s that strip along the side of the highway that causes your car to shake if you start to go over the line towards the ditch. It’s a guide to help us wake up to our driving, when we have zoned out for some reason. It gets us back on course.
I’m curious what things in your life act like rumble strips for you. What are those patterns of behavior, choices that you start making, feelings in your body that are signals to you that you’re about to go into the ditch of life? Maybe it’s that you’re feeling crabby or tired all the time. Maybe it’s that you’re not enjoying life anymore and feel a loss of enjoyment in the things that used to bring you pleasure. Maybe it’s because you’re feeling so on edge day after day, you fear you will never get yourself out of your restless stressed out state.
Our rumble strips are there. I promise you. We all have them. What we sometimes do not have is an awareness of them. I would encourage you to start to be curious about where rumble strips are showing up in your life. One way to do that is to start to pay attention to the kinds of choices that you’re making.
Are your choices always in alignment with your values? I can say whole heartedly mine are not always. I may make a choice to work late to get something done and I know that’s not in alignment with my value for spending time with my family and relationships. I may choose to eat that 2nd piece of chocolate (okay, okay 10th piece of chocolate) even though it’s not in alignment with my value for physical wellness. Sometimes my choices don’t match up and when more and more of my choices don’t match up with my values, I know I’ve hit a rumble strip.
Does that happen to any of you? Think about it. Where in your life do you see yourself going off course and hitting that rumble strip? What are the signs for you? Where are the choices that you are making not lining up with your underlying values in life? I’d love to hear more about it in the comments below.
Remember, rumble strips are there to wake us up and help us get back on course. No need to be judgmental towards yourself when you catch yourself doing these things, making these choices, falling away from your values. The rumble strip doesn’t judge. It just wants you back on the road.
It sounds weird, but did you know that your grief is a gift to you? Seriously. And this isn’t the first time I’ve written about this concept. Almost two years ago this idea hit me over the head like a ton of bricks after my son’s 15th birthday, when I wrote this earlier blog. Grief is a gift to us. It is a testament to how important things are in our life, measured by the amount of grief we experience with each new loss. And the grief helps us to keep a tally of what is valuable in our life. We do not grieve as much over the loss of a good series on Netflix as we do about a picture that reveals the aging of our children. And there is a good reason for this. Take a listen to this latest Vlog to hear more.
Good grief! And no, I’m not referring to a Peanuts character. Good grief is a concept that Americans are too unfamiliar with. Instead, we are more familiar with phrases like, “change is hard” or “time goes too fast”. It’s hard sometimes to break out of these constructs.
Here’s the thing though…we are more like a river than a standing body of water. We do not stay in the same place. Instead we move continually, change continually, grow and age continually. All of these natural changes entail some loss, yet they also entail something new to come. Nothing ever really “goes back” and nothing ever really “stays the same”.
I have two beautiful children. My son is 17 and my daughter is 6. I can close my eyes and imagine my daughter as a newborn and my then 11 year son holding his new little sister, who he called “our baby”. This thought can bring tears to my eyes. Tears of joy, tears of love, and yes tears of longing for a time gone by. And this my friends is what I call a “good grief.”
Good grief is a part of the greatness of life. Things keep moving like a river. While we can always go and find that river in the same place, the river itself is ever changing. This is how we work too. Our memories of the times we love the most are always there for us, whenever we want to access them. Yet every time we access these memories, the life we are presently living somehow changes what we see in those memories. Sometimes it is because we are sad that these memories represent that those times are never going to happen again. We long for the days when we were living in those memories. We want so badly to be able to be there again, just one more time.
On the other side of that, we can also feel the wonders of good grieving when the memories we have make us feel hopeful for the wonders yet to come. This happens to me sometimes when I am looking at my son these days. He is living a part of his life that is still a part of my life that I remember quite vividly. I remember 17. I remember it well. Some of my very best friends now, were my very best friends then. Some the lessons I was just embarking on then, are the kinds of lessons that I am using 20 times a day now. So I look at my son and I think, “Oh I can’t wait for him to experience these friendships as lifelong ones” or “Oh baby…I want so much for you to know that this is just a bump in your road…you’ll see that some day.”
Grief is not something to be avoided, yet rather something to expect and cherish as part of life. Good grief especially. It helps us to put life in perspective. To get into the part of us that can stand back and observe our lives as a whole and see that even the hard times and challenging lessons are times that are good FOR us and TO us. Grief is a space for us to recognize the beauty of what was, what is, and what will be.
What’s your good grief? I would love to hear about it in the comments.
Do you ever find yourself making the same mistake over and over? It can feel maddening. You know that you are doing it, yet you can’t seem to stop yourself. Do you know why you repeat the same mistakes over and over? Did you know this is a normal part of being human? You aren’t crazy…you are changing. And repeating something over and over usually means there is an underlying story we have been telling ourselves about our lives that no longer serves us, so we need to uncover and change it.
Take a look at Dr. Natalie’s Vlog describing why this happens and how we can make peace with this and work towards changing it.
