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.
The Holidays are Amazing aren’t they? So much to do, so much fun to be had, so much extra time…uhh…NOPE! Not that last one. There is most definitely NOT extra time. We do want to try and squeeze every last drop of FUN out of the little time we have though.
If you are a woman in midlife, I’m going to guess that by January you are SO EXHAUSTED that you want to take a long winter’s nap. Am I right? Of course, no rest for the weary! If you are like most of us, January is filled with New Year’s resolutions. So where are you going to find the energy for that after running yourself ragged all holiday season?
Here is a tip from Dr. Natalie on how to prevent this from happening to you another holiday season. Take a look.
Join us monthly as we work together to help you design the life you have always wanted for yourself. No gimmicks! Just results! Dr. Natalie has nearly two decades of experience as a Clinical Psychologist and she is ready to help women in midlife break the chains of living in constant survival mode.
Please be sure to sign up. Even if you can’t join every month, you will also have access to online courses, workbooks, guided meditations, and get the video highlights sent out after each months group coaching event. It is well worth it!!! Make 2023 your year!!!
Did you know that you can book a call and talk to Dr. Natalie directly! She would love to help you personally and answer any questions you have about her offerings. Sign up for her complimentary DEEP DIVE CALL now. No charge. No obligation. Just 30 minutes 1:1 with Dr. Natalie herself.
It’s here! The holidays are upon us. I know this time of year isn’t everyone’s favorite, yet it does have a certain amount of cheer involved…doesn’t it? The things we do in these weeks we do only once a year. Rituals and traditions that help us feel like we unite with everyone we love in our life or who have been in our life. I like to think when I get out the rolling pin and mat that my mother used to bake cookies with me for the holidays, she is standing right with me today, even though she has been gone for years now. Rituals do that.
So do all the fun decorations. Last night I was cracking up with my son as we looked at all of the old cards and pictures he made for me during the holidays. One was just a card with a holiday tree drawn on it and inside he said, “Dear Mom. This is your present. Sorry this is all you get. I am broke.” He may have been 8 when he wrote that. Hysterical!
Today my suggestion is that we bring a little bit of this cheer and celebration into our everyday lives as a form of self care. Watch and see what you think.
So many women in midlife are struggling with the idea that they are the only ones struggling. This isn’t true. In fact, many of us from the Gen X generation are struggling with the very same dissatisfactions…women, men, and non-binary alike. We are struggling with a bad bill of goods that we were sold growing up (incidentally as one of the most unparented generations of all time…”latch key” kids as we were).
We were told that we could “do anything”. We were schooled on how the injustices of sexism were torn down in the 60s and 70s by Women’s Liberation Movement. We were given the premise of “color blindness” as an anti-racism principle and educated on the idea that the freedom fighters of the Civil Rights movement had eradicated racism. The idea was that government policies set by Title IX and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had saved us from our parents’ injustices and the world was now our oyster.
Unfortunately, the way things turned out we are now feeling oppressed by the EXPECTATION that we should have been able to do everything, when it was supposed to be an OPPORTUNITY to do anything we wanted without the same constraints of generations before us. As we have helicopter parented the generations behind us, in our Millennial and Gen Z generations, we have done a better job of being more realistic in our expectations and sheltered these later generations from the unreasonable expectation that “you can do anything you want” means “you should be able do everything you want.” Yet, we are still holding ourselves accountable and feeling shame when we are unable to meet these unrealistic goals that should never been served to us this way.
Dr. Natalie breaks down in today’s video, one of the ways this mythology persists for us. Take a listen to her explanation here and stay tuned for her tip on how to dismantle this myth in our own lives.
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.
Trust is an interesting concept. I hear this theme come up mostly when people are talking about their relationships to other people. In fact, trust is actually a relationship with yourself. Once this trust in oneself is established, most everything else can fall into place. This is an abstract concept and one that we are not taught about with the principles of trusting.
Let’s start further back. We have many ideas of how our life should be. We have patterns that we get into where we have high expectations for our life based in preconceived notions that we were taught, followed by disappointment when our expectations for our life do not manifest in the way that we had anticipated. Unfortunately, when this pattern occurs it stops the flow of our life. Instead of moving forward we hold fast in our resistance to the way things are and thwart our desire to change the outcome.
Here is the interesting piece to this. We are desiring to create our own outcomes. Yet, we create based on our lived experience. We cannot create outside that map. How happy are you with your past? Many of us have regrets and would like to move past where we have been. Yet we are trying to do so with a map of only where we have been. This doesn’t make sense does it?
We very much limit ourselves when we resist the new or unknown. Yet, as Virginia Satir said, “People prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.” Living our lives is about being in the flow of change, living without preconceptions of how we “should” live. Surviving, on the other hand, is about resisting change and staying in what is known. So the question becomes – Do you want to “live“ your life or do you want to “survive” your life?
In order to “live” our lives we must trust ourselves. And in order to trust ourselves, we must take three active steps. The first step is to let go of our old fears. These fears are based in our previous lived experiences. Any time something in our life triggers these fears, we are wired to go into a state of survival (fight, flight, or freeze). It is most definitely an active and effortful step for us to overcome our fixed reactions to these fears. The second step is to let go of our programming and conditioning. These are the unwritten rules that we abide by that were taught to us by family, society, culture, and religion. While we may choose to keep abiding by some of these unwritten rules, we must be able to know when the rules don’t serve us any longer. What we must be able to do is recognize when this programming and conditioning is telling us we “should“ be a certain way, fueling our resistance to change, and then learn to put those particular unwritten rules to the side. For the last and third step we must learn the art of allowing things to be as they are, rather than trying to impose our own belief of how they “should“ be. This may seem on the face of it to be a passive step, however, it most definitely is effortful for us to stand aside and allow life to flow rather than impose our own ideas of how it “should“ be.
When I start to talk to people about trusting themselves as the answer to moving into “living” their lives rather than “surviving” their lives, I am often met with the same resistance. This resistance comes in the form of statement such as, “But doc, if I don’t work towards my goal I might fail.“ Or, “Doc, if I don’t have expectations I could fall into bad habits. I know what is ‘right’ for me and I need to work towards this, or I will be working towards what is ‘wrong’ for me.” Both of these fears are based in a threat that is framed by what we know from our past lived experience. We are using the map of the past to judge the future in these examples. These statements of resistance also make the assumption that living in trust of ourselves is somehow a passive strategy. Nothing could be further from the truth.
So how does trusting ourself help us keep moving forward “living” our lives? That is a great question. Without trust in ourselves to be able to handle whatever comes towards us in life and see the value of it, we will live in our own fear that nothing that comes towards us has value unless we give it value through our own past lived experience. Trust in ourselves then becomes the ultimate goal. We want to be able to trust that we can live into whatever comes our way. Trust that whatever the future has in store for us has value, even if at first we don’t see that value. Trust that the new map for our lives will reveal itself and may have no resemblance to the one we already had in mind. And trust that this is as it should be. Once we learn that we can trust ourselves to take on whatever comes our way, nothing can stop us.
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.
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.
“I know better!” How many times have you uttered those words? And how many times have you been frustrated, angry, maybe even a little rageful that you did it again anyway? You are in good company my friend, because we all have been caught in that cycle.
The question really is how to get out of the cycle. I have been asked this so many times in my practice that I recognize that this is a learning opportunity for all of us, not just those in therapy. The truth of the matter is this is part of our human wiring, based in our brain. We repeat old behavior patterns when we aren’t even thinking about it. Why do you ask? Because our brain thinks for us.
That’s right! Our brain has a way to rewire itself so that it can do things without even asking our conscious awareness for input. So pesky patterns first develop from a behavior we thought met a particular need. We repeated the behavior enough that now our brain does it despite our “knowing better.”
Want to learn how to rewire your brain and stop these pesky patterns? Watch the video below.
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.
Are you a women in midlife that feels like the life transition you are in has you falling flat and feeling less inspired? Dr. Natalie talks in today’s Vlog about how this is a normal stage in any major life transition and what causes this to occur. She also shares with us a tip on how to reconnect our inspiration with our goals in action. Take a look.
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.
There is an old SNL skit with Will Farrell and Christopher Walken, where they are at a recording studio trying to get a song right and the only feedback Christopher Walken gives is “More Cow Bell!” I think we should all think of self-love, self-acceptance, self-compassion, self-care, and all the “self-“s in this manner. Anytime you are feeling off, down, anxious, etc., give yourself the advice “MORE SELF-LOVE”. It is the key.
In today’s Vlog Dr. Natalie will talk about how we have all been carefully taught to be judgmental of ourselves, yet likely no one ever sat you down to teach you how to love and care for yourself. As a woman in our culture this is especially true and exceptionally hard to work against when in midlife. The tip today is a trick about how to see yourself from another’s perspective. We may have skills for caretaking others, even though we don’t apply them to ourselves. Listen to how Dr. Natalie tells us to capitalize on what we do know, to help us do what we don’t know.
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Join us monthly as we work together to help you design the life you have always wanted for yourself. No gimmicks! Just results! Dr. Natalie has nearly two decades of experience as a Clinical Psychologist and she is ready to help women in midlife break the chains of living in constant survival mode.
Please be sure to sign up. Even if you can’t join every month, you will also have access to online courses, workbooks, guided meditations, and get the video highlights sent out after each months group coaching event. It is well worth it!!! Make 2023 your year!!!
