I know I said my last blog would be my last blog for the year but something happened in my community this week that has inspired me to write another one and it’s one that I think is very, very important.
Last week’s blog was all about creating space for the life and the love that you want to experience for yourself in 2017 and there are 9 great steps that you can take that will help you to realise what you want providing all goes to plan.
What I didn’t say in that blog, however, was this: Control is an absolute illusion.
CLICK HERE NOW to listen to My Juicy Life Podcast #24
In my book 6 Keys To Happiness I write about something I call The Art Of Confession and I want to talk about how important this is in this week’s blog.
So many women that I know have difficulty sharing their innermost feelings and asking for what they need and many more feel that they are constantly being let down and disappointed by the people in their lives when they do take a chance and reach out.
This leaves many feeling disappointed, overwhelmed, isolated and sometimes angry because they don’t often ask for help and many feel the spend a lot of their time helping others so how come no one is helping them when they really need it.
Today I want to talk about Adulting – what is it, how to do it, how to teach your children to do it and why it is particularly difficult for co-dependents to do.
This blog is for women who struggle with life, or aspects of it, including relationships or parenting , curbing bad habits or managing challenging behaviours – your own or others.
CLICK HERE NOW if you prefer to listen to My Juicy Life Podcast Episode 20: How To Adult
I want to explain how you might find yourself in circumstances that range from less than ideal to downright dangerous and possibly even out of control. Those circumstances might include finding yourself in an abusive relationship, constantly fighting with your children, struggling to manage your child’s behaviours, struggling to manage your own behaviours, getting in over your head financially, struggling with health issues, having trouble keeping a job. Continue reading →
In this week’s blog I wanted to talk about programming – how it happens and how our unconscious minds then determine all of our experiences throughout life.
I especially wanted to talk about Co-dependency which is a particularly insidious program and one that I am intimately familiar with as it runs deep within my family.
Co-dependency is also something that shows up in my counselling practice on a regular basis as it likes to reveal itself in the relationships of many a hopeful couple in a reasonably short space of time.
There are many ways in which co-dependent programming manifests in our lives so if you are struggling in your relationships or in one relationship in particular, then listen in, find out if co-dependency is an issue for you and what you can do about it if it is.
In today’s blog I want to look at the way in which we approach the unfair circumstances in life and I am asking the question are you a learner or a loser.
It sounds harsh, I know but if you have ever had a situation in life where you have been treated unfairly, or you have seen someone you know treated unfairly, or if you are one of those people who gets angry at the all too many news reports of someone being treated unfairly and if you feel passionate about correcting the wrongs in this world then this question is definitely for you. Continue reading →
As long as I can remember there has been a lot of talk about our rights as individuals in a democratic society and about what freedom of speech is.
Without a doubt my peers and I have grown up in the fastest period of growth and change for all of mankind, but particularly for women.
I was born in the early 60’s when many women only worked until they married at which point it was expected that they would have children and care for their husbands full-time. You could pay off a home on one wage. My aunty had what was known as a Glory Box which was full of hand embroidered doylies, tablecloths and other household goodies and she worked to fill it in preparation for married life. Mum had a machine in the laundry with two rollers that she hand fed every item of clothing through in order to squeeze out the excess water prior to placing on the line, we only had one car, the TV was black and white and we had to get up and go over to it to change the channels or adjust the volume. Continue reading →
In today’s blog I am asking the question: How important is spirituality to a rich, juicy life?
Now most of my readership is made up of women and it is not too difficult, as a general rule, to get a good discussion going about spirituality and explore the impact it has on us girls.
In this day and age however, I might lean toward thinking that our male population might benefit more from exploring this topic than our female population, but whether you are a male or a female, it is definitely something worth exploring if you want to know what it’s like to live a richer, juicier life.
Why? Because a rich, juicy life has depth and it has purpose or meaning. While spirituality, on the other hand, answers the age old question we seem to ask in our darkest hours which is ‘what’s it all about’?
And, because in the words of Socrates, ‘the unexplored life is not worth living’.
So today’s blog is all about getting you thinking and helping you to find the right answer to this question for yourself. Continue reading →
Today I wanted to talk about ways to process through deeply painful emotions that might be impacting various areas of your life and about emotions that you can’t seem to move beyond.
Something I see a lot of in my counselling practice are women who have been wronged. They have been let down by someone close – their partner, a parent, one of their children, a sibling or a friend – and they are in a world of pain.
They feel disappointed, hurt, rejected and alone and they are not only angry, they resent the fact that they have been hurt and they don’t understand why when they try so hard. The pain they are feeling eats away at them as everywhere they go their pain goes with them. They have talked to everyone they can think of to help them understand and try to relieve their pain but instead of feeling better, they only seem to feel worse.
Today I wanted to share some really effective ideas for processing through a really painful event and the feelings that you might have a result so that you can move forward without all that emotional baggage weighing you down, stealing all of your joy and sucking the juice out of your juicy life.
Motivator Tony Robbins refers to e-motions as energy in motion and it is my personal experience as well as my experience as a counsellor that we get into trouble when our emotions get stuck.
Getting in to action is a great way to move energy and deal with emotional pain so following are 5 things you can do to help yourself when you are in pain.
Give yourself permission to have your feelings.
Know that if someone has done something to hurt you then you have every right to your feelings. A lot of women get stuck here and it creates an emotional pressure cooker for them. They put themselves through all sorts of turmoil because they have been raised (or programed) to be good girls and good girls are supposed to speak and act nicely all the time. This is the biggest lie and you were told this so that you wouldn’t complain or make the people around you feel uncomfortable. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that you don’t have a right to your feelings. And especially don’t do that to yourself.
2. Stop resisting.
Know that resistance is useless. Feelings are neither right nor wrong. They just are what they are so the best thing you can do is stop judging your feelings and just accept that you have them and even if you don’t understand them or their intensity, they are your feelings and you have them for a reason.
3. Separate fact from fiction.
Learning the difference between fact and fiction in a situation has the power to change your whole outlook and as a result, change your feelings. When I ask clients to define what actually happened to them, and when they stick with the facts, their stories are often quite short.
When I ask them what they thought was happening at the time, or what they were afraid might have been happening, their stories become long and complicated and this is often where most of their painful emotions are generated from.
Being able to see the difference often changes how a client feels about what happened and can take a great deal of pain out of the situation.
4. Identify your feelings.
It is important to be able to name what you are feeling and take note of how intense your feelings are on a scale of 1 – 10. When I spoke about Emotional Intelligence and the 5 steps to emotional maturity in the video I did for The Measure Of A Man, I put a lot of weight onto our ability to articulate our feelings and identify their intensity in order to be able to adequately manage them.
What I have learned is that it is when we can name the precise feeling we are experiencing, we know it, and then we almost automatically know what we need in order to soothe ourselves and heal our pain. I cannot stress how powerful this step is if we truly want to move forward and be free of the pain we have been carrying around with us.
If you find yourself bringing things up from the past every time you get upset then there is a good chance you have not yet got this step right and until you are able to name the feeling associated with the event, you will keep bringing it up and going over it again and again.
5. Ask yourself what you need?
The answer to this question will come easier and more quickly if you have correctly identified your feelings, and it might surprise you when you realise what it is that you need to feel better. When the answer comes to you, however, it is important to commit to following through and doing what you need to do in order to heal. Otherwise the pain will grow and it will be compounded by the fact that you didn’t bother to act in your own best interest.
As a counsellor, the best thing I can do for my clients is to ask powerful questions and these are about the most powerful questions I can ask.
I encourage you to print this up and put it somewhere that you can easily find it because it really is a powerful way to process through difficult emotions and you can even use it to help someone you love – a partner, a child, a parent or a friend – to process through their pain.
And finally, if you would like to learn more about emotional intelligence and how you can be happier then you will find heaps more information in my book 6 Keys To Happiness which is available at MJL Publications.
Until next time…
Important Links for creating a Juicy Life in 2016
If you want to know more about Holistic Counselling and Relationship Coaching follow this link:
Holistic Counselling and Relationship CoachingIf you would like to know more about Emotional IQ read click the link below to my book 6 Keys To Happiness6 Keys To HappinessIf you would like to take yourself on a 21-Day Body Love Challenge to heal physical and emotional wounds follow this link:21-Day Body Love Challenge for Women
I look forward to working with you and alongside you while you create your very own Juicy Life in 2016
This week in my blog I want to bring greater understanding to the process of developing Emotional Intelligence and show you how it applies to relationships in general, and to Domestic Violence in particular.
With two women every week losing their life as a result of Domestic Violence, and given that we have to dedicate the entire month of May specifically to the prevention of Domestic Violence, I know we all agree that the direction we are heading in needs to change.
Children are losing their mothers, parents are losing their daughters, siblings are losing their sisters and there is no undo button for what can only be described as an absolute tragedy every time a woman has her life taken from her as a result of a domestic dispute.
Of course, death is the extreme outcome of the problem and there are many more women who are suffering – mostly in silence – from repeated bouts of abuse and physical violence toward them.
I am very pleased to see that a television advertising campaign has been launched that is generating thought and conversation around the issue. Learning to show respect for women starting at a very young age is an important part of the solution in my opinion, but I believe the issue runs much deeper, and that there are a couple of stages of emotional growth that need to be addressed even before we start thinking about how we feel toward others or how we are impacting on them.
Today I want to show you the 5 stages of emotional growth that we must go through in order to become functional and responsible decision makers in all areas of our lives. When we understand how emotional maturity comes to be, we can effectively direct ourselves and our children toward attaining emotional maturity, and when we attain emotional maturity, we are most unlikely to ‘lose control’ or harm anyone, including ourselves, and we certainly wouldn’t take a person’s life.
Stage 1 is Self-Awareness
This is the stage where we learn to (i) articulate what we are feeling and (ii) adequately identify the intensity of our feelings. These are not skills we are – or are not – born with. These are skills we learn and if we are lucky, we have great role models in our lives who model these skills for us from a very early age.
Stage 2 is Self-Management
Self-Management literally refers to our ability to manage ourselves in a functional manner once we are aware of our feelings and the intensity of them.
I cannot overstate the importance of these 2 stages with regard to our emotional maturity. Until we understand and implement the skills associated with the first 2 stages of emotional intelligence, we are not in control of ourselves. We are loose canons at the mercy of people and events outside of ourselves and we cannot be sure how we might behave in various circumstances.
Domestic Violence is not the only potential outcome for someone who is in pain and unaware of their feelings and the intensity of them. Self-harm often occurs here in many forms including extreme risk-taking, cutting and harmful addictive behaviours. There is always a lot of unrecognised, unexplored and unresolved pain beneath these harmful behaviours.
It is not unnatural either, to believe that if the people around us would just change the way they do things then we would be much happier and easier to get along with, but how disempowering is that perspective? We would all be waiting a long time to be happy if our happiness and “good moods” were dependent on the choices others made in their lives.
Emotional maturity is being able to manage ourselves and our behaviour regardless of what is going on around us and until we fully understand that, we can never be truly happy. Nor can we be relied upon to behave response-ably.
This is the first area where we can, as individuals, have the biggest impact on Domestic Violence in our society. We can make sure we are managing ourselves for starters. We can practice naming our feelings and judging their intensity and then we can explore what we can do to manage ourselves better and more effectively.
If you are avoiding facing any painful feelings, or if pain is keeping your from adequately mastering these skills, I implore you to find a counsellor you are comfortable with and explore any driven behaviours you might have that are harmful to you or to someone in your life, so that you can then go on to establish and nurture healthy relationships and stop any pattern of abuse or violence toward yourself and others.
Stage 3 is Social Awareness
Social awareness is the awareness of how our decisions and actions are impacting on the people around us, and we cannot be fully aware of how we are impacting others if we do not have a good grasp of the first 2 stages of emotional maturity.
Stage 4 is Relationship Skills
Relationship skills need to be developed in order to be able to establish and nurture important connections in our lives, as well as communicate our needs adequately and be able to restore a relationship to it’s functional place when we are human and hurt someone.
Stage 5 is Response-able Decision Making
Finally, when we understand how emotional growth occurs and we make the decision to consciously develop or parent ourselves into emotional maturity using these steps, we reach a place where we are able to make decisions about how we want to respond to the people and circumstances in our lives, rather than react to them from a place of pain or hurt that we had no idea existed let alone how intense our feelings were.
Men are not the only ones who struggle with emotional maturity, and whether we are talking about preventing Domestic Violence, child abuse, overeating, or childhood development issues, our level of success in EVERYTHING, and I mean everything, will come back to our emotional intelligence and how capable we are emotionally. Today, however, we are talking about it in reference to violence toward women.
Further to learning how to manage ourselves better, the second thing we can do to help curb Domestic Violence in our society is to start judging men by their emotional IQ before we judge them by how much money they have, how good-looking they are or how popular they seem to be. Look seriously at who they are when times get tough. This is when we find out how emotionally mature a man is and whether or not he is capable of managing himself in a way that honours himself and his loved ones.
A real man, to me, is one who is self-aware, able to manage himself and able to respond thoughtfully and compassionatelyto what life throws at him. He is nurturing, he takes responsibility for himself and his choices rather than blame others, and even if he wants to, he doesn’t run away when things get tough.
Let’s start encouraging all of our men to be emotionally mature and by our example teach our boys how to manage their emotions from the earliest possible age. Can you imagine how juicy your life could be if emotional intelligence were to be your number one priority for yourself and for a partner? Everyone will be happier and healthier, including our men.
If you would like to know how you can develop your Emotional IQ, I write in much greater detail about developing Emotional Intelligence in my book 6 Keys To Happiness and I also include lots of exercises that help my readers to develop a healthy self-awareness and healthy tools for living an emotionally rich and juicy life.
Please share this post so that others might come to better understand emotional intelligence and have the opportunity to have a positive impact on Domestic Violence today.
Important Links for creating a Juicy Life in 2016
If you want to know more about Holistic Counselling and Relationship Coaching follow this link:
Holistic Counselling and Relationship CoachingIf you would like to know more about Emotional IQ read click the link below to my book 6 Keys To Happiness6 Keys To HappinessIf you would like to take yourself on a 21-Day Body Love Challenge to heal physical and emotional wounds follow this link:21-Day Body Love Challenge for Women
I look forward to working with you and alongside you while you create your very own Juicy Life in 2016
Communication breakdowns and the turmoil that often follows are among some of the most painful experiences in life for many women and as a Counsellor I often see people after a long series of communication breakdowns, which complicates things further and makes life feel really messy and unmanageable for them.
As busy mums who are often juggling far more than what would normally be considered humanly possible, I know you don’t have a lot of time or energy to sit and try and work through a miscommunication, pulling it apart bit by bit, agonising over where it might have gone wrong and guessing how you might have contributed to it so that you can “undo” whatever it was that happened and get back on track with whatever it was that was demanding your attention before the “thing” happened that caused a child to storm off and slam a door, a husband to get cranky or a friend to stop calling.
Today I want to highlight some common causes for communication breakdowns and give you some rules to live by that will fix them fast.
What I am going to do is give you some insight in to human behaviour – some rules if you like – that will help you to be more confident about moving forward when miscommunications do happen.
When we understand the dynamics of communication and the typical responses people have when it breaks down, we are going to be much slower to take things personally and much quicker to respond in a way that will actually make things better and fast.
Just last week I was talking to someone about an incident that had really hurt her. She thought everything was going great and then it occurred to her that she hadn’t heard from a particular friend for a little while so she decided to take some time out to call her and see what was happening.
What happened next she was totally unprepared for. Apparently she’d done something to upset this friend and she didn’t even know she’d done it. She totally got the cold shoulder and felt like she’d lost her friend forever.
As you can imagine she was devastated. After a little chat and some carefully worded questions however, she calmed down and was able to understand the situation from a different perspective.
There are some rules to follow when it comes to communicating that can make all the difference in situations like this. And whether it is with a friend, a partner, a child or a family member, the rules are the same.
Rule # 1
Know that when someone is having a reaction to you, it isn’t about you.
The same is true when you are having a reaction to someone else. You think it is about them but it isn’t.
He who has the pain has the issue that needs to be addressed so you need to stop pointing fingers or being defensive and start asking some questions about where the pain is coming from.
Rule # 2
Even if it is about you, it still isn’t about you and the sooner you realise this the sooner you will get to the real problem and find a solution.
As long as we are willing to take responsibility for how someone else is feeling, we are helping him or her to stay stuck and creating a problem for ourselves. Instead, take responsibility for triggering the pain and then dig deeper to find the original source. Ask questions like: What is really going on? What is the issue really about?
Rule # 3
All negative reactions are rooted in fear. It’s true. Fear of loss, fear of loneliness, fear of being unimportant, fear of being unlovable, fear of being not good enough, fear of being left behind…the list is endless.
Find out what the fear is in this situation and address it truthfully and compassionately.
Rule # 4
We all want to feel safe, heard, validated, loved and valued. We all want to know we matter and that our thoughts and feelings are important.
Find out: What is the need that is not being met in this situation?
Rule # 5
A genuine desire to support someone comes from the heart and asks the question, “How can I support you?” It creates a space for the people we love to explore their own needs and it lets them know that we are here for them while they do that.
Ask: What does your heart want? Whether it is your heart, or a loved one’s heart, you might be surprised by some of the answers you hear.
The wonderful thing about following these rules is that over time there seem to be less and less miscommunications as we learn to deal with what is happening in the moment, rather than getting side-tracked by what we are afraid might be happening.
Remember to be gentle with yourself as you learn new ways of doing things. Remind yourself that you are doing your best and that is all anyone can do.
And finally, feel free to share this with someone you love if you feel they might benefit.
Important Links for creating a Juicy Life in 2016
If you want to know more about Holistic Counselling and Relationship Coaching follow this link:
Holistic Counselling and Relationship CoachingIf you would like to read my book 6 Keys To Happiness follow this link:6 Keys To HappinessIf you would like to take yourself on a 21-Day Body Love Challenge to heal physical and emotional wounds follow this link:21-Day Body Love Challenge for Women
I look forward to working with you and alongside you while you create your very own Juicy Life in 2016
