Self-worth and self-esteem are very similar and both have an enormous impact on how we go through life. Women, young and old, are constantly bombarded with images of how we are supposed to look and act, and depending on the measuring stick we choose to use to determine our self-worth, we can easily find ourselves feeling really down and out because we feel worthless and unappreciated as we are.
There seems to be constant pressure to be better, be prettier, be slimmer, be smarter, look younger, be more savvy, be a better mum, have better kids, be a sexier partner, be a better daughter, earn more money, stretch the budget further, have a cleaner home, have a better home in a better suburb, drive a newer car, and the list goes on and on.
Is it any wonder so many people don’t feel good enough? And to add insult to injury, we don’t just beat ourselves up for not being good enough, we do it to other women.
It’s exhausting trying to keep up with all of that and every time we measure ourselves against all of that and we come up short we are in danger of our self-worth and self-esteem being eroded further and further which is so damaging.
Today I wanted to look at how we develop self-worth and give you 3 ways in which you can develop yours so that you can stop feeling miserable and start feeling better about who you are right away. Continue reading →
In today’s blog I want to talk more about living a richer, juicier life and what it takes to really live the dream.
Many of the women I know and work with want ‘more’ in their lives but they don’t know what that is or how to manifest it for themselves. They just know they want it, and in between their busy-ness, in those few moments when they are not running toward something, their hearts ache for it.
That thing they seek seems to be illusive and unreachable and some women develop what feels like an unfillable black hole within so they come to believe that if only they were able to become ‘more’ then they would find what they are looking for and finally fill that hole.
Goals around beauty and wealth and success are set and scheduled into the calendar because these women ‘know’ that when they attain those goals that will fill the emptiness. They will be loved and free and filled with joy forever more. That promise alone gives them hope that they will finally be happy, but it also keeps them so busy that they don’t notice that it actually takes them further away from what it is that they are really longing for.
A rich, juicy life goes so much deeper than the type of happiness that is attained from following that course of action.
A rich, juicy life is a deeply fulfilling life that doesn’t depend on outer circumstances for it’s existence.
A rich, juicy life starts with a feeling and then it naturally develops into an action which then produces a result that grows and sustains the original feeling.
Have you or someone you know ever achieved an amazing goal only to find that you didn’t feel the way you thought you would feel when you got there? Have you ever gone into a deep depression after an achievement of that sort? Have you ever been bewildered by how all that hard work did not do anything to advance you in your original quest to fill the emotional black hole that is now growing even bigger inside you?
What happens next is many women set bigger and better goals and work themselves even harder than before, believing they just have to work a little bit harder and get a little bit better and then, then they will find their happy place and the love they are looking for.
The problem is that thinking you need to be ‘more’ in order to be happier is an affirmation of a belief that you are not enough just as you are and that belief is what actually needs to change.
When anyone sets a goal to be ‘more’ because their heart is aching for ‘more’ they might reach that goal, and that could be a wonderful achievement. But, because they set it from a place or a feeling of emptiness, the feeling they are going to experience ‘more’ of, once the hype and adulation has passed, is just more emptiness.
I don’t actually know anyone who is feeling empty and longing for more in their lives because they are not enough. But I do know a lot of women who are feeling empty and longing for more in their lives because they believe they are not enough.
So how does one really create a rich, juicy and deeply fulfilling life? Here is my recipe:
Know you are enough. You might not feel it and you might not believe it but just know it because it is true. We don’t need to believe in the law of gravity to know it is true and experience the results of it. Stop waiting to feel like you are enough and just accept the fact that you are.
2. Focus on the feeling you want to feel in each moment by filling your life with things that make you feel the way you want to feel. It is never the “things” you want to feel a certain way. It is the feeling you believe is associated with that thing you are seeking. If you want more love in your life, as so many women I know do, then get into that feeling as much as you possibly can. Lots of people do this by practicing gratitude which is so powerful. I do it by thinking about my partner and my children and my creator. I feel so much love when I do that and I feel like the richest woman on the planet when I do. I also spend lots of time at the waterfront and with people I love and listening to my gospel music which I love and doing work that I love. Resign yourself to spending a lifetime exploring your inner world and getting to know what really lights you up. Try new things that interest you. Give yourself new experiences. Follow your bliss as they say.
3. Follow your inspired thoughts and desires. They will lead you to new ways to experience the state of being you want to live in and the outer conditions you want will show up in much bigger ways than you could have imagined. Inspired thoughts for me are the things that come to me in the early hours of the morning before my brain is fully awake. They are the ideas and thoughts that light me up and make me want to jump out of bed. For some people they come in the shower or during the stillness of meditation but they usually come when our brains are busy doing other things.
A rich, juicy, inner life is something that I think few people really know and while my own experience of such a life isn’t really altered by how others experience their lives, I do love helping other people to know what a rich, juicy life feels like for themselves.
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
In my last blog I talked about how NOT taking time to meditate daily was actually making your life busier. This week I want to share what I believe are the top 5 meditation styles for beginners or anyone who doesn’t know where to start.
There are many different styles of meditation and many more reasons why someone might be inclined to try it, so the first thing a beginner has to do when they are looking for the style that best suits them is to get clear about what he or she wants to get out of meditation. Continue reading →
February 8 2016 begins the Chinese New Year which promises to be the beginning of a very interesting year so I thought I would try to squeeze an additional blog post into the new schedule so that you can get your head around what is coming and make the very most of it.
CLICK HERE NOW to listen to My Juicy Life Podcast #3 Year of the Yang Fire Monkey
NB: If you don’t have time to read or prefer to listen to it click on the SoundCloud button now and it will take you to the audio version.
You may or may not follow Chinese Astrology or Feng Shui but every year is believed to have it’s own unique energy based on a number of observations and conditions.
2016 is the year of the yang fire monkey so here are some things I personally think we can expect from the next 12 months and some tips for making the very most of the energy coming our way.
Some YANG characteristics include: active, strong, direct, bright, loud, fast and powerful. Think of the sun.
Some of the characteristics of the FIRE Element include: sharp, fast, destructive, hot and bright.
Some characteristics of the fire MONKEY include: bossy, energetic, creative, fast-paced, very clever and highly competitive.
It is my opinion that we have some very big strong energies coming together hard and fast with a sign that often represents unlimited opportunity and uncanny success, and all this tells me that 2016 is going to be a fast-paced year where many opportunities will present themselves without warning. There might be some huge clashes of energies in your life, even some explosive events, which might precede these opportunities but they will more than likely burn out quickly, as will the opportunities themselves, as the cheeky but clever monkey moves quickly and successfully from one irresistible challenge or competitive opportunity (shiny thing) to another.
I would suggest that the best way to take advantage of such energy is to BE READY. That means getting clear about what direction you would like to move in over the next few years so that when opportunity presents itself, you will be able to recognise it for what it is, and get on board with it immediately. This will come much easier to some than it will to others. I don’t believe you need to know the details, just be honest with yourself about the direction and you will know when the right opportunities present themselves to you.
I encourage you to write down at least one thing in each area of your life that you would like to achieve (want, not feel you should) over the next 24 to 36 months. Even if you don’t have all the details, when opportunities arise they are either going to be what you are looking for, or not. Then, be willing to bend in terms of how you think you will get there. Be open to new avenues and new possibilities. That is what I believe being ready in the year of the yang fire monkey looks like.
In terms of the Feng Shui school of Flying Stars, there will be a sickness energy at the centre of all homes and buildings which can negatively impact health and it will be intensified for the first month. Reduce this influence by:
Increasing the amount of gold, white and silver in that area by changing soft furnishings and decorations
Reducing any reds,purples or electrical items
And keeping activity to a minimum.
Do the same in the North-East as there will be a challenging energy residing there also.
Take advantage of the favourable energy expected in the south-west by doing the opposite of what is required in the centre.
Decrease gold, white and silver in the area,
Increase reds, purples and fire elements,
And increase activity to increase good fortune in your relationships and in your finances.
There are also favourable energies in the South and South-East which will impact on your reputation and wealth, and all creative types and students will do well to spend time in the West.
I really enjoy learning about Feng Shui and understanding how the subtle energies impact us from day to day, but at the end of the day, some good things will happen for us all this year, and some challenges will arise for us. It might be more extreme for some than for others, but ups and downs are what life is all about. That’s the juice of life. How we perceive those ups and downs, and how we manage ourselves during those times is what makes all the difference to whether we have a juicy life or not.
If you can make time for a space clearing ritual in between the 9th February and the full moon, it will be a very powerful time for setting intentions for the year and for the space or spaces you live and work in.
Also, make sure you get lots of vitamin D this year, exercise regularly, and increase your intake of probiotics to ensure maximum health and physical resilience.
Happy Chinese New Year 2016. I am so excited to be working with you, for you and alongside you while you create your very own Juicy Life.
oooOooo
If you want to jump start your Juicy Life join me on a 21 Day Body Love Challenge starting on Monday February 15th. Go here to get the details and message me if you want any more information.
Hi and Welcome to My Juicy Life Blog. Because I am making it my business to help women live a richer, Juicier Life in 2016 I thought I would start with my favourite three steps for falling in love with yourself.
CLICK HERE NOW to listen to My Juicy Life Podcast #2 Three Ways You Can Start Falling For Yourself Today
NB: If you don’t have time to read or prefer to listen to it click on the SoundCloud button now and it will take you to the audio version.
Now so many people talk about the importance of loving yourself and why you should be doing it, and they are all probably right but I always found personally that anything I wanted to do always had a stronger pull on me than anything I should do . So I want to give you the information you need that will make you want to fall madly in love yourself?
Very simply, you cannot have a deeply fulfilling, juicy life if you are not deeply and madly in love with yourself, and if you are not deeply and madly in love with yourself then you must be in some degree of pain. It is one state or another. Think about the parts of you that you do love and think about the joy you get from them. Now compare that with the parts of you that you don’t love and think about the joy you are not getting from them. We tend to resist what we don’t love and resistance causes us to stay stuck or go backward in many ways.
Further to that, we really do reap what we sew and if we are feeling meh about ourselves, we are going to put meh energy into everything we do and get meh results bouncing back at us which is going to make us feel more meh.
There is nothing juicy and fulfilling about meh. Meh is just meh.
So what am I talking about? What does falling deeply and madly in love with yourself actually mean? I am talking about building and sustaining a spectacular relationship with yourself by becoming conscious of how you think about yourself, how you speak about yourself and what you do for yourself. That means thinking about yourself from a loving, supportive, compassionate and caring perspective. It means talking about yourself in positive and uplifting ways. And it means acting lovingly toward yourself. It means seeing yourself as the star in your own life instead of the co-star of someone else’s life, and it means looking up to yourself as you would someone you truly love and admire and respect. Imagine having a relationship like that with yourself? What sort of energy would you bring to you life, to your work and to your other relationships if you felt like this about yourself? And what sort of Juicy experiences would you sew in turn?
The three ways in which you can start loving yourself today are really guidelines to help you build your relationship and keep your relationship with yourself on the right track.
Know Yourself
To know yourself you need to spend time with yourself, ask yourself great questions and listen to your heartfelt answers, just as you would if you were getting to know someone else. Spend time journalling every day. Explore your feelings around different events and circumstances. Ask yourself how you would like things to be in your life. Find out what really matters to you with a values exercise. There are so many ways to explore who you are and scheduling time out for journalling is the best way I know to ensure you have the time and space to really know yourself. As you get to know yourself I know you won’t be able to help but fall in love with yourself.
2. Love Yourself
Make the decision to love yourself. Don’t wait for the feelings to show up. Make the decision that you are going to love yourself no matter how you might feel at any given time and then act from that decision. Love yourself as a mother loves a challenging child. She might not like that child at times but she will always choose what is in the child’s best interests because she loves him.
As challenging as it might be to start with, I guarantee that the feelings of love you want to have for yourself will show up pretty quickly the more you decide to act from a place of love.
3. Believe in Yourself
One of the greatest gifts of love one person can give to another is to believe in that someone in spite of how they are showing up to life. Wherever you are right now, however you are feeling about yourself and your life, I encourage you to make the decision to believe in yourself in a way that possibly nobody has ever done for you before. I am talking about being your own best friend and your own number one fan and making a pact with yourself that you will believe in your ability and your potential like your life depends on it. I am also talking about no longer waiting for someone else to give you permission to believe in yourself and every time I think about doing this for myself I just want to cry from the deepest part of my being. There is nothing juicier or more magical than backing yourself and taking a leap of faith in your own name. It’s a powerful affirmation in action and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to live a Juicier Life in 2016.
If you are craving a rich, juicy and deeply fulfilling relationship with yourself then I highly recommend that you join me on the 21-Day Body Love Challenge which is starting in a couple of weeks. Simply follow the links below to register for the program.
In my next blog, I will be talking about creating a Juicier Life in 2016 using Feng Shui and what you need to do to make the most of the energies of the Chinese Year of the Yang Fire Monkey. It is going to be a very interesting year.
Until then I am looking forward to working with you, for you and alongside you while you create your very own Juicy Life in 2016
oooOooo
If you want to jump start your Juicy Life join me on a 21 Day Body Love Challenge starting on Tuesday February 9th. Go here to get the details and message me if you want any more information.
It is so important to be living and working in an environment that inspires you and enhances your experience of each moment that you spend in that environment.
Asking yourself what you want to achieve in each space of your home or office is a great start. Bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens have obvious purposes but if you ask yourself how you want to experience each space, it will help you to know how you want to decorate and place your furniture within those spaces.
We have recently renovated my workspace and I am so much more excited to be working from there that I wanted to share some pics.
What can you do in your space that will give you a lift and improve your outlook on life?
Yes. Absolutely. You bet it does. The things we put into our body alter our biochemistry and definitely have an impact on how we think, and on how we feel emotionally.
I recently decided to stop buying ‘treats’ for myself. More specifically, I had decided not to buy CHOCOLATE ‘treats’. It was my New Year’s Resolutions for 2014, and unlike previous years, when I might have resolved to change my entire life overnight with the inevitable outcome of an epic fail, and the subsequent diminishing of my self-esteem, I simply chose something that I thought would stretch me, in a direction that I thought would benefit me, but without being so ridiculous that I could never achieve it.
If I’d resolved not to EAT any ‘treats’ I would not have lasted the first few days, when my habit of looking for them still lingered. But I only resolved not to BUY them, which meant I was still able to ‘indulge’ in other sweet food items if I wanted.
After a couple of days, however, I simply stopped looking for food unless I was hungry, and because I hadn’t bought myself any ‘treats’, I was feeding myself with more nutritional options and feeling much more satisfied.
It has been a month now and a few things have happened that I have found very interesting.
First thing I noticed was when I had 4-5 jersey caramels at about the 3 week mark, and woke up during the next couple of nights with terrible anxiety, and was very restless, so I know now for myself, without a doubt, that sugar impacts terribly on my emotions, and if I hadn’t minimised my exposure to it, I might not have realised just how much it was impacting.
Secondly, I used to think that stopping yourself from eating what you wanted was a form of deprivation, but I have come to realise it is a gift that you give to yourself, and that you are more, not less, because of it.
Thirdly, I have learned that the things I have always called ‘treats’ are in fact definitely NOT ‘treats’. Instead they are empty, calorie-laden, food-like substances that impact on our physical and emotional state of being in a very negative way. Eating processed snack foods is not ‘treating’ yourself. It is actually hurting yourself. Since when has it been a ‘treat’ to hurt ourselves?
Finally, I realised that ‘treating’ myself was serving two very important purposes. One purpose was to self-soothe and the other purpose was to reward myself. I am so glad I realise that because now that I have these new perceptions, I have new choices, and I can’t wait to see how the rest of the year goes.
If you are experiencing anxiety and / or depression and you are struggling to manage it, I challenge you to reduce your exposure to processed ‘treats’. See them for what they really are and make the decision to replace them with foods that nourish your body as well as your emotions.
If I can help in any way, you know where to find me.
Most of us have a good idea of what Self Esteem is. It’s the name we give to the way we feel about ourselves, the way we measure what we think is our worth, or the way in which we regard ourselves.
We tend to have low self esteem when we don’t like ourselves, and when we don’t feel we are acceptable. On the other hand, we tend to have high self esteem when we think we are pretty good and believe that we have something of value to offer to the world.
When I ask people for a step by step plan for building a healthy self esteem, however, most don’t have a clue where to start, which tells me that self esteem for many people happens entirely by accident and at the unconscious discretion of parents or caregivers.
Clearly, that works well for some, but not so well for others.
One of the simplest definitions I have heard to date regarding the development of self esteem came from Dr Phil McGraw. He said that when we see ourselves consistently acting in ways that please us, we come to like and respect ourselves, and as a result, we develop self esteem.
When we realise that we have the skills that regularly bring success to us, when we create things that work, when we achieve goals, when we meet our own expectations and achieve great results through our actions, the good thoughts we have about ourselves are reinforced and validated.
This is even true if we have developed negative beliefs about ourselves through our childhood. We can undo these beliefs by literally proving them wrong before our very eyes, and watching ourselves do that helps us to real-eyes that we are more worthy than we might have first thought.
I would add, however, that it is very important to be honest about what pleases us, and sincerely seek our own approval (self esteem) rather than seek approval from someone else (external esteem).
How can we be sure we are seeking our own approval? A simple values exercise will help with that.
By getting clear about what we value, and being sure that the values that are influencing our decisions and driving our actions are our own values, we develop a stronger sense of self, and from there, the opportunity for a healthier self esteem is greater.
If building self esteem is important to you right now, and you would like help working out what your personal values, or If you want to make an appointment to seek further support in another area of your life, contact me.
