We are going to talk about the need to understand the order of the things in our life and how energy flows around us. The different energy elements that we have in our life, but also how energy flows between people. There was an interesting study that came out of HarvardUniversity that looked atquantum physics and talks about thevibration of emotion.
In my book “Define Your Inner Diva”, in the last chapter on Spirit called ‘Dharma Diva’, I discuss the difference between ancient Chinese belief systems and the ancient Indian belief systems. Both of these ancient systems have four areas of lifethat they focus on – Birth Traits, Physical Movement, Traditional Medicines and the Order of Things.
Why is that important?
The HarvardUniversity study talked about the impact of emotion and how emotion vibrates atdifferent levels. Shame vibrates the lowest, being very heavy, followed closely byfear. Interestingly this Harvardresearch actually shows that shame isthe lowest vibrating emotionthat we experience. Alternatively, if you look atjoy and gratitude, they vibrate right up therenext to love and almost the point ofenlightenment.
Why is it important to understand howemotion impacts?
Youwould have heard it before, youare a product of the five people youspend the most time with. If you arespending time with people who arevibrating at a very low level, it’s heavy – fear, shame,guilt, then all of that really negative stuffyou are feeling around yourself, yourlife and the way that it looksin the future – would be quite differentto what happens if you spend a lot oftime with people who are celebrating joy, laughing and having a great time andexperiencing that connection with otherpeople that we love to hang out with. Eventhrough our friends, just communicatingthat really positive vibe with eachother – that is a vibrationalconnection that is a measurableemotional vibrational connection.
This, to me, was just so profound!
Remember, a few weeks ago, Italked about the movie ‘Resilience’? It’s like this research from Harvard University gave me themissing piece to the puzzle! I’m soexcited because I get to incorporatethat information into my new book, which I’mcalling “The Trouble With Trauma.” This is an essential component to understanding ‘how’ thatvibrational element impacts how we dothings when we interact with otherpeople.
How do we replenish? How dowe give that energy back to ourselves?How do we find the things that bring usjoy, that lift us into that emotionalspace so that we are operating up high and not down low. How do we ensure this happens in conjunction with the peoplewe regularly connect with.
In the book I talk about yoga, spendingtime in the ashram and the vibrational things that I do when I am there –which produces much the same feeling.
Another option to consider is dancing, tapping into musicand recognising that the vibration ofdifferent types of music, like house music (I knowyou wouldn’t all listenhouse music!). Have you ever observed how a DJ can actuallymake the level of the music escalate upand up and up? This is usually based on the the repetitions in the music, in terms of thebeats per minute in the music and theybuild it into this ‘bigthing’ and people feel it in their bodies – that’s really important!
When you replenish your spirit, you are trying to tap into those thingsthat make you feel good about you. It isthose things you can feel. You canfeel it when you are walking into a room of peopleand it feels really heavy and revolting.You’re just kind of like ‘Oh my goodness! What happened? Who died?’.
You wantto recognise whenit’s really positive and spend time trying to make things more positive…So, spend time with those people who makeyou feel more positive.
Thisweek go and hang out with five peoplewho make you laugh and if you can’t find ways to laugh with somebodyelse, then search YouTube for afavorite comedian, or just do somethingthat lifts your mood.
Whateveryou do, don’t be sitting there justwatching the news… That’s not helping!
This week I experienced a bit of a low point in my financials in my business account. It got me thinking about the fact that as women in business, when you work in a service based industry and you are reliant on people turning up to pay for their hour of time with you, or connecting with you in whatever way that they agreed to, what do we do if they don’t actually meet that obligation?
These days, I do have a cancellation policy, but often what happens is that if people don’t turn up and then you send them a bill for your unutilised time, you often never see them again. I wonder how we should get around this issue as women in business, or as women who run businesses. This is an important thing to consider, I understand that you’re not all in business but maybe it will help you to understand what it’s like for those of us who are.
Just something to consider… If I take holidays these days, I don’t get paid. I might be going to speak at an international conference, like I am going to one at the end of June that’s in France, but that is more about the prestige of having your name on the bill – right? It’s not actually because you are getting paid for your time. I would have gone to that conference anyway, but it just got me thinking.
I was in training for three days last week and we were talking about all of the different things in media that it is possible to do and I started thinking about my time. I was thinking about how much time I put into developing a lot of things that people don’t end up having to pay for, and please don’t misunderstand me I’m notcomplaining about that – I love what I do!
It’s just that I find it quite amazing when things all seem to happen at once. This week was really ‘odd’ because it usually takes people so long to get in to my books, that they very rarely just don’t turn up! Right?! It’s quite an unusual situation, yet today, of all days. I have had three in one day… My brain is like ‘What’s going on? It’s not even a full moon!’
I just want to encourage any of you who work for yourself, and find it a little bit challenging and frustrating when you can’t get people to understand that you need to be paid or remunerated for your time. You know you don’t have that security of somebody just paying you, whether you’re at work or not! That is the luxury of big business or government, it’s really not the luxury of small businesses like me.
I hope this is useful to some of you and doesn’t just come across like a big raving rant! It’s not meant to be a rant, it just made me think about how much self-reliance we have to actually have as women in business.
One of the things we often don’t consider in our career is that it’s never too late to re-educate yourself or to decide that maybe you want to have a career change. For those of you who have read my book ‘Define your Inner Diva’ in Decisive Diva, the chapter on Career, I talk about undertaking a career review. This is quite an important thing to do because often when we reached that point in our lives where we think that we really don’t like what we’re doing in life and you may feel like you want to do something completely different, but we have educated ourselves to reach our career pinnacle, it seems that picking up and doing something different is entirely too hard.
In my book, I talk about our seven-year developmental cycles, the first complete cycle ends around 35. This is often about the time where we reach a point of feeling a bit like a ‘fraud’ in our working life, we often think “I don’t actually think I like what I’m doing, who I am or what I’ve chosen to be!”
We end up chosen to make ‘something’ of ourselves in response to our negative feelings that come from adolescence. We don’t like a lot of the things that have happened in our adolescence, who we think we are and we come out of adolescence feeling different like we don’t belong. So, we decide that we’re just going to be “this” in our career and when we actually decide we are going to to be “this thing” we often make choices based on what we think other people will see value in. For example, if I become a lawyer then my parents will be really proud of me. Often our parents influence what we decide that we want to do for a career as an adult and so you do something because they want you to do it and not necessarily because it’s something that you’re really interested in, or passionate about.
As a result, by the time we hit that last seven-year cycle between 28 and 35, there’s this feeling that can start to build within us that says “Actually, I don’t think I like what I’m doing. I don’t think I fit. I don’t think I’m passionate about it. I don’t think I’m really that interested in it. I feel like a bit of a fraud around these people and I don’t really belong and I don’t know what I want to do anymore!
At this point, many of us think “It’s too late! Bad luck… You’re just gonna have to suck it up and stick with it!” However, this is often the time that I say to people that it really is an opportunity for you to decide that you want to do something different.
For me, it was at 28 that I decided to go to University and start on a completely different career path and study psychology. I started studying when my youngest was one. I then spent 15 years of my life studying part-time, whilst working full-time, to get my degree finished and getting through my internship. Trying to jump through all of the hoops necessary to get me to a point where I could sit here and have this validity that says I understand human behavior and therefore I can talk about it and work in that space every day. It was hard!
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that studying part-time for 15 years, whilst working full-time and raising two children, the majority of that time as a single parent, was easy… It wasn’t! But, it was what I really wanted to do as it was my passion and for me, it was something that I felt that I couldn’t just turn my back on, or I knew that I was going to spend the rest of my life unhappy.
It wasn’t that my career was bad, I was happy enough in the job that I was doing and I had done reasonably well for myself in my work, but it wasn’t fulfilling me. It wasn’t making me feel that when I woke up every day, that I wanted to leap out of bed and go to work. It was a job and it was needed security for me at the time, and as a sole parent, it was one of those things that I needed to do to ensure I could meet my responsibilities. Sometimes we have to make those sacrifices, but I really wanted to do something that would change our long-term outcomes as a family.
I did this for my daughters, as much as for myself, and I wanted to make sure that I did something that would make me feel fulfilled. Something that would make me happy, as opposed to doing something that just paid the bills or made the people around me think I was an okay person.
If there is one thing that I would encourage you to do, it is to realise that it is never too late to decide that maybe you would like a career change, that you would like to do something that really does fulfill you, much more than what you are doing now. So, if that sounds like something you want to explore, just consider short courses in adult education, no one said it has to be a big commitment to a degree.
I never stop learning. I’m off next week to do some training and it’s not always about psychology. I often like to learn about other things, different areas of interest, if I think that it might help me or influence the way that I look at things. I’m always open to education as knowledge isn’t heavy and it doesn’t cost us anything to carry with us, it is weightless and it’s not a burden to carry… It is just something that can assist us to move forward.
Daylight savings has finished and I always get a little sad about the cooler weather coming, but we’re having this beautiful extended Indian Summer, so I’m not complaining. I’ve only got eight weeks until I go to Europe anyway, so I’m just going to enjoy it while I can, before it starts really getting cold around here.
I recently went to see a documentary called “Resilience” and I am really excited by the fact that it talks about a study that was done using an assessment called the Adverse Childhood Experience Questionnaire (ACE). In essence, several doctors in the US recognised that people who were having major health issues came from particular demographic areas that were associated with a lower socio-economic status.
These doctors believed that there appears to be a strong link between mental health and physical health and they wanted to understand about the causality of that link. What they have discovered is that if people have adverse childhood experiences, this results in excessive stress in children and, in turn, these negative mental health impacts affect the child’s physical health outcomes over their life course.
Now for those of you who have read my book ‘Define Your Inner Diva’ (if you haven’t read it then you might want to grab a copy here), you know that I talk about how we need to repair the ‘self’. In the first Chapter ‘Delightful Diva’, I outline why negative experiences from childhood affect the development of our sense of self and this impacts many areas of our life – how we approach relationships, our career and the impacts on our health and wellbeing.
If we can focus on health and wellbeing briefly, in my book I focus on excess weight and how it is directly related to our emotional overeating. We believe our problem is our weight and we try and control our food intake by dieting or increasing our exercise to resolve the problem. However, we need to resolve the issues with ‘self’ before we can get our best health outcomes, in terms of our weight management and a focus on exercise.
Looking after ourselves has always been about the awareness of the psychological side of health and wellbeing and I have anecdotally observed that some people, who have quite serious mental health issues, also seem to have significant physical health issues. This study has demonstrated amazing outcomes in consideration of the link between adverse childhood experiences (which requires a score of four or more, out of the ten, for you to have a ‘significant’ increase in the negative health outcomes in your overall general health) and the link to chronic disease development – cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity and many other major physical health issues.
This research has uncovered the link between adverse childhood experiences and trauma. In essence, what they are talking about is trauma, as it is in our early childhood, and this comes from being exposed to acutely stressful situations, mostly abandonment in our childhood.
As a society, we do not acknowledge the pain that our children experience from this sense of abandonment, because we think that they are young and they will just ‘get over it’.
Alternatively, considering they are not talking about it very much, we don’t actually choose to address the issue as we believe it does not impact them.
I was just astonished, but really excited in some bizarre way, that they finally found something that clearly shows the link between adversity in childhood experiences and the impact that these experiences have on our mental health as children and young people.
We then carry that experience with us through our lives and the impact that it has on our physical health and wellbeing is so profound that I just believe that we are edging on the precipice of a really amazing time in medical research history, when we can finally start to see that as ‘human beings’ we are holistic – that our mind and our body are 100% connected, and the way that we think about things is going to impact what happens in our physical body.
Even though this was something that we knew intuitively and we have talked about, we keep it at that level! I couldn’t believe that finally, a doctor had chosen to investigate this phenomenon from a doctor’s perspective and found that there is a link.
So, I hope that you found that interesting as well as I did… I am going to put a link below to the resilience movie because I think it is an astonishing documentary and I am so excited that we are finally getting some evidence together that helps to support the ideas that I have been talking about for a really long time. ?
This week I wanted to share with you my recovery journey following an injury to my arm. Being with clients most days, I have to sit still and write a lot, which I find can aggravate my injury. Therefore I have decided to make a commitment to myself, and work on getting some strength back into my upper body.
I hear a lot of people (myself included) saying that they just don’t have time to exercise, focus on our bodies or work on strengthening our bodies. For those of you that have been watching my videos for a while, may have noticed that I don’t talk about exercise from a weight-loss perspective, but one of toning and strengthening your body and what you put in your mouth.
For me, toning and strengthening my body, means managing my injury and helping to ease the pain. This was a huge reason why I decided that I needed to get back into high intensity interval training again. I started my journey working with a trainer one-on-one and then with small group training.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Personal trainers can be expensive and seen as a bit of a fad. For me, this was the best way I was going to be able to work with somebody who understands that I have shoulder issues and why I am trying to rebuild strength in my body. They also are able to provide insight on the best exercises to do to help manage and reduce my pain on a daily basis.
This training has already been so beneficial. I have noticed that while I am sitting with clients and taking notes, that my pain levels have been a lot more in check and not as intense. While this has helped, it still requires me to take time out and limit the number of people I am able to sit with each day.
While I have to think about how I spend my time (not sitting in front of computers for too long or sitting with clients for long periods of time) I also have to put time into taking care of my body and being able to focus on how I do certain bits of exercise and what I need to do to give me the best return on the investment of my time.
I think that one of the biggest things that people asked me when I decided I needed to get back to exercising again was ‘How on Earth am I going to find the time?’. For me, it just got to the point where I realised that by not exercising, I was forcing myself to have more downtime due to the pain. What I decided was, if I made the time to strengthen my body, it would allow me to require less down time and be able to put time into more productive things, rather than laying on the couch with heat packs and complaining about the pain.
Often we look at fitness or going to the gym as something we do only to lose weight. But we need to realise that we need to exercise to build the strength up within our body and make sure that our body can support us to do the things we need to do, day-in and day-out.
At the moment, I am fitting in my exercise in the middle of my working day. This helps me ensure I am breaking up my day into small chunks and not getting stuck at my desk. I also find I am still fitting in exercise such as stretching or yoga in the mornings because I know it will help me later when I exercise intensively.
When I talk to people about making their plan about what they want to do for themselves and how they want to incorporate health and fitness into their life, I make sure they understand that nobody else can tell you how to do it and what will work for you. You really just need to look at your situation and your lifestyle, so you can eliminate your excuses not to do it.
In my journey, my first step back into regular exercise was joining up at Curves gym. I loved the idea of the continuous circuit so you didn’t have the excuse of ‘I missed the start of the class, I will have to go another day’. This ‘no excuse’ opportunity helped get me into a routine of going regularly. I like to remind everybody that it takes three weeks to form a new habit, so you have to commit to something for a month before it will start to feel like a needed part of your routine.
When we think we can’t fit something in, think about the things you can substitute instead of just ‘adding’. This will help you utilise time you already have, for something more productive or more useful to your day to day life. It is especially important to your wellbeing to make sure you take time for yourself, because you can’t look after others if your energy cup is empty.
So today I thought I might talk to you about careers. One of the biggest things we may need to consider about our work environment, and why perhaps we may be having some issues in the workplace, is about passion.
Often when you become successful in a particular role, we have a tendency to just decide we are going to just sit pretty for a while. We acknowledge that we have worked hard to get there and you’re doing great stuff and don’t want to push yourself out of your comfort zone – after all, you deserve the break.
After a while, just sitting pretty can actually be a disservice to ourselves. This complacency, can lead us to find our situation becoming stale. If you don’t have a continuous input of passion for the work you do, it becomes drudgery and not something that we wake up excited for every day, but instead you find yourself dreading the idea of going to work.
If you’re in this situation, I would recommend you read through the Career chapter ‘Decisive Diva’ in my book ‘Define Your Inner Diva’. In this chapter I talk about the importance of passion, and what it is you need to do if you’ve lost this passion and want to get it back.
One of the reasons we end up having problems in mid-life is from problems in the workplace. For example, if one day everything was going great in your project but then something happens, or you feel that there is an issue at work and you got the blame for it, and you suddenly feel ostracised or disconnected in some way from the other people in your work environment. This can have a big impact on our sense of self.
The main reason this has such an impact on our sense of self, if because of the way we grew up and our negative belief system. Once we become adults, we decide ‘I’m going to be this’, and once I achieve that people will respect me and all my negative beliefs won’t matter anymore’.
Now this idea works for a while, but after a few years you start to get the feeling that you’re a bit of a fraud and not presenting your true self. You may believe that if you showed people who you truly were, and how you really feel about yourself, that they would pull you up on it and you may find yourself out on your ear.
It’s really important to understand that when something happens in the workplace, we end up in a situation where we have fallen back into our negative belief patterns because we may have lost the foundation for what we have based our positive feelings about ourselves on our work. This can happen when we find ourselves placing our value in what we do, not who we are as people.
This is very common, as most people don’t like how they feel about themselves by the time we get to the end of adolescence. At this point we find ourselves questioning what we are going to do with our lives. This can lead to making a decision ‘I’m just going to be (insert career role here)’ and even if you find yourself being very successful at your chosen career path, at the end of the day our career is just what we do.
Many of us work very hard and throw ourselves into our work fully, we approach things with an amazing work ethic to prove ourselves to anybody who will take notice and get upset when people don’t notice how much we truly put in, because through our work is how we are defining ourselves and our value.
At this point, if things aren’t going well in the work environment, then we start to feel flat and low. Sometimes in our careers, we aim for a pinnacle and then when we reach it we experience joy, but then the feeling of ‘now what’ sets in. Inside we feel like we still need to do something, or work towards something more. This can leave us feeling like we are never happy with what we’ve done. This is why it is so important to acknowledge we are good at what we do, but our work doesn’t define us as a person.
Once you can understand who you are and resolve how you feel about yourself, you can get full acceptance of yourself. Then what you do in your career will not become our defining point, but just something else we do that makes us wonderful.
I thought today I might talk to you about that evil thing called money. In my book ‘Define Your Inner Diva’ I have a whole chapter dedicated to finances, and one of the big things I like to talk about is what happens financially when you go into a new relationship. A lot of what happens with women, is that if we have a hard-fought battle in the family court or something similar, you feel like you have lost a lot of security in your finances. This can lead to us ladies going into a new relationship with a fear that it’s going to happen again, because we have just been through that hard fought battle and we’re scared of it happening again.
This fear can lead to women feeling awkward about talking about financial agreements to protect ourselves going into a new relationship. This can also stem from feelings of guilt about new relationships and the expectation that “it shouldn’t be a problem because we love each other and it should get itself sorted”.
Despite this fear and guilt, there are a few good reasons why we should agree with our new partner on a financial agreement when you’re going into a new relationship, especially if you have children. If you have children from a previous relationship, it is an important step to ensure that if the relationship breaks down, you will still be able to provide for your family as you need.
If you are going into the relationship with grown-up children or no children at all, it is still a good idea to discuss a financial agreement with your new partner. Usually this is relevant to people in the 40-55 age category, so a concern for you may not be providing for your children, but a bigger concern would be in what happens with your finances should something happen to you.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if the relationship is new, long term or you are married, but it is important to cover off the things that will cause your partner grief should (god forbid) something happen to you.
This is why I always say that when you’re going into a new relationship, what you need to make sure you do is cover off what might happen with your finances, in this unlikely event something happens to you, to prevent an entitlement going solely to your partner instead of your children.
For example, in your superannuation, there will be certain components that automatically go to your partner in the event something happens to you, and you can’t allocate then somewhere else. Often in this scenario, its better to just let that happen and have it go to your partner because they are more likely to get more value from that than your children.
Then what you want to do is make sure you can cover off (usually through an insurance policy) what goes to your children. I usually advise that a good way to measure what this should be, is that you work out about what your super is and you match that and then say this insurance policy will go only to my children, and superannuation can go to my partner.
For these reasons, I have taken separate insurance cover to allow me to give this money to my children. A very common thing to happen in a second marriage for example, is that the will says the partner has the right to stay in the family home and the children have to wait until the other party of the couple passes away before they are able to access the house. This is a large contributor to angst amongst some families when it comes to estates and wills following the death of a parent or close family member. Commonly, everyone has their own feelings and opinions about who should get what.
It is a horrible thing to have to think about ourselves in terms of dollars and cents, but in reality it is just easier to manage the emotional upheaval a little better by making sure we have sorted our financial issues out ourselves, before we pass on.
So this week I’ve been talking to lots of people about the impact of trauma in their life. I was talking to a specialist last week and she said, “So when you going to write a book about trauma?” I said, “Funny you should ask because that’s what I’m doing now.” Then I got to thinking about one of the challenges I am currently facing, which is in creating my diagram to work to show why certain elements of my key theory are so important and how they interact.
My theory around trauma is that our primary emotional need and number one thing that we all need and strive for in life is a connection. A connection is vitally important to us as human beings.
Our whole life we seek to connect as human beings. We want to try and connect with other people – first with our parents, siblings and extended family. Then we go to school and want to connect with our school friends, and then later in life its other friends, work and intimate relationships that form our important connections. These different points of connection within our lives are what make us feel good about ourselves.
In my previous book ‘Define your Inner Diva’, I talk about the need to connect with ourselves, to assist in understanding that our negative belief system develops from how we see ourselves. This is a big thing that we need to resolve within us before we can form the ideal relationships we crave, the success we want or the financial freedom we desire.
When looking to resolve our negative belief system, I like to look at why we don’t feel good about ourselves as people. Common reasons for this are because we could not get the connections we craved throughout our childhood, or we could not get the connection in the way we were expecting. This is where trauma comes from – trauma is the essence of disconnection.
When you think about the things in your life that are traumatic for you, the things that make you feel bad about yourself such as feeling rejected, that is the trauma causing a disconnection. Perhaps you were abandoned, and that is what has led to the feeling of rejection to arise.
When we can’t get a connection the way we want it, then we look to change the way we connect with other people. Our primary experience from childhood is expecting that we will connect with people in a strong and positive way. For example, you may have had a relationship with your mother that was loving and full of care, or you may have had a relationship where she made you emotionally responsible for how she felt, or you may have had no one at all who seemed to care or was aware of your presence. These different factors are going to impact how you choose to connect going forward in your life.
If you reflect on how you were able, or unable, to have the connection you craved with your parents, this will lead you to understand the way you enter into adult relationships. If you had a negative experience of connection in childhood this can lead to feeling like you want to push people away and keep them at a distance because “they will leave anyway”. In this situation, you feel that no matter how tight you hold onto them, you feel that you can’t trust people to stay around. If, on the other hand, you had positive and nurturing connections in your childhood, you will be more willing to openly connect with people and be able to trust them as you want too.
An example of this impact I like to look at is a TED talk by Brene Brown who looks at vulnerability from the perspective of the “wholehearted”. She talks about how there is one group of people who are really happy living their life and allow themselves to be vulnerable, which in turn, allows them to form positive connections with others.
Being vulnerable allows you to open areas of yourself up, to allow people to see things about you that may result in them rejecting you, however, it usually results in making you feel closer to others through that vulnerability. Being vulnerable allows us to be open and make way for people to truly love us for who we really are and form the strong positive connections we desire and enable us to live our most luscious life.
I been looking for the opportunity to talk to you about something that I’ve been reflecting on, I’ve not been home in nearly two weeks and when I returned home my beautiful little dog whom I’d had for eleven and a half years was really sick, he’s been sick for about a year and one of the things that has amazed me was the number of people that have different reactions with regards to grief and loss.
So I came home on a Wednesday night, it was very obvious to me that my dog wasn’t his usual self and I had to take him to the Vet the following day, his issues were not resolvable and we tried all sort of things but his body basically said enough was enough and I had to put him down the next day, which was very sad but he was eleven and a half and had a really good life. I always said that he must have been in his last reincarnation. He must been ready for nirvana because you know your last life, right before you reach nirvana has to be the best one. He had a pretty good life, but the impact even though I knew he was sick, even though I knew that his health was deteriorating and I knew beyond a doubt that I could not keep him in the space where he was suffering.
It still was a really difficult experience and a number of people have reacted to it in different ways. I’m always surprised to find that there is some people who don’t have the same level of emotional connection to animals as I do, and you know some other people who seem to have highly sensitive kind of response to animals, some people have lost horses and had really big reactions to it, some people can’t necessarily understand that because these animals are really big and it’s not like you can have them curl up on your lap but feels a little bit different.
But my main issue around that was to understand grief and loss, grief and loss happens to us regardless of our circumstances. The worst thing that we can do to ourselves is not to take the time to acknowledge that a person or an entity that gives you some level of emotional connection is now no longer available to you in your life. This brings with it the sense of hollowness, emptiness, like something is missing, it’s a key component and something that people just misunderstand and often down play.
We think it shouldn’t be this important or I shouldn’t be so upset about it. In reality a lot of us have a connection with our animals that is very safe. We feel that we can be true to ourselves with an animal and that animal is going to love us anyway. Particularly strong in the case of dogs.
So I just wanted to highlight the importance of recognising that grief and loss is a key component and whether it’s an animal or somebody who you had in your life. We go through a loss and grief process when we lose a partner even if it was just your decision to step back from a relationship, we still go through a grieving process.
That’s just acknowledging that sometimes you just feel a bit flat, you don’t necessarily want to engage in doing things with people, you find that you’re a little bit more sensitive, really easily upset or life just sort of temporarily lost its mojo. It’s a really important thing to be aware of and to understand, give yourself that little bit of space and time to just reflect on a good times. I think about the good times that I had with that beautiful little dog, but also acknowledge the loss, that’s part of the grieving process to allow yourself to reflect back on the good times.
They’re not all good times and I get that – especially in a relationship. But it’s a really important process and if we just try to ignore it and pretend that it didn’t happened and move past it or pretend that it didn’t actually had an emotionally impact, we actually do ourselves a disservice. We make it more difficult for ourselves in the future.
This week I’ve been talking to people about relationships, and the thing I found most fascinating is this idea that love conquers all. The idea that if you just met somebody, fall in love, find that perfect match when we’re young knowing that this is the one, is a crazy notion that we seem to have in our society. And if we don’t connect with that right person or it doesn’t work out, that is somehow the end and we don’t get another opportunity.
I’m here to tell you that the idea of there’s a lot of fish in the sea is real not just because there’s a lot of people out there who are open to having different sorts of relationships but because you can’t always match with somebody just by love. It’s not that you don’t care about them or what happens to them, but in all honesty most relationships are actually some level of business partnership. The notion that moving forward you actually have to have shared goals, shared values and shared idea about where you’re going to end up in terms of where the relationship takes you, you don’t often think about those things. As young person, you must be friends in high school, high school sweethearts caught up in romanticism of it all, the emotional connection. When things change and responsibilities come, sometimes that whole romanticism that was there in your teens actually stops being relevant anymore. You’re growing up you’ve got responsibilities and often we find at this point in time, two individuals who seemingly have this great relationship suddenly start to have issues.
As teenagers, you’re never going to ask the question… do you think that we should actually try and buy a home, or are you happy renting for the rest of your life? Do you actually want to settle down somewhere and have children or are you just hoping that you could travel the world and be a free spirit? Do you want to have children when you’re young or do you want to have them when you’re older and be able to travel and live your life first? These issues are ones that we don’t educate our children about. We don’t teach them about the kinds of things that are going to impact on their relationships when they’re young.
On the flip side of that, when we come out of the relationship and we’re looking to get in another relationship, we often find that we are drawn in the same things that we had on our previous relationships, but somehow package it up as looking different somehow yet often the issues underlying that relationship ended up being the same. For example, my first husband was now alcoholic , when I met my next partner, my big issue was to make sure my partner didn’t drink, but that partner used to smoke a bit of marijuana, his emotional disconnection, a result of his own issue was much the same as it was for the alcoholic. So the difference between the two were really pretty minor, but in my head, they had to be different because they walked and talked different but the underlying issue is still actually the same.
I’ve seen women who come through that midlife phase, come out of their relationship not happy, not getting what they wanted and go straight into a new relationship. They don’t actually sit down and think about what do they want for themselves out of a relationship, what’s that kind of connection that they want, are they prepared to bear their soul and expose themselves in a vulnerable way? A lot of people hold themselves back, they want to talk about the things that they really want or really need in a relationship but fear of rejection and fear of actually exposing themselves and being vulnerable. Brene Brown in TED Talks talked about, The power of vulnerability. It is the idea that you can’t experience joy unless you open yourself up and be vulnerable. Although sometimes by opening yourself up and being vulnerable, you are drawn to the person who has supported that component of your vulnerability and therefore, we feel the need to accept everything that surrounds us as something that even though we might not like it, we have to deal with.
Let me give you an example. I talk in the book about when sometimes you come into a relationship later in your life, you make compromises about the things you probably shouldn’t, I’m not saying you can’t compromise, all relationships are about compromise. That’s actually what makes us human being, but in my situation, my daughters had grown up and left home and I no longer have that responsibility when I’m looking at meeting somebody new. I have been in the situation where I’ve meet people who of the similar age and they’ve got younger children. I’m not opposed of people having children, but the reality is I want to travel. I want to be able to experience other cultures, I want to be able to pick up and take off overseas, live there for several months, if that’s what I wanted to do. I want to go away for weekends, I wanted to be free to pick up and do things that I wanted to do and I don’t want to feel like I have to make considerations for weekend sporting events and all of the things that impact when you have younger children. Share care arrangements you can make allowances for because you might have only them half of time, maybe you can work with that. You have to be clear to what it is that you want for yourself and what the person brings. Just because you met somebody, had sex… you think I’ll just hang out with them, there hasn’t been a better option more recently doesn’t make a relationship.
And a lot of women who I have talked to have been afraid to step back and say this is what I want to myself. I want to meet somebody who is emotionally available, I want to meet somebody who’s secure in themselves and understands who they are as a person, I want to meet somebody who has the similar financial perspective to the way that I approach money. I want to meet somebody who sees that in ten years’ time, when they have grandchildren, that they had to be close and actually spend time to those grandchildren or alternatively, I want to meet somebody whose believes just because they have grandchildren it doesn’t define how they are supposed to live their lives and they can still go on and travel and do other things.
I understand that some point in the future, because it’s in the future and we don’t know what the future brings. We are going to have some compromises and some adjustments, I say to my clients that your future needs to be a bit of a hand drawn map on piece of crumpled paper with the pen on your hand and at some point your goals want to change and its okay, you can change the way your map looks, It’s your map. You can do that but the thing you should not do is to compromise yourself just because you don’t want to be alone, don’t screw up your map and throw it in the bin and completely adopts somebody else’s map, that’s their dream, that’s their life, that’s their goal for themselves and you could choose to be a part of it, but there has to be a marrying of those things. There has to be a shared goals. A shared outcome.
As young people, if you decide to get married, one of the things you should talk about is how many children do I want. How do I think about private school education or do I want to stay five minutes around the corner from my parents, do I want to live overseas for a while. Does my job mean that I have to travel internationally and that means that my partner is always left with the responsibility of their children, how do I feel about that? The majority of issues that happen in a relationship and lead to divorce are about needs not being met because most of the time, they are never discussed or addressed.
We think we fall in love, this person loves me, therefore everything else is just perfect and we’ll work it out along the way cause love conquers all. It’s all shit. Love doesn’t conquer all. And in fact the idea that love conquers all is actually why most people end up in the situation where they make compromises and stay in relationship that they should’ve never got into in the first place, because they didn’t ever give them what they need. I feel like I’m on my soapbox this week, but I had a really interesting conversation with a couple of women last week around the idea that when you meet somebody, it must be about where you meet them or the kind of work that they do or their background or their life story and there is this idea that if I have success meeting somebody in an online dating site, then if my girlfriend went to the same dating site she could find the same kind of person. No that’s not how it works. You have to be clear with your own issues, resolve them and work them through, know your own foibles because I know my own foibles, I’m pretty clear on what they are but then it’s about when you meet somebody, you have to be honest to those foibles and you need to be prepared to be really upfront about what it is that you want. I’ve met some beautiful people whose life doesn’t match mine, It’s about my life journey and my life stage and if that doesn’t match up to the other person’s life stage, my decision to not enter a relationship with that person, it has nothing to do with them personally, It’s to do with the fact that my life stage and their life stage don’t marry up and can’t, if I compromise myself, to make my life stage marry up on what his is, I’ll end up resenting him. That’s not fair to anybody. Not to you. Not to them.
I hope that was interesting.
I hope it’s something that’s really useful for you and if you found it useful you might be able to share it with your friends.
