I was talking to a friend recently about catching up and they had asked if we could grab a coffee. My next couple of weeks are quite busy, I’m actually a finalist in the Women in Business Awards and a few other things are happening, so I told them I’m a bit busy at the moment and we could catch up in a few weeks. The response was ‘Oh, It would be not to have a life.’
It’s funny, it made me think about the perception that someone might have about ‘Having a life!’ I was thinking the reason that I have a life because I created one!
It’s something I talk about a lot when I talk about how you ‘Define Your Inner Diva’. Your best life isn’t just going to fall in your lap without you doing anything about it. Therefore, in order to have a life you have to make plans about how you can create that life for yourself. We can’t just sit back passively and wait for whatever life throws at us and just deal with it.
I remember a conversation with my Mum years ago, when she was talking about having another partner, “He’s not going to just come knocking on the door!” You have to put yourself in a place where you are open to whatever the universe wants to present to you.
If you want to have a busy life you’re going to have to create that for yourself by making opportunities to connect with others. Connecting is ultimately what makes us feel happy and makes life feel worth living and enjoyable.
This idea that it would be nice to “Have a life” is interesting because it implies that you don’t believe you have control over whether or not you get to have a life. Yet the control you have over what your life ends up looking like is entirely up to you.
How you get to live the life you love has a lot to do with taking stock of where you are at, in terms of your own self-awareness about who you are, what you want, what your challenges are or what personality traits you have that might cause issues with other people. We all have them, there is no perfect human being.
It’s the part within you that says somewhere in there I still have ultimate control over my destiny and I can choose to have experiences that reflect who I want to be and how I want to live my life.
We need to stop believing that we don’t have ultimate control over our lives, because we do! Even when we are unhappy in certain situations, if we can look at the situation with a sense of self-reflection and awareness and you can figure out how to fix it. When you do that it makes a huge difference to how you feel about your sense of control over your life and moving forward.
That’s the part that makes you feel like you can actually really love your life. I love my life. I do have bad days and I do make mistakes, except mistakes are how we learn to understand ourselves. We can feel more comfortable with where we are at because we know we fought hard to get there and it wasn’t just handed to us.
You actually have to make some decisions and create that luscious life for yourself.
I recently went skydiving and it was one of those things on my 60 by 60 list and I loved it. I wasn’t really scared, I could’ve lined up and gone again straight away. That’s not because I’m a fearless person, it’s because it was something I really wanted to do. It was awesome to have that experience, free-falling with the wind around you with nothing between you and the elements, and then to have the parachute bring you down and to be able to see the world from a completely different perspective. It was fantastic! That opportunity didn’t just fall into my lap. I had to make the decision, and it was actually my third attempt, but I didn’t allow that to deter me. I did it because it was something I really wanted to do and I made it a priority. I didn’t wait for somebody to present my life to me at my front door.
I hope I have inspired you and helped understand how you can create the life that you love. Don’t sit there and wait for it to be given to you, create it.
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!
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.
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 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.
In the last few weeks I’ve been talking about relationships, how our behaviour impacts our relationships, and not just intimate relationships, it’s also about friendships. I am talking to you about some really interesting things that come up when we have issues in relationships. One of the things that come up for me recently was my own sense of self and how I interact in relationships and bringing baggage into a relationship.
I’m amazed that even though I would consider myself to be reasonably self aware, when I’m in relationship there are still some underlying negative beliefs about myself that get triggered somehow making me think that this relationship is either not good for me or I’m going to screw it up somehow, perhaps I’m not as good as they think I am, and this is even though I’ve done some huge personal development work.
So I just want to share recent experience. I have a new partner we’ve been together now nearly six months and this relationship is amazingly transformational, quite different to anything I’ve ever had before and I’m aware that a huge part of this is because I became very clear with what I want in a partner and what I don’t want in a partner. I became very aware that my choice of partner had an awful lot to do with me feeling like I had to give a lot of myself to somebody else, my value to any relationship was actually about my ability to give. I always end up with partners with issues and those issues strongly impact me and after a while even though you see somebody work through their issues, you become resentful with doing all of the work to support them and to resolve their issues. It seems like they’re not trying really hard to resolve their issues. Now that I find myself in a situation with somebody who doesn’t have any issues I’m finding certain things trigger issues I have within myself not the least of which is somehow I don’t deserve this, that its almost too good to be true. So classic example, couple of weeks ago, a girlfriend of mine lost a partner and I went to the funeral and number of my other friends were there and they were all talking about the fact that my current partner is just lovely. He is, but the issue for me was not so much that they were highlighting that he was lovely. They were asking where we met, questions about him to the point that I had told them a story about something nice that he did for me. They were asking where can we get a guy like that? I went home and I said “hey just so you know when you get sick of me there’s half a dozen woman lining up waiting for this spot to be vacant and they all think that you’re awesome, we had a laugh about it and at that time I didn’t think it affected me, but a couple times that night and then for the next couple of days, I was making the same negative comments “so when you get sick of me”, “when we’re done”, “when you’re over it,” “when you decide to turf me out”. To the point that after a couple of nights he said to me, what are you doing? Is this you trying to push me away? Why are you being negative? I had to stop and think, step back and think about the language I was using and try to understand myself, why would I do that? The next morning I thought, you know what? It’s because when everybody says how nice he is, in my brain there’s some really doubtful part right at the very back or down in my gut that says he’s too good for you and you don’t deserve it.
My response to that is to start pushing him away. There’s something about this relationship that seems to have no issues, nothing that I can fix. I’m not doing anything or contributing a huge amount, the fact is I like to be with this person but somehow just being with them doesn’t seem enough to me. Why would he stay around? I really don’t quite understand what I think is wrong with just being myself in a relationship. It still is one of those things that even though I’ve learned to accept it at the top thinking level, I still feel somewhere inside that I don’t deserve love and a huge part of that is probably to do with the rejection from my father.
I just thought that you might find it interesting that even though I sit here and do these videos and I have a background in psychology and everybody thinks that I must have all my shit together that I’m just a normal ordinary everyday human being like everybody else and as I say to my clients I have issues too. I still consult somebody else to help me understand myself. Sometimes the perspective we get about people its not always correct but it’s about our ability to be able to learn from our experiences and be more self aware and the ability to share that in a way that my partner can understand. So I hope that was useful gorgeous.
I can’t believe that we are getting to the end of 2017. It’s been a hectic year for me and I know many others, so I thought I would talk to you about an area in the book that I mentioned about spirit. It’s important that we connect with something that replenishes our spirit regularly, to maintain balance in our lives.
We regularly give our energy to other people through listening to friends’ problems, supporting others through life and through your regular day to day activities. Because we spend so much of our own energy on other people, we must have a way of being able to get that energy back in. In the book, I talk about several things that you can do to replenish your spirit.
Firstly, you need to find out what nourishes your spirit. This is something that makes your spirit pool feel full again, and lets your mind feel refreshed and balanced. This means that this ‘something’ is something that you choose to do only for yourself.
I find the best way for me to replenish my spirit is to spend some time at the ashram. There are a couple of Satyananda ashrams in Australia and in for several years I’ve been doing Satyananda yoga and I found it to be right for me as it covers all the seven areas of yoga. I find that just being there and being disconnected from the world (my mobile phone stops working about a kilometre from the front gate) and I find that it gives me this sense of disconnect that’s awesome. It makes it easy for me to relax to unwind, and just take time to focus on putting some positive energy back into my body.
If I go on a Saturday night, they do a vibrational chanting ceremony. As a psychotherapist, I understand the importance of vibration, and how vibration impacts the in the limbic system – where the amygdala is. The amygdala is the part of the brain that is involved in arousal (mainly your fight or flight instincts). Chanting, just in its vibration, helps to balance and settle that area down quite a lot. People who are highly anxious, who do chanting or vibrational work, tend to find that it really helps a lot in reducing their arousal, making them feel calmer and more settled. There is also a fire ceremony they usually do on a Saturday night in the ashram, which I enjoy because it helps me to be able to feel myself bringing in some positive energy, build up the vibration in my body and helps me replenish my energy.
As a psychotherapist, I spend a lot of my working week giving my energy to other people. While this is quite rewarding to see the positive return, I still need to remember that I have to replenish myself – something we all need to remember to do. This allows our energy flow to come in and out, similar to a flowing pool, rather than a well that can just run dry.
That’s why I talk about the importance of trying to find the thing that replenishes your spirit. It’s about doing things that allow me to stop, and in lots of ways just experience pure joy from doing something that I love to do.
I’ve taken time to reflect lately, and I’ve realised its been a while since I’ve been to the ashram and really done something to replenish my spirit. I’ve been really noticing it lately, where I’m starting to feel like I’m missing something, which means I’m not going to be able to keep doing what I’m doing. I have learnt through my own personal spiritual journey, that it’s important for me to be able to go to a place where I feel like I can have that input into my energy space. This time also allows me to reconnect with my intuition and to my own body. Through time I have built my awareness of how important it is, and I get to a point where I’m yearning for it.
So, as we head into the silly season, I just wanted to reinforce the importance of remembering to connect with your spirit, finding something in your life that allows you to give back to yourself in a way that renews on invigorates you, so that you can continue to connect with other people going forward.
The 9 mind tricks you need to navigate family tension – so you don’t crack.
In an ideal world, we’d love all our family members and look forward to spending as much time as possible with each and every one of them.
In the real world, however, this isn’t always the case!
Many of us have an “eccentric” uncle, or an aunt who enjoys a few too many wines, or just an irritating sibling or cousin who asks totally inappropriate and infuriating questions (about your work or your relationships or all those things you’d rather not talk about).
That’s life; and it’s a reality of life that during the festive season we tend to have more family gatherings and therefore more interactions with these people who normally, we’d spend minimal time with.
It might not be what we’d choose to do, and it might not always be fun, but it is something we need to manage. The good news is there are ways to minimise distress and maximise your chances of actually enjoying yourself this Christmas.
Here are my practical and powerful tips:
Be prepared
Forewarned is forearmed. More often than not you know these people, you know how they’ll behave and you know what might well upset you. So, there’ll rarely be any surprises! Try to predict what might happen, and imagine the best possible outcome including you coping well.
Use your strengths
We all have natural talents and attributes that can help us cope with adversity. These include gratitude and humour, social intelligence and forgiveness. Whatever yours are, find ways to use them.
Ask them to stop
You can, of course, directly request the cessation of unwanted or unpleasant behaviours. This won’t always be successful, but it’s definitely worth considering in some situations.
Limit your interactions with certain people
This applies to both the number of them and their duration. You don’t have to spend all day with those relatives you don’t like. Say hello, politely ask a few appropriate questions, then move on to others who you’re more likely to have fun with.
Accept them for who they are
Stop trying to change them or expecting them to change – your relative has probably been the way they are all their lives and they’ll most likely stay that way. So, accept that and try to focus on whatever positive characteristics they possess.
Avoid certain topics
There’s no point torturing yourself and so there’s no point entering in to conversations or debates that will only lead to you feeling frustrated or upset. Accordingly, steer clear of these subjects and/or redirect them on to something less adversarial if or when they do pop up.
Choose your battles
Following on from the previous point, you don’t have to join every argument. And, even if you do get involved, you don’t have to win! Let them be right about some things – you never know, it might actually make for a more festive gathering.
You can’t control what others do/say, only how you react
This is possibly the most important point to remember, in any situation. No matter how well you implement any or all of the strategies described, this won’t necessarily have total or maybe any impact on how your relatives behave. Regardless, you can always control how YOU behave and ultimately, that’s all that matters.
At the end of the day, the end of the day will come
So remember that even if unpleasant, nothing lasts forever. Keep calm and enjoy the show.
Dr Tim Sharp aka Dr Happy is at the forefront of the positive psychology movement and founder of The Happiness Institute.
