Negative self-talk can make moving forward difficult. When we listen to our negative voices and believe them, we can end up sabotaging ourselves. “You aren’t working hard enough!” “You should be further along in your career!” “You aren’t smart enough, attractive enough, wealthy enough, experienced enough, old enough……..you’re not enough!” “You’re too introverted, too extroverted, too aggressive……you’re too much!” Negative self-talk is often the result of unrealistic shoulds that we carry. When we don’t measure up to our shoulds, they scold us.
Read more →Our thoughts have a powerful impact on our feelings. More impact in fact, than do events or environmental circumstances. Our thoughts can help us feel good. They can also cause us a great deal of unnecessary emotional distress. All of us, from time to time, use faulty thinking when we interpret the events that happen in our lives. Since many of our thoughts are beyond our immediate awareness, we may not even realize this! When we use faulty thinking,
Read more →Living inside hope can make all the difference. Yesterday, while pondering the opportunities and challenges of a new year, I came across this wonderful Barbara Kingsolver quote: The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. (Animal Dreams) Figure out what you hope for. Live inside that hope. I think Barbara
Read more →Is there anything you need to “let go” during this Holiday Season? I love how Melody Beattie describes “letting go”: “Letting go doesn’t mean we don’t care. Letting go doesn’t mean we shut down. Letting go means we stop trying to force outcomes and make people behave. It means we give up resistance to the way things are, for the moment. It means we stop trying to do the impossible-controlling that which we cannot-and
Read more →Sometimes quick stress relief is exactly what we need. Have you ever found yourself in a pressure-filled situation (disagreement with your spouse, chaotic work meeting, unexpected traffic jam) and suddenly -your pulse is racing, -your heart is thumping, -your blood pressure is rising, -your face is flushing, -your muscles are tensing, -your sweat glands are working overtime, -you feel like you are physically going to explode? If you can identify with this scenario, you have experienced the unpleasant sensation of
Read more →When unwanted events and circumstances enter our lives and when, for whatever reason, it is not possible to change our situation, we can focus on tolerating and accepting whatever distress we may feel. We can practice distress tolerance skills and learn to bear our pain skillfully. In the process we discover we can survive and do well even in very difficult situations without resorting to behaviors that will make our situations worse. I found myself in such a situation this
Read more →A little food for thought about the power of choice, from one of my favorite authors: “Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature
Read more →Finding your future: Is your future something that’s “out there” waiting for you to discover? Or is your future something you are creating by the choices you are making today? What do you think?
Read more →“How are you?” No, not the social question, but a genuine “How are you? For real. This question, “How are you?” can be challenging to answer for real because we are not used to focusing on who we are, who we are being at any given moment. We are much more accustomed to focusing on and describing what we are doing. ‘ I believe it is important to distinguish between what we are doing ( the “what”, the action) and who we are being (the
Read more →I spent the last week in Wisconsin hanging out with my 80-year old parents (well, to be completely fair, my mom doesn’t turn 80 until January). Mom’s total knee replacement surgery a week ago today, was the impetus for my visit. Although my parents didn’t really NEED me there, it was nice to experience the ups and downs of the surgery and the complications that followed, together. In the process, we did a lot of remembering, shared our “bucket lists”, and did some
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