Tag Archives: reflection

Four Questions About Love

Valentine’s Day can bring up a lot of emotions, especially for women. Did your significant other show you the affection you hoped for? Did the day go the way you wished? Or, maybe this year you do not have a significant other to celebrate a relationship with.

Whatever the underlying cause, your sense of love and being loved can be triggered around this holiday regardless of how you intellectually claim otherwise.

While the emotions are still in sight and have not become a distant memory tucked neatly away, take 30 minutes today to go somewhere private—a walk in the woods or the bathtub will work. Ask yourself these 4 questions.

  1. Do I feel loved?
  2. What would have made me feel more loved, if anything, this past Valentine’s Day?
  3. How much of my self-worth comes from the love I receive from other people or one other person?
  4. What situations make me feel the most loved?

You might want to journal your answers and really own how you feel. Once you take stock of your current situation, I challenge you to spend the next 30 days loving yourself.

What would that look like?

How could you take better care of you, be kinder to yourself, love yourself—right now, as you are?

Are there things in your answers to the four questions above that you might be able to do for yourself, rather than wait for someone else to do?

Years ago a mentor of mine told me to go home and tell myself “I love you,” while looking myself in the mirror over and over again—until I felt it. Really felt it. I thought it a silly exercise, until I tried to do it. As I repeated the phrase over and over, I began to cry because I realized how little I really did love myself—without someone else validating I was worthy of love.

Make a commitment to find out what will help you feel worthy of love and to do those things for yourself.

  • Are there things you have always wanted to do, but have held back from doing in order to support others that you could now do—a class, a trip, a commitment to a new routine?
  • Do you love flowers, but never buy them for yourself?
  • Do you enjoy alone time but never carve time out of your other commitments?
  • Are there friends you want to spend time who you could set a monthly or weekly date with?

Find the keys that will tell yourself—through action—that you are loved and lovable. By growing your self-love you will not only be happier, you will also be helping those around you love you more because you will be radiating that you are worthy of love and attracting love because your heart will be full of love to give.

Amy

Be Your Own Holiday Hero

As you enter into the holiday season it is easy to get swept away with all the activities and loose focus on what matters most to YOU! In fact, most people live like that all year—swept away by the momentum of external events with little internal direction to meet their own needs.

With a small amount of attention, you will enjoy the holidays more and wake up in the New Year with a clearer sense of purpose and direction, ready to create new goals and more importantly prepared to achieve them.

I have a fun exercise to help you achieve this. Take time in December to reflect on the year almost at a close. Make note of what goals you accomplished, which have changed, and what remains unrealized; but focus on what has gone well. Start to build a list or journal of everything that you have done, all you overcame, and things you accomplished this past year.

By putting energy into remembering your successes before the year ends you are:

  • Preventing a feeling of overwhelm as holiday distractions have a tendency to make you feel like you are not getting enough done.

  • Reminding yourself of what you consider important which will help you make choices about how you spend your time this month.

  • Reinforcing what you do well and your self-confidence.

  • Remembering what things you enjoy doing and do well.

  • Creating a strong platform from which design goals that inspire you, not ones you feel you “should” do, at the beginning of next year.

Make sure you include personal and professional successes. You can start by taking a half-day retreat, or just an hour one morning to get started. Then read and add to this list (or journal) at least once a day. You will find your holiday season more fulfilling and you will be ready to embark into next year full of positive energy.

Note: It does not hurt that this exercise also expand your holiday party conversations beyond the weather!

 

 

 

Happiness 101

Do you long to be happier?  Maybe you are content with your life; yet, feel your day to day mood rarely swings into full gear on the happiness throttle.  What can you do?

I recently saw a social media post about neuroscience research on happiness that intrigued me so much I followed it all the way to the various source articles that it referenced to learn more. The Business Insider article by Eric Barker that summed it all up offered four keys to becoming more happy.

Although you may have heard it all before, it is important to understand that neuroscientists are studying human brains and finding confirmation that these steps truly change the chemical make up in your body and the activity in your brain.  If you are not actively doing all four regularly, you might want to ask yourself, “Why not?”

The four things you can start doing today and feel real results do not take a lot of time, are fairly simple to do, and are in your control.

  1. Find what you are grateful for.

    There are lots of reasons to look on the bright side of life; and we often feel shame when we don’t. But now the research shows that even looking for something to be grateful for on the days when it feels like your whole world is upside down can increase your levels of dopamine and seratonin–both of which help you feel better. Researchers even found that gratitude and searching for things to be grateful for increased you neuron density creating greater emotional intelligence, which makes finding things to be grateful for easier. So the more often you do it the easier gratitude becomes. I use a gratitude journal as one of the key antidotes for feeling stressed and unhappy. 

  2. Give your negative feelings a label.

    This is an interesting tactic you might remember from parenting classes. Parenting classes always include the advice to help your child identify their feelings and put a name to them. The mere act of labeling your feelings disipates their power over you. This is not going into the story and justifying how terrible things are; it is simply a word or phrase that describes how you feel. Researchers have now studied people’s brains using MRI technology while they are upset and find that labeling how you feel reduces the activity in your amygdala–you know the place in your brain that makes you overreact and go into fight or flight. How simple, yet powerful!

  3. Make decisions.

    Decision making is often stressful and you might think putting this on a list of ways to become happier is non-sense. But don’t rule this gem out so quickly because making decisions reestablishes your feeling of being in control, and we all know that is a whole lot less stressful than feeling out-of-control. Apparently our friends in neuroscience have found that making decisions engages the pre-frontal cortex and reduces anxiety and worry. But not all choices are easy and you can read more about ways to help you make even the toughest choices in my blog.

  4. Hug someone.

    Scientists have confirmed that human touch is good for us.  Whether you hug everyone you see today, shake people’s hands, or go get a massage, you will be releasing oxytocin–the feel good hormone. Here is a challenge.  Apparently, research shows that 5 hugs a day for four weeks increases your happiness quotient big time. Want to try it with me?

I love the idea that things we intrinsicly know about life are starting to be proven with science. Hopefully, knowing the science behind the advice will encourage you to take action and live happier, starting today!

For more ideas about increasing your feeling happiness each day read 5 Easy Steps to Increase Your Happiness.

Maya Angelou ~ you are trailing wisps of glory!

A black woman born when women and blacks both had little rights, she died with President Clinton, First Lady Obama, and Oprah Winfrey at her memorial.  She became symbol of triumph for many since she rose from meager beginnings to a world renowned author with her autobiography I Know Why Caged Birds Sing about growing up a black woman in America.  She reminds us anything is possible when you believe in yourself and continue to look for the rainbow, even as it storms.

Her most important message for me is to find our own voice, not the one that makes everyone else comfortable.  As First Lady Michele Obama stated at Maya’s memorial, “She told us that our worth has nothing to do with what the world might say. Instead, she said, each of us comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. She reminded us that we must each find our own voice, decide our own value, and then announce it to the world with all the pride and joy that is our birthright as members of the human race.”

I often urge breaking free of the roles we all box ourselves into over the years.  Maya Angelou is a great model for us all in knowing we can have, do and be anything we want and more than one thing in a single lifetime.  Here are some of the things she did:

  • Authored numerous books (seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry)
  • Became a  single mother at 17
  • Became San Francisco’s first black streetcar conductor
  • Danced at a strip joint
  • Was a prostitute
  • Worked as a fry cook
  • Sang on records
  • Was an actress, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs
  • Acted alongside James Earl Jones
  • Earned a Tony nomination for her work on Broadway
  • Wrote music
  • Played music
  • Received an Emmy nomination for her acting in the 1970s TV miniseries “Roots”
  • Danced with Alvin Ailey.
  • Worked as a coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
  • Lived for years in Egypt and Ghana as a journalist
  • Met South African liberation pioneer Nelson Mandela
  • Helped  Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. organize the Poor People’s March in Memphis, Tennessee where the civil rights leader was slain on Angelou’s 40th birthday.
  • Wrote plays, movies, and television shows
  • Earned 30 honorary doctoral degrees
  • taught American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina

The next time you feel resigned to stay where you are, doing what you do even though you feel uninspired and unfulfilled — because it is what you do, remember Maya Angelou.  Find you voice, pick something you are passionate about and announce it to the world with all the confidence of one who has wisps of glory trailing from them!  And know you can change your mind later and pick something anew!

Thank you for all the inspiration you gave to so many Maya Angelou!