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Creating a Work/Life Balance

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Creating a Work/Life Balance

If you’re cruising a sweet balance between your work life and the rest of your life, stop reading now. Congratulations! You don’t need this post. If you’re struggling to find a schedule that works for you and searching for ways to feel more satisfied in life, then this post is for you.

People come to me all the time seeking help with creating a work/life balance. There’s a pretty limitless amount of reasons why people have a tough time creating this balance. Most people can look at a few aspects of their lives and modulate them.

First, make a list of the things you have to do (like earn money, take care of your kids, chores, etc.) and the things you want to do (school, art classes, travel, hobbies, etc.). Sometimes this isn’t as clear-cut as it seems. Like, if exercise is critical to maintaining your emotional and physical health and you’re just not the same without it, it wouldn’t go into the “want to do” pile; you’d put it in the “have to do” pile. So, it’s important to look at your values and unique needs when organizing these lists.

Next, identify your obstacles and their possible solutions. For instance, if you know that watching television before you go to bed regularly tempts you into making it to bed too late making you wake up zapped and sluggish before work, set a cut-off time for an hour before you want to be in bed. If your schedule requires you to work late one night and then turn around and be back to work early the next morning, plan for it by making your week’s worth of lunches at the beginning of the week or some variation of that. Invest in some dry shampoo to significantly cut your shower time for that day. Ask your partner to help make sure the daily chores get done. The most important part of identifying obstacles and solutions is the cognition around it. Maintaining awareness of your obstacles and how you want to handle them tempers your stress because you’re aware of your choices and what you’re doing to address the stress. It feels less like life is just happening to you.

Time management is another important aspect of finding balance. If you know, you often get distracted at the beginning of or during tasks, identify what happens for yourself and how you can rectify it. Some of this will inevitably require some willpower; you’ll have to wait to go on social media sites or not get coffee with a coworker or stop cuddling with your dog so that you can make dinner. Time management is more than just making sure you do what needs to be done when it needs to be done in the order that it needs to be done. It’s also about what’s happening for you emotionally and cognitively. If you’ve just worked out, and now you’re walking your dog before work and you start thinking about how the dog still hasn’t pooped, and you have to do a million and one things at work, get the oil changed, come home and make dinner, take a shower… you’re not managing the time you’re in right now which is the present. You’re stressing yourself out when there’s nothing you can do because you can’t speed up time and you can’t make your dog poop faster than he’s going to poop. Part of successful time management is mindfulness so, keep bringing yourself back to what you’re doing right now. You’ll get to that other stuff.

Learn how to say no and stick to it. This will give you oodles of time and relieve you from so much unnecessary stress. Say no to Steve at work who always asks you to help him with his reports. Say no to meetings that you aren’t required to attend. Say no to the neighbor who wants to talk for 20 minutes when you are just coming home from work. Say no to the millions of distractions online or on T.V. when they are trying to suck you in. By saying no to other people and things, you’ll get to start saying yes to your peace of mind (which is what this balance is about in the first place).

Create a daily schedule for yourself and stick to it for four weeks so that you can see how it feels to use a routine. Keep the integrity of the schedule by sticking to whatever you have assigned for each time slot. You can always go back to your free-form schedule if you find a routine too confining. This is helpful both at home and at work. (It is especially helpful if you work from home where the distractions are plentiful and insidious.) Keep in mind that you’re going to have to leave the office before you’ve finished every single task on your to-do list. I know it’s stressful to leave work knowing you have more emails to answer, phone calls to return, and reports to write. But there will always be more. You will always have more work to do. You can finish your emails, but more will appear in your inbox. More calls will come in. More reports will need to be written. It’s up to you to decide where the day’s cutoff is, and it’s up to you to stick to it.

This brings us to using a flexible mindset when something interferes with a previously scheduled block. Maybe your car breaks down, or your kid’s school calls you to pick them up for some reason or your computer crashes. You will drive yourself crazy if you freak out too much about unforeseen problems. This is not a time for freaking out. This is a time for mindfulness and identifying the obstacles and their solutions.

And finally, cut yourself some slack. You’re a person, and you’re going to make mistakes, run into snags, and might be dealing with other challenges like anxiety, depression, grief or something else. Remind yourself that you’re doing a good job. And maybe read Sarah Knight’s The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck. It’ll bring you some much-needed levity and insight into learning to let go.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

9 Behaviors for a Healthy Relationship

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9 Behaviors for a Healthy Relationship

I get a lot of questions about what makes a successful relationship, and while each relationship is unique, there are some standard behaviors you can employ that will propel you toward success. At first, this shift in behavior can feel clunky and even a little stressful. Don’t worry about it. If you practice this stuff enough, it’ll become a habit. And don’t get me wrong. Sure, on the one hand, it’s a challenging shift, but it’s also totally worth it.

Ok, so here we go.

1) If the iconic ‘80s show, The Facts of Life, taught us anything it was that “you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both.” Accept your partner for the whole person they are, someone with wonderful gifts, adorable traits, and irritating quirks. It’s along the lines of a pick-your-battles situation. Everyone has flaws. You can’t change that. And seriously, you cannot change that so don’t try. It’s fine to fight about them. In fact, you will, and this is totally healthy (as long as you’re using fair fighting techniques). But if you want your relationship to be successful you’ll need to be able to accept your partner’s flaws and remember why you’re with them. Don’t be with someone if you think they’ll make a good partner as long as they change core parts about themselves. It’ll only invite hurt, drama, and resentment. Be with someone whose imperfections you can deal with on a regular basis.

2) Empathic honesty without blame is what it’s all about. You don’t have to be brutally honest. In fact, I don’t recommend it. You love this person and you’re expressing yourself honestly for your relationship to overcome something so, there’s no need to take an aggressive approach. You’ll also want to move away from using blame while delivering your honesty. It will be easier for your partner to listen and you’re message will be clearer if you leave blame out of it.

3) Communicate your needs, feelings, and experiences directly. Don’t expect your partner to read your mind; say what you need to say. Open and honest communication can be intimidating for a myriad of reasons, but it’s worth it. The alternative is clamming up about it and relying on dropping hints and passive aggressive communication. For the love of everything holy, please don’t do this. Your partner ends up getting confused (understandably) and you end up building resentment toward them when they inevitably don’t meet your needs. When you clearly and directly state your needs you not only avoid unnecessary strife, you also give your partner a chance to show up for you which builds trust and intimacy.

4) Don’t be a victim. Engaging a victim perspective positions you and your partner against one another which strips away the intimacy you’re working so hard to build. Instead, be a champion for yourself and advocate for what you need. Using number 2 and 3 is a great way to do this. When you communicate using empathic honesty and direct messaging you’ll feel empowered, and your partner will feel like a valued member of your partnership.     

5) Look for the best in your partner. You started dating this person for a reason. You’ve continued dating them for a reason. Once the initial excitement wears off, and you’ve gotten a few fights under your belt, it’s pretty easy to let those reasons fade from memory. The solution isn’t always easy, but it’s simple. Look for the best. Look for what your partner does right, for the loving intentions behind their behavior, and for what gifts your partner brings to your life. When you actively look for the reasons why you love your partner you become more supportive, more charitable, and more loving. You become a better partner. (Looking for the best in your partner also makes it much easier to put their mistakes and flaws into reasonable perspective.)

6) Stop keeping score. This is a kind of opposite to looking for the best in your partner. With score-keeping, not only are you looking for all the things they did wrong, but you’re also not letting mistakes become part of the past. There are many reasons for doing this. You might keep score so that you can hold it as currency. You might use these wrongdoings as reasons to do something you shouldn’t or to not do something you should. Or maybe you use them as a way to absolve yourself from your misdeeds. This hurts the relationship because you set the default to “look for the faults” with your partner instead of “look for the best.” Use number 1 to help you out with this. Remind yourself to be with your partner now, not yesterday, a week ago, five years ago. Remind yourself that you choose this person which means you choose to be with their mistakes. You might also feel tempted to keep score about sacrifices you make for the person, good deeds, and favors. Don’t. This is an effective way of building resentment on your end and mistrust of your gifts on theirs.

7) Spend time together, time engaged in parallel activities, and time apart. It’s not healthy to spend every waking second together so don’t. Couples need a balance of time together with various levels of engagement and time apart. The time you spend directly engaged with your partner is beneficial for building and maintaining intimacy. It gives you the chance to have shared experiences which can enrich the narrative of your relationship. Time spent together, but less engaged (like when one of you is playing Angry Birds, and the other is cooking, or you’re reading separate books) is also enriching and allows you to maintain your individuality while simultaneously enjoying the company of the other. The time you spend part from one another is critical for maintaining your relationship with yourself, your individuality, and your self-sufficiency. When you prioritize time apart, you allow yourselves to experience new things to take back and share with your partner which is also pretty attractive.

8) Let go of some conflicts. Of course, it’s important to address conflict and find resolutions, but there is such a thing as resolving something to death. The truth is, you’re just not going to resolve every single problem, and that’s ok. This is where numbers 1, 5, and 6 can help you out. Accept the other person’s differences and flaws, remember why you’re with them and don’t keep a tally of all the times they’ve hurt you or pissed you off. And know that you are going to have recurring disagreements and arguments; it’s part of being in a long term relationship.

9) Know when to let go of the relationship. This plays as big a role as the others in creating a successful relationship because said relationship might be the one after the relationship you’re in currently. Sometimes you’re ill-matched and there’s nothing you can do to change it since changing it would mean altering core parts of yourselves. Knowing when to end it helps you to bring the relationship to a close in a healthy way and move onto a more successful partnership whether that means being with yourself for a while or being with someone else. The important thing is to be in integrity with yourself and your values.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

After the Hurt

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After the Hurt

We’ve all said or done hurtful things either by accident or intentionally. If we’re in a relationship long enough, it’s bound to happen. The injury can happen for many reasons. Sometimes we feel hurt so we hurt back. Sometimes we’re carrying around so much hurt from past relationships that we act from a defensive (or offensive) place. Sometimes we expect to be hurt, so we hurt first.

After we’ve hurt someone we love so many feelings are likely to surface. We might experience guilt, shame, residual anger at the other person, anger at ourselves, and sadness. We want to apologize for our actions, but we don’t know how or where to start. And the difficulty of extending an apology is exacerbated by our anger at the other person if we feel hurt by them, too. It’s pretty common to succumb to the temptation of sweeping it under the rug and forgetting about it (until the next time).

And while it is easier to forget about it in the short term, this is a dicey way to go. When we don’t hold ourselves accountable for wrongdoing, we send messages to our loved ones that we aren’t prioritizing their feelings, that dealing with conflict is too scary, that we aren’t concerned with their experience, and that we have difficulty with interconnectedness. Withholding an apology is a way to cut off intimacy and garner fear and resentment in the relationship, things that, over time, can kill a relationship. Most of us let this happen unintentionally. We’re not necessarily trying to sabotage the relationship (at least not consciously).

So, how can we do our part to keep this from happening? We have to show our loved one empathy and take responsibility. This starts with getting ourselves back on track. We have to remind ourselves what our values are and the importance of the relationship. This will help us stay in integrity with ourselves when we start the conversation and maintain our resolve when it starts to feel uncomfortable (because it will).

Once we’ve grounded ourselves in our values and our commitment to our loved one, we can come to them in an attempt to make peace. Sometimes we come to them, and they’re not ready to talk about it. That’s ok. This process is not about absolving ourselves of anything; it’s about showing integrity and love to the other person. It’s important to give respect and wait until they’re ready.

When they are ready to start the conversation, we should begin by taking responsibility for whatever it is we did or said. The most important thing is not that we start off by effusively apologizing; that indicates that our primary goal is to be forgiven, that this whole process is about making ourselves feel better. The most important thing is to let the person know we see them, that we understand what we did wrong, and that we want to know how they experienced the hurt. So we listen.

Next, we validate them. We listen to them, and we validate their experience. We make room for them as they communicate how they feel about what happened. This is not the time for us to defend ourselves or to explain our actions. This is the time for us to listen to the other person’s experience.

Finally, we show empathy. We let the other person know that we can understand how they might be feeling. If this understanding eludes us, we can ask supportive questions to help us identify with them.

Ok, so we take responsibility, listen, validate, show empathy. There is a time in the conversation to explain what was happening for us, and it’s now. After we’ve taken responsibility, listened, validated, and shown empathy, we can communicate our experience.

It’s a little tough-going at first, but this process is incredibly rewarding. It nurtures the relationship. If you have any questions or need some clarification, please let me know.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

Advice for Anyone Seeking Therapy or Counseling

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Advice for Anyone Seeking Therapy or Counseling

I’ll admit that when I’ve experienced a problem I’ve waited until I’m pretty desperate to address it. I’ve also waited until I just can’t take it anymore to get help. First, there are the, “Oh, maybe it’ll resolve itself” thoughts. Then I think, “Well, it hasn’t gone away, but I’ll just look around out there to see if there’s anything that seems helpful.” It’s usually around the “I can’t go on like this” thinking that I’ll decide to seek help and by that time, I’ve been white knuckling it for so long that I’m craving instant relief and resolution.

Sound familiar?

This happens all the time. Many of us don’t seek a solution at the first or second sign of a problem. There are many reasons why people don’t seek help right away. Sometimes it’s pride, sometimes fear. Some of us grew up in homes with unresponsive adults on whom we couldn’t depend for help so, we learned that healthy support isn’t an option. Many of us believe that our circumstances are “just the way life is” and we don’t believe a better alternative is available to us. Whatever the reason behind it, the longer problems exacerbate, the more resources we burn through trying to hang in there.

Often, by the time a person reaches my couch they’re ready to either quit a job, send their kid away, get a divorce, cut off their family, or throw in some other kind of towel. They’re over it (and they’ve been over it) and are looking immediate relief. They’re hoping for a major shift in the first session or two. And this can make for a pretty rough start to therapy.

There are some therapeutic protocols that can yield faster results, but they’re not indicated for every presentation. When they are indicated, there is often a lot of groundwork that has to be constructed before any of these modalities can take hold for a person. It takes practice to become more self-aware of our behavior, to gain insight, to change our thoughts, and to change our behavior. It’s a process.

It’s not that it takes years and years of therapy before anyone can benefit from its tools. It’s just that it’s not going to change things overnight. It took time and action for the problem to build, and it will take time and action for it to resolve. Therapy can sometimes be a painful, scary, and frustrating endeavor. It’s also totally worth it.

So, if you’re reading this and have been thinking about starting therapy, go ahead and start making the calls to the therapists who seem like they might be a good fit for you. If you’re reading this after what feels like a failed therapy attempt or still need to know more about what to expect, read on.

You probably already know that there is no magic elixir, no magic pill or incantation or book that will make all (or any) of your problems disappear. Therapy doesn’t offer a magic cure either. What it does offer is a supportive space to tell your story, reflect with an experienced professional on what has and hasn’t worked and why, and practice new ways of trying to work out the problem. Sometimes people report that it’s felt as though things have gotten worse before they’ve gotten better. It’s messy and challenging to open up the can of worms we’ve been carrying around for years. Other people say that it felt more like slow and steady progress. There are people who felt like they made progress and then crashed again or plateaued. As many people as you gather in a room are as many different stories about the therapeutic experience.

Sometimes you won’t find the right therapist for you, and that will be frustrating. Sometimes you will find the right therapist, and you’ll be frustrated by certain questions or homework assignments or the fact that you have opened up to a stranger, and you’re still really suffering. This is all part of it. In therapy, on your road to wherever it is you want to be, you are going to feel a multitude of emotions, some uncomfortable, some wonderful. You are going to try things that work, and you’re going to try things that don’t work so well. You’re going to make gains, and you’re going to have setbacks. The difference is you won’t be doing it alone. You’ll be doing all of this with an enlisted ally who wants you to succeed, who reflects back to you what they see, and who will offer variations on an approach based on their intimate knowledge of you, your situations, and human behavior.

If you can work through the intermittent discomfort, there’s a whole other world waiting for you on the other side.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

Stop Catastrophizing

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Stop Catastrophizing

As I was finishing up grad school, I began diligently searching for jobs in my field. After a lot of cover letter writing interviewing, I finally found an entry-level position and set up shop. A little while later I was laid off due to budget cuts. I hadn’t been in love with the job, but I’d liked it well enough and the prospect of job hunting again and being unemployed for the first time scared me. One night, I was talking to my wonderful friend about it, and I was freaking out. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I recall verbatim her response. After I had painted us both a bleak picture of my future she paused for a minute, then said, “So, do you think you’re going to be the 80-year-old in the retirement home who just never found another job?”

She stopped me dead in my tracks, trained a spotlight on my thinking, and called it out for what it was- catastrophizing. Catastrophizing is worst-case scenario thinking. It’s pretty common and can be kind of fun when using it for affected theatrics or hyperbole. It’s much less fun when it feels more like a belief, and we’re just waiting for it to happen.

In my line of work, people catastrophize to me a lot. Sometimes they’re aware they’re doing it and sometimes they’re not. It’s my job to help them identify the behavior and get their thinking back into reality and under control.

Catastrophizing is a bit like a photo filter for our brains. And, oh, there are so many filters available to us. We can use the all-or-nothing thinking (or black and white thinking) filter, the discounting-the-positive filter, the mind-reading filter, and the blame filter. That’s not even all of them. There are countless ways for us to distort situations.

When we employ all-or-nothing thinking, we only allow for extremes. We invisibilize the whole picture, which means we invisibilize a lot of pertinent information. With this line of thinking, there are no positive outcomes for us.

Discounting the positive is a way for us to either weigh only the negative or weigh the positive in a negative way, either about ourselves, a situation, or someone else. It looks like this: “Why would anyone want to hire me? I’m young and inexperienced and don’t have a very impressive resume.”

Mind reading offers just about as much comfort. Here, we assume we know someone’s intentions. “She probably called me into her office because she wants to reprimand me for something.” “He told me he liked my presentation only because he feels sorry for me and is hoping his kindness will somehow make me believe in myself.” These are good examples of mind reading. With assumptions like these, we improve our chance at living in a state of interminable insecurity.

Using blame as a cognitive distortion is equally as useful as its sibling methods. When we use blame, we can either take none of the responsibility or more than our fair share. Something is either everyone else’s fault because they didn’t (fill in the blank) or because we didn’t (fill in the blank). “I shouldn’t have asked for that raise.” “I shouldn’t have said anything about how I was feeling.” “She shouldn’t have spoken to me that way.” “They shouldn’t have set the bar so high.” When we use blame as a defense, we don’t have to see a situation clearly which means we can stick to our patterns that have become so uncomfortable for us.

All of us fall into these distortions at some point. It’s important that we identify them and know how to handle them. We can combat them by asking ourselves questions that will help us with our reality testing. A useful question that I like to use both professionally and personally is, “What is the real evidence that this is true?” This is a good jumping off point. Any evidence we think we’ve found to support our distortion can be thoughtfully worked through and sorted. It’s best to enlist an ally when we first start challenging our cognitive distortions because we’ll likely fall into the same patterns if we don’t have a more objective outsider. Start with a trusted friend, family member, or therapist. You’ll find that you don’t have to believe everything you think.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

“This is all your fault.”

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“This is all your fault.”

It’s important that we hold ourselves accountable. To be in a healthy relationship with ourselves and one another, we need to be able to accurately identify when we do something right and when we do something wrong. If we hold ourselves accountable, we learn what works, what doesn’t, and how to be a safer partner, friend, or loved one.

If I hurt your feelings, I need to take responsibility for my actions so that I can keep the integrity of the relationship. If I unintentionally hurt your feelings, I might say something like, “I can see how that would be hurtful. I’d be hurt, too. I’m so sorry that’s what it felt like to you. I would never intentionally do something to hurt you.” Then I’d probably ask you more about what it was that made you feel bad. I’d want to know what happened so that we’re both understood, make sure we increase our fluency of one another’s language, and sharpen my tools so that we have a better chance of avoiding a repeat. If I intentionally hurt your feelings, I might say something like, “You’re right. I was wrong to say that. You have every right to be hurt. I’m so sorry I hurt you.” I would do everything I could to provide a space where you felt heard and safe enough to express your experience.

The same would be true if I did something right. I’d need to be able to identify and take ownership of doing something loving or nurturing. Anything I might do in our relationship would be important information for how I feel about you, the relationship, and myself. My behavior is what I do, but it’s not who I am.

Think about that for a minute. Our behavior is what we do; it’s not who we are. One of the valuable gifts of accountability is that it reminds us of this truth every time we use it.

Blame is different. Blame tells us that our behavior is who we are. While accountability says, “I did this” blame tells us, “I am this” and is usually followed by some form of punishment and shame. Blame isolates us from our loved ones and our best selves.

When we blame ourselves, it usually sounds a lot like, “It’s all my fault. I always do this.” There is often a feeling of shame behind self-blame. We’re ashamed, so we blame ourselves, which makes us feel more ashamed, and it just goes on. Using blame also means that we are less likely to own our attributes in a positive way. There’s a better chance that we’ll throw our favors or good deeds in someone’s face, use them as weapons, or use them as tools to blame.

Anyway, we use blame will result in a negative outcome. It doesn’t matter if we blame ourselves or someone else. The message we are sending is the same- “one (or both) of us is faulty.”

When we practice accountability (whether we’re holding ourselves or someone else responsible), we increase our social and emotional resilience. We have a better understanding of what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again. We become better partners, friends, and colleagues because we’re much less toxic. We don’t have to delight in others’ mistakes and minimize their attributes because we are confident in ourselves. Accountability gives us freedom.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

The Problem with Escapism

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The Problem with Escapism

Most of us like to take mini vacations from stress and responsibility, just get away from it all for a bit during our day. Sometimes it looks like scrolling Instagram, having some wine at the end of a workday, playing a game on a device, watching beloved television programs, or exploring online. There’s nothing wrong with this practice. In fact, this kind of self-care behavior can help boost our resilience so that we’re able to keep up with our commitments. If we approach and engage these practices in a balanced way, they can have therapeutic value.

Depending on our own social and emotional resources and what’s happening in our lives, it’s easy to slip into escapism. The things that used to help alleviate stress or provide a bit of soothing can become problem behaviors that amplify our stress. Sometimes we catch it early and cut it off at the pass. We’re able to veer back onto our preferred course. And sometimes we notice the shift, but feel unable to stop. Sometimes we don’t notice it at all.

It’s understandable why we seek out these behaviors and become dependent on them. They’re fun, and they help our brains release various amounts of dopamine (the “feel good” neurotransmitter). Who doesn’t want to feel good?

But, as with anything, we can overdo it. What once made us feel good now doesn’t give us as much of a high. We need more. It would be bad enough if it stopped there, but it gets worse.

We become accustomed to a certain amount of dopamine that is released, and we need more to make us feel as great as we did before. We’re chasing the dragon. Then, we start to feel less motivated to do other things because it appears to our brains that these activities have lost their appeal. We start processing things differently. We perceive usual tasks to take more effort and believe that they have less value to us. This usually means we need more of our escape activity to offset our increasing discomfort. Over time, we can train ourselves to increase the dread we experience connected to certain activities through the use of our escape tools.

The thing about the human brain is that it loves to learn new things. It’s a little adventurer. The dopamine boost that our brains get from learning something new and completing the pattern of information is incredibly valuable. Our brains are constantly seeking the next hit of new information.

A few escape tactics are fine if they are kept in check and balance. If we rely on them too much, we’ll experience increased depression and decreased motivation, which will take a toll on our self-compassion and self-efficacy. It can be a pretty tough pattern to break.

Try a little experiment. Dedicate a week to addressing your life without using your escape tools and see what you notice. If you want to try this, but aren’t sure how to start, or you tried and failed, let’s tackle it together. Sometimes we just need a little support and accountability to make the transition.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

What Failure Really Means

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What Failure Really Means

No one likes to fail. It’s disappointing and, depending on what failed, is accompanied by various negative emotions. And there are just countless ways in which we can fail, aren’t there? We fail in relationship, flunk out of school, and fail at our jobs or in our careers. We can fail board exams, sobriety tests, and physical exams. Really, at every turn, there is an opportunity to fail. Life can start to feel pretty daunting… depending on how we value failure.

Failure means different things to different people. To some of us, it might mean we’re not good enough or that we didn’t try hard enough. To others, it might mean something is wrong with us. However, we look at it, under these assumptions failure is something to be ashamed of.

There’s another way to understand failure. We can look to it as a teacher. If we fail, it means we tried something. We put ourselves out there and took a risk. Maybe the failure is there to tell us what doesn’t work. Maybe it means we should try it a different way or at a different time or using alternative components.

We’re going to fail. It’s inevitable. If we try enough things, we’re going to fail. It’s part of living. The healthier our relationship with failure, the more useful it will be to us and the easier it will be to manage.

So, how do we do it? How do we become more open to the negative or uncomfortable experiences that are a part of the journey of accomplishing our goals?

It’s helpful if we have a growth or “challenge” mindset versus fixed or “threat” mindset. With a growth mindset, we view things as experiments. Everything is a teachable moment. With a fixed mindset our beliefs are absolute, impermeable to change, and everything is a threat. We’re much more insecure and defensive in a fixed mindset. The first step, then, is to try to talk ourselves through an endeavor or a failure as though it’s an experiment… because it is.

A helpful way to become more psychologically flexible is to access our curiosity. “What didn’t work? Why? What should I try next?” The more we move toward curiosity and away from self-judgment, the less we will view failure as an exhibition of our lack of worth and the more inclined we will be to make the necessary changes.

We’ll spend less time ruminating, hiding, and avoiding and more time learning about what we need to do to fix the problem. We will increase our emotional resilience.

Most of us know we need to make improvements, but we start to lose the value of that knowledge when we take failure personally. Taking a position of curiosity will help us get closer to our goals.

It takes courage to fail. It takes courage to be open to the lessons failure has to teach. It’s common for us to avoid trying so that we can avoid the discomfort it brings. It’s common for us to experience failure and let it define us instead of gathering the information, reassessing it, and bouncing back for another experiment. Hiding from avoiding failure is a great way to teach ourselves to become more fearful of failure. It’s an effective way to clip our own wings and make sure we stay stuck.

But if we let it, failure can mean that we have the courage, strength, and resolve to try something again and again, that we are unstoppable champions of our goals.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

Motivate Yourself

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Motivate Yourself

You and I both know that, sometimes, it’s hard to self-motivate. Pretty much everyone experiences it at some point- getting out of your warm bed on a cold morning, sticking with your workout routine, catching up on emails and phone calls, giving a presentation to a large group, making the healthy meal choice, initiating a difficult conversation, transitioning from something fun to something not-so-fun. It might even sort of feel like a miracle that you were able to make it from bed to the bathroom to brush your teeth this morning.

And before you get too deep into the “Ugh, I’m so lazy. I just need to suck it up! Everyone else seems to be able to do it” narrative, let me just tell you that every typically developing human brain experiences this same problem. The human brain is wired to seek comfort and satisfaction because comfortable and satisfied equals safety (i.e., you get to live). Discomfort, on the other hand, equals danger (i.e., you might die). It’s adaptive. This process is what helps keep you from standing in a busy street full of cars or leaving your hand on a hot stove. Your brain doesn’t care (or even know) if, in reality, you won’t die from giving a presentation to 500 people. It just knows that its little limbic system is firing signals that the current situation is not safe. Your body is a great listener to this network and starts to release more cortisol into itself and before you know it, you are in full fight or flight mode. Do this enough times and you get a good old fashioned pattern happening in which you don’t even need to think twice before this process is right behind the trigger.

But take heart. It’s possible for you to rewire this process in your brain so that you don’t have to go through quite so much sturm and drang. It takes work and commitment, but with enough practice, you can retrain your brain to respond more favorably to what you previously viewed as insufferable tasks.

Rewiring your brain to perceive things differently can help you to accomplish all sorts of things that normally feel tricky or burdensome. You can learn to manage your time better, delay gratification, improve your self-discipline, strengthen your relationships, and improve your confidence, just to name a few. You might even start to view your brain as a cute sidekick and powerful ally instead of an enemy. To improve or maintain the relationship you have with your brain, take a look at two basic things you can do to increase your ability to self-motivate.

First thing’s first. You need to know why you are doing what you’re doing. You’re much more likely to keep your commitments if they are in line with your value system. Start by identifying your values, the way you live your life, your personal code of integrity. Do you want to be a better parent? Do you want to live a more purposeful life? Do you want to be and feel healthier and stronger? Identifying your values behind the action is crucial for getting your buy-in.

Second, you must identify actionable and measurable goals for yourself. This will give you a concrete plan for next steps and a sure-fire way to see if you’ve hit your target or not. Let’s say that one of your values is self-respect. Part of how you demonstrate self-respect is by treating your body well. Some ways you can treat your body well? Get yourself moving regularly and feed yourself healthy foods. So, one of your actionable and measurable goals can be “Today, I will take 200 more steps than I did yesterday” and “Today, I will drink 16 more ounces of water that I did yesterday”. Start small and be realistic. Remember to step up your goals as you accomplish them. The more you practice accomplishing the challenges you set for yourself, the more you will increase your confidence and ability to self-motivate and the better you will be at it. (I’m serious. fMRIs show that the more our brains experience challenges and accomplish goals related to those challenges, the more emotionally resilient we become.)

Some days, you might shoot your goal right out of the water. On days like these, you will feel invincible. Other days, you might have a hard time making it to your goal at all. You might even fail. This is a good thing. We can talk about how these failures are useful to you (and how failure, in general, is an important part of the human experience).

If you’ve tried this and are having trouble or if you can’t seem to get yourself in gear to make the first move, please let me know and we can talk about next steps.

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie

“I have anxiety… or do I?”

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“I have anxiety… or do I?”

I’m a therapist. I talk a lot about feelings. On this site, I write a lot about feelings, how overwhelming they can be, the consequence of letting them spin out of control, and how to manage them. Since I don’t want feelings to get a bad reputation, I’m going to talk about what incredible guides they can be.

People come to see me for help with their relationships, careers, decision-making, and trauma work. Feelings play an important role in all of these situations. It’s common for people to have trouble deciphering and trusting their feelings. For most of us, when feelings are left unidentified or untrusted they can start to feel like they are totally out of our control. This is when emotion management is really helpful.

And sometimes they’re not out of control. Sometimes they don’t need to be contained and managed. There are times when all we need to do is listen to them because they are telling us something we need to know. This is tricky, though. It can be a tough balance between listening to what our feelings are telling us and feeling overwhelmed and confused by them.

A lot of us struggle with this. We look for ways to soothe feelings we would rather not feel. We look for ways to soothe others’ feelings that they would rather not feel. We reinforce that certain feelings are nothing more than a hurdle to jump. We just want those feelings to go away so that we can feel good again and do what we want to do. It’s understandable.

Remember the example about fire? When we put our hand near a flame, we feel the heat. The closer we move our hand to that flame, the more heat we can feel and the greater the pain we experience. If it didn’t hurt, we wouldn’t be inspired to keep a prudent distance from the flame, and we’d get burned. The pain serves as a useful guide to help us protect ourselves from danger.

We can use this logic for all emotion states, too. If we’re resentful, it might mean we need to self-advocate. If we’re embarrassed, it might mean we need to be more honest with ourselves. If we’re anxious, it might mean we need to put more effort into something. And let’s look at a big one- guilt and shame. Sometimes these emotion states are warning us and sometimes they’re drowning us… and sometimes it’s both.

There are plenty of times when feelings are less about our present experience and more about our past experience. When this happens, the anxiety that we’re feeling might have nothing to do with our level of effort. This is when managing and containing the feeling is important because the guide is a bit off; it’s your brain’s way of trying to predict what is going to happen next based on an old pattern, not the current pattern.

The best way to differentiate between feelings as guides and feelings as overwhelming monsters that need to be managed and contained is to learn about your patterns, past, and present, and start making connections.

If you have any questions about how you can use your feelings as guides, please call or email me. My contact information is located in the “Contact Me” section of this website. I look forward to talking with you!

 

Love and Be Loved,
Natalie