Do Yourself No Harm

One of my favorite authors is Elizabeth Gilbert.  Her down to earth, matter of fact, style is refreshing.   Recently I watched her speech at the Oprah Magazine 10th Anniversary and was once again blown away by her real, genuine take on life.  We are all doing the best we can, with what we have.  The key is to recognize that in ourselves and those around us.

Check out Elizabeth Gilbert's talk on Do Yourself No Harm.

Living Happier with Our Bodies: The Happy Medium Place

Over the past few days, I have been thinking a lot about body image.  Many of us struggle with body image, weight, healthy eating etc.  I am happy to report, I have greatly decreased my Fat Talk over the past few months, as have my friends.  But I know it is still there, the idea that we aren't enough because we need to lose a few pounds, had donuts for dinner or didn't fit in our workouts this week.

I would like to lose weight--just 10-15 pounds that have creeped up over the past few months.  The problem is, I tend to have 2 modes when it comes to my weight.  A. eat whatever I want whenever I want it--which is what I have been doing the past few months, pizza 2-3 times a week, bite size chocolate treats throughout the day and more then the occasional fast food.  B. I am militant and become obsessed with monitoring every morsel of food for calorie count and nutritional value.  Neither option works for very long.  Option A. Leaves me lethargic, bloated and gaining weight.  Option B. Leaves me obsessed, cranky and unfulfilled. I know, there has to be a happy medium somewhere.

I woke up on Monday--after having pizza and burgers all weekend and decided I needed to do something--which for me means get militant. And a friend of mine who is a trainer/nutritionist gave me a diet to get me jump started.  One month of being hard core and I would lose some weight, cleanse my body and feel better.  I happily agreed, took the diet, went to the grocery store and 2 meals in realized I can't do this.  I can't eat chicken and broccoli and brown rice for dinner every night for a month.  I realized once again I was going down the very scary militant track.  I decided to figure out what I wanted, yes I want to lose weight and fit into the new summer dresses I bought.  But I also want to be able to enjoy my life, have the occasional ice cream and enjoy pizza night with my nearest and dearest (who by the way can eat WHATEVER he wants and still be thin--sadly, I am delusional and like to believe I can eat that way too and not gain weight which is why I am 10-15 lbs overweight, shocking!) More importantly I want to be healthy.  I want to feel energized and excited about my days. I want to know I am feeding my body with the nutrients it deserves not just making sure I keep it under so many calories.   AND I don't want to be obsessed with food.

So I am trying something new--the happy medium place.  The place where I limit sugar, avoid fast food and pick foods that I enjoy that are nutritionally sound. This place also includes pizza night, and the occasional treat of ice cream or cake.   Most importantly, in this place I am not warring against my body hating it for packing on the pounds. I am going to embrace my body from a place of love, a place where I want to treat it well and give it the food it deserves and the movement it craves.  Jen over at Follow My Bliss wrote a lovely post about this happy medium place.  "Love first", she says--and I totally agree.  We need to love our bodies whether we need to lose weight or not.  Because if we don't love our bodies we won't want to take care of them.  The endless battle needs to stop so we can Live Happier in our bodies.

Have you found the happy medium place? What tips do you have for making peace with your body?

Separating Our Self Esteem From Our To-Do List

I admit I am a little unmotivated today. It is warm and sunny here and all I really want to do is hang out.  I have been running from thing to thing most of the day and if I am honest I really haven't accomplished anything on my to do list. I was just getting ready to grab my latest novel and sit out on the porch and then I heard my internal voice go off.  I told myself, "AT LEAST write in your blog, then you will feel like you accomplished something, then you will feel good about yourself" And then I caught myself, caught my internal messages.  REALLY?!?  I will feel good about myself when I accomplish something!  Will I? Or will I just add to the list of more things I need to do to feel good about myself?  It really does get annoying.  No matter how much I know and have internalized the message that I am lovable, worthy, valuable period. I still have the underlying current of you will be good enough when messages. So I decided to go back through my day and think about all the messages that just happened today.

I will feel good enough when:
the kitchen is cleaned,
I make a million dollars,
the house is free of dog hair (which is never going to happen even if I vacuumed every hour)
I have watched everything on my DVR
I have checked off everything on my work to-do list
I finish the book my mom lent me 2 weeks ago
I eat healthier and treat my body better.

And that, my friends is just my list from today.  Honestly, it is only what I can remember from today.  Who knows how many other messages I didn't really acknowledge. How many messages have YOU heard today?

For whatever reason these messages are prevalent.  We might feel like we are fighting an uphill battle trying to win out over our negative critic.  But the key, as I see it continues, to be awareness. Awareness that they are lurking there.  Those pesky little voices that tell me I will be enough only WHEN I accomplish something.  Truth is these voices can be motivating, they can inspire me to get up off the couch and write, vacuum or return a phone call.  But the damage comes when we get stuck in the belief I will be good enough when.  Bottom line I am good enough no matter what, even if I gave myself the rest of the day off to hang on the porch and read.  AND at the end of the day I will probably feel better if I accomplish a few things on my to do list.  However, neither option has nothing to do with my self worth.  They are just options, choices in how I spend my time.  Because the list will always be there. A free evening to hang with my dog reading a good book in the sun won't always--guess I made my choice.

The Great Debate: Teaching Others How to Treat You

The other day I was debating with a friend of mine about the idea that we teach other people how to treat us.  Personally, I love this idea I find it empowering and insightful.  It helps me to realize that I am not a victim in my life.  I have had relationships in my life where the person wasn't treating me well, they were being disrespectful or uncaring. By 'teaching them how to treat me' if I stick around and put up with that negative behavior, I am teaching them it is ok to treat me with disrespect.  I am teaching them that I will be here even if you treat me like crap.  Now, it is NOT saying that I deserved that behavior in the first place, I brought it on myself and taught them from the very beginning to treat me poorly (which is what my friend was arguing).

It really got me thinking about that phrase--while I see it as empowering and I have choices and control, my friend sees it as she has all the responsibility for how people treat her.  So even if someone treats her poorly it is still her fault because she taught them wrong.  (I love that when someone shows me an entirely different  perspective I hadn't even thought about!!!)  I can understand her perspective and why she interprets the phrase/teaching in such a way.  And we had quite the rousing debate around the phrase.  I left with a new perspective (and also still a love for this teaching) and she left with a new perspective as well (don't know if she still hates the teaching or not).  And I told her I was going to blog about the phrase and our discussion.

I do believe that when we hang out for negative behavior we teach people that it is ok to treat us poorly.  And when we appreciate the people in our lives who treat us with love and respect when we pay tribute to them and honor them, they continue to treat us well.  That is the basis of the phrase for me.  We can chose who we have in our lives and by honoring the ones who respect us and cutting out the globbers we can teach people that we deserve respect and require that.  

My friend showed me that, in order to practice this teaching we first have to have the belief we are worthy of respect and love. We have to have the knowledge that we can't 'change' people and we can't make someone love us or treat us well.  Frequently we enter relationships believing if we are 'good enough' or do the 'right thing' we can fix the person we are with, we can earn their love and respect.  But in true healthy relationships, we 'earn' respect and love simply by being ourselves and genuinely showing up for the other person.

I am asking you to weigh in on the debate--what do you think of the phrase: Teaching other how to treat you?  

Sitting in the Muck

As a therapist, one of the things I know helps people move through their pain, grief, and life challenges is to sit in the muck.  To sit in the uncomfortable and be ok with the anxiety, fear, sadness, anger that emerges. When we are able to sit in the uncomfortable and face the emotions that come forward we are able to move through them faster.  If we can't sit with them we tend to run from them, and they grow and grow and grow.  However, as a person I know that one of the hardest things to do is to sit in the uncomfortable. To just be present to the grief, insecurity, and anxiety that comes forward.  To be comfortable in the unknown.

Lately, I have been doing a lot of career counseling with clients.  I love career counseling, helping people discover their passion and what makes their heart sing.  However, one of the hardest things about career counseling is it requires a time when clients have to sit in the muck.  Clients have to face their insecurities, their anxiety and fears around living their dreams.  For many clients in order to figure out their dreams, they have to shut down so many negative voices and face so much anxiety around the shoulds and what-ifs' that they get frustrated and exhausted.  My job as a career counselor isn't so much helping someone figure out their career as it is helping them become less afraid to sit in the muck and be truly present with themselves, negative voices and all.

When we can sit in the uncomfortable and face the muck and sludge that comes up we can let it go.  Many of us don't even want to go there we don't want to face the underlying anxiety, fear and insecurity that faces us all.  We spend our time running from thing to thing so we can avoid looking at 'what do I really want out of my life'.  Because we are afraid of the answer, afraid we won't be enough, afraid we won't succeed, afraid the negative voices are accurate.  Whatever we are afraid of we need to sit with it for awhile until it loses some of its sting and we can move through to live our dreams.  Until we face the muck we will continue to run, never really paying attention to our heart's desires.  The key is not to sit in the muck all at the same time, but to allow ourselves a little bit at a time.  As we face our fears they become less scary. Give yourself time and space to sit in the muck.

Today ask yourself the question, what do I truly want out of my life?  And if that is too big ask yourself what do I truly want out of the next year?  the next month? or even just today?  Then pay attention to what comes up, welcome it and sit with it.

Paying Tribute

Last week I took my mom to a fundraiser for a local Women's organization that helps empower women and girls to become stronger.  One of the components of the fund raiser was that every person who bought tickets had the opportunity to do a tribute to a person who impacted their lives in a positive way.  I had submitted a tribute for my mom because she inspires me with her strength, wisdom and courage.  She has helped shape me into the woman I have become. The organization published all of these tributes in a giant booklet that they gave to each of the attendees. It was a wonderful idea. I spent some of my afternoon reading the tributes and they were extremely touching and inspiring.

It got me thinking about how rarely we truly tell someone how much they mean to us. We rarely pay tribute to the people in our lives who influence, inspire, love, support and even challenge us to be better. We miss these opportunities for a thousand reasons.  Maybe we just don't think about it, or we are too proud to say the words out loud or we just don't have time.

Over the past few weeks I have been thinking about a speech I heard when I was in high school (over 20 years ago).  The presenter, David Austin Sky, talked about the definition of true intimacy.  That definition has come to play out in my own life and I have been thinking of David frequently over the past few weeks.  Ironically, he happens to live in my neighborhood and frequently walks past my house. I had seen him a few times in my neighborhood and debated stopping him to tell him the story and to thank him but talked myself out of it because I felt silly and embarrassed.  However, yesterday as I was opening my window shades to start my day I saw David walking past my house and before I could talk myself out of it, I ran out to the curb to catch him (pajamas and all).  I told him the story of how I remembered his speech and the influence it had on me. He was blown away and very appreciative that I had taken the time  to share how he had touched my life.  I didn't feel silly or embarrassed, I felt empowered and joyful, that I had shared my true feelings and appreciation for someone that inspired me over 20 years ago.

I love those stories, for him he was giving a presentation that he had given 100s of times, to an audience of 100 teenagers and here it is 20 years later and I am sharing how that story stuck with me and shaped me.  It is amazing when we think of how we can touch people without even realizing it.

Today I want you to think about who is someone who has inspired you to be a better person--a friend, a parent, a child, a teacher.  Someone who has touched your life in a meaningful way, it can be over the long haul as my mom has inspired me or a moment in time as David did.  Regardless,  think about this person, and pay them a tribute.  It can be in the comments section of my blog, a letter you write to them, a text message, phone call, e-mail or telling them the next time you see them.  Share your love and appreciation to this person.  Please, share how they changed your life and inspired you to be a better person.  I swear it will help you live happier.

Loosening Our Grip

I have been getting a lot of messages lately either through songs I have been listening too, conversations I have had or stories I have been told about the dangers of holding on too tightly.  It is a tough lesson and I thought maybe the universe was telling me I needed to look at it a little closer.

I admit I am a control freak. I like to know what is going on, when it is going to happen, and if I can how it will take place.  Lately, I have been re-learning the lesson that really much of my life is out of my control.  Yes, I try to pretend that I am in control, I try to delude myself in to thinking that I am the master of my fate.  And then the universe reminds me that there are many, many things I can't control: other people, our health, bad news, good fortune, bad luck, timing, etc.  I can try to have a grip on my day, week or life but in reality the harder I grasp on to control the more challenging and difficult life becomes.

A great example for me that I have noticed a lot recently is my need to rush from thing to thing. My need to control my schedule to the minute. Yes, there are places I need to be and client appointments I need to make but many of my 'deadlines' and 'timelines' are self made.  And as I scramble to make sure I make it through the grocery store in record time so I can eat my lunch at the predetermined time I realize I am rushing for no reason.  Much of my life I try to control for no reason other than the desire to control. Lately I have been loosening my grip (or at least trying to). Some of this loosening is due to my surgery last week and being forced to relax some and some of it is due to the repeated awareness of how tightly I am gripping my day to day life for no reason.  You know what?  The world doesn't collapse if I get off schedule, if I don't get everything on my to do list done, if I spend more time talking with my best friend and therefore don't get my garden weeded.  So when I catch myself tied up in knots because I am trying to control every aspect of my life I realize life is bigger than my having control.  I literally take a breath and take the proverbial weight of the world off my shoulders and life becomes happier.  

Another area where our grip gets tight is in relationships.  The need to control someone else is deadly to a relationship.  Rather than respecting someone where they are and allowing them to be themselves we try to make them into who we think they should be or who would best serve our needs.  The relationships I see that are the most toxic are the ones in which one partner has a death grip on the other.  When we try to control, manipulate, pigeon hole or suffocate our friends/partners we are doing a disservice to ourselves and those we love.  The best relationships I know are the ones where we loosen our grip so much that we give each other the ability to fly and we both choose to always return home. 

Where do you need to loosen your grip? 

Defining Success

How much of your life are you living for other people?  That has been a theme in my office over the past few weeks.  I keep hearing the same messages "I should be at this point", "By the time I reached this age I thought I would be at a different point", "My parents always told me I should be a _____", "I really want to stay home and take care of the kids and financially we can handle it but I should be working".

All of these outsiders telling us what to do and where we should be.  Offering some sort of invisible measuring stick of success.  Bottom line, at the end of the of our lives the biggest way we can be a success is to live a life that is hits our values and makes us feel whole and complete.  Too frequently we get caught up in the invisible measuring stick or living our life for other people.  We don't even think about what WE want or value or need.  Here's news, there is no invisible measuring stick of success.  Success is defined by each individual.  Only YOU can identify what success will be measured by in your lifetime. Is it how much money you make, how well adjusted your children are, how many countries you visit, or how many moments that left you breathless?  Recently, I have taken an informal pool asking people what defines success at the end of their lives, and they all have a different answer.  Rarely is the response, how much money they make or how successful they are.  Most answers involve laughter, joy, passion, and relationships.

But still we get stuck on being successful and measuring up to the invisible measuring stick.  So I am curious, how do you define success?  What makes your life successful?  What is your measuring stick consist of?  And most importantly if I could be a fly on the wall of your life using your measuring stick would I define you as successful?  Or have you gotten caught up in measuring yourself by someone else's stick?

Asking for Help

Sorry I have been out of touch.  Friday afternoon I had surgery and have been spending my days recovering on the couch.  Today I am finally feeling like myself.  Lying on the couch gave me lots of time to think, mostly about what a terrible patient I am.  The hardest part of the past 5 days wasn't the pain or discomfort.  It wasn't the surgery or the recovery.  The hardest part was asking for help.  I pride myself on being super independent on being able to take care of myself.  However, Friday evening coming home from the surgery center I needed someone, I needed my nearest and dearest to make me dinner, get me ready for bed and care for me.  Even Sunday morning as I headed down my walk to take my dog Mocha for a potty break I KNEW I was to sore and tired to be satisfy Mocha's walking needs.  I knew I would need to call my brother and have him and my niece and ask for help.  I just couldn't swallow my pride and ask for help (not until I got half way down the block and truly admitted to myself what a bad idea it was and called my brother)

So I learned a couple of things over the past 5 days of recovery.
1.  I am more stubborn then I thought--which is saying something because I always thought I was pretty stubborn!  
2. It is ok to ask for help.  People actually LIKE helping you once they get use to the fact you are asking.
3.  You have to teach people how to help you.  Meaning, I had to actually ASK for what I needed unfortunately that damn mind reading thing hasn't kicked in yet with my family and friends.  This was a tough lesson for me, because I am so independent people weren't use to me asking for help.  They didn't know what I needed or how to help me.  I had to
4. Most importantly I realized by swooping in to take care of everything, by attempting to not 'need' anyone and be uber independent I am missing out on the love and kindness that comes when people give to you.  I am missing out on the feeling of safety and security as my family and friends called to check on me, stopped by with hugs and food or just held my hand as I cried for no reason.   I was reminded that it is ok to need people, actually it makes life more enjoyable to know you have people you can count on and want to give to you when you let them.

I admit none of these were NEW lessons for me, they were all repeats of things I have shared here.  But I wanted to re-share them because I am sure I am not alone in my 'I am woman, hear me roar stance'. And to be honest, I really like that part of me.   I also like the feeling of knowing I have a support team out there ready to rally when I need them, all I have to do is ask.  This weekend I lived happier because of them.