I follow a lot of business blogs and although I enjoy them, I see a nonstop necessity to go at full speed. In reality, in my work as a therapist and coach who mostly focuses on emotions, I realize that we are often limited by things that happen in our daily lives.
Today, my daughter asked me what my New Year’s resolution was. I told her I would like to be calmer and truth be told this was a resolution that I made several times last year. In 2017 I was trying to be calmer, or to put it another way, clinically-manage my frustration tolerance better. I improved but not as much as I wanted to. I think the reason for my failure was that I hadn’t fully embraced why I lose my cool.I hadn’t fully accepted that I use frustration to avoid being direct.
Don’t let who you are stop you from being what you could be. -Jordan Peterson
It’s the little things that can make a big difference in preventing us from achieving our goals in life.
What is that little thing that you do that stops you from getting to where you want to be? For most of us, it’s more than one area that holds us back from fulfilling our potential.
How can you work on that today?
A client made this for me after a recent session. She was describing how work and life were going well but, you know, everything could be better. So I replied to her good is good.
All due respect to Elton John, but I’ve found acceptance—not ‘sorry’—seems to be the hardest word.
We crave it on an almost cellular level—in fact, our very existence was once tied to acceptance from our tribe. Today, we seek it all the wrong places from the size of our paycheck to our number of “likes” on Facebook. We search for it from strangers and spouses alike. We try to fill our acceptance vacuum with everything from boxed wine and Netflix to spin class and Xanax.
It’s become a predictable but all too common phenomenon: A beloved celebrity dies, and the social media blame games begin. As news of a celebrity death spreads across our screens, most people act, well, as decent human beings.
We experience the shared grief and sadness at a life lost too soon or celebrate a long life lived well. As the comments, tweets and remembrances roll in, most people express sadness, kindness, and loss with respect.
One of the biggest tricks to plugging in and thinking possible is finding your flavor.
Why do I use the word “flavor”? Because I want to help you to get you out of your head and into your heart and soul. So much of our programming has to do with thinking. And thinking is great! For some things. We need our thinking brain for math and science and maps and all kinds of other logic-based reasoning, but what we know about happiness is that it is NOT one size fits all principle. There is no one correct solution for everyone, the way there might be to a math or science problem. Therefore thinking only is not the sole key toward achieving happiness. We must also include the heart.
Many sessions with my clients are sprinkled with thoughts about regret.
What if I had done this instead of that?
Why didn’t I know this sooner?
What if I had gone, not gone, chosen a different doctor?
When I came up with the term to think possible, it was in response to years of thinking that to be successful you had to be close to perfect. As I dismantled my own belief that one had to be excellent in every way to be excellent in some ways I realized that many of the people that came in to see me felt the same way. If I am not almost perfect in all ways I can’t be amazing in any one way?
So this is what we did. It is what we do. We spent all day making the massa sovada, the bread of my ancestors. We baked it the way my dad’s mom had, which she had learned from her mom, and her mom had likely learned from hers. The recipe has changed a little, but with so few ingredients, it remains pretty similar. We do this to connect to my grandma. By connecting to her we connect with each other (which was her biggest passion anyway).
