As human beings, it is our nature to fixate on what we want or desire rather than appreciate what we have right now, or where we are in our own journey. When you think about it, our modern conveniences help solidify those expectations. For example, the Amazon elves will bring us our things from Amazon the same day. Need some things from Target? You can have your order in a couple of hours. Want to order from your favorite restaurant? They can deliver that to you, too, within the hour. Obtaining these things take little effort. Just a click of a button and you can get what you want. These conveniences are great, but it teaches us that we don’t have to delay our gratification.

When we have the ability to get whatever we want, when we want it, we begin to lose the patience needed to trust in the process. We lose belief, that maybe the universe is unfolding as it should, and if something is truly meant to be, it will find its way back to you. We lose the ability to trust the process. And the truth is, going through the process is where we grow and discover more about who we are. When climbing the mountain, the true victories are all the challenges you had climbing it and all you had to go through to reach the top. It’s where you learned what you were really made of. No mountain top can show you that – only the journey can.

Train your mind to believe that whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. If a door is meant for you, it will open. If it doesn’t, well then, it is not your door.

When we fixate on a specific thing or outcome, we close ourselves off to so many other possibilities and opportunities. To realize your full potential, you need to have mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing.

The definition of modesty is the quality or state of being unassuming or moderate in the estimation of one’s abilities. It isn’t having a low opinion of yourself, but rather a way of being. For example, in a group project at work your teammates give you most of the credit because you worked really hard, and you modesty say it was a real team effort and success wouldn’t have been possible without everyone’s help. You know you went over and beyond, but you don’t feel the need to state it to everyone else.

Having a low opinion of yourself on the other hand is an issue with how you see yourself. When you struggle with your self-image and whether or not you believe you are worthy, self-destruction is quick to follow. You see, if you come from a place of believing you are less than, you will always be seeking to prove to others that you are enough. Not only will you become overly dependent on external validation, but you will also lose yourself in the process as your soul erodes one compromise at a time.

Many times, people who struggle with believing in themselves fear becoming arrogant, full of themselves or a narcissist. And if you wonder about that about yourself, I have good news for you…The fact that you are worried about becoming that way tells me that you aren’t. But here are the key differences between being confident in yourself and arrogance:

1. You like to learn. A confident person knows they don’t know everything and look for opportunities to learn more about themselves and the world around them. They are open to new things. Arrogant people tend to be stuck in their lane and don’t like to be challenged.

2. You a strong sense of self-esteem. How you feel about yourself isn’t dependent on what others think of you. Arrogance is often a front people put up to mask some serious insecurity and low self-esteem. Confidence is silent and insecurities are loud.

3. You don’t feel the need to dimmish other people’s light to make yours brighter. People who are confident in themselves and where they are in their own journey, don’t feel the need to bring other people down so they look better. But arrogant people will seek to elevate their own stature by diminishing yours.

Happy New Year’s Eve! I thought it would be fun to share my list of things I want to do in 2022. After 2020 and 2021, I am eager for things to go back to “normal”! Here’s my list in no particular order:

• Prioritize getting 7-8 hours of sleep every night.
• Prioritize hydration.
• Lose 10% of my overall weight.
• Get in better shape to do more hiking adventures.
• Go on a road trip into the mountains in the Summer/Fall.
• See the Northern Lights.
• Visit Lowell Observatory.
• Prioritize spending more quality time with my husband and family.
• Make a visit back East.
• Work on Self-Care Sunday posts for this website.
• Figure out what I want to do with our YouTube channel and create a content calendar.
• Improve my video editing skills.
• Spend time meditating every morning before exercise.
• Prioritize down time and don’t let work seep into that time.

What are the things you want to do in 2022?

It is much easier to be proactive than reactive in repairing damage after it has happened. When it comes to our relationships, I like to look at healthy relationships as being a competition in generosity. What does that even mean?

Over time in any relationship, people become super comfortable with each other and stop showing each other the love, admiration, and respect that they feel. This familiarity causes them to feel like their partner just knows that they love them. After a while couples stop connecting on an emotional intimate level and begin to focus on criticizing their partners, especially with small things.

According to clinician and psychological researcher John Gottman, the number one factor that ends romantic relationships are expressions of contempt by partners. Partners who focus their energy on being critical towards their partner, actually end up missing 50% of the positive things their partner is doing and will see negative things that aren’t even there. This not only leads to a distorted view of what’s happening in the relationship, but it breeds feelings of contempt and resentment.

On the flipside, Gottman and his researchers have shown that kindness and emotional stability acts like a glue that bonds partners together. If you think of kindness and generosity as a muscle that can grow stronger through exercising it, your relationship can radically improve.

What does generosity look like in a healthy relationship?

1.) Giving someone your time is the most valuable gift you can give. Being 100% present with them and being focused on what they are saying, rather than mumbling “uh-huhs” and going back to checking something on your phone can build connection, rather than weaken it.

2.) Take time to appreciate your partner’s positive qualities and be generous with your compliments. I fall into this trap with my husband. He will do or say something that makes my heart smile, and I will forget to tell him about it. I have to be intentional because I truly want him to know how much I admire and respect him. And he often replies that he would have had no idea that I felt this way if I hadn’t mentioned it. So, take the time to give your partner positive feedback.

3.) Don’t jump to conclusions about your partner’s intentions. It is so easy to assume that when your partner does something inconsiderate, it was intentional. Or if they are running late (my personal pet peeve) that they don’t value your time. Give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that your partner has good intentions.

So many of us have stayed in survival mode. The scars you wear are evidence of how hard you have fought to save yourself. Be proud of all that you have overcome. Many times, the wars that we have had to fight where not ones of our choosing – especially when we were younger. We had to level up and confront the war, even when we weren’t ready or didn’t know how to respond. We did the best we could under the circumstances. And we survived. But have we healed?

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, said, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” We can’t change what happened to us. But we can change how we respond to it. 

Healing from our trauma allows us to take back our power. We get to choose from that point forward how things are going to go. What we can do in taking back our power becomes limitless. We get to determine what we will do with our experience and how it will shape us going forward. But more so, healing is our responsibility. While we aren’t responsible for what happened to us, we are responsible for healing ourselves. 

Interestingly, researchers have discovered that many people who experience trauma, also experience incredible growth. As in, more than your average person who hasn’t experienced trauma themselves. Called post-traumatic growth, it is defined as “positive psychological change that is experienced as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances.”

In a recent Scientific American article, they list seven areas of growth seen in people who experience high levels of adversity:

• Greater appreciation of life
• Greater appreciation and strengthening of close relationships
• Increased compassion and altruism
• The identification of new possibilities or a purpose in life
• Greater awareness and utilization of personal strengths
• Enhanced spiritual development
• Creative growth

While the idea of healing and post-traumatic growth sounds fantastic, it takes time. A lot of time. And it isn’t easy. Sometimes it takes therapy. Working through what wounded you is a gift you can give yourself – a gift you 100% deserve. You were created to live a victorious, extraordinary life.

And if you are struggling right now, know that you are not alone. We all fall sometimes, and it is okay. It’s okay to grieve and be where you are right now – just don’t stay there. In a previous post, I talked about how you can start the healing process. You can read it here.

What change to you choose for yourself?

When you love someone, they will inevitability hurt you. How do you find the ones worth suffering or? Is it someone with a good heart who has just made some mistakes? Or is the person selfish who cares more about themselves than others?

Earlier this year I talked about how the responsibility of love is to keep another’s heart safe. I went in depth on healthy traits of an intimate relationship. Below are what they are in a nutshell, and you can click on the link to the post to read about what these traits look like.

1. You can be happy and whole on your own.
2. There is trust on both sides.
3. Each person is authentic, and they love and respect who each other is at their core.
4. You both know how to effectively communicate.
5. Each person takes personal responsibility for their own feelings, actions and thoughts.
6. You treat each other with respect.
7. You both welcome boundaries and aren’t offended by each other setting them.
8. Each partner makes the relationship a priority and actively put forth effort.
9. You both know how to resolve conflict.
10. Both show gratitude and appreciation for each other.

When you have these 10 traits in your relationship, getting through those difficult times are much easier. You meet problems in your relationship as a team and work to overcome them together.

Less than two weeks ago, I wrote about the importance creating some distance when trying to see things more clearly. We talked a lot about the law of attraction and knowing what you deserve.

I want to expound on why we lose sight of what we deserve when we stay in situations that no longer serve us. You see, we tend to look for some kind of closure when there has been an end to a significant piece of our life or our relationships have gone off the rails. So we hold on until we feel that sense of closure.  

Closure allows us to let go of what once was. It is acceptance of what has happened, honoring what was once there and integrating it into our lives. This integration allows us to move forward without self-imposed limitations and offers us opportunities in our lives that we might not see if we stayed stuck in the same place.

With relationships, it is completely human to want answers from someone when they are hurting us. We go into puzzle-solving mode, trying to understand where things went bad and where the red flags were. We keep seeking information until we are satisfied. But the truth is, most of the time we will never get all the information we seek.

Here’s the thing about closure: Closure is an inner-self journey of healing. It only requires you and you have to find peace on your own. And not all situations are going to look the same. It isn’t a linear process – it can be pretty messy.

It’s also important to note that everyone is different when it comes to closure. We all have distinctive ways in how we heal. Some need closure and peace of mind more than others, and that’s totally okay.

Let’s talk about some ways you start to get closure for yourself and restore your peace of mind:

1.) Give yourself the freedom to feel all the emotions you have – without judging yourself. Some find it helpful to journal their feelings and some prefer talking to a friend or therapist about how they are feeling. There is no right or wrong way to feel and you have every right to feel how you feel about it.

2.) Express your feelings in a way that promotes healing for you. If you know that confronting the person involved will bring you peace of mind, see if they will speak to you about it. If they aren’t, respect their boundary and write a letter to them and don’t send it. If you are seeking closure from the loss of a loved one, I find that sometimes saying the things that you wish you had the chance to say to them in person through a letter helps, too. 

3.) If you wronged someone, apologize. If you did something or said something that was hurtful, acknowledge and own what you did to the person involved. Whether it’s in person, on the phone or through email, express it. If the person doesn’t want to talk to you, respect their boundary and write a letter of apology and save it for a later date or just discard it instead of sending it.

4.) Practice gratitude and focus on what you learned from the experience. Say your ex ended your relationship out of the blue and you didn’t see it coming. Practicing gratitude and focusing on what you learned from the experience helps integrate what happened. Perhaps the relationship was an opportunity to learn more about what you like and don’t like in a partner. Maybe looking back you see some red flags that were there, and you can use that knowledge in future relationships. Relationships that end, while painful in the immediate, provide an amazing amount of opportunity for introspection and personal growth.

5.) Be patient with yourself. Like I said earlier, creating closure for yourself isn’t a linear process. It takes time. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other and stay open to all possibilities that lay ahead. 

In my first Self-Care Sunday post, I talked about how important it is to start your day from a place of gratitude.

We live in a culture where we are constantly bombarded by things. What people are doing, what they have, where they are going, etc. I often refer to social media as someone’s highlight reel. What you see is curated and manufactured content that doesn’t tell the whole story. Often it doesn’t even tell the real story. But we spend so much time looking at snapshots of others, with very limited context and we torture ourselves by comparing our lives to theirs.

When we don’t consciously practice gratitude, we come from a place of lack and we enter situations with scarcity mindset.  As a culture, we tend to focus on what we don’t have. If I had more time, when I’m happy with my weight or when I have enough money, then I will be happy. We base how we feel about ourselves or our situation from a place of not feeling good enough or that we have enough. We become dependent on outcomes that are theoretically going to make us happy – outcomes which we may or may not have much control over at all. When we become dependent on these things, we begin to create these expectations from others or from life in general. And like Shakespeare said, expectation is the root of all heartache. The danger of this kind of mindset is that you start living your life from a victim mentality.

If we approach our day from a place of being grateful for all that we have, we are already living our life from an abundance mindset. When we see things as abundant, we are more in control of our experience. When we feel like our world is abundant and we are open to the world and all its possibilities, a funny thing happens – we begin to attract everything we want.