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2.
You feel overwhelmed, overworked, undervalued and
under-appreciated. In fact, you feel like a
victim. It seems like things are being done
"to" you
(or a group of people you belong to) and
nobody appreciates you.
Antidote:
These feelings springs from a sense
of scarcity, so the best antidote is to start feeling
grateful. Once you begin to feel truly, sincerely grateful for
all the gifts you do have in your life (and everything in
your life is a gift), your energy levels increase and you
start enjoying your life again. Don't forget to feel grateful
for yourself, your strengths and abilities, what makes you
uniquely you.
3.
You need to buy a new bookshelf just for
your self-help books. I smile as I write this, since I probably have
one of the best collections around. It's not so much that
you have a large library, but that you are constantly
seeking for a magic answer, for the one single piece of
information that is going to lift you up and put you back on
the road to being your best self.
Antidote:
Go within. Use meditation, journal
work and prayer to seek the answers that are already within
you. Use the writings of others as starting points if you
will, but recognize that their writings are the answers
they came up with when they went inside themselves.
Start
with five minutes twice a day if that's all you have, but the
peace you are looking for already exists within you.
Become
friends with it once again. The easiest tool I can
recommend for this is the 3-Breath Miracle. Engage your mind in
following your breath for three long, deep, slow breaths, holding
them as long as possible and expelling air when you exhale.
Pay attention to how you feel once you do this completely.
This is the energy you are going for.
4.
The only reason you go to work is to keep a
roof over your head and food on the table.
This has nothing to do with the nature of the
work you do, but with how you feel about how you are using
your gifts and talents, and whether or not you feel you are
doing the best job you possibly can. Do you feel respected at
work? Do you respect the work that others do around you?
Antidote:
Remember that people around you
primarily serve as mirrors for how you feel about yourself.
When
you start giving 100% of yourself at work, when you
strive for excellence in all you do, and when you value
your contribution to the team/effort, others will
start reflecting that back. You cannot find work
that you love if you can't find the joy in the work that you
currently do. Again, it starts from within.
5.
You don't have a clear sense of who you are
or what you stand for. You find it difficult to make choices and you
feel like you are drifting from one life situation to
another. What seems important one day seems inconsequential the
next.
Antidote:
Identify your values. When you know
what you truly hold important in this life and allow yourself
to make choices in alignment with those values, you
gain tremendous freedom in your life. Being true to what you
believe in is very liberating. A simple way to get some
clarity is to ask yourself "What do I want to role-model for
others?"
If this confuses you because you thought you
were clear about your values and what is important to
you, you may be in a transitional mode where the priorities of
your values are shifting. This happens at different times
in our lives as we mature, get older and experience
different life events. For example, having children is a time
that many of us experience a shift in our priorities, as is
getting older and experiencing health problems.
As a rule,
allowing yourself to be "in the present" and seeing
that you are not giving up on a value, but reassigning it a
number will do much to let go of the confusion.
6.
You are more worried about being right than
about being happy. This is an easy game to get caught up in.
We
often look for life experiences that vindicate our opinions,
and not the other way around. The lure of being
"right" is
very seductive and it is very easy to sabotage
yourself with this game.
Antidote:
Ask yourself "Where in my life am I
letting my need to be right to take over? Am I willing to
let go of being right? Am I willing to be happy?
What
would it look like to be happy instead of being
right?" The
key point here is being willing to choose being happy over
being right. Once you make that choice, you will start to
notice where your need to be right is getting in the way.
7.
Before you go to sleep at night, you find
yourself wishing you had spent your day doing something
other than what you did. If you find yourself doing this on a
consistent basis, it's time to look at the choices you are making.
Also, this is different from not getting to something you
meant to do because something else required your
attention. This is about doing non-productive things on a regular
basis, then wishing we'd done something else.
Antidote:
There are two suggestions for this
item. The first is to not wait until you go to bed to review
how you spent your time. Look at what you are doing on an
hourly basis. The other suggestion is, once you are looking
at this hour, make a conscious choice about what you want to
be doing. You can choose to watch TV or play on the
computer, but at the end of the day you will be able to honestly
say you did what you wanted to do. You can also try to spend
five or ten minutes of each hour doing something that will make
you feel good to get done. Allow yourself to build on small
successes.
8.
You spend a lot of time doing things that
keep your mind occupied (so you don't have to think about
you). While related to number seven, this is the actual
activity that keeps you from producing your best effort.
When we are really determined to sit on our greatness, we
usually don't get to the point of wishing we'd done
something different. The primary focus of this activity is to not
think about you or your life. Therefore, it must engage our
mind and keep it occupied. It might be TV, the computer, the
news, what the neighbors are doing, anything that can grab
us and keep us.
Antidote:
Many of these activities are
designed to deaden the thoughts that make you uncomfortable (see
number one). Often, when we get tired of the negative
messages, our first response is to try to stop thinking.
The more
we don't think, the more energy we need to spend on not
thinking. Some down-time is good, even essential.
The
key here is when big chunks of time are lost to these
activities. The first thing to do is to give yourself permission to
do the activity you are doing. Again, it's bringing
it into the realm of choice. Then, let yourself make
different choices from time to time.
9.
You feel an underlying sense of sadness
(when you let yourself feel). Part of the reason
we don't want to let ourselves think or feel
is that we are afraid we will be overwhelmed by the sadness. We are petrified to go down that
road.
Antidote:
If you feel sadness, something is
going on and it is critical to release the tears.
Give
yourself an opportunity to cry in a safe environment.
For
example, although we may not be able to give ourselves
permission to cry about what we need to cry about, we can
cry while watching a sad movie. One of my favorite
movies to use for this purpose is "Pay it
Forward," but you
probably have your own favorite. It's really important to free
yourself from this emotion, and allowing it out is actually
the way to not being overwhelmed by it. Once you allow the
tears, don't be surprised if you have a real burst of energy.
10. You keep all conversations at a
superficial level. Safe topics are the weather, the news, TV and
movies. If you find yourself steering all
conversations away from you, you may be in emotional hiding.
Antidote:
Find an outlet so that you can allow
yourself to go inwards safely. Try journal writing,
writing a letter to God, or some other format for getting in touch
with what's going on.
* * * *
Louise was a life coach and inspirational
writer who passed away in 2011. Rest in
Peace, Louise!
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