When you’re trying to improve your relationship with your partner, it’s easy to focus on the negative stuff. You see all problems that need to be addressed, and your attention naturally goes there.
But . . . if you’re always focused on the problems, chances are you may be increasing the divide between you. There has to be an equal, if not greater emphasis, on what’s right!
Of all the tools we have to help us navigate life, the mind is the first and most important.
Everything we do, think, feel, and remember is facilitated by our minds. It’s our starting point, our perceiver, our interpreter, and ultimately has the last word on how we experience our lives.
The paradox is that the mind can be an amazing tool to help us actualize our desires and goals, but it can also be our worst enemy.
Meditation is a life-changing habit that has cumulative effects over time. There are many types of meditation, and I encourage you to explore them all and decide what works best for you.
If you’ve never tried it before, you might find this technique simple and effective as a starter. It can also be practiced long-term. Either way, it’s easy and will get you engaged and on your way.
When you make a mistake or are disappointed in yourself for something you did (or didn’t do), do you react by beating yourself up?
Does it help?
Not usually. It may relieve some of your guilt, but most times not. More likely, it makes you feel worse.
Catastrophic thinking is a debilitating source of anxiety that plagues a lot of us. Most simply, it means jumping to the worst-case scenario when thinking about a situation or future event.
Your husband doesn’t call you on his way home from work like he usually does, and you decide he must have been in an accident and is probably dead.
The term “Narcissistic Personality” is currently popping up a lot in the news, so I thought it would be a good subject for an article. Any time a mental health diagnosis begins to surface regularly in popular culture, distortions and misunderstandings occur about what it means.
Let’s start with a definition of “personality disorder.”
Gossip is a part of life. Most everyone has engaged in it. It starts early in life, usually in elementary school, but it gets a big boost in middle and high school. You’d hope that it would be left there as people grow up and move into adult life, but that’s not the case.
Go in any office setting and you will hear it, or just sit in a restaurant with you ears open. Better yet, go on Facebook and you’ll see every kind of people bashing imaginable.
When you’re focused on outcomes and end results, and you measure your sense of worth and value in terms of your achievements and performance, you can easily see yourself as a failure when you don’t succeed.
Worse yet, you become the failure. That leaves you swinging between feeling really worthy when you achieve, and really unworthy when you don’t.
Recently a client said to me that he wanted to do something “great” with his life. He’s a young man at the beginning of his career, and he has aspirations to succeed.
There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a normal desire, but as we continued talking about it, I knew there was more going on. There was a strong sense of urgency, and even a little tinge of desperation.
With the amount of talking we all do, it would be a good idea to step back and assess how well you think people listen when you are talking.
Do you feel heard? Do you think that others value what you have to say? Do you have a voice?