How to Stop Being a People-Pleaser
Those of you who are familiar with my work will know that I confess to being a recovered people pleaser. There was a time in my life when I’d bend over backwards to keep everyone else happy. I valued other people’s needs more than my own, tried hard to fit in and would automatically say yes to whatever was asked of me. It wasn’t until the stress I was under became unbearable that I realised something was seriously wrong. There was so much pressure in my life that I was left with no choice but to dig deep and change the way I related not only to others but also myself. It took some work but I turned myself around. How about you? Are you exhausted from being all things to all people? Are you forever trying to please others to the point where you feel like you’re losing yourself?
Are You a Silent Prisoner of Shame?
If I were to name one thing that has the most impact on a person’s happiness and experience of life, it would be their self-worth. Our level of self-worth affects everything – from our health and relationships to our careers and financial abundance. So, let me ask, where do you stand on the spectrum of self-worth? Do you feel good about yourself? Do you love and accept yourself, warts and all? Or are you ‘self-rejecting’, always finding reasons to feel bad about yourself? If it’s the latter, I invite you to read on …
How to Stop Caring about What Other People Think of You
How concerned are you about what people think of you? Does it bother you occasionally or a lot of the time? We are all influenced by other people’s opinions to some degree, sometimes without realising it. We might wear an outfit to a social event because we think other people will like it, for example, or refrain from expressing an opinion at work to avoid being thought unintelligent. This is a consequence of our social conditioning and our need to belong – to be accepted and liked …
How to Get Out of Your Own Way and Get What You Want
Have you ever come close to achieving a personal goal or fulfilling a long-held desire, only to somehow mess things up at the last minute? Do you have goals or intentions but find that instead of moving towards them, they drift further away from you? Are you making excuses or keeping busy with distractions rather than pursuing the things you want? If this sounds familiar, you’re engaging in self-sabotage – a problem I come across a lot in my coaching work …
How to Recognise the Toxic People in Your Life
You probably know as well as I do that the quality of our relationships directly affects the quality of our lives. Healthy relationships are good for us. They have a positive effect on our mental and physical health, enhance our lives, help us grow into better versions of ourselves, and even cause us to live longer. Unhealthy relationships are not good for us. They have an adverse effect on our mental and physical health; they diminish the quality of our lives, cause us pain and hurt, and degrade us. People who value their inner peace and happiness always keep their relationships under regular review …
How to Not Take Things so Personally
You may recall that last month I began a series of newsletters focusing on the personal habits of happy people. Happy people tend to think and behave in ways that allow them to feel peaceful and content, no matter what’s going on around them. With a little effort, we can all learn to do this. The first of these habits, which I wrote about last time, was letting go of grudges. This month I’m going to focus on happiness habit two: how to not take things too personally. I think you’ll agree that many people struggle with this one. Someone says or does something, and before you know it your mood has plummeted and you’re upset or angry …
How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others
Do you constantly compare yourself to other people? Do you often find yourself thinking that other people have more than you or are better than you? The comparison game is as old as humanity itself. I guess we all want to know how we measure up to other people. This drive is a part of our innate desire to understand ourselves, and our place in society. In recent times, however, social comparison has risen to a whole new level thanks to social media. It’s almost become an epidemic. Theodore Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” And he was right …
How to Cultivate Greater Self-Worth
Humour me for a moment and imagine that you have the power to clone yourself so that there are now two identical versions of you out there in the world. Now, let me ask you a question. If you were to meet this other ‘you’ would you be good friends? Would you like ‘you’? I often ask my clients this question and their response gives me an insight into how they see themselves. Their answer tells me a lot about their sense of self-worth and their self-esteem in that moment. Self-worth is defined as “the sense of one’s own value or worth as a person”. Self-esteem is defined as …
Dealing with Shame: How to Weaken Its Destructive Hold over You
Have you ever felt shame? I’m sure you have at some point in your life. All of us have. Shame is that awful feeling of being worthless, rejected or cast out. Deeply painful, it brings humiliation and distress in its wake. Its close cousin is guilt. Guilt shows up when you believe you have done something bad; shame shows up when you believe you are bad, so much so, that you are totally unlovable. Shame’s toxicity does not end there though. It also carries with it a sense of helplessness, that there is nothing you can do to purge yourself of its burdensome and soul-crushing presence …
The Gentle Art of Saying ‘No’
Emotional overwhelm is something that brings many people to my practice. For them life has simply got out of control. There are too many people making too many demands … too much to do in too little time … too many expectations and not enough energy to deal with them all. The result is anxiety which, if left unchecked, leads to mental, emotional and physical breakdown. We all experience overwhelming feelings. I’m guessing you know what that’s like. I certainly do. In fact, I used to get overwhelmed a lot. Nowadays, though, it’s less the feeling of overwhelm that I deal with than the …
How Much Power Do You Think You Have Over Your Life?
The concept of personal power is one that I deal with a lot in my work. Put simply, this is the degree of influence a person feels they have over their experience and circumstances in life. One of the key goals of therapy is to move a person from a place of disempowerment to a place of empowerment. A disempowered person believes they have no control or power over their circumstances and experience of life. An empowered person believes that they do. When I begin working with a new client one of the first things I do is ….
The One Habit that Could Keep You Out of Therapy
It takes a lot for a person to seek support and, even more, to pay for it. We all do a great job of handling the issues in our lives by ourselves. Until, that is, it all gets too much and we reach crisis point; something happens that shakes us to the core and we discover that we simply can’t deal with it anymore. I see this all the time in my practice. It is the life crises that bring people to the services that I offer …
7 Spiritual Laws for Getting What You Want Out of Life
I vividly remember the feeling of overwhelming confusion when, many years ago, I was asked what appeared to be a seemingly straightforward question: “What do YOU want?" I was stunned into silence. I had never thought about this before. The person I was talking to was highly amused: _“Is it any wonder you feel stuck? You don’t get anywhere in life if you don’t know where you are going …