Emotional Wellness

Loving Yourself

I left my parents home with a horribly damaged self esteem. I then stepped into a marriage that would take 19 years to see the truth of my creation.  I had created a more challenging experience than even my childhood was for me – and further eroded my self esteem. But something magical happened when I started over at age 37. The beginnings of feeling good about who I am started to blossom. This was the start of my emotional wellness.

That was over 28 years ago and I live most days now feeling quite wonderful about who I am and my positive contributions to the planet. That’s what good emotional wellness feels like to me. It encompasses me as a relationship-haver, me as a life coach, teacher and writer. It includes all areas of my life. One of the most recent areas for me to feel good about is my physical self. I love how I look even though I’m almost 66 and have the body of a healthy 66-year-old. I love my naturally silver-tinted hair, and I love how I dress. We all have different appearances and to appreciate our outside we must love ourselves from the inside. I call this emotional wellness.

I was just putting makeup on for an event I’m attending a bit later in the day. I could contemplate plastic surgery or trying to make myself look younger but that is not who I want to be.  Emotional wellness is seeing who you are and knowing that you are exactly where you are supposed to be and loving yourself no matter what.

I haven’t written anything about marriage and money so far but I think it’s a good topic since I believe most marriages have big issues around money.

Like other areas of our lives, we each have our stuff (definition: Ego + Unheard, Unprocessed Emotions + Unmet Needs). I come from a family where there was a lot of fear and denial around money. My mother was very afraid of not having enough. I believe my father was also afraid but he covered it with many layers of denial. So I come by my stuff quite honestly from the environment I unconsciously absorbed for the first 22 years of my life. I’ve certainly experienced fear around not having enough and in some ways covered that over with denial – a fine combination of both my mother’s and father’s emotional imprints.

The Martian has his own but I’ll let him comment on that. Anyway, since we both believe we attract into our lives at the level of vibration our emotional selves are at (Law of Attraction), we’ve done just that. We’ve always had enough even when we lost it all in 2001 at which time we both experienced intense fear for months. I’m guessing that to some extent our financial situation right now is reflective of all those months of fear.

I’m not aware of much, if any fear, about not enough these days but I only know the full truth about it by looking at the results in my life.

So back to money in our relationship. It’s never been an issue. Because of our high level of honesty and communication, money issues fall under the topic “Everything We Talk About” and we know where the other is. Also, because we have a real partnership attitude, it’s never mattered whether I was earning more or he was earning more. When I was earning more doing work I hated, I was very honest about my resentful feelings that he could not do this kind of work and got through them to the benefit of enhanced closeness and communication.

I guess money issues are only a separate issue if you don’t keep them open and honest and communicate whatever is going on with you about them with your partner.

I’ve been thinking about what a love hate relationship is. The operative word to me is “love”. If one is calling it “love hate”, it must mean there is first love. So where does that take you? Well, if this love hate relationship is someone with who you are having romantic relationship or marriage with, you’ll want to be investigating, understanding and dealing with where the hate is coming from. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

1)      Am I carrying resentment because of behavior in the relationship that has gone unaddressed?

2)      Do I feel I hate the person I also love because we have issues and they aren’t being dealt with?

3)      Is this relationship about failed expectations?

4)      Am I always in a love hate relationship? (Is it because I like the drama?)

5)      Is this relationship very similar to my parents relationship or my relationship to either of my parents?

There are serious issues underlying the questions above. The first three questions have to do with communication in the relationship. If one is to have a healthy long term relationship that succeeds, communication needs to happen. Yelling is not the kind of communication I mean. I am talking about expressing appropriately the feelings and emotions that occur when one is in close connection with another person. Feelings get hurt. Mistakes happen. Misunderstanding happens. Bad days happen. Big and small events happen. Other people and situations impact what is happening between the two of you. If children are involved, everything is multiplied. And all problems have a solution but if the reason you call it a love hate relationship in the first place is because communication is poor, it is likely it will eventually end up becoming a totally hate relationship and end.

If your answer to question 4 is yes, I’m betting the answer to number 5 is yes also. If this is the case, it might not be enough to just express emotions appropriately within the relationship, it might mean you will have to deal with your relationships with your parents before you can turn your love hate relationship into one you’d call a love relationship, there’s a lot of healing work that needs to be done. With large and unresolved issues from the past, it is most likely that every relationship you ever have will continue to create problems until you realize that you are worthy of a love relationship and do not need to settle for love hate.

Coaching and Relationships?

Coaches often work with relationship problems. (I have a personal slant here.) I would not want to work with a life coach getting relationship help if that coach didn’t have successful relationships herself – and I’d want to know something about her relationships.

How can someone teach or coach me about healthy relationships if she has no real experience herself? She may have taken many courses but unless she can examine a successful relationship from the ‘inside out’, how can she work with me and understand what my situation needs in order to help me right it?

If I were looking for a relationship coach because I had relationship problems now or in the past, I’d be looking for the following:

1. I’d ask the coach about their personal experience in relationships.
2. What kinds of issues the coach has overcome in helping relationships – theirs and others – and what kinds of tools might be offered.
3. I’d want to know if it was possible to have the coach sometimes speak to me and my partner either together or separately.
4. I’d ask the coach’s definition of building trust in relationships and her definition of healthy relationships.

Introducing, (your name goes here) the great!

How Do I “Own My Power”?

Our neuroses are the raw material out of which an interesting personality may be crafted.
Original Self, Thomas Moore 2000, Harper Collins, p. 15

I’ve been a study in holding myself back. These are some of the ways I’ve done it:

• I’ve given certain people too much power. I think they know or can do more or better than I can. Thinking that I have tried to almost BE them. Guess what? You can’t be anyone but yourself.

• I’ve protected someone close to me from the judgment of others. For example, I never wanted my mother to know when I was hurt or angry with my ex-husband. I guess I didn’t want to let her think she was right. She didn’t like how he treated me (and I didn’t like how he or she treated me). The funny thing about this is that SHE was the one who he reminded me of and who changed a happy sensitive little girl into a person who would totally ignore her own knowledge that this man was never going to be a good partner for me.

• I’ve said I was going to do something – and then didn’t follow through like the zillions of times I said I was going to lose weight – and didn’t. How loving is that to me?

How have you held yourself back? Are your boundaries being stepped on? Do you keep your word – especially to yourself?

Here’s an assignment to help you get your power back. Every day ask someone what they value in you. The more stuck or depressed you are feeling the more important it is to ask this question. The more you don’t want to do it, the more you need to.

Expectations of Building Healthy Relationships

I have a friend for many years. When I first, formally started my coaching practice, she was one of my first clients. I wasn’t able yet to observe myself in the coaching process enough to be able to see if the calls were building healthy relationships between my client and myself.

A couple of weeks ago she called and said I need your help. She said, “I’m overwhelmed and confused about creating my business so I either watch TV or eat to avoid the whole thing.”  I agreed immediately but we didn’t really lay out what she expected from me and from the coaching itself.  One of the best tactics in building healthy relationships is to outline expectations upfront. The lack of having done that immediately showed up as a problem. She missed an appointment, then had a gas company guy come at the time of the next appt. and was heavy into negativity when we finally spoke on the delayed appointment.

I don’t perceive my job as talking a client out of their negativity. I perceive my job as working with it to change it. Subtle difference but a big difference in results for the client – and results for me. Which leads me to what I experienced that day.

When I hung up from our call I was tired and drained. I thought it was because I didn’t have enough sleep. But several hours later I had my next client appt. and although later in the day, I felt exhilarated and stoked which is how I most often feel after coaching – which I’ve used as an indicator that coaching is a gift of mine. Also, I remember learning from John Gray about a zillion years ago that if a relationship is giving you energy, it’s a good relationship and if it’s taking away energy, there are problems. He was referring to intimate relationships but what’s more intimate than a relationship between a coach and a client?

So back to my question: to coach a friend or not to coach a friend? I still don’t know if it’ll work in this case but I have begun to remedy the situation by requesting my friend to please write down her expectations of me and of our coaching. We will speak about it next week and we’ll see where we end up.

Lesson learned: When building healthy relationships you must request and layout expectations and boundaries.

Click here and watch the Three Magic Secrets Movie for free – a free self-help ebook!

Is Asking How to Improve Your Self Esteem Even Important?

Self esteem may not seem that important to some (they’re probably feeling fine about themselves) but it has a huge impact on your daily life. It has an affect on your moods, your reactions and how people treat you. So it is important to ask how to improve your self esteem.

Seek learning on how to get past negative emotions like anger, jealousy and blame and not let them overshadow your thinking. (Check out this tool .)

Everyone experiences small episodes of these harmful emotions but if you let them be your whole focus, you will never be happy and everyone you meet will know it.

In addition, these emotions build up and create harmful physical conditions like heart disease and high blood pressure. Make sure you laugh everyday. Watch a comedy show to lift your mood. You can’t possibly feel hopeless or angry if you are laughing.

Following are more ways how to improve your self esteem:

1. Increase your self esteem by doing nice things for other people. They don’t even need to know you did it. In fact, it might is better if they don’t. It will make you feel very good about yourself though, and that is what is important.
2. Stop criticizing every little mistake you make. Watch the words you say about yourself. No more “stupid” or “dummy”. Everyone makes mistakes.
3. Take all those negative things you are thinking about yourself and turn them into  positive thoughts and your self esteem will be on the rise one little step at a time.
4. Learn to choose how you respond to whatever situation you may find yourself in. You can decide to calmly handle a situation with as little stress and bad feelings as possible or you can freak out yell, scream, cry and make a bad situation worse.
5. And if your emotional residue from the past is so large it doesn’t feel like you have a choice, seek help – self-help, coaching or therapy. Whatever suits you.
6. Another way to make yourself feel better and give your self esteem a little boost is to dress up now and then for no reason. It will make you feel good knowing that you look good. Do not allow yourself any criticisms about how you look, only good thoughts.
7. If you up for a real stretch, ask 3 people what they like about you. Let what they say about you wash over you. Let it in and just say, “Thank you”.

The next time you ask how to improve your self esteem, think back to this list and get to work.