Self Exploration in the Movies?

We saw a movie last night that made me think of some things  Sometimes we jump into relationships or jump from encounter to encounter looking for something.  Only to realize that what we have been looking for can be found from within ourselves.  A little time and self exploration we could have saved ourselves months or sometimes years of horrible or worthless relationships.

Back to the movie: Pretty New York young woman with no purpose other than to find a man. She’s got a good job but doesn’t particularly like it. She just does it. Goes from man to man – drinking too much, having sex too fast and not having any relationships that last and feels worse and worse.

She finally does meet a nice man who comes from another country and wants her to come with him after knowing each other a few days. She declines and, as the plot unravels, ultimately takes a trip to that country, loses his contact information and decides to be there just for her own self exploration.

At the end of the movie she’s on her way to the airport when missing young man walks onto the train but doesn’t see her. My husband and I wished the movie ended with her choosing to not go over to him but that’s not what happened. She goes over to him and allows herself to be taken off the train by him and in the end chooses to miss her plane. It is a big step for her to make that choice based on the personality that’s portrayed but wouldn’t it have been a bigger step (and very non-Hollywood) if she just continued to create a life where she got to know herself through self exploration and became a full person first before she partnered with someone?

First of all, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO BART.
Second, I love and honor you, Maia.
Have a wonderful day, celebrate with Bart, celebrate your love as you do each day, but even more so today.
We can talk tomorrow, and we can set a time. I myself have a busy day today as I have an appointment with the immigration lawyer and not sure how long that will take.

The Life Coach Boost

Get started boosting your self esteem by hiring a life coach. Since a life coach usually helps people with any and all areas of life from career to finances to overeating, all of the work that you do with a life coach will eventually lead back to your self esteem and help to slowly (or quickly) increase it.

A life coach will:

• Help you focus on the positive
• Show you that you are deserving of all good
• Challenge you to reach for what you are worthy of
• Challenge you to reach for what you want
• Point out the positive attributes that you take for granted about yourself
• Gently (or not so gently) tell you the truth about where you are kidding yourself

As you work with the coach and overcome challenges that you face and reach the goals you set out, your regular experience of the focus just being on you with your life coach, will continue to help you raise your self esteem. The life coach will be someone other than yourself that will help make sure that you are held accountable until eventually as your self esteem and self confidence increases, you can learn to hold yourself accountable for your actions and learn to change the negative, critical voices in your head.

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

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Life Coach – Real or Fake?

With the growing trend of life coaching, everyone is calling themselves a coach these days. I recently joined twitter , a cool social networking site. It’s amazing how many people who are in sales and network marketing call themselves “coach”.

Elsewhere in this blog you might have read that my personal prejudice is that a life coach does not have to be certified and does not even need formal training necessarily. I learned more from receiving good coaching than I did at my very expensive training school.

That being said, if you want to hire a life coach and you find someone who calls themselves coach but has nothing to offer, it will become apparent to you when you interview the coach – whether in person or on the phone.

An authentic coach will offer you a sample session or will have an in-depth conversation before either of you could possibly consider whether you are right for the coaching relationship with each other. I used to offer a sample session but since I don’t know you and don’t know enough about you, I find that if we ask a lot of questions of each other, if we are forthright in our communication and I understand what you want from your coaching, I can then tell you what I can offer. I often tend to tell a potential client what I’ve worked on with other clients and what I’ve changed in my life in relationship to their needs.

Many who call me have told me that they talked to lots of coaches and they felt “sold”. It takes a high level of confidence in ones self, a lot of trust in the Universe to provide the material goods required by the life coach and a strong sense of intuition to not feel fearful of not being hired. I told you in another post recently that I “fired” a client when I realized I was beginning to totally resist our appointments.

Since I usually look forward to each session with anticipation and joy and leave feeling focused, centered and empowered, I knew something was very wrong. I realized that I had been blinded during our initial interview by my ego in agreeing to work with this lawyer because he is my ex-husband’s nephew and I thought it was such a “special compliment” to me seeing what our marriage status is and has been for 25 years. Well, that didn’t work out. We ended on a positive note but I fell into a very human trap of satisfying my ego but not seeing that we weren’t a good match to start out with.

So, again, hopefully you will know immediately if you have the right person or not to hire as a life coach. But certainly you will figure it out quickly and that’s why I advise – keep interviewing until you are sure.

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

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The Importance of Emotional Health

My family knows what my life is about. They know that I am a big proponent of authentic expression of feelings in pursuit of mental, spiritual and emotional health. With that in mind, my daughter sent me to this site: We Feel Fine . Their mission is as follows:

Mission

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

It is my experience that feelings and thought walk hand in hand to create our vibration.  The emotional health of our vibrations is how the Universe decides what to send our way. Do you attract fabulous stuff? Do you attract not so fabulous stuff? Your creation is dependent upon your emotional health.

by Savina Cavallo, YOU University Coach

Finally, I’ve created the habit of journaling.

It took me a long time and quite many trials.  Through the years I’ve started a journal many times…then I forget.  Weeks, months and sometimes a year would go by without writing, until I felt the need again to journal what was going on in my life, inside and out; I’d start all over again.

Why do I journal?  Well, in my journal I can express what I’m feeling.  These are words infused with who I really am and what is actually going on inside me, and in my life.

Journaling helps me unload the emotional “stuff” I may be carrying around.  Journaling is a useful tool in self-development and also for inner healing. I can write my desires, my dreams and goals.

I write emotions I may have towards people in my life exactly as I am feeling them:  anger, fear, distrust, frustration, or love, admiration, desire…feelings I am not ready or unable to express outwardly, but my journal holds and receives them.  It’s my friend.  Never divulging what I write, but just holding my heart.

When I read my journals from years back, I can appreciate my journey, how I’ve grown and developed, or how I’m still the same in certain areas of my life.  It usually brings a smile to my face.  I can witness my own transformation.

Would you like to get into the habit of journaling?  Visit and be a member of a free journaling community where you’ll learn to journal by following weekly topics that are related to your everyday life.  Here’s the link:  Journaling-for-YOU

You Might Have to Change Friends

I have a client who is successfully navigating a healthy relationship with a man for the first time in her 46 years! Her work on herself is wondrous. She has healed a scarily abusive childhood, healed very damaged self-esteem and most recently lost over 80 pounds. In chatting with her today, she commented that she is a “bit narcissistic”. When we discussed what she meant by that, I realized she was really talking about self care.

I am not a therapist and I’m not going to look for a definition of narcissism that a therapist might use. I’m going to define narcissism to be what I understand from my therapist friends. As far as I understand narcissism is pretty much not being able to see beyond your own belly button. It’s all about you. You are never wrong. All roads lead to you.

This is very different than being a person who observes their behavior and wants to see where and whether she is acting from self love.

If she is truly taking care of herself – most particularly when she has never really had a good relationship with a partner in her whole life and wants some very positive change, then deep, thoughtful, very observant self care is vital. That is not narcissism. That is not whatever else others have accused you of when you wanted to take care of yourself.

You were with the wrong people. People who truly love you, want and celebrate for you as you care for yourself. That means they support you having boundaries. That means they want you to express yourself authentically. They love you. Find and hang out with only those people.

Life Coach and Your Self Esteem

The Old Cinderella Story

You know the story. Wealthy, loving, widowed dad meets gold-digging woman. Dad marries women and brings her and her two less than lovely daughters to live in manor. Dad dies and leaves less than loving step-mother in charge of all three daughters. Step-mother is jealous of natural daughter’s inner and outer beauty and treats her like a servant. One day the prince plans a ball that he wants all young women in the kingdom to attend and at which he will choose a princess. Step-mother will not provide clothes for the natural daughter and locks her in the house the night of the ball.

Along comes Cinderella’s Fairy God Mother and with her Magic Wand, provides Cindy with a beautiful dress, glass slippers and turns a pumpkin into a pumpkin coach. You certainly know the rest.

The Real Scoop

Imagine this story as a metaphor for change and self esteem.  Growing up as she did – criticized, belittled, unloved – Cinderella wore her old raggedy self and felt unworthy of fulfilling her real purpose here on Earth (OK. OK. It is a bit pre-feminism to think her real purpose is to marry the Prince. But play along.)

Along comes her Fairy God Mother, waves her Magic Wand and outfits her in the accouterments of real self esteem – enough to make her beauty recognizable to her real purpose.

That Fairy Godmother just waved her magic wand. You can create magic  with a life coach but you will have to do some work. If you are willing, the results will be the same as Cinderella’s. You will be transformed!