Allison Vesterfelt's Blog, page 6

Why It’s So Hard to Love Yourself And How It Can Change Your Life

Loving myself has not always been something on my radar. In fact, if you would have asked me five years ago, I would have told you that the idea of “loving myself” seemed sort of secondary to the really important things in life—you know, like loving other people. The whole thing seemed a little too self-focused for me.

But then one day I was having a conversation with a friend who is a huge “Love Yourself!” advocate. She was asking me how things were going and I was telling her about a few different frustrating circumstances in my life. I mentioned the job where I was working and how I felt like I was always being taken advantage of by my boss. I told her about the relationship I was in and how I felt like I was constantly being criticized and even manipulated.

It seems like nothing I ever did was good enough.

(To see this full print, and to order your copy, click here)

Come to think of it, I told her, I felt like this in many most of my life—like I was never really appreciated for my contributions or hard work. My tendency was to support, to say “yes,” to go with the flow, to concede my point first, to avoid arguing, and at the end of the day, I felt like so many of my friends and significant others and employers took advantage of that.

If I was being really honest, I told her, I often felt overlooked, overburdened, and like I never really got what I wanted.

What do you want? She asked.

I stood there and looked at her for a few minutes with that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. The truth was I didn’t even know.

It wasn’t until later that I would learn this is really common experience for people—especially women—who work their entire lives to be accepted and considered desirable by others but who have no idea who they truly are or what matters to them. The concept of loving themselves is foreign, not just because they have misunderstood what it means, but also because they don’t even know who their “selves” really are.

“We try to appear attractive, nice, good, valid, legitimate or worthy to someone else instead of discovering what we actually feel and want for ourselves. IN this kind of conscious or unconscious arrangment, other people are expected to provide our own feelings over power, worth, or vitality at the expense of our authentic development.” —Polly Young-Eisendrath, Women & Desire

While it might feel or seem like we’re being “selfless” by focusing on others and forgetting about ourselves, the truth is this is not selfless at all. In fact, a person who forfeits her sense of self ends up relying on others inordinately to support her and validate her and make her feel okay.

Loving ourselves is more important than we ever realized.

That’s what I learned as I sat there talking to my friend. After my rant, she didn’t tell me I should quit my job or even that I should end certain friendships or leave my relationship. In fact, she put the ball completely in my court. She told me: “You need to raise your opinion of yourself. If you don’t love yourself,” she said, “you’ll have a hard time finding or experiencing love from others.”

I looked at her skeptically.

“And you won’t be able to truly love anyone until you’re able to love yourself.”

To be honest, I wasn’t sure I believed her. But I was also desperate. I felt like a hollow, emptied out shell of a human being and I needed to be filled up. So I told her I would give this “raising my opinion of myself” a try and I asked her what I should do next. She referred me to a few books.

Here’s what she recommended:

The Power Is Within You by Louise Hay
You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay
You Can Heal Your Body by Louise Hay
The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman
Women and Desire by Polly Young-Eisendrath
Lovability by Dr. Robert Holden

Over the course of the next few months, as I read these books and developed a curiosity about what it would look like to raise my opinion of myself and learn how to cultivate self-love, I began to practice some of the tactics I learned. I wasn’t sure they would make a difference. But the results were really remarkable.

As it turns out, love is an incredibly powerful force in this world and we have endless supplies of it to give, as long as we can learn to first accept the love that’s freely and readily available to us.

Here are just a few ways my life changed as I learned to love myself.

1. Your physical health improves

If you haven’t ever considered the connection between your mind and your body before, it can sound a little bit strange. But think about this: what happens to you when you feel fear? Your hair stands up on the back of your neck, you may get goosebumps, your heart-rate increases. This is the mind-body connection.

Your physical body responds to an emotional state you experience.

It’s really as simple as that.

A great book that unpacks the mind-body connection is called You Can Heal Your Body by Louise Hay. In the book, she discusses what a powerful impact love (or a lack of love) can have our our physical health. She attributes a lack of self-love to ailments all the way from headaches to diabetes to back pain.

To be clear, she is not saying that any of the diseases or ailments we experience in our body are cured simply by love. Nothing is that simple.

She merely says there is a strong connection, which is hard to deny.

I’ve written before about the incredible impact changing my own self-talk had on my physical body. You can read the whole story here.

But for the sake of this article, I have one simple assignment for you. Think about a physical ailment you are experiencing regularly. Do you have digestive problems? Constant back pain? Hormone imbalance? Acne? What might these physical ailments be trying to tell you? If you had to write yourself a letter from the pain or problem you’re experiencing, what would the letter say? Would it ask you to slow down? To pay attention? To be kinder to yourself?

When we are kind to our bodies, they are kind to us.

2. Your relationships improve

Recently I was on a business trip and texting with a friend. She and I had talked about the idea of meeting up in the city where I was staying when I was finished with my work. As we texted back and forth solidifying plans, I told her I would be done by around 5:00 on Friday and she could come whenever. But as I sat there in my hotel room, exhausted from that day of work and staring down another long one, a thought came over my brain. It went like this:

Why do you keep doing this to yourself?

To me, the thought meant: why do you keep pushing yourself so hard? You’re exhausted. You need rest. You still have to drive home. Of course you want to see your friend, but you know yourself. You are going to need some downtime or you aren’t going to be very useful to yourself or anyone else next week.

So I reluctantly typed out a text back to my friend that said, “actually, can we reschedule? I know we talked about this, and it was a plan, but I’m just so exhausted and I feel like I’m on the verge of getting sick.” I felt badly for changing plans. But her response back made me feel so loved. She said, “are you kidding? Thank you for telling me the truth! No need to apologize. I get it.”

My love for myself in that moment—loving myself enough to say, “hey, I’m too tired for this”—set me up to receive her love and friendship, which came in the form of, “no worries!”

Without my love for myself, I never would have experienced that love from her.

The good and also hard truth about loving yourself enough to take good care of yourself is that your relationships will start to shift. Some of them will end. Certain people, as you begin to respect yourself, will raise their opinions of you as you raise your opinion of yourself. Others will not be interested in respecting you in that way and those relationships will come to a close. As painful as that can be, you can feel thankful that the only relationships in your life with be with people who respect you and care for you and wish you well.

Just because a relationship ends does not mean you are doing something wrong. In fact, just the opposite. You can only be friends to so many people. You might as well make them people who love you the way you deserve to be loved.

3. New career opportunities open up for you

For years I worked jobs I hated, for bosses who didn’t respect me, because I didn’t believe there was anything better out there. Actually, the truth was, I didn’t believe I deserved anything better than where I was working. For so many of us, our career problems are a problem of self love and self worth.


Let me ask you: do you believe you deserve to work that satisfies you?

Do you believe you deserve to get paid what you’re worth? Do you have a hard time even talking about, or thinking about, what you’re worth?

I know I did. In fact one of the things I realized—after reading Katty Kay and Claire Shipman’s bookThe Confidence Code—was that my confidence in my ability to achieve work that satisfied me was as important as my skills. And I was lacking in confidence. So after finishing the book, I sat down and put into writing several accomplishments or areas of expertise that felt significant to me. My list looked something like this:

I have an Masters degree
I sold all of my possession and spent a year traveling the United States

I’ve visited 20+ countries
I wrote a book and was nominated for “Best New Author” by the ECPA
I have coached dozens, if not hundreds, of people through writing their own books
I’ve co-founded multiple companies and written two online curriculums for authors
I have managed multiple high-level online platforms

I don’t know about you but that is so hard for me to do. It feels like bragging. Can you relate?

What would be on your list of accomplishments?

I have a challenge for you: can you list what you would consider your greatest accomplishment in the comments of this post?

When I finally started addressing some of my self-worth issues around my work, doors began to fly open for me in my career. It felt almost comical. The more I believed I was worthy of the opportunities, the more the opportunities came. I still have a lot of work to do in this area, but the work is so rewarding, it hardly feels like work.

I’m convinced our career success is at least as much about our confidence in our skills as it is about our skills themselves.

Imagine all the things over the years you wish you had said or done or tried—but didn’t because something held you back. Chances are, that something was a lack of confidence. Without it we are mired in unfulfilled desires, running excuses around in our heads, until we are paralyzed. It can be exhausting, frustrating, and depressing. Whether you work or you don’t, whether you want the top job or the part-time job—wouldn’t it just be great to slough off the anxiety and the fretting about all the things you’d love to try but don’t trust yourself to do? IN the most basic terms, what we need to do is start acting and risking and failing, and stop mumbling and apologizing and prevaricating. —The Confidence Code, by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman

When you love yourself and have confidence in yourself, you are willing to put yourself out there without fear of rejection. You can admit what you’re good at and what you have to offer. You bring that confidence into an interview room—or hey, even into a Christmas party where you might meet a potential employer, business parter or client. You can ask for help or answer honestly and bravely when someone asks, “So, what do you do?”

When you learn to love yourself well, the whole world will seem like it’s open to you; and you will be open to receive it.

4. You have fewer feelings of loneliness

In a world that is hyper-connected and yet not really connected at all, we are living in a culture of loneliness. And although we’ve found all kinds of ways to numb our loneliness—Netflix, social media, phones, etc—that lonely feeling is never really far away. Maybe you can relate. Do you ever feel like you have a million “friends” and yet nobody really knows you?

One of the things I noticed was that, as I began to grow in love for myself, I grew in like for myself too. By that I mean those feelings of loneliness dissipated as my relationships grew deeper and more satisfying and I as I discovered how comforting and satisfying and even fun it could be to spend time on my own.

I started finding myself craving more down time and alone time because, hey, I was a really fun person to be around.

In fact, thanks to Julia Cameron, I started taking myself on dates (yes, really). In her book The Artist’s Way She ask you to think about what someone who knew you really well would do for you on a date. It doesn’t have to be expensive or elaborate. It just has to be kind and thoughtful. The idea is to stop sitting around waiting for someone to do something nice for you when you can do something nice for yourself.

Here are a few ideas for what you could do for yourself for a date.

Go to the movies
Make and eat a food you love
Buy yourself a cup of coffee
Get yourself some flowers
Write yourself a nice note
Order pizza and watch a movie
Give yourself a pedicure

This is not to say we don’t need other people. We definitely do. Our friends teach us how to love ourselves by being loving to us. But what happens as we learn to love ourselves is we realize we really enjoy being alone and a night by ourselves doesn’t feel like punishment.

What could you do to take yourself on a date this week?

5. You are happier and have more fun

One of the greatest misconceptions about loving yourself, if you ask me, is that it’s all about expensive shopping trips and pampering. This is not only untrue, it’s also misleading for two reasons. One because a person who shops and pampers herself does not necessarily love herself well. The two are not necessarily connected.

And the second is because true love is totally free.

Learning to love ourselves can look like allowing ourselves to sleep in for an extra hour on a Saturday morning or choosing to take a night off from social activities because we know we need it. Maybe it’s about eating something really healthy or making a trip to the gym. Maybe it’s about taking a night off from exercise so you can let your body rest.

Perhaps loving yourself looks like asking for help from a friend when you really need it or asking a close friend to come over and talk.

What ends up happening, inevitably, as we allow ourselves to take these radical steps of self love and self care is we realize life does not have to be this knock-down, drag-out, white-knuckle, exhausting fight all the time. It can actually be really fun. When someone offers to pay for something for me, I can receive it. When the opportunity presents itself to sleep in, I can enjoy it. When I get a day off, I don’t have to feel guilty.

I can laugh. I can play. I can enjoy myself. The world’s beauty is unfolding for me and I can soak it all in.

The post Why It’s So Hard to Love Yourself And How It Can Change Your Life appeared first on Allison Fallon.

What No One Ever Says About New Beginnings

About seven weeks ago by the time you’re reading this, I stumbled upon some information that has changed my life forever. It has re-arranged the way I do business. It has, for all intents and purposes, ended my marriage. It has colored and re-colored the way I see everything that has taken place in my life in the past several years.

It has leveled me in the best and worst ways.

For privacy reasons, I cannot share any more than that right now, but I tell you that much because I know my experience is not unique.

I’m sure you can think of a time when you were lied to, or betrayed, or fired without explanation, or forced to let go of something you did not want to lose, or when someone you loved said goodbye to you without your permission. We don’t always get to choose our new beginnings. And because of that, we can understand how beautiful and also devastating a new beginning can be.

A new day, a new year, a new job, a new life, a new relationship, a new start—they all come to us without permission, in the best and worst way. They barge in our front doors with the beautiful promise of second chances and new potential and unexpected opportunity. And they also come with heartbreak, because new beginnings nearly always follow endings.

I love the way Billy Collins puts it in his poem called Aristotle. I could read and re-read these words a hundred times in a day:

This is the beginning. 

Almost anything can happen. 

This is where you find 

the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land, 

the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page. 

Think of an egg, the letter A, 

a woman ironing on a bare stage 

as the heavy curtain rises. 

This is the very beginning. 

—Billy Collins (from Aristotle)

Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t it exciting to think about what can happen when you’re standing at the beginning of something brand new?

And yet, if new beginnings are so invigorating, why did I talk to more than one friend on the first day of the new year who discussed feeling overwhelmed, anxious, sad, or in some way depressed at the weight of what lay in front of them? The night before we’re lighting off fireworks and holding glasses of champagne and talking about how amazing the new year was going to be—and by the time we woke up in the morning, we sat in our beds, overwhelmed with what a new beginning really meant.

What makes a new beginning so difficult?

One thing that makes it so difficult to start something new is that we don’t really know where to start. Yes, of course the possibilities are endless. They are infinity, in fact. But that is part of what makes it so difficult to know exactly where to begin. Because where should you begin when you can begin anywhere? In the face of all that possibility, all that blank space, it is easy to feel a little intimidated, even a little lonely.

It makes me think of what it feels like to sit down and start working on a brand new writing project. I could stare at the blinking cursor for hours before a word I deem worthy of being recorded will finally come to me. It is not that I don’t have words. It’s just that none of the words feel as deep and meaningful as I need them to be.

None of them feel like the first line, the first sentence.

And in that space, that excruciating time before anything is on the page, what I feel is anticipation and dread and even worry. Will this be a story worth reading? Will it be “the first word of paradise lost on an empty page?” Or, will it be an extraordinary waste of time, a lousy attempt at expressing myself that never makes sense to anyone—including me?

And I suppose that’s the second reason new beginnings can be a little challenging, because in addition to the fact that there are a million ways we could begin, there are also a million ways the story could end. We do not always get to choose our endings. In fact, most of the time we don’t. We commit ourselves to the process without any guarantee of how things will turn out.

This is the great risk of living our lives: there are so many things we don’t get to choose.

And at the beginning of a new year, or a new relationship, or a new job, or a new season, I think we intuitively recognize this: that no matter how many good intentions we have to lose weight or eat better or be more vulnerable or change that bad habit or pattern, or re-write a part of our story we haven’t loved, that we ultimately are not in charge of every detail, and we are at the mercy of so many things over which we have no control.

It takes a great deal of faith to put in the effort in a world where there are no such thing as a guarantee.

And just like writing, I suppose, there’s a sort of comfort to that messy middle. It would be easier to edit something that was already there—because at least I have something to work with. At least I have something to go from. At least I can read a sentence and say, “no, no, that’s not quite right.” And then I can talk about why it’s not quite right and that helps me get to something that is right, or at least that is more right than the first one was.

In the beginning, it can feel a bit like you don’t have that, like you’re starting over.

A quick word about change.

Change can bring about a lot of anxiety—especially change that we didn’t initiate or ask for. And honestly, even when you’re the one who quit the job or chose to leave the relationship, or decided to go on the trip, when the pieces of your life are shifting around, it’s normal to feel at least a little out of control.

Here’s how Journalist Deborah Ward puts it in her Psychology Today article, Coping with Change.

But it’s not unusual to feel shocked, overwhelmed, anxious and depressed and even fearful [at the beginning]. Even when we know we are about to face something new, the change can be overwhelming and unpredictable. And it’s this sudden lack of control over our personal environment that can lead us to feeling anxious, while the thought that we won’t be able to handle the new situation can bring on feelings of depression.

I hope this brings great comfort to you, especially if you are feeling less than thrilled at the outset of this new year. You’re normal. It’s okay. If, amidst the poppers and the streamers and the confetti and the champagne, you’re feeling less than sure-of-yourself and about what comes next, you’re not alone.

Because the New Year came without your permission, and it will come again next year, regardless of what you do or don’t do. One of the very few things we can count on in this life is changing seasons.




Change is hard—even when it’s really good for us. (Tweet that)

And that’s the second thing that is really great to remember about change, especially when we’re in the middle of it, is that change is good. It’s natural. It’s normal. It’s part of life. It’s really good for us. Without change, we stagnate. We don’t grow. We become complacent. We get bored. We do not have the tension and conflict we need to become who we were always meant to be in this life.

Without the possibility of change, even the greatest gifts in our lives lose their luster, because we can take them for granted, knowing they could never go away.

Rebirth and change are necessary to our lives. The clinical definition of death is cessation of change. If one is not changing, one is dying. Any practice or framework that is not curious and novel stands with its feet in concrete, which may be the definition of any form of fundamentalism —Pittman McGehey, The Spiritual Journey from Biography to Autobiography

If you’re in a really hard season right now, the good news is: change is coming. And when change does come, you will leave this hard season with who you’ve become in the midst of it. So do everything you can right now to become the person you want to be when your circumstances get a little better.

And if you’re in a really good season right now, enjoy every minute. Soak it up. Because no season lasts forever.

This is the teetering, delicate beauty of life.

Three things to remember about new beginnings.

There are a few things I think we can remember about new beginnings that can help us manage at least a little of the anxiety.

First remember the feeling you are “starting with nothing” is simply not true. I mentioned at the beginning of this article the idea of staring at a blank page with a blinking cursor, and the truth is, even when I begin to write a new book I do not begin with nothing. I come to the page with invisible libraries of knowledge, experience, research, understanding, essence, personality, and voice.

You are not starting with nothing in this new year. You are starting with YOU—the very most important thing you could have, and all you need to begin.




Remind yourself: I have everything I need to begin. (Tweet that)

And second, while you can acknowledge the feeling like you don’t know where to begin, it might help to remind yourself that nobody knows exactly where to begin when they’re starting somewhere new. It might seem like everyone else in your life has incredible clarity about their purpose and their plan and their intended outcome in this new season, meanwhile you’re floundering around just trying to get off your couch—but that simply is not the case.


I know because I talk to people all the time who are the most confident, accomplished, organized, efficient, productive, happy people I know who admit, when they get really honest, that they do not know for sure exactly where they are going or what they are trying to do. NOBDOY DOES! We are all just doing our best, feeling around in the dark.

Of course, there are ways to gain more clarity. I’ll provide some resources to that effect in the end of this article. But the point is nobody just gets clarity or direction without really fighting for it. Nobody out there magically has more than you have.

You have EVERYTHING you need to begin.

When I start to get myself worked into the “I don’t know where to start” frenzy, I remind myself of a phrase a friend repeated to me at a conference this past year. It has become a mantra for me. It’s technically three phrases linked together, and while it’s been attributed to several different people, as best as I can tell it was first said by a man named Arthur Ashe.

It goes like this:

Start where you are.

Use what you have.

Do what you can.

This is my life plan. I’m not joking. There might be moments when I have a more elaborate life plan than this, but really, this is the most elaborate life plan I will ever need—and here’s why:

Start where you are. You can’t start anywhere else but where you are. You can try, but you won’t be very successful. You can spend a lot of time wishing you were someone else, so that you could start from where they are starting, but that will just make you feel badly about yourself and will just become time you later regret wasting. The only place to start is where you are. It makes beginning really easy!
Use what you have. You have resources at your fingertips. We all do. And we could spend a long time dwelling on the fact that somebody else has more resources than we do, or better resources, or that our resources are not what we wish they were, but I’ll be honest: the most truly successful people I have known in this life do not waste time complaining that they don’t have more. They simply use what they DO have and get going.
Do what you can. I’m convinced that one of the main reasons we experience so much disappointment in our lives and burn out before we reach our goals is because we expect way too much our ourselves. We have these crazy ideas about what we can accomplish and then we wonder why we feel like such losers when we can’t do it all. Perfect house, killer career, obedient children, loving marriage, fulfilling sex life. Who has that? Anyone you know? I didn’t think so. All you can do is all you can do. Stop beating yourself up for being human. You are not a superhero. Sadly, neither am I.

And finally, one thing I am learning about making progress in life is that there really is no huge rush. Anyone who makes you feel like “time is running out” is trying to get you to do something that benefits them—and that you might not agree to do if you have too much time to think about it. There is no need to be frantic. There’s also is no need to sit around twiddling our thumbs, but life is not a race.

Anytime you feel like you are “running out of time” remind yourself there is no such thing. Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.

Nothing more can be asked of you.

A final word about new beginnings.

There’s a phrase that goes, “wherever you go, there you are.” And in a seasons where there is so much newness for me that it can be a little unsettling, I try to remind myself of that phrase for two reasons.

First of all, because it is a comforting reminder that no matter what happens to me, no matter what I lose or what I gain, what I have left at the end of the day is the person I am becoming. Change is not easy. It is slow and steady and arduous and painful most of the time, but real change—inside change—is lasting.

No matter where you go in life, no matter what you have or don’t have, what can never be taken from you is who you are becoming.

And the second reason I try to keep this close at heart is because it is a reminder not to numb the pain away, or to make decisions outside of my conscience or character, because at the end of the day, while my circumstances are always changing, what stays the same is ME—the version of myself that I get to carry into the newness of tomorrow.

And that one small reminder helps me, even in the unpredictability of life, even in a season of newness and change.

I hope it helps you, too.

Additional Resources:

Michael Hyatt’s Best Year Ever

I honestly can’t think of anyone better to help you clarify what you want and take the steps to get there. I don’t get paid anything for sharing this with you. It’s just a product I really believe can help you.
Necessary Endings by Henry Cloud
Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard by Chip & Dan Heath

The post What No One Ever Says About New Beginnings appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

Why Setting Goals Often Doesn’t Work (And What to Do About It)

There was one thing I was supposed to do this year—one thing I promised myself I would accomplish—and I didn’t do it.

To be fair, there were other things I did do from my same list of goals, things like “read two books a month” and “start blogging regularly again” and I can give gratitude for the fact that I was able to leverage the time and willpower at my disposal to bring those things to being. But there was that one thing, the really big one, that had me in knots as I looked at it, wondering why it was the most important thing on my list and I didn’t do it.

Can you relate?

Maybe there is something you’ve tried to do for many years in a row—like lose weight for example, or get outside more often, or watch less TV, or take that trip you’ve been dying to take, or have that hard conversation with that person you love, or eat kale—and maybe no matter what you’ve done, you haven’t been able to accomplish it.

Or maybe you don’t even remember the goals you set for yourself last year. Either way, there are few things more painful than knowing what you want and not being able to accomplish it.

The statistics about this phenomenon are pretty staggering, actually. According to Forbes, only 8% of us actually complete the objectives we set for ourselves at the beginning of the year. Which should make us all feel a little bit better about the fact that we haven’t been able to make progress with that important thing we’ve been working toward for years. And yet, if you’re like me, it also makes you wonder what makes some resolutions stick and not others.

Sure, one approach is to say, “forget it. There’s no point in setting goals anymore. They never really work anyway.” Another approach is to say, “okay, so this isn’t working very well. Let’s figure out a better way to think about setting goals so they can really serve us.”

I favor the second approach and here’s why:

Because changing ourselves and our habits is the most powerful tool we have to change the world. By that I mean we have very little power to rescue the many people in this world who are suffering and hurting, and very little power to prevent difficult or painful things from happening.

But we do have at least a little bit of power to change our own thoughts, patterns, and behaviors, and when we leverage that power, our personal change can have a corporate impact. Individual change has a powerful energetic pulse into the world. (Tweet That)

Each of us has the potential to change the world.  Because the price of change is so high, we seldom take on the challenge. —Robert E. Quinn, Deep Change

Changing our lives, our habits and our patterns is not easy. It doesn’t come at a low cost. But the alternative doesn’t come at a low cost either. The most dangerous thing we can believe is that we do not have an impact. For better or for worse, we are all changing the world.

Why We Don’t Follow Through With Our Goals

There are a dozen reasons, in my mind, that we don’t accomplish the goals we set out to achieve, and one of the most pressing reasons doesn’t have to do with the goals themselves, but the motivations with which we make them. Namely, we set goals from a place of self-hatred, rather than self-love.

For example, “lose weight” was the most popular resolution of this past year (big surprise) and as a woman who has been on various diet and exercise plans in my lifetime, I can say there is a profound difference between a weight loss plan I take on because I care about my body, because I want to feel good about myself, have more energy and supercharge my creativity; and the weird crash-diets I’ve done because I look at myself in the mirror and can’t stand the sight of the reflection staring back.

I’ve done both—and there’s a good chance you have too. And there’s a difference, would you agree?

Which one makes you feel better about yourself?
Which one is more enjoyable?
Which one is more effective?

I love the way Elizabeth Gilbert puts it when she is talking to writers about how to keep their promises to themselves to write on a daily basis. She says what they don’t need is more self-discipline. She insists they have plenty of that. What they need, she says, is more self-forgiveness, or self-love.

As for discipline—it’s important, but sort of over-rated. The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you. You will make vows: “I’m going to write for an hour every day,” and then you won’t do it. You will think: “I suck, I’m such a failure. I’m washed-up.” Continuing to write after that heartache of disappointment doesn’t take only discipline, but also self-forgiveness… the point I realized was this—I never promised the universe that I would write brilliantly; I only promised the universe that I would write. So I put my head down and sweated through it, as per my vows. —Elizabeth Gilbert

What would it look like if we stopped expecting ourselves to accomplish our goals perfectly and instead just allowed ourselves to fumble clumsily through them?

Can we have enough self-forgiveness to bring our resolutions to life this year?

Setting goals from a place of self-hatred, rather than self-love, will rarely work. Or it will work for a short time but won’t bring the satisfaction that we so desire. So this year, as you think about your goals and resolutions, ask yourself first: do I want that for myself because I love myself so much, or because I will hate myself until I achieve it?

Three Ways We Focus on The Wrong Things.

Another reason we fail to accomplish the objectives we put in front of ourselves is simply because we focus on the wrong things. There are a few different ways this can happen, but one way I see playing out in my life more than any of the others is that I focus on the “how” before I even know the what.

Here’s what I mean by that:

Do you find yourself thinking, “I would really love to [fill-in-the-blank] but that’s just so impossible. I mean, how would I ever meet the right people, or get the money, or be able to move my family, or have the skills, or be in the right place at the right time?” This is a subtle and powerful form of self-sabotage that literally derails our objectives before we can even put them on paper.

In fact, many of us don’t even allow ourselves to fully admit or understand what we want because we can already think of half-a-dozen reasons why we will never get it.

Another way this tendency plays out is that, while we think about our resolutions in passing, we never write them down or remind ourselves of them on a regular basis—and because we’re not totally clear about our priorities—we end up focusing on what is urgent in our lives, rather than what is really important. Our lives end up being dictated and dominated by our daily to-do lists, rather than our values.

Here’s what Greg McKeown says about that in his book Essentialism:

Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential. —Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

He emphasizes, over and over again, how if we don’t choose our priorities in life, someone else will choose them for us. And I don’t know about you, but this one is hugely convicting for me. I am really good at filling my time with things that make other people happy, or that make me feel productive, but not always so good at honing in on what really matters to me and moving toward that with laser focus.

This is a huge reason many of us have not been able to meet our goals—myself included.

And the final way we get stuck focusing on the wrong things is that when we are setting goals, we focus mostly on what we CAN’T have or what we’re cutting out or giving up. We want to watch less TV, give up sweets, stop smoking, quit putting money on a credit card or stop wasting time. The problem is we focus so much on what we’re trying to avoid that we end up actually getting the very thing we’re avoiding.

We move in the direction that we’re pointed, so why not point ourselves toward what we want to invite into our lives, rather than what we’re trying to get rid of? Check out how Charles Duhigg, the author of The Power of Habit has to say about the one thing we must remember about changing out habits:

The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.” —Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit

In other words, you can’t simply get rid of a bad habit. You really have to replace it with a better one. So when it comes to creating lasting change in our lives, we might find more success if, instead of focusing our attention on something like, “stop watching TV before I go to bed” we set an intention like, “read a book for 30 minutes at bedtime.”

The Most Counterintuitive Obstacle to Setting Goals

It wouldn’t be fair to move forward in this discussion without talking about the most counterintuitive obstacle to achieving our goals or resolutions, which is that we get too attached to the outcome we’re trying to create. You’ve heard it said, “if you love someone (or something) let it go.” The same could be said for our objectives.

At the end of the day (or year), we have to be willing to surrender the outcome we so desire, because without being willing go accept the flow of change in our lives, we can’t make progress in any direction. We only have control over so much—our own thoughts, choices, and behaviors. We do not have control over what other people choose to do, over the weather, or over any other circumstances outside of our control.

If we’re ever going to be happy with our lives, we have to learn to accept what we cannot change. (Tweet That)

Not to mention, we spend way too much time trying to change our external lives hoping it will change the way we feel about ourselves on the inside. We want the new job, or the raise or promotion, or for our boss to finally tell us he’s proud of the job we’ve done so we can finally be happy. We’re desperate to get married, or to have a baby, or to have our parents or friends or children act a certain way—so we can finally be at peace.

The problem is: change happens from the inside, out—not the other way around. Here’s how Robert E Quinn, author of Deep Change puts it in his book:

To make deep personal change is to develop a new paradigm, a new self, one that is more effectively aligned with today’s realities.”  “In doing so, we learn the paradoxical lesson that we can change the world only by changing ourselves. —Robert E. Quinn, Deep Change

In other words, our only hope for creating real, lasting change in our lives is to change the in deepest parts of ourselves—our thought patterns and ideas about the world—not just to give our career, our family or our bodies a proverbial facelift. We have to be willing to let go of the idea that getting the thing we want will change how we feel about ourselves. It won’t.

Although changing how we feel about ourselves will, more often than not, help us get the thing we want.

So if what you’re looking for is weight loss, it’s of course important to focus on diet and exercise. But it’s also important to focus on how your feelings about yourself might be dictating your choices and actions. If what you’re wanting is to finally go on that trip you’ve been putting off, it’s not just about saving a little bit more money. It’s also about asking what it is that makes you keep putting it off in the first place.

It isn’t until we can begin to unravel the thought patterns that are keeping us stuck that we will be able to make the actual, tangible process we so desire.

Cut Yourself A Break

Finally (and this one is really important) I believe we have to learn how to cut ourselves a break. I won’t even try to say it as eloquently and eloquently as Elizabeth Gilbert in this fantastic article from the Huffington Post:

Because it breaks my heart to know that so many amazing women are waking up at 3 o’clock in the morning and abusing themselves for not having gone to art school, or for not having learned to speak French, or for not having organized the neighborhood scavenger hunt. I fear that—if we continue this mad quest for perfection—we will all end up as stressed-out and jumpy as those stray cats who live in Dumpsters behind Chinese restaurants, forever scavenging for scraps of survival while pulling out their own hair in hypervigilant anxiety.

So let’s drop it, maybe?

The bottom line is that goals are hard to accomplish and habits are challenging to change. So if you’re like me and you’re coming to the end of this year and realizing you didn’t make the progress you were hoping to make this year, don’t use this as an excuse to not keep setting goals for yourself, or not inviting new and beautiful things into your life.

Pursuing the things that are important to you is never easy, but the effort is never wasted. You are busy becoming you and bringing the best parts of yourself to this world.

Resources:

In case you’re interested in learning more about setting goals that will actually stick this year, here are a few additional resources for your reading pleasure. Hope you enjoy.

5 Steps to Setting Powerful Intentions by Deepak Chopra
Your Guide to Ditching Traditional New Year’s Resolutions by The Every Girl
The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg
Deep Change, by Robert E. Quinn
Better Than Before, by Gretchen Rubin
Michael Hyatt’s The Best Year Ever

The post Why Setting Goals Often Doesn’t Work (And What to Do About It) appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

10 Unexpected Gifts to Give And Receive This Christmas

There is going to be a lot of gift-giving this Christmas, and trust me, I love giving (and of course receiving) gifts as much as the next person. But it’s always good to remember the gifts we don’t even have to pay for, already in our possession, that we can both give to others and also receive for ourselves.

No matter what you have or don’t have this Christmas—what you get or don’t get—the following ten unexpected gifts are yours for the taking.

1. The gift of imperfection

When you think about the story of your life, are there scenes you wish you could just delete altogether? Are there mistake you’ve made that you believe are too big to recover from? Are there negative experiences you worry have changed you forever?

Do you ever wish you could just wipe the slate clean and start over?

The problem is we cannot run from the stories that have shaped us. They live inside of us and become a part of us and come with us, wherever we go. The good news is these pieces of our stories are precisely the parts that make us each so remarkable.

I love this quote from Brene Brown’s book, The Gifts of Imperfection:

“When we spend a lifetime trying to distance ourselves from the parts of our lives that don’t fit with who we think we’re supposed to be, we stand outside of our story and hustle for our worthiness by constantly performing, perfecting, pleasing and proving. Our sense of worthiness—that critically important piece that gives us access to love and belonging—lives inside of our story.” —Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

What if we stopped wishing for a life someone else has and started embracing and celebrating the life that is ours? This beautiful gift is yours to use and shape and enjoy. There is no time left to be wasting it or complaining about it or wishing it away.

2. The gift of going without

I love the idea that, even when everything we think we wanted has been stripped from us—the job, the retirement plan, the marriage, the baby, the good health, the friendship—what we have left is the best gift we could ask for: ourselves.

In fact, often times discovering who we truly are requires having all the external things stripped away.

In his book The Gift of Being Yourself, David Brenner talks about how often we build a false self around external attachments, and even when they are rally good attachments, we do so at the expense of what we most desire:

Becuase it is hollow at its core, the life of a false self is a life of excessive attachments. Seeking to avoid implosion and non-being, the false serve grasps for anything that appears to have substance and then clings to these things with the tenacity of a drowning man clutching a life ring. One person might cling to his possessions, accomplishments or space. Another may cling to her dreams, memories or friendships. Any of these things can be either a blessing or a curse. They are a blessing when held with open hands of gratitude and a curse when they are grasped in fists of entitlement and viewed as “me” or “mine”. —David Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself

I don’t know about you, but I can identify with the feeling of grasping for things I believe have substance as if they were a life preserver, as if I will die without them. A person. A relationship. A new possession. An opportunity. An amount of money in the bank.

What is it for you?

What if not having that very thing is pointing you toward your most unexpected gifts?

3. The gift of unexpected change

Maybe you’re in a place right now where you’re facing a very unexpected change in your life. Perhaps you’ve lost a job, or a loved one has recently died, or you found out you’re sick, or someone in your life is really hurting.

Maybe the hurting person is you—and you just don’t feel like yourself.

When life takes a left turn, it’s natural to wonder: why? But what if, instead of asking, “why is this happening to me?” you asked, “why is this happening for me?” Seriously. What if you took out a piece of paper right now and starting making a list of all the reasons this circumstance could be happening for your good?

I love this quote from Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love:

God never slams a door in your face without opening a box of Girl Scout cookies (or however the old adage goes), some wonderful things did happen to me in the shadow of all that sorrow.

Not everything about your circumstance will be good. But don’t let this season pass you by without recognizing the incredible gift change can be.

Life is not static. It was never meant to be. It is always changing. So if you’re in a place that seem tense or confusing or sad or dark, the good news is it will not be this way forever. That is your great hope. Hold onto it.

4. The gift of fear

Fear is something we, as a culture, talk about often. We want to overcome our fear, get rid of our fear, punch our fear in the face. But fear is not only a natural, normal part of life, it can also be one of many incredible, unexpected gifts—if we’re willing to accept it.

Fear can warn us, it can protect us, it can speak to us, it can answer our deepest questions. But not if we try to avoid it or wrestle with it or pretend it doesn’t exist. What if, instead of resisting or resenting our fear, we could walk up to it and talk to it, knowing it was powerful and wise and had no control over us?

Here’s what Kate Northrup has to say about fear in her book, Money: A Love Story:

Within your deepest fear lies your deepest knowing of where your brilliance would best be utilized next. And that’s why you’re so freaked out. There’s a new horizon available to you. It’s calling your name, but right now the way you’re hearing it is through the lens of fear. That’s okay, you’re doing great.

There’s a wonderful Fritz Perls quote I heard via Gail Larsen, at her Real Speaking workshops, and it goes like this: “Fear is excitement without the breath.” Gold lies in the places where big emotional charge comes up for us, especially when that emotional charge comes in the form of fear.

Did you catch that? Fear is only one expression of energy. Another expression is excitement. Which means fear and excitement are often intertwined. When you pay attention to the gift of your fear, you also might find what you most desire.

Breathe. Listen to your fear. It is whispering you secrets.

5. The gift of losing everything

Sometimes the very best thing that can happen to us is what we would call the “worst” thing that could happen to us: we lose everything. Everything we’ve worked for, everything that has been given to us, everything we believe makes us “worthy”. Because what we have left over, when all of that is gone, is hope. What an incredible, unexpected gift.

Recently I read an article by Christena Cleveland that discusses the connection between hope and privilege—and how the two can be mutually exclusive.

Here’s a short expert from that article:

My friends are right. My privilege—my access to power, influence and agency due to my social location—clogs the pipeline between me and God, reducing my ability to receive the always present, always powerful flow of hope, comfort, and empowerment. When faced with a tragic injustice, I have the option of turning toward other things that will bring me temporary solace: Netflix and Jelly Belly binges effectively numb my pain; and a victory (of the bargain variety) at Nordstrom Rack goes a surprisingly long towards boosting my (false) sense of power.

What if the very things you think are the elements of the life you desire are actually blocking you from the thing you desire most: spiritual awakening?

The feeling of being alive.

Pay attention for the ways that you are going “without” this Christmas and then remind yourself how those open places are just spaces for you to encounter and experience and enjoy what you have always wanted—pure Love—a closeness and intimacy with God.

6. The gift of friendship

I’ve been going through a hard time lately and I would not have been able to make it through without my friends—who have cooked for me, texted me, checked in on me, listened to me, let me vent and cry, and even come over to my house and helped me get a Christmas tree up and decorated.

When I think about how thankful I am for true friends in this time, I’m reminded of this quote by Henry Nouwen:

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.

How can you receive and give the gift of friendship this holiday? It’s perfectly free.

7. The gift of happiness

Most of us are looking for happiness and peace outside of ourselves. We’re hoping some new relationship will come along, some opportunity, some amount of money, some promotion, some person or event to validate us and make us feel happy.

But the happiness you are dying for has been with you—inside of you—all along.

You already possess all you need to be genuinely happy. The way you reach that awareness is through an inner journey that brings about an emotional, psychological, and spiritual transformation. A deep inner shift in your reality occurs, aligning you with the creative energy of the Universe. Such change is possible when you invite Spirit to open up the eyes of your awareness to the abundance that is already yours. —Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance

I like to think of happiness like a garden. Some of us have, long ago, planted the seeds of happiness and contentment in the garden of our spirits, and we are reaping the results of that garden today.

It’s a big, flourishing garden that is producing food I can pick and eat.

But if I never did plant my garden, it’s easy for me to look over to my neighbor’s house and say, What? Why does she get such a beautiful garden when I don’t have one? If I would look, I would see I have the seeds and the soil, just like my neighbor. I simply haven’t put them to use.

Plants grow with love, nurture, care, food and water.

How are you growing your own happiness today?

8. The gift of knowing the truth

I’ve been thinking a lot about truth lately—and how truly painful it can be.

It is painful to hear, for example, a true criticism of something you’ve worked hard to accomplish. It’s painful to hear “you’re fired” or “I’m furious with you” or “I want to break up.” This is why you hear it said “ignorance is bliss”. Because not knowing can feel fairly peaceful, while knowing the truth cuts right to your heart.

But without truth, we live on shaky ground—all the puzzle pieces of our life sort of making sense, but not really adding up.

The truth is what sets us free.

If you are holding a secret to yourself—something you’ve known you needed to say for a long time, but haven’t been able to muster the words—give the gift of truth to the person who deserves it today. You are not protecting anybody by keeping secrets. You’re simply prolonging the pain.

And if you are facing some hard truth that you don’t want to accept, know that accepting the truth is your only path to freedom. The truth is all you have. The truth is your lifeline. It is your way forward. What a gift.

9. The gift of pain

I’ve been taking yoga at a studio recently, and this is the first time in my life I’ve consistently practiced (unless you count with laptop on my living room floor). I’m being pushed and challenged and my body is screaming at me, at points—quite literally shaking and boycotting the pain I’m putting it through.

And yet I know that pain is not always a bad thing, no matter what it feels like. In fact, some pain is just a part of life. And even the pain that is unnatural or that I should never have had to suffer does have a lot to teach me.

Where would we be without it?

In her book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor points out what we might be missing if we work our whole lives to avoid pain:

The way most people talk about darkness, you would think it came from a whole different deity, but no. To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up. To want a life with only half of these things in it is to want half a life, shutting the other half away where it will not interfere with one’s bright fantasies of the way things ought to be.

If we run away from darkness on principal, doing everything we can to avoid it because there simply is no telling what it contains, isn’t there a chance that what we are running from is God?”

No, pain does not feel good. But in my pain I find perspective, compassion, growth, grace, humility, groundedness, and even God.

10. The gift of breath

This past week I held my little baby niece for the very first time. She was not even one week old. One of the things that struck me as I held her was how well her little lungs were working, even though she was so new to the world. She didn’t have to think about breathing. No one taught her. She just breathes. 

And breath is the very thing keeping her alive.

How amazing is that? Just one of our many unexpected gifts.

When we are hurting, or surprised, or terrified, our first instinct is to hold our breath. It’s almost like, for a moment, we’re not sure we want this gift we’ve been given. But breath is the very thing that makes our life manageable.

It is what guides us through the pain and what points us back to ourselves.

And no matter what we have or don’t have, no matter where we are, no matter what is happening in our lives, we can always, always breathe.

What a unexpected gift.

The post 10 Unexpected Gifts to Give And Receive This Christmas appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

Getting Over The Fear of Not Enough

Do you ever get the feeling that, no matter what you do, there is never going to be enough? Not enough money, not enough time, not enough energy to accomplish the things you dream of accomplishing? Or never mind dreams—just enough energy to get through an average day would be appreciated.

This is something I’ve struggled with my entire life. It’s strange because I’ve never actually gone without much of anything. I mean, unless you count going without a latte I wanted or that too-expensive pair of boots or the trip to Italy I’ve always wanted to take.

But the fact that I’ve never really gone without doesn’t stop me from worrying about going without.

Will I be able to pay my mortgage this month? Will I be able to go on that fun trip my friends are planning in a few months? What if my car breaks down and I can’t afford the repairs? What if I run out of time and miss that deadline? What if that client never wants to work with me again? It’s always straight to worst-case-scenario.

Sound familiar?




Here is what the fear of “not enough” looks like in my life:

Anxiety around purchases or expenses—especially unexpected or unnecessary ones.
Worrying about money or about how I will get things done.
Feeling frenzied during the day, running from one thing to the next.
Trying to fix things I don’t know how to fix or give gifts I don’t have to give—because I am worried the need won’t get met if I don’t meet it.
An inability to enjoy the things I do have because I’m focused on what I don’t have.
Jealous feelings toward friends when they get something I don’t have

Competing and comparing, being really hard on myself for not “measuring up”

For a long time, I just thought this was how everyone felt when it came to money and time and energy. It’s strange how something totally crazy-making can become “normal” when we live with it everyday. It wasn’t until I started to meet people who didn’t share my same anxieties around enough—who seemed deeply content with themselves, with their efforts in a given day, their income, their possessions—that I realized there was a better way.




And strangely, miraculously, these people actually appeared to have more—more time, more energy, more resources, with less effort—than anyone I had ever met.

Needless to say, I was intrigued.

What is a Scarcity Mindset?

Never in a million years would I have told you I had a scarcity mindset. As far as I was concerned, I acknowledged and celebrated abundance in life. A phrase that was repeated in my house growing up, over and over again, was: God provides. And I would have repeated that phrase to you, even as an adult.

But the more I started to learn about a scarcity mindset and what it looked like, the more I realized this was something I was struggling with.

A scarcity mindset, by my definition, is simply:

A persistent feeling of not-enoughness—feelings of inadequacy, fear of going without, a lack of self-confidence—most often stemming from negative thought patterns around time, money and energy.

So having a scarcity mindset has little to do with what you have in your bank account or how much time or energy you have to give in a day and very much to do with how we feel about ourselves and what we believe about what we can offer to this world.

Where Does A Scarcity Mindset Come From?

Our beliefs are most often informed by and built around our experiences and how we interpret those experiences—more so than what we’re verbally taught. So you can be told a hundred times, “God provides!” but if you are constantly struggling financially and don’t have a good story to tell yourself about why you are struggling financially, it’s easy for the unconscious story that forms to sound like this:

God provides—just not for me.

The other thing to remember is that you are immersed in a culture which thrives off convincing you that you are not enough. And when I say “thrives” I mean quite literally, thrives. Companies are literally profiting off of your feelings that you are not pretty enough, not thin enough, not smart enough, not cool enough, not stylish enough, not fill-in-the-blank enough.

According to the authors—led by Debra Trampe, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands—advertised products, unlike unadvertised products, affect both whether and how the viewer thinks of herself afterward. In other words, an image of the high-heeled shoe in a stylish advertisement is likely to trigger a sense of inadequacy. (The New York Times).

We see something like 5,000 ads in a day, and people are literally profiting off of us acquiring a deep belief that we need something more.

No wonder we have a scarcity mindset. No one is immune.

We must constantly be fighting a mindset that tells us there are only so many resources to go around, and that in order to get what you need, you must fight for it, bargain for it, compete for it, and really only the smartest, savviest, hardest-working, luckiest people will “win” at it. Every man or woman for herself.

A scarcity mindset sets us up for unhealthy competition, jealousy, franticness, anxiety, overworking, and confusion about what really matters most.

What is An Abundance Mindset?

There is something I’ve been practicing consistently over the past four years that seems to be helping me with my anxiety surrounding money and time and just generally this idea of enough. It’s a small shift, but it’s made a huge difference for me. I’ve seen tangible shifts in the resources available to me, yes.

But more importantly I’ve experienced a positive shift toward peace and self-assurance, even when I don’t have exactly what I think I want or need.

It’s called an abundance mindset.

An abundance mindset is, very simply, changing the story we tell ourselves surrounding our experiences of enough. It is taking the same desires, circumstances and experiences we’ve always had surrounding money, time and energy and changing the story we tell ourselves about it. Same experiences. Different story.

When I get an unexpected bill in the mail, for example, I can say to myself, “ugh! Why does this always happen? I work so hard for my money and everyone is always trying to get a piece of it.” Or, I can say to myself, “thank goodness I have the money to pay this bill. I am so provided for.”
When someone asks me for time I don’t really have to give, I can think, “Everyone always needs something from me. Why can’t I just get an afternoon to myself?” Or I can say, “I wonder what it is about me that has such a hard time saying no. What am I afraid of?”
When it’s a Saturday morning and I’m dreading getting out of bed because I’m out of energy, I can moan and complain and drag myself out of bed, or I can ask, “what would happen if I just slept for an hour longer? What if my to-do list isn’t as pressing as I think it is?”

Where a scarcity mindset tell us there is not enough time to sleep in for another hour, or that our friend who asked for our time will be so lost without our help, or that everyone is always trying to take our money from us, an abundance mindset simply says: life is complicated. There will always be competing needs and expectations.

But I am enough. I have enough.

What An Abundance Mindset Isn’t.

To be clear, an abundance mindset isn’t some “health and wealth” magic wand that is going to immediately transform you into a millionaire flying to Italy first class in no time. At least not in my experience (although I do believe this can have a tangible impact on your income—it has on mine). An abundance mindset is about receptivity.

So it means I am open to receive whatever life brings my way—including disappointment, confusion, pain, etc, because I know happiness and peace are not dependent on my circumstances.

My happiness is something I carry inside of me.

When I have true feelings of “enough” I can allow to flow into my life what flows into my life and to flow out of my life what flows out of my life. I don’t need to coerce or control people or things around me because I know that everything that happens to me is an opportunity to learn and that I will receive exactly what I need, exactly when I need it.

Everything I need is always available to me—even if it isn’t exactly what I want.

That’s an abundance mindset. And it’s much easier said than done. By that I mean it’s much easier to write about than it is to actually carve out those thought pathways when you’re facing loss, or a fear of loss, or a season of living without.

Getting Over A Scarcity Mindset

Like I said before, transforming a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset is complicated for a litany of reasons—including that we have to change the deeply-ingrained story we’ve been telling ourselves about what it means to have enough, and also because we are fighting an uphill battle against advertising and culture.

One of the most important things we can do, I believe, to carve out these new stories for ourselves, is to intentionally change our thought patterns.

So, for example, over the past four years I’ve been working really intentionally to root out some of the negative thoughts I have around having enough or being enough (thoughts like, “no matter what I do, it’s never enough!”) and to replace those thoughts with the truth about the resources I have available to me in my life.

Here are some thoughts I’ve been working to deeply ingrain:

Everything that happens to me is an opportunity to learn. This is a reaction against my tendency to say, “why is this happening to me?” When I approach a challenge in my life like a victim, I miss out on the incredible gift it can be to me if I’m willing to receive it for what it is: an opportunity to learn.
I will receive exactly what I need, exactly when I need it. This replaces the thought, “How will I ever afford that?” or “What if the car breaks down?” I remind myself that I don’t have to have it all figured out today, but that I will have exactly what I need, exactly when I need it.
There’s more where that came from. I learned this from Marie Forleo, and say it to myself most any time I spend money.
I now release what I no longer need. This gives me the freedom to get rid of things in my life that aren’t serving me, instead of hoarding them. How often do we keep things for years because we think to ourselves, “someday… I might need this again.” Sometimes it takes releasing something we no longer need to make space for new things in our life.
I accept all blessings as they flow into my life. I tell myself this when someone offers to buy my coffee or give me a gift. Instead of fighting or arguing or feeling guilty, I receive it. Because it is by receiving I am able to give.
It’s okay to be happy and enjoy my life. I have spent way too much time in the past feeling guilty for being happy. This statement is a reminder that my happiness does not equal someone else’s unhappiness. Happiness is not a limited resource.
I can do even difficult things with joy. This is a phrase I use every time I find myself tempted to complain about something I must do. We all have these things. Responsibilities. Obligations. Expectations. When I do these things I remind myself, “I can choose to do this with joy.”
I am not obligated to give what I don’t have. When I say “no,” I remind myself of this: I am not the source. I don’t have to fix, take care of, impress, improve, or perfect anyone’s life. It is not my job. It is enough for me to just be who I am. I am enough.

Truly, I could go on. But hopefully that gives you an idea of how I’ve used ideas of abundance to change the way I think about myself and what I have to offer to the world.

The Difference it Makes

One of the main differences I’ve seen in my life is just the sheer reduction of anxiety. Anxiety has been a hard-fought battle for me for years—years—and I’ve seen more improvements in the past four years than I have in the ten years before that. I am convinced a huge part of the progress I’ve seen in this area can be attributed to the fact that I can now take a deep breath and say:

I am enough. I have enough. I’m going to be okay.

Another change I’ve seen is an increase in joy.

In the past, my approach to life was sort of like a football player (I’m terrible with sports analogies, but go with me here). I figured I should just put my head down, grit my teeth, take the hits and do whatever I needed to do to get to the other side of the field. These days I’m looking up and wondering: who is the opponent I’m grimacing against?

And what was this “other side” I was talking about? Have I been missing my life?

I love this quote from a book called Simple Abundance:

Today I want you to become aware that you already possess all the inner wisdom, strength, and creativity needed to make your dreams come true. This is hard for most of us to realize because the source of this unlimited personal power is buried so deeply beneath the bills, the car pool, the deadlines, the business trip, and the dirty laundry that we have difficulty accessing it in our daily lives. When we can’t access our inner resources, we come to the flawed conclusion that happiness and fulfillment come only from external events… And so we’ve learned to rely on circumstances outside ourselves for forward or backward momentum as we hurtle through life. But we don’t have to do that any longer. We can learn to be the catalysts for our own change. — Sarah Ban Breathnach

I’m finally waking up to this reality: life doesn’t have to be this painful, horrible, grin-and-bear-it kind of experience. In fact, even though many things in life will be painful, life itself can actually be really beautiful if we are willing to see it that way. It really isn’t nearly as much about our circumstances as we have always imagined.

Our value is not determined by our bank account, our title or position, our rank, our skill set, our marital status, our last name, our education, the amount of designer clothes we own, the number of fancy destinations we’ve visited, or anything else. You are enough. You have enough. You are going to be okay.

I hope, no matter what happens, you will find a way to believe that.

More resources:

It’s important for me to note, especially when it comes to a conversation about money, that there are very real, practical needs associated with finances and when these immediate needs aren’t met, a conversation about mental abundance is virtually impossible to engage.

For that reason, I’m included both some very practical and also theoretical resources below.

Hope they help.

Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University helped me get out of debt and get control of my finances several years ago, so that I have been able to more fully enjoy my life and engage conversations about greater abundance.
This is a beautiful, helpful interview with one of my very favorite bloggers Marie Forleo and her guest Kate Northrup, talking about money mindsets that may be holding us back.
Kate Northrup’s book, which she discusses in the above interview, is called Money: A Love Story and is a fascinating approach to changing our financial lives through addressing our negative attitudes about abundance.
When it comes to talking about an abundance mindset and how it can impact our spiritual and physical lives, I love this book Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach.

The post Getting Over The Fear of Not Enough appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

Learning How to Be Happy in the Midst of Pain

On the one hand, this season can be one of the happiest times of the year. It’s a time to gather with friends and family, to eat decadent foods or treat yourself to that extra glass of wine; to linger a little longer at a table, laughing or telling stories, to spend a little bit extra on ourselves or others, to enjoy the finer things in life and to put up decorations that, even at their very worst, are glimmering and beautiful.

And at the same time, this time of year can also be a reminder of what is missing from your life. Maybe it makes you remember somebody you’ve lost earlier this year, or earlier in your life. Perhaps there is something you desire to have—a baby, a business, a marriage, a friendship—but haven’t been able to manifest for yourself yet.

Maybe you walk through the mall, like I do, and feel thrown off your center of gravity by all the messages about what you lack, what you need to measure up.

Maybe your home or your life isn’t as glimmering and beautiful as you want it to be.


I understand.

This Christmas season will be nothing like I thought it would be. I had plans. Big plans. Plans I’ve been hatching since earlier this year—booking plane tickets and charting dates on the calendar and scheming surprises and dreaming of fresh cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning.

And for reasons I can’t and won’t explain until it is time, my Christmas will not be like that. Maybe you’re in a similar position. Maybe there is something you want this Christmas, but you can’t have it—something that can’t be wrapped and put under a Christmas tree—and maybe there is no amount of shopping or carols or glittering lights that can replace what it is you are missing.

Can you learn how to be happy when you’re in pain?

To be honest, the thought of being happy, even when in pain, hasn’t always been appealing to me in the past. I’m not a fan of pretending to feel things I don’t feel, and that’s what “learning how to be happy” sounded like to me.

But this week, as I was reflecting on the disappointment I feel over the fact that the next few months will be so different from what I had imagined, I also received news that my brother and his wife were about to celebrate the arrival of their little baby girl. When I heard, this is what I wrote on my Facebook page:

My heart is breaking this week over some things going on in my little world, and at the same time, right this minute my sister-in-law is SO VERY CLOSE to giving birth to my first baby niece. We’ve been calling her meatloaf for the past few months (I think because my SIL was craving meatloaf while she was pregnant? Haha, I can’t even remember). I’m sure she’ll have another name soon—one that won’t mortify her when she becomes a teenager.

Until then, I’m sitting here thinking how strange it is that I can feel such sorrow and such joy at the same time. That there can be tears and laughter in the same breath. Life is a great paradox.

That realization seems like an important one when it comes to a conversation about happiness: that feelings of happiness don’t mean an absence of pain. In fact, true happiness stays in the midst of the pain. That does not mean we pretend to not feel the pain we feel, or that we minimize it’s affects on our life. It means we fight like hell to see something good, in even what might be a really terrible situation.

We learn to leverage our profound human ability to curate happiness. It doesn’t take the pain away, but it is a great comfort when the pain inevitably comes.

Life is both profoundly beautiful and also painful. You cannot have one without the other.

A world filled with pain.

I was listening to the radio this week and the station I listen to was doing a telethon for St Jude’s Children’s hospital in Memphis Tennessee. To be honest, telethons often bug me—all the hype and the heart-strings pulling and getting the little kids to tell their story tends to make me feel a little manipulated. But this time I didn’t roll my eyes or even change the station.

All I could think about as I listened to the stories of the parents fighting for the life of their kids, and the kids (as young as four) fighting for their own lives, was how many people in this world will be truly grieving this season—grieving the loss of something they wanted and deserved and that is more basic and human than whatever may end up under our Christmas trees.

Think of all the people who must be grieving this December:

The victims and families of the shooting in Paris
The victims and families of the shooting in San Bernardino
The victims and families of the hundreds of other mass-shootings that have taken place in this country in 2015.
The innumerable Syrian refugees still without homes.
Those fighting a terminal or life-threatening illness and their families.
Those who have lost a loved one this year or in previous years.

I could go on and on. There are so many heartbroken people. Maybe you’re one of them. Maybe you know someone who is. Maybe you look out at the world and see how much pain there is and you are grieving for others who are grieving. The pain of others often reminds us of our own pain.

Pain not discriminate. It hurts no matter how we go about acquiring it. (tweet that)

If you’re feeling pain or know someone who is, here are a few small mindset shifts I’m practicing that are helping me find peace and joy, even when circumstances aren’t ideal.

It’s okay to be happy.

For most of my life I felt guilty about being happy because I thought of happiness as a limited resource—as if there was only so much of it to go around. When I looked around at the world, or even at the people in my own little world, I saw so many people suffering from unhappiness, it didn’t seem right for me to feel happy.

If I was happy, who would have to be unhappy at my expense?

I’m starting to realize how flawed this view of the world always was. Happiness is not a limited resource. In fact, it isn’t a resource at all. It is a contagious state of being, that has very little to do with our circumstances and so very much to do with the way we think about our lives and what is happening around us.

The fact that happiness is contagious is not just a nice thought. It’s a chemical process that takes place in our brains, thanks to mirror neurons:

When we see someone experiencing an emotion (be it anger, sadness, happiness, etc), our brain “tries out” that same emotion to imagine what the other person is going through. And it does this by attempting to fire the same synapses in your own brain so that you can attempt to relate to the emotion you’re observing. This is basically empathy. It is how we get the mob mentality, where a calm person can suddenly find themselves picking up a pitchfork against a common enemy once they’re influenced by dozens of angry minds. It is our shared bliss at music festivals, or our solidarity in sadness during tragedies.

But it is also your night at the bar with your friends who love love love to constantly bitch, whether it’s about their job, the man, the government, or about their other so-called friend’s short-comings, or whatever little thing they can pick apart in order to lift themselves up and give themselves some holier-than-thou sense of validation when you nod your head in acquiescence, agreeing like a robot afraid of free-thought.” —Steven Parton, Uplift

There are a few things I take from this when it comes to happiness.

First, if you’re having a hard time figuring out how to be happy, find people who are happy and spend quality time with them. You might even consider telling them: I’m going through a hard time and you seem really happy. I need that positive influence in my life right now.

It will not fix all of your problems but there will be an “instant” quality to your happiness, thanks to the amazing way your brain works. And the even better news is that the more adept your brain gets at experiencing happiness, the easier it will be for you to recreate that experience of happiness over time. It’s like riding a bike.

The more often you feel happy feelings, the easier it will be for you to feel happy again.

The fact that happiness is contagious like this completely reverses the way I used to think about it being a limited resource. The more happiness I can curate in my life, the more happiness I can pass on to those around me. Spend some time confronting some of your limiting beliefs around happiness. You might find the main person restricting the amount of happiness possible in your life… is you.

Happiness is not circumstantial.

It’s so easy for me to get stuck thinking “I’ll be happy when…” I’ll be happy when I graduate from college, happy when I get a masters degree, happy when I don’t have to work in a restaurant anymore, happy when I get married, happy when I have a baby, happy when I make more money, get a new car…

I could go on and on. I’m sure you could, too.

The truth is that happiness is not based on our circumstances.

Happiness is a state of mind that is created from our reactions and interpretations of circumstances outside of our control, which are constantly changing.

Generally speaking, our happiness—in fact, any emotional state, including a negative one—is generated by interpretations of events… When we interpret our negative boss as an obstacle, for example, we feel angry and frustrated; if, in contrast, we view our boss as “exactly what we need in order to become a better person,” we experience a sense of calmness, perhaps even gratitude — Raj Raghunathan Ph.D, Psychology Today

What are the “I’ll be happy when…” messages that you have been silently saying to yourself and what is something proactive today to remind yourself that the “thing” you are longing for can’t make you any happier than you are right now?

Things provide temporary happiness—a relationship, a compliment, a good meal, a new pair of jeans—but the happiness you cultivate from inside yourself is a deep, lasting happiness that will stay with you, even if or when any of those good “things” go away.

Exercise your power of choice.

One way I’m learning how to be happy, even when my circumstances aren’t ideal, is by exercising my power of choice. I like to think of it as stealing my life back.

Here’s what I mean by that:

There are many things in life we do not get to choose but one thing we always have a choice about is how we respond to and/or interpret the events that unfold in front of us.

Remember happiness is born of our interpretations—not our circumstances. So the best way we can take control of our happiness is to take control of how we’re interpreting our life’s events. When something takes place that seems unfair or less-than-ideal—when the car breaks down or an unexpected bill comes or someone gets sick or a relationship ends—we can either think to ourselves, “why is this happening to me?” Or we can say: why is this happening for me?

We do not have control over life’s events, but we have control over our thoughts about each and every one of those events. This is the one thing we can control in this life. Do not give up your power of choice. Or, if you have, reclaim it as soon as you are able. Steal your life back.

What are the stories you tell yourself about what is going on in your world right now?

How might those interpretations be keeping you learning how to be happy?

There is only one person you can make happy.

Because happiness is a state of mind or state of being, I am the only one who can generate happiness for myself. And I cannot be in charge of generating it for others. No circumstance, person, situation, opportunity, or amount of money can be in charge of my happiness and I cannot take on the impossible task of making another person happy.

It just won’t work.

If you’ve ever spent any amount of time trying to make another person happy—and most of us have, to some extent or another—you know the absolutely frustrating and impossible task it proves to be. You can give and give and give until you’re blue in the face, and they’re still not happy.

Happiness is an inside job. (tweet that)

And because it’s an inside job, that means we all must take responsibility and accountability for our own personal happiness. You are the only one responsible for the thoughts inside your head, the story you are telling yourself about your life events. You can be kind to people. You can work so share the happiness you have.

But at the end of the day, you are only in charge of making yourself happy. You have to leave the happiness of others to them.

Do not minimize pain.

I think perhaps one of the most important things I can say in a conversation about happiness and pain is that happiness—no matter how much of it we work to cultivate and curate—does not take away the pain we feel. It just doesn’t. This is, in my opinion, where so many people go wrong when talking about happiness.

Happiness helps us cope with pain. It comforts us in the midst of our pain. It helps us, ironically, interpret our pain in positive ways (which is exactly how we find happiness in the first place). It compounds upon itself, grows from itself, and once it gets rolling, has an incredible momentum to bring hope and peace and even more happiness to those around us.

But it does not take away the pain.

There is no escaping pain, sadly. We can either deal with it, or we can defer it to deal with it later, but we cannot escape it.

The real challenge then, is realizing that happiness and pain can and do coexist. In fact, this is the only way for them to exist—together. This is the great paradox of the life we are living. Philosopher Alan Watts says, ”Because human consciousness must involve both pleasure and pain, to strive for pleasure to the exclusion of pain is, in effect, to strive for the loss of consciousness.”

Life is not either/or. It is not happiness or pain. It is both, and.

So I hope no matter where you are today, no matter what you feel you lack, or what you still desire, or how dark or painful your Christmas season seems, I hope you’ll be able to find just a sliver of happiness. Because truly, a sliver is all you need.

The post Learning How to Be Happy in the Midst of Pain appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

What Are Limiting Beliefs and Are They Holding You Back?

Back when I was finishing college and trying to make a decision about what I was going to do next, I met with my advisor. I was terrified in that meeting. I was always a bit timid in the English department at my university, where as saw myself as the bottom of the barrel, the least dedicated or intelligent of a group of incredibly dedicated and intelligent students.

So in that meeting, when she asked me what I was planning to do after graduation, I hemmed and hawed.

What do you want to do? She asked, hoping that would make things easier.

Again, I stammered and stuttered and told her I didn’t really know.

I was working as a bartender at the time to help pay my way through college. It was great money, honestly, and for the most part it felt easy. When I pictured life after college, I figured I could just sort of keep doing what I was doing. I mean, it was close to my house. I wouldn’t have to learn anything new. I could walk out with cash in my pocket every night.

I guess that was what I “wanted” to do…? How were you supposed to know?

“You can’t really do much with an English degree,” I told her, reciting the words so many had said to me before I chose my major.

“Have you considered graduate school?” She asked.

“It’s crossed my mind but I don’t really think I’m cut out for it.”

I thought about how I’d have to fill out an application and get a letter of recommendation from a professor, and none of my professors would probably write one for me. Then I’d have to pay an application fee and, well, money was already tight, and what if I didn’t even get in? That would be a huge waste of 40 bucks.

At the end of our meeting, I got up and walked toward the door. She stopped me for a moment and looked straight in my eyes and said:

“If you want to go to graduate school go to graduate school. You can do what you want.”

Of course I left her office muttering to myself about how that wasn’t totally true. What if I wanted to be in the WNBA? Did she think I could do that? What I couldn’t see at the time were the many dozens of limiting beliefs at play there and how profoundly we can hold ourselves back.

Are you holding yourself back?

Do you ever get the sense that you are holding yourself back? That there is more you have to offer to this world, more buried deep inside of you, but it feels like there is some invisible force getting in your way?

Do you get the sense that you are playing small?

I read a quote once by Marianne Williamson. You’ve may have read it at some point, too. It goes like this:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” —Marianne Williamson

And when I first found this quote, it all sounded so unreasonable to me. Who would be scared of being powerful? But the more I began to zoom out from my life, and look at myself as if I were not myself, the more I began to see how the person most at fault for holding me back was… me.

Can you relate? Have there been times in your life when you could have made a move toward a better job, or a healthier relationship, or even toward a more challenging, happier existence, and you just didn’t?

What are we so afraid of?

What is a limiting belief?

A limiting belief is simply something you believe to be true about yourself, about others, or about the world that limits you in some way. These beliefs may hold you back from taking chances, keep you blind to opportunities in your path, prevent you from accepting gifts offered to you; or simply keep you stuck focusing on the negative aspect of your circumstances, rather than seeing the positive.

The challenge with limiting beliefs is most of us don’t think we have them and they can be really hard to spot.

The first time I heard the phrase “liming belief” I wasn’t sure. I mean, were my beliefs really that powerful? Did the have the power to limit me? Did beliefs come from what I experienced in the world—or did what I experienced in the world reflect what I believed about it?

Honestly the first one sounded far more plausible.

And even if limiting beliefs were powerful enough to impact the reality of my circumstances, did I have any limiting beliefs? If you would have asked me then, I would have said “no”. But consider the beliefs dictating the conversation with my advisor that day:

You can’t make money with an English Degree.
I’m not the “kind of person” who would do well in graduate school
It would be better to stick with what was easiest than challenge myself with my work.

Can you think of some limiting beliefs that might be getting in your way? Here are a few common ones.

I’m not very smart (or pretty, or interesting, or funny).
My brother (or sister) is the successful one.
Money is hard to come by and easy to lose.
I’m not cut out for that job.
That activity is really more of a guy thing (or a girl thing).
Men (or women) are liars and they will always be unfaithful to me.
Relationships always end in heartbreak.
Nobody loves their job. Work is supposed to be boring at best, miserable at worst.
Women (or men) are manipulative and they can’t be trusted.
I am not worthy of being loved
Only the lucky people succeed at what they care about
Nobody is really all that happy.
The only way to get what you want is to be dishonest
Life is pretty much meaningless

The most challenging thing with limiting beliefs is that they are often buried deep in our consciousness, so that we don’t realize they’re there and we can’t see what they’re doing to us. From our perspective, life is just “happening” to us and it isn’t until we begin to see the negative patterns play out, again and again, that we stop and say:

How did I get here?

Could my beliefs about myself or the world have something to do with it?

How do limiting beliefs work?

The problem with limiting beliefs is that most of us do not consciously decide what to believe, nor do we recognize the many ways these beliefs are limiting us. It happens quietly, behind the scenes and beneath the surface. Not to mention, it can be difficult, if not impossible without serious help, to admit we have played a role in the very pain that has so devastated us.

It’s terrifying to consider that we have, all along, had the power to release ourselves from the painful cycle that has been torturing us.

When I turned 22, a year and a half after I graduated with my degree, I decided to take a major step of faith and quit the bartending job I was bored with in hopes of finding something better. The problem was I hadn’t addressed my limiting beliefs. And what can often happen when we take action without addressing our limiting beliefs is we just recreate our old scenario somewhere new.

So yes, I quit my bartending job and moved away from the town where I was living, back to Portland, Oregon where I had grown up. But months passed, and surprise surprise, no one came to knock on my door to offer me a new, better job (I didn’t even know what kind of job I wanted). So eventually I ran out of money, and can you guess what happened next?

I ended up getting a job…working in a restaurant. Pretty much the exact same job I’d had before.

This is the power and danger of limiting beliefs. They can dominate our stories and dictate them, no matter where we go. That is, unless we make a conscious choice to change them.

Wherever you go, there you are.



Go back for a minute to the beliefs you acknowledged above. How might those beliefs be limiting you as we speak? How might the beliefs you have about yourself, others, or the world, be limiting your ability to take chances, seek opportunities, or see the gifts already sitting right in front of you?

How do you discover your limiting beliefs?

To discover limiting beliefs, we must pay attention to patterns.

In my life personally, I’ve had the most success uncovering my limiting beliefs by paying attention to the less-than-desirable patterns in my world and then tracing them back to a belief connected to them. So, for example, when I found myself working at another restaurant in my 20’s, feeling miserable, I started digging to see what beliefs might be limiting me.

I spent time writing, journaling, reading and driving—because those are the ways I process best, and what I found were the following thoughts:

I’m only good at waiting tables—I’m not sure if I can do something else.
I’m not sure if I even deserve to have a job that satisfies me more deeply than this one.
I’m not the “kind of person” who succeeds in life.
The economy is bad. There just aren’t that many jobs out there.

And just like that, I started to see how my negative beliefs about myself and about the world around me were keeping me from creating the life I desired and from having opportunities to bring my gifts to the world.

My own beliefs were keeping me small.

Are you starting to see how limiting beliefs can work to create the very negative realities we are hoping to avoid?

How can we overcome limiting beliefs?

Honestly, discovering you have a limiting belief is such a huge step forward, if you’ve gotten there, it’s time to celebrate! You know the saying, “knowing is half the battle”? It’s really true. When you know and acknowledge your limiting belief as just that—a belief you can choose to change that is limiting you—you are on the right track.

This is really the hope of this whole thing right here: we can choose to change these beliefs!

We have control over what we think.

1. Replace your beliefs



One thing I’ve done to help me overcome my own limiting beliefs is to create affirmations or little prayers for myself that help me to retrain or reroute the negative pattern that takes place in my head. There is a considerable about of research that shows how our neurological pathways can change as we choose to think differently about the world.

So I went through my own list of limiting beliefs—the ones I saw showing up in my life the most often—and wrote new thought patterns I wanted to form to replace those old, limiting beliefs.

Here are the affirmations I’m using right now:

I am safe and protected in the world.
The abundant resources of the universe are available to me.
I deserve to prosper.
Everything that happens to me is an opportunity to learn.
I release the need to identify as the victim.

I say these affirmations to myself every single morning. I try to say them multiple times each day. Anytime I’m in a situation where I think to myself, “This always happens to me!” I replace that thought with, “Everything that happens to me is an opportunity to learn.”

Each time I catch myself thinking, “that person doesn’t even give a crap about me!” I remind myself: “I release the need to be the victim.”

And every time I feel myself thinking that my life is such a bummer and it must be nice to be one of those “other people” who have everything handed to them, I tell myself: “I deserve to prosper.”

Slowly but surely, it is changing the way I think about myself and even more powerfully than that, it’s changing the way I experience my life.

2. Work with a therapist.



Sometimes you will need help—even professional help—to overcome your limiting beliefs. You’re working with neurological pathways here, and it’s like skiing in ruts that are 10 feet deep. You can try and try to change your path, but until you’re lifted out of the rut you’re in, you’ll have a hard time skiing a different way down the mountain.

And truly, even when you’re lifted out, you will have a tendency to slip back in.

So working with a therapist is a totally reasonable, logical, super helpful thing to do to help you overcome that invisible force that is keeping you anxious, frustrated, stuck and depressed.

For most people, limiting beliefs have been part of their internal world for so long that the beliefs feel ‘normal,’”…Working with a therapist can help. A clinician can help you uncover limiting beliefs, understand how they were formed, interrupt the limiting patterns and create new, adaptive ways of understanding yourself and your world. —Margarita Tartakovsky, Psych Central

I’ve been in and out of therapy for several years of my life and I truly don’t know how I would have survived without the people who have supported me through my darker times. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

3. Make Something



I read something recently by Brene Brown that caught my attention. A reader had reached out to thank her for her work on shame but this person had a question. He asked: how do you go about making positive changes in your life once you realize where you’ve been letting shame dictate your actions?

Her response was so simple and yet profound.

She said: create.

From all of her research and interactions with people over the years, she had come to the conclusion that one of the best ways to solidify new and positive changes in our life is to put our hands to something—grow a garden, write a book, journal, write poetry, paint, design, engineer something, invent, innovate.

There is something about the act of creation that helps us to see ourselves, that helps us carve those new neurological pathways, that helps us manifest the life we can see in our heads and feel in our hearts but we can’t seem to make make a reality in our lives.

I can’t help but agree with her.

The act of creating is not a frivolous activity. It is not something “extra” for the margins of our lives, if we have time. It is the very way we live our lives. It is a lifeline. Where would we be without it?

If you’re interested in reading more about limiting beliefs, I’ll share a few articles below that have been helpful for me.

The Backfire Effect: The Psychology of Why We Have A Hard Time Changing Our Minds (via Brain Pickings)
Where Belief Is Born (via The Guardian)
Overcome 8 Common Limiting Beliefs That May Be Keeping You Stuck (via Tiny Buddha)

Also, I’d love to hear from you. Do you have limiting beliefs that are holding you back? What are they? What are some steps you are taking (or can take) to help re-route those pathways?

The post What Are Limiting Beliefs and Are They Holding You Back? appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

What to Remember When You’re Feeling Overwhelmed

I tend to get overwhelmed easily. I hate this about myself—mostly because I feel in a constant state of inner conflict, wanting to be a part of every gathering, spend time with every friend, travel to every place in the world and accomplish more and more in my career—and at the same time knowing there is only so much I can handle.

There is only so much any of us can handle, but it seems sometimes like I get overwhelmed more readily than most. Too much light. Too much noise. Too many people. Weird smells. Too many notifications, too many emails and text messages—the beeping, the buzzing—all the unfinished items on my to-do list…


AHHHHHHHHHH!

If you’re not easily overwhelmed, none of this bothers you all that much. You can stand lots of external stimulation and you can still stay pretty calm and centered within yourself. But if you’re like me, even a tiny bit “too much” of anything and you risk a total meltdown. Too much traffic on the highway, too much caffeine, even too much volume in someone’s voice when they are speaking to you.

You notice all the little subtleties and differences in “too much”. You notice things other people probably don’t notice.

Very often I find myself overwhelmed and wondering what to do about it.

Can you relate?

A Lesson In Staying Calm.

I’ve been taking this new yoga class and recently my instructor said something I thought was so profound. Despite the fact that I have always looked at yoga classes and thought, “oh that’s cute… they’re stretching…” I am now eating my words. Yoga is so much harder than what I was expecting.

Often in class I feel overwhelmed.

I feel overwhelmed with what is being asked of me and my body; I feel overwhelmed with the thoughts that are going through my head (“you suck at this,” “you’re an idiot,” “everyone is staring at you,” “you’re so weak!”); and I feel overwhelmed by the fact that everyone else seems to be able to do the postures with ease, while I’m wobbling all over the place, limbs flailing in the air, like an idiot.

My response in the moment is usually to, first, push myself to the point of injury to save face in front of the others who are stronger and more flexible than me. Second, to get angry with my body when it won’t comply and try even more aggressively to force myself into the postures. And then third, to burst into a sort of frustrated fit for being such a horrible failure.

It’s really cute. You should be there to see it.

But this past week at a yoga class, when my body wouldn’t comply with one of the very simple postures (or at least that’s how everyone around me made it look), I did my usual frustrated sigh and angry look, and then I heard the instructor say something I won’t soon forget. She said:

If you get overwhelmed, that’s totally normal. Just breathe. Your only real job in here is to breathe.

In fact, she said that if we needed to, we could either lay down on our backs to recollect ourselves when we are feeling overwhelmed, or we could take an easier or modified version of the pose. But no matter what, our first and most important job was/is to breathe.

I found her advice to be hugely profound for me—and I don’t just mean in the yoga studio.

Are you A Highly Sensitive Person?

There’s a book by Elaine Aron called The Highly Sensitive Person and I have to admit, the first time I picked it up, I thought to myself, “What a crock. There’s no such thing as a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). That’s just a label for a bunch of losers and cry babies who aren’t strong enough to face the world like I am.”

Disclaimer: if that doesn’t give you a peek into my self-destructive and highly critical inner-voice, I don’t know what will.

But just because I’ve resisted it doesn’t make it not true. It is a scientifically proven that there are some folks who are more stimulated by their environments than other people. We’re more sensitive to sights, sounds smells, loud noises, people yelling at us or raising their voices, and to changes in our environment. And I know because I am one.

Here’s what I didn’t realize about HSPs until I actually opened the book and read it:

You can be highly sensitive and also love adventures.

You can be highly sensitive and also love people.

You can be highly sensitive and also be a high achiever.

Having a sensitive nervous system is normal, a basically neutral trait. You probably inherited it. It occurs in about 15-20 percent of the population. It means you are aware of subtleties in your surroundings, a great advantage in many situations. It also means you are more easily overwhelmed when you have been out in a highly stimulating environment for too long, bombarded by sights and sounds until you are exhausted in a nervous-system sort of way. Thus, being sensitive has both advantages and disadvantages. —Elaine Aron

I’m not sure why I felt so resistant for so long to admitting I was more sensitive than other people. But maybe you can relate.

What if you didn’t have to feel so overwhelmed, so often?

What would it look like if we started paying very close attention to how our bodies were responding in certain situations—and rather than measuring our “success” by how other people are responding under the same circumstances (like other people’s yoga poses) we simply said to ourselves: at least I’m here, at least I’m present, and my only job is to breathe?




This very simply lesson has helped me so much over the years. It has helped me have grace for myself in those moments when it feels like my body is betraying me because it gets exhausted. It’s helped me take the breaks I need, even if no one else needs them, because I can only measure my body against my body. It’s helped me to squelch that nasty inner-critic who sometimes likes to make me think I’m “weak” or “ineffectual” because I am not the same as everyone else.

It helps me to thank myself for showing up and remember: your only job is to breathe.

Making Space for Yourself

A few years ago I learned another lesson that would become a huge help for me as I worked to fight my own battle with overwhelm. I went away for a week-long retreat at a place here in Tennessee called Onsite. One of the things we did during this program was work with horses.

It’s amazing how much our work with animals can tell us about ourselves. The first time I read that dogs reflect our energy back to us, like mirrors, I joked that there was no way that was possible, since my dog is clingy, moody and a little bit codependent

Of course I knew it was more than a little bit true.

So I was excited to spend some time working with the horses because I knew it would give me some insight into myself.

The first person I watched go into the pen couldn’t get the horse to come near him. Over time, he learned to coax the horse, to woo him, and to invite him into a shared space. The second person to go into the pen somehow spooked the horse and he started bucking. She couldn’t get him to calm down; and the handler eventually explained that, again, she was going to have to control her energy a bit and invite the horse into shared space with her.

Next was my turn and my lesson came before I even entered the pen.

I walked up to the handler and she asked what I was hoping to work on that day. I told her I was feeling a little apprehensive about even going in there. I don’t know, something about a 1000 pound animal kicking his iron-clad feet in the air made me feel a little less-than-calm about sharing a space with him. Maybe even a bit overwhelmed.

She said to me something I’ll never forget. She said:

“You can always decide to leave the pen.”

She explained how, at any point, if I was feeling overwhelmed, or anxious or like I was being threatened inside the pen with the horse, it was always my right to leave the pen. And suddenly it occurred to me: DUH. It is always my right to create space or distance for myself.

Always.

I never have to ask for permission or offer any kind of explanation for myself. It’s kind of me if I choose to do so, but I don’t owe it to anyone.

That single piece of advice has helped me with so many experiences in my life where I feel overwhelmed. I can always, always, take the space I need for myself, no matter what is going on. I can always breathe. I can always take a break. I can always say, “this isn’t going to work for me.” And no matter what anyone else in the room is doing, I can always lay down on my back and take a minute to breathe.


It doesn’t mean I’m a failure.

I can always leave the pen.

You Don’t Have to Do Anything Now.

Another important lesson that has helped me fight overwhelm I learned came this past summer at a conference called World Domination Summit in Portland, Oregon. The event—in case you’ve never heard of it—is so much less threatening than it sounds. It’s basically a group of leaders gathered together to dream and talk about how to influence the tiny “worlds” we live in.

One speaker I heard at WDS who really left an impact on me was named Lissa Rakin. Lissa told a story about a time she felt overwhelmed—actually “overwhelmed” might be an understatement. She was doing her residency to become a physician, and she was sleep-deprived, starving and beyond her human capacity for functioning.

That’s when she found herself at the grocery store.

And when she was checking out at the grocery store, she found that the clerk was moving very slowly to count her change. She felt perturbed, but at first didn’t say anything. The longer it went on, however, the harder it became to contain her anger.

Finally, she burst out yelling, something to the effect of: “If I did my job like you did yours, there would be dead people everywhere!”

She described that moment as being one of those out-of-body experiences where you think to yourself, first, “is this really happening?” and then “who is this alien person saying these awful words to a complete stranger?” and then finally, “how did I become this woman?”

Then Lissa said something I’ll never forget. She talked about going home and trying to decide what she should do next. She talked about weighing all the options. She talked about the opportunity cost and feeling stuck and not knowing how to move forward. And then she told herself something I now say to myself all the time. She told herself:

”You don’t have to do anything right now. You just have to make peace with what’s true.”

And when I’m feeling overwhelmed, sometimes this is what I need most: to make peace with what is true. Maybe that’s something as simple as, “I’ve pushed myself too far” or “I cannot do everything.” Maybe the truth is, “I have a really difficult choice to make,” or “I can’t be all things to all people.”

And in those moments when I’m most overwhelmed, it helps me to know I don’t actually have to make any changes right this very minute.

My first job is to make peace with what is true. The actions I need to take will follow suit.

Practical Tips for Avoiding Overwhelm.

In addition to fighting the shame we inevitably feel in a world where Highly Sensitive People are considered “broken” or under-developed, we also live in a world that favors non-HSPs because, to put it simply, in order to thrive in our highly-connected, fast-paced world you have to get good at managing lots of input.

So how can HSPs learn to function in this world—practically speaking?

The short answer is this: we can get good at filtering out all of the unnecessary input so that we can focus on what really matters. That means we can work to control all the dinging, ringing, unnecessary background noises, TV, electronics, crowd noises, weird smells, etc that make us go insane so we can find more peace in our environment.

Here are some intently practical steps I’ve taken (and still am taking) to manage the input in my life so I can still stay sane and bring my gifts to the world.

Control your technology (so it doesn’t control you)

The other night we were having dinner with a close friend who happened to be in town for a wedding. At one point, he got out his phone to show us something, and I noticed he didn’t have any applications on the face of his phone! Like almost exactly none.

He had text messages and the phone application at the bottom, but other than that, his phone seemed to be application-free.

Obviously this became a topic of conversation, because in the world we live in, that’s like a pink unicorn or something. How do you have no apps? What do you do when you need to look something up? How do you check your email? What if someone sends you an emergency email? (Big gasps).

He proceeded to explain to us his strategy with his phone, which he has turned into a glorified flip phone. He answers calls on it. He responds to text messages. But he gets no notifications. He doesn’t use it for the internet. And he doesn’t respond to emails from it.

This of course, incited another barrage of questions.

You can TURN OFF notifications? (for the technologically challenged of us) And the answer is yes. It’s true. You can actually get those little red dots on your phone that cause you (okay me) so much stress to go away. You have control.
How did you delete the apps that come already loaded on the iPhone and won’t go away? He told us how a friend of his found a workaround for this, and had to enter a special code, etc, but an alternative, he said, is just dropping them into a file and putting them on your third page over from your home screen. You never see them. It’s almost like they aren’t there.
How do you do email? He told us he has a system for checking email twice each day that doesn’t involve his phone. He told us the whole system, which is too long to explain here, but which simplifies his email time down to less than two hours per day. Other than that, he just doesn’t pay attention to it. Can you imagine!?

The result is obvious, in some ways. He doesn’t waste time scroll through social media—which provides lots of input that can easily become overwhelming. He doesn’t waste time on email or lose track of emails (a major, major source of overwhelm for me). And when he’s waiting for a friend, or for the five minutes between meetings, his first response isn’t to go directly to his phone.

He creates more white space in his life for thinking, dreaming and being creative.

It’s amazing how easy it is to think that we don’t have control over our technology, that it has taken over our lives and that there is simply no going backward. This is a fallacy. We have control. We can turn our phones off, leave them at home, program them to meet our needs, and plug them in in another room for the night.

You control your technology. It doesn’t control you.

Take care of your physical body.

As I was thinking about practical ways to deal with overwhelm, I also remembered a dear friend who once told me that when she is up against feelings of overwhelm, she goes through a list of very simple questions she asks herself.

The questions go like this:

Have you eaten?
Have you slept?
Have you exercised?

As it turns out, these three things—food, sleep and exercise (or being outdoors) are profoundly play a huge role when it comes to mental and emotional overwhelm. In her book, Aron shows how HSPs actually need more sleep than their less sensitive counterparts. Not to mention, HSPs are more stimulated by the stimulants we put in our bodies every single day—caffeine, alcohol, sugar.

And one of the main ways we can counteract overstimulation in our life is by exercising or getting outside, reconnecting with our bodies and with nature.

More often than not, our emotional overwhelm is connected to our lack of care for our physical selves. When we can learn to take care of ourselves physically, we are also taking care of ourselves mentally and emotionally.

Create rituals and routines.

One way Aron suggests HSPs can minimize their feelings of overwhelm is to create a mostly-predictable schedule you can follow from day to day. The benefit of this is that HSPs tend to be stimulated by change. So, in other words, those who are highly sensitive might have a hard time during seasons of transition—where they don’t know what to expect next, or where plans are changing from moment-to-moment.




It’s not impossible for an HSP to deal with change, or to manage transition, but as far as it lies in your control, why not create a schedule that can minimize your feelings of change and free up space for you for to be your sensitive, creative, happy self?

Here’s an example.

Because I travel all the time, and I work for myself, it isn’t possible for my schedule to be exactly the same every day. But one thing I’ve done is to create rituals and routines I can take with me on the road.

First thing I do every morning is stretching or yoga. Then, I drink a big glass of water while I take my vitamins.
When I’m getting ready in the morning, I listen to This American Life or Radio Lab (or, let’s be real, sometimes I watch Netflix). But it’s this predictable thing I do everyday and its comforting.
Before I go to bed, I make a cup of tea and watch a TV show on Netflix.

I also bring a small, travel-size candle with me when I travel. The predictable smell feels familiar and helps calm my spirit.

Additional Resources.

If overwhelm is something you struggle with and you want more resources for handling it, here are a few books, resources, etc I love and that have supported me and continue to support me on my journey toward accepting myself—sensitivity and all.

Quiet by Susan Cain—If you haven’t already read this book, you need to get your hands on it. It’s a beautiful reminder of the strength and quiet wisdom we sensitive people have to bring to the world.

Becoming Minimalist—living more simply is one thing I’ve done that has helped me majorly with my feelings of overwhelm. Imagine a life with less debt, less clutter and more freedom and open space! Ahhh! There is really no one better at helping you simplify than my friend Joshua Becker.

No Sidebar—speaking of minimizing and simplifying, if you don’t already subscribe to the newsletter at No Sidebar, it’s definitely time to do so.

The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine Aron—I linked to this book earlier in the post as well, but it’s a great resource if you think you might be one of those people who is extra sensitive.

The post What to Remember When You’re Feeling Overwhelmed appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

Depression, Indecisiveness, Anxiety and What Finding Yourself Actually Means

I got an email recently from a woman who was struggling to make a big decision. She had been dating a guy for several months and he was ready to to take the next step of commitment with her. But she wasn’t sure. She felt torn, she said, and that made her a bit anxious. But she couldn’t put her finger on why she felt that way.

Maybe you can relate to the position she was in—having a big, life-altering type decision to make, but not sure which way to go. I know I can.

The guy was great, she told me. Her friends loved him and he treated her well. On top of all of that, usually her mother didn’t like her boyfriends, but in this case she would make comments about how this was the “best guy she had ever dated” and how disappointed she would be if it didn’t work out.

And so as her boyfriend waited for her to make up her mind and her friends doted over her with compliments about him and her mother made jokes like, “don’t screw this up!” she felt beside herself with anxiety.

Am I supposed to feel like this? She wondered.

Why “Finding Yourself” Matters So Much.

You hear people talk about “finding yourself” all the time and yet most of us don’t really know what it means or why it matters. In fact, I think the term gets sort of watered down. We think of “finding yourself” as this cursory thing we do, on the side, if we have time, after we get the more important work of life done.

We forget what an incredible danger it is to live life without knowing who you are.

We forget there is very little progress we will be able to make in this life if we don’t have a firm grip on who we are and why we matter.

The language psychologists use for a person who hasn’t “found themselves” is: lacking of a sense of self or a lack of personal identity and psychologists recognize that when a person lacks a sense of personal identity, their problems extend into every aspect of their life: relationships, career, even mental and emotional health.

A person without a strong sense of identity tends to suffer from:

Anxiety
Addiction
Manipulative relationships
Co-dependence
Feelings of emptiness or meaninglessness
Feelings of helplessness
Lack of self confidence
Stunted dreams
Financial difficulties

Not to mention, it can be really difficult to make a decision—even a small one. When we don’t know who we are, we end up spending more time wondering about what other people want from us than about what we want and need for ourselves. Which, of course, can be incredibly anxiety-producing.

How can you possibly measure your success or progress or integrity in life if you’re measuring by other people’s standards? The measuring stick is constantly shifting, depending on your circumstances, your situation, your surroundings, or who is doing the asking. You feel pulled between your boss, your mom, your friends, your spouse, and maybe, just maybe, some very quiet, inner-voice.

And at some point, you will let one or more of them down. You cannot possibly meet so many expectations.

It’s exhausting. It’s awful. I’ve been there. And in many ways we are all there at some point in our lives—including the young woman who sent me that email—because finding yourself is not a one-time event. It’s a journey we’re on together (tweet that).

Lack of Personal Identity and Depression.

There is a psychologist and author named Albert Bandura who has done a considerable amount of research around something he calls self-efficacy, which could be translated: a strong sense of self. He makes a specific connection between a weak sense of personal significance and depression.

I know depression is a complicated issue with lots of complicated answers. Not to mention, I have gone around and around with depression in my life. I’ve spent years on medication and in therapy and it hasn’t been until the past five or ten years that I’ve discovered some freedom from it.

Just the thought depression is something that sort of haunts me to this day.

But it hasn’t been until I’ve begun to develop a stronger sense of self that I’ve been able to find a bit of freedom from my depression. That is not a prescription, but it is a suggestion to consider that if depression is as much a part of your life as it has been of mine, it’s worth considering it might help to work on finding yourself.

Bandura says, “A weak sense of personal-efficacy operates on the cognitive source of depression in several ways.” He lists three ways specifically, and since his prose gets a little thick from there, I figured I would translate them so they’re easier to understand. You can see his full text here.

Here’s how a weak sense of self could contribute to a person’s depression:

First, it impacts how we interpret positive and negative experiences. When someone with a strong sense of self experiences something negative in their life—anywhere from a bad grade on a test to a death in the family or a personal illness—here is how that person interprets that experience: “what a bummer that happened to me. I wonder how I can turn this around.” On the other hand, when someone with a weak sense of personal-efficacy experiences the same thing, they say to themselves, “this always happens to me! Why is my life such a disaster? There must be something wrong with me!”
Second, it impacts the degree of control we believe we have moving forward. When the events of life are less-than-ideal, a person with a strong sense of self puts the locus of control inside himself for moving forward. So, for example, if he scores poorly on a test, he thinks to himself, “I’ll have to study more next time.” Or if he suffers an illness he thinks, “I need to take better care of myself in the future,” or “I will approach this with a good attitude.” On the other hand, a person without the same sense of self-efficacy puts the locus of control for moving forward outside herself. When the events of life are less-than-ideal, she says, “I wonder when my time will come,” or “I can’t catch a break. Everybody is out to get me!”
Third, it influences the story we tell ourselves about personal accomplishments and failures. Bandura’s research actually showed that people with a strong sense-efficacy felt slightly better about themselves socially and emotionally than their peers. The story they told themselves about their successes was, “that’s because I’m smart and capable,” and the story they told themselves about their failures was, “well… I couldn’t have been expected to do well because I didn’t get much sleep [or that person was distracting me… or whatever.]” This isn’t to suggest we should have inflated egos (which can cause depressed states of their own) but rather that the story we tell ourselves about our successes and failures influences how we feel about ourselves.


How do you process successes and failures as they happen to you?
What does this tell you about how much control you have moving forward?
What is the story you tell yourself about your personal accomplishments or failures?

When it comes to finding yourself, depression and making big decisions, it shouldn’t surprise us that the mind and body are profoundly and miraculously connected.

How Do I Know If I’ve Found Myself?

A lack of a strong self often flares up during times of change or transition in our lives, since often times we mistake our sense of self for things like: the city we live in, the person we are married to, our job, career, money, family, status, etc.

Our true self does not come from our outer-life. It comes from our inner-life.

So when we move to a new place, leave a job, have a baby, see our grown kids leave the house, get married, or start in a new position, we often find ourselves thinking, “who am I?” This is normal and also an invitation into a deeper journey of finding yourself.

Here is my own personal definition for finding yourself:

Finding yourself is the process of discovering who you are and why you matter apart from outside achievements, relationships, and even in the face of great challenges or in life’s shifting environments. A person who is finding herself is learning to trust the the sound of her own voice, listen to her intuition, take action based on her convictions, face conflict and criticism with grace and power, and to visit that place of peace inside herself, despite what is happening around her.

When you have a strong sense of self, you are able to adapt well to changes, to soothe yourself in times of sadness or discomfort, stay true to your convictions (even when there is outside pressure), avoid codependent or manipulative relationships, set boundaries with pushy people in your life, leave behind a constant need for approval, drop the guilt, receive criticism, act authentically, lead gracefully, and take responsibility for your life—no matter how it turns out.

Yes, it is a huge task to “find ourselves” and one that is never fully finished. In fact, once we feel like we’ve “mastered it” life usually hands us more challenging and interesting situations to help us continue our path of growth.

How Do I Find Myself?

One hard truth about developing a strong sense of self is that so much of this important development takes place in childhood. If you have faced some kind of trauma in your childhood, or if your parents didn’t help you establish a strong sense of self—or if you came from a religious background where developing a strong sense of “self” was considered selfish—you might still have a lot of work to do when it comes to finding yourself.

The good news is that it is never too late to begin your work. In fact, if you are feeling profoundly lost as you read this, you are in a beautiful place.

“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.” ~Henry David Thoreau

Below I’m going to include a list of things that have been vital to my own journey of finding myself as I’ve been guided by great therapists, friends, advisors, mentors and my own intuition. Your journey will look different than mine, no doubt, but still, I hope this list helps.

Know and own your story.

Like anyone, there are parts of my story I haven’t wanted to own. Namely the fact that I was sexually abused when I was very young, and kept that secret to myself for nearly two decades. Although I’ve shared this before, I’m sensitive about how I talk about it and how often, in part because I want to protect those involved, but mostly because I don’t want this to be my story.

Truly. Honestly. Please God anything but this story.

And yet, this is my story.

When we deny our stories, they define us. When we own our stories, we get to write a brave new ending —Brene Brown

I am in process of writing my own brave new ending to my story. It is not easy. In fact, sometimes it feels downright awful. It means re-routing old beliefs, re-wiring brain patterns, letting go of ways of coping, learning to face the conflict and the joy and the pain of life unguarded, and it means I end up failing and losing my temper and crying in public more often than I would like to admit.

But it is worth it every single step because what has happened to me in the past does not define me (tweet that)

See a therapist.

I avoided seeing a therapist for years because I thought to myself, “oh, it’s not that bad. I’ve got this. Look at me. I have so many opportunities. I have a great family. What am I complaining about?” All the while, deep down I knew I needed some help to sift through the more complicated parts of my story.

Do not try to walk this path alone. It’s too treacherous. If you aren’t comfortable finding a therapist, ask a few trusted friends or family members to walk with you.

When you begin to re-write your story, parts of yourself you never knew existed (hint: less-than-pretty parts of yourself) will inevitably come up. When this happens, thank God for the support around you and for the opportunity you have to heal and grow.

Learn about yourself and how you are wired.

I read all the time. I’m always trying to figure out more about myself, how I operate and why it matters. This has been a lifeline for me as I walk this journey of finding myself. Figuring out the driving motivations behind why you act the way you do not only helps you own your story, it also helps you interact and communicate in a positive way with others.

Below, I list a few resources I have used that have really helped me to discover how I’m wired. This list is certainly not exhaustive but I hope it helps.

Enneagram
Strength’s Finders
Meyers Briggs

Stop avoiding.

We often “find ourselves” in the situations we most want to avoid. We find ourselves in unrest, conflict, discomfort, fear, illness, distress, loss, transition, change, disappointment, failure, even in bad relationships. So if we spend our lives trying to avoid these things, we may miss the very messages and lessons life has to offer us.

These days I tell myself, over and over again, “everything that happens to me in life is an opportunity to learn” because I have learned the hard way—it is.

What seems like the worst thing that could possibly happen to you might turn out to be the very best thing. Because sometime it takes losing ourselves to find ourselves. And when we resist these lessons, we resist the very beauty and joy life is trying to offer us.

Learn to look “in here” rather than “out there”

Think back for a moment to the young woman I mentioned in the beginning of this post who is trying to make a decision about whether she wants to marry her current boyfriend. Notice how much time she spent explaining what other people wanted from her, thought about her (and her boyfriend), or what they were expecting her to do. And trust me, I’ve been there.

Here’s my advice for her: you already know your answer. It’s inside of you.

That isn’t to say we don’t need the support and help of those around us. But it is to say we must be careful who we ask, because what we really need from those sources of support is not advice or direction. What we really need is someone to help us discover the answer we have always known all along.

What we really need is to find ourselves.

The post Depression, Indecisiveness, Anxiety and What Finding Yourself Actually Means appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

The Trap of A Manipulator And The Only Way Out

I worked for a boss once who made me feel terrible about myself. He would often make unrealistic requests of me—sometimes long after work hours—and make me feel guilty if I didn’t act like it was “my pleasure” to do it. I worked hard for him. Really hard, always thinking that if I could finally prove myself, he would trust me, and I could relax and feel normal again.

But that moment never came. In fact, the longer I worked there, the more anxious I felt. I kept having to work harder and harder, just to keep him even moderately happy. I never knew how he was going to act. Sometimes he would be jovial and fun. Other times he would raise his voice and scream at everyone in the office.

To make matters worse, he would constantly make comments about how I should be more grateful for my job, or joke about how he paid me too much.

The longer I stayed, the harder it felt to leave.

Then one day, at a work party, I finally had a wake-up moment. I listened to him recite an idea I had presented to him at a meeting months back—and play it off like it was his. When I first presented him with the idea, he shrugged it off like it was stupid. And here he was, announcing it to our coworkers, taking all the credit as if it were his own.

Still, after that night, it took me several months to finally quit that job—for reasons I’ll explain later in this post—but I never looked at him, or at myself, the same. And I did eventually find my way out from under his thumb.

A Lesson In Manipulation.

One thing I didn’t realize about manipulation is it can happen to you without you realizing it. In fact, this is probably how it happens most often. We feel things like anger, frustration, anxiety, depression or low self-esteem. What we don’t necessarily realize is that these feelings can be simply different faces of what we really feel, which is manipulated.

In fact, it wasn’t until I was in my late twenties and finally in therapy that I started realizing just how many times I had been manipulated in my life—including by the boss I described above.

And once I realized how often I had been manipulated, and still was being manipulated, the sensation was overwhelming. On a daily basis I would find myself feeling furious about a phone call I “needed” to make, a friend I “had” to meet for lunch, a party I was “supposed” to show up for, or a work project with an impending deadline.

It was a bit of a personal crisis.

I actually found myself feeling suspicious of everyone—including myself, by the way—not to mention resentful, rebellious and totally uncertain of who I was or what I wanted in life.

So I started seeing a therapist. And together we talked about areas where I felt manipulated, and even about a few ways I had been manipulative myself. We worked on forgiving myself for using manipulation as a way to protect myself when I didn’t have any other method, and on developing healthier boundaries and strategies for creating space and safety.

She also taught me two lessons about manipulation that have changed my life.

The first one goes like this: if you’re feeling manipulated, ask yourself what you need from that person. If you don’t need anything, they can’t manipulate you. She explained how one of the most common manipulation tactics is a sort of unhealthy “exchange.” For example:

Between a parent and a child: “If you obey me, I will love you.”
Between spouses: “If you keep me happy, I will stay with you.”
Between a boss and employee: “If you never upset me, I will keep paying you.”

She talked about how manipulation thrives because each person is upholding his or her respective end of this distorted agreement, and how the only way for the manipulated person to come out from under the thumb of the manipulator is for her to realize she doesn’t need the thing that is being leveraged anymore.

So in other words, as a grown child, the love and approval she craves is already inside of her. As an employee, she can find another job if the demands become unreasonable. As a spouse, she doesn’t need her partner’s approval in order to feel good about herself.

This lesson changed my life.

The only thing that changed my life more was the second lesson she taught me, which I’ll share with you in just a few paragraphs.

9 Different Kinds of Manipulators.

Before I share the second lesson I learned from my therapist—the one that helped me to figure out why it took me several long, awful months to leave that unreasonable job—I thought I’d share another lesson I learned, thanks to a book I read by Harriett B. Braiker called Who’s Pulling Your Strings?.

There are several different ways a person can manipulate you. In fact, according to Braiker, there are nine different kinds of manipulators. No wonder it can be so difficult for us to know if we’re being manipulated, not to mention to find our way out of those relationships.

Below are the nine different manipulative personalities Braiker lists in her book.

As you read, you may begin to recognize some of these tendencies in relationships that are taking place right now in your life. If so, keep reading, because in the following section I’ll tell you the lesson that finally helped me break free.

The Machiavellian. This personality type is named after the sixteenth century political philosopher named Italian Prince Machiavelli. His philosophy toward all of life—romance, military movement, all other matters—went like this: the end justifies the means. In other words, as long as I get my way in the end, it doesn’t matter who is hurt in the process. And the Machiavellian personality is no different. Machiavellian personalities tend to exploit others to their own (often self-serving) end.

The Narcissist—this is a personality you have probably heard of, and although the term is widely overused, it is characterized by an inflated sense of self-image, along with a sense of entitlement. So not only does this person think very highly of himself, he also believes he deserves to be paid special attention, even to be given certain things, simply because he is himself. Narcissists characteristically have a hard time feeling empathy for other people. That, along with his feelings of entitlement, allow him, like the Machiavellian, to use others for his own sense of personal gain.

The Borderline—a person with borderline personality has highly unstable relationships and constantly shifting moods.

For example, the borderline may think of her lover or partner as the most wonderful person she has ever met. But this attitude can shift drastically to one of devaluation and even contempt triggered by a disappointment that somehow proves to the borderline that the partner does not care enough about her or understand what she needs. This sudden precipitous shift catches the mark off balance and makes him vulnerable to manipulation (Braiker).

You can tell the borderline apart from the other manipulative personalities because when you are around her, you likely feel sucked up into her drama and chaos. And despite the fact that borderline personalities can be highly manipulative, they are also great at playing the victim. Since they are acting from a place of their own desperation, fear and other feelings of overwhelm, they have a hard time understanding how their actions could be as destructive as they ultimately are.

The dependent—this person is very reliant on the support and help of others and is also terrified of abandonment. She therefore manipulates others to stay close to her so she won’t have to function on her own. This is the girlfriend who is clingy, needy, and submissive. She has trouble making her own decisions, so she is constantly looking to others for help and guidance. If you have a friend or partner who you feel like you constantly have to parent, you might be dealing with a dependent manipulator.

The histrionic—In addition to the drama of borderline, the histrionic is always attempting to be the center of attention. In fact, this is her primary motive behind manipulation. She might use strange tactics in order to keep the attention constantly on her—either leveraging her sexual prowess, dressing provocatively or in outrageous styles, or even feigning injury to regain attention when it seems to be fading away. The histrionic is usually vain and self-absorbed, and much like the dependent and the borderline, she manipulates largely out of evocation—evoking negative reaction in others.

The passive-aggressive—passive aggressive people are sneaky manipulators. Despite the fact that their behavior is hostile and aggressive, it flies so completely under the radar that you can’t always notice it. Not only do I recognize myself in this form of manipulation, it was a huge shock to realize this behavior is actually quite hostile. Passive aggressive people are filled with rage but haven’t found a way to express it healthfully, so they act passively resistant. Procrastination, dawdling, stubbornness, intentional inefficiency, forgetfulness—these are all tactics of manipulation. Rather than confront the person who they feel puts unfair demands on them, they complain whine, and sulk. THIS WAS ME WITH MY BOSS!

By not doing what is required of them or by seemingly complying with requests that are then sabotaged through passive resistance, the passive-aggressive personality manipulates others by evoking frustration and hostility. They are unlikely to change and display very poor insight or understanding of how their passive resistance affects others.

Passive aggressive people easily justify their behavior since it isn’t outwardly aggressive.

The Type A (Angry)—These folks have what Braiker calls “Hurry Sickness” and often get angry in traffic, or in long lines, or when someone holds them up. They also have an almost insatiable need to win. Their anger, hostility and competitive spirit acts not only as a threat to their own health but it is the weapon they use against others to make sure they always get their way. They are constantly trying to stay at the top of the pile, make sure they are always first in line, and make it where they’re trying to go on time, even if it’s unreasonable to do so. They control using intimidation.

The Con—This personality typically begins young and starts small, with lying about homework or stealing candy. Then, as the con gets older, the lying and stealing escalate until he is highly impulsive, irresponsible, and even dangerous. When I was reading this description, what came to mind was someone who holds hostages to rob a bank, or a young man who open fires on a university campus. Also in this category would be someone like the main character from the movie Catch Me If You Can. The manipulator uses his charm and charisma, as well as other people, to accomplish his means and end. Ultimately he has no conscience and therefore no guilt for his behavior.

The Addict—for the addict, everything takes a backseat to her addiction. Addicts notoriously lie, deny, exploit others, and wreak havoc on their families, work, and social relationships—all for the sake of their substance abuse or addiction. The motive for the manipulation is simply maintaining relationship with the addiction, whatever that looks like. This leaves those in relationship with the addict feeling guilty, depressed, humiliated, angry, frustrated, uncertain, and with a very low self-esteem.

I don’t know about you, but as I was reading, I was thinking both of subtle ways I have been manipulative in my lifetime and also of various manipulators who have come in and out of my life. I also couldn’t help but think about how manipulative personalities are not developed in a vacuum, and how much pain and personal tragedy must go into someone developing one of these above traits. I have a great deal of compassion for the deep wounds that motivate someone to manipulate.

But just because we have compassion for someone who might be in this position doesn’t mean we don’t take steps to protect our well-being. Manipulators may change, but we won’t be the ones to change them (TWEET THAT).

The only way to deal with a manipulator is to change ourselves. We have to be the kind of people who can’t be manipulated.

More about that in just a minute.

The Great Danger in Manipulation.

The real danger in manipulation, if you ask me, is that manipulators steal your ability to bring your unique beauty and gifts to this world (TWEET THAT).

They don’t do it because they’re terrible people, and they might not even do it on purpose, but that doesn’t make it any less of a tragedy. When you are in the grips of a manipulator, what we miss out on is you—all bright and shining and beautiful in this world. When I think back to all of the years of my life I wasted living for the purposes of other people, at the expense of my own passion and joy and creativity, I cringe. And when I see other people doing the same, I cringe again. We need you and your gifts. The world is a better place with you than without.

This is the real danger of manipulation. What a tragedy. I can think of few things more devastating.

In addition, those who are caught in the grips of manipulation—both the manipulator and the manipulated—can’t experience genuine love. You might experience the thrill of control; that little rush you get when your manipulative tactics earn you the center of attention, or when complying with someone else’s demands get you their temporary praise or adoration. But those things are fleeting. They won’t last for even a day. You will need more tomorrow. In fact, this is why manipulation is so addicting, no matter what side of it you are on.

There is no amount of center-of-attention, praise, adoration or control that will make you feel like you are good enough.

That feeling comes from the inside out.

If you find yourself in the throws of a manipulative relationship, there are really two things you need to know.

The most important thing you can do is alter or end that relationship
It will be very difficult

Why We Keep Being Manipulated

One of the things Braiker mentions in her book that rang really true to me is that certain people, with certain personalities, are more prone to manipulation than others. As I read, I recognized myself as one of those personalities, which meant that I had a lot of work to do when it came to overcoming manipulative relationships.

This was why it took me several months to finally submit my resignation for that job, and it’s why many of the manipulative tendencies of that relationship followed me to other jobs, not to mention other friendships and romantic relationships.

It wasn’t until a conversation about two years ago with my therapist that I realized why.

We were talking about a relationship I was still in that had some manipulative tendencies—both my tendency to be passive aggressive (a form of hostility) and this other person’s tendency to be angry and explosive (just like that old boss had been). She explained to me how I was going to have to find a way to alter this relationship, or end it. My response was, “I’m not ready for that.”

She asked, “why not?

“I’m not ready to give up what I get from it.”

“What’s that?”

“Feeling like I matter,” I said, without thinking about it.

And there it was, standing like a beacon of hope that I wasn’t sure I was ready to walk toward—the true, honest answer that was both my way out and the handcuffs that had been keeping me stuck all along. The reason I allowed myself to be manipulated, over and over again, was because of what I got from it.

I wasn’t trapped. The only thing holding me back was me.

More often than not, we are manipulated because we choose to be. And if we’re ever going to get out of our manipulative relationships, whatever they look like, the best thing we can do is stop hoping the manipulative person will change, to stop playing the victim to their manipulative tactics, and choose to change ourselves.

If you’re interested in reading more about manipulation and how to find your way out, I highly recommend the following resources:

Who’s Pulling Your Strings? by Harriet Braiker
Boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud
The Power is Within You by Louise Hay
Safe People by Dr. Henry Cloud
Emotional Blackmail by Susan Forward

Have you ever been in a manipulative relationship? How did you find your way out.

The post The Trap of A Manipulator And The Only Way Out appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.