Allison Vesterfelt's Blog, page 7

Redefining Power Can Show You How Much Of It You Actually Have

When I was in my twenties, I stayed in a bad relationship too long. He was a sweet guy and he loved me the best he knew how. But he was an addict, and I was codependent, and so our life together was all drama, all the time. For four long years I surrendered what I really wanted and needed, hoping I could save him and that we would find happiness together.

I had a thousand excuses for why I didn’t want to leave. First of all, these things happen in a frog-in-hot-water kind of way. It starts off good in the beginning and slowly deteriorates over time, so that you almost don’t even realize it’s happening. Also there was this powerful force between us, this magnetic pull, this ability I had to get through to him in a way no one else could. And he had a certain “way” with me, too.

Our relationship was one of the only places in my life where I felt powerful.

Meanwhile, my life around me was crumbling. The career I had always dreamed of having was replaced with a bartending job, which wasn’t bad necessarily, but I was bored. To combat my boredom, I shopped, and drank, and watched the Food Network, and let so many of my passions and dreams fade into the distance.

I stood by as friendships I had worked years to build fell apart. I was busy tending to “emergencies” we had created out of our own dysfunction (trips at 2am to pick him up from a bar fight; long drives around the city looking for him after not hearing from him for four, five, six days at a time). Also, I was embarrassed at how many times my friends had urged me to leave him when I didn’t feel like I could.


Maybe you’ve been in a position like this before, where you knew you were supposed to do something—like send that email or make that move or call that person or go see the therapist or end that relationship—but you keep putting it off.

Sound familiar?

I will never forget the morning I finally made that decision.

I had reached my breaking point. For years I had been praying, in a silent sort of way, that someone would come “rescue” me from this relationship and that morning I realized: the only one who could rescue me was myself. So I gathered my things, kissed him on the forehead and, with mascara streaked down my face, I walked out of the house, never to turn back.

I give myself some credit for leaving that day. It took guts—all the guts I had to give right then. It’s comforting to realize that, when we’re facing a problem, we don’t have to have all the answers. All we need to know is the next right step, and all we need to do is muster the courage to do that ONE thing. The rest will reveal itself later.

But it wasn’t until a few years down the road I learned a lesson that would transform the way I saw that whole relationship, not to mention all of the relationships in my life.

It goes like this: it wasn’t him, it was me.

By that I don’t mean that he played no role in the destructive force we were. He did. What I mean is that, after years of blaming him and thinking things would just be different if I could just meet someone new; and after years of watching that same dynamic repeat in my life, again and again, I came to a heart-wrenching and beautiful realization:

Wherever you go, there you are.

We cannot escape ourselves. We cannot outrun ourselves. But we also don’t need to. Because the power we need to influence our marriages, our friendships, our family relationships, our careers, our physical health and even our world doesn’t live “out there” with circumstances or things or people. It lives inside of us.

What does it mean to be powerful?

If you would have asked me five years ago what it meant to be powerful, the picture in my mind would have been of a man, sitting on a hill, probably on a throne of some sort, perhaps with a scepter in hand. This person could, in my mind, command armies or make money rain from the sky and people listened to him.

I didn’t much envy this kind of power. I thought of it as people in power, rather than people of power and I saw people in power to be domineering and cruel, self-centered and volatile, unpredictable and hogging all the resources.

Today, my picture of power is so much different.

The picture is of a person standing firmly on two feet, hand to heart. Powerful people stay true to their word. Powerful people don’t get sucked into the frenzy of life, of fame, of money. Powerful people are at peace with themselves—their strengths and weaknesses. Powerful people speak up when they have something to say. We listen to powerful people, not because the demand our attention, but because they draw us in.

Powerful people do not fight to get noticed. They notice themselves.

Powerful people have integrity—but not in the way we normally think about that word. Integrity actually started as an architectural term. For a building to have “integrity” it had to be unbending. Unmovable. So when an earthquake came, or a tornado, or a flood, or high winds, the building would stay structurally sound. It wouldn’t move with the weather. Its internal elements would stay in tact.

I have learned over the years that integrity, in this sense, is one of the most important things we can have, and also one of the most difficult to obtain.

Integrity is not about following a list of unbending rules. It’s about following our unbending inner-wisdom. It’s about staying centered even in the midst of great chaos and conflict. Think about this for a minute. We have to be so in tune with our internal lives, that even in the midst of great conflict and chaos and noise, we can still hear ourselves.

When the shaking comes in your life, how do you hold up?

What happens to you when there are high winds?

My 23-year-old sister-in-law was recently diagnosed with cancer. I can’t imagine the amount of fear and confusion that must be passing through her as her world turns from peaceful to chaotic overnight. She and her husband had just begun a total remodel on their house they day they received the diagnosis. Now, as her house sits in shambles, and she loses her hair, as she suffers hospital stays and complications, it would be so easy for her to wonder, “why me?”.

And yet I’ve watched her, in spite of the high winds of her life right now, maintain an attitude of faith and grace. She hopes for healing. Of course. We all do.

But she also recognizes that healing is not her hope. Hope is her healing.

She wrote a magazine article recently where she talked about what it was like to receive that dreaded call and what life has been like since. She says:

After the diagnosis, the procedures, the hospital stays, and complications just six weeks in, I see that suffering has so many secrets to share. Secrets that are sought after by most of humanity. There are no shortcuts to these secrets. They are whispered in your hear and if you are listening, stick to your mind and heart for good.

Do you believe that? That your suffering will whisper secrets?

She is a light in the dark spaces. One powerful woman.

When a woman realizes how powerful she is, she grows in her integrity, unbending to the winds of change happening all around her. She walks away from that bad relationship. She faces that tragedy or crisis with peace and hope. Instead of complaining, or playing the victim—which would be so easy—she admits that every circumstance in her life is an opportunity to learn and to grow and she accepts the challenge with grace.

Oh, and she fights her ass off. She kicks cancer in the throat and fights to recover her spirit and her strength becomes the healing force for herself and the world around her.

I met a Jewish woman recently who taught me about power.

Her name is Rabi and Rabi is the type of woman who grabs your attention even before she opens her mouth. She is stunning. And no, I don’t mean stunning like Miss America stunning, or A-list Hollywood Celebrity stunning, although I’m not knocking that either. Rabi stands probably five foot seven inches tall and is in her late 50’s or early 60’s. She wears long, sweeping clothing that cover her figure in the most elegant way you can imagine.

And when Rabi walks into a room, people listen.

That was one of the very first things I noticed about her: how powerful she was. Not CEO powerful or rule-with-an-iron-fist powerful. But powerful like a woman who has been there, who has weathered the storm and learned to stand strong in spite of it. Strong because the worst thing that could have possibly happened to her already has.

Rabi is an Israeli Jew and a few years ago, her son was killed by a Palestinian sniper. Since then, Rabi has dedicated her life to bringing peace to one of the most conflict-ridden regions of the world. But not in the way you might imagine. Peace begins, she insists, inside of us. So she has made it her life’s work to befriend others who have lost loved ones in the conflict—Israelis and Palestinians both. She told me:

Pain does not discriminate.

Pain is pain, no matter how you’ve suffered it.

And even though what you see on the news is that violence is ramping up in that part of the world (it is) what you will never see on the news is that Rabi’s love is ramping up, too. She is doing it—bringing peace one friend at a time. Rabi may not be the top news story tonight but she is immovable, unbending in the waves of one of the most chaotic wars of our time. She is fighting this battle in the only way she knows how—with love.

Who is more powerful—a man with a gun; or Rabi, a woman with a love so fierce she refuses to hate anyone, even the man who killed her son? Some might argue the man with the gun because he can take a person’s life. I would argue Rabi. Because while those guns may be destroying bodies, Rabi is restoring spirits.

Including mine.

What I learned from Rabi is that there is an unstoppable force in this world that has not yet been fully realized and it is this: a woman who knows how powerful she is.

Love is the most powerful force on this planet.

It took a lot of love for me to walk away from that toxic relationship that day. It took love for myself, for the guy who I would never be able to save, and a love for the future version of myself, who would need space and time to grow into he powerful woman she wanted to be and always knew she was.

It takes love, even now, to continue fighting this tendency in myself—my tendency to think I can “save” people, the tendency to give up what I want for the sake of what other people want from me.

Wherever we go, there we are.

And yet everything we face in our lives—whatever that looks like for you—is an opportunity to grow into your power, your force, your integrity. Every challenge you face, every obstacle is another step in the process of discovering the woman inside of you who knows what she wants, who isn’t afraid to fight for it, and who knows that the most powerful force of change comes from the inside out.

It’s taken me way too long to get this, but I’m letting grace wash over all the old versions of myself, the version who could never seem to be at peace with my circumstances—with being single, or with being married, or with wanting a baby and not being able to get pregnant. I’m having grace for the girl who thought that changing what was happening around me would change how I felt about myself.

I’m having grace for all those versions of myself and also not wasting another minute focusing on what’s “out there” when I know the real power lies in what’s “in here”. I’m working to plant that seed, to water it, to grow it and to find the peace and clarity and calm I’ve known were inside of me all along.

I’m learning to be still.

I’m learning to listen to my intuition.

I’m learning to do the one next right thing.

I’m not fighting cancer. It’s not world peace. But it’s my journey, my path, and I’m learning to stand in my power, and that is more than enough.

The post Redefining Power Can Show You How Much Of It You Actually Have appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

The Real Problem With Body Image Issues

I don’t sit around thinking about how much I hate my body. I really don’t.

When I was younger it occupied so much more of my mental space. I worried about my weight and my height and picked at every single perceived failure and flaw. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown into myself at least a little bit. I’ve stopped trying to beat my body into some kind of strange submission.

But there are these moments. Moments like this week when I went to a new yoga class for the first time and had to stand in a room full of mirrors, watching my reflection next to a dozen others bodies. Moments like when I catch myself turning sideways in a bathroom mirror, placing a flat hand on my low stomach and sucking in. These are habits I picked up at a young age and, well, I guess I still find myself sinking into them.

In these moments, I am transported back to a time when “body image issues” were a much greater part of my life and psyche; and I am also reminded how this part of myself will never really go completely away—or at least not on its own.

The only way our body image issues fade into the distance is if we are constantly addressing the broken ideals, thought patterns, and heartbreaking experiences that created them.

I’ve always felt self-conscious about my body.

I felt like I was too tall and, when I was really young, too thin, and then, when I hit about seventeen, I worried I was too round and for years counted calories or skipped meals—or binged or numbed myself with alcohol—and glared at myself hatefully in the mirror, no matter what size I was.

I thought often about how one day I would get a nose job, or liposuction on my thighs. I hated my face, which was covered with acne and could never find clothes I liked enough to cover up how uncomfortable I felt in my own skin.

And now as I get older, the body image issues are changing. My hair is turning grey and I have stretch marks and my veins are starting to peek through my skin, and although I have so many more emotional resources now than I did when I was sixteen, it’s still a fight to love my body when it doesn’t look exactly like I wish it would.

I know I’m not the only one.

Statistics read as high as 91% when it comes to women who are unhappy with their bodies. Strangely enough, that statistic seems low to me. I’ve had enough conversations with enough women to know that, when you really get them talking, most will admit this is something they wrestled with. It bothers them. They don’t want to be “the kind of woman” who worries about it.

But they, too, find themselves standing in front of the mirror, picking and pulling and poking and wishing things would be different.

And I confess I used to think of body image issues as just a female problem. Maybe you’ve thought about it that way, too. But men aren’t off the hook here. While their body image issues tend to look different from women, they’re just as problematic.

While the media pressure on women hasn’t abated, the playing field has nevertheless leveled in the last 15 years, as movies and magazines increasingly display bare-chested men with impossibly chiseled physiques and six-pack abs. “The media has become more of an equal opportunity discriminator,” says Lemberg. “Men’s bodies are not good enough anymore either. (Atlantic Magazine)

It turns out as many as 68% of normal-weight men perceive themselves to be too thin. And in some cases, the pressure might be even worse for men, who are less likely to feel comfortable enough talking about it with women or other men.

The problem with the way we think about our bodies.

The problems with hating our bodies are virtually endless. Starting with the most obvious, there is a clear physical danger to be reckoned with—not just for us, but for our kids. Young girls and boys are starving themselves, overeating, overexercising, binging, purging, cutting, or practicing other dangerous behaviors, and justifying all of it.

And to say this is a problem with young people would be underestimating it.

Although these behaviors do tend to start when we’re young, the habits are addictive and don’t die easily, and even when they do die, they tend to rear their ugly heads in times of intense stress in adulthood. We get better at hiding it. We’re better at explaining it away. But body image issues can look like any of the following:

Obsessive calorie counting or unnecessary restriction of certain foods
Feelings of disgust when looking in the mirror (or avoiding mirrors altogether)
Weighing yourself daily (or multiple times a day)
Over-exercising to the point of injury
Inability to find clothes that make you feel good about yourself
Overeating or binging
Carelessly eating calorie-rich, nutrient-poor foods

For a period of time in my twenties, I would go running every day—somewhere between 3-10 miles. At one point, I injured my hip so badly I could hardly run without bringing myself to tears, but I kept running anyway. The thought of taking time off caused too much anxiety for me.

It’s easy to hide your body image issues when you can mask them as being “healthy”.

I’ve also had strange ticks with clothes. For most of my twenties, I didn’t like the way my hips looked in pants (they were too “wide” I thought) so I would tear through my wardrobe in the morning, looking for an acceptable option. I would either have to wear a top that came down far over my hips, or I would have to wear a loose-fitting dress.

Sometimes our body image issue are easy to overlook because of how common they are. Think of how “normal” it is for a women with a stuffed-full closet to say, “But I have nothing to wear…”

On top all of this off, our kids are watching us and taking cues and mimicking our behavior and the cycle continues on.

How the problem keeps getting bigger.

So part of the problem is that young boys and girls today are putting themselves in danger—that we are putting ourselves in danger—and that body image issues are hard to spot because we’ve gotten really good at hiding them as adults.

But that’s not all when it comes to problems.

On top of all of this, our hatred for our bodies doesn’t have a boundary. We cannot hate our bodies and love ourselves. It doesn’t work that way. Our bodies and minds and spirits and selves are too connected and the hatred leaks through, and our hatred for ourselves will sabotage our relationships, our careers and ultimately our happiness.

Our body-image problems are not body-image problems. They are self-image problems.

While we’re busy trying to get our bodies to look like the airbrushed model on a magazine cover, we miss the miracle of our bodies right now. Stop and think about this with me for a second. Your body takes in the food you give it, processes it for fuel, discards the waste, and filters out dangerous toxins to keep you healthy. Every day. Three times each day.

Your legs hold you up. Consistently. Daily. Wherever you go, there they are, are a constant support system for you. They take you on walks and runs. Your back holds you up as you sit at your computer; and your lungs, without any effort on your part at all, are right in this moment pulling in oxygen from the atmosphere, distributing it to your vital organs and into your blood stream, and then discarding carbon dioxide out of your mouth.

And while you might be rolling your eyes and little bit and thinking, “How is this supposed to help me with my body image issues?” I would challenge you (and me) to think about what might happen if we started practicing gratitude for what our bodies can do for us, and already are doing for us, rather than punishing it for what it can’t—and maybe was never made—to do.

If you’re struggling with chronic pain, infertility, digestive issues, an injury, or some other kind of physical ailment, ask yourself what gratitude for your body, even at a point when it seems like it might have failed you, might to do heal wounds and restore broken places and bring you back into alignment with yourself again.

I’m not saying it’s a magic healing ticket.

What I am saying is that body image issues, like so many things in life, are a vicious cycle. Because when you hate your body, you punish it. You feed it crap food and lay around watching Netflix, instead of going for a walk. Or, maybe you wake in the morning and force yourself to go for a run, even though you know you need that extra hour of sleep.

And when we make an enemy of our bodies, I’m convinced our bodies, in turn, make an enemy out of us.


The unlikely culprit of body image issues.

The most often cited culprit for why we hate our bodies so much is the media, and yes, I see the connection there.

Take a look at billboards targeting the insecurities of women so they can cater to the desires of men. Take a look at how women’s magazines focus on looks, snagging dates and keeping mates, while men’s magazines have cars, gadgets, and a centerfold of a barely clothed woman with a free sachet of Vaseline. This tells women: using your looks, lure a man to keep you; and to men: here’s a naked woman whose image you can use to pleasure yourself. —Shakira Sison (Rappler Magazine)


It’s obvious that media—magazines, movies, music, billboards, websites, commercials, etc—play a huge role in how we feel about our bodies. We are drawn to images of perfection for reasons we can’t totally explain and yet they paint impossible ideals for us.

But there is a culprit we talk about so much less often: us.

We forget how much our negative thought patterns, negative ideas, and even our choices and purchases impact how we see our bodies and the bodies of others. We love to cite media as the one to blame, as the terrible monster who keeps whispering to us that our bodies aren’t good enough, when the truth is our thoughts and choices and decisions are playing just as big a role. Media is driven by the power of popular opinion—our opinion. My opinion. Your opinion.

What is your opinion of yourself?

What do you say or think about yourself when you look in the mirror, or down at your belly and thighs and see the images staring back? And how might changing your opinion of yourself shift the way our culture revolves around the worship and reverence of perfect body parts?

Could a tiny change inside of you be the perfect place to start?

A few friends and I were recently having a conversation about plastic surgery and despite how much progress I’ve made with my own body image issues, I found myself drawn in by the allure of an easy “fix” for parts of my body that aren’t even broken.

To be clear, I have no judgement of plastic surgery.

I have friends who have made this decision for themselves and I reserve the right to make a similar choice at some point in my life. But what I noticed that disturbed wasn’t that I wanted to have a boob job, it was how desperately I wanted to be the kind of woman who could say, “I don’t need plastic surgery to feel good about myself.” and how instead, my thoughts and feelings toward myself fell short.

I felt the same way recently while at yoga class where I stared at my own body in the mirror, next to all the bodies standing next to me and thought—without even meaning to, without even wanting to—about who’s body was the strongest or the thinnest or the most remarkable when the truth is all of our bodies are remarkable.

It wasn’t being unhappy with my body in that moment that made me miserable nearly as much as it was my own internal conflict with myself.

How will I teach my future daughters to love their bodies if I cannot? 

How will I teach my sons that beauty is more than skin deep if I can’t see that in myself?

Ultimately I don’t think the goal is to stop thinking about what we eat or stop exercising or even stop eating pizza and ice cream once and awhile (I’m certainly not planning to give any of those things up). But I would say the goal is to make tiny steps to bring ourselves back into congruence with ourselves.

How can the way we want to feel about our bodies match the way we do feel about our bodies? How can the way we feel about our bodies match the way we hope our kids feel about their bodies?


The cure?

I do think the changes can be very small and still make a big difference. We can begin to notice the way we think about our bodies, the way we talk about our bodies and we can begin to replace negative message with positive ones. I’m working on this.

A few weeks ago I was with a friend who has a teenage daughter.

Her daughter is built very thin, like her mom, and we were talking and laughing about food and what we like to eat. Her daughter, who is 14, started to tell me how much she loves meat. Without even thinking about it I said, “Good! You need some meat on your bones!” And for an hour after I said those words, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Where had that come from? Why would I say something like that?

Eventually, I realized that the only reason I had said that was because it was something said to me very often when I was young. I just got caught up in the moments and those words, which I was apparently holding onto in my own body, in my bones, just sort of popped out.

Eventually, I apologized.

I told my friend how sorry I was and how inappropriate it was of me to make a remark about her daughter’s body, even if it wasn’t meant to be negative. I told her her daughter was beautiful, just as she was.

And I probably should have gone to her daughter directly, so she could have heard it from me. I should have said:

Your body doesn’t need to be airbrushed or filled out or thinned down or plumped up or perfectly smooth or anything different than it already is for you to be beautiful. You don’t have to look like the movie stars or the magazines or the girls on the TV. Those things are an illusion, a mirage, like chasing the gold at the end of the rainbow and missing the treasure which has been inside of you all along.

I could have done more. But it’s a start. It’s a small step. I’m doing what I can, for now.

The post The Real Problem With Body Image Issues appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

One Thing People Forget When Dealing With Anxiety

Honestly, I’ve been dealing with anxiety for most of my life. My guess is part of it has to do with being a pretty sensitive person. Part of it, I’m sure, has to do with the world we live in, where there are all kinds of demands on us and our time that weren’t there even twenty years ago. And then there’s part of it that is just me, letting my own negative thoughts get away from me.

But if you’ve dealt with anxiety, at any level, you know what I’m talking about.

Sometimes it’s as simple as just a fluttering feeling in your stomach that won’t seem to go away. It can show up as an oversensitivity to caffeine—one cup of regular coffee makes you feel like you’re going to jump out of your skin. Sometimes it manifests as stomach aches or headaches or other kinds of physical pain. Sore muscles, for example.

Sometimes my right shoulder will lock up. Especially if I go too long without dealing with my anxiety, I will hardly even be able to move it.

I’ve also dealt with crippling stomach pain, digestive issues and food allergies for years, that I only later discovered were strongly linked to my anxiety.

And then there are the panic attacks—which I haven’t experienced in a long time but I can still remember them like they were yesterday. The dizziness, the racing heart, the feeling like a stack of cinder blocks is sitting on your chest. I remember how they would come out of nowhere—when nothing remotely troublesome seemed to be happening.

Big or small, anxiety can be a huge impediment to our lives.

Even a very small amount of anxiety can keep us from doing what we love and from being ourselves, unless we know what to do with it.

You might find yourself avoiding certain things or certain people because they make you feel anxious. Maybe you catch yourself saying really weird things in social settings, things you wish you could reel back in—out of your anxiety. Anxiety can short-circuit our brain function. It can make us act out of character.

Often, anxiety gives us the opposite out come from what we want.

Years ago I was preparing to give a presentation in grad school. I was really nervous. First of all, public speaking terrified me. Second, my grade depended on this presentation and I wanted to leave a good impression my with professors and fellow-students. The problem was, each time I sat down to rehearse the presentation, I would feel anxious.

So for weeks, when I should have been preparing, I didn’t. I always had an excuse for why I “couldn’t” prepare right that moment—like I had something else on the calendar, or the dishes just had to be done, or I had to go pick up some groceries. They always felt like legitimate excuses, and in a way, they were.

But what happened was, it came to the night before the presentation and the anxiety had compounded. I was even more anxious than I had ever been and it was almost too much to handle.

I tried making up for loss time—staying up late, preparing content, rehearsing as many times as I could in the short time I had left—but even then, I was so anxious I could hardly focus or concentrate. I woke up the next morning to drive to the presentation, exhausted from staying up late and also from the physical strain of anxiety.

The presentation went okay but not nearly as well as I wanted it to and not nearly as good as it could have been if I was able to manage my own anxiety.

Anxiety gave me the opposite of what I wanted.

Even small amounts of anxiety can have this effect.

A few weeks ago I made plans to spend time with a close friend. At the beginning of the week, I started to see my calendar fill up and realized there was a good chance I wasn’t going to be able to make our coffee meeting work. I hated the thought of having to cancel. I worried it would make her feel like she wasn’t important to me, and I worried she’d be upset.

So, I didn’t call to cancel. Instead, I felt anxious about it all week and told myself I would find a way to squeeze everything in.

Maybe you can see where this is going. By the time our coffee meeting came around, I was being pulled in a dozen different directions, and no matter how much I wanted to make our meeting work, I couldn’t do it. I called her to give her the bad news and the first thing I said was, “I’m so sorry, I hope you aren’t hurt…”

Her response was very gracious, but she told me honestly, that the thing that hurt her most was I had waited until the day-of to call.

“I wish you would have told me sooner,” she said. “I could have made other plans.”

Again, I was so worried about hurting her feelings, I waited until the last minute to call her, and my last-minute call was what hurt her feelings the most. Are you starting to see the pattern here? If we don’t understand our anxiety and where it’s coming from, if we don’t find healthy ways to cope with it, it has the strong potential to hurt more than just us.

So what do we do with it?

First of all, kicking your anxiety to the curb and saying “goodbye” to it forever is probably not going to work. In fact, according to research, this is one of the most damaging ways of dealing with our anxiety. Anxiety is a natural, normal fear response and, when we try to say “goodbye” to that fear, we end up with one of two things

A numbness or denial of our feelings
Behavior that is dangerous to ourselves or others

I love the way Elizabeth Gilbert puts it in her latest book, Big Magic. She says: “If your goal in life is to become fearless, then I believe you’re already on the wrong path, because the only truly fearless people I’ve ever met were straight-up sociopaths and a few exceptionally reckless three-year-olds—and those aren’t good role models for anyone.”

She goes on to say:

The truth is, you need your fear, for obvious reasons of basic survival. Evolution did well to install a fear reflex within you, because if you didn’t have any fear, you would lead a short, crazy, stupid life. You would walk into traffic. You would drift off into the woods and be eaten by bears. You would jump into giant waves off the coast of Hawaii, despite being a poor swimmer. You would marry a guy who said on the first date, “I don’t necessarily believe people were designed by nature to be monogamous.

The question is: is there a way for me and my fear or anxiety to peacefully co-exist? Yes, it turns out there is, but it’s going to take some work.

First, it requires getting curious.

As long as we’re anxious about our anxiety, we won’t be able to make any progress with it—and this is what a “say goodbye to your anxiety!” approach so often does to us. It turns us against our anxiety, it asks us to treat it like an enemy, instead of doing the one thing that can help us make progress with it, which is: be curious.

A Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer designed a study specifically to highlight how curiosity could transform anxiety.

First, she gathered a group of willing volunteers to give public speeches. Each person in the group was randomly assigned to one of three smaller groups. The first group was told not to make mistakes at all because mistakes were “bad”. She told the second group that any mistakes they made would be forgiven.

And finally, she encouraged the third group to deliberately make mistakes and incorporate those mistakes into the speech itself. What happened next? The participants who were randomly selected to be in the third group were not only rated the most effective and intelligent of their peers, but they also declared themselves more comfortable and at ease than their counterparts.

What if this is what our anxiety needs from us?

Rather than saying to our anxiety, “you again? Get out of here you asshole!” What if it needs us to think, “Interesting… I wonder why I’m feeling afraid right now… What is this fear trying to tell me? I wonder where these sensations are coming from… I wonder what I am supposed to be learning…”

Remember, your anxiety is trying to tell you something.

Recently I was having a particularly good day hanging out with a friend of mine. We both had the whole day off and got to spend some quality time together. The day itself couldn’t have been more perfect—starting with a long, lingering breakfast, then a walk with our dogs to the park, then later a movie and a glass of wine. It was magical. I loved every minute of it.

But for some reason, I couldn’t kick this feeling of anxiety. It was just that subtle flight-or-flight, heart-fluttering thing.

It didn’t make any sense. There wasn’t anything there for me to feel anxious about. Maybe you can relate. One of the most frustrating things about anxiety is the way it can come out of nowhere, over seemingly nothing. And on top of feeling anxious, you feel mad at yourself for feeling anxious and totally ruining the moment.

Since she’s a good friend, though, I knew I could tell her about what was going on, so I filled her in. And when I did, she did exactly what I needed her to do in that moment. She helped me be curious.

She asked, “what do you think your fear saying to you? What is it about?”

I thought about it for a few minutes, and at first, I couldn’t think of anything. The day with her had been perfect. There was absolutely nothing to feel be nervous about. But as I allowed myself to be curious, something occurred to me: I realized something about having a really good day actually made me a little anxious.

“Tell me more about that…” she said.

I explained how, for some reason, when things were going well, it made me afraid that something bad was right around the corner. I also told her I thought I felt guilty for being able to rest and have a relaxing day like this, with luxuries other people in the world don’t get to enjoy. Movies. Wine. Expensive food.

Just like that, as I gained some perspective on my anxiety, it lifted. It’s amazing. When we finally hear what our anxiety has been saying, it can stop screaming so loud (TWEET THAT).

What next?

Just realizing where our anxiety is coming from doesn’t necessarily do the trick. In fact, what I noticed in the weeks and months after this conversation with my friend is that many times, when things were going really well, this feeling of anxiety would flare up again.

Business would be going really well and i would feel anxious it was all going to fall apart.
My relationship with my husband would be going great, and I would get this sinking feeling like this was too good to be true.
I would get good news or be doing one of my favorite things and I would start to feel anxious, like I didn’t deserve it.

Here’s the truth: anxious thoughts are habits we’ve formed.

They’re patterns we’ve developed over the years. And like any habit we’re trying to change (exercising more, eating right, reading instead of watching TV) it’s going to take quite a bit of willpower, discipline, self-love and even commitment in order to change them. The same thing is true for our anxious thought patterns.

Habits don’t change on their own.

They change one at a time, as we work to replace bad habits with good ones.

So, in my case, I decided to replace my negative thoughts with positive ones. The negative thought which was causing my anxiety told me, “when things are good, something bad is about to happen,” and also, “you don’t deserve to be happy.” So the positive thoughts I decided to replace them with went like this:

It’s okay to enjoy yourself
It’s safe to be happy
You deserve to prosper

Now, each time I feel these anxious thoughts come back to me, particularly when things are going well, I replace my old, negative thought patterns with these new ones. And slowly, my anxiety is actually working for me. Each time it reminds me of my old, bad habits, I have an opportunity to work on these new, better ones.

It’s important to remember there’s a difference between a small, manageable about of anxiety and the bigger, more consuming, life-altering amounts of anxiety classified by an anxiety disorder. If you feel you might be suffering from an anxiety disorder, I would highly encourage you to seek professional help.

But if what you’re suffering from years of bad mental habits, like I was, I want to urge you to take responsibility for your anxiety, make friends with it, get curious, work to change your negative habits and patterns with lots of compassion and self-love.

And take heart. A happier, more care-free existence is ahead.

The post One Thing People Forget When Dealing With Anxiety appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

How To Find Love In A Culture of Loneliness

I’ll never forget the first time my husband and I went to marriage counseling.

I was happy to be there, at least as happy as you can be to be in marriage counseling. Mostly, I was looking forward to that delicious moment when a trained professional would finally tell my husband what I had been telling him all along: he needed to change the way he treated me.

I wanted her to tell him he needed to work less and pay more attention to me, to put down his phone at dinner time, to compliment me more often, to avoid criticism and to “pursue me”. I was lonely in our marriage and sad that our relationship hadn’t turned out the way I wanted it to.

So imagine my surprise when, about three quarters of the way through our first session, the therapist turned to me and asked: are you willing to consider the possibility that the reason you feel so lonely has as much to do with you as it does with him?

I was shocked. I just sat there, dead still with my eyes all scrunched, like a scene from a sitcom or something [insert pause for audience laughter here].

And at the same time, after so much time of feeling frustrated and sad and at the end of my rope, I had this deep, pit-in-my-gut feeling like this was the answer to the guidance I had been asking for. It certainly wasn’t the answer I wanted and I wasn’t sure exactly what to do with it, but it was an answer nonetheless.

It was my first step in learning how to find love.

Do you ever feel lonely?

It’s not like you don’t have great friends and you might even be in a committed relationship, but do you ever feel like nobody really notices you? They might see you. But they don’t really see you—your strength, your pain, your beauty, your skills, what you have to offer to the world.

Your boss. Your spouse. Your friends. Your parents. Are they missing it?

Maybe your marriage isn’t exactly what you know it could be, or you wonder why you’re still single when you wish you weren’t. Maybe your friends are wonderful and supportive but you just don’t feel as connected to them as you wish you did. Maybe it seems like people always want something from you, like you’re giving out more than you’re getting back.

Do you ever feel that alone-in-a-crowded room feeling?

If this is you, you’re not alone. The world we live in can be a lonely place. We’re hyper-connected and at the same time not connected at all. We live these transitory lifestyles and depend on technology and social media but we don’t know how to connect up close.

But I think the real reason we experiencing this epidemic of loneliness is because we don’t know how to love ourselves.

We keep looking to outside circumstances to experience the love we desire—to jobs, to paychecks, to people, to marriage, to status, to relationships, to organizations, to thrilling experiences. We keep showing up for counseling appointments, hoping the counselor will set someone else straight so we can finally feel loved.

When the truth is, the love we are looking for has been with us all along.

We have the resources inside of us to cultivate a life, rich with love.

Why love?

Love is the connective tissue binds connects us together, it is the substance that dissolves the walls of intolerance and hate and frustration and misunderstanding; it is a powerful force of change inside our bodies and hearts and minds, and also a powerful force of influence in the world around us. Love is what brings us peace, even in the midst of great conflict.

And if we can’t love ourselves, we can’t love anyone else—and we can’t let anyone else love us.

Ever since that counseling appointment with my husband, where the therapist asked that unforgettable question, I’ve been on a journey of learning to grow love from the inside, out. And what I’m learning is this: love changes everything.

What does it mean to love yourself?

Most of us are confused about how to find love. I certainly was that day as I sat in our therapist’s office as she explained to me that, if I didn’t love myself, I would never be able to accept love from my husband, no matter how he changed his behavior. She said it would be like a brick wall built around me, that no matter how hard he worked to love me, he wouldn’t be able to penetrate my lack of love for myself.

I was skeptical. But at that point, I was willing to try just about anything.

So I decided to do some research and stumbled across two books. One is called Anatomy of the Spirit by Carolyn Myss and the other is The Power is Within You by Louise Hay. Right away, Louise Hay’s definition for loving myself helped me moved beyond visions of simply “pampering myself” or giving into my every desire or whim.

She called self-love a “deep appreciation for who we are.” She went on to say:

When we love ourselves, we accept all the different parts of ourselves—our little peculiarities, the embarrassments, the things we may not do so well, and all the wonderful qualities too. We accept the whole package with love. Unconditionally.

After reading this, I started to notice how little love I had for myself. First of all, I noticed how negative my thoughts were toward myself.


Thoughts can be hard to catch. We often don’t realize they’re happening because we have so many of them—some experts say as many as 70,000 per day—and they can also be wordless or abstract. Some thoughts are concrete and discernible like, “I need to make dinner” and other thoughts are images or sensations that float by without our notice.

But when I began to pay attention, I started catching these little things. With my work, for example, I noticed that every time something went wrong, I would have a strong fear response. Normally, I wouldn’t have thought much of this. I would chalk it up to the stress of the job. But I started to ask myself: where is this fear coming from?

And I started to uncover thoughts I didn’t realize I had:

This is all your fault
You’re such an idiot
That client is going to fire you
Why did they hire you in the first place?
You’re a total fraud

All this before I even really knew what had happened. I really couldn’t believe how negative my thoughts were toward myself.

Another thing I noticed was how many decisions I made out of guilt or a vague sense of self-punishment. Even decisions that were mostly good for me—like getting up early to go for a run or skipping my craving for ice cream—were often motivated by a feeling like I didn’t deserve to be comfortable or happy.

I was amazed, when I stopped to think about it, how many decisions I was making to try and prove I was worth loving.

Why don’t we love ourselves?

If loving ourselves is so great and brings all these benefits into our lives, why don’t we do it? Why are we so resistant?

What I found as I walked through my own process is that there are a lot of obstacles to learning to accept ourselves at all, let alone to radically accepting ourselves. Some of them are internal and some of them are external, but learning to let go of old thoughts and ideas was a huge part of my own process to learning to love myself.

Here are a few of the obstacles I came across:

First of all, we face a culture that tells us we can never been thin enough or trim enough, never be fit enough, smart enough, sexy enough; never have enough money or enough social status. We are being influenced daily by advertisements that point out our lack and sell us their corresponding pill or a program.

What if we simply said, “I acknowledge I’m not exactly where I want to be, but I accept myself fully and completely, just as I am.”?

Additionally, our early experiences are formative in our lives and negative or critical words spoken to you early in your life stay with you for a long time. Think about things your teachers used to tell you, or your parents. Did they make you feel guilty or ashamed of yourself? What about that kid on the playground who used to call you names?

Now think about how you’ve allowed yourself to cultivate these thoughts over the years by ruminating over them and dwelling on them and playing out the tape, over and over again.

Speaking of early experiences, many of us grew up with religious teachings that told us we were filthy, awful people undeserving of any good thing. The truth is we are made in the image of the Divine. We are so deeply loved. You are worthy of receiving love. You are worthy of loving yourself.

We also have our fear, which we use as a layer of protection to prevent ourselves from getting hurt again. The problem is the more we use fear to protect, the less likely we are to feel love. Painful experiences will happen to all of us in our lifetimes; and the very force that makes us resilient enough to rebound from those experiences is love.

Are you willing to let go of your fear and believe you are strong enough to face this world, unguarded?




Finally, we have our egos. Way too often we think we’re the center of the universe. We think the world revolves around us. We worry if we drop the ball on this one thing, the rest of the universe is going to collapse around us. This is simply not true. When we embrace our own humanity and say, “I’m not perfect—but I don’t need to be,” we begin to feel our love for ourselves return.

We feel an awe and wonder at our place in the universe, rather than a burden of responsibility for making the world turn.

The truth I want us all to catch here is that, while there are outside factors influencing our ability to love ourselves, most of the control lies in our own hands. We can learn to cultivate a deep and enduring love for ourselves.

How can we learn to love ourselves?

In my own journey, the most profound thing I’ve done to cultivate a deep love for myself is to change my thought patterns. Thought patterns, like the ones I shared above, are both evidence of our lack of love for ourselves and also the very thing standing in the way of accepting and growing the love that is already there.

We all have negative thought patterns keeping us from loving ourselves. Some are more obvious than others.

If you don’t think you have any negative thought patterns, try putting yourself in a situation where you feel profoundly uncomfortable. Ask yourself where that discomfort comes from. What is it about? What is it telling you? Also notice your criticism of others. Our criticism of others is often a reflection of how we feel about ourselves.

Do you find yourself criticizing others for not being thin enough?
For not making enough money?
For the clothes they wear?
For being “dumb”?

Our criticisms of others give us these valuable hints about how we feel toward ourselves. And when we can mine out the negative thoughts we have about ourselves, we can begin to replace them with loving ones.

If you’re still having a hard time figuring out the negative thoughts you have about yourself, my suggestion is this: get less busy. It is in stillness and silence and solitude that negative feelings about ourselves rise to the surface so we can catch them. Learn to sit in stillness, to meditate, to fall asleep at night without the TV on. In these margins you will learn to hear and understand how you feel about yourself.

Loving thoughts will change your life.

The process is really simple, honestly. I started, for example, by taking a negative thought I had about myself like, “you’re never going to succeed” and replacing it with a positive thought, or a few positive thoughts like, “the success you desire is coming to you in its time” or “you deserve to be successful”.

I would write these positive thoughts down in my journal or repeat them to myself when I felt overwhelmed or anxious or lonely.

Slowly but surely, I started to believe them. I felt less anxious, more at peace with myself, less likely to lash out in anger or pout when things didn’t go my way. My relationships got better—including and especially the relationship with my husband. I was no longer waiting for him to change his behavior so I could feel good about myself.

And here’s the crazy part. My husband’s affections have naturally shifted toward me as I’ve learned to love myself. I don’t have to coax him to stop working. He just does. I don’t have to ask him to put down his phone. He does it without my asking. This is how to find love.

It’s amazing how much easier it is to like someone who likes themselves (tweet that)

Do you believe you deserve to have a good life?

By that I don’t mean everything will work out perfectly for you all the time or that you will get everything you want. What I do mean is that the love you feel for yourself can stay with you no matter what takes place in your life.

That love will comfort you, keep you company, keep you at peace and even transform you into the person you’ve always wanted to be.

Love is the most powerful force in the world.

I used to have a hard time resting or even sitting down—especially if I was stressed. People would come over to my house for dinner and I would be on my feet the entire time, serving food, washing dishes, refilling drinks. These days I realize that most of what people want from me is just for me to be with them—after all, I’m likable! I like myself.

I used to be racked with guilt and anxiety over the smallest things. I’m learning that comes from a place of self-hatred and perfectionism and love for myself is slowly curing that. When something would go wrong in life, I used to take it as a failure on my part. Now I see situations that don’t go my way as either unexpected blessings and/or an opportunity to learn.

A year an a half ago, I honestly wasn’t sure my marriage would survive. And over the course of the last 18 months, that relationship has totally transformed. I don’t even recognize us anymore. And I’m convinced the transformation is because I stopped waiting for someone else to do something different so I could feel good about myself and chose to feel good about myself—just as I was.

The love I always been so desperate to feel had been with me all along.

The post How To Find Love In A Culture of Loneliness appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

Learn to Trust Yourself And Live Without Regret

Why is it so hard to make choices to change our lives—even changes we know are good ones? Why do we stay in bad relationships, hang onto bad eating habits, or stay at jobs where our energy is being sucked out from under us? Why do we keep saying “yes” to too many things, taking care of others at the expense of ourselves?

Why are we still putting off that business idea, or that book idea we’ve been harboring for years, or ignoring that nagging feeling?

Why don’t we pick up the phone and say hello, call that friend and apologize, text that family member to say we love them, finally share our opinion in a group of friends, or stand up for ourselves to that bully at work?

If you ask me it’s because life, if we’re going to live without regret, takes a huge dose of courage.

A life of love, not of fear.

A few years ago my husband and I were trying to make a big decision. The place we had been living and working for the past year wasn’t working for us anymore and we were seriously thinking about leaving. But as with anytime you’re about to make a major turn in your life, we were worried about taking the leap.

What would people think of the choice we were about to make? Would we disappoint people?

And mostly: was this the “right” decision?

Looking back, it’s hard to explain why we were so scared to pivot. I could list all the reasons to you, but they wouldn’t make sense. Fear is powerful but it isn’t logical. The fear doesn’t even make sense to us looking back. What I can explain is the deep, guttural feeling we had like we were supposed to leap.

We knew exactly what we were supposed to do. We were just terrified to do it.

We asked dozens of people for their advice and the responses we got back were mixed. Then we talked to a friend who finally had the guts to say to us what no one else would. He said: you can ignore that gut feeling gnawing inside you, but if you do, you’ll cut yourself from your very life force.

Your spiritual insight and energy, your creativity, and your joy will dissipate. You’ll die a slow painful, spiritual death.

Right as all of this was happening, my dad suffered a massive heart attack.

In fact, heart “attack” doesn’t really do justice to what happened. It was more like a massive heart failure. In an instant, his heart just stopped beating. They revived him six times before he even made it to the hospital and the doctors called my mom and told her to get the whole family there.

We all came to grips with the fact that he might not make it.

Wondering if my dad would survive long enough for me to even say goodbye brought up all kinds of feelings of regret for me. Should I have been more available? Should I have called more often? Should I have worked less? Should I have said, “I love you” more?

It also lit a fire under me. Life was so short and could not be wasted with frivolous fears and worries. The only thing that mattered was love: radical love for myself and those around me, love of life and all the gifts it brings. It was time to live without regret.

Miraculously, my dad survived.

And once we were all sure he was going to be okay, I asked him to tell me what it was like—nearly dying. He said something to me I’ll never forget. He said: you know, I’m sure it was so scary for you guys to have my life hanging in the balance, but it really wasn’t scary for me at all. I didn’t feel any fear. All I felt, he said, was total surrender.

In the moments when the ambulance crew was trying to revive him, when the whole family was scrambling to get to the where he was, when the doctors and nurses were struggling to keep him alive, while we were all terrified and distressed… he wasn’t distressed at all.

“It was so peaceful, nearly dying.” he said. “It’s living that’s the hard part.”

We all laughed because we knew what he meant. Now that he had the gift of life again, it was time to get on with all those dreams he had been deferring, all the ideas he’d been putting off, all the places he wanted to go and things he wanted to say… now was the time.

Life, if we’re going to live without regret, takes a huge freaking dose of courage.

And at the same time, maybe there was something he could learn about living from nearly dying. Maybe there is something we can all learn. Part of living with courage is learning to surrender to the flow of life, to let go of our ideas about how things are “supposed” to go and to embrace what comes.

Perhaps our version of “the perfect life” isn’t so perfect after all.

My 23-year-old sister in law was recently diagnosed with cancer.

And let me tell you, watching her receive her diagnoses, go through treatment, encounter obstacles with courage and conviction and keep a positive attitude the whole way has been both heart-wrenching and also beautiful. Heart-wrenching because of the pain she’s enduring and beautiful because, well, talk about freaking changing how you thought things were going to go.

A year ago, she and her husband (my husband’s brother) decided to make a move of their own, not so different from the move my husband and I made all those years ago. Their intuition was ramping up and telling them to go, so they did it.

They quit jobs and said goodbyes and packed their things.

They came to Nashville. They got a great deal on a house that needed some love, so they started gutting it for a total remodel. They knew this wasn’t going to be the most comfortable year of their life, and there was a lot of risk involved in this decision, but they did it, with courage and grace and conviction and beauty and no regrets.

That’s when the diagnosis came in.

I’ll be honest, if I were her, it would be so easy to throw my hands up in the air and say, “forget it! I give up! Life is out to get me. There is no way to win.” And yet she doesn’t seem to feel that way at all. Instead she told me: sometimes the suffering, more than the healing, is the greatest catalyst for our transformation.

Talk about courage and surrender to the way we thought things “should” be. Talk about the very embodiment of how we are so much stronger than we think.

Watching her journey has been yet another a wake-up call for me in my life—to stop worrying and being afraid of “bad” things that might happen to me and start paying attention to how powerful I am to face any number of obstacles that may come into my life. I say to myself, over and over again, “every experience in my life is an opportunity to learn.”

There are no guarantees in life. You have today.

What are you going to do with it?

Too many of us are tiptoeing around our own lives, trying not to piss too many people off or make too many waves. And I wonder if, when we get to the end of our lives—no matter when that happens—if that will be the very thing we regret most. I wonder how many of us will say, “I wish I would have spoken up sooner. I wish I would have made that move. I wish I would have… I wish I would have…”

And how few of us will say, “Wow, I really regret speaking up for myself or doing what was right for me or loving people radically and completely, or loving myself…”

What are we so afraid of?

I want to linger on this question for a minute because I think a lot of people ask it rhetorically but very few of us actually answer it. Obviously we’re afraid of something or we wouldn’t hesitate when it comes to taking steps toward things that matter to us.

What keeps us from saying, “I don’t like how I felt when you said that…”
What keeps us from quitting the job that no longer suits us?
What keeps us from adopting that baby we’ve been dying to adopt?
What keeps us from leaving that abusive relationship?

The answer, if you ask me, is this: we don’t trust ourselves enough.

We don’t trust our intuition to lead us in the direction we are designed to go.

When intuition speaks, when that internal engine starts to rev itself inside of us, we feel that gut-check or red flag that something should be different, when we get the sense it’s time move or time to change or time to speak up, we don’t act because we don’t trust ourselves. And we don’t trust ourselves because we break promises to ourselves every day.

Every time you say you’re going to do something and then do something different; each time you act outside of your conviction; every time you take care of other people at the expense of yourself; each time you say “yes” when you mean “no”; all those times you’ve let resentment build and strangle you, you’re chipping away at the trust you feel for yourself.

We are terrible friends to ourselves, terrible protectors of our own hearts. We’ve broken promises to ourselves again and again and again.

No wonder we don’t trust ourselves.

And I can hardly imagine how things might change if we realized how powerful we truly are. If we knew how the love and grace we desire to feel for ourselves has been with us all along, how the resources we need are at our fingertips, how every experience that comes across our path can be for our good if we will accept it.

I wonder what would change if we knew how much agency we have been given to overcome even the most challenging obstacles. Maybe we could trust ourselves more.

Maybe we would take that step of faith we’ve been dying to take.

Maybe we would stop worrying about regretting it.

Regret is just a feeling.

At the end of the day, regret is just a feeling. You’ll meet some people who will say, “I don’t believe in regret” or “regret is a waste of time and energy” but for one reason or another, this advice has always bothered me. Feelings of regret are something we all deal with and I’m not a big fan of denying feelings.

Also, regret can be a positive force in our lives if we let it.

First, let’s take some of the power out of the word by defining it. Regret is simply this: wishing you would have done things differently.

You will get to the end of your life and wish you had done things differently. That is a given. You might say, “I did everything I could with what I had, but with what I know now, this is what I would have done differently. I can have love and grace for myself, but if I had it to do again, here’s how I would have done that.”

We don’t have to fear regret or resist it or deny it.

But there are some things we need to know about regret.

Regret is a tool, not a weapon. Think about this: a hammer is really effective for pounding nails into the wall but it is not meant for pounding your finger. Should we say, “hammers are dangerous and no one should ever be allowed to use them!” No. We just need to know what hammers are used for and exercise caution with them. The same is true with regret.
Don’t allow yourself to ruminate. Thinking about situations you regret once or twice and saying, “wow, I wish I would have handled that differently” can be effective in curbing future behavior and avoiding additional regret. But obsessing over past mistakes again and again and again will keep you stuck. Learn to trust yourself and trust your process. We all make mistakes and are a work in progress.
If you can correct course, do so. If you can’t, let go. There are some things we regret that we simply cannot change. If you’re a parent who wasn’t there for your kids, who are now grown, you can’t go back. What you have is now. And in order to live in the “now” you must let go of the past. If you feel regret and can use it (as a tool, not a weapon) to correct course, great. Apologize. Adjust. Change. Otherwise, forgive yourself and everyone else for not being perfect and choose to move forward with grace.

A few months ago I met a girl who was about to make a big decision.

She told me all about the positives and negatives and everything that was holding her back. She used words I would have used so many years ago when I was trying to make a choice for our next right step. I could hear the fear in her voice and I felt like this was a window, looking into the past of my very own life.

And what I told that girl—who was really me, if I could admit it—was this:

You are so deeply loved and more powerful than you can possibly imagine. You are protected in this world and so completely safe. Everything you feel you lack, you have access to in abundance. You can trust yourself. You will learn along the way, and that’s a blessing not a curse. It’s okay to be imperfect.

The world is opening it’s arms wide to you. There is no way you can mess this up. You are brave and beautiful and a work of art.

I just wish I could gift you the courage to see it.

The post Learn to Trust Yourself And Live Without Regret appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

Women, Confidence And The Problem No One Is Talking About

Ever since I read an article in The Atlantic about The Confidence Gap between men and women, I haven’t been able to get it off my mind. Mostly, I think, because the article put words and research to something I’ve noticed take shape in my own life over the years: women (myself included) lacking the confidence men seem to have in droves.

Of course, this is a generalization. And of course my experience is limited.

But the research seems to support my observations: women are less likely to share their opinions in a group of people, more likely to apologize for things that aren’t their fault, less likely to take risks, more likely to take criticism personally and less likely to consider themselves competent in their work.

What is confidence?

There are many different ways to define the word confidence but I love the definition authors of the book The Confidence Code use:

Confidence is not, as we once believed, just feeling good about yourself. If women simply needed a few words of reassurance, they’d have commandeered the corner office long ago. Perhaps the clearest, and most useful, definition of confidence we came across was the one supplied by Richard Petty, a psychology professor at Ohio State University, who has spent decades focused on the subject. “Confidence,” he told us, “is the stuff that turns thoughts into action (Kay & Shipman, 2014).

Did you catch that? Confidence is the stuff that turns thought into action.

So the writers I work with on a daily basis (99% women) who are desperate for me to tell them their idea is a good one before they move ahead with it, or who are vying for the validation of a publishing contract before they begin to write their book—that’s a lack of self confidence. Or the woman I know who confided in me how terrified she was to speak up at a table full of men… that’s a confidence issue.

It’s one I can identify with strongly—but it’s a confidence issue nonetheless.

Confidence is the reason my friend who is a gifted dance instructor hasn’t yet tried to monetize what she does for a living, even though people are begging her to. She’s terrified to fail and afraid she’s “asking too much” by charging money for her skills. It’s the reason another friend, who is a successful businesses woman and mother underplays her skills and abilities—especially around men.

It’s the reason I have thought to myself, on more than one occasion, “How lucky am I to have found success in this area…” while the men I know think to themselves, “look at how hard I’ve worked to get where I am.”

Why are women lacking in confidence?

It would be difficult to have this conversation without talking about how culture has shaped the confidence of women. On the one hand, never before in the history of the world have women had so many opportunities open to them:

In the United States, women now earn more college and graduate degrees than men do. We make up half the workforce, and we are closing the gap in middle management. Half a dozen global studies, conducted by the likes of Goldman Sachs and Columbia University, have found that companies employing women in large numbers outperform their competitors on every measure of profitability. Our competence has never been more obvious. Those who closely follow society’s shifting values see the world moving in a female direction (Kay & Shipman, 2014).

And yet, we can’t ignore that, for decades (centuries) women have been taught to be silent, stay at home, remain uninformed, listen to their husbands, obey the rules, to play nice, and to take care of others at the expense of themselves. There is just no way this legacy wouldn’t make it difficult for a person—any person—to feel confident in their own sense of self-worth.

Not to mention, while women are certainly making progress in the work world, we are still the primary caretakers—not only of our children and husbands but of our extended families as well. I met a man recently who runs an assisted living facility and do you know who he said their primary marketing is directed toward?

The eldest son’s wife. She is the one coordinating care.

And while there is nothing wrong with women being caretakers, it does add a complicated layer to this whole confidence issue. It is virtually impossible for us to make decisions without considering the laundry list of possible impact—how might this be perceived, who might this offend, how my choices might impact the life of someone who is in my care.

Then of course, there is also advertising, which too often exploits women or attacks our self-confidence to get us to buy products we don’t need. Entire industries are built off of women feeling like they need plumper breasts or glossier lips or more beautiful teeth.

People are making money—lots of money—off of our lack of confidence.

But that isn’t even the most dangerous problem.

Yes, there are still cultures and communities all over the world where women are seen as second-class citizens. And yes, there are places right in our midst where women are still being downgraded or kept silent or abused. But thanks to the courage of so many women who have gone before us and the courage of so many brave and brilliant men for that matter, fewer and fewer women are questioning the value they have to offer in this world.

But the most dangerous problem we face today, if you ask me, is that there are cultures and communities everywhere, right in our midst, where people mean really well but men and women both are stuck in old, comfortable patterns.

If I’m being really honest, my house is a place like this.

We mean well. We’re trying. It’s important to both my husband and I that neither of us miss out on opportunities to bring our gifts to the world; and that we both feel confident enough to speak our minds, make tough decisions and take risks for what we each believe matters. But there are still moments where we fall into old ways of relating to each other.

And by that I mean I find myself, in moments, relying on him for my confidence.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but it’s true.

I catch myself asking his permission before I make decisions—even small ones. I assume he knows what he’s doing when it comes to electronics and financial investments, so I don’t learn (when really, he’s just Googling it). I take his advice for my career over my own gut instinct. It’s comfortable. It’s easier. It’s what I’ve seen modeled out there in the world.

But mostly I do this because it takes a lot of courage and creativity and innovation and effort to manifest something new.

The most dangerous enemy of women is not culture or social structures or even men—who are up against cultural shifts and challenges of their own, to be fair. The most dangerous enemy of women is women. It’s the way we treat each other, the thoughts we have about ourselves, the permission we give ourselves to opt out of doing what is difficult and new.

The biggest reason we, as women, lack the confidence so many men have is because we keep blaming things like culture and advertising and the people and structures and communities instead of realizing the truth that we have what it takes to be just as confident in ourselves as men do.

The only one holding us back is us. We keep waiting for someone else to gift us our confidence when the truth is, we’ve had it all along.

It is inside of us. We’re just keeping it all pent up.

How do I know this? Well, to start, I see women all around me who are killing it when it comes to confidence. If confidence equals action, then not necessarily feeing all put-together when you’re executing that action doesn’t make you lose any confidence points. So in that case, I can think of a thousand women who are ramping up their confidence game.

I watched a terrified but brilliant woman, and friend, recently deliver a beautiful keynote at an event. She was scared (who wouldn’t be?) but she did it anyway, and I’m so glad she did. We needed what she said.

My sister-in-law, who just found out she has cancer, cut off her own, beautiful, long, flowing hair. Rather than let the cancer take it from her, she took action. She showed cancer who was boss. And she looks amazing (actually I think she looks kick-ass. That’s what I told her).

I’ve been listening to Liz Gilbert’s podcast called Big Magic lately and she interviews six women, all in different stages of life, who are all embarking on a creative project. She takes them through what she calls a “Magic Lesson” which is basically helping them discover their inner confidence and creative power. And let me tell you. Each one of these women is taking a massive step of confidence. What an inspiration.

Not to mention Liz Gilbert herself, who is a woman paving the way for all of us.

I could go on and on about women I admire who are taking the world by storm. But here’s what I want you to hear:

Every time you exert your opinion into the world, each time you stand your ground for something you want, each time you exercise your creative energy, every time you take a risk to try something new, even if you know you won’t be good at it—you are building into your own reservoir of confidence, one that you can access anytime you want.

It’s yours. You own it.

I have friends all over the country, and the world, who are bravely creating things and taking risks and going to places they never thought they would go. Some of them are venturing to dangerous parts of the world, some of them are venturing into motherhood, daring to lose sleep and go through labor pains and give themselves over to someone they deeply love.

Women are walking the delicate tightrope between staying at home to care for their families and putting their thoughts, ideas and gifts out there in the world.

This is where confidence comes from.

Thought to action. Applying for the job. Starting the investment account. Reaching out to that new friend. Trying to have a baby. Taking the opportunity. Booking the trip. Saying “yes” where you would normally say “no” or “no” where you would normally say yes.

And the stakes are really high here.

This is not something small we’re talking about. There are so many problems that come along with not having enough self-confidence.

To start, when we don’t know and love who we are, we harm ourselves.

This explains the reckless abandonment with which so many women enter into toxic relationships, and the years after years they stay. It explains experimentation with drugs and overdoing it with alcohol. It explains depression and anxiety, silence in the face of abusive religion. It explains eating disorders and over-exercise or binge-eating and throwing up.

Second, when we don’t know who we are, we can’t really be in relationship with anyone. So many women are waiting to get married in order to feel confident. But for me, getting married exacerbated my lack of self-confidence. Because if you put two people in a relationship and one person has no idea who she is, you get… well, actually, there is a word for this.

It’s called co-dependence. And it’s not pretty.

If you want your relationships to grow, if you want to feel closer to and more supported by your friends, if you know your relationship with your husband isn’t what it could be, hold off on blaming him/them. Work on your feelings of self-confidence and as your inner-world shifts I bet you’ll see your outer-world will change as well.

Confident women are changing the world.

Without confidence, we can have all kinds of ideas about how we want the world to be, but we will never be able to execute them. Thought to action. That is what confidence does. So if we don’t work on our own sense of self-confidence, it’s going to be difficult for us to make progress on much of anything.

Women can be the answer to so many of the world’s problems.

But not without confidence.

Confident women are ending violence against women. They’re standing up for themselves and saying, “I won’t let you treat me like this. I’m putting an end to this for good.” Confident women are rescuing other women from slavery and prostitution. They’re taking refugees into their homes and giving them money and helping them heal.

Confident women are getting on stages and standing up in their homes and saying to their husbands and their children, “things use to be this way, but that is going to change.”

Confident women are restoring peace in the world.

Confident women are starting businesses and raising brave girls and sensitive boys. They’re speaking up at tables full of men and women alike and standing up against cultural messages that say only a certain kind of person matters.

They’re removing themselves from communities and relationships where they are not valued because they know they will never find their voice where they’re asked to stay silent. They’re deeply compassionate but also strongly convicted and unwilling to act in a way that goes against that conviction.

But most of all, confident women are taking a stand against their own jealousy and pessimism and perfectionism and competitive spirit and are saying to the women around them, “I think you are so brave and beautiful for doing that thing you just did.” They’re taking notes and getting creative and telling themselves, “nothing is impossible… we can do this.”

You are a confident woman. That’s the truth.

You just might not know it yet.

The post Women, Confidence And The Problem No One Is Talking About appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

The Mind Body Connection and The Closest Thing I’ve Experienced to a Miracle.

For more than a decade, I struggled with crippling food allergies. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a position like this—either with chronic pain, or infertility, or migraines, or hormone imbalance or extra weight that just won’t come off—where it’s clear there is something “off” in your body but nobody can figure out exactly what, and so there seems to be no solution and no end to your suffering.

But if you have, you know how completely trapping it can feel.

And the other thing you know, if you’ve ever been in this position, is how hard it is to talk about what you’re experiencing. I didn’t talk about my food allergies for years. Mostly because phrases like “bowel movement” and “loose stools” don’t exactly seem like polite dinner conversation but also because anytime I tried to talk about it, I worried I was complaining or drawing attention to myself, or making a big deal out of nothing.

It was easier to just say, “no, I’m really okay. I’ve got this covered. Things are under control. My suffering is nothing compared to so-and-so.”

But I was really sick.

Some days I would have such bad diarrhea it would make me afraid to leave the house. Most nights I would lay awake, praying for my stomach to stop hurting. My diet consisted of, basically, Saltine crackers, diet coke, easy mac, french fries and the occasional bowl of cheerios with soy milk. So super healthy, in other words. But these were the things that seemed to cause me the least amount of pain.

And still, I made a handful of trips to the emergency room. The doctors would ask me what my pain was like, and the only thing I could think to tell them was, “it feels like I’m digesting needles” or “…I think my insides are bleeding.”

All their tests came back negative.

Celiac and Crohn’s and Ulcerative Colitis and colon cancer and a number of other things. They even tested me for lactose intolerance, which I was convinced I had, but nope… that test came back negative, too. Nobody could explain what was happening to me.

And then, finally, a glimmer of hope. A diagnosis. A specialist I was seeing ordered a test, just on the off chance, and the results came back positive. Dietary Fructose Intolerance (DFI).

The solution they gave me was to avoid fructose (the sugar found in fruit, most vegetables and of course High Fructose Corn Syrup) for the rest of my life.

I’ll never forget taking the list of “approved” foods to the grocery store for the first time, wandering around for an hour and a half or so, reading labels, and putting everything I was used to buying back on the shelf. After close to two hours, I came home with several bags full of food I had to (gasp) cook myself.

I started watching the food network, learning how to make my own food and finding some peace in nourishing myself.

You would think this would have fixed everything, but no.

When I started following the diet my doctor recommended, my symptoms dissipated. At least there was that. I was able to sleep through the night with very few stomach problems. My chronic migraines stopped. I stopped making those “fun” little trips to the emergency room. Within a few months, I dropped 20 pounds. It’s amazing what your body can do when it isn’t fighting an uphill battle all the time.

But my diagnosis also meant that three times a day—at least—I was reminded of my limitations. This was back before people were talking about things like “Gluten Free” or “Paleo” or GMOs and organic. This was the age of Atkins, people. And the way I saw it, I had two choices. Either I could spend the rest of my life being the girl with food allergies or I could disengage from the whole corporate eating ritual altogether.

So I all but stopped going out to eat with friends.

Honestly, it never felt super worth it anyway. I would order a plain piece of chicken—cooked with no oil or seasoning (because it was too much trouble to ask what was in the marinades and mixtures), on a salad, which was usually a bed of iceberg lettuce, with no tomatoes or carrots or dressing. $15 to be embarrassed and anxious and mostly miserable.

Holidays were also packed with anxiety for me.

Suddenly I became the problem, the topic of conversation, “Can Ally have this? Can she eat that?” Or I would bring my own food, packed into little tupperware, like a total loser, and eat my wierd-o food while everyone else pigged out on pumpkin pie and stuffing. I always felt left out, or like the “problem” everyone else had to solve.

In fact, there were times I just ate what was put in front of me—all the while knowing it would make me sick—just to avoid the public humiliation.

One day, someone I knew suggested my problem wasn’t just physical.

I’ll never forget it. “Have you ever considered…” she asked, “that your food intolerances might be connected to your fear and anxiety?” And while you might think this suggestion would be a glimmer of hope for me, a light at the end of the tunnel, it wasn’t. I found her comment insulting and so completely impolite and out of line, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days.

And then weeks.

It taunted me. It infuriated me. How could she…?

After that, I didn’t want to, but I did begin to see some parallels between the physical symptoms I was experiencing and my fears and insecurities. For example, I would often think to myself, after refusing an invitation to go to dinner, about how left out I felt—how this “always” happened to me, how nobody really understood what I was going through and how I was invisible and insignificant.

I also noticed how the pain would flare up during times when I was under a lot of stress—one time when I was in a job that was a terrible fit for me and another time when a close friend of mine committed suicide. My symptoms would come back, in full force, even though I was eating all the same foods that had eliminated my symptoms months ago.

This was just enough to keep me wondering, keep me guessing that maybe there might be more to this than just the physical.

But I wasn’t convinced.

I kept the possibility of healing in the back of my mind.

I would research and try a new diet where you’d be really strict for a few weeks or months and then re-introduce the problematic foods. I worked with a naturopath who walked me through an elimination diet and suggested I cut out gluten for good, so I did that.

I tried a product called Juice Plus—a whole food supplement that contains the real, whole fruits and vegetables, which are picked at their optimum freshness and then condensed down to capsule form. I thought maybe this would be a good way for me to get some of the nutrients I knew I was lacking, without the fructose itself. I also hoped it would bring healing for me, as it had for so many others.

I tried acupuncture and essential oils and yoga and probiotics and a dozen other things. I drank bone broth. I did fermented foods and all-organic and paleo and a Whole 30.

This went on for a decade. I tried everything I could think of.

And yet nothing worked. Progress, maybe, but no real healing. My hopes were always dashed. Each time I would feel more demoralized than the last.

A little over a year ago, I started seeing a therapist.

And about six months into our time together, she told me something that piqued my interest. She said, “I work with clients all the time who work through their emotional symptoms and then their physical ones all but vanish.” It felt reminiscent of the phrase that woman had said to me so many years ago—about my food allergies being connected to my emotional state. Except this time I knew she was right.

Why is it that the most helpful thing we can hear in the moment is also the most difficult?

As she and I talked more about this, I realized that so many of the emotional things we were working on together mirrored the things I had, for so long, experienced with food. Feeling invisible or “different” or constantly left out translated to never being able to participate in this those holiday get-togethers, dinners or group gatherings.

People-pleasing or always deferring my own needs for the sake of others translated into my tendency to eat foods that made me physically ill just so I didn’t have to bring up my food allergies or draw attention to myself.

A fear of being vulnerable or asking for help translated into my inability to talk openly about the struggle I faced with food on a daily basis.

The more we talked, the more I began to see the direct connection between what was happening with me physically and my emotional struggles.

Can I be honest?

There was a tremendous amount of fear in this realization for me. If my external world reflected my internal one, and if I had the power to shape my physical symptoms by addressing my emotional ones, what did that mean for me? It meant I had a huge amount of responsibility, first of all, and activated all my insecurities about not being good enough.

Could the reason I hadn’t found healing, despite all my effort, be because I was somehow fundamentally flawed?

What if other people deserved to be healed but I did not?

The more we talked about this, the more I realized my fears were keeping me from the healing I desired. And when I could calm my fears and actually listen, what I knew—deep, deep down, was this: healing is not a passive event but an active one. We must participate in our own healing.

It’s a “get up and walk” kind of thing.

So I made a few commitments to myself.

First, I told myself I was going to believe for my own healing, no matter how long it took. I would continue the things I had done before—acupuncture, essential oils, good diet, Juice Plus, etc—because I knew they had helped me with symptoms and pain and I knew they were part of my progress. But I was going to incorporate an emotional aspect as well.

I was going to work through what was happening inside until it showed up on the outside.

I also committed I wouldn’t do this alone, so I started talking to my closest friends about my allergies and their symptoms.

Two of my friends specifically—Betsy and Katie—would call me each time before I came over to their house and say, “now, remind me: can you have carrots? I’m making soup, but I want to make sure you can eat it.” I’m not sure they’ll ever know how healing it was for me that that was their response to me. I was terrified of being an inconvenience, of being left out, and their gestures of love showed me my fears were unfounded.

I belonged. I was welcomed. Even if my food allergies were an inconvenience, I wasn’t an inconvenience.

I committed to celebrate even the smallest victories in my healing, something that did not come naturally for me. I would not undersell myself or expect too much.

I refused to feel defeated.

I told myself, over and over, “you deserve to find healing.”

And only as I felt compelled, I began reintroducing foods, one at a time. I started really slowly at first—just a bite of a banana one day, and then another small bite the next. I reminded myself that I was in control of this process and that I could stop anytime I wanted. “You have choices” I would tell myself, which was something I was telling myself in my emotional healing, as well.

I had luck with a little bit of banana, so I moved on to blueberries. Then tomatoes. Each time I would eat something that used to make me sick, I would say to myself:

“This is good for me and my body knows exactly what to do with it. My body will take what’s good and get rid of the rest…”

As soon as I started having some success, I gained some momentum. I tried more and more foods, without any problems. Pineapple and honey and peppers and tomato sauce and orange juice and everything a little faster and in bigger quantities. And before I knew it, I was eating nearly everything again.

Foods I hadn’t touched in fifteen years. A miracle.

But to top off everything, after more than a month of eating all my new foods with no symptoms, I found myself in a particularly stressful circumstance—one that triggered all of my fears insecurities—and within seconds, physical symptoms returned.

It wasn’t until I removed myself from this situation, set a boundary, and talked to a friend about what I was going through that my symptoms eased again.

Why am I telling you this?

Not only that, why am I writing the longest post I’ve ever put on my blog to tell you this?

Good question.

First, I know I’m not the only one who is feeling trapped by some kind of physical ailment—migraines or endometriosis or Cancer or food allergies. And I know physical illness, along with it’s obvious physical symptoms, comes with many emotional ones as well.

Hopelessness. Vulnerability. Fear. Distress.

And while I am not making any direct comparisons from my unique and specific situation to yours, I do want to say: our outer world so often reflects our inner realities. The connection is not always direct or specific, but if you’re like me, considering the connection might give you some insights you weren’t able to see before.

Also, one of the greatest lessons I learned through this whole process was this: we have power to shape and shift the world around us. We don’t have total control. But we have more control than we give ourselves credit for. And the physical world we experience is often a reflection of the emotional world we carry inside.

Finally I want you to know, if you’re on a healing journey (aren’t we all?), don’t give up.

It may take so much longer than you ever imagined to find your healing, and healing my come in a way you never imagined or expected, but that’s okay. You have time. And the journey itself is so important. You’re learning and gaining along the way in ways you don’t even realize. You’re growing and changing and becoming along the way, and people love you so much—enough to call you and ask you about carrots—if you will let them.

You deserve to find healing. So don’t give up.

The post The Mind Body Connection and The Closest Thing I’ve Experienced to a Miracle. appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

The Real Reason We’re All So Busy

The month of August was busy for us. I mean BUSY. I was pretty sure, at some point, my calendar was going to say, “no I’m sorry, there is not enough room for any more events in August… come again later.”

In fact, the only thing busier than our month of August is… uh…

Our month of September.

Right now, if I sit and look at my iCal for long enough, I can feel myself start to hyperventilate. I see weekends where we’re working or traveling, all the way through the weekend, and I can already feel in my bones how exhausted I’m going to be. The whole thing makes me want to let out a tiny whimper.

But it also has me thinking about why I do this to myself.

Why are we so freaking BUSY all. the. time?

The reason we most often cite for our chronic busyness (myself included) is we don’t want to let people down. It’s our people-pleasing problem that’s really getting in our way, we say. And in a roundabout way, I guess we’re right. But I think there’s a much deeper reason we pack our schedules so full we want to cry.

That is this: busyness makes us feel less inadequate.

We’re mind-numbingly busy because we choose to be. Busyness is our crutch. (Tweet That)

I read all these things on the Internet (and everywhere) about people waking up at 5am to crush their productivity and if I’m being totally honest, the whole thing makes me feel a little sick. It’s not because I think there is anything wrong with waking up at 5am or being insanely productive.

Like everyone, I’m always trying to maximize the amount of work I get done with a given amount of energy. And I have gone through long seasons of my life waking up at 5am.

Book-writing seasons. Great seasons. Happy seasons. Productive seasons.

But the reason the whole thing makes me feel sick to my stomach is because, at the end of the day, no matter how much we accomplish or produce or “crush”, no matter how early we wake up, it will never make us feel like we’re enough.

That feeling has to come from somewhere else.

If I’m being honest, I like staying busy. It’s comfortable to me. I’m happiest when I have my nice little to-do lists organized neatly on post-it notes, with tiny little tasks I can efficiently check off. By the end of the day, I feel so happy and in control, like life is CRAZY, but I have totally CONQUERED it.

You know, being so amazing and all.

Busyness helps me cope with my feelings of worthlessness.

If I can do more, be more, go harder, make more money, fit more in, please more people, get more attention and accolades for my accomplishments, maybe one of these days, one of those accomplishments will make me feel like I’m not such a waste of space.

Maybe one day, if I’m busy enough, I’ll finally start to feel like I matter for something. The problem is it never happens like that.

Feeling worthy is something that happens from the inside, out. (Tweet That)

A little over a year ago I spent a week at a place called Onsite.

It’s basically like summer camp for adults, with some counseling woven in. They make you turn in your cell phone and you’re not allowed to talk about what you do for a living. Then you spend a week with the same small group of people doing pretty much… well… nothing.

In fact, I remember being struck by how easy it was to sit for an hour—or more—after dinner, just talking about… hmm… who even knows what? I don’t really remember what any of our conversations were about. I just remember feeling deeply connected and endeared to these people who, for all intents and purposes, I had just met.

Now, to be fair, it didn’t start off like this.

The first few hours at Onsite—without my phone or my friends or my busy schedule to move me from one thing to the next—felt horribly awkward and painful. I wondered what on earth I had done. It took everything in me not to get in my car and drive home.

But, by the end of the week, despite the fact that I was totally disconnected from the world around me, completely disengaged from my career goals, didn’t send or receive a single email or a single text message…

This was probably the most “productive” week of my life.

Worthiness comes from the INSIDE, out.

Then productivity follows. Clarity of thought and of vision. Decisiveness. Permission to let people down.

I’m not sure how this sits with you.

Maybe I’m the only one who super-charges my schedule so I don’t have to sit still with myself. Maybe I’m the only one who numbs myself out at the end of the day watching Netflix until I’m so tired I can’t keep my eyes open, so I don’t have to get comfortable with the silence.

Maybe I’m the only one who, on a day when I have nothing to do, finds things to do just so I can keep feeling “productive”.

But I kind of don’t think I am.

So if you’re even slightly tracking with me, here is something I am working on.

I say “no,” then I pay attention.

I say no to doing the dishes while our dinner guests are still there, opting to put it off for the morning so we can continue in conversation—and then I pay attention to how it makes me feel. Anxious. Stressed. Like I’m not doing enough.

I say no to a project that is a great opportunity. A huge leg up for me. A “can’t miss” kind of thing. Then I pay attention to how it makes me feel. Like I’ll never make it—never make a good living doing what I do, never achieve the success I want.

I say no to a volunteer event—the one that would benefit so many people and make me look so great and loving and kind. Then I pay attention to how it makes me feel.

Like I’m not nice enough, not kind enough, like I don’t do enough.

And in those places where I am so broken and fragile, I love myself.

Which mostly looks like laughing at myself, because, well, I am ridiculous. And also amazing. I remind myself that no amount of success or money or fame or even attention for doing “good” will ever make me feel good. No amount of domestic prowess will ever make me feel like I am enough.

Not for very long anyway.

I already am enough. Deep down inside I know it.

And I can find it down there, like buried treasure, if I am patient and persistent and quiet enough.

And if I can just find some space in my calendar…

The post The Real Reason We’re All So Busy appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

Why I Don’t Think The Self Help Industry Works

I haven’t brushed my teeth in four nights.

Don’t worry. I brush my teeth every morning (I mean at least there’s that, right?). But somewhere along the way in life I got into this bad habit of going to bed without brushing and, well, for some reason it’s just been a hard one to kick.

My dentist and I have conversations about this often. Basically every time I see him.

It goes like this:

Dentist: how’s that brushing and flossing going?

Me: oh, you know… it’s pretty good. I brush often. I mean, it’s basically every morning… and I flossed like five times today since I knew I was coming here… can I have my free toothbrush?

Dentist: well…

And every time he does the whole spiel where he tells me about plaque and build-up and “the gum disease gingivitis” and how important it is to brush and floss multiple times each day—preferably after each meal—and then he sends me on my way with my new toothbrush and tiny samples of toothpaste.

Then, that night, without fail, I lay awake in bed thinking about how I should probably get up and brush my teeth.

But I don’t do it.

This whole thing has me thinking about the self help industry.

I know, it’s a leap, but go with me. See, the self help industry is built on the assumption that people want to change their lives—they want to get fit, get happy, get out of bad relationships and into great ones, get going with positive habits (like brushing their teeth, for example)—and they just don’t know how to do it.

And, I mean, at first, it seems like that’s the gist of it, doesn’t it?

Who can argue with helping people make positive change in their lives?

But the major problem with the self help industry, as I see it, is that, for the most part, people don’t need to know what to do in order to change their lives. They don’t need to know the 10 steps or 7 strategies.

For the most part, people know exactly what they are supposed to do.

The only problem is they aren’t doing it.

We have some friends who are going through a tough time in their marriage. We get it. We’ve been married almost four years and we’ve had a few of these times ourselves. We’ve mentioned to them, several times, how helpful marriage counseling has been for us, and each time they’ve nodded their heads in agreement, as if they’re going to call the next day and make the appointment.

But then we see them again a few weeks later, and we ask how things are going, and they get this nervous look on their face because they haven’t called the therapist yet.

No judgement here. It took us three years to get the help we needed in our marriage. Things had to get pretty bad before we were willing to admit we needed any help at all. But although I have no judgement, it does leave me with a question.

What is it that takes us so long to do the things we know will really help us?

In college, I dated a guy who treated me really poorly.

He was an addict. And honestly, when he was sober, he was a really sweet guy. But then he would go on these binges and be gone for days at a time, without much explanation. Or he would say things to me that were hurtful and mean, only to come back and apologize a thousand times later.

I put up with that shit for years—YEARS—before I finally decided to leave him. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I should do. It was always so obvious. My friends would beg me to walk away and I would promise them, this time, I would. But knowing what to do, for some odd reason, didn’t help me do it.

Every time I would go to break up with him, I would chicken out at the last minute.

Why didn’t I break up with him sooner?

What’s getting in our way?

And I guess that’s the question I want to linger on for a minute. Because while I do think, at times, self-help can be helpful, I also know that once we know the ten tips and sevens ways and twelve “hacks” and fifteen strategies that can get us unstuck, the next question we need to answer is:

Now that we know, why aren’t we freaking DOING something about it?

If you’re anything like me, chances are the obstacles standing in the way of you and your goal are not physical obstacles, although these are always the first things we name: we need more money, more time, a nicer house, a more luxurious schedule, a better toothbrush—one of those fancy electric ones.

The obstacles standing in our way are almost always invisible obstacles.

Our greatest obstacles are most often things like fear, insecurity, self-loathing, guilt, a bad attitude, complaining, etc.

And to discover these invisible obstacles, we have to pay very close attention to ourselves.

So, for example, when I pay close attention to myself at bedtime, here’s what I see: I watch myself fold laundry, do dishes, take the dog out, sweep, check Twitter, and not leave any time for my nighttime rituals. I don’t wash my face or brush my teeth. I don’t use my essential oils or take my vitamins. I basically just collapse into bed.

And then I think about what I would tell a friend who was struggling to make time for herself at the end of the day, or the beginning of the day, or any time of the day; and it all snaps into place. I wonder why that woman I’m watching doesn’t value herself as much as she values other people and things.

Bingo. There’s my answer.

Not to mention a more productive place to start than trying to strong-arm myself into brushing my teeth every night.

Are there obstacles you’re facing that you can’t seem to overcome?

Maybe it’s an addiction. Or a bad relationship you need to leave. Or maybe you have been waiting to quit your job, or to stand up to someone who is bullying you. Or maybe you have a creative project you’ve been putting off with a thousand excuses. We all have something.

Whatever yours is, I have a challenge for you.

Put aside the articles and the listicles and the self-help books for just a minute. Stop trying to figure out what you are supposed to do next. You already know. Let go of excuses like money or time or better connections. Those excuses are no longer serving you. In fact, they’re distracting you from the real obstacles.

Instead, watch yourself. Pay attention. And when you see yourself from the outside, in, look for signs of fear or insecurity or self-loathing or a bad attitude. When you find it, take a deep breath. Withhold judgement. Give yourself a radical dose of grace and hope and love.

It won’t fix your problems right away. But in a roundabout way, it will give you what you want.

The post Why I Don’t Think The Self Help Industry Works appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.

Why Are We Surprised When Leaders Fall?

I read an article this week about another leader who was found to be having an affair. This time a university president.

Apparently the man’s son caught footage of his father on his cell phone camera, and well, I think you can imagine how things went from there. I would tell you more about the unique circumstances—who wrote the article, what exactly happened, what university it was—but it wouldn’t really matter.

At the end of the day, they all come back sounding the same, don’t you think?

And this really isn’t intended to be an article about scandal, or sex, or men having affairs. Because the offense could have been anything really. And the leader could have been anyone. That’s the thing that struck me about the whole thing: how perfectly unoriginal it was. And yet, still, everyone seemed to be truly shocked it had happened.

Is it wrong that it didn’t shock me at all?

I don’t mean to sound jaded. I hope this doesn’t come across like, “they’re all corrupt, you can’t trust a single one of them!” because that certainly isn’t how I mean it. But it does sort of baffle me that we’re still so shocked when a leader falls off his pedestal, even though we were the ones who put him there.

People were never meant to be on pedestals. We were never meant to position ourselves above and below.

We’re meant to walk beside each other.

So, in the face of yet another prominent leader who, come to find out, is saying one thing and doing another; in the face of the names of 32 million Ashley Madison users being released to the world (400 of whom are pastors); and in a world where it seems like you can’t trust anyone—especially “leaders”—it’s important for us to remember a few things.

Here is what I know to be true.

Everybody’s s**t stinks.

If there is one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s that people are people are people are people. Without exception. No matter what you do for a living, no matter how “noble” you seem, no matter how much good you do for the world, it doesn’t change the fact that you eat and sleep, get tired, and…yes, poop.

Sorry if this shocks you, but it’s true. You poop. I poop. We all poop. And all of our poop smells like… poop.

It’s a law of life.

So, all that to say, if someone’s life looks perfect from the outside—if it appears as if they don’t poop, for example—remind yourself of this: that simply means there are things you don’t know about them. It simply means there are dirty parts of their life they don’t show you.

You are a leader.

We get so focused on other people who are leaders who have totally screwed up that we forget we are leaders. Each of us, in our own way. And we forget how many ways, every single day, our actions don’t live up to our words.

We live duplicitous lives. Our actions do not live up to our ideals. We mean well, but we fall short.

We are incongruent and dishonest and hiding.

This is not to say that all inconsistencies are equal, or that lying about eating Twinkies is the same as lying about having an affair, but it is to say that we are all only a few steps away from a long, hard fall. And the only person we can control is ourselves, so we might as well focus on that.

We weren’t built for fame.

We weren’t built for fame. None of us. We were built for connection. So what happens when we put people on pedestals, or put ourselves on them, is we set everybody up for failure. We set the leader up to fall and we set the followers up to be disappointed.

That said, there is a reason we love the idea of pedestals and leaders who stand on them. It’s because it takes the responsibility off of us.

As long as we can point to the guy (or girl) standing on the pedestal and say, “he told me to do it!” we don’t have to take responsibility for our own actions or accept our own consequences. It’s one thing to admire people for character traits they have, or for accomplishments, or for the ways they inspire us.

It’s another to put them so high above you that you forget who you both are: human.

Environments that expect perfection breed deception.

Nobody is perfect. Not one person. So when perfection is what is expected of us and we are punished for anything less, no freaking wonder we go to great lengths to hide the truth. No wonder politicians, religious leaders and prominent families are the first ones to seemingly “fall”.

You’ve heard it said, “you’re only as sick as your secrets” right?

May we all learn to create environments where people feel free to come as they are, imperfections and all.

Rock bottom isn’t as bad as it sounds.

I’ve had a few “rock bottom” moments of my own in my life—where the disconnect between my words and actions comes to light and it feels like all is lost. I’ve been found out. And although these moments can be devastating to a leader’s “public” life, they are actually quite healing in their private life.

They set things right again.

They’re painful and miserable but full of grace.

Kathleen Norris says, “grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.” This has certainly been true in my life. Falling off a pedestal, as painful and awful as it looks from the outside, is usually the best thing that can happen to us.

Because again, we weren’t meant to stand on that pedestal in the first place.

Leaders need support.

One of the greatest detriments of putting leaders on pedestals is we forget, just like anyone, they get tired, they lose sight of what they’re doing, they feel lost, they wonder if they have what it takes, they worry they don’t know what they’re doing, they question if they’re making a difference… and we don’t support them.

We praise them, we applaud them, we silently envy them.

But we rarely support them. There’s a difference.

When was the last time you reached out to someone who leads you and told them what a difference they made in your life? When was the last time you asked them, totally without pretense, what you could do for them?

Maybe if we could begin supporting leaders instead of worshipping them, we wouldn’t be so surprised when they fall.

Because we all fall. Maybe then, we could help them get back up.

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