The final Secret to Happiness Tip #3 has arrived, Self Love. A word liberally used these days – “you need to love yourself more”, “you can’t love another person until you love yourself first”, “you can tell she doesn’t love herself”, “if you loved yourself better that wouldn’t have happened.”
Self love advice is given freely and copiously by friends, loved ones and well intentioned onlookers to steer us back to a happy, fulfilling life.
Self love is foundational to everything, it influences who you pick as a mate, how you cope with problems, how you look after yourself and the image you project out into the world. Self love is a secret to happiness.
What is self love? Firstly, I’ll tell what it isn’t….a beauty makeover, a new set of clothes, being inspired, falling in love. Sure they’ll make you feel good but you can’t grow your self love from here.
Self love stems from appreciating yourself, which grows from actions that support your physical, psychological and spiritual growth. Cultivating self love is a dynamic process that feeds off all the actions and events that mature us. You can tell it’s happening when you start accepting who you are warts and all and rarely feel the need to explain away your short-comings. You have compassion for yourself and others, seeing mankind collectively as on an adventurous journey to find personal meaning. When you’re getting close to real self love you’re more centered in your life purpose and values, and each day you intentionally choose to make the effort to live a full and meaningful life.
Here’s my Six Self Love Tips:
1. Own Yourself. Get clear on what you think, feel and want. Clarity allows you to be YOU regardless of the outside circumstances. You know this has happened when you’re stable, centered, grounded and can weather life’s storms in your stride.
2. Act on your needs rather than your want. You love yourself when you turn away from things that feel exciting and fun in the moment that may not be good for you, to what you need to stay strong, centered, and moving forward in your life. Metaphorically, it’s like junk food – it can taste good now but it’s bad for you long term. Automatic behavior patterns can keep you stuck in the past and erode self love until there is nothing left.
3. Practice self care. You love yourself more, when you take better care of your basic needs. Like nourishing yourself daily through healthy activities, like eating good foods, exercising, getting enough sleep, engaging in healthy relationships and interactions.
4. Set boundaries. Self love shows up in setting limits or saying no to work, love, or activities that deplete or harm you physically, emotionally and spiritually, or express poorly who you are.
5. Protect yourself by bringing the right people into your life. Frenemies says it all, it’s the type of “friends” who take pleasure in your pain and loss rather than in your happiness and success. Get rid of them, life’s too short.
6. Forgive yourself, accept you’re perfectly imperfect. Cease over punishment for mistakes when learning and growing. Ideally learn the lessons, accept your humanness and turn up the love and compassion dial and in the process master your self love.
Now ideally, pick one or two from the tips above and start cranking up your self love meter. It’s true that you can only love a person as much as you love yourself. The more self-love for yourself, the better prepared for healthy relating. And you’ll start attracting people and circumstances that support your well-being and being the best YOU.
A midlife crisis can be sign posted with a loss of your confidence, feeling anxious and disappointed in the middle years, often questioning your purpose and direction. Did you know the best indicator of a midlife crisis is big lifestyle changes? Being discontent and looking for change. Often friends, family or co-workers will notice it before you do.
What is a Midlife Crisis?
A midlife crisis or transition is a time when you naturally change biologically and physically. It’s an active process of transformation using play, exploration and flexibility.
Did you know every 7 to 9 years we change who we are? Think of how you changed from birth to age 7, then 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49, 56….
Your most significant seven year cycles are adolescence & midlife. Adolescence you’re getting into society and there can be conflict about the release process of you entering into the world.
Whereas midlife is about being old enough to become your own person and the ending of reproductive years to free up energy for other things. There’s no fixed age, rather a range often from 35-55. A Midlife Crisis can be induced by stress, death of a loved one, divorce, separation, job loss, family dramas, social circle, menopause or feeling inauthentic to who you really are.
During your midlife crisis you will have new found energy that’ll attract new friends and fuel your desire to explore life and find yourself once again.
11 Top Signs of Midlife Crisis
Desire to run away to somewhere new.
Feel like quitting a good job.
Unexplained periods low mood or depression
Feeling trapped in current family relationships or leaving the relationship, either physically or mentally
Keep asking yourself, ‘where am I going in my life?’
Feeling trapped or tied down by fiscal responsibilities.
Desiring a simple life.
Recent trauma or stress can trigger a Midlife crisis – Death of someone close, experiencing a health crisis, changing jobs or divorce
Irritability or unexpected anger.
Doing things out of character often, to mix it up a little.
Sudden desire to get fit, healthy and look good.
Why do Midlife Crisis Happen?
A Midlife Crisis or Transition shakes things up and gets you back on track to where you really want to be in life. The more off track the bigger the transition.
In midlife transformation you are becoming two people at the one time. There’s your –
Mature self – dealing with job, family responsibilities
Younger self (8 year old essence) – exploring life, playing and growing.
Midlife is about merging your younger spirit, full of dreams and desires with your older responsible self. A midlife readjustment can be needed if you’ve got off track.
There’ll be times when you switch between your younger and older self. Your younger self often doesn’t have the words to explain what you’re doing and can often be overwhelmed by responsibility. This can be hard for people around you to accept.
Ideally, allow time for the two parts of you to integrate so you can find peace, joy and contentment moving forward.
Play, movement, experiences and flexibility are essential to test, rebalance your body and integrate emotional and spiritual changes.
This time can made painful by viewing it as a midlife crisis. Better to view as a midlife transition, acknowledging and owning your feelings and processing them bit by bit, allowing you to make a transition in steps, realigning as you go.
How to Make your Midlife Crisis a Midlife Transition –
Graceful awareness, acknowledging and owning your feelings. Repressing and denying your feelings and emotions until you blow like a volcano, with lots of collateral damage is not a good idea.
Take moderate steps. Small mistakes are easier to recover from than big ones.
Remember the lessons are in the doing. Start somewhere, you learn by making mistakes and autocorrecting to find your way.
Running away isn’t your answer, rather reducing pressure bit by bit to allow the space for you to grow into a new person
Ideally, release in staged amounts interspersed with holding on to keep you more stable long term.
Embrace exercise and movement (yoga, swimming, dance, belly dancing, gym, paddle board..) as an essential part of re-integrating your life.
Express yourself through journal writing, art or being creative to allow you to discover new words and expand beyond your boundaries.
Be selective about who and how you talk about the change going on inside to others. It can scare them, elicit judgment and resistance, which can feel like they’re holding you back.
Release self-judgment, so you have more options to change. Beginning to change creates less conflict internally.
Foster opinions rather than judgments. Opinions can be changed, judgments can’t.
How long will Midlife Crisis Last?
Often 3 to 5 years, as you work through incongruencies in your life. There will be highs and lows, false starts and tangents before the dust settles. Roughly 30% will be disappointed with the outcome. 25% of these will often repeat the crisis roughly 7 years later, without help.
Getting help and guidance can mean resolving a midlife transition in less than 2 years with a great outcome and less traps and tangents.
Words of wisdom – release, go slow – learn, grow and thrive.
Overwhelm can grab hold and give you a big squeeze at this time of year. I’m seeing and feeling it’s effects on many clients as well as myself.
In today’s world we are bombarded with infinite distractions, choices and responsibilities. Perfect conditions for overwhelm – where you get crazily future focused, over-thinking and fearful, letting go of where you are right now. You’re left feeling dis-empowered, disconnected and exhausted.
What happens to you – fight, flight or freeze? Or a you a mix of all 3?
“You can’t calm the storm, so stop trying. What you can do is calm yourself. The storm will pass.” – Timber Hawkeye
What can you do about overwhelm?
Overwhelm is more about how you choose to respond to the world rather than the actual events. Managing your time and energy are crucial elements and keeping a big picture perspective.
Here are symptoms of overwhelm:
Feeling anxious
Nerves are shot
Have no inner space
It’s hard to breathe
Constantly feeling stressed and tense
You’re irritable
There’s no fun in your life
You’re feeling constant pressure
Procrastination and indecision
Awareness is essential to finding YOUR antidote to overwhelm. So many people unconsciously live in an overwhelmed, anxious and stressed state. Take the time to check in now by stepping your mind back into your body then scan from head to toe like a glass of water emptying – “how do I feel?”, “how does my body feel?”
Here’s what you can do to shift overwhelm –
1. Stop
Have the courage to stop what you’re doing, step back and get a big picture perspective. Do this by shutting your eyes, deep breathing and checking in with your body – how do I feel? Opt out for chill time – 15 minutes, an hour, a day or a weekend to reset.
2. Simplify
Overwhelm is literally your head being full of complicated thoughts. Let’s aim for simplicity and spaciousness. Ask yourself, how could I make my life simpler? Brainstorm possibilities.
3. Know your priorities
What’s most important to you? What do you value? How do you want to live on a day-to-day basis? How do you want to spend your precious time and energy? The answers will give you focused flow, which will feel so much easier.
4. Value yourself
Needing to constantly produce, perform and prove can be a sign of low self-esteem. You turn yourself into a human doing to get external appreciation and approval. Are you over-doing and over-committing? Check in – why am I doing what I’m doing?
When you value yourself, you are approving and appreciating yourself from the inside out.
5. Tune into what you want to feel
Refocus your attention and intention on how you want to feel most of the time. Is it balanced, free, kind, playful? What are your words? Now aim towards living it. Aim for progress over perfection.
6. Let go or limit things
Notice where you’re spending most of your time. What’s draining your time and energy? What are you able to delegate or let go of? A good way of uncovering these things is to journal nightly to uncover your overwhelm triggers.
Paradoxically by creating more discipline in your life, you have a greater sense of inner freedom.
7. Commit to less
Are you over-committing your time and energy? Are you setting unrealistic goals? Are you a people pleaser? Is it time to say thanks but no thanks more often?
8. Re-imagine a new schedule
Ok, it’s time to create a new schedule that keeps you out of overwhelm. If your happiness and health were a priority, what would your day look like? What time would you go to bed and wake? What morning routine would you have? How would you set up your day to thrive? What self nurturing elements would you include regularly?
Overwhelm is a very uncomfortable place to live. Know that it is only a perspective shift away and you have a choice in every moment. Is it time you chose, checked in, scheduled and made time for a new way? Start somewhere and improve over time.
“Promise me you will not spend so much time treading water and trying to keep your head above the waves that you forget, truly forget, how much you have always loved to swim.” – Tyler Knott Gregson
Domestic violence is silently infecting our communities. I see many gorgeous women suffering from the effects of Domestic Violence past and present, each day in my work. I decided it’s time to speak up.
Did you know in Australia,
1 in 3 women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence perpetrated by someone known to them
1 in 5 women over 18 have been stalked during their lifetime
1 in 5 women experienced harassment with in their workplace? (sourced White Ribbon)
What is domestic violence?
Domestic violence refers to violence, abuse and intimidation between people who are or have been in an intimate relationship. The perpetrator uses violence to control and dominate the other person. This causes fear, physical harm and/or psychological harm and violates the others human rights.
Domestic violence can include:
emotional abuse
verbal abuse
financial abuse
psychological abuse
physical assault
sexual assault
isolating a woman from her friends and family
stopping a woman from practicing her religion.
To show you, here’s Sharon’s story. Sharon came to see me feeling anxious, down and overwhelmed and had just hit her 50’s. She wanted to get her health back on track, so she had plenty of energy to help her ageing parents, keep up her part-time job and support her 3 teen boys, one of which was doing the VCE that year and have energy over for herself and her partner.
As we spoke, she opened up about one of her teen boys pushing her into a metal pole and cracking her rib, after she had put a curfew on internet access. And how her husband had felt she had provoked it. This was one of Sharon’s many stories, as she opened up more and more.
This is not OK.
It’s time to prevent men’s violence against women. And yes, men can be the victims of domestic violence but it’s usually from other men.
For me this says’s it all,
“Strong fathers, strong families”
“Real men walk the talk”
It’s time to speak up and not just stand by. Time to prevent this silent epidemic of domestic violence from crippling the beautiful women in our society from fully participating in life. It has a huge impact on families, the community and the nation.
Did you know on average it takes a victim of domestic violence 24 attempts before they finally leave?
Often the signs go unnoticed simmering in the background, for an extended period of time until things escalate and they say how did I get here, such as in the Rose Batty case.
Gas-lighting is common and often precedes emotional and physical abuse, since the woman is more likely to remain in, an abusive relationships.
Gas lighting is a form of emotional abuse where a person is manipulated repeatedly into distrusting his/her own memory or perception of events. Making targets question the very instincts that they have counted on their whole life, making them unsure of anything.
Here is a list of what domestic violence can look like on the everyday. If you see this happening to a friend, family member, work colleague – speak up and seek help.
Domestic violence commonly involves many of the categories of abuse below –
Emotional abuse includes name calling, mind games; undermining parenting skills; criticising beliefs, criticising abilities, put downs; emotional withdrawal at times of need; silent treatment; using anger to contro; excessive controlling jealousy; stalking/harassment behaviour.
Social abuse includes being prevented from studying or advancing self/skills, denigration/put downs before family, friends or others, isolating by being obnoxious in front of friends and family – driving them away, interfering with car to control movements, phone calls monitored.
Spiritual abuse includes undermining spiritual beliefs/practices, use of spiritual/religious rituals to abuse, denial of access to religious practices/networks
Financial abuse includes controlling all finances and denying access to money, coercion to sign contracts without being an equal partner or fully informed; gambling all money and assets away leaving family destitute, overzealous scrutiny of expenditures, forced to hand over pay, dragging out family court proceedings in order to force all funds to be spent in legal costs, incurring debt and then disappearing leaving the debts to be paid by the partner left behind.
Physical abuse includes hitting, pushing/shoving, restraining, physical intimidation, use of body language such as standing over/invading personal space, damage to property or possessions, dragged out of bed in middle of night to perform physical tasks.
Sexual abuse includes being forced to perform acts which you find humiliating, forced to wear clothes which make you feel degraded, forced to be constantly sexually available no matter how tired, sick or disinterested, sexual harassment.
Increasingly I’m seeing domestic violence perpetrated by teenage boys, especially those addicted to computer gaming. Perhaps violent games have normalised physical, disrespectful behaviour and reinforced there are little consequences.
Violence against women starts with disrespect. When we make excuses we enable it to grow. Such as what did she do to provoke him or it’s not that bad or she’s oversensitive.
Violence is violence and it’s not OK no matter what. We have a choice in every moment. Walking away and cooling down is available to all of us.
Often when victims of violence look back they can see the signs were there very early on and have escalated to the mess that is happening today.
As adults, we have the biggest influence on what young people think. By calling out and challenging disrespect and recognising excuses, we become part of the solution and stop the cycle of violence towards women.
Actions will encourage our children’s behaviour in the future. It’s vital you set standards and ensure our children understand what’s acceptable. You don’t have to have all the answers, just be ready to explore topics together and have a conversation.
Research is clear. Violence against women starts long before intimidation or a fist is raised. It starts with attitudes and behaviours in young children, attitudes that their parents held before them and so the cycle continues.
And it’s not just warning your daughters to be careful, but also teaching your sons respect and consent.
It starts with ourselves, as parents, teachers, coaches and employers, we have a big impact on young people. We can change attitudes and behaviours bit by bit. Many voices making small changes has a big impact over time, as does consistency at home, in schools, on sport fields, in communities and our workplaces.
It starts with the way we think then with the words we use. Remember your attitudes towards situations will be absorbed and mirrored by your children.
Remember children don’t fully understand the wider context so it’s up to you to explain it to them, show and tell what’s unacceptable and what they can learn from it.
If we want to change the stats of violence against women in Australia, we have to start from the beginning. Start by reflecting on our own attitudes and behaviours and where they come from, so we can break the cycle for our children and help create a future free from gender violence and inequality.
Did you know how you do one thing is how you do everything? Small things, big things, under stress. There is a default pattern you keep repeating. What’s yours?
How you handle and manage any situation, challenge or experience in your life is how you probably handle all of them. HuffPost
I totally got this last year after attending a self development workshop in Fiji. I’d just arrived in Fiji, after boarding a red eye flight from Melbourne, arriving at my destination, two planes & a car ride later at 8.30am the next day.
After a short welcome blurb and a night of broken sleep I was told to get ready to scale a pole & jump off it. My heart sank and a wave of hot and sweatyness engulfed me. All I could think was, “You’ve got to be kidding. I couldn’t have prepared less if I tried.”
We arrived at the location, my heart racing and mouth so dry I could hardly swallow and just thinking, “oh shit” as I lined up. Parting words from instructors being – How you do one thing is how you do everything.
Meaning when placed under stress we have a “go to” pattern we play out, over and over again. It was time to undercover mine.
What’s your pattern when challenged?
Do you freeze up & avoid?
Do you race to the top & forget to enjoy the journey?
Do you need others to model the way?
Do you find it hard to let go to move forward?
Do you overthink and talk yourself out of your greatness?
Do you have a logical sequence or do you miss steps & become unbalanced?
How we think we’ll do something, is often not how our body acts. Interesting! To finish off the story, I did way better than I expected. Yes I get it, we often under-estimate our resources and over-estimate the challenge.
I scaled that sucker with ease and kept my gaze on the horizon. No looking back. It was all about going forward and being in the moment and not letting the past determine your future. No looking down or back, to freak the hell out of myself.
I paused at the very top, to collect myself and let go of the pole, to stand on top, as I rearranged my feet. What a metaphor for life – Letting go of what is, to move forward into what will be. How You Do One Thing, Is How You Do Everything!
Victorious and in awe of what was possible, I savoured the moment. Took it all in. There was no way you were going to get me up there twice – once was enough! Now to get down. The only way was to jump. I was supported by a harness and rope, yet the feeling was the total opposite. How true is that of life. When things go really wrong, there’s often a wave of hidden support that envelopes us, from what seems like nowhere.
It’s time to jump. I shut my eyes and leap forward into thin air. “Ohhhhhhh shit!” Here I finally felt that glorious support from a grinning Fijian face holding the other end of the rope. I survived it all. You learn so many lessons and insights by doing something outside my comfort zone. And I wouldn’t be forgetting them any time soon.
Breakthroughs don’t take 10 years to happen. Breakthroughs happen in a moment. A moment when you say “That’s it I’m done. Time for change. Let’s make this happen. Onwards and upwards.” In that moment there’s shifts in attitudes, behaviour and awareness that last.
Among the group, there was a saying – “Leave your bullshit on the pole”. It was a time to breakthrough those limiting beliefs, stories and rules to emerge on the other side new and improved.
A moment to shift towards and step up to the life you were meant to live. Is it time for you to have a breakthrough – physically, mentally, emotionally?
Need help with a 7 Day Feeling Great Reset? Click here to get started.
Female Hormones Weight Loss – Diets and exercise not working? Don’t give up! “Calories in, Read more
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