Category Archives: Self-Worth

Superwoman Under Stress: How to Overcome Over-Responsibility & Guilt

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I’ve encountered, through my work, many professionally successful women who struggle with immensely stressful lives.  It seems that they are pulled in so many directions that they’re breaking under the strain of their responsibilities.  They feel trapped in a life of unhappiness where every day is just about making it through the day with what little’s left of their energy reserve.  Having a successful career seems to come at a price, and this is especially true if you’re a woman. 

Whilst a lot of men’s issues can be traced to an unwillingness to grow up and be responsible, many women suffer from feeling overly responsible for those in their lives.  For one thing, women are naturally nurturing.  We have an inbuilt sense of needing to nurture the emotional needs of others.  Men, on the other hand, tend to act on a need to provide materially for their family and friends.  This is one of the ways the genders are wired differently and it is this kind of difference that make men and women complement each other so beautifully in relationships.  But while these different tendencies are our innate gifts that help foster closer relationships with one another, they can cause a great deal of confusion in certain contexts.   

Feeling emotionally responsible can be a curse, it can generate guilty feelings.  As I’ve written in previous posts, guilt is a corrosive energy that eats you up from the inside and quickly erodes your sense of worth.

Typically, a woman who holds a highly-demanding job and also has a family to look after can feel overwhelmed by responsibilities that go beyond her duties.  It is not just about juggling a career and family – often, a woman running a business will feel responsible towards her employees who have become like her extended family members, and she feels a level of responsibility for their welfare that exceeds that of an employer’s.  Thus, even when outwardly she is capable of making hard business decisions that affect her employees, the stress that builds up from guilty feelings can accumulate overtime.  For instance, making the decision to terminate the employment of someone is never easy, but for someone who feels guilty about not fulfilling her role as multiple nurturer, her guilt can reach damaging levels.   

This stress will tend to spill over to her family life and make her more distant with her family as she struggles with these uncomfortable feelings which are made worse by her sense of failure as chief nurturer for her spouse and children.  Concurrently, she may also feel she has failed as a friend as she judges herself to be doing insufficiently to support her friends or to fulfil her various roles in her social and community circles. 

If this sounds a bit like your life, try these suggestions: 

#1  Time-Off, Get Away

Find a time away from your environment.  Remove yourself from all sources of guilt, i.e. what triggers you to feel guilty (family, work, etc).  Even if you can only find half a day, it will give you back so much in terms of clarity of thought and energy.  It will also allow you to connect to your true self again, get to know your own needs and give you a chance to nurture your needs for a change.  Bringing back some balance this way will allow you to go back to your environment with a fuller tank and better ability to nurture others.     

For this reason, it is imperative to make it a priority to put aside some time for yourself every day.  Asking someone who is caught in a life of over-responsibility and guilt to take time out for herself on a daily basis is often met with resistance, as she is convinced it is impossible to find any free time from her busy schedule.  But it’s essential to find that time or you risk becoming even more unhealthy and unhappy.  Challenge yourself if you think you can’t possibly sacrifice anything from your schedule to create a slot for yourself.  Think of the consequences of burning out if you didn’t do something to correct that imbalance now.  

#2  Give Up Being Control Freak

Those close to you might have joked about you being a control freak.  Even if you tend to laiugh it off, ask yourself honestly if you might be just a bit too attached to your roles.  If so, you are putting in too much effort trying to control outcomes.  Most women are resistant to give up this control because it makes them feel like they’re not being a responsible mother/wife/boss.  But if you’re too controlling as a mother/wife/boss, giving up some of this control will make you a more responsible mother/wife/boss.  This is because when you’re stressed out from the crazy need to control, you will express your frustrations to those around you and end up doing the opposite of nurturing the emotions of those you love. 

One of the symptoms of being too controlling is depression.  I believe that depression is caused by an excess of giving or efforting.  When we focus all our energy on controlling, our energetic system becomes blocked: there is no flow of creative energy or life-force – and we feel drained, discouraged, uninspired.  In this state, you are useless as a nurturer.  Magic happens when you let go of this illusional control.  It opens up avenues, options, ways out – and you find your power again. 

#3  Take Risks, Delegate

In your efforts to control outcomes, you leave no room for mistakes.  Striving for high standards may be a good thing but it can cross the line of being healthy when it becomes an obsession.  A lot of the stresses of a ‘high-powered’ career woman can be alleviated by a willingness to delegate.  Yet she imagines that the consequences of not doing the work herself will add to her burdens.  Nobody can do it better than I can, is a common protestation.  If this is you, let go of perfectionism.  What you deem to be perfect is only one way of looking at things, and giving up your idea of what is perfect will relieve you of so many of the unecessary burdens you’ve chosen to carry.  Accept that mistakes may be made by those to whom you delegate the work.  Allow room for mistakes to be made, knowing that it will correct itself in time. 

#4  Create Distance From Your Critical Voice

Take a moment to notice that critical voice in you.  Pay attention to what it’s saying to you:  You’re a bad mother.  You’re a heartless bitch.  You’re not good enough.  You stupid woman.  You’ve done it again, haven’t you!  

This is the voice of your inner critic.  But you have adopted it as your own voice and you are totally convinced about what it is saying to you.  Reclaim your power from your inner critic by acknowledging that you are not your inner critic and it is not you.  It is just a voice that has taken on the messages from certain authorative figures in your life.  Creating a distance from your inner critic and its beratings will allow you to assess yourself in every situation more rationally instead of automatically buying into what it is saying. 

As strange as it may sound, your inner critic’s role is to protect you from being hurt.  Quite likely, as a child, you had learnt that certain behaviours brought on painful consequences.  For instance, you learned that after school when you went outside to play instead of doing your homework, your mother would scold you for being lazy and punished you.  To prevent you from being punished again, your inner critic serves to remind you what not to do again, over and over.  Acknowledge its intention but know that it is operating in the wrong context. 

#5  Learn To Say No

When you’re feeling like you have a thousand things to do, the only way out is to say no.  Saying no does not mean having a confrontation; you can be firm but polite, and firm does not mean hard or harsh.  Be gentle yet unwavering.  When you state what you want without any guilt or apology, people will likely accept it without drama.

Notice how your inner critic is making it difficult for you to say no.  Again, acknowledge why it is saying what it’s saying, and go ahead and do it anyway.  Notice the screechy and exaggerated tone of its warnings, designed to scare you off.  Refuse to be scared off from your efforts to nurture yourself.  Feel the satisfaction and excitement as you make your own choice, independent of what your critical voice is saying. 

#6  Celebrate Your Compassionate Nature

Turn your attention for a moment to acknowledge the part of you that is compassionate.  Sure, if you worry yourself sick over too many people’s welfare, you’re being overly responsible.  But it doesn’t take away from the fact that it is based on a positive quality.  Now strip it down back to its basic quality which is love.  Recognising that there is love at the heart of your problem can motivate you to see yourself in a more positive light.  After years of listening to your inner critic, it’s easy to believe that you’re a highly flawed human being.  It comes from focusing too much on how you’re not delivering, which will actually take you further away from love.  On the other hand, focusing on the aspect of love behind your intention can bring you closer to fulfilling your role as nurturer, to yourself as well as to others. 

#7  Learn To Nurture Yourself

It is interesting how women are natural nurturers but often we don’t know how to nurture ourselves.  There’s an almost self-sacrificing nature in us.  It is imperative that you learn to nurture yourself or else you’ll be driven to manipulate others to get their love and approval.  Nobody but you can give you what you need.  When you learn to nurture your own needs, you keep your relationships clean without acting out any unfinished business you may have with your parents in the context of your relationships.  Look at your unmet needs and think about how you can provide for yourself emotionally. 

Bear in mind that self-nurturance is an attitude rather than a list of things to do.  How might you change the way you relate to yourself?  Could you see yourself through a different lens, or modify the way you think about yourself?  Turn that compassion towards yourself and forgive yourself for the little things you beat yourself about. 

#8  Strengthen Your Sense of Self

When you have a strong sense of yourself, you’re less likely to burn out from the demands of your roles.  It’s valuable to spend some time to get clear about who you are, beyond your roles as mother, wife, boss.  These roles have shaped your identity and you have adopted this identity as your immediate reference of who you are.  Yet who you are goes deeper than your ability to fulfil these roles.  What inspires you?  What drives you to become more than who you are being now? 

Pay attention to your emotions; they give you clues about your inner self.  Notice and acknowledge what is going on in your emotional world.  Explore your inner world – the dark and the light in you, the weak and the strong, the good and bad.  Observe the spectrum of emotions in you and what motivates you.  What makes you special?  Who are you, without your identity? 

#9  What Are Your Hiding?

Work, business, and your sense of responsibility for others, may be an escape – a way for you to mask unprocessed emotions.  Ask yourself what you might be afraid to face if you took away your identity as the boss or whatever your job title is, the reliable friend, the supportive wife, etc.  In other words, you may be creating dramas to distract you from your inner turmoils.  These dramas, including the generated anxiety, may act as your drug and you are addicted to it (see my next post on this subject).

Working on your personal issues will give you back some control and sanity when you realise that a bulk of your stresses are unconsciously created by you yourself.  You can then make an empowered choice to let go of this pattern and create a calmer, more fulfilling lifestyle.  

 

I wrote this article not to highlight the weaknesses of the female gender or to diminish the sense of nurturance in women.  Rather, it’s to show you a more empowered way to embrace the beauty of being a woman in the context of operating in the business world where our sense of responsibility can sometimes be overdriven and cause us problems.  When you turn that nurturing quality to yourself, your perception of how much work there is outside of you will change.  That old adage, “You need to be selfish in order to be selfless,” is never truer.  You need to take care of yourself first before you can take good care of others.       

Why We Stay In Abusive Situations

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When working with clients, I see a common theme that crops up all the time, no matter what life issues they are struggling with at the time.  It is the feeling of being trapped, unable to find a way out of a situation.  Whether it is in a relationship, a job situation, or their home life, there is a huge emotional need to create change but also a daunting prospect of what taking steps towards change could entail.  These problems manifest as stresses, confusions, frustrations, worries and conflicts.  The word ‘stuck’ is very apt in these situations, as they struggle internally with wanting things to be different and yet are crippled by thoughts of negative consequences of change.

You may know of a friend or family member who complains about being in an emotionally abusive relationship.  Or a former colleague who still hates his job but can’t seem to find the resources to leave the job.  Or someone who continues to invest in the same business after repeatedly running into disappointments.  Perhaps they are hoping that things will be different this time, while continuing to stay in the same behaviours, or that things will improve on their own.  I call these and similar types of situation ‘abusive situations’ because you are in a position of being abused by others or by yourself (self-abusive).

If you find yourself stuck in an emotionally unhealthy situation, it may be time to honestly examine your motivations and begin breaking apart the energy of stuckness.  This will begin freeing you to move in a more fulfilling direction.  The first step is to commit to looking at your situation with total honesty.  That means owning up to the pain being in this situation is causing you.  What are you sacrificing or not honouring in yourself by being in this situation?

It also means acknowledging that it’s a choice you have made to stay in this situation.  Granted, it may seem that staying is the only option, at least for now.  That may or may not be true.  But the power comes from acknowledging the truth of why you are staying in this situation.  We tend to make excuses to justify a choice or behaviour – in short, we lie to ourselves to make ourselves feel better.  By looking at the real reasons you are still in this situation, you take your power back.  Honesty gives you power, even if the thought of being honest makes you feel weak at the moment.

Start by listing the external factors (e.g. money,  social obligation, a promise made to someone).  Then list the emotional factors (i.e. what are your fears?).  You’re likely to find that listing the emotional factors is more challenging than listing the practical reasons.  In fact, practical reasons are often used to cover up deeper, emotional motivations.  So let’s explore some of these motivations together.

Fear Of Being Judged

Perhaps you’re afraid that others might judge you for having made a mistake.  Again.  If you have an emotional history of having failed before, you may refrain from coming clean with others that things aren’t going all that well for you in the same department.  What transpires then is a painful need to hide what is really going on for you.  In time, you may even be driven to isolate yourself.

The thought of telling someone is too embarassing.  Or maybe you’re afraid that people might worry about you (after all, you’ve worked hard to change your life around after the last ‘failure’).  Were there sceptics around when you had first gone into this situation?  People whom you imagine are dying to find a chance to say to each other, “Well, that’s hardly surprising, is it?”

As real as it may seem, all these things are taking place in your imagination.  The mind has a tendency to blow things out of proportion.  We tend to believe that we are judged by more people and more harshly than in reality.  Accept that some people will judge you, but also acknowledge that some people will be supportive of you.  How we tend to focus entirely on one aspect and magnify it until it is the only thing we see in our reality!  Seek out those who support you rather than those who run you down just because you are about to take a courageous leap.

I’ve found that too few people can admit to having made a mistake.  There is nothing wrong with saying, “Looks like I made a mistake.”  It is honest, simple and humble.  Very few people would be able to pass negative judgements on that for long.

Punishing Yourself

How much of you staying in an abusive situation a way for you to punish yourself?  Perhaps you are harbouring feelings of guilt from your past, and you are now motivated by a need to allay your guilt by putting yourself through pain.  If this rings true for you, look at where this guilt is really coming from.  The true source of this guilt is seldom from a person involved in the current situation; rather, it’s likely to be displaced guilt projected onto the current situation, so that you feel compelled to ‘make up’ for whatever pain you perceive you are causing the person involved now.  A kind of displaced or misplaced loyalty.

In self-destructive acts, this person you are punishing yourself for might be you.  You are perpetrating abusive acts on yourself because you are punishing yourself for something you feel guilty about.  If you did or are doing something that conflicts with your ethical principles, you may take it upon yourself to correct that imbalance by punishing yourself.

Give yourself permission to forgive yourself by reflecting on the lessons you can learn from your mistakes.  How can you become a better person because of the experience?  By focusing on how more whole you are when you incorporate those lessons into who you are from now on, you can stop the self-beating and change your actions from self-abusing to self-loving.  Consciously choose self-loving acts to reinforce moving towards healing and forgiveness.  Ask yourself, “Is this act or thought self-loving or self-abusive?”

Disempowerment & The Fear Of Responsibility

Making empowered choices can be scary.  We fear stepping into our power because we fear the responsibility that comes from exercising our freedom.  If we allowed other people to make decisions for us, we won’t have to be responsible for making a wrong decision.  There may be a link to some deep-seated guilt from your past (see above), which may have made it feel safer for you to take a back seat in life.  Yet if this conflicts with your desire to be in control of your life, it will cause you to be resentful of who you leave the decisions to, as well as yourself for choosing not to honour your power.

We choose the route of disempowerment because we see getting empowered as hard work, that it’s too far a destination for us to reach.  Truth is, empowerment is our natural state.  It takes more resources to move away from empowerment than it does to move away from disempowerment.  We have to sacrifice our integrity, dishonour ourselves, compromise our values to become disempowered – and we suffer the pain of moving in such an unnatural direction away from our authentic self.  By reversing all those choices – by staying in integrity, honouring our truth, living in line with our values – we immediately return to an empowered state.

Low Self-Worth

Perhaps you suffer from low self-worth and you believe that being in abusive situations is what you deserve.  Even though you profess to want to change things, deep down you don’t believe that you deserve better than the situation you are in right now.  If you don’t work on improving your self-worth, you may forever devalue yourself in an attempt to fit in with your perception of yourself.

Holding yourself in poor light makes you feel unworthy of a better job, career, relationship, home, lifestyle, etc.  You may wonder at times why you still choose to move back to this and similar situations, thus perpetuating a cycle of self-abuse.  Raise the value of yourself in your eyes.  That is the only way out of this cycle.  If you don’t heal your relationship with yourself, you will eventually find yourself in the same situation.  Even if you take conscious actions to move into healthier situations, if the source of your low self-worth is not examined and healed, the results will only be fleeting.

If this seems too big a task for you to go through on your own, seek the help of a therapist.  There are also lots of effective techniques available in the self-help sector.  The technique is less important than your willingness and openness to healing and growing.  It may takes years of healing but every step is a progress in healing.  That journey can be a joyful adventure as you discover more and more beautiful aspects of yourself.

The Allure Of Staying Imprisoned

Sometimes, we choose to stay in helpless situations because we carry unresolved anger from our past.  Staying in abusive situations gives us an excuse to be angry.  It provides us with an outlet to express our sense of injustice.  Our past indignation becomes an unfinished business which allows us to feel justified in voicing that anger about being mistreated.  So we stay trapped by choosing to imprison ourselves, even when we really do have the resources to get out of it.  We focus on why we can’t get out of it, instead of why we can and must.

Sift through what’s right and wrong in this situation: same anger, rightful anger, but wrong context.  Put the anger back to where it belongs and deal with the anger in its appropriate context.  Knowing that you might have been motivated by a need to feel angry by putting yourself in this situation gives you the power to choose something better.

Along with the need to feel angry is the need to show others that you are being mistreated.  You may be waiting for a saviour because your saviour never came to your rescue last time and you still feel the unfairness of it.  By staying helpless, you ‘prove’ to others how wrong it all is – for someone to say, “Yes, this is unfair,” and maybe extend their love and support to you.

The saviour is you.  This time, there will be no saviour outside of you.  That is not to say that you should close the door to people who offer love and support to you.  It simply means that you take it upon yourself to step into your power and own up to your deeper, emotional motivation in this situation.  When you call it for what it is and deal with your emotions in their appropriate contexts, you relate to your world differently – a world where people are kind, compassionate, loving and supportive.

The Illusion Of Scarcity

If you’re buying into the illusion that the world is a place of scarcity – that resources and opportunities are in short supply – you would feel more fearful about getting out of your situation or “rocking the boat” in any way.  Fear of losing what you have, even if it’s shit.

The fear of running out of resources is such an intense emotional investment that it traps a person in awful situations.  It is a crippling fear that renders you stunned, incapacitated as your spirit withers away.  For all the awfulness that you go through by being in that situation, you put up with it because it is better than nothing.

Are you certain that you’ll be left with nothing?  What is nothing?  Money, house, friends?  How depleted is it really?  Is it really down to nothing?  Tell the truth about it.  Some money to last you a month is not nothing.  A less luxurious house is not nothing.  Two supportive friends is not nothing.  What about the things you will gain?  Having more integrity, self-honour, freedom, happiness, joy, peace is not nothing.  Where you lose out, you will gain in other aspects.  This is a given is you’re being true to yourself.

Trusting that the Right Thing Will Be Delivered

If being in this situation is causing you huge conflicts, start exploring whether you can make any changes while preserving the relationship, job, business, etc.  In other words, is it salvageable?  It may be a case of you learning to stand up for yourself and saying no to abusive people.  Do you have a pattern of people-pleasing?  How might you assert yourself and draw your boundaries to protect yourself from being abused?  Even if you invite unpleasant reactions when you say, “No more!” you come out of it with more dignity and self-respect.

If you are trying to preserve what isn’t working anymore, you risk running into great mental turmoils and eventually destroying yourself.  Maybe you have already been racking your brains and found very little hope for improvement within that context.  Walk away from the situation.  At least you get to clear your conscience with yourself.  What about the fear of leaving someone feeling hurt, abandoned, betrayed?  If you can’t stay in the same situation without removing the resentment, then your choice to stay is a continued choice to be resentful to others.  Your self-sacrifice, your voluntary imprisonment in that situation, will continue to generate anger and resentment and renders both of you joyless.

Things rarely improve on their own under these circumstances.  By staying in the situation, you will become stagnant or things will get worse.  When you cut your ties with that situation and break an unhealthy pattern of allowing yourself to be abused, you trust that in time things will move in your favour.  When you do the right thing by you, your direction will be revealed to you.  I have witnessed many times how giving up something brings in something better which we never imagined before.  This is the gift when we open up to trust.

Why People Are Driven To Destroy Themselves

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One of the themes that often come up when dealing with addictions is the tendency for self-destruction – when the drive to use drugs, alcohol or other compulsive activities renders a person unable to stop that behaviour but to spiral faster and faster into destroying himself.  Why do some people seem to have this need to destroy themselves?  What can they do to break out of this obsessive drive that seems to grip them so powerfully?

Whether a person is dealing with an obsession with drugs, alcohol, money, sex or food, the nature of this obsession is the same.  The greed for more (in quantity, frequency and intensity) escalates as the person breaks down more and more boundaries that have previously defined what kept him safe.  These boundaries may relate to the physical body (what is and isn’t acceptable for what we do to our body), social circle (who is and isn’t appropriate for us to hang out with), our moral codes (what behaviours we will and won’t accept from ourselves), and our dignity (what we will and won’t tolerate from others).  Deep in the throes of addiction, gripped by obsession, we cross that line again and again, pushing our boundaries further and further away from us.

These internal boundaries, which once prevented us from hurting ourselves and others, now can no longer keep our behaviours in check.  We’ve freed ourselves from our own protection and left the door wide open for careless indulgence in our drug, and we descend madder and madder into a tight, small hole of existence where the only thing that keeps us going is more drugs, even when it’s become obvious that we are destroying ourselves by continuing in that cycle.  Our mind directs this breaking-down of our boundaries, it has a life of its own and we can’t do anything to stop it from running our lives.

Or is it?  Are we really that powerless against our own mind?  If the mind is such a feared entity, then to conquer addiction we must find a more powerful adversary to fight the mind’s war of self-annihilation.  But before I get into that, let’s look at what makes the mind do what it does in promoting self-destruction.

A lack of self-worth, while cliché-sounding, is a good place to start.  If you had a total conviction of the true worth of yourself, you would not be driven to hurt yourself.  If, on the other hand, you have any doubt about your true worth, an inkling that you might not be worth much at all, that small seed of doubt can be massaged into a full-grown conviction of your unworthiness when the mind provides enough evidence for it.

When you are lacking self-worth, you’d tend to believe that you do not deserve to experience positive things and to sabotage the good that you do have.  This pattern might have been kept under wraps in normal circumstances but in the throes of addiction when the evidence stacks up with each episode of using, it becomes increasingly exaggerated until you are literally attempting to destroy yourself.

Guilt and shame about past or present behaviours can cloud a person’s view of herself.  They promote a self-punishing mindset.  Guilt makes you look for punishments, and when it is not apparently forthcoming from others, you tend to inflict that punishment on yourself.  This is especially prevalent in situations where you are keeping a secret – if only you are aware of what you have done, then that punishment can only come from yourself.  That guilt which only you are aware of can drive you to subconsciously inflict damage on yourself.  Like guilt, shame makes you want to punish yourself – if you feel that the person you are is unacceptable, then you would tend to seek punishment, or punish yourself.

Unresolved anger is another emotion that promotes a self-punishing mindset.  When you’re angry with someone, eventually you will take it out on yourself.  If you have a tendency to be passive or passive-aggressive (i.e. instead of asserting your feelings you keep them to yourself to avoid confrontation, but the feelings remain in you), your anger will likely build up until you explode in a fury against others.  A lot of times, however, you will seek ways to deal with that anger before you explode, and one of the easiest ways we know is to punish ourselves.  Sometimes, even when we have asserted ourselves, we are still left with the feeling that justice has not been restored.  In the absence of a way to right the wrong, we berate ourselves for not being able to ‘fix’ the situation.  Why can’t I handle this? you scream inside.  Your mind begins to find a list of reasons, usually about you being a failure, inadequate or stupid.  That anger is eventually turned against you.

These underlying beliefs and attitudes towards yourself give rise to a mentality of self-punishment, which if unexplored can drive you to destroy yourself.  Trapped in the cycle of self-destruction, you generate more emotional pain and mental anguish, until there seem to be no escape or respite.

Spirit is the true direction.  It is the true power.  The mind is nothing compared to spirit.  Spirit can befriend the mind to take away some of its power.  The mind can absorb the influence of the spirit’s magical pureness and transform itself to be outward expanding, taking us to a positive outlook.  Spirit can lift us from the mind’s manipulations and show us a better way of being, that there is a more worthwhile pursuit other than destroying ourselves.  Spirit can wipe out the mind’s ego trip.

There’s a hidden element in our path of self-annihilation – an attempt to find out what is left after we’ve destroyed ourselves.  It’s our unconscious search for spirit, guided by a belief that there must be something more than just this form of existence that we know of.  But we go about it the wrong way – we fight, we conquer, we destroy, when the way to spirit is to relax all resistance, give up all judgements and see what’s left there.  Spirit is found not by doing something but by undoing.  If you simply relax into being, you will see and feel spirit right here.  It has always been here.

Pick any scene you like.  Coming to in a drunken mess.  Stuffing yourself with food uncontrollably until your stomach aches.  Screaming at your loved ones when they try to show their love to you.  Locked in a compulsion to buy more and more to make you feel better about yourself.  In each of these scenarios, you’re bound to be left in a state of self-loathe and self-pity, with hopelessness draining the life out of you.

No matter how hopeless you feel, look for the tiny spark of light within you.  At first, you may only sense a vague, dim spot among the darkness.  Focus on it, until it grows bigger, and bigger, and it overwhelms your entire being.  This spark is your all-healing spirit.  Inside of us, there is a part of us that has remained pure and sacred no matter what kinds of trauma we’ve experienced in life.  I call it our Sacred Self.  In all our struggles and turmoils, we tend to see ourselves as damaged; to see that there is a part of us that is uncorrupted, unpolluted, untouched by it all can be very healing.  Once you acknowledge this part of you, it will expand, and very quickly, you’ll be able to see your situation more clearly, ideas will come to you as options to get yourself out of your situation, and you won’t feel so lost and forsaken anymore.

Simplicity Is The Way To Go

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I’ve been asked what my resolution is for 2010, so I will share it here.  For the record, I have stopped making new year resolutions some years ago.  I had found that the long list I tended to come up with too depressing after a while.  Too much unnecessary pressure, as if life did not present enough on my plate already!  I’ve since taken the route of flowing with whatever life presents, whatever time of the year it is.  This year, if I were to come up with one resolution, it would be to keep every area of my life as simple as possible.

Simplicity is my current buzzword.  It really appeals to me where I am at this stage of my life.  The idea of lightening my load gives me an immediate sense of peace as it creates more room for my creative expression.  Here’s my take on it:

Simplicity cuts out all the frivolous stuff that depletes our energy by taking up too much of our attention.  It frees us up so that we can focus on the things that matter most to us without being pulled in different directions.  When our attention is focused on fewer things, we retain our power to create the fabulous life we deserve.  Simplicity enables us to nurture our own path and to ensure our emotional wellbeing.  Instead of being bombarded by critical thoughts as a result of trying to fulfill everyone’s expectations, we are able to manage the areas towards which we have chosen to channel our energies.  Our load becomes lighter and we’re able to give more to what’s really important to us.

Culprit #1:  People-pleasing

One of the first steps in creating more space for our own pursuits is by drawing our boundaries with people.  I have decided to spend my free time with people I really care for and who supports my growth as I support theirs.  That also means spending less or no time with those who are stuck in perpetual mental poverty and all the behavioural symptoms that come from it – i.e. being manipulative, unreliable, unprofessional, under-handed, lazy, abusive, controlling, etc.

When we try to become all things to everyone, we become overloaded with responsibilities.  These responsibilities drain us mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically.  Mentally, we become harsh on ourselves as we struggle to make everyone happy, and we suffer emotionally.  Our spirit is depleted because we neglect our self-growth.  In the end, our health suffers.  Compromising ourselves this way isn’t healthy for any relationship as the imbalance will catch up with us eventually.

Self-nurturance should be everyone’s priority.  Without people-pleasing, you will be able to create a healing space for yourself without feeling guilty about leaving other people behind or neglecting obligations that are borne out of guilt.

Culprit #2:  Over-analysing

Stop trying to figure things out too much.  The mental drain from needing to work out, comprehend and label everything leaves us with little resources to get clarity on the things that really matter to us.  Learn to be okay with not knowing.  What if your mind resists letting go of knowing?  Consciously relax that resistance and allow the discomfort to move through you without further resisting it until you find yourself in the space of not knowing.  After some practice, you will get better at it and eventually master the art of letting go.

Sometimes, we tend to read too much into other people’s behaviours and take them personally.  We generate negative feelings from the stories we create out of what we think other people’s motives are towards us.  To simplify your life, give up the need to interpret other people’s actions and accept that all of us are doing the best we can given our circumstances.

Culprit #3:  Starting too many projects

I have a habit of working on too many projects at a time and end up not completing any of them.  This year, I will focus my energy on completing not more than two projects at a time.  Having one or two pet projects is more inspiring, without the daunting prospect of having to move ahead with so many different projects.

Also in this category, I will finish reading one book before starting another.  Seeing five unfinished books on my bedside table (a few with cobwebs) gives me a certain amount of stress.  For books that I cannot get past certain pages, I will abandon the need to finish reading them.  One book only at a time.

Culprit #4:  Being indecisive

When we can’t make up our minds about something, guess where our attention is.  Everywhere.  And each subject gets only a watered-down version of our attention.  People can’t decide because they’re afraid that what they choose will turn out to be not such a good choice and that what they’ve not chosen turns out to be better.  Sometimes, even after making a decision, people are still wondering if they’ve made a good choice.  Guess where their attention is.  Neither here nor there.

I have a reputation of being rather indecisive when ordering meals.  I love food, and the more variety is presented to me the more indecisive I get.  I’ve been practising being quicker when ordering food.  I’m also learning to be happy with what I pick out of the menu and to enjoy it fully without wishing I had ordered something else.  Sometimes, if I can’t decide between two items, the solution I take is to order both, which leads me to ask you:

What if you wanted more than one thing?  In the spirit of simplicity, I will say that it is okay to choose two but more than that is a sign of greed and distaste, not to mention it will pass the point of being simple!

Culprit #5:  Forcing things to happen

In one of my previous posts, I talked about the power of deciding and taking actions (The Power Of Saying “I Have Decided!”).  Now, there’s a difference between being proactive and being too forceful in manifesting an outcome.  When you’re being forceful, you risk crossing the line into being desperate and manipulative.  The harshness of this energy will repel rather than support the manifestation of something you desire.

Give it over to trust.  Trust will relieve you of worrying too much and forcing things to happen.  Worrying is not going to help bring about a different outcome, it will make you feel smaller and smaller.  With trust, you will enter the space of infinite possibilities where all the abundance in the world can bring whatever you want into manifestation.

Culprit #6:  Needing to be perfect

This is a killer energy-drainer for so many people.  Needing to be perfect means that you will always be judging yourself against other people and feeling inadequate.  How do we rate perfection anyway?  Whatever you think perfection is, the bar will be raised as soon as you get close to it.  So you’ll be caught up in a cycle of striving for something that doesn’t exist (for more on this subject, read The Perfection Of Imperfection).

When you strive to be perfect, you are in essence saying to yourself that you are not good enough right now.  So your well-meaning projects get abandoned until the day when you feel you have reached perfection.  The question I’d like to ask you is, when will you ever be good enough?

You don’t have to make yourself believe you are perfect now if you don’t feel you are.  Just work on recognising that you are good enough to do whatever it is you are waiting to do.  Focus on your accomplishments so far and know that you are capable of accomplishing more – but only if you get on with it.  Let go of wanting to be the best.  It is better to do a little than not at all while you wait for perfection.

Culprit #7:  Neglecting yourself

Sometimes, choosing to take time out for ourselves may seem counter-intuitive.  We tend to find it easier to carry on with writing that report, making those phone-calls, tending to somebody else’s needs, etc. and end up over-stretching ourselves.  We need to choose to do the things that help reduce our stress levels even in the midst of trying to reach a deadline.  It may seem as if by taking time out we would slow our progress, but a dedicated half an hour of being in our own space would allow us to reenergise and be more productive in the long run.

If you work from home or if domestic chores become overwhelming, taking a relaxing bath or meditating in a quiet corner will clear your head and leave you recharged.  When you’re in front of your computer, you may come across a nurturing article but delete it without reading because you’re afraid of wasting precious time.  Yet the article may contain soul-nourishing messages or give you insights for where you are heading in your life.  The point is, we sometimes make poor choices, thinking that the things that are going to do us good are a waste of time.

Operating on adrenaline may help push you forward when you lack motivation, but one can’t live healthily like that.  That chaotic way of living will lead you to create more madness in your life.  In contrast, a calm, focused, present mindset will help you to make clear choices and make the management of your daily life simpler.

Culprit #8:  Over-promising

This is a behavioural outcome of people-pleasing but deserves its own category because it is such a stress-building pattern.  Overpromising generates guilty feelings when you find yourself unable to deliver on your promises.  Guilty feelings lead you to beat yourself up and feeling lousy about yourself.  Very quickly, it turns into the worst kind of mental self-abuse and creates a massive entanglement of conflicts within yourself.

Forcing yourself to stop the habit of over-promising is not enough.  You need to examine what motivates you to do it.  Some of the common issues behind over-promising include insecurity about who you are perceived to be, fear of rejection, and unresolved guilt around something that happened in the past.  There’s a big, juicy story in your head; explore that story, own up to your feelings associated with that story, and challenge how real it is.  In the process, you chart your way out of being held imprisoned by that story and liberate yourself forever.

Culprit #9:  Wanting to get your way all the time

Most of the people who visit this blog have probably been working on transcending this for a while, but you would remember what it was like struggling from your ego in your dealings with other people.  The inability to let go of being right and getting your way all the time is a massive drain on our resources.  The constant fight to prove a point or win an argument or get the upper-hand in a situation or one-upmanship is a waste of energy.  When you come out the end of it, the price you get is an inflation of your ego, but it might have cost you a few friendships or respect from your peers.

It takes maturity to be able to concede to another person’s viewpoint, to withdraw from an argument, to accept that someone else is better than you, and to be gracious about receiving less than you’ve given.  We can learn to be comfortable with not getting our way by simply accepting it.

Simplicity surrounds you with a sparkling, clean energy.  It allows you to respect the powers of your gifts and in so doing strengthens your sense of yourself as a powerful, magnificent being.

So simple.

Diving Into The Inspiration Of Dream-Following

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Recently, I’ve been inspired by a couple of good friends who plunged into the adventure of pursuing their shared dream.  In doing so, they demonstrated their faith in staying true to their dreams.  They’ve reminded me of the value of following the internal compass of desire despite persisting fears.  Moreover, they’ve stirred up my own sense of ambition and adventure around some forgotten dreams which I’ve stored in the back burner as I buried myself in work in the past 13 months.

As I examined my own fears around pursuing my dreams, I realised that a lot of the fears are just excuses.  They aren’t that real once I put myself through an honesty test.  Whenever I spoke to my dream-following friends, I would get a spurt of inspiration to nurture my own dreams.  I knew that this inspiration would not last, so I dived into the energy of Inspiration to set forth some actions.

Inspiration is a powerful force that can turn dreams into reality.  It’s a feeling of being deeply-moved and of spirit dancing with joy.  It releases a flood of ideas and possibilities in our minds.  Dreams get a clearer tint when we’re inspired.  It seems and feels all so possible, so worth pursuing.

Great things can be achieved when we dive into Inspiration.  It supports us in our journey to making our dreams come true by elevating us from the level where fear operates.  What are some of the common fears that stop people from pursuing their dreams?

Dream Killers

Worthiness is a common issue – you may stop yourself from realising your dreams because you don’t really believe you are worthy of them.  Another way of saying this is, your dreams may appear to be too great for who you think you are.  While you want it, you’re not allowing yourself to get it, so your efforts often get cancelled out.  Before you can achieve what you want, you need to work on increasing your self-worth so that your dreams can match who you think you are.

The fear of not being good enough may block you from going after your dreams in case you fail.  Perhaps a history of being disappointed has created a nightmare of having positive expectations and then being let down, or putting effort into something and then failing, that continues to haunt you today.  You shy away from taking a leap into the unknown, feeling safe to step forward only if you’re assured of the outcome.  The downside to this is that you live a less-than-fulfilling life and your dreams remain unrealised because you may never feel safe enough to venture forth.

The way forward is to honour your dream while keeping an open mind about what the outcome may be.  This is the best mindset to adopt around dream-following.  It would not imply failure on your part should the outcome turn out to be different from your dream.  The gift may not be the outcome you envision but something you discover along the way of pursuing your dream; the dream may only be an illusion to drive you to what you really need.

Then there is the fear of being good (which is just as damaging as the fear of being not good enough).  If in the past you’ve been persecuted for being successful, you might think twice today about actualising your potential.  So you minimise your exposure and stay under the rock to avoid any chance of being judged for what you’re doing.  It’s likely that you have overblown the proportion of judgements against the encouragement and support you will get.  A change from focusing on the potential judges to focusing on those who will admire you for pursuing your dream will start to shift your view to a more balanced perspective.

Knowing that those who judge you will tend to be projecting their own inadequacies may help you to take their judgements less personally.  And knowing that people’s perception of you is not set in stone can help you to transcend your current feelings around certain people – sometimes, we stop ourselves from doing something because we anticipate critical reactions from only a few people in our life, not the whole world.  Know that these people may start to feel more respect for you or even find inspiration from you.

If the thought of leaving someone else in pain about their own inadequacies is a major deterrent to your own success, you’ve got to stop feeling pity for them.  The fact that the idea of this person suffering is deterring you from being happy means that you care about the person.  Feeling pity for someone is disempowering and degrading.  Elevate your view of that person.  Recognise their strengths and achievements.  In your mind, raise them to your level so that you can appreciate the existence of unique paths in life, rather than seeing it as a game field of winners and losers.

A lot of our emotional-mental blocks to self-actualisation are fears that are irrational.  They are leftovers from our childhood pains and are no longer valid.  As an adult, those fears are keeping us stuck.  We may need to heal the emotions that are imbedded in those experiences on which we base our current reality.  Then we can move on from that past reality to create a bright future for ourselves.

How Real Are Your Limitations?

There are many people who complain about not having any dreams to pursue.  I don’t know what it is that I want to do…  I don’t have something I am passionate about….  Life is dull and uninteresting…. The sad thing is that many of those who do have a dream that inspires them will then find it hard to move forward with that dream.

Often, what we perceive to be limitations that get in the way of our dreams aren’t that real.  Some of the common deterrents I keep hearing from people are the lack of resources (financial, contacts, market demand), geographical limitations, relationship considerations and work commitments.  If you put every one of those limitations to the test – with brutal honesty – you’re likely to find some creative ways around it.  Also, by stretching your internal resources, you’ll find that you can summon those qualities which you believe are important to pursuing and living your dream.

Staying true to what you hold as important to you is an admirable trait.  Yet sometimes in being too rigid about what we won’t compromise can result in us compromising ourselves.  In dream-following, having the flexibility to consider other options will open doors to being on our path to that dream.

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