by Dr. Heléna Kate | May 1, 2017 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
It’s easy to talk about how to change your life when you are in a place of growth, but what about how to change your life when you feel stuck? When you find yourself in a hole dug from disempowerment, overexertion, emotional withdrawal, and apathy — and you’re good and stuck — how do you climb back out? The short answer to how to change your life when you feel stuck is to stay engaged and not give up. The long answer (the answer to, “yeah that’s great Kate, but how do I actually DO that?”) is a little more complex and takes a little more personal power.
An idea I often stress in my work is that it’s not the situation you are in, but the way you react to it, that defines your life experience. Your personal power to change your life lies in your ability to define how you react to life. I won’t pretend this is always easy… It\’s easy to feel disempowered when reading the news, hearing that a loved one is sick, or finding yourself the brunt of someone’s road wage on your way to work (Leave it to Life to challenge your personal power on the daily…). The key here is not to fall into emotional withdrawal from the world, lest you find yourself in that proverbial hole of stuck-ness. Instead, react with “positive action.”
Throughout life we experience and witness so much negativity that employing “positive action” can sometimes seem a laughable (or sick) joke. How could our actions make a positive difference or have a lasting impact on this ever-changing, vast, often-harsh world? Me? Me, end hatred, hunger, and abuse? Me, ensure social equity, education for all, and protections for our planet? These are impossible-seeming questions and, when we don’t come up with answers, we stop ourselves from seeking solutions.
The hard truth is that, no matter how hopeless action may seem, apathy is noxious. Giving up in the face of adversity will leave you feeling like a half a person, and it demotes the people around you. The answer to how to change your life when you feel stuck, or how to change the world, is to ask different questions. Instead of trying to answer “What can I do to change the world?” (we don’t know, Batman), try “What can I do right now to create something good?,” “Who can I call right now to bring a moment of joy into the world?,” and “Where I can I lend the time I do have?”
The tools you need to change your life when you feel stuck are the same that you need to change the world. They are love, truth, and compassion. I believe that the entire world benefits when you choose to build your life with these tools. Equipped with these three holistic healing tools, you can approach adversity with positive action and transform your world. The answer to how to change your life when you feel stuck lies within you — it always has, and it always will.
If you think you need help bringing love, compassion, and truth to each situation you face, you’re not alone. While we have the inherent ability to do this, the capability takes practice. One resource you can rely on is focused practice of these skills. This is why I developed programs like my LifeWork Community — to provide the tools and the opportunity to practice new ways of being. Another resource is self-education and self-reflection. Below, I’ve provided some more depth on what our toolkit of Love, Truth, and Compassion look like in action. Take a read.
HOW TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE WHEN YOU FEEL STUCK: THE TOOLKIT
Love
\”Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.\” — Buddha
Love is the most powerful, world-changing tool we have. I\’m fully aware of how Pollyanna this sounds. My challenge to you, though, is this: try it! Get your heart broken, feel disrespected, lose something you really cherish, and see how quickly you can move on from the negativity you feel into LOVE. It takes a high degree of awareness and sophistication to experience our negativity and move beyond it into a place of love. Anyone who has walked this path knows that this is the way of a REAL bad-ass.
The first thing we need to do is cultivate love inside ourselves. To do this we need to hunt down the barriers to love that live within us more ferociously than we hunt down barriers to love in the world outside us.
This does not mean that we turn hatred toward these parts of ourselves. It means we see them,
accept them and let them go.
Truth
\”If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth
what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.\” — Jesus Christ
Truthfulness is a time-honored and respected trait. To be truthful is to be honest and trustworthy. It requires a commitment to speaking and acknowledging the truth, and to acting with integrity. When we have our truth we also have our respect and love.
While philosophically there are many types of truth, the truth I\’m talking about here has a dynamic
holism that is much more easily experienced than written about. There is a paradox around truth, though, and it\’s this: truth does not make anything untrue.
Whenever you negate something, there is a lie present. Truthfulness allows for multiple perspectives in a way that honors each of those perspectives. One very common example of this is that if you make yourself wrong you\’re not living your truth – nor are you allowing others to live theirs.
Compassion
\”No man is a true believer unless he desireth for his brother that which he desireth for himself.\” – Muhammad
To be compassionate is to open your heart to the suffering of others. Compassion, to me, is a healing action. When we offer compassion to ourselves or others we are, in fact, healing ourselves or others. One of the best ways to practice compassion is to tend to our own pain and suffering. Without a doubt, one thing we gain from our own hardship is an ability to give love to others while they experience hardship of their own.
Still, sometimes we might find ourselves feeling closed off or judgmental about others who are in a difficult spot. We can feel wronged and, because of this, feel justified in wanting understanding from the other person. When we do this, we withhold our compassion and do not give our understanding to the person we feel wronged us.
If you want to have an impact on the world, each time you feel wronged stop and take a moment to understand the other person\’s perspective.
TLDR
To change your life when you feel stuck, learn how to effect positive action in the world. Suit up with a toolkit of Love, Truth, and Compassion, and go deep. While I’m certainly not knocking it, you don\’t need to start a movement or become a politician to have a positive impact. Focus on being a better person and sharing this with the world, and you’ll elicit transformation in ways you couldn’t have imagined. The skills you need are simple and within the reach of every single one of us. If you need practice or guidance, click here to check out my LifeWork Community program.
I will leave you with this quote from Rumi. \”Listen with the ears of tolerance. See through the eyes of compassion. Speak with the Language of love.\”
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Apr 24, 2017 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
Whether you lost your job because of a company cut back, a major mistake, or a personal issue, losing your job can cut to the core of how you feel about yourself and can seriously affect your ability to carry on with life as usual. As with any difficult time, it is incredibly important to take action that affirms who you are and allows you to regain personal power after losing your job.
This list of practices will help you figure out how to regain your power after losing your job, but it isn’t only that! This is a list to keep someplace you will see it every day — to remind you to keep doing things that will help you stay on track, pick yourself up, and move on with your life after challenges.
How To Regain Personal Power After Losing Your Job
Give yourself a moment to breath: Like any loss, grief is a healthy part of the process of losing your job. It is all too easy to move on too quickly and not give ourselves a moment to feel the impact of what has happened. When you bolt from pain like this it actually holds you back later on in life. Taking some time to grieve now will mean that you will be less likely to get really off track when you start moving forward.
Focus on what you did right: Without being defensive or negative, remember that even if you lost your job, there were many things that went right for you and that you did, in fact, do right. Take stock of how you were successful and effective in your job. This will help you to feel better and to better represent yourself when looking for future work.
Learn from your mistakes: Again, without being defensive or negative, take an honest inventory of where you might have done better or what you might have done differently. Any “failed” situation provides us with new insights into how we might change our behavior to get better results. Yes, there are situation that are totally out of our control, but it can never hurt to consider how you might do things differently going forward.
Get support: You will need support in many ways to continue to move forward: emotional support from family and friends, professional development support in getting yourself ready to get back in the job market, networking support in contact the right people, and so on. Independence and self-isolation are not the same thing. You cannot do this alone and it is counterproductive to your empowerment and happiness for you to try. Embrace the resources around you!
Take action: There is a time to pause and a time to take action. If you want another job, you will benefit from creating an action plan and strategy for getting a new job and moving forward. When you take action you will feel more powerful and capable in your life. This will result in both short and long term gains.
Reframe: Is the sudden increase in your free time after the loss of your job a benefit or a detractor from your life? Is it possible that losing your job is actually freeing you to find something better? These are the kinds of reframes that empower you to take action and make change. As bad as things are, try to open to the potential positive impact of every situation. Ask yourself, what is the good that will come out of this?
Keep your Perspective: There is no doubt that losing your job is a life experience that most of us want to avoid. Nevertheless, it is an experience that many of us do have. If you find yourself in this difficult situation, it does not mean much of anything about who you are or what you are capable of. Keep your self-talk framed around “I lost my job, now what?” instead of “I lost my job, I am worthless.” Avoid making this experience mean more than it does.
Stay the course: If you have a difficult time finding work after losing your job, keep practicing this list of suggestions. Each of these practices will keep you feeling more powerful in your circumstance. Do not worry if you have a bad day. Just get back on track as soon as you can.
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Apr 3, 2017 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
No matter how dark and difficult the place you find yourself, there are ways to change your life for the better. When we are faced with adversity, we sometimes forget how much choice we have. It might even seem as if choice has been taken out of the equation completely. After all, why would we choose to be in this dark and difficult place? Doesn’t the very fact that we met an obstacle mean that we don’t really have any control anyway?
To really get the most out of life, and to change your life for the better, you have to learn to differentiate between control and choice.
True control over the events of life is an impossibility. Life, by its very nature, will hand us a serving of difficulties – whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and however it wants. There is no amount of personal development that will give you control over things like death and other people’s behavior. When we try to control life – and inevitably fail – we are both unsuccessful and unhappy.
Choice, on the other hand, is something that we always have, even when we think that we do not. We have choice when we decide how we look at a situation, how we remember it, where we focus our attention, and how we shape our intentions. Even people experiencing the worst that life has to offer have reported that even in the darkest of times they still had choice.
In short, we do not have control over everything that life throws at us, but we have choice about how we respond to it.
Some of our greatest potential can be accessed when we recognize that we are at choice and we start making some changes to move our life in the direction that truly serves us.
There are two different categories of behavior that help you change your life for the better. The first is ongoing practices that you can do regularly and consistently to create positive change in your life. The second is about how you handle situations and how you can reframe a circumstance to move it in a more positive direction.
Ongoing tips to change your life for the better.
Learn what makes you happy: Truth be told, many of us never learn what really makes us happy, or even how to tell if something makes us happy at all. Yet, knowing what makes you happy is one of the most important skills for moving our life in the direction that we want it to go. If you are not sure what makes you happy, start to pay attention to how you feel as you do things. Do you feel good? Notice the sensations associated with feeling good so that you can more easily tell in the future. Rinse and repeat. Check out some of the ways to tell if something is not working for you by reading this article.
Do what makes you happy: Yes, it is that simple. When we do what makes us happy, we are happier. Sometimes people tell me they worry that doing what makes them happy means they’ll fall into a pattern of instant gratification and irresponsible behavior. And yes – sometimes what makes you happy in the moment might meet these qualifications, but, if you’re listening closely enough to yourself, you’ll realize that these behaviors rarely make you truly happy over time.
Learn what makes you healthy: Self-care is essential to a better life. Self-care is regularly and consistently doing things that take care of you. I am not talking crazy diets or intense regimens unless that is truly what you need. But, our perceptions and our ability to make decisions are intimately linked with how well our physical body is operating. Just as our physical body is influenced by our emotional well-being. Neglecting any part of ourselves makes it difficult to change our life for the better. Take some time to find out what really works for you in terms of keeping you healthy and it will support you every step of the way to a better life.
Do what makes you healthy: Enough said. You need to know what makes you healthy and then you need to take action on it.
Cultivate positive self-talk: Positive self-talk is a skill that finds its roots in compassion. When we develop this skill, we learn to take our own side and treat ourselves like the good person we aspire to be. Positive self-talk is not lying to one’s self or denying what it true. It is delivering the truth in a kind way and learning to fully support ourselves in the realm of our thoughts. Cultivating positive self-talk helps us develop other skills that allow us to shape our life in better ways and feel more at peace in each moment.
Cut out what you are tolerating: Realize when you are merely tolerating people, places, and things in your life. Living this way lets us slip further and further away from what will make our lives healthier and happier. Make a regular practice of identifying the large and small things that are no longer working and then let them go. This is will increase your sensitivity to your own needs and open you to the life you truly want.
Situational tips to change your life for the better.
The previous set of tips help us consistently step in the direction of a better life. You can practice them any time to help build your relationship with yourself and define what you want out of life. However, we are often looking for a way to make our life better when we are challenged by distressing circumstances. Here are some additional techniques to help you create positive change during challenging situations:
Think outside of the box: The solution is not in the problem itself. Many times when we are challenged we spend our time focusing on our pain or loss. We can productively interact with our reaction to a challenge by giving ourselves the space to have our feelings about whatever is going on. However, it is important to recognize that additional time spent trying to get back what we lost, or to change a circumstance to what we wanted it to be, will not bring us closer to our desire for a better life. We might believe that “If we could only [insert aspirational yet unrealistic description about a past event here]” then we would be happy again. The truth is we can be happy again by finding an alternative option that will work for us. While you’re brainstorming any and all alternatives, you may even land a next step that you’ll like even more than your last option. Some of the greatest leaps forward in our own happiness happen when life steers us away from what we thought we wanted towards something new that we discover we want even more.
Notice the places where the problem is not: When life gets challenging we can forget to see all that is still going right. We feel extremely overwhelmed and we can actually stop other areas of our life from thriving. So, when you start to say to yourself, “my life is a total mess!” – stop. Step back and take stock. Is it truly a total mess, or can you feel gratitude for how well some areas of your life are doing? Remember to step outside the current problem and consider it from within the folds of the good things in your life.
Remember what feels good is good: This is one of the ways that an ongoing practice of understanding and doing what makes you happy serves you during your most difficult times. If things are not working for you and you know what it feels like to be happy, then it is all the easier to find your way out of a bind. You just search for what makes you feel good and keep doing it and following it until you are in a better place, breadcrumb style. If you are looking for a way out of a challenging circumstance and you are not experienced in doing what makes you happy, you’ll find this a little more challenging, but not impossible. Ask yourself simply, “what would feel good to me right now?” Or, if I don’t like what is happening, “what is an alternative to this that I would like?” Remember to think outside the box. Don’t get stuck thinking that the thing you can’t have is the thing that would make you happy.
Take action but not from distress: It is so important to DO things to change your life and not to sit still if you want to see change. However, it takes a bit of practice to be able to take action that is productive rather than reactionary. Make sure the changes you are implementing are driven from your true and lasting needs and desires.
Make it manageable: You might need a total life overhaul, but doing it all at once is usually impossible and will probably leaving you feeling overwhelmed. Try picking an area of your life that you think will make the most difference and design changes in that area. Once you feel you have integrated those changes and seen some results try working in another area. Rinse and repeat.
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Mar 27, 2017 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
When we get hit with a challenging life event, it pushes us, boldly and forcefully, to change. But what about the rest of the time, when nothing is horribly or chaotically wrong? Without the big signposts of high-impact life events, how do you know when its time to change your life, and how do you start to actually take action? It might be a change in a daily activity or it might be a change in a big part of our life. Here are some clues that you are ready for a life change.
- Unfocused: Do you find yourself unable to complete an essential task, or spacing out while reading a book? Perhaps you need to pay attention to what you are not doing. What I mean is that sometimes we have difficulty focusing on an activity at hand because we are not attending to other parts of our lives. Have you had fun or spent time alone recently? If you’re having trouble focusing on daily activities, doing something you have not been fitting into your life might balance you out and increase your focus.
- Sleepy: Ok, so, sleepy is really just bored most of the time, but sometimes it is a sign of too much heaviness – you’re still carrying around things that no longer serve you. It is time to freshen things up! What is the new way that you can engage with whatever is boring you to tears? It could be an aspect of your work, it could be a new program that you started.. Find out if there is a fresh way of connecting to what you are doing, or just let it go. Drop the heavy!
- Grumpy: Are you feeling frustrated when you come to work, does the idea of picking up the phone and talking to that “friend” make you grumble like an old mountain man with a hound dog and a shotgun? When things are healthy they are also happy. The key is to figure out whether you need to let go completely or make smaller changes inside yourself so that you feel more in alignment with what you are doing.
- Overwhelmed: Are your cupboards a mess, do you have too much to do, or are you over stimulated by your life? Being overwhelmed is the experience of “too much,” or even chaos. You can even have too much of really good stuff because, in the end, too much is too much! So what can you weed out of your life so that you feel less overwhelmed and more at peace on a daily basis?
I help women take action when its time for a life change, so that they can start living the life they have always dreamed of. Click here to learn more about how to find happiness for yourself, with Dr. Kate\’s help.
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Mar 20, 2017 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
Happiness can be a surprisingly fickle thing. Sometimes, a new routine or a new perspective can revitalize your life and sense of well-being. Other times, change presents a challenge to our happiness. Learning how to make your joy and energy resilient to the drain that life’s changes sometimes leave us feeling is a key to safeguarding your happiness.
All too often, we forget that happiness is a skill, and that being skillful takes practice. Here are 5 small things you can do every day to practice your happiness skill-set and safeguard your joy.
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Happiness Practice #1: Start Positive
The first few moments of your day can set the tone for the rest of it. So, start each morning with a quiet moment, an affirmation, a journal entry, or any other activity that helps you tune into your feelings and intentions for your day.
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Happiness Practice #2: Look For It
Your focus channels your power. Unfortunately, we often focus on what makes us unhappy rather than what brings us joy. Make an effort to recognize what\’s going well in your day and be present to the things you enjoy.
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Happiness Practice #3: Get Clear On What Makes You Happy
This may seem like a no-brainer but it\’s actually something we often overlook. What brings you the most pleasure and happiness? Time alone or time with others? A home-cooked meal or take-out and a movie? Becoming conscious of the things you most enjoy means that you will choose them more often.
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Happiness Practice #4: Say “Thank You”
To yourself, your partner, your child or co-worker. Make a point to express your gratitude for what\’s working in your life. Showing your appreciation will immediately make you and the person you\’re thanking feel more positive. And, by expressing gratitude for the things the people around you do, you reinforce the positive behavior as well as the positive feeling.
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Happiness Practice #5: Slow Down
Slow down and savor the good parts of your life. Pay attention when you\’re eating something delicious. Choose to really listen to your friend while they\’re talking. Take the time to notice what\’s around you on your daily walk or drive. The more you can use your five senses to be present to what you\’re experiencing, the better.
Life is always a mix of things. No matter how bad a day seems, there\’s always something in it that\’s positive. Use the list above to help you focus in on the good that\’s present in life\’s simple, daily events. These simple things can add up quickly and drastically increase your happiness.
