by Dr. Heléna Kate | Feb 20, 2016 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
One thing I hear over-and-over again from people is that they’re afraid to fail.
They’re afraid of what others will think about them if they fumble towards their goals. They’re afraid to endure the pain of falling short or failing. And so, they make their fears their reality. They stop short on realizing their goals or don’t take action in the first place.
I certainly have feared failure. And my fear has, at times, paralyzed me.
If you’ve experience this, then you know how much it sucks.
Sometimes fear of failure is rooted in perfectionist tendencies. Perfectionists never feel good enough. When they realize they’ve made a mistake, it’s enough to take them down into a place of self-criticism and self-shame. Often times, this stops perfectionists from doing anything at all.
A perfectionist streak can hurt your health, career and relationships. This is because it exacerbates fears of failure so much so that you don’t reach for your goals at all. Compounding this is the internal judgment and negative dialog that’s part of the perfectionist’s tool box and are used as weapons against themselves for not achieving what they deeply want to achieve.
If you relate to this, there’s hope! You can change your perfectionist tendencies by embracing your limitations and failures. This isn’t an easy thing to do. It takes ongoing patience, but it can be learned.
Here are five things that you can do to become less of a perfectionist.
1. Stop performing: Do you find yourself making everything polished and perfect? Does everyone think you’re amazing – all the time? It can be great to be amazing. But know what’s even better? Being liked for who you really are! Instead of perfection, aim for genuine.
2. Lean into your mistakes: If you’re screwing up, let yourself screw up. It can even be fun. Take it from me – a self-professed serious person. Make a point of not taking YOURSELF to seriously.
3. See your mistakes as opportunities: There is something to be gained from every time we fail. How can you turn the coal of your moment into a diamond?
4. Give credit to and enjoy your strengths and limitations: A funny thing happens when you embrace either your strengths or limitations – you become better able to embrace its opposite. This means you increasingly step into your full self.
5. See it as a gift: When you’re willing to accept your limitations, everyone around you breathes a bit easier. This is because when you accept your shortcomings, you create an environment of love and acceptance that helps helps everyone around you heal themselves.
Want a step-by-step guide to find and live your life purpose? My Morning Mindset Life Purpose is an inspirational daily video series that delivers tips, insights and exercises straight to your inbox for three weeks. Morning Mindset will help you step-in your purpose and live your life to its fullest. Learn more here!
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Feb 13, 2016 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
I’m an independent and individualistic person. And still, I have woken up some days to realize that I was living a life someone told me to live, and not one I decided I live. At the time, I didn’t know how to make my own choices for my life. And – more to the point – I was concerned that the way I wanted to live was somehow wrong.
I’ve come to learn that the fear and indecision I felt at the time was inevitable. To learn and to grow required that I don’t yet know.
To not know – and the feelings that emerge when you don’t know something – sets the stage for curiosity, exploration and change.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve talked a lot about how to connect with and express your personal truth. In the end, your personal truth comes down to choice! The choice to live your life according to your integrity. The choice to live your live according to your values, aspirations and beliefs. The choice to follow your curiosity and passion.
The truth is that the choices you make have a powerful impact on your life. Yet, your choice to TRULY LIVE YOUR LIFE has a greater net effect on your world.
When you choose to express your full self rather than some compromised version of yourself, you gain many gifts. Here are some of them:
1. You’re more free and able to step into your success
2. You’re healthier
3. You have more to give and yet you don’t give compulsively
4. You feel more fulfilled regardless of your situation
5. You give people permission to be themselves
6. Your life becomes easier
When you chose to express your full self, you inevitably feel happier. In turn, you’re less attached to the outcome of any particular situation. This is because your sense of happiness is your own. It’s not contingent upon what someone else decides to do, or to not do. Instead, you’re more at peace with how situations evolve and morph.
Further, being your full self gives you the opportunity to access your potential. And this frees up parts of you that you might not have previously known about. When you decide to tune into your authentic curiosity, your latent desires and abilities rise to greet you.
It takes a lot of energy to NOT be your self. In one way or another this shows up as stress. The more stressed you are, the harder it is to do the right thing for yourself. This becomes a vicious cycle that continually decreases your vitality and sometimes shows up as illness.
When you choose to be your full self, you’re full of life. You know your strengths and can use them to meet your challenges. This leaves you feeling stronger and not depleted. The choice to be your full self also stops you from giving in ways that hurt you. You can’t hurt your self and be your full self. This is fundamentally because to BE YOU is to LOVE YOU.
Being your full self is its own reward! You feel better all the time. Even when you’re faced with life’s inevitable challenges, you have a sense of solidity and inner-joy that can not be snuffed out. The life-affirming effects of this cannot be overstated!
By being your full selves you naturally give people permission to be their full selves. This is a permission that emerges through setting the right example. Conversely, the more critical you are of yourself, the more you hold yourselves back and the more inhibited people feel around you.
This all adds up to a very simple truth: that your life will be less challenging if you show up to it as your full self (which I’ll add is not always the easiest thing to do). Yet. when you express your full self and make choices that are best for you, living your life gets monumentally easier.
As I mentioned in the beginning of this piece, being your full self is a choice in each and every moment. Most of the time the choices we make are made unconsciously. But the more aware you become, the more conscious you are in each moment, the more you’re able to choose the perfection you already are.
Are you looking for a way to help other people transform their lives and have a profound impact in the world or a pathway to strengthening your work with others?
The Master Transformational Coaching program is designed to give you individualized training and top-notch resources to help you become profoundly successful doing what you are meant to do.
To learn more about this opportunity and how it might be right for you, CLICK HERE.
If you are ready to take this next step towards your life purpose, I can\’t wait to meet you.
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Feb 6, 2016 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
One of the most useful skills is the ability to “clear.” I use this skill daily to weed out the things in my life that don’t serve me. These things are not necessarily external. Quite often they’re internal. By consistently eliminating what holds me back from being my full self, I’m increasingly able to live from my core.
What Takes You Away from Being You?
When it comes to your deeper truth – there are two things that you need. You need to have a sense of who you and the opportunity to express your full self. It’s worth asking, though, if there are situations in which self-expression might bring you harm? And if so, what can you do when we find yourself such a situation?
Here are a few common situations that tend to inhibit your free, full expression of your deepest truth.
Negative Connections:
Some people bring you down. Other people push or drag you down. The latter is the most toxic. It’s important to clear your life of anyone or anything that is a constant downer unless you feel unhampered by their behavior. Just as a steady diet of straight sugar would leave you feeling horrible, if you digest ongoing negativity you’ll feel pretty awful inside.
Holding Grudges:
Holding a grudge is easy to do. Yet, it’s so harmful for our overall health! When you don’t allow ourselves to forgive others, you do ourselves harm. You might not notice it at first, but the anger that encases your grudge takes you apart bit by bit.
Unresolved Issues:
Do you need to apologize to someone or confront them about an unresolved issue? Do you have a lingering doubt? Loose ends are energy leaks. They make it harder to stay on track with things that help us fully express who we are.
Negating and Discrediting:
Do you put yourself into situations where you are not seen or even outright discredited? Are you made fun of or put down because of who you are? Just like racist jokes are not funny, neither are comments that undermine who you.
It’s important to recognize these situations when they happen in your life. Once you’ve spotted these drains on your full expression, you’ve got a lot of options.
“Clearing” is one of the most important skills I teach in my LifeWork Programs. We all need to learn how to remove physical and emotional toxins from our bodies and environments so that we can remain healthy.
In fact, the ability to “clear” is a step along the way towards your personal development. As you move through your growth process, there will be times when you face challenges rooted in present circumstances or from the past. You will make the best choices for yourself if you remember to return to your core self. You’ll also show yourself real self-care if you take a mental and emotional shower after a hard day of personal challenges.
Here’s what that looks like in action!
Disconnect:
When you have negativity in your life that blocks you from being able to express your deeper nature, one clear step towards getting clear is taking space from your everyday life. This is one part of a larger operation. Because it’s also important that you learn to disconnect mentally, emotionally, and energetically. Even if someone is no longer in your life, they can continue to have a negative impact. Maybe you replay the emotions or thoughts associated with the negative circumstance. Maybe there is just a feeling of negativity related to the person.
There are so many clearing techniques to help you disconnect. One of the exercises I recommend in my LifeWork Program is gratitude. Stop three times a day and notice five things for which you’re grateful. Notice how your feel before and after you reflect your gratitude back towards yourself.
Forgive:
Holding onto the memory of hurt only hurts you. A grudge won’t ensure you make a different choice in the future. A grudge won’t protect you from future hurt. In truth, the energy that it takes to hold a grudge could be put to better purposes.
If you’re holding a grudge, see if you can find compassion for this other person. A great forgiveness exercise is Ho\’oponopono, a Hawaiian forgiveness prayer. Look it up online. The practice of the prayer essentially goes like this.
I’m sorry
Please forgive me
Thank you
I love you
Repeat each one of these statements while thinking of the other person.
Tie up your loose ends!
Create a list of everything unresolved or unfinished in your life – the big and the small. Make a point to clear up one thing at a time until you’ve checked all the boxes on your list.
Challenge:
Sometimes the best thing you can do to get clear is to not pick up the problem in the first place. If you’re being discredited or put down, recognize that this is someone else’s perspective. It’s not yours. You can learn from this other perspective without accepting it. Instead, return to what is true for you to keep yourself free and clear of things that hold you back from being your full self.
Are you looking for a way to help other people transform their lives and have a profound impact in the world or a pathway to strengthening your work with others?
The Master Transformational Coaching program is designed to give you individualized training and top-notch resources to help you become profoundly successful doing what you are meant to do.
To learn more about this opportunity and how it might be right for you, CLICK HERE.
If you are ready to take this next step towards your life purpose, I can\’t wait to meet you.
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Jan 30, 2016 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
“He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.”
― Lao Tzu
Throughout history, religious and mystical teachers have emphasized the importance of knowing yourself. They have universally recognized inward inquiry as the path toward wisdom and outward fulfillment.
In the 20th century, psychology ushered in a new arena for this inquiry. Psychology – and its effect on our social consciousness – kick-started the now 10-billion-dollar self-help industry, which provides everything from genius insight and guidance to quackery.
Sadly, the personal development industry often sells ineffective solutions to the human condition. This is because personal development authors and leaders don’t consider the actual mechanism necessary to produce the solution desired. For example, an author or leader might stress the importance of knowing oneself, but fail to realize that most people don’t know what this actually means.
The greatest example of this disconnect is the longstanding insistence that telling one’s story and understanding one’s past is sufficient to create change. This thinking states that someone who told their story and rooted through their past and – yet – things had not changed for them must have some part of them left uncovered.
Jung, whose insights penetrated far past the interpretations of his work, said: “I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”
A camp of psychologists called Behaviorist challenged this insistence. Their work began by extrapolating how to create change based on the behavioral patterns they observed in mice. They focused on changes to behavior in place of changes to understanding.
While the field of psychology learned quite a bit from these differing approaches, I believe they each largely missed the mark in their attempt to help a person thrive within the human condition.
Fulfillment doesn’t simply come when we change our behavior nor does it come when we excessively comb through our past. Rather, it’s the result of the wisdom gained from internal inquiry expressed through our day-to-day experience.
Jesus said, “He who has not known himself does not know anything, but he who has known himself has also know the depth of all.”
Unfortunately, the path to apply this knowledge is nowhere to be found in religious texts. There have been many superficial maps that guide the way to self-knowledge. Most often, these maps are dictates for social conduct. The actual guidance is only spoken about in mystical traditions.
The way I see it, wisdom is the key that opens the door to our selves and self-knowledge. We’re able to create inspired lives that make a difference when we rely on and apply our wisdom.
So, how do we apply our wisdom and access our deep self-knowledge?
I say start with Self-Love! To me, self-love is the total acceptance of ALL of who you are.
Yet – if I had a dime for every time someone asked me: “How can I start loving myself” or “What does self-love even mean?”
If you Google self-love, you’ll get a lot of answers like “do what you love” and “pay it forward.” While these practices help, they generally don’t get us there because they emphasize behavioral shifts alone.
You can read this quote and quite likely it touches you in some way. “You can search through the entire universe for someone more deserving of your love and affection than yourself and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself as much as anyone in the universe deserve your love and affection.” Buddha
You KNOW it’s true. But how do you actually get there?
The mechanism for getting there begins with looking inward – to begin the search for your deeper nature inside yourself. This, however, is only one half of the process. As you look in, you must look outside yourselves and begin to take normal and prescribed action in your world. At this juncture you either gain more wisdom and fulfillment or more pain based on how you apply the information you receive. You can see what happens next as guidance in the direction of your true nature or you can see it as another obstacle.
The truth is: there is no difference between “loving yourself” and “being yourself.”
When we use all of our interactions with the world to guide us in the direction of our true and deep nature and then choose to express our nature to the world, we experience the deepest form of self-love possible.
When we do this with others, it is loving them.
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
― C.G. Jung
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Jan 25, 2016 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
When it comes to the “true self”, one fixed point for contemplation is the relationship between your ego your essence. The terms “true self,” “ego,” and “essence” are broad and have many associations attached to them. So, for this week’s newsletter, I’m going to talk about how you can make your ego work for you as a tool to help you fully unearth your true self.
We need to have a working connection with our true self to feel a sense of success and fulfillment. Put another way, it’s only through our connection with our true self that we’re able to feel satisfied by the positive outcomes of our efforts.
Our ego is both an obstacle and an ally. On one hand, if our ego runs a-mock and rules every decision we make, it would be impossible to experience our true self. On the other hand, our ability to fully access and express our true self emerges with the help of our ego.
Personal development work requires that you become aware of your ego and your true self. Further, this work teaches you how to use the many aspects of who you are in a productive way.
There are several common problems that people encounter along their path of personal development. The main problem is that – once we realize that we’ve previously been totally consume by our ego – we forget that we’re actually part of something much greater than ourselves.
As Eva Perakkos says:
“Even those of you who have, for years, formed a concept of the real self, of the creative substance that enlivens every human being, forget in ninety-five percent of your daily lives that this creative being lives and moves in you and you live and move in it. You forget its existence. You do not reach for its wisdom. You stake all your reliance on your limited outer ego self. You neglect to open yourself for the deeper self\’s truth and feelings. You go blithely ahead as though there really were nothing else but your conscious mind, your ego self with its immediately accessible thinking processes and will force.”
If she’s right and we do indeed forget to draw on the infinite richness always ever-present outside ourselves, what can we do to change this? How can we live from our true self more fully? How can we connect to our true self so that we can create richer and fuller lives?
I propose that we look at the ego as if it were a tool. Think of it this way: if I can use a hammer, then it can serve me. If I think I’m a hammer, then I will be used by something else to serve some other end (and most likely hit up against something quite hard in the process.)
The only way that we can stay conscious of our ego is to employ it.
Again Eva Perrakos puts it very well:
\”The ego must know that it is only a servant to the greater being within. Its main function is to deliberately seek contact with the greater self within. It must know its position, it must know that its strength, potentiality, and function is to decide to seek contact, to request help from the greater self, to establish contact permanently with it. Moreover, the ego\’s task is to discover the obstructions that lie between it and the greater self. Here, too, its task is limited. The realization always comes from within, from the real self, but it comes as a response to the ego\’s wish to comprehend and to change falseness, destructiveness, and error.\”
Here’s the catch! If you’re not careful, you can easily fall under the spell of your ego and confuse it with your true self.
You can’t get rid of your ego, and you can’t ignore it either. And if you stop using it to help draw out your true self, you’re likely to fall under its illusion.
So. How can you make your ego work for you? Well. You can draw on the will of your ego to focus yourself on removing obstacles to your true self. You can also work on strengthening the lived experience of your true self so that it becomes less and less of a concept and more and more of an indelible part of your every-day experience.
Eva:
\”The intellectual acceptance of the real self as a philosophical precept will not alleviate [the problems] because it cannot give a sense of reality and true experience of the real self. This requires more. It requires an actualization of the faculties of the real self.\”
What this means is that you’ve got to train your ego to sense and support the expression of your true self. The truth is that you really can feel into your true self. To do this, you need to use your ego to plug into the wants, needs and full expression of your deeper self and remove the obstacles to it along the way. All the while, keep your eye on your ego so that you do not fall under its spell.
Awareness, of all kinds, is not the end of the road. Rather, it’s part of a cycle. Once we have an awareness we need to learn how to apply it, live it, work with it.
