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.
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Mar 6, 2017 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
Establishing a true practice of happiness is an elusive but powerful skill. In its own right, it is a hard goal to achieve. Harder still, however, is chasing the commodified and distorted versions of happiness that we have been taught to seek and think we can achieve.
Happiness has become a myth that has been both downplayed and exalted, made to seem both commonplace and unattainable. Busting the myths of happiness can be an important step toward truly being happy. See which ones might have caught you in their snare and be happier now.
7 Happiness Myths:
You know how to be happy:
I have to start the list with this because it is such a common myth that gets in the way of people being happy. We think that we are supposed to know how to be happy, but I find that most people do not have the skills they need to make themselves truly happy. The good news is that you can learn how to truly be happy and, with a little work, you can get yourself feeling great.
The goal is to be happy all the time:
You can’t be anything all the time and if you were you would likely lose the capacity to recognize it. But you can benefit from moving in the direction of being happier as often as possible. In fact, find time each day to do one thing that makes you happy and you will be feeling the difference in no time.
Happiness is linked to external events:
It does not matter how much money you have or where you are from. True happiness is not about circumstances or possessions, it is our relationship with ourself.
Other people can make you happy:
While being around toxic people will affect your happiness, there is no one who can really make you happy but you. It is important to pay attention to who you feel happy around and who you don’t, but recognize that learning how to make yourself happier can only come from you.
You can be anywhere and be happy:
This one sounds like, “If I just do enough work on myself I will be happy with my crappy job and my unfulfilling relationships.” This has to be on the list because, while happiness is an inside job, losing sight of the impact that outside circumstances have on our happiness is equally problematic. Unload the toxic parts of your life and open up to more happiness.
You need to be somewhere (else) to be happy:
If you are one of those people who keeps looking around the corner or over the horizon for your happiness, I have to tell you, you are not going to find it there. When we chase happiness we don’t find it. We find whatever else we put in its place. The keys to happiness lie within us, not in the next city we plan to move to.
Happiness is available to you regardless of how you act or what you do:
This sounds like, “Happiness is my birthright and I should have it even if I make little effort at my own personal development.” Happiness entitlement gets in our way. It also denies the reality that some of us battle biological predispositions that make attaining happiness even harder. Approach happiness with gratitude, and you invite more of it.
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Feb 27, 2017 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
We often strive to create healthy and satisfying relationships. But sometimes, despite how much we may try, we’re unable to create relationships that are mutually supportive and fulfilling. When this happens, there are several things we can do to bring our best selves to our relationships, and in turn, bring about the positive change we seek.
Get to Know Yourself:
To be your best self in your personal relationships you need to develop your awareness of yourself. What do you value? What do you dream of? What are your strengths? Where are the skills you want to hone? When we ask ourselves these kinds of questions we grow our awareness of ourselves and we can use that awareness to create relationships that are beneficial for everyone involved. Sometimes our personal relationships hit a rough patch. When this happens, your awareness will clue you into how you might be contributing to the difficulty at hand and whether or not that relationship should be maintained.
Love Yourself:
Learning to love yourself is such an important step towards creating healthy relationships. It’s cliché but true – to truly love someone else, you have to love yourself first. This is because we’re unable treat someone better than we treat ourselves. Our limits in loving others comes from our inability to love ourselves. Over the course of our relationships, these limits inevitably come to light. We may compensate for our inabilities by giving more to others than we have – or have allowed ourselves – to receive. Yet, this can set us up for difficulty. If we’re not loving ourselves then we’re likely looking for someone else to give us that sense of being loved. This can be the starting point for lots of problems like dependency, fear of abandonment, and fear of intimacy. To really love ourselves, we need to see the unique value and intrinsic beauty of who we are without any externally imposed definitions. To begin to do this, take the time to tell yourself all the things that you like about yourself. And do it often.
Clear Your History:
Part of showing up as our best selves is to be in the present moment as much as possible. This means that our previous experiences need to be left where they belong – in the past. To do this, people typically undergo a process wherein they remember the past, understand how it affected them and then disentangle themselves from it. There are a number of different tools that people can use to clear themselves of aspects of their past that no longer serve them. For example, there is EFT, Access Consciousness, energy work, Core Energetics, and the list goes on. If you want to create a different baseline for yourself, it’s helpful to find a method that you can use to continually reinforce your new way of being.
To clear your history, try on a few methods that you sense would be a good fit. Then keep an open mind while you see if they’re effective for you. It takes a little while to clear your past from your present, so give this process some time. As you do this your awareness will increase and old feelings might come to the surface. When in a relationship, sometimes it’s helpful to let the other person know when something from your past has been activated and communicate what you need when this happens.
Own your stuff:
Nothing makes a relationship stronger than integrity. The biggest gift you can give yourself is know and own your contributions to your relationships – both in the positive and in the negative. When things get difficult in a relationship, look for the ways that you’ve contributed to the problem. Simply ask yourself: “Is there anything that I would have done better or differently if I had remained in full integrity?” If the answer is yes, then do your best to make right on what you know you could have done better.
When we’re unclear about how our own issues influence our relationships we’re likely to do unintentional damage. When we’re unconscious of our unresolved feelings about our past, we’re more likely to blame, shame and guilt others when those unresolved feelings are triggered. It’s only when we’re aware of our contributions to the state of our relationships and able to stay in our integrity that we can create environments in which our relationships can thrive.
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