by Dr. Heléna Kate | Mar 29, 2016 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog, Uncategorized
There are times when we get a premonition or a gut feeling about a situation. Perhaps it’s a flash or an insight that shows us events to come. Or perhaps it’s a feeling that what we’re doing leads us astray from what we truly want.
Sometimes we listen and respond to our premonitions and sometimes we don’t. What I want to explore here is why don’t we listen to ourselves? Why do we choose to tune out our feelings, intuitions and observations? And, if we made the effort to tune in, how could we listen to ourselves more effectively?
What I’ve learned through my work is that people have unique ways of processing information, though there are commonalities that run through particular personality types. I try to help people learn how to best hear, listen, and then respond to their inner-guidance.
All too often, we don’t recognize our feelings or sensations as inner-guidance. We might feel ill-at-ease or hear an inner voice express concern. Yet, somehow we fail to realize that we’re receiving crucial information from within and not simply churning thoughts or ill-founded worries.
You might ask: “once we understand this internal information as guidance why on earth would we choose to not listen to it?”
We generally disregard our inner-wisdom for several reasons. Most often our inner-guidance cuts against what we want to be true or how we want things to go. Sometimes, though, our minds are so cluttered with the details of our everyday lives that we cannot fully hear what our bodies are trying to tell us. It’s easy to lose sight of our deeper truth in the busy-ness of modern life.
To hear our inner-guidance we need to clear out our clutter. We need to clear it out from our lives, our minds, and our hearts.
Once we’ve made some space, we’re better equipped to tune into and listen to ourselves. The truth is that the messages we receive from within are frequently direct and simple. They tell us: “Stop doing this or start doing that.” Our job is to focus and refocus on the simplicity of the guidance we’re getting and figure out how to align ourselves with that simplicity.
This skill is more of an art. Aligning and realigning with our inner-guidance takes an equal measure of finesse and surrender.
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by Dr. Heléna Kate | Nov 13, 2015 | Uncategorized
At the heart of it, motivation is the WHY that defines your desire to do something. And this WHY is crucial to your ability to follow through on the goals you\’ve set for yourself. When you connect your task at hand with the deeper reason that motivates your actions, you give yourself the energy necessary to persist, especially when things get tough.
Once we know what we want and why we want it, a strange thing tends to occur. Our increased awareness about our goals shines a light on our internal blocks. What this tells us is that we\’re not able to move forward by simple understanding of our motivation. Rather, we need to dig deep and resolve what holds us back.
This week\’s blog post explores the emotional, informational and logistical reasons for which we sometimes lose our motivation and offers tips on how to find it again.
How to Find + Keep Your Motivation
More often than not, our connection to our motivation brings us into direct relationship with our resistances and self-imposed obstacles. We cannot start or stay motivated until we understand what gets in our way and what we can do to attend to it.
In most cases, the culprit is one of the following:
Emotional Blocks:
We often experience negative and limited thinking hand-in-hand with emotional disturbance.For example, we might think \”I don’t have what it takes to do this.\” This brand of thinking conjures up feelings of hopelessness and despair.
Emotional blocks hold us back from taking action. They siphon off our momentum, drain our motivation, and leave us to stew in doubt
Informational Blocks:
Sometimes we don’t know what we need to move forward. This can dovetail emotional blocks as well. For example, when we don’t know what we need to take the next right step, we tend to experience a fear-based emotional response that hypnotizes us into thinking we\’re doomed to make a mistake. We often freeze around this fear in a state of analysis-paralysis.
Logistical Blocks:
Sometimes we don’t know how to take our next step. For example, we deliberate with ourselves about whether we should start a therapeutic practice by calling a therapist or by reading a book. Or, if we\’re starting a business, we wonder \”do I start by building a website\” or \”get business cards?\” These simple examples illuminate the everyday decisions we face that can challenge and overwhelm us.
Many times, we think that we\’re experiencing a logistical challenge, when in fact we\’re up against an emotional block. Either way, what\’s required here is that you both face logistical challenges and emotional blocks head-on.
Whatever our blocks are, we need to find ways to move past them so that we can stay on track with our goals.
Here are some tips that will help you overcome the most common blocks that people face as they work to keep stride with their dreams, ambitions and personal hopes.
Emotional Blocks:
Sadly, there is absolutely no way to provide information that will help you easily trouble-shoot emotional blockages. This is because emotional blocks are so unique to our personal history that no panacea is readily available. However, in this instance, knowledge is power. If you\’re aware that an emotional block is keeping you from realizing your success, you\’re on track to resolve it.
The next step requires that you to find techniques that help you clear your emotional blocks. I\’ve found that certain techniques work best for certain situations and certain levels of development. For example, talk-therapy might be instrumental at one point in your healing process, whereas energy-work might be the best mode of treatment at another point. If you\’re experiencing emotional blocks, start a personal development practice with a professional or start some research into personal development techniques.
Once you\’ve developed your emotional toolbox, you\’ll be better able to assess your blocks and remedy them with increased efficiency.
Informational Blocks:
We can either take the fast route or the slow route towards information. The fast route requires that we find someone to teach us what we need to know. The slow route allows us to collect the necessary information on our own and at our pace. The primary thing required to resolve an informational block is a complete sense of what you need to solve the problem at hand.
Logistical Blocks:
If you\’re challenged by how to move through a project, it\’s best to either follow an established pattern or to get outside help. There are step-by-step guides for just about everything you can think of. And there are many experts available to walk you through the process.
When it comes right down to it, it\’s easier to maintain our motivation when we have the right support. As obvious as this might be, many people try to face new and challenging situations on their own. This approach can quickly drain your motivation, especially with projects you\’ve struggled to succeed at before.
Support can come in many forms. You can find a friend to partner with. You can join a group. You can hire a professional. Or you can simply let some of your friends or family know of your intentions and ask them to help you stay on target. As long as you\’re getting the right support, it doesn\’t really matter who\’s providing it.
I\’ll leave you with a final tip on keeping up your motivation.
And it\’s this: give yourself rewards! The most important part of a reward system (or a punishment system) is that it\’s adhered to. So, when you hit a milestone, make sure to properly celebrate yourself. You earned it.
As much I\’d like for everyone to sign up for a reward system, the reality is that some people are best motivated by a system of punishment. When something big enough is on the line, these people find the energy and umph necessary to move forward. If this describes you, then I recommend getting creative with your punishment system.
For example, I\’ve had several clients who would make a sizable donation to charity if they did not keep their projects moving forward as planned.
It\’s essential that we return to the WHY that compels our motivation as much as possible. When we do this often, our WHY comes to define our intrinsic sense of our motivation and helps us build the skills necessary to trouble-shoot when the going gets tough.
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Jun 8, 2015 | Uncategorized
Trusting yourself is synonymous with confidence. There is confidence in what we do, for example, a skill that we can apply like cooking or speaking French. And, there is confidence in who we are. The latter relies on a deep knowledge of self that allows us to feel secure.
Trusting yourself is founded on being in integrity. The more we act in ways that feel right to us, the more that we act in accordance with our values, the more that we come to trust ourselves.
Think about it this way. If you were your own friend and you constantly lied to you, acted disrespectful, or were unreliable, would you want to keep you as a friend?
Well, it is pretty similar.
Every time that you act in a way that does not have integrity, you respond to that by checking out just a little bit more –from yourself. Pretty soon, what used to feel so good starts to be something you start to avoid. Instead of being the free-spirited person, who does what he or she thinks is right and is full of energy, you become a low energy person who tries to make others happy or other forms of just getting along.
Being in integrity gives us energy and helps us learn to trust ourselves.
Trusting yourself is cultivated through understanding. It is hard to trust what is totally foreign and unknown. It is just not built into our survival programming. We might be OK with it but we do not have a deep sense of trust in what is unknown.
Similarly, when we don’t know ourselves, we don’t trust ourselves and the more familiar we are the more certain we feel about when and how we can step up and when and how we might need to get a bit of support.
When people start engaging in personal development work they sometimes start to see parts of themselves that they did not see before. This often means that they start to trust themselves a little less for a time. However, as time goes by, this grows into a much deeper sense of trust as more things become understandable and sometimes even predictable.
Trusting yourself is supported by self-assessment and acceptance. How trust-worthy are you as a person. When you make a promise to yourself, do you keep it? Do you tell yourself the truth even when it is hard? You will learn to trust yourself more, even if the answer is no, if you ask the questions and are honest about where you stand.
You can always work to be more reliable and trustworthy person. In order to really be able to make an assessment of yourself, you need to have enough self-acceptance to weather the initial inquiry. That means you are willing to “stay on your own side” regardless of what you see in yourself. Otherwise, you simply will not see what you are not wanting to see.
A candid look at yourself can be the beginning of much deeper trust of oneself.
Trusting yourself is a gift. Just as trusting another person is a gift to them. It means that they are worthy of trust. It means that you are worthy of trust. And, what is better than that.
Once you gain your own trust, difficult circumstances become easier to manage, you feel more confident in your choices in relationship, you feel more confident in your career. You know you always have someone to rely on.
Someone who will not let you down.
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by Dr. Heléna Kate | Sep 23, 2014 | Uncategorized
Growing up I often heard the phrase “You shouldn’t care so much.”
Derivatives of this idea included: So what if they’re talking about you. Who cares what they think? He’s a jerk; why do you care about him? You’re your own person; why do you care about what she’s doing?
I associated the word “care” with stress, because in all these instances, caring meant feeling bad.
It meant being overly worried about someone’s opinion of me, or feeling for someone who didn’t feel for me, or thinking someone was somehow better than me.
I frequently responded, “What kind of person would I be if I didn’t care?”
I also argued that not caring could be a limiting choice.
Sometimes someone else’s criticism contains a valuable lesson. Sometimes someone who seems like a jerk really needs someone to take a chance on him (or her). Sometimes someone else’s choices help us illuminate the path we really want to take.
If we decide to stop caring in all instances that might push and challenge us, we risk closing ourselves off to insights, relationships, and ideas that could change our lives for the better—and potentially do the same for others.
I’ve since realized that the real message isn’t to stop caring, but instead to recognize how we care and why so that we don’t give our power away.
Sometimes we care with love; sometimes we care with fear. Sometimes we care with self-respect; sometimes we care with self-contempt. Sometimes we care with a sense of possibility; sometimes we care with fears of inferiority.
The important thing is that we don’t let caring about people or circumstances detract from our ability to care for ourselves.
A friend of mine recently told me she’s stopped caring about what people expect of her. Knowing that she values those relationships, I concluded that she really meant she stopped stressing about how well she met their expectations.
She essentially decided to stop worrying about things outside her control, and focus instead on all the things that were within her power.
That’s what it means to care for ourselves: to do our best and celebrate that, even as we keep learning and growing.
Lori Deschene is the founder of Tiny Buddha and the author of the Tiny Wisdom eBook series, Tiny Buddha\’s Guide to Loving Yourself, and Tiny Buddha: Simple Wisdom for Life\’s Hard Questions.
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by Dr. Heléna Kate | Sep 4, 2014 | Uncategorized
Napoleon Hill suggested that when we have a failure or disappointment, there is always a seed of an equivalent benefit that will be revealed later on. I have found his advice to be true, and it has saved me a lot of grief in my life.
The genius of Hill\’s theory is that we will be happier if we change our view at the time we are discouraged to focus on looking for the benefit rather than dwelling on the misery. It really works.
Do you have an example of where a disappointment had a seed of a wonderful benefit that was revealed to you later?
Want continued support so you can shift your focus, achieve more and feel more successful? Email us and Kate will be happy to meet with you so that together you can find the right program for where you are at today!
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by Dr. Heléna Kate | Aug 5, 2014 | Uncategorized
As we grow older and have less time left, there may be a tendency to ask, “What impact have I had?” “What have I contributed to others and future generations?” “What is my legacy?”
Most theorists agree that adult development is ongoing. As we age, a major task is to move beyond concerns of the self and acquire wisdom in order to contribute to others and future generations. In my dissertation research, I asked creative older adults I interviewed, “How important is it for you to leave a legacy or contribute to future generations?” (Robertson, 2005). Surprisingly, many of the participants I interviewed were not concerned with leaving a legacy—even though, in my mind, they would leave bodies of work and had already contributed to present and future generations. Some talked about what they would pass on to children and grandchildren, but most indicated that their time was “now” and they did not expect to be “remembered” for more than one or two generations.
In the book Live Your Legacy Now! Ten Simple Steps to Find Your Passion and Change the World, Barbara Greenspan Shaiman (2009) tells about the “inheritance” she received from her family, how she was inspired to create her legacy, and practical advice for people who want to make the world a better place. She explains that a legacy goes beyond the common conception of leaving a bequest, or funding a hospital wing or university building to preserve one’s memory in the future; it is sharing your “humanity” and is a gift to the present and the future.
Recently, my husband, John and I have been blessed to get to know Barbara. She has become a dear “new” friend—an experience that somehow feels “extra special” as you grow older. We were thrilled when she invited us to attend the 2014 Women’s Achievement Awards, presented by KYW Newsradio 1060, and held on June 25, 2014 at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, PA. Barbara and four other women from the Philadelphia area were honored for their outstanding achievements.
Barbara’s award was for the legacy she has established and how she helps others to do the same through Embrace your Legacy, which offers programs to create “cultures of caring” for a variety of audiences. Barbara’s approach to creating a legacy is that it does not have to be just for the future—it can be lived now, which is what the title of her book suggests. In addition, creating a legacy does not have to wait until one is an adult. Through Champions of Caring, a non-profit organization Barbara founded in 1995, she developed a program that has empowered more than 10,000 youths in Philadelphia and South Africa to make the world a better place by becoming engaged citizens and leaders of social change.
What makes Live Your Legacy Now so powerful is that the first part of the book tells Barbara’s story of how she became involved with building her legacy and helping others to do the same. Stories can be powerful motivators; if we examine our lives, most of us are able to discuss our heritage and identify events that have shaped who we are. Barbara’s parents—her mother, Carola Iserowshi Greenspan, and her father, Henry Greenspan, were Holocaust survivors. Barbara tells how her parents’ survival, a journey she took with her family and other Holocaust survivors to visit Auschwitz in 1989, and a brief meeting with Steven Spielberg spurred her to create her legacy.
For those who might think, “I have no idea what my legacy could be,” and “I don’t know famous, powerful people who could help me even if I did,” Barbara’s book provides a process to find out and offers very practical advice. She gives step-by-step suggestions of how one can explore their past and identify present values, skills and passions to create a vision for the future that will make the world a better place. Live Your Legacy Now is a reassuring book for those who find the idea of creating a legacy a bit intimidating or grandiose because it helps one to live “on purpose.”
The subject of living your legacy exemplifies key principles of existential-humanistic psychology. A major challenge for individuals and cultures is how to live as fully as we can, despite individual trials and unbelievable horror we may confront. Certainly, the Holocaust is an example of such a horror. Lest we forget, Holocaust museums are stark reminders of how human beings can lose their humanity. In the face of such inhumanity, people such as Barbara’s parents and Viktor Frankl survived, created legacies, and made the world a better place. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor and founder of logotherapy, which stresses the importance of finding (or creating) meaning for existence. He strongly believed in the importance of freedom coupled with responsibility.
While not everyone will have experiences as horrific as the Holocaust, most people can identify problems they would like to address and causes about which they feel passionate. The thoughts expressed in Live Your Legacy Now are very consistent with existential-humanistic psychology, and the tagline of this website: “It matters that people have a way of looking at their lives that lets them ask the big questions and determine how they want to live.” Examining who we are and what we want to contribute “is vital to the transformation of our despairing and violent world.” Creating and living a legacy is a way to break “new ground to humanize the world around us.” What is your legacy? Or, even more important, what is the legacy you choose to live right now?
reblogged from the Saybrook University blog.
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