by Dr. Heléna Kate | May 19, 2015 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
The day that I reached the 300k mark in my business I didn’t feel happy. I had been frequently attending fancy events staying in fancy hotels –you know the kind with really large water features, perfect gardens, and extremely polite staff –the kind who say “can I do anything else for you miss” right after they have done anything for you. I had a book published. People were seeking me out for my expertise daily. I was on my way to the big time!
I did not feel happy because it was not in alignment with who I am. I love healthy organic food, funky boutique hotels, intimate and powerful events. I love things that feed my soul not just my wallet. I am in business so that I can go to a balmy tropical island in the winter and feel the sand on my bare toes, so that I can continue to learn what is going on on the cutting edge of my field. I am in business so that I can create quality. I truly believe that business can have the power to change the world and what is more, I know some key things that entrepreneurs like you are missing when it comes to creating your very own business.
I was not paying attention the way I needed to be. I was too busy doing. The answer to fix this problem is coming back into alignment.
Alignment is when who you are and what you are about is unobstructed by thoughts, emotions or experiences. A simple way to say it is: You are thinking, feeling and doing what is right for you. Not right based on what your ego might want but right for you from the place deep inside –the deepest truest part of who you are.
A definition of alignment is a position of agreement or alliance.
It is also possible to describe alignment by the saying that the inner and outer are in agreement. They are mutually supportive. One of the ways that we can tell if there is alignment is through the experience of resonance.
While resonance can be used to direct ourselves in other ways, it can help us now if we are on the right track by giving us that feeling of “home” or “rightness.”
In physics, resonance is “A phenomenon that consists of a given system being driven by another vibrating system or by external forces to oscillate with greater amplitude at some preferential frequencies.”
Again, another way to put this is that when you are in the presence of something or someone that is resonant there is an effect that happens. Something on the outside of you resounds with something on the inside of you letting you know that there is an agreeable relationship.
You can use this experience to help you make choices in all parts of our life.
Here is the trick. Often, we do not have contact with the deepest and truest part of ourselves and so we need to develop that as well. Here are some ways to listen to what is truly important about who you are and what you are desiring:
- Meditate: Learn to see your mental and emotional chatter as simply that and not who you are.
- Pay attention: to what it feels like to be in an environment that you at least guess is ideal for you.
- Know with more than your mind. Your heart and your gut are great resources for staying on track.
- Watch what happens: Be an observer of your life. You will learn a ton!
As with most consciousness skills, observation is the starting point. They require that you pay attention to what is often overlooked. Slowing things down or taking pauses throughout your day can help immensely when growing these skills. And these skills can help immensely in growing a more successful and fulfilled life.
Like this topic? Join me for more on alignment and resonance on this weeks Real Answers Radio. The show is live and I would love for you to call in with your thoughts and questions!
by Dr. Heléna Kate | May 8, 2015 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
I am not on top of the latest and greatest news the way that some people seem to be. I have a tendency to get things a little later than hot off the presses. However, I happened to watch the Bruce Jenner interview pretty much as soon as it was available. It was a fluke really. While I am very concerned with equality for and understanding of all types of issues especially those related to gender, I was relatively oblivious to all of the press. Yup, that is the truth. I don’t watch reality TV and my consumption of media is low.
The night of this interview I was looking for a something to watch on Hulu and I stumbled on this interview. After watching 10 minutes of it, I knew I needed to bring it to my coaching training program, which was having an intensive the next day. There was so much in that interview that made for rich discussion when working with people. But, what struck me more than anything was that it reminded me that people –all of us—struggle with knowing and being our full selves and that this challenge causes us so much pain.
We can’t be happy if we do not truly accept ourselves. But, what does true self-acceptance look like? Let me see if I can put it into some more concrete terms.
You are either OK with who you are or you are not. You are either on your own side or you are not. And, what this feels like, when you accept yourself, could almost be described as weightlessness.
If you wonder whether you accept yourself ask yourself these questions:
- Am I at peace with all my decisions?
- Do I love myself –even the not-so-great parts?
- When faced with information that supports a less than noble view of myself can I love myself and also challenge myself to be more?
- When in a disagreement, can I respect my own view while respecting the other person’s view?
- Do I know that no matter what I discover about myself that I am good?
If you answer “no” or are not certain, try some exercises taken from my book Real Answers to help you work on fully accepting yourself:
Powerful questions: With these next statements, you have the opportunity to become more aware of any areas of your life where it will benefit you to come to terms, as well as what you might be afraid of.
Complete these statements about yourself:
- One thing I have a difficult time accepting about my life, but deep down know is true, is:
- Some of the things I feel I need to accept about my life that may be difficult to accept are:
- The reason I know these things are difficult to accept is:
- I will know that I have fully accepted these things about my life when:
- This stops me from accepting these things about my life:
- I would accept these things about my life if only:
- I am afraid that, if I accept these things about my life, then:
- What I need to do to accept these things about my life is:
Speak your truth: One of the ways we can move into a deeper level of acceptance is to speak the truth about our lives, making it more real. This increased sense of reality just naturally works to increase our acceptance of what was. For example, I have an event in my life where I had a fight with a close friend of mine. After this fight, I begin to slip into some story around it. For example, my friend was really unfair or my friend overreacted. You can see that these are judgments, and as I was mentioning before, judgments are about the mask. If, instead, I am able to state the data about what happened, this is the actual sensory information. In other words, “What I saw was …,” “What I felt was …,” “What I experienced was …” If I am able to break down the information as truthfully as possible, I will begin to see the situation for what it is.
Talk to someone who was there: This is why personal growth groups and therapy groups work really well. If someone has gone through a similar experience―or, as is the case sometimes with family members, the same experience―sharing that experience with someone who can understand helps us accept that experience. We come to know that this is what truly happened and these are the effects it had. As I was saying earlier in this book, when people go through a trauma, they often minimize the effects or don’t recognize the effects. They do not see that what happened to them directly affects their life. For example, that their depression is related to the trauma or that their angry outbursts are related to the trauma. It is education, which allows us to see all these experiences connect inside of us―how we live them out. This is another example of how we can use acceptance to help with our awareness.
Bringing acceptance into your personal experience will radically change the way you approach almost every aspect of your life and ultimately will bring a lot of benefit to the world.
Like this topic and want to learn more? Join me for Real Answers Radio this Thursday, May 14th at 12pm EST. Real Answers airs live and your questions are always welcome! Tune in here
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Apr 20, 2015 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
Like many of the personal development terms that have become common in our vernacular, life purpose is something that many people talk about and feel they should have and often times wonder how they would know if they had it.
While some people might think of life purpose in terms of fate or destiny, I prefer to think of it in terms of the expression of your whole self. In other words it is less important that we know it and more important that we are it.
In truth that is a little bit of a stretch, there is no way for us not to be our purpose. However, we can feel more or less connection and pleasure from it. And, that is the reason for us to “find” our life purpose.
In my Make It Happen Guide, I write, “Whatever you want or dream of you can have it. It is in you. You are the one you have been waiting for.” One of the problems with life purpose is that people go looking for it. Then because they are looking for it they feel perpetually disconnected from it. It becomes something beyond themselves that they must find instead of a natural expression of who they are.
So, connecting with your life purpose is really about connecting the deeper and truer aspect of who you are and to do that you can do the following.
- Pay attention to where you feel connected, excited, passionate, of positive. These are clues to deeper truths about yourself and therefore your life purpose. Do more of what makes your feel good.
- What if bad things make you feel good? Sometimes people get stuck because what they feel they want to do is destructive or negative. If you feel this way, you might say, “if I did what I wanted to all the time then I would ____.” Fill in the blank with some negative outcome. But even your negative pleasure can lead you in the right direction if you approach it in the right way.
- Honor your dreams. They are with you for a reason. The hints that you get along the way from your fantasies can profoundly connect you to yourself and your purpose.
- Your purpose is not necessary a vocation. But, it may be able to be turned into one. Think less about what work you want to do in the world and more about what kind of impact you want to have or what kind of contribution you want to make.
I love this topic of life purpose and I look forward to talking with you about it more on my weekly radio show, Real Answers this week.
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Apr 13, 2015 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
This week I want to talk about personal power and empowerment. What does it mean be in your power? What gets you there, what holds you there, and what gets you off track? When you know more about these dynamics you are able to harness really deep forces for creation and transformation.
What does it mean? The term empowerment was popularized in the 80’s. It was based on the idea of “giving to, or increasing, the strengths of other groups of people whether those are educational, spiritual or otherwise.” Personal empowerment then became a buzz phrase for when we “give” ourselves back our own power or when we feel our own sense of power without the need to hold it over another.
Like many expressions of the personal development field, the phrase personal empowerment states something in a way that helps us understand how to shift our perspective. We have the ability to do or say things that will give us more power. We have the ability to hold our power in a way that is more about our deep respect for our self than it is about holding it over or using it on another. Personal power and our own empowerment is the result of our knowing we have the ability to choose and in influence the many aspects of our life.
What gets you there? If we have the ability to empower ourselves then how do we do this? What are the practical everyday types of things that you can do to feel confident and able to move forward with whatever you want to create in your life.
From an energetic perspective, being in our power overlaps with other experiences such as being centered, grounded, connected to our self, or clear (other expressions that help us understand HOW to be more powerful.) When we cultivate these states, we cultivate a stronger sense of personal power.
What holds you there? Once we have discovered our own power, we soon find that we can just as quickly lose sight of it. To stay connected with our power, we need to put ourselves in environments that support us and learn how to support ourselves. We need to need to take care of ourselves in the deepest way possible. And, be more and more aware of the situation in which we lose touch with our personal power.
What gets you off track? Standardly, what gets people off track are the core patterns that disempowered them in the first place. Somewhere along the line, you were hurt while being in your fullness and this had you take a dramatic action to try and protect yourself. Once we have reclaimed our power we are most likely to let it go when we face replicas of these past events. You can easily find out what gets you off track by figuring out what you are afraid of or afraid of having happen.
Why is this really important? Staying connected to your personal power is foundational to being able to create the life and business that you want. Without it, we do not know how to see each situation as an opportunity and each moment as a choice. This limits what we can create and often leaves us playing the role of the victim rather than the role of the victor.
What is personal power and how can you connect to it and use it to propel your life? This week on Real Answers Radio, Dr. Kate discusses how personal power is linked to being able to create and manifest what you want in your life. From this perspective, tools for cultivating personal power are one of the most important things we can learn. Tune in to explore what being empowered really means and what you can do to step for fully into it.
by Dr. Heléna Kate | Apr 9, 2015 | Dr. Heléna Kate's Blog
Relationships are the one of the most rewarding and challenging parts of our life. There are types of personal development that we are unable to do unless we are in relationship and there are ways that relationships push us to do work that we would not be otherwise motivated to do.
One of the greatest challenges in relationship can be our boundaries –maintaining a connection to our self, being open with another, and caring for the relationship that exists between us. We can run into challenges like losing our self in the relationship, over-caretaking, shutting down, passive aggressiveness, or saying things that are hurtful and can’t be taken back. Any of these sound familiar?
In the 1980’s Melody Beattie wrote about co-dependence. This is the pattern of behavior that a person develops when relating to a loved-one who has an addiction. However, Beattie’s writing hit a chord with most people whether they were in a partnership with an addict or not. Chiefly, she focuses on understanding what is ours to deal with and what is another person’s. This level of clarity is essential for other relational skills to develop. It is impossible to create healthy connectedness if we lack the ability to hold onto our self.
Holding onto our self is the ability to stay connected to what we think, feel and want while being in a relationship with another person. This is particularly important when that person is under stress or in a crisis. In intense situations, it is easier to get consumed by another person’s experience. Even sexual intimacy, as positive as it might be, requires not only that we can deeply connect and even merge with another but that we can come back to ourselves as well.
The truth of the matter is, when we do not know or understand something, our ability to be in relationship to it is limited. This means we need to be able to see our self ,or in other words be aware, to “hold onto our self.” The less we are aware of ourselves, the harder it is for us to know when something is us and when it is not. So, this is one of the many ways that personal development work serves you. The more that you know the easier it is to navigate relationships.
It is necessary to know our self to be open to a relationship in a healthy way. Being open in a relationship is both about the ability to connect and to disconnect. However, primarily it is about being able to choose when we want to connect and disconnect. This allows us to be consciously open or to consciously choose not put up a boundary when something is not healthy.
However, what I often hear people struggle with is determining what is healthy or not healthy for them. I have said that self care is anything and everything that is affirming of the entirety of who you are. It comes up here again because determining what is healthy or not healthy is guided by the same concept. Does it affirm or support who you are? If it does then it is healthy for you even if it is difficult. If it is does not, then it is not healthy for you.
Of course, the greatest gift that we can give in a relationship is our willingness to be as respectful with that other person as we have learned to be with our self. This desire to support another person in honoring and caring for themselves and learning and growing in their capacity to know themselves is a beautiful gift of a relationship.
The relationship is the third part of the equation. Relationships take care and time to be able to flourish. It is not enough for people to just invest in their own awareness and growth they also need to invest in the relationship. It becomes another member of the relationship and requires selflessness as much as anything else. What can you give to the relationship? How do you give to the relationship?
Developmentally, we are not able to give to the relationship until we have learned how to take care of ourselves. We are simply too immature to really be able to give what is required. That is why we need to start by doing our own work and understand what it is that supports us as we go through life. When we have done this work, the act of giving selflessly to a relationship is an additional joy rather than something that creates imbalance.
If you find yourself in a relationship and you are questioning your knowledge of your own needs or understanding of the different aspects of who you are, don’t worry too much about it. We are all in a continual process of growth. As you move forward in your relationship you will be called to focus on different aspects of the relationship: you, the other person, and the relationship itself. This process, if you choose to engage in it will be both challenging and deeply rewarding –ultimately offering you one of the most beautiful experiences that life has to offer.
