Showing posts with label feelings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feelings. Show all posts
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Confidence
THOUGHTS -> Feelings -> ACTIONS
Can't feel good about yourself if you're thinking negative thoughts.
~Whatever you want more of in life, you have to give it out first!
~Appreciate what you get in your life and you'll get more!
Direct our thoughts. Focus on what we want to focus on.
Feel good about the actions.
# 1 Practice good posture
# 2 Pay attention to your internal dialogue. Talk to yourself like someone # 3 you really love and care about.
# 4 Put your best self forward. Dress for success
# 5 Boost someone else's self-esteem
Don't dream it, be it. Fake it til you make it!
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
3 Ways to Feel Good When Things Seem Bad
“It isn’t what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it’s what we say to ourselves about what happens.” ~Pema Chodron
Here are 3 insights that helped during those “you’ve got to be freaking kidding me” times:
1. There’s a healing side to pain.
When a challenging event happens—a break-up, a sickness, or having your leopard pink car seat covers stolen—the human mind, being what it is, thinks this is why you feel badly.
You hear it all the time: “Oh, you poor thing for losing your car seat covers.” Or, “She’s such a rat to do this to you.”
The truth is, it’s your perception of the situation that makes you feel bad. This means that no matter how crumpled-in and dysfunctional you feel, you’re not. It’s just your thoughts that are a bit wonky. And actually, your thoughts on this were always wonky; the situation just exposed them.
Take my situation. Everything I’d based my self-esteem on was gone: work, grades, friends, boyfriend, the ability to sit up straight for more than half an hour.
I thought I was upset because I was sick, when the truth is, my situation had triggered every negative belief I had about myself. Things like:
“I’m only lovable if people like me.” “I’m only worthwhile if I’m busy doing things.”
I so strongly identified with all the things I did that when you took them away, I felt miserable. I’d been given the opportunity to see what I really thought about myself.
Someone could have told me “you’re worthy and lovable,” and I might have intellectually known this, but I didn’t feel it.
What I began to realize was that behind the pain, over time, my faulty beliefs were shifting. My sense of self-worth was beginning to heal by itself.
The pain is the faulty belief system being ripped out by its roots. You feel like you’re losing something dear. The trick is to understand that it’s just a faulty belief going away. And beneath it lays a pocket of self-love that you haven’t previously been able to access.
As poet Kahlil Gibran says: “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.”
2. Pain fades when we let go of expectations.
Most of us live in an intellectual way. We make plans for our life and then we try and follow them through. We think we know the best way for our life to proceed.
The truth is, a large part of our pain is caused by an attachment to our expectations.
For example, one of the reasons I felt so bone achingly sorry for myself was because I had a plan for how to have a good life—and it didn’t include Dr. Quinn.
I thought success came from going to college, getting a good job, and having a family. No one said anything about spending all this time in bed. But actually, it was the best thing for me.
To illustrate you how powerful your expectations are, try this exercise:
First, imagine you’re me.
Now, imagine you’d grown up thinking the best way to have an awesome life was to spend five years in bed cross-stitching cushions. That it was something everyone did.
“Oh yeah,” you’d say to your friend, “I’m just off to do my five-years-in-bed years.”
And they’d be like, “Oh cool. I hear you learn such amazing things, like how to feel self-assured, and you get clarity on your life direction, and you start to feel that inner calm we’re always reading about. “
Seriously.
Now think about your current situation and imagine that for your whole life, you believed that what is happening to you was going to happen. And not only that, but it’s the absolute best thing to happen.
So much of the pain we feel is because we can’t let go of how we think life should look. Your mind thinks it knows the best way for your life to work out—but simply put, it doesn’t; the plan it had was flawed in the first place.
Your mind can only see your life as it’s showing up right now. There is a bigger picture.
3. You’re doing fine.
Learning about personal awareness and healing can be such a helpful thing, but remember, there’s no right or wrong way to feel.
Feeling grateful and “being positive” and so on is perfectly fine, and sure, it can be helpful, but if you don’t feel like it all the time, don’t worry about it.
Instead of attaching a judgment to how you’re feeling or what you’re thinking, try just noticing it.
I believe the act of simply noticing and accepting how things are, right now—no matter how messy and dysfunctional they seem—is the most powerful, healing thing you can do.
http://tinybuddha.com/blog/3-ways-to-feel-good-when-things-seem-bad/
Here are 3 insights that helped during those “you’ve got to be freaking kidding me” times:
1. There’s a healing side to pain.
When a challenging event happens—a break-up, a sickness, or having your leopard pink car seat covers stolen—the human mind, being what it is, thinks this is why you feel badly.
You hear it all the time: “Oh, you poor thing for losing your car seat covers.” Or, “She’s such a rat to do this to you.”
The truth is, it’s your perception of the situation that makes you feel bad. This means that no matter how crumpled-in and dysfunctional you feel, you’re not. It’s just your thoughts that are a bit wonky. And actually, your thoughts on this were always wonky; the situation just exposed them.
Take my situation. Everything I’d based my self-esteem on was gone: work, grades, friends, boyfriend, the ability to sit up straight for more than half an hour.
I thought I was upset because I was sick, when the truth is, my situation had triggered every negative belief I had about myself. Things like:
“I’m only lovable if people like me.” “I’m only worthwhile if I’m busy doing things.”
I so strongly identified with all the things I did that when you took them away, I felt miserable. I’d been given the opportunity to see what I really thought about myself.
Someone could have told me “you’re worthy and lovable,” and I might have intellectually known this, but I didn’t feel it.
What I began to realize was that behind the pain, over time, my faulty beliefs were shifting. My sense of self-worth was beginning to heal by itself.
The pain is the faulty belief system being ripped out by its roots. You feel like you’re losing something dear. The trick is to understand that it’s just a faulty belief going away. And beneath it lays a pocket of self-love that you haven’t previously been able to access.
As poet Kahlil Gibran says: “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.”
2. Pain fades when we let go of expectations.
Most of us live in an intellectual way. We make plans for our life and then we try and follow them through. We think we know the best way for our life to proceed.
The truth is, a large part of our pain is caused by an attachment to our expectations.
For example, one of the reasons I felt so bone achingly sorry for myself was because I had a plan for how to have a good life—and it didn’t include Dr. Quinn.
I thought success came from going to college, getting a good job, and having a family. No one said anything about spending all this time in bed. But actually, it was the best thing for me.
To illustrate you how powerful your expectations are, try this exercise:
First, imagine you’re me.
Now, imagine you’d grown up thinking the best way to have an awesome life was to spend five years in bed cross-stitching cushions. That it was something everyone did.
“Oh yeah,” you’d say to your friend, “I’m just off to do my five-years-in-bed years.”
And they’d be like, “Oh cool. I hear you learn such amazing things, like how to feel self-assured, and you get clarity on your life direction, and you start to feel that inner calm we’re always reading about. “
Seriously.
Now think about your current situation and imagine that for your whole life, you believed that what is happening to you was going to happen. And not only that, but it’s the absolute best thing to happen.
So much of the pain we feel is because we can’t let go of how we think life should look. Your mind thinks it knows the best way for your life to work out—but simply put, it doesn’t; the plan it had was flawed in the first place.
Your mind can only see your life as it’s showing up right now. There is a bigger picture.
3. You’re doing fine.
Learning about personal awareness and healing can be such a helpful thing, but remember, there’s no right or wrong way to feel.
Feeling grateful and “being positive” and so on is perfectly fine, and sure, it can be helpful, but if you don’t feel like it all the time, don’t worry about it.
Instead of attaching a judgment to how you’re feeling or what you’re thinking, try just noticing it.
I believe the act of simply noticing and accepting how things are, right now—no matter how messy and dysfunctional they seem—is the most powerful, healing thing you can do.
http://tinybuddha.com/blog/3-ways-to-feel-good-when-things-seem-bad/
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Monday, April 15, 2013
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Sunday, January 20, 2013
How to Hack Your Brain
With a few simple tricks, you can exploit your brain's innate functionality to change just about anything about yourself.
most of what you consider part of your identity is a product of influence.
We have a tendency to think that change is difficult, but it's really just a matter of changing your influence.
While everything stored in your recent memory may not be immediately accessible, all you really need to bring something up is a trigger word.
This is a list of words synonymous with or related to ambition. It's designed to be read aloud to put you in a more ambitious mindset, focusing your thoughts and priming your brain to react ambitiously when these words, or portions of these words, come up later in your day.
-drive
-do
-go
-make
-objective
-important
-create
-commitment
-purpose
-enthusiasm
-eager
-motivation
For more reading on priming, and a look at some really interesting studies, don't forget to check out the references for this article.
Using Your Emotions
If you've ever found yourself making out-of-character decisions based on your emotional state—such as binging on ice cream after a breakup—you know how easily your feelings can overtake your actions. Rather than letting your emotions lead you towards poor judgment and irrational behavior, however, you can learn to compensate for different emotional states and to fabricate emotions to alter your mood. In order to do that you need to, simply put, get in touch with your feelings. The idea isn't so much to cry into a pillow about your wasted childhood, but understand what you're feeling when you're feeling it, what the root cause is, and what you can do about it. We're going to take a look at how you can dissect your emotional state to use it to your advantage, and also look at how you can fabricate emotion to change how you're feeling.
Make Yourself Uncomfortable
Your emotions aren't in full force if you're not really doing anything, so you need to put yourself in uncomfortable situations in order to bring them out. This doesn't mean you should make yourself feel horrible, but that you should go out and do things that you might resist because you're worried about the downsides. Meeting new people is something that makes most people uncomfortable, and it's a great place to start, especially if it's a first date. Try new things that scare you. If you notice you're glued to the couch and don't want to get up, do the opposite. Spend time with people you don't like. Go to a movie you're sure you'll hate. Your experiences won't always be pleasant, but they should incite emotion that you can later analyze and better understand.
Keep Track of How You Feel
Like an abbreviated diary, every time you have an emotional reaction to something, write it down. You don't need much detail, but just a sentence or two noting the emotion you're experiencing and the (possible) cause. For example, I get extremely irritable when I'm hungry. I will lose my temper far more easily when I'm hungry, so whenever I notice myself thinking irrational (and sometimes hateful) things, I always remind myself that I'm just hungry, I'll eat in a minute, and the "asshole" who accidentally missed the garbage can and didn't notice is mostly a result of my frustrated stomach. Until I started to pay attention, I never really noticed that I was a jerk whenever I was hungry. Instead, I just thought I was a jerk. This is a simple example, but the point is this: pay attention to how you feel and the other issues currently present, and you'll find it much easier to manage your negative emotions.
These expressions do surface from genuine emotion, so repeating them can actually make you feel happier/sadder/angrier/etc. through repetition. If you need to change your mood and your mindset, the ability to fake it ‘til you make it is very, very useful.
Always be healthy first before playing mind tricks- taking care of your body and your mind.
http://lifehacker.com/5747213/how-to-hack-your-brain#references
most of what you consider part of your identity is a product of influence.
We have a tendency to think that change is difficult, but it's really just a matter of changing your influence.
While everything stored in your recent memory may not be immediately accessible, all you really need to bring something up is a trigger word.
This is a list of words synonymous with or related to ambition. It's designed to be read aloud to put you in a more ambitious mindset, focusing your thoughts and priming your brain to react ambitiously when these words, or portions of these words, come up later in your day.
-drive
-do
-go
-make
-objective
-important
-create
-commitment
-purpose
-enthusiasm
-eager
-motivation
For more reading on priming, and a look at some really interesting studies, don't forget to check out the references for this article.
Using Your Emotions
If you've ever found yourself making out-of-character decisions based on your emotional state—such as binging on ice cream after a breakup—you know how easily your feelings can overtake your actions. Rather than letting your emotions lead you towards poor judgment and irrational behavior, however, you can learn to compensate for different emotional states and to fabricate emotions to alter your mood. In order to do that you need to, simply put, get in touch with your feelings. The idea isn't so much to cry into a pillow about your wasted childhood, but understand what you're feeling when you're feeling it, what the root cause is, and what you can do about it. We're going to take a look at how you can dissect your emotional state to use it to your advantage, and also look at how you can fabricate emotion to change how you're feeling.
Make Yourself Uncomfortable
Your emotions aren't in full force if you're not really doing anything, so you need to put yourself in uncomfortable situations in order to bring them out. This doesn't mean you should make yourself feel horrible, but that you should go out and do things that you might resist because you're worried about the downsides. Meeting new people is something that makes most people uncomfortable, and it's a great place to start, especially if it's a first date. Try new things that scare you. If you notice you're glued to the couch and don't want to get up, do the opposite. Spend time with people you don't like. Go to a movie you're sure you'll hate. Your experiences won't always be pleasant, but they should incite emotion that you can later analyze and better understand.
Keep Track of How You Feel
Like an abbreviated diary, every time you have an emotional reaction to something, write it down. You don't need much detail, but just a sentence or two noting the emotion you're experiencing and the (possible) cause. For example, I get extremely irritable when I'm hungry. I will lose my temper far more easily when I'm hungry, so whenever I notice myself thinking irrational (and sometimes hateful) things, I always remind myself that I'm just hungry, I'll eat in a minute, and the "asshole" who accidentally missed the garbage can and didn't notice is mostly a result of my frustrated stomach. Until I started to pay attention, I never really noticed that I was a jerk whenever I was hungry. Instead, I just thought I was a jerk. This is a simple example, but the point is this: pay attention to how you feel and the other issues currently present, and you'll find it much easier to manage your negative emotions.
These expressions do surface from genuine emotion, so repeating them can actually make you feel happier/sadder/angrier/etc. through repetition. If you need to change your mood and your mindset, the ability to fake it ‘til you make it is very, very useful.
Always be healthy first before playing mind tricks- taking care of your body and your mind.
http://lifehacker.com/5747213/how-to-hack-your-brain#references
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