Tag: hypnosis

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Become a Resiliency Ninja: 3 Powerful Mental Shifts To Reset Yourself for Success

Here’s the executive summary for the years 2020 and 2021: Most of us have been handling an endless number of decisions while navigating ever-changing scenarios with lots of conflicting data and very little guidance.  In fact, How To Thrive In a Pandemic is not on Amazon yet, unfortunately.

Whether the last two years have been a blessing in disguise or a mixed bag of sorts, the need to be making decisions has remained constant. And even more so if we’re wearing the ‘mom’ and ‘business owner’ hats almost simultaneously.

Our daily lives have fallen within a spectrum of trying to answer these two questions and making decisions accordingly: “What’s going to happen next?” and “What’s for dinner?”

In between the mile-long of to-do’s, the endless chores at home, what might be happening in your business, issues with your spouse or kids and handling finances, our daily quota of “best decision-making” pixie dust quickly runs out.

It has also meant having to make thousands of new choices on the spot and wondering whether those decisions are right or not.

This uncertainty about the long-term impact of our decisions might lead us to think we’re winging it, or worse, feeling like frauds. Therefore, as mothers and businesswomen, it can be easy to experience Imposter Syndrome and feel the insecurity and self-doubt creep in.

This triple whammy of pandemic fatigue, decision fatigue, and Imposter Syndrome is hopefully subsiding this year and a glimmer of hope seems to loom ahead.

Therefore, this is a great opportunity to do a quick mental reset to bring about the success, personal growth and happiness we actually want while knowing how to effectively call the shots regardless of what is happening outside our door.

Here are some powerful mindset tactics that we can use to our advantage to achieve our goals faster while keeping our emotional and mental wellbeing in check.

Powerful Mindset Tactic One

Let’s start with tackling pandemic fatigue. It seems like it’s the hardest one out of the three.We’ve been handling an endless number of decisions while navigating ever-changing scenarios with lots of conflicting data and very little guidance.  How To Thrive In a Pandemic is not on Amazon yet, unfortunately.

It’s only natural that the questionat the back of everyone’s mind is When will this end?

Feeling like we have no control of what’s happening triggers feelings of overwhelm and anxiety in many of us. Especially if our thoughts fall into the realm of the 3 P’s: thinking that it’s Pervasive (there’s no escaping it); thinking that it’s Personal (I’m the only one going through this); and thinking that it is Permanent (it will never end).

So, here are three things that can help keep pandemic fatigue at bay.

Change the Narrative

Fatigue, exhaustion, overwhelm- they are all stories of resistance. We feel triggered while imagining a future where everything goes wrong. Trying to calm down these negative emotions is challenging and only adds more fuel to the fire.

That’s because the shift from anxiety to calmness requires many steps along the emotional ladder. Excitement, by contrast, involves an almost identical physiological state with a slightly different story — a story that welcomes and looks forward to the future instead of dreading it. That’s why excitement is so much easier to pull off than staying calm. We’re no longer trying to change our basic physiology. We’re just changing our story about it.

Another tactic involves accepting the negative feeling in the moment instead of feeling ashamed or frustrated by it. This will actually help you feel less anxious. Acknowledging the feeling instead of fighting it frees you up to learn how to manage it. Accepting it doesn’t mean giving up, either. It means you stop spending energy berating yourself for being anxious and in a negative state and instead allows you to lean into holding space for yourself in that moment.

Pencil It In.

Postpone the overwhelm and anxiety – and make a date instead. Set aside 10 minutes each day during which you can feel all these feelings and anything you want! Give yourself permission to not be okay. You’ll find that you won’t perceive the situation which triggered the initial overwhelm to be as bothersome or worrisome when you come back to it later. Our thoughts actually decay very quickly if we don’t feed them with energy or attention.

Use the Most Powerful Words

Finding reasons to say thank you truly goes a long way. Gratitude is really the most powerful antidote against fear, anxiety, overwhelm, and stress. The truth is, we cannot be in a place of gratitude while being worried or anxious at the same time.

It also shifts the focus from what’s not working or how we think we’re not measuring up because at the neurochemical level, being thankful helps modulate the prefrontal cortex, which manages negative emotions.

Whether we do it through journaling or verbal expressions, when we are grateful, we are more empathetic and positive minded by nature and we’re able to dissolve negative feelings almost instantly.

Powerful Mindset Tactic Two

According to studies[1] the average adult makes approximately 35,000 decisions per day. But as entrepreneurial moms, that number easily quadruples. In between the mile-long list of to-do’s, the endless chores at home, what might be happening in your business, issues with your spouse or kids and handling finances, our daily quota of best “decision-making pixie dust” quickly runs out.

Decision fatigue was first coined by social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister, who identified it as “the emotional and mental strain resulting from a burden of choices.” 

When your mental energy is depleted, you either start making bad decisions or stop making decisions altogether. Work, home front and family are the three biggest areas where it gets depleted. Since in the past two years we have all been running on a smaller mental and emotional bandwidth, prioritizing what’s essential and non-negotiable from what isn’t is key.

A good strategy is to define what decisions have a high, long-term impact while also making as few decisions as possible throughout the day- especially those that we know are a given, like the dreaded “What’s for dinner” at 5pm every day. Here’s what that looks like for these three areas:

Business

For the most part, decisions related to our business rank high in priority and have high stakes attached to them. The best approach is to make a plan that allows you to make business-related decisions either on a a) need-to basis or b) preferably when your mental bandwidth is at it’s best_ i.e. at times when you’re rested and refreshed. This helps avoid making uninformed and costly decisions.

Write down your top business decisions and priorities for the day and tackle them at the beginning of the day when your pixie dust basket is filled up. This might require a bit of detective work, but in the end, you will be able to pinpoint what nonessential decision-making we can cut down on and live without.

With young kids at home this might be a challenge, so having plans in motion for how you make decisions regarding your home and family will help sustain your mental bandwidth for when you need to focus on the business.

Home Front

House-related decisions can rank lower in priority, meaning those decisions have lower stakes. Yes, we all want a clean house and a full fridge but deciding on whether we do laundry in the morning or evening won’t have a high impact or cost when it comes to your children’s wellbeing or your health, for example.

Automation and routines can help. Besides meal prepping, what other things can you already establish beforehand, so you don’t have to spend time thinking about them? Setting up automatic bill payment frees up a lot of time and energy. Having a meal calendar in place avoids brainstorming on the spot on what to cook that day. Even going as far as having a uniform for the week for ourselves eliminates the “what to wear?” conundrum. 

In a nutshell, set up your day so that you have to make the fewest decisions possible around the house so you can truly focus on what matters.

Family

As parents, we are still making the thousands of decisions we were already making pre-pandemic PLUS thousands of new ones we are given daily to think about. No wonder we’re mentally exhausted!

Examining your rules is key. Especially the ones regarding your children. What do rules and decision fatigue have to do with one another? Well, living with kids means that sometimes rules are meant to be broken. Or at least tested (daily by the kids) to determine how robust they are.

When we wonder “Are my children testing me?” the answer is yes. Probably not consciously, but they do want to have confidence that someone is piloting the plane so to speak.

The caveat is that rules mean enforcement. And coming up with ways to enforce rules is tiring! The more rules we have, the more enforcing we need, so more decisions need to be made. And in no time, your pixie dust is gone.

Allowing yourself some grace about where to draw the line is also crucial. This is where taking a stand about mom guilt comes in.

We are all doing the best we can with what we have and what we know.

Let. It. Go.

If no screen time on weekdays is your non-negotiable rule, and you have to go into a full-on enforcement mode about it, then do it. And let it go.

Because many times, we do it, and then we’re secretly wondering whether we should have been more flexible or if we are being too harsh. Then we go down a rabbit hole chasing a rabbit that we will never catch.

Go over your rules, trim out the ones that you can live without, and take a stand with your non-negotiable ones. Drop the guilt when you enforce.

Rinse and repeat.

Powerful Mindset Tactic Three

Does it sometimes feel like everyone seems to have it together, and you’re the only one scotch-taping your way through life? Or using double-sided tape, for that matter?

According to studies, 70% of women feel this way. That means seven of your ten best gal pals are also using glue guns to keep their life afloat.

Of course, that doesn’t make the fear and worry of Imposter Syndrome completely go away.

So why do we feel like phonies?

It tends to boil down to a deep-rooted inability to believe we’re good at what we do or that we have value. One tell-tale sign is that it’s hard to accept praise from others believing there is a hidden agenda behind other people’s compliments. It is difficult to fully believe praise towards us.

Another giveaway is we tend to go into a perfectionist streak, believing doing things perfectly will keep others from finding out we are not as good as they seem to think. But this puts us in an emotional hamster wheel waiting for the other shoe to drop and being found out. Therefore, anxiety increases along the way.

As women running our business we might even have praise deficit. Especially in those early stages of growing a business when we’re working solo or from home. We might not hear enough praise from others to give us a sense of whether we are doing a great job or not.

Listening to your self-talk holds clues as to how you handle praise as well as how often are you able to praise yourself. Do you deflect praise from others and play it down? When someone gives you a compliment do you automatically give one back? Perhaps you subconsciously think that if you stand out from the rest (even in a positive way), people will no longer like you or accept you.

Social acceptance is a survival mechanism dating back to our ancestors. We had to be part of the tribe to survive back in the cave days. The need to belong is deeply ingrained in all of us. However, modern life has made things even more difficult in this front.

One thing I’ve seen play out countless of times as a Licensed RTT Practitioner is how we’ve been conditioned to accept a narrative that puts us at odds within ourselves intensifying feelings of Imposter Syndrome and undermining our confidence as mothers and entrepreneurs.

It’s hard to feel like we are good enough when society places paradoxical demands on us: 

  • We are expected to be nice and play nice, yet “nice girls” don’t get ahead.
  • As women we are held to higher standards for work and professionalism yet we’re criticized if we are too good for others.
  • We are expected to put a strong front professionally yet lose business due to not being relatable.
  • We are expected to work like we don’t have kids and mother like we don’t work. 

Trying to actually live up to these expectations already set us up for failure. The way we can counteract this is two-fold:

Nurture Your Inner Cheerleader

The first thing we must do is be intentional about praising ourselves. Constantly.

Tell yourself the words you’ve been waiting to hear. This is where it pays off to be self-sufficient and give to ourselves the praise we want. We will never know a hundred percent what someone else’s intentions are when they praise us. But our mind won’t ever question our own praise.

Grab a pen and post-it notes and write “I am enough”, “I have fantastic coping skills”, “I’m a great mom to my kids”. Place them in your work area, bathroom mirror, fridge, near the laundry basket, as your screensaver_ wherever you are sure to constantly see them. These are great subliminal messages to feed your mind about your worth and value!

You do You

Another mental shift is to stop the comparison game. Stop comparing your apple crumble to another woman’s tiramisu. This is how you keep tabs on your mental and emotional state. Or as I like to tell my clients: You do You. The more we keep to our own lane, the less leeway we allow to Imposter Syndrome to creep in.

Sometimes, the feeling of not enoughness is so deep-rooted that seeking professional help is the best course of action. Just like anxiety and overwhelm, the silver lining is that Imposter Syndrome is highly treatable and the earlier you seek help, the better the outcome.

This is due to our internal beliefs creating a blueprint that conditions our mind into recreating overwhelm, anxiety and not feeling enough as familiar emotional scenarios. The good news is that we can transform and upgrade old limiting beliefs and rewire our mind with a powerful new blueprint.

Once you realise you can change your life through your beliefs, you will discover that you can remove toxic thoughts that previously prevented you from reaching your goals. Resetting our thoughts and actions and breaking patterns of negative thinking despite what might be happening outside our door is the fastest way we can bring about the results that we want in our business and in our lives.

When we are able to do this successfully, every single area of our life changes for the better. After all, we’re not only building successful businesses, but we also want to have a successful business that works around our dream life.

Hey mama!

I help business leaders and entrepreneurs achieve higher levels of success, confidence and freedom.By tapping into the subconscious and transforming limiting beliefs she facilitates powerful business transformations. Let’s hop on a Inspired Action Call with me today and let’s start shifting your limiting beliefs around.

Book your Inspired Action Call!

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/stretching-theory/201809/how-many-decisions-do-we-make-each-day

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Watch Your Step! The Interesting Way Your Mind is Hindering You As a Mom

Let’s start this conversation with a cliché: They say the day a baby is born so is a mother.

And here’s another one: Nothing quite really prepares us for motherhood (this one is quite an understatement).

From the onset of pregnancy, right down to the birthing experience, our child’s unique personality and even the circumstances surrounding our motherhood journey at any given moment, it’s hard to predict what will come up as we walk around with our mom’s hat on.

It might even be a case of we don’t know what we don’t know. Our unique motherhood journey unveils itself gradually with each milestone, stage and phase that we arrive to. You could even say that being a mother is such a dynamic role because we constantly have to be adapting and piecing together all the layers and variables that come our way in real time. It’s impossible for anyone to fully prepare ahead of time as all the possible combinations are too many to predict.

Simply put, there’s a myriad of cognitive and emotional demands placed on us given all the learning that takes place while we parent.

Yet, one thing I’ve seen play out countless of times as a Certified RTT Practitioner is how at some point during our motherhood journey, The Pebble in The Shoe Theory begins to unfold. And how it starts to undermine our confidence as mothers.

For the most part, we think our life journey is a linear one: going from being infants, to children to teenagers and then to full-grown adults. And that our role as mothers also follows a linear path (baby arrives and we begin to acquire practice and knowledge about what to do next). It seems that our past experiences have given us a better vantage point from which to effectively parent.

But it is not usually the case.

And the most tell-tale sign of this is when we enter what I call the triggering zone.

We enter the triggering zone whenever it seems that our kids have found the exact buttons to push that get us into reactive mode. It’s almost like we don’t recognize ourselves. Only after we’ve had time to mull it over, and mom guilt finally creeps in, we realize with embarrassment that we probably took things out of proportion and there was no need to react like Mommy Volcano.

But in the heat of the moment, it appears we’re simply going on auto-pilot, reacting the same way again and again, even when we have tried to change our reaction or even negotiating with ourselves that no matter what, we won’t go off like last time. (Only to repeat the cycle the next day).

Why is it that our kids push our buttons like no one else?

And why does it feel we’re constantly in this loop: feeling overwhelmed and frustrated to the point of snapping and over-reacting, then feeling guilty about it afterwards and trying to change our ways but falling into the same pattern repeatedly?

Cue in The Pebble in The Shoe Theory.

The triggering happens because we’re re-enacting a relationship that shaped who we are now as adults.

Yes, that’s right. We’ve been in a parenting relationship before, except that previously, we were the child. What’s more, most of our internal beliefs came from this dynamic.

The blueprints we internalized as children while we were being parented by our parents are pretty much still in place when we reach adulthood. If we haven’t actively been doing the inner work on ourselves prior to becoming mothers and ‘peeling away the layers’ as they call it, we will tend to carry with us all these old beliefs and blueprints around like an old suitcase, and which are at play when we parent.

It is part of our human experience to form beliefs about ourselves and the world around us to make sense of things. Through our childhood and even still to this day, we continue to have millions of beliefs, some ranging from the inconsequential (“X brand is the best brand for paper towels”) all the way to what we subconsciously believe about ourselves or our abilities (“I’m not really good at math”) and everything in between.

Internal beliefs underpin every single action we take or not take, without exception. There is never a situation where a belief isn’t at play. And this is mostly highlighted in our role as mothers. Sadly, many of those beliefs tend to be outdated and limiting. But because they operate subconsciously, we’re not usually aware.

What The Pebble in The Shoe Theory is about is that our children tend to be our biggest triggers because when we interact with them we re-enter a relationship we’ve been in before and so we’re playing out (now as mothers) a part that we were subconsciously witness to: that of our own parents’ behaviors and attitudes when they parented us.

The caveat is that we’ve only played this interaction from the child side in the past and now we’re mirroring this dynamic from an outdated blueprint.

Our children’s behavior in fact has nothing to do with our triggers. They are going through their own developmental stages and acting age appropriate as they go through their own growing curve (barring any medically diagnosed conditions).

What our children do is act as a mirror that projects back at us our own beliefs and conditionings that formed during childhood. But because it’s a mirror image, everything is reversed. And we are unable to see how the distortion is playing out in real time. Or in this case, how we’re approaching our parenting through a lens that is outdated, limiting and in most instances, no longer valid.

To show The Pebble in The Shoe Theory at work, let’s look at this flipped image of singer Adele below.

Twitter/TurnYourPhone

The image is a seemingly mirrored version of the original, used as the cover art for her album “25.” However, if you look at the image right side up (or by turning over your phone) you’ll see something much more disturbing.

While Adele’s face has been turned upside down, her eyes and mouth have actually been left the right way up. As a result, when we turn the picture right side up, the singer’s face looks outright nightmarish.

This is known as the Thatcher Illusion, and it illustrates how our brain can’t properly process a face (or a photo of a face) that is upside down. The interesting part is that the brain thinks it can, so you get a confident feeling that everything is alright, until you turn it over.  

So how does this link to The Pebble in The Shoe Theory?

In a nutshell, it illustrates how what we think might be triggering us is actually an upside-down version of old beliefs we have internalized that are distorted (but from where we stand they seem quite ‘normal’) or we simply don’t notice it (they are blind spots).

We think we parent from a cause-effect logical standpoint: Our child acts and we react to it. Or more specifically, our child acts and that behavior triggers us. Just like how we think Adele’s upside-down face image looks okay.

But when we flip it the other way around, we realize the features are not what they should. Likewise, when we start to recognize our triggers as blind spots that signal old limiting beliefs at play, and how we might be re-enacting those early-year relationships we had with our caregivers and parents, we then start to see how outdated and limiting they truly are. 

Becoming aware of this is the first step towards changing how we parent to avoid falling victims to these triggers and perpetuating the cycle with our kids. Therefore, we can start healing ourselves from limiting and self-sabotaging beliefs that are holding us back.

When we’re feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, and triggered we think we need to address the feeling directly.

But the overwhelm and frustration are only the symptoms. They’re not the issue.

It may seem you feel overwhelmed and triggered because your child just had tantrum number thirty of the day, or she is not cooperating the way she should, or the constant whining is driving you crazy.

In fact, it may also seem that all of the million to-do’s, the endless chores at home, what might be happening in your business (or at work), issues with your spouse or partner, your finances, or just simply trying to juggle all the balls in the air are the reason why you’re feeling triggered.

But this is not why you react with overwhelm and frustration.

All of the above- including your children- are external things. They are happening OUTSIDE of you.

The root cause of your overwhelm and frustration lies in your thoughts.

What you actually think about the circumstances in your life. These are your internal beliefs: the ones that were wired in when you entered this parenting relationship the first time around. Back then you were the child in the relationship. And you internalized things from a child’s point of view.

These beliefs created a blueprint that conditioned your mind into using it as reference moving forward. Now, as you find yourself on the other (parent) side of this parenting relationship some decades later, your mind is looking at the relationship the same way you look at Adele’s upside-down picture. It seems familiar and for the most part, normal. But we know it could very well be distorted. And our triggers point to where those old limiting beliefs are hidden because they are causing overwhelm and frustration.

Depending on your own personal set of circumstances and upbringing, the blueprints that you formed in your mind early on, can either be working for you or against you.

The constant triggers point towards a misaligned blueprint. 

We think we’re able to tackle motherhood from a clean slate and armed with all the knowledge we accumulate from books, workshops, classes or even from others that have gone before us as we first become moms. But we have certainly experienced the parenting relationship before.

The so-called pebble in the shoe refers to all those limiting beliefs we’re carrying around unaware of their existence and how they might be impacting the way we’re showing up as mothers.

The reality is that everyone’s beliefs-which are almost always invisible and unconscious- shape every single thought and action we take in every area of our lives.

Beliefs are like the Thatcher Illusion. It’s only when you turn them on their head that you can begin to see the truth even though what you “see” looks “normal” yet, in reality, it is often highly dysfunctional and contradictory.

Our inner beliefs, like our mind, arise out of our biology, but are influenced by so much more than cells and signals: Our emotions, memories, relationships, also play a part albeit unconsciously in how these beliefs are shaped.

To break this cycle of triggers and negative thoughts, you need to be aware of the limiting beliefs that make you feel overwhelmed, stressed, angry, frustrated…and start to choose to act on a different blueprint altogether.

If you understand the importance of upgrading old limiting beliefs and rewiring your mind (with a powerful new blueprint) I invite you to take the first step into having a Rapid Transformational Experienceso you can leave overwhelm and frustration behind, and instead install powerful new beliefs that will make you feel inspired, calm and confident as a mom. Frazzled mom is so last year! Step into your motherhood shoes empowered and with ease knowing there’s no painful pebbles keeping you triggered.

Schedule your free Connection Session with me. We’ll talk about all the things that are limiting you.

As a Certified RTT® Practitioner, I’ll share what you can do right now to start taking Inspired Action and feel calmer, confident and guilt-free. Even if we don’t work together, you’ll leave the session knowing the exact steps to break the cycle of limiting beliefs so you can move forward with confidence and ease.

Book your session here:

https://calendly.com/themomergymovement/30min