Believe in Yourself
This is Your Lifework
Believe in Yourself! If your self confidence is being tested by unemployment, underemployment, a promotion, job interview, child raising, or life(!) affirm your successes and renew your faith in yourself. We can’t wait for other people to bolster our confidence and nourish our being! Trust Yourself – The Hero’s Way!We need to trust ourselves rather than blindly following the latest guru of the day. Doing our best to be good human beings; loving our children, spouses, making a decent home and livelihood is a heroic journey! Believe in Yourself!
Remember Past Successes & Build Confidence A near middle-aged man in one of my last workshops had followed his calling for the past decade with unbounded zeal. Alas, his career had never developed into long-term employment but rather, was fraught with numerous set-backs, lay-offs and even dismissals. With five children to feed and his life passion now shelved this man faced depression and desperation. Yet, we could all borrow a page from this man’s heroic story as he further explained how he was managing this most difficult passage. He said rather than allowing himself to be crushed by these demeaning events he emphatically reminded himself of his numerous life successes. Through this, he refueled his belief in himself enabling him to persevere with a measure of dignity. Believe in yourself by focusing on your many successes. Stop now and list at least ten of your life successes. Reminding ourselves frequently of our accomplishments rather than nagging ourselves with our so-called “failures” is the crux of finding meaning and peace in work and life. If we can’t encourage and support ourselves now, the “ideal job” will not supply us with the happiness or fulfillment we seek. If your self confidence is being tested by unemployment, underemployment, a new promotion, a job interview, child raising, or life (!) affirm your successes and renew your faith in yourself. We can’t wait for other people to bolster our confidence and nourish our being! Nourish Your Being Turning fifty years old this week supplied me with the perfect opportunity to either nourish or negate myself and my life. To believe in myself or not. As I reflected upon the last decade of my life I found warm comfort in the woman I have become. Not always so. As I reread my “Fortieth Birthday” column, I’d written for a local newspaper a decade ago, I could clearly see how far I’d come. Back then, my fortieth birthday reflections led me to grieve. I had left behind decades of broken relationships and lost businesses – all strung together by my deep need to be loved and approved of by others. Within that column, I spoke with somber sadness of not wanting to repeat my broken past in the next half of my life. In closing that Fortieth Birthday column I made an earnest wish for myself, I wished “to live the next forty years being true to myself.” Believe in yourself. Rereading this column showed me clearly my wish had come true this past decade. This priceless gift affirmed how far I’d grown from that 40 year old woman who had abandoned herself – for decades – seeking inner worth, love and acceptance through external props and people. How remarkable to have unearthed this time-capsuled treasure, written a decade ago, upon my fiftieth birthday! We can all give ourselves this priceless gift of believing in ourselves, affirming our lives and nourishing our being by pondering our past and seeing how far we have come. Our mistakes no longer have to be something we punish ourselves for. Now, we can make an effort to have compassion for ourselves, re-write those old stories and give thanks for the lessons learned. By performing these small rituals of remembering and affirming our lives, we nourish and build our being. It is in here, inside, we build a strong, solid foundation that can help us weather the storms of life. Through building a strong sense of self we can find a new freedom and believe in ourselves. Freedom at Fifty The slogan “Freedom at Fifty” takes on a new spin when I think of how free I am now compared to when I tried so hard to please everyone. The disease to please, often driven by feelings of insecurity and unworthiness can be chronic and life debilitating if left unchecked. Do you balance your needs for quiet, private time with the needs and demands of work, career-search, family, friends, life? A client of mine, aged “fifty-something,” regularly stops and asks herself, “What do I want/need here?” She went on to say that now, in her fifties, she is able to set boundaries with her family as never before. We both affirmed we have discovered a real freedom in our fifties. Before you accept that next job, take on another task, commit to someone else’s agenda - stop. Take some time and ask yourself, “What do I need here?” How can we hope to find our Way if we do not listen to ourselves or find time for ourselves or believe in ourselves?
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return to your True Self, God and Gifts? If so, you would likely be interested in my Mentoring Program. TERESA’S LIFEWORK MENTORING The purpose of my Lifework Mentoring program is to help you hear the voice of your True Self - your Inner Guidance. Only when we are connected to our True Self (God, Higher Power, Inner Guidance, or however you choose to define this) can we live our life authentically and fully express our gifts. My Lifework Mentoring program is about you uncovering your answers from within. It is not about me supplying so-called 'expert' answers for you. Listening for Your Holy MusicMy Lifework Mentoring is about creating sacred space wherein your soul feels safe enough to speak its truth. I’ll reflect your inner wisdom – your holy music - back to you. Through listening to our soul speak we come to know our truth and then, can more readily follow our deepest calling. "Teresa, thank-you so much for sharing your strength and wisdom with me -- and for giving me a gift I didn't really realize I needed -- permission to truly express my authentic self and to tell the world who I really am and what I offer. For that I am truly grateful." Jan Moore, MACertified Retirement Coach | Each of us has our answers within - sometimes we just need to listen more deeply, practice more patience, solitude, reflection, contemplation and sharing with someone who listens and cares. For many people - friends and family cannot offer this type of mentoring or support when the time has come to listen to one's own truth above all else. Within my Lifework Mentoring I offer suggestions and practices for you that have brought me closer to my True Self, and have resurrected my mission and my passion from the ashes. Most of us simply need someone who can reflect our “holy music” back to us and encourage us to follow our True Self. It is so easy to overlook our own ‘God-ness.’ Please visit me at "Lifework Mentoring" if you would like to find out about our introductory, 30 minute, complimentary Lifework Mentoring session. ************************************************Enjoying These Articles?
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************************************************Trust Yourself – The Hero’s Way! Buying a VCR may not seem like a noteworthy purchase in a high-tech world yet it proved to be a worthy blessing offering much learning. Boxes filled with VHS recordings were unearthed from dark recesses where they had hidden for over a decade.! Replaying some old home videos for the first time in fourteen years eerily pulled us back to witness a much younger self - long ago left behind. One of our time-travels took us back to 1991 to perhaps the first workshop I publicly presented called “Being Your Best, Inside and Out.” There I stood, so very polished, professional, all-knowing; assuredly directing people how to think and present themselves correctly in order to have successful lives. Barely a chink showed in that professional armor.
Self-Help Sledge HammerI shuddered to hear myself assuredly espouse the latest personal development philosophies without fully evaluating how those words might affect others. I had not considered how people might feel after being told “You must do this/do that, strive for more, set the right goals, live with passion, avoid mediocrity, change your thinking, be a peak performer etc… to be successful.” How carelessly back then I said, “If you think you have a comfortable life, are comfortable with your job, home, family this is the death rattle. To be comfortable is a death. We must always be reaching for more…” Now, through living a much kinder approach to life I know this endless striving for more is often a compensation for feeling inadequate - not good enough. Now I know that calling anything short of peak performance – mediocrity - hurts us. This “self-help hammer” devalues our human journey. The same night we were reviewing my past “self-help” seminars we were called to pick up our fifteen year old boy from a Friday night party. The parents wanted us to know they had found bottles of vodka and some kids had been drinking. We managed to handle that volatile situation with enough love and understanding to hear the entire truth from our teen. (Quite a different story from the cover-up being told at the party!)
The Heroic JourneyDoing our best to be good human beings; loving our children, spouses, making a decent home and livelihood is a heroic journey! Any philosophy that intimates we are failures or are living lives of mediocrity if we work in a job that is not our passion is the antithesis of self-help. Perhaps the job is not our greatest love but often we do it out of love for our homes and families and in this, there is great honor and humility. Of course, this excludes forcing ourselves to work somewhere that is toxic or making us sick. Nor am I advocating ignoring our dreams or the changes we long for. Rather, I am suggesting we put more trust in ourselves and our God for our answers than in latest “How to Achieve” philosophies or shallow societal values.
Grow Self-Trust Our self trust grows the more we notice how we are feeling after hearing, reading or watching something. Do we feel a little bigger and better about ourselves? Or do we feel less-than if we do not comply with the message? We need to look inside for our truth rather than blindly striving to follow the latest guru of the day. As our teenage son remarked about my canned “self-help” video given so long ago, “I didn’t know you were one of those phony people who go around telling people what to do!” To be fair to myself those workshops back then were an excellent experience for me, offered with good intention and some pearls. However, at that time I had not come to realize how damaging this continual striving and pushing to do more, be more, change more, is to our precious selves. Back then, I worked over-time to hide my feelings of inadequacy and mostly commandeered my world from my head. Now, I do my best to live and speak from my heart… to live a much kinder life philosophy. So my heroic friends be kind to yourselves, trust your own inner wisdom, and know you ARE worthy just by being.
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