relationships – Self Discoverly

What is the Difference Between Emotional Management & Emotional Processing?

December 5, 2023 selfdiscoverly

If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “This too shall pass,” then you may be able to grasp emotional processing. When we process our emotions, we let them flow through us without resistance so that we can release them. When we manage our emotions, we see them as something unruly in need of being tamed or as something too big to truly experience in the moment. From a simple definition perspective, this is the difference between emotional management and emotional processing. Emotional management is taming the big emotions so that they do not become out of hand and lead to projection, defensiveness, offensiveness, self-harm or self-destruction. Emotional processing is accepting and allowing our emotional experiences and emotions to flow through us and releasing the cause leading to the emotional experience. When we process our emotions, we find the cause and uproot it never to be triggered by it again. Emotional management is what we reach for when we are unable to process our emotions.

UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONAL MANAGEMENT

Emotional management has many names. Coping, stress management, behavior management, riding out the storm, surviving… When we manage our emotions, we seek to get through whatever challenge we might be having. In the moment, we do not have a belief that we can process our emotions and free ourselves of the cause behind the emotion, so we simply seek to manage the situation. It’s kind of like when we have young toddlers running around our house. That is not the time to tidy our home and stage it for a viewing. Instead, we simply manage the situation. We keep the toddlers alive, we keep potential dangers out of reach, we give them toys and things to occupy them and accept the mess in exchange for happy toddlers. When we are on active toddler duty, we are likely not focusing all our attention on work, on household tasks, etc. And so it is with emotional management. If I get really bad news from work, but I’m about to pick up my two kids from school, melting down or losing it has to wait. And so, I manage my emotions by distracting myself, grabbing a coffee, or just thinking about something else. I suppress the emotions in that moment. Emotional management is what we use when we do not believe that we can experience our emotions fully in that moment and let them flow and release the cause behind the emotion or emotional experience. When we temporarily suppress our emotions, then feel and release them when the time is right, this is healthy emotional management. When we suppress our emotions and refuse to feel or release the causes and instead let the unfelt emotions and emotional experiences build, this is unhealthy emotional management.

UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONAL SUPPRESSION

Sometimes we suppress our emotions only temporarily while we get to safe place to feel them and other times we suppress them for years and years! The problem with doing this is that over time emotional suppression causes emotional sickness. Every emotional suppression causes another layer over a previous emotional suppression. What we must understand about emotional layering is that the only emotion we can process is the one on top. This means if we put off feeling and releasing an emotion and choose to suppress it and then a new emotional experience comes along that we too choose to suppress, before we can process the first emotional experience, we have to process the new one. Emotional layers build and to access lower layers, we have to peel away top layers. If we have a chronic habit of suppression, you can see right away that the clean up job of this is going to be massive when we finally decide to feel and process our emotions! Liken it to a leaf clean up on an acre property surrounded by trees. If we wait four autumns to do that leaf clean up, it’s going to be significantly more involved than if we just did an annual leaf clean up. Our emotions are no different! Suppressing our emotions is not avoiding them. We may be able to deny them and temporarily forget about them, but every time we are triggered and experience a trigger response, that triggering is because of an emotional experience or emotion that we chose to suppress!

Unconscious emotional suppression is the worst kind of emotional suppression because we do not even know we are doing it. As children, we learn emotional management and processing skills and unconsciously we adopt these skills and for many of us never realize that we are engaged in these behaviors so never wake up to become aware that they are learned behaviors. So for most of us, when we begin the process of self-discovery, awakening and emotional processing, we are faced with a really, REALLY big clean up job. When we look at it this way, we can understand why we reach for emotional management or coping mechanisms instead!

COPING MECHANISM EXTREMES

Depending on the level of emotion, different emotional management tactics come into play. For the average person who may have had some life disappointment and hurt may manage their emotions by reaching for sugar when they are stressed or getting busy when faced with big emotions, but for the person who has a lot of trauma, the pain that is experienced may be more severe and so after exhausting all the average emotional management tactics sadly seen as normal–caffeine, sugar, salt, avoidance, denial, etc.–we may see some turning to addictions like drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, excessive spending, etc. If we can understand that ALL emotional management is an attempt to distance oneself from emotions, we can understand that nobody wants the addiction. What people want is RELIEF from feeling! It is the seeking of relief that sometimes leads to addiction. But addiction itself is sought by no-one. Until we understand this as a society, we will not change how we look at addiction and therefore change how we treat it. If people knew how to process their emotions and that there was a light at the end of the tunnel FROM doing it, there would be a LOT less addiction in our world. Addiction continues to exist because people do not know and therefore when faced between pain and relief, they reach for relief. Furthermore, because we live in a society where suppression, denial, self-deception, avoidance and resistance is the norm with work and 95% of the population is in survival mode, we simply view emotional management as how we regulate our emotions. On top of that, the level of survival mode that we are in as a whole sadly leaves very little opportunity to choose emotional processing over emotional management.

THE TRUTH ABOUT EMOTIONAL REGULATION

When we regulate our emotions, we step out of fight, flight, freeze mode. We pull ourselves back to neutral before triggering. Emotional regulation is not emotional processing. When we process our emotions, we gain understanding about what the cause of our emotions and can then with understanding believe in our ability to allow the emotion to flow until it passes through us. The reason that it feels like there is no end to emotional processing when we give this a try is because we have layers upon layers of unprocessed emotions within us and so, similar to emptying a 24 foot swimming pool, it will feel like the process is never going to end! This is why emotional management and emotional regulation are even a thing. If we were all taught about emotional processing from birth and our society was built in a manner where everyone just felt their emotions in the moment and let them flow, there would be no addiction, no coping, no managing stress, no stress at all! The truth is that we are faced with regulating our emotions and managing them because we live in a society that demands our emotional suppression and shut down in order to accommodate its needs and wishes. What we are most coping with is the expectation to engage in things like emotional management and emotional regulation–which of course expect us to suppress and shut down our emotional experiences to make another feel safe and comfortable. The expectation of emotional management is ALWAYS about accommodating another!

UNCONSCIOUS IMPRISONMENT

We are living in an age where we believe that slavery has ended. We believe that concentration camps will never be a thing again in “democratic” countries. We believe that democratic countries actually have freedoms. This could not be further from the truth! True freedom–EMOTIONAL FREEDOM–is when we have complete autonomy over our time, energy, and choices. That means that when we are truly free, we awaken each day to abundant access to nutritious food, clean water, a safe shelter, ideal temperature control, every other basic need as well as opportunity. We also awaken to complete choice over how we spend our time and energy. This means that we are not bound by a schedule, having to rush around to get kids to school and ourselves to work. We can pursue passions and interests, explore, and basically follow after our own curiosity and feelings. Rare is it to have a human being having this lifestyle and experience. This is because an individual would have to be raised with this mindset and conditioned to the skills, tools, and knowledge to align one’s life in this way. For the majority, we were sent to school and conditioned to become workers for the 1%. Rockefeller himself once said that he was creating school so the 1% could have workers. And so, step one of this massive undertaking of emotional processing is to awaken to the reality of the world we are living in. Until we can see our reality clearly, we can not possibly see our options.

THE OPTIONS

Option one is to stay asleep and radically accept your own reality whatever that is including the ebbing and flowing of emotional regulation and emotional management. Option two is to awaken to reality, accept the self-discovery journey and choose emotional processing over emotional regulation and emotional management. We cannot choose to awaken without also choosing the self-discovery journey though. Once our eyes are opened, they can never be closed again!

PART OF THE JOURNEY

Something that I learned on my own road of self-discovery has been that love capacity and emotional management and emotional processing abilities go hand in hand. If we do not know what true love or real love or unconditional love or authentic love or whatever term we want to use to capture this kind of freely given love without conditions, then we will not grasp the benefit of choosing a self-discovery or emotional processing journey. The difference between emotional management and emotional processing is also to do with perception. If I believe that there is no benefit to processing my emotions–that love will be at the end of the tunnel, for example–I will not feel enough motivation to engage in this feat.

TWO KINDS OF LOVE

When we feel loved and love without conditions we understand the concept of needs. We come to realize that no human can survive without their needs being met. Furthermore, we understand that when another human being engages in unloving behaviors, addictions or unhealthy emotional management, they do so because they are attempting to meet their needs, not to deliberately harm me. And, the behaviors they are engaging in are the only things that they have belief in. When we have perception of unconditional love or real love or authentic love, we have agency. We have free will or personal choice. We can choose between engaging in unloving behaviors, addictions or unhealthy emotional management or we can choose love. Until we have the perception of two polars of love, we lack autonomy, free will or personal choice. We only have true agency when we have perception of unconditional love. This means that it is an impossibility to change behaviors without first becoming aware of and educated on what unconditional love actually IS.

WHAT IS LOVE?

For the person in need of receiving love, love is to be seen, heard, and understood by another. Our needs are seen, our behaviors are understood and our voice is heard. We are known by the loving person and therefore no longer alone in our experience. From our current level of consciousness, we are unable to love ourselves and therefore need to be loved by another. This love may come from authors, content creators, doctors, therapists, friends, or other individuals with the ability to meet our needs. As we humble ourselves to the receiving of this love, we acquire skills and tools which enable us to eventually meet our own needs. Once we can receive unconditional love from others, we can begin to connect with ourselves and discover ourselves and our inner-being (what some call an inner-child) and over time discover the needs of this inner-being and meet his/her/their needs ourselves. This is what self-love is known as–the nurturing and loving of our inner-child. Once most of our needs are met, we can then freely give unconditional love to others because we have the capacity to do so. Prior to this experience, we are bound by conditional love or ebbing and flowing love because when triggered, when unable to process our emotions, when overwhelmed, we will step into unhealthy emotional management patterns and the receiver of our “love” will not feel it as love. It is because our emotional regulation, management and processing is linked to our capacity to receive and give love that makes it the greatest call to action.

PRESENCE AND AUTHENTIC LOVE

Authentic love (or what some refer to as unconditional love, but what I refer to as a more realistic form of human love) is nothing more than accepting another’s free will. When we love authentically, we understand that the only thing we have power and control over is our own feelings, thoughts and actions. And truly the only love that we have control and power over is the love we let in and the love we freely give away regardless of whether others let it in or not. We cannot force love into another human being. Even if we love them with all our might, only they can choose to let it in, but first, they have to believe in it and perceive it as love. We are human. We live in an imperfect world. The vast majority of us are plagued by this triggering/survival emotional experience that requires us to regulate our emotions and manage our emotions over processing them. The BEST love that we can give from this place is well-intentioned love where our intention is to love authentically or unconditionally, but we may become triggered and react as we learn—the commitment to learn and change being the bridge from intention to realizing unconditional love capacity. And so, lifting the pressure from ourselves that we do have our priorities in the right place, we are seeking to love unconditionally and we are accountable when we fall short.

ONLY ONE WAY TO ELIMINATE PAIN

While addictions and coping mechanisms feel good in the moment, they require constant hits to maintain the “feeling good” effect. There’s only ONE way to eliminate pain for good and that is as Robert Frost once said, “through.” Only one way out and that is through. It’s in. We have to accept turning inward. We can’t put off one more day where we let our emotions pile up. For some of us, the emotions reach the top and there’s no more piling that can happen. And once the piling reaches the top, the pain of pressure from so many layers ends up forcing us to respond. I think this is why many sages say that those with the most trauma and pain have an advantage? I have never seen it this way. I only see all emotional management and pain as a call to action to change and rebuild our societal structure to create an emotionally free society where everyone can thrive. As we are learning, we will be at the whim of emotional regulation and emotional management. There’s no way around it. Setting our goal to eliminate our own pain of the past and to learn how to process our emotions gives our lives direction and the hope that as we learn and develop these skills, we can experience a different reality.

WHEN FACED WITH THE CHOICE

When faced with the choice between reaching for long term emotional management or emotional processing, consider this: There is an absolute time to reach for emotional management. One of this times is when we are first learning emotional things and we have yet to reach a place in our development to understand how to process our emotions or before we even gain intellectual understanding of emotional management and emotional processing. During this time, the best course of action will be to manage our emotions. But as we grow and the longer we are on the journey, we come to find ourselves faced with the conscious choice to choose between emotional management and emotional processing. When we reach this place in our development, here is something that can help you to decide. When faced with the choice, look at emotional management and emotional processing like this: Authenticity desires you to win. Propaganda wants to win. Authenticity desires you to process your emotions and gain true emotional freedom. Propaganda desire you to manage your emotions so you stay dependent on the system. When we choose emotional management long term, we choose the same system failing billions of people every day. When we choose emotional processing, we take steps toward creating a new earth–a new world filled with conscious people with their own agency–where we are all emotionally free!

This is my hope for you, Discoverlies!

MUCH LOVE!!

Turn your New Year’s Resolution into a Lifetime Resolution

December 3, 2023 selfdiscoverly

Ugh! New Year’s! Why does everyone make such a big deal about resolutions and why do we all start off so motivated and excited, but by Valentine’s Day, we all seem to be buying those damn big boxes of candy? I’ll tell you a secret! Our emotions are in the driver’s seat of ALL resolutions. Doesn’t matter how strong our will is, in the end, absent emotional understanding of ourselves, our emotions are the trump card.

SO HOW DO WE TAKE CHARGE OF OUR EMOTIONS?

9 out of 10 times, when we are reaching for something that is not good for us, we are doing so because we have been conditioned to seek that behavior pattern to calm our nerves and manage our emotions. Maybe our dad would come home from work grumpy and our mom taught us early on to stay in our rooms and play quietly to give him space and quiet when he came home. Now, in our adult life, anytime anything mirrors this dynamic we find ourselves “playing quietly” in our room when we want to be working on our goals! It is not enough to tell ourselves that we are not eight years old anymore. Our eight year old self cannot hear us. There’s a disconnect and when times of stress arise, all she wants to do is run to her room for comfort and safety–her fear makes her deaf. So, before we can inform her that she no longer needs to hide in her room, we need to gain understanding of her so we know how to communicate with her so she can hear us! The only way to connect with her and communicate with her is through self-connection.

HOW DO WE BECOME IN TUNED WITH OURSELVES?

STEP ONE: BECOME THE WATCHER

The first step is to learn how to see our inner-selves. Until we are able to identify the behaviors, feelings and thoughts associated with our inner-selves, we will not be able to know what to do next. Observe yourself retreating to your room, take note of the feelings arising within you, pay attention to the thoughts running through your mind. If you feel inspired, begin to write down your observations so that later you can process your experiences. Once we gain insight into our own thought and behavior patterns and can connect feelings with past experiences, we can transition into step two.

STEP TWO: BE KIND TO YOURSELF

Our inclination is often to judge ourselves once we identify behaviors and thought patterns. “Uck! What is wrong with me?” Please do not do this. There is NOTHING wrong with you! None of these things are your fault whatsoever! You were a teeny tiny child when you absorbed these thought and behavior patterns! It’s an eye-opening experience to come face to face with the unconscious. Believe me, I get it! But it’s also a miraculous experience because beyond the UCK is your dreams, goals, and perfect vision for your life! And that is why it is so very important that we are kind to ourselves! Absent kindness and gentleness, we create another obstacle to overcome! As an observer, there is no judgment. All we are doing is taking note of what IS.

STEP THREE: BEGIN TO PROCESS AND MAKE CONNECTIONS

If your childhood experience involved your mom taking out a pint of ice cream anytime she was stressed and now you are watching yourself doing the same, take note of the behavior pattern. You now know why you are doing what you are doing! You LEARNED this coping mechanism! FEEL that! Embrace the a-ha moment! You now know why you are constantly at the table with a pint of ice cream every time you are stressed! The pint of ice cream is simply a coping mechanism you LEARNED! And this coping mechanism is so engrained that now, when you are stressed, the only way you know how to manage the anxiety is to eat the ice cream! It’s the only tool you have in your stress management tool box! If your New Year’s resolution is to lose weight, can you see how understanding this dichotomy is so very essential to achieving your goal? We can increase the tools in our stress management tool box and with the added tools comes added choices and options!

STEP FOUR: DON’T EAT THE ICE CREAM

If you can allow yourself to be overwhelmed only a little, there is much wisdom to be gained. When we make a conscious choice to resist our urges to unconsciously self-soothe and we choose to instead see what our feelings are all about, we take a step closer to being able to clear the block standing in the way of our emotions freely flowing. If you’ve read past blogs of mine, you remember that emotions are just energy flowing. It is our emotional blocks that keep them from flowing. Absent blocks emotions just flow. We were taught to shut down the emotion with the ice cream, with quiet, etc. We were taught to shut down our needs so that our dad could have quiet when he came home, for example. As a result, we learned that emotions should be shut down rather than felt. As a result, a lot of our emotions became stuck and the shutting down behavior became the block keeping the emotions from flowing. That means that the only way to get our emotions to flow is to remove the behavior associated with the emotional shut down. And once we do that, the emotions should automatically flow.

STEP FIVE: BECOME THE WATCHER OF THE EMOTIONS ABSENT THE COPING MECHANISM

What feelings are arising when you do not engage in the coping mechanism? What sensations are you feeling? Is your heart pounding? Are you shaking? Have you lost all ability to think? Or maybe your thoughts are racing a million miles a minute? Is all you can think about getting back into that safe place? Are you able to breathe? If so, try to take a deep breath from your nose and inhale to your belly. Try to hold onto the breath for a minute before exhaling. When you exhale, exhale hard to release all the air. Try doing this for as long as you can to stay present. After the breathing, see how you feel. Do you feel any calmer? Any safer? Any better? Or are you just as anxious and desirous to reach for that coping mechanism? If you are finding it challenging to do this work, reach out to a mental health professional who can support you so you don’t have to go it alone!

STEP SIX: PROCESS OUT THIS EXPERIENCE

What did this experience teach you about yourself? At the very least, are you now able to see the connection between your past and your coping mechanism? If the answer is yes, then you’ve opened a window into your consciousness! Congratulations! Now you understand how the process of self-discovery works! The more that we allow ourselves to experience our emotions instead of shutting them down, the closer we get to self-connection. Once we process out enough of these experiences, we become so confident with the process that we really do not need to read blogs like this one. We will just understand and best of all, DESIRE to do the work. We will see the benefit. We will see our lighthouse (our New Year’s resolution) at the end of the tunnel waiting for us and we will feel our stuck emotions and want to move the blocks so they can flow knowing once they do, we win. Emotional processing is not really as complicated as people make it out to be. The MOST complicated part of emotional processing is our resistance. FEAR stands in the way of so much growth. What we do not know or understand (or believe in) causes us to resist. We believe in our pint of ice cream because it’s familiar and it eases the anxiety in the moment–it works immediately. But afterward, that extra 50 pounds we are carrying around remains the same. We appreciate the self-soothing in the moment, but then fight with our negative thought patterns after when we gaze at ourselves in the mirror, when we struggle climbing the stairs without getting out of breath. This is because we believe MORE in the pint of ice cream than we do in the natural process of self-connection, feeling our emotions and letting them flow. Our environment taught us that the right thing to do was shut down our emotions, so now letting our emotions flow feels awkward because we are so used to shutting down our emotions. Before we can believe in something new, we must SEE these truths and FEEL them for ourselves. Only after we see and feel will we be able to decide for ourselves the cost/benefit of both options.

STEP SEVEN: TAKE YOUR OWN SELF-DISCOVERY JOURNEY

Now that you’ve done a test run, consider taking your own self-discovery journey. Instead of setting a New Year’s resolution that you likely are not going to keep, why not set a Lifetime Resolution to become conscious? As a conscious person, you’ll have complete dominion over your emotions, thought patterns and behaviors and setting and achieving goals and objectives will become a lot easier. You’ll never have to set another New Year’s resolution again because instead you’ll be working toward your best life every day!

FIND YOURSELF, FIND YOUR ANSWERS

Once we discover ourselves, we discover our younger selves and we become able to connect with her/him/they. Connection enables us to nurture and meet our younger self’s needs for ourselves rather than waiting on someone else to do it for us. It enables us to understand our past and present selves. It enables us to have clarity on our thoughts, behaviors and emotions and as such enables us to simultaneously have clarity on best solutions. We are all different so googling “how to self-care” or “how to achieve my goals,” is likely not going to bring us the answers that will best help us. ONLY turning inward and finding ourselves can yield us the BEST answers. EVERYTHING you want to and need to know can be find within you. There is nothing that I can say or do that will be more helpful than what your inner-self can say to you! I am only here to assist you with the work TO unite you with your inner-self. Once you become connected with your inner-self, you will not need somebody like me! And that is my hope for you, Discoverlies! I created this platform because I knew my early struggles trying to find information, trying to find knowledge and wisdom to assist me to calm the war going on inside of me, to ease my anxiety, to change my dysfunctional behavior patterns…to achieve my own New Year’s resolutions. And in the end, that entire journey brought me full circle to myself.

THREE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF

I no longer set New Year’s resolutions. My resolutions are integrated with my life goals now. Here are the three questions that I concluded are THE most important if you choose to kick New Year’s resolutions to the curb and instead make a Lifetime Resolution.

WHO ARE YOU?

Do you know who you are? Like REALLY know? I am talking deep down knowing. Do you know what your true desires are? Do you know what your personal values and beliefs are separate from conditioning? Do you know your integrity? Do you know your worth and value? Can you FEEL this worth and value? How about your life purpose? Have you reached a place in your life where you have a sense of knowing that there’s a reason that you are here and that nobody can do or give what you can? When we know who we are intimately, we develop an inner-confidence and self-assurance that cannot be shaken by even the darkest critic or fiercest hater. Once we truly know ourselves, we desire our authenticity more than we desire acceptance or approval.

2. WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

Do you know your direction? What path are you on? Do you know the reason you are on that path? Do you know where that path leads and the ends to that path? Is your lighthouse at the end of the tunnel about you are is it about someone else? When we know where we are going, we feel confident and clear on that destination and with that confidence, we trust the destination we’ve set for ourselves and believe in our ability to reach it. While we may be miles from where we are heading, we trust fully in the charted path. And the simple act of having the destination carries us for years and years as we ebb ever closer to arriving at our desired destination.

3. HOW ARE YOU GOING TO GET THERE?

When I determined where I was going–self-discovery and authenticity–I already knew how I was going to get there. Having been on the path for over a decade, I learned the formula of emotional identification, emotional management and emotional processing. I came to understand relationship management and processing. I gained insight into the importance of priorities and boundaries and the power in slow and steady consistency. Most of all, I learned the power of faith and trust in the universe and its assistance program that is powered by my and other’s personal requests. I need only ask for help and help comes. All I had to do was learn to ask the right questions and develop patience for when those questions would be answered. Sometimes, I have to gain more knowledge and understanding on something before the thing I am requesting gets granted. For example, if I want to eat nutritiously, I first need to understand how my body works, what it needs and how to decipher between what is nutritious and what is not. Furthermore, I need to learn what is nutritious for my body versus someone else’s. It’s a process. And for me, after being on the journey long enough, I simply discovered that setting my goal of achieving something like paying off a debt was not as inspiring as setting a goal of self-discovery. For me, I learned that the more that I know and understand about myself, the more conscious I will become and with that consciousness the more likely I will know what the next best step is. I discovered along the way that I can influence my outcomes through conscious perception. When I can see the next best step, I do not have to engage guess work. And I found that the only way to have such perception is with self-discovery. Self-truth precedes universal-truth, so the more I know myself, the more I will know everything else.

Lifetime Resolutions give us focus. They give us direction. They also give us a lot more grace and mercy. Learning is infinite and only possible with mistakes. We learn through trial and error. And many times, it is from our errors that we see the answer. In my opinion, New Year’s resolutions are a lot of pressure. They require a lot of will power and tend to come with a lot of misery. I remember diets I’ve been on in the past that involved my will power. I despised the kale and spinach and eventually became rebellious and said, “Fuck it! I am having the brownie!” which of course led to more than one brownie and a vicious cycle of self-loathing. Been there done that and never found any self-confidence or self-worth. I found things like self-love, self-compassion, self-understanding, self-care, self-confidence, self-assurance, meaning, hope, faith, and love on my self-discovery journey. And during this journey, I have found that lasting achievement is possible once we are achieving things for the right reasons.

DO IT FOR THE RIGHT REASON

FAR too many of us are chasing goals to be liked, to be approved of, to be accepted, to belong, to be loved…

“If I win this title, everyone will have to love me.”

“If I make this much money, everyone will approve of me.”

“If I rise to the top, nobody will hate me.”

These are the types of thoughts that often propel people’s New Year’s resolutions and goal setting. They are not about self-care at all. And we wonder why so few can achieve their New Year’s resolutions. Long ago I adopted a self-belief that I would rather be alone and myself than with people. The pain and stress involved in being liked and accepted by others was too great. At one point in my life I accepted that nobody was going to like me. I was unlikable. I of course, later discovered that I was likable to the right people, but before I could discover this, I had to be where I was and so, I accepted that I was unlikable. This simple acceptance freed me because it enabled me to drop all the approval seeking, acceptance seeking, people pleasing behaviors that I was engaging in that were draining all of my time and energy. With those behaviors no longer weighing me down, I could use all that time and energy toward pursuits that actually mattered to me! Along the way, I discovered a liking for myself and with this self-confidence, I quickly found others who liked me too! And what a difference it is to be in relationships with people where I can leave the mask at the door! How much easier it is to just be myself than to pretend! I learned that it was better to be myself and have a handful of people who liked me and accepted me than having to wear around a heavy mask and seek after goals that only drained me and left no lasting joy. Instead I decided to figure out what made me happy and what the ideal life was for me. What this taught me is that Lifetime Resolutions give our lives direction and purpose and with them, there is no need for New Year’s resolutions!

EMBRACE YOURSELF

You ARE lovable, Discoverlies! You ARE worthy! You deserve EVERYTHING that you desire and this New Year’s, I want to learn that you are believing in these truths for yourself and taking action to not let another day go by where you are trapped in old behavior patterns! Embrace who you are right now and believe in who you TRULY are! Believe in your worth to discover who you truly are! Once you believe it, all that’s left to do is take the first step.

I believe in you, Discoverlies!

Much Love!!