Category Archives: Blog

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Has Shame Got You Stuck?

3 Strategies To Help You Win The Battle For Your Identity

Have you ever felt stuck? You’ve got lots of ideas and many directions you could be taking, but you just feel immobilized. It’s almost like you begin something new, criticize it, and abandon the idea in your mind because you know it will fail all before you’ve even taken any action. If you’ve ever had this experience then shame might be keeping you stuck.

Shame? Can it be? Is it really that hard to believe? Any human being with the capacity for compassion and empathy can experience shame. So, save sociopaths, we’re all at risk of feeling the sting of shame at some point in our lives.

Shame is aimed at our self-worth. It introduces itself as the threat that we aren’t lovable and convinces us that we are unworthy of connection and belonging. When it’s present, our thoughts center on what’s missing instead of what’s there. We become scarcity-minded, are constantly comparing ourselves with others, and are generally disengaged.

Sure, we struggle to keep performing, proving, pleasing, and perfecting for others so that we can fit in, but we never really feel like we belong. We wear a mask to hide our imperfections and stay silent about what really bothers us because we’ve been told that our voice doesn’t matter. When something pokes our sore spot, we get defensive and others wonder what’s wrong with us.

According to Brene Brown’s research on vulnerability, shame, and living wholeheartedly, around 80% of adults live in a struggle for worthiness, and 41% of adults can recall a stifling emotional experience where their creativity was criticized. The resulting shame altered the way they felt about themselves and became a part of their identity.

So, shame is a battle for your identity. In the human psyche there’s nothing more powerful than what you believe to be true about yourself. It affects every single action you take, every single day. We will seek to act in alignment with who we think we are because we have a deep need to feel congruent with those beliefs about ourselves. I refer to identity as “the force that shapes our destiny” because our destination is determined by our decisions, and our decisions are determined by our identity.

So, how do we get out of the shame cycle? Here are 3 strategies that will help you out. 

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Change This To Quickly Increase The Quality Of Your Life

Increase The Quality of Your Life

So what if I told you that there was this one thing that, if you changed it, would exponentially increase the quality of your life for the better? Would you be interested? I hope so! Because the reality of many of our lives is that we’re not happy with how things are and we’d like to make things better but just don’t know why we don’t feel like doing it.

I shared in a previous post about how distraught I became after the release of my book in January and how I struggled with feelings of depression and discouragement as a result. But what I didn’t share with you was one of the most powerful tools I used to get out of that rut and get back on track to feeling a greater sense of meaning, purpose, and satisfaction with life.

One of the most powerful ways we can transform the quality of our lives almost overnight is to change the way we’re evaluating our world. And if you want to quickly increase the quality of your own life it’s time to ask better questions. 

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5 Ways To Stop Sabotaging Your Success

The definitive guide to getting out of your own way

Don't Shoot Yourself In The Foot

Sometimes it feels like we are destined to fail. We achieve something great only to have life bring us down. We take 2 steps forward and 1 step back. Things are really going well in our lives and then the bottom drops out. It feels familiar to us and unfair all at the same time. We know something’s wrong, but what could it be?

Have you ever felt this way? If you have, then you may be subconsciously sabotaging your success. I know, I know…Why would anyone deliberately destroy something they worked so hard for? Why would anyone want to become the cause of their own failure? Well, the simple answer is…no one would! And yet many of us find ourselves stuck in the cycle of self-sabotage without realizing that it is ourselves that have created our own circumstances.

Maybe you’ve been in a relationship where your partner treats you better than you’ve ever experienced and then, all of a sudden, you feel a reason to distrust them. Maybe you got a promotion at work and then, all of a sudden, you’re extremely unhappy. Maybe you reached a goal that you’ve always wanted and then, suddenly, you feel sick.

After my recent book release, I found myself in a miserable place. I had just accomplished a significant goal in my life and business but I wasn’t happy. In fact, I felt discouraged, powerless, and unsuccessful. Why? Why had a new height in my personal success story been followed by a new low?

The truth is, none of us are immune to self-sabotaging behaviors. And if we want to be truly successful in our lives and businesses then we’ll need some tools in our kit to help us break the cycle of these negative and limiting behaviors.

Here are 5 ways to stop sabotaging your success and start living life without limits. 

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Springing Back To Life When You Feel Dead Inside

How do we act when what once brought us so much joy now brings us so much pain?

We all feel dead sometimes. Lifeless, discouraged, maybe even depressed. These feelings are our soul’s response to disappointment. Something in our lives didn’t turn out quite like we’d planned and now the force of life that once flowed in us and through us feels painfully absent.

I recently battled these feelings after the release of my first book, “Your Best Is Next.” I didn’t know it at the time, but during the writing process my subconscious was forming an expectation of how I was going to be treated after I’d published. I thought that I’d release the book and I’d be selling copies to everyone on my list (that didn’t even come close to happening), that my phone would be ringing constantly from journalists that wanted to interview me (nope, not even once), and that my book would open doors for more speaking engagements so that I could share my message with established audiences (you guessed it…nada).

I became really discouraged by what wasn’t happening. I stopped writing on my blog (as you may know). I stopped leaving my house to work and isolated myself. I started eating lots of junk food to make myself feel better but it only made me feel worse! I was completely lost in my own sorrow and didn’t know what to do. I didn’t feel like creating. I didn’t feel like writing. I didn’t feel like doing much of anything.

So what do we do when our dreams are unfulfilled? How do we act when what once brought us so much joy now brings us so much pain? What can we do to snap out of our dead moment and bring our hearts back to life?

The answer comes from the central figure in human history and what the pattern of his miraculous life teaches us about restoring the life to our own. 

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Why Change Is So Hard and What To Do About It

WhyChangeIsSoHardArticle

One of our biggest obstacles to putting our pasts away is the way others lock us into the way we behaved in our past. Do you have these people in your life? It’s definitely not just in extenuating circumstances like the ones I’m describing. Family relationships can be some of the most difficult to navigate when we’re in our process of transformation. People that have known you to be one way and behave certain ways continue to expect that you’ll always be the same. It’s as though you can’t change in their eyes, because if you did the new you would place an enormous amount of pressure on them to change as well.

Change is not something that most people do well. When asked to change how they approach their work, for instance, most employees will give lip service to their bosses but continue doing things the way they’ve always done them. Why? Because change is work. Not laborious, physical work but introspective, spiritual work.

Change causes us to look inside at the way we do things and how we view others. It demands that we adapt to a new way of seeing and being. Change is hard to grasp for minds that are resistant to growth.