Authenticity Requires Consistency After Recognizing what feels off, Exploring the facts with curiosity, telling yourself the Truth, Understanding your patterns and needs, and Reclaiming the narrative of your own story – this is what comes next: you move forward differently. You make decisions from alignment instead of fear. That’s what it means to Navigate your life authentically. In the last step of the RETURN Method, we are free to move forward in our lives and live from a place of authenticity. That sounds exciting and rewarding, but what exactly does it mean to Navigate Your Life Authentically? What is it actually like? Most people value authenticity in theory but struggle…
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The Story You’ve Been Told vs. the Story You Choose Everyone tells themselves a story about their own lives. We all carry around a story of who we are and how we got that way. A lot of those stories were written when we were little, oftentimes during moments that felt bad and made us feel like we weren’t enough. Being bullied when you’re in middle school may have taught you that you needed to prove yourself, that you needed to maintain a certain image in order to have value. You may have created this narrative around an isolated, yet ongoing, event that happened and had nothing to do with…
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The Power of Understanding Yourself Many people try to “fix” themselves before they even really take the time to get to know themselves. How can you fix something you don’t fully understand?It’s common to: …without first asking ourselves: When you don’t understand the underlying problem, you tend to treat only symptoms. The result is often a series of chasing, reaching, and repeating affirmations – while subconsciously fearing that they might actually come to fruition. At any point in your journey, it’s important to be aware of how you’re feeling, your boundaries, and your values. If you don’t already know what your boundaries are or how you feel about a particular…
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The Moment After Curiosity So here we are. We have recognized that something feels off and explored the facts with curiosity. Now it’s time to be honest with ourselves. Here, we’ve reached the Truth step of the RETURN Method. Being honest with ourselves about our own truth and our own responsibility is a natural next step. While this type of honesty is very direct, it doesn’t need to be harsh or scary. Acknowledging a truth that you might not like doesn’t have to be a confrontation. We can consider it to be data that we use moving forward. The truth is stabilizing. It’s not something that needs to be avoided.…
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Once you’ve recognized that something felt off and spent some time with yourself to see how you feel and how you would like to respond, it’s time to take a look at the facts. In the second step of the RETURN Method, we aren’t fixing or reacting to new information – we are exploring it. We aren’t looking at something, assuming something about it, and then spiraling in our heads after. What we are doing is gathering more information. We look at the information that we have with curiosity and observe facts. What did you experience yourself? List what you know to be true. Take a breath and look at…
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The Subtle Signal Most People Miss If you aren’t in tune with your body, you might miss the subtle cues it gives you. Your body tells you when it needs something; its always communicating with you. When we don’t understand ourselves well enough to recognize the signals within us, it can lead to challenges in other areas of life. Have you ever felt anxious and uncertain, only to realize you hadn’t eaten at all that day? Maybe you had a headache and then later remembered that you didn’t drink enough water. We might have days where something feels “off,” but we aren’t sure what it is. Sometimes we just accept…
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The Exhaustion of “Fixing” It’s so common to feel like something is “wrong” with you. The idea that we aren’t good enough has been marketed to us our whole lives. Other people project their insecurities onto you and make you question yourself. Someone who doesn’t know how to handle their own emotions makes you think you are lacking in some way. There are a lot of things that separate us from who we are – from infancy all the way until now. Self-development is great, and I would say it’s actually quite important. However, there is a difference between growing as a person versus constantly trying to fix something about…
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Sometimes it seems that we diagnose someone else as being insecure, as if it’s a jab. Under the right circumstances our ego might take the wheel and call that other person insecure – as if by comparison, self-doubt doesn’t apply to everyone. However, when we are the ones experiencing uncertainty, it’s easy to find reasons to feel worse and fall deeper into victim thinking. Let’s talk about where self-doubt come from, and how to build real self-esteem. Needing external validation is a learned thing, absorbed over years like secondhand smoke. And just like smoke, it clouds everything – how you see yourself, how you move through the world, and how you…
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We all want to be accepted by the group, included, and made to feel like we matter. It’s part of our evolution; at one point not being accepted by the group meant you lost safety and would likely get eaten by something. Now, the consequences aren’t so dire, but we still want to be accepted. It seems like sometimes there’s almost an unspoken idea that the more liked you are, the more value you have. For those of us who learned to attune to others early, or learned connection through caretaking, being liked by the group may feel specifically important. We may expect approval as a necessity. Check out Stop…
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Introduction I was thinking recently about all the times I’ve heard someone say they wanted to do something, go somewhere, speak up – but they felt bad about actually doing any of it. Have you ever been there? Maybe you wanted to say no to an invitation to go out, but you said yes because you “felt bad”. Maybe you wanted to ask the server about your order because you specifically requested no cilantro, and there’s definitely cilantro in this – but you don’t want to make anyone “feel bad”. I’ve even heard stories from friends about going on dates, or spending more time with someone than they actually wanted…
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Introduction: Looking Beneath the Surface I recently started a new job, and I really went into it with the idea that if I could have all of my questions and answers ready, I would be more prepared, more successful, and start doing really well right out of the gate. While I would soon realize that my expectations just needed to be managed with regard to time, I learned something here. Typically, it takes a long time for people to get started in my field, so I was actually on track as I was. As it happened, I wasn’t considering that a new hire is clearly going to be experiencing different…
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I’ve talked to a lot of people who would consider themselves ‘people-pleasers’. If you can relate, you might already know that it’s exhausting, lonely and never ending. People-pleasing is deeper than the desire for attention or approval, the desire to people-please is a message that there are parts of you that need to heal. For many of us, constantly tending to other people’s emotions, and keeping tabs on how they feel is a deeply ingrained survival mechanism. We learned this early on in life to stay safe, feel enough, or avoid rejection. More often than not, this pattern stems all the way back to childhood experiences of trauma and emotional…
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How do you normally react when someone tries to push your buttons? Do you immediately feel your heart rate increase and roll up your sleeves? Or, do you take a moment to pause, and think about how you would like to respond? What if you withdrew your energy altogether and chose to be unbothered? Today, we are going to discuss healthy detachment. You can think of this in action, as pulling your energy back from a person or situation. No big exit, no heads up – just quietly reclaiming your power. We’ll also talk about what happens on the other side of that energetic shift. Does the other person feel…
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The Opinions We Imagine Have you ever worried about what someone thinks? Have you ever been making plans, putting an outfit together, or even just looking at yourself in the mirror, and suddenly found yourself feeling self-conscious because you’re worried about what someone might think of you? So many of us base our decisions, our moods, and even how we feel about ourselves on what other people think about us. Before making decisions, we often think about what other people think. Sometimes those are opinions people have actually expressed to us, such as advice from a parent or expectations from a friend. But other times, we’re not responding to their…
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When Your Center Moves Back to You Eventually, there comes a point in our healing when we realize that the things happening outside of ourselves are much less important than what’s going on, on the inside. When we detach and begin focusing on our own well-being first, our center moves back to us. In my last post on healthy detachment – Healthy Detachment – What It Is (and What It Isn’t) – we explored what healthy detachment actually means and how it creates emotional space for what’s important to you. What’s interesting is what begins to change once you start putting that understanding into practice in real life. Your internal…
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The Moment You Realize You’re Waiting I overheard a conversation recently where two people were talking about someone, and referred to them as a “pick me girl.” They were talking about someone who seemingly goes out of their way to get attention and clearly makes her presence known. For some of us, people like that can be a little much, but I was curious to understand further. It got me thinking about the term “pick me girl.” To say someone is that type of person, we are essentially saying they are someone who raises their hand enthusiastically in hopes of being chosen – hence the term “pick me.” Why would…
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The Strange Fear of Letting Go Overthinking is the worst. It takes up your time and valuable space in your mind. Sometimes we get in our heads over the most insignificant thing – and it can run away with us. What if something bad happens? What if this happens? What if that happens? If we struggle with worry and overthinking, we often resort to the worst-case scenario almost instantly. Maybe for some of us, we ruminate for days or more on the same subject. We might think about every possible outcome until we’re sure we’ve thought of everything. Being in worry makes us feel like we’re doing something. Sometimes worrying…
