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Meet Joy In It’s Tracks!

Meet Joy In It’s Tracks!

Tell Yourself These Three Things To Find Your Peace

I have found myself working with clients lately who tell me they feel completely stuck in their lives. They describe experiencing lots of intense big feelings. They are connected to symptoms of anxiety, overwhelm and report an inability to move forward.

Are you experiencing this too?

Are you lying in bed at night, and feeling completely overwhelmed with all the thoughts of the day, instead of falling asleep?

Do you wake feeling exhausted and continue to overanalyse life? Is it easy for you to make decisions, or does the analysis paralysis kick in and everything has to be considered?

Before I commence any work with clients, I find myself exploring all their perceived blockages. I get the client to explain in detail how they internally experience their challenge.

When you breathe air into that area that feels stuck, things start to open up from within. You can gain an incredible understanding of exactly what is jammed into tiny spaces. You can learn, see and feel all of the things that contribute to what you are perceiving as stuck. When you shine a light on the resultant subconscious behaviours that you implement unknowingly to keep you safe.

When you are in neurological survival, you aren’t thriving. Your clarity of thought has been sabotaged. Your decision-making ability has been hindered by trying to process too much information.

When you are in survival, your brain is simply reacting to the outside world. You aren’t seeking joy bubbles, and you are running a behavioural program that is likely anchored into something from the past.

When you are in the space of survival, you are not present.

There is an art to returning to the present moment. It is where you can create change. The present moment is where you can reset and revitalise. It’s also where you maintain motivation to continue chasing joy bubbles.

 

Here are three things you can tell yourself to return to right here, right now.

1. Start the day right

Before your feet hit the floor, the moment you wake up. Take a deep breath in and out. Smile (because the muscles required to move your face generate a tiny dopamine hit) broadly and state the following-

Good morning gorgeous! Today is going to be a great day!”

Sounds ridiculous I know. But seriously try this. The reason it’s so successful is that this is your first energetic intention for the day. 

This singular statement can be likened to ringing the bell for the universe to come calling, ready to take your order for the day. This statement (or something like it) is very intentional. It drives purpose and it is very high in vibrational energy.

Stating this statement first thing in the morning is like you are creating your internal weather system. It’s the easiest way to manifest emotional sunshine for your day ahead!

2. Choose again.

Throughout the day, remind yourself that the human mind can experience up to 80,000 thoughts a day. I know busy mind right? Additionally, you need to be aware that these mostly subconscious thought processes can contain up to seventy-five per cent negativity.

Why so blue?

Your brain automatically defaults to what you thought about yesterday. You’ve laid the thought cable already through your analysis, review, and audit. And then you attached emotions to the thoughts — in other words you have already attached evidence that you were correct to feel bad about the thought.

The brain has already placed the thoughts into the memory system. Evidence locked in. It’s that simple.

When you have a positive thought, your brain will seek evidence to demonstrate you were correct. Therefore it takes a little more effort on your part to create a shift in the tide of negative you think about.

I liken your body to a gigantic hotel. Your mind is the presidential suite. When you have a negative thought come along, it’s like a homeless person is using the bed of the presidential suite as a toilet — you get the drift. 

That negativity needs to be immediately evicted for you to remain present.

If the thought is crappy and negative, then your presidential suite is being trashed and abused. This is what negativity does to your psyche.

Due to the sheer number of thoughts in your mind, in my clinical experience, we don’t need to analyse everything. You simply need to insert a circuit breaker into the mind mix and change the direction of where you’re heading.

You can try saying “choose again”, which was coined by Gabby Bernstein a decade ago. Alternatively, you could try the Byron Katie question “Is that real?

Both are useful and have their place as guards against negative thoughts continuing.

Here’s the thing, the moment you consciously recognise that something negative has sprung up into the mind, you can choose to take action. Insert the circuit breaker question and simply breathe.

The use of breath allows you to calm down physically through the recognition that you aren’t under threat. This breath brings you into the present moment and reactivates the brain that the old survival program is not required.

Once you’re present again, you can better discern what is real and right in front of you, or what is simply an old and unwanted thought pattern. In this moment of recognition, you are changing the plasticity of your brain and choosing a new neural pathway to reroute the thoughts.

Fair warning. When you first begin to ‘choose again’, or ask yourself ‘is this true?’, you may easily become overwhelmed with the number of times your awareness is alerted to negativity.

Let me say that this is normal when you first realise how much smack you think and say to yourself!

I choose to see this as a very productive step forward, and you can too. The more you acknowledge, the more you shift, and the faster you change the old reactive thoughts.

3. Wrap up the day well

At the end of the day, as you’re brushing your teeth be sure to make eye contact with yourself. Allow your eyes to soften at who you see. 

This is a simple act of kindness to and for yourself.

This single gesture also sets you up to dialogue with yourself. No matter how extreme your day has been, you need to celebrate you survived another day. 

Dig deep and find some small component of your day that you could celebrate — even if only starting a high vibe with your morning intention.

Celebrating small wins allows the body to create small hits of dopamine. It also trains your mind to actively seek positivity, instead of becoming trapped once more on the negative mouse wheel.

This simple exercise works well for your night and sleep routine. You’ve inserted a circuit breaker of thinking of the negative and actively gone searching for evidence of what was potentially good. 

For those days where it seems nothing has gone well, I invite you to use the time to reflect on what you learnt about yourself or another. This activity allows you to place yourself in another’s shoes and observe their behaviour or actions. 

Observation allows you to see another’s experience, without you having to judge or invest in their drama. Sometimes when you can acknowledge that another‘s behaviour is subpar, the realisation is a gift on many levels. 

We are all human, working towards perfecting our imperfections. We all have good and bad days. We all experience stress. We all respond differently to stress.

Conclusion

What might you lose if you could set your intention, keep those negative thoughts in check, and wrap up a day by being your cheerleader? Give just one of these tips a go, to shift your motivation to live the life you want!

First published with Illumination, a Medium Publication. Click here this piece.

Need a taste of calm?

Click here to enjoy Karen’s latest
freebie offer.

Enjoy this program’s short presentation, which includes the experience of a meditative hypnotic recording to support resetting your calm.

Want to read more like this?

This is My Roarsigned copies of my first published book can be purchased from this website. Self Reflection – A little Look Withinclick here 8 Hot Tips How To Journal – click here Can You Risk Not Stepping Up To Mother yourself?Click here

About Karen

Change Facilitator

Karen Humphries is a Kinesiology Practitioner, Health & Business Coach, LEAP & NES Practitioner, Intuitive Meditation Facilitator, and published author. She is a self-confessed laughaholic.  She loves being of service to the world with her humorous and positive approach to life, encouraging people to ‘choose to change and bloom from within.’ 

Karen Humphries, Change Chick, Change Facilitator, Kinesiology, Wellness Coach, Australian Bush Flower Essences, LEAP Facilitator, Trauma, Public Speaker, Cancer Ambassador, Blooming From Within, Traralgon, Victoria, Gippsland
Do you look good in orange

Do you look good in orange

Ask yourself this question next time you’re about to lose it

I had a client exclaim in her clinic session the other day that she was ready to kill someone. Namely one of her family members.

Don’t worry. She’s not a serial killer. And I took the opportunity to remind her that losing your shit causes you to wear orange and heavy duty bracelets!

It’s just that her frustration had escalated so significantly and tipped over into a space of unregulated emotion — namely anger and rage.

She had become a volcano head – ready to explode at any moment, fuming and seething with barely contained disdain. She was exactly like a volcano before it erupted, just smoking away frightening the local townsfolk -namely her family. Her emotional state was exceptionally volatile and she felt completely out of control.

There are numerous things that lead us to feel frustrated. Here are some examples:

  • Feeling not heard within a conversation or space
  • expectations not met despite your best planning efforts
  • juggling too many balls in the air at any given time

Frustration is likely to be the top layer of a feeling. There will be more emotion beneath that has not been spoken, expressed, or given air. It’s highly likely that you may not even be consciously aware of all that is festering beneath the surface.

Frustration can have a voice of its own. A voice that rants, raves and yells uncontrollably. A voice that speaks often from a sense of stagnation or helplessness, an inability to make things happen in the way that someone wants.

The vibrational frequency of frustration means that those feelings of unmet expectation can rapidly escalate to anger or rage in the blink of an eye.

Need some tips to release frustration?

Frustration is often a kinetic energy. This means frustration is a moving emotion, and you’re unlikely to be able to sit still with it. Additionally, you are likely to require some movement to shift the sensation of the unwelcome negative-based emotion. Moving your mouth will commence activation of the release, but you are likely to continue to feel frustration deeply within your body.

1. Stay present

When we feel uncertain about something, this can be likened to triggering an unconscious fear. Therefore our human reaction is that we tend to want to control the process or outcome. This is driven by fear of the unknown, uncertainty, or loss of control. It’s an emotion that is based on the future tense.

When you can remain present, you’re not activating the neurological survival program that drives you to start planning all of those contingencies in your head to counteract the undoubted and misperceived doom you’re stressing about.

2. Accept you are human

Our human existence mandates that we are always gathering data from our experiences. Our brain gathers sensory data of what we see, hear and feel. What also happens is that our brain attaches an emotional response to the sensory data, and creates a program.

This allows your brain to simply respond when an experience is repeated without having to recreate the same program. When we re-experience an emotional response, our brain simply reactivates the survival reaction that was originally created.

Why?? Because change is a constant in our lives. Our brain has a wonderful compensation program to reduce the need for reprograming everything, and therefore screen out what it perceives as useless detail.

Change is a gift. A gift to learn more. A gift to evolve. A gift to flow and receive/give more through our life. I am referring to the gift of shifting or relearning the subconscious survival reactions to create positive change in your life.

However, if your expectation is unrealistic — that you want the outcome to be perfect the first time — you’re setting yourself up for heartache. We weren’t born and then ran within hours of birth.

You’re not a horse. You are human.

You must first engage your neural pathways to create patterns and habits, rather than stumble, trip or fall. In turn, this trains the brain muscles to move you into new experiences of attempting to walk in new ways without falling. You learn to step out of your survival reaction, refine your resilience and then move forward metaphorically.

3. Manage Expectations

When you place an unrealistic expectation in relation to that experience you attempt something the first time and there is failure, two things happen. You doubt yourself.

Doubt makes you feel big emotions associated with failure when you don’t meet the expected outcome. You shame yourself subconsciously in relation to not achieving. This can lead to diminished self-worth and a misperception of insecurity. This doubt expands your fear of trying again and failing, rather than simply feeling safe or confident enough to make another attempt to achieve the experience.

4. Acknowledge your beliefs

Think back to when you were younger. Were you raised a winner?

I’m being serious now.

Set the snoopy snigger aside, and reflect on whether you were raised with ‘tough love’ or ‘all participants receive a reward’?

Your response links to the previous point and the potential expectations you developed from childhood about how things should be. Your beliefs and values influence your bias, what you know to be true. These aspects of your psyche also influence your behavioural patterning.

When your perceived expectations are not met, this will generate a negative emotional response. This reaction is often subconscious and not something we can initially control. This reaction reaffirms the fear to be true.

Continually failing to meet expectations can generate bad behaviour within ourselves, and worse, trigger misperceptions in others about who we are. In other words, it can quickly lead to a misperception of feeling, or worse feeling judged.

In this circumstance, before you lose it ask yourself the Byron Katie question in relation to the unrealistic expectation — “Is this real?”

This singular and powerful question allows you to acknowledge that the old reactive belief (based on the survival reaction) may now be outdated or no longer serve you. This acknowledgement allows you to step out of the old non-serving program, and release the negativity of frustration, anger and rage. It allows you to choose a different emotional outlook.

Our old programmed survival reactions drive the negativity of frustration and anger. Ignoring the signals this emotion generates, allows the energy of it to build.

As the frustration escalates, your capacity to remain calm diminishes, because your survival reaction is heightened. This is the mental and emotional tipping point of whether you change the colour of your outfits — can you walk away or do you find yourself reacting and later regretting?

Conclusion

Consider implementing one of the suggested actions should you experience those moments of intense frustration, anger, or rage and don’t want to wear an orange jumpsuit!!

First published with Illumination, a Medium Publication. Click here this piece.

Want to read more like this?

This is My Roarsigned copies of my first published book can be purchased from this website.

Self Reflection – A little Look Withinclick here

8 Hot Tips How To Journal – click here

Can You Risk Not Stepping Up To Mother yourself?Click here

Need a taste of calm?

Click here to enjoy Karen’s latest 
freebie offer.

Enjoy this program’s short presentation, which includes the experience of a meditative hypnotic recording to support resetting your calm.

About Karen

Change Facilitator

Karen Humphries is a Kinesiology Practitioner, Wellbeing Coach, Intuitive Meditation Facilitator, Clinical Hypnotherapist, and training Resource Therapist. She’s also a published author. 

She is a self-confessed laughaholic.  She loves being of service to the world with her humorous and positive approach to life, encouraging people to ‘choose to change and bloom from within.’ 

Karen Humphries, Change Chick, Change Facilitator, Kinesiology, Wellness Coach, Australian Bush Flower Essences, LEAP Facilitator, Trauma, Public Speaker, Cancer Ambassador, Blooming From Within, Traralgon, Victoria, Gippsland

How To Beat Sunday Scaries

How To Beat Sunday Scaries

Three strategies to overcome dread and avoidance of a new week

Does this happen to you? You have a ripper weekend, jam-packed with adventure(s), excitement and joy bubbles, only to arrive at your Sunday afternoon and then, meh?

Does the arrival of Sunday night generate a sensation of reluctance, anxiety or even dread?

My clients tell me they dread Sundays and Monday mornings. Their complaints mirror that of mild allergic reactions! They report overthinking all the things. They overanalyse tasks or encounters. They tell me they experience shortness of breath with their panic!

Let’s combat that crap because next week isn’t here yet!

I was listening to Mel Robbins on an Instagram live the other day and she referred to this feeling as the Sunday Scaries! It’s an appropriate reference when you think about it.

Of course, we would all love to have longer weekends and sloth our lives away. But if you’re anything like me you’d soon get bored and seek creative stimulation.

Here are three things you can do to release, delete and let go of the Sunday scaries

Let go of expectations of what will happen this coming week.

This type of thought process is based on the future-based time reference. You can’t change what hasn’t happened yet. Additionally, when we have negative thoughts about the future, it’s often linked to a fear of something unknown, unforeseen, or uncertain.

You don’t want to be entertaining negative thoughts. You certainly don’t want to be investing your mental energy and accidentally intending an experience you fear!

Let go of expecting you will complete everything on your to-do list.

As one overachiever talking to another, let’s get this fact out in the open. It’s virtually impossible to tick everything off your to-do list. There I said it and the world didn’t implode!

If you’re getting ready to argue with me, let me ask you these qualifying questions

Just how hard would you have to flog yourself in order to get everything done?

  • What do you really gain by ticking everything off the list this week other than fatigue?
  • What do you fear happening if you don’t finish?
  • Will you likely shame yourself or be unkind, or worse feel like a failure if you don’t finish?
  • And frankly, why would you want to insert yourself into such a state of stress that you’re half dead once you’re finished??

Perhaps instead you could start to ask yourself, what could I do right now in this moment and stick with that single task until it’s finished?

Maybe you could tackle the hardest thing on your list? Perhaps you could smash out all the easy tiny things first?

Pick one strategy and try it this week.

Create a positive mindset and focus on how you want to feel at the end of next week.

Take a few moments to picture in your mind what you want to feel and allow your imagination to create the sensory experience of how you will look, feel, hear or even taste Friday afternoon.

I invite you to activate your imagination and ask yourself the following:

  • How might that feel in your body?
  • What might you see (perhaps yourself ticking off all the things on your list)?
  • What could you see yourself doing if you felt like you accomplished something rather than just surviving another week?

You can choose a calm approach to the week ahead. This choice shifts your mindset from a negative outlook to a positive one.

When you choose a calm approach you are creating opportunities to go with the flow and achieve more than you ever expected. When you are calm you can focus more readily on the task at hand.

When you are calm, your thoughts are clear and often concise. You tend not to wander off on tangents or get distracted. The problem-solving parts of your brain remain in solution orientation rather than survival.

This type of calm mindset allows you to be kind to yourself and slow down enough to listen to your body’s signals — when do you need to do more or perhaps when do you need to slow down and rest?

Resting isn’t a sign of weakness. You’re preparing the body and the mind to reset and recharge and become ready once more for another round of life experiences!

First published with Illumination, a Medium Publication. Click here this piece.

Need a taste of calm? Enjoy Karen’s latest freebie offer –click here.

Enjoy this program’s short presentation includes the experience of a meditative hypnotic recording to support resetting your calm.

Want to read more like this?

This is My Roarsigned copies of my first published book can be purchased from this website.

Self Reflection – A little Look Withinclick here

8 Hot Tips How To Journal – click here

Can You Risk Not Stepping Up To Mother yourself?Click here

About Karen

Change Facilitator

Karen Humphries is a Kinesiology Practitioner, Health & Business Coach, LEAP & NES Practitioner, Intuitive Meditation Facilitator, and published author. She is a self-confessed laughaholic.  She loves being of service to the world with her humorous and positive approach to life, encouraging people to ‘choose to change and bloom from within.’ 

Karen Humphries, Change Chick, Change Facilitator, Kinesiology, Wellness Coach, Australian Bush Flower Essences, LEAP Facilitator, Trauma, Public Speaker, Cancer Ambassador, Blooming From Within, Traralgon, Victoria, Gippsland